Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

As an ex-Essex girl, this was a poignant trip down memory lane for my last trip to the theatre this year, taking me back to my teens and old stomping grounds with DJ Froggy and junior disco nights, and that bit of Essex that continues to sit on the edge of London.   Alfie (Clive Owen) and Julie (Saskia Reeves) have been together for over 30 years, but Alfie has received a terminal diagnosis for his cancer and wants to stop treatment, Julie wants him to ‘fight’. Alfie was a DJ, and the whole play is punctuated with some pounding house and acid disco beats to punctuate their conversations as they both reminisce and look forward, including debating what should be played at his funeral.  There are some lovely intimate and funny moments that are evidence of their long relationship, as they have one long conversation in a single scene for the full 90 minutes of this play; they talk and laugh and argue, sparring and making up, as they talk about what this will mean for them and ...

Bryan Cranston, Paapa Essiedu, Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Hayley Squires are the core of the cast assembled for this revival of Arthur Miller's family drama about the sins of the fathers coming back to haunt their children.  It's overlaid with a critique about money grabbing bosses taking opportunities in a time of national crisis to make a quick buck regardless of the harm it may do. So, it may be over 75 years old now, but with so many modern resonances; certainly I was thinking about the Michelle Mone and other Covid scandals.   I liked that this production doesn’t try to force the point though, which is clear enough, without needing to set it in a modern context.   The production really struck gold with this cast.  Essiedu and Cranston are a powerhouse duo, and the whole ensemble are just magnificent.  Bryan Cranston plays Joe Keller, the bluff, jovial, proud master of industry wanting to leave a legacy for his remaining son.  Marianne Jean-Ba...

A play about one woman’s struggle to hold down four jobs is very funny, particularly in dealing with the complications of entitled bosses. She has a home working job as a PA that she does while working her separate job as a concierge for some luxury flats, mixed with a house/dog sitting job, then evenings and weekends doing data entry.   It 's very funny but also it isn't.   All of this working means she doesn’t actually have any life for herself, i solated from her friends and family because she is working so hard, employed by unsympathetic and exploitative monsters.  It  gradually becomes clear how the trap has closed on her through trying to do the right thing for her family after her dad has run up huge debts with payday lenders.   Libby Rodcliffe is excellent and very very funny in playing Bea and her chaotic life, but in this monologue she also plays all of the other characters, moving around the stage to help us to keep track of Bea’s incre...

A few things going on in telly at the moment with older stroppy women - it’s good to see.   The Beast in me.  Clare Danes and Matthew Rhys on opposite sides of a tense thriller full of grief, vengeance and rage.  It has some fairly clunky twists and turns and some bits were too obvious,  particularly the resolution which was ridiculously signposted, but I really enjoyed it all the same. It’s always moving forward (and twisting back on itself sometimes) and the two leads are brilliant.  Clare Danes is twitchy, restless and angry, Matthew Rhys is scarily in control until he isn’t.  Both great performers and a great supporting cast,  it was fun to watch this unravel.  Great autumn telly ( series, streaming on Netflix) Down Cemetery Road:   This has lived up to its promise and I am loving it as a weird mix of thriller and comedy with cartoonish violence but with interesting friendships between women (it passes the Bechdel test)  a...

Ani is a young, successful and award winning academic specialising in Milton’s Paradise Lost, but with a secret addiction to violent pornography.  Ani tells her boyfriend and her friends that is is harmless and not real, but we see the toll it places on her relationships, health and career.   It’s about addiction and the remorselessness and deviousness of it, but it’s also about grief, and sadness, the dichotomy of pleasure and pain, and uses Milton’s Paradise Lost to consider the nature of shame, guilt and sin. Somewhat unsubtly. the first scene has Ani trying to persuade her boyfriend Liam to eat an apple tart while she makes her arguments that her porn watching isn’t harmful.  It also uses Milton as a basis to take a good bite at misogyny too, both from the men around her but also internalised.  Ani is transgressive too in her sexual desires; she is articulate in rejecting the discrepancies between expectations of men and women, and the policing of female des...

I saw this a few weeks ago ( notes here ) and despite some reservations, I really was blown away by the performances.  I also felt it had taken me a while to properly get to grips with it the first time around, and as it isn’t the sort of thing that gets recorded for posterity I grabbed a last minute bargain ticket in the front row of the circle to watch it again.   Everything I said about it the first time is still true, an intimate play with big themes, about two young men trying to find their place in a world which doesn’t really have space for their dreams, living small lives in small towns which are not where the action is*.  I like the way that the big stories of the western colonialist expansion, tales of derring do which are used to create a great national story, are nicely undercut through Lewis and Clark’s 1804-6 expedition diaries, talking about the realities of hard travel, bad food, mixed with appalling racism and exploitation of the native peoples and s...

I am a big admirer of Nicola Walker, and in this particular play at the Royal Court she is Miriam, a mother grappling with the disappearance of her teenage son, Oscar.  The play ranges over a seven year period, dipping back and forward, with panic at the early stages, and as the police investigation remains unresolved, the whole family find different ways of living with the absence.  The Unbelievers in this case are the family who have lost faith that Oscar will return and are finding ways to move forward with their lives, whereas Miriam is fierce and obsessive about not giving up.  Things all come to a head when Oscar's dad (Paul Higgins) suggests holding a memorial service. The staging is simple but effective with a soulless waiting room at the back where the cast go when they are not performing, presumably to represent the limbo the characters are all experiencing; meanwhile the main action takes place in the living room towards the front of the stage.  I think th...

 Othello at the Theatre Royal Haymarket An Othello with a starry cast of David Harewood (Othello) and Toby Jones (Iago), it had a full auditorium with a young and excited audience (I'm assuming it is still on the A level curriculum).  A simple but effective set, and this is a fairly simple and effective version.  Whilst the racism and misogyny are present, they are played pretty straight, without, for example trying to make it particularly current.   David Harewood was great, moving from an expansive and in love Othello, to a broken vengeful man as Iago’s poison sinks in, and the surrounding cast were all pretty pitch perfect.  I found Toby Jones a weasely Iago, although not as compelling as Rory Kinnear’s version back in 2013ish.  What I did  find strange was the amount of laughter at Iago’s dastardly plans - this wasn’t uncomfortable titters, but proper laughs as if this was all just a bit of sport.  They did dry up after the interval thoug...

This was an intense hour and 45 minutes.  It's based on Genet’s play about two maids conspiring against their overbearing, self obsessed and unpleasant mistress, who in this iteration is some kind of online lifestyle influencer.  This turns into a fast and furious critique about celebrity culture, social media and online influencing whilst mostly keeping hold of the original plot.  Visually stunning, this makes one of the best and most innovative use of screens I have seen, with live streaming from iPhones into the massive mirror/screens that fill the back of the stage.  The use of filters and personas is inspired, and helps with the sense that reality and fantasy are getting more and more blurred.  The maids don't just try on her clothes, but also her online persona.   The three person cast (Phia Saban, Lydia Wilson, and Yerin Ha), are all fabulously on point with this, although it is sometimes hard to focus on them, given the amount also going on on ...

Down Cemetary Road - Based on a novel by Mick Herron, the man responsible for Slow Horses, I am only two episodes in but it has a great cast, and it's fast moving and lots of fun.  It’s a slightly odd mix of thriller and comedy in a way which actually isn't very different from Slow Horses, but some of the characterisation is a bit too broad, so it sometimes feels a bit clashy with some actors thinking they are in a comedy, others in a dark thriller.  Of course, it can be both, but it isn't quite as subtle as Slow Horses.  Despite some tiny reservations the dialogue is pretty snappy and I am enjoying Emma Thompson as the stylish equivalent of Jackson Lamb.  It’s being released one episode at a time so let’s see how it develops. ( Series, streaming on AppleTV+) Film Club - Romcom vibes, but with the rom being more of a tease rather than any action, this is a well put together family comedy drama written by and starring Aimee Lou Wood as a young woman who holds a film ...