Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

Murderbot - this is a sci-fi comedy drama with a Deadpool sensibility.  Murderbot is a security robot that has developed free will and if the company find out he will be scrapped.  He finds humans incredibly irritating but if he lets them die he will be scrapped.  Therefore he keep his clients (a well meaning but slightly incompetent bunch of scientists) alive. He’s addicted to watching schlocky sci fi series and spends most of his time watching those and using them to understand human behaviour. Silly and funny but also endearing,  this makes me laugh and the episodes are all less than 30 minutes long which is another bonus as far as I am concerned. ( series streaming on Appletv+)   Heretic - I am loving High Grant’s post romcom career.  He plays a brilliant creepy monster in this horror thriller.  Witty and smart with plenty of stuff to unpick.   It had an annoyingly open metaphysical sort of ending which I think was supposed to be meanin...

 A story about a Black seamstress in the early part of the 20th century, this is a small and delicately woven piece.  A small ensemble cast, with an excellent Samira Wiley in the centre, unfold the story carefully.  Esther is 35 and fears she is left on the shelf, but she is saving money through her work sewing gorgeous undergarments for her female clientele, and she plans to open a beauty parlour with the money one day.    But out of the blue come letters from George, a man she has never met, currently working on building the Panama canal.  Through her friends and clients helping her with the letters, a romance develops despite their relationship only coming from letters.  Alongside this is a sweet and unspoken romance with a Jewish fabric salesman (Alex Waldmann), wooing Esther with ever more gorgeous fabrics.  But this delicate little romance comes to nothing when Esther marries George at the end of the first half. The second half is packed wit...

An adaptation and translation  of a Japanese play, this small but affecting production makes the most of the tiny space at the Park Theatre with a massive screen taking up the full width and height of the back wall.   The play is about a small boy setting off on a quest to try to find where his dad has gone after he died, since his mum tells him that dad has become a star. Shotaro becomes obsessed with trying to find out how that would have happened.  The narrative, as much as there is one, consists of Yoko (Millie Hikasa), Shotaro's mother trying to find where where her son has gone, meeting characters along the way and finding out what they each think happens after death.  Each of the characters are well drawn and likeable in their own right, bringing laughs and sometimes a more adult perspective on what often feels like a quite childlike story.  I loved the puppetry for the central character Shotaro and some of the scenes with the puppetry, full ensemble...

This is a revival of the 2011 play about the impact of a series of real life murders by a serial killer in Ipswich during 2006-7.  The play opens with a 'Community in Bloom' competition in London Road including a visit from the mayor. During the first half of the play the narrative focuses on the nervousness and suspicion in the road in the wake of five murders of women working as prostitutes in the London Road area and the arrest of a neighbour also living on the road.  I found this part quite frustrating as the voices were mainly of the residents, who are scared, suspicious of each other, but also pleased that the police are now taking an interest and that there is no longer prostitution in the area.  There's a glaring silence where the voices of the women are missing during that first half. In the second half though, along with an excruciatingly long silence to focus on the women victims (the play just stops) we then get some voices of the women, or at least those who ...

Mountainhead - I saw a preview screening, followed by Edith Bowman interviewing Jesse Armstrong the writer, producer and director, previously the creative genius behind Succession and Peep Show .  This is a very funny but bleak look at what could happen if Techbro billionaires  are allowed to do whatever they want.  Super alpha male, full of their own importance and genius, the world almost literally at their feet, we spend a weekend with them in a mountain retreat while the world burns due to a new social media launch which sends fake content rolling around the world.  These guys think they have the solutions but are only interested if it will actually benefit them personally, and because of their playground level of rivalry things escalate badly. The title is obviously a play on Fountainhead, the novel which champions the rights of individual genius against the needs of the ordinary people in the world (It’s recommended by Robbie the selfish asshole in Dirty Danc...

  A Terence Rattigan play from 1952 doesn’t sound that appealing until you add Tamsin Greig into the mix and it suddenly became a must.  Surprisingly, although  it is pretty much of its time, I found it more modern than some of the kitchen sink dramas that pretty much swept Rattigan and his types of play away into history, for a while at least. A story about a woman who loves her younger lover too much and her husband not enough, and with neither of them loving her the way she wants to be loved, this is a pretty sad play, but despite opening with Hester’s suicide attempt, it’s also pretty funny, and not always in a bleak way! I read that there are some parallels with Rattigans own life where an ex lover killed themselves after leaving him for another man.  That's pretty sad in itself, and the play is very thoughtful about the impact of not being loved enough or as you wish to be loved, something that affects all of the main characters. Tamsin Greig is fantastic in th...

  At the Donmar, this revival of Patrick Mather’s play about masculinity, gambling,and fathers and sons  is sharp and properly funny, although all versions of these men are lying to themselves as well as everyone else  Women are hardly relevant in this at all as the men banter and argue and their different relationships and motivations are uncovered.   Stephen  (Daniel Lapaine) owns a restaurant and runs a Sunday night poker night after hours for his staff but really as a way of connection with his gambling addicted son, Carl (a fragile Kasper Hilton-Hille).  Meanwhile Chef Sweeney (Theo Barklem-Biggs)knows he has a gambling problem and tries to resist so he can spend his money with his daughter.  Frankie (Alfie Allen) is cocky and a bad loser but wants to become a professional poker player.  Ash (Brendan Coyle in his tough guy mode) is an already a professional gambler and second father figure to Carl , although we find that he is proba...

A Thursday afternoon matinee in a theatre in East London is perhaps not the most auspicious way to see a satire about race, with a particular focus on the American experience, but that was the only date I could manage on this tour with a tiny but mighty cast. The audience was an interesting mix of older, probably retired people, together with a balancing part of the audience as school children.  One interesting thing though is this play is predicated on the audience being, as usual,  older and mainly white, and this time it wasn’t, having a much wider race profile than usual.   The play itself is a bit Beckett-ish, particularly at the start, as Tambo (Clifford Samuel) and Bones (Daniel Ward) find themselves as a double act in a dysfunctional minstrel show, trying cheating, then reason and eventually more and more dramatic and painful acts to try to get the audience to give them empathy and money as they realise that they are just pawns in a game.  Then we leap f...

I was mainly watching TV this month, although there were a few films here and there that caught my attention. The Change - series 2 (streaming C4). Continues on from exactly where we left everyone in series 1. There’s a bit of a magical realism feel about this comedy where Linda (Bridget Christie) leaves her husband and children to take some time back in repayment for all of her unpaid and unappreciated work as a woman, wife and mother over the years.  Menopausal and pissed off, she ends up living in a small backwater in a caravan in the woods.  But she clearly still loves her husband (played subtly to pack the character with subtle unsubtlety by Omid Djalili) and although she finds a male friend he’s not a romantic interest which I love too. Riffing off of Christie's comic fury about the way women are treated, particularly as they get older, it’s also properly funny whilst being a bit misty eyed about the cycle of life too. I also get a bit of a Detectorists vibe from it thro...

There’s a lot going on in this new play at the Old Vic set in 1980s rural Ireland, but at its heart it’s a family drama, with pretty strong Uncle Vanya vibes.  We had side seats up in the balcony which meant we lost a bit of the stage but overall I don’t think we missed that much.   Focused on three siblings, Dermot (Chris O'Dowd) Stephen (Brian Gleeson)  and Billie (Rosie Sheehy).  Stephen and Billie are still living in the run down family farm after their father's death.  Billie loves trains and is an expert on train lines, stations and routes and it becomes clear she can’t manage on her own and Stephen is responsible for looking after her.   Older brother Dermot is a bit sleazy and flashy but he is the one that got out of town. His wife still loves him but he brings his young girlfriend, Freya ‘she’s 20 or will be at her next birthday’.  We meet the final members of the family as they gather in the house for a family meeting.  They in...

This is an absurdist play from the 1950s by Eugène Ionesco in which all the people in a town gradually turn into rhinoceroses, so a slightly unusual premise to get our heads around.  This was a new production at the Almeida by Omar Elerian, which stripped a lot back.  At the opening of the play we are faced with a bare set, with just a curtain and the simplest of raised stage, and the cast, all except Berenger (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù) dressed in clinical white outfits, meaning that there are few clues to what is going to happen.  We open by meeting the Provocateur (Paul Hunter) , who acts as the host and master of ceremonies for the evening, getting everyone hyped up with some dance movements that he uses again and builds upon during the play.   Then we get into the play proper, with stage directions given out loud by the Provocateur, always reminding us that this is a play and that the cast (and the audience too) are following instructions.  I loved the way ...

 Jab At the Park 90 Theatre, this one had an unusually small audience, so much so that we all naturally sort of socially distanced ourselves amongst the seats.  This is a relationship drama set in the midst of Covid.  Anne (Kacey Ainsworth) is a health worker and therefore ‘essential’ whilst Don (Liam Tobin), as his wife points out, is ‘non-essential’;  he agrees, he’s a luxury item ‘like a bath bomb’.  At the start of the lockdown , the banter is light, but as things progress, the cracks in the relationship show and things turn nasty.  Apparently based on a real story, it’s well performed and actually very funny.  It feels pretty accurate, and uses the real timeline including the lockdown language, the deaths, debates and Barnard Castle, but it doesn’t really set the world alight.  I think that we could have had more about the decision that Anne has to make and why she makes it, given the abusive relationship - that was sort of just displayed and...

 Warfare I got a last minute ticket for a preview of the new A24 film Warfare with a short Q&A with the director Alex Garland and a couple of the cast (Kit Connor and Cosmo Jarvis)  It was in the BFI IMAX which is probably the best way to see this immersive experience.  Garland's previous film, Civil War took a neutral view  of a fictional civil war in America.  It was graphic and grim, a sort of updated Apocalypse Now about war being pointless and hellish, but he got some criticism about not taking a moral stance.  This film takes it further in many ways, although it is about a real mission that went wrong in Iraq in 2006.  The film tries to remove any editorialising or imposition of narrative structure or morality, instead just letting it play out in real time over 90 minutes.  Based on the accounts of the US Navy Seals who were there, there is no hero, back story or character development; in fact it is often difficult to tell the men apa...

A younger than average audience was a good start for this new production by Nicholas Hytner and presumably that has something to do with Jonathan Bailey in the titular role bringing in the fans from his recent screen successes (Wicked, Bridgerton, Fellow Travelers).  By the cheers at the end I think everyone enjoyed it a lot.  We had a cheap seat in the front row, sort of behind this production which is (almost) in the round.  Apart from a few occasions when we were peering around chairs or between legs, the view was great though, and on many occasions I would argue better than some of the pricier seats. I’ve seen quite a few productions of this over the years, some funny, some heavy with the drama and politics.  This version strikes an effective middle ground, and is great at pulling clarity from the complicated politics going on throughout this play.  A spare set, modern dress and Succession-esque music set the scene here as a play about both power and fa...

Farewell Mr Haffman  A WW2 drama with a strange twist and quite a lot of sometimes uncomfortable laughs. It's 1942 in Paris, and Joseph Haffman (Alex Waldmann), a Jewish owner of a jewellery shop proposes that Pierre (Michael Fox), his French catholic employee takes over the business while Joseph hides in the cellar.  Meanwhile Pierre has a counterproposal of his own which turns this wartime drama into a somewhat fraught relationship triangle drama with the two men and Pierre's wife Isabelle (Jennifer Kirby). Giving us a different slant on the Nazi persecution of Jewish people, this had a lot packed in, but after the first hour I was wondering if it had been written into a corner.   However, the last half hour throws in a new twist which moved things along considerably.   Pierre agrees to host a dinner with Otto (Nigel Harman), the Nazi ambassador to Paris and his wife Suzanne (Jemima Rooper), putting the cat amongst the pigeons as Mr Haffman decides to com...