Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

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...