Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

I always enjoy this play, although it’s been a while since I last saw it.  But this is a fantastic revival.  Modern but keeping the spirit of the original, there’s verve from the very start in making sure the audience know they are part of the action.  The first half leans heavily into the rom-com-iness of it all, whilst the second half takes us off to a bleak war before back home again.   I have never seen Adrian Lester turn in a bad performance and this is no exception.  He dazzles as early Cyrano, playful and passionate, whilst still retaining cynical outsider vibes, and then makes the switch to sadder Cyrano completely seamlessly.  Susannah Fielding is excellent as Roxane too - no limp lettuce behaviour here, and with her own agency.   Costume and set are all gorgeous, keeping to tradition despite the more modern sensibility and language.  I really enjoyed the poetry too, and unlike The Misanthrope last week it never detracted from c...

 First thing to say is that Sandra Oh is fantastic, and she is surrounded by an excellent cast for this reworking of Moliere’s classic about the hypocrisy of aristocratic society.  Oh plays Alice, a straight talking writer who is being pursued to apologise for things she has said.  Paul  Chahidi plays her friend John, and Tom Misan as Stephan her younger lover, both doing a fantastic job in providing a counterbalance and foil to Alice's passionate inflexibility. Jemima Rooper is also perfect in her relatively small role as Stephan’s bitter ex wife, using social media to cause real life damage.   Alice, in this version of the play is a writer who is wedded to honesty and telling the truth as she sees it, with no patience for dissembling, compromise or taking a pragmatic path.  This eventually affects her career and her relationships.  Completely rewritten with an up to date focus on narcissism, cancel culture, social media pile-ons, online misinfor...

 A day out in London took me first to see the new Marilyn Monroe exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, followed by a brief wander through Tate Modern before ending the day at the Globe for a glorious production of Much Ado About Nothing. First, the Monroe exhibition which was extensive, organised by her life story and relationships with different photographers over the years including Philip Hausman, Cecil Beaton and her close collaborator for on-set photography, Eve Arnold.   It was interesting how closely she curated her image, having control over which proofs got to see the light of day and which were banished (until now) to obscurity by Monroe's pen through the image. Ironic how that control vanished after her death. There were plenty of stories about her being difficult and fighting with the studios, but it is interesting to see how many of them were her not wanting to be put in the dumb blonde box.  Her story is so well known but there were plenty of pho...