Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

  Another night out at a period play, this time from 1969.  This domestic farce is still very funny, operating like clockwork as it should.  The premise is that Frank (Roger Allum), an ineffectual but well meaning man, decides to intervene when his wife explains that she missed their anniversary as someone in his work team is having an affair.  Being the genial, if incompetent boss that he is, and totally misunderstanding the situation, he tries to help resolve the perceived marital difficulties of Mary and William, Bob and Theresa, causing highly entertaining chaos.  The play is in the round, with the set ingeniously split between the overlapping homes of the Featherstones and the  Phillips. which enables  some excellent scenes where the couples have phone calls, conversations and even more entertaining, two concurrent dinner parties, without noticing the others are there. It is definitely funny, but some of the relationship dynamics are really dated,...

I had a trip into London on a day off, and managed to squeeze in a few exhibitions plus some theatre.  Abigail's Party I am going to start with the final visit of the day which was to see the Mike Leigh classic, Abigail's Party, revived with Tamzin Outhwaite as Bev, the monstrous hostess from the 1970s.  One of the amazing things about this was, although she opened with a slightly nasal intonation reminiscent of Alison Steadman's defining performance, she very quickly moved away and made Bev her own.   Bev is still a monster, perhaps a little more vicious than I remember, but that might be because the 1970's culture on display here was even more jarring than I remember it being when first produced.  A clever touch is to make Tony and Angela, their new neighbours who are visiting, of Asian heritage, adding an additional frisson to the class and other topics that fall out of Bev and Laurence's mouths. Tony and Ange are as awkward as any of us would be dealing with...

I have always loved the scale of Anish Kapoor's work, even if I don't understand much about the philosophy behind it, and this exhibition's initial hit is based on the overwhelming size of the first exhibit when you first walk into the gallery, with a scale that made me feel overwhelmed and squashed at the same time But I hadn't seen his works with the blackest of black paint before.  Apparently there is a whole controversy because he has bought exclusive rights to this colour, and I can understand the outrage, but he certainly makes the most of it.  I don't think it really shows in photos, but the optical illusions, created by how dark the paint is, are truly amazing and makes it a properly interactive experience.  They look like they are floating in midair, or completely vanish when you try to capture anything three-dimensional in an image.  The photos here are the best I could do, loads of them just don't make sense in 2D, so it means you'll just have to ...

 Maxim Gorky’s play, first performed in 1905, puts his own spin on dissolute Russians hanging out in the countryside, oblivious to the plight of the peasant class.  With period dress, but with the language ostentatiously modern (reworked by Nina and Moses Raine), and covering similar ground as Chekhov, (apparently this was written as a response),  for a moment or two I wondered if we had accidentally wandered into The Cherry Orchard or Uncle Vanya instead.   Varvara (Sophie Rundle) and Sergei (Paul Ready) are hosting a large party at their summer retreat, and they and their guests spend their time bickering, and idly talking about life’s pointlessness and poetry whilst in the background (and sometimes in the foreground too) love affairs are played out.  A famous writer is coming to the house, and the party are putting on their own performance of A Midsummer Nights Dream.   These people are not aristocrats, but born into poverty, self made, and edu...

Man and Boy at the Dorfman I knew very little about this rarely performed Rattigan play beforehand but, for me at least, this one was a hit.  I last saw Ben Daniels being amazing in Medea a couple of years ago.  This time he plays Gregor Antonescu, a successful financier in 1934, with all sorts of financial interests including loans to the fascist movements in Italy and Germany, clearly moving in those circles.  We meet him at the moment his dodgy dealing has caught up with him and he seeks sanctuary in his estranged son’s basement apartment in Manhattan.  The murky world of the rich hits pretty hard in the light of the Epstein scandal, showing how disposable people are in this world, including his son, as he offers him up without his consent, to a closeted gay corporate boss.  In this world, people are no more than commodities and Antonesco states 'Love is a commodity I can't afford' .  What matters instead is how anyone or thing can help with the deal....