Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

  I cannot lie, the big draw for me of this Beckett classic was Ben Whishaw and he and the whole cast didn't disappoint, doing a great job of bringing what can be a pretty bleak play to life. Set in a colourless blasted landscape with a nearly dead tree as the only landmark, Vladimir (Ben Whishaw) and Estragon (Lucian Msamati)  are waiting for Godot, their unseen overseer.  Passing through is Pozzo (Jonathan Slinger), and his bound and whipped lacky going by the name of Lucky (Tom Eddon).  In the first half, the long pauses broke up the tragicomedy of the two men trying to find interesting ways to pass the time in an empty, bleak and meaningless world.  As I think is deliberate, the wait for the interval felt interminable at times with the pointless of it all.  Interestingly, the second half picked up a bit in pace, as we have the existential angst of human existence laid out for us.  I really enjoyed the dynamic between Msamati and Whishaw, holding ha...

A last minute returned ticket took me into London and to the Royal Court, fighting through the Championship League crowds to see Ben Whishaw, Emma D’Arcy and Kayla Meikle in Bluets which is pretty resolutely sold out.  A bit like a poetry reading, a bit like an art installation and, with live cinema as well, it also becomes a bit like an experimental film,  It was an intriguing 75 or so minutes.  The play itself doesn’t really have a narrative, instead being a kind of exploration of love, grief, pain, depression, desire,  all overlaid with the colour blue.  The premise is the narrator has lost a lover and has a friend who has had a terrible accident, and has also fallen in love, or maybe in desire, with the colour blue.  I can understand that, in that blue is surely the most desirable of colours but I was surprised that we didn’t get more of the actual colour on the screens.   All three actors stand at their own station with a desk with various pr...