Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

So, another year, another crop of great stuff, and another set of opinions you didn't ask for but are getting anyway.  I am having to be brutal in my selections here as there as so many great things I couldn't shoehorn in.   I have linked to my original thoughts too, where I have already published them. Best revival of a play So many great plays, many of them revivals this year, so I am working on the basis that the play needs to be properly old to fit into this category, and there needs to be something different from the original production.  There were many also rans, but the nominees are: Macbeth:  At the Donmar, with David Tennant and Cush Jumbo, this is a play I usually don't actually like very much, spoiled I think by studying it at school.  I was also suspicious about the use of headphones throughout, expecting that it would be distancing from the action.  In fact, it did the opposite; having the protaganists whisper their soliliquy direct into...

First, let’s get it out there that I think Paapa Essiedu is an impressive actor so I was really pleased to get an on-the-day ticket for a second row seat to see his performance as Delroy.  I really like the auditorium at Soho Place, I don’t think there is a bad seat anywhere, but this was a particularly  good view although sometimes a bit uncomfortably close to the action. This 100 minute long monologue is intense, even more so in this intense space with eye contact possible with every member of the audience, adding to the engagement, or maybe complicity we feel.  And as ‘Delroy’, or maybe Essiedu, may well ask you a specific question and expect an answer we’d better be paying attention. I have somehow been seeing this trilogy of state of the nation plays in reverse order.  I saw the third (Closing Time) last year, but I still need to book to see the first one (Michael), annoyingly I missed Rafe Spall as Michael in the first iteration because I was ill.  Doing i...