Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

This witty play by Winsome Pinnock takes us on a brisk but clever journey through a country house mystery with cod ghost story undertones.  I enjoyed it a lot.  Fee (Sylvestra Le Touzel) is a direct descendent of Henry Harford and has inherited the family estate, complete with a grand but crumbling mansion, and has discovered journals from her slave owning ancestor.  Abi (Rakie Ayola) and Marva (Cherrelle Skeete) are Black academics trying to authenticate the documents .  There’s much fun to be had poking fun at the impoverished aristocracy selling off their legacy to all and sundry to keep things going, with a fake ghost and a music artist, ‘Fallas E’ making a music video in the fountain in the grounds.  As the plot moves on, It turns out that everyone has some kind of connection to the Harford family plantation.  Abi’s Nigerian aristocratic ancestry were implicated in the slave trade, whilst Marva a working class protege has potentially her own link with ...

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....

As an ex-Essex girl, this was a poignant trip down memory lane for my last trip to the theatre this year, taking me back to my teens and old stomping grounds with DJ Froggy and junior disco nights, and that bit of Essex that continues to sit on the edge of London.   Alfie (Clive Owen) and Julie (Saskia Reeves) have been together for over 30 years, but Alfie has received a terminal diagnosis for his cancer and wants to stop treatment, Julie wants him to ‘fight’. Alfie was a DJ, and the whole play is punctuated with some pounding house and acid disco beats to punctuate their conversations as they both reminisce and look forward, including debating what should be played at his funeral.  There are some lovely intimate and funny moments that are evidence of their long relationship, as they have one long conversation in a single scene for the full 90 minutes of this play; they talk and laugh and argue, sparring and making up, as they talk about what this will mean for them and ...

  A man turns up at the door of an ex-UN Relief worker, asking what happened 45 years previously when he was a displaced child after WW2.  Juliet Stevenson plays Ruth, that relief worker, who was 20 years old in 1945, and Tom Wlaschiha plays the adult Thomas.  As well as the German and Slavic children left without families or carers after the war, there were also children (often from Slavic backgrounds) who met Aryan 'master race' criteria stolen from their families and placed with new families to grow up as Germans, attempting to wipe the memory of their previous lives, language and culture.  As the play also points out, after the war there was a concerted effort by the Soviet forces to do the same for all displaced Eastern European children (with the west doing something not so dissimilar).  This is all brought to life in the attachment that develops between Ruth and Thomas as they try to find his family; it is this little boy that has turned up at Ruth’s door...

Adeel Akhtar is continuing to carve out a line in morally ambiguous roles after his performance last year in Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard  and his angsty Prime Minister in Black Doves.  This time he plays Anghad Singh who is a mid ranking shadow minister when we meet him, eyeing party leadership after a sex scandal.   He believes he represents change, as he tells and retells his story as the son of a Sikh baggage handler, gradually sharpening it at each retelling.  What he is less explicit about but becomes clear over time, is that  he went to the same elite schools as his white British colleagues, his dad made good (giving shades of Sunak) and eventually became a property magnate and a slum landlord too.  Just as he makes his move to become the leader of the party, his father dies, leaving all his estate to Anghad and none to his two sisters.  Anghad thinks he deserves the money and the position and fights for it.   With multiple themes,...

This Pulitzer prizewinning play by Katori Hall presents as a warm family comedy drama and it works very well at that level. Cordell (Kadiff Kirwan) hasn’t got a job, and left his wife and sons two years ago for his new partner Dwayne (Simon-Anthony Rhoden) and he is still feeling guilty about both, but he is putting all of his energy into winning the Memphis Hot Wing Competition, and he has called on their friends and potential couple Big Charles (Jason Barnett) and Isom (Olisa Odele) to help.  Meanwhile Dwayne is worried about his nephew E.J. (Kaireece Denton) going off the rails.  The final character here E.J.’s dad (Dwayne Walcott) a man who thinks masculinity is all about being tough.   So, this is a found family of Black American men, bringing together different versions of masculinity and sexuality and all trying to live their best lives.   There are many layers here, including references to racism, homophobia and police brutality (E.J’s troubled mum ...

I did a fair bit of pondering over who is really the underdog in this new play by Sarah Gordon.  We meet all three Brontë sisters but Charlotte (an excellent, feisty Gemma Whelan) is the one who acts as our guide through this story, and it’s her point of view we hear although she's a pretty unreliable narrator.  The play is funny and rolls along, more than a little bit meta, and with plenty of reaching across the fourth wall.  We get to meet the sisters when they are trying to work out how to make ends meet and eventually develop their plan to use male pseudonyms to get their work published.  I liked the scratchy way their sibling relationships and rivalries were laid out, with Charlotte as the bossy and overbearing older sister with narcissist tendencies, and Anne (Rhiannon Clements) constantly being undermined but fighting back.   The play references their work, but actually it is only interested really in their relationship, so it was a shame really that...

I had a double bill sort of a day.  The last bit first…  Till the Stars Come Down  This production is in the round and for the first time ever I was on the far side of the Dorfman theatre.  On a simple, circular, revolving set, the play opens with women getting ready for a wedding, and for a good half hour the chat and laughter (with some pretty good one liners) swirls around as we get to know the three sisters at the heart of this play, a couple of nieces and Aunty Carol (an impressive Lorraine Ashbourne).  These woman are close, although Maggie (Lisa McGrillis) has moved away, something Hazel (Lucy Black) is clearly bitter about; and it also appears Aunty Carol has more or less invited herself and her ridiculously big hat.  The men only appear later as the wedding gets going, and that feels right in a play about all sorts of things but with a backdrop of a post- mining town where the main work is at a warehouse and the younger generation don't seem to kno...

  I popped into town on a last minute whim and got a great £20 ticket right by the stage for this new play by Annie Baker.  The journey by train was a bit painful so I rushed in to the auditorium out of breath just as they were closing the doors, wriggling out of my coat as the lights went down. This play was an immediate change of pace.  Sofi (Christina Kirk) arrives first, with her book, to sit in one of the many sun loungers, eventually joined by Eileen (Marylouise Burke) and one of those desultory conversations follows that might happen by a pool or in a hotel garden. But it becomes clear that Sofi, Eileen and the other residents are actually at some kind of strange clinic (which used to be a motel and where the patio overlooks a car park and a bakery) and all are undergoing strict cleansing regimes.   Over the next hour and 45 minutes there are snippets of conversation with long pauses and then jumps in time called out by Sofi ...'5 hours later’ ...‘22 hours lat...