Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

My diary notes for this week include an interesting theatre trip and a selection of movies The Lehman Trilogy This week's theatre trip took us to a matinee of The Lehman Trilogy, which I missed first time around.  At nearly three and a half hours long (although with 2 intervals) this is a bit of a marathon, but it actually didn’t feel like that, in fact the last act felt a bit rushed in the end.   A great revolving set with a cast of three embodying all of the characters with just a change of physicality and voice, and a live pianist to accompany the action and set the mood.   This history of a family and brief history of the growth of America and capitalism at the same time,  was really interesting and enjoyable, particularly in walking us through the journey from middle men to traders to the consumerism bit where they were lending people money they don’t have to buy things they don’t need. The tone was a bit elegiac and I would have liked a bit more anger at t...

This was a play we have been anticipating for two years so we weren’t going to let the little matter of a tube strike put us off. This isn’t a subtle play but it’s certainly powerful and I’d say it is even more timely after being delayed by Covid and in this age of high populism. The play charts how an ordinary-ish man goes on a Faustian journey from going along with, then is complicit, leading to full immersion in the Nazi project of genocide. The challenge of standing up to something that you know is wrong but might be ‘Good’ for an individual but bad for others is explicitly called out and the fact that David Tennant’s Halder doesn’t believe the ‘anti-jewish rubbish’ makes his complicity even more painful as he betrays his family and friends for his own good life. We’d talked over dinner before the play about what gives life value, and had an interesting discussion in the interval about climate change protest and what is and isn’t acceptable, which shows how live these issues are. H...