Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

Ani is a young, successful and award winning academic specialising in Milton’s Paradise Lost, but with a secret addiction to violent pornography.  Ani tells her boyfriend and her friends that is is harmless and not real, but we see the toll it places on her relationships, health and career.   It’s about addiction and the remorselessness and deviousness of it, but it’s also about grief, and sadness, the dichotomy of pleasure and pain, and uses Milton’s Paradise Lost to consider the nature of shame, guilt and sin. Somewhat unsubtly. the first scene has Ani trying to persuade her boyfriend Liam to eat an apple tart while she makes her arguments that her porn watching isn’t harmful.  It also uses Milton as a basis to take a good bite at misogyny too, both from the men around her but also internalised.  Ani is transgressive too in her sexual desires; she is articulate in rejecting the discrepancies between expectations of men and women, and the policing of female des...

In the tiny Jerwood theatre in the loft of the Royal Court, and at an appropriate 90 minutes long, this was an entertaining evening spent with 16th century football.  Set in the reign of Edward VI we have Percy and Rowan, joined by a stranger as they are marking the outer boundary of the annual football match between villages, and it's probably going to go on for hours if not days.  They are far away from the action, barely pawns in the game but still heavily invested.  I had to think a bit to get my head in the right bit of history but of course this was the middle of the religious purges after the death of Henry VIII where to be on the wrong side or in the wrong group could mean being subjected to attack or even death.  The play takes all of the metaphors you have probably ever heard of applied to football and squeezes them in together, looking at the cultural, religious, territorial. gender divides, and pretty much every boundary you can think of.  The battle...