Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

I saw this a few weeks ago ( notes here ) and despite some reservations, I really was blown away by the performances.  I also felt it had taken me a while to properly get to grips with it the first time around, and as it isn’t the sort of thing that gets recorded for posterity I grabbed a last minute bargain ticket in the front row of the circle to watch it again.   Everything I said about it the first time is still true, an intimate play with big themes, about two young men trying to find their place in a world which doesn’t really have space for their dreams, living small lives in small towns which are not where the action is*.  I like the way that the big stories of the western colonialist expansion, tales of derring do which are used to create a great national story, are nicely undercut through Lewis and Clark’s 1804-6 expedition diaries, talking about the realities of hard travel, bad food, mixed with appalling racism and exploitation of the native peoples and s...

Despite the underpinning themes of American colonialism and the westward landgrab vs modern America, this is a suprisingly intimate play, although as it is written by Samuel D Hunter who wrote The Whale  I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.   Jake, a well to do liberal arts graduate has been following the westward trail towards the Pacific taken by his ancestor, but he washes up 300 miles short in the small town of Clarkston and gets a night job in Costco where he meets Chris.  Chris is trying to get into a writing course, but has an addict mum to worry about.  So that’s the set up, which doesn’t sound particularly promising but this ends up being a tender play about people trying to find connection and make the best of their lives, despite the challenges they face.  It’s a bit clunky with the amount of exposition, but the central performances are excellent and I found myself drawn into the lives and concerns of the young men.   Joe Locke plays Jak...

Another year another season as this small and perfectly formed but big-hearted love story continued on the journey based on Alice Oseman's webcomics.  One of the great strengths of the webcomic and the TV series is that there is so much here apart from the central love story, all woven in and never feeling gratuiously squeezed in for the sake of plot.  Having said that, Oseman, who writes the series too, does talk about the need for a different beat and higher stakes being required in the show, leading to the introduction of new characters and storylines.   The core stays the same though, the story of Nick and Charlie falling in love and navigating their final years in school, and true to the source material to the extent that many of the scenes in the webcomic are lifted straight onto the screen as if by magic.   I have written here and here about the earlier series and for season three there are again multiple story lines, the primary ones being Charlie's...

I am in love, that giddy sort where you want to tell everyone about your new love, and your heart leaps every time someone mentions them. One of the features of a crush is the need to mention them as often as possible to anyone who will listen. So, I am going to gush - look away if it is too painful.  My new love is Alice Oseman's Heartstopper series. I had read some of the graphic novels and webcomic and thought it was beautifully done, but missed the Netflix series when it first appeared. I've made up for it since.  The TV series is a real gem, a shining jewel which has unfrozen my cynical old heart. There have been a lot of reviews celebrating the inclusivity and importance of authentic casting and the representation of the LGBTQ+ teen experience in this series, and they absolutely are some of the reasons it is so successful but not the only ones.  Using fresh takes on romcom tropes, idealised and pure of heart it may be, but these feel like real 3D teens navigating...