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...

 At two hours straight through this play is at the limit of my concentration without an icecream to refresh my synapses, and by the end my brain certainly felt it had been through a workout.   Originally conceived and workshopped by Simon McBurney and Complicité, the play opens with a simple set of a chair and one man. Khalid Abdalla opens as himself then morphs into ‘Omar’ then others during the following couple of hours.  He starts with an entertaining lecture on memory, and how the brain works, but quite quickly diverts into thinking about his family then the London diaspora and this segment ends with a piece of audience participation to underline how closely humans are related to each other as well as how our own memories work.  I don't like audience participation but it was for good reason. Kicking off from the way that the hippocampus in the brain is responsible for creating both memories and imagining the future, this spirals off into mixing the stor...