Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

 Maxim Gorky’s play, first performed in 1905, puts his own spin on dissolute Russians hanging out in the countryside, oblivious to the plight of the peasant class.  With period dress, but with the language ostentatiously modern (reworked by Nina and Moses Raine), and covering similar ground as Chekhov, (apparently this was written as a response),  for a moment or two I wondered if we had accidentally wandered into The Cherry Orchard or Uncle Vanya instead.   Varvara (Sophie Rundle) and Sergei (Paul Ready) are hosting a large party at their summer retreat, and they and their guests spend their time bickering, and idly talking about life’s pointlessness and poetry whilst in the background (and sometimes in the foreground too) love affairs are played out.  A famous writer is coming to the house, and the party are putting on their own performance of A Midsummer Nights Dream.   These people are not aristocrats, but born into poverty, self made, and edu...

It’s always interesting to see the ways that Greek tragedies are reworked for a modern audience.  The Bacchae are a bunch of women, followers of the god Dionysos who serve as the chorus but are the main characters this time.  They are back in Thebes to help Dionysos take revenge for his abandonment by his aunt Agave (Sharon Small) after the death of his mother.  The Bacchae are led by Vida (a fantastic Claire Perkins) who introduces the Bacchae to the audience as individual independent women who have all joined for different reasons, and are all living for pleasure without being ruled by men (except Dionysos that is - to be fair, they do call out for themselves!). When the women of Thebes hear about this, they all begin to join the Bacchae too.  Whilst Dionysos sneaks into Thebes and entraps his half brother King Pentheus (an absolutely fabulous James McArdle) the Bacchae take Agave hostage but she soon becomes the most fanatical of the group and blood thirsty in a w...

A play about morality, hypocrisy and women’s place in a capitalist world, despite being well over a century old  and in Victorian dress (written in 1893 and banned from performance until 1925)  many of the arguments being made in this play could be happening today. Vivie (Bessie Carter) is a modern young woman and has just graduated from Cambridge, with plans for a professional career.  Her mother (Imelda Staunton) has been largely absent due to travel and business affairs but today she pays a visit, expecting her daughter to conform to becoming a genteel young woman and marry well. Staunton as Kitty is as impressive as you would expect.  I loved the mix of grand airs all being undercut slightly by the London twang underlying her accent.  The four men appearing in the play are a mix of entitled, arrogant, selfish, immoral, venal or just plain unpleasant.  Robert Glenister (excellent as Sir George Crofts)is the embodiment of grasping bullying capitalism, we ...

This is a revival of the 2011 play about the impact of a series of real life murders by a serial killer in Ipswich during 2006-7.  The play opens with a 'Community in Bloom' competition in London Road including a visit from the mayor. During the first half of the play the narrative focuses on the nervousness and suspicion in the road in the wake of five murders of women working as prostitutes in the London Road area and the arrest of a neighbour also living on the road.  I found this part quite frustrating as the voices were mainly of the residents, who are scared, suspicious of each other, but also pleased that the police are now taking an interest and that there is no longer prostitution in the area.  There's a glaring silence where the voices of the women are missing during that first half. In the second half though, along with an excruciatingly long silence to focus on the women victims (the play just stops) we then get some voices of the women, or at least those who ...

Third row seats at bargain prices, and for once without any big people or heads in the way, so that got us off to a good start. As the play gets underway, when we first meet Coriolanus (David Oyelowo) he is smoothly mixing as part of the elite, glass in hand.  After his huge success as a general winning in a war for Rome he seeks to become a political leader but finds that a whole different thing.  He isn’t that keen on trying to appeal to the masses who he views with some contempt, and makes it clear that the games and nonsense required to gain popular support is beneath him. As a result, the Tribunes in the Senate who represent the plebs/masses don’t like him much and so successfully conspire to unseat him and get him banished.  The wheeling and dealing that surrounds Coriolanus is tricksy, with different camps trying to get advantage. As a play about power and politics, it speaks well about the gap between the masses and the elite, populism, and the desire to retain po...

  I am old enough to remember the much loved tv series and I was interested to see how it had been condensed to fit into just over two and a half hours with interval.   The set grabbed attention straight away, with cranes and industrial building and the Mersey rolling away on the backdrop.  I liked the unemployment office which introduced most of the key characters and showed the performative rote nature of the weekly visits.  I have to say though that it felt like there was  a lot of plot and scene setting to get through in the first half which came at the expense of character .  All necessary  but I came out at the interval feeling a bit detached from it all.   The second half though starts to hone in on the people that this stuff is happening to, and for me it found its heart then, these men, not knowing how to be men when they can’t work any more, and families struggling to adapt, although still with a warm but sharp undercurrent of ...

An evening at the theatre watching another play about the difficult birth of the NHS, this was a perfect mix of politics and sentiment that absolutely hit the spot for me.  Our pre-show conversation had been all about the hole that the country is in, and what could possibly shake us out of it, and it was like this production heard us and carried on the debate.   This is a biography of Nye Bevan  (Michael Sheen) as a patient of the NHS he brought into being, and from his hospital bed dosed up with morphine, recalling his life through surreal dreams.  Episodic and hallucinatory, we get shown the bullying he endured as a child partly due to his stammer, the death of his miner father through black lung , the wonder of a library with books ‘for free!!’ and the development of political nouse as he worked his way through committees and councils, including the Tredegar Medical Aid Society (the model for the NHS) before ending up in Parliament.   The challenges...