Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

A play about one woman’s struggle to hold down four jobs is very funny, particularly in dealing with the complications of entitled bosses. She has a home working job as a PA that she does while working her separate job as a concierge for some luxury flats, mixed with a house/dog sitting job, then evenings and weekends doing data entry.   It 's very funny but also it isn't.   All of this working means she doesn’t actually have any life for herself, i solated from her friends and family because she is working so hard, employed by unsympathetic and exploitative monsters.  It  gradually becomes clear how the trap has closed on her through trying to do the right thing for her family after her dad has run up huge debts with payday lenders.   Libby Rodcliffe is excellent and very very funny in playing Bea and her chaotic life, but in this monologue she also plays all of the other characters, moving around the stage to help us to keep track of Bea’s incre...

 Jab At the Park 90 Theatre, this one had an unusually small audience, so much so that we all naturally sort of socially distanced ourselves amongst the seats.  This is a relationship drama set in the midst of Covid.  Anne (Kacey Ainsworth) is a health worker and therefore ‘essential’ whilst Don (Liam Tobin), as his wife points out, is ‘non-essential’;  he agrees, he’s a luxury item ‘like a bath bomb’.  At the start of the lockdown , the banter is light, but as things progress, the cracks in the relationship show and things turn nasty.  Apparently based on a real story, it’s well performed and actually very funny.  It feels pretty accurate, and uses the real timeline including the lockdown language, the deaths, debates and Barnard Castle, but it doesn’t really set the world alight.  I think that we could have had more about the decision that Anne has to make and why she makes it, given the abusive relationship - that was sort of just displayed and...

A last minute ticket got me into this sold out performance at the tiny Park 90 theatre.   This is a sweet but also bitter little story spread over 60 years about a romance that never really gets off the ground.  We first meet Leonard (Barney White) and Violet (Cassie Bradley) in 1942 in a hotel room in Bath where they have a stolen night together before Leonard joins the forces.  They are sweetly shy, but passionate and ambitious about their lives as they talk about waiting for each other and Leonard plans out their marriage after the war.  We next meet Leonard and Violet in the sixties and then again in the early 2000s.  These later meetings become both bitter and sad, with Leonard seemingly stuck and still waiting whilst Violet gets on with living life. Written in 2011 by Nick Payne who also wrote We Live in Time , this is a small tale but deftly written and beautifully staged and performed showing the effects of time on them each time they meet....