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...

I am a big admirer of Nicola Walker, and in this particular play at the Royal Court she is Miriam, a mother grappling with the disappearance of her teenage son, Oscar.  The play ranges over a seven year period, dipping back and forward, with panic at the early stages, and as the police investigation remains unresolved, the whole family find different ways of living with the absence.  The Unbelievers in this case are the family who have lost faith that Oscar will return and are finding ways to move forward with their lives, whereas Miriam is fierce and obsessive about not giving up.  Things all come to a head when Oscar's dad (Paul Higgins) suggests holding a memorial service. The staging is simple but effective with a soulless waiting room at the back where the cast go when they are not performing, presumably to represent the limbo the characters are all experiencing; meanwhile the main action takes place in the living room towards the front of the stage.  I think th...

At a puppet show in a town square, a deaf boy is shot dead by a soldier for not responding to his commands.  The next day the whole town wakes up deaf or pretending to be.  This play at the Royal Court is based on the 2019 book length poem by Ukranian poet Ilya Kaminsky.  Using signing, spoken and written word, it's also a multimedia work, making use of cameras and projection, puppetry and even a drone hovering intimidatingly over the audience at one point.   The set is deceptively simple in design, with the puppet stage staying central whilst other elements and the cast move around it. The sound design is excellent too, with white noise and low rumbling sounds, sometimes blurred speech, evoking a tiny bit of the deaf experience.  It sounds as if it will be bitty, but it does come together in something of a poetic tapestry.   This is a complicated play, a fable, with layer upon layer of metaphor and allegory, and despite light and moving moments, ...

This play dives straight into action with the opening scene between two men as Christopher assumes that Sihle (Sifiso Mazibuko) is a workman associated with the truck that is blocking his driveway, only to find out that they are actually new neighbours in suburbia, having renovations done.  This sets the scene pretty well as a sharp comedy/satire about prejudice and privilege, class and wealth which is as entertaining as it is uncomfortable in places.   We meet three couples in the neighbourhood, firstly Christopher and Lynette, white and well established; Lynette manages sale of the properties and ‘encourages’ the right sort of people.  Another white couple, Andrew and Jess who have stretched themselves to live in the estate and don’t really feel they fit, and then there are Sihle and Bonola, a Black couple, aspirational professionals who have worked hard to get where they are.  Bonolo (Mimî M Khayisa) in particular is very wedded to showing that they belong in...

  A last minute change of plan saw me heading to the Royal Court after Skeleton Crew was cancelled at the Donmar. The Royal Court is leaning into an experimental phase at the moment and this is no exception.  Like Bluets , this makes use of loads of technology but in this case we have different actors each night, unprepared and unrehearsed, cold-reading the play, partnering and standing in for the playwright who joins by webcam, apparently from his Berlin flat.   Tonight the actor was Nick Mohammed but unfortunately my last minute cheap seat was restricted view, and the staging meant that for about half the performance I couldn’t actually see him so a chunk of his performance was as a disembodied voice.  Wearing an earpiece which was feeding lines and stage directions, when I could see him, Mohammed looked remarkably calm as he responded to what was happening on screen or the directions he was being given. The playwright Nassim Soleimanpour is Iranian, now livin...

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...

A last minute returned ticket took me into London and to the Royal Court, fighting through the Championship League crowds to see Ben Whishaw, Emma D’Arcy and Kayla Meikle in Bluets which is pretty resolutely sold out.  A bit like a poetry reading, a bit like an art installation and, with live cinema as well, it also becomes a bit like an experimental film,  It was an intriguing 75 or so minutes.  The play itself doesn’t really have a narrative, instead being a kind of exploration of love, grief, pain, depression, desire,  all overlaid with the colour blue.  The premise is the narrator has lost a lover and has a friend who has had a terrible accident, and has also fallen in love, or maybe in desire, with the colour blue.  I can understand that, in that blue is surely the most desirable of colours but I was surprised that we didn’t get more of the actual colour on the screens.   All three actors stand at their own station with a desk with various pr...

Cowbois, a transfer from the RSC, is a joyous fantasy, delivered pantomime style.  The basic premise is that in a boring backwater town in the Wild West, the men have been gone for a long while looking for gold and the women are bored, and frustrated.   Then a dashing outlaw,  Jack Cannon, comes to town.  Jack is different from the other men and turns out to be exactly what is needed to shake up the town. There's a sign on the wall in the bar saying 'No Guns, No Politics' which is frequently ignored and only really noticed when anyone shakes the status quo.  Full of cliches,  subverted and played for laughs, this is a play about masculinity, gender, gender roles and freedom, calling out how hard it is to be different, in the end though everyone gets to try out what works for them. I’d say the play is about 20 minutes too long (I'd easily shave 10 minutes off each half) and it took me a while to get over the arch style being used here, but once I was in...

This was another one of those evenings where the audience was a bit annoying.  I had a woman along from me who didn’t just laugh but responded back with little comments and repeating the funny lines.  Then in the second half someone had an audio reader turned on which spent about the first 10 minutes describing what was going on on stage really loudly - maybe they didn’t know how to use their headphones but it took them a really long while to sort it out.    Anyway on to the actual play.  A mix between a sitcom and kitchen sink drama with an overlay of existential dread, and with a cast of 4; a grandmother, her two daughters and granddaughter.  The opening scene is an entertaining commentary on our  addiction to mobile phones as the family wait for their tea in absolute silence apart from the pinging of their phones and then eat their chippy tea with mobile phones in hand, communicating with the outside world, but also with each other.  There are ...