Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

 Apparently I saw 42 theatre productions in 2025, although I feel like I still missed loads.  Anyway, this is my pick of the year - totally subjective and I am making the rules to suit me.  I have written about each one of these earlier in the year so have given the links to those  reviews too. Best New Play Clarkston:   Considering I know very little about the opening up of the American West, this wasn't really a must see, and I initially booked because Heartstopper's Joe Locke was starring, and I was curious to see him on stage.  But actually, despite the unpromising subject matter, I found the play really interesting, with themes around small towns and lives vs big ideas, economic, historical and cultural forces, and this takes a look at where meaning does and should sit, with dextrous writing which wraps the ideas together so that each line has more than one meaning. InterAlia:   I loved Prima Facie and this play, by the same writer Suzie Miller, ...

A Thursday afternoon matinee in a theatre in East London is perhaps not the most auspicious way to see a satire about race, with a particular focus on the American experience, but that was the only date I could manage on this tour with a tiny but mighty cast. The audience was an interesting mix of older, probably retired people, together with a balancing part of the audience as school children.  One interesting thing though is this play is predicated on the audience being, as usual,  older and mainly white, and this time it wasn’t, having a much wider race profile than usual.   The play itself is a bit Beckett-ish, particularly at the start, as Tambo (Clifford Samuel) and Bones (Daniel Ward) find themselves as a double act in a dysfunctional minstrel show, trying cheating, then reason and eventually more and more dramatic and painful acts to try to get the audience to give them empathy and money as they realise that they are just pawns in a game.  Then we leap f...