Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

Letitia Wright plays Yvonne, an ambitious Black journalist in this play about journalism and journalistic integrity.  It’s set in 1990’s America, and a white man lost in a car in a rundown area of town is attacked and murdered, his wife describing the murderer as a Black man.  So it sets itself up as a bit of a whodunnit, with the newsroom well placed to investigate.  Yvonne is keen to cover the story but has just started her job in the Black newsroom and she is put on local Black stories rather than the bigger one she is interested in. Her boss is Pat (played by Lorraine Toussaint - loved her in Orange is the New Black ) a war weary veteran of the civil rights movement with Neil (Ashley Thomas), as her enthusiastic sidekick who is convinced the wife is responsible for the murder.  The last of the main quartet of the cast is Wilf Scolding as Jeff, Yvonne's rich boyfriend, who also happens to own the paper. Despite setting us up with a mystery, this is really about wh...

  Another night out at a period play, this time from 1969.  This domestic farce is still very funny, operating like clockwork as it should.  The premise is that Frank (Roger Allum), an ineffectual but well meaning man, decides to intervene when his wife explains that she missed their anniversary as someone in his work team is having an affair.  Being the genial, if incompetent boss that he is, and totally misunderstanding the situation, he tries to help resolve the perceived marital difficulties of Mary and William, Bob and Theresa, causing highly entertaining chaos.  The play is in the round, with the set ingeniously split between the overlapping homes of the Featherstones and the  Phillips. which enables  some excellent scenes where the couples have phone calls, conversations and even more entertaining, two concurrent dinner parties, without noticing the others are there. It is definitely funny, but some of the relationship dynamics are really dated,...

I had a trip into London on a day off, and managed to squeeze in a few exhibitions plus some theatre.  Abigail's Party I am going to start with the final visit of the day which was to see the Mike Leigh classic, Abigail's Party, revived with Tamzin Outhwaite as Bev, the monstrous hostess from the 1970s.  One of the amazing things about this was, although she opened with a slightly nasal intonation reminiscent of Alison Steadman's defining performance, she very quickly moved away and made Bev her own.   Bev is still a monster, perhaps a little more vicious than I remember, but that might be because the 1970's culture on display here was even more jarring than I remember it being when first produced.  A clever touch is to make Tony and Angela, their new neighbours who are visiting, of Asian heritage, adding an additional frisson to the class and other topics that fall out of Bev and Laurence's mouths. Tony and Ange are as awkward as any of us would be dealing with...

  Well, this was a white knuckle ride!  Based on a 2018 Danish film, this is a tense thriller with Russell Tovey holding the stage for the full 65 minutes of the play. Joe (Tovey) is working alone in a police emergency response control room.  Bored, and with a monotone voice as he deals with time wasters, he is also making judgements about every call, and the people who call in, and deciding whether he needs to give it proper attention.  We learn he has family problems and that there is some kind of hearing hanging over him.  When he gets a call from Emily though, he gives it his full attention and we see him spring into action, perhaps going further than he should in true police drama style.   This is fantastically tense, with Tovey holding our attention every step of the way as we watch his decision making, both good and bad, unfold in real time.  It tackles toxic masculinity, and mental health issues as well as police misconduct and with a soci...

I always enjoy this play, although it’s been a while since I last saw it.  But this is a fantastic revival.  Modern but keeping the spirit of the original, there’s verve from the very start in making sure the audience know they are part of the action.  The first half leans heavily into the rom-com-iness of it all, whilst the second half takes us off to a bleak war before back home again.   I have never seen Adrian Lester turn in a bad performance and this is no exception.  He dazzles as early Cyrano, playful and passionate, whilst still retaining cynical outsider vibes, and then makes the switch to sadder Cyrano completely seamlessly.  Susannah Fielding is excellent as Roxane too - no limp lettuce behaviour here, and with her own agency.   Costume and set are all gorgeous, keeping to tradition despite the more modern sensibility and language.  I really enjoyed the poetry too, and unlike The Misanthrope last week it never detracted from c...

 First thing to say is that Sandra Oh is fantastic, and she is surrounded by an excellent cast for this reworking of Moliere’s classic about the hypocrisy of aristocratic society.  Oh plays Alice, a straight talking writer who is being pursued to apologise for things she has said.  Paul  Chahidi plays her friend John, and Tom Misan as Stephan her younger lover, both doing a fantastic job in providing a counterbalance and foil to Alice's passionate inflexibility. Jemima Rooper is also perfect in her relatively small role as Stephan’s bitter ex wife, using social media to cause real life damage.   Alice, in this version of the play is a writer who is wedded to honesty and telling the truth as she sees it, with no patience for dissembling, compromise or taking a pragmatic path.  This eventually affects her career and her relationships.  Completely rewritten with an up to date focus on narcissism, cancel culture, social media pile-ons, online misinfor...

This is a complete updating of Ibsen’s classic early feminist creation at the Almeida, and I really wanted to like it.   Romola Garai is Nora, who, in this iteration, is married to a financier with a city boy made good vibe, (including the recovery from addiction).  He is just about to make it big by selling his company.  Nora is an over-excited trophy wife when we first meet her, spending money that as her husband points out, they don’t have yet.  But she wants a good family Christmas and so Torvald (Tom Mothersdale) acquiesces.  But all is not as it seems.  Nora has secretly put them in debt to save her husband and family, but a blackmail plot and a flirtation make everything a lot more complicated.   I appreciate the attempt to bring it up to date,and it is ostentatiously of the moment, including the delight of a  financier recognising that war will bring in big money for him.  The question of how to be a woman in today’s world is still a ...

An Episcopalian church in  the US is preparing for the arrival of some special visitors who will need privacy in one of their rooms.  Life is going on in the rest of the building but Brandon (Ameri Bacchus) and Judy (Susie Trayling) as they are setting up, decide to stop the music lessons and other activities until after the meeting is over so that there are no distractions.   The visitors are two sets of parents who lost their children in a school shooting seven years before. Gail (Lyndsey Marshal) and Jay (Adeel Akhtar) lost their son Ewan whilst the murderer was Linda (Monica Dolan) and Richard (Paul Hilton)’s son  The four parents sit at a table in the middle of the room and talk through  their grief, anger, regrets, and consider if or how they can reconcile themselves to what has happened.   A small scale truth and reconciliation hearing.   This is a new play at the Donmar by Fran Kranz which I understand is based on the film of the...

This witty play by Winsome Pinnock takes us on a brisk but clever journey through a country house mystery with cod ghost story undertones.  I enjoyed it a lot.  Fee (Sylvestra Le Touzel) is a direct descendent of Henry Harford and has inherited the family estate, complete with a grand but crumbling mansion, and has discovered journals from her slave owning ancestor.  Abi (Rakie Ayola) and Marva (Cherrelle Skeete) are Black academics trying to authenticate the documents .  There’s much fun to be had poking fun at the impoverished aristocracy selling off their legacy to all and sundry to keep things going, with a fake ghost and a music artist, ‘Fallas E’ making a music video in the fountain in the grounds.  As the plot moves on, It turns out that everyone has some kind of connection to the Harford family plantation.  Abi’s Nigerian aristocratic ancestry were implicated in the slave trade, whilst Marva a working class protege has potentially her own link with ...

 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...

Set in one room in a country house in Derbyshire, centuries apart,  the mysteries of the universe and those a bit closer to home are explored.   The set is in the round, a single circular space with circular lights and globes above, suggesting the universe; the staging really makes the most of this set up.  The two worlds  of the 19th and late 20th century overlap and sometimes intermingle in this clever, deceptively simple production.   In the 19th century, Thomasina (Isis Hainsworth) is learning about Euclidian geometry, Fermat's last theorem and latin, but also about love, and why a house guest has been discovered in a carnal embrace with her tutor, Septimus Hodge (Seamus Dillane). Their conversations are fond and bantering, and also pretty funny, as it becomes clear that Septimus is in the centre of plenty of romantic intrigue at the house and using his considerable charm to ensure he escapes any potential trouble.  He's also a conte...

It’s 1938 in middle class Brooklyn, the year of Kristallnacht, and Sylvia (Pearl Chanda), who has been taking a close interest in what has been happening in Germany, suddenly becomes literally paralysed with fear.  No-one can understand why she is so afraid - this is all happening the other side of the ocean, so her distress is incomprehensible to those around her.  In the meantime, her husband Phillip (Eli Gelb) continues to reject and hide his Jewishness, with internalised antisemitism, a defender of Hitler and insisting that his name is Gellburg not Goldberg.  Whilst he works hard to assimilate, at the same time he is proud of what his son has achieved as a Jew, and it is really his journey we follow over the course of the play.  The set is covered in newspapers, both historic and current, and there are four clocks on the wall showing times around the world which align by the end of the play, and the message is pretty clear, that we ignore the rise of fascism at o...

Man and Boy at the Dorfman I knew very little about this rarely performed Rattigan play beforehand but, for me at least, this one was a hit.  I last saw Ben Daniels being amazing in Medea a couple of years ago.  This time he plays Gregor Antonescu, a successful financier in 1934, with all sorts of financial interests including loans to the fascist movements in Italy and Germany, clearly moving in those circles.  We meet him at the moment his dodgy dealing has caught up with him and he seeks sanctuary in his estranged son’s basement apartment in Manhattan.  The murky world of the rich hits pretty hard in the light of the Epstein scandal, showing how disposable people are in this world, including his son, as he offers him up without his consent, to a closeted gay corporate boss.  In this world, people are no more than commodities and Antonesco states 'Love is a commodity I can't afford' .  What matters instead is how anyone or thing can help with the deal....