Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

 Othello at the Theatre Royal Haymarket An Othello with a starry cast of David Harewood (Othello) and Toby Jones (Iago), it had a full auditorium with a young and excited audience (I'm assuming it is still on the A level curriculum).  A simple but effective set, and this is a fairly simple and effective version.  Whilst the racism and misogyny are present, they are played pretty straight, without, for example trying to make it particularly current.   David Harewood was great, moving from an expansive and in love Othello, to a broken vengeful man as Iago’s poison sinks in, and the surrounding cast were all pretty pitch perfect.  I found Toby Jones a weasely Iago, although not as compelling as Rory Kinnear’s version back in 2013ish.  What I did  find strange was the amount of laughter at Iago’s dastardly plans - this wasn’t uncomfortable titters, but proper laughs as if this was all just a bit of sport.  They did dry up after the interval thoug...

  A Terence Rattigan play from 1952 doesn’t sound that appealing until you add Tamsin Greig into the mix and it suddenly became a must.  Surprisingly, although  it is pretty much of its time, I found it more modern than some of the kitchen sink dramas that pretty much swept Rattigan and his types of play away into history, for a while at least. A story about a woman who loves her younger lover too much and her husband not enough, and with neither of them loving her the way she wants to be loved, this is a pretty sad play, but despite opening with Hester’s suicide attempt, it’s also pretty funny, and not always in a bleak way! I read that there are some parallels with Rattigans own life where an ex lover killed themselves after leaving him for another man.  That's pretty sad in itself, and the play is very thoughtful about the impact of not being loved enough or as you wish to be loved, something that affects all of the main characters. Tamsin Greig is fantastic in th...

  I cannot lie, the big draw for me of this Beckett classic was Ben Whishaw and he and the whole cast didn't disappoint, doing a great job of bringing what can be a pretty bleak play to life. Set in a colourless blasted landscape with a nearly dead tree as the only landmark, Vladimir (Ben Whishaw) and Estragon (Lucian Msamati)  are waiting for Godot, their unseen overseer.  Passing through is Pozzo (Jonathan Slinger), and his bound and whipped lacky going by the name of Lucky (Tom Eddon).  In the first half, the long pauses broke up the tragicomedy of the two men trying to find interesting ways to pass the time in an empty, bleak and meaningless world.  As I think is deliberate, the wait for the interval felt interminable at times with the pointless of it all.  Interestingly, the second half picked up a bit in pace, as we have the existential angst of human existence laid out for us.  I really enjoyed the dynamic between Msamati and Whishaw, holding ha...

My busy weekend started out with a visit to Dominic West's version of Eddie in A View from the Bridge .  A fairly traditional interpretation, what I did find interesting was that Eddie's increasingly toxic behaviour was still being laughed at by the audience, which I found really strange.  In the second half, the first kiss got the appropriate hiss/gasp of shock, but the second one, which is surely one of the cruxes of the play, got some gasps but also quite a lot of laughter - what was that about?  Apart from that, the modern resonances around immigration and fragile working class masculinity still hold I think.  I liked Callum Scott Howell's portrayal of Rodolpho too, a proud man who refuses to conform to the stereotypes and hostility he faces as an illegal immigrant, although his italian accent was a bit flaky.  In this version I felt a fair bit of sympathy for Eddie who doesn't understand himself, living in a world he doesn't understand, and I think that is ...