Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

  I am old enough to remember the much loved tv series and I was interested to see how it had been condensed to fit into just over two and a half hours with interval.   The set grabbed attention straight away, with cranes and industrial building and the Mersey rolling away on the backdrop.  I liked the unemployment office which introduced most of the key characters and showed the performative rote nature of the weekly visits.  I have to say though that it felt like there was  a lot of plot and scene setting to get through in the first half which came at the expense of character .  All necessary  but I came out at the interval feeling a bit detached from it all.   The second half though starts to hone in on the people that this stuff is happening to, and for me it found its heart then, these men, not knowing how to be men when they can’t work any more, and families struggling to adapt, although still with a warm but sharp undercurrent of ...

 A warm and dry evening lends itself perfectly to an evening at the Globe and this one didn’t disappoint.  This is a traditional version of the play that surely would have satisfied the purists but without being stuffy at all.  For the first half, the theatre was full of the lovely lightness and comedy of this classic enemies to lovers romcom.   Ekow Quartey was an engaging and sweet Benedict and Amanda Vitalie turned in a great comic performance as a fiery fury of a Beatrice.  The two secondary lovers were fairly insipid but that’s no fault of the actors;  I’ve rarely seen performances that manage to lift those characters into something more interesting.   The second half  has a fairly clunky change of pace and tone, and always feels like a screeching handbrake turn to near tragedy but, in an echo of Romeo and Juliet, the priest’s suggestion to play dead works out this time and so we get our happy ending. The bit that really grates thou...

 I love the Donmar as a theatre, even when, as on this occasion, I am in the back row of the circle in the horrid high seats.  And with this production, in the round, and with the lights kept up, implicating us all in the events on stage, there is even more opportunity for people watching than usual.  I was particularly taken with the woman who held the programme up to the side of her face for the whole of the first half, then kept a scarf wrapped over her nose and mouth for most of the second.  Was there a bad smell?  Did she have toothache? And of course there were always the few who looked like they were dropping off. So what about the actual play?  Well this is a radical rethink, with a hippy feel and significant rework of the text, making it much swearier and up to date in general.  And it had lots of music added, particularly in the second half, plus a conscious effort to involve the audience in the action, to the extent of getting audience membe...

I did a fair bit of pondering over who is really the underdog in this new play by Sarah Gordon.  We meet all three Brontë sisters but Charlotte (an excellent, feisty Gemma Whelan) is the one who acts as our guide through this story, and it’s her point of view we hear although she's a pretty unreliable narrator.  The play is funny and rolls along, more than a little bit meta, and with plenty of reaching across the fourth wall.  We get to meet the sisters when they are trying to work out how to make ends meet and eventually develop their plan to use male pseudonyms to get their work published.  I liked the scratchy way their sibling relationships and rivalries were laid out, with Charlotte as the bossy and overbearing older sister with narcissist tendencies, and Anne (Rhiannon Clements) constantly being undermined but fighting back.   The play references their work, but actually it is only interested really in their relationship, so it was a shame really that...

I don’t know Henry IV pts 1 and 2 very well, so don't really know what they lopped off to squeeze the two plays into 3hrs 40 minutes including interval.  But whatever was lost, the remaining bits produced an engaging few hours.   Ian McKellen’s Falstaff, who was the original big draw for me, was as good as I hoped, playing a big bluff character with subtlety underneath the coarseness.  His Falstaff is older of course, but with richness and depth even in part one, and the relationship with the prince develops beautifully during the play.  My big takeaway though was that Toheeb Jimoh as Hal was really impressive and a talent to watch I think. He plays the prince as a high energy and wild fun seeker at the start.  He holds himself tight, with a sense of danger and anger just below the surface and this comes out not just against his father the King (Richard Coyle), but with Falstaff as his other father figure.  And I loved the way the relationships are pla...

We were a bit late to the party booking tickets to An Enemy of the People, so it was almost sold out on the cheaper seats  and we ended up standing.  We did a bit of horse trading so that we could stand together, but I quite like standing; there’s often a touch more camaraderie with the plebs standing at the back so as usual there were a few interesting chats to be had before and afterwards. As for the play, I found the opening scenes a bit dry with loads of exposition and struggled to get into it a bit, and the earnestly hip gang on stage were also quite annoying. But by about half an hour in, I had bought into the narrative and was interested to see what happened next.  Centred around a water pollution scandal in a small town, it reminded me a bit of The Inquiry at Chichester last year.   This reworking of the Ibsen play makes us think about our own complicity in the situation we find ourselves in not just in a theoretical way, but bringing it to life wi...

The Hills of California A Jez Butterworth play comes with high expectations.  As usual I deliberately hadn’t looked at reviews although I did see a lot of 4 stars so I was seated and ready, as was the youngish (good) but quite noisy (bad) audience. The play is set completely in the Seaview Guesthouse (previously Seaview Guesthouse and Spa - but with no view of the sea).  And we open in the public lounge - a seventies classic with broken jukebox and a tropical themed bar.  Three of the family’s four daughters are assembling as their mother Veronica lies dying upstairs.  It’s Blackpool in the midst of the drought of 1976 and everybody is very very hot. This first scene tells us a lot about the family dynamics (mother upstairs is still keeping up appearances wearing her wig) and the women are arguing about whether Joan, who moved to California 20 years ago and has never been back, will show. So, a family drama about grief and loss mixed in with a lot of family dynamics....