- Venue: Wilton's Music Hall
- Date: 24th December 2022
The Wild Wood a 100 years on?
Yesterday at a matinee of The Wind in the Willows Wilton’s, at the Wilton’s Musical Hall
When Grahame wrote his children’s novel (1908 at the height of the Edwardian summer), the great middle class fear was of the proletariat criminal/ anarchist/ bolshevist class arising and stealing their privilege and comfort, and the initial loss of Toad Hall to the weasels and stoats exactly captures this fear.
- Venue: Noel Coward Theatre
- Date: 16 November 2022
- Directed by: Jeremy Herrin
- Staring: Zachary Quinto, David Harewood
Intellectuals dumb-down?
The sure-handed James Graham gives us Zachary Quinto and David Harewood playing out the Gore Vidal / William F Buckley TV Debates during the 1968 US Party Conventions which chose Richard Nixon to trounce Hubert Humphrey. These debates, a complete departure from the reporting norms of the time, were reported as electric – and the play gives us a good idea (at least dramatically) of how they rolled out.
- Venue: Cinema
- Date: 7 November 2022 (on release from 4 November 2022)
- Directed by: Oliver Hermanus
- Staring: Bill Nighy, Aimee Lou Wood, Alex Sharp, Tom Burke
A life well lived?
In general I don’t review films (there are already too many outlets doing so), but I cannot pass commenting on ‘Living’, the remake by Oliver Hermanus of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 ‘Ikiru’; scripted by Kazuo Ishiguro and staring Bill Nighy.
- Venue: The Harold Pinter
- Date: 13th October 2022
- Directed by: Dominic Cooke
- Staring: David Tennant, Sharon Small, and Elliot Levey
Anything but Good?
Just back from the revival of the 1982 Good at the Harold Pinter https://goodtheplay.com/ - a 3 hander (until the very last scene) with David Tennant playing a German literature professor and novelist in the 1930s and Sharon Small and Elliot Levey playing a multiple of parts, on occasion within the same ‘scene’.
- Venue: Bridge Theatre, London
- Date: 4th October 2022
- Directed by: Nicholas Hytner
- Staring: Simon Russel Beale
An Ibsen too far at the Bridge
Tonight at the Bridge Theatre for Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman https://bridgetheatre.co.uk/whats-on/john-gabriel-borkman/ - a bit of a change of tempo from the Ray Cooney I saw last. With Simon Russell Beale as Borkman and Nicholas Hytner directing, it is difficult to go very far wrong, of course, but this late Ibsen is starting to knock on the door of the absurdists.
- Venue: The Mill at Sonning
- Date: 26th September 2022
- Staring: Steven Pinder & Natasha Gray
Definitely Funny
At a matinée of Funny Money at the Mill at Sonning Theatre (which runs till November). A Ray Cooney farce is not intellectually demanding fare – but we have had perhaps a plethora of intellectually demanding moments of late. If well played, and this was, it is simply (at times) chokingly funny.