Little Revolution by Alecky Blythe, Almeida Theatre, 30 August 2014

We so wanted to really like this one…

…and we sort-of did like it, but still felt a little let down by the piece. It could…we felt should…have been so gripping and exciting.

We loved Alecky Blythe’s verbatim piece a few years earlier, The Girlriend Experience – click here or below…

The Girlfriend Experience, Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, 20 September 2008

…so we thought a verbatim piece about the 2011 riots, complete with “community chorus”, would be a special evening of theatre.

Here is a link to the Almeida stub on the piece.

It all felt very different on arrival at the theatre, with the space transformed for this piece and entrances to the space where audiences normally fear to tread.

But the piece itself never really took off into the stratosphere as perhaps it should.

We heard a lot from the good-hearted middle class people who felt conflicted by the riots and/or tried to help those who got into difficulties during the chaos. We heard less from the rioters themselves.

To be fair on Alecky Blythe, she took the orthodox view on the play and stuck only to the verbatim material she could gather at the time, so I suppose that would be weighted towards those slightly safer situations…

…not least because people are not normally full of conversation while rioting…

…I imagine; not ever having been in the heart of a riot personally.

The reviews were a bit mixed – as Janie and I predicted when we saw the preview – click here for a search term that finds the reviews.

Below is the trailer:

Frost/Nixon by Peter Morgan, Donmar Warehouse, 19 August 2006

Janie and I were really taken with this play/production. On my log I gave it a one word review:

superb.

Peter Morgan writes these historical/biographical plays really well and Michael Sheen seems well fitted to the lead roles in them, be the role Tony Blair or David Frost.

Actually the whole cast was excellent, with especially memorable performances by Frank Langella, Kelly Shale, Lydia Leonard and Corey Johnson.

Michael Grandage was doing great work at the Donmar at that time.

There is a superb Donmar educational resource available for this production, now in the public domain but not well publicised, which I have scraped to here and/or the image link below:

Taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Frostnixonposter.png with the same attribution and for the same fair use reasons as stated on Wikipedia.

We saw the original Donmar run quite early in its life – perhaps even still in preview or just after the press night. The play/production was extremely well received, deservedly so. A link to reviews can be found here.

The piece transferred big time and also was made into a film. Janie and I were delighted to have seen the original production before the big fuss broke out.