Travel, Theatre, Music, Cricket, Tennis, Writing, Life
This was our first theatre visit after returning from Vietnam in February.
A really good one too.
Here is a link to the Royal Court stub for this piece.
We rate David Eldridge highly as a playwright. Here was a superb cast and Dominic Cooke himself directing.
We really enjoyed this play and production.
The critics on the whole loved this piece – click here for a search term that finds the reviews.
Below is a link to the trailer:
We both found this piece charming and entertaining. It is about the birth of the cinema in the late 19th early 20th century shtetl.
It doesn’t get full marks for historical authenticity and it is a very sentimental piece, but that’s not always so terrible.
Superb cast, very well directed and some wonderful effects with the use of film.
Nicholas Wright has previous on these history-based imaginings. We loved Vincent in Brixton for example. Also Mrs Klein – click here or below for that one:
Mrs Klein by Nicholas Wright, Almeida Theatre, 24 October 2009
Travelling Light got mixed reviews – click here for a search term that finds them. Several critics really liked it. Others felt the sentimentality and stereotypes were not for them.
We very much enjoyed our evening, while recognising that this is an entertaining play, not a great play.
Below is the trailer…
…and the following vid has mini interviews with the key cast and creatives.
We normally love Simon Stephens stuff…
…but this was a stinker.
Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi re-imagined as an International Human Rights trial.
Technically it was very clever – the video/special effects were very innovative. Good cast too.
Great writer but this piece just didn’t work.
The subject matter is so grave that the arty, post-modern “trial of the fictional character” idea just didn’t work for us.
Nor did it work for the critics – click here for a term that finds the reviews. Don’t click if you were involved in this play/production.
The trailer is embedded below:
Just occasionally we don’t have enough positive adjectives to describe how we felt about a play/production.
Constellations by Nick Payne was such a show.
Here is a link to the Royal Court resource on this production.
Upstairs, but with a stellar cast – Sally Hawkins and Rafe Spall, this was a stunning piece of theatre that genuinely wowed us…
…and by 2012 Janie and I were not easily wowed.
In fact Janie doesn’t usually go for these “science meets love” type plays, but this one is truly exceptional, making her feel neither dumb nor condescended.
Charles Spencer’s rave review in The Telegraph includes a short vid interview with the stars – click here.
I think I liked this play more than Janie did.
It was a fictionalised…somewhat fantasised account of encounters (which did occur to some extent in real life) between the writer Mikhail Bulgakov and Joseph Stalin.
We were blessed with Alex Jennings as Bulgakov and Simon Russell Beale as Stalin, with Nicholas Hytner in the director’s chair.
In truth, I don’t think it was a great play. It was a very good idea for a play with some very good scenes within it, but as a whole it didn’t quite work for me as an entire play.
But there was enough really good stuff going on to please me plenty, on balance. Whereas I think Janie found it a little drawn out and confused/confusing.
The reviewers were more with me (on the plus side) than with Janie (on the “a bit muddled) side – click here for a search term that finds the reviews.
Below is a link to the trailer:
…and the following vid is an interview with John Hodge, the playwright:
I don’t think we’d been to the theatre on Boxing Day before…nor have we (to date) since.
But the timing worked for us and we thought, “why not?” We are very keen on Mike Leigh’s work generally. Also we wanted to make amends for the involuntary hoo-ha, in front of Mike Leigh’s very eyes, last time we attended one of his plays – a few months ago – especially as he had been so nice about it:
But unfortunately, we didn’t think all that much of Grief.
It had a fine cast including several of Mike Leigh’s regular stars, headed up by Lesley Manville.
The play had been developed in ensemble – the Mike Leigh method if you will. But, to us, it seemed rather dated and lacked sparkle this time.
It got somewhat mixed reviews – click here for a search term that finds them.
Below is a sort of review vid about the play/production:
We are very keen on Neil LaBute plays and the Almeida has (or had) made a bit of a specialism in them over the years.
While not quite his razor-sharp best, we thought this was a very good play and production.
Here is a link to the Almeida resource on this play/production.
The acting was excellent – all four performances top notch.
It was very well received by the critics on the whole – click here for a link through to the reviews.
Below is the trailer for the production we saw:
I remember us both really dreading the shlep to the Almeida just before Christmas and then both being so glad that we went.
We subsequently (four/five years later) saw a companion piece for it at the Hampstead, Reasons To Be Happy…
Reasons To Be Happy by Neil Labute, Hampstead Theatre, 8 April 2016
…which we didn’t think was anything like as good.
We thought this was an excellent play and production.
We booked it on the back of Joe Penhall’s superb play Blue/Orange. We also got a fantastic cast, not least Ben Daniels and Sophie Okonedo.
Here is the Royal Court resource for this play/production.
The Ben Daniels character, the father, is basically being sucked in by a cult. On reflection at the time of writing (January 2018) it has a fair bit in common with My Mum’s A Twat – click here, which we saw recently, except the cult-ista in the more recent case is the mum and the storyteller is the affected child later in life.
Anyway, Haunted Child mostly got very good reviews – click here for a link term that should find them.
Below is the trailer:
We thought very highly of this play and of this production.
Here is a link to the Royal Court resource on this play/production.
As soon as we entered the Royal Court Upstairs, we felt a bit un-nerved by the arrangement – we seemed to be sitting higgledly-piggledly on top of the action.
This production had started its life in a Peckham outreach location – a former cricket bat factory it transpired, which probably explains the unusual layout of the room. The working title of the play had been SW11, so I think Rachel De-lahay originally had a Battersea Estate in mind rather than a Peckham one – little matter.
The action was full of ethnic and inter-generational tensions. Very well written – where is Rachel De-lahay now (he asks, writing in 2018)?
Here is a link to a search term for the (mostly excellent) reviews.
Here’s the trailer…or rather playwright/director interviews…for the production, which was shot at that Peckham site:
Gosh I remember how disappointed we were by this one.
We had loved Conor McPherson’s previous work whenever we had seen it – especially but not only The Weir.
But this play, set in the early 19th century, just left both of us feeling cold.
Super cast, with several of the “usual suspects” for Irish plays, not least Bríd Brennan. Plus an early sighting of Caoilfhionn Dunne.
But for us, nothing could quite save this play.
I remember saying afterwards that it was like “Chekhov had written a ghost story” and I remember smiling when I subsequently saw one of the reviews saying just that.
Here is a link to a term that finds the (mixed/indifferent) reviews.
I think we stuck it out on the strength of the performances and the hope that it would liven up in the second half.
Below is an interview with Conor McPherson about the play…
…and below this is the NT trailer for the production:
Oh well.