Tag: Anna Maxwell Martin

We don’t much go for West End productions, but this one does read like a Cottesloe, Royal Court or Hampstead type production, despite landing in the West End straight from its original Australian production.

The play is a comedy, loosely based on a real incident in which Germaine Greer was breifly kidnapped by a deranged “fan”.

Thank you, Official London Theatre, for all the details about the production – click here.

Janie and I saw this on the Saturday of the Lord’s test, with Lord’s tickets in our hand for the Sunday and with me having been at Lord’s on the Friday, enjoying a long weekend…

…Eileen Atkins, Anna Maxwell Martin, directed by Roger Michell…what could possibly go wrong?

Not a lot, really. It was funny, yet also quite forgettable. Only by skimming the above OLT synopsis and the reviews that follow does it start to come back to me. A bit like the test match really, seems like I was having that sort of weekend:

• Michael Billington in the Guardian damns it with faint praise as only he can;
• Rhoda Koenig similarly in the Independent, pointing out the Germaine Greer hates the piece (perhaps a plus?);
• Ian Shuttleworth in the FT uses the phrases “Ben Elton with brains” and “a marvellous confection”;
• Charles Spencer in the Telegraph absolutely loved it and imagined that couples seeing it together would be debating the feminist issues therein at length…wrong in our case.

Still, it was worth seeing and for sure a notch or three above the usual West End comedies.