The thing about Phil (Patrick Brennan) being a veteran comedian making a comeback gig is that the audience isn’t treated (or indeed subjected) to very much in the way of comedy. The entire play is set in a makeshift dressing room in one of the upper floors of a pub. The play bills itself as an “examination of masculinity in distress”, though it could be argued there wasn’t much masculinity in evidence in the first place to be distressed. There’s a sense of superiority about Phil that suggests he … [Read more...]
A Splinter of Ice by Ben Brown at Jermyn Street Theatre | Review
“You have to know your history,” a fellow theatregoer remarked at the interval, in reference to understanding the various nuances in the dialogue. I doubt I would have been able to follow it all without, for instance, having read Graham Greene’s (Oliver Ford Davies) The Third Man many years ago. As it is, some of the details weren’t, frankly, all that interesting - who said what to whom and when and in what context may well have been of interest to Greene and to his friend and MI6 former … [Read more...]
Our War by Andrew Ashaye at Brockley Jack Studio Theatre
It is a story not told often enough, at least not on stage, even in cosmopolitan London. I am reminded of a conversation I had some years ago with a black cab driver, after yet more Tube problems forced me to fork out for a taxi home - Britain is obsessed, my cabbie insisted, with the Second World War, with too many people not understanding that the Germany of today is a very different place to what it was in the days of the Third Reich. Our War capitalises on this ‘obsession’ with World War … [Read more...]
RICE by Michele Lee at Orange Tree Theatre | Review
There’s a warped sense of humour in Rice which didn’t appeal to me, although there were some in the audience that for whatever reason thought it was hilarious that Yvette (Sarah Lam) refers to another, albeit off-stage, woman as “ugly”. It’s a rather depressing piece of theatre, really - more or less everyone (by which I mean various other characters) is apparently full of bullsh*t, and there’s a lot of shouting going on. At one point I wondered if I was watching an episode of EastEnders, … [Read more...]
No Fear! at Hoxton Hall | Review
The sort of gymnastic movements with which Linda Marlowe closes out No Fear! would be impressive at any age, but at 81 years young she defies the image of an octogenarian sticking to things like brisk walking and stretching as part of their exercise regime. And so it was that her (somewhat) advancing years expressed themselves in other ways, most notably when Marlowe left the stage, ostensibly to retrieve her spectacles from her dressing room. I couldn’t tell if this was scripted or not, though … [Read more...]