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Post by peelee on May 15, 2019 14:34:59 GMT
Actually, showgirl, I'd been looking for something I could squeeze in before the FA Cup Final kick-off this coming Saturday at 5.00pm. I've mentioned my behaviour re the play at the Bush, and wasn't attracted either by what the Royal Court has on offer. I've already seen the excellent Jane Clegg, a revival of a St John Ervine play, at the Finborough.
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Post by peelee on May 14, 2019 22:43:57 GMT
I've hovered thinking about booking tickets for this several times in recent weeks, yet there's been something about it that each time has caused me to fly away undecided. I admit this has happened almost every time I've looked at the Bush website in recent years. And it's not only the Bush that has failed to enthuse me when I have otherwise been up for a decent play and prepared to spend a bit of money on tickets, ice cream, play text or programme.
On the other hand, when I've seen reasonably priced tickets available for interesting plays at venues like the National, the Finborough, the Old Vic, Soho Theatre, Jermyn Street Theatre, the Latchmere or sometimes Questors, I've booked without delay. The Firm at Hampstead Theatre Downstairs and Rutherford and Son at the National, have had a similar get-on-and-book feeling as soon as I've slapped eyes on them on their websites.
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Post by peelee on May 14, 2019 19:18:12 GMT
We saw this at the weekend and really enjoyed it. There have been some cast changes in this five-handed piece but two actors previously involved, I read, appear again in this play returning to Hampstead Theatre Downstairs. Nice space and nice prices, with seats mostly unreserved. Issues raised seem to cover the waterfront but there's nothing predictable about any of this. Engaging characters grab the attention and the ninety minutes (no interval) whizz by. Good writing, Roy Williams; well directed, Denis Lawson.
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Post by peelee on Apr 30, 2019 10:35:50 GMT
If this is still running, go and see it. Writing from the 1980s that stands up still, as well as presenting 2020s-style audiences with both historical insight into the period it came out of and, with regard to 'nowadays' when things are supposedly more sophisticated, knowing and different, food for thought. I read this online yesterday and she makes an argument about the play that is worth thinking about: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/29/fourth-wave-feminism-play-top-girls-feminism
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Post by peelee on Apr 16, 2019 12:54:13 GMT
There was a protest and traffic was diverted and some bottlenecks developed. But taxi drivers didn't denounce this, as far as I know, and not if ITV London approached them in their black cabs presumably because media were looking for a reaction in order to make a side-story perhaps about cab drivers. Quite different had the taxi drivers federation, or other union-style body, say, issued a press release critical of the protest — then you might have been justified.
Over on BBC London TV News, or it could have been Sky News, drivers who'd been interviewed behind the wheels of their vehicles were no more than mildly resigned to delays, though up to one hour-long said one man. IIRC all said, 'Yes, delay, but however frustrating traffic is today, they've got a right to protest'. And there were a few understanding smiles from them as they spoke into the microphones that had been put before them. London cabbies work around the clock and will have seen far worse than this kind of delay.
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Post by peelee on Apr 16, 2019 11:58:13 GMT
When I saw this at the Dorfman Theatre I was struck by the writer's skill and the quality of acting that beautifully presented a hopeful woman and a hesitant man in a situation that was all too recognisable for many people. People from different occupations and worlds of work, and also quite different emotional-pasts. Social awkwardness viewed sympathetically. Beginning is such a good title for this play.
Having seen the actors in this in the Druid Murphy plays staged over here in London by the much admired Galway theatre company for Cultural Olympiad in 2012, I'd say this production should be petty good. Eileen Walsh then went on to appear in things I've seen at the National Theatre, London, and at the Royal Court, and I've loved her acting range. Were I in Dublin I'd love to have a look at this new production.
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Post by peelee on Apr 16, 2019 11:33:51 GMT
What a play! Or was it the acting? It's likely the writing, acting and directing combined have made this such an engrossing piece of theatre. I'm so happy to have seen this, based on Steve's upthread recommendation last week.
I think it was Steve, too, who alerted this board to the rather decadent and wonderful Effigies of Wickedness about the German songs and cabaret acts that defied but got squeezed by the Nazis, staged at the Gate Theatre in West London last year.
I guess 'early birds' got the best ticket prices from whenever it was that booking opened, but there are still tickets at what looks like a range of prices, all pretty reasonable I'd say. And what I appreciated too: the play text at discount. Anyway, if you see this it's unlikely you'll give a fig what you paid for a ticket. Down from the Traverse Theatre, Scotland, and surely this'll prove one of the highlights of London theatre this year.
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Post by peelee on Nov 29, 2018 21:18:59 GMT
It is likely to be true. In writing terms he seems to have done all sorts of projects.
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Post by peelee on Nov 19, 2018 21:01:52 GMT
I noticed a couple of newspaper reviews awarded two or three stars, yet when I went to the cinema mildly intrigued but ready for disappointment I discovered I rather liked Peterloo. A lot of work and craft has gone into it. It'll also have some filmgoers wanting to know more about the massacre and its significance.
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Post by peelee on Nov 11, 2018 17:08:31 GMT
Only recently released for cinema showings in the UK, Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old is to be broadcast tonight on BBC2 at 9.30pm and runs for roughly 90 minutes: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0brzkzx
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Post by peelee on Nov 11, 2018 0:47:49 GMT
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Post by peelee on Nov 10, 2018 16:53:31 GMT
I think that the first time I saw Sarah Kestelman on stage was in Gorky's Exiles in 1971 in the Aldwych Theatre days of the RSC. I've just checked who else was in the cast and there are names that rose to the top of their profession. In that decade the RSC did a run of plays that had originated with Russian writers, novel enough to me to get tickets for what was a lovely theatre for that sort of thing.
Re this latest production at Hampstead, I might well go to see Uncle Vanya, as it offers what other theatres won't be offering for the foreseeable future. I've had emails lately from local theatres drawing attention to their new plays I'll describe as in their terms, 'dealing with the issues of our time' that don't float my boat nor even have the effect of me wanting to go looking at boats. So, a classic revived: there's far worse out there that that by the look of things.
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Post by peelee on Nov 8, 2018 0:56:36 GMT
He was just another luvee who gave up his real name, 'Schicklgruber', for the celebrity name 'Hitler' he became better known by. Come to think of it, he might have avoided the term 'kiln' for the more frequently used word 'oven'. I can't help thinking that the worse that could have happened with a tricycle would be suffering a couple of punctures. What probably went against Tricycle was the spelling of it for those who find such tasks require mild effort, whereas the modern US corporate habit is to opt for the recently crept-in 'pick' where once we learned to spell and use 'selection'.
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Post by peelee on Oct 30, 2018 17:33:32 GMT
I've seen hardly any of those plays, yet have liked much of what I have seen in the last year. So, for those un-nominated and not on this prize nomination list, don't worry — I was among people who probably did like you!
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Post by peelee on Oct 30, 2018 17:26:15 GMT
As the centenary of the Armistice approaches, release of Peter Jackson's documentary based on British film in the Imperial War Museum and BBC archives is timely. The commentary derives from interviews in oral history archives, that are skilfully integrated with film of British volunteers from the balmy August days of 1914 through to war-exhausted November 1918.
It is roughly chronological though without any dates or named battles mentioned, and is both appalling and fascinating, while witnesses with a range of regional accents explain facts significant and trivial that were features of the war they experienced. There have been individual films and documentary series about this war before, but what makes this new documentary stand out is the re-processing of film the better to help the modern viewer connect with something that by now lacks living witnesses. Fuzzy old monochrome film clips are transformed into colour detail that underlines the humanity these soldiers share with people like us now.
There have been stage classics based on the 1914-18 war front, in the decades that followed the war, never mind other works that may have had immediate impact in their postwar time but been forgotten as time has passed. This latest film underlines the intensity of what happened to war participants, and I think why it eventually reverberated culturally and politically once realisation of what had happened sank in.
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Post by peelee on Oct 29, 2018 23:30:30 GMT
Thank you for the information. I'll act on it.
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Post by peelee on Oct 29, 2018 23:25:15 GMT
I started reading the play text of The Young Marx the other day, having enjoyed the farce when I saw it at The Bridge where it worked in its own witty terms, and it reads nicely. Although when I saw film The Young Karl Marx, by Raoul Peck—he also wrote and directed recent documentary about the work of James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro—I thought it far more interesting and satisfying than Bean and Coleman's play. That was a piece of liberal piss-taking, essentially, and pandered a bit to its local City of London audience, but probably well chosen by such a theatre wanting to attract what it imagined would be a wider, curious audience.
I'd avoided Julius Caesar though tickets for it made a handy, on-the-day supplement to a birthday present, and we took it in that spirit. The Trumpery-treatment was a bit predictable, given the mood of the arts scene these last couple of years, though I thought that women in certain roles worked well enough and gave it a freshness. The young people present around the moving stage seemed to enjoy it, so may have been a nice first-theatre-experience for some that will be built on longer term.
I enjoyed The Barney Norris play, Nightfall, which was much less arts-scene oriented than other stuff to be seen on stage, but more attuned to limited options in the countryside where the struggle to survive and be able to plan is more pressing. Posters on here didn't like it, as I recall, but apart from having been better suited to a smaller space it was good of The Bridge to give this young writer the kind of billing his work deserves.
In the end, I didn't get to see Alan Bennett's Allelujah! and made only periodic half-hearted attempts to book seats throughout its run. I haven't tried seriously to buy tickets for the new McDonagh play, though admire this theatre's staging of his new work. I'll read about the play more widely elsewhere before deciding whether to buy tickets. What I would have shelled out for was the play that had Laura Linney in it; those tickets had sold out fairly quickly, though.
I like the layout of the theatre , the seats are decent, the staff friendly, and it's a nice place to meet friends before a play. I've also had some nice conversations with strangers of all ages before plays and during intervals, and all that's something about this new theatre that works for me.
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Post by peelee on Oct 25, 2018 18:14:00 GMT
Switzerland has been slotted in at the Ambassadors because early closure for Foxfinder has created space for something like this from November for what'll be a couple of months at least. Small cast and straightforward set design, in what I believe is quite an intimate theatre with overhanging circle, should recreate what helped it to work at the fair-size Ustinov Studio, Bath. It deserves a tour, I think I mentioned on another thread a while ago, but if that does not happen then at least a London opening will get it the kind of bigger aggregate audience it deserves.
It got a great response from the audience when we saw it. But the novelist-subject of this play was no delicate flower, was 'difficult' with some people, and this play presents that more irascible side of her. It'll upset some, because she was prejudiced, plain-spoken and could use words with effect. Misanthropic, said some, but an influential writer and much admired. Long years ago, she wrote one of those books on how to write and she being such a good thriller writer there were plenty interested to know more of her technique and her writerly experience.
Re a comment upthread, she wrote several novels that featured the not-quite-right protagonist Tom Ripley. That character has featured in at least two films: the well-structured unfolding of the story in The Talented Mr Ripley released twenty years ago—blimey! how time passes—and the very different and distinct Purple Noon from the early 1960s when you see why young Alain Delon had such screen presence and was 'box-office' to the kind of cinema-goers uncertain whether the next French film along would be worth going to see. It was her novel that was adapted for Hitchcock's wonderful Strangers on a Train, about oddball Bruno who proposes he and another traveller in a railway carriage each commit a murder as a favour to the other. The more recent film, Carol, arose from her original work.
IIRC this play lasts ninety minutes, without an interval, so, not to annoy fellow playgoers, you might have to walk out before you even walk in.
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Post by peelee on Oct 23, 2018 19:03:47 GMT
There were various adverts he did for Holsten Pils. Here with George Raft who in later life was forever knocking back allegations about involvement with gangsters:
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Post by peelee on Oct 23, 2018 15:06:20 GMT
cleoskryker, I didn't so much hate the film as become gradually irritated by its dawdling pace and focus on slacker-types, the film dawdling along with them. I found that eventually I was bored by it. In such situations, I often try to analyse not just what's wrong but what might have made it better — it's a way of getting something for my money out of the experience. This time, though, the pictures had become just lights moving on a screen, while I used the cinema darkness and comfortable seat to turn over in my mind something I was writing at home and had only part-completed. I have to do that sometimes while my companion absorbs herself in the film that she at least is happy to watch, and I never lobby to leave something even though we are so close after this many years that she senses when my mind is elsewhere and realises what I am usually doing mentally with my time. I'm that sort of bloke. She and I laugh about this afterwards. For this film, though, I was there on my own, gave it an hour, and then went home to watch some 'live' European Champions League football on my TV. American Animals got positive reviews, and if you and others loved it then I have no reason to argue with you.
I'm sorry that Stories at the National didn't do it for you. Not a great play but I found it fascinating even at the very early preview performance I attended. There is a lot in it, and in my time was approached by a couple of women, very good friends, about conception, so could identify with the protagonist's dilemma in this play. Though I wasn't like any of the male characters in the play, the responses from them seemed plausible. It's partly an age-thing, I suppose, and about life experiences. It's not a class-issue as far as I am aware, so 'middle class' this and 'middle class' that, as per other comments, doesn't lay a glove on this play. Nina Raine used her kind of egotistical, buzzy, literary family, as a possible model to help her write Tribes, I imagine, and this new play presents the kind of family that will have a range of possible choices and social acquaintances in an urban setting, to make this play true enough. As always, I recommend not what I like but what I like and think others on this board may like. For I am mindful that funds are limited and so people have to take informed risks. But not informed enough by me as ever to have people know beforehand the story, the subplots, etc. There is no one story in his play, but Stories. Let the audience see and hear them unfold!
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Post by peelee on Oct 22, 2018 19:40:47 GMT
I was watching a US film, American Animals, at a cinema a few weeks ago, and found its ponderousness and lack of necessary editing to be the explanation. So very unusually for me, I left mid-film about an hour in. Funny thing was, I left at what was probably the most exciting long scene, the robbery of something from a library, but I really didn't think by then that I'd be missing anything. Whether they got away with it, or all got pinched by the cops, mattered little to me by then. I wouldn't ask for my money back in that sort of situation; I'd simply credited the film with more to it than it had to offer.
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Post by peelee on Oct 22, 2018 19:25:22 GMT
Those here who remember that very good BBC TV series State of Play, about a British newspaper and conflict with crooked senior politicians that featured Bill Nighy as a charismatic newspaper editor with staff that included John Simm and Kelly Macdonald, may remember that then newish TV actor Tom Burke played a fact-digger who quietly got on with it. It was compelling TV at the time.
There was a Hollywood remake that put it all into one USA-based feature film, and starred Ben Affleck, Helen Mirren and Russell Crowe, but it was nowhere near as good.
I've never seen Don Carlos, by the Schiller I'd never heard of until hot ticket Mary Stuart in the West End with Harriet Walter and Janet McTeer, but on the strength of that play I'd like to see this play.
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Post by peelee on Oct 22, 2018 18:59:05 GMT
Agnes Colander looks interesting. And after Proud Haddock's recent involvement in Square Rounds, I'd be curious enough to want to see Billy Bishop Goes to War, the most performed Canadian play apparently. I'd like to see Creditors, as I never have seen this play by Strindberg, though I'll give Miss Julie a miss. Mary's Babies is based on a fascinating premiss that might well have me seeking tickets.
Somebody involved with Jermyn Street Theatre has compiled a worthwhile-looking season.
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Post by peelee on Oct 22, 2018 13:00:42 GMT
He's written books about his research for earlier plays. So it seems an odd thing not to do now. Research helps, and amidst the information processed there is a tendency for ideas to crop up.
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Post by peelee on Oct 21, 2018 15:51:39 GMT
Very good. It's about a grown-up issue, is serious, yet has fun with the stories that people come out with, serious though they're being. Get a ticket and enjoy the experience.
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Post by peelee on Oct 18, 2018 14:57:39 GMT
Thank you, crowblack, but the tickets obviously went to a lucky buyer within 23 minutes of your post.
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Post by peelee on Oct 15, 2018 14:27:57 GMT
What'll you do if there are? You wouldn't give up your ticket, would you? Unless anyone here can answer your question, then go along expecting the worst. That way you'll be prepared. And if it isn't as bad as you feared, then perhaps you may even be pleasantly surprised.
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Post by peelee on Oct 11, 2018 18:44:51 GMT
Good fun. A nice idea to revive the original play, about young Hogarth, with characters Henry Fielding and Robert Walpole also in the thick of the often bawdy action. It brought to mind brilliant history, The London Hanged, by Peter Linebaugh, and publications about the poverty and the knocking-shops in the streets around Covent Garden. The more recent play, The Taste of the Town, is set decades later and includes not just the now much older though still ribald painter but the likes of David Garrick and Horace Walpole. Knickers-off in the first play, two blue-stockings taking tea and in conversation with the painter's relatives in the second production.
There is much laughter, admittedly though potty-mouthed dialogue will appal some, though it's made up for with some droll local references and theatrical in-jokes that maintain the intention of amusing theatregoers. I got an email reminder today that this pair of plays, Hogarth's Progress, is due to run for another week or so. There are some very good performances to savour. The set design is simple, yet thinks big in setting the context of those times and as if these are painterly canvases there to conjure up atmosphere.
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Post by peelee on Oct 8, 2018 12:56:43 GMT
Unlike others on this board who've voiced their dislike of what they attended back then, I liked this play at the National Theatre when it was on there a few years ago. As there's a new production and it's on tour, if it comes near London and I can get to a venue staging it then I'll certainly be up for seeing it again.
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Post by peelee on Oct 5, 2018 15:31:47 GMT
I got a supposed reduced-offer for these plays the other day, that seemed nothing of the sort; likewise All About Eve from some other outfit. Counter-productive, I think. Each offer amounted to simple advertising.
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