Art and Culture, London, Plays

Simon Godwin’s Macbeth – Ralph Fiennes & Indira Varma at Dock X

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Ellie & I used to watch plays all the time. I remember one occasion when we saw one matinee in the afternoon, then walked straight from that theatre to one across town to watch another play. It wasn’t unusual for us to see three or four plays a week. Back in the days of thriving thespians & thoroughly thrilling, thought-provoking theatre productions. IS IT WORTH THE EFFORT? For several years now, we’ve barely managed to make the effort of going to the theatre once every other month. And it was nearly always disappointing. We’ve come to cherish the times when a play turns out to be okay’ish, that’s how bad it got.   All pics of performance, incl. feature pic, (c) Matt Humphrey, else (c) BerkeleySqB. 25 QUID TO SEE RALPH FIENNES? COUNT US IN. So when my wife, who’s our ‘events manager’, found out about this year’s Macbeth production […]

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Art and Culture, London, Plays

Agatha Christie’s Mousetrap – The world’s longest-running play

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When I was twelve years old, my parents took my little sister and me on a four-week round-trip with our trailer in England and Wales. It was during that trip that we spent one night in Covent Garden and watched the world’s longest-running play, Agatha Christie’s Mousetrap. The setting is Monkswell Manor in rural Berkshire during a snow storm. Only recently, this manor has been converted into a bed & breakfast. Agatha Christie’s Mousetrap: as English as tweed, mansions, and bad weather I remember quite vividly how the play epitomized Englishness to me. Of course the location had to be a castle-like mansion, not an inner-city apartment. The location had to be in the countryside, not in town. The weather had to be bad, it couldn’t be sunny. Everyone was wearing proper clothes like tweed jackets, sturdy coats, Oxford shoes, plaid socks. They couldn’t just rock up in jeans or […]

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Art and Culture, London, Plays

Hansard – Who wouldn’t like to watch a domestic for 90 minutes?

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We’ve just come back from watching actor and playwright Simon Woods’ Hansard at the National Theatre, which is directed by 41-year old, Washington, D.C.-based, Cambridge graduate Simon Godwin. Woods’ debut as a playwright had its premiere on this stage two months ago and is only showing until 25th November, with all except tomorrow’s show sold out. 39-year old Old Etonian Woods is clearly not lacking good connections to get his first attempt featured on the nation’s most prestigious stage. While reading English at Magdalen College, Oxford, in the early Noughties, he was in a relationship with Rosamund Pike for two years. A few years later the two would play lovers Jane Bennet and Charles Bingley in Pride & Prejudice. For the past ten years, Woods has been in a relationship with Christopher Bailey CBE, aged 48, the chief executive of Burberry, the British fashion empire. We weren’t initially planning on […]

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Art and Culture, London, Plays

Exit The King with Rhys Ifans at the National – Soso..

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I’m a huge fan of Eugène Ionesco and the Theatre of the Absurd in general. I had been looking forward to the performance of Oscar-nominated former stand-up comedian Patrick Marber’s adaptation of Ionesco’s play Exit the King at the National (until 6th October) with very high, perhaps overly high expectations. It’s the first time the National does Ionesco!! The 1h40m performance (no intermission) was decent by most accounts and, as usual for every London stage performance, received many 4 out of 5 and 5 out of 5 reviews (3 out of 5 by the Guardian). Without any doubt Rhys Ifans’ stage presence is super-intense and riveting, the performance of all the other actors, such as Indira Varma, also excellent. All photos (c) Simon Annand. The initial play is a manic mediation on death, which follows King Berenger, who is 483 years old, on his last day, while he is being […]

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Art and Culture, London, Plays

The Lehman Trilogy at the NT – Loved it (and I worked there)!

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We’ve just returned from a performance of the Lehman Trilogy at the National Theatre. It was one of the best plays we’ve seen in years, truly awesome. While previous performances of the play across Europe have involved vast casts, Ben Power‘s (the NT deputy artistic director’s) English language version of Italian playwright Stefano Massini’s play involves just three actors. They re-enact the one and a half centuries of the Lehman brothers’ family history from when the first of the initial three brothers emigrated from a small village in Bavaria (where I’m from) to Montgomery, Alabama, in the South of the U.S. From when they were god-fearing, law-abiding, humble, not-so-well-to-do corner store owners (and later on cotton merchants) to them losing control of their investment bank in the 1960s, and to the bank’s demise as a faceless global investment bank in the Financial Crisis of 2008, when godless monsters like Dick […]

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