Women Beware Women -Middleton (National Theatre)

This production is now over!! Anna and I were supposed to see it in previews a few months ago but you know, I got sick and stayed sick for a very long time. But we managed to go down to London specifically to see it the day before it closed and it was magnificent!

I was expecting a massacre of Revenger's Tragedy (2008) proportions so when the final balletic death-dance came along I was pleased that there was an amazingly choreographed bloodbath but relieved that it wasn't bloody like the disturbing scenes I remembered from the last restoration tragedy I'd seen at the National. Yes, the final scene was amazingly well done, really beautiful and spine chilling without being disgusting, it was terrifying! One after another after another gets their revenge and is killed until there is no one left, wow, it made all the hairs on my arms stand on end!

Anyway, some brilliant performances. I went to see Sam Barnett and Harriet Walter, neither disappointed. Barnett did his usual cute Posner act (Awwww!! Posner betrayed!! Awwww!!) and Walter was outstanding, seemingly unknowingly cold and calculating in the first act and then a giggly girly so taken with the young boy in the second. Oh! That character was me! That was my future!! My two husbands dead and buried and then along comes Posner, a beautiful blond boy, sigh, swoon! I adore him!! Ugh, I'm going to be such a predator when I'm old. But enough about my horrible self-realisation. Harriet was amazing, a wonderful strong lead and she is stunning!

But there were discoveries too! That's what we love!! Discovering young actors! The two girls were good, especially Lauren O'Neil who had the stage presence of a young Alex Kingston, what a deep powerful voice that little blonde has!! But this is what it's all about folks... This was the same feeling the first time I saw Rory Kinnear on stage in The Man of Mode (2007), the same wide smile on my face, the inability to take my eyes off him whenever he was on stage. Harry Melling is hilarious. Who'd have thought that it would be Dudley from the Harry Potter movies who would come out of those films a promising actor. Not only is he ridiculously funny, both with delivery and physically- he is actually really good looking! I saw him in Mother Courage last year and he was playing the dim-witted son, he has been promoted to scene-stealing fool, it won't be long before he's given more opportunities. I can see his whole stage career, he is going to be brilliant.