We booked Chimerica ages ago because we needed a Saturday matinee to make our London trip complete, nothing was on that grabbed us, even Chimerica we thought sounded a bit naff, granted we'd only read the title and nothing else but we booked it anyway saying "I wonder if Stephen Campbell Moore looks like a turtle in real life or just in the History Boys film?"
Stephen Campbell Moore is incredibly attractive in real life! So was Claudie Blakely, but I knew that anyway, she's super cute. BUT the attractiveness of the actors played no part in how fucking awesome Chimerica was. The play had just opened, and we looked briefly at a Guardian review on the way just to see what we were letting ourselves into, five stars and the phrase "incredibly filmic" jumped out.
The staging was amazing, a rotating box with sliding doors provides countless different rooms and settings, projections of photographic backdrops set the time and the scenes perfectly. Chimerica was like State of Play (the bbc drama not the US film), journalists getting too involved in a story, but this time a photographer getting in too deep, it was a thrilling scary and exciting drama with a believable love story dropped in! There were scary bits too! It was amazing, by the interval neither of us wanted it to end, it was the best most enjoyable piece of theatre I'd seen for ages, it was really great. A week later all the newspapers had given it five stars and it was transferring to Broadway. Enjoy it America! It's a brilliant political thriller!
