From Morning to Midnight (National Theatre)

And now the National Theatre’s Christmas show for grown ups! I saw it a couple of weeks ago, another preview, with my friend Lisa for her birthday. I don’t think she’s a fan of German expressionism or maybe she was just two hungover from the day before… but I actually really enjoyed it.

Adam Godley’s performance was totally insane, all arms and leg and jerky angles, I booked it because I knew he was good but I did not realize just how good he was. Brilliant. I enjoyed the first half of the play more than the second, I think just because of the maniacal behavior, but also the beautiful snow! Ever seen a giant stage covered in billowing snowdrifts? Lovely! There were some great things to look at in the second half too but Adam Godley calmed down (a bit) and there was not nearly as much shrieking and clambering about.

Long tall actors should always clamber about like loons. It pleases me.

Emil and the Detectives (National Theatre)

I went to see the National Theatre’s Christmas show on the preview night a couple of weeks ago. It was good fun but I regretted not having any children with me. I don’t know, it wasn’t my cup of tea, and maybe it’s cruel to say so but I didn’t enjoy it because I just didn’t think the kids were good enough! Maybe they’ll get better (or are better already!) with practicing the show but the majority of them were just not very good at projecting their lines. I was not that far away from the stage and I had trouble understanding what they were saying. Also, and yeah, I guess this is cruel, I just thought all of them lacked charm. There were only two of the child actors who I thought were charming and that I’d want to be friends with if I was a kid.

Still though, the children in the audience loved it and I could see how special it would feel to go there as a family for your Christmas show.

The Ritual Slaughter of George Mastromas (Royal Court- October)

Back to the present day! I saw this overly long piece a couple of months ago. Let me have a look at the texts I sent to my pal afterwards to try and remember how I felt. Hmm.. Seems I thought there were lots of good bits but it was so long that they weren’t worth waiting for. BUT Tom Brooke was amazing and terrifying. He does that maniacal breakdown acting so well with his Mr Punch face. Frightening!

Made For Each Other (Edinburgh Fringe)

Made For Each Other by Monica Bauer and performed by John Fico is my other highlight of this year’s Fringe. I was working at the venue where both of Monica’s shows were performed -she performed a monologue about her young life which was also very good but this is undoubtedly her masterpiece.

Wonderfully performed by such talent! All of us who managed to see it wept with joy and sadness.

Fleabag (Edinburgh Fringe)

Fleabag was the first play I went to see at the Fringe this year, my playwright friend Lisa bought the tickets after hearing it was good. She also bought us tickets for something SO awful that we had to walk out of it, it was totally dire, something from the Royal Court’s writing program about a post-apocolyptic hotel where everyone spoke in insipid cliches, Christ it was terrible. We were not the only walkouts but for some reason the thing still got good reviews. The lesson is you can’t trust reviews at Fringe time.

HOWEVER. Fleabag, a one woman monologue written and performed by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, was just a wonderful first play to see in Edinburgh this summer, made me think it was totally worth it giving up those tickets to see DanRads who would probably be rubbish anyway (turned out he was amazing, boo!). She was an excellent story-teller, the performance and delivery was so good when I remember it I remember the specific scenes, the café, the train journey, the characters, the outfits she was wearing, yet Waller-Bridge was sitting on a stool dressed in black for the whole performance. This is talent.

Chimerica, Almeida Theatre

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!