Review – Before the Party, Almeida Theatre

Here’s a puzzler to confound, should you happen to find yourself at a party surrounded by theatrically persuaded people: What is the connection between Before the Party and the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?

Give up? Well, the latter wouldn’t be quite the same without the formers’s writer. Academy Award nominee, Hitchcock collaborator and BTP playwright Rodney Ackland is also credited with discovering Chitty star Sally Anne Howes. That’s if you believe the Gospel according to St Wiki. We do. Who would think to make that up?

But his 1949 play (based on a short story by W. Somerset Maugham) is a bit of a puzzler itself. Part family drama, part melodrama,  part satire, part comedy and – in this production – bearing absurdist overtones and (rather redundantly)  animation. It’s as if Ackland were delving into the darker recesses of Terrance Rattigan’s psyche and percolating it through a wafer thin filter of Joe Orton.

Review – Filumena, Almeida theatre

“Tell me why we’re seeing this?” Andrew had grilled Phil with such alarming regularity that if he’d been looking into a mirror The Candyman would probably have appeared.

“Because Samantha Spiro is in it and I saw it years ago and really enjoyed it” Phil repeated with increasing impatience.

Of course Phil’s ‘years ago’ wasn’t Judi Dench’s Filumena, which was a mere 14 years ago, but the Franco Zeffirelli production from so long ago that Patricia Hayes was playing the maid and Joan Plowright’s youthful sons included Trevor Eve and Larry Lamb.

Those were the days when Phil would sit in the gallery of the Theatre Royal Brighton and see everything and – more peculiarly – enjoy almost everything. How times have changed.

Review – The House of Bernarda Alba, Almeida Theatre

“I wanted to rewind the first couple of minutes and see them again,” Andrew whined at the end of The House of Bernarda Alba. Not for the first time Phil wished Andrew would pay more attention to things.

But on this occasion, to be fair, THOBA does open with something of an unexpected coup de théâtre - a promising start indeed. Not only did it introduce the clever conceit that Bijan Sheibani‘s production has adopted but it grabbed the Whingers’ limited attentions instantly making them wonder if this brilliantly timed stunt was the work of theatrical illusionist Paul Kieve.

Review – Reasons To Be Pretty, Almeida Theatre

Neil LaBute is never far from controversy but the Whingers have less issue with his subject matter than his titles. Andrew got himself in a right old tizzy about a missing comma In a Dark Dark House (also at the Almeida Theatre) and earlier this year he was quite punctilious about the punctuation again when that AWOL comma turned up quite superfluously in In a Forest, Dark and Deep before being being told to stand on the stupid step as it was a quote from Walt Whitman.

It was Phil’s turn this time. Shouldn’t Reasons To Be Pretty be Reasons to be Pretty, arguing that Ian Drury’s song “Reasons to be Cheerful” opts for lower case on the copula verb? When the play first appeared in New York in 2008 LaBute seemed To Be taking no chances, dropping the upper case completely by opting for reasons to be pretty. Gosh, everyone seems confused. Some think it’s Reasons to Be Pretty.

But are we arguing about physical appearance rather than content? This is what Lord Harold Fritz-Liberty (Mr LaBute’s Royal Wedding name) is tackling again in the third of his trilogy of plays on the subject. Phil had previously enjoyed the twisted The Shape of Things (also Almeida when it decamped to King’s Cross) and both Whingers were very taken by his Fat Pig.

Review – My City, Almeida Theatre

Yeah, yeah, first previews and all that.

But such is the pulling power of Tracey Ullman‘s return to the stage in Stephen Poliakoff‘s first play for 12 years that, due to an administrative oversight in the Whingers’ theatrical diary “planning”, this was the only night we could make in the foreseeable. So there.

Ullman plays a former primary headmistress Miss Lambert who is prone to wandering the streets and underbelly of London by night. One night she is discovered laying on a park bench by one of her former pupils Richard (Tom Riley). This chance meeting leads to a peculiar night on the town with another ex-pupil Julie (Siân Brooke) and the other two members of Miss Lambert’s strange coven of teachers (David Troughton and Sorcha Cusack).

Review – A Delicate Balance, Almeida Theatre

Dear Mr Albee,

Dr Andrew and Dr Phil dropped in at the Almeida surgery recently. They administered detailed examinations to the troubled men and womenfolk of your 1966 play without even taking recourse to insert the Whingers’ Patented Rectal Thermometer. We’re afraid we have bad news for you, the prognoses are not at all promising. Here are our findings:

Review – House of Games, Almeida Theatre (Phil’s review)

Golly gosh. Can it really be a full year since the Whingers’ minds were not as one. Last September two consecutive shows (Talent and Ben Hur Live!) created a gulf wider than the one a freshly-banged-up popster created in Hampstead’s Snappy Snaps.

Andrew was adamant, “I’d sooner sit through Passion again.”

Review – Mrs Klein, Almeida Theatre

Dear Andrew,

Where are you? You don’t call, you don’t write, you don’t Twitter, have you turned into Stephen Fry? And you keep sending me off to see things on my own, it’s all rather disquieting.

I heard rumours you were spotted in Coventry earlier this week. I can quite categorically state it wasn’t me who sent you there.

By the time you receive this letter the run of Mrs Klein will probably have ended long ago and we’ll be DBEs.

It’s all beginning to look rather peculiar. The last time you sent me off to the Almeida Theatre it was Duet for One, a play set around a series of therapy sessions.

Are you trying to tell me something?

Review – Duet for One, Almeida Theatre

Dear Andrew

Mea culpa. Apologies for taking so long to reply to your letter of Jan 25th.

I’m sure that today being Valentine’s day you had other plans anyway. What is it this year? Skywriting interlocking Whingers’ masks in the sky? Leaving a trail of rose petals down Shaftesbury Avenue?

As an incurable romantic and I’m sure as loved up as ever, you’ll probably be in a right old lather, running hither and thither, making romantic gestures all over town. I do hope that some people make gestures back at you.

I know I turned down the chance to be near you at Be Near Me, I hadn’t realised the significance of it’s title. How perverse that I should de duetting as one at Duet for One on this, the most romantic day of the year.

Review: In a Dark Dark House, Almeida Theatre

The Whingers have very few secrets left. Oh, it’s true that they know the locations of some dark, dark bars which they will never share with their clamouring, clamouring public; places where they can enjoy a bottle of red, red wine uninterrupted by the constant, constant throng of fans and celebrity hangers-on.

And Phil knows secret, secret things about Andrew that he wouldn’t dream of sharing with the world: he has after all seen him swilling his undie(sirables) in a Frankfurt hotel bathtub; he knows what Andrew looked like before his operation; and that Andrew’s middle name is Margaret. But he would never, never tell.

But the secrets unravelled in Neil La Bute’s In a Dark Dark House at the Almeida are altogether more controversial.