Review – Our Country’s Good, National Theatre

Can it be really be 26 years since Phil saw the original Royal Court production of Our Country’s Good after it transferred to the Garrick Theatre? Sadly it is. How time flies.

But time must have stood still for convicts exported to Australia in the 18th century. It took 8 and a half months in those days. Mind you it probably won’t stop Phil whingeing about the food, the lack of space or his fellow passengers next time he takes off on a long haul flight.

Review – Untold Stories, Duchess Theatre

There were uncomfortable shards of recognition at Alan Bennett‘s autobiographical Untold Stories.

Phil discovered that the contents of his kitchen cupboard are not dissimilar to those of Bennett’s parents: the long-forgotten ground white pepper, the glacé cherries (though not sitting in an egg cup), the container of cocktail sticks, and the stubborn dried up dribbles of food that need chipping at to remove, all lurking with other long-past-their-sell-by-date items way back behind more pressingly urgent comestibles.

And Phil’s mother is from Yorkshire too. Not that he’s suggesting his mother’s kitchen cupboards are anything other than immaculate. At last, here’s a show that gives you something to take away with you; that it’s time to consider a spring clean.*

The parallels in Cocktail Sticks, the second of this double bill of recollections, were sometimes a little too close to home and not just in the kitchen department.

Review – The Doctor’s Dilemma, National Theatre

The Whingers have to make big decisions too you know.

Phil was so incandescent when he heard incandescent light bulbs were being phased out that he stocked up forgetting that most of his home was already lit by halogen down lighters anyway, with just one lamp (which he rarely switches on) using the old bulbs.

He never learns (he was the same when gas lighting was phased out). There’s no chance he’ll get through all of them in his lifetime. What should he do with his box of 50 bulbs?

In George Bernard Shaw’s what-it-says-on-the-tin play The Doctor’s Dilemma bachelor and newly-knighted Sir Colenso Ridgeon (Aden Gillett) is also in a quandary. He treats typhoid, the plague and has developed a new treatment for tuberculosis. If only he could find a cure for the highly contagious modern malady Superfluous Like Syndrome which afflicts the younger (and some not so young) generation of today; introducing several unnecessary ‘like’s into every sentence they utter.*