Review – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Theatre Royal Haymarket

Ah yes, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Another thing with regard to which we are way behind the curve so we won’t labour things.

Review – Flare Path, Theatre Royal Haymarket

It’s an perfectly understandable but misheld conception that the Whingers are difficult to please. Actually it’s deceptively untroublesome.

It’s the little things really: alighting at a theatre and ascertaining the show is 90 minutes with no hiatus; finding enough wine in the bottle for another couple of glasses when we thought we’d drained it; hearing on the wireless that another actress has been glorified as a Dame Commander of the British Empire.

But there’s nothing quite like discovering a new salutation with which to raise one’s pre and post show libations. And believe us, we’ve been practising diligently after inspecting this revival of Terrence Rattigan‘s Flare Path.

“Tinkerty tonk!”

Try it. It trips off the tongue in the most profoundly satisfying manner. No other shibboleth is nearly as agreeable.

So even if there had been little else to fancy in Sir Trev of Nunn‘s first production of his season at the Theatre Royal Haymarket we would have still emerged deeply obliged, our lives enriched.

Review – Waiting for Godot with two of the X-Men, Theatre Royal Haymarket

The Whingers were once described by someone quite influential as “moderately influential” but the truth of this throwaway remark was stretched – like the waistband on Andrew’s elasticated slacks – to breaking point when it came to obtaining tickets for Waiting For Godot.

The Whingers had talked about seeing it on tour before it came to the Theatre Royal Haymarket but just didn’t get around to it, there being no teams of horses wild enough to drag Phil back into the provinces.

So the Whingers decided to call in a few favours. But it’s funny how people who “owed them one” suddenly suddenly stopped returning their calls. One (and he knows who he is) went as far as laughing in Phil’s face. Imagine that.

Things were getting desperate.

Phil hatched a plan to get elected as an MP, fork out cash to a tout and charge it as an expense, disguising it amidst his general ornamental duck house-related receipts if necessary. Andrew even considered the possibility of stalking and then seducing someone connected with the show, perhaps in a ghastly travesty of  Mrs Robinson. But Phil believed this plan was likely to go tits-up by the time it got to the soft music and négligée and probably long before that.

Review – On The Waterfront, Theatre Royal Haymarket

It is with bowed heads and silly, sheepish expressions that the Whingers admitted to each other that neither had ever seen the original classic film, On The Waterfront.

Despite growing up feasting on a veritable cornucopia old black and white movies they tended to dine from the menu of great divas. Andrew’s life and tastes were shaped by Sunday afternoon TV screenings of Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Lana Turner classics. Phil – some considerable years earlier – had forked out his ‘apenny to develop a palate for the likes of Theda Bara, Vilma Bánky and Marie Dressler.

So between them, somehow the grittier, more testosterone-fuelled movies such as Elia Kazan‘s eight-time Academy Award winner had passed them by. Perhaps their lives could have turned out so differently otherwise.

But on the other hand it was with few preconceptions and even less knowledge than usual that they sidled over to the Theatre Royal Haymarket to catch Steven Berkoff‘s acclaimed stage production of On the Waterfront.