Review – Exit the King, National Theatre

“Stop this infernal pantomime!” shouts one of the Queens in Patrick Marber‘s version of Eugène Ionesco‘s Exit the King.

How many of us in this preview audience must have been thinking exactly the same? Yes, we’re nailing our colours to the mast straight away and saying what a dreadfully dreary evening this is. Even if it’s only 1 hour 40 minutes it feels much, much longer. Still, you can pass the time glancing round the audience and seeing if those on the ends of rows are slipping out discretely. Yes, some did. Lucky bastards.

Review – Betty Blue Eyes, Novello Theatre

You may wonder, should you luxuriate in having too much time on your hands and nothing better to do with it, what the Whingers have in common.

Andrew tries manfully to do his bit to save the planet. Phil finds it a bit of a chore but does find the recycling bin a useful over-flow receptacle for his umpteen empty wine bottles.

Andrew is vegetarian. Phil regards a bacon sandwich as the perfect hangover cure believing Andrew would cope better if he just got some meat inside him.

There you are, very little congruity between the Whingers really. Andrew would of course be on the side of the pig, Betty Blue Eyes, while Phil would be imagining the smell of bacon sizzling over his ring.

Review – After the Dance, National Theatre

It’s hard to believe that the Whingers have never seen a Terence Rattigan play before. Well, not as Whingers anyway, nor even when they were going to the theatre together as dull-and-plain-old Phil and Andrew before they re-branded as the dull-and-plain-but-with-airs West End Whingers.

Of course, each had seen a Rattigan before they first met that fateful day when they both reached for the same artichoke in marketplace of Capri. But clearly the Whingers’ appreciation of a well-constructed play, a proscenium arch, French windows, hats and servants declaring “luncheon is served” meant that a Rattigan sortie was well overdue.

All that was missing was a Dame of the British Empire, but you can’t have it all can you? Surely the Whingers would be in seventh heaven?

Review – The Habit of Art by Alan Bennett, National Theatre

Poetry not really being his thing, Phil had never, to his knowledge, read any W H Auden. Until last night, that is, when he read one of the celebrated poet’s works in the programme for Alan Bennett‘s new play the The Habit of Art. He’s none the wiser about the poem, poetry or Auden.

Andrew, on the other hand, is far more literary having delivered a triumphant yet moving rendition of Colonel Fazackerley Butterworth-Toast as a precocious eight year old to a presumably stunned audience at the Cheltenham Festival of Performing Arts.

Phil’s closest brush with poetry was at the National Gallery’s Sitwell exhibition when he was nearly mown down by Sir Stephen Spender’s wheelchair shortly after which in the gallery’s shop he got the chance to marvel at Lady Spender’s splendid ignorance of the logistics involved in writing a cheque. He did however, once appear in a school production of Benjamin Britten‘s Noye’s Fludde. Playing a wave. And he can still even sing Kyrie Eleison. And if you ask him very nicely he won’t.

All of which preamble brings the Whingers to their Monday night evening out at a preview of the most eagerly anticipated theatrical event of the year: the new Alan Bennett at the National Theatre.