Andrew is on sabbatical but Phil is soldiering on to help you decide between the Merlot and the Marlowe and generally putting London's West End theatre to rights
A three and a half hour three-hander where the each of the three hands is a white male? At the National? No doubt apologies will be demanded and made.
A surprising lack of box-ticking here then, but there is an awful lot of box-lifting and box-shifting. But we will return to that in due course. Read the rest of this entry »
So, on vellum then, not looking too promising. 
Rarely performed and generally considered to be one of Shakespeare’s problem plays, Timon of Athens has had just one outing on The Broadway, according to the gospel of St Wiki.
Apparently it was co-authored by Thomas Middleton and is incomplete. Who knows? (Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance probably).
Two of them writing together and they couldn’t finish it? Was there a more pressing stack of ironing? Sounds scarily familiar to us. Unfinished is a bit of a conundrum: might it go on forever or end abruptly in under three hours? TOA sounded a bit of a tease. Read the rest of this entry »
You’re a casting director. You’ve got Hitler’s favourite play sitting on your desk. Who you gonna call? Ian McDiarmid! Read the rest of this entry »
Do the Whingers exist?
Or are they merely characters created by their own writings?*
And is it inappropriate to use the word “merely”?
Without their incoherent ramblings would the characters of Phil and Andrew exist outside these pages?
Is it only you (yes, we mean you) reading these very words at this very moment that gives the Whingers their existence? Read the rest of this entry »
A West End Whinger 