Review – Lingua Franca, Finborough Theatre

The Whingers have been cunningly brushing up their linguistics of late. Not by choice, you understand. It’s just rubbing off.

Phil scraped a pass in his School Certificate exam which just about enabled him to cope with the basic French in The Railway Children. But Aspects of Love left both Whingers scratching their heads with entire scenes lost in translation.

If this really is the emerging theatrical trend of vingt-dix perhaps audiences should enrol in the titular Lingua Franca language school of Peter Nichols‘s new play which offers plenty of French, German and la bella lingua to get one’s tongue around. As long as one only wants to know how to say knife, fork and spoon.

Another reason for dropping in to see the school in action before it closes on 7th August is the disproportionately (to the size of the Finborough Theatre)  starry cast. Chris New! Rula Lenska! Why can’t all fringe theatre be comme ça?

Review: Prick Up Your Ears, Richmond Theatre (en route to the Comedy)

With their own diaries groaning and a deluge of theatrical openings looming the Whingers found the only way they could possibly fit everything promising in was to trek off to the Richmond Theatre to catch the appropriately monikered Simon Bent‘s stage adaptation of John Lahr‘s biography and Joe Orton‘s diaries, Prick Up Your Ears.

Chronicling playwright Orton’s rise to fame and his volatile relationship with Kenneth Halliwell Phil found distressing parallels not only with the Gallagher brothers but with the Whingers whose own meteoric ascent (albeit to nowhere and even then only in their heads) and similarly symbiotic alliance suggested some worrying parallels. Let’s just say Phil came out of the theatre and headed straight to Franchi’s to get a lock for his tool box and leave it at that, shall we?