Review – Grief, National Theatre

Pity the poor marketing people at the National Theatre. You can imagining them coaxing him. “Come on Mike luv, get your finger out. We need a title. We have to produce a poster. We can’t call it A New Play by Mike Leigh. That’s what we called it last time.”

With Leigh’s “living as the character for months” working methods with actors, one suppose titles are the last thing on his mind and knowing the entire run was already sold out did they need one at all?

Yet a title – Grief – and a typographic poster solution reminiscent of a hammer were eventually found. Was Leigh going to be banging his gloomy theme home? Things didn’t look promising.

But what else might have called it? Depression? Retirement? Nice Fifties Frocks? He must have been miffed that Tea and Sympathy was already taken.

Review – When We Are Married, Garrick Theatre

You know you’re in good hands when the curtain rises and the set gets a round of applause.*

Simon Higlett‘s well-dressed Victorian sitting room drew gasps of admiration from the crowd, possibly because it brought back distant memories although presumably not from the Eastern Europeans or possibly Russians behind the Whingers with sweets wrapped in old Eastern Bloc cellophane which had been designed to be LOUDER when crinkled than the sad cellophane of the decadent West . WE WILL BURY YOU IN OUR CELLOPHANE.

But we digress. Having grappled with the Glaswegian accents in Men Should Weep last week it was comforting for the Whingers to head in a southerly direction and have their ears caressed by Yorkshire tongues. Phil’s mother was born in York (Nunnery Lane, since you asked) and he was oop there only a few weeks ago so it almost felt like home to him, only without old underpants strewn everywhere.

Review – Bedroom Farce, Duke of York’s Theatre

Some showbiz names are so inextricably linked as to almost be inseparable: Burton and Taylor, Morecambe and Wise, Rogers Rodgers and Hammerstein, Jannette and Ian Krankie, Phil and Andrew. And then there’s Jenny Seagrove and Bill Kenwright.

But creatives providing gainful employment for ‘er indoors is nothing new in showbiz. Think Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter, (more ‘er next door in their case). Think Woody Allen and Mia Farrow (more ‘er across Central Park in theirs).

Having told a friend he was seeing Jenny Seagrove in Bedroom Farce Phil received a rhetorical text to enquire, “Is it a Bill Kenwright production?”. It’s a running gag. Of course it was. And why not?