Some mopping up – Hot Tin/ Slaves of Solitude / Young Marx

For those kind folk (that should probably read as singular rather than plural) who have been interested enough to ask where Phil’s been, here lies the answer. Hip replacement don’t you know, beating Patti LuPone to the crutches by a matter of weeks. He feels Patti’s pain. And he’s just beginning to dip the toe on the end of his newly bionic leg back into the world of theatre that doesn’t come with a surgeon and anaesthetist.

Review – Handbagged, Vaudeville Theatre

Strange how things come in pairs.

Phil recently saw two Nunns back to back and now this is his second play in a row portraying living royals.

Of course the Queen is missing from Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III but in Moira Buffini‘s offering, Handbagged, she’s very much alive. There’s two Queens; an older version, Q (Marion Bailey) and one younger, Liz (Lucy Robinson). But some may feel it should come with a warning, “this play contains two Margaret Thatchers”.

Review – Time and the Conways, National Theatre

Aren’t the Whingers selfless putting you, dear reader, before their own personal safety? For last night the Whingers – surgical masks on faces – bravely risked a public gathering before their  inevitable outlawing (public gatherings, that is, not the Whingers).

Laughing in the face of swine flu the Whingers trotted off on their trotters, like pigs in sh*t, crackling with excitement, to the National Theatre (before it gets shut down) for the first preview of Time and the Conways by that lovely old leftie J B Priestley.