Review – Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Harold Pinter Theatre

Give Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? an award now (correct envelope please). Audiences have been banned from eating in the auditorium. The West End might be coming to its senses at last. Hurrah!

It seems like yesterday, although it is 11 years, since we saw Edward Albee‘s 1962 Tony Award-winning play (Best play, actor and actress) on the Shaftesbury Avenue with Kathleen Turner being both brilliantly hilarious and pathetic as the vitriol-and-booze-fueled, husband-baiting Martha. It’s one of the most perfect pieces of casting Phil’s ever witnessed.

Review – Wild, Hampstead Theatre

Mike Bartlett‘s King Charles III and his telly thingy Doctor Foster amused us so much we’d almost forgotten just how much we also loved his Cock.

Now, in Wild, he concentrates on whistleblower Edward Snowden, who leaked information of US mass surveillance programmes. He’s portrayed here as Andrew (Jack Farthing doing not unreasonable doppelgänger work) who we encounter awaiting an uncertain future holed up in a characterless Moscow hotel room (design Miriam Buether) where he’s visited by two enigmatic people, a man and a woman both claiming to be called “George”. Can he trust them? Are they here to help him, kill him, or just tease the hell out of him?

The Whingers Awards 2009 – the very worst and the not so bad

With another year rapidly drawing to a close it is time for the Whingers to reflect and indulge themselves in a little more navel gazing – not our own navels, as that would be even duller than usual for you – but the innies and outies of the sometimes fluffy navels of London’s artistic directors, producers, players and theatres and award The Whingies to the most outstanding ones.

But first our own navels: 2009 has been a year of heady excitement for the Whingers. It was a year that saw them inadvertently whip up controversy and heated debate again and again and again.

It was also a year in which artistic differences reared their ugly heads threatening the very fabric of the West End Whingers, a tear in the polyester bed-sheet of their existence so delicate that a clumsily clipped toenail might have been all it took to rent it from headboard to toe straight down the middle.

The Whingers were courted by the British Broadcasting Company, libelled as “muckrakers” in the National Press, lampooned in song and Phil had his pithiest aphorism to date quoted (yet mainly without attribution) by national critics. There was an evening of confusion in which Phil was mistaken for Michael Grandage and the Whingers finally received an award for their artistic endeavours.

And we finally got the opportunity to choose between the Merlot and the Marlowe.

So, without further do, here are the results of the Kentish Town and Vauxhall juries:

Review – Cock, Royal Court

Things weren’t looking good as the Whingers entered the Royal Court‘s upstairs auditorium. The Court was very much in officiousness overdrive up there.

It’s all so very, very strict. Greeted by a humourless usher who makes an airport security official look like Pollyanna, instructions come thick and fast: you may take one small bag in if you rest it on your lap; “double check your phone is off” (a good thing, granted); only bottled water is allowed. Yes water! No wine, how on earth were the Whingers going to last one and three quarter hours without sustenance?

Yes, there are many hoops to be jumped through if you wish to see Mike Bartlett‘s Cock.

Review – Dido Queen of Carthage, National Theatre

Strange really. In spite of the pledge that appears at the top of every page of this website the Whingers have never actually had the opportunity to tell you whether it’s worth missing the Merlot for the Marlowe.

Since they were born three years ago out of the foam created by the severed genitals of Uranus in the sea near Cyprus* the Whingers have consumed bathtubs of Merlot but their paths have never crossed that of Mister Christopher Marlowe.

All that was put to rights on Tuesday evening at the press night of  Dido Queen of Carthage at the National.