Review – Anna Christie, Donmar Warehouse

Dear Andrew,

They say you can’t be in two places at the same time, but obviously the Whingers can. You swanned off to the Edinburgh Festival and unlike last year, you haven’t even had the courtesy to send even a postcard.

Your departing instructions were to “mop the surrounds”: take in the Pinter you suggested or perhaps the Caryl Churchill. Thanks a bundle.

Then you handed me the much sought-after tickets for Anna Christie – hot presumably because Jude Law is in it and not because you’ve been holding them in clammy palms. And it is a Eugene O’Neill to boot (not a master of the art of  brevity) while you’ll be seeing shows in Edinburgh that last what –  an hour or less?

But what would you have made of it? In a Being John Malkovich sort of way I’m going to try the unthinkable and get inside your head and imaginge what you’d have made of it.

Review – Cause Célèbre, Old Vic

Tuesday 22nd March 2011: Stephen Sondheim’s 81st birthday (and by an ironic coincidence also Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 63rd).

What a relief. We can relax again knowing we no longer need to assist Mr Sondheim in celebrating his 8oth. It has been a too, too exhausting year.

But now Mr Rattigan is making similar demands on us from beyond the grave in commemoration of what would be his 100th.

We had already tooted into our party blowers for his Flare Path a few days earlier. Now we were required to quaff bubbly again at the Old Vic for his last play (originally for radio), written in 1977, Cause Célèbre.

Review – After the Dance, National Theatre

It’s hard to believe that the Whingers have never seen a Terence Rattigan play before. Well, not as Whingers anyway, nor even when they were going to the theatre together as dull-and-plain-old Phil and Andrew before they re-branded as the dull-and-plain-but-with-airs West End Whingers.

Of course, each had seen a Rattigan before they first met that fateful day when they both reached for the same artichoke in marketplace of Capri. But clearly the Whingers’ appreciation of a well-constructed play, a proscenium arch, French windows, hats and servants declaring “luncheon is served” meant that a Rattigan sortie was well overdue.

All that was missing was a Dame of the British Empire, but you can’t have it all can you? Surely the Whingers would be in seventh heaven?

Review – Madame de Sade, Donmar at the Wyndham’s Theatre

Oh dear.