Review – Endgame / Rough For Theatre ll, Old Vic

If Waiting For Godot is known for being the Samuel Beckett play where nothing happens, Endgame is identified as the one with old couple in the dustbins.

But first we must dispose of the amuse-bouche Rough For Theatre ll, which precedes the dustbin play. No, we’d never heard of it either. But we can tell you it’s a play where a man called ‘C’ stands on a windowsill seemingly about to commit suicide.

Impressed We never see his face, but Jackson Milner, in a mini coup de théâtre, stands on that sill like a statue for the whole 25 minutes of the play’s running time. Milner is so convincing that at times Phil suspect he might actually be a very lifelike prop. Did Beckett write plays purely to make his actors suffer?

Review – Frankenstein, National Theatre

When the West End Whingers was created on a metaphorical slab in Soho’s White Horse hostelry some five years ago there were no very, very frightening thunderbolts or lightening or power surges blacking out the West End and no mobs of angry gay villagers.

Indeed their genesis was a much duller affair than even might be inferred from their prose.

Less prosaic, however, was the extraordinary dream that Phil had recently when he drifted off on the banks of the Queen Mother Reservoir just off the M4, the result of some very Swiss cheese. In it he was married to the poetess Pam Ayres and a Gothic Dr Philistein (or possibly Philistine) was giving life to the Andrew known and loved today. The creature was assembled from any detritus Philistein could lay his hands on scavenged from skips around the Walworth Road with the occasional body part thrown in, he linked up his monstrous achievement to Vinopolis and waited impatiently for some inclement weather.

But interestingly even Phil’s unleashed, gratinated Gothic dreams could not compete with the vision that director Danny Boyle and designer Mark Tildesley have conjured up at the National Theatre for Nick Dear‘s version of Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein. For it does look rather splendid.