Review – The Visit, National Theatre

You wait a lifetime for a play that features a character limp, blind people, prosthetic limbs and some funny business on a step ladder and you get two in a row. Endgame managed to squeeze all those elements into 85 minutes. This one has them too but takes things a little more leisurely.

Four hours. Four flipping hours!! That’s what the National’s website was promising last week when Phil payed a visit to, err, The Visit.

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 – Six Degrees of Separation, Old Vic

The idea that everyone in the world is separated from everyone else by no more than six people must send extra winter chills to the readers of these pages. Imagine being that close to the Whingers.

But for the Whingers it’s a concept that has gained appeal since they started blogging. If you’ve ever had the misfortune to meet a Whinger you can now swank to your friends that you’re only one person away from Mel Brooks, Pamela Anderson, Britt Ekland and Lionel Blair. Imagine how close that puts the Whingers to the movers and shakers of this planet – one away from Megan Mullally, Brian Blessed, Christopher Lee and Sammy Davis Junior (although he’s dead, sadly) and just twice removed from Debbie Reynolds, Topol and President Nixon. And obviously Three Degrees from Prince Charles.

Even for the Whingers it’s a sobering thought.

Review – Her Naked Skin, National Theatre

There really are some rather spooky coincidences connecting the Whingers to the National’s new lesbian prison drama set against the backdrop of the fight for votes for women in Edwardian England.

Phil – who is very emancipated – feels a particular affinity with the movement: his grandmother was a suffragette; his uncle was governor of Strangeways Prison where suffragette Derby Day martyr Emily Wilding Davison was detained; Phil himself was hooked on the seventies suffragette TV drama Shoulder to Shoulder; and in the days when he cycled (before Dave and Boris made it unfashionable) he used to chain his bike to railings.

And Andrew is a Lesbian. Well, he isn’t actually one at the moment, but he hopes one day to become part of the Lesbian community once he has saved up enough to buy the little Greek hideaway he’s always hankered after.