Review – Reasons To Be Pretty, Almeida Theatre

Neil LaBute is never far from controversy but the Whingers have less issue with his subject matter than his titles. Andrew got himself in a right old tizzy about a missing comma In a Dark Dark House (also at the Almeida Theatre) and earlier this year he was quite punctilious about the punctuation again when that AWOL comma turned up quite superfluously in In a Forest, Dark and Deep before being being told to stand on the stupid step as it was a quote from Walt Whitman.

It was Phil’s turn this time. Shouldn’t Reasons To Be Pretty be Reasons to be Pretty, arguing that Ian Drury’s song “Reasons to be Cheerful” opts for lower case on the copula verb? When the play first appeared in New York in 2008 LaBute seemed To Be taking no chances, dropping the upper case completely by opting for reasons to be pretty. Gosh, everyone seems confused. Some think it’s Reasons to Be Pretty.

But are we arguing about physical appearance rather than content? This is what Lord Harold Fritz-Liberty (Mr LaBute’s Royal Wedding name) is tackling again in the third of his trilogy of plays on the subject. Phil had previously enjoyed the twisted The Shape of Things (also Almeida when it decamped to King’s Cross) and both Whingers were very taken by his Fat Pig.

Review – My City, Almeida Theatre

Yeah, yeah, first previews and all that.

But such is the pulling power of Tracey Ullman‘s return to the stage in Stephen Poliakoff‘s first play for 12 years that, due to an administrative oversight in the Whingers’ theatrical diary “planning”, this was the only night we could make in the foreseeable. So there.

Ullman plays a former primary headmistress Miss Lambert who is prone to wandering the streets and underbelly of London by night. One night she is discovered laying on a park bench by one of her former pupils Richard (Tom Riley). This chance meeting leads to a peculiar night on the town with another ex-pupil Julie (Siân Brooke) and the other two members of Miss Lambert’s strange coven of teachers (David Troughton and Sorcha Cusack).