Andrew is on sabbatical but Phil is soldiering on to help you decide between the Merlot and the Marlowe and generally putting London's West End theatre to rights
You wait a lifetime for a frothy wartime comedy by a gay Sir that opens with someone waking up the worse for wear and wondering who the stranger they picked up last night is and you get two in a little over a week. What are the chances?
First there was Sir Terence Rattigan’s 1943 While the Sun Shine‘s now we have Sir Noël Coward‘s 1939 Present Laughter. Read the rest of this entry »
Another Whingers’ first; one which left Andrew to reflect on genetic instruction.
You may recall that Phil’s sister Elizabeth was once reduced to contributing to this site, penning a review of the 8 hour Oberammergau Passion Play so that we need never trouble ourselves with it.
Anyway, the poor woman undertook her inaugural Whingers’ trip last night, forced to accompany the Whingers because she’d read She Stoops to Conquer at school, really liked it and so was – relatively speaking – an expert.
Not only an expert, but one who could sit still for eight hours. Andrew tried to imagine Phil sitting still that long, or reading a text or liking anything and concluded that they could not possibly share the same DNA.
On the other hand there was clearly a bond at work for both Liz and Phil were equally thrilled that Katherine Kelly was making her National Theatre début. Who? As they impatiently explained to Andrew, Ms Kelly was until only last week the hugely popular Becky McDonald in the “serial drama” Coronation Street. Apparently one of the best characters of recent years, she left the cobbles, not looking over her shoulder in the back of a Street Cars cab, but whisked off to Barbados by a new love, conveniently freeing her up just in time for to begin Stooping at the National.
Why on earth would anyone want to go to see Clybourne Park, the latest offering at the Royal Court? These are the only reasons we could think of off the tops of our heads. Read the rest of this entry »
At the end of last week’s cliffhanger episode our heroes zeros had vowed never – but never – to go to the theatre ever again until they could once again wave at a Dame of the British Empire through a proscenium arch in a crumbling West End theatre… Read the rest of this entry »
A West End Whinger 