Review – Handbagged, Vaudeville Theatre

Strange how things come in pairs.

Phil recently saw two Nunns back to back and now this is his second play in a row portraying living royals.

Of course the Queen is missing from Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III but in Moira Buffini‘s offering, Handbagged, she’s very much alive. There’s two Queens; an older version, Q (Marion Bailey) and one younger, Liz (Lucy Robinson). But some may feel it should come with a warning, “this play contains two Margaret Thatchers”.

Review – Before the Party, Almeida Theatre

Here’s a puzzler to confound, should you happen to find yourself at a party surrounded by theatrically persuaded people: What is the connection between Before the Party and the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?

Give up? Well, the latter wouldn’t be quite the same without the formers’s writer. Academy Award nominee, Hitchcock collaborator and BTP playwright Rodney Ackland is also credited with discovering Chitty star Sally Anne Howes. That’s if you believe the Gospel according to St Wiki. We do. Who would think to make that up?

But his 1949 play (based on a short story by W. Somerset Maugham) is a bit of a puzzler itself. Part family drama, part melodrama,  part satire, part comedy and – in this production – bearing absurdist overtones and (rather redundantly)  animation. It’s as if Ackland were delving into the darker recesses of Terrance Rattigan’s psyche and percolating it through a wafer thin filter of Joe Orton.