Tag: plays

theatre

Not A Book: Fallen Angels

veritywilde

Happy Sunday everyone, double theatre recommendations this week for you as we head towards Christmas and I get out and about in the run up before the festivities start.

Fallen Angels by Noel Coward is 100 years old this year and this is the first revival in twenty five years. Jane and Julia are best friends and one morning after their husbands leave for a golfing weekend, they hear from a former boyfriend that he’s in London and is planning on paying them a visit. The news throws them into a panic and then into a state of wild excitement and recklessness. The upshot is chaos – very, very funny chaos.

I don’t know how the idea of women having had pre-marital sex and getting drunk will hit to younger audiences who just accept it as a fact of life, but I can see why this caused a huge stir when it was first produced – with the personal intervention of the Lord Chancellor being needed to get it the licence it needed to be performed. This version stars Janie Dee, who I loved in Follies and Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends but haven’t seen in a play since the Angela Lansbury revival of another Coward play Blithe Spirit more than a decade ago (gosh that’s scary). It was pretty early in previews when I saw it, but it was already in really good shape – although I suspect some of the physical comedy moments will have tightened up by now. I didn’t love it the way I did Private Lives, but that’s a very high bar (current count: four viewings of three different productions of it live and repeat viewings of one of those as well as TV version on streaming services) but if you like Coward, I think you’ll enjoy this. I saw it less than a week after I went to the Cecil Beaton exhibition and I think they’d make a pretty good double bill.

Fallen Angels is on at the Menier Chocolate Factory until 21 February 2026, although judging by how full it was the night I went (it looked sold out) you may want to buy your ticket sooner rather than later.

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: Nye

veritywilde

Happy Sunday everyone and I apologise profusely for doing a theatre show two Sundays in a row, but this one only has a couple of weeks left in London (and then a run in Wales) so I’m trying to give you the best chance to get to see it if you want to!

In case you don’t know, the Nye of the title is Anuerin ‘Nye’ Bevan – who was the Health Secretary who created the NHS. The play finds him faced with death and reliving the key moments of his life. Michael Sheen is playing Nye and is turning in an amazing performance as the former miner turned union official then politician and eventually minister. Apart from Sheen and Sharon Small as his wife Jennie Lee, the rest of the cast are all playing a variety of roles as you travel through the moments in his life. I knew the rough outlines of his life story but really that’s not necessary to follow the play – once you’ve got the idea that it’s all going on inside his head (and hopefully the pyjamas are the clue to that).

I’ve put the trailer in if you want a taste, but basically this is a really clever and well put together journey through one man’s life that also outlines what healthcare provision in the UK was like before the NHS and how it was brought about and the resistance it faced. As someone who has only ever known healthcare through the NHS, it is easy to not realise what the reality was before the NHS and this really captures that. It’s 2 hours and forty minutes (including interval) but it really flies by. And you get a rendition of Get Happy (one of my favourite Judy Garland performances) to boot.

It’s on at the National until August 16 and then it moves to the Wales Millennium Centre from the 22 to 30 August.

book adjacent, theatre

Book Adjacent: Pride and Prejudice (Sort Of)

veritywilde

We are back at the theatre again this week because I had such a good time at Pride and Prejudice (sort of) on Friday night that I needed to write about it asap.

So, if you’re here and reading this, I’m going to assume you know the story of Pride and Prejudice. And this is a modern retelling of the story through the eyes of the servants, and with a cast of five each playing a servant and then various of the main characters, who sing carefully chosen pop songs at key moments. Here’s a trailer to give you a bit of a sense of what we’re talking about because it’s sort of hard to describe.

The London production of this won the Olivier award for Best Entertainment or Comedy Play in 2022 and I can totally see why. The commentary on the events of the book is on point, the songs are witty (including Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow and You’re So Vain) and the running jokes are a hoot too. I laughed and laughed and laughed. I thought my mum who was sat next to me was going to cry laughing at more than one point.

We did wonder how it might work if you *don’t* know the story of Pride and Prejudice – which as I said may not be a problem for you but maybe your normal theatre going companion isn’t an Austen fan. Well luckily I know someone who went earlier in the week to me and who isn’t familiar with the original text and she also enjoyed it – her description was “pretty good” and she liked the meta-commentary on the events and also the sweary bits, of which there are a few. So I think it’s probably a pretty safe choice for a theatre trip – if you don’t mind a bit of swearing (my mum coped) and some double entendres!

We were the second stop of a new national tour around the UK – you can find all the rest of the dates here along with info on how to book.

Have a great Sunday!

theatre

Not a Book: Best of Enemies

veritywilde

Getting this in quickly before the barrage of Christmas posts as I went to see this the other week when it was in late preview stages and it’s now open and has been reviewed.

Best of Enemies is a new play by James Graham about the televised debates between Gore Vidal and William F Buckley Jnr at the Republican and Democratic conventions of 1968. The two men represented the new left and the new right respectively and hated what each other stood for. In real life, they remained enemies for the rest of their lives – with lawsuits and counter suits – extending even beyond Buckley’s death when Vidal was still happy to insult him. The play uses transcripts of the dialogue from the TV debate for those sections and imagines what was going on behind the scenes.

In the play Buckley is David Harewood and Vidal is Zachary Quinto. Casting a black actor as the white Buckley does highlight the times when Buckley is talking about race – but that’s not the main focus of the clashes between the men shown in the play. Quinto is excellent as Vidal – arch and snarky and supremely confident in his own abilities and beliefs. The staging – as you can see from the photo has TV like windows – that can show you the control room behind or be used as TV screens to project the actors during the debates, or the sections of rival newscasters talking you through the events of the day.

The play is making the argument that the debates are the start of the commentator-led, TV politics that has turned into the polarisation you see on social media – and while that may sound like a bit of a reach, the debate sections of the play feel very timely – almost spookily so at times. I thought it was really, really good – and if you’re in London before the 18th of February and fancy a show, this would be a good pick.