I’ve been watching a rather good fringe Macbeth,
… reading about how the world’s poor live on $2 a day
…and hearing about the role of women in Africa’s new wars
Over on My London Your London I’ve a review of the new play Liberty, which opened last night at the Globe – good fun, if a touch contrived and definitely too long – particularly in this London September. If you’re going, I’d definitely recommend the long-johns.
Quoted in the programme of Her Naked Skin, the “suffragette play” now at the National Theatre:
Sir,
Everyone seems to agree upon the necessity of putting a stop to Suffragist outrages; but no one seems certain how to do so. There are two, and only two, ways in which this can be done. Both will be effectual.
1. Kill every woman in the United Kingdom.
2. Give women the vote.
Yours truly, Bertha Brewster
It’s a flawed play, but an absolutely gripping one: I’ve a review over on My London Your London.
Over on My London Your London I’ve a review of an Australian comedy that’s just opened in London, Cosi, by Louis Nowra. In the tiny White Bear, but well deserving of a bigger venue.
I’m currently reading Andrew Marr’s A History of Modern Britain, a lively account covering political and cultural events from 1945 onwards, and it introduced me to Joan Littlewood, responsible for the Theatre Workshop, which was, Marr says, “by far the most dogged and courageous attempt to make theatre matter”. She was “a Cockney-born outside who fled RADA for a career in provincial poverty… touring through Kendal, Widan, Blackpool and Newcastle, they would be the very first act to exploit the Edinburgh Internal Festival as a “fringe” performance … their first major play … was Uranium 235 an impassioned and funny account of the road to the nuclear bomb, with a strongly anti-nuclear message at a time when … the pro-Bomb Labour government was widely supported.” (p. 94)
Yet, as Marr said, the “Angry Young Men” are much better remembers. Female, left, forgotten…. ever thus.
Not perfect, but powerful, witty and sophisticated: I’ve reviewed over on My London Your London Howard Barker’s I Saw Myself – with one of the finest parts for a mature female actor that I’ve ever seen. It is on until April 19 – see it if you can.
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