Dessert(Southwark Playhouse)

For a 77-year-old this might however be considered an impressive work-rate!

I wonder if Jan Brock is referring to King Lear(RSC)

Previewing now and already heavily booked but no comments here yet? I'm not seeing it until next week so am unable to add mine but has anyone else been, or, apart from jason71, booked? Irrespective of its merits, it looks as though anyone considering seeing it had better check availability.

Saw this last night, and was underwhelmed. It's like Yasmina Reza's "Art," crossed with Marx's "Das Kapital," but unfortunately, more the latter than the former.

Some spoilers follow. . .

I'll refrain from saying what actually happens, at dessert time, at a dinner party for very wealthy people. Suffice to say, there is a plot, twists occur at about the rate you'd expect in a well-plotted play, and the value of art is discussed.

Between twists, we get the kind of super long speeches that anyone who saw the same writer's "Daytona" will be familiar with. Except, in "Daytona", the speech Oliver Cotton gave himself was filled with mystery and intrigue, and the one he gave Maureen Lipman was elegiac and moving, whereas the endless enormous speech in this play felt to me a LOT like "Das Kapital," a tediously lengthy and lengthily tedious rendition of a dull one-sided tome that killed my enjoyment of the passable plotting and cutting characterisations.

The two most enjoyable characters, for me, were in support: Teresa Banham plays the American philistine wife, of a posturing master-of-the-universe, with such blase honesty that I couldn't help laughing at her every utterance; and similarly, Graham Turner's blundering stuttering hesitancy as an old-soldier-turned-servant, of yet another master-of-the-universe, had me equally amused and charmed.

The two masters-of-the-universe, at the centre of the plot, are themselves well-realised by Michael Simkins and Stuart Milligan, the former all poise and fake modesty, the latter all charm and honest arrogance.

But these worthwhile performances struggle to stay above the surface of a mahoosive, blunt, capitalism-bashing club of a speech, that not only outstayed it's welcome, but was propagandist and inaccurate.

There are entertaining elements here, but this play's attack on First World Capitalism makes "Bodies" at the Royal Court seem subtle.

2 and a half stars.

PS: For perspective, I rank this at the bottom of this year's theatrical excursions, along with the unfunny "The Miser," but above the execrable "Mudsummer Night's Dream."

It is also worth noting, that Trevor Nunn doesn't have to sit in another theatre, he probably earns more from royalties than all of us put together in a year. He was passionate about theatre at Cambridge and it has never diminished.

Trevor's vaunted (and once genuine) "passion for theatre" long ago devolved into an inability to stop. There comes a time in every artist's life when you have to say enough is enough, otherwise you risk soiling the reputation that you spent all those decades building towards. Sigh .... am bracing myself for the worst for this.

Saw it tonight. As bad as expected. Starry audience though: Sophie Thompson, Mo Lipman, Tom Wilkinson (with his wife Diana Hardcastle), and more ..... notably few press, though, which was weird since it was press night.

Well. You know when you're talking to someone and you have a very good point to make but then for whatever reason you meander off and head into a different direction before trying to get back to your original point but by that time you've got yourself into a bit of a knot and don't know how to get out of it? This play is it.

A bunch of deeply unlikeable characters who are only particularly funny if you like laughing at poor people who don't have a holiday home (or four). To be honest . .


The evening was saved though by seeing Glynis Barber. OMGosh, she is FOXY.

I didn't think it was that bad, it had its moments but yes it was rather overheated.

Both Cotton and a note-taking Nunn in the audience then ligging about at the interval. In a major, shocking departure from his usual attire, Nunn was wearing a slightly lighter than usual shade of denim shirt. I almost didn't recognise him.

You'd hope, or think - he's practically made of denim. But on this occasion it was trainers.