The Writer - Almeida

I'm in Tuesday for press night and I am so so excited

Beginners was full of nice performances but the children were bored and baffled in equal measure. I gave it a damning review, as did the Evening Standard's Fiona Moubtford. For me Crouch is going to young audiences for the reasons you say but they bring adults, some of whom might be able to tell whether they are watching a Royal Court reject.

The press night cupcakes were nice though!

It’s not MINE

Others I see

What THEY carry

I just have a small carrier bag from LIDL

Steve I wonder why Hickson said “girls” get all the buzz when “boys” get most of the production slots on offer. Perhaps she meant young, photogenic girls like her, in which case she should also feel sorry for less photogenic older women who, according to Timberlake Wertenbaker, don’t get a look in.

By the way, before you all take me to task yes Wertenbaker is very photogenic, but that’s not the point.

Foxa, you need to BE Ryan to see through Ryan's eyes. If he had reviewed Adler and Gibb, I'm betting he'd have written about tighty whities. This is why Ryan is so necessary to Theatreboard, to let us see truths we'd otherwise miss. I mean, thanks to Ryan, I now realise Cambridge Analytica is a Bond girl lol!

Of course, it was my intention to lose you at Tim Crouch, if that would save you pain lol. Still, I think you may be ok. Here are more thoughts:

Tim Crouch is like the comedian, Andy Kaufman, in that he likes his audiences to cringe and squirm. Ella Hickson, while she uses the same techniques as Crouch, isn't like that.

So while Crouch will deliberately stage longeurs, Hickson in fact will write the opposite: a sense of urgency.

In fact, the single continuous thread I've felt in Hickson's work, that I've seen, is her sense that time is running out, and that makes her plays more conventionally exciting than Crouch's plays.

In Eight, at the Trafalgar, time was up for four actors who never got to give their monologues (by audience vote), while the other 4 gave monologues about time running out lol.

In Precious Little Talent, also at the Trafalgar, time was running out for poor Ian Gelder, suffering from dementia, while his daughter, Olivia Hallinan felt her own pleasurable time with him running out.

In Boys, at Soho Theatre, time was running out for four Boys, as their halcyon uni days came to a close, and Tom Mothersdale's overgrown child took a last sniff of cocaine off his teenage girlfriend's stomach, while Danny Kirrane sat on top of a fridge, with death on his mind, as political unrest roared outside their flat.

In all these plays, that sense of time running out gave an urgency to the subject matter that made you leave the theatre gasping for air.

I missed Hickson's plays, Hot Mess and Peter and Wendy, but came back in with Oil, at the Almeida, to find Hickson growing into an experimental phase. Hickson borrowed Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine presentation of characters who live centuries through historical events, as well as her strategy of presenting scenes in different styles, and her deconstruction of feminism, to show us a world where both the depletion and use of oil meant time was running out for the Western World, for feminism, and maybe for all of humanity. So despite branching out into experimental terrain, there was still terrific urgency to the work.

And now, in this play, while she uses Crouch's meta alienation techniques to wake the audience up, she doesn't set out to piss her audience off, as Crouch might. In fact, instead, you get that Hicksonian sense of urgency and confused malaise, that time is running out for artists to make a difference in the world, that while patriarchy reaches it's tipping point, nonetheless most artists may merely be masturbating their audiences with titillation, sexual, violent, narcotic, musical, commercial: as someone who has booked a return trip to Tina the Musical, I know I am the kind of pleasure seeking fool, who is the target of some of The Writer's heaviest criticisms. And yet, Hickson presents her material not as a critique, but as an exciting urgent ride of ideas, that she is on with us, equally confused.

Simply put, she may have gone meta, but her sense of urgency continues to energise and entertain.

Cleo, regarding Hickson's years-ago observation that girls get the hype over poor hard-working boys, I'd suppose the following:

1: She overestimated the quality of her male peers' work;
2: She underestimated the quality of her own work;
3: She mistook the media's sexist amazement that females like herself, Lucy Prebble, Anya Reiss, etc could actually write, for some kind of preferment or advantage, instead of the patronising nonsense it really was.

Saw this last night. The stalls weren't completely full but pretty busy. One very elderly couple walked out twenty minutes before the end but everyone else stayed put. 2 hours was ok as the seat next to me was empty and so I had legroom.

The play itself feels all over the place. The first section is somewhat like a typical Guardian opinion piece come to life. Interestingly done though, especially if taken with the Q&A segment. The second section with the partner and the boyfriend I found the most accessible - looking for meaning in life/art and the choices/compromises we need to make.

And then unfortunately I could not follow the second hour at all. I couldn't and still can't make anything out of the excursion into the woods nor the writer with her girlfriend, even a day later.

They know they're gonna get slammed!

No, it will be because they liked it.

I’ve only found 4 star reviews from WOS, BWW and Time Out. Nothing from the bigger hitters yet.

5 stars in the Standard - www.standard.co.uk/go/london/theatre/the-writer-review-romola-garai-blazes-in-defiant-attempt-to-rewrite-the-script-a3822836.html

I hope they use this from the Time Out review on the poster:
"So devastatingly perceptive that I felt my flesh being ripped off my bones to expose the gruesome true self that my flabby shell of flesh is fraudulently concealing."

Libby Purves hated it - theatrecat.com/2018/04/25/the-writer-almeida-n1/

I shall think deeply about what I am saying, oh Great One of Theatreboard! I was indeed an arrogant fool, not just in questioning the impartiality of professional critics, but also in questioning your mighty, irrefutable theatrical proclamation. Thank you for putting me firmly in my place.