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A Man For All Seasons: Seagull True Story - Marylebone Theatre

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It's not often that you see a play that tells you not so much a story but gives you a sense of how it feels to be in a situation, how it feels to be silenced, how it feels to be marginalised, how the dead hand of consensus stifles your creativity. However, in Seagull True Story, created and directed by Alexander Molochnikov and based on his own experiences fleeing Russia and trying to establish himself in New York, we have a chance to look beyond the headlines and understand how the war in Ukraine impacted a a group of ordinary creatives in Russia. And how the gradual smothering of freedom and freedom of expression becomes impossible to resist, except for the brave or the suicidal. Against the backdrop of Chekhov's The Seagull, which explores love and other forms of disappointment, it presents a gripping and enthralling depiction of freedom of expression in the face of adversity. After playing earlier this year in New York, it plays a limited run at the Marylebone Theatre . Fro...
Theatre: By the Bog of Cats with Holly Hunter

Holly Hunter in a West End play was too good to pass up at £15, so I went to Wyndhams Theatre to see By The Bog Of Cats tonight. The house was half full so there was plenty of room to stretch out in the theatre.

It was an updating of the Medea story to Ireland amongst the peat bogs and the travelers who live in them, so that might explain why it hasn't found an audience. Holly Hunter could stand on stage and recite a list of vulgarities and it would be still worth seeing her act of course...

At crucial moments in the story the man sitting next to me kept rustling his bag of nuts which was a bit of a distraction, and just before Hunter's character gets killed by a man with a white face (not sure about the logic behind that part) somebody's phone went off. The magic of live theatre...

Miscellany

* Liquorice Allsorts are back on my table.
* Was followed tonight at Piccadilly Circus tube station by a man in a pinstripe suit and a cheap backpack.
* Have started looking in earnest for nice place to live in fabulous location... That has own bathroom and broadband. Apart from that, I am not fussy.

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