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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...
Reflections on a Thursday in London

As the search begins for lost loved ones I recall going through my work yesterday. There was enough to do to not think about the events as they were unfolding. Taking calls, placing calls, locating people, background research, typing messages. It all filled time.

But the scale of it all hit me around lunchtime. That was when I first saw the bomb damage at Tavistock Square on the CNN webiste, which is just a couple of blocks from where I live. I recognised the street by the trees overhanging the road as they are so leafy and bright green. I walk down that street on the weekends on my roundabout way into Covent Garden. It isn't the most attractive part of London. The area is not really anything remarkable about this area at all, but because I live there it is familiar. I had this strong feeling of "That's my neighborhood!". Suddenly the atrocity has a very very localised feel to it.

Then to see the wreck of the red bus, its bright coloured seats and orange grab rails it is again familiar. I recall what it is like to be crammed in on a peak hour bus in central London. It is a typical London experience. And then you see that its frame is twisted and the grab rails are flailing about. You can imagine what it must have been like, but then you can't.

It is interesting however as you think well I never travel THAT way to work as if to reassure yourself that you were never in harms way. It is always entirely possible that you could be doing anything on a morning on your way to work, but you weren't.

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