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High anxiety: Collapse - Riverside Studios

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It’s a brave or maybe slightly provocative production to use Hammersmith Bridge on their artwork for a show called Collapse, which is about how everything collapses—poorly maintained bridges, relationships, and jobs. Nothing works. That’s probably too close to home for Hammersmith residents stuck with a magnificently listed and useless bridge on their front door. It gets even weirder when you realise the piece is staged in what looks like a meeting room with a bar. However, keeping things together in the most unlikely of circumstances is at the heart of Allison Moore's witty and engaging four-hander, which is currently having a limited engagement at Riverside Studios . The piece opens with Hannah (Emma Haines) about to get an injection from her husband (Keenan Heinzelmann). They’re struggling for a baby, and he’s struggling to get out of bed. But he managed to give her a shot of hormones before she started worrying about the rest of the day. She’s unsure she will keep her job with ...
Movie: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

After a hectic day in the office I decided to go and see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It was playing at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton, which is a grand old theatre that is a feature on the high street which has great seats and a good sound system... No trip to Brixton is complete without a visit to the cinema (although try and get to see a film in the main cinema and not in the extended bit)...

As for the movie, I recently had a discussion with a Gene Wilder devotee who was passionately arguing that nobody could come near his comic genius. I thought that was all very well but that first movie had all those dreadful songs and departed from the book in several key places. Besides, I thought Johnny Depp would make this far more interesting and he did by becoming Michael Jackson. There is a scene towards the end where Wonka tries to lure Charlie away from his family into his big glass elevator so they could live together - and alone - which surely could have been lifted straight from a Martin Bashir documentary.

To be fair on the film and not just take the fashionable reading of the day, it was very entertaining. There are a few smart updates to the original story as well (although I am not sure why Mike TeeVee's father replaces his mother... The gender balance seems all wrong there)... Roald Dahl's text remains for the Oompa Loompa songs, and they seem a lot more fun than the last time I recalled them too. All told a not particularly subtle at points (there is this heavy handed aside into Wonkas upbringing), overall it was fun... And cruel... Squirrels attacking a girl from Buckinghamshire is surely something anyone in their right mind will want to pay to see!

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