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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 ...

Scenes from Bloomsbury Sunday 14:11 - It isn't everyday when you find a working fridge freezer for £35 outside your front door... Not surprinsingly (as Londoners love a bargain), within an hour it was sold... Just in time to beat the heavy afternoon rains that would have probably rendered it less useful...

In another curiousity the central heating came on this week in the building... Apparently winter is here even if it isn't... It made me wonder whether:
  1. The other residents of the building are fearful of temperatures below 15 degrees,
  2. The authority that runs the building gets a good deal on the gas used to heat the boilers,
  3. The other residents missed the furnace-like atmosphere of the stairwells over the past three months when the heating was turned off,
  4. The basement rats turned it on after eating their way through everything else down there,
  5. The authority that runs the building doesn't have any idea as to what it is doing, or
  6. All of the above.
In another property matter my flatmate R went to the East End on the weekend - Hoxton to be precise - to look at a penthouse apartment at the top of charming 1960s council building. He took a friend who commented that while the area is ripe for regeneration (afterall the East London line is going there and it will be closer to the Olympics site), it isn't there yet. And you still have to share the excrement-smeared lifts with the other distinguished residents on your way to the top. To top it off the owner of the penthouse managed to give the place a hideous makeover with bathroom tiles in the living room and a curious display of the man appearing in photographs with African men sporting AK-47s. R decided against making an offer on the place. It just wasn't him... Posted by Picasa

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