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No country for old women: Old Ladies - at Finborough Theatre

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The day after seeing The Old Ladies at the Finborough Theatre , I was describing the play to someone in great detail: about three old ladies who lived in a rickety house in southern England in 1935. Based on Hugh Walpole’s novel and adapted by Rodney Ackland, it is the sort of story with enough believability, humour and mild thriller to stick in your mind. Perhaps it is the lure of this dark, forboding tale of a life without money, to be alone and to be old, that makes you feel attracted to this poverty porn. But then again, given the state of the world, the cost of living, an ageing population, or just the fact that it’s a dog-eat-dog world, it might as well be an every little old lady-for-herself, too. It’s a well-acted and staged piece that moves at a brisk pace, so there isn’t much time to think about it too much. And in the intimate (or should that be claustrophobic?) space of the Finborough, there’s nowhere to avert your eyes. Even if you wanted to.  The scene is a grim Cathe...

Movies: Match Point

Today was one of those cold windy and wet days so it was a perfect opportunity to go to the movies. Match Point had just opened and being a new Woody Allen flick (and his first to be shot in London) it was well worth going to… Or so it seemed. It turned out that the story was a series of clichés held together by some pretty bad acting / pouting on the part of lead actor Jonathan Rhys-Myers. There was also a rather absurd plot development of two murders committed by a shotgun that took place in a central London apartment block with not a CCTV camera in sight. In real London six cameras would have caught the murderer's every move (unless the cameras had burnt out or malfunctioned)…

Part way through the film A asked me if I was seeing a lesson in the film for me and I whispered back to him that the lesson from this film is to not screw around with your tennis coach as they can be such nasty bitches...

The locations were bog-standard spots and included St Mary Axe ("the gherkin"), views of the Palace of Westminster and the passé vogue upmarket shops around New Bond Street that are now in any city of the world. It is a pity that you don't see films shot in London use more interesting sites. Granted "The Constant Gardener" showed off some great London locations, but where are the films shot in Catford, Haringey, Hackney and Stockwell? Ok maybe they aren't the nicest spots in town but there is also Highgate, Hampstead, Soho and Bloomsbury that don't often get a look in…

London was also Woody Allen-ised in that it was always overcast, and at one point there seemed to be a blizzard happening. One can only hope that Woody's next London outing is a little bit more entertaining and interesting than this one. Oh the rest of the cast weren't too bad, but when they were such boring characters with such silly dialogue to speak it was a struggle to get too excited about them…

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