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Prayers and thoughts: The Inseparables @Finboroughtheatre

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The Inseparables brings Simone de Beauvoir’s posthumously published novel to life. It traces a lifelong friendship between Sylve and Andrée, two unconventional girls who grew up in a stifling world where being a woman meant getting married or entering a convent. With a quick pace and engaging performances from the two leads, it is a journey back into the 20th century that captures two unconventional women trapped in a conventional world that will have you reflecting on how much or little things have moved on in the last century. It’s currently playing at the Finborough Theatre .  We’re introduced to Sylve praying for her country, France, to be saved from the war and indoctrinated into the world of faith and obedience. But too smart for all that, her life was full of detached guilt and boredom. But when she meets Andrée, a new arrival at her school, she is struck by how different she is from everyone else. She was burned in a fire and had a passion for life that nobody else she knew...

Film: A Scanner Darkly

I caught the movie A Scanner Darkly on Wednesday evening. Based on Phillip K Dick's novel and set seven years in the future in California where the war on terror and the war on drugs seem to have merged as the same threat. The film was a trippy sort of story full of paranoia and hallucinations. It was probably deliberate that it all didn't make sense until the last half hour or so.

It was also a film that was shot normally and then animated using a process called interpolated rotoscoping which added to the dreamlike feel to it… In the end I kind of liked it as it was like a graphic novel. The only problem I really had with it was that it was a bit hard to take a movie about drugs featuring Robert Downey Jr and Winnona Ryder… It felt like watching a sensitive documentary on the holocaust narrated by Mel Gibson or Tom Cruise doing a community awareness spot on depression: just all wrong and a distraction.

The author acknowledges at the end of the film all the people who have done drugs over the years that he has know that are either dead or with liver failure, mental illness, bowels that don't function or some other problem… A nice message to send the audience out of the theatre with…  

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Opera and full frontal nudity: Rigoletto

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Fantasies: Afterglow @Swkplay

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Play ball: Damn Yankees @LandorTheatre

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Damn Yankees at the Landor Theatre is one hell of a fun, sexy show. A great cast of dancers and singers give this show about a man who sells his soul to get on his beloved baseball team (and give them a chance of winning) new legs and balls. It also helps to up the ante with the sexiness with some healthy doses of cleavage and legs (and that's just the men). The musical is a retelling of the Faust story set in the 1950s when the New York Yankees dominated the game.
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