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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 an office water cooler Thursday 17:35


Scenes from an office water cooler Thursday 17:35, originally uploaded by Pauly_.

The water-cooler conversation today was strangely enough... About water coolers. Over the past few weeks somebody had been putting the plastic cups in the dispenser the wrong way and it was starting to really bug people.

Apart from looking aesthetically dreadful, the cups would get stuck in the dispenser...

Today it was crunch time for the rouge-cup-dispenser-placer. After a colleague had spent earlier this week fishing out the cups which had been put in "end in" only to find by the afternoon they were around the wrong way a notice was placed to alert this rogue cup person that there was a right way and a wrong way to stick in plastic cups...

I assisted in the drafting of the notice by suggesting the phrase "the lip goes in the hole first". I thought that was not as suspect as the drawing... But anyway...

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