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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 ...

Theatre: The Shallow End


The Shallow End currently playing at the Southwark Playhouse is an opportunity to revisit this satire on British media with recent events of phone hacking, arrests, resignations and enquiries in mind.


The play is set at the wedding of a media mogul's daughter, who has just brought a broadsheet newspaper and it about to take it downmarket. During the celebrations the axe is about to be weilded on the old guard as debates about about the future of a newspaper in the digital age.

Playwright Doug Lucie notes in the promotion materials that the play was originally attacked when it premiered in 1997 as being hysterical and inaccurate. He notes today that the work probably doesn't go far enough with what is known now about the business. Drug use, sex and coarse language abound in this work. What is missing is the entrenched corruption and cosy relationships between the press, politicians and police. And the public's insatiable appetite for buying news of triviality, or selling stories about C-list celebs to the papers in the first place... Perhaps that is for another play...

Presented as a series of unrelated scenes, it does feel a little disjointed and overlong as a piece. And it would have been fun to have cast the characters to resemble the current crop of News International players. But it is quite fun to watch nevertheless and fascinating piece to revisit. It runs until 3 March.

Audioboo reaction with @Johnnyfoxlondon and Adrian from Melbourne Australia follows...

Shallow Boo: the Shallow end (mp3)

 

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