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Death becomes her: A Brief List Of Everyone Who Died @finborough

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For a natural process, death is not a topic that comes up naturally for people. We ask how people are doing but expect the response to be “I’m great”, not “I’m not dead yet”. And so for the main character in A Brief List of Everyone Who Died, Graciela has a death issue. Starting with when she was five and found out only after the matter that her parents had her beloved dog euthanised. So Graciela decides that nobody she loves will die from then on. And so this piece becomes a fruitless attempt at how she spends her life trying to avoid death while it is all around her. It’s currently having its world premiere  at the Finborough Theatre . As the play title suggests, it is a brief list of life moments where death and life intervene for the main character, from the passing of relatives, cancer, suicides, accidents and the loss of parents. Playwright Jacob Marx Rice plots the critical moments of the lives of these characters through their passing or the passing of those around them. Howeve

Dire sheep: Big Brother Blitzkrieg @KingsHeadThtr


It seems like a great concept: after many rejections from Vienna's art school and a botched suicide attempt, Hitler wakes up in the Big Brother House.

But what could pass for a five minute sketch is dragged out for an excruciating seventy minutes with few laughs.


Satire I thought was meant to be funny. At least it is in Chaplin's The Great Dictator and pretty much anything from Mel Brooks. Instead we have an earnest and unconvincing argument that we all get swept away by charisma in the end.

If the intention is to explore what does reality television do for politicians the answer from this seems to be not a lot. The programme notes Donald Trump is using reality television fame to run for President. But he is also spending a lot of his own personal fortune on doing that (and the jury is still out on how well that is going for him).

The big brother household assembled seems a bit odd as well. They look too old to be contestants. And if they are meant to spoofs of media personalities it is too unclear to be be funny. Besides, given the average age of any Big Brother winner is 25, I would have thought Hitler had no chance...

Big Brother Blitzkrieg runs at the Kings Head Theatre until 30 January.

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