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A Man For All Seasons: Seagull True Story - Marylebone Theatre

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It's not often that you see a play that tells you not so much a story but gives you a sense of how it feels to be in a situation, how it feels to be silenced, how it feels to be marginalised, how the dead hand of consensus stifles your creativity. However, in Seagull True Story, created and directed by Alexander Molochnikov and based on his own experiences fleeing Russia and trying to establish himself in New York, we have a chance to look beyond the headlines and understand how the war in Ukraine impacted a a group of ordinary creatives in Russia. And how the gradual smothering of freedom and freedom of expression becomes impossible to resist, except for the brave or the suicidal. Against the backdrop of Chekhov's The Seagull, which explores love and other forms of disappointment, it presents a gripping and enthralling depiction of freedom of expression in the face of adversity. After playing earlier this year in New York, it plays a limited run at the Marylebone Theatre . Fro...

Scenes from Barcode Vauxhall Sunday 22:41

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It was bank holiday weekend so it was the time to be dancing yeah (and to be dazzled by dem pretty lights)...

Scenes from Clapham South Tube Sunday 21:36

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Beer and chips that didn't make it... Forks complimentary...

Scenes from a Soho Bar Saturday 20:48

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DSC02766 Originally uploaded by Pauly_ . There was this little wooden man...

Scenes from Clapham Common Saturday 17:19

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The common is a little busier this weekend with the 2-day Metro Weekender on. Punters without a ticket to the event (which sold out) could sort of pick up the music just outside the fenced off area... If the amount of news space devoted on the subject are any measure, the locals seem to get very excited about the noise that is generated from the handful of concerts staged every year on the common. Depending on how the wind blows, it seems to be either muffled noise or nothing at all... One unintented consequence of these concerts is some very good looking people descend upon SW4 and that can only be a good thing surely...?

Scenes from a Brixton Bar Friday 19:42

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Scenes from a Brixton Bar Friday 19:42 Originally uploaded by Pauly_ . Cocktail hour...

Catch phrase of the week...

I miss you like tiramisu.

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 do...

News: Poppy seed cake is popular nowadays...

All the news today is about the 420,000 Eastern European migrants who have come to the UK since enlargement of the EU in May 2004. This number does not include self-employed individuals. They didn't all try to settle in London (after all it is the antipodeans that have 18 people living in a bed-sit in Dollis Hill), the migration patterns appear to have covered all over the UK – with a particular focus on the Anglia region…