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Working it all out

Whenever we contemplate life’s innumerable mysteries, the imaginative scope of the human brain soon reaches its outer limits and we have to resort to head-shaking wonder and quite possibly the issue of whether God exists or not and other similarly-profound matters. It is almost as if the more [...]

September 28, 2016 // 0 Comments

A MAGNIFICENT MAGNIFICENT SEVEN

It’s an accepted truism that a remake is never an improvement on the original so I went to the 2016 version of the The Magnificent Seven with some considerable trepidation. The original John Sturges version starring Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, Horst Buchholz and [...]

September 26, 2016 // 0 Comments

The Dresser/ Theatre Royal

The Dresser by Sir Ronald Harwood is a play I know well and have seen many times. The playwright, who was the dresser of Sir Donald Wolfit, in a programme note refutes the suggestion that the central character ‘Sir’ was modelled upon the celebrated actor manager. However it is [...]

September 23, 2016 // 0 Comments

National Treasure

Operation Yewtree is always going to be a fertile area for drama and National Treasure succeeds in delivering it. The central role of a superannuated comedian ( Paul Finchley) arrested on rape charge allegedly perpitrated in the 70s is well played by Robbie Coltrane. A strong cast also features [...]

September 22, 2016 // 0 Comments

Pushing a boulder up a hill

It’s well-known that two signals of old age are firstly, an entrenched belief that things were better ‘back in the day’ [what a horrible phrase!] and secondly, a tendency to repeat one’s own stories. Thus I begin my post today hoping, probably in vain, that in addressing today’s chosen [...]

September 15, 2016 // 0 Comments

The ‘Bake Off’ is off, then

Two of the great things about being over the age of fifty (well, okay fifty-five) is that one can retain one’s propensity for having firm, not to say strident, opinions on areas of life and commerce in which one was once proficient and/or knowledgeable about whilst simultaneously absolving [...]

September 14, 2016 // 0 Comments

The Flemish House/Georges Simenon

Georges Simenon is one of those authors many have heard of but less have read. Older readers will recalling actor Rupert Davies definitively in the role of the bulky French detective in his trademark raincoat and pipe. A good friend of mine and the Rust presented me with a copy of The Flemish [...]

September 13, 2016 // 0 Comments

To Get Back, or not to get back

Being roughly ten years younger than the Beatles, when they first burst upon national British consciousness I immediately became an obsessive wide-eyed fan of theirs in a male ‘from a safe distance, middle class, watching on TV, listening on radio, reading the newspapers and magazines, always [...]

September 13, 2016 // 0 Comments

Relatively Speaking

I have written before that critics do not take Alan Ayckbourn as seriously as they should as he is viewed as commercial and popular. Having suffered through Pinter’s No Man’s Land at this very theatre I found two hours of cleverly constructed farce a great source of entertainment and [...]

September 10, 2016 // 0 Comments

Salute to Bridget

In common with what is now my fellow members of two generations of women, since Helen Fielding first brought her to the printed page in The Independent newspaper in the mid-1990s, I have had to come to terms with the Bridget Jones phenomenon. However, unlike some of the sisterhood, I have never [...]

September 9, 2016 // 0 Comments

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