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Somewhere that's green: Potty the Plant at Wiltons Music Hall

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"I'm Potty the Plant," sings a potted plant in this odd little fringe concept of a show. It's hard not to get the tune out of your head, even if the show is brief. It's an earworm for a show that features a worm-like plant as a puppet. And given the show's brevity, running at only an hour, it's hard to get too annoyed by a lack of a coherent story, even if it still seems like the show could use a bit more development (which is underway). It has made its London debut at Wilton's Music Hall. The premise is that Potty, the plant, lives in the hospital office of Dr Acula (geddit?) and dreams of a life with the cleaning lady Miss Lacey (Lucy Appleton). But Dr Acula might be responsible for why all these children are disappearing while trying to romance Miss Lacey for her family's money that she doesn't have. Three nurses are on the case, trying to solve the mystery.  If the show settled on a convincing plot, location and set of characters, it could ...

Movies: Match Point

Today was one of those cold windy and wet days so it was a perfect opportunity to go to the movies. Match Point had just opened and being a new Woody Allen flick (and his first to be shot in London) it was well worth going to… Or so it seemed. It turned out that the story was a series of clichés held together by some pretty bad acting / pouting on the part of lead actor Jonathan Rhys-Myers. There was also a rather absurd plot development of two murders committed by a shotgun that took place in a central London apartment block with not a CCTV camera in sight. In real London six cameras would have caught the murderer's every move (unless the cameras had burnt out or malfunctioned)…

Part way through the film A asked me if I was seeing a lesson in the film for me and I whispered back to him that the lesson from this film is to not screw around with your tennis coach as they can be such nasty bitches...

The locations were bog-standard spots and included St Mary Axe ("the gherkin"), views of the Palace of Westminster and the passé vogue upmarket shops around New Bond Street that are now in any city of the world. It is a pity that you don't see films shot in London use more interesting sites. Granted "The Constant Gardener" showed off some great London locations, but where are the films shot in Catford, Haringey, Hackney and Stockwell? Ok maybe they aren't the nicest spots in town but there is also Highgate, Hampstead, Soho and Bloomsbury that don't often get a look in…

London was also Woody Allen-ised in that it was always overcast, and at one point there seemed to be a blizzard happening. One can only hope that Woody's next London outing is a little bit more entertaining and interesting than this one. Oh the rest of the cast weren't too bad, but when they were such boring characters with such silly dialogue to speak it was a struggle to get too excited about them…

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