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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 ...

Theatre: Burn not chatroom then citizenship...

Monday night I forgot I was at the National Theatre again to see "Burn, Chatroom and Citizenship" – three new one-act plays. Except that they only perform two and I was stuck with "Burn" during the first half. It was a bit of a bore, although had some nice commentary about social workers and car stealing. The second half was "Citizenship" and it was much more lively and funnier (no surprise when it was written by Mark Ravenhill of "Shopping and Fucking" fame). The tale about a boy who sees a girl and gets her pregnant while looking for a gay relationship was pretty funny. The characters and dialogue were fantastic (even if the plot was a bit suspect)…

The crowd was a very young crowd as these performances were originally performed at the NT last year by school children, and they all have yoof feemes and all that… So once you got past the audience belching and laughing at the wrong parts it was a good night out…  

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