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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...

It's too darn hot, we're having a heatwave...

With the temperature reaching 36.6 degrees near Gatwick on Wednesday, it was not a day for bragging when one was in one of the few offices in the building with air conditioning (and sitting right under it). I stayed back late at work just to enjoy the cool. In this heat other anti-social acts include:
  • Going out for ice creams and not coming back with enough for everybody

  • Closing the ventilation windows on the tube trains claiming it is too breezy standing next to it

  • Perspiring over fellow audience-members at a Proms Concerts (it was the Queen's 80th Birthday tribute tonight and the television cameras have picked up the audience battering programmes desperate for some movement of air)

  • Forgetting deodorant and using the grab rails on a peak hour Clapham omnibus

It is weather strictly for the Abercrombie and Fitch cargo shorts, a light t-shirt and flip flops… Incidentally thanks to global warming summer temperatures are expected to become more Mediterranean in London over the next 10-15 years so today's record is one that is unlikely to last for long…

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