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Life upon the wicked stage: Already Perfect at Kings Head Theatre

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Performing two shows a day on a Broadway run sounds exhausting enough. But when you’ve just had a not-so-great matinee and are having a crisis of confidence, I would assume the last thing you’d want is to confront your past. Yet that’s the situation in Already Perfect, writer-performer Levi Kreis’s slightly autobiographical journey of confronting the past and his younger self. With a series of toe-tapping and emotional songs in a sleek production, you’re invited to experience someone else’s therapy session. And with a show title called Already Perfect, you know what kind of session this is going to be. It makes for a show where nothing is left unsaid, even if it is unnecessary,  unbelievable or best left on a greeting card. It’s currently playing at the King’s Head Theatre .  The story begins in his dressing room after a matinee, with Kreis alone. The show didn’t go so well. Struggling after being dumped by a lover, pressure mounting on the evening show being filmed for poster...

Theatre: The Shallow End


The Shallow End currently playing at the Southwark Playhouse is an opportunity to revisit this satire on British media with recent events of phone hacking, arrests, resignations and enquiries in mind.


The play is set at the wedding of a media mogul's daughter, who has just brought a broadsheet newspaper and it about to take it downmarket. During the celebrations the axe is about to be weilded on the old guard as debates about about the future of a newspaper in the digital age.

Playwright Doug Lucie notes in the promotion materials that the play was originally attacked when it premiered in 1997 as being hysterical and inaccurate. He notes today that the work probably doesn't go far enough with what is known now about the business. Drug use, sex and coarse language abound in this work. What is missing is the entrenched corruption and cosy relationships between the press, politicians and police. And the public's insatiable appetite for buying news of triviality, or selling stories about C-list celebs to the papers in the first place... Perhaps that is for another play...

Presented as a series of unrelated scenes, it does feel a little disjointed and overlong as a piece. And it would have been fun to have cast the characters to resemble the current crop of News International players. But it is quite fun to watch nevertheless and fascinating piece to revisit. It runs until 3 March.

Audioboo reaction with @Johnnyfoxlondon and Adrian from Melbourne Australia follows...

Shallow Boo: the Shallow end (mp3)

 

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