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No country for old women: Old Ladies - at Finborough Theatre

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The day after seeing The Old Ladies at the Finborough Theatre , I was describing the play to someone in great detail: about three old ladies who lived in a rickety house in southern England in 1935. Based on Hugh Walpole’s novel and adapted by Rodney Ackland, it is the sort of story with enough believability, humour and mild thriller to stick in your mind. Perhaps it is the lure of this dark, forboding tale of a life without money, to be alone and to be old, that makes you feel attracted to this poverty porn. But then again, given the state of the world, the cost of living, an ageing population, or just the fact that it’s a dog-eat-dog world, it might as well be an every little old lady-for-herself, too. It’s a well-acted and staged piece that moves at a brisk pace, so there isn’t much time to think about it too much. And in the intimate (or should that be claustrophobic?) space of the Finborough, there’s nowhere to avert your eyes. Even if you wanted to.  The scene is a grim Cathe...

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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