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Showing posts with the label Joan Didion

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Searching undeterred: The Gift @ParkTheatre

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I recently had a few parcels go missing from where I live. The first parcel disappeared without a trace. The second parcel's contents were removed, and the box was left alone in the lobby. It's one of the things that you have to put up with living in central London. Apart from complaining to the delivery company and filing a police report, it crossed my mind to think about what would happen if I sent myself something rather unpleasant for a future parcel thief to open up. Well, Dave Florez's new work, The Gift, is in this line of thinking, except that the lead receives an anonymous gift of a turd in the mail rather than sending it to himself. It is lovingly gift-wrapped in a cake box from a posh north London bakery. It's a fascinating and hilarious three-hander currently playing at Park Theatre .  Colin (Nicholas Burns) is a little obsessive at the best of times. He doesn't let things drop quickly and is obsessed with the details behind anything and everythi...
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Theatre: The Year Of Magical Thinking

Saturday night I finally caught up with The Year of Magical Thinking which has been playing since April at the National Theatre. Featuring Vanessa Redgrave on a chair, it tells the story of American author Joan Didion and how over a year she lost both her husband and her daughter and the process she went through in dealing with it (or more to the point not dealing with it). The play is based on her book however it exapnds the story to include the loss of her daughter as well. There is such a frank honesty to this story that even with the subject matter you can't help but be drawn into it. Perhaps it is the way it constantly asks the audience to reflect on this story as it will happen to all of us: the details will be different but the end result is the same. It was certainly was a novel way of reminding us all about our own mortality and how dealing with it is part of life. Perhaps the subject matter (people die), the fact that it was the bank holiday weekend and people may not ...
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