REVIEW: The Diary Of A Teenage Girl, Southwark Playhouse ✭✭✭
It’s very pleasant, often amusing, and if it doesn’t plumb any depths in its conventional story of growing up.
It’s very pleasant, often amusing, and if it doesn’t plumb any depths in its conventional story of growing up.
Ellen McDougall’s Othello is a very solid production, with excellent performances and a number of intriguing original motifs. Whilst these did not all work for me, mileage will vary between audience members, and the production’s many strengths and the excellent venue means it is to be recommended.
The great, central achievement of this production is in the two-handed coup of Jeremy Legat and Ed MacArthur’s dazzling performance as duetting singer-actor-dancer pianists.
Alas poor Sherlock, we know it well. Even in the opening scenes of this ingenious production, it was clear that Andrew Scott would more than match his TV co-star Cumberbatch.
This piece isn’t going to change the face of theatre, but it delivers what it is required to do, and is as entertaining as the excellent wedding band that occasionally, unexpectedly, crop up out of James Button’s excellent design.
It’s a very clever idea, and writer Tom Stenton is to be congratulated for having formulated it and brought it thus far along the road to taking theatrical shape.
Overall, despite a good cast and production values, the play doesn’t reach the heights it could have.
If you like simple – very simple – soap-operas about nice middle-class people, who drink lots of prosecco and talk at inordinate length and to no great purpose about their very ordinary relationships, then this is the play for you! If not, give it a miss.