scaryblog

  The third in an occasional series of The Human Voice reviews... We've done the play , we've done the opera , so I thought I'd do the film (or one of them, anyway) - this is the 2020 Almodóvar version starring Tilda Swinton.  Now, no-one would expect anything with those two names involved to be an arty affair now, would they? And arty it is, but the most striking thing about it is how short it is - it's a mere 30 minutes (the play came in at something like 90 minutes).  Wow, you must be thinking - they must really squeeze the dialogue in to make anything make sense in that period of time.  Well, they REALLY squeeze it in because they don't really get going on the dialogue until 10 minutes in.  And then she spends most of the rest of the time on the phone talking to her ex-lover - and she's not very happy with him.  That's all you need to know really - it has a very dramatic ending though (MUCH more dramatic than I was expecting) and it actually does a good...

The first in a (really very) occasional series of opera reviews... I have actually already started watched an opera (Cosi Fan Tutti) with a view to reviewing it and I was actually quite enjoying it, but then I got distracted by something shiny and have yet to come back to it.  So why would I randomly pick an opera which was on BBC2 last night (apart from, you know, generally being pretty random).  Well, it's La Voix Humaine by Francis Poulenc - which, if you've been paying attention (and I'm sure you have been), you'll know was based on the play of the same name by Jean Cocteau which me and the lovely Mrs Reed went and saw recently with Ruth Wilson in.  And, even better, it was less than hour long (and included seven minutes at the beginning where they have a good old chat about it). And well, at the most basic level, it's pretty much the same as the play - one woman wandering around her apartment chatting away on the phone, except that in this case most of the chat...

The first in a (very) occasional series of play reviews... The Human Voice : Harold Pinter Theatre So, we've done a few musicals, but we haven't done any plays yet - until now, that is!  My general preference would be to go and see a play over a musical, but I quite understand that it's not for everyone (and particularly not for my children).  However, my lovely wife is aware of my preference and, at somewhat of a loss as to what to get me for Xmas, bought me tickets to go and see Ruth Wilson in The Human Voice.  And so, at the second time of asking - thanks to Covid, but even more thanks to the theatre for given us a refund which they didn't have to do, we headed off into the big city to see it (not knowing an awful lot about it, other than believing it to be a monologue at just over an hour long - which sounded like it might have been challenging viewing). Sitting in the theatre, with about 10 minutes to go, the curtain rose to show us a very large (4x10m?) piece of g...