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With a single dessert and just two glasses of wine our bill was kept in check - but the effort of doing so was not much fun
Babbo
Film
This is a film with beautiful performances and a visual style that urges you towards reflection
Bright Star
Theatre
Although the first half of Kwei-Armah’s production is pacy, funny and intelligent, the energy level then drops off
Seize The Day
I loved this film from start to finish. Take the girlfriend, tell your mum - I'd see it again tomorrow and will buy the dvd.
I saw this last night and can't remember the last time I was so moved in the theatre.
I have been to many of London's so-called best Japanese restaurants and none have been as good as the food that I've had at Aqua Kyoto
London,
Nicholas de Jongh's rating
Reader rating
Description: Aboriginal walk through memory, dreams and fear from Matt Cameron.
The surrealistic title of this fascinating memory-play by the Australian Matt Cameron, signals its liberation from tired conventions of realistic theatre.
Soutra Gilmore's raked stage design suggests the runway for a plane about to take off. The play itself climbs to wild heights of dream, fantasy and memory and leaves you stumbling, true to life, though not to realism, in a no-man's-land of uncertainty.
Cameron takes his basic leap of inspiration from two mysterious disasters: a never-explained TWA plane crash and the case of an Australian woman who had to wear a pressurised body suit after being set alight by her boyfriend.
Ranging between past and present, relying upon dreams' coincidences, Cameron links these two events through the figure of Titus, a young man who was killed in the TWA crash or went missing. The play implies that the motives for people's extreme behaviour are as unfathomable and hard to elucidate as the reasons for a plane's downfall.
The first scene sets a tone of ominous and eerie surrealism: the plane crashes before our very ears, moments after Irene, Titus's burned, bandaged girl-friend has a premonition of the disaster; Titus, a passenger on the doomed flight, suddenly materialises in a picture being painted by his onearmed father.
The young man then assumes human form, his skin peeling in the crash's fire, as he flails at T S Eliot's "still-point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless". Scenes from Titus's childhood, with vignettes of his mother's frustration and his father Stanley's aggressive hostility, are reenacted in parallel to a search for the young man's body. Cameron reaches heights of the visionary macabre when Stanley and Irene trawl through the plane's debris. "Breathe normally though death is imminent," the flight attendant gruesomely instructs.
No illumination is achieved through the glass eye's fallible perspective. But Erica Whyman's production, though handicapped by its crass decision to go for British accents, casts a nightmarish glow. Ian Drysdale and Sandy McDade as Titus and Irene are riveting exponents of Cameron's remarkable imagination.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
