Grief is the thing with feathers (Complicite)

Oh... that'll be why the street was blocked off in town today - filming Peaky Blinders (yay!)

Just booked for The Damned and Medea and also had a look at availability for this - "Grief" is selling pretty well although there is a fair amount left. The other two have loads of availability.

As noted above if you are worried you get 20% off with membership and save the £3 booking fee, plus you get into the art gallery for free if you like that sort of thing, so if you're booking more than one ticket, or for more than one show, it's worth considering! Bear in mind you don't get 20% off all theatre shows - doesn't apply for some visiting companies like the RSC, for instance.

I can't decide if I should book for the Barbican today or keep the faith that it will eventually make its way to Oxford. I wouldn't want to miss out all together, but it's going to be an expensive booking day for me if I book everything I want to see in the new season this morning.

I rarely see things at the Barbican, but do returns for good seats pop up a lot like they do at other venues? If it's a sell out I presume they will. This is a long time off but a tasty matinee for something else may show up nearer the time to justify the overnight stay.

Yes, the Barbican will take returned tickets for credit and they put them up on sale online. So a good chance of returns popping up. Alternatively this means you could book now and return later if you can't make it? But bear in mind you have 6 months (I think) to use the credit.

Got myself a seat at the front of the Upper Circle in the first week of its run - I want to see this, but not so much I'm willing to pay £60 for a stalls seat.

I asked at Oxford Playhouse today....and they were quite optimistic without actually committing! They said “watch this space”

I REALLY didn’t like this : if it wasn’t for the fact I was sat on the front row of the upper balcony and to get out in the dark meant there was a high possibility of falling over the railing to my doom, I would have left by the halfway mark. I was just bored witless after half an hour or so.

If you didn’t like Misterman, you really aren’t going to get along with this. It’s basically a one man show from Cillian Murphy save for some interjections near the end from some ‘adorable moppets 😐’ - plenty of loud scratchy noises, back projection and use of flashing lights and mega phones (I’m guessing Enda Walsh has been to see U2 a few too many times in recent years)- the character of Crow is just Murphy pulling a black hoodie up and doing some regionally pronounced bollocks to no great end, like some kind of post modern Charlie Chuck.

It wasn’t a total write-off, there were a couple of nice moments (more like seconds actually) near the end but I’m probably just saying that because my own mother passed away a couple of years back, but the whole show is an awfully big haystack to go through for some not particularly impressive needles. Thank God I didn’t pay full whack for stalls seats.

I’ve just got back from this and there’s a fair bit to unpack. Great performance from mr Murphy, a real tour de force, and I loved the staging though feel I’d rather have seen it ina much smaller venue with a different kind of audience and maybe would have preferred not to see the children on stage - I didn’t warm to them, that fish story and the lip syncing further distances them for me (apologies for typos but I’m not used to typing on a phone!). Also feel I should have done some homework - I try to avoid reviews when I’ve already booked well in advance but it’s half a lifetime since I read ted Hughes and I feel it would have helped....or read the programme notes first.

A difficult watch if you lost a parent as a child as the flashbacks to your own grief and coping strategies became entwined with the piece and could take you out of the flow, fortunately/unfortunately I was older than these kids and was able to escape into my own life, often unsuccessfully as I hid from rather than facing my grief. (“Like a mothers kiss on your first broken heart” from Wam Wet Circles by Marillion still gets me to this day)

I found the montage of women quite emotional as they imagined/longed for a maternal element/replacement in their lives, one thing I noticed was that it did not include the ghosts of the lost parent when you see a doppelgänger, which for me continued for a number of years.

Not an easy watch, Cilian Murphy was excellent morphing between the two characters, the Barbican continues to be one of the best places to see experimental theatre on a large scale and have booked to see Rooms in a few weeks time.

It quite took me out of the moment. Moira Stewart! Janet Ellis!

I really wasn’t a fan of this at all. Cillian Murphy is always great to watch, but I thought that for the most part this was a real misfire of a production, and - bar a few snippets - didn’t really capture the spirit of the book at all. The Crow in this was f***ing annoying, and he wasn’t in the book. And why was there so little interaction between the Dad and his sons and the Crow and the boys?

And don’t get me started on the ludicrously overblown visuals and sound effects, the megaphone, strobe lighting etc etc - who on earth thought that was a good idea? It’s a bit like deciding you’re going to do a stage adaptation of an Ingmar Bergman movie and then giving the job to some guy who directs videos for Metallica and Iron Maiden. I love an arena rock gig, but this wasn’t the place for those sorts of pyrotechnics IMHO. It made for a show that was often both bombastic and tedious, which is a hard combo to pull off.

To be fair, the final third worked quite well, when they trusted the source material and kept the staging relatively simple.

I could tell that the woman next to me hated it with a passion, yet there were clearly people who loved it. Lots of people were on their feet at the end, some in tears, while others sat there with their arms folded. So definitely a Marmite show, as has already been noted.