The Last Stand of Mary Whitehouse

This was great - I hope it plays somewhere else, otherwise you need to be in range of Nottingham Playhouse by next Saturday.

Looking at the reviews, the thing that strikes me is that they all (rightly) love Maxine Peake as the title character, but most of them don't make enough fuss about the performance of Samuel Barnett who plays all of the other roles: if just one of the two gets an award, it should be him.

There is at least one bit that made me go 'that's not right' - the idea that the closure of Gay News in April 1983 was a) before the arrival of Aids in the UK (nope), b) that meant no national info on Aids, so c) more deaths.

For one thing, the big shift in behaviour for men having safer sex with men was over the spring and, more so, summer of 1983. I'd need to look at old issues of Gay News to see how much they encouraged that before the end.

April 1983 also saw the first showing of the BBC Horizon programme, Killer in the Village, and that was very widely viewed from talking to people then and over the next few years.

Oh, and the 'national' is a way to not acknowledge the role of Capital Gay from the end of 1981, and that was read outside London - I think it was even officially distributed in Brighton - including its up-to-date coverage of what was happening here and in the US.

The Void

A space-based horror. The extensive use of video looks too consistent to be generated by AI, and the sound design, lighting, and stage magic effects - to get some of the effects, one of the two actors has to disappear / reappear somewhere else without being noticed by the audience - are excellent. The performances are also very good.

Overall, it's good, but it's the script that's the problem. Chunks of it are a bit too much like the 'question tennis' scene in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (without the comedy) and overall it fails to deliver a satisfying end. The journey's good though.

On tour.