Marketing

Mutterings continued.

I'm back from trawling the Fremantle and Stock Road markets (and Elizabeth's Bookshops) for booty. It's been a rather costly exercise but I don't care 'cos I got loads o' goodies including: Midsummer Night's Dream (the play GRADS is producing next summer), complete with neat pen drawing of Will himself that a previous owner must had drawn; bottle of home-made lemon curd (to which I'm addicted); yummy home-made spearmint and pine soap and Japanese Rice Scrub (I use their Fuller's Earth mud pack); Wombah coffee beans; a Yorkie Bar ("They're not for girls!") and 3 small bags of Walker's Crisps (including Marmite flavoured); some apples (Pink Ladies, my absolute favourite) ; and, drawing a big breath, the BBC The Comedy of Errors, All's Well That Ends Well, Two Gentlemen of Verona and Coriolanus, as well as Stoppard's Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and a 1977 Cinema Papers.

Whew!

Theatre news from the British Theatre Guide website:

On the Ceiling to Close Early

The Birmingham Rep production of Nigel Planer's On the Ceiling (Garrick) is to close early on 1st October. It began previews on 30th August and opened on 12th September to universally poor reviews. Comparatively kindly, the BTG's Philip Fisher described it as "like an extended version of one of those productions on the Edinburgh Fringe that cannot make up its mind whether to list under comedy or theatre," and concluded, "Ron Cook and Ralf Little give the show their all but it is still not enough to lift a light comedy with a single comic idea to anything that would justify a night out, even if tickets are still apparently selling (for Saturday matinees at least) at preview prices."

Nicholas de Jong called it "piffle", Benedict Nightingale decribed it as "glum" and Charles Spencer said it was "the theatrical equivalent of painting by numbers." Oh dear.

Oh, to be visiting the National in London - Playing With Fire! Now, some reviews (well, only the important bits *g*):

From The Stage Online: "Carefully researched, it makes for a tough evening of theatre in which New Labour technobabble comes head to head with blunt talking councillors, brilliantly led by David Troughton as the bluff leader of the council, backed by Northern sideswipes from Trevor Cooper as a pipe-sucking socialist."

From The Telegraph: "Emma Fielding is authentically irritating as the smug, jargon-spouting Blairite, David Troughton is persuasively agonised as the decent, baffled council leader, and Oliver Ford Davies attacks the follies of multiculturalism with alarmingly persuasive bravura."

Most reviews, unfortunately, aren't terribly good.

A propos of nothing, my electronic car door unlocker thingie doesn't work at Spotlight in Cannington. The first time it happened, I thought it was broken, however it worked when I got home. The second time it happened I thought it was more than coincidence. The third time I went to Spotlight I parked in a different place, at a different angle, and it worked. Odd. Very odd.

Some reviews for What the Butler Saw - from the Theatre Australia website.