I’d heard great things about, but never got to see, Nick Payne’s two-hander play “Constellations” featuring a cosmologist, a bee-keeper, and branching scenes to show the many alternative ways their story could have gone. (The Guardian explains more in its review of the original production.) So I was excited to see it appear for streaming on National Theatre at Home, with Anna Maxwell Martin and Chris O’Dowd…
[Read More]The History Boys, and teachers real and archetypal (August 2004)
[This post - on Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys when it was still new, my own French and maths education, and comedian Adam Bloom’s narrative maze-hedging - was originally published on LiveJournal on 4 August 2004 and is re-posted here as part of a migration from Livejournal. It has some minor editing, interjections from 2022, and fixing/replacement of broken links - not everywhere has been able to follow Tim Berners-Lee’s 1998-and-still-there advice that Cool URIs don’t change.]
[Read More]A Tom Stoppard riddle
Can you identify two Tom Stoppard plays represented by a single picture?
As my mind wandered while assembling some flat-pack furniture, I was (perhaps inordinately) pleased with myself for coming up with a riddle about one of my favourite playwrights.
[Read More]A Tom Stoppard riddle - with answer
Can - or did - you identify two Tom Stoppard plays represented by a single picture?
As my mind wandered while assembling some flat-pack furniture, I was (perhaps inordinately) pleased with myself for coming up with a riddle about one of my favourite playwrights.
[Read More]