What larks, Pip? These larks!
Time is like butter. When I buy a tub, it seems to remain nearly full for ages, until somehow, suddenly there's just two days' worth left. I voiced this thought to Alicia (pictured below, enjoying rose petals) in the kitchen we share in Newbury, while I was making breakfast at two in the afternoon, and she suggested I put it on the blog, since I hadn't posted anything since December. This was three weeks ago.
And now here we are, after a month's run, with just four nights left of Mark Evans' theatrical adaptation of his Radio Four Bildungsroman Behemoth "Bleak Expectations" – I can hear the piccolos from "Whistle Down the Wind" rehearsing what will replace us as I write – and so here's the plug for it. Come if you can, and haven't. Tickets are
here. (I've been plugging the show relentlessly on other social media, obviously, but
have you seen how depressing things are over there?) Really, I couldn't be happier to be in this. I get to play a baddie previously played by Anthony Head, and Mark and director Caroline Leslie, and, well, everyone, have done a miraculous job of not only taking capital N radio Nonsense and making it work onstage, but also probably more trickily, chanelling five series of a sitcom into a moving, two-hour, cod-Dickensian narrative. We perform it in a real old watermill too, which is gorgeous, like Disneyland's "Enchanted Tiki Room" but with Victorians instead of
toucans, and if it's a bit out of the way, it still gets National Press. Here we are in The Metro!
We also received a nice review in
The Times, which you can read the top bit of without paying, as well as maybe the best three star review I've ever read in
The Guardian - its only rival being the review from which these quotes accompanying Pamela Raith's gorgeous photos have been taken,
HERE.
Some other reviews, for – if no reason other – my own miserable hoarding:
An interview with our producer stroke star, Dom "Pip Bin" Hodson, for
West End Best Friend (he honestly auditioned other Pips)
And this single tweet from another Dom:
