Òran Mór are streaming some of their A Play, a Pie and a Pint shows from the past.

https://playpiepint.com/our-mini-season-from-the-archives/

First up will be Sunset Boulevard, the Lunchtime Cut. You’ll need to provide your own pint. And your own pie.

The National Theatre are streaming the 2014 version of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Gillian Anderson. Premieres tonight, streaming free for a week.

This is the run where Anderson went full method. She talks in interviews now about how she was wandering around London drunk thinking she actually was Blanche DuBois.

Anyone want to watch Scottish Ballet doing The Swan? One of my suppliers is a corporate sponsor and has loads of tickets to share.

The Swan sees David Dawson’s daring, visceral choreography from Swan Lake perfectly paired with the rich, romantic Tchaikovsky score. With an all-female cast led by Principal Constance Devernay, The Swan is a powerful showcase of our dancers' strength and connectivity.

The film will premiere on Thursday 19 November at 7pm and will be available online until Thursday 26 November. The short film will be followed by a video interview with members of Scottish Ballet (the film’s director, Eve McConnachie, in conversation with First Artist Roseanna Leney).

Tickets are free and must be booked in advance by registering on Scottish Ballet’s website via this link. Please select from the dropdown menu and click on J Thomson Colour Printers.

You need to select one ticket and register for an account as though you were buying it. There’s no charge. Scottish Ballet will send out links nearer the 19th.

Scottish Ballet do good films and online performances. And while I’ve not seen this take on Swan Lake, they performed a wee section from it at one of our big burlesque clubs a few years back and it was pretty fucking ace.

We watched Leopoldstadt last night - the NT were streaming it to various cinemas, I suspect the date was chosen because it was Holocaust Memorial Day.

For the uninitated, it's Tom Stoppard's new play, directed by Patrick Marber (who rightly described it as "not like Stoppard's early, funny ones")

From a technical standpoint alone it's dazzling - a play that tracks the fates of various members of a large jewish family in Vienna, for half a century - starting in 1899.  It's a huge ensemble cast of characters (though I don't quite accept Marber's suggesion that there's no specific protagonist) and it's quite a feat to marshall them through multiple generations whilst keeping all the narrative threads clear and intact.

It's also powerful stuff, as you might expect given the period, people and place. Stoppard takes the time to establish the family as real people, with real concerns, beore allowing them to be swallowed up by the rise of fascism. It's clear the piece has emerged from his own exploration of his jewish ancestry, to the point that it perhaps risks self indulgence towards the end.  Equally there are points where it arguiably leans a little too much into exposition - I sometimes felt I was listening to a man who desperately wished to teach me what he's learned, rather than watching a narrative.

Of course, what he's learned is important, and worth being reminded of, so perhaps that's no bad thing. He explores not just the holocaust itself, but the wider history of the region and the people. There's a lot of discussion in here of what it means to be jewish - the conflict between religion and race, the question of whether it is better to assimilate, or establish your own nation - and where both approaches might end. It's clever, thoughtful, difficult stuff - delivered with wit and made to look deceptively easy.

I don't think I'm giving away anything by saying it's not a universally happy story, though it is none the less hopeful, and utterly human. It's also way too timely for something set long before I was born.

It looks like its current run may have ended, but I don't doubt it will pop up again in the not too distant future, and if nothing else, I dare say the NT will add it to their streaming service at some stage.  In any case, I recommend it if you get an opportunity.

At the risk of making the theatre thread into another "what's the best Ghibli movie" discussion - I went to see the RSC's stage adaptation of My Neighbour Totoro on Saturday.

There are various critical notes I could give - they've made some minor changes that result in some pacing issues in the second half, and Totoro's relatively light plot makes it an already challenging choice for a play but...

I saw a real life Totoro and nothing in the whole world will stop that from being amazing.

Properly magical. I haven't felt such insane joy since I was a kid - and you could feel it rippling round the room. Nothing in the show ever quite compares to the moment when you first see the big fella himself, Mei climbing on top of his enormous furry stomach and screaming in delight - but that sense of wonder also never quite fades. 

At some point they will inevitably give in and start showing bits on TV and photos, which I suspect will take much of the thrill out of it, but so far they've done a good job of keeping any of that out of the public eye, making it a genuine surprise. I went in fairly convinced that sowing Totoro himself would have to be some sort of theatrical fudge, but it's not. He's there, and it's amazing.

Which isn't to say the illusion is entirely complete. Indeed, they take a nice approach to handling the fact that everything non-human in the show is a puppet. Like many stage shows the puppeteers are visible on stage - taking it a step further here, in that whilst they're dressed in black, they're also very much presented as spirits in their own right. Mischievously changing around scenery, or sometimes even intervening to move the human characters at times. 

The puppets themselves, from Jim Henson's Creature Shop, are simple but perfect. 

Beyond puppets, the staging is pretty fantastic. The orchestra is present throughout, sat in trees above the action - whilst the girls' house unfolds, and twists and turns as the scenes require it. The girls themselves are played by adults - but so well that the kids that came with me would absolutely not believe that they hadn't been watching children. Whilst there are elements of the adaptation that I'd criticise, they got the soul of the piece just right - the play is happy to sometimes stop and just watch people till fields for a moment.

I've seen it described as a musical, but that's not really accurate - no character bursts into song at any point. Rather, it has a soundtrack - specifically Joe Hisaishi's original score, here recreated (and sung) almost perfectly as the action plays out on stage.  Each song is sung in both Japanese and English at different times in the production, and again, it works incredibly well.

I'll stop gushing now.  Suffice to say it's an incredible piece of theatre - joyful, magical and extraordinary. If you find yourself in the immensely fortunate position of being able to get a ticket, don't think twice, just go.

Brooks wrote:

I think my niece and nephew will go proper apeshit for this, if I can get them tickets.

The kids I went with absolutely loved it. That said I obviously took my own kids as well, who are now 17 and 20, and they were, if anything, even more excited. (It helps to have been reared on it.)

It looks like tickets are a bit of a nightmare to get at present, though they're making cancellations available as and when they pop up. We had the "cheap" seats (about £50), on the upper circle - and there was still a really good view of the stage, so if that's all that's available, it's still worth it. (Though I'm absolutely certain that right down at the front, with the puppets coming right up to your face, would be amazing.)

One of my London-based pals put some phonecam footage of Totoro up on his Instagram last night and it looks properly magical. Amazing stuff.