It's based on a newspaper comic strip that's been going since the 1980s, and I haven't really read since then, about a yuppie investment banker who maintains a lavish lifestyle by judicious office manoeuvring. Didn't seem that promising, since he's not a sympathetic character and rarely encounters significant difficulties.

However, apparently the cartoon has had him aging in real time, and by now he's something of a dinosaur in a City dominated by young quants and multilingual workaholics; hastily munching down sandwiches at their desks rather than indulging in three-hour lunches.

The comic character rarely displays any other emotion that smugness; but the play has this fractured by fear, despair, anger and regret as his wife walks out on him while he struggles to cope with a crisis at work. Robert Bathhurst puts on a excellent performance as Alex's desperation escalates but he struggles to maintain his composure.

The staging is excellent. A dozen or so white panels are scattered around the stage, with characters, scenery and expository text projected on them, in the style of the cartoon. There's a surprising amount of animation as Bathhurst walks up and down projected stairs, the scenery pans and rotates behind him, and zooms in and out of wide shots of trains and scenery. Much of the time Bathhurst can't see which projection he's talking too, and it's impressive the way he maintains the rhythm: would be fatally easy to start talking to the wrong panel, and very hard to recover.

The jokes are funny, the plot works, and didn't seem to be too many in-jokes. You don't really need to either follow the comic or know the City to make sense of it.

Lest you think the caricature is too broad, the audience contained a small but significant fraction of city types living up to stereotype, braying loudly before and after about which characters they were, and how much like their life stories the play was.

Overall, well worth a look.

Reading
Wrote up quite a bit on "Biological Anthropology: an Evolutionary Perspective" and "Year of the Jouncer", on my work PC, then foolishly forgot to upload it. So, you'll have to wait till next week. I know it's hard, but I'm sure somehow you'll find the strength to carry on.

Web
Western Union’s dominance of the industry casts it in a host of unlikely new roles: as a force in development economics, a player in American immigration debates and a target of contrasting attacks.

China increases renewable energy spending.

Piclists. 7 Wonders of the Totalitarian World. 50 fictional weapons. 10 cheesiest Star Trek TOS monsters.

Beowulf prologue in Anglo-Saxon.

Blog ratings. HuSi diary section is rated PG. "This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words: drugs (3x) fuck (1x)".