THERE'S A HAMSTER IN IT!

I have been reduced to write an 'Angry of Tunbridge Wells' blog at the inability of the press to read blurb.  I've had to fend off two reviews for Storyteller this year, both of which were marred by the reviewer's inability to read blurb.  Both came to the "Comic Ghost Stories... including the tale of a poltergeist hamster" and then wrote angry disappointed reviews that the show was comic and featured a poltergeist hamster.  The public seem to be able to grasp this but the press - sent additional material with passages like -

"A traditional ghost story show, with a difference – it’s played for laughs not for fear.  Ghosts are faintly absurd things, they wander around making noises, feeling generally sorry for themselves – why do we take them seriously?"

- seem incapable of understanding this simple fact.  So... just in case you don't already know, in case there is any confusion lingering, let me tell you now...

THERE'S A FUCKING HAMSTER IN IT - ALRIGHT!

And relax.

Okay, I'm not that worried about these reviews because, like myself, they're on a blog and so no one reads them.  This partly explains the lack of editorial control on one review that did actually libel me.  Not critical opinion, actual proper libel.  Well, they did for about two hours, until I saw it, wrote a polite letter explaining the law and demanding a retraction.  This was got, within minutes.  But that's the problem of the wild west of blogging, a lot of people forget there are rules and standards out there in the real world.

But I can take heart that it's even more dog eat dog in the wider publishing world.  Have you read the reviews for the all female Julius Caesar at the Donmar?  Well, they're mixed, some love it, some hate it.  This is fine.  It is the sexism of the commentary that makes my blood boil - the implicit and occassionally explicit commentary from three Daily Telegraph reviews saying that women just can't hack these bloke parts.  Not a review of the performances, the play, the staging, but a blatent piss orgy on women doing an all female Shakespeare, stating that because Shakespeare did it the other way round (boys playing girls) this is somehow NORMAL.  RIGHT.

Women playing men, men playing women - HOW IS THIS NEWS!  We're actors.  That's what we do - we pretend to be other people.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.  That's it.  It is one thing to say that this production doesn't work, it is quite another to say that women can't hack it - which is implicitly what this particular boys club is saying.

So... as I say.  I don't have it half bad at all.