Okay so here is my three days after show report - Fransiscojo will add things too -.... this is rough notes first and I'll tidy it up as I go along/get time....

Should preface it by saying that though Polonius wasn't in it that it will still be as biased. Though not as funny. Probably the opposite - this version was about death and people stumbling around in a broken world trying to patch things up with words that had lost their meaning, names and roles being called out to try and place an order on the universe - 'you are - you make me - I am not the' - and misplaced love that could fix everything if only one of the relationships in the play were actually healthy. And then moments of actual physical care stuck out a mile and were horribly moving. It was devastating.

CAST
The Actress: Leila Crerar
The Brother: Jonothan Oliver
The Son: Steven Bloomer
The Neighbour: Katie Morgan
The Writer: Simon Muller
The Doctor: Alex Blake
The Bailiff: Scott Brooksbank
The Bailiff's Wife: Liz Richardson
The Bailiff's Daughter: Marianne Oldham
The Schoolteacher: Max Gell
Yakov: Jethro Skinner
MC: Alex Hassell

Things I remember.

For warm-up we did focusing on arguing, adding in 'You're calling me a ....' before every unit.

Act 1: The warm-up seemed to give big mass of energy to Maz and Max through exposition/argument at top - Max's why are you always in black line an astonished accusation, met by Maz with 'I'm in mourning for the death of my career'. Maz's addiction to Hamlet throughout the play was a brilliant offer...I really liked how she kept breaking scenes and making unexpected entrances and exits and really things that had not been done before - it kept throwing everything and the impression of a broken world full of shocked people really strong - but then other people staying really close to units too - so it was a strong ensemble because lots of different instruments got a voice, different rhythms, if that makes sense...it really wins.

Jono can't do up his jacket as he tries to calm down Steve.
Jono: It's broken. Everything I have is like this.

Steve picks a fake flower to play she loves me/not - can't pick the petals off.
Steve: See? My mum the fake flower...They're all at the Donmar looking at me thinking 'shame he got mixed up in all those politics'....Jono defends the Donmar.

Yakov checks Katie out after coming back from swim - Katie suddenly unsure if we've skipped a bit and are now in a different scene...Yakov checks out the audience once her focus is back on Steve/Simon Muller

Steve is openly scathing of Simon's writing: It's airport novels!

The phrase - 'a unique voice' gets repeated in lots of different contexts...I start wondering if that's the problem with the world they're in - all these unique voices but no-oneactually listening to anyone else's...

Katie tries out standing on a wobbly table. Is adamant with Steve: 'I need to understand what you're saying'.

Maz and Max wander directly into Alex and Liz's interrogation/flirtation - it doesn't seem to matter as the world that we're in seems strangely private in public anyway given that of course there's an audience - and it almost moves it further away from naturalism and into a more abstract zone which I quite like - suddenly there seems more room to find pathways of meaning and what the characters might be symbolising - but anyway they dive off again after a bit.

Liz on Actresses: 'They're not higher up they've just breasts and legs'

Leila comes in changing the lighting - 'what about tea lights! Atmosphere! Do you remember wearing this when you were 5?' (a feathered yellow headress) - Leila wears it instead. A beautiful weird family portrait is created against the whitewashed brick wall in the corner as they watch the play ( a new one from Steve?) - which is horribly raw poetry.

Katie 'Death is Amazing. I feel it's warm embrace'. Maz is a still statue all throughout.

Leila introduces Simon: 'He's completely autistic with people'. Simon and Katie genuinely match each other for shyness - for the first time fishing seems like something to cling on to when there's nothing else...an opportunity for an outlet sure, but there is a sense that everyone knows it's not really the topic of conversation.

Scott's story is about death too - at a prizegiving. Scott is a really earthy Bailiff all throughout, and I want to be like him when I grow up, in his attention to detail and ignoring of time and trust of right now.

Alex ditches the black gloves once everyone has gone. The play made him feel alive. Maz cracks up when Steve asks if she means that his mother wants him sexually. He's NOT AVAILABLE. Maz comes back in with To be or not to be. 'Test me on my lines'. Alex waits on book for her to begin. Instead she confesses her love for Steve, and rushes off quickly.

Act 2 - audience moved to being in the round

Leila sucks on a lollipop and challenges Alex to decide who he would rather take to a desert island. Maz concedes that she wouldn't be much good at making bikinis out of fig leaves, but don't worry she'll get over it one day. Her Hamlet addiction becomes even more isolating - she is literally surrounding herself with a completely different discourse to that that everyone near her is talking - her refusal to enter their's is both heroic and awful at the same time.

Katie enters - Leila praises her because look, she'd know how to survive. 'She'd be ripping the heads off monkeys'.

Jono gets calmly reminded by Alex that smoking and drinking destroy the essence of you....Maz interupts with pins and needles, limps off giggling. Again a really nice change of rhythm, and unexpected. Scott enters, he and Leila fight straight to the point, and he really means it when he resigns.

Liz and Alex argue. Liz is passionate, Alex logically reasoning. Lots of logical arguments tonight - not managing to cover up the brokenness of things. Alex can't do it.'I'm just - stuck'. Katie gives him a light blue glove. Liz throws it into the audience.

Steve enters with crow seagull. 'It's like I woke up and everyone was dead. It's a nightmare - everything's broken'. He is quietly desperate, Katie relentless.

Simon enters -immediately sees the dishcloth on the floor that Steve wrapped up the crow/seagull in...'what is that?' Katie says it's a cloth. After a bit he notices the crow...'what is THAT?' Katie explains - the disorder of units again, is interesting in terms of where it throws the other actor - although the audience won't know it I bet they get the sense of danger it infuses everything with. Simon's 'I'd like to spend a bit more time inside you' line sounds like another bad attempt on the part of a very shy writer to have a crack at a pick-up line - it gets a big laugh and Katie doesn't ignore the laughing but laughs along with them, hand over mouth, shocked. The scene that follows is deadly serious though - Simon is genuinely frightened of being locked up, and he is acknowledging his disease to her, in a way it seems, so that she knows what she's dealing with. He really lays out at her feet his dilemma - he is so ill with this thing that he is incapable of maintaining anything healthy, but he must keep going because he knows that massive things are happening to the world that he can nearly put the words to, and if he could, it might really just change things. He can feel a massive paradigm shift but he is frustrated by his own incapability. But he is really hunting something massive and important - but it's like the tube doors shut a splitsecond before he can reach it. he genuinely thanks her for the conversation when he's called away. Katie thanks him via the audience once he's gone. The both of them were'nt afraid to really let the stakes go massively big in this scene - it just blasted the whole game of it wide open exposing the fragile nature of it all - and love and words are the only things that are holding it all together.

Act 3 - playing space is on other side from Act 1.

Act 4 - playing space the same.

Maz is still addicted to Hamlet/Shakespearean tragedy and has a quiet, desperate energy that breaks through every now and then...she'll be coming home 'tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow...' She and MAx make some beautiful antitheses together.

Liz nearly gets a nice response out of Steve. He goes off and plays the Amelie soundtrack on the piano. The scissor chandelier threatens above Maz.

Alex and Jono are frustrated with each other. This whole bit in Act 4 is still the hardest to activate, for everyone in the scene I reckon, to get on the front foot....is it that we know we're being confronted with death? On the part of the brother and everyone knowing about the son....I don't know, maybe there's just something about death that even when someone is ill the thought of them actually not being there is just unthinkable - I was talking to an old chap at the french the other day and his wife passed away earlier this year, and he said that even though she'd been ill for years the actual absence was so sudden - I think maybe the Doc and the Brother can be so blunt with each other not because they're expecting his death, but because they're not, there's a part of your brain that does expect things to just continue and continue...or not. I don't know. Or maybe there's something about act 4 that has something really russian about it that ew havn't unlocked yet...I wonder what the key is. Or maybe it is just like that...it's not that it doesn't work as a scene full of people trying to activate the scene, instead of having raging arguments! Alex and Jono got into electricity metaphors which sort of fed the imaginary apocalyptic landscape feel going on in my head....something about the inadequacy of any technology to fix actual humans.

Alex: 'Death is nothing to be cared of - we make it up - it's a weakness in our imagination'. Brilliant. It somehow rings out because like being scared of the unknown, of death, I'm reminded of what Yoli says about how she used to be scared of the audience beofre working at the Globe. And here the connection is back, so we're not scared of the audience so much. And maybe we know more than we think we do anyway...

Alex's favourite city is Bombay because it's so alive.

Steve describes Katie's letters: 'It's like she's been shot in the head but she's still looking at you and smiling for a momnet before she falls - you can just tell'

Leila brings in Steve's article in the Daily Mail, which she only reads for the stars. Steve shares his aside directly to one audience member - a really lovely choice because the audience on the other side still hear it, but they take in the reaction of the chap being spoken to so personally as well.

The party play Cluedo, or try to start.

Steve plays Satie but wrong on the piano. It makes me wonder whether the times in history where pieces of art or architecture or verse or music have been praised for their perfection is because it creates an illlusion of perfect order in a disordered world, opens a doorway to a way of seeing and ordering...

Jono is helped out to dinner. The physical care is just so moving after all the words not hitting targets, not changing anything. The bodies touching changes things.

Steve reads us his latest - a description of a funeral 'the rain lashed down on the mourners'...

Katie comes in. She's going away to Bruges. She wasn't enough for Simon. He didn't help her choose the coffin for their 2 week old baby.

She stands on another wobbly piece of furniture and performs for Steve. 'Death - where I have never been happier'.

Steve shoots himself - the dull thud of the piano lid.

Brilliant, brave, wonderful, really sad show. Well done amazing people.