The Groundling has been engaged on another blog with a 31-Day Challenge thingy. Groundlings should know better. Anyhow this has all been about being a better commenter on other people’s as well as your own blog. It’s been distracting me from the business of this blog for a lot of the time, but there have been benefits. I’ve met up with some new bloggers in my other blog‘s niche (e-learning), but more particularly, have discovered some good new theatre blogs to hang out in … and comment on.
I manage to travel overseas once a year and get to see some top theatre in London and at other times New York … wherever I find myself in fact. So I’m starting to nose out what’s playing in London, my destination in a month or so. I subscribe to the National Theatre’s e-newsletter and have all too frighteningly easily grabbed a couple of seats online already. I like the swish of turning up at the Box Office, rattling off a number, and picking up tix. Heck I just like hanging out at the NT watching the world go by from the security of a foyer seat and an overpriced glass of wine … well I do come from the lucky country when it comes to wine.
Anyhow, where I’m going with this post … I’ve stumbled over Phil and Andrew, a couple of lively lads who write West End Whingers, a very witty and irreverent review blog on current offerings in the West End. They act as a salutary antidote to some of the more serious takes in the Guardian on Theatre a subset of their Culture pages. The Guardian is one of my favourite mainstream sites for entertaining, well-written and diverse critical writing. The Guardian also maintains a meta-blog page here where you can fan out to theatre writing on other blogs.
This morning doing a hot-link shuffle from the Guardian’s page, I found Natasha Tripney’s Between Interval Drinks: London theatre both West End and Fringe, because a girl cannot live on gin alone. Aha! This sounded like me. As the name suggests, the blog features reviews of big-house as well as fringe productions currently on show in London, and all told with a very personal voice; her mother’s opinions on a show also appear from time to time. Now this I understand; mothers like 2-year olds have an uncanny way of asking the right sort of hard questions from time to time. I left a comment and will be back.
