Happy Xmas^TM three people! As a "present" here's the best Christmas song ever:

Something for everyone, this, but I'm particularly thinking of triomakesmehot who is starved for live theatre. Call it a Christmas present, albeit one she'll have to pay for herself ;) This website, Digital Theatre, launched a couple of months ago and lets you download performances of plays by leading UK theatre companies the Royal Court, Young Vic, Almeida, English Touring Theatre and the RSC. There's only four shows available so far, but two of them are ones I saw earlier this year - so if you've read one of my theatre reviews and wished you'd seen the production, this might be your chance. There's Kafka's Monkey, which as you can probably guess from my review I've downloaded myself despite already having seen it, Kathryn Hunter really is a unique performer. And there's Parlour Song which I also gave a good review to at the time. And as an added bonus for triomakesmehot, both the above feature Potter actors - Hunter was Mrs Figg, and Toby Jones from Parlour Song is the voice of Dobby.

Plus in the "coming soon" category there's already a trailer up for Over There with Luke and Harry Treadaway, the play from which the avatar I'm using here comes. So you can watch that if you want to know what the hell that picture's all about (although I'm not promising you'll be any the wiser if you do watch it, to be honest.) I know it's not the same as actually getting to go to the shows but if you don't live anywhere near London I'd have thought it would be worth trying out.

With a busy couple of days I've not had time to blog this but now I'm catching up, and before we get Doctor Who back (just the two episodes for now, but not really that long until we've got another full series, Moffat/Smith's first) just time to finish reviewing this year's series of Merlin.

( Spoilers for 'The Last Dragonlord' )

Well as I'd said last week, I was bound to be less prolific, Twitter-wise, once The X Factor ended. Instead this week I went very British and just rabbited on about the weather.

What the... It's snowing? Where did that come from? I mean other than "from the sky."
11:43 AM Dec 16th from txt

This year's Get Into London Theatre is really disappointing - all the shows I'm interested in have almost zero availability.
2:43 PM Dec 16th from web

Sleb Spot: Cillian Murphy at Wilton's Music Hall. He has the same rucksack as me.
6:53 PM Dec 16th from txt

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My sister's spending Xmas^TM in New York but due to an ongoing health problem would have had trouble carrying her suitcase on the Tube to the airport, so yesterday I went along with her to Heathrow. I'd started reading Count Karlstein a couple of days before, but it's not a long book so the bus journey to her house and then the Tube back from Heathrow was enough for me to finish it.

Philip Pullman's first children's book, Count Karlstein went out of print but was reprinted a few years ago in the wake of his success with His Dark Materials. Rather than the ambitious epics he wrote later, this is a short, comedy fairytale about two orphan girls whose evil uncle wants to sacrifice them to a Demon Huntsman, and the plucky serving girl who may be their only hope. In Pullman's introduction he says the story started life as a school play he wrote when he was a teacher, and it certainly shows these origins. In fact it surprises me that it hasn't been turned back into a stage show - with its comedy policemen, physical comedy and outrageous coincidences that the audience/reader is always one step ahead of the characters in guessing, it seems like perfect Christmas show material, and kept me chuckling on the Piccadilly Line yesterday.

Tonight was my last theatre trip before Christmas, and I nearly missed it! Not long before I was due to leave it snowed heavily again and the traffic came to a halt. I spent half an hour at the bus stop waiting for a bus that everyone could see just at the traffic lights, but which just couldn't get past them because the cars in front were at a standstill. I couldn't even get through to London Travel Information so had no idea if the Tube would be OK once I finally got to the station. Luckily it was, and I'd given myself so much extra time to get there that I arrived at the theatre with ten minutes to spare. Fortunately the show was worth the effort in the end.

Nothing to do with the famous rehab centre, Michael Wynne's The Priory is about Kate (Jessica Hynes) who's had a terrible year and has decided to bid it good riddance with a New Year's Eve party at a country house with all her oldest friends, including Carl, an ex-boyfriend she's been having an affair with. Unfortunately all her friends bring unexpected guests: Carl brings his wife Rebecca, Ben met Laura yesterday and they're already engaged, and Daniel is surprised when Adam, a younger man he's been chatting to online, turns up at the front door expecting sex. It's a good-looking cast that includes Joseph "Fit Dad" Millson as Daniel, Alastair Mackenzie as Ben and Nick Blood as Adam, any one of whom might have caught my eye if it weren't for the presence of Rupert Penry-Jones as Carl. It's a bit ironic that Mr Pendulum-Jones is playing an actor whose roles dried up once he lost his looks, since he's pushing forty but still looking as good as ever - there was actually one of those audible mutters of disagreement from the audience at the line about him losing his looks.

Totty aside it's very entertaining, and although the set looks like it would be ideal for a farce it's actually more the dialogue that gets huge laughs, and some excellent performances - apart from the people I already mentioned, Charlotte Riley is fantastic as the dippy Laura. Her insistence that Daniel must become her new GBFF is a good running gag. This being a Royal Court show it gets more serious in the second act, and some of the themes are a bit obvious, but overall it remains entertaining - in fact it's a long time since I've heard so many gasps of shock from an audience. The characters may not all be likeable but it's to Wynne's huge credit that they're so relatable as to get people reacting like that after two hours in their company. It's not the best show the Royal Court's had this year but to be fair it's up against some tough competition.

The Priory by Michael Wynne is booking until the 16th of January at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs.

I'd heard a couple of people say how much they enjoyed Stieg Larsson's "Millennium" trilogy, so I decided to give the first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a chance. Mikael, a recently-disgraced journalist is given a chance to get out of the spotlight for a while, by a billionaire industrialist who wants him to investigate a 40-year-old mystery: The disappearance of his niece, who the old man is convinced was murdered. Meanwhile the girl of the title, Lisbeth is a possibly autistic investigator with a gift for hacking (computers, not phlegm) who has been hired to investigate Mikael himself. The book throws in a lot of different elements, from thriller to old-fashioned detective story, and mixes them up in sometimes unusual ways. I don't know if it's an idiosyncracy of Swedish writing or this particular writer but the pacing is pretty interesting - Mikael and Lisbeth's eventual meeting comes out of the blue, and some of the major plot strands are resolved long before the end - and rather than make the story feel sloppy instead it makes it more unpredictable. I definitely enjoyed it, largely for having a unique feel to it, and will have to get the other two books in the series.

It's a bit of a gamble taking someone to a new show as a Christmas present but fortunately Legally Blonde was a hit as far as my sister was concerned. Plugged as coming from the people behind Hairspray, that only refers to the design team as far as I can tell, but then I guess when the visuals are as important as they are to these two shows then fair enough. But it's pretty obvious the two don't share songwriters, as Laurence O'Keefe and Nell Benjamin's are lots of fun but not at all memorable - by the time I'd left the theatre I couldn't remember any of them.

Fortunately the show's energetic and ragingly camp enough that it doesn't mattter if you don't leave humming the tunes. The story doesn't differ much from the film, as far as I could tell only one major character has been ditched (the scary female lecturer) and it's well-cast. Sheridan Smith is the obvious choice to play Elle; I last saw her in Little Shop of Horrors and she's just as good here. Her ex-boyfriend is of course played by BISEXUAL Duncan James, so I guess it's just as well that he's meant to be pretty smarmy. Her geeky true love is played by CANADIAN Alex Gaumond, while rather excitingly the sleazy Professor Callahan is Peter Davison, which means I've now seen all the odd-numbered Doctors on stage, including #11 (although I'm not counting Doctors 1 & 3 because even I can grudgingly accept that stage appearances by men who've been dead for a decade or more are unlikely.) Penny was especially impressed by how good Jill Halfpenny was; the former Eastenders actress plays Stiffler's Mom Paulette the beautician.

While the music might not have struck me as anything special, I enjoyed a lot of the lyrics, especially one song that takes the piss out of America's overly-romanticised view of Ireland. And in case taking a film that was pretty gay to start with and turning it into a musical wasn't enough, there's lots of added campery in the songs and sets, including the song "There! Right There!" whose chorus deals with the dilemma of whether someone's gay or European. Unfortunately for the cast and crew none of them could ever be the star in a show that features live dogs on stage, and despite only making a couple of apparances it's Bruiser, played by a chihuahua also called Bruiser, who gets a bigger reaction than either Smith or BISEXUAL Duncan James at the curtain call.

Legally Blonde by Laurence O'Keefe, Nell Benjamin and Heather Hach is booking until the 23rd of May at the Savoy Theatre.

Last year one of my favourite shows was Now or Later, helped largely by a fantastic performance from Eddie Redmayne. Pair him up with Alfred Molina (you've seen him in loads of things even if you don't know the name; most high-profile would probably be as Doctor Octopus in Spider-Man 2) and you've got a bit of a dream cast for John Logan's new play Red. Set in 1958-59, Molina is the ageing Mark Rothko, working on a mural commissioned for the Four Seasons restaurant. Redmayne is Ken, his young assistant in the studio and an aspiring artist himself. Over the course of two years the gloriously self-absorbed Rothko lectures his assistant on the true value and meaning of art, and the importance of his generation "stamping on" the cubists before them, while not quite accepting that Pop Art doing the same thing to him is equally valid. Obviously in this teacher/student dynamic what's building up is Redmayne fighting back, but while this of course is what happens and the play is mostly long conversations, it never feels predictable. The two actors are as good as you'd expect, and Michael Grandage's production is constantly dynamic - most memorably the two "prime" a canvas (Rothko's version of which is to cover it in red paint so he can then add layers afterwards) in a beautifully energetic scene that borders on dance and leaves them both covered in paint. (Eddie Redmayne paint-spattered and panting and having to take his shirt off and have a wash and OK there may have been moments when I was somewhat distracted.)

But totty aside this is a great play fantastically acted, and all the elements work to make for a memorable evening - Christopher Oram's set evokes Rothko's studio, dimly lit because the artist feels too protective of his paintings to expose them to natural light; and Adam Cork's dramatic music gives a sense of occasion, and after scene changes blends interestingly with the music the characters listen to while working (chamber music for Rothko, jazz for Ken.) Another exciting show from the Donmar.

Red by John Logan is booking until the 6th of February at the Donmar Warehouse.

Well my volume of tweets should slow down a bit now, since The X Factor ended on Sunday, with the totally unsurprising result of Joe winning. He was by far the best performer but it would have been quite funny to see Olly win and then FAIL spectacularly in the charts (The X Factor can't really do male winners, can it? It doesn't bode well for ickle Joe, which is why I almost wish he hadn't won so he could just go straight to musical theatre which would clearly be his strongest option. And it's become clear why Cowell was so desperate to keep Joe in the closet - he seems to have an eye on a Disney deal for him.) Anyway, between reality TV and other ramblings, I reached 2000 (!) tweets this week!

Cool, my copy of Time Out is the Troughton cover! How did they know he's my favourite? #doctorwho
12:02 PM Dec 9th from web

My cat allergy's made my right eye flare up. Weird... It's usually the left.
4:25 PM Dec 9th from txt

Holy Ghost Zone? I think church rebranding just jumped the shark.
4:47 PM Dec 9th from txt

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It's been a while since I last looked at Buffy Season 8 because the most recent storyline, Jane Espenson's "Retreat," has been the longest of the season at five full issues. And contrary to the promises at the end of the last arc, the world still knows about vampires and Slayers, but I'm really not clear on how this has supposed to have happened so smoothly. As the idea was introduced in "Harmonic Divergence" with its reality show for Harmony, I guess the lack of reaction is a comment on celebrity culture, with humanity being relatively blase about the supernatural since it provides us with more gossip fodder, but it seems a major shift to introduce to the Buffyverse for the sake of a gag.



( Spoilers )

In keeping with the general theme of Merlin series 2 it's been a couple of thoroughly meh episodes followed by a good'un. ( Spoilers for 'The Fires of Idirsholas' )

Back in May I read Terry Pratchett's latest all-ages book Nation, which is now the new Christmas family show at the National Theatre, adapted by Mark Ravenhill of all people. I don't think it's a secret that I've never been entirely convinced by Ravenhill as a dramatist and having seen the production I'm still not sold that he was the best person to adapt the book. The play keeps most of the major events of the book as after a tsunami Daphne (Emily Taafe) is washed up on the Nation where Mau (Gary Carr) is the only survivor. Ravenhill ramps up the role of the foul-mouthed parrot Milton (Jason Thorpe) who unsurprisingly goes down a storm with the younger audience members. Although there's still a strong presence of the book's science vs religion theme, there's much less emphasis on Mau questioning the existence of his island's god than in the original. The story's all present and correct, but it seems to lack some of the charm.

Luckily director/designer Melly Still throws in a lot of impressive visual touches which make the show a spectacular, and the actors' performances restore a lot of the emotional resonance. There really are some very clever special effects and bits of stage magic, plus some more of the animal puppets the National's been perfecting over the years, all of which make for an interesting show even if it didn't move me as much as the book did. Having said that, I went to see it with vanessaw and her daughter, and I had to quickly find a tissue for Vanessa as she suddenly got tearful at the end, so maybe seeing the story fresh it has more of an impact.

Nation by Terry Pratchett, adapted by Mark Ravenhill, is booking until the 28th of March at the National Theatre's Olivier.

Once again I go ages without remembering a dream, then remember two days in a row. I was sitting with a friend (no idea who) by a table with a stack of paperbacks on it. I want to say they were Richard Matheson books, but it's probably more the case that they were the small-format paperbacks I have several of his books in, so I just associate them with him. We'd read one novel ridiculously quickly (as in, minutes) and moved onto the second one. Before reading the book itself I looked at the title pages, and each of them had one or two quotations on them, themed around freedom of speech and/or pornography. One was something like "No reader of pornography ever protested the removal of an article." For some reason I found this amusing and wanted to show it to my friend, but when I looked again I couldn't find it - every opening page had quotes on it, but none were that particular one. I kept trying to see if two pages had stuck together, and as I did the pages started to split in half. At this point the book went from a small paperback to a large hardback, with colour illustrations and tissue paper protecting the illustrated pages.

This morning I dreamed that I was walking along the main road, somewhere between my flat and the gym. On one corner was a building site, an almost-finished apartment block with builders still wandering around it. A man in a hard hat was standing where the entrance would eventually be, when the building suddenly subsided into the ground. The whole ground floor went under, taking the man with it. Two more builders ran to look down the hole he'd fallen into, when the ground shook again and the first floor went down as well, taking them with it. Obviously a lot of people in the street were now panicking, but nobody seemed to actually be doing anything about it, so I called 999 on my mobile. The operator agreed to send ambulances and police (actually wouldn't you need the fire service as well, to get the men out of the hole?) but with no real sense of urgency - actually he was just chatting with me on the phone. I remember thinking aww, he's nice, but this may not be quite the time to be all friendly.