Miranda's musings

I spend a lot of January and February each year running around to various cinemas, watching all of the films nominated for the best picture award at the BAFTAs and Oscars – it’s a fun challenge which takes me to locations all over London and to see films which I may not otherwise have watched. La La Land was arguably this year’s runaway success even though it didn’t (or did briefly) win the Academy Award for Best Picture.  However, talking to lots of people about it, I have noticed that it wasn’t the triumph with audiences that the press would have us believe.  Broadly my friends fell into two camps:  my actor and big theatre going friends tended to love it.  Everyone else was a bit more “meh”. I think the reason for its success at the awards is twofold.  Firstly, Hollywood loves a bit of navel gazing.    There were so many times during La La Land that I was wryly laughing to myself but no one else around me was.  I could really em...

February. The shortest month of the year.  It felt like the longest at some points. I have just completed the “28 Plays in 28 days” challenge set up by The Space Theatre - yes that’s correct, I wrote 28 plays in 28 days.  I made the decision to enter very last minute – I saw it advertised on Twitter, had a quick look, fired off an email and half an hour later had committed to the challenge.  I think if I’d thought about it, I probably wouldn’t have done it, but I am so glad that I did.  At 10pm each evening an email from “Sebastian” appeared in my inbox with that day’s task, which had to be completed and emailed by 10am 36hours later.  The tasks ranged from writing a murder mystery, to being inspired by a song, a play with no plot, a play with no actors, personal pieces, biographical stories of fictional people, finishing a play you never finished and so on.  Each task was different and challenging. What I found fun was that there wasn’t a lot...