'BIRD' BY LAURA LOMAS REVIEW

So many things about theatres make me nervous. These things include, but are not limited to: the possibility of actors flubbing their lines and everyone has to pretend everything is fine; the possibility of an actor seeing you and thinking you're bored when actually it's just the way your face goes; everyone being able to hear you eat/drink/sneeze; the idea that the people in front of you spent double on their seats; people saying really embarrassing pretentious things in the queue for the toilets in the intermission; the fact that everyone seems generally quite rich and smart and always seem to have one hand in their pocket while they stroll about; and the nagging thought that the whole production would be better if it was a film. While theatre ought to feel purer than cinema, I end up thinking about all these extraneous things and not paying as much attention as I should to the play.

I thought 'Bird' would be like that, but actually - even more so than when I saw, say, Hamlet soliloquise at the RSC - it made me understand why you'd choose theatre as a medium for your story. I'm sure Amaka Okafor as Leah Bird would be brilliant in some filmed version of 'Bird', but having her wandering around right in front of you, talking the way friends do about their new boyfriends, was this unrivalled, captivating experience. In the bar afterwards, me and the people I went with said how whenever Leah posed a question we'd felt compelled to answer her. It was fully immersive - the light touches of unreality, instead of throwing you out of the world of the play, simply pushed a little at the boundaries of what you accepted. 

The monologue Leah delivered snowballed from its kind of funny, kind of kitchen-sink beginning to something that was grotesque, heartrending and yet never heavy enough to be unpalatable. Leah, who is being exploited by an older man whom she describes with such loving, adoring detail, is a character who uses asides, detours and conversational dead-ends the way any other fourteen-year-old girl does. It was very difficult to sit and listen without wanting to help her; Okafor's performance was full of moments that made Leah this vital but vulnerable character (and 'We Found Love' by Rihanna, which plays a couple of times in 'Bird', has been recategorised as a tearjerker in my head now). Wonderfully, the dialogue never dipped into that horrible fake teenage-speak that some writers use when writing about young people - that weird soup of out-of-date slang, peculiar swearing and attitudes that are either completely childish or ancient. Laura Lomas' words were simple, clear, and real.

GONE GIRL REVIEW

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.

I read Gone Girl when I was going through this huge thriller kick one summer - inhaling all the Thomas Harris and James Patterson I could find, and completely wrecking my attention span in the process - and for a few heady days, it was all I could think about. The prose is beautiful, just lyrical enough, and there was nothing lazy in the machinations of its plot. However, if I could go back, I would have refrained from reading the little review quotes on the first few pages of my copy. They were all talking about the HUGE TWIST. I was constantly alert for this HUGE TWIST, and felt like I was David Tennant in Broadchurch, hired specifically to unspool the thread of this dark incident - to figure out the twist before it was revealed. When the HUGE TWIST came, I was just like, oh. There it is. I was mainly relieved. 

The HUGE TWIST is that Nick Dunne didn't callously murder his "New York wife", Amy; she removed herself, to teach him a lesson. We learn this halfway through the book and film. In a clumsier author's hands, this would just be rude, frankly - a cruel "it was all just a dream" tactic, for shock and not much else. The first chapter where Amy reveals her plans is one of my favourite things, not least for the "cool girl" rant that helps wash away the bitter aftertaste of Nick's casual misogyny. I was so interested to see how they handled the twist in the film, because in the book it's easier to move from narrator to narrator, our narrow focus tilted this way and that by the warring parties. 

The first half of the film, pre-twist, follows the book closely. One of the things I was most excited about was to see how Fincher captured suburbia, and he didn't disappoint: his shots all looked like something from Arcade Fire's The Suburbs album booklet, all angles, with clear, crisp colours and liquidy lighting. If The Social Network was a wash of yellow, Gone Girl is pale, soft blue, the shade of sky and lake. We follow Ben Affleck as Nick, who remains peculiarly unaffected by his wife's disappearance, moving through this landscape with the broad confidence of the popular guy in high school. Affleck is so, so good as Nick - I didn't particularly like his character in the book, but something about seeing his inappropriate grins and ridiculous remarks play out in front of you makes it hard not to like him. The whole cinema was laughing at him in a sort of fond way every time he said anything.