This year’s bland vanilla brule of a Baftas was so impeccably tasteful in word, deed and outfit that it disappeared down it’s own self-satsifed throat and came out the other end as a few meaningless fart bubbles smelling of champagne and tuberose. The sole memorable moment centred around Tilda Swinton, who staggered onto the stage in glorious golden Dior which made her look like a hump-backed whale, glistening with jet barnacles, the head of an anaemic auburn mermaid rising from it’s majestic maw.

Swinton’s lean, lupine frame is wasted on the screen. The Apollonian proportions of a Sienna or a Johnny look elegant on camera; but there’s nothing quite like an atpyical, animal anatomy on the stage, as the Old Vic’s new production of Speed the Plow proves. Although Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum, as film producers Charlie Fox and Bobby Gould, act with equal brilliance in their cut-throat, bullet-paced pas de deux, Goldblum steals every scene with his lolloping, oscillating, spaghetti-statured lank. Six foot four and skinny as an Arts Council grant, this brooding screen fly has become a seductive stage spider with a Humphrey Bogart face and Jimmy Stewart moves.

Many of my favourite actors run to bodily extremes, from the bear bulk of Richard Griffiths and Simon Russell Beale to the consumptive fragility of Anna Maxwell Martin and Ben Whishaw. The National’s new silent physical theatre piece, The Hour We Knew Nothing Of Each Other, throws the infinite, fascinating strangeness of ordinary bodies into sharp relief, and reminds us that our humanity is never stronger than when we realise how alien we are. Let’s haul Gareth Pugh out of London Fashion Week and get him to design a Chekhov.

As for the Hitchcock Blonde? I thank God daily that my dangerously angelic, anodyne beauty is tempered with a hump. And a wooden leg.

• 27 actors
• 450 characters
• No dialogue

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves…

• 2 Whingers
• 1 bottle of wine before the show with…
• 2 very agreeable vegetarian fajitas at Los Iguanas
• 2 guests (Neil and Andrew Field)
• 1 inquisition at the National Theatre Lyttelton cloakroom as to which show we were seeing
• 3 pounds for the programme
• 0 sightings of Baz Bamigboye for a change
• 6 minutes late curtain-up
• 0 intervals
• 0 opportunities to visit the toilet
• 4 increasingly impatient bladders
• 1 set inspired by de Chirico
• 1 baguette nibbled on stage plus
• 2 ice creams consumed and
• 3 apples and
• 1 Mars bar
• 1 actor (Jason Thorpe) playing the same irritating character throughout
• 2 men with silly things on their heads (a child’s cot and a tree stump-don’t ask)
• 1 balloon on stage (don’t directors ever listen to the Whingers?)
• 2 of Phil’s signature sneezes
• 1 near-apocalypse/false ending
• N0thing in it as funny as the woman behind Andrew evidently found it
• 1 idea by Peter Handke repeated over-and-over-and-over-again
• 2 votes of support for revoking any prizes awarded to said Handke
• 65 minutes too long
• 20 minutes of willing it to end
• 23 – number of times Phil looked at his watch
• 493 – number of times a person crossed from one wing to the other before Andrew gave up counting
• 1 reason (please give us) anyone might pay to see this?
• 0 ideas what it was about
• 1 “hour we knew nothing of each other”
• 95 minutes’ actual duration
• 1 complaint to Weights & Measures on the grounds of wilful misrepresentation
• 94 minutes wondering mostly how many props there were and how the costume changes were organised
• 3 minutes collecting cloaks
• 4 minutes discussing it after over…
• …1 more bottle of wine
• 10/10 for intellectual rigour
• 2/10 for enjoyment
• 2/10 for engagement
• 1 show the critics will admire
• 1 show Quentin Letts will hate
• 4 stars – Phil predicts – Time Out magazine will award it.
• 2 Whingers now rather regretting not clambering onto the stage during the last few minutes and saying a word – any word
• ½ an idea to go again and do so

In plays, many audiences judge a performance by how much the actors delivered their words. The voice is a powerful tool to get a message across to others.  But what many may or may not realize is that the power of sub-text, or, the “words behind the words,” is what can bring an audience to their feet.

In this article,  Austrian playwright Peter Handke is about to prove to the world just that.

He has written a 1 hour 40 minute play with no words called “The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other.” It will premiere tomorrow at the Lyttelton Theatre in London, England.
The cast, comprising of 27 actors, will play 450 characters speaking through their body language.

The story, according to the article, has no plot and every character only appears once.

Is this a new form of theatre we will see more of in the future?

Time will tell…

For now…Here’s the theatre’s video trailer of the play!