The Female of the Species offer- free hotel with tickets August 1, 2008
Posted by Linda in : hotel and theatre deals, midweek, offers , add a commentThe Female of the Species is just one of the shows included in the Show and Stay summer sale. This new comedy play is doing really well in London and now you can combine it with a one night 3 star hotel stay for just the price of your tickets! That’s amazing, isn’t it? A top new London comedy and a 3* hotel from just £47.50 each?
Dates and performances
The deal is for week day evening performances between August the 1st and September the 5th.
Book Female of the Species Theatre Breaks
Check availability for Female of the species weekday performances as there are limited numbers and these tickets are selling fast. You need to book now if you want to take advantage of the free hotel offer.
** Female of The Species with Free Hotel offer **
Ooh, don’t forget, you can upgrade to a 4*hotel from an extra £10 each! And Show and Stay can save you up to 40% off your rail fare as well.
August Special Offer – Crazy London Hotel Deals July 26, 2008
Posted by admin in : offers , add a commentFree London Hotel Deals
The summer sale at Show and Stay continues with the craziest London hotel deals for August. They are actually giving away one night’s stay in a posh London hotel for absolutely nothing! I don’t know how they can do it, its just mad. The only snag is that you have to sit through an entire performance at one of the West End’s top musicals. Better choose wisely then!
The Deal
It’s your chance to spend a free night in a three star London hotel after a great night out, just by buying theatre tickets for a weekday (yes, that includes Friday nights) in August 2008 out of a range of eleven of the best West End musicals or two plays (see below). In fact the offer extends right up until Friday 5th of September so this could also be very interesting to those who live just close enough to London to get home after a night out, but would relish the opportunity to stay over and do something in London the next day. You could turn an enjoyable evening at the theatre into an unforgettable city break for as little as £42.50 per person. That price would be for two people seeing The 39 Steps and then sharing a double room at the Jury’s Inn Islington.
The Hotels
You can stay in a 3* hotel from amongst the prestigious list available at Show and Stay. Some of these are closer to Theatreland whilst others are in the popular South Kensington area – it’s up to you. Or you could upgrade to a luxurious Four Star Hotel for as little as ten pounds. What?!? Ten pounds is just ridiculous, I mean you probably couldn’t get a dingy bed and breakfast in drizzly Morecombe for that price! We’re talking about prestigious international style Hotels in central London, where the jet set business community stay over and celebrities hang out.
The shows
These are the popular shows included in the free london hotel offer, together with the total inclusive show and hotel deal price per person (including a £5 supplement for the first three shows listed)
- We Will Rock You – £60 Rock On! book
- The Sound of Music – £60 book
- Billy Elliot – £65 book
- Never Forget – £54.50 Take That! book
- Chicago – £52.50 book
- Spamalot – £55 Monty Python’s hit comedy musical book
- Blood Brothers – £50 book
- Female of the Species – £47.50 *comedy book
- Marguerite – £60 book *recommended classy new musical at the Haymarket
- The 39 Steps – £42.50 book
- Buddy – £55 Rave on book
- Zorro – £55 book *recommended for the fantastic flamenco music and special effects
- Stomp – £45 book
Click on any of the shows above for more information or here to transfer to the special page on the booking site. All you have to do to get the free London hotel deals is to keep within the 13 qualifying shows, choose a weekday before September 7th 2008 and then pick one of the first hotels that comes up, with the golden “offer hotel” badge.
then start looking forward to your best ever summer theatre break in London. Have a good one.
The Female of the Species Reviewed July 17, 2008
Posted by Linda in : comedy, reviews , add a commentThe Female of the Species, Vaudeville Theatre 15-07-08
The Female of the Species a comedy, opened last night at the Vaudeville Theatre. The play is ‘loosely’ based on an incident in the life of Germaine Greer. The author Joanna Murray-Smith is at pains to deny that the feminist writer at the heart of the play is based on Greer stating that she wouldn’t dare to portray her on stage. Germaine Greer begs to differ, points out that the incident itself was nearer to tragedy than farce, and is suitably outraged.
I’ve read most of Germaine Greer’s books and I’m a great admirer of her work. This made me rather uneasy but we’d been given some complementary tickets (one of the perks of blogging ) and I thought I’d go with an open mind.
There is nothing like a Dame
Dame Eileen Atkins takes the lead as Margot Mason, a famous feminist author. I’m trying here to avoid mentioning Germaine Greer again but it’s very hard. She even looks a tiny bit like her, although at least she’s not wearing one of those classic grey Greer frocks. Her performance is quite wonderful, pure class and very funny. She dominates the stage and the play showing us in turn the vast ego of the woman, her undeniable intellect and her vulnerability. Atkins mixes this with some great comic timing and some lovely, physical comedy. Even in moments when the focus was off her it was hard to drag my eyes away from her expressive face.
I think her real triumph was to take a potentially unsympathetic part and make us see Margot as very human and often actually right in her assessment of people. Atkins’ Margot is witty and smart with a tiny edge of self-doubt. Even though Margot is the focus of everyone’s anger in the play Atkins’ performance steals the show and it is the other characters who end up looking hollow and foolish.
So far so good.
I was not so happy with some of the other performances. I felt that the rest of the cast were patchy. Everyone had good moments but no one shone. Each of the characters in turn gets to have a go at Margot (by now handcuffed to her desk) and tell her just where she, and the rest of the feminist movement have gone wrong. Each tries to tell her she is to blame for the situation they find themselves in.
The two younger women, Anna Maxwell Martin (the self styled ‘homicidal intruder’) and Sophie Thompson (the ‘disappointing’ daughter) both played their parts with gusto but with a rather exaggerated use of physical ticks.
I quite enjoyed Paul Chahidi as the son -in -law. Despite the character being dense, well meaning, full of platitudes but a bit of a cardboard cut out Chahidi managed to make me feel quite sympathetic to him.
Poor Con O’Neill has a strange and amazingly short part to play, coming on only for the last 15 minutes or so as the taxi driver. He’s almost the last to speak and is made to give voice to the argument that it’s these nasty feminists who have messed up a system that’s worked fine since the time of the cave men (no – really!) Unfortunately the biggest laugh he raised the night we saw it was when he slightly corpsed in response to a line from Sophie Thomson.
There’s also a very small cameo role as Margot’s publisher for Sam Kelly right at the very end.
So is it funny?
Well, yes. There are some wonderful one liners and moments of hilarity. It’s not the great intellectual comedy, which it sort of aspires to be but it is funny. It made an interesting and enjoyable evening at the theatre. If I had paid for my ticket I wouldn’t have felt in the least bit cheated. It was a real treat to see a genuine Dame of the theatre in action.
The Female of the Species – new comedy play July 15, 2008
Posted by Andy in : comedy , add a commentThe Female of the Species
“The Female of the species” is the title of a song from Space which was a big hit in the early nineties and gets rolled out as a soundtrack to TV stories about spiders or women.
It’s also the title of a play by Joanna Murray-Smith which previews this week at the Vaudeville Theatre in London where it is set to run until October 2008. The play is an Australian export in the form of a comedy/farce which explores the roles of motherhood and celebrity feminism.
Dame Eileen Atkins plays the lead role of Margot Mason, a 1970s feminist pioneer having authored “The Cerebral Vagina” and other bestsellers.
The play was initially inspired by an event in April 2000 when Germaine Greer was “held captive in her home by a deluded young student” but that’s just a departure point for a work of fiction and Germaine Greer herself has criticised the play saying in a Sunday Times interview that “Murray-Smith is an insane reactionary who boasts that she has not read a single feminist text. She holds feminism in contempt.”
Also starring Con O’Neill (Blood Brothers) and Anna Maxwell Martin (Midsomer Murders, Doctor Who)
Is more deadly than the male.
Here’s the Space video of the young Liverpudlians performing the classic hit The female of the species
