"The Flick". Burton Taylor Studio
When Jerry Seinfeld pitched his new sitcom to NBC in 1989 he told them it would be a show about nothing. Just people talking to each other while doing... stuff. One of the greatest episodes consisted simply of Jerry and his friends waiting for a table in a Chinese restaurant. A generation earlier, the episode of Porridge that shines out like a beacon of comic brilliance is the one where Fletcher and Godber spend the entire 30 minutes talking in their cell. Great writers like Larry David, Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais knew that talking about nothing meant you could talk about everything. And Annie Baker knows it too. Her Pulitzer-winning play The Flick features some cinema workers cleaning the seats after screenings. That’s all. But it’s the journey inwards that counts, not along. And that journey is mesmerising, tragic, funny, and potholed with unrequited love. The Flick is three hours long. The last comparable running time to this in Oxford was Monstrous Regiment earlier this term...