Adapting Sartre’s enduring fable of courage in the face of political oppression for the age of fake news and nostalgic nationalism, Exchange Theatre uses this timeless Greek tragedy to shine a light on our own politically turbulent times. This highly charged and dark tale of Orestes and Electra follows the siblings as they prepare to take revenge on their mother Clytemnestra and her husband, the tyrant Aegisthus, who controls his populace with false information.

Game of Thrones actress Meena Rayann steps into the role of Electra, introducing Samy Elkhatib as her vengeful brother Orestes, with Raul Fernandes (Quartier des Banques, RTS) as the God of Flies and Exchange co-founders David Furlong and Fanny Dulin as the tyrannical Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, The Flies is at The Bunker from 11^th June – 6^th July.

Exchange Theatre prides itself on its multicultural and diverse heritage and is thrilled to present The Flies in alternating French and English with a fully bi-lingual cast.

The Flies is at The Bunker Theatre, 53a Southwark Street, SE1 1RU, running from 21^st June – 6^th July.

Tickets can be booked here: https://www.bunkertheatre.com/whats-on/the-flies-les-mouches/about

Images courtesy of Exchange Theatre.

One of our reviewers loved this retro Console by Thumbs Up Look at it, doesn’t it bring back memories, or aren’t you as old as I am. If that’s the case, then enjoy the newness of this image.

Our reviewer and his mates played over the Bank Holiday – well, it was raining much of the time and they had hours of challenging gaming.

Looks good, works well. And packed with over 274 16-bit games: shooting arcade, puzzle and sports activities what’s not to like.

Nostalgia is big at the moment, and this is state of the art nostalgic gaming. It flew high in the 80s. Could well repeat now: fun but tense, they loved it.

This plugs directly into your TV, has two controllers for multi-player use. RCA and power cables included. It will make a fabulous present.

Orb Gaming Retro Console, £34.99 from Thumbs Up.

Annie Clarke’s new novel Girls on the Home Front is published on 29th May

Three limited edition books (hand numbered from 1 to 1000) of Mrs Dalloway is released on 3^rd June  by Parisian publisher SP Books. These bring together the three handwritten notebooks in which Virginia Woolf wrote the classic text in one pretty special hand-bound edition.

The volumes represent a return to ‘slow reading’ in a digital age, offering an intimate insight into the writer’s mind and thought-process, and giving new life to a well loved classic.

The interesting manuscripts includes revisions, crossed out passages and personal memos in the margins in Woolf’s own handwriting, and are of interest in their own right as a design object, the perfect coffee-table centrepiece or addition to a curated bookshelf.

Over the course of time between June 1923 and October 1924, Virginia Woolf wrote in three notebooks the first full-length draft of what was to become Mrs Dalloway

Clarissa Dalloway had already made several appearances in Woolf’s writings, in her first novel The Voyage Out and the short stories ‘Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street’ and ‘The Prime Minister’. In a diary entry for October 1922, Woolf notes that she planned to write a novel about ‘Mrs Dalloway seeing the truth’, in which her heroine was supposed to commit suicide. Yet in her notebooks, Woolf develops the story of another character, shell-shocked war veteran Septimus Warren Smith, the anti-Clarissa that ends up committing suicide in her place. To fax your documents or files in a better and a more medern setup you can click here to find out more

Woolf would write in her diary of Mrs Dalloway:

“I meant to write about death, but life came breaking in as usual”. Thus the draft of  The Hours,intended to be a narrative about London after WWI, develops into the parallel lives of Clarissa and Septimus, in a London at once restored to itself and irrevocably changed by the war.

In 1941, after Woolf’s death, her husband Leonard Woolf sent the manuscript of ‘The Hours’ to her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, who kept it until her own death in 1962. A year later, it was purchased by the British Museum Department of Manuscripts, now part of the British Library. ‘The Hours’ represents the only full-length manuscript draft for ​Mrs Dalloway, revealing different initial versions of the final text.    Leonard describes the notebooks in which Woolf wrote her text as bound in the ‘coloured, patterned Italian papers’ of which she was very fond. The volume shows the substantial additions, changes and corrections that Woolf made to her manuscript, revealing her creative process in flowing purple ink. Woolf draws pencil margins on each page of the notebooks, in which she records the date, word count and many other insertions, sometimes including personal memos and notes for her essays.

The notebooks reveal Woolf’s hesitation between two possible titles, recording the shift by which Clarissa Dalloway becomes the central focus of the novel. Initially titled ‘The Hours?’, the work is renamed ‘The Hours or Mrs Dalloway’, before settling on ‘Mrs Dalloway (or The Hours)’ in the third notebook. The manuscript also reveals an alternative opening describing the bells and temples of Westminster, which is revised in the second notebook to the well-known inaugural line: ‘Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.’

The text is accompanied by two essays by leading Woolf experts. Helen Wussow, dean at The New School, New York, has published an edited transcription of ‘The Hours’ entitled ​Virginia Woolf ‘The Hours’: The British Museum Manuscript of Mrs Dalloway’ (New York: Pace UP, 1996). Michael Cunningham is an American novelist and screenwriter, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours (1998), based on the life of Virginia Woolf and inspired by Mrs Dalloway.

SP Books  is an independent and acclaimed publishing house founded by Jessica Nelson and Nicolas Tretiakow in Paris in 2012, specialising in the publication of limited facsimile editions of manuscripts from some of history’s most renowned authors such as Jules Verne, Lewis Carroll, Jean Cocteau and Charles Baudelaire.

Each limited edition book is hand-numbered from 1 to 1000, and from 3 June is available for £180 from spbooks.com. An exclusive foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham is printed alongside the manuscript.   RRP: £180 www.spbooks.com

Images courtesy of sp books

Annie Clarke is the author of Girls on the Home Front.

Is it me, or are baby toys getting cuter? I love these sweet ball-shaped animal rattles, suitable for babies from as soon as they can hold a toy.

The set of four balls, each with a different animal face and in different colours, will grab Baby’s attention for sure.  There is a cat, a rabbit, a panda and a bear – personally I love the rabbit, but I’m sure my grandson will enjoy the remaining three.

They are very light, so easy for Baby to hold, and nice and soft to chew or slobber over.  Each has a soft and distinct jingle when shaken.  They are made of a wipe-able fabric for easy cleaning and would make delightful additions to your cot’s soft toy community.

When Baby reaches the throwing stage they will continue to be fun too, hopefully without knocking over too many vases.

They are available at Baby To Love at just  £14.95 for the four.

By Dr K Thompson, author of From Both Ends of the Stethoscope: Getting through breast cancer – by a doctor who knows

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01A7DM42Q

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01A7DM42Q

http://faitobooks.co.uk