HOT: The Year of Magical Thinking, National Theatre

A one-woman show with Vanessa Redgrave was bound to be a winner. I'd heard a lot about Joan Didion's book about the time after her husband and daughter died, and how she coped and lived through her grief. The play was a looping and poetic narrative about the moment of death when time froze and everything changed in an instant, the stories of their lives together in Malibu, Honolulu and New York, and her loving relationship with her husband and her wish to protect her daughter. Sometimes the prose threw me (a sparrow has no eyes) but Redgrave admirably conveyed the poetry in the prose without resorting to histrionics.