Monthly Archives: December 2025

UNDER AN ALIEN TREE

   The suffering and the pity of Gaza affects us all:  bitter division on the streets,  hysterical demonstrations feeding a violently rising antisemitism. And all across the Anglosphere a cultural undertow of competitive personal victimhood. 

       So how is it to be young and barely adult,  and Jewish, in London now? Sam Grabiner’s intense rackety play, driven along for nearly two unbroken hours by James MacDonald with a terrific cast, offers some insight.   Elliott – the matchlessly patriarchal grump Nigel Lindsay – is visiting his son and daughter and some of their ten housemates in one of those “guardianship” semi-squats,  an old industrial building with a noisy overhead heater blowing off at intervals. the Northern Line rumbling underneath and a wonderfully evocative description of how to find the lavatory, upstairs along metal corridors, through confusing doors and finally “ducking under a gantry.”

       It’s Christmas Day,  and it is Elliott who opens alone,  with scornful glaring suspicion of the lit Christmas tree (“it’s weird”) and telling a long story about a Cossack guard , a rabbi’s wisdom and a massacre.  This is interrupted by young Noah’s arrival, then his sister Tamara’s, as he comes to terms with their Gen-Z explanations of the company expected.  Like Jack, who they’ve known for years but who “goes by Aaron now”.

       “Is that” asks the older man suspciously “a gender thing? Sounds like a pronoun thing to me”.  Brilliant.    But no, we shortly discover that “Aaron” is back from time in Tel Aviv, and all for Israel in a cool, modern secular pride “I stand physically taller there”.

     This,  Tamara doesn’t go along with.  She has formed her own ideas about Jewishness in natural distress at the Gaza conflict  (several of the young start sentences with “did you see the news,?”).    In a tremendous ranting performance by Bel Powley  -over the group’s candlelit table loaded with Chinese takeaways,  she explains a mystical, almost Platonic-shadows idea that Judaism used to be spatially rooted but now in the diaspora is rooted in time, like Shabat observation , as God disperses himself in shards of light.   This theory morphs quite rapidly into questioning the right of Israel, and accusing it of  “importing Nazi ideology..WE ARE THE BAD GUYS NOW! . This in turn enrages Aaron, while her brother Noah and his quiet girlfriend Maud look on nervously,  and a random housemate Wren wanders through looking for drugs. At last Elliott suddenly rises from lying exasperated on the floor after too much Chinese food, and roars  “IT’S OURS! OURS! They [Palestinians] had their chance, what about Oslo, it’s OURS now!” 

     Tamara by the way is also culturally furious that they’re having Chinese on Christmas Day because that is what non-Jewish people always assume Jews do, “we’re Jew-minstrels!”    Noah at last goes into his own worries about who he is, or should be.  “Do you think the Covenant is real? We have lost God and replaced him with Woody Allen..Tottenham…anxiety… I sort of miss the pogroms”.   He is by this time not uninfluenced by some magic-mushroom liquor brought in Aaron’s luggage.

       It’s quite fast (though some of a n almost surreal later section could be dispensed with for a more thoughtful end).  Grabiner mostly writes sharply with a lot of wit,  and all the cast draw you into their characters and make you care.  But if you are not Jewish, believe me it will help to do as I luckily did .  Go with someone who not only is Jewish but has lived  steeped in recent experience of that particular North-London generation and its very young people’s angsts. Two generations away from the Holocaust, often actually prosperous and full of chances,  but haunted by that heritage,  tormented by the news, conflicted over Israel, and never quite confident in where they belong (but who is, at twenty?).    Well, my companion absolutely recognized the play’s truths and conversations,  and I certainly recognized and remembered that questing immaturity. 

     And don’t worry about the usual absurd list of trigger warnings: the nudity is very brief, as is the blood, dead fox, sexual behaviour and vomit.  As for the discussion of antisemitism, Islamophobia, drugs, abuse and bereavement that’s all stuff we need to talk about.   Not least the drugs, kids: magic-mushrooms and ketamine don’t  make it easier to think clearly about history, morality or human brotherhood,  do they?

Almeida.co.uk to 8 jan

Rating 3

DRINK DEEP OF GLORIUMPTIOUS FROBSCOTTLE

         The RSC holiday season show offers a rising generation  some proper theatrical wonder, away from banal screen CGI and avatar gaming – though it does use a modest share of projections from time to time. Children  love home-made miracles and here are plenty: puppetry both vast and tiny,  flying dreams made of light and blown into sleepers from a great horn, spectacular moments forcing you to see-yet-not-see the puppeteers.  It’s Roald Dahl’s gentlest and least resentful story, about  a girl’s friendship with a 25-ft giant.  The Big Friendly Giant – BFG –  means no harm but builds lovely dreams in his laboratory.  He is routinely bullied by bigger, 50ft giants,   with names like Bloodbottler, who prey on orphans. When he nervously kidnaps the firm-willed 8 year old  Sophie by accident, he is  persuaded to join her plot to give the Queen a nightmare which alerts her to use her power against the monsters.  

           It takes taste,  tact and heart to put it on stage,  and Tom Wells’ adaptation (directed by Daniel Evans and supreme puppetmeister/designer Toby Olie) achieves it. There is some slightly odd plotting in the first half when the Queen is suddenly introduced, delightfully surrounded by colourful footmen, without any warning mention of why; something which might baffle  newcomers to the book who just  want to know how Sophie is getting on.    But never mind; it becomes clear.  

       And importantly, John Leader is glorious.  He somehow has the perfect face for a simple-hearted giant, who trips over his words and invents grand new ones like wondercrump and gobblefunking; a chap often bullied, a bit nervous of being captured and put in a zoo, and who has never really had a friend.   The immense puppet-head is beautifully like him, and elegant transitions from scale to scale mean we sometimes see the real John Leader with a tiny puppet Sophie,  sometimes the towering puppet carrying or arguing with  the real Sophie.  The bad giants tower even higher,  so of course there are moments in the later jeopardy  when one of them,  played real-actor-size by Richard Riddell (nicely thuggish),   overshadows a puppet BFG as well as even smaller minipuppet humans.  Anyway, it all works beautifully.  The puppet operators are, rightly, given their full credits in the programme.

        Sophie  – on press night Ellemie Shivers – is a splendid part for a child RSC debut, being  bespectacled, firmly prosaic, scornful of adult inadequacies and always determined (facing death, she shrugs “I”m eight, I’ve had a good innings” and later when the Queen’s fraught soldiers catch her “I’m not scared. It’s not my first kidnapping”.)   She sees straight away that Leader’s sweet natured BFG with his uncertain, benign gestures and wobbling language is no problem but a chap who needs managing, so she does so.  She is equally exasperated, as we are entertainingly forced to be,  by the two khaki-clad military chiefs with asymmetric moustaches (providing a good ongoing joke) because they are obsessed with thinking  everything (even a cake) is a dangerous international assassin in disguise. They panic when the thumping giant footsteps are heard and shut the Queen up against her will “It’s a panic room, ma’am” “Well, it’s working!”she snaps.    

    What was oddly and peculiarly touching was the handling of this Queen (played by Helena Lymbery with great spirit).  She of course is the late Elizabeth II of Dahl’s 1975, in robust grey-permed middle age, a bit impatient with the butler and more so with the military.   It had to be her, for the story;  and watching Lymbery responding  to the girl and her giant , bored with flummery and and staring down the bossy soldiers,  I could only reflect that of course they couldn’t have moved the plot on to Charles and Camilla.  `Elizabeth II may be gone but  is still in our heads and instincts,  a personality, a necessity,  a reassurance. The Queen. 

       As it all resolves in happiness and a big breakfast (the BFG’s table is a billiard-table balanced on four grandfather clocks), there is the Dahl-invented outbreak of whizzpopper farting for all,  and one rather sly joke. The thuggish giants are imprisoned on a diet of foul snozzcumbers,  and told by HM   “it’s not a forever home, just a hole in the ground while we work something out”.  I know who that made me think about.

Rsc.org.uk. To. 7 feb

Rating 4 

I

CINDERELLA AND THE MATZO BALL.          JW3. , Finchley Rd

L’CHAIM !  TO LIFE,  AND PANTOMIME JOKES

    It’s not often that you get to hiss and boo Prince Charming,  but Nick Cassenbaum’s third magnificent foray into his  brand-new genre of Jewish panto reimagines him  as formerly Charminski:  Ronan Quiniou playing the hipswivelling and  petulant lord of a bankrupt kosher kingdom. His  mistake is to assume there’s money coming from hardworking Cinderella of the Breadzinsky bakery (Talia Pick, who beautifully sings along with various puppet-mouthed loaves). But as many have observed ever since Diana, the poor girl would always have done better with honest Buttons, oy vey!  . Another good joke on the old tale has Michael Cowan  as Charminski’s aide disgustedly  grumbling at being given a job “schlepping round the kingdom , touching FEET!”

        But these  are no spoilers, as I haven’t revealed anything about an unexpected identical twin, a giant menacing prawn, or how many of the massed school parties at the matinee clocked the artful circumcision joke (not many, they were small. Come evening there will be big laughs).  There’s a greatpleasure is in these school parties and the big family sense of it all.  Some are  orthodox in tiny hi-vis jerkins and small kippahs, some more secular.    My real Jewish companion – it helps to take one for explanations if you’re a baffled goy – was greatly amused by the way that when the very funny Ugly Sisters (Libby Liburd and Rosie Yadid)  decided to run off to the Land of Traif to be secular , only the most orthodox school booed her.    

       Another  joy of these JW3 pantos  is the merry willingness to include in the family-joke of it all a few quite cheeky refeences to the sacred, in a way Christian panto  doesnt much, and one suspects Islam , even if it did a panto,  wouldn’t at all. Like the character claiming to be a piece of bread but not at Pesach, because being unleavened would make her “terribly flat”. Or even better the slinky arrival at the Matzo palace ball of “Yolanda Yom- kippur, hoping to do something tonight she can atone for later”.  

        The music is terrific as ever,  led by Josh Middleton on accordion and trumpet (sometimes simultaneously, which is a good trick) , with Oliver Presman on tuba and trumpet and Migdalia Van Der Hoven on drums.  They draw entirely on Jewish  composers and legendary performers, with fanfares and snatches from Fiddler, Oliver and Cabaret , and at one point The King and I. A favourite  moment for me was Middleton with his accordion crooning “Fools rush in”. in basso Elvis style during the Prince’s wooing,  where a chat-up line as she flees for Shabbos midnight is “shall we  for a walk, study some Torah?”.  That made the adults behind me giggle a lot.

        It is all grand fun, and for all the sly oy-vey and pehpehpeh family jokes,  has all the panto essentials anyone could ask for: glass slippers, a magic punchbowl that punches you, Debbie Chazen on video as the fairy godmother making abominable bakery puns,  and added star-power in various  Jews at Ten bulletins crisply voiced by the real Emma Barnett:   aka Emma High Barnet / Friern Barnet / Barnet Bypass.  A big family show,  ready to laugh and scold.  I was for a while a bit worried that this latest JW3 panto had no bossy Jewish Mother to sort everyone out,  but then near the end there are three:  the misbehaving Prince haunted by terrifying ghosts of mother  and aunties threatening to pinch his cheeks. Perfect. The small children hooted at that. Mazel tov, all! 

Jw3.org.uk.        To 4 Jan

Rating five

JUST FOR KIDS? CONTRARIWISE!  WE ARE ALL ALICE

     In a fleeting moment of meta-theatre when the monstrous crow (well, umbrella) had the house shouting “Behind you!”,  Tweedleee grumpily cried “house lights! Everyone!  This is a serious adaptation of a classic , it’s not  a pantomime!”.  To which of course came the cry “Oh yes it is!”. 

       But actually, he was right, for all the panto merriment in it.   Joanna Carrick’s lively four-hander is just as Lewis Carroll would have liked it,  down to Georgia Redgrave’s perfect characterisation of Alice, a  keen-eyed polite yet argumentativeVictorian child confronted with an adult world of absurd, illogical, bossy yet easily-offended individuals. 

       For in all the best adaptations of both the Alice books, the fact that people happen to be caterpillars, rabbits, playing-cards and an egg  can never disguise their identity as grown-ups through a child’s lens.  Probably, given Dodgson’s reality, eccentrially Oxford grown-ups.   The chidlren around me – from teens down to a 7-month old baby thrilled throughout at the colours and music – clearly saw that  easily: Emily Jane Kerr’s irritable Humpty Dumpty is everyone’s pedantic pompous teacher, Alec Murray’s Hatter the entertaining but unreliable uncle prone to lead a chorus of “Where did you get that hat?”,  Joseph Russell’s Dormouse, emerging blearily from a giant teapot with a long mad story about the treacle-well,  is any of us attempting an impromptu bedtime story with an uncooperatively questioning child. As for Jabberwocky, the frumious bandersnatch is every scary football in human life…

        Kerru, Murray and Russell of course are all the other characters too, starting out as a rabbit jazz-cabaret and morphing elegantly into the rest with the assistance of Katy Latham and Betty Read’s designs, against a charmingly furnished nursery) .  Indeed one joy of such productions is that while being good fun for us adults,  when you see them as a child  their obvious ingenuities encourage the conviction that yeah,  you can go home and put on a show yourself, with tablecloths,  upside-down chairs and  home-made cardboard hats! Anyone can!    That this revelation  is a boon in the age of the children enslaved to the screen and smartphone cannot be overstressed.

     So the two hours including interval pass with joy all round, some very good jokes (no wonder the poor Cheshire cat gets a hairball trying to describe the March Hare) and some cracking new songs – not least the chorus in which all rapidly joined of the flamenco Red-Queen going it large with a lyric of  “Paella, FAjita, enchilada!” while throwing around her red skirts.  But we’re in Victoriana: tradition matters, so there’s where-did-you-get-that-hat reprised,  and Bumps a Daisy and other fine snatches from our common ancestry.  

    Moreover – and some would have wantd to start with this original element, but literary enthusiasm overtook me:   Redgrave’s Alice is also a gymnast and aerialist. She  quite frequently upside down in a hoop overhead or doing a somersault or handstand with aplomb.  As a lively child would wish. Bravo! 

www.redrosechain.com   to 4 Jan 

 

HELLO AGAIN SAILORS

    This is one of ENO’s beloved triumphs,  the one which got some of us through the latter Covid years in frivolous merriment.  For back in gloryIn 2021 I saw Cal Mc Crystal’s larky, spectacular production  twice, with Les Dennis bravely – and triumphantly – taking the singing role as the First Lord. This time the celebrity bolt-on is Mel Giedroyc, with only one sung line but a lot of sub-panto larking around , both as the cabin boy and as a rogue amid the sisters-and-the-cousins-and-the aunts.  But the merriment of the production is the same,  under the exuberant conduction of Matthew Kofi Waldren.  Moreover, Henna Mun, from the lastest crop of ENO Harewood Artists, is a lovely Josephine: fine voice, naturally, but also a good physical wit.  And the booming Neal Davis is the FIrst Lord, with a bass bounce  to savour afterwards.   

     And , to my particular delight , once again John Savournin is Captain Corcoran:  he capers on like a nimble blue spider and leads his horpipe  tap with an irresistible air of mournful responsibility.   Thomas Atkins is an irresisble Ralph Rackstraw too, especially when caught escaping  and forced to listen to the tremendous “To be an Englishman!” chorus in a huge crinolin with his hair in bunches,  while a  giant Union flag falls from overhead and a figure of  Boris Johnson flies past on a zip-wire. 

     Indeed there are all McCrystal’s borderline- silly physical jokes – which do get slightly frowned upon by G and S purists like my companion, though she got over it when Savournin did his hornpipe.   There’s  the magnificent revolving ship appearing to confuse the captain and cause a third unexpected chorus;  there’s Buttercup falling over the rail,   Dick Deadeye interfering with the love duet by shooting down an albatross in the background,  and various other reasons to keep a sharp eye on whatever the tars might be up to above and behind the more romantic scenes.  McCrystal has done wonders for us new-converts to Gilbert & Sullivan,  just as Sasha Regan did , in a smaller-scale but equally disruptive spirit witht the chaps.  This, by the way, is a link to my carefully versified moment of truth about the genre, back in 2014..

https://theatrecat.com/tag/hms-pinafore/

   But meanwhile, off to ENO for a Christmas treat… 

www.londoncoliseum.org         to 7 ‘feb

A GHOSTLESS DICKENS TREAT FOR CHRISTMAS 

This is wonderful: a three-hander adaptation by Abigail  Pickard Price, with the Guildford  Shakespeare Company. They’re well up to the new-vaudeville  style of the 1980’s  Reduced Shakespeare, only with better costumes.  Three deft, fast-moving actors play everybody, with instant hat-swopping and the hurling on and off of gowns and frock-coats. Surprisingly elaborate ones: I still don’t quite see how Luke Barton’s Peggoty becomes Ham becomes Micawber and becomes Ham again so fast, what with Mr Dick to handle meanwhile. Though Mrs Steerforth’s outfit is so vast it looks as if Barton was able to step into it from behind in a second.  Nor do I know for sure  – only Louise Beresford can – whether Uriah Heep’s dark clerical trouserings were there all the time under poor doomed Emily’s wafting seablue gowns.  When things are really hectic,  a character’s brief appearance can be as a hat, and Murdstone is a coathanger, though his jacket’s arm can suddenly throttle David.  But the quick-change of personality and gender is, as always, enlivening.  And adaptor-director PIckard Price has at her side Amy Lawrence the  as movement director: it shows. 

      But what is particularly fine about  this production, what makes it in the end as engrossingly moving as Dickens would wish, is that of the three only one – Eddy Payne – is required to do a wholly sincere,  consistently credible emotional performance, while Beresford and Barton dart round him in spurts of brilliant character-acting.   Payne  grows from the scared, naive, wondering young  David  to a confident young man, a gentle appreciator of Mr Dick (one of the nicest portrayals of mental incapacity in literature). Then he is lovesick , becoming an affectionate but impatiently struggling husband  to the terrible “childwife” Dora, and finally a weary, responsible figure at the heart of the legal-circus-chaos of Micawber and Spenlow and Wickfield and Heep and the ruined Miss Trotwood. I swear that during this latter process, a bravura final quarter of the show,  the once-boyish Mr Payne actually grew a grey hair or two. 

    So his solo David anchors the story – the text is Dickens treated with Ming-vase care – while the drama surges around him. It has the same feel as Ianucci’s brilliant recent film of the book: a whole England flows around it, vivid and perilous and absurd .  Barton’s big Micawber speech, delivered over the top and far down the other side, is a great delight.  So was remembering bits I had forgotten over the years since reading it:   – the demise of Mr Spenlow (startlingly evoked in two seconds, theyre very deft with props) and the existence of old Mrs Steerforth and her confrontation with Emily. Splendid. Memorable. It really ought, given where David Copperfield was born and Peggoty lived,  to come to Suffolk and `Norfolk very soon..Meanwhile, just go. 

jermynstreettheatre.co.uk to 20 December.

Then Theatre royal Windsor , then  Holy Trinity Church, Guildford

rating 5 (and a costume-design mouse for Neil Irish, because that quick change stuff doesnt come easy….

LADIES WHO LURCH

The Lord Chamberlain took a bit of handling to let this play’s louche  presumptions of extramarital liaisons be flaunted onstage: and one public morality campaigner shouted from the box at its premiere when he did let its suggestion of female sex-before-marriage creep pas them .  It shows us two wives of ten settled years’ standing, their dull safe amiable husbands off playing golf in Chichester, being stirred to romantic panic by the impending visit of  a Frenchman  – Maurice! – who had flings with each of them before their marriages.  Fred and Bill once briskly dispatched to the golf, the women spend the day and evening agonizing over whether to run away from temptation, or confront their old lover with virtuous assurances that they love their husbands even though the grand passion has settled to “happiness and tranquillity devoid of all violent emotions outside golf”   

    As memory unrolls and faint half-acknowledged rivalries surface –  there’s Pisa, Venice, and a deeply regretted row over a salami sandwich –  they move between maudlin and yearning nervousness, and at one stage Coward gives us a tour de force of pas-devant the servants non-sequiturs while  the maid (we’ll come to her, oh yes)  serves a four course dinner at which they plan to be elegantly surprised by the man’s arrival:  a performative “sistahs before mistahs” assurance to him that they’re well over him, oh yes.  .This   bonding, quarreling, and reckless drinking lasts through the bravura first half – Janie Dee and Alexandra Gilbreath well up to it –  with not a man in sight.  Then in the brief second  half all three baffled or artful males are on stage to hear  a number of truths, accusations and lies, and each more or less say their piece.  

        Grand holiday fare for stressed couples, it comes in under two hours with interval, a squib which isn’t, admittedly, one of Noel Coward’s greatest or most-revived plays (though the two Hermiones did it in 1949…!)    It is, on the other hand, rich in his trademark scenes in which overwrought  people in 1930s polite-society  get furiously impolite to each other over classy silverware and crystal and- as a bonus – are effortlessly outclassed by their servants.  The maid Saunders – Sarah Twomey – at first seems a bit wooden but then shows how much of it is a deliberate front: she has worked in grander places than this, knows more about golf than the master plays the piano far better than the mistress, and delivers a lovely balletic interlude while tidying-up, courtesy of her time “With the Ballet Russe”. Twomey also deploys a most pleasing talent for a straight face, not easy round the rising chaos of alcohol, anxiety and rising animosity once Galbreath kicks her shoes off…

     It’s a squib all right, but in Christopher Luscombe’s fine production  it has Janie Dee,  and Dee never fails to enhance one’s evening.  She is Julia,  the more self-contained and intelligent of the pair, and deploys in her face every level of Confident hauteur, bafflement, desire for an even keel through life alongside an instinct to capsize it.  Gilbreath’s Jane is a perfect foil, more immediately emotional about the possibility of Maurice re-entering their lives with his moustache and big eyes and shining teeth and the way he kissed your hand while looking up adoringly.

      The comedy of the picture of they paint of this superb cicisbeo  is enhanced by our earlier glimpse of both balding husbands in fairisle jumpers, long socks and golfing knickers. When they reappear for the conclusiom, Christopher Hollis and Richard Teverson nobly mask any natural erotic fascination they own in magnificent layers of unerotic husbandliness, rising only briefly to outrage about how wives should be repentant. And to the agreement, when he finally and fleetingly appears, that Duclos seems a good chap.  He is Graham Vick, worth it for the accent and moustache alone .

menierchocolatefactory.com  to 21 feb 

rating 4

  A BEAR WHO DESERVES HIS STATION

    This could have been awful ,  a desecration of the children’s favourite which became a national icon of reassurance when he sat down to tea with the late Queen.  But Jessica Swale’s book, tweaked from the originals and the first film, full of self-referential jokes,  and larded with Christmas jokes (“I’m a taxi driver not a taxidermist!” , is teamed with songs by Tom Fletcher of McFly. And the whole is held as firmly as any beloved old teddy by Luke Sheppard’s fast, mischievous direction.  He is not known for musicals, except Starlight Express at Wembley, but knows absolutely what to do: keep it moving, keep it singing and larking around  with dance and slapdash on a stage massed with objects (Mr Gruber’s curio shop) and zap us with spectacular projections by Tom Pye of Totoro fame.  Make you think it might go wrong, but never let it…

        But you want to know about the bear?  It is beyond brilliant. I suspended all disbelief.  Of course a 3 ft 6 bear can talk and sing. He is in fact Arti Shah (or an alternate Abbie Purvis) in a bear-suit,  deploying – this is real skill -wonderfully expressive body-language from mischief to hard stare to worried pathos.  But his head and jaws are being operated by remote puppetry from offstage by the singer, James Hameed (or Ali Sarebani)  who at first appears just behind the bear,  as a baffled scruffy arrival at Paddington:  it is, after all, a refugee tale.   The result of performance and puppetry is complete suspension of doubt.  You love him and believe him. Seriously.  The puppetry is immaculate.   

       As to the songs, they rock along: the Don’t Touch That is masterful slapstick as the bear wrecks half the house and the set dangles a bathtub through the ceiling and Adrian der Gregorian as Mr Brown panics;  Victoria Hamilton-Barritt deploys fabulous contralto evil as the predatory taxidermist with her “pretty little dead things” (is this going to put children off the Natural History Museum?)  and in the second half the Marmalade song is a wonder of singalong enthusiasm. 

       Plenty of laughs:  Bonnie Langford in her seventies is a perfect sassy old  Mrs Bird, splits and cartwheel and all,  and Tom Edden as a repentant Mr Curry handles drop-dead ironic lines like  “to make Paddington into a tourist attraction? Who would DO that?”   Perfect.   The only flaw in the whole thing is perhaps the “Geographers’ Guild” idea and numbers, with a shrilly woke passage decrying museum collections – “leave things where they ought to be”.  Which is a bit rich when you’re celebrating putting a wild Peruvian bear in a blue duffle-coat….

     But that’s the only culpable silliness which knocks off a fifth star.  It’s a blast.  

thesavoytheatre.com   to end of 2026 and probably almost forever…