"Dead Man's Cell Phone" Review

Charles Isherwood’s review in Wednesday’s Times, “A Nagging Call to Tidy Up an Unfinished Life,” is very creatively written, using a cell phone as an underlying theme to tie his entire article together. I thought his lede was great, starting out by describing cell phones as the thing that you have to turn off before you go to the theatre, in his review of a play about a cell phone. Since this was a very new play that not very many people have heard of yet, Isherwood made the wise decision to start of his review with a plot summary and saved the majority of his commentary for the end of the article. I think that Isherwood generally liked the play, but he didn’t mention his “but” until about halfway through the article. He used a lot of really good imagery in his writing and described Mary Louise Parker’s clothes and the way she was standing on stage so well that it was easy to imagine exactly what the show was like. The reference to Dickens at the end of the article gave it a good sense of closure and tied the kicker back in to the theme of cell phones he used for the whole article.