Olivia Williams: 'I came out of the theatre all fired up' I try not to use this column as a platform for mundane whinges, but I have stumbled upon a national scandal, and I must share it... did you know that the company called OpenReach has a monopoly over all phone lines from the point where they leave the interior of your house? You should care about this because outside every house is a distribution box full of wires that is OpenReach's responsibility. Mine was made of Bakelite and had plants, rust and a few hundred mangy pre-war wires sticking out of it, which might have explained why every call I made sounded as if my interlocutor was eating raw carrots. None the less, I had to resort to holding an OpenReach engineer hostage with cups of tea until his supervisor came to find him to have them survey the damaged box. I have found OpenReach engineers hiding around the corner until I leave, then running up to the front door and dropping a card saying "we called but you were out" and screeching off in their minivans before they could be called to account. They will not make appointments, are answerable to no one, and demanded I pay more than £1,000 to repair the distribution box BEFORE I had installed the interior line. In what crazy parallel universe do you rent something you know to be faulty? If I rented a car that required £1,000 of work to make it drivable, I feel some sort of consumer protection might kick in. Is this the marvellous legacy of Thatcherite deregulation? The line was clearer when I had a rotary phone and my number featured the word Paddington. Feeling angry and violent after another inconclusive OpenReach fiasco, I stumbled to the theatre with low expectations to see Cheek by Jowl's Ubu Roi, an unperformable play frequently attempted by students because it was written by an angry young Frenchman, Alfred Jarry, who opened the play by shouting "merde" at his 1896 audience. However, I came away all fired up with the power of theatre to express our frustrations and hold a mirror up to our hypocritical faces (or in this case, faeces). The phenomenal denouement, where an incensed teenager guns down his middle-class family, dragged to my mind the sorry conclusion of President Obama's attempt to introduce innocuous gun reforms. In a startlingly blunt speech, Obama pointed the finger at several backsliding senators, who opposed the bill for fear of NRA-backed reprisals. But unlike Jarry and Olivia Williams, Obama managed to stop short of shouting merde at the dissemblers ranged on the White House lawn.