Four Courts In 25 Hours; Boston Manor Centre Court, Lord’s Real Tennis Court, Royal Court Theatre & Boston Manor Court One, 8 & 9 February 2020

Saturday 8 Feburary, Janie and I went to Boston Manor for an early game of lawn tennis. It was a bit chilly but the sun was shining and the weather was set dreadful for the next couple of days.

So although I was due on court for a real tennis match that afternoon, we both needed some exercise and both fancied some of the outdoor variety.

We had a good game. I thought I played well and hoped my timing would be as good that afternoon as it had been that morning. In the end I think it was.

A quick scrub up and then off to Lord’s in Dumbo for the MCC v Dedanists match.

Parking Up Dumbo…Outside Moreton Morrell in this photo as it happens

The MCC v Dedanists match has been reported extensively on the Dedanists Society and MCC websites. Your truly has written the report. Here is a link to the Dedanists’ Society site.

Here is a link to a scrape of the report on The Dedanists’ site, which might be easier for you once my report is no longer headline news.

Here are some pictures. First up, the Captains:

Carl Snitcher in “thinker” pose
Sam Leigh keeping an eye on the guests, no doubt

Below are some of the spectators, rapt with attention, hanging on every shot:

Here’s me, John Thirlwell and my partner Martin Village (grabbing a coffee) as we came off court.

Here’s a link to all the stills that Janie took that day:

Janie took a few video clips, the first of which illustrates the famous Harris serve followed by the infamous Harris grunt…

…this next one shows some relatively classy play by our standards…

…and this next one includes my incisive calling, an all-time favourite string, “switch…up yours…well played”:

For the uninitiated, the phrase “up yours” is not a petulant expletive in the direction of one’s partner. Heaven forbid. “Up” indicates that the ball will land on the penthouse above the dedans gallery, thus telling one’s partner that there is no need to volley. “Yours” means that the ball, once it descends, is for one’s partner to play.

Considering that Martin and I had never even seen each other play before, let alone played together, I thought we got a lot more of that sort of stuff right than might have been expected.

I have scraped CCTV video evidence of the match highlights from all five of the rubbers, which can be seen in silence but glorious colour, through the following embedded links. We join Tony Friend & Paul Cattermull v Yuri Kugler & Julian Sheraton Davis in the second set with the score at 4-4:

We join Sam Leigh & Simon Martin v Simon Webster & Rodger Davis in the second set with the score at 3-3.

We join Giles Stogdon & Carl Snitcher v James McDermott & David Enticknap in the second set with the score at 2-3.

We join Peter Dean & Giles Pemberton v Johnny Saunders & Linda Sheraton Davis towards the end of the first set with the score at 4-4.

If you are a truly in search of passing some time (nearly an hour), you can watch both sets of the Sebastian Wood & John Thirlwell v Ian Harris & Martin Village match below.

As if that wasn’t enough drama for one day, Janie and I went on to the Royal Court to see All Of It after Lord’s. It was a wonderful 45 minutes of theatre, reported on here and below:

On Sunday morning the wind was howling at 40 mph plus and the weather forecast looked increasingly terrible. But the rain didn’t start first thing and Accuweather suggested that it wouldn’t rain until 11:00, so we decided to brave our regular 10:00 slot.

Just a little bit crazy – picture from some daftness a few years ago

Strangely, there was no-one else around in the park, apart from Linda Massey who was battening down the hatches of the pavilion.

Linda briefly came across to the tennis courts to tell us:

Ok, I am now officially declaring that you two are mad.

Strangely, once we got used to the wind, we had an exhilarating, fun although not exactly classic, game of lawners.

We played on Court One on Sunday, whereas we had played on Court Two (Centre Court) on Saturday. So those two, plus the Lord’s real tennis court and the Royal Court theatre add up to four courts in 25 hours.

Don’t tell Linda Massey, but we went back to Boston Manor Park again on Monday morning in similar weather – again no-one else around – and had another game of lawners. We’re not mad…we’re just a bit mad on tennis.

Tennis

All Of It by Alistair McDowall, Royal Court Theatre, 8 February 2020

Oh gosh yes we loved this short play.

On the back of a busy but fun day…

…we wondered whether we’d done the right thing booking this – especially as the Royal Court rubric on the piece was vague, even by Royal Court vague rubric standards. Click here for a link to the unhelpful material.

The little videos in the Royal Court information resource on this production really do not do justice to the piece or to the production’s creators.

I had booked this production because we had been so impressed by Alistair McDowall’s writing, especially Pomona at the Orange Tree a few years ago:

We’d also been impressed by Kate O’Flynn when we’d seen her perform.

This production of All Of It is only running for eight performances over the next few days, so change your plans, beg the Royal Court to find you a ticket, do anything to get to see it. It is 45 minutes of theatrical delight.

Actually, it is 42-43 minutes of theatrical delight. For the first two or three minutes we were both thinking, “oh-oh”, until we realised what was going on and how the piece was going to unfold.

Then we could relax and enjoy a virtuoso performance of a rather brilliant piece of writing.

The piece is basically a short, lyrical monologue about an ordinary woman’s life. All of it.

Just take our advice and get to see it, but you’ll have to be quick. If you miss the next few days, start nagging the Royal Court to transfer it or put it on again because this production really deserves to be seen by lots of people and should give pleasure to far more people than eight-Royal-Court-houses.

Me, just before I’d seen All Of It

Persona by Ingmar Bergman, Riverside Studios, 25 January 2020

We feel as though we have been waiting for ever to see the opening of the new Riverside Studios.

Word reached us in the autumn that the venue had opened for food and drink, so we looked it up to discover that the first theatrical production was to be a stage adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s astonishing movie Persona.

Ingmar Bergman – one of my heroes

I don’t do heroes much, but I make a few exceptions and Ingmar Bergman is one of those exceptions. I love most of his films. Apart from the occasional lemon, such as All These Women, which I am prepared to accept is a lemon.

Persona is a bit of a “marmite” movie – some people consider it to be a masterpiece, others dislike it intensely. I have always rated it highly as a movie – not his best but a very interesting piece.

The idea of it as a stage piece intrigued me…and Janie, who does not rate the movie as highly as I do.

Below is a preview video for the Riverside production, which explains how they transformed the piece from a film script and other archival material into the performance piece we saw:

I believe we saw a preview, just a few days into the run. Janie and I very much enjoyed the production. We both thought it worked well on the stage – possibly better on stage than it does as a film.

This version is sort-of narrated by an imaginary film professor (portrayed by Paul Schoolman) who finds himself sick with pneumonia in the very hospital in which Bergman wrote Persona. This fictional character metaphorically unspools the film into a stage piece.

One other excellent feature of this production is the musical instrument the Earth Harp, a huge installation which sits in one corner of the stage and splays out from there above the audience, dominating much of the studio space. It was performed by its inventor William Close.

It is hard to get a true sense from the video below of how this instrument sounds and vibrates through your body in a live performance, but you’ll get a nice tune and a bit of an idea:

Anyway, the performances were all very good and we were gripped by the piece.

We sensed that some of the audience were bowled over by it, others less so. I don’t suppose this production will be quite as marmite as the original film, but I expect it will divide audiences and critics.

Reviews, if/when they come, will be findable through this link.

We thought it was an excellent start for the revived venue. Slightly less excellent is the cold feel of the expanded, large space that is the venue as a whole. Early days of course and work in progress, naturally. But having dispensed with the shabby chic look of the old place, the Riverside crowd need to start developing some character to the space.

The large colourful paintings helped a bit, but with price tags in the thousands, it felt like a shout out to wealthy West London media types and a bit off-putting to us shabby chic returnees and/or to locals who might have been hoping for enhanced community space for real people.

But go judge for yourselves if you are able – you can see Persona at The Riverside until 23 February 2020. We recommend it.

Scrounger by Athena Stevens, Finborough Theatre, 17 January 2020

Almost certainly not the actual wheelchair involved in the story
Stephen B Calvert Clariosophic [CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

What a story.

Athena Stevens, playwright and performer, was born with athetoid cerebral palsy.

And she is ballsy.

But in 2015 she suffered a devastating incident at the hands of British Airways, when the airline accepted her as a passenger on a plane that was too small for her motorised wheelchair, despite having been informed of the chair’s dimensions, causing Athena extreme humiliation and severe consequential harm. Worse yet, her wheelchair was destroyed in the incident.

This play, Scrounger, is a two-hander which makes light and dark in equal measure about this incident and its aftermath; a dramatised true story.

Here is a link to the Finborough resource on this play/production.

In type, it reminded me of Rohan Candappa’s candid piece about being made redundant unfairly by his company.

Athena Stevens starts the piece by “calling the audience out”, as she puts it in the playtext, reproaching us for our enlightened, left-leaningness.

It’s an interesting start.

Then she reproaches a “late-comer”, who the audience might be forgiven for taking at face value. Smug me, I realised this must be the other member of the cast, whereas Daisy, bless her, was taken in until the deceit was made obvious.

A rollercoaster piece ensues. The sense of injustice in the way that Athena was treated is palpable.

Yet, there is something about Athena’s immediate full-on social media and then media attack on BA which seemed, to me, counter productive.

I have only ever been driven to complain about relatively trivial or minor issues. I was reminded of my extensive correpsondence with Garuda Indonesia 25+ years ago:

My method in such circumstances, as indeed was Rohan’s in his rather Kafkaesque situation, is to threaten the faceless bureaucracy with public exposure of their jobsworthiness.

Athena Stevens, by contrast, went straight to the social media (and then the regular media), which I think was always likely to result in the unjust bureaucracy digging its heels in and taking its time over its responses.

Perhaps Athena’s is the modern way with social media and in any case I do sympathise with her very specific and difficult situation. But one part of her story, which adds to the darkness of it, is the way this matter caused a breakdown in her relationship with her boyfriend. She wanted to seek legal advice as well, whereas he wanted her to stick solely with the media campaign; he felt that going to the law was (I paraphrase) “too aggressive”.

My view, for what it is worth, is that a media camapaign is at least as aggressive, if not more so, than asserting formally that the other party has been negligent.

But as a piece of drama, the story unfolds wonderfully well, with some clever devices of deisgn and trickery along the way. Athena Stevens is a very good writer and she wrote this story with great gusto.

There are some great lines in the play. After her humiliation at Heathrow, BA Uber Athena (Scrounger) home.

I wanted the ride home to be quiet, but the driver turns on LBC.

There is no level of hell, which cannot sink further…with the addition of an LBC broadcast.

Athena Stevens’s performance is also something to behold, as indeed is the performance of Leigh Quinn, who played a plethora of other parts with great energy and skill.

Janie and I thought this a superb piece and a great start to our 2020 theatre-going. It’s been well received and quite widely reviewed. So you don’t need to take our words for it – click here for the reviews and stuff.

Midnight Movie by Eve Leigh, Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, 30 November 2019

No, still don’t get it…

Whoops.

I booked this on the back of us very much enjoying Eve Leigh’s unusual piece, The Trick, earlier this year at The Bush:

But where The Trick had been unusual and a little puzzling, Janie and I both found Midnight Movie impenetrable.

Here is The Royal Court’s verbiage on the piece.

The trailer also provides some clues:

In many ways the play is in the tradition of dream plays, so it would be wrong to complain about the lack of plot and confusing switches. But this piece seemed, to me, so very disjointed, it was hard to get anything much out of the experience.

It is laudable that Eve Leigh and the Royal Court have tried to produce a piece that specific speaks to people with physical challenges, but the notion that the central male character was substituting internet experience for the physical experiences his body would not allow, really struggled to make that point through the material.

Janie really hated the piece.

I tried to go with the flow but couldn’t get anywhere with it.

It is only 70 minutes long, but it felt like so much longer.

We both had out own physical challenges by the end of the ordeal – those narrow arse-ache chairs had us John-Wayning out of the theatre.

We saw a preview, so there’s a chance that the piece has been tightened a little ahead of press night, but I doubt it.

Early signs from the reviews is that the opacity of the piece shines through, as it were.

A rare miss for us at the Royal Court.

Unknown Rivers by Chinonyerem Odimba, Hampstead Theatre Downstairs, 9 November 2019

We have a split jury on this one. I really liked the piece and found it interesting; Janie found it a bit ordinary and dull.

Not much pace, I’d agree, but it tackles topics such as mental illness, ethnic identity and urban social issues rather well in my view.

Here is a link to the Hampstead information about this play/production.

Below is a video about the play/production:

The acting was excellent; Renee Bailey, Doreene Blackstock, Nneka Okoye and Aasiya Shah all top notch – Janie and I both agreed on that. We also both thought the play well directed by Danial Bailey and we both liked Amelia Jane Hankin’s minimal yet imaginative set.

Not sold out even on a Saturday night, which seemed a shame – the play runs until 7 December – a few weeks yet to run at the time of writing, so click on the image above or click here for ticket information.

Little Baby Jesus by Arinzé Kene, Orange Tree Theatre, 26 October 2019

Janie and I are a somewhat split jury on this one. I really enjoyed the play, finding it entertaining and suitably dramatic. The first half has a much lighter tone than the second. Janie found the first half rather silly and trivial, while she found the second half too long and ponderous.

If the reviews are anything to go by, I called this one “right”, but don’t tell Janie that. Here is a link to the reviews.

Janie and I were able to agree that the three young performers put in excellent performances. In particular Janie was surprised to learn that Khai Shaw has only just graduated from Rose Bruford, as he seemed so confident and assured in his performance. But all three performers – Anyebe Godwin and Rachel Nwokoro included, are relatively new to the stage yet pulled off superb, energetic performances.

I was attracted to book this production because Janie and I had been so taken with playwright Arinzé Kene’s performance piece, Misty,at the Bush last year:

I learn from the programme – which is also a helpful play text with another Kene play, Estate Walls, to read in my spare time – that Little Baby Jesus is actually an early work by Arinzé Kene. The play is being reworked at The Orange Tree some eight years after it was written and performed at the Ovalhouse Theatre. Interesting also that Kene originally worked on the piece with Chè Walker, whose Time Is Love/Tiempo es Amor we very much enjoyed at The Finborough a few months ago:

But returning to Little Baby Jesus, there are signs that it is an early work; I understand Janie’s sense that the first half is somewhat unstructured with the three performers introducing their main characters and also performing a lot of secondary characters to introduce the stories. I found it fun seeing that material unfold but Janie probably wasn’t the only person in the audience who found some of it confusing and the language, at times, hard to penetrate.

The second half has a completely different atmosphere, as the youngsters all, for different but in each case tragic (or potentially tragic) reasons, need to grow up in a hurry.

As is often the case with youthful playwrights (Kene was in his early 20s still when he wrote this piece – what a great sign of burgeoning talent) I could see a little too clearly where some of his ideas came from. Structurally, I was reminded of Faith Healer by Brian Friel. And surely the most shocking scene in the second half, when the youths find an abandoned baby, is partly based on and deliberately reminiscent of Saved by Edward Bond.

But this is the way that fine young writers find their own voice and Arinzé Kene surely has a fascinating voice with colourful stories to tell. I highly commend this production of Little Baby Jesus and I shall surely be looking out for his Kene’s work again.

Here is a link to The Orange Tree resources on Little Baby Jesus.

The Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond - geograph.org.uk - 398198

Gaslight by Patrick Hamilton, Playground Theatre, 24 October 2019

Press night at the Playground Theatre, a new venue in Notting Hill (Latimer Road) at the invitation of First Floor Presents. I saw and reviewed its production Lemons Lemons Lemons at Barons Court a few months ago…

…yet First Floor invited me again. Thank you. I’m glad.

I very much enjoyed seeing this production of Gaslight. It is very well acted on the whole and an interesting take on the piece.

Here is a link to the Playground Theatre resource on this production.

Also another link, to an interesting Guardian piece about Gaslight, which talks about this production and another, very different style of production currently at Watford. It also has a clip from George Cukor’s 1944 Hollywood version of Gaslight.

Possibly a little unfair, then, for me to watch a clip of Ingrid Bergman as Bella and then, a few minutes later, watch Jemima Murphy play the part live. Jemima’s own fault for sending me that link, I suppose.

I had only ever seen Gaslight in its movie forms before – there was also a 1940 British film version directed by Thorold Dickinson (Alfred Hitchcock didn’t make a Gaslight, although many a pundit thinks he did) – but Gaslight is probably more suited as a theatre work than as a film. In any case, Jemima Murphy in particular did well as Bella in the “intimate but not claustrophobic” setting of a 100-or-so seater theatre.

ALL PHOTOS BY WILLIAM WATERWORTH – Jordan Wallace as Jack and Jemima Murphy as Bella

Patrick Hamilton is, for me, a frustrating writer. His novels are intriguing, well-written and have become far better known latterly than during his lifetime, when they mostly flopped. He made his dosh from more crowd-pleasing, melodramatic fare for the theatre; not least Rope and Gaslight.

Was it really 10 years ago that we saw Rope at the Almeida…

…yes, but I only Ogblogged it a couple of years ago.

But despite my low expectations from Patrick Hamilton as a playwright, First Floor’s production of Gaslight strangely worked for me.

I’m not sure if the script has been cut; I’m guessing that it has and quite rightly so, if the play was originally as long as most 1930s numb-bum-fests. But in any case the directing and acting focused well on the psychological elements of the play, leaving the melodrama and weak crime thriller plot mercifully in the background.

It is, after all, the psychological elements of this play that give it enduring relevance. Gaslighting has become a verb in psychological parlance, increasingly used to describe the several forms of domestic, mental abuse depicted in the piece and sadly all too common in our society.

Just imagine if the term Ogblogging were to become a verb? At least that would be positive rather than negative activity. I don’t think anyone has ever felt trolled by an Ogblog reference.

But I digress. Gaslight.

Rough justice? Jemima Murphy as Bella with Joe McArdle as Rough

Fine supporting work especially from Joe McArdle as Rough, Rebecca Ashley as Elizabeth and Grace Howard as Nancy. In truth Jordan Wallace seemed under-powered for his role as Jack in the first act; I suspect the young actor was very nervous at the start of press night. The slow start in the first act is not helped by the script, but it is quite a short act (there are four) and the piece warms up quite quickly. Jordan Wallace came into his own in the final act, during which his bullying became more sinister and…

***SPOILER ALERT***

…Jack’s comeuppance worked very well. The final act was far and away the highlight for me, with all of the performers well warmed up and neatly directed.

I’d also like to put in a word for the venue, The Playground Theatre, which apparently has been used as studio space for developmental work for several decades, but has only recently been converted for use as a fringe theatre venue and very cosy-looking cafe. I briefly met the artistic directors, Peter Tate and Anthony Biggs, who made me feel very welcome and spoke passionately about their project.

But returning to this production of Gaslight at the Playground Theatre, I was largely impressed and certainly entertained. I commend it – running until 10 November.

A History Of Water In The Middle East by Sabrina Mahfouz, Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, 19 October 2019

Bus outside The Royal Court, Sloane Square - geograph.org.uk - 1089253

Another day, another play, another “aftermath of Sykes-Picot” imaginative piece of theatre. Hot on the heels of our thoroughly entertaining evening at The Swan on Monday…

…this hugely entertaining and thought-provoking piece about the Middle East.

Here is a link to the Royal Court Theatre resources on A History Of Water In The Middle East.

Writer and performer Sabrina Mahfouz pulls no punches in blaming colonial powers past and present for many of the Middle East’s woes. While taking care to avoid attacking particular Middle-Eastern peoples, her lens does therefore focus almost exclusively on colonial interests without considering the intra-Middle-Eastern proxy wars and conflicts that surely also play a major part in the multifarious problems in that region.

But it would be impossible to be historically comprehensive and profoundly nuanced in a 70 minute piece that also seeks to entertain as well as inform. This piece does both with aplomb.

Along with Sabrina Mahfouz, highly talented multi-instrumentalist musician/composer Kareem Samara, plus excellent performers Laura Hanna (who sings magnificently) and David Mumeni (who doesn’t), have pulled off a superb performance piece.

At one point Mumeni sings, karaoke-style, a Suez Canal version of Sweet Caroline that would have worked in NewsRevue had that show started in 1956 rather than 1979. Personally I’d have tidied up some of the scansion, but we’ll let that pass; I suspect the scansion deficiencies were deliberate, for effect. Laura Hanna’s operatic-style aria for an heroic female plumber in Jordan 30 years hence was also an absolute highlight for me.

But despite the fun aspects, the piece is also about that troubled region and impending crises. While campaigners of the Extinction Rebellion kind might be accused of exaggerating for effect, this piece points out, accurately, that Yemen is already one of the most profound humanitarian crises the world has ever seen and that is before that sorry nation runs out of water; an imminent disaster with little sign of any redress.

There was so much going on in this piece, Janie and I were both grateful for the playtext-style programme so we could/can read bits of the text on reflection and in discussion.

At the time of writing (the day after we saw the show), there are still some tickets available for the Royal Court run. Here is a link that finds reviews and the like. We hope this piece gets a transfer and thus a wider audience. It is intelligent, informative, entertaining and witty. We’d recommend this piece/production highly.

A Museum In Baghdad by Hannah Khalil, Royal Shakespeare Company, Swan Theatre, 14 October 2019

Gertrude Bell, 1909, in what is now Iraq

Janie and I saw a preview of this superb production at the Swan, about a week before press night.

We became fascinated with Gertrude Bell when we saw the film Letters From Baghdad and a panel discussion about it a couple of years ago at the Curzon.

Hence our enthusiasm to decamp to Stratford and see A Museum In Baghdad more or less as soon as it opened. The RSC explains and describes the piece in its resources here.

Playwright Hannah Khalil explains her thinking behind the piece here:

The following trailer explains little but does give a flavour of the atmospheric music and sensescape of the piece:

Janie and I loved the play/production and came away from the show buzzing from the quality of ideas, drama, sounds and emotions we experienced at The Swan.

Janie tends to dislike plays that overlap time periods (this play is set in 1926 and 2006) and mess with the linear telling of stories, not least because she often finds that confusing. But this one works so well and certainly worked for her, such that the overlapping of the two time-settings just added a little to the chaos of the situations being depicted, without interfering with the narrative line.

The production runs at The Swan for a few months before transferring to the Kiln in London. We have not yet been to the latter since its refurb, so wonder how well the piece will work there. It certainly worked wonderfully for us in the three-sided Swan setting. It certainly should appeal to Kiln audiences.

All of the acting was top notch, as was the design, sound and movement. Hard to single out performances, but Emma Fielding, Rendah Heywood and Rasoul Saghir were exceptional.

We were grateful to be staying just across the road in The Arden, as the heavens were in open mode that evening. We debriefed over a snack supper there. I believe I spotted Mark Ravenhill with his entourage, amongst the small number of people who decamped to the hotel after the show.

We loved A Museum In Baghdad – what else is there to say?

Postscript following press night: reviews of this production can be found through this link.