Quite a shocking play centring around a man on a sex offenders’ register in small town USA. “Shocking” as in mood-affecting.
It was good drama, although in some ways lacked something dramatically given the quality of the material and the superb cast and crew lined up at the Bush of all places.
We found this evening hard going on a Friday evening, but for the right reasons. The play really made us think about the subject matter; Janie and I were talking about it all weekend. That’s good theatre in our book, even if the play and production fall short of the “absolutely top notch” class.
At that time, we were having a shocking run at the Hampstead – so much so that we started to lose faith in the place – revived of course when the Edward Hall era turned the place around.
We stuck it out, if I remember correctly, hoping for a more interesting second half. Marginally more interesting but in truth the play really was a lemon.
This play was good fun. It is basically a comedy about a punk band that fell out in unusual circumstances reforming many years later as Mammon comes calling. It sounds a bot “so what?” and it some ways it was, but it was an entertaining evening at one of our favourite venues.
It didn’t get a west end transfer, but perhaps that idea was b*llocks, never mind. The Bush was still a room above the pub in those days, which seemed a fitting venue for this piece.
This was a very interesting and entertaining piece of verbatim theatre. Robin Soans is good at this stuff; we’d seen Talking To Terrorists at The Royal Court. It was probably this sole factor which encouraged us to book the play.
We were pretty much out of love with the Hampstead Theatre at this time; during the Anthony Clark era. Clark himself directed this one and did a decent job of it.
It was deservedly pretty well received on the whole by the critics:
The “programme” – or rather the single sheet of printed A4 you tended to get at the Orange Tree Room – went missing for this show, which is a shame.
It was one of three plays we went to see in that room above the Orange Tree Pub, which they kept going as a second venue for a while but stopped using I think later that year.
This was Janie’s and my first visit to The Orange Tree together…my first visit there full stop.
I cannot reconstruct the whole cast and creatives list, but we can ascertain that the cast included:
Michael Higgs;
Henrietta Garden;
Mairéad Carty;
Ian Angus Wilkie.
Rachel Kavanaugh directed.
I remember really liking this play and the production and really liking The Orange Tree Room. It reminded me a bit of The Gate, a small fringe venue of which I was already fond.
Did they really make more money turning that prime space into hotel rooms?…
My diary is a bit of a confusion for that evening – indeed all that it reads is “Madness”…
…which I’m sure means “The Madness of George III”. But my theatre log is very clear that 17 October was this particular evening with John and Mandy and my diary also shows that “George III” reigned on 30 September for me:
What I think happened was that Bobbie, once again, could not make the planned theatre visit to see Madness of George III on 17 October, but was very keen to see that play. I vaguely recall Bobbie arranging a ticket swap with friends so that she/we could see “Madness” midweek a couple of weeks earlier and her friends got the prized Saturday night tickets that I had procured.
That freed up the evening of 17 October for Janie to meet John and Mandy and for all of us to see Death And The Maiden, which was still one of the hottest tickets in town that year, even though Juliet Stevenson (who had wowed audiences as the lead) had moved on.
Penny Downie played the lead in the cast we saw, which, as super subs go, is pretty darned super. Danny Webb and Hugh Ross played the male parts.
Janie and I are struggling to remember what other arrangements we made with John and Mandy around this evening. I think we might have had Chinese food in Soho with them before or after the theatre. Perhaps Mayflower? Or Joy King Lau in those days?
I also realise that my diaries at that time are littered with clues that John and Mandy must have recently moved house around that time:
Guessing that John and Mandy moved to Dangan Road that August, hence the address and phone number scrawled on 12 August……did I really escape the carnival 30 August to join John and Mandy in the George at Wanstead 30 August? Guessing that “birthday thing” 28 August would have been with my parents, but I’m not entirely sure about events of that weekend other than the 29 August hot date with Janie.
Anyway, on the day I am writing this up (29 August 2017), we shall be seeing John and Mandy later in the day, so I’ll pick their brains on these matters this evening and update this piece accordingly.
The play is set in an unspecified nation emerging into democracy from brutal dictatorship. Ariel Dorfman was a Chilean exile during the Pinochet years and the brutal regime is clearly based on that one. It is one of those hugely affecting plays about torture and the abuse of power. It brings to mind also One For The Road by Harold Pinter and Fermin Cabal’s Tejas Verdes.
I’m sure we did something after the play – perhaps we did eat afterwards. For sure we’d have needed a drink. For sure we found a way to discuss and decompress together for a while.
I remember being very pleased that John, Mandy and Janie all seemed to get along so well; in that regard alone the evening was a tremendous success (to use John’s favourite adjective). But it was also an excellent evening of theatre and I’m sure we must have eaten and drunk well…if only Janie and I could remember those details too.
Postscript: A strange coda to this story. Both Janie’s and my diairy say “The Madras House” for this evening, not “Death And The Maiden”. But my log says Death And The Maiden and I have no recollection of going to the Lyric with John and Mandy to see The Madras House – Janie and I saw that play at The Orange Tree many years later. Did we make a late switch of play choice or have the memories and documentary records got into a terrible muddle? I think probably the former.
This is the third and final part of my 25th anniversary Ogblog trilogy on “how Janie and I got it together”. In case you missed the first two parts and are interested in reading them, here are links to the first two episodes:
So, the ossobuco supper gave me the perfect opportunity to phone Janie to thank her for her hospitality and ask her out.
As luck would have it, I was sitting on a pair of hot tickets, The Street Of Crocodiles at the Cottesloe Theatre. It was my habit back then to book up quite a few such productions a long way in advance, with Bobbie Scully in mind for first dips, but with an unwritten agreement with Bobbie that she couldn’t commit that far in advance and that I might need to find someone else to join me…
…anyway, I had these tickets for 29 August and they seemed an ideal way to reciprocate.
Janie seemed keen on the idea, so the date was set.
I also offered to cook Janie a pre-theatre meal, after first checking that she liked Chinese food.
I can’t remember exactly which dishes I went for, but I’ll guess I plugged for bankable favourites that were reasonably easy to prepare and which needed relatively little clearing up afterwards:
cha chieng lettuce wrap – probably using veal mince or a mix of veal and pork mince;
chicken and cashew nuts with yellow bean sauce;
I thought the second main dish was steak slices with onions, mushrooms and black bean sauce, but Janie reckons the second dish was prawns with ginger and spring onions and now I think she is right;
pak choi with oyster sauce;
steamed basmati rice.
No TripAdvisor review for the meal, but on reminding Janie about it just now, she has described it as “amazing”, so there you go.
But far more amazing than my meal was The Street Of Crocodiles. It really was a stunningly good show.
The play is based on the stories of Bruno Schulz, which (from what we can gather) were weird enough when written, but when given the Complicite treatment, they become a sensory overload of words, music and movement.
Janie had driven to my place and insisted on also driving to the National Theatre – the latter habit being one she rarely deviates from 25 years later.
The evening seemed to have gone splendidly well. Janie was very complimentary about my cooking and seemed very taken with the show.
When we got back to my place, I asked Janie if she wanted to come back upstairs to my flat.
She said no.
I asked her if she was absolutely sure.
Janie said that she was absolutely sure and drove off.
So that was that – although on this occasion I sensed that “no” meant “not this time” and that there would be plenty of other times.
