“8:00 Valentine Night The Square Restaurant” 6 Bruton Street W1 Karine”
…reads Janie’s more helpful entry.
Janie’s diary also informs me that we went to Sound On Wheels in North Harrow that morning, where the indomitable Maurice & Ray will have sorted out the latest arrival in our household, my souped-down Honda CRX, Nobby, with a sound system.
25 years on, Sound On Wheels has gone. As has The Square, which presciently closed down just before the Covid 19 pandemic.
When we went it was all the rage, having relatively recently moved to Mayfair. It was in the process of collecting its second Michelin Star had it not done so already.
Janie remembers this as one of the finest meals we have had, with superb service too. It was a very special evening.
Naked by Luigi Pirandello, Almeida Theatre, 21 February 1998
There had been a lot of hype about Juliette Binoche coming to tread the Almeida boards, so we were really looking forward to this one.
Our review:
Not as good as we expected – the critics were more convinced by Ms Binoche than we were
My recollection is that we found it hard to hear what she was saying despite the fact that we were sitting in the front row.
The critics fell in love with her, though. My friend, Michael Billington, going a little overboard. I agree with him about Juliette Binoche’s “eccentric inflections” and that Oliver Ford Davies put in a blinder of a performance.
David Benedict in The Independent leapt to Juliette’s defence, like a knight in shining armour, denying even the accusation that the inflections were eccentric:
Nicholas de Jongh in The Standard hated the play but loved Juliette Binoche. I would agree that part of the problem was the play – not one of Pirandello’s best:
I stand by our own review – we couldn’t hear clearly what Juliet Binoche was saying in a play that, in any case, would have been a fairly difficult watch.
We ate at Pasha afterwards. Another once-excellent eatery that is no longer there 25 years later:
In those days, Ralph Fiennes was one of my buddies as Lambton Place…
…OK, what I really mean is that I’d quite often see him there and we were nodding acquaintances.
Anyway, Fiennes was doing great theatre work in those days, not least at the Almeida, which was having a heyday under the joint leadership of Iain McDiarmid (also one of my nodding acquaintances in the Notting Hill neighbourhood back then, as it happens) and Jonathan Kent.
I wrote in my log:
Very good production. Ian McDiarmid near stole the show the night we went understudying as Kosykh.
It was my “get out of jail” weekend. Michael Durtnall (my chiropractor) had insisted that I “lock down” for a month to enable my back to start healing – otherwise he wouldn’t treat me. More on that elsewhere, but basically this weekend was the end of my confinement and boy did I make the most of it with Bridge on Friday, this theatre visit on Saturday and a wedding on the Sunday.
I am very keen on David Edgar so we (me & Bobbie) will have long before booked to see this just after press night. I was very pleased to have negotiated my way out of lockdown to see this.
All I wrote in my log is:
Very good. Neil Kinnock and his entourage were there the night we went.
At the time Neil Kinnock was leader of the opposition. I don’t know whether he and/or his entourage took notes during this paly, but it was a political drama to be sure.
It is set in an unspecified former communist country that resembles the former Czechoslovakia.
Excellent cast; Karl Johnson, Stratford Johns and Katrin Cartlidge standing out in my mind.
This was the famous (or perhaps infamous) National Theatre production of Hamlet which took Daniel Day-Lewis to the very edge of reason and from which he quit part way through the run.
I went very early in the run – in fact it might even have been a preview – with Annalisa. I suspect that I had booked the thing with Bobbie in mind, but so long before the appointed date that Bobbie could no longer make it.
Let’s just say that, back then, I thought of Shakespeare as more Bobbie’s thing than Annalisa’s thing. Annalisa has latterly assured me that theatre, including Shakespeare, was very much her thing.
Anyway, I recall that we sat right at the front of one of those side wedges in the Olivier – you are very close to the action there, especially when the action is on your side of the stage.
I also recall that Daniel Day Lewis was a very wet Hamlet – by which I mean sweating and spitting his lines. Annalisa remarked afterwards that we should have taken umbrellas with us had we known.
It was a superb production, with a great many big names and several names that weren’t big then but went on to be big. National productions were a bit like that in those days – some still are I suspect.
I was motivated to write up this theatre visit while sitting at Lord’s in September 2018 watching, for the first time, Ethan Bamber bowl live. His father, David, was Horatio in this Hamlet production, nearly 30 years earlier.
Other big names/fine performances included Judi Dench, John Castle, Michael Bryant, Oliver Ford Davies & Stella Gonet. A young Jeremy Northam had a small part in the version we saw but stepped up to the plate when Daniel Day-Lewis walked out. Later in the run, Ian Charleson took on the role to much acclaim, just before he died.
I think this was still quite early in Richard Eyre’s tenure at the National and he directed this one himself, extremely well.
My only other recollection is a quote that Annalisa picked up from an American visitor to the National, who told his wife that he didn’t think all that much of the play – “too many of the lines were clichés”. I guess you can’t please everybody.
Postscript: An Enthusiast From Across The Pond Sought Help…
…in March 2024 I received some unusual correspondence from a gentleman in the USA, wondering whether I still had the programme (or playbill in his terms) as he was keen to see Daniel Day-Lewis’s biography notes from that production.
I have mentioned before that Ogblog serves as a fifth emergency service on occasions and this felt like such an occasion. No sirens or speeding vehicles through the streets of London needed, but I fortuitously was able to lay my hands on this particular programme with relative ease, having not yet returned that batch to deep storage.
