January 2020 – Ian Louis Harris

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.

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.

A Reel Good Evening With John White, 21 January 2020

John and I had planned to go out for dinner on this particular evening, but then, a couple of weeks before the due date, John e-mailed me to ask if I still had a reel-to-reel tape recorder, as he and Pippa had uncovered a couple of reel-to-reel tapes when clearing his late parent’s house.

I said yes.

I didn’t say that my machines (by the end I had two by way of insurance/back-up) were in storage in the City.

Anyway, I trolleyed my Sony TC-377 back to Clanricarde and established that it more-or-less worked. So I suggested to John that we dine at mine instead and do some archaeology on his tapes.

I played a poor game of real tennis ahead of our reel evening, followed by a bizarre incident in Waitrose, in which, because I was given an unannounced/unlabelled bargain offer giving me an unexpected £6.50 off my basket of goods, I had failed to reach the magic £50 tally which meant that I could be fined some huge amount (£20? £60? Can’t remember) for parking in the absence of jobsworth at the till letting common sense apply.

It took me a good 15 minutes to get the “Balsamicgate” incident resolved, by which time I feared being late for John except that…

…John had, in the meantime, texted me to say that he couldn’t get near a tube and would be late.

Chill…

…I texted him, while probably still shaking with heated rage at the Waitrose incident and still feeling that I was running late.

In the end, I had time to prepare a salad and get most of the food ready ahead of John’s arrival with his tapes…

…and what amazing tapes they turned out to be.

There’s John’s parents encouraging a very little John to speak, on a tape labelled December 1963 which we think must refer to the date of that historic recording, together with John’s dad playing the piano and practising a speech to his Cuprinol colleagues around Christmas 1964.

John was a bit disparaging about his dad’s piano playing abilities, but I actually think that he plays very well for an amateur. I bet John’s dad was better at playing the piano than Vladimir Horowitz, Glenn Gould or Daniel Barenboim would have been at managing Cuprinol’s Services Division or selling bottles of Cuprinol Timber Treatment. Here’s a whole load more of dad on the piano (c 30 minutes of the next clip, plus 15 minutes from a radio light entertainment programme):

Image “borrowed” from Sixties City.net – click the pick for a link to that super site and more about Alan “Fluff” Freeman – I’m sure the Sixties City folk won’t mind…or if they do, they’ll request its removal from this piece..

The most interesting material for the general reader are some extracts from very early broadcasts of Pick Of The Pops. The one below, which has been dated as 14 Janaury 1962, was only the second ever Sunday broadcast of that show and seemingly a rarity – a recording thought lost.

Here is another, short Pick Of the Pops snippet, probably early March 1962, including the introduction to the programme. Just the first three minutes, after which is other pop music, perhaps from that programme but probably from a variety of programmes:

One more Pick Of The Pops recording, from late January or early February 1963, by which time John’s dad was editing out Alan “Fluff” Freeman’s voice:

For some reason, John’s dad also recorded a BBC television programme about freemasonry:

There is some more family-oriented material. Here is a three minute snippet of John and other kids, perhaps a party in the mid 1960s, followed by a poor six minute recording of John’s dad having a French lesson:

There is a lot of light entertainment material, much of which is not so well recorded:

But sandwiched between those last two light entertainment blocks is a truly surprising find, which I only myself uncovered a few days after John’s visit, while I was ripping the content of both tapes into digital form.

I have not yet had a chance to discuss this element with John, so I don’t feel entirely comfortable reveling this to the entire world at the same time as I reveal it to John and his family.

But the fact of the matter is, that John’s dad clearly continued to nurture an interest in modern music for longer than John knew about or even suspected. There is a 36 minute section which must date from the early 1970s which I can only describe as “rock”. Some would even describe some of it as “prog rock”. No-one could deny that some of it is even “glam rock”.

My guess is that John’s dad probably wasn’t a clandestine apron-wearing, breast-baring member of the Freemasons, despite the BBC recording about that subject. But we cannot possibly deny his dad’s clandestine rock phase. It’s unmistakably there on one of the channels of the big tape, buried between 50 minutes of light entertainment lounge music and a further 10 minutes of same. Now you know, John, now you know.

Did the way Marc Bolan flipped his hip always make John’s dad weak?

Joking apart, it was a lovely evening in many ways. John was clearly moved to hear this family audio material, probably for the first time ever and certainly for the first time consciously as an adult.

It reminded me so much of some of my own family trove of such material, only some of which has so far found its way to Ogblog:

Daddy Reading The Gingerbread Man To Me, Guessing Late 1966

My Very First Audio Recording & Inadvertent Desecration Of Mummy’s Tape, With Friends, Woodfield Avenue, Guessing Late 1966

Pick Of The Pops Chart Rundowns, Probably 28 July 1968 & 4 August 1968, Possibly 4 August 1968 & 11 August 1968

Dinner In Noddyland With The Jams, 18 January 2020

Jo, Janie & Max admiring the spread before we descend upon it & devour it

We spent a very enjoyable evening with several of The Jams.

As well as those depicted above, Kim was also there, but she did not want to be photgraphed for some reason. Perhaps Kim had told Micky she was going out for a wild night of clubbing and didn’t want him to know that she was, instead, having a decorous evening at our place. Joking apart, Micky was unfortunately unable to join us for the evening. He’d have loved the food.

Actually the central dish had presented us with some logisitcal issues. Janie set her heart on cooking a fusion prawn dish of a part-Peruvian. part-Japanese nature. It required Aji Amarillo paste as a vital ingredient; yellow aji being central to Peruvian cuisine.

To that end, Janie sent me a message on Thursday afternoon asking me to order a bottle of a particular paste through Amazon for her, which I did.

On Friday afternoon I received a message reading…

…arrggh…

…with some photos, one of which is shown below.

A Prime example of Aji Amarillo, glass and bubble wrap

I ordered another bottle on next day delivery and complained about the first bottle – the latter problem no doubt being a battle to come as the trader in question seems to have no mechnaism for refunds without physically returning broken glass and gunge to them, which I refused to do.

Anyway, a pristine bottle of the requisite condiment arrived about three hours before the guests. Timely.

But it wasn’t all prawns and aji amarillo…

…oh no…

…there were starters of smoked salmon open sandiches together with some cheesy nibbles and raw vegetables.

Neither Jo nor Max had been to Noddyland before, so they got a guided tour early in the evening, during the drinks and nibbles session.

For the main meal, as well as the prawns, there were patatas a lo pobre, cauliflower cheese (for Kim) and a massive tomato & mango salad…

…as well as breads. The latter, together with crackers, went well with the cheeses (thank you for the cheeses, Kim) that followed the main course.

Max Jamilly had just been awarded his PhD in synthetic biology. I made the mistake of addressing him as Mr Jamilly just the once…then, when corrected, as Dr Jamilly. We agreed that I might be the first person to have spoken that mistake and the first person to have addressed him correctly as Dr Jamilly. It’s always good to be first.

Jo and Kim are planning a trip to Jamaica, so we discussed that and I tried to help out with some varied Caribbean music. Kim tried to convince us that Cuba is not in the Caribbean, but on that point (as on a few other subjects) she found herself outvoted for some reason.

In fact we five chatted about all manner of subjects and were shocked when we realised how late it was, at which point Kim, Jo and Max called time on the proceedings.

What a very enjoyable evening it had been and gosh how it flew by.

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.

How I Said ‘F*** You’ To The Company When They Tried to Make Me Redundant by Rohan Candappa, Z/Yen Offices, 28 January 2016

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:

A Dreadful Journey Home From Bali, Via Jakarta, Bangkok & Abu Dhabi, Worthy Of Complaint, “Courtesy” Of Garuda Indonesia, 12 & 13 December 1993

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.

A Gentle Start To 2020, Including Music & Food With The Smiths & The Neighbours, Early January 2020

4 January 2020: The Smiths

Our first outing of the decade was a visit to Mike and Marianna Smith’s house; an opportunity to eat together, make some music together and to see their kids, Eva and Bob, now that they are teenagers.

For those Ogblog readers who don’t know…

…and who are looking for somebody to blame for my music-making…

…it was Mike Smith who got me into the idea of playing the four-string guitar.

Mike makes & refurbishes stringed instruments of many varieties – the picture below depicts Mike playing a mandola, with a cello-like thing made from a half-baked mandolin by his side:

The pictures imply that Mariana did all the cooking and that Mike and I did all the playing, but that would be unfair on Mike (who prepared much of the delicious Mexican meal we enjoyed) and indeed on Eva, who is cultivating pie making skills, as illustrated above.

We also spent plenty of time chatting too, about the kids school activities, Mike’s latest initiatives and learning some more about Mariana’s Slovak family and background.

One strange coincidence vis-a-vis the music and Mariana. Amongst other things, I was tinkling the renaissance song Belle Qui Tiens Ma Vie, which I am currently working on with Ian Pittaway, my early music teacher.

A few days after our delightful evening with The Smiths, I read Ian Pittaway’s essay on this piece and its context:

The pavan, the priest and the pseudonym: ‘Belle qui tiens ma vie’ and Arbeau’s ‘Orchésographie’ (1589)

Ian has added an annex to that essay about the Czechoslovakian folk group, Spirituál kvintet, who wrote and recorded a “Czechoslovakian protest” version of this song in the 1960s:

On discovering the coincidental link between the song and Mariana’s origins, I sent the link to Mike and Mariana. In typically subdued language, Mariana resonded:

I was slightly blown away by Spirituál Kvintet’s Pavana…

12 January 2020: Marcena & the Neighbours

As if we didn’t eat and drink enough with friends and neighbours in December, Marcena very kindly invited us in for drinks and nibbles on the second Sunday of the decade.

Coincidentally, Marcena’s centrepiece was also Mexican, a very tasty tacos dish, although there were also potatoes and chicken cutlets which bore the hallmarks of her southern Asian and southern African backgrounds.

It was a very enjoyable evening. Janie (Daisy) tried to construct an alternative narrative for everyone else’s life…

…in fact at one point I wondered whether the full moon a couple of evenings earlier had got to her…

Any howl you might hear is likely me pretending to be a dog, in a vain attempt to scare a cat away from tormenting our visiting birds

…but in the end the truth would out and we all found out a bit more about each other, over some very tasty food and wine.

Chilled times.

Indeed, to add to the chilledness of the past two-three weeks, I also enjoyed:

a couple of music lessons with Ian Pittaway,
a jamming evening with DJ on 14 January at my place, with some yummy grub from Speck,
several games of real tennis at Lord’s, including club night on 16 January.

A Brief & Personal Tribute To Nick R Thomas, Who Died On 10 January 2020

This piece is a response to the news that Nick R Thomas has died. It culminates with two personal memories, including a sound file of one of my favourite Nick R Thomas comedy pieces.

The above photo is borrowed from Nick R Thomas’s Facebook account; his own choice of signature image.

I met Nick in 1992, when I first started writing for NewsRevue. He was a seasoned comedy writer by then, having been writing News Huddlines, Week Ending and various other stuff of that kind for a couple of years.

Like many of the regular NewsRevue writers at that time, Nick encouraged me and other keen amateurs when we joined the NewsRevue pack. Many of us got involved at that time or, as I think was the case with Nick R Thomas, cemented that collaborative writers friendship around NewsRevue in the early 1990s. We started to describe ourselves as “the class of ’92”.

Most of us had become less actively involved with NewsRevue by the turn of the century, but kept in touch with each other through occasional dinners known as Ivan Shakespeare Memorial Dinners, in honour of the first of our cohort to pass.

Although Nick R Thomas had moved to Bournemouth, he was for some time one of the more regular attendees at those dinners and was great company at those, presumably taking an infeasibly late train home quite often or occasionally staying up in London to join us.

I think the last of his visits to one of those dinners was in October 2017, which was a special Class of ’92 gathering to review old material…

Class Of ’92 Ivan Shakespeare Memorial Dinner, Café Rouge Holborn, 5 October 2017

Sadly, Nick was not well enough to join the NewsRevue 40th Anniversary party last year:

NewsRevue 40th Anniversary Party, Show & Smoker, Canal Cafe Theatre, 18 August 2019

But actually I’d like to end this piece with two very personal memories of Nick.

In the autumn of 2016 a friend had a show at the Canal Cafe Theatre (about Brexit of all things), so I arranged to go on a Thursday and did a shout out to the NewsRevue crowd that I intended to stay on and watch NewsRevue that evening as well. Nick turned up unannounced and we spent a very enjoyable late evening together at NewsRevue – it felt like the years rolled back, although of course we were not looking out for our own material in that week’s show in November 2016. Click here or below for my write up of that evening:

Brexit The Musical by David Shirreff and Russell Sarre, & NewsRevue, Canal Café Theatre, 17 November 2016

My second memory is of Nick as lyricist…but not businessman. In the early 1990s, many of us were approached by the west-country singer/comedian Ben Murphy for material. Ben performed and recorded much of our stuff.

Ben always needed badgering for the money, but (until the inevitable, final small bad debt) always paid me in the end, in order to obtain more material.

I always assumed that everyone else from NewsRevue must have been handling Ben the same way.

But I recall a conversation with Nick R Thomas some years later (probably around 2004 when we had the 25th anniversary of NewsRevue), when Ben’s name came up and Nick told me that Ben had never paid him. Nick had always assumed that no-one got paid by Ben. I’m not sure how often Nick sent Ben yet more material without first receiving (and banking and clearing) Ben’s cheque for the previous batch.

I think this story proves that Nick was a natural for the arts, whiereas I was a natural for commerce.

Anyway, what does survive (something money could not retrospectively buy) is Ben’s recording of one of my favourite Nick R Thomas lyrics; The Bald Song.

Nick R Thomas was a fine comedy writer and was one of the good guys. I, together with a great many others, will miss him.

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