Monday 2 November 1998 – Left London in morning. Flew day/night to Kuala Lumpur, then transit on to Rangoon arriving mid morning 3 November.
Tuesday 3 November 1998 – Tired and travel weary. Met by Ko Kyaw, our guide. Slept afternoon – rose early evening. Looked around Hotel [Inya Lake] – dined in “Grill” restaurant. Tried varied Burmese menu, including chicken salad, tomato salad, mango pickle, shrimp condiment, chicken curry, snapper & shrimp, vegetable vermicelli, mixed vegetables, mung bean soup, and Burmese tea.
We must have been seriously travel weary when we arrived in Yangon, as we didn’t take a single, solitary photograph that day. In our defence, we knew that we would be returning to Yangon later in our trip.
A placeholder piece which shows the full itinerary and has links to the albums of all our photographs for this trip can be found by clicking here or the link below:
Sunday night at “The Wig” to see this concert by the Chagall Trio, peppered with readings from Marc Chagall’s autobiography delivered by my old schoolmate, Samuel West.
We heard:
Dmitri Shostakovich – Piano Trio No 2 in E Minor, Op 67
Philip Grange – Homage to Chagall
Igor Stravinsky – Rag-time for Eleven Instruments
Aaron Copland – Vitebsk – Study on a Jewish Theme
Janie is partial to a bit of Chagall, visually, and is fascinated by Chagall’s life story, so the whole idea seemed to tick a lot of boxes for us. It was indeed a super concert that pleased us.
We were on a Richmond kick that quarter, for some reason, with three visits to The Orange Tree and two visits to the Richmond Theatre. Coincidence really, I should imagine.
Janie liked it more than I did.
That is my log’s pithy conclusion.
Excellent cast, with Stephanie Cole, Stephanie Beacham, Benjamin Whitrow & Gerald Harper. Christopher Morahan directed it. A transfer from Bath, as was often the case at Richmond.
Reading that review 25 years later, all I can think of is the wonderful Peter Cook quote: “I go to the theatre to be entertained. I don’t want to see plays about rape, sodomy and drug addiction – I can get all that at home.“
I think we must have been experimenting a bit at The Wigmore Hall for this one, as I don’t think of this music as being Janie’s taste. Perhaps I was especially keen to encourage her to hear the Richard Strauss songs…or at least i was keen to hear them performed live. Olaf Bär certainly gave them some baritone oomph.
We heard:
Ludwig van Beethoven – Trio in B Flat Op 11 for Clarinet, Cello and Piano
Gustav Mahler – Kindertotenlieder for Voice and Ensemble
Richard Strauss – Five Songs
Arnold Schoenberg – Verklarte Nacht Op 4 for String Sextet.
I sense that I enjoyed this concert more than Janie did.
My log is silent on this one. I think we quite liked it but clearly didn’t rave about it. Our diaries add nothing. Not even the fact that, almost certainly, we went to Don Fernando afterwards for a Spanish meal.
The local gazette papers had a rave review for this piece:
By gosh there was a fuss in the UK press about this one, with theatre journalists falling over themselves to heap praise, in particular on Nicole Kidman, essentially for looking the part and being able to act.
We had tickets for the first Saturday, because back then, as members of the Donmar, that was the sort of thing we did, especially if someone as grand as David Hare was credited with writing a whole new version of a play.
The play, originally known as La Ronde by Arthur Schnitzler, was highly controversial when it was written at the turn of the 20th century. There are 10 characters. David Hare’s version at Sam Mendes’s request at The Donmar (subsequently transferred to the Cort Theatre in New York) was not the first time the play was staged as a two-hander. It starred Iain Glen and Nicole Kidman.
Janie and I thoroughly enjoyed our evening, but probably for all the wrong reasons. My log comment speaks volumes:
Nice bodies, shame about the play.
Having been wowed by David Hare’s wonderful solo performance piece Via Dolorosa the week before…
…Janie and I found The Blue Room to be comparatively thin dramatic gruel.
Still, nice bodies as I (and the fawning journalists) said, plus a bizarre moment for me personally. Janie and I were sitting right at the front at one of the sides of the stage, as oft we did at the Donmar. As the stars took their final bow and departed the stage, Nicole Kidman seemed to look straight at me and wave at me with her fingers. One of Janie’s patients was in the audience that night and came up to us as we were leaving the theatre in a state of great excitement, because she had seen Nicole Kidman waving at me. The patient wondered whether I knew Nicole Kidman personally, to which my answer was, “not until this evening”.
25 years later, all I can say is that me and Nicole, we go back a long way.
Here are some of the fawning newspaper pieces. The Standard, seemingly without irony, devoted its Page 3 to the news & review. Frankly some of the language used in this Standard page would not be acceptable 25 years later:
In the Guardian, there is a gushing piece in The Arts Diary which, like the other papers, probably would get heavily edited or spiked today, while our friend Michael Billington did the worthy thing and reviewed Our Country’s Good at The Young Vic instead. (Janie and I went to see that the following spring when it came back from its tour.)
…the evening that Nicole Kidman and I had our magic moment ‘n’ all…
…I came across the above headlined diary entry the day before.
Delving into Janie’s diary for more clues, I discover that Janie “collected wild boar” on the Thursday when in town (that would have been from Harvey Nicholls in those days) after collecting red cabbage and marinade from Waitrose first thing.
Strangely, just the other day (25 years after the above wild boar evening), Janie and I were discussing our inability to get wild boar any more . [Insert here your own joke about me having progressed from wild boar to wild bore in the space of 25 years.]
Less strangely, we’re still very much in touch with John and Mandy 25 years later…
I think this wild boar dinner visit might have been the first time that Janie and I met Lydia.
In the coincidence department, the Cambridge Theatre (where Lydia now resides) is within spitting distance of The Donmar Warehouse in Earlham Street, where 25 years earlier, Nicole and I…
Another Sunday evening concert at the Wigmore Hall, this time to explore the church music of Haydn and his contemporaries with Peter Holman, Psalmody and The Parley of Instruments.
We heard:
Joseph Haydn – Three Psalms from Improved Psalmody (Ps 31, Ps 41, Ps 69)
Charles Burney – The Dialogue Hymn: Tell Us, O Women
John Stafford Smith – Horrible is the End of th’Unrighteous Generation
Joseph Haydn – The Emperor’s Hymn: Poco Adagio from the String Quartet in C Major, Op 76/3
Joseph Haydn -Give to God Our Thankful Songs
William Gardiner of Leicester – Give to God Our Thankful Songs
John Foster of High Green, Yorkshire – The God of Gods the Lord Hath Call’d
Johan Arnold Dahmen – Three Songs from Eleven Sacred Songs
Johan Arnold Dahmen – Two Psalms from Improved Psalmody
Samuel Webbe Senior – Where, Lord, Shall My Refuge See
William Shield – My God, My King with Joyful View
Thomas Greatorex – This is the Day the Lord Hath Made
Samuel Webbe Junior – Variations in A Major on “”Adeste Fideles”
Joseph Haydn – Three Psalms from Improved Psalmody (Ps 61, Ps 26, Ps 50)
Jolly good it was too, in the hands of these experts.
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