It was my turn to choose and John’s turn to pay. I chose Lita Marylebone, which has received excellent reviews as a relatively recent opening.
Life took me to that Baker Street Quarter of Marylebone a little early on a glorious summer afternoon, so I took a short stroll around friends and family sites…
Annalisa’s place, back in the dayA house in Manchester Street which was, according to Portman Estate records, my Harris family’s place briefly in the late 1920s.
…took some tea outdoors in a cafe and sat reading in Paddington Street Gardens South until dinner time.
Then Lita.
The conceit of the place is sharing plates, which both John and I like. I sense that the maître d’ encouraged us to over-order, by suggesting that we order three plates from the small category, three from the medium and two from the large plates. Perhaps I should have asked him if those numbers were for rotund people like himself, or slim-jims like me and John.
Still, it was great to taste so many utterly delicious plates:
Wildfarmed sourdough, cultured butter
Kentish radishes, smoked cod’s roe
Smoked Basque sardines, ajo blanco, cherries
Salad of Romana courgettes, artichoke, ricotta, basil, mint
Plus some Ratte potatoes, which were surplus to our requirements but very interesting/different from your regular taters.
We chatted about all manner of things and the evening flew by. I took several pictures of John (see also headline picture), but he didn’t take any pictures of me…
…but that was OK, because my earlier appointment had been all about pictures of me – about 300 of them.
John, still crazy after all these yearsMe – still hip after all these years
I chose a beautiful afternoon to down tools early and drive out to Hampton Court Palace to see some quality tournament real tennis.
I hatched the idea several weeks earlier, when Janie was called for jury service that week and the next. At that time, June, the weather was cold and we’d had more than our fair share of rain. I thought of this booking as a bit of a hedge against my summer sports watching being rain-blighted.
As it turned out, none of my chosen June/July tennis and cricket watching was so blighted and 2 August was destined to be a seriously hot day.
I watched the first of that afternoon’s two matches from the sauna that was the dedans gallery: Nino Merola v Nick Howell. Here is the highlights reel:
In the break between matches, I ran into Linda, whom I know through the Dedanists and have even partnered on one occasion. She was stewarding. When I mentioned the heat, she pointed out that the upper gallery places had barely sold and that I would be welcome to watch the second match from those less crowded and cooler giddy heights. It turned out to be excellent advice, both for me and also to relieve some pressure on the heaving dedans gallery.
I enjoyed the views from the upper gallery – initially (before the match started) the external views:
Then from the inside, the view of the match itself. I have viewed from the hazard end before (at Prested) but never from a great height like this:
Rob Shenkman v Ben Taylor-Matthews, it was. Ben depicted above. Here is the highlights reel:
It was a most enjoyable afternoon. The choice of a Friday afternoon in early August made sense in the end, as the drive to Noddyland was a doddle compared with the usual rush hour jam home from Hampton Court.
I received a kind invitation to see and review this play/production – a fairly rare occurrence for me at a location and on a day that I was able to do. Janie has been summonsed to the Old Bailey (she claims it is jury service) so I ventured south of the river alone.
I’d never been to The White Bear Theatre, Kennington before. It is a “room above a pub” theatre, much in the style of, in the old days, The Bush (The Bush Theatre now has its own swanky space around the corner from the old pub), The Gate (which has moved from above a pub in convenient Notting Hill to an inconvenient space in Camden) and The Finborough Theatre (which is still in its original location, but currently has no pub underneath!). Indeed The White Bear appears to be, much like The Finborough, a magnet for new writing, which earns it a huge thumbs-up from me.
The White Bear is just around the corner from picturesque Cleaver Square
I suspect it is the Finborough connection that led to my e-mail address being in Sarah Lawrie’s e-rolodex, as she produced a couple of productions there which I had reviewed favourably: Scrounger by Athena Stevens and Death Of A Hunter by Rolf Hochhuth.
OK, so I had not seen Sarah Lawrie act before, but I had seen director Jonathan Woolf act a small part in a big production: Travelling Light at the RNT, in 2012 just before “I parted ways” with Nick Hytner the following year.
Can Sarah act as well as produce? Can Jonathan direct as well as act?
***Spoiler alert*** – yes they can.
The Box is a fringe-theatre-style one hour drama. Very much the style of play we like.
I found the first 20 or so minutes bemusing. I know I was supposed to be bemused, but perhaps just a bit too long or a bit too bemusing.
I wrote the word “disjointed” in my jotter. I also wrote “collection of vignettes”.
But soon the drama and tragedy that underpins the play was unfolding and the meaning of those disjointed scenes became apparent.
During the initial scenes, I was unimpressed by the acting; it came across as am-dram overacting. Frankly, I was surprised that both performers were fringe-award-winning actors based on those early scenes. But once it became clear that I was witnessing, in those early scenes, fine actors playing the role of ordinary folk acting out fantasies, I was with the message. How could I not be, given that Janie and I have Ged, Daisy and a cast of thousands to play with?
How this might play out in the USA, where even fringe audiences are prone to walk out after 10 or 15 minutes if they are displeased, I don’t know. That’s worth the playwright and cast thinking about, though, as the play struck me as having an American feel to it that could, with minor revision, do well over there.
…all of which are very successful American plays. That is not to say that the play is derivative, but several of its themes share themes with those plays.
Photograph by Alex Walton.
I thought both performers were very good indeed; as the play went on and as the tragedy became clearer, they performed dramatically but without melodrama. Sarah Lawrie in particular came across as a sympathetic character, but as the story unfolded the bottled-up anguish of Martin Edwards’s character also came to the fore.
Photograph by Alex Walton.
If you want to see this production at The White Bear, you only have until 3 August to see it. It deserves a bigger audience than it is getting at that small but sweet space. But then, how often do I find myself thinking that about fine drama at fringe theatres?
We don’t really patronise The Wigmore Hall for the wow factor. We quite like the fact that we are quite often amongst the youngest people in the audience. We like early music and we get a good dose of that from The Wig.
But we do sometimes book a concert at The Wigmore Hall that we think might have a wow factor and sometimes, like on this occasion, we call it right. It does tend to mean that we are bringing the average age up rather than down, though.
They like a bit of fusion, do the O/Modernt gang. On this occasion, it was an East/West fusion that they explored, as well as a temporal “Bach to Beatles” shtick.
Here’s what we heard:
Johann Sebastian Bach – Contrapunctus 1 from Art of Fugue BWV1080
Pēteris Vasks – Concerto No. 2 ‘In Evening Light’ UK première I. Andante con passione • II. Andante cantabile • III. Andante con amore
Max Richter – On the Nature of Daylight
Soumik Datta – Migrant Birds from Awaaz (arranged by Jordan Hunt)
John Lennon & Paul McCartney – Blackbird (arranged by Johannes Marmén)
Soumik Datta – 1947 from Awaaz (arranged by Jordan Hunt)
Jordan Hunt – Misremembrance
Wojciech Kilar – Orawa
Soumik Datta – Awaaz from Awaaz (arranged by Jordan Hunt)
John Lennon & Paul McCartney – Across The Universe (arranged by Johannes Marmén, plus sarod & tabla riff) – encore
To give you a feel for what we heard, here is a clip from O/Moderndt playing Distant Light by Pēteris Vasks. The piece we heard was the follow-up concerto by Vasks. It was a nice touch to have Vasks at The Wig for his premier – I even managed to congratulate him in person as we were leaving the hall.
The sarod, tabla and a heap of special furniture/equipment arrived during the interval for the second half of the show.
Soumik Datta getting readyTechnician “turning it up to eleven” for Soumik Datta and Gurdain Rayatt
There’s no video to be found of O/Modernt and the sarod & tabla fellas all playing together, but here is a 15-year-old clip of Soumik Datta and Gurdain Rayatt playing as a pair, which will give you a feel.
Here is a more recent recording of that pair playing together:
The most “wow” piece of the evening was Orawa by Wojciech Kilar. Here is that piece played by a more formal orchestra than O/Modernt.
The encore had to calm us down again, which it did. Here’s what Across The Universe sounds like in O/Modernt’s hands.
The sarod & tabla coda to the Across The Universe encore helped us all to float away from The Wig.
We heard several younger members of the audience saying that they had been blown away by the evening. This is surely the sort of thing The Wigmore Hall should be doing more often.
To the Royal Court Theatre on a Friday evening. “Why Friday?”, I hear you cry. Because the Royal Court is now, in its wisdom, starting Saturday shows at 6:30, which is a bit early for us in the summer months, when we like to take advantage of the outdoors in daylight.
This sounded a bit more techie but a similar idea.
That’s exactly what it was.
When we booked it we had no idea who we were going to see. We discovered a week or so before our evening that our performer was to be Rebecca Lucy Taylor aka Self Esteem.
This is what she looks like when she does one of her more regular things – singing contemporary music:
It is hard to review a piece like this because I imagine every performer stamps their own mark on the piece – that is sort-of the idea. But certainly the evening we spent at The Royal Court was a gripping 80-90 minutes of theatre, using multi-media the way theatre can use multi-media best. It added to the live performance rather than making me wonder whether we should simply be at home watching a film.
It seems to have had mixed reviews, but then different reviewers saw different performers respond to the piece in different ways. Here’s a link to reviews.
We found it moving and thought-provoking. We’re very glad we went and we’re very glad we saw Self Esteem. We could have done without the screaming groupies, but you can’t have everything…or rather you can’t omit everything that you don’t want.
Back then, I wasn’t a member of the MCC but I did know how to tick boxes on a form requesting a chance at returns if there were any.
This time, I simply applied for a guest ticket and this time, now that diversity is all the thing, I could even take Janie as a Member’s Guest into the pavilion and enjoy a relaxed dress code in there.
Janie loves the upper sub deck. Given that the sun indeed chose to shine on us that evening, that is the spot I picked, getting to Lord’s early enough to secure good seats up there.
Last time I travelled to Lord’s separately from Janie for the sun deck, Janie walked straight past me up there, so I decided to take no chances and sent her a selfie so she might recognise me…or at least recognise my shirt.
I hope readers have noticed the little nod to MCC colours about that shirt.
Janie arrived in good time, as evidenced by the headline photo, which she took.
England had already secured the series by the time this match came around. We didn’t think they batted brilliantly but we guessed they’d batted well enough.
As it started to get a bit colder and my picnic got depleted, we decided to catch the end of the match at home.
There will be a King Cricket piece of mine about this test in the fulness of time – I’ll publish the links here.
Meanwhile, just a placeholder to note that I:
watched and played real tennis on Day One;
brought Janie as a guest on Day Two;
watched and (once the match was over) played real tennis Day Three.
It was a very one-sided match, but passing time at Lord’s when there is a test match on is always a pleasant experience, however the cricket is panning out.
Rune & Djokovic Squaring Up Ahead of Centre Court Battle
I scored us a pair of centre court tickets for the second Monday of Wimbledon this year. Not bad, I hear you cry. I thought it was a smart move this year. I always thought that “Manic Monday” was better observed from the comfort of a living room and a gadget that enables switching between channels. But the craziness of “Manic Monday” has, in theory, been dissipated by the use of “Middle Sunday” for half of the draw.
Theory and practice failed to collide this year, with so much rain through Week One and Middle Sunday, that our Monday, which was blessed with good weather until early evening, was pretty manic.
Still, we were scheduled to see the following matches on Centre Court…
Elena Rybakina v Anna Kalinskaya
Taylor Fritz v Alexander Zverev
Novak Djokovic v Holger Rune
…and there was loads to see on outer courts.
Taylor Townsend & Katerina Siniakova on Court 18
We arrived a little late to get in to one of the main outer courts for the first match of the day, but after wandering around for a short while, I worked out that we’d get on to Court 18 to see at least part of the conclusion of a rain-affected Ladies Doubles including several players we like: Katerina Siniakova & Taylor Townsend v Leylah Fernandez & Ena Shibahara.
Rain constantly threatened but didn’t come until late afternoon
We bailed out of Court 18 before the finish, keen to see the first match on Centre Court.
Elena Rybakina & Anna Kalinskaya
After the first set, I went out to stretch my legs, only to discover, on my return after the first three games of the second set, that Kalinskaya had retired. Still, my leg-stretching had enabled me to spec out the neighbouring outer courts, where some of the youngster action was now underway.
Flora Johnson
We watched Flora Johnson overcome Alena Kovackova before returning for the start of the Fritz v Zverev match – a rare example of a match between two players with Z in their surname.
Zverev hitting
Having consumed my hot smoked salmon bagel during the first match, perhaps my defences were down. Or perhaps it was the relentless big serves and not much else at the start of that match. Anyway, I must confess that Janie caught me napping during the first set and kindly prevented what might have been a notorious snore-gate incident.
I did the leg stretch thing again at the start of the second set and returned for the end of that set, which also went Zverev’s way. I suggested to Janie that the rest of the match was only going to be interesting if Fritz revived and that would take quite some time. Janie agreed, so we decided to wander around some more and take in the outer courts.
Janie’s eye’s fell on some mixed doubles: Jan Zielinski & Su-Wei Hsieh v Hugo Nys & Demi Schuurs.
Hugo Nys & Demi SchuursSu-Wei Hsieh
It really is a privilege to be able to watch these fantastic players at such close quarters on those outer courts.
Then we focussed on some more youngsters for a while: Henry Bernet & Flynn Thomas v Mark Ceban & Charlie Swaine.
Mark Ceban & Charlie Swaine
Then to Court 14, where I spotted that an interesting-looking mixed doubles was about to start: Maximo Gonzalez & Ulrikke Eikeri v Jean-Julien Rojer & Bethanie Mattek-Sands…
…but not before Janie snapped some hydrangeas that took her fancy:
Bettanie servesUlrikke Eikeri & Maximo Gonzalez
All the while I was keeping an eye on the score from Centre Court. Once it became clear that the fourth set between Fritz and Zverev was heading for a tie-break, I suggested that we return to see the end of that match, one way or another.
That we did and it was a well worthwhile switch. That tie break was excellent and Fritz went up through the gears in the final set.
Fritz, victorious
We stuck around for the first set of Rune v Djokovic (see headline picture), but by then we had seen plenty and thought that people queuing for returns were more deserving than us.
Besides, it had started raining and it looked as thought he rain would only get worse. We quite fancied getting home before the proper heavy stuff.
The young lad from Guest Services admired my poncho, describing it as “stunning”. Excellent taste, some youngsters these days, excellent taste and good choice of advective. He even sounded as though he meant it.
We didn’t go too mad with the camera at this one – we were a bit photo-ed out from Eastbourne. But if you want to see all 60 pictures, here they are on Flickrt:
We always have a a great day at Wimbledon. This day, despite its frenetic nature, was no exception.
All the more reason to find out what Viktoria and Misha are up to, musically. Further, we liked the sound of the Brazilian theme for the concert, which we sensed, correctly, would please us.
We enjoyed a light supper of charcuterie and stuff at The Wig before the concert. They do that sort of thing very well these days. While we were eating, the performers were setting up and photographing one another.
The conceit of this concert, if indeed conceit describes this simple rationale, is that Viktoria and Misha perform a selection of the stuff that they like to play together. Their joy in playing this music really came across in performance.
We heard:
Blue Deer by Misha Mullov-Abbado
Brazil by Misha Mullov-Abbado
Shir Lelo Shem by Shalom Hanoch
Adagio & Allegro From Violin Sonata No. 1 in B minor BWV1014 by Johann Sebastian Bach
Moderato from Sonata in D for solo violin Op. 115 by Sergey Prokofiev
Sabiá by Antônio Carlos Jobim
Little Astronaut by Misha Mullov-Abbado
Shanti Bell by Misha Mullov-Abbado
O Silêncio das Estrelas by Lenine & Dudu Falcão
O Cabo Pitanga by Laércio de Freitas
Träumerei from Kinderszenen by Robert Schumann
Tico Tico by Zequinha de Abreu
Here is a lovely example, recorded a few years ago, of them performing one of the above pieces:
Their closing number, Tico Tico, is more than a bit of an earworm for me. Not least, because the Harris family gramophone records included a version of that song by Mickey Katz and His Kosher Jammers. Viktoria and Misha’s version sounded more like the above example and did not sound at all like the following recording:
I sense that Misha and family thought the event went well. Misha and Viktoria certainly look pleased in this green room photo.
Thanks again for allowing me to use your photographs, folks.
This Wigmore Hall lunchtime concert was a bit unusual.
Camerata RCO is the scaled-down chamber orchestra bit of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. They are making a bit of a reputation for themselves playing scaled-down versions of enormous symphonies, such as this sixth one by Anton Bruckner.
