We found this one a real dud. Both the play and the production.
The subject matter really interested us. The housing crisis and the notion of a protester taking on the establishment…
…but this play missed the mark for us in so many ways. The protester was not only a flawed hero (that’s a good idea for such a play) but is in many ways a shirking beneficiary of the housing crisis. It is hard to buy into the conceit of a play when you find the moral hero at the core quite so conflicted and irritating.
The production had ideas beyond its ability to deliver too, with several long interludes of singing and movement that were almost embarrassing in their amateurishness. Janie struggled (failed) to avoid laughing in inappropriate places at times – the good news being that those were such noisy times, few if any other people would have noticed.
Another scene that really didn’t work for us…let’s call it the shark scene…had us laughing at the artlessness of the performance rather than at the material itself, which was meant to be comedic, but not in that way.
The good news for us was that we were both in a pretty relaxed mood on that Friday evening; this lemon of a play/production was so poor it almost entertained us to share that sorry experience and chat about it afterwards. Had we been in a stressy-end-of-the-week mood, having rushed to get to the theatre on time, we might have been far less amused.
Also, as we were just around the corner from Mohsen, we had a very tasty Persian meal to look forward to and then enjoy in Noddyland after the show.
We really do think it is a shame that this one was such a flop for us. We’re becoming very fond of the Finborough and we also both think that the subject matter – the housing and inequality crisis in our society, is a very relevant topic for theatrical treatment at the moment. Just not this play/production.
…the answer, quite simply, was that I hadn’t even noticed that they were happening. I know I’m supposed to be finding more time for the things I want to do now, but I hadn’t even skimmed the Gresham College lecture list for the 2017/18 year.
Of course, one of the many wonderful things about Gresham College these days is that the lectures are all archived on-line, including in video form.
So over Christmas I caught up with Christopher Page’s series, by watching the first two lectures on-line.
I found both lectures absolutely fascinating. I was particularly taken with the notion, which Christopher Page stated very clearly in the first of the lectures, that the Tudor guitar was, to all intents and purposes, a baritone ukulele; i.e. “my” instrument.
I learnt a lot watching those two lectures and/but I realised that such lectures, with live performance included, would be far more stimulating and enjoyable live…
…which is, after all, within even easier reach of the Z/Yen offices than Gresham College itself (by a few hundred yards).
So I booked out the remaining four dates in my diary and resolved to try my very hardest to organise my City working days around those slots.
I’m glad to report that my plan worked for lectures three and four.
17 January 2018 – The Guitar in the Age of Charles I
This was a wonderful lecture, not least for the diversity of the performances that peppered the lecture. Not only several different stringed instruments – the period covers the transition from four-course gittern-type Tudor instruments to five-course Baroque guitars of the Spanish variety – but also some performance with castanets which was a very pleasant surprise and addition. Christopher Page himself played a bit during this lecture.
So I commend the YouTube below if you can spare the time to watch it – most enjoyable as well as informative:
I picked up a few ideas for my playing at this lecture, not least realising that even I can muck around with the later Folia progression.
A charming lady sat next to me during this lecture – a visitor from Canada – who was strolling the City – had never heard of Gresham College and had simply wandered in having seen the sign outside the church. She was absolutely transfixed by the lecture and the whole idea of Gresham College. She chatted for a while with me, Professor Francis Cox and Frieda after the lecture; it turned out she was also named Francis.
7 February 2018 – An Englishman (with a Guitar) Abroad
I actually did a slightly better job of organising my work around this day, but that did mean that I really was squeezing in the lectures time slot, but still I was able to get to the church in time to grab a decent seat.
At the time of writing (9 February 2018) the video has not yet been uploaded, but the other resources are there and the lecture will go up in full eventually I am sure…
Ulrich Wedemeier – the sole performer for this lecture
Again the lecture and the performances were fascinating and interesting.
My fun takeaway from this lecture was a vignette about Charles Stuart (soon to become Charles II) spending 50 livres to transport one guitar and 18 tennis rackets from France to England (presumably in expectation of the Restoration).
This possibly says something about Charles’s relative levels of interest in those two hobbies, but probably says more about his relative playing styles and the fact that broken tennis rackets cannot be repaired in quite the same way that guitars can be restored.
It brought to mind one of my favourite pictures from a busy day a year or so ago when I indulged both hobbies on the same day:
Packing it all in; real tennis and 16th/17th century guitar jam – did Charles Stuart’s consignment look anything like this?
The rest of that day was littered with early music coincidences, which took me back thirty years and involved the Hilliard Ensemble and even Christopher Page’s Gothic Voices project too. Truly weird. Watch this space for a retroblog piece on’t.
“Please leave your mobile phones on and be sure to set the volume to loud”…
…is not an entreaty you’ll often hear in the theatre just before the start of the show, but for this show it makes a great deal of sense. It makes even more sense to join the Whatsapp group set up for the piece – not a requirement but an experience-enhancing move for sure.
The scene as we entered the theatre
Janie and I both obliged, but while I found all the social media discussion and exposition fascinating, Janie got lost in the techiness of it all and said the piece left her cold…
…which is a shame.
Because the story was, in my view, well written and well told by writer/performer Javaad Alipoor. He shows, through the stories of three disaffected young men, how people can be radicalised through social media, both to Islamic extremism and also to alt-right type fanatical politics.
Janie said she found the whole idea of it rather depressing. It didn’t make me feel that way. Concerned, yes, but not depressed. Disaffected youngsters have always been susceptible to extremism – social media is just the modern way of grooming and recruiting them.
I’m more concerned with the ways social media seem to be polarising opinion and dragging communities apart from each other, rather than fulfilling their potential role as universal media that can bring people closer together.
But that’s another story…and if Javaad Alipoor wants to write a play about that, I’d be up for seeing more of his work…
I think my key moment was at c10:36 (about 30 minutes in) when I made the topical West London analogy of the slightly leaky pipe c/w the major burst water main. Much of West London had been without water pretty much all day on the day before the hearing – which I found rather nerve-wracking while I prepared, but it did lend me a useful analogy.
I did say some other stuff too, so it is certainly worth getting a bucket of popcorn and hunkering down for an hour of viewing.
16 months deeper into my real tennis career (and into Brexit of course), I kept thinking during the hearing that the name “Lord Aberdare” was familiar to me in a tennis context…then wondered whether I was getting confused.
When I got to Lord’s later, I saw that, as I had half remembered, the name “Lord Aberdare” was all over the real tennis Gold and Silver Racket honours board.
It transpires that our man, the current (fifth) Baron Aberdare‘s, grandfather, who was the third Baron Aberdare – click here or picture below for bio – had a twenty-or-so year cricket playing career for Middlesex County Cricket Club before and after the First World War and also went on to dominate amateur real tennis between the wars; probably one of the greatest amateur real tennis players ever.
by Walter Stoneman, bromide print, 1930. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_3rd_Baron_Aberdare_in_1930.jpg#file – see there for full details of non-free use rationale, which also applies to my use.
You’d have thought that this wonderful coincidence would have inspired me to a great victory on the tennis court that evening…but you’d be wrong. The 3rd Baron would not have been impressed by my performance on the court…
…I wonder what he would have made of Brexit and or my performance before the Peers? Would he have yelled “better than half a yard” or “hazard the door” to mark the end of my pivotal speech?
Brexit, Middlesex cricket and real tennis…the story of a fair chunk of my life at the moment, I suppose.
Janie and I had different views on the relative merits of the two pieces. Janie preferred this one, finding the tender emotional elements of it more gripping than the psychological thriller.
I was a little surprised that Janie warmed so much to this piece – she is usually very resistant to plays that leap backwards and forwards in time, complaining that they mess with her ability to follow the narrative line. She felt that the way the actors deployed their bodies and their voices made it very clear, most of the time, whether they were children, youngsters or adults.
I’m usually fine with temporal gymnastics, but this play had even me a bit confused right at the end, when the two female characters suddenly acquired names we’d never heard before and pregnancies…
…I heard several people wondering about that as we left the theatre…
…but about 15 minutes later, while washing my hands at Don Fernando before dinner, I worked out that the pregnant duo in the final scene must have been the mothers of the two female protagonists just before the main pair were born.
We thought this was a very good play/production indeed.
We have been very pleased with most of our visits to the Orange Tree since the dawn of the Paul Miller era; one of those excellent visits was a couple of years ago to see a Brad Birch play called The Brink – click here or below:
That experience was good enough to have us looking out for Brad Birch, so we very much wanted to see Black Mountain…
…so much so that we decided to make a rare trip to Richmond on a Friday…
…indeed we shall repeat the visit today (the very next evening) to see Out Of Love; the other play being shown in rep with Black Mountain at the moment…
…we are looking forward to seeing the same cast and production team again, because Black Mountain was that good.
Very suspenseful, it reminded us a lot of The Brink, in that we see the psychological disintegration of one male character and at times cannot tell the extent to which the images and sounds we are hearing are supposed to be genuine or in his head.
But Black Mountain is also about relationships and guilt and whether trust can ever be restored fully after a major breach.
Great trailer – embedded below:
I suspect that the Orange Tree’s success with these modern plays owes a great deal to the spirit of collaboration; in this case with Paines Plough and Theatr Clwyd. Long may that spirit continue.
Here is a link to the reviews Black Mountain has had – it seems to have divided the critics with some excellent reviews and some indifferent ones. None of these at the time of writing are from this Orange Tree production (which is still in preview), although I suspect that this piece is already quite well honed over the autumn by this production team.
This was a very interesting and enjoyable concert. It had sounded like an excellent idea when we saw it announced in the booking schedule:
Simon Trpčeski traces his Macedonian musical roots in Makedonissimo, a programme of folk melodies specially arranged for piano and a band comprising violin, cello, woodwind and percussion.
A close collaboration with Pande Shahov, this concert will be the project’s UK première. Listen out for the strong jazz flavours of the traditional Pajdushka dance.
All of the performers…
Most of the music was based on traditional circle dance music or “oro” music. There is evidence of such music dating back to medieval times, although no evidence that the particular Macedonian folk melodies used by composer Pande Shahov for these pieces are of anything quite like that vintage.
Indeed, Macedonian traditional music, in particular its dance music, prides itself on some extremely complicated rhythms – maxing out at around 22/16 and/but some using 4/4 and trying just about everything in-between. I’d hazard a guess that the more complex ones didn’t emerge until well after the Renaissance. Who knows?…
…and who cares? We heard some wonderful music.
Yes, it was easier to clap along and imagine dancing to the simpler rhythms. Some reminded us a bit of Latin American dance rhythms, simply because of the complexity rather than the exact nature of the rhythms – there was not “too much syncopation” (as Kid Creole might put it) – but there was a decidedly jazz feel to much of it, as promised.
The musicians were all excellent and enjoying themselves (jazz culture showing its face again). The percussionist, Vlatko Nushev, had the most amazing beard – twisted into the equivalent of a long pony tail – you can only just see it in this picture:
Vlatko does great beard as well as great percussion
The audience was not the usual Wigmore Hall crowd at all. Hardly any of the usual faces. The Macedonian community had turned out en masse and in style. Before the show they had a reception in the Bechstein Room which must have been 90% of the audience – it took an age to navigate the hall for the start of the show.
Here is a short vid of Simon Trpčeski playing a short piece by Pande Shavov, based on Macedonian folk music, in this case with the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra. It also gives you a feel for Simon Trpčeski’s intense desire to talk about, as well as play, the traditional music of his country; although this piece is more orchestral/classical in style than the small ensemble dance pieces we heard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsZ-vunPaXQ
Janie assumed that the very dolled-up woman sitting next to her was a Macedonian beauty; during the interval Janie remarked on, as she saw it, this Macedonian/Eastern European trait of women paying great attention to appearance. So Janie’s heuristics were somewhat dented when that particular woman engaged Janie in conversation as we sat down and it turned out that she was a visitor from Colombia who, purportedly, loves the Wigmore Hall and had picked up a sole ticket next to us…presumably a return.
There had been a rather shady-looking gentleman in a union jack tee-shirt sitting in one of our seats, next to the Colombian woman, when we arrived. Janie speculated as to whether they were a pair or not. I guessed not, while Janie speculated wildly.
Janie’s other obsession that evening was with the cellist, Alexander Somov, who looked nothing like his picture in the programme. All was explained at the end when the composer, Pande Shahov, came on stage to take a bow and we realised that their pictures had been accidentally switched in the programme.
Pande Shahov, take a bow
We had a thoroughly enjoyable evening and learnt a little bit more about world music than we had known before.
The subject matter overlaps with several plays we have seen lately – not least the notion of bad parenting sometimes emanating as much if not more from the mother than the father. Also the notion of major personality and mental health issues being passed down the line.
…but in the case of Yous Two, these serious issues are portrayed in a mostly comedic, or at least light-hearted style. The mother is dead and the father is trying his best…which isn’t to say that he is doing very well in many of the parenting departments. The daughter is sassy and clever and wants life to progress for her in a hurry.
I was more impressed by the play and the acting than I was by the set. The whole play takes place in the tiny bathroom of the father and daughter’s grubby pad. The (perhaps unnecessary) full length panels depicting the outside and inside walls of the bathroom adversely affected sight lines for most of the audience, at one end or both. I think that could have been avoided without detracting from the claustrophobic feel.
Worse; the layout of the bathroom was contrary to all common sense – with the toilet backing on to the inside wall and the radiator backing on to the outside wall. Yes I know some botched up bathrooms might end up designed that way, but given the sight-line problem and the illogical nature of the obstacles causing the sight-line problem…
If directors can get type cast in the same way as actors, Chelsea might expect to be directing plays set in bathrooms for the rest of her career now…so she should get her head around plumbing and the basics of design around utility services. I did also wonder, briefly, whether the notion of “kitchen sink drama” has now been superseded by a new genre; “bathroom tub drama”…yes, I obsessed.
So to get back to the bit that really matters, we did really like the play and we thought all of the performances were very good.
All of the protagonists were there the night we went – Chelsea Walker, Georgia Christou the writer etc, as we were there on a preview night.
Unusually for downstairs, there was a proper programme for this show and apparently there will be a press night and formal reviews. Perhaps there has been a permanent change of policy downstairs?…the ushers were unsure. We have long felt it is a shame that some of the wonderful things we have seen downstairs don’t get formal reviews, although we did understand the “freedom for experimentation and innovation” thinking behind the policy. Times change.
I sort of have to drag Janie to SJSS these days, especially in the winter. There is a rather cold, austere feel to the place; increasingly so. The main hall looks tired and well overdue for a refurb or even the major overhaul that has been oft muted for years.
But I still love the place. This programme looked very interesting as it comprised performers we’d not seen before and several composers & works that would similarly be new to us. So Janie relented for once, recalling that she loves the crypt bar and heck, it was Friday evening after all.
The concert had not sold well, sadly, which does add to the coldness of the SJSS atmosphere. We sat at the front to get a good look.
I was especially keen to see the advertised “archlute, theorbo and guitar”, having always thought that the theorbo and the archlute were the same thing.
Archlute, Theorbo and Guitar?
I went home none the wiser, as I am pretty sure we only saw two such instruments and it is quite hard to switch theorbo-type instruments unnoticed, I imagine. Perhaps the rubric was supposed to read “archlute (theorbo) and guitar”.
I’m obsessing.
The soprano, Anna Dennis, is clearly a superb singer and performed wonderfully well, although we sensed that she was not feeling 100% well. What a trooper.
Henrik Persson blessed us with fine playing on a seven string bass viol, which always feels like a bit of a “buy six get one free” bonus when we see one of those. Perhaps that makes up for the lack of the third plucky-strummy instrument.
Julian Perkins was consistently excellent on the harpsichord.
We both felt that James Akers was more natural on the theorbo than on the baroque guitar. Perhaps we are becoming more fussy as I learn the basics of that instrument, but it just looked and sounded like more of an effort for Akers when he played the guitar. Challenging pieces, I suspect.
Anna Dennis and Purcell were the stars of the show; the rest all felt somewhat secondary. But we enjoyed the whole evening and lamented the fact that so few people had seen such truly top notch Baroque singing in that fitting, albeit now genteely distressed, setting.
John Random sits on the “Sounding Board” for the Old Royal Naval College. I’m not entirely sure what that means…
…I’m not sure John is entirely sure…
…but one thing it does mean at the moment is that John has the right occasionally to take a guest to tour the Painted Hall Ceiling.
This really is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the ceiling of the extraordinary painted hall up close and personal, while scaffolding is up as the ceiling is being conserved.
How could I possibly say no when John offered me such a tour?
John dons a hi-viz vest and a hard hat
John went the whole hog, safety-dress-wise, whereas I, on learning that the hard hat was voluntary, declined the offer to wear one of those.
We were part of a small group, led my the intrepid Martina; a young, pint-sized Italian woman who seemed to know an awful lot about the ceiling.
Meet William and Mary
We are very much in the baroque period for the painted hall and ceiling. We are also steeped in the politics of the Glorious Revolution. So William and Mary take centre stage and sectarian symbolism abounds.
Symbolic characters…not the sectarian ones I am glad to say…I should have listened & memorised…River Thames & London I think…
To be honest, the detail was a bit much for me, but the awe-inspiring opportunity to see this extraordinary work up close and learn about the conservation project was extremely interesting and memorable.
I would thoroughly recommend a visit while there is still time – still several months at the time of writing this – I suggest you do it sooner rather than later.
It was a sunny winter’s day, so after the tour we strolled a bit and I especially wanted to see the chapel, where I had attended at least one concert in the past.
Scrubs up nicely, that chapel
The chapel looked especially splendid in the sunlight – I hadn’t seen it on such a day before – plus it had clearly been through a clean up and refurb of its own since my last visit, perhaps 25 years ago.
John and I pondered whether any royals had (or would) die on the day of this Painted Hall visit. We decided that, if the worst did happen, we really should abandon any future plans to meet in Greenwich.
I personally am keen on eel, although usually in the smoked form…
…indeed as soon as I have finished writing this piece I shall sup on smoked eel and salad…
…so let me press on.
John found the eel a bit difficult to navigate, because the stewed eel served alongside the pie has the bone still in. I told John that I seemed to be managing the geography of the eel pieces better than him, which he found a curious turn of phrase.
Anyway, John and I both found the eel pie shop food a little bland – not least the meat in the pie and the parsley sauce – indeed the eel was far and away the tastiest element.
We thought we might enjoy some tea/coffee elsewhere more than we’d enjoy it in the eel pie house, so we went around the corner to Red Door Cafe – a quirky place which was very much to my taste.
The proprietor, William, played a very interesting and eclectic mixture of music, ranging from Leonard Cohen to Arvo Pärt.
Red Door served a very good cup of coffee and also had an intriguing collection of teas…I sampled the white which was very nice. John tried some cake which he said was also very good. I’d certainly go to that cafe again like a shot.
John and I chatted until we realised that hours had gone by in this jovial fashion, but we both really did need to get on and do some other things before the end of the day.
