Olly Goodwin having received his Olly-Vier Theatre Award from Rohan Candappa
The above quote comes from Germaine Greer. It is apposite to both elements of the enjoyable evening I am about to describe.
“It was Candappa’s fault, Sir”. That non-quote is nevertheless true – this evening would not have happened, had it not been for Rohan Candappa doing his thing, both in terms of keeping us ’73-’80 Alleyn’s alums together and in helping to promote writing and theatrical talent.
Kat Kleve first came into my orbit when she worked with Rohan on One Starts in a Barber’s,One Starts in a Bar, which several of us Alleyn’s alums first saw at the Gladstone Arms in the autumn of 2018, after which it went to Edinburgh the next year and ultimately Kat’s bit ended up being Rohan’s first Lockdown Theatre production, And You Are? You can read all about it by clicking here or the link below.
Hence Rohan’s idea for us alums to meet up there for a bite, a drink and a show.
As coincidence would have it, Olly Goodwin was a Trustee of The Theatres Trust back when The Other Palace was just an idea. Olly was instrumental in helping that project get its planning permission. If you have ever wondered why that building has a glorious but perhaps incongruous-looking marble staircase…
…ask Olly. And if you have ever wondered why Rohan thought fit to award Olly Goodwin with an Olly-Vier Theatre Award…see headline photo…the answer is intrinsically connected to the above coincidence.
The food was pretty good and the serving staff delightful at The Other Palace, even when Olly exclaimed:
Hey, why have you served Ben with his drink before serving mine, which I ordered earlier?…
…ignoring the large glass of wine that the waitress had placed in front of him a few moments before serving Ben. That wine glass is also commemorated in the headline picture.
Here is the whole scene just before we went into the theatre…except that my lens isn’t wide enough to have captured all the group and I have cruelly left out our ringleader, Rohan.
You’ll just have to take my word for it that Rohan is like a kid in the proximity of a candy store on such occasions.
Ah, there he is…
Actually, we all tend to display our inner overgrown schoolboy modes when we get together, which is at least some of the point behind getting together. As Germaine Greer said:
You’re Only Young Once But You Can Be Immature Forever.
Anyway, recollecting our youth over dinner will have helped prepare us for the coming of age musical, Tink, which we then went down the Olly Goodwin Memorial Marble Staircase to see.
The conceit of the piece is that the central character – this is a one person show – is a modern Tinkerbell, growing up in the early 21st century rather than the early 20th century character in Peter Pan.
Not in truth my type of show, but Kat Kleve is a very talented and versatile performer, so there was plenty to enjoy in the performance.
It’s basically a coming of age story set in a fairies and elves context, which seemed startlingly like a human context to me. I liked the agonies Tink goes through around trying too hard to be the best at everything (which, it seems, is not guaranteed to make you popular – who knew?) and the social mores around how to dress and behave at teenage parties.
Especially interesting, to me, was the business around social media, which hadn’t been invented when we were kids. I’d long suspected that it is probably even harder to bee a teenager now than it was back in our day – this play illustrated some of the reasons why.
The songs are not really my type of songs either. They reminded me a little of Ed Sheeran and Meghan Trainor style singer-songwriter songs. Very well delivered, though. Here is an example of one of the songs:
That style of song might be spot on for the intended audience for this show, which I imagine to be a bit younger than me. We were there for the opening night and didn’t feel out of place, but I suspect that the average age of the audience will come down a decade or two on most other nights…
…apart from the nights for which Rohan is taking a posse of his friends.
The show runs until 20 October, so if you are reading this in time you might well want to click this link and grab some tickets, before dynamic pricing takes Kat Kleve out of your price range.
This was an interesting and enjoyable visit to the Finborough, albeit not the most drama-strewn visit we have ever made to that place.
Beryl Cook is an interesting character in that she found art later in life and lacked both the inhibitions of her generation and the pretentions of her chosen field. But she basically led a conventional provincial middle-class life that lacked drama. The play is therefore a collection of Beryl Cook’s own comments and things said about her in interviews. Interesting, but not dramatic.
The thing that makes this performance piece unusual is that Kara Wilson, in the persona of Beryl Cook, paints an artwork during the hour of the show. That aspect was truly fascinating.
As we understand it, The Finborough arranged this run with Kara Wilson at relatively short notice, when the theatre’s autumn plans went awry.
This engaging theatrical work enjoyed a successful run at Edinburgh – many of the formal reviews you might find about it relate to that run, although several are now emerging from The Finborough run too. Click here for reviews.
We also enjoyed the discussion afterwards.
Don’t you find it difficult to perform a solo play and paint at the same time for an hour?
…asked Janie, which I imagine was a question that had passed through everyone’s mind, but no-one had yet asked the question.
This show is an excellent and unusual experience in the theatre. Based on a true story, Isabella Nefar is superb as a young woman who escapes to England from an abusive marriage in Iran. She doesn’t find London life easy either, but takes solace in cooking Persian food to remind herself of the home she might never see again.
While telling her gruelling story, she also cooks Ash-e Reshteh; Persian noodle and herb soup, which after the show she serves to anyone in the audience who fancies it…which was almost everyone.
Aware that the play was this kind of thing, we got to the Soho Theatre a little early to try to get front seats. We knew that the visibility would be fine just about anywhere, but the smells would be subject to the inverse-square law and we wanted to smell this play.
…and also our friend Jacquie from the Boston Manor tennis courts, which was a little more of a surprise in this context.
Anyway, we got the front row seats we fancied and were entranced by the short show.
Unusually for us, we ventured to the theatre by tube rather than car, as Soho is such a awkward place for driving. A points failure near North Acton confounded us, sending our West Acton bound tube to Hanger Lane instead, making our return journey a little fraught. Fortunately we’d had a bowl of soup to sustain us and hadn’t left our dinner cooking at home when we went out!
Contemplating the yummy soup, not the journey home
This show previewed at Soho before a very well-received Edinburgh run and then a short reprise at Soho. It was very well received by the formal reviewers – click here for plenty of links.
Hopefully My English Persian Kitchen will be revived elsewhere, so that more people can get to see it, smell it and eat it.
Roald Dahl‘s books and stories were a significant part of my life as a child and teenager growing up in the 1970s. Dahl’s widely publicised anti-Semitic remarks in the early 1980s shocked me at the time.
Giant is about Dahl and those remarks, set during an imagined afternoon at Dahl’s Great Missenden house in 1983.
I grabbed a couple of “first Saturday preview” seats for this one as soon as tickets became available for Royal Court members. I am glad that I did.
Mark Rosenblatt surely wrote most if not all of the play before the events of 7 October 2023 and for sure no-one knew that the Israeli Defence Forces would be bombing Beirut a couple of days before the first Royal Court preview. The play seemed extraordinarily topical, even though that topicality was inadvertent.
It is a very well-written play, depicting Dahl as a charismatic yet monstrous character. An extremely eloquent disruptor, who would use the power of his words and status to charm or bully as he saw fit. Everything I had read about Dahl suggest to me that the character was well researched and brilliantly depicted by John Lithgow, who is clearly a top draw stage actor.
Other real people from Dahl’s world were depicted: Felicity “Liccy” Crossland whom Dahl married soon after his public anti-Semitism row, and Tom Maschler, who was head of Jonathan Cape, Dahl’s publisher.
Into this mix, Rosenblatt throws a fictional character, Jessie Stone, who works for Dahl’s US publisher. Unlike Tom Maschler, who seems (or at least purports) to be able to manage Dahl’s wonky characteristics, the Stone character confronts Dahl directly with her concerns about his remarks, with predictably scary results.
Wondering whether anyone in the audience can tell that I am “one of them”.
Although the moral dilemmas in the two plays are different in nature (do you grass on your old mates to protect your career? Do you apologise for things you said even if you did really mean them?), both plays are based around true characters and real events and both plays are structured around a visit to the home of the maligned protagonist.
Janie enjoyed both plays/productions but preferred Here In America to Giant, primarily because she found the moral dilemma more paradoxical. By the end of Giant, Janie was convinced that Roald Dahl was a ghastly character with scarily racist views.
I found the arguments suitably nuanced in both plays and enjoyed both for their excellent acting and production, as well as the quality of the writing/drama.
However, I did sense that Here In America diverged from the historical reality of its situation less than Giant.
In Giant, the conceit of the play suggests that Dahl might have made his most outrageously and blatantly anti-Semitic comments as a result of being cornered by his publishers and fiancée on a single afternoon. In reality, Dahl made many such comments in several interviews/conversations over an extended period of time. Dramatic licence, I accept, but it made Giant, for me, a little less convincing as a dramatic whole.
There are some terrific speeches and lines in the play. Janie and I are glad we bought the play text so we might refer back to some of those. Romola Garai was excellent as Jessie Stone; her speech at the end of the first half of the play was a coup de theatre.
Elliot Levey’s performance as Tom Maschler also stood out. Several of his lines, explaining how you can be an overtly English Jew without obsessing about Israel and while feeling more English than anything else, certainly resonated with me. As did his speech about not feeling the need to apologise for the actions of the Government of a country in which he held neither nationality nor residency. And as did Maschler’s speech about low-level anti-Semitic remarks and sneers being essentially harmless and part of the price for being a Jew in England at that time.
Indeed that experience is so strange, I realise, on reflection, that Don could easily have been a Roald Dahl short story character. Click the above link if you dare. But I digress.
There was a lot to think about in the play Giant and we’ll go on thinking about it for some time, no doubt.
The short Royal Court run (to 16 November 2024) is already all-but sold out, but surely this excellent play/production is lining up for transfers; both sides of the Atlantic, no doubt.
Imagine politics in the USA embroiled in weird paranoia, obsessing about enemies within, making counterfactual accusations directed primarily towards people from migrant communities, with freedoms consequently being eroded by egotistical politicians.
But this isn’t a play about the Trumpian era; the play is about the Second Red Scare in the 1950s and the impact it had on the friendship between playwright Arthur Miller and director Elia Kazan.
I have been a fan of David Edgar’s plays since the mid 1980s, when I got busy reading every play I could get my hands on. In those days I was able to get my hands on a lot of David Edgar’s plays.
In the 80s and 90s I got to see several David Edgar plays performed, but he is not so prolific these days and not often revived in places that Janie and I tend to visit.
Still, like London buses, after a dearth of Edgars for several years, two new ones have come along at the same time: this one and The New Real, which we have booked to see in Stratford-Upon-Avon next month.
This one, Here In America, is just our sort of play – and this production at The Orange Tree is just our sort of production – we loved it.
I have long been fascinated by the phenomenon that became known as McCarthyism and in particular the impact it had on the performing arts. In 1952 Elia Kazan eventually agreed to name names rather than jeopardise his career, whereas Arthur Miller risked jail by refusing to name names when he was summoned to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1954, around the time that Kazan was enhancing his career with films such as On The Waterfront:
In David Edgar’s hands, this story fizzes with political and interpersonal energy. The play is mostly dialogue between Kazan and Miller, with Kazan’s wife, Molly Day in a great many of the scenes. Several scenes also include Marilyn Monroe, who appears in Milleresque fashion, perhaps as flashbacks, perhaps as unreliable memories or perhaps as imaginings. Very reminiscent of such scenes in Miller plays, e.g. Death Of A Salesman. Very well done.
All the actors played their parts well: Michael Aloni (who struck us as very Arthur Miller-like), Jasmine Blackborow, Faye Castelow and Shaun Evans. Director James Dacre is also to be congratulated for making this multi-faceted play work extremely well within the limits of The Orange Tree’s small in-the-round space.
Janie and I left The Orange Tree with lots to discuss; many big-picture political matters, questions around loyalty to friends and also loyalty to loved ones. Both Kazan and Miller betrayed their wives with Marilyn Monroe and later, arguably, jointly betrayed Monroe’s memory through their work.
But before we left the auditorium, or rather as we were leaving, I was able to congratulate David Edgar in person. We were there on the first preview night for this show so it was hardly a surprise to spot him there. I asked him if Here In America and the forthcoming play The New Real are companion pieces.
Didn’t really think about it that way…but there are two lines that appear in both plays,
he said. I promised to form my own opinion on that question. I’m glad I had the opportunity to speak with David Edgar, albeit very briefly, having followed his work for so many decades.
It was a very memorable preview night in the theatre. I’ll add a review link once the play has been formally reviewed. It is running at The Orange Tree until 19 October. Highly recommended by both me and Janie.
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?
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.
The piece is basically an adaptation of a book by Maggie Nelson, which is a narrated story, more in the form of a poetic meditation than a novel.
All of the cast were excellent: Emma D’Arcy, Kayla Meikle & Ben Whishaw – especially the former.
The use of film projections and intriguing props, which we often find a distraction when we see them used in theatrical productions, worked extremely well in this piece. I have subsequently read the book and realise that the visual devices were, in a way, a distraction from some of the words, but in a good way given the dramatic sense those devices gave to the production.
Reviews are out now, although we saw a preview. (IT has taken me a few weeks to get around to writing this up). Click here for a link that shows the reviews. The reviews are mixed. londontheatrereviews.co.uk shared our feeling that this was as an excellent example of theatrical productions using projections. But I sense that Susannah Clapp in The Observer was more intrigued by the piece than overboard about it. Time Out found it a bit obscure, as did theartsdesk.com
Click through the preceding link, read the reviews…and if you get the chance, see the show and decide for yourselves!
Long in the planning, this week off was a much-needed short vacation for me and Janie, having had no holiday time for yonks.
Yet we nearly didn’t even get started, as I had some sort of mishap at the start of the weekend before we set off.
Saturday and Sunday 11 & 12 May – Something’s Afoot
I woke up on Saturday morning feeling sore just under the lateral left ankle. Janie said I had been thrashing around, seemingly in pain, during the night. She had assumed cramp. I had no recollection of such thrashing but this felt like more than cramp.
An attempt to run it off playing tennis on Saturday morning (perhaps a foolish move) did not help; indeed I couldn’t even walk by the time we got home. Despite us spending Saturday afternoon and evening doing the RICE routine with the foot, come Sunday morning, I could still take no weight on the foot and was really concerned that our trip might be in jeopardy.
I thought I should inform Alastair Robson, one of The Doctors Of Leamington, who had organised the tennis and luncheon aspects of the trip: Leamington on the way up on the Monday and Moreton Morrell on the way home on the Friday.
Me & Alastair, no doubt talking balls, at Leamington in 2023
I regret to inform you that I have done myself a mysterious mischief around the ankle…Janie heard me scream out in pain during the night Friday (I have no recollection of it) and/but I had some sensitivity below my lateral ankle yesterday. I thought I could “shake it off”, as the young folk say, but by last night and this morning I was more or less completely non-weight bearing.
We suspect the anterior talofibular ligament, which is utilising its right to remain silent but is looking more than a little guilty this morning.
The upshot as of this morning is that I cannot weight bear on that leg again yet, let alone run. I am hopeful that my condition will improve quite rapidly but I don’t suppose I’ll be properly balanced/mobile again for a while.
I am happy to present myself at the tennis courts Monday and Friday to do the best I can, but the best I can might not be much good. Janie and I would love to lunch with you if the friendly games and lunches go ahead, either with me or without me playing the tennis.
Alastair sent a quintessentially retired-doctor’s (or more accurately, a quintessentially Alastair Robson) reply:
Aargh! But never dismiss the power of prayer (the Dr using irony as treatment – lost on some of the patients)…
There will be a pro knocking around in both clubs on the days in question, so we could always rope him in as a fourth, if need be…
Anterior talo-fib ligament?- a very flash diagnosis: going for Honours, I presume.
A small sacrifice – a goat, say – to Jupiter might speed healing rate.
‘Better soon’ – as I also used to say a lot –
We did consider prayer and/or goat sacrifice – after all, the doctor had recommended it and you should always listen to the doctor, but decided to persevere with the RICE method. Within a few hours, I detected improvement and wrote again to Alastair:
When you have a podiatrist in the house, the phrase “sprained ankle” is simply not specific enough. I’m certainly not aiming for yet more flashy honours at my age and stage!
Janie and I are neither praying to God, nor gods, nor sacrificing any beasts in hope rather than expectation. But elevation yesterday evening, immobilisation overnight, ice this morning and the more meaningful sacrifice of the hour of lawn that Janie and I should be playing this morning, is, so far, paying significant dividends. I’m still hobbling but can weight bear again now and the intense pain has subsided.
Your Plan B regarding the pros availability as substitutes sounds ideal in the circumstances. Given the trio of talent that would remain on show if I were to need to stop, the pros will no doubt be resorting to prayer and caprine/ovine sacrifice for the next 24 hours/few days respectively.
See you tomorrow as planned.
Monday 13 May – Leamington For Tennis, Then On To Stratford-Upon Avon
By the Monday morning my left foot felt much better and I was happy to drive (which mostly works the right) and give the real tennis a try.
John Yarnall & I partnered well, I felt
Remarkably, I was barely hampered at all and I thought played pretty well, John Yarnall & I partnering well against Alastair and Norman Hyde. The latter two, me and Janie went to lunch at Cote, then Janie and I set off for Stratford.
We got to our Airbnb cottage around 17:00, which gave us time to dump our things and go off to the local Waitrose to get some provisions, before getting ready to go out to the theatre.
Our lovely cottage was located to the south-west of the centre, being about 10 minutes walk from the central shops, restaurants and theatres.
It was a bit wet in the evening, but still we strolled to The Other Place for our show, English, which I have written up separately – click here or below.
The weather relented into a very pleasant late afternoon.
On our way to the talk, we stopped at Marcos, which I had assessed as “the deli most likely” for our trip. I was a bit short of the sort of coffee I like so we bought a pack of cafetière coffee. We showed interest in the food too, but I suspect Tony was not expecting to see us again when we departed on Tuesday, as he greeted us so warmly the next morning when we returned for bread and lasagne.
The talk about English was very interesting – described in the above piece about our visit to the show…or click here for that link.
After the talk, but before our dinner at Lambs, we had a drink in the garden of The Arden. This was a nice treat for us, as we stayed at The Arden last time we stayed in Stratford, in 2019, but the weather had not smiled enough for us to take a drink in the garden that time.
We enjoyed ourselves at Lambs so much Janie forgot to take “food porn” photos of our dinner. Take our word for it, it looked as good as it tasted. We ate:
Crispy Sweet Chilli Duck Salad with watercress, beansprouts and cucumber
Pan-fried Calves Liver with creamed potato, wilted spinach, pancetta and crispy shallots
Pork Chop with grilled hispi cabbage, creamed potato, crispy shallots, cider and bacon sauce
Bennett’s Farm Ice-cream
Yum.
Wednesday 15 May – Tennis, Town & Terrace
The weather was lovely on this day. We resolved to get some bread and some portions of lasagne from Marcos, which would enable us, together with the provisions we had already procured, to self-cater that day.
Problem was, we resolved to get to Marcos reasonably early to secure bread, but hadn’t taken into account the fact that the pasta dishes are not ready that early.
Had we phoned in advance…
Still, no hardship having a couple of hours to kill in Stratford. We decided to wander around town and also wander across the bridge to the Sports Club, to investigate tennis possibilities in person.
We bought some doggie gifts in the dog shop for Kim’s pooch. Then some sandals for me and shoes for Janie in the shoe shop. Then we strolled by the river and across the bridge to the sports centre.
The Sports Club people were friendly enough – they let us look at the tennis courts and informed me that I could register as a guest and pay to play if we wanted to. The courts are mostly carpet, with three being “euro clay” -i.e. synthetic clay (sand-like stuff) on a matting base. We thought we’d like to try the latter.
We strolled home via Marcos, where our lasagne and bread was waiting for us. Then we booked our tennis and readied ourselves for battle.
It took us both a while to get used to the clay-like bounce and/but we had a very good game on that surface, so we resolved to return the next morning, weather permitting.
After a light, late lunch of bread and prawn cocktail, we enjoyed the rest of the afternoon on the lovely, sunny terrace of our cottage. Then a restful evening in, enjoying our lasagne with salad and wine.
Thursday 16 May – Tennis, Coffee Shopping & Theatre
So taken had I been with the coffee I bought from Marcos (PNG Fire Dance from Monsoon Estates Coffee) I did some Googling and discovered that the company was a local importer/blender. I called them on the Thursday morning and they said that we could visit their place. I had booked a 10:00 tennis court so we agreed to visit Monsoon at 11:30.
We had another really good game of tennis. Glad I booked 10:00, as the threatened showers started soon after we finished playing – indeed while we were on our way to Monsoon.
Monsoon Anne
Anne and Chris at Monsoon were super friendly and helpful. We left with 3kg of coffee beans and the wherewithal to order more from them on-line once we need more.
Me, ready to make off with the stash
We stopped at Waitrose on the way back to get some cheeses and grapes for our lunch. We figured that those, plus some smoked mackerel we had procured on our first visit, would get us through this day.
A splendid late lunch of cheeses followed by some rest before the evening show made for a very enjoyable day. Plenty of time to get the salad ready for our post-show nosh too.
We saw The Buddha of Suburbia that night, which I have written up separately – click here or below:
A light supper on our return was just the ticket, as we didn’t get home until 10:00ish. It rounded off a great day very nicely.
Friday 17 May – Home Via Moreton Morrell & The Antelope Lighthorne
We said goodbye to our lovely little cottage in Stratford, setting off a little too early for our appointment at Moreton. We had ordered some more of Marco’s bread so stopped there on the way out of town, then went and had a quick look at the Welcombe Hills Obelisk/monument.
Been there, seen it, done it.
Then on to Moreton, where I was to partner Alastair this time, against the combined forces of Peter Mason and Bernie Spratt. For some reason Janie only shot video of this epic match. Fortunately for you, only a few seconds of “footage” survived.
The Moreton floor has been completely redone since my last visit. I found it hard to adjust to the new surface at first, but played reasonably well towards the end. The pairings worked well to make a good game.
The Antelope Lighthorne was a very pleasant country pub in which to take lunch and decompress after our efforts. Peter was unable to join us on this occasion but the four who remained, me, Janie, Alastair and Bernie, had a thoroughly enjoyable lunch.
An event-free drive home – how come I can drive 90+ minutes out of London without incident, while the London driving seems to be close to an incident or near miss every 90 seconds? – enabling us to unload and enjoy a relaxing Friday evening at home.
It had truly been a fun-packed and enjoyable break.
To round off our short break in Stratford, we had arranged to see The Buddha of Suburbia.
I read this novel “back in the day” and remember really wanting to like it and enjoying the subject matter yet not liking it all that much as a novel. I also recalled that it had been turned into a TV series “back then”, which I didn’t see but which I imagined might have been a better medium for the story than the novel.
Thus, all those months ago when we planned this trip, I told Janie that I fancied seeing this show and she needed little persuading.
We are so glad we chose it.
The Swan was an excellent setting for this production
We pretty much agree with the main points that flow from the reviews. On the whole we are not mad about long shows, but this seemed a breeze to us despite being close to three hours long (including the interval).
The 1970s look and soundscape was a trip down memory lane for us, much as it was for Hanif Kureishi I suppose. The main sentiment is joyous celebration of the era and coming of age, but there was plenty to think about too, in terms of the ugly aspects of that era, not least overt racism.
We sat in the front row, which got us caught up in the one small piece of audience participation in this show. That was mostly directed at Janie but also, in the end, also at me.
Maybe I shouldn’t have worn THAT shirt.
Still, we survived the experience and anyway Janie and I are used to people laughing at us.
At the time of writing there is as yet no sign of a West End transfer, but surely this wonderful piece will lend itself to a decent and successful run in The Big Smoke.
