The highlight of this weekend – or at least the most memorable event – was me being recognised by Elvis Costello when he and his misses were heading for their seats just behind us at the Albery.
I have written that up in my piece about the play/production:
Prior To the West End, A Jaunt To Lincolnshire & Nottingham
Our diaries indicate a flurry of activity on the Friday and the Saturday, which I only vaguely remember. Janie had a podiatry course at Nottingham University on the Saturday morning and we had chosen to take the Friday off to make that a more palatable affair, not least because Janie didn’t fancy the crack of dawn start to go to Nottingham and back in a day.
We lunched at The George At Stamford, in Lincolnshire, a place I knew and linked from “back in the day” when business took me up that way. Janie checked us in to The Village Hotel and Leisure Club in Nottingham, which enabled me to enjoy facilities while she was on her training course. Janie’s diary reminds me that she arranged for both of us to have massages there on the Friday evening when we arrived, which we both deemed to be a very ordinary “pitty-pat” experience, unlike our regular arrangements in London.
After Janie’s course we legged it back down to London and then on to The Albery. It all reads very hectic in the diaries – we’d for sure avoid such a crush 25 years later, as I write.
And The Next Day…
We went to the Barbican Hall for a concert, which I have written up here, with yet more celebrity name-dropping potential for me and Janie:
A star-studded audience our night: me, Janie, Elvis Costello…
…we didn’t/don’t normally go to celebrity gala preview evenings for productions. Indeed, I think we ended up at this one by accident.
If I remember correctly, Janie booked this one on an early priority booking as she was a member of the Almeida Theatre, which was responsible for (or at least heavily involved with) this production. We tend to like and book previews, because they are usually low key and precede the hullabaloo of press nights and the like. For some reason this one seemed to be different.
We got to the Albery and our seats in good time. Then someone in the row behind me taped my shoulder and said “hello” as he was going past towards his seat. It was Elvis Costello, whom I had got to know reasonably well in the 1990s at Lambton Place Health Club (now BodyWorksWest).
In fact, for several years at Lambton Place, I was aware of this friendly fellow who was obviously in the music business, as indeed were many members at Lambton’s. I had not recognised him as Elvis Costello, despite my having several of his albums and having seen him live several times in the 1980s. On one occasion, a few years before The Albery, he and I were chatting in the steam room and I asked him what he did. He said that he used to be in a band called Elvis Costello and the Attractions. “Oh yes”, I said “I have several of your albums and saw the band live more than once. Do you mind telling me your name?” He told me, and clearly found my embarrassment at my gaff funny.
I even reviewed one of Elvis Costello’s gigs for Concourse, our student newspaper, in 1983. That was only seven or eight years before I first met him.
Anyway, roll the clock to April 1999 again. We were still on “chat quite regularly at the health club” terms, hence Elvis Costello tapping me on the shoulder, saying hello and stopping for a brief chat as he was going through to his seat.
“Who was that?” asked Janie after he and his Mrs had moved on. “Elvis Costello”, I said, quietly and matter-of-factly I thought, but my words caused a flurry among a group of celebrity-spotters in the row in front of us, who proceeded to keep turning around at regular intervals, looking at Elvis Costello and quizzically looking at me and Janie whom, I suppose, they now suspected of being celebrities worth spotting in our own right. I found this more amusing than Janie did.
Unfortunately, the pre-show hullabaloo was probably the most entertaining aspect of the evening from my point of view. I didn’t much like the play and found Cate Blanchett’s character Susan incredibly irritating.
Not as good as we had hoped it would be
…was my log comment, so I am pretty sure Janie felt the same way.
It was all very well produced and had a tip-top cast under Jonathan Kent, but that couldn’t rescue the evening for us. Here’s a link to the Theatricalia entry.
Paul Taylor in The Independent shared our doubts about this play/production, although saying that he would sooner spend three weeks stuck in a lift with Hedda Gabler than have a drink with Blanchett’s character Susan is harsher than I could have been:
We had posh nosh at The Beaumont afterwards. I think it had recently had a makeover at that time – it will have had a makeover or two since (he says, writing 25 years after the event).
We do like our Tennessee Williams, do Janie and I. This is a rarely performed play and I have always been fascinated by it.
Indeed, we must have been very keen to see this one, as we booked for the first Saturday of the West End run. We tend to avoid the West End these days.
We loved it. I wrote in my log:
Superb. One of the best so far this year.
Sheila Gish was predictably excellent, but we were also much taken with a young Rachel Weisz; I think this was the first time we saw her. There was more to the cast than those two – see tags in this piece – the Theatricalia entry unusually lacks them.
This was a major revival of Pinter’s classic, directed by Trevor Nunn with a cracking cast including Imogen Stubbs, Douglas Hodge, Anthony Calf and several other fine actors.
Unusually, we got to this one late – it had been running at the National for a while, since November 1998, by the time we saw it, towards the end of its run.
Charles Spencer had given it a rave review in The Telegraph:
The play is set some decades after the war, with Albert Speer somewhat rehabilitated as someone ancillary to the Nazi atrocity machine, despite his Nuremberg conviction. This play was about the unravelling of that more favourable image. David Edgar also wrote a play on this subject which was produced the following year, but this Esther Vilar one was the only one of the two we saw.
We went with The Duchess, as was always the case at The Questors. She was a member and got a certain number of guest passes “thrown in” with her membership. She was determined to take advantage of those.
Janie’s diary informs me that she collected oxtail that earlier day and that we all went to Mama Amalfi for dinner after the show.
The log is unusually silent about this event. Especially unusual, as I was regularly recording my thoughts, even if just solo word, at that time.
I suspect this means that we didn’t think much of the piece/production but didn’t want to rubbish it.
Our diaries are also silent on what we did afterwards, other than a note in Janie’s diary to expect the show to end no earlier than 10pm. I suspect we picked up shawarmas on our way home.
