We both really enjoyed this play/production about he psychoanalyst Melanie Klein.
I had seen the original production of this play at The Cottesloe back in 1988 and really liked it.
Janie and I are keen Almeida-istas; I guessed that this would be yet another really good Almeida production and that the play would be to Janie’s taste. Add to that a superb cast – Clare Higgins and Nicola Walker are two of our favourites, plus Thea Sharrock (formerly at The Gate) directing…
…what could go wrong? Nothing. This was a great production and Janie did really like it.
It took me a while to work out what my diary note for that evening, which merely reads “race night”, meant.
I didn’t remember going to any events about ethnic politics at that time.
Then I remembered a Seaxe Club evening in the St John’s Wood Church Hall, where we raised some money for the cause by betting on movie clips from old horse and dog races.
Apparently this was an age-old Seaxe Club tradition, but as far as I know it has not been done since 2009 (May 2017 is the time of writing).
Barmy Kev At The Races – picture courtesy of Barmy Kev (I owe you some wine)
It isn’t normally my policy to take a precautionary scrape of pieces other than my own authored ones, but I thought this one should be held locally just in case – click below only if the above link doesn’t work:
I really cannot add much to Barmy Kev’s piece, other than to say what a fun evening it was and what a shame it (or something similar) hasn’t been repeated.
David Hare is very good at burrowing around all manner of interesting topics, but I suspect he was too far away from his spheres of knowledge and understanding with the financial crisis.
Hare almost admits as much, as the narrator of the play is a somewhat perplexed author.
So to me, Hare was making the obvious points about the financial crisis well enough, but there was little dramatic tension and no new insight in the piece.
Janie liked it a bit more than i did, but I suspect that she got more out of it, being less steeped in the financial crisis in the first place.
I’m glad we saw it, but this is second division work from a first division playwright. There was little a good cast and production could do to save it.
One really excellent thing about the Almeida is the quality of on-line resource they put up for the productions, with lots of information about the play, the creatives involved in the production, plenty of pictures and links to many reviews (the favourable ones of course).
The other really excellent thing about the Almeida is the quality of stuff it puts on. This play/production was no exception.
Ödön Von Horváth (imagine answering the “how do you spell it?” question with that name) has long fascinated Christopher Hampton. This seemingly small canvas German play, about the moral consequences of covering up the true reason for a deadly train crash, is in reality a pre-war allegory with the wilful blindness that led to Nazi power.
It was an especially good evening in the theatre; Janie and I both remember it fondly well. I also recently (when we saw The Ferryman) remembered that we had seen the excellent Laura Donnelly before, but didn’t at the time connect it with this play/production.
This concert did more for me than it did for Daisy.
I thought she might like classical music, of the Mozart and Mendelssohn kind, in the form of string quartets rather than the symphonies and orchestral pieces she claims not to like.
Wrong.
She still found them twiddly and not to her taste really.
Not that she minded; an evening at the Wigmore Hall would struggle to be unpleasant.
The conceit of this tasty concert was to play baroque music that has been used in movies in the last 25 years.
It would have made little difference to us had we remained ignorant of the movie link, but possibly the conceit helped to pull in an audience, not that the Academy of Ancient Music needs much help at the Wigmore Hall on a Friday evening. Perhaps it helped the night before in Cambridge.
Richard Egarr has a very pleasant manner, as do the named soloists for this gig.
This is what we heard:
Just what the doctor ordered after a hard week’s work. Or under any circumstances really.
This was another of those days when I hoped to see some cricket at Uxbridge but the weather was set foul. My track record over the years on days when I want to go to Middlesex out grounds can only be described as terrible…almost as terrible as Middlesex’s 2009 season.
Middlesex were having a shocking season that year, so it was hard to get reporters. Hence Hippity volunteered to go to Uxbridge and then write this one up…at least that’s what the editor was told.
Hippity’s regular (dry) vantage point
Hippity’s writing career mercifully tailed off after the 2009 season, with just the occasional piece for MTWD or King Cricket subsequently.
For the record, rabbit-friendly “Uncail Victor at Uxbridge” is Vic Demain, who has gone on to grander things – at the time of writing he is groundsman at Chester-Le-Street. Not so rabbit-friendly “Uncail Micheál at Lord’s” is Mick Hunt.
I vaguely remember Tim Groenewald being taken poorly towards the end of this match and there being a resulting health scare (unfounded as it turned out) about both squads. The details are lost in the mists of my memory, although linger somewhere on the message boards. I do remember him being a bit of a thorn in Middlesex’s side on subsequent meetings over the years though.
As for the scurrilous suggestion that Middlesex might end that rotten season coming bottom of the second division, that was an outrage. Middlesex in fact came second from bottom, a full two points clear of the county championship wooden spoon – click here to see the table. Middlesex are yet to “win” that particular wooden spoon ever, I believe.
