Why a picture of me eating wonton soup? Because our diary notes for Hil & Chris’s weekend visit are light on detail, other than Janie’s “menu”:
Wonton soup;
Shin of veal;
Triffle [sic].
Despite the trifling spelling mistake, I expect the desert was just as enticing as the other courses. The wonton soup will have been my contribution and it will have been excellent.
I have even less intelligence on the first seasonal Ivan Shakespeare Memorial Dinner. It was a Cafe Rogues [spelling mistake intentional] in Maida Vale. But the soon-to-be traditional sounding of the alarms and post mortem e-mails from John Random were not forthcoming back then…
…or if they were forthcoming, they self-destructed in five seconds or something like that.
I don’t think the tradition of quizzing and trophy awarding got started as early as that first Christmas, but I might be wrong.
I’m leaving it to Random to do whatever archaeology he can, be it excavation of ancient scrolls, old computers or his own brain, to see if any further information survives.
No pressure, John, but this one is all down to you.
We also both remeber it quite well, 25 years later. That might have a fair bit to do with the superb cast: Mark Rylance, Harriet Walter, Imelda Staunton and Oliver Cotton. The production was directed by Matthew Warchus. We didn’t recogognise his name then but we certainly do now. Here is the Theatricalia entry for this one.
Yasmina Reza (as translated by Christopher Hampton) was all the rage in the English speaking world back then. This was our fourth go at one of hers – Art having been the piece that kicked off the Reza fashion…
Anyway, apart from Art, with thought Life x 3 to be the most interesting and memorable of Reza’s works.
Again we went to a preview, so we were ahead of the critics. What did they think? Here’s Charles Spencer who seemed pretty impressed with it, at least as entertainment if not as profound drama:
Janie’s diary reminds me that we had dinner the night before with Jamil and Suad Amyuni at Home House, which was also a very memorable evening in its own way.
Janie’s diary also notes, beside Far Away
1/2 hour.
It was short, but not quite that short. I know we saw a preview, but I trust my memory and the reviews that, even the preview, ran to more than 45 minutes, but probably less than an hour.
Fabulous cast – not only Linda Bassett but also Kevin McKidd and Katherine Tozer, directed by Stephen Daldry. I only realise now what a hot ticket this must have been and how privileged we are/were, as Royal Court members, to grab hot tickets like this before they all got grabbed.
Predictably, Charles Spencer didn’t think much of it – he didn’t tend to get Caryl Churchill:
Even giving the casting vote to our friend Michael Billington doesn’t really help, as Billy-o gives the production four stars but his review is somewhat equivocal.
Strangely, the productions that tend to float our boats the most tend to split the reviewer jury. I guess Janie and I like controversial stuff. And as the now late (25 years on) Jamil Amyuni once famously put it in a different context:
A lovely concert of fairly standard baroque fare, beautifully performed by Fabio Biondi and Europa Galante.
We heard:
Antonio Lucio Vivaldi – Concerto in G Minor for Strings RV 157
Wilhelm Friedemann Bach – Sinfonia in F major F67 Die Disonanzen
Johann Sebastian Bach – Violin Concerto in G minor (after BWV 1056)
Antonio Lucio Vivaldi – Violin Concerto in B flat major op 8 No 10 La Caccia
Antonio Lucio Vivaldi – Concerto in D minor Op 3 No 11 for two violins, cello & strings
Antonio Lucio Vivaldi – Concerto in G minor for 2 violins and cello Op 3 No 2
There’s not much video of Europa Galante from that early period of their existence – but this one of them performing the delicious Vivaldi RV558 gives a good idea of what they looked and sounded like back then.
We were such groupies in those days – we leapt in early and went to see the opening night (i.e. the first preview) of this one, on a Friday.
So keen were we to make sure that we were psychologically and spiritually ready for the experience, we both took that Friday off work. OK, maybe we had some other things to do that day, such as try to jostle Gavin along into finishing the long overdue work in Clanricarde Gardens.
Anyway, this piece is about Proust’s Remembrance, not my rambling memories. The conceit of this production was a film script that Harold Pinter had written in the 1970s, adapting Proust’s epic into screenplay. That movie had never been made. Di Trevis liked the screenplay and helped further adapt it into a three-hour play, which she then directed.
Fabulous cast – including Duncan Bell, Sebastian Harcombe, Julie Legrand, Diana Hardcastle, David Rintoul and a young Indira Varma.
There was a buzz in the theatre world about this one ahead of time and I think it buzzed on for some time. It certainly transferred to the Olivier, but I think that had always been planned in to the deal.
We loved the Cottesloe (now Dorfman) and were very keen to see this one early.
I remember being very impressed by it. Janie thought it a bit long…
…try reading Proust, love…
…and/but I suspect that our preview ran longer than the scheduled three hours as some material was probably cut between previews and press night.
Some of the press gushed. Here’s Nicholas de Jongh:
I must admit, I’ve made do with having seen this production and reading some passages in translation. The full one-and-a-quarter-million pages of the novel will have to wait – almost certainly for another life.
I had been a bit of a Kinky Friedman fan for a while before I met David Seidel. Michael Mainelli had recommended/lent two or three of Kinky’s novels to me, which I had very much enjoyed. Elvis, Jesus & Coca-Cola is a title I especially remember.
Also, fascinated by the idea that a group could even be moderately successful with the name Kinky Friedman & the Texas Jewboys, I had bought a couple of his albums on CD and found myself listening to them surprisingly often. Sold American in particular pleased me – here’s a link to the album on YouTube Music. I also have a copy of Lasso From El Passo – here’s the YouTube Music link to that one.
Anyway…
…Kinky came up in conversation with David Seidel one day, as well it might have done, given our shared interest in humorous music. David said that Kinky was due to play Brighton in November and that he and Rachel planned to go, as they lived out that way – Hove, actually.
Would Janie and I like to…
…naturally, that Sunday meet up was set.
I remember that afternoon/evening fondly. We started off at David & Rachel’s house – I think it might have been the first time that Janie and I met Rachel, then went under their local guidance to the show.
I’m pretty sure we all thought the show was good fun.
I remember talking about Janie’s and my visit to the Royal Court the previous evening and agreeing that we would arrange a reciprocal visit to London for the Royal Court in the new year, which we did.
But the centrepiece of the evening was Kinky Friedman, accompanied by but one of the former Texas Jewboys, Little Jewford, who was the last of that sub-tribe.
The following previous piece by Clark Collis in The Telegraph (of all sources) provides more background than most readers will want about Kinky and that tour…with plenty even for the most diligent readers.
Article from 18 Nov 2000 The Guardian (London, Greater London, England)
Kinky’s performances at that time looked a bit like this. Trigger warning – Kinky Friedman parodied bigots and misogynists by using their style of language, some of which is very offensive:
And if you would like to learn more about Kinky through a documentary, here’s a 50+ minute documentary made about a year after that concert.
This evening in the theatre was part of that year’s Royal Court “Exposure Young Writers 2000” programme. Janie and I were especially impressed by the second play we saw.
Dominic Cavendish agreed with our assessment, while being pretty impressed with all of it, including the pairing of plays we didn’t see.
We have subsequently seen a lot of plays on these subjects, but at that time the subject matter and style seemed, to us, very fresh and encouraging for British theatre.
We booked this preview, leaping in ahead of the reviews, for a Friday evening, at the start of a big weekend of “show-going” for us. We were all booked up for Saturdays and I would have been very keen indeed to see this.
I had seen the play before – on a school trip in 1977 at The Greenwich Theatre, with Max Wall playing Davies, Anthony Higgins playing Mick and Peter Guinness as Aston. I’ll write that up in the fulness of time. Meanwhile, here’s the Theatricalia entry for that production.
Undocumented (although it will be Ogblogged at some point) is my own performance as Aston for AO-level drama at School in 1979.
But returning to 2000, let’s have a look at how Janie and I got on at The Comedy Theatre – now renamed the Pinter Theatre, as it happens.
Nicholas de Jongh wrote very highly of it, wondering only about Gambon not quite ringing true:
You get the idea. I did the right thing booking a preview on a Friday. You wouldn’t have been able to get a ticket for love nor money once the reviews came out.
Janie’s diary tells me that we were in Row C. Mine tells me that I parted company with £60, which I suppose was sort-of real money back then.
Oh, but worth it. I will return to the topic of Gambon’s drifty accents when i write up my own Pinter acting experience from 1979. Watch that space.
Anyway, The National obviously felt the urge to have another go at Hamlet less than 12 years later, with Simon Russell Beale, Peter McEnery, Sara Kestleman and Denis Quilley to name but a few.
Janie remembers being impressed by the acting, but still not really relating to or engaging with Shakespeare. I remember feeling that I had probably previously seen the best production of Hamlet I was ever going to see, despite thinking that this was pretty darned good; especially Simon Russell Beale’s performance.
Very good indeed.
That’s what I wrote in my log.
But you don’t want to listen to us. Here are some reviews. First up – Nicholas de Jongh, who also liked Simon Russell Beale more than he liked the production
Similarly, our friend Michael Billington applauds SRB’s performance and John Caird’s directing of it, but feels that the production strips out the big picture political aspects of the play:
Janie noted in her diary that the play ran for 3 hours and fifteen minutes, so I’ll guess that she was grateful for John Caird’s cuts of the political elements – goodness knows how long the play would have taken in John Caird’s hands if we’d also had the Fortinbras sub-plot to deal with.
Still, to summarise the critics – they warmed to the production almost exclusively because of Simon Russell Beale’s quality. I’m surprised that no-one gave their review the headline, “Saved By the Beale”. They missed a trick there.
I have previously written at length about the shock and loss felt by us Canal Café comedy writers (and all else who knew him) when Ivan Shakespeare died suddenly and unexpectedly in February 2000:
John Random liaised with Ivan’s de facto widow, Elspeth, to put on a tribute show in Ivan’s memory, in late October that year. Naturally Janie and I went to see the show.
It was a little ironic that the show was on the night after Janie and I went to see Light at the Almeida, as we would often see Ivan there. Ivan was a regular volunteer at the Almeida; this I ascertained very soon after I got to know him through comedy writing. Indeed Janie probably knew Ivan better from chats at the Almeida than through NewsRevue.
To my shame, I forgot to pick up a programme that night…
…but that doesn’t matter a jot, because John Random, who directed the show, clearly did not forget to preserve the programme, which has naturally emerged as part of John’s & my NewsRevue archaeology project:
NewsRevue stalwarts Genevieve Swallow, Stephan Bessant and Mark Brailsford performed the words of the show, while equally stalwart NewsRevue-ista Jenny Gould tinkled the ivories.
The material from the show would have born a startling resemblance to the anthology of Ivan Shakespeare material gathered by the Kim Morrisey at the ComedyCollective Writers Project, mercifully preserved on the Internet Archive – click here for the index to Ivan’s preserved oeuvre.
If you only look at one piece, I would recommend my favourite Ivan song lyric, The Farmers’ Song – click here. I can never hear The Archers theme music without thinking of Ivan and that lyric…
…which, as a fairly regular Radio Four listener, means that I think of Ivan and the lyric quite often.
