A rare visit to theatre in town on a Friday evening for us – I think the plan was for Janie’s sister Hilary and her husband Chris to visit that Saturday/Sunday but in the end that visit got postponed.
My log is silent on this play/production, so it obviously didn’t have a profound impact on us. Excellent cast though: Shirley Henderson, Catherine McCormack & Larry Lamb, directed by Michael Attenborough.
Nick Curtis in The Standard admired the attempt to tackle the very difficult issue of extreme child abuse, but felt that this play/production didn’t work:
This note in my diary reminds me of one of the occasions when Abe nevertheless invited me back to play doubles with him and his pals. Not on that wintery-looking grass court, of course, but indoors on the carpet.
I don’t recall what happened tennis-wise – I suspect that I partnered the best of the four and that we had a decent game on the back of that.
I remember what happened afterwards more clearly. Abe was keen to see the progress (or lack thereof) in my Clanricarde Gardens flat, which had been a conversation piece over drinks. I think we also agreed all to dine at The Park Inn, my favourite Chinese restaurant, on Wellington Terrace just a few strides from the flat. So all four of us bundled over to my part of Kensington as it were, to see the flat.
It was very much still work in progress. I remember one of the guys questioning whether it would all be done before Christmas if, as I had described, Gavin was unable to retain a member of staff even for half a day so was effectively working alone on the job.
I also remember one of the guys (perhaps the same one) suggesting that the smell of solvents inside the flat was so great that it was making his eyes stream after five minutes and was surely so strong that anyone working in there for several hours would be “high as a kite” for much of the day.
Valid points, I sense.
Eventually it was all done and lovely…much to the relief of all of the then residents.
I don’t much recall the meal either. But at The Park Inn it will have been good.
…nada for a couple of weeks. We went to Kim & Mickey for dinner on Saturday 30 October, but then seemed to lie low socially and culturally for a fortnight. Janie’s diary suggests that she was working full pelt. Mine suggests that I was on a major report writing deadline or two, as I saw few clients and blocked out several half days and whole days for writing.
Then we went to the Donmar Warehouse to see this beauty of a play/production, which we both rated as:
Very good.
Great cast: Colin Firth, Elizabeth McGovern & David Morrissey. Directed by Robin Lefevre.
It had enjoyed a short run at the Donmar earlier in the year; we caught its autumn return. Janie booked it, so her diary reports that we sat in seats A24 & A25 and that she parted company with £48 in total. Thems was the days!
Nicholas de Jongh in The Standard shared our liking for this play/production:
In Janie’s diary for Sunday 14 November, but not mine, the following reminder – presumably based on me saying to Janie, “let’s not forget to listen to…”
The Attractive Young Rabbi. Barry Grossman. 11:30 Radio 4.
Tracy-Anne Oberman was also a NewsRevue (or more specifically, SportsRevue) alum, so this series was definitely a tribute to our NewsRevue “Class of ’92”.
There’s Barry in the Guinness World Record photo, with specs, holding the award.
I enjoyed listening to The Attractive Young Rabbi again. It is quintessentially BBC Radio Four comedy.
Postscript: Barry Grossman Writes…
Thanks Ian, except you and Janey [sic] must have missed it because it was actually on Friday, the 12th of November.
And there were no i-players, BBC Sounds or internet archives in those more innocent times. Perhaps you taped it on your reel-to-reel tape recorder the size of a house and listened to it on the Sunday.
I responded to Barry as follows:
Weird but clearly true that the broadcast was on the Friday not the Sunday, yet the note is unquestionably written in the Sunday section of Janie’s diary.
My guess is that Janie wrote the note there because the Friday page was completely crammed with patient appointments. The Saturday block is covered in notes about something completely different and unintelligible. So the only space for an additional note on that page was the Sunday block.
Quite right that there was no public domain technology to help us listen at an alternative time, but Janie did have a midi hi-fi thing in the maisonette that would enable you to record onto cassette from the radio. I was out visiting clients that day, but she would have been able to press the record button on her midi gadget at the appointed hour. My guess is that the note was a reminder to do that.
No gargantuan reel-to-reel tape recorder available at that time – that device lives in the flat and the flat was being refurbished that autumn. Probably just as well – Janie was reluctant enough to press a “record” button on a bog-standard midi system. My reel-to-reel would have seemed like something out of Mission Impossible to Janie…
An unprecedented hat trick of evenings at the theatre concluded with this piece. Little did we know when we booked it that this to be a highly controversial play.
Here’s a newspaper clipping from the following day:
No-one else seems to have reviewed it. The other papers seemed obsessed with news of the play’s controversy rather than the play itself, which is a a shame.
I recall that we rather liked the Pleasance Theatre but not its location.
We had been traipsing around that day, having been to the City for a do (neither of us can remember) and then a stop off to see some oriental art at the British Museum before The Pleasance. Would we have the energy for all that 25 years later? Would we have the energy for a hat-trick of evenings at the theatre?
For some reason, stuff at The Old Vic rarely works for us and this production of Antigone was no exception. It had been bigged-up in the media on the back of a big name cast, headed up by Tara Fitzgerald alongside Jonathan Hyde, Anna Calder-Marshall, Zubin Varla and several others, under the skilled direction of (and adaption by) Declan Donnellan.
More often than not, if the critics are divided, we side with Billington (Guardian) over Spencer (Telegraph), but Charles Spencer panned this production (perhaps more vociferously than our view). I’ll let him have the last word:
In truth we remember little about this one. I was taking some time off – mostly to “supervise” the fraught business of Gavin renovating my flat. Janie was trying to work half days and take a bit of time off too. We saw several plays and exhibitions that week.
We had discovered the Chelsea Place Theatre a few months earlier when we saw Home Body/Kabul…
This was the last ever production in the Room above The Orange Tree pub itself. The bespoke Orange Tree Theatre had been up and running for a while by then and the decision was made to stop doing some shows above the pub still. A shame in a way, as we loved that small venue. But understandable.
Here is a preview of the show from the Richmond & Twickenham Informer:
Judging by the markings in both of our diaries, we had planned to go away for a couple of weeks that October and then changed our minds. Probably because we didn’t think we could leave Gavin unmanaged doing the works at Clanricarde Gardens. This was one of several things we booked up to replace the holiday. We both did some work but worked light during those weeks.
It wasn’t a great play or production, but the story was interesting and Mairead Carty was always very watchable.
I don’t remember a great deal about this one. I don’t think we were particularly impressed, although we wanted to be, because the idea of former prisoners making drama feels like a wonderful idea to us.
Our friend, Michael Billington, took the trouble to go and review it for The Guardian. We’ll take his word for it.
A successful night at The Questors with the Duchess (Janie’s mum). I wrote,
very good,
in my log, which will be a comment on the play/production rather than The Duchess’s conduct.
Janie and I subsequently saw a superb production of this play at The Donmar.
I recall having some reservations about seeing an amateur production of this great play, but actually The Questors had actors and creatives of sufficient quality to carry this work well.
Janie’s diary suggests that we went to eat at a place named Rastificia afterwards, on Ealing Broadway, at 10:30. Sounds like Jamaican food from the name.
Just what Janie and I will have needed on a Friday evening after a long week’s work. No doubt the waiters made a fuss of The Duchess and no doubt she wanted to stay for one more cigarette at the end of the meal, so we’ll have got home very late indeed.
Also, no doubt, the deal was that The Duchess did the theatre tickets, Janie did the interval drinks and I did the meal. [Note to historians – The Duchess got several pairs of guest tickets free each year with her membership of The Questors – I’m pretty sure we didn’t go any more often than the using up of the freebies allowed].
“Parsimony is the best policy” – The Duchess of Castlebar
Weiss Curtis Standard 23 Nov 1999, Tue Evening Standard (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com
Weiss Spencer Telegraph 27 Nov 1999, Sat The Daily Telegraph (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com
