This Cheek By Jowl production started at the Everyman in Cheltenham and Northcott Exeter before switching to the Lyric Hammersmith. Janie and I rated this one very good. We must have been very keen to see it as we went to the penultimate performance on a Friday evening (on a weekend when we also went to The Orange Tree on the Saturday), which even for us was a bit excessive.
We are especially partial to Tennessee Williams; while this play is not “major Williams” it was still a gripping theatrical event for us.
We were on quite a roll with our theatre going that spring. We thought this one was very good, as indeed we had consistently said for some time – certainly everything we had seen since our return from the Middle East.
We are both partial to a bit of Lorca, but Dona Rosita is considered to be a difficult Lorca play. This production did the piece proud.
A superb cast for this one, including Celia Imrie, Eleanor Bron, Phoebe Nicholls, Justin Salinger, Amanda Drew, Kerry Shale, Kathryn Hunter (she seemed to be everywhere at that time) with Phyllida Lloyd directing. Here is the Theatricalia entry for this one.
Our friend, Michael Billington, was suitably impressed with it.
…the sort of fortnight that looks, twenty-five years later, like an utterly mad way to over-fill one’s diary and hare around the country like a mad thing.
A tour for Barnardo’s. with whom I was working quite a lot back then, took in Yorkshire, Wales and Barkingside in the space of a few days, interrupted only for some meetings with other clients and a foreshortened weekend which included dinner with Janie’s lovely neighbours, Hussein and Saji on the Saturday.
I guess the frantic aspect of the work was somewhat self-inflicted, as I had arranged a proper long weekend in Stratford only a couple of weeks after returning from a three-week holiday.
Our main purpose in Stratford was to take in a couple of plays, which I shall write up individually and separately. On this slightly extended visit I do recall also having the time to have a proper good wander around the town and take in some of the touristic sites we wouldn’t normally find time to see when visiting Stratford for the theatre.
Was I welcome in these places or was I Bard?
We stayed on until Tuesday 22 April and went to a Seder (perhaps at Jacquie’s, perhaps at Mum & Dad’s) the evening of our return.
We celebrated our homecoming from the Middle East with a visit to the theatre to see this wonderful production of, coincidentally, Pinter’s The Homecoming.
What a cast. Lindsay Duncan, Michael Sheen, Eddie Marsan, Keith Allen & David Bradley. Roger Michell directed it.
25 years after the event (March 2022) I am starting to write up the wonderful 1997 trip Janie and I took to see Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, followed by some restful time in Eilat.
Hopefully my diary/log together with the many pictures we took will prompt my memory to tell the whole story, as my notes are light and even the Abercrombie and Kent itinerary (a bespoke jobbie for us as independent travellers) seems to have gone walkabout in the intervening quarter of a century.
Writing about it now is tinged with sadness, as I realise that many of the things we saw have been destroyed and can never be seen again. The artisan depicted in the headline photo, working away in the Aleppo Souk, is but one example of that.
The photos have been available on Flickr for some time, so Ogblog readers who like to look at pictures and read captions can glean much about the journey without reading the Ogblog pieces.
Here are links to the pictures divided by country visited:
The Ogblog pieces mostly cover a day each, with highlights from the photo albums (and some stock photos where desires/required) to illustrate the stories.
For reasons I hardly need to explain, we then did very little during the day, apart from lounging, reading and swimming.
In particular, we tended to skip lunch, other than perhaps some nuts and a beer.
We befriended a camel, whom we named Cadissa, convinced that this single camel had followed us all around the Levant and was now resting up in Eilat along with us. On subsequent holidays in the Middle East and Maghreb we would often encounter Cadissa again…or so we would say, anyway.
Cadissa was there on business that morning
In short, we had a very relaxing and enjoyable break at that place. Although we don’t normally go for that type of big hotel, it was just the ticket after a rigorous touring holiday.
Our flight home was quite late in the day, so we made an impromptu arrangement for our transport vehicle to give us a brief look around Tel Aviv-Yafo before we went on to the airport. I think we had used up all of our film ahead of that mini tour; in any case we have no pictures from it. Janie hadn’t seen any of it before – I hadn’t been up top to see the contrast of and views from Yafo before.
…I was given quite a grilling on exit by an Israeli security guy, who perhaps found our Lebanon, Syria & Jordan trip a matter of concern. He tried to wrong-foot me by telling me that I had been inconsistent in my account of where we had been.
When I repeated what I had said and then shown him the Abercrombie & Kent itinerary, he apologised to me and then let me through.
An apology from an official – there’s a first time and a last time for everything I suppose.
You can see all the pictures from this trip in a single, 300+ picture album, by clicking here or below.
Hounslow Chronicle Glass Of Water 08 May 1997, Thu The Hounslow Chronicle (Hounslow, London, England) Newspapers.com
