This is a very interesting movie; in some ways an entertaining documentary and in other ways disturbing/thought-provoking.
It is the true story of identical siblings who were separated at birth as part of an ill-conceived scientific experiment and who become reunited in their late teens by happenstance.
While the other films we saw this season were all very interesting, both about the people involved and the issues those people encountered in their lives, Three Identical Strangers was deeper in that it made us think about a great many hugely important issues, ranging from medical ethics to the nature verses nurture debate.
The movie is extremely well made. It avoids the pitfall of trying to be too conclusive whereas, in reality, part of the fascination and tragedy of the story is that it isn’t and could never have been conclusive.
Janie and I saw the movie early evening and then spent the rest of the evening debating the issues. Highly recommended.
Actually I ended 2018 reading the following short Kindle book by my old Alleyn’s school buddy, David Wellbrook.
I would like to recommend David’s book, My Good Friend, highly to anyone who cares to pay attention to my opinion.
I say, “I would like to”, rather than “I have recommended”, because Amazon, in their (absence of) wisdom, chose to reject the following review, which I submitted this morning:
An Exceptionally Good “Merry Pranks” Chapbook
This is a chapbook in the Renaissance sense of the word – i.e. a short, inexpensive booklet or short book. As it happens, it is also a “chap book” in the more modern sense, as it is a comedic set of anecdotes about the scrapes two young chaps – inseparable friends, who manage to get each other into (and sometimes out of) trouble.
Imagine a version of “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks” with two central practical joker characters and you are starting to get the picture.
The adventures of this pair of twenty-somethings, David Wellbrook and his “Good Friend”, in the 1980s, mostly occurred either when they went on holiday together or when they were chasing opportunities to make a quick buck and/or score with young women.
The identity of My Good Friend appears to be a closely guarded secret. Some sources suggest that he is now a knight of the realm. Other sources suggest that he is an ordained minister of the Church. It is also rumoured that he was transported to the antipodes before the end of the 1980s, where he remains at large. On my reading of this laugh-out-loud short book, it is quite possible that “My Good Friend” today is all of those things and more besides.
More than just funny, the book is ultimately warm and charming. Read it and you’ll no doubt wish that you had spent your school days growing up with these clowns. I know I did.
Within about one minute of my submission, I received the following e-mail rejection:
Thank you for submitting a customer review on Amazon. After carefully reviewing your submission, your review could not be posted to the website. While we appreciate your time and comments, reviews must adhere to the following guidelines: http://www.amazon.co.uk/review-guidelines
I felt quite put out by that rejection, for several reasons:
It was nigh-on impossible for someone to have really read, by which I mean read, thought about and cognitively digested, the content of my review in the short interval between my posting and the rejection notice;
I have submitted several Amazon reviews in the past and never been rejected before;
I carefully read the review guidelines and could not work out which element of the guidelines I was deemed to have breached;
I did feel that the one review that Amazon has published so far for this book, by Derin, was, in my opinion, while amusing and a nice bit of fun amongst old friends, in breach of several of the guidelines…unlike mine. Here is a scrape of Derin’s review which might well bite the Amazonian dust if by chance Amazon wonks start crawling all over this incident:
So, I decided to appeal to Amazon customer service in order to have the injustice reversed. I wrote as follows:
I am horrified that you have rejected my thoughtful and well-crafted review for this book – see below. The review was rejected within seconds, so I do not believe that someone gave it due consideration at all, whereas, I’m sure you can tell, the review is well-written and honest.
Frankly, if you do not reconsider and choose instead to publish the review I shall never review anything on Amazon again.
Here is the reference number that came with the rude e-mail from you – thereafter the content I sent: Reference A1F83G8C2ARO7P-RKQCVM2C9B62D.
A couple of hours later I received the following Kurt reply:
Hello Mr Ian L Harris,
This is Kurt from Amazon Customer Care.
I apologise if your feel that your review of “My Good Friend” by David Wellbrook has been rejected.
Thank you for taking the time to provide not only a well thought out but also a heartfelt review of one of our Kindle Titles.
We do not wish to make you feel rejected and sincerely how that you continue to provide both Amazon and Amazon Customers with more of your book reviews.
It always helps customers like yourself to find the right title for themselves and helps Amazon find the right title types to provide to loyal customers like you.
We hope you continue your Kindle reading and heartfelt review.
If you require any other assistance, we can be reached 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You can contact us by following the link below: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/contact-us
Thank you for taking time to contact Amazon.
Your feedback is helping us build Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company.
Warmest regards, Kurt C Amazon.co.uk
So that’s it then. My appeal has been denied. The use of English in the denial note is so awful, it cannot even be an entirely algorithmic decision (I figure the original rejection decision might well have been).
So please allow me, in my own space, to unpick that travesty of an e-mail reply from customer services.
…I apologise if your feel that your review of “My Good Friend” by David Wellbrook has been rejected…
I don’t FEEL that it has been rejected; it HAS been rejected.
…We do not wish to make you feel rejected and sincerely how that you continue to provide both Amazon and Amazon Customers with more of your book reviews…
I think you mean “hope” not “how”, but there is no point hoping, Kurt. When I said, “if you do not reconsider and choose instead to publish the review I shall never review anything on Amazon again“, I meant it.
…It always helps customers like yourself to find the right title for themselves and helps Amazon find the right title types to provide to loyal customers like you...
I see. So you want me to write reviews, which you will publish or reject at your algorithmic whim, so that you can sell me and other people more stuff. Well, I think I told you before that you have blown that deal with me and it should come as no surprise that the deal is still blown. Now with brass knobs on
… Your feedback is helping us build Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company…
I am hoping against hope that Amazon’s corporate behaviour today is not the Earth’s most customer centric stuff.
…Warmest regards, Kurt C …
Well, I guess it was a pun to describe the denial note as Kurt, as I suppose there is an attempt at courtesy, but to milk a similar pun, it is an “empty Kurt C” as far as I am concerned.
So, my dear friends, there it is, my first rejection of 2019 and it wasn’t even past noon on the 1st of January.
I tried to help David Wellbrook in his quest to storm the world of electronic publishing, but I failed to get past the first hurdle.
In similar circumstances, David’s “Good Friend”, The Right Reverend Sir Nigel Godfrey, would, by now, no doubt, not only have had his review published but also been given a year’s free subscription to Amazon Ultra Platinum Prime for his trouble…
…oh darn, I think I’ve just blown the Good Friend’s cover.
Anyway, it is possible that more potential but undecided readers will land here than on that crummy Amazon Review area. So if you are one of those potential readers…
Janie and I had (are having) ample opportunity to play tennis over the holiday season this year. The weather is dull but basically dry and warm enough to enable us to play.
The majority of our contests have been draws. Of the eight contests we’ve had over the holiday season so far (as I write on 31 December), five have ended undecided as 5-5 draws. Until today the completed sets sat at 1-1. Today I managed to win the set, but was down in the second set when we agreed we’d had enough.
Picture from Nemu in Japan last month – imagine that racket spped
Janie is playing powerfully these days and is also mixing up her play to put me off my rhythm.
And talking of powerful women…
…our traditional Curzon film fest over Twixtmas has been a veritable powerful women fest.
Yayoi Kusama’s story really is fascinating, as is her art. The more perceptive Ogblog readers might have observed a sample of her infinity work taking over the look of Ogblog in the past week or so.
Actually we were glad to have the DVD rather than a cinema viewing of this one – as the subtitles were a bit difficult to read at times and tended to move on ridiculously quickly on some occasions, so we were grateful for the chance to scroll back and make sure we had assimilated the wise words.
Here is the official trailer for that movie:
The DVD is still available (just not from Victoria Miro) – e.g. from Amazon.
28th December we went, after work, to the Curzon Bloomsbury to see Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. Frankly, we hadn’t heard of rapper and activist Mathangi Arulpragasam, aka M.I.A. but thought her story and the description of the movie sounded fascinating.
Here is the official trailer for that movie:
It is a fascinating movie. Elements of the film go to the heart of debates about activism around complex causes. Other elements are almost comedic documentary, such as the apparently infamous incident where M.I.A. “gives the finger” to camera when performing for the Superbowl and kicks off a massive controversy – that bit reminded me more of Spinal Tap than Joan Baez or Pussy Riot.
Slightly strange mix of audience at the Curzon too. Mostly younger people who clearly have an affinity with M.I.A. as a contemporary singer, with a smattering of (how do I put this politely?) somewhat older-looking folk, like ourselves, who were probably there for the human rights more than the music. The fussy white-haired lady on our row of the Dochouse seemed to have come straight from “human-rights-activist central casting”.
The movie was well worth seeing.
30 December we returned to the Curzon Bloomsbury to see the movie about Hedy Lamarr.
Here is the official trailer of Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story:
I had read quite a lot about this one and it is a fascinating tale. Not only her achievements as an inventor of information & communications technology but also the way she completely changed (some would say reinvented) her life after escaping from Austria in the troubled 1930s. I had previously read about her scientific inventions but, before seeing the movie, I had no idea that she was born and raised Jewish nor that her first marriage was to an Austrian armaments manufacturer who had sold weapons to Hitler.
As with all three of these movies, I couldn’t completely buy in to the “powerful woman who have been denied their rightful credit” story. All three of these women are, unquestionably, to some extent, victims of injustice. Hedy Lamarr by all accounts should have benefited from her patent on frequency-hopping (or spread spectrum) telecommunications. But then, so should her co-inventor, George Antheil – he remains even less remembered for the invention that Hedy Lamarr. It is also a huge stretch to attribute all of the value in GPS, Bluetooth and Wifi to the technology in that patent.
In truth, all three of the powerful women in these movies have benefited from their beauty and charisma, while also being held back from some of the credit that might have accrued to their efforts had they been men or had they arrived at their achievements from more conventional routes.
But then, even Janie’s powerful tennis comes from an unusual source these days…
…anyway, my excuse is that it is difficult to concentrate on getting the ball back time and time again, when you know that the power and balance in Janie’s shots is being cultivated by such unconventional tennis preparation:
Making my head spin…
This will be my last posting for 2018 – happy new year to those Ogblog readers who follow Ogblog contemporarily.
Clearly not. In my own defence, I thought that activity would have died down by the Saturday before Christmas. For us, work-wise, it had – but not for the shops and shoppers in neighbouring Oxford Street. Who knew?
In any case, I was very keen to see and hear this concert. Janie and I had very much enjoyed the Avital Meets Avital concert some eighteen months earlier:
So I was fascinated to see how Avi Avital got on with Baroque music and sort of glossed over the proximity to Christmas when I booked this Venice Baroque Orchestra concert.
Suffice it to say that the journey was suitably awful for Janie and me to agree, “never again at this time of year”…again. Yet, also again, the pain soon turned to pleasure when we listened to the music and watched the musicians.
Mostly Vivaldi, but we got to hear some Geminiani (of the Corelli variety) and one piece by a later Neapolitan composer, Giovanni Paisiello. Avi told a fruity anecdote about the difference between Venetians and the hyper-romantic Neapolitans.
Avi Avital also told an amusing anecdote from his early childhood about falling in love with the Winter concerto from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, only to find out some years later that the piece he had actually fallen in love with was the Summer Concerto. Avi claims, it wasn’t until he went to Venice to work with the Venice Baroque Orchestra, that he actually experienced a violent summer thunder storm and realised why that stormy-sounding music represented summer rather than winter.
But the most interesting anecdote, which Avi told right at the end of the concert, was the fact that the concert very nearly didn’t happen at all. Most of the musicians were stranded as a result of the Gatwick Airport Drone Incident, which had required Avi’s team and the Wigmore Hall to work tirelessly rerouting musicians to enable the concert to go ahead. And we thought we’d had a stressful journey to that concert!
The orchestra are clearly seasoned exponents of this flavour of baroque music, although we felt that one or two members of the orchestra were not at their best that evening; perhaps travel or even life weary.
Avi Avital is an extraordinary, charismatic virtuoso of his instrument – his quality shines through all he plays. Yet, Janie and I both felt, some of the pieces that have been transposed from violin virtuoso pieces lose some of their musical quality through the transposition. Not for want of fine playing, but simply because the mandolin is a more limited, metal-stringed instrument. I enjoyed the change in some of the transposed pieces, but really missed the violin’s colour on others.
Below is a YouTube of a lovely, similar performance from a concert in Seoul a few week’s earlier:
Janie started to obsess about Yayoi Kusama before we went to Japan, as Janie had heard about Kusama’s new gallery in Tokyo and how impossible it was to get in there. We tried. We failed.
We even discussed Kusama with some art loving Brits, “Mr & Mrs Tinker”, while travelling between Tsumagao and Takyama and tried, without success, to book from a Japanese railway platform this Victoria Miro exhibition for our return to London. It was sold out. Failed again.
Then, a couple of weeks after our return from Japan, Janie learnt through a client that the Victoria Miro Yayoi Kusama exhibition had been extended and that a few of those extra timed slots might still be available. Janie called me excitedly and we managed, at pretty high speed, to find a suitable slot in our diaries, thus grabbing one of those few remaining Victoria Miro slots.
Janie got to the flat well early that afternoon so we decided to stop off at the British Library along the way – Janie had never seen the place. We had a quick look around the Sir John Ritblat rooms – Treasures Of The British Library, taking in some beautiful old books from around the world, plus the Magna Carta.
Then we took some refreshment at the library before heading off for our early evening Yayoi Kusama appointment at Wharf Road.
A pretty strict appointment it is too. While the team at Victoria Miro are pretty relaxed about people wandering around the open exhibition rooms and the garden, the small infinity room exhibit is done on a timed entry with each pair given precisely one minute to walk around the room and look/take pictures.
Actually the whole show is one of those experiences for which the maxim “a picture can tell a thousand words” applies, so I’m going to stop writing and instead show a dozen or so of the pictures we took – the first two being from that infinity room:
Two other aspects of this exhibition really delighted both of us, especially Janie. Firstly, the limited edition book, the purchase of which was effectively the deal through which we got our exhibition tickets. The book has wonderful pictures of all the exhibits – Janie expects to enjoy dipping into that book from her metaphorical coffee table for some time to come.
Secondly, we managed to procure the very last copy Victoria Miro had of the DVD Yayoi Kusama: Infinity– thanks to helpful Ayley at Wharf Road for holding that back for us. As it happens, at the time of writing that DVD is widely available – only a few clicks away. Still, we have our copy in hand and are looking forward to watching it over the seasonal break ahead. It looks like a fascinating documentary about Kusama’s life and work.
In short, we had a very enjoyable experience – we felt fortunate and privileged to have seen this show. We celebrated back at the flat, suitably enough, with a Japanese meal from the new Eat Tokyo place that has just opened up on Notting Hill Gate.
If the above dozen photos isn’t enough for you, you can see all 89 photos we took at the exhibition on the following Flickr album:
A bittersweet occasion, as Janie and I joined an informal conclave to say goodbye to Toni (Antoinette) Friend, who had died a few days earlier and been interred at family funeral.
Toni’s sons, Will, Tom and John, organised a discreet, small gathering at Daphne’s, one of Toni’s favourite places.
John and Will each made a short, moving speech about their mum, but mostly the gathering was, in accordance with Toni’s wishes, a celebration of her life.
It was very tastefully done. We met several people we had met before and a few that we hadn’t met before. Janie took a few pictures, the best of which are below.
Toni would have enjoyed this gathering – it had all the hallmarks of her style – and she would surely have been proud of her boys for the graceful way the event was conducted.
We had a fine lunchtime meal as our Z/Yen seasonal works outing this year, in the Guildhall. The meal is described in detail on the menu above.
I personally went for the tempura of cod followed by goose and cheesecake – all was delicious. I wouldn’t make this point on Now & Z/Yen, but on my own blog I feel able to say that:
Tempura of Atlantic cod with garden pea puree and lemon grass drizzle
…is just a posh way of saying “fried cod & mushy peas”. Very tasty, it was.
Anyway, if you want to jump to the punchline unexplained, click the YouTube link below – especially 2’45” onwards, which illustrates the sort of thing we did, although we did it for ourselves:
Here’s the lyric I wrote to enlighten our proceedings::
EXTZY 2018 VERSION
(Sung to the tune of “Ding Dong Merrily On High”…or more accurately “Branle de l’Official”)
Buy/sell merrily at Z/Yen, In market games we’re trading; Buy/sell heavily, you ken, Z/Yen coffers we are raiding.
ExtZy, For prizes or donations; ExtZy, For prizes or donations.
This lark isn’t just a game, We’re Z/Yen Communitizing; Building membership’s our aim, And benchmark analyzing.
ExtZy, For prizes or donations; ExtZy, For prizes or donations.
Play through Avatars we’ve made, Z/Yen peoples’ role as ringers; Let’s just hope that when we trade, We’re better play’rs than singers.
ExtZy, For prizes or donations; ExtZy, For prizes or donations.
It is extraordinary how, when I was planning this year’s Z/Yen festive singing, all roads led back to my early music teacher, Ian Pittaway, really quite by chance. The Now & Z/Yen piece doth explain.
Rest assured, a fine time was had by all and that, despite our brawl in the Guildhall, we would be welcomed back there.
Well who’d have thought it? You see The Double Dealer at the National Theatre as a teenager in 1978 and then, quick as a forty-year flash, another London production comes around.
to enjoy a backstage tour of the National and see a matinee of the 1978 production in the Olivier Theatre 12 October 1978 – written up here.
When this 2018 production was announced for the Orange Tree, one of our favourite fringe theatres, my immediate reaction was that I simply had to see it. But Janie really doesn’t like restoration comedy at all…like…not at all. So we resolved that I would go to Richmond midweek to see this one.
A game of real tennis – a fitting activity to precede seeing a play by William Congreve
I played real tennis late afternoon at Lord’s, then drove over to Richmond to see the play. Tennis is an especially appropriate activity before seeing Congreve, I discovered, as William Congreve managed and premiered most of his plays (subsequent to The Double Dealer) at Lisle’s Tennis Court, aka Lincoln’s Inn Fields Playhouse, in the last few years of the 17th century and the early 1700s.
I took my seat a little early and observed several members of the cast scurrying back and forth across the stage as if still setting up the party which forms the backdrop to the play The Double Dealer. The conceit of this production is that the audience is, in effect, other guests at the party, so the cast at times engages with members of the audience. I thought that aspect worked really well, although one gentleman sitting next to me seemed more than a little nervous of, as he described it, “audience participation”.
Actually I think the cast were, prior to the start of the play, deliberately trying to suss out the audience – working out who might respond willingly or less willingly to such business. As luck (or ill-fortune, depending on your view) would have it, the two seats next to me were unoccupied.
Dharmesh Patel, who was playing Careless, sat next to me for a while before the show and asked me whether I was an Orange Tree fan, a restoration fan or neither. I told him about my 1978 experience with the play and that I was also an Orange Tree fan. He told me that Selina Cadell, the director, had seen and talked about that star-studded 1978 production it a lot in rehearsal. I said that I was hoping for better. “No pressure then”, he said.
Of course, it is not a competition between the two productions. The equivalent budget for the National production would have been orders of magnitude higher. The Orange Tree holds 180 people maximum; the Olivier can hold nearly 1000 more people than that. It is almost like producing the work for a different medium.
From a personal point of view, my response as a kid of 16, experiencing a major theatrical production for the first time, having had a thrilling backstage look at the play and the production beforehand, cannot be compared with my response 40+ years later, having seen and experienced so much else since.
Not a kid any more.
One intriguing parallel between 1978 and 2018 is a context of political turmoil and Machiavellian-style politics – even more so in 2018 in fact. The Double Dealer is not an especially sophisticated play – in fact it is quite straightforward by the baroque standards of the period – but it surely was written to illustrate political intrigue as well as the overt intrigue of families and sexual relationships depicted.
I read the play in its entirety, for the first time, the night before going to The Orange Tree – from this wonderful Project Gutenburg source, here. When I read the following couplet, from Maskwell’s (The Double Dealer’s) soliloquy at the end of Act One:
One minute gives invention to destroy, What to rebuild will a whole age employ.
…my immediate thought was, “that reminds me of Brexit.” When Maskwell said that line on the night, a woman in the audience said out loud exactly what I had thought when reading the night before.
Actually, the Maskwell character reminds me even more of the Double Dealer President across the pond, who is shaking up domestic US and global politics with his harem-scarem style. Except that Maskwell is a far more charismatic villain – at least he is so in the hands of Edward MacLiam, a pantomime villain perhaps, but still a charismatic one.
One element of the play I didn’t notice at all the first time, partly by virtue of my youth and partly by virtue of the time, was the female element of the sexual politics involved. The Lady Touchwood character (played well by Zoë Waites, who had to work especially hard, as she also played Cynthia, well) is a fairly straightforward villain, but the Lady Plyant character (played by Jenny Rainsford in 2018, having been Dorothy Tutin’s award-winning role in 1978) is surprisingly complex. In a way she is also a Double Dealer – but as a woman she is (to milk the card game metaphor dry) playing with a lesser hand with fewer tricks. She knows she can use her sexual allure to some advantage but, having made the decision to marry an old man she does not fancy at all, is frustrated and in thrall to her own sexual desires. In a modern sexual politics context, the #MeToo movement and fake news phenomena came to mind as well.
Personally, I enjoyed the audience interaction, of which I thought the cast did plenty, but not too much. The production could have descended into excessive pantomime style in the second half but they wisely reigned in most of the ad lib business as the plot plays out to its inevitable denouement.
I also appreciated the use of the original Purcell music, being a bit of an early music aficionado myself. Paul Reid and Hannah Stokely (as Lord & Lady Froth) performed Cynthia Frowns as a solo voice and cello duet extremely well for the context of the play. They are clearly both capable musicians, so it sounded lovely, but they made their efforts come across as “just difficult enough” to be in keeping with their faux culture vulture characters.
Listed as “Celia (Cynthia) Frowns” – even Purcell recycled his original material it seems – who knew?
In short, in my view, this production of The Double Dealer is a really excellent revival of an interesting but not great restoration work.
The reviews have been mixed – click here – but I’d certainly recommend this production (unless, like Janie, you have an aversion to restoration comedy) as a thoroughly entertaining evening at the theatre, with enough in the text and performances to please thoughtful members of the audience too.
Janie and I had planned a day off that Monday anyway, so Brian Eno’s seasonal bash shifting to the Monday worked well for us – a rare opportunity for Janie to join in that fun.
We had been keen to see Japan House in Kensington since we learned of its arrival in London:
It was well worth seeing – many different artists displaying subtle ideas about making art from, or at least enhanced by, paper.
Then on to Brian’s party. I was keen to get there in good time to join in the singing. This is not seasonal singing but it is an opportunity to join in with Brian’s rather excellent a capella choir. A mixture of old and modern songs, carefully honed week in, week out by the regulars, who largely manage to prevent keen irregulars like me from ruining the sound.
Plenty of time for some eating, drinking and chatting – as usual with Brian’s parties, we chatted with several very pleasant and interesting people – before the dancing started in earnest. Janie is never a wall flower when there is a chance to dance and I knew that Brian’s choice of music is mostly right up Janie’s street.
Two very tiring hours later, Janie and I thought we should make our excuses and go – we both had work in the morning and felt we had left it all out on the dance floor by then. Good times.
The Alun Armstrong character is a deputy headmaster, a teacher of 45 years standing, who is due to retire. Maggie Steed is his wife and Nicola Walker is their estranged daughter.
I don’t think it is a spoiler to explain that the central aspect of the controversy in which the central character is embroiled is his use of the cane, until corporal punishment was prohibited in the mid 1980s…
…or is it? The play’s title is The Cane, so it must simply be about that topic. Certainly the cane is a central artifact to the plot…
…yet much of the story doesn’t really add up. Would modern school children really riot against a teacher, days before his retirement, simply because he used to administer the cane 30+ years ago? Surely there must be more to it than that?
Similarly, much of the family’s back story doesn’t exactly add up or reconcile between their memories either. Axe marks on the wall are a visible example throughout the piece.
Janie saw these conundrums (or do I mean conundra?) as signs of weakness in the plot, but I thought the cane was a metaphor for the use of violence as a disciplinary measure generally. I thought the play was a metaphor for power struggles and violence within institutions like schools, within families, between teachers and pupils, between husbands, wives and children.
Still, it was hard to sympathize with any of the characters. In particular, the Maggie Steed character seemed at once pathetically weak and yet hell-bent on making forceful, irreversible decisions in an attempt to assert some element of power. I think Maggie Steed’s voice was failing on our night, which hopefully is a passing issue, but her floundering gestures didn’t really work for either of us. Perhaps she can control and channel those a bit more convincingly between preview and press night.
Janie didn’t find Alun Armstrong’s character sinister enough either, whereas I thought his manner of suppressed violence disguised by a kindly veneer was sufficiently creepy or sinister for me. Vincent Price without the ham.
Similarly, for me, the Nicola Walker character was sinister. We couldn’t get to the bottom of her motivation, even by the end of the play, but I think that air of mystery was the writer’s intention. At first you wondered how this person could be the daughter of those parents – by the end I thought I could see the echoes – a different style of controlling behaviour and a different style of violence – but still those characteristics to the fore.
Personally, I liked the debate about education within the play. In the absence of physical discipline through corporal punishment, how do teachers maintain control. (Answer, in my view, mostly by teaching well.)
There was a fascinating speech from Nicola Walker’s character about discipline the modern way in academy schools – a form of, “eyes front at all times, no talking in the corridors between lessons”. I could imagine that being effective as discipline…but I’m not sure I’d have been any more comfortable in that sort of disciplinary environment than I was/would have been in the old-fashioned “threat of corporal punishment” environment.
Whether that debate would seem as interesting or insightful to those mixed up in the education system (either as parents, teachers or pupils) today I have no idea, but it seemed relevant and interesting to me, sitting (as I do) on the outside of education for several decades.
Before the play we got chatting with a woman in the drinks queue who turned out to be Gaynor Churchward…Minnie Driver’s mum. It would have been interesting to have learnt after the show what she thought about the play; her life experience of schooling being rather unusual and very different from either of ours. But we didn’t stick around to chat with anyone – we dashed off for a shawarma supper and a reasonably early night.
I agree with Janie to some extent that the piece might benefit from a little more naturalism and direct tackling of the issues/story, but I still found the production a worthwhile and enjoyable evening in the theatre, in the hands of some expert theatrical operators.
