Gosh, we thought this was a very good production indeed.
We both normally have reservations about “dystopian future” plays. Janie in particular was not sure about the subject matter of this one when we booked it. Had it not been for my enthusiasm for the specific moral dilemmas I saw coming and our general sense that Hampstead Downstairs plays are normally worth seeing, we might well not have booked this.
In short, the play is about a future society in which genetic profiling becomes the “be all and end all” of people’s prospects.
Indeed Janie said she found the subject matter creepy during the interval and we noticed that several people did not return after the interval. That is a real shame, because the play was extremely well acted, directed and produced; well worth watching for the drama that unfolds, even if the story line is not quite your bag.
The plot was somewhat predictable, because (without wanting to give too much away) the motivation that might cause certain behaviours could only logically have been caused by the eventual, pivotal plot twist.
But I still think this is a good play – the dialogue is top notch and the moral dilemmas well worth exploring, even if in the context of a future society, elements of which seem prescient but the extreme version depicted seems somewhat unlikely.
Below is the promotional video for this play/production:
Attempts to get John Random (aka John Burns) to see some real tennis at Lord’s had not gone particularly well, previously, with John being called up to appear in a meerkat advert last time he was due to come see.
So when John called on the afternoon before our arrangement for 6 April, because he had a last minute call to be a 1940’s MP, we both thought the worst.
But in the end, as the call turned out to be 15:00, we still had time 6 April for John to see me play. As it happens, the contest turned out to form part of an unusual type of hat-trick. This was the second of three singles matches in a row in which my opponent had a double-barrelled name. Such names are not exactly rare amongst players of real tennis at Lord’s – but three in a row must be quite a rarity. In any case, I played well (by my own modest standards)…
Hopefully I have come on a bit in the 18 months since this photo was taken
…then John and I took some lunch at Mazi in Notting Hill Gate before he went off to be an historic MP.
I’d forgotten how good a place Mazi is – and so convenient for a local lunch. So when Stephen “Stentor Baritone” Barry got in touch on the following Monday with the good news that the Lord’s tickets we thought had got lost in the post had in fact been returned to him, I suggested we meet at Mazi for a quick bite on the Tuesday to avoid further possible postal misery. A very enjoyable lunch and a good chance to catch up, as we hadn’t seen each other for some months.
The Lord’s tickets in question are for Charles “Charley The Gent Malloy” Bartlett and Nigel “Father Barry White” Hinks, who shall be joining me and Daisy (Janie) on the Saturday of the test match.
But Charley and I had/have some cricket to see in advance of that test match – not least and first up, the opening day of the season at Lord’s – now a traditional meet. I produced a picnic in my traditional stylee. Smoked salmon bagels, Iberico ham muffins and a fine Riesling (Alsatian on this occasion) forming the core.
Gawd it was cold at times that day. But we suffered for our love of cricket and sat it out at the front of the pavilion.
The MCC have been granted permission to use floodlights for the County Championship matches this year, which is a real coup and/but frankly overdue. I understand why local folk didn’t want untrammelled use of floodlights at Lord’s in the evenings, but they cause no disturbance during the day.
We’d probably have had no play at all without the lights and indeed, because it was so gloomy, only got a limited amount of play – about half the day’s play – even with the lights.
Middlesex had of course been inserted by Northants and I thought did well to battle it to 136/4 by the time stumps were drawn.
No shame there, though. John Random had been similarly “stitched up like a kipper” by it. Indeed it seems to have fooled most people.
I dare Ogblog readers who missed the posting over Easter to click through, watch the little vid and work out what was going on.
But enough of Lauds and back to Lord’s…
…play ended a little early and the day ended all too quickly, as always. I shall be joining Charley at Chelmsford next Friday, with the weather forecast suggesting a more pleasant climate for cricket than that gloomy opening day. But it had been worth it for the splendid company and the cricket, of course.
The week had somewhat run away with me, though, having ruled out much of the previous work day unexpectedly for Hazel Jacobs’s funeral, followed by the Middlesex CCC AGM, which also had a somewhat funereal feel to it this season.
Anyway, I got to the office after an early meeting at the LSE and managed to get my office stuff done by the appointed hour, so I was able to hot-foot it to SJSS on time.
A jolly looking harpsichord
I thought Tabea Debus came across really nicely – showing great enthusiasm and academic interest in her instrument and the topic of the concert, while projecting also the poise and folksiness of a true show-person. A star in the making.
She has previous at SJSS and they in fact made a short vid for her first mini-residency as a young artist a couple of years ago – see below:
The concert I saw was mostly Telemann – the theme being the subscription lists Telemann developed during his masterful music business career, plus the high-falutin’ composers who were among his subscribers and friends; Bach, Handel and Blavet.
Below is a video of Tabea performing some delicious Telemann, but not the stuff we scoffed that lunchtime:
Tabea also played a couple of modern works which were part of a commission commemorating the 250th anniversary of Telemann’s death. One of those, Frank Zabel’s “…fizzling out” was extraordinarily complex-sounding and must be a real challenge to play.
Then on to a music lesson for my humble skills – although Ian Pittaway seemed surprisingly pleased with my simple transcription of a Loqueville Rondo.
Then on to punish myself with two real tennis singles matches at Lord’s – 135 minutes unbroken is too long for an old geezer like me.
But I digress.
That lunchtime at SJSS was an hour supremely well spent. I’ll be looking out for Tabea Debus’s name again, that’s for sure.
…this evening at the Royal Court – the opening night of Instructions for Correct Assembly – did not.
We arrived at the box office to the dissonant tones of a shouty man, who apparently did not understand what a member of staff was saying to him, tearing that poor member of staff off a strip. The evening went down hill from there.
We were told that the show was approximately 110 minutes without an interval – that is a worrying sign to me. It sometimes means that the play is so absorbing, the creatives feel it best not to break the spell with an interval. But more often it means, “best not to let the audience out for an interval, they might not come back”.
The bar was overcrowded and it took an age for us to get a couple of glasses of juice ahead of the show. The crowd seemed unusually down-beat for an opening night. This all gave me a sense of foreboding, which I did not share with Janie, other than to say, “I’m not sure I’m up for these heaving theatre bars any more”.
The audience did not get less irritating when we entered the theatre. A very tall couple entered the row in front of us – the female of the pair wearing a high-hair do reaching “fairly tall gentleman in a top hat” heights. “There’s lucky”, said Janie when they sat down a few seats to the right of us – at that juncture the seats in front of us were still free. In the end, though, in front of Janie, a very fidgety man. To the left of her, the type of people who forget that they are not in their own living room. Around the place, several mobile phones went off during the show.
Within about five minutes, I guessed that this play/production would not please either of us. At around that moment, Janie turned to me and whispered, “I’m not going to like this one – I can tell”.
What can I say about this play/production?
I had high hopes for it when we booked it. We had found an earlier Thomas Eccleshare play, Heather, at the Bush Studio, fascinating, just a few month’s ago:
But while that one was an innovative, quirky hit for us, Instructions for Correct Assembly kept missing the spot.
A couple who lost their only child in his early adulthood, try to build and train a robotic replacement.
There were some excellent lines. Eccleshare can write. The jokes when the couple did (or didn’t) turn the “opinionated dial” on the robot’s control panel were sometimes funny, although it was basically variants of the same joke several times over.
There were some excellent performers on show – their talents underused and misused on the whole. The only performance of note was Brian Vernel as the robot/druggie son.
There were some excellent illusions to assist with the creepiness of the robotic doppelganger idea – the production team clearly wanted us to experience the uncanny valley, as indeed the neighbour/friend characters get freaked out in the play.
Why the non-robotic characters were made to dance robotically during some of the scene changes is anybody’s guess.
The whole thing added up to very little in our view – a fascinating subject but a very poor play. The comedy of trying to assemble a robot much like an Ikea flat pack bed felt trite and inconsequential, while the tragedy that had befallen the family sat uncomfortably (indeed melodramatically) with the comedic element.
Below is a trailer/interview for this play/.production:
Perhaps we wouldn’t even have bothered to turn up had we watched that video in advance.
Once this show is reviewed, those reviews and other resources will be available through the search term links you can find if you click here. My guess is that those involved in the production and their loved ones would do best by not looking.
As we were leaving the auditorium, a small group of nice, older people were struggling because one of the women’s coats had got caught in the chair mechanism. We tried to help, but agreed in the end that they should wait for some assistance once the place emptied and the lights went up. The man, whom I recognised as a regular, said to me, with a twinkle in his eye, “we need the instruction manual for the chair”. Sadly, that was probably the most entertaining line of the evening.
Out in the lobby, the same shouty man from our arrival was tearing some other poor member of staff off a strip about some issue or another, this time about the exits. It was so bad, Janie remarked afterwards that she suspects that shouty man has a serious brain disorder. The irony of that notion – both with the subject matter of the play and the way we felt about the evening we’d just experienced, was not wasted on me.
Instructions for Correct Assembly is one to avoid.
We’ve mostly been very impressed by the stuff we’ve seen at the Finborough Theatre. We started trying the Finborough less than a year ago and this piece, White Guy On The Bus, was our tenth visit in that short time. Again we were most impressed.
We thought we must have seen US playwright Bruce Graham’s work before, until we realised that we were both probably making an amalgam of Bruce Norris and James Graham. The best of those two would make a pretty formidable amalgam as it happens and Bruce Graham’s piece, while perhaps lacking some of the flair of either of his semi-namesakes, was an excellent piece of writing.
Add to that Finborough’s ability to assemble a quality team of actors and creatives to pull together a low budget production that punches well above its weight…
…this was a very good evening of fringe theatre.
The themes of racial tensions, social inequality and political correctness seemed absolutely pertinent for our times. In truth the play is a bit of a slow starter, but by the interval we found ourselves hooked on a thriller with lots of issues and by the end we felt thoroughly entertained and thought-provoked. Two hours well spent.
Below is a trailer from one of the US productions – Curious Theatre Company:
Below is an extract from another of the US productions – Northlight Theatre – which gives a better feel for how the play comes across on a small stage:
as Janie and I we were walking up the stairs to the theatre, the man in front of me turned around and said “hello Ian” – it was Kim Ridge. I wondered out loud whether Kim and Catherine were regulars at the Finborough, but it turned out that they were there quite by happenstance having decided to give the place a try for the first time;
after the show, “The Ridges” disappeared rapidly, but Janie and I stuck around and chatted briefly with a very nice Canadian lady who had been sitting next to us. It turns out she goes to many of the fringe places we go to – I didn’t recognise her face but suspect we’ll run into her again. Next to her was a really pleasant young woman who also chatted with us about the play. It was that sort of theatre experience for us – we wanted to talk about the issues afterwards;
a yummy meal in Noddyland taken away from Mohsen’s – Janie and I continued to mull the issues over dinner.
…we thought Death Of A Hunter might be a bit of an anti-climax.
In fact, it rounded off our weekend of theatre rather well. Naturally this is not in the same production league as the Almeida’s production. But this interesting one hour play about the last hour of Ernest Hemmingway’s life, superbly acted by Edmund Dehn, is basically everything we hope for when we go to small scale theatre such as the Finborough.
We rated this piece and the performance very highly. If you are available one of the nights it is showing, we’d recommend that you grab a ticket now before it sells out.
Janie and I both really love Tennessee Williams but neither of us are very keen to see revivals of plays if we have seen a decent production before.
So this production of Summer And Smoke, a play that neither of us had seen before, at one of our favourite places, The Almeida, sounded like the hottest of hot tickets to our taste.
So much so, it would have been understandable had our massively high expectations not been met…but we needn’t have worried – this production most certainly did the business for us.
I’m not too sure why this play is so rarely performed, other than the fact that I think it does need some sort of imaginative staging to come alive – achieved wonderfully by Rebecca Frecknall and her team in Rebecca’s first major gig as a Director.
Frecknall is a star director in the making and Patsy Ferran is similarly a star performer breaking through just now.
I’d heard a lot about The Gesualdo Six – they are currently the hottest boy band of the early music vocal consort world – so I have been keen to see them for some time.
This early evening concert at St John’s Smith Square slot didn’t suit Janie on a Wednesday, so I made one of those unusual but no longer rare concert bookings just for me.
What a super short concert it was.
SJSS had been turned around for this concert, so the audience faces the organ, not the massive, tired-looking stage – something I know they’d been talking/thinking about, but until now I had not yet experienced it. Janie and I have thought for some time that this configuration would work better for soloists and small ensembles.
It does work better.
I got in early to bagsy a good seat and took a picture. You can see my coat draped across a front row seat.
SJSS Turned Around
Nice touch with the candles.
The hall soon filled up – several hundred people I would estimate – the largest audience I have seen at SJSS for a while. The idea of doing an early evening concert of this kind ahead of the main event certainly worked for this evening – perhaps also linked to the fact that this concert was part of the Holy Week Festival.
The people sitting to the left of me clearly knew one of the singers, Guy James, who chatted with them briefly before the gig. The younger woman in that party asked him to throw in a pop song or two – but he shyly demurred, saying that he’d love to but it would probably get him into trouble with the others. Not very rock’n’roll.
I did and do have an arithmetical problem with this group. When I looked at the picture on their website – click here –and/ or the above SJSS web page and/or indeed the programme for the evening, I kept counting seven people in The Gesualdo Six.
A knowledgeable-sounding fellow sat next to me about five minutes before the start of the Gesualdo Six concert – he said that he had seen some of the performers before (e.g. Joseph Wicks recently) but never the entire ensemble together and was very excited to be getting to see them.
I mentioned my cardinal number problem – i.e. the matter of seven people comprising The Gesualdo Six, hoping for some insight from this knowledgeable fellow.
“I know, yes…tough isn’t it,” was that gentleman’s unhelpful reply.
But from now it’s all good news.
There were only six people in The Gesualdo Six on the night – which put me at my ease again.
The music was absolutely lovely.
Indeed, the opening number, Tallis’s Te Lucis Ante Terminum, was worth the price of admission alone (as sports commentators would tend to put it).
I don’t normally go for modern choral music mixed in with early music, but I was much taken by the several lullabies by Veljo Tormis, which contrasted nicely with the Byrd lullaby.
I also enjoyed Owain Park’s own piece, Phos Hilaron. I cannot honestly claim to have got much out of Joanna Marsh’s pieces, though.
But basically I loved the gig – they are a wonderful ensemble – so when Owain Park announced that we could buy pre-release copies (due out Easter Weekend) of the group’s debut album on exit, I was up there with my £12 like a shot.
You can order/buy the album from all the usual outlets or direct from the band’s site by clicking below:
Below is a video from an unspecified place of The Gesualdo Six singing some Tallis – a piece from the album but not from the gig.
Likewise, the following piece of Thomas Tomkins (seen below in Ely Cathedral) is on the album but wasn’t on show at the gig:
They only sang one piece of Gesualdo on the night – not the following one, but I can’t let you sample The Gesualdo Six without Gesualdo himself:
Finally, below is a little documentary piece about the group from SJSS itself two years ago. They look unfeasibly young in the vid – they still look young but not THAT young. Two years is a long time for a boy band. Another couple of years on the road and they might look like The Rolling Stones by 2020.
All of this rather puts my own attempt at some seasonal, medieval-style performance into the shade:
A long-planned dinner at the Noddyland house with DJ, Lana, Linda and Maurice.
Janie had been so hoping for some decent weather so that we could take drinks and nibbles in the garden before dinner, she wasn’t going to let single figure temperatures and dank weather stop that aspect of the project.
So we all wrapped up warm and went outside for drinks with nibbles of Kilcolman (West Cork) smoked salmon and tempura prawns.
Perhaps it was the need to try and stay warm that ensured that the conversation was lively and animated from the word go out there.
I hope everyone has now recovered from the cold.
The main course, wild pacific salmon with new potatoes and salad was also a hit; mostly served with a very fruity Vouvray upon which Janie has settled of late.
The conversation got yet livelier over cheese and a very fine bottle of vintage port.
It was one of those evenings that just worked. Although several of the people didn’t know each other, everyone seemed to get on really well and really easily.
A very enjoyable evening of great food, good wines and superb conversation amongst friends.
Simon Jacobs very kindly took time out from his hectic promotion schedule to meet me for dinner on Tuesday. Simon’s new single, Sore, came out three days later – today at the time of writing.
You can hear the song and watch the vid on the embedded YouTube below.
The first thing I feel bound to say about our evening on Tuesday is that the song Sore is most certainly not the story of Simon’s evening with me. Neither of us drank excessively, although we did share a bottle of rather jolly Alsatian Riesling, nor did we dance on any tables in a shirtless stylee.
Of course, what Simon did after we parted company on Holland Park Avenue is a matter solely for him, but I can report that the song and video were already in the can by Tuesday, so if Simon’s lyric is reportage, it is reportage of some earlier evening. Come to think of it, it could be reportage of a great many evenings at Keele “back in the day”. but that is an entirely different matter.
Anyway, we dined at the Ladbroke Arms, which had impressed me when I met Kristof there for a drink just before Christmas. I had resolved then to try the food some day soon – so when Simon suggested that I find a gastro-pub near me for our meet up this time, it seemed an ideal choice.
Click picture for link to pub’s site – photo borrowed from that site
The staff took my request for a relatively quiet, corner table literally, so we were in the snug back area in the corner, which actually is a nice quiet spot for a chat.
Simon and I discussed all manner of things, but clearly at the forefront of Simon’s mind was his music career, past and present.
“When I was very young, I briefly joined the Jackson 5”, said Simon.
Now I have known Simon since we were both 15 or so and this was the first I had heard of this matter.
“I know it sounds strange,” said Simon, “because my name isn’t Jackson…”
“…also strange because I don’t recall one of the Jackson 5 being named Simon,” I chimed in, somewhat suspiciously.
“OK, name them all then,” said Simon, confidently.
“Michael, obviously”, I said tentatively, “Tito, Marlon…um…Jermaine…um…um…”
…”and Simon”, said Simon, who then embarked on quite a long story – 45 seconds to a minute – more than my full attention span anyhow – in which I thought he explained that, as a nipper, he imagined himself to have been asked to join his heroes in the Jackson 5 and managed to convince some naive fellow nippers in the park that Simon was now a Jackson.
“It is morally reprehensible to lie about one’s singing career”, I thought quietly to myself, “but if merely a pre-teen fantasy lived out in the park one day, I suppose it is just about forgivable after all these years”.
But when Simon sent me a kind note the following day, he included this factoid:
PS: Marlon, Tito, Jermaine, Simon, Michael… and when Jermaine stayed with Motown and the rest of us went to CBS, little brother Randy joined… it’s all on Wikipedia…
So is it true? Was Simon really a member of the Jackson 5 back then? Or was Simon guilty of generating a bit of early 1970s fake news, which for some reason (presumably to bolster his current musical career) Simon still seeks to perpetuate?
I decided that I would have to investigate this matter for myself.
My first ground for suspicion was that Simon’s surname is Jacobs, not Jackson, so how could Simon Jacobs possibly be “a Jackson”?
Well, actually, Wikipedia puts that matter into clear perspective. The original line up, known as The Jackson Brothers, included “childhood buddies Reynaud Jones and Milford Hite playing keyboards and drums, respectively”.
OK, so it was not unprecedented for a non-Jackson to join the Jacksons. But the Wikipedia entry for that group clearly mentions a brother named Jackie – the one whose name had slipped my mind (and presumably Simon’s too) – who was in the Jackson 5 throughout. So could the Jackson 5 ever have comprised six people?
That’s not quite as daft an idea as it sounds – we all know about the lesser-known fifth Beatle and the lesser-known fourth and fifth Marx Brothers. But the name “Jackson 5” does seem, at least to me, to have a cardinal-numeric requirement to it. When Jermaine left, Randy stepped in to keep the arithmetic pure to the eponymous value “5”.
Yet, even though I could find no textual evidence that the Jackson 5 sometimes exceeded five people, I did find, also through Wikipedia, the following fascinating piece of photographic evidence:
By The Jackson 5 (eBay front back) [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsNow sums is not necessarily what I do best, but I am pretty sure that there are six people in that picture which is clearly labelled “Jackson 5 1974” on Wikimedia Commons.
So perhaps Simon really was in the Jackson 5 at one time. I must say that, by the time I got to Wikipedia, all mentions of Simon were omitted from the Jackson 5 entry, but perhaps that is simply some sort of spoiling tactic by Simon’s competitors, who know he has a single coming out today.
So does Simon sound like a former member of the Jackson 5? Does Simon look like a former member of the Jackson 5? I am hopeless at judging these things and am open-minded, so I’m sitting well and truly on the fence for this one.
You, dear reader, should judge for yourself, by listening to Simon’s new single, watching the video and possibly then buying the single, e.g. directly from Simon’s site – click here:
Anyway, as usual, it had been a fun evening chewing the fat with Simon. Big tick in the box for the Ladbroke Arms food and service too.
And to reiterate, I was not sore the next morning…at least not until after I had played two hours of tennis from 8:00 a.m. straight through to 10:00. Then I was very sore.
