Mr Burns by Anne Washburn, Almeida Theatre, 7 June 2014

We really didn’t like this play. I can see from the reviews that it was a “marmite” show.

The problems we had with it were many and varied.

We struggled to suspend belief for the notion that a disaster of the kind described could lead the USA into an autarkic breakdown of society. (Mind you, writing three-and-a-half-years later…)

We struggled to engage with the characters, who were a little too “everyman/no man” for us.

We struggled with the length of the play.

We (or certainly I) found every twist and change predictable and obvious…so much so, that, during the second interval, although we had not looked at a synopsis or review before our visit, I told Janie what the third part was bound to be about…and (by all accounts, we gave it a miss) got it pretty much spot on.

Here is a link to the Almeida’s ever-excellent on-line resource.

The following is the Almeida’s audience response vid:

…and here is a link to a search term that will find the reviews, good and bad.

No Wu Man No Cry, The Journey Of The Chinese Pipa, Wigmore Lates, 6 June 2014

OK, the concert wasn’t really entitled No Wu Man No Cry, perhaps it should have been.

Wu Man is a fine exponent of the pipa…

…aka “that Chinese theorbo thing” to Janie, as she learnt to describe it after accosting a William Carter the theorbist at The Wig a few years earlier:

William Carter, Theorbist Extraordinaire’s Mystery Punter Outed, 24 September 2010

This concert was a fascinating mixture of Chinese early music and modern pieces in a traditional style.

It was one of those Wigmore late jobs, so we struggled to find the energy to go to the hall and then had a terrific time.

Here is a link to the Wigmore Hall resource on that Wu Man concert.

Below is a super vid which shows Wu Man’s virtuosity playing a piece much like some of those we heard that evening:

We retired to the bar afterwards and enjoyed the Tom Green Septet…described here through this link.

Another very pleasurable late evening of music at The Wig.

The Day Charley the Gent & I Didn’t Go To Radlett To Watch Cricket, But Chas & Dot Did Come To Noddyland For Dinner

Most of what needs to be said about this day is summarised in the King Cricket piece about it – click here or below:

Middlesex Second XI v Essex Second XI at Radlett

If by any chance anything ever goes awry with that link, it is scraped to here.

In case you can’t be bothered to click but can be bothered to read my scribblings, the plan was for me and Chas to go to Radlett to watch some cricket, after which we would retire to Noddyland where Dot, Chas’s wife would join Chas, me and Janie for dinner.

In the end it rained such that cricket made no sense but a very pleasant dinner still made sense.

I’ll leave the final word to Chas:

…we had a great time yesterday, the house and garden are both very beautiful, the area is gorgeous, you both have made a very good decision to live there.

I felt a little embarrassed as the food was everything thing I adore, and lovely wine too!

To my amazement Dot enjoyed the Salmon and really enjoyed the hospitality, even the singing and ‘metal’ playing!

Don’t forget the option for you to see cricket at Essex is still very much open – just let me know some possible dates and I will organise.

I took Chas up on that offer – the following season – reported here and below:

Essex v Australians at Chelmsford, Day 2, 2 July 2015

But before that, indeed fewer than 10 days later, Chas and I were together again at Lord’s for Day Two of the Sri Lanka Test:

England v Sri Lanka Day 2 Lord’s Test Match, King Cricket Match Report, 13 June 2014

Those are both events reported more comprehensively on King Cricket than on Ogblog!

Essex v Australians at Chelmsford – match report
England v Sri Lanka at Lord’s, day two match report

Incognito by Nick Payne, Bush Theatre, 31 May 2014

We really liked this play/production.

We had been blown away by Nick Payne’s Constellations, so our expectations were high…

…this piece met those expectations.

It is all well explained on the Bush’s excellent on-line resource – click here.

This search term link will find you independent reviews and resources, although you shouldn’t much need them because the piece was very well received so the above Bush resource covers most of the bases.

Here is a very interesting interview/explanation from Nick Payne:

Below is a tantalising trailer which says little but looks spectacular:

A super evening of theatre. This one really deserves a revival and/or a major theatre run.

The Golden Age Of French Sacred Music, Le Concert Spirituel, Wigmore Hall, 30 May 2014

Another weekend, another early music concert that May. Perhaps I got over-excited with the booking forms or perhaps I had indeed spotted a glut of really superb visiting acts doing interesting concerts.

This was another good’un, that’s for sure.

Friday night, so no doubt the golden era sacred music will have induced each of us at some stage to nod off a little…but not a lot.

Here is a link to the Wigmore Hall resource for this concert, which helpfully shows you the programme they played. Trust me, it was sacred music and not, as advertised, scared music.

I seem to recall Janie finding Hervé Niquet a bit showy in style – Janie can be very unforgiving on that point, but we both really enjoyed the gig.

Below is a vid of Le Concert Spirituel singing something else, somewhere else, but it is a lovely short piece and you’ll soon get the idea:

Lovely sound.

Privacy by James Graham, Donmar Warehouse, 24 May 2014

This was a fascinating piece.

It is an uber-modern play about privacy, data and all that. Some members of the audience, perhaps foolishly, left their mobile phones on and acquiesced to a request to submit a selfie – only to discover that geeks can find out a heck of a lot about you just from the simple combination of that submission and other stuff we readily transmit and is there to be found.

To some extent the piece was born of the Edward Snowden/Wikileaks saga, but in truth this play is an entertainment about the issues for ordinary people more than the geopolitical aspects or the Snowden case itself. We did subsequently see a super play that really was about a Snowden-type case, Mike Bartlett’s Wild at the Hampstead, which was cracking:

Wild by Mike Bartlett, Hampstead Theatre, 17 June 2016

If this now sounds like a geeks night out without drama, I’m giving you the wrong idea. It was a powerful story and piece of drama to boot – a strong cast and superb production qualities as we might expect from the Donmar.

Click here for the excellent Donmar “Behind The Scenes” material for this play/production.

Here is a link to a search term that finds reviews and other useful resources about the play/production.

The first time we came across James Graham – This House, we weren’t so keen. But this one was sufficiently different and engaging to convert us to Graham’s writing…

…just as well, because Ink really was smashing:

Ink by James Graham, Almeida Theatre, 17 June 2017

Two Fabulous Baroque Concerts And A Dinner At St John’s Smith Square, 23 May 2014

Both of these concerts, part of the Lufthansa Festival Of Baroque Music that year, looked superb.

For reasons of my own (work related) I had tried the more formal dining option at SJSS a couple of times by then and thought Janie would enjoy such a meal too. Turned out (as I suspected) the restaurant was all geared up for people who wanted to see the two concerts and dine in-between.

Here’s the splurge on first concert;

We hadn’t seen La Risonanza before, although we had, I think, seen Fabio Bonizzoni – at least I have his wonderful recording of the last Domenico Scarlatti sonatas.

It was a good concert, although I recall we liked the sonatas more than the duets. Not a comment on the skills of the singers, they were excellent, but the style of those baroque duets don’t tend to please us, we discovered.

We both enjoyed our dinner; very attentively and well fed we were. In many ways the SJSS dining-crypt has more atmosphere than the SJSS concert hall itself, which can seem rather large and cold at times.

But the highlight of the evening was this last chance to see The Hilliard Ensemble perform Morimur live. I had owned and enjoyed the magnificent recording of Morimur for some years by then and was delighted to have a chance to see that composite work performed live:

William Cole, on the Interlude blog, describes the Morimur concert that evening thus:

…the Hilliard Ensemble with violinist Kati Debretzeni gave quite simply one of the most extraordinary concerts I have ever attended.

Here is a link to the whole William Cole review.

Talk about going out on a high. By that December, the Hilliard Ensemble was done saying its goodbyes to the world and that (un-Sinatra-like) was that.

Of course it is still possible to get the recording of Morimur – click here for a link to general resources on it or the image below for one specific link – I would highly commend the recording.

We still listen to Morimur quite a lot – its haunting quality is just so moving. The alternating of chorale and violin music just works..at least it does for us.

As for that Baroque evening at SJSS – very memorable indeed.

In the Vale Of Health: Missing Dates by Simon Gray, Hampstead Theatre Downstairs, 16 May 2014

Janie and I both really like Simon Gray’s plays and we really like the Hampstead Downstairs.

So this project; taking all four of Simon Gray’s attempts to write about a quirky pair of brothers in The Vale of Health, seemed like something we should do in full.

We saw them in this sequence/timing:

  • 21 March 2014 – Japes;
  • 18 April 2014 – Japes Too;
  • 2 May 2014 – Michael;
  • 16 May 2014 – Missing Dates.

We’d often see the same faces in the audience again. One gentleman who sat next to us on the last night, we’d seen at least once before. I said to him that it would be like saying goodbye to close friends when this little season ended and he said, “that’s exactly what I was thinking”.

Very intimate plays, beautifully written (it’s Simon Gray after all) and very well acted/directed.

I’m cutting and pasting this same piece for all four evenings; the above and the links below basically apply to all four.

Here is a link to a search term that will find you Hampstead resources and (unusually for downstairs) reviews, as they transferred this little season upstairs afterwards, because it had done so well downstairs.

Here is a YouTube interview and stuff:

Treasures Of The Renaissance – Masterpieces From The Golden Age Of Choral Music, Stile Antico, 11 May 2014

Just gorgeous, this concert was.

Here is a link to the helpful Wigmore Hall calendar note that tells you exactly what we saw.

This was Renaissance choral music at its best.

Barry Millington in the Evening Standard gave the gig this rave review – click here.

Below is a vid of Stile Antico, singing Ego flos campi by Jacobus Clemens non papa, which was the second piece they sang to us and which gives a very good sense of their glorious sound:

Coincidentally, the above recording was made at the Old Royal Naval College which I shall be visiting in a few day’s time (as I write in January 2018), although not for music purposes.

For those who are not blessed with Latin scholarship, “Ego flos campi” means, “I maintain my oral hygiene when I go camping”…

…although those words are occasionally mistranslated by so-called experts as, “I am the flower of the field”.

Anyway, enough of scholarship. Janie and I had enjoyed an early music oriented weekend from start (Joanna MacGregor tinkling the Goldberg on the Friday) to finish – we had no complaints about that.

Play that vid again, go on…gorgeous it is.

Searching For Sugar Man, Riverside Studios, 10 May 2014

I’m not sure quite what put us on to this superb movie, but we booked an all-too-rare showing of it weeks in advance at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith. I suspect this was our last visit there before the closure for major redevelopment of the site.

It is a most unusual, true story. The American singer-songwriter, Rodriguez, was for some time billed as “the next Dylan” (the kiss of death for many a career) but vanished into obscurity.

Unbeknown to him, he was a cult, underground figure in South Africa where his music was extremely well-known and where he was believed to have died. After South Africa emerged from the apartheid era, some fans tried to track down Rodriguez’s story, discovered that he was still alive and the rest is history.

Here is a link to plenty of resources on the film and Rodriguez’s story.

Here is the IMDb item on this movie.

And below is the official YouTube trailer for the movie:

I also bought the soundtrack album, which Janie and I have enjoyed listening too quite a lot.

It isn’t often that a movie sticks in our thoughts for a long while after we saw the movie, but this one really did. Highly recommended.