Janie and I both tend to like Simon Stephens plays, so there was little debate about booking an early sighting of this one at the Royal Court.
We enjoyed our evening, but neither of us could honestly say that this was one of Simon Stephen’s best or most memorable plays.
The play is about a rock star at the end of a long tour. The issues covered, while done well, seemed superficial compared with most of Simon Stephens’s plays. The dialogue glistened, but then what do you expect?
The conceit of the play is a Shakespeare pastiche, imagining a future King Charles III stumbling into a constitutional crisis with the government. (Three and a half years on, that scenario seems more likely than it did in April 2014, but I’ll leave that thought to one side).
That Shakespeare pastiche style worked in places but grated on me at times.
This was to be our last sighting of Tim Pigott-Smith, whose fine acting we enjoyed many times over the years. The whole cast was good and it was magnificently staged and produced.
Afterwards we went on to Haozhan chinese restaurant for dinner – we felt this place had gone down since our previous visit, but still was a good enough and convenient place to end an enjoyable evening.
I had a funny feeling I skived the Middlesex AGM in 2014. My diary says “day off”, but by reviewing my electronic records, it seems that I took most of the day off, then went to the Middlesex AGM via a bit of work at the flat.
I don’t recall much/anything about that AGM, but I did exchange e-mails with Richard Goatley about it afterwards, setting up a lunch with him the following week (9th), so cannot deny that I was there.
I better recall the Seaxe Club AGM, which took place four days later. We were still in the old Middlesex Room that year. My memory of that event assisted by the report in an electronic version of the subsequent newsletter – a novel development for the Seaxe Club that season, partly as a result of “youngsters” such as me and Barmy Kev pushing the idea.
We were bowled over by this piece/production. We thought it was brilliantly acted and gripping from start to finish. It is about two feral sisters, both damaged by abuse in different ways.
It divided the critics but it did not divide us.
Ellie Kendrick and Sinéad Matthews are both young actresses to look out for. Vivienne Franzmann is yet another super female writer emerging via the Royal Court.
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.
This was a very unusual piece about the Herero people of Namibia and the tragedy that befell them at the hands of the German colonial power in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The whole title is unfeasibly long.
It is written & performed in the post-modern style of a group of young people trying to put together a performance about…
It occasionally grated but mostly it worked well; a very moving, informative and entertaining piece.
We needed 10 days of complete rest and relaxation, so opted for Zighy Bay at the North-West tip of Oman. So “tippy”, it is actually much closer to Dubai than to Muscat, hence flying in to the Emirates and driving across to Zighy Bay.
Mike Smith had persuaded me to try playing the baritone ukulele a few weeks before and lent me such an instrument. I said I would get no chance to start before my holiday and was reluctant to take his instrument with me, but Mike assured me that he would not be fazed if anything happened to it. So I basically took up the instrument out there. Baby steps.
I’m not too sure what else I can say about this blissfully restful break.
We loved the place.
We played tennis pretty much every day. We swam in that little pool of ours. We took strolls.
We read quite a lot. I especially remember reading Joe Boyd’s book White Bicycles, but I read several others too. Perhaps you can spot the book pile in one of the videos.
I played around with that musical instrument, very early steps down that road.
We ate wonderful food. We locked away our mobile phones and pretty much didn’t look at them for 10 days.
Towards the end of mum’s life, these outings were not easy affairs, as her confusion was certainly getting quite a bit worse from the start of that year.
Mum liked La Cucina in Northcote Road and had settled on that as being “her place” after a not such good meal at Numero Uno early in her time in Nightingale.
A large corner building marked by large burgundy awnings, Italian bar and restaurant La Cucina is a Northcote Road landmark – indeed you’ll often hear uttered locally ‘I’ll meet you at La Cucina. But the popularity of this restaurant isn’t just down to being easy to find, of course not, La Cucina is so well loved by Wandsworth locals for numerous reasons, not least the laid back, friendly atmosphere and friendly service from all Italian wait staff.
Indeed, we were happy to carry on going there because the waiters used to fuss around mum (Janie deliberately malapropises the notion of waiters fawning around mum to “fornicating waiters”) and make her feel special. They also did “old fashioned Italian-style food”, such as liver strips in sauce, that made her feel comfy.
Garry and Janice kindly came up from Southend to see her/us from time to time and this was one such occasion. Mum was really pleased to see them – she still recognised people she knew well at that time – six moths later it was different.
An enjoyable lunch indeed. I think we retired briefly to the Nightingale cafe so mum could show off her family to the visiting masses.
A curates egg of a play, this. Good in parts. Irritating in others. It is set in an apartment block in which a pair of Manhatten sophisticates are thrown together with a vulgar pair of Melbournites when their tower apartment block has a total blackout.
Below is a Vimeo of the cast talking about the play:
I recall we enjoyed the first half of this one more than the second half. Still, we were glad to have seen it and went to Don Fernando for some Spanish grub afterwards.
