This evening – a rare visit to The Cottesloe on a Tuesday evening – was the first time I saw Ken Campbell perform.
I was really smitten with this piece – I found it very funny. I think I got more out of it than Janie did, but she was fascinated enough to want to see more of his work after that.
One of the things that attracted us to the piece, apart from the weirdness of the blurb, which promised us – I paraphrase from various book blurbs available:
“Cathar heretics, a mysterious female French book thief and a Vietnamese violinist who does pig impressions”.
It would be difficult to say no to that, especially as we had booked to go to Vietnam a couple of months later.
Janie and I saw an early preview of the show; it didn’t get reviewed until October but we saw a preview in January.
It was about astronauts, their lives, moon shots & stuff. I found it interesting but it didn’t work as drama for me. Janie was less interested in the subject matter but quite enjoyed the play in the round. (Did you see what I did there?).
Paul Godfrey wrote and directed it. It might have been tighter if he had let another director tweak and interpret a bit.
Janie and I were very keen on Pinter and also very keen on Complicite, so we took the opportunity to see both on one Saturday during that crazy autumn during which Z/Yen was born.
According to my contemporary log:
Landscape is a short play, seen late afternoon/early evening before seeing “Out of a House Walked a Man”. Very good.
Ian Holm and Penelope Wilton. Top notch performers both,with great Pinter pedigrees too.
What a cast! Daniel Craig, Susan Engel, Clare Holman, Stephen Dillane, Harry Towd…directed by Declan Donnellan too.
I insisted that Janie go alone to see Perestroika and she told me at the time that it was not as good as Millenium Approaches. But was she saying that just to be kind or was she saying that because she got less enjoyment without me or was she saying that because actually the first part is the better part?
A strange play, this. Here is a link to its Wikipedia entry. Writing about it 25 yrars later, it seems in some ways more relevant now than it did then, as evidenced by the several revivals of it in recent years.
And there was Janie and I thinking that we’d spent an evening seeing an interesting play by Caryl Churchill performed exceptionally well. What simple souls we were/are.
This is the third and final part of my 25th anniversary Ogblog trilogy on “how Janie and I got it together”. In case you missed the first two parts and are interested in reading them, here are links to the first two episodes:
So, the ossobuco supper gave me the perfect opportunity to phone Janie to thank her for her hospitality and ask her out.
As luck would have it, I was sitting on a pair of hot tickets, The Street Of Crocodiles at the Cottesloe Theatre. It was my habit back then to book up quite a few such productions a long way in advance, with Bobbie Scully in mind for first dips, but with an unwritten agreement with Bobbie that she couldn’t commit that far in advance and that I might need to find someone else to join me…
…anyway, I had these tickets for 29 August and they seemed an ideal way to reciprocate.
Janie seemed keen on the idea, so the date was set.
I also offered to cook Janie a pre-theatre meal, after first checking that she liked Chinese food.
I can’t remember exactly which dishes I went for, but I’ll guess I plugged for bankable favourites that were reasonably easy to prepare and which needed relatively little clearing up afterwards:
cha chieng lettuce wrap – probably using veal mince or a mix of veal and pork mince;
chicken and cashew nuts with yellow bean sauce;
I thought the second main dish was steak slices with onions, mushrooms and black bean sauce, but Janie reckons the second dish was prawns with ginger and spring onions and now I think she is right;
pak choi with oyster sauce;
steamed basmati rice.
No TripAdvisor review for the meal, but on reminding Janie about it just now, she has described it as “amazing”, so there you go.
But far more amazing than my meal was The Street Of Crocodiles. It really was a stunningly good show.
The play is based on the stories of Bruno Schulz, which (from what we can gather) were weird enough when written, but when given the Complicite treatment, they become a sensory overload of words, music and movement.
Janie had driven to my place and insisted on also driving to the National Theatre – the latter habit being one she rarely deviates from 25 years later.
The evening seemed to have gone splendidly well. Janie was very complimentary about my cooking and seemed very taken with the show.
When we got back to my place, I asked Janie if she wanted to come back upstairs to my flat.
She said no.
I asked her if she was absolutely sure.
Janie said that she was absolutely sure and drove off.
So that was that – although on this occasion I sensed that “no” meant “not this time” and that there would be plenty of other times.
I went to see this play with Bobbie Scully. I remember it very well; both of us were very taken with it. It did prove to be a big hit, transferring and being produced again many times.
This original production really was a cracker. I think it pretty much made Jane Horrocks’s name; I don’t think she was all that well known before – perhaps she was known on the TV. Pete Postlethwaite and Alison Steadman were terrific.
I’m not sure what we did for food, but we tended to go to The Archduke or possibly RSJs after the show in those days.
No on-line reviews from those days, so you’ll just have to take my word for it – it was a cracking show. I rated the evening very good in my log, that’s for sure. Several reviews on-line for subsequent versions refer to the 1992 production – click here for the search term that brings those up.
Better yet, below is Michael Billigton’s Guardian review:
I think they got their timing wrong having press night on 17 December… a rare Cottesloe opening that missed out on Michael Billington or indeed anyone from the Guardian. But in my view it was the critics who missed out on a very good production.
I don’t really remember much about this one, which suggests it was not so memorable an evening at the theatre.
Bobbie might remember it better, but I doubt it.
Excellent cast of National Theatre usual suspects. Ron Cook, Marion Bailey, Sally Rogers, Paul Moriarty, Peter Wight, Gillian Barge, Karl Johnson and many others. William Gaskill directed. The Theatricalia entry for this one can be found here.
Michael Coveney absolutely loved it in The Observer:
I do recall Bobbie telling me about her imaginary friend, some time before this production. But as far as I know that didn’t all go horribly wrong for her. I certainly don’t remember this production generating additional revelations from Bobbie.
Coveney on Violin Time Sun, Oct 6, 1996 – 76 · The Observer (London, Greater London, England) · Newspapers.com
