Travel, Theatre, Music, Cricket, Tennis, Writing, Life
Very interesting play, this one.
Lots going on, mostly in Australia, spanning eighty years. We saw this play before the Ashes started, so did not breach our “Aussie abstinence vow” during the Ashes, I’m pleased to report.
Andrew Bovell is a very good playwright; worth looking out for. Excellent cast and production too.
Here is the OfficialLondonTheatre.co.uk stub on this play/production.
This was a short play with a good cast and minimal set. We wanted to like it more than we did like it.
Set in Dresden, it is about a house that changed hands while retaining secrets across 60 years of political strife.
Janie usually hates plays that jump backwards and forwards in time, as this one did.
The play and production is well described in The Stage – here.
…you get the point.
Not sure what we ate afterwards – in all the temporal confusion it’s a miracle that we succeeded in getting food and getting home in that order.
A short dystopian piece about lives in a gated community in some future or remote authoritarian place. Here is a link to The Gate’s stub on this piece.
We have done this sort of play on a Friday evening at The Gate before (and since), because it is sometimes so convenient to see them and stay at the flat on a Friday, but heavy/dystopian drama is not my first choice of activity for a Friday night.
Anyway, beyond our temporal reasons for being unsure about it, the critics also seemed unsure:
The acting was top notch and as always we marvel at the way they manage to turn that small space above a pub into a proper space for drama. But Janie and I concurred with the reviewers about the play.
Not sure whether I cooked or whether we grabbed some Turkish food from the (now late, lamented) Manzara. As I’d delivered my Gresham lecture the night before and (it seems) gone off early on the Friday morning to see clients, I’ll guess the latter and jolly tasty it will have been too.
Unusually, we took Phillie to the theatre with us on this occasion. It must have been a long prearranged thing; I think Tony was doing one of his long business trips in the far east, so we had Phillie to stay for the weekend and it was planned far enough in advance for us to book a good Cottesloe production for us all to see.
This was a very good play/production. Funny, thought-provoking and very well acted. Great cast; not least Stanley Townsend, Olivia Williams and Dominic Rowan. Thea Sharrock, who had impressed us so much directing at the Gate, was starting to get higher profile gigs; this being an early example of one of those.
Phillie, bless her, unaccustomed as she was to the theatre, was a bit “west-end theatre-ish” at first, talking as if she was in her living room watching TV, until Janie gave her “the look” a couple of times. I think Phillie enjoyed that theatre trip very much.
I’m pretty sure this was the occasion that, afterwards, we went on to Zinc Bar and Grill in Heddon Street. Now gone, I believe, a couple of reviews of that Conran place survive:
Anyway, Phillie really enjoyed herself that evening – she got quite tipsy at Zinc, as was her wont by then, but the important thing was that she had a good time.
We had a very entertaining weekend at the end of January that year, seeing Feelgood on the Friday and then Entertaining Mr Sloane on the Saturday…
…just before heading off for a wonderful holiday in South-East Asia.
On the Friday evening, we saw Feelgood. We would have eaten at Harry Morgans before the show. I remember this play having a superb cast: Jeremy Swift, Henry Goodman, Amita Dhiri, Nigel Planer, Pearce Quigley, Sian Thomas, Nigel Cooke and Jonathan Cullen (according to my log), and being lots of fun. Max Stafford-Clark directed it. It transferred to the Garrick with a slightly different cast – Peter Capaldi taking Jeremy Swift’s place. Here’s the Theatricalia entry for that one.
Nicholas de Jongh really liked it in The Standard, especially heaping praise on Henry Goodman’s performance:
Feelgood, de Jongh Standard 1 Feb 2001 Evening Standard (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com
Charles Spencer in the Telegraph gave it a short but positive review too:
Feelgood Spencer Telegraph 10 Feb 2001 The Daily Telegraph (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com
Our friend Michael Billington covered Feelgood in a general piece about political theatre at the start of 2001:
Feelgood plus, Billington Guardian 17 Feb 2001 The Guardian (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com
Billington concludes that article with a statement that seems oh so apposite as I write 25 years later:
…theatre is a place of information as well as entertainment and the more it cuts itself off from society – and relies on a mixture of anodyne musicals and Hollywood-star casting, the more it is doomed to glamorous irrelevance.
In truth I remember little about this one. Terrific cast: Justin Salinger, Samantha Edmonds, Lisa Palfrey, Jonathan Cullen, Stanley Townsend and Sheila Hancock, directed by Rufus Norris.
It got neither plaudits nor roasting in my log, which probably means that we didn’t feel strongly about it either way.
Our friend, Michael Billington, really liked it:
Under Billington Guardian 21 Sept 2000 The Guardian (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com
Whereas Nicholas de Jongh gave it a dreaded Standard blob:
Under de Jongh Standard 20 Sept 2000 Evening Standard (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com
I’ll give the casting vote to Paul Taylor in the Independent, who really liked it.
Under Taylor Indy 30 Sept 2000 The Independent (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com
