Travel, Theatre, Music, Cricket, Tennis, Writing, Life
I don’t remember a great deal about this one. I don’t think we were particularly impressed, although we wanted to be, because the idea of former prisoners making drama feels like a wonderful idea to us.
Our friend, Michael Billington, took the trouble to go and review it for The Guardian. We’ll take his word for it.
Hyacinth, Guardian, Billington 21 Oct 1999, Thu The Guardian (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com
I wrote “very good indeed” in my log for this one, which means that we both must have thought it very good indeed.
Paines Plough tended to do good stuff and Vicky Featherstone knows how to direct. This long precedes her dystopian miserabilist phase at The Royal Court, of course, although it had traces of misery in it.
In those days the Lyric Hammersmith Studio was putting on quite a lot of good stuff of this kind and getting good notices in places that mattered too.
Here’s Kate Bassett in the Telegraph:
Riddance Telegraph Bassett 27 Sep 1999, Mon The Daily Telegraph (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com
This production had clearly taken the Edinburgh Fringe by storm, as the following preview from the Feltham Chronicle attests:
Riddance Feltham Gaunt 16 Sep 1999, Thu The Feltham Chronicle (Hounslow, London, England) Newspapers.com
According to my diary, we ate at Riso in Chiswick afterwards. I cannot find anything about it on-line and cannot remember anything much about the place. My handy copy of the 2003 Harden’s suggest that the place was not so memorable. That might explain it.
Still, the play/production was memorable, which matters more.
