Janie and I were very taken with this creepy three-hander at the Royal Court. I remember us agreeing that it was Pinteresque at the time – without the influence of reviews I hasten to add.
I think this was our first sighting of a Martin Crimp play and for sure we were intrigued enough to seek out his work several times subsequently.
Owen Teale, Juliet Stevenson and Indira Varma, directed by Katie Mitchell. All people who had impressed us before and/or since.
My friend Michael Billington in the Guardian shared our fascination with this piece and also saw the Pinter parallels:
With the Royal Court in exile, we missed the original “Upstairs” version of this at the Ambassadors. With all the stuff we had been dealing with in 1998, this one almost passed us by completely when it transferred “downstairs” to The Duke of York’s. So when the Duke of York’s production returned to that Royal Court “home in exile”, at the start of 1999, to kick off a major tour, we booked early and were there at the outset.
Excellent play and production
I wrote.
That was to say the least. It was truly memorable and awe-inspiring drama. No wonder many critics had fawned over it when it first came out in 1997.
We saw a great cast and crew – most if not all the originals – Kieran Ahern, Brendan Coyle, Dermot Crowley, Michelle Fairley and Jim Norton acting, Ian Rickson directing. Here is a link to the Theatricalia entry for the production we saw. It was a privilege to have seen that production.
We were tending to book RNT things in preview or very early in runs, so this was an unusually late visit to see this one – perhaps we couldn’t get the seats we wanted until later or perhaps we missed it in the first block of dates.
Anyway, we thought this was “very good”.
One of our favourite troupes, Théâtre de Complicité, was responsible for this one. Juliet Stevenson played the lead along with Simon McBurney who also directed. The Theatricalia entry can be found here.
This was the first of those “in the round” productions that the RNT did at The Olivier while it was being refurbished.
Nicholas de Jongh in The Standard was not too keen on it:
We were ever so keen to see this one. We saw Landscape in the afternoon/early evening and this one at the regular theatre hour – a veritable theatre-fest of stuff we were very keen to see.
As usual a stupendously good cast assembled by Complicite, including Kathryn Hunter, Toby Jones and Marcello Magni. Simon McBurney at the helm but not on the stage for this one.
…and hung around for the Complicite. I guess we were a little time poor for theatre and stuff that autumn, as I was busy birthing Z/Yen and stuff that autumn.
Still, we highly rated both shows so that must have been a day to savour.
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 have very limited recollection of this one, other than finding it shocking and hard to watch.
My diary is ludicrously light on detail and I got confused between this one and another production I failed to get a programme for. In this case, I think we saw a preview and the programmes weren’t ready.
I dined with (presumably) Bobbie at the Archduke before the theatre and we then went on to Jilly’s place, presumably for a birthday party. The diary suggests we had lunch on Sunday also.
Fortunately for the theatre element of the weekend, there are Theatricalia entries and reviews to help me out. Here is the former – click here.
Below is Michael Billington’s top notch review of this production: