The set was effectively a small studio apartment which we, the tiny audience, was observing from above. You really almost felt you were in the apartment with the couple. And the couple were discussing very intimate stuff.
Janie and I took Charlie (Lavender) with us to this one, which I think she enjoyed very much. We’re struggling to remember what we did for grub on this occasion; we think we possibly ate at the Royal Court itself.
We really liked this play. It was funny and interesting.
It’s one of those verbatim theatre jobbies. Alecky Blythe went round talking to prostitutes at “the parlour” and pulled together a play about them based on their own accounts.
Intriguingly, the cast listened to recordings as they delivered their lines, to add a particular type of authenticity to the verbatim method.
We thought this might be a good one. That’s why we made the rare decision to book the Royal Court for a Friday evening.
We were not disappointed.
The story is simple enough; a young Indian girl in Mumbai has been videoed by her boyfriend having sex with him and the video inadvertently goes viral, ruining the youngsters lives; in particular hers and those of her family.
Lots of big modern issues in there. We found the play intriguing and disturbing. The production was very well done.
I remember we left feeling uncomfortable; sexual exploitation is that sort of subject on the stage – you feel a little complicit in the exploitation even though you know you’ve been watching a play. In this play that exploitation is as raw as a symbolic uncooked kebab.
It certainly wasn’t a fun play, but it was very well acted – we were more with the good reviews than the haters.
My diary is silent on what we had for dinner after the play, but it might easily, ironically, have been some form of kebabs, as we would often as not go to Ranoush or Mohsen after the Royal Court. But perhaps we went to May’s for Chinese food on this occasion, even if that choice was a change of tack after seeing the play.
This turned out to be one of the hottest tickets in town for a while. We didn’t realise it when we booked it. We see a lot of productions upstairs and often enjoy plays there by young/as yet unknown playwrights.
Indeed, we normally see them early in a run, but nephew Paul had arranged to stay and said he’d like to go to the theatre with us, so we chose this play as “youthfully suitable” and so booked for a few weeks into the run. Thus, by the time Paul came down to stay, he knew we’d got him a surprisingly hot ticket.
Polly Stenham is a very talented young writer, although we now have the hindsight to wish that she had moved on from this “chamber play about dysfunctional families and damaged youngsters” genre – her subsequent plays so far (several years on) have all been echoes of similar. Still, this one subsequently transferred to the West End making Polly, at 21 by then, the youngest West End debutant since…maybe ever. Michael Billington gushed – click here.
The whole cast was brilliant, but Lindsay Duncan stole the show, as you might expect.
Nephew Paul was very taken by the whole thing. We had to explain that we don’t always pick quite such winners, especially when we go for the smaller stages and unknown writers.
…so made a bee-line for Zinnie Harris’s next play – this time at the Royal Court.
The subject matter of Nightingale and Chase – a woman being released from prison, was very interesting. I’m not sure this one quite worked as theatre, though.
Not many actual reviews, but you can trust our friend Michael Billington to give such a production the full works and to remind me why we wanted to like this one more than we actually did:
The Royal Court is really good at finding ways to showcase the work of young writers who are working with their various programmes. In truth, Janie and I are not so good at turning up to see those showcase performances; we do so rarely, although we were going through a bit of a phase of it at the turn of the century.
On this occasion, we braved Sloane Square on a Friday evening to see this miscellany of pieces connected with the Notting Hill Carnival. Timely, fewer than 10 days before carnival.
As you might expect, it was a mixed bag.
This will have been our first sighting of Leo Butler’s writing. In truth I don’t recall making a mental note about his material based on this showcase. We went to see his play Redundant a few weeks later, but I suspect that I had already booked that before 17 August!
Our friend, Michael Billington, suggested that this play was not as good as Roy Williams earlier material and that he needed to branch out a bit. I think he was probably right, as we really went for some of William’s later plays even more than this one, but it was good enough to get us hooked:
Apart from the quintessentially US nature of the production and the left field approach to tackling racism through performance, it’s hard to see much similarity between the evenings.
Rebecca Gilman’s play was memorable through its “warts ‘n’ all” approach to anti-racism and political correctness on campus. Also memorable was a superb performance by Emma Fielding in the lead role. The supporting cast were also “Royal Court good”, as was Dominic Cooke’s directing.
Our friends David and Rachel found it interesting and we had plenty to discuss over grub after the play.
Our other friend, Michael Billington, gave it a very good review in the Guardian:
Janie’s diary reminds me that we had dinner the night before with Jamil and Suad Amyuni at Home House, which was also a very memorable evening in its own way.
Janie’s diary also notes, beside Far Away
1/2 hour.
It was short, but not quite that short. I know we saw a preview, but I trust my memory and the reviews that, even the preview, ran to more than 45 minutes, but probably less than an hour.
Fabulous cast – not only Linda Bassett but also Kevin McKidd and Katherine Tozer, directed by Stephen Daldry. I only realise now what a hot ticket this must have been and how privileged we are/were, as Royal Court members, to grab hot tickets like this before they all got grabbed.
Predictably, Charles Spencer didn’t think much of it – he didn’t tend to get Caryl Churchill:
Even giving the casting vote to our friend Michael Billington doesn’t really help, as Billy-o gives the production four stars but his review is somewhat equivocal.
Strangely, the productions that tend to float our boats the most tend to split the reviewer jury. I guess Janie and I like controversial stuff. And as the now late (25 years on) Jamil Amyuni once famously put it in a different context:
