Omar Elerian

Where did January go?

So after a refreshing break in Alicante it’s home to reality: car for MOT; final eye test after cataract surgery and the promise I made to sort out 45 years worth of company paper work for shredding. So glad I did take my Christmas break.

The first play of the new year was the intriguingly named Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo at the Young Vic. The tiger of the title is the ghost of an animal shot by a US marine stationed in Iraq during the ill-founded war. It (in human actor form) prowls around the stage bringing memories for the marines and philosophical questions for their interpreter Musa who used to be the gardener to Saddam Hussein’s two sons, who appear later, and cause a guilt-trip for Musa who allowed them to exploit his daughter.

It was surreal, written by Rajiv Joseph and directed by Omar Elerian who has a track record with surreal with Ionesco’s The Chairs and Rhinoceros which we saw at the Almeida. It was funny. moving, if a bit erratic, but a worthy start to a year of theatregoing.

I loved Maggie O’Farrell’s book Hamnet. I did not like Lolita Chakrabarti’s stage version which a gang of us went to see at the Garrrick with great expectations and emerged with great disapppointment. I had misgivings therefore about the much talked-about film version, somehat allayed when I noted that Chloé Zhao co-wrote it with the book’s author. So I booked a matinee showing at Picturehouse Central and decided to go into town early and take in the last few days of Wayne Thibault at the Courtauld Gallery. I don’t think I’d heard of him but an email from the gallery intrigued me so off I went and am very glad I did, The exhibition was entirely of works from the 1960s when he was grouped with the Pop Art movement. He painted still lives of everyday Americana – slot machines, deli counters, cakes and the like. They were very affecting in making you look intensely at the ordinary and think about things in a new way. He also made prints of several of the subjects one of which on display he had hand coloured twenty years after making the original etching.

I loved the thick paint around the lollipops

I had an hour to spare before the film so popped into Yoshino to say Happy New Year to Lisa, collect my supply of gyokuro tea – my first drink of every day – and have a delightful light lunch chatting to Lisa as she prepared the space for a 30 strong party of Japanese bankers that evening.

Hamnet the film did not disappoint. It matched the slow reveals of the book, filled the screen with nature, glovemaking and the love and the games of young children. The storytelling was clear and excellent and the child actors were all very accomplished. The tragedy was well handled and the closing scenes at the Globe had me welling up. What a performance from Jessie Buckley! I knew she was good but this was astonishing.

From time to time, the orchestra of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment organises trips for Friends. I wrote about a visit to the amazing Hatchlands keyboard collection with Steven Devine last year. This one was to explore the wonder that is the V&A East Storehouse with Martin Kelly, my viola-playing team captain when we won the Chistmas Quiz. Martin had selected a number of instruments from the extensive V&A catalogue and gave us fascinating insights into the contruction, history and use of instruments ranging from the tiny kit fiddle used by dance masters to the enormous Dragonetti bass via a serpent and a harp and others from the racks. Some of the detail of design, carving and inlay was phenomenal. The breathtaking size of the storehouse and the randomness of displays made for a fascinating visit even after Martin had finished his excellent part of the tour.

Then it was back from drenched Hackney Wick to the Royal Opera House for an insight evening on the subject of Boris Godunov with my friend Susie Stranders taking us expertly through Mussorgsky’s score. I got there early and spent an hour not reading my book but chatting to a gentlemen with shared widowerhood and love of music as topics for conversation. As we left the table to go to the talk we shook hands and he said, “By the way I’m Mike”. “Me too,” I replied. Susie’s talk was peppered with anecdotes from performances and some excerpts sung by cast members including Bryn Terfel who is Godunov.

I’ve seen Sheridan’s The Rivals several times but went with Frances to The Orange Tree on her recommendation, She’d already seen it when I was away and came to see it again. I congratulate her on her taste. Updated to the flapper era 1920s, Tom Littler’s production was wonderfully funny and Patricia Hodge as Mrs Malaprop was outstanding. The rest of the cast were superb too in the intimate Orange Tree space where you feel part of the action. I recalled going with my grandchildren to see the Richard Bean and Oliver Chris update Jack Absolute Flies Again at the NT a few years ago. Sheridan’s work from 1775 stands a lot of different interpretations. Must be something about the core material!

The OAE often invites friends and the local community to open rehearsals at its base in Acland Burghley School. On this day there was a Friends event at 2 pm followed by a Community one at 4. I was very impressed to see the numbers of people streaming into the school as I was leaving. The orchestra was rehearsing mostly Mozart’s clarinet concerto played by principal clarinetist Katherine ‘Waffy’ Spencer and directed from the violin by leader Kati Debretzeni. Waffy was at pains to point out that the work was written for the basset clarinet and she has had one made specially so that the concerto can be heard as Mr M intended. As always it’s fascinating to eavesdrop on the discussions that form the final performance and the exchange of ideas around this most democratic of orchestras. They were off to the Anvil in Basingstoke, Oxford and the Warwick Arts Centre before coming into the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Sunday 1 February. Waffy then introdued a piece they were going to play as an encore – an adaptation of an aria from Mozart’s Die Entfuhrung where the warring male and female protagonists were a bassoon and her clarinet. It was lively and very funny.

Kati makes notes, Waffy cradles her basset clarinet ‘Grace’

I then made an interesting cross north London journey on the C11 bus – Gospel Oak, Hampstead Heath, the Royal Free Hospital, Belsize Park and eventually Swiss Cottage – to the Hampstead Theatre to join Frances for a new play in the smaller downstairs space The Ghost in Your Ear.

This was an interesting event in which we were all equipped with headphones to hear the script of a ghost story being read by an actor in a sound studio for an audiobook. It’s written and directed by Jamie Armitage and the sound design is buy the brothers Ben and Max Ringham who did such a great job with Blindness at the Donmar back in the lockdown days. As someone who has spent a lot of time in the control room of audio studios it was intrinsically interesting and the story getting progressively scary was very well paced. Frightening it was, but not heart-attack inducingly so.

I got a final sign off after my cataract operations and can now revert to my familiar state as ‘a bloke who wears glasses’ with varifocals with no correection for distance and enough for close up that I can type and read my phone and kindle without need to rummage about for reading glasses. I then had the pleasure of two trips to the Union Club, first to have lunch with my dear friend Michele who has had a hard year as as a make-up artits as the film and TV industry shrinks and then for dinner a couple of days later with newly-master’s Guildhall graduate Kristina, a fine soprano, her boyfriend Luka and Paola who looks after tickets and data for the OAE and who I know well from my many visits to their gigs. On both occasions food, wine, service and company were excellent.

I went ( slightly by mistake and rescued by checking my ticket folder) to a matinee of Woolfworks at the Royal Opera House. This ballet had been heavily advertised in ROH emails and I had hoped Rosa might be back from Spain to come with me. Not to be however so I set off on my own and didn’t pick up any new friends called Mike on this occasion. The ballet by Wayne McGregor is based on three Virginia Woolf books: Mrs Dalloway; Orlando and The Waves. I’d read the first two but not The Waves, which I’ve now purchased. The work is classed as a three-act ballet but I felt it was three one-act ballets given the variety of source material and treatment. Mrs Dalloway was all bustling charatcters around three huge revolving wooden frames introduced by Gillian Anderson reading an excerpt from Woolf’s essay On Craftsmanship. The stories of Clarissa and the shell-shocked Septimus intertwine with elegant moves. Orlando matches the surreal nature of the book by having gold-costumed charaters with ruffs anf bustles making their way through several centuries and a gender change all accompanied by a startling laser display that carved up the stage and indeed us in the auditorium. The Waves was played out against a projected backdrop of extremely slo-mo monochrome waves and ends with her suicide note being read. The score was specially composed by Max Richter and was very filmic, dramatic and emotional. It’s still on and comes to cinemas from 9 February if you fancy a look. Highly recommended. https://www.rbo.org.uk/tickets-and-events/live-in-cinemas-woolf-works-details

The last week of January contained three remarkable outings to the theatre. The first was Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, generally acknowledged as his masterpiece and you can see why. With its time shifts, a quest for the unknowable, dangerous relationships and moments of side-splitting humour it makes for a mind expanding evening. I’d seen the original NT production and this version at the Old Vic couldn’t be more different, but as with Sheridan earlier, the class of the work shines through. Whereas the NT production was naturalistic with vistas of stately home parkland, the design of which is an imporatnt factor in the play, Carrie Cracknell’s version at the Old Vic is sparse, in the round with a few props and helps you to concentrate the interplay of the characters and the richness of the language. It was a bit of a shock also to see the venerable Old Vic transformed for an in the round production as apparently all this season’s plays will be.

The Old Vic transformed for a season in the round

The mood changed abruptly the next evening when we went to see Guess How Much I Love You at the Royal Court. Written by actor Luke Norris and directed by Jeremy Herrin it is a play about a couple’s loss of a child through a non-viable pregnancy. Their grief and their reactions to it are powerful and moving. Rosie Sheedy and Robert Aramayo – newly Bafta-nominated for I Swear that day – display an array of reactions to the terrible news the ultrasound scan brings them through changing scenarios over time. But within the overall sadness of their plight the play has great moments of lightness and humour. Very effective set design and lighting gave a real sense of their enclosed and captive lives as they lived through the intensity of loss and eventually move towards a more promising future.

After intellectual exercise and emotional turmoil the week ended with J B Priestley’s When We Are Married at the Donmar. Sheer madness and hilarious farce ‘oop north’ when three couples discover that they weren’t officially married by a young curate 25 years ago. Facades fall away, roles reverse, past pecadillos intrude and there is a literally staggering performance from Ron Cook as the photographer from ‘The Argus’ who has been sent to snap the triple anniversary for the paper. Told to go away he gets progressively drunk, his cheeks redder at every new appearance, and crashes his way through the set. It was a shock to see John Hodgkinson as the host of the celebrations Joseph Helliwell since we last saw him covered in blood as Titus Andronicus. I’d never seen this play before and it made me rethink Priestley who I only knew from An Inspector Calls and Time and The Conways.

The month ended with a final piece of drama on the stage of Vicarage Road Football Stadium where I had the pleasure of Frances’ company in the hospitality Sir Elton John Suite which I’d won through The Supporters’ Trust lottery. We had good food and wine, visits from Luther Blissett and Tommy Mooney, a poor loss to Swansea City on the pitch and later the news that our much-loved manager Javi Gracia had resigned. He’d been back to his family in Malaga earlier in the week and I think decided that wet, grey Watford was not where he wanted to be. The club have gone through many managers (23 I think, some twice as with Gracia) over the fifteen years the current owners have been in charge but only a few have got in first by resigning.

News

Another fun week with a few surprises

On Monday I went with Frances to see Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros at the Almeida Theatre. I’d read this in French as part of my studies at UCL back in the 60s, when we’d complained that the reading list was too classical and old-French oriented. The Theatre of the Absurd struck a chord with the young and foolish me and I even directed a production of fellow-absurdist Alfred Jarry’s Ubu sur la Butte in the Lycee Francais annual drama compettiton for London college French departments. We got the best actor award. The core of Rhinoceros was still there with its warning about totalitarianism embodied in the metaphor of the residents of a small town in France turning into rhinoceroses. But the adaptation with audience participation conducted by Paul Hunter though elaborate hand gestures and claps and rhinoceros roars with kazoos made it a very different spectacle. Translated and directed by Omar Elerian – he also did a great version of Ionesco’s The Chairs here a couple of years back – it incorporated humour, menace, slapstick and some cod metaphysical discussions and an interpolated song sequence in Italian by love-object Daisy sung brilliantly by Anoushka Lucas with back projected slogan “What do you want meaning for?” The playing for laughs may have detracted a little from Ionesco’s warnings of extremism but it was a fun night in the theatre.

*Anoushka Lucas as Daisy and Sope Dirisu as Berenger in Rhinoceros.*

Imagine my shock on Tuesday morning when The Guardian had the following headline. I had to send it to warn Frances in case they’d escaped from the theatre and were invading Islington and Tufnell Park.

I’d been meaning to go to the Dulwich Picture Gallery to see the Tirzah Garwood exhibition for some time and now I had a chance. As with so many women artists I knew of her mainly as the wife of Eric Ravilious whose work I had always liked. Their artist enclave at Great Bardfield in Essex with Edward and Charlotte Bawden is well documented but I was delighted to find out more about Tirzah who admitted that managing the family and the household had interfered with her own artistic development.

And what an artist she was in so many media and despite all the household wrangling! She started out as a talented maker of woodcuts – and many know of my love of a print – and with Charlotte Bawden she established a reputation for marbling paper – all the rage for lampshades and book endpapers in the pre-war years. The exhibition features embrodery, a quilt, wood engravings and some model village collages in box frames which were inventive and charming. Finally she was able to turn to oil painting at which she adopted a somewhat naive style with surprising elements like the trees in the Photo Shoot below made with prints from gathered leaves. It’s well worth a visit and is on till 26 May. It’s also very funny – she obviously had a great sense of humour. That’s her in the train compartment.

*Huge variety of textures in a woodblock print*

Thursday evening sees me join Frances again, this time at the Kiln Theatre in Kilburn to see Shanghai Dolls a new play by Amy Ng. The dolls of the title are two influential characters in Chinese history: Jiang Qing who as Mme Mao is generally regarded as the architect of the disastrous Cultural Revolution; and Sun Weishi who was the adopted daughter of Mao’s arch rival Chou En Lai and became China’s first female theatre director. Before the play we were able to introduce a friend who has recently moved to the area and her daughters to the Kiln which we hope will become a useful cultural hub for them – teenage eyes widened at the thought of £5 cinema tickets! I enjoyed the play very much despite some slightly melodramatic delivery from time to time., But it brought back some distant memories. I was in China in 1981 as part of a lecture and workshop visit when I worked for the Inner London Education Authority. This was five years after the end of the Cultural Revolution but we saw the effect it had had on artists with hands wrecked by rural toil, writers’ spirits broken through lack of books. Several people – including our interpreter Sho-jian asking if I could marry her so she could get out of China – were adamant that the movement had been an utter failure, but were still not willing to talk about it openly, only when we found quiet unmonitored corners.

People were keen to practice their English with us in Beijing in 1981

I had tickets for a Wigmore Hall concert on Saturday but thanks to a recommendation from Frances I went first of all to the Royal Academy of Arts to see the Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism exhibition. Good call Fran! The last time a major exhibition of Brazilian art was held in London was at the RA in 1944 – I didn’t go as I was one. The show featured ten different artists who had had an influence on mid twentieth century art movements in Brazil. Sadly it closes on 21 April but you can get a flavour here. Many of the artists had studied in Europe but most had a very distinctive local feel featuring indigenous characters and local traditions. Given that some of our friends are members of Morris sides, I liked the Brazilian equivalent.

With time in hand I sauntered up Bond Street towards the Wigmore Hall and with sunny skies, warm weather I looked up and saw something i’d never noticed before. On the Time-Life Building half way up is a screen by Henry Moore from 1952. It’s appaerntly a very rare example of work of this kind in that he could sculpt both sides. I’ve walked along Bond Street many times but to my shame had never noticed it before.

And when I turned round from snapping one surprise, I got another. The Halcyon Gallery where I recently reported my surprise at Bob Dylan’s paintings, there’s a superb array of Hockney works on paper. These range from the early lithographs of Celia Birtwell and Californian pools to recent iPad drawings in Yorkshire and Normandy. I need to win the lottery before I can go back as a customer but the staff are most obliging and informative if you just want to look. Then it was time to make for the original target of today’s outing after some unexpected delights along the way.

I met a young music composition student Zyggy de Somogyi a couple of years ago at a weekend in Oborne in Dorset and we’ve remained in touch. Indeed I asked Zyggy to write the music tracks for the series of videos we made to celebrate 100 Years at Vicarage Road for Watford Football Club in 2022. Basing his work on some fan chants I sent he matched the predominant sounds of the decades – ragtime, swing etc to drive the narratives along. I’m here today to listen to the world premieres of two of his works commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society Composers Programme which gives young musiciians space to develop. Ten years ago Dani Howard was on the same programme and I met her at the same weekend in Dorset – small world.

Zyggy introducing the first work Music for the quarter life crisis Etude for synth. This was a solo work for Xiaowen Shang. It opened with dramatic synthesiser notes and segued into lyrical passages. Then recurring motifs transferred from the synth to an almost orchestral piano sequence. The playing was emotionally powerful and was rapturously received by a fair sized audience for Easter Saturday at lunch time for an all contemporary music gig.

Other pieces were a new work by Ashkan Layegh, a trio by Lowell Lieberman that showed off the skills of the group Temporal Harmonies Inc – Xiaowen on piano, Lydia Walquist on flute and Mikolaj Piszczorowicz on the cello, followed by Caroline Shaw’s wonderful In manus tuas is based on a motet by Thomas Tallis arranged for solo cello and Kaija Saariaho’s Mirrors for flute and cello. The concluding work was Zyggy’s second premiere IN THE EVENT THAT YOU STAY, This was written with the trio in mind and indeed with their collaboration. It’s in four movements which included drama, bombast, a peaceful second movement, a sense of progression and a finale which featured soft vocalising chanting of the title and eventually all members singing. It brought a lump to the throat. I was a very impressive work and I hope it enters the repertoire of contemporary chamber music.

*Lydia, Xiaowen, Mikolaj, Zyggy and Ashkan taking a bow*

I had a chance to meet with all the musicians in, and outside the Cock and Lion pub as well as several members of Zyggy’s family. His mum said she was pleasantly surprised with his compositions because there were tunes in his pieces which she thought he’d had knocked out of him at uni. “He used to write tunes,” she said “and then he didn’t.” There certainly were tunes and they were very professionally played. It was a real pleasure to listen to andf then spend time with these talented young musicians. Cuts notwithstanding, there’s great stuff going on out there.