Season of Bangla Drama

Masterpieces metamorphosed

Les Bonnes by Jean Genet was one of the plays I read at university in the 60s and I’d seen the film version with Glenda Jackson, Susannah York and Vivien Merchant a decade later, so it was with great anticipation that I went with Frances to see what Kip Williams would make of it. After last year’s Picture of Dorian Gray with Sarah Snook we expected screens to play a part. And they did. And how! The filmy curtains initial framing the set gave us the feeling of trangressively entering madame’s boudoir and then the fun began. The role-playing maids of the title act out fantasies of dominating and eventually killing their disdainful mistress.

Quite how the actors managed to use their cameras and select filters to produce the effects on the screens that dominated the background, I’ll never know. Emotional performance while managing tech – the demands are high on acting skills these days! Phia Saban and Lydia Wilson met them with apparent ease. Yerin Ha was a little too camp and age-adjacent for my taste as the draconian madame but it was a great evening’s entertainment. With Kip Williams you learn to accept that things will change – it was billed as ‘a version’ after all.

Before going to the Donmar, I had been to the Dulwich Picture Gallery with Jadwiga to see the exhibition devoted to Anne Ancher, a Danish painter I confess I’d never heard of. Living all her life in the town of Skagen at the extreme northern point of Denmark she was devoted to capturing light in the landscape but especially in portraits and interiors where there were hints of the influence of Vermeer in the lighting effects. She died in her seventies in 1935 and the paintings cover most of her long life. The exhibition runs till March 2026 and is highly recommended not just by me – it got 5 stars in The Guardian.

Next up was a group outing with Frances, Farzana, Richard and me to see Assembled Parties at Hampstead. It’s a blackish comedy written by Richard Greenberg and was a great hit on Broadway in 2013. Set two decades apart in the same apartment of screen star Julie, we find a Jewish family celebrating Christmas with assorted relatives, friends and others. In Act 2 Julie is widowed and has a feel of a Norma Desmond who life has passed by and only survives in her rather less opulent surrounding by the invisible support of others.

Among these is her sister-in-law Faye, superbly played by Tracey-Ann Oberman in scintillating form who gets the best lines and attitude. We all found Julie, as played by Jennifer Westfeldt a little unconvincing but the poignancy of the reduced means and expectations of a once proud family showed through the many laughs that the script also gave us.

Talking of metamorpheses, how do you make a 500+ page 2004 Booker prize-winning novel into a two hour stage play? Fran and I had been to an Almeida insight session earlier at which the answers were clear – get an ace adaptor in Jack Holden and a great director in Michael Grandage. The resulting script clearly had to leave a lot out for those of us familiar with The Line of Beauty, but author Alan Hollinghurst had been involved throughout and the evening gave us a good account of the early days of Thatcherism, the gay scene in the 80s with the spectre of Aids and the class system in full flow. And it did contain some very explicit scenes of sex and drug taking that were so much a part of the source. The lessons of a dangerous era seem not to have been learned – the wealth and class gap is ever wider, tolerance of ‘otherness’ is at a very low ebb again and politics and politicians remain completely out of touch with everyman.

And follow that with another great challenge. How do you bring “one of the most important English-language poems of the 20th century” to the stage? Adrian Dunbar has produced and directed a staging of T S Eliot’s The Waste Land. There’s the full text of the 434 lines of the poem spoken by four actors but it’s interspersed with music by Nick Roth for a jazz quintet and the Guildhall Session Orchestra conducted by John Harle. Added to this melange was some of the earliest colour footage of London which evoked and echoed Eliot’s words about his adopted city such as “Under the brown fog of a winter dawn / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many / I had not thought death had undone so many.” Hearing Eliot’s complex work recited added greatly to my appreciation of it. The music was an interesting complement, never overlapping with the text and the footage was just stunning. A fascinating hour in the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

I was up bright and early the next morning to drive down to Hatchlands House near Guildford for one of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s periodic Friends’ excursions. The house contains the Cobbe Collection which has a staggering array of keyboard instruments owned and played by some of the great composers among them Purcell, Johann Christian Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Chopin, Mahler and Elgar as well as the piano that Napoleon gave to Josephine. We were conducted through this historical tour by the OAE’s principal keyboard player Steven Devine with added insights from the eponymous collector Alec Cobbe, a little jet lagged after flying in from Ireland that morning. Their shared knowledge and Steven’s keyboard artistry made for an engaging trip and added substantially to my own musical education.

I travelled back in good time to join Frances, Farzana and Richard for a trip to the Pinter Theatre to see the revival of Conor McPherson’s The Weir. Timing was such that we were able to have a pre-theatre dinner in the wonderful Yoshino. Lisa was her usual welcoming self and managed to feed us elegantly as well as the late-arriving Farzana (thoughtless colleagues on Zoom calls!) with food that delighted her on her first visit before we all set off.

It’s a play I’ve seen before – nothing happens in a rural Irish pub, but everything happens in the minds, interplay and scary stories of the four male locals and the incomer Valerie. With Brendan Gleeson and Sean McGinley in the cast it was a super evening of witty dialogue, hidden back stories and brooding atmosphere. Lots of Guinness and scathing references to Harp drinkers – remember Harp?

23 years ago I filmed a studio interview and a gig at the Cavern Club in Liverpool with a young indie singer songwriter Ian Prowse. It was part of a language teaching video series for teenagers in Europe that we did in a yoof magaziney style. Dee and I loved his music and attitude and we remain friends after all this time. So on Saturday I set off for the Half Moon in Putney for a set from his current band Amsterdam. Frances joined me at the pub hot foot from Derby where she’d seen Watford’s first away win for eight months! I settled for the TV experience and was glad I’d conserved my energies as the evening was an all singing all dancing show with the band on top form – standin’ and boppin’ for two hours takes it out of us old uns!

The next day Frances and I and Farzana went to a new venue in London that led to another incredible evening – this time of multi-influenced jazz. HERE at Outernet is beside Centre Point and Tottenham Court Road Station. It’s deep in the basement but we weren’t bothered by noise from the tube. We were enthralled by a brilliant set from Nubya Garcia and her band. Anyone who has read my blogs knows I am a huge fan, following her from her early days in Lewisham pubs. This set – mostly songs from her latest album Odyssey – was supported by visuals on the giant screen at the back of the stage. Nubya herself was in great form with her mix of musical cultures inflecting her music, but with some lovely old school touches like references to My Funny Valentine and other classics in her solos. This lady does jazz. An ever-present in her line up over the years has been Sam Jones on drums. What is it about drummers called Jones? Jo held Count Basie’s band together, Philly Joe was Miles’ and Bill Evans’s favourite, Elvin was inseparable from Coltrane and now there’s this guy Sam whose propulsive and imaginative work takes the band into the stratosphere. Farzana and Fran had to put up with me hustling one of Nubya’s former managers as I’ve quoted Nubya in a pitch for BBPC to the Deptford Literary Festival next year. (I later got her blessing so forgive me!) What a night!

Next up was a theatre road trip. Fatherland by the precocious Nancy Farino who also starred in it, is a journey of discovery between an ominously named father, Winston Smith, and his daughter Joy in a converted school bus to County Mayo to discover some newly discovered heritage. Car seats on wheels and lighting effects neatly deliver the bus to the stage. There’s a great deal of barbed and bitchy banter among the deeper affection and interpolated scenes with father and a solicitor indicate that Winston’s life coaching practice has led to a suicide for which he’s being sued. Joy also lets us into her mind world of fears and fantasies. Nancy Farino has come through the Hampstead Theatre’s Inspire programme. More power to it if it continues to produce work of this quality.

Work of high quality was a trademark for Josef Hadyn. The OAE had been touring a programme of symphonies and a piano concerto through Germany, Switzerland and Italy with Sir Andras Schiff at the keyboard and as conductor (I nearly wrote with the baton but his hands are expressive enough). The did a concert in Udine and I had to wonder whether any of the Pozzo family attended – the Pozzos own both Udinese and Watford football clubs. The last date on this tour was at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

I like Haydn’s rhythmic impulse, his unpredcitability and his sense of fun and the two symphonies – one from his early period No 39 at the Esterhaza Court and No 102 from his prime in London showed real development of style and technique and were a joy to listen to as was Sir Andras’ performance of the concerto No 11 played on a Walter fortepiano just like one we’d seen at the Cobbe Collection a few days earlier.

Another busy month concluded with BBPC’s last bimonthly poetry meet up of the year at the Whitechapel Gallery which took the form of a review of the year’s activities and an open mic session for a dozen poets to share their own work or read from their favourite poets.

Many of us then went to the nearby Altab Ali Park for the launch of this year’s bijoyphool. This is the Bengali victory flower which has evolved from the British Remembrance Day poppy.

The green and red flower is worn for the first two weeks of December and commemorates the Bengali language wars of 1952, the war of independence of 1971 and the countless citizens who died in them and since. Three of the freedom fighters from the latter war were present in front of a replica of the Shahad Minar matryrs’ memorial in Dhaka. It was a privilege to be asked to say a few words for the local TV chanel about what it meant to be there at this moving ceremony.

The final event of this year’s Season of Bangla Drama was a play Joyontika produced by Trio Arts about post partum depression, a topic little discussed in the community but which affects many women. It was a mixture of drama, dance and polemic with some interesting technical tropes and delivered a powerful message. I was able to catch up with a few friends and indulge in some super spicy biryani to conclude a successful Season – delivered this year with no funding from the Arts Council. All hail to the indefatigable Kazi Ruksana Begum the Arts Development Officer for Tower Hamlets for bringing it all together.

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Music, mystery, movement and more

I had the privilege a couple of weeks ago of seeing an hour of the technical rehearsal of The Unbelievers at the Royal Court as part of Frances’s patrons’ deal. It was fascinating and set up a sense of great anticipation for the play itself. It did not disappoint. The central performance of Nicola Walker was quite stunning as a woman grieving the mysterious disappearance of her teenage son. Spoiler alert – he doesn’t appear but his absence hangs over the three intercalated time periods after his failure to return home.

The whole cast remains on stage throughout except for a couple of costume and role changes in a set that has a sparse domestic interior at the front with what looks like a police or doctors’ waiting room at the rear. Fear, anger, incomprehension, blame and violence swirl through the mother, her two ex- husbands, children and step-children. Some people, it seems, found the mingling of the day after, a year after and seven years after time periods confusing but I thought it added to the power of the writing, depicting clinically the way grieving does affect your sense of reality and time. It sounds bleak but had quite a few moments of hilarity. A serious examination of grief, guilt and sanity leavened by tender, moving and funny moments.

Next it was off to the downstairs theatre at Hampstead where new playwrights are given space to experiment. The Billionaire Inside Your Head by Will Lord was an examination of greed, ambition, entitlement and fantasy in an office setting. Echoes of Glengarry Glen Ross and other Mamet two-handlers spring to mind as a thruster and a slacker trade dreams and insults. The entitled slacker Darwin is the son of the company’s owner who as well as appearing in the drama, opens it with a chorus-like prologue as The Voice, that sets the scene for us all to examine our thoughts. The debt-collection nature of the company is perhaps a bit less exciting than Mamet’s realtor wheeler dealers but the tension between Darwin and the OCD Richie is well depicted. It was exciting, engaging and thought-provoking – just what Hampstead downstairs aims to be.

There was lots of the movement of my title in both the above but the prime expression of it this week came in Akram Khan’s Thikra: Night of Remembering at Sadler’s Wells where I had the pleasure of Rosa’s company. Devised in conjunction with the Saudi visual artist Manal AlDowayan, this is an intense hour of modern dance infused with classical Indian forms and a sound track that moves from a foreboding drone through ragas, Balkan chorale, drumming and hints of Purcell.

The twelve female dancers all have waist-length black hair that forms an important part of the performance. Would have been an interesting casting call: “Find me twelve women with equal-length black hair who can dance classical Bharatanatyam choreography”. Nine of the dancers were uniformly clad in olivey long dresses while the sacrificial victim was in white, the matriarch in red and her sister in black. AlDowayan’s involvement gave it a very graphic look that comes from her work in exploring cultures, heritage and change. The narrative didn’t really matter but was essentially about annual rebirth and renewal through sacrifice. Visually stunning, musically stimulating – an hour of total transportation into a world of magic and wonder. You can get a short glimpse of it here.

A select group of us returned to the Bridge Theatre for The Lady from the Sea. I haven’t been there for ages as it’s been wall-to-wall Guys and Dolls. I wrongly thought this was a version of Hedda Gabler but Ibsen actually wrote a play with this title so I need to brush up my Scandi classics knowledge. This was a Simon Stone adaptation, so after the Billie Piper Yerma, expectations were high for something off the wall. And we got it – the usual Ibsen anguished captive bride played bravely by Alicia Vikander resisting the cage into which her husband Andrew Lincoln, in great form, had placed her. The drama plays out on a thrust stage (the Bridge is so versatile as a space) which becomes soaked with rain in Act 2 and then turns into a swimming pool. Writing, acting, sound and lighting were all excellent but the award of the evening has to go to the set design and build – the vision of Lizzie Clachan. Another exceptional evening of entertainment.

After all this fun it was back to work – as a producer! A couple of times a year for the last few years, I’ve recorded an audiobook version of a reader for use in teaching English as a Foreign Language in Germany. I’ve now, it appears, done 11 of them – here are a few from Hueber Verlag in Frankfurt.

I have a small repertory company of actors who are brilliant at producing a range of characters in the course of the narrative – teenage protagonists, their parents, threatening outsiders, police and other officials. The stories are often a bit Famous Five but tackle issues like single parenthood, criminal behaviour, the environment and relationships. For this one, Joining the Circus,I invited Gyuri Sarossy, who I met at a Hampstead Theatre party a while back, to perform the script. It doesn’t sound the most likely name for an English language project but he is English born of a Hungarian father and English mother. The story involved a farming family setback by the father’s accident and a circus family devastated on finding their usual pitch was waterlogged and wouldn’t work. Gyuri was born in Bristol so we opted for a West Country accent for the farmers and an East Midlands for the circus people. It worked extremely well and I am constantly amazed at how these actors can switch characters seamlessly in a single sentence. After the recording Gyuri was off to Budapest to record his final scenes in a vampire movie. Another spoiler – he dies. A week later we hear that the client likes the results of the session. Great news – we’ll all get paid! A little.

It was then on to my main unpaid role as a trustee of the British Bilingual Poetry Collective. I was invited by the publisher of the collective’s anthology Home and Belonging, which resulted from a series of translation circles like the last blog’s reference to the Barbican, to chair a discussion panel at the Palewell Press Literary Festival. The day also included readings from a number of poets including Chika Jones and Nasrin Parvaz who feature in our anthology. It was fixed a long time ago and so I missed Watford’s best game of the season so far, a 3-0 demolition of Middlesbrough – such dedication to the cause, such a fair weather fan!

However the occasion was very interesting with my panellists translating from Arabic with Dr Amba Jawi and Catherine Temba Davidson as collaborators, Barbara Mitchell who translates from Spanish and Caroline Stockford who does Turkish and Welsh and finds striking and unexpected parallels. We ranged over the process of translation and the difficulties of rendering essence and spirit rather than words, the degrees of faithfulness and liberties translators are allowed and the reactions of the original authors.

In all the cases featured here there were difficulties since all the authors were in prison on political charges. Palewell Press specialises in human rights publications so this was only to be expected. The overriding message was that all art forms have to continue to expose and challenge human right abuses whever they occur.

Next day, to make it a full weekend of poetry, I co-hosted BBPC’s annual contribution to the Tower Hamlets Season of Bangla Drama. The season has a theme each year – we’ve done ‘love’ and ‘hope’ and this year it’s ‘kindness’. We decided to go all alliterative and call the session Kindness with Kazi using the poems and songs of the national poet of Bangladesh Kazi Nazrul Islam. Shamim Azad and I hosted the occasion which had performances by the brilliant singerJoyeta Chonchu of a couple of Nazrul songs , my colleague Milton and I recited one of his most famous poems “I Sing of Equality” followed by a discussion of his work and influence on people’s lives. After a short break we then broke up into pairs to talk about kindness given or received in our personal lives after which everybody wrote a short poem or piece of prose. There were some very moving contributions and very positive feedback that participants found it both enjoyable and valuable.

Monday saw me joining Frances at the Orange Tree Theatre for Hedda. Ibsen is all the rage these days it seems – well I guess he has been for a while. This is an adaptation by Tanika Gupta – well really more of a new play based on – Hedda Gabler, relocated to Chelsea in the post-war, post-partition of India period. Tanika’s take is based around the need to conceal the ethnicity of Hollywood’s Anglo- Indian stars, in particular Merle Oberon. The evening was pacy, directed by Hettie Macdonald, twisty and with a full range of emotion, fear, deception, devotion and angst.

From the dramatic opening with her lifelong maid, brilliantly portrayed by Rina Fatania, asking which face whitening she’d like today through to the realisation that she’d made a disastrous marriage believing her screen career to be over, Pearl Chanda was Merle Oberon.

A powerful performance with hints of her former influencer status dashed by the creeping reality of her current dull life. It touched a real nerve with me as I was currently reading Kiran Desai’s Booker nominated The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny which brilliantly examines the whole question of identity, ethnicity and personal authenticity. I was fortunate to be able to speak to Tanika about our Kindness event and she said her father used to sing Nazrulgeeti (KNI songs) around the house all the time. That was before seeing the play so sadly I wasn’t able to tell her how much I enjoyed it.

Another part of the Season of Bangla Drama was a presentation of kindness stories collected by long-term Bangladesh resident Peter Musgrave who had taken part in our BBPC Kazi session so it seemed only right to go to his. An added attraction was that Gitabini, the singing group featuring my friend Rumy Haque was to perform. There were stories to bring hope of new flood resistant ways of building houses and farming being demonstrated by NGO staff to educate the Bengali populace, particularly in the most threatened areas. One of the countries most prone to disappearing into the Bay of Bengal if climate change continues unchecked – not sanguine about the current COP to prevent it – but good to see alternative approaches to mitigate the effects. Gitabini sang a Kazi Nazrul Islam song and Rumy recited her conservation-oriented poem about a banyan tree and I was able to chat with a number of old and new friends at the post-event Koffee and Kake.

I’m fortunate to call the young composer Dani Howard a friend and so when her saxophone concerto was finally to receive its UK premiere I just had to whizz off to Poole to the Lighthouse Arts Centre to hear it. I did some voluntary work a few years back for the London Chamber Orchestra which had originally commissioned the concerto but then got into financial difficulties and couldn’t complete the contract. So I’d waited nearly two years to hear it. Stockholm Philharmonic and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra came to the rescue and while I didn’t make the world premiere in Sweden, I wasn’t going to miss out on the first UK performance. The journey was horrendous. The train was 30 minutes late arriving at Waterloo because of earlier signalling problems, and quite a bit more than that departing. Then we couldn’t get into Southampton Station because of other trains blocking our platform. Finally they decided to skip some stops and head directly to Poole after Bournemouth. At least Delay Repay will kick in and I’ll get some dosh back. By the time I’d checked in to the hotel, checked out the location – my first time at The Lighthouse – and gone for a walk down to the Quay it was dark. I guess one benefit of this was the bright lights of the Poole Museum shone out. A quick beer and back to the hotel to prepare for the concert. Was all the hassle worth while? Oh yes.

The concert opened with a Wagner piece I’d never heard – the overture to his first opera, a comedy called Forbidden Love. A comedy from Wagner! It failed miserably and lasted for only two performances in 1836, but the overture was fun, very jolly and lively, opening with castanets of all things! But the main event came next. Dani had written the concerto specifically with the versatile Jess Gillam in mind. In three contrasting movements the music showcased Jess’s talent but also wove evocative call and response moments with different sections of the orchestra. Lush pastoral passages alternated with bold percussive swathes and the brass were strongly featured – Dani does like her brass – one of her first pieces I heard was her trombone concerto for Peter Moore at the Barbican in April 2022, another amazing performance. Dani says the concerto is a homage to Adolf Sax who invented the wonderful instrument which finds its place more frequently in jazz clubs than in the concert hall. I love the way Dani combines pure and simple sounds from nature with a clear understanding of the power of complex orchestration. She’s a master of the medium. The Times critic liked it too: The first movement bubbles and chatters, passing ideas between soloist and orchestra, while the finale is a dazzling moto perpetuo, dispatched with seeming ease by Gillam. Best of all was the central movement, an extended cadenza for Gillam, who made it seem as if we were hearing Sax’s innermost feelings.

Jess Gillam is a master too and for her encore, chose a piece she’d played in BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2016 – Pedro Itteralde’s Pequeña Czarda – when the conductor was Mark Wigglesworth, now principal conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, whose home base is the Lighthouse. Most appropriate. After the interval we heard the orchestra in full flow with Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. It will be interesting to compare this rendition with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s approach in June next year on period instruments under Sir Simon Rattle.

Dani takes in the applause with Jess just visible beside her

What made the evening extra special was that Dani invited me to the pre-concert reception where I met her mother, Belinda, again – we had both been at the Barbican gig in 2022 – meet her sister Sam for ther first time and catch up with boyfriend Sion Jones who I’d met at the Colin Currie percussion concerto at the Wigmore Hall. Dani was of course the centre of attention with a former pupil effusing over her influence on his career and her former music teacher from Hong Kong, now working in Poole, bringing a class of her primary pupils to say hello. After the concert, Dani had some formal duties but after a while she and Sion were able to join Belinda, Sam and me in the pub where I’m afraid we stayed till they kicked us out. After all the music it was an evening of fascinating conversation eavesdropped and joined in with by locals Jeff and Jonny and covering coping with bereavement, mine and the Howards’ who lost a husband/father last year, music, the arts generally, contracts, 2027 paradigm shift and blogging among others which were continued outside the pub until we all decided to head for our rather tardy beds in three different hotels.

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Carry On Culture

After my slightly odd Valentine’s weekend I plunged into a fortnight of amazing cultural activity. Keeping on keeping on will, I hope, hold dementia at bay. Another life motto has always been ‘Do it while you can’. I don’t usually write about this stuff but the blog is partly for me to reminisce with when I can get out anymore. So ignore if you just like my travels not my opinions.

So here’s how it all kept coming. Monday 17 February East is South at Hampstead Theatre courtesy of Frances’ patronage. Company, canapes, networking first class play not so much. It was a semi sci-fi thriller/Line of Duty style interrogation about data leaks from a world changing computer programme Logos. Written by Beau Willimon the creator of the US version of House of Cards, its subject matter was highly apposite with the march of AI. However it sometimes felt as if the script had been written by AI with strange diatribes, a virtually unused character and rather cliched and confusing flashbacks.

The next night made up for any disappointment. Following my previous exploration of Sadler’s Wells East Tuesday saw me heading for the Rosebery Avenue Sadler’s for Pina Bausch’s Vollmond. Need Es to lift your spirits? Well they were here aplenty! Entertaining, exquisite, energetic, enthralling. It was one of the last things Bausch choreographed and it a lot lighter in mood than some of her work.

We had dancers flirting, arguing, courting and conversing often soaked in torrential water flowing from the flies. I got talking in the interval to a couple of professional classical musicians – she harpist, he oboe – which was an interesting precursor to Wednesday. We all absolutely loved the performance and my only regret was that two friends who would have loved it couldn’t be with me.

Wednesday evening saw me accompanied by local resident Frances to the launch of the 2025-26 season of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment of which I’ve been a long-time supporter and occasional contributor of blogs, scripts and articles. It was help in the wonderful brutalist hexagonal hall of their home Acland Burghley School in Tufnell Park. Alongside the exciting reveal of Fantastic Symphonies to be played between October and March at the Southbank Centre and on tour, we were treated to a recital by the mezzo-soprano Helen Charlston accompanied on the harpsichord by Satako Doi-Luck. Helen benefitted from the OAE’s rising stars scheme and now has a stellar recital career covering baroque, classical and contemporary repertoire. However she will find it hard to stop being asked about singing Dido’s Lament backwards in an OAE video. Satako is part of Ensemble Moliere that specialises in exploring the world of Baroque music. I’ve been to a couple of their concerts too. But the plans for celebrating OAE’s 40th anniversary are exciting with the return of early supporter Sir Simon Rattle who contributed a splendid video interview to the evening, alongside many other familiar figures in OAE history. Check out the programme here and let me know if you fancy joining me to hear this fantastic group of players and lovely people.

I stayed home on Thursday and on Friday joined my friend Opu Islam at the launch of an exciting heritage project in the Bengali community in the East End. It’s an initiative from the Season of Bangla Drama to which the British Bilingual Poetry Collective (of which I am a gtrustee) contributes each year. There were discussions with producers and poetry recitals as well. It’ll be interesting to see the outcome in the 2026 festival.

What a treat on Saturday with Celia Imrie and Tamsin Greig both on stage at the Donmar Warehouse in Backstroke! Two superb actors trading mother daughter love and insults in equal measure in a fascinating if slightly baggy play. It made me wonder if writers are always the best people to direct their own work. Still a hugely enjoyable evening.

I woke on Sunday at 10:15 after finally falling asleep at six after a horrendous night with acute toothache. This was too late for me to get to Watford to see our arch rivals Luton beaten 2-0 some revenge for our defeat in the reverse fixture. It was on the telly and the house was filled with shouting best left on the terraces.

I’d arranged to visit a friend Nuala O’Sullivan on Monday afternoon before going to join Frances at the Orange Tree in Richmond. Nuala was a BBC World Service colleague back in 2009 and then co-wrote on of my ELT series with me in 2014-15, She has subsequently founded and runs the highly successful Women Over Fifty Film Festival so it was great to talk film, literature and life with her. Walthamstow to Richmond is not the most straightforward journey but I’m glad I made it. Frances had been invited to a special staging of the play in the hope (successful) of luring her back as a patron. At a reception we had an opportunity to talk with Tom Littler the artistic director of the Orange and also the director of the play we were about to see. Both very impressive.

I’ve long been a fan of Howard Brenton from the controversy over The Romans in Britain back in 1980, through plays like Pravda at the National, The Arrest of Ai Wei Wei and Drawing the Line at Hampstead. This new work Churchill in Moscow in which two would-be world leaders slugged it out in negotiations could not be more timely. Dramatically it was frightening, funny and fascinating with wonderful supporting roles for the two interpreters who put their own palliative gloss on what Churchill and Stalin were saying to each other. In the compact space of the Orange Tree you really felt part of the action.

The rest of the week was calmer just on Thursday a pre-concert talk about and an electrifying performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto with Vilde Frang and the Eroica Symphony in which Maxim Emelyanychev conducted the OAE in a rousing performance with no residual hint of Napoleon.

Then there was a trip to Watford as part of a consulting group helping plan the move of the Watford Museum from the old site in what was Benskin’s Brewery into the Town Hall later this year. Lots of interesting ideas with fellow supporters and friends. I also foolishly decided to have an occasional away-day trip to our game at Stoke on Saturday which proved beyond all doubt that we go for the people not the football – excruciatingly dull match – adjudged a bore draw by colleague Frances in her blog, but great beer and conversation.

And the next week was pretty similar …