August started well with an invitation to my granddaughter’s18th birthday party. Daisy could at last legally buy a pint and I enjoyed a few with her and many other family members and friends in the Shortlands Tavern. It has recently implemented an “No under 21s after 8pm” rule after recent troubles with young people. My daughter thinks these were largely self-inflicted by putting televisions everywhere and staying open late during the World Cup and encouraging a younger clientele. We were not ushered off the premises but chose to leave around nine after a good evening of catching up. Daisy and the family had just returned from a fabulous trip to Vietnam and Cambodia about which I heard lots of good things.
The next Sunday saw another trip to the Royal Albert Hall to a concert by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. I had arranged to dine with Frances in the Queen’s Arms the lovely nearby pub where we had missed Dani Howard on the previous Sunday’s Prom trip. There are still no trains into Charing Cross from Lee so I thought a bus from Victoria to the RAH would be easy. Not so. The National March for Palestine had caused a massive gridlock around Hyde Park Corner – no problem with that a worthy cause – but a TFL guy advised that he couldn’t say when the next 52 bus would make it down to Victoria. There were two other concert goers who were anxious about making the trip as they wanted to catch the Hockney at Serpentine North before the concert – I just wanted to get to the pub to meet Frances. So I suggested a taxi. They were worried about cost but finally we agreed and were joined by a fourth passenger so all costs were shared.
By a brilliantly circuitous route the driver contrived in good time to drop three of us at the hall and took the fourth woman on to her home on Kensington High Street – raised eyebrows were met with “I downsized a big house into a tiny postage stamp flat!” Good food, wine and conversation ensued and we made our way to the hall.
The OAE development team had suggested we might like to join them for a pre-concert or interval drink at their box. We headed there to find that only white wine was on offer. In a piece of noble generosity my friend Luka whizzed off to source some red as Fran and I had not wished to switch from our dinner tipple. Thanks Luka – much appreciated! Some very interesting conversations with other guests included music, lack of arts funding and cricket. The concert itself was excellent. I had never heard of, let alone heard music by, Zelenka. He was admired by Bach and Telemann and I enjoyed his Misere for its brooding intensity and varied choral writing but especially for the soprano lines for Erin Morley who was in brilliant form in this piece and in two Mozart concert arias. In between Peter Whelan directed the OAE in a performance of Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music a rather strange requiem for a fellow mason as indeed was Zelenka’s piece. It was a very engaging first half with the band on great form under a conductor they love working with. The second half was devoted to Hadyn’s Nelson Mass where Erin Morley was joined by Helen Charlston, Guy Cutting and William Thomas. Both Helen and Guy are graduates of the Rising Stars programme through which the OAE helps so many young singers progress their careers. While Erin Morley has the lion’s (esses’?) share of the arias, the other voices worked well to provide us with a thoughtful version of this complex work with its low strings and drums contrasting with steely blasts from the trumpets and lush orchestral ensemble passages. Another great evening at the Proms.
The next trip was to catch up with Adrian Lester and Susannah Fielding in Cyrano which has transferred from Stratford to the Noel Coward Theatre in St Martin’s Lane. I met Fran again for a pre-theatre snack in the excellent Barrafina in Adelaide Place – wonderfully convenient for Charing Cross station which is today again receiving trains from Lee for the first time in a month. Barrafina staff are chatty, the food superb and the wine slipped down nicely. As did the play. I’ve always known Adrian Lester was a great actor but this performance was outstanding and backed up by a superb cast of actors and musicians who roamed around the theatre throughout a really funny and emotional evening. As someone who likes playing with words, I loved this adaptation by Debris Stevenson and director Simon Evans which absolutely crackled with one-liners, classy put downs and truly duff verse as well as some emotional interplay in the love triangle. Brilliant!
You know you are getting old when the NHS offers you a vaccination against a virus you’ve never heard of. I looked up RSV and found that it was respiratory syncytial virus and the vaccination is intended for “older adults and newborn babies”. So I’m now worried that I’m entering Shakespeare’s seventh age and will finish up “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”. As an asthmatic anyway I thought I’d better do it and discover that the nearest pharmacy I can attend is in Downham Way which “sans car” is an exciting two-bus ride away.
It all worked out fine and to date, the possible flu-like symptoms I was warned of haven’t materialised and my weak lungs have some extra protection. And I had a trip as a passenger through some of the less familiar parts of southeast London.
BBPC is working with New Cockney Poets towards an event on 4 October to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street when the East End rose to repel Owald Mosley’s fascists from marching through the area. So we set our participants the theme of East End Identity for this session’s poems. Some wrote on the day, some had prepared poems ahead of the meeting and others who couldn’t attend sent in their poems. Inspiration came from a film of the action back in 1936 with first hand commentary from a particpant and from the Cable Street mural.
My friend Jadwiga and I celebrate each others’ birthdays with a lunch. We share a date 19 but are two months apart. Because of lots of other commitments we celebrated mine in August at Ognisko, Jadwiga’s favouriite Polish restauarant in Exhibition Road. After a surprisingly hot beetroot soup – we both expected it to be cold – I then had a rabbit leg in mixed vegetables and Jadwiga who doesn’t eat meat had smoked salmon blinis.
Our tradiiton is then to walk up and view the current year’s Serpentine Pavilion. Unfortunately it was closed for a private event so we could only admire the fine red brickwork of its construction. Designed by LANZA atelier from Mexico City the design is known amusingly as a crinkle-crankle wall. The serpentine nature of the wall apparently gives it more stability and uses fewer brisks. It is certainly very curvy and has some bricks with inttricate patterns baked in. We weren’t able to experience its translucent canopy roof so had to make do with the website images for the effect.
What we did discover was a new artist in the Gallery. We had to admit that neither of us knew anything about Cecily Brown a Btritish born painter who trained at the Slade and moved to the USA in 1994. They are mostly very large colourful canvases close to abstraction. However as you look closer there are humans, animals and especially fallen logs over streams in a reccurring series of “Nature Walks”. She applies paint in very thick broad strokes in the majority of works here but we both really liked some of her smaller works, These are mainly monotypes, that is one-off prints, not editions, to which she adds pen and ink drawing, crayon and pastels to great effect. I found these really interesting in subject matter and technique. An unexpected pleasure that rounded out the birthday treat very nicely.
Another cross south London multi-bus trip found me at the gate of the Dulwich Picture Gallery. A couple of weeks ago Lucy Nicholson, herself a renowned photographer, recommended the exhibition Portrait of a City which showcases over 100 images of urban life in the USA from 1907 to 2012. Many are by well-known photographers like Diane Arbus, Saul Leiter, Alfred Stieglitz, Helen Levitt and Bruce Anderson and many by others I hadn’t heard of. The photographs themselves were all worthy of a long look just as images but build a dramatic impression of urban life in America over the century. There were some interesting film clips too.Thanks for the tip Lucy.
More bus journeys took me from Dulwich to the Southbank Centre for a talk by a favourite Japanese writer Mieko Kawakami. I debated taking a photo of her book titles in my Kindle to sign but decided that would not be cool. Her talk was fascinating covering her own rather deprived background, her writing style and choice of themes – all quite different so far in the five books I’ve read. Then a large chunk of the evening was devoted to talking about Murakami and translation. The description of the collaboration with translators and the degree of trust involved was very insightful. At one point she said that Jay Rubin, who has translated a lot of Murakami, was of the opinion that Murakami’s translation into Japanese of Catcher in the Rye was better as a read than Salinger’s original – quite a claim. Mieko also talked with admiration of Murakami’s beautiful Japanese. She was funny – you knew when a joke was coming because the Japanese in the room laughed before the superb interpreter, whose name I didn’t catch, – could deliver the English equivalent. A fascinating evening and some re-reading to be done withn new perspectives on the books.
The arrival of a new Almodovar film is a real incentive to venture into Picturehouse Central for a treat. His latest is Amarga Navidad – Bitter Christmas in English. A recurring theme in his later work has been the blurring of fiction and reality. How ethical is it to steal someone else’s life story for your script? As always, the sets and wardrobe are strikingly colourful and chic. The acting is emotionally powerful and the split era timescale works well with tragic events of 2004 being purloined for eminent director Raul’s (Leonardo Sbaraglia) 2025 script.
Relationships across genders are vivdly drawn and the close friendships of the female characters contrast with the more withdrawn males. The execption here is the brilliant Patrick Criado a firefighter who moonlights as a stripper in brilliant glitzy underpants who is supportive of the panic attack prone commercials director Elsa, played by Barbara Lennie. In a gender swap Elsa is Raul’s alter ego in the modern day script. The parallel stories intertwine in an intriguing way and as so often music plays an important part – Alberto Iglesias’ score won the Soundtrack Award at the Cannes Film Festival and a haunting Mexican song from Chavela Vargas makes an impact. This is not Almodovar’s best work but I found it riveting throughout and with Madrid at Christmas and the black sand of Lanzarote as locations and his brillinat designers’ sets, props and costumes it are always visually as well as intellectually and morally interesting.
After the film, I popped into Yoshino to pick up my supply of gyokuro and apart from the usual delightful catch up with Lisa, I had the bonus of seeing Shoko who had come to the Prom a couple of weeks ago that featured Dani Howard’s concerto for brass Signal. Shoko had been away in Poland for a week and is now back in London where she works at a Japanese bank. Both these women are delightful company and a longer session at Yoshino where food as well as beer will be taken is planned. Shoko approved of my current reading – a hilarious, scary, futuristic satire called Tokyo-to Dojo-to or The Sympathy Tower Tokyo. She doesn’t completely share my love of Murakami finding his “beautiful Japanese” (Meiko Kawakami) prose quite hard going sometimes.
A Month in the Country is Ivan Turgenev’s most famous (only performed) stage work although there have been adaptations for the stage of several of his novels including Fathers and Sons also by Brian Friel whose version I just saw at the Donmar. I have seen the play before but it was difficult to tell whether what the audience shared was more Turgenev or Friel. OK, the plot was Turgenev with the pampered, moody Natalya longing for a true connection, preferably with a younger beau, from her loveless marriage – very Nordic, with echoes of Strindberg, Ibsen and of course Chekhov. However the latter comparison is retrospective as this play predates his better known compatriot’s theatre debut by 25 years. As we enter we find a leafy glass box through which said Natalya peers out from her symbolic prison – a little heavy perhaps. No complaints with the rest of the production though. It moves swiftly through the scenes with the box descending as a marker. The sets are sparse with lots of very wafty grasses and minimal furniture. Natalya’s gowns are exquisite – hats off to the design team – and the other cast wardrobe well chosen for their characters. But that’s all surface, what about the play?
Sophie Okonedo can seemingly do no wrong. She gives a faultless performance as the sneering and demanding diva Natalya and as the pleading and needy would-be mistress. Just brilliant! Alastair Petrie was also outstanding as the spurned but devoted lover-in-waiting, Patrick Gibson was a revelation as the young tutor Alexey by turns falling in and out of love with both Natalya and her ward Vera in a nuanced performance. I couldn’t fault any of the supporting cast who are too many to list – it’s a big cast for a small space – but they all do justice to Friel’s witty adaption. Oh did I mention that it is sidesplittingly funny? I was sitting behind critic Mark Lawson whose frequent guffaws should guarantee a good review. It’s an evening about love and marriage – the first both requited and not and the latter a prison and a promise. I think I wrote that the Donmar’s The Guilty was my play of the year. This runs it close.
This blog started and ends with my granddaughter. For some time Dani Howard and her partner Sion Jones had said they could arrange for Daisy to sit in the pit beside their friend flautist Holly during a performance of Oliver! at the Gielgud Theatre. A great opportunity for work-experience for one about to study music and drama at the Guildford School of Acting. After an early supper in Pasta Evangelsists in Wardour Street, the Addisons and I arranged to meet and make introductions in the Blue Posts pub and then walk to the theatre. Why are there two Blue Posts pubs within about 300 yards of each other? I knew the one in Berwick Street very well from days past when recording voice overs with Chris Timpson at his studio in Duck Lane round the corner. However Dani and Sion were in the one in Rupert Street – even closer to the theatre. Oops! We did meet, chat and become firm friends all round and then Jo, Chris and I went in the front door to take our seats in the stalls while Daisy went in through the stage door. She found it loud – it is remarkable how much noise a 12 piece band can produce – interesting and useful. After the show we then all (minus Jo who had a bit of a headache) gathered at the other Blue Posts for a debrief, some networking and a few drinks before heading off home after a thoroughly entertaining evening.
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