Tom Stoppard

After a week of brilliant music, family and theatre in London I now find myself in Alicante.

Thursday saw neighbours Les, Sean and Maria and me make our way to our local wine bar and then to Blackheath Halls to see the Andy Sheppard quartet. Dee and I and a colleague had recorded an hour long to show with Andy back in 1999 and guitarist John Parricelli was still part of the group.

He is still a complete master of the soprano and tenor saxophones and was given great accompaniment from Dudley Foster on bass and Nic France on drums in an evening of varied old and new material. He made me cry by playing ‘Dancing Man and Woman’ which Dee and I had as our play out music from our wedding back in 2001. Happy memories through the tears.

My friends Anna and Lisa ventured up from Ramsgate to see Ute Lemper visiting Marlene Dietrich. They had a spare ticket and invited me to join them.

I didn’t really know what to expect but thoroughly enjoyed Ute telling us about a three hour long telephone conversation she had with Marlene in Paris. She had written to convey her horror at the press calling Ute ‘The new Marlene’ and the diva had phoned her back. This story interspersed with the great songs made for a most enjoyable evening

Sunday was little short of a miracle when son and daughter-in-law, daughter and son-in-law, two grandchildren and I were all free for lunch at the same time. Amazing fun and great stories all round. A great start to Christmastime.

Monday saw me go with Frances to the press night of Indian Ink at the Hampstead Theatre. It coincided with Tom Stoppard’s funeral and we were a bit worried about how it might affect the cast, especially Felicity Kendall. They were all superb and particularly Felicity playing the older role rather than the one of poet Flora Crewe she had created twenty years ago and Ruby Ashbourne Serkis playing Flora in front of Felicity. Gavi Singh Chera was also excellent as the beguiling – to Flora – Indian painter. As always the witticisms and hilarity were countered with serious debate about the role of Britain in Empire. Not his best play but definitely worth seeing for the acting and the brilliant set and lighting design – oh and the incidental music is good too.

I had a lovely lunch with Camilla Reeve the publisher of BBPC’s anthology Home and Belonging. It was a generous thank you from her for my chairing the discussion panel at her literary festival back in November. An enjoyable discussion ranging over many topics.

Wednesday was at the Almeida for Christmas Day, the second play in a month featuring a Jewish family (not) celebrating Christmas. This was provocative with references to Gaza and antisemitism, family bickering and made some good points but for me was a bit disjointed and I felt needed longer in development to get a better play out.

Twelfth Night came early with Frances, Farzana, Richard and me heading to the Barbican, some of us via the excellent Jugged Hare for dinner. This was the RSC`s production starring Freema Agyemang as Olivia and Sam West as Malvolio with Gwyneth Keyworth at Viola and Michael Grady-Hall as a brilliant Feste – brush up your juggling skills if you’re in the front rows! It was hilarious, but also touching, emotionally grabbing and was spoken with such clarity that your respect and admiration for the genius Bard of Avon rocketed even higher.

I had Friday at home to tidy up the place and think about packing. Saturday was my last Watford match of the year and we actually won 1-0 against Stoke, so another good omen for the festive season. Sunday evening I drove to Stansted in a horrific downpour which made my arrival in Alicante so welcome. I’d been equivocating about coming away for Christmas this year and am already glad I finished up with a decision to make the trip. I checked in to a very pleasant well-situated hotel where I think for the first time in my life my room is right opposite the lift not the 200 yards race I had to make last night at Stansted. Legs thus spared, I went walkabout to get my bearings in a city I have only been to once so long ago that not much sticks in the mind. A quick tapas lunch with a beer confirmed the decision to make the trip. The bar had no menu but served tapas of the day on wood blocks and a bit like Yo Sushi, they count up the blocks to make your bill. With a big party you’d get a Jenga game thrown in. The Christmas spirit and the love of tapas were well in evidence.

Further down towards the Mediterranean the welcome was even clearer at the end of the palm-lined promenade.

I then crossed to the marina to select my yacht when I win the lottery. It’s a very pleasant harbour to be further explored tomorrow.

And on the way back up (gentle slopes) through town there are some lovely examples of modernisme architecture which I shall also explore further.

So after all those wonderful outings and stimulated by some excellent cultural offerings (see other recent blogs) it’s a week to slow down a bit. Sunday saw me take a train to Southend to attend a volunteers day at The Jazz Centre UK where I’d been invited because the management team thought I might be able to contribute something to their publicity, marketing and social media plans. I think this was based largely on the fact that I designed and maintain the website of legendary tenor saxophone player Alan Skidmore and posted about his recent gig at the Centre. It was a lively series of discussions with lots of ideas being put forward but, as with so many charities, their execution will depend on funding being sought and secured.

The midweek gave me the pleasure of welcoming my friend Anna Blasiak – a Polish writer and translator – to Raggett Towers. We worked together at one of the British Bilingual Poetry Collective’s Translation Circles a couple of years back and became firm friends. Here she is explaining a nuance to Eeshita while I’m looking for the right words to convey it in English. She is one of the twelve poets featured in our anthology Home and Belonging published by Palewell Press last year.

And as well as buying me an excellent thank you breakfast before she left on Thursday, I have an invitation to the launch in Ramsgate in April of the latest book she has written with photographs by her wife Lisa Kalloo. I’m looking forward to that trip and spending more time with this creative and lovely couple. I’ve stayed with them before and exploring this increasinly arty town on the Kent coast is a real delight.

Thursday evening saw me joining Rosa and Hattie, Paola and Harry from the OAE at a Friends’ Outing to see The Score at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. I also met Nuria, a friend of Rosa, who was visiting London from Barcelona. She professed to have little English but we got by and she laughed in all the right places in the play.

And there were plenty of laughs in the story of deeply Christian J S Bach going to the court of deeply militarist Frederick the Great where JS’s son CPE is among the coterie of composers the king had collected around him. Cue high levels of competitiveness and entrenched positions.

Brian Cox’s performance was outstanding – grumpy, serene and authoritarian by turns – and it was good to see him on the stage with his wife, Nicole Ansari Cox ,for the first time since they did Tom Stoppard’s Rock and Roll together in 2006. As well as providing lots of camp melodrama, Oliver Cotton’s play led you to think about patronage, compromise, theology and materialism in a lively production by Trevor Nunn. The scenes where the Mr and Mrs Cox-Bachs were together were very touching.

Friday lunchtime took me to the Arcola Theater in Dalston for a rehearsed reading of a famous modern Japanese play newly translated into English. Multiple award winning Ai Nagai is celebrated in Japan for her plays that focus on social issues and this one is no exception – menopause, relationship breakups, jealousy, ageing and memory all feature. Translated by one of the actors in this reading Meg Kubota, the English version had us all laughing out loud on numerous occasions an sucking our teeth in shock at others. It’s called Women Who Want to Tidy Up and features three schoolfriends who have kept loosely in touch through to their fifties where one of them, Tsunko, has broken up with her much younger boyfriend and is not answering her friends’ calls, So they arrive to find the apartment on which Tsunko had spent a lot of money in a complete hoarder’s mess. Although it was a reading, the stage in my mind’s eye was strewn with black bin bags, cardboard boxes, clothes, newspapers and magazines and half empty food containers. It’s a designer’s delight when it gets the full production which it richly deserves. I hope through the good work of the Japan Foundation it does secure a full London staging – it is very funny and very thought-provoking about stuff. Marie Kondo’s shadow looms over it.

Tag: Tom Stoppard

Christmas trip

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