The Importance Of Being Ernest - Encore Screening

Having seen the first three productions of Oscar Wilde comedies from the Classic Spring Theatre Company shown live in cinemas, (A Woman Of No Importance, Lady Windermere's Fan and An Ideal husband) I missed the fourth. So when an encore screening came to the Aylesbury Odeon last night, I was one of only a dozen or so in the audience. All three plays have been classically staged with traditional sets and costumes, both these look very good in close up on the big screen.

The performance is distinguished by the rapid delivery from the terrific cast. Fortunately the sound is of high quality so we hardly miss a word, not like one of the critics who complained that in the theatre he missed too much. The play still came in at just over two hours, so the pace has to be high. Although I was glad of the occasional pause and we could take a deep breath. The Wilde wit comes thick and fast. I'm still not sure who or what Brumby was.

I didn't recognise most of the excellent cast, but the two women above are a hilarious Pippa Nixon as Gwendolen (who I saw in King John and As You Like It at Stratford) and a clever Sophie Thomson as Lady Bracknell (famous here for her role as Sheila in Detectorists). All the women are not like anyone I have ever met, or maybe there are glimpses now and again........

All About Eve at the Noel Coward Theatre

Te Noel Coward Theatre on St Martin's Lane in the West End seemed familiar. I then found it used to be the Albery Theatre and I'm sure that is where I went with my daughter to see Oliver back around 1979 or 1980. Now owned by Delfont Mackintosh Theatres, it was refurbished in 2006 but is still cramped in the back of house.

The play itself was quite spectacular if not emotionally satisfying. It is staged with technical brilliance, the set is amazing but the ingenious staging somehow overshadows the limitations of the script. The dialogue seems to reflect that by Joseph Mankiewicz from the classic 1950 film, but it does seem quite dated. Director Ivo van Hove has adapted the screenplay for the stage, but it would have been better to give it a more modern update.

However the acting is generally first class. Gillian Anderson as Margot and Lily James as Eve are both very good, but the highlight for me was Monica Dolan as Karen, a theatrical outsider and part time narrator, she delivers a powerful performance. She is well known in our house for her brilliant role as Rosemary Pritchard in W1A and as Mrs Peggy O'Dowd in Vanity Fair. For me she was also excellent as Marion Thorpe in A Very English Scandal. Here she is almost unrecognisable for those roles and her command of the American accent puts others in the shade. She is on the far right in the photo below.

The Playfair Cricket Annual

I used to buy this every summer in my youth, an inexpensive guide to the cricket season's events and players. I could never afford Wisden and even today, the Playfair Cricket Annual is only £6.86 compared with Wisden, which at £36.36 seems vastly expensive.

This year I wanted a guide to all the forthcoming World Cup matches, but it is most useful for the information about all the county cricketers when we watch one day or 20/20 on the TV. Excellent value.

Maidenhead Easter Ten

After the heat of last year's Milton Keynes Half Marathon, another very warm day for the Maidenhead Easter Ten Mile race. Unfortunately there was no shade from the sun that shone the whole time.

I knew early on that my pace was slower than the previous five times I had run this race. For the first five miles I was running conservatively at just under ten minutes per mile. However by mile six my pace had slowed and for the second half of the run I must have been averaging at 10 minutes 40 seconds a mile, my normal slow run pace.

My final time was 1 hour 44 minutes and 2 seconds, the slowest of all six of these events and over ten minutes slower than my PB.  I was also well down the field compared with previous years, although I did manage an age grade of just over 60% which seems a small miracle.

Rock Island Line - The Song That Made Britain Rock

Billy Bragg's fine documentary basically follows the story in his book Roots, Radicals and Rockers as described in my bog posting of 28th February 2018 entitled "The First Skiffle Recordings".

But one thing that Billy missed in his programme Rock Island Line - The Song That Made Britain Rock was the first skiffle recording. This was by Ken Colyer's Skiffle Group who recorded Midnight Special, Casey Jones and  K.C. Moan on the album Back to the Delta which also featured five trad jazz numbers by Ken Colyer's Jazzmen. These were all recorded in Decca's studios on 25th June 1954.

Billy ignores these recordings and goes straight to a couple of weeks later when on  the 13th July 1954, Chris Barber's Jazz Band went into the same Decca studio to record the album New Orleans Joys. Like Colyer's album, Barber's contained skiffle tracks, this time there were four by the Lonnie Donegan Skiffle Group.

What Billy missed was an idea of why Colyer's skiffle songs never made it, whilst Lonnie's paved the way for British rock. For me, Colyer's voice, and for that matter Dickie Bishop's vocals on Lonnie's next recording -  the EP Backstairs Session of May 1955, were never in the same class as Lonnie. So when, on the 11th November 1955 (16 months after it was recorded), Decca released the single Rock Island Line from the July 1954 recordings, the world would never be the same. As I posted earlier:

If you listen to those first two tracks that found their way onto the LP, you may agree with me that, by today's standards, they still sound perfect. Sometimes it is when perfection arrives by accident, that history is made. The combination of the three superbly played acoustic instruments (even the washboard is just right) and Lonnie's crystal clear voice places these recordings above anything that has been heard before.

The Remains of the Day at the Oxford Playhouse

"I'm so glad you're feeling better". Stevens ignores his father's approaching death to attend to his duties with the guests of his employer Lord Darlington. This is so typical of the repressed butler who is bound by his conviction of what a good butler should be. Stephen Boxer is so good in the role that, for me, he even eclipses that played by Anthony Hopkins in the film version.

Equally wonderful is Niamh Cusack as Miss Kenton, her feelings for Stevens are ultimately subdued by his apparent coldness towards her. Barney Morris, in his adaptation of the Kazuo Ishiguro novel,  has perfectly captured the nature of a pre WW2 household. There is also the underlying danger of the rise of fascism as Darlington tries to use his position, with that of others like him, to seek appeasement with Germany. After all, their conference is in his house.

The director, Christopher Haydon has cleverly steered away from the structure of the movie by playing pre war and post war scenes simultaneously on the stage. So one minute Stevens is talking to people he meets on that famous journey to the West Country to see Miss Kenton (now Mrs Benn) decades later and being interrupted by Miss Kenton and others in the household in the past. This theatrical device works very well to keep up the pace. I'm not sure the gentleman next to me got that at all.

There are other aspects to the production that are also superb. The set by Lily Arnold is one, but I liked the combination of the music between scenes (echoes of Downton Abbey) with the movement of the ensemble (collecting and distributing props) which resembles the business of the household servants. For once, a mention for the movement director,  Lucy Cullingford.

And then the final extended scene is perfection. No wonder there was not a seat to be found in the theatre on a Tuesday evening.

London Rules, Dear Mrs Bird and Taft

Having enjoyed Mick Herron's "Slow Horses" (the first of the five Jackson Lamb thrillers), I skipped the next three and caught up with his crew in "London Rules". The witticisms are great at first, but they do become a little tiresome by the end. One of the gang remarks: "If I'd wanted to be a librarian, I'd have gone to library school, taken library exams, and saved up enough library stamps to buy a library uniform". See what I mean? There are occasions when the writer tries to I inject some literary merit into a straightforward terror attack plot. "Night keeps it's head down during daylight hours, but it's always there, always waiting, and some open their doors to it early; allows it to sidle in and bed down in a corner". Herron should stick to the more witty stuff, but sparingly. 

I needed something light after the histrionics of "London Rules", and this book was exactly right. Emmeline is a sympathetic and lovable narrator, although sometimes you want to give her a good talking to. Despite the deadly serious background of London in the blitz, Emmeline has fancy ideas of what she can contribute to the war effort. But instead finds she is only working for a woman's magazine. The prose and dialogue wonderfully reflect the style of the early forties, but the story does lack some power and emotion that a more experienced writer might have wrung from Emmeline's predicaments.

Ann Patchett's second novel is one of her best. This is a mature white woman writing with a male narrator who is black. John Nickel is separated from the mother of his son (they were never married) and has ended up running a bar in Memphis, Tennessee. The story of the characters he meets in the bar, whether staff or visitors, mingle with his own family.  It took me a while to get used to the occasional insertions of another story, this time about the father (now dead) of Fay and Carl who appear in the bar. Is it real or imagined? Somehow it felt as this was being told by John in the third person. 

The dialogue (and there is stacks of it) is top drawer. Nobody writes family conversations better than Ann Patchett. There are some quite complicated relationships. When you come to an evening John spends with the parents of his ex and their other daughter, you know you are in the very capable hands of a great writer. She is equally good in her descriptions of place: "It's a fine day to be working outside. One of those great April days when everything is up and blooming and the weather isn't hot or cold." Just like it is now.