Sparks at Royal Albert Hall (30 May 23)

On my second visit in two days to see Sparks at Royal Albert Hall I was only a few seats away from where I was the day before, Rausing Circle Row 1 Seats 94-5, and this time I was with my froend, and long-time Sparks companion, Peter.

We travelled up from Ham together and the efficient public transport got us to RAH in time to inspect the merch (Peter bought some stuff) and to get a couple of beers. The Greene King session IPA had been good enough on the first night to have it again on the second.

The evening went much as it had on the Monday with the same timings and almost the same set, though I was pleased to see Veronica Lake make the selection this time.

 

Perhaps it was a little more familiarity with the new songs or perhaps I was just in a better mood (walking there on Monday may not have been the best idea) but, whatever the reason, I enjoyed the concert even more than I had the day before, and I had loved that one. 

Sparks did everything a Sparks fan coule have wanted them to do, as always, and that is why we are already hoping for another tour (or two) before they decide to retire gracefully.

Sparks at Royal Albert Hall (29 May 23)

Obviously I was going to go to see Sparks when they announced a couple of concerts at Royal Albert Hall (RAH) and the only question was who to go with on which dates, assuming that I could get tickets.

I do not know if it was because of Sparks' increasing fame or the draw of RAH but getting tickets was much harder than I expected. I was on the RAH website the second public booking opened only to find the stalls and the first two circles already sold out! That left me with the uppermost seated circle where the good news was that the front row was available so I got three seats, Rausing Circle Row 1 Seats 120-22, for £50 each with all fees included. A bit more than I had paid before to see Sparks, Roundhouse a year earlier was £43, but significantly less than the sold out sections. I had not sat in that part of RAH before but was happy with the seat and the price.

Having got three seats it made sense to take Julia and Julie, who I had first met at a Sparks gig.

We all met at South Ken to eat having made our ways there separately; Julia got the tube from Richmond, Julie came down from Oxford and went to V&A first, and I walked there.

We got to RAH just before 7pm and I grabbed a pint before we all went into the hall and continued our chatting until the support came on. Mr.B The Gentleman Rhymer did a fairly short session in a Bonzo Dog style enhanced by including a medley of Sparks songs.

8:30pm at Sparks entered to rapturous applause and much cheering.

The setlist was very different from the last time that I saw them as they had a new album, The Girl is Crying in Her Latte , to promote but the style was just the same and was just what all the fans wanted.

Russel spoke quite a bit and danced a lot, Ron sat mostly motionless rising only twice to sing/speak part of one song and, as expected, to perform the legendary Ron Dance.

It was all excellent, and ended on an exceedingly high note with the sequence When Do I Get to Sing "My Way",  The Number One Song in Heaven and This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us. They could have played just those three songs and I would have been happy.

Somehow they managed to keep that level up with an encore that included My Baby's Taking Me Home and finally finished with All That (from their previous album A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip) which I think will be a mainstay of their set from now on; I had my phone's torchlight on for that one.

Wuthering Heights at Rose Theatre

Rose Thetre, Kingston is doing great modern versions of classic stories, I am thinking of things like The Importance of Being Earnest and Lord of the Flies, so it was a very easy decision to go and see Wuthering Heights. The poster above was enough to convince me that it would be interesting so I dutifully paid my £25 (very reasonable!) for seat J39 in the stalls.

As always, I walked there allowing myself enough time to grab a beer before going in to the auditorium.

I has heard several versions of the story on the radio over the years but had managed to forget almost all of it so I could approach it afresh (again). The story had lots of births, marriages and deaths and I very much appreciated the family tree drawn at the back of the stage where these were recorded as they happened, very useful when trying to work out who were cousins and who were siblings etc.

The large set of characters and the long timescale of the story were skilfully met by having actors play several different roles, e.g. a mother would die and the actor reappear sometime later as her sister's daughter, or something like that. It worked well.

One actor caught my eye slightly more than the others (this was very much an ensemble production) and that was Nicole Sawyerr who played Isabella, Frances and young Cathy. She shone on the night but I may also have been recalling seeing her in something at Theatre 503 where she has performed a few time.

The language of the production was modern and so was the staging but the story was still very much Wuthering Heights. Instead of being a period piece it was a bright and fresh production and that made it more relatable without losing any of the drama.

Wuthering Heights was a great success.

Richard III at Rose Theatre

I do not need much urging to see any Shakespeare play and when it is on at my nearest theatre and holds the promise of being a modern version then going becomes a no-brainer.

Richard III is one of Shakespeare's more powerful, and dark, plays yet it gets performed much less frequently than, say, Lear, and I had only seen it twice in recent years, both in excellent productions.

And, as someone forced to watch Bridgerton, I was aware of Adjoa Andoh.

All that meant that I was quick to pay £40 for regular seat J33.

I walked to Rose Theatre giving myself enough time to buy a beer before going into the auditorium. It was pretty busy, which I always like to see.

I last saw Richard III in 2017 at Arcola Theatre so my memories of the story were not great. That may have helped this time as the story is the main point of the play with Richard rising to become king through the ruthless elimination of all competitors. Macbeth rises clumsily while Richard rises purposefully. It is possible to sympathise with Macbeth (or to blame his wife!) but Richard has no excuses. It's a gripping story and well worth watching again.

With Richard III at the heart of everything the play succeeds or fails on the actor playing the role and Adjoa Andoh was convincingly evil.

There were some modern elements to the production, such as Morris Dancing(!), these were small choices in the flavour of the piece and it remained a very recognisable Richard III, and I loved it for being so.

This production of Richard III managed to be both a traditional telling of the tale and have enough that was different to make it distinctive. 

The Retreat at Finborough Theatre

Finborough Theatre has been doing quite a few foreign plays lately and that suits me well as I like to learn about different cultures and to hear from different perspectives. The Retreat is by Canadian writer Jason Sherman who Finborough Theatre had called upon before.

I liked the simplicity of the premise, a writer's retreat, and the simplicity of the production, just three main characters, and I was easily parted with £23 for an unreserved seat.

The preliminaries were so standard that the server at Cafe de Coin knew what my order was as soon as I walked in. Fed and watered I made my way to Finborough in time to bag a seat in the front row.

I liked The Retreat from the start as the characters were engaging and the premise was interesting. In the centre of it all was a young inspiring female writer and and older established male writer looking to move away from low-brow success to do something more worthy, next to them was the writer's partner who put success (money) first and beyond that was the young woman's father.

Very quickly there was a lot going on and that is why I loved the play so much. We had the developing relationship between the two writers, things about Jewish culture that were interesting philosophically but which I did not fully understand, an examination of what is meant by "home", and the gradual exposure of what had gone before and which had helped lead to today.

It was riveting and highly entertaining stuff and that was helped immeasurably by strong performances from all three main actors, Jill Winternitz, Max Rinehart and Michael Feldsher. Jonathan Tafler was good too, as the father, but his role was less prominent. This was a play about people and it needed the good actors that it got.

The Retreat was another example of what Finborough Theatre does best.

August In England at Bush Theatre

The poster tells you that August In England is Lenny Henry's first play and that alone was enough to get a ticket.

I had seen quite a lot of Lenny Henry over his long career starting with New Faces in 1975, Tiswas from 78 to 81 and all the way through to The Witcher: Blood Origin in 2022. I was not going to miss the opportunity to see him in a small theatre playing a part that he wrote.

I booked it back in October, when it was first announced, and having been caught out slightly by a person with large hair on my previous visit I went for the front row, seat AA9, which cost a mere £22.5 due to my pensioner's discount.

Sadly Bush Theatre had stopped doing food and I did not have an established pre-theatre eating place so I looked for one on the walk up from Gunnesbury Station. I finally ended up in the large pub on the corner of Shepherd's Bush and Goldhawk Road which now calls itself Sindercombe Social where a halloumi and chips was well received.

The set was simple and, so it turned out, so was the production. To be honest, it was far more like a monologue than a play. That is merely to clarify its content, and does not diminish it in any way.

Lenny Henry told us the story of a man who, as part of the Windrush generation, came here as a young child. His story was at times ordinary, poignant and funny but always engaging and entertaining. Lenny Henry's fifty years as a performer stood him in excellent stead.

The changing moods of the story, as with any life story it has its up, downs and funny moment, carried us along happily for over an hour.

Then we got to the Windrush Scandal and the story turned dark. For the second time in two nights I was watching a play about the UK's harsh and inhumane immigration policies and for the second time in two days I was saddened, angry and ashamed.

August In England was a very human and very real story told by a master. It was both an entertainment and a political message, and that made it good theatre.

The Beekeeper of Aleppo at Richmond Theatre

For some reason I was slow to the party when this was announced and when I finally decided to go my usual seat had gone so I was pleased that the equivalent seat on the other side was available.

The pricing was slightly different this time (I think I found out why later) and there were more cheaper seats in the front row of the Dress Circle and I was able to claim A3 for £33.

I was also able to claim a 500cl bottle of Budvar beforehand and while £7.5 is steep compared to pub prices I have paid more for less at other theatres - when did small cans of beer become a thing?

The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a little odd in that it starts with a Syrian refugee in this country saying that he is not going to tell the story of how he got here and then the play does just that.

It also had an odd set that did not look like anything specific and which was all sorts of different places. Some of these transformations were assisted by projected images and the scene at sea was particularly effective.

And that was the problem with the seat. This production had additional equipment in the rig either side of the stage and that seriously interrupted my view whenever people where on the bed at the right of the stage.

In many ways the story was one that I knew of a couple being forced out of their homeland by violence and making desperate decisions in the effort to get here that included working for criminals to raise the money to pay for being smuggled.

The last part of the story was the harsh and inhuman treatment they got once they arrived in the UK. Depressingly this play was written before the recent immigration laws and things are even worse now.

The play got a very warm reception at the end with lots of cheering but I found it a little thin, perhaps because I knew something of the story beforehand and perhaps because I had seen more engaging plays about refugees, Cargo at Arcola Theatre comes immediately to mind.

The lasting impression from the play was that harsh and inhuman treatment we give to immigrants and that is a message that needs to be shared.