Mary Broome at the Orange Tree

Before writing this I quickly reminded myself of all the plays that I have seen at the Orange Tree in recent years. There is a lot of good, and even great, stuff there in a diverse and challenging portfolio.

Mary Broome is an exception in that it disappoints on several levels. I'll try to explain why.

I like to look at three aspects of plays; the writing, the staging and the acting. In this case I'll start with the acting as that was the most successful part of the play.

The two lead characters in Mary Broome are Mary a housemaid and the son of the family that she has a relationship with.

Mary is played by Katie McGuinness who I've written nice things about before for her roles in Nan (2007) and Chains of Dew (2008).

Katie delivers again as Mary Broome the humble but dignified housemaid.

But the star of the show is Jack Farthing as Leonard, the son who seduces, marries and then abandons Mary.

Leonard sees himself as an artist, a writer, and expects the world to look after him because of the beauty he creates. Real work is not for him. He is vain, foppish and aesthete. His language is colourful and often barbed. Jack is utterly convincing in this role.

The acting is the one part of the play that I have no hesitation in recommending.

I found the staging stilted, though I am sure that some of this is down to the weaknesses in the play, which I will come on to.

A big attraction of the Orange Tree is that it is staged in the round and the best plays make use of this. But Mary Broome does not.

The seating arrangement do give you a closeness to the action (I was in a front row as usual) but the engagement was missing. This is in marked contrast with, for example, Once we Were Mothers (2007) where I wrote, "It is like being in the room with her when she goes mad".

The lack of vitality was embarrassingly obvious in the last scene where the daughter of the family (Leonard's sister) stood immobility and silent next to me for quite a long time. I'm sure that we both wondered what she was doing there.

And that leads me to the main problem, the play itself.

In addition to the pointless daughter we had other equally pointless characters in the other son, his fiancée/wife and two friends of the family. Some were used sparingly as an excuse to have a conversation with but none of them added anything meaningful to the story.

Not that there was much of a story either. I gave most of it away earlier (Leonard seduces, marries and abandons Mary) and all that there is to add is that having been abandoned Mary sets off to the new world to make a new life with an old admirer.

None of this comes as a shock and none of it has much of an impact on the characters either who end the play just as they started.

Which leads me to conclude that the real purpose of the play is to show how two very different women, Mary and Leonard's mother, drift aimlessly through life satisfied but never happy. This is revealed to us through the contrasting eyes of two men, Leonard the artist and his stern, traditional and autocratic father.

I left Mary Broome very disappointed with the evening but these things happen and I'm far from losing faith with the Orange Tree. In fact I've already got my ticket for the next play!

Walking through the grey soul of London

I've spent many a happy hour walking through the unfamiliar streets of London just to explore and discover. Over the years I have learnt a little more about the various parts of London that I have worked in and about the routes between there and the places I visit regularly.

It can come as no surprise then that I found myself on a walk organised by the Museum of London with the theme Walking through the grey soul of London.

I learnt about the walk at a Big Ideas meeting but dallied a little before booking my place and was lucky to get the final ticket for the night that I wanted to go. Clearly there are quite a few people like me out there.


The heart of the tour was Finsbury, the evocative Borough that got swallowed up by Islington in 1965 leaving behind a few faded reminders of its claim on London.

We met in The Harlequin in Arlington Way, just South of The Angel. I thought that the area was new to me but soon in to the walk I realised that we were just behind Saddler's Wells which I have been to several times.

Within a few minutes we had found a brick wall etched with the signs of policemen, learnt that a long wooden pipe brought water from Hertfordshire to a reservoir there and the little gardens were once the New Tunbridge Wells.

After that the journey took many twists and turns and the stories flew at us as we stopped briefly by each strange landmark.

We encountered Finsbury Town Hall, a road settled by Italians, the house where a woman lived to a ripe old age simply by never cleaning anything and a concert hall that became a church.

Pubs were and advertised feature of the walk and a stop at the Coach and Horses in Ray Street let us refuel and rest a little.

It also allowed some of us (not me!) to lie in the road and listen to the vestiges of the Fleet River heading south towards the Thames.

We also learnt that we had been following the route taken by the Artful Dodger when he first me Oliver.

A little further on we met the recently abandoned Post Office train, a collection of spoons stuck to a wall and various other oddities that I failed to note as we headed towards our next rest at the Pakenham Arms on the borders of Bloomsbury.

Flesh was flagging a little then and it was clear that the advertised 9pm finish was impossible and the suggested 9;30 finish was unlikely.

But that mattered little as we embarked on the final and most interesting part of the evening as we headed back towards The Angel before taking an even more convoluted route than before that took us through parks, past workers' cottages that now cost a fortune, to Lenin's former home and other such delights.

By then it was dark but still our guide, Robert Kingham, kept us enthralled with his stories.

By then it was almost 10pm and even though we were all a little tired and hungry it was with some disappointment that we made our final stop of the evening at the Union Tavern, carefully chosen, it seems, to be as far away from any tube station as it is possible to be in London leaving me with a fair walk back to Kings Cross and the Piccadilly Line home.

It was a fabulous evening rich almost to excess with discovery and delights. It could have been tailor-made for me and the rest of the group seemed to enjoy it just as much.

Big Ideas on Cooperation

This month's Big Ideas discussion on Cooperation got off to a bad start when the billed speaker, Richard Sennett, failed to show. This left Big Ideas. Nathan Charlton and Rich Cochrane to run the show and it also meant a slightly delayed start while they worked out what to do.

I do not know what direction Richard would have take us but Rich opened up a broad canvass from social technologies to human evolution with lots of points in between.

As a result the discussions wandered in many directions, sometimes simultaneously, and, as a group, we failed to focus on any particular aspect of cooperation, much less get to any sort of agreement on it.

That said, it was a good discussion with many people contributing, including a few newcomers, and nobody hogging the debate.

The experimental twitter stream (#BIGI) was a little thin in Danny's absence but other people besides myself made some contributions. This is what we said:

reesmf Technologies like Twitter and Facebook help us to collaborate but the baddies use it too. #bigi

reesmf Collaboration needs a purpose. #bigi

reesmf Connection is not the same as collaboration. #bigi

reesmf Evolution getting lots of name checks but no votes for Marx so far. #bigi

dannyrye @reesmf tolpuddle martyrs. That's *quite* marxist #bigi

reesmf Big Society is looking to change the social framework within which we collaborate. Better than state diktat. #bigi

reesmf Current NHS framework encourages collaboration on research etc. Proposed changes will prevent this. #bigi

reesmf Are there situations where cooperation is better than competition and can we identify rules for this? #bigi

leighblue #bigi interesting debate on cooperation. Though without a clear question, hard to distinguish between coordination, collaboration and co-op.

A few broad themes emerged during the debate, including frameworks, game theory, evolution and economics.

A framework defines the context within which the cooperation happens. In some cases this is very visible, e.g. Facebook defines what we can do with our connections there, but in society as a whole they can be less obvious and generally fall under the headings of expected or acceptable behaviour.

Game Theory shows us that cooperation can be a winning strategy. Professor Martin Nowak's work got a few mentions here. Somebody (must be an academic) had read his books but you can learn all you need to know about his theories from his recent RSA talk.

The discussions on Evolution and Game Theory were linked (by me!). Evolution is driven by variation which means that various strategies are always in play from the outright selfish to the martyr and Game Theory shows us how different strategies will have prominence at different times.

Not quite sure how, or why, we got on to economics but we spent some time talking about the demutalisation of building societies and the privatisation of BT. I think that Rich made the most interesting point here when he asked if we could be considered to be all cooperating within a competitive market.

Words like "good" and "sinister" got quite a few mentions but we failed to identify any inherent goodness or evil in cooperation or competition. The question that left me with (briefly tweeted above) was whether there are identifiable characteristics of situations where cooperation or competition are clearly the better strategies.

For example, can we prove that the health service needs to be cooperative (so that practitioners can share "best practice") and that car manufacturers need to be competitive to drive innovation.

Having written that, it now occurs to be that a difference (or THE difference?) is in the nature of the customer choice; in health we just want the best care and don't mind who fixes us but with our car we all have different desires.

That sounds like a topic for another debate on another day. Perhaps Richard Sennett will make that one.

Diplomacy on the edge of the EU

The British Czech and Slovak Association (BCSA) held it's formal Annual General Meeting in April and this was immediate followed by a public talk by Michael Roberts, British Ambassador to Slovakia 2007-10.

The fitting venue was the Slovak Embassy in London and the function room was packed for the event.

Michael Roberts had prepared for the talk well producing both a presentation and typed notes to accompany the pictures. This flair for preparation came through during the talk too as a lot of what he presented was the result of work he did for the Queen's visit to Slovakia.

We were entertained with lots of little stories showing historical links between Britain and Slovakia. Most of these were unknown to us beforehand so it proved to be an informative talk too.

For example, we were told that tapestries from Mortlake in London had been found in Bratislava Castle.

We also heard interesting takes about Englishmen measuring Slovak mountains, attending Slovak royal weddings and spying in Slovakia.

Michael also gave us some of his views on Slovakia which were generally favourable and he intends to remain working in the region even though he has now retired from the diplomatic service.

The city of Kosice came in for particular praise for its beauty and culture, something that more of us will be encouraged to sample when it become the European Capital of Culture in 2013.

The role of the European Union was another interesting facet of his time there as Slovakia become more and more engaged with Europe, leading to it joining the Euro currency zone, then the control that the EU had over Slovakia lessened as it had fewer things that it could threaten to withhold Slovakia from. You have to jump through hoops to get in to the clubs but once you are in then you're a member setting the hoops for the next countries that want to join.

I suspect that Michael Robert could have talked all night about Slovakia but he managed to restrain himself to around an hour. We then had a few questions before breaking up for drinks, nibbles and conversations.

Another highly successful BCSA talk.

Steven Berkoff's One Man at The Riverside

My current plan to explore London's fringe theatre took me back to The Riverside (Hammersmith) again, this time for Steven Berkoff's one-man show called, er, One Man.

It's a show in two very different halves. In the first half we have Edgar Allan Poe's Tell-Tale Heart and after the break it's "Dog".

It was Tell-Tale Heart that attracted me as I grew up on a feast of Edgar Alan Poe films, usually featuring Vincent Price.

The story of the Tell-Tale Heart was narrated to us by the murderer himself who explained why and how he committed the crime. He also explained to us that he was not mad, as had been suggested to him, though clearly he was.

Steven Berkoff plays the murder with menace, dressed up smartly in black and standing in a harsh spotlight. Sadly I've been unable to find a decent photo of this on the internet and I was unable to take one myself as I was sitting in the front row and so it would have been too obvious (I've been told off at The Riverside before!).

This was a theatrical tour de force. The acting was mesmerising and powerful and we were sucked in to the murderer's dark and distorted world. Genius.

The only slight problem that I had was with some of the audience (particularly one small group of young women) who found some of the man's exaggerated behaviours amusing. I thought that we had all stopped laughing at mental illness. The false humour ill-fitted the mood and story too.

Dog was completely different and you were meant to laugh at that.

Dog gave us a view of the life and thoughts of a middle-aged Millwall fan and his rottweiler told through a series of short scenes.

This was over-the-top chavviness, exaggerated to make the point and to entertain. For example, he drinks thirty four pints of lager when fourteen would have been sufficient for the story.

Steven also plays the role of the dog and we get his view of what it is like to have an owner like that. Mostly the dog starts by swearing and threatening extreme violence but calms down and becomes the submissive dog the owner thinks it always is.

In Tell-Tale Heart the drama came from the story, in Dog it comes from the characterisation. And so, again, there is the slight discomfort that we are laughing at somebody simply because they are not like us and we feel superior to them.

The lack of a story, or of any obvious jokes to compensate, makes Dog the weaker of the two pieces but both are really all about Steven Berkoff's acting, and that's why they are worth seeing.