It is only 18km from Brentford to Waterloo

Like most of my walks with my regular companion, this one started with a vague plan that we adopted as we went along.

His suggestion was to walk from Ealing to Central London and I amended this slightly to start in Brentford (PokemonGo is to blame here!) and to end at Waterloo Station as that gave us the fastest route home.

The plan then became Gunnesbury Park, Ealing Common, Acton Park, Hyde Park, Green Park and St James' Park.

After my series of small disasters on my last walk to West Hampstead it was good to have a plan that worked, as they always used to do.

The walk was a good example of what walking through London is like with an interesting mix of areas including some very grand, some very new and some a little shabby. We also found some attractive coffee shops, Rada Cafe in Brentford, Dada's Diner in a part of Acton that is apparently called The Vale despite any evidence of hills, and Benugo on The Serpentine.

Despite these three leisurely stops we covered the 18km in a respectable four hours (i never pause the tracker these days because I forgot to restart it too often in the past).

The sunny windless weather helped but the real star of this very enjoyable walk was London, particularly the parts that were new to me; there was architecture, open spaces and a fest of culture.

From Kingston to Mayfair

This year's BCSA Annual Dinner was held at a new venue, The May Fair hotel in, er, Mayfair so it was an easy decision to walk there.

As with all walks north of the river the big decision I had to make was where to cross and I chose Barnes Railway Bridge because the walk from there to Hammersmith is pretty direct, follows the river all of the way and is car-free for large sections.

It had rained heavily and I was dressed smartly so I avoided Richmond Park and took the more practicable but less interesting walk along the road instead.

At least that gave me the opportunity to walk along Clydesdale Gardens in North Sheen (probably) which I had not done before which means I have now walked 36% of the roads in London Borough of Richmond (three people have done 100% so I still have a long way to go).

The second decision was where to stop for coffee and as I was looking for somewhere upmarket and trendy that rules out a surprisingly large amount of the route and I was not able to have my break until I got to Orée Kensington High Street. They have a branch in Richmond so I knew what to expect and that the Raspberry Croissant was a good option.

The cafe was welcome but the number of pedestrians was not and the section along Kensington High Street was quite slow. I would have gone down side streets as I usually do but I had to tick off the street sometime and this was the day to do it.

The final quarter quarter also meant a depressing amount of time waiting at pedestrian crossings, as it always does in Central London. Cars still get far too much priority over the far greater number of people trying to get around using more sensible methods.

The final statistics were 21.38km walked in 4 hours and 43 minutes.

Mrs Warren’s Profession at Richmond Theatre

Mrs Warren’s Profession was written by George Bernard Shaw so of course I went to see it. My usual seat Dress Circle A25 was a nicely modest £23.5.

As the image makes clear, the production made much of the casting of real-lift mother and daughter Caroline and Rose Quentin as the mother and daughter in the play, something I had seen done well before with Killing Time at Park Theatre in 2027 with Brigit Forsyth and her daughter Zoe Mills. This play was rather different in that the mother/daughter relationship was not very close (because of Mrs Warren’s Profession) so their real-life relationship mattered less.

While on casting, it is a shame that the Richmond Theatre website lists only four of the six cast members when the two missing actors both had substantial roles and played their parts very well. It was the mix of characters and their relationships that was the heart of the play.

I am sure that Mrs Warren’s Profession was very shocking when first performed in the 1890s but times and attitudes have changed and it is less so now, though some current moral red lines were still stretched and broken.

Deprived of most of its shock value, Mrs Warren’s Profession now relies on its humour more and while there is plenty of that it is not the constant stream that Wilde delivers and some of it seems very obvious today.

All that lead to a thoroughly satisfactory evening which was never exceptional but which was always competent, engaging and entertaining.

The Lavender Hill Mob at Richmond Theatre

I have to address the elephant in the room first.

The Lavender Hill Mob concerns the robbery of gold being transferred from Royal Mint to Bank of England and this is a part of London that I know very well as both my sons live in flats in Cartwright Street which is part of the Royal Mint site (once owned by The Crown and now by People's Republic of China). So it annoyed me intensely when the play described the passage of the gold down Cartwright ROAD! An error it made twice. They also turned left into East Smithfield when they should have gone right.

It also annoys me a little that the play describes itself as a "side-splittingly funny, fast-paced comedy" when it is no such thing, and nor should it be.

But I'll begin at the beginning which was an email from the theatre announcing the show and being a fan of both the original story and the theatre I was quick to book and got my usual seat Dress Circle A25 for an extremely fair £22 thanks to my loyalty card.

I hoped for something that mimicked the mood of the film with amiable thieves gently committing an audacious crime and that is exactly what it was. The humour, like the action, was maintained at a constant level that was certainly high enough to be good entertainment but which never made the claims made for it in the publicity. There were a few obvious funny bits added to try and justify the "side-splitting" claim but these were too contrived and completely unnecessary, the play was doing fine without them.

The staging was a real positive with the story told as a retrospective with the people in the room playing out the various parts so, for example, we only met one of the actual criminals and the others were played by other people who also played other roles. It worked well.

If you liked the film of The Lavender Hill Mob then you would also like this stage version and should forgive it its occasional dalliance into slapstick. Getting that street name wrong still hurts though.

A loop through Bushy Park

I do far too many medium distance walks to document them all (though I can find them all on MapMyWalk) but I liked this one enough to say something about it.

The reason I liked this walk is that it covered a reasonable distance (20km) mostly along a river or through a park and did so without ever getting that far away from home.

The heart of the route was a simple loop starting at Teddington Lock and following The Thames upstream all the way to Hampton Court, then through the old part of Hampton to enter Bushy Park by a side pedestrian gate, through a couple of woodland areas to a cafe for lunch and then back through Teddington.

The weather was ridiculously good for the middle of November with plenty of low sun and enough warmth to make walking comfortable. The light enjoyed dancing on the water and weaving through the trees which made the whole walk delightful. And all this is on my doorstep.

Not Now at Finborough Theatre

I love the programming that Finborough Theatre is doing at the moment and so I see most things that are on there and any shows that I miss are more down to a lack of time than to the particulars of the play.

In this case it helped that Not Now is written by David Ireland because I had seen a couple of his plays previously, at Finborough, and loved them.

I have a routine when going to Finborough but that was blown apart by a tube strike that day which meant that after a lot of walking and a couple of slow buses, my evening meal was a sandwich bought at a nearby Sainsbury's and eaten on the way. Still, despite everything, I got to the theatre not that long after 7pm and was able to claim a seat in the front row.

The premise of the play was simple, a young man in Northern Ireland is about to go to London for an acting audition (the play opens with the opening of Richard III) and he gets involved in a discussion with his uncle who wants to be helpful but isn't. That conversation soon veers off, as all conversations do, and soon covers the relative merits of Shakespeare and Stephen King, Irishness, The Troubles and being gay or not.

It's a normal conversation from which we learn much about the two men and their family. Some surprising secrets are exposed through the tensions between the two. But they are family and this is good natured stuff, each wants to explain their point of view and not just belittle the other's.

A pleasant surprise for me was that the uncle is played by Stephen Kennedy. The name meant nothing to me (to my shame) but I recognised the voice immediately because his real name is Ian Craig and he's the chef at Grey Gables in The Archers. He also appears to have gone to school in Strabane where my mother grew up and many of her family still live, and to be Actor-in-Residence at Kingston Grammar School which is just down the road from me and where my younger son went to school.

Matthew Blaney played the nephew and together the two actors gelled magnificently, they looked and sounded like a nephew and uncle having a normal if slightly awkward conversation.

Not Now was short, just under an hour, but packed so much into that time that it felt like a full evening at the theatre.

Finborough Theatre and Not Now was a perfect match and I am glad I was there to see it sparkle.

Ek/ Forsythe/ Quagebeur at Sadler’s Wells Theatre

One of my worst kept resolutions is to see more dance. Seeing the Ek/ Forsythe/ Quagebeur triple bill at Sadler’s Wells Theatre was only a small step in fixing that but it was a very enjoyable step and one that confirmed sense of my resolution as well as the stupidity of my failure to keep to it.

The only part of the triple bill that had any recognition for me was the final part, The Rite of Spring choreographed Mats Ek. My first encounter with Ek is lost in the midst of time but it, and a few subsequent exposures, were enough for me to make the booking, Second Circle Row A Seat 5  for £35.

Being a matinee meant that I had to find somewhere to have lunch and Fox Garden Court Cafe, in the Sadler’s Wells complex but accessed through a different door, proved well up to the mark and I had a lovey spicy vegetarian mulligatawny soup. Having found it I shall be using the cafe again.

I love dance but have no idea how to describe it! The three pieces had some similar tropes in that they all used several dancers in varying numbers, were all modern in style and all focussed mostly on the limbs. The different styles of the three sets of music was the main difference between the dances, though I am sure that somebody who knows more about dance than me (not difficult) would spot significant stylistic differences.

I went primarily to see The Rite of Spring by Mats Ek and that was my favourite piece. The Stravinsky music, played by a live orchestra, helped as did the more astute choreography, there was just more going on and more of it was unusual. That said, all three pieces were thoroughly entertaining and very well received.

And I got a boost to my more dance resolution too. Sadler's Wells had screens in the front of house (and cafe) trailing some forthcoming shows and I was excited enough at the prospect of Bat out of Hell and their sister theatre, the Peacock, to book that for next February.

Spike at Richmond Theatre

I like to support my local theatres and as their programming is pretty good it is more a matter of choosing which date to see a show than of choosing which shows to see. At Richmond Theatre this decisions is eased as my ATG Theatre Card offers discounts on some performances, and so it was that I went to see Spike for an extremely reasonable £23 in my usual seat Dress Circle A25.

I was not sure what to expect, having studiously avoided reading any descriptions or reviews, other than it was about Spike Milligan. What Spike turned out to be was the story of Spike during the period when The Good Show rose to national prominence. This included lots of scenes from the show as well as the story behind the show from Spike's perspective, which was mostly a battle against the authority of the BBC much as he had battled against such authority, from the same class of people, in the Army.

Spike was shown to be as funny in real life as he was on the radio, though his personal life had its bad moments too.

Basically the play was a series of scenes of either The Goon Show, Spike trying to write the show and get due recognition for doing so, and of recollections from his Army days. These fragments were strung together skilfully to make a coherent and entertaining story.

Spike was a great deal of fun and was informative too. Lord Reith would have approved, as did I.

The Importance of Being Earnest at Rose Theatre

I made a News Year's Resolution for 2022 to restart my blog by writing something, however short, about every theatre trip, gallery visit or other signifiant event and here we go!

What finally drove me back to blogging was the fantastic production of The Importance of Being Earnest at Rose Theatre.

I was not that tempted to see it at first as I had seen and heard several productions of Earnest over the years and while the whimsical bon mots are entertaining I had never fallen in love with the play. What persuaded me to go in the end was a loyalty to Rose Theatre, I see all the main theatrical productions there, and there being no real reason not to see an Oscar Wilde play. So I duly forked out my £35 (I now qualify for a Concession Senior Citizen rate so getting old is not all bad) for seat J40 in my usual area.

That this was a different production was made clear at the start with the cast making entrances and exits to music before the actual play started. The tone was set immediately when the manservant, Lane, came in carrying a tray of cucumber martinis arranged in a pyramid. There were numerous acts of humour added to the play like this and they all added nicely to the scenes being played out before us.

What really made the production so brilliant (aside from the obvious strength of Wilde's words) was the cast and each and every one of them was excellent; I particularly liked Abiola Owokoniran as the outrageous dandy Algernon Moncrieff, and Phoebe Campbell and Adele James as the two young ladies. 

What made the performances so remarkable is that this was a young cast and for several of them it was their first major stage role. You would never have guessed this, I certainly did not.

The direction of the play took it towards pantomime, but not too far to be childish. There were lots of exaggerated gestures and expressions, especially from the young ladies, to push the humour along. Reinforcing the idea of pantomime, the formidable Lady Bracknell was played flamboyantly by a man.

The continual humour in the staging matched the continual humour in the script and Earnest was a delight throughout. I never do star ratings because theatre is so subjective but this Earnest is most definitely a five star show.