A Streetcar Named Desire at Almeida Theatre

I am something of a fan of Tennessee Williams but I had seen and heard versions of A Streetcar Named Desire a couple of times in recent years so the production at Almeida Theatre did not appeal immediately. Then the late casting of Patsy Ferran as Blanche piqued my interest mostly because she had been superb in another Williams play Summer and Smoke, also at Almeida.

A lot of other people were interested too and the complete run was showing at as Sold Out. I kept checking availability and a decent single ticket popped and I went for it. Seat B3 (front row) in the stalls cost me just £25 thanks to a generous discount for older 65s.

I had good plans to fit in some walking and eating before the matinee performance but things went a little wrong due to engineering works on the railways and I ended up walking there from London Bridge and having to miss lunch. No problem there, I just had a very expensive can of beer before the performance.

The arrangement of the theatre was different from usual with a square raised stage and seating all around it, that explained why row B was the front row, There was a gap all around the stage to allow actors to move easily around it and that gave me plenty of leg room and also made the look up to the performance area more comfortable.

The empty stage was a good sign as I like productions that use few props.

The opening of the play explained some of the stage arrangement and set the mood for the production with the cast all coming on stage which was then flooded with rain. I have no idea why they did that.

I found the production very mixed and am finding it hard to write about in a way which fairly reflects how I feel about it.

There were a lot of strengths, I loved the quieter moments where one or two actors on a bare stage let the words do all the work, the performance of Paul Mescal as Stanley was perfect.

Unfortunately there were some weaker elements and while these did little to detract from the overall drama they did enough to annoy, like a scratch on a new car; some elements of the production intruded on the drama, like the use of drums (!), and while Patsy Ferran got everything right I do not think she was old enough or, sorry, glamorous enough to be convincing in the role, the last person who I saw play Blanche was Gillian Anderson who had both the seniority and glamour.

I also think this production underplayed the main scene (no spoilers) and I am not certain that I would have guessed what had happened if I did not already know the story. And that matters because without the full import of that scene what follows makes little sense.

In list form there was more wrong with this production than was good about it but the good elements lasted much longer and I really enjoyed it overall.

A quick trip to Fortnum & Mason

My usual walking friend wanted to buy some salmon from Fortum & Mason so it was an easy decision to walk there on our next longish walk.

As always the first, and biggest decision was where to cross The Thames and we went for Putney Bridge as that was the most direct route.

I thought about trying to find a slightly different route there but there were no sensible alternatives so we took the route we always do.

We also had a break where we always do, at Putney Pantry just to the south of the bridge. The coffee and blueberry tart were most welcome!

There was more room for exploration on the other side of the bridge, and that is what we did. Out usual route, taken several times is along Kings Road but this time we tried to find a quieter away between that road and Fulham Road.

And that plan worked pretty well too. The route we took this time is the blue line and the purple lines are routes taken previously as recorded on CityStrides, Incidentally, the cluster of lines in the middle is around Finborough Theatre, a regular haunt.

Walking along new roads worked very well (apart, from possibly the bit where we went through the industrial part of a hospital) and we saw many new interesting things, notably houses we could not possibly afford and parks we could not possibly afford to live near. There was also a large number of blue plaques, mostly of people I had never heard of, especially in Eton Square.

The last part was the hardest with Piccadilly thick with tourists and Christmas shoppers and Fortum & Mason even busier. Luckily we were only buying one thing, my friend knew where to find it and the queue fot the till was not stupidly long so we were out agin in about ten minutes.

Shopping done and 21km covered in four hours; that is what I call a good morning's work.

The Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary! at Jermyn Street Theatre

With a worrying number of versions of A Christmas Carol on at theatres across London it was nice to find some different seasonal fare to savour.

I like Jermyn Street Theatre for various reasons and that was a strong pull in this case. I was also familiar with the tale of Madame Bovary, having listened to an audio drama of it a couple of times I knew that while it is a tragedy there was a lot of good humour along the way.

Some things change and some things change. It used to be a moderate walk from my office in Kings Cross to Jermyn Street and it is now a pleasant longer walk of just under 20km. The restaurant above the theatre used to be a nice Italian and now it is an interesting African called Papa L’s Kitchen. The walk and the food were an excellent start to the evening.

The play opened towards the end of the story with Madame Bovary in the pharmacist getting arsenic to kill herself only to find that a couple of rat catchers had just bought it all. We were told that this was a framing device to enable the tragedy to be turned into a comedy.

We then went to the true beginning with the first encounter between Emma Rouault and local doctor Charles Bovary, and the story took a familiar route from there.

A familiar route but one twisted into great humour, the seeds of which were already in the text. Milking the humour for all it was worth was a fabulous cast of just four playing all the roles with melodrama, panache and a flamboyant array of props and costumes.

It was a lot of fun every step of the way.

Then there was the ending. I will not spoil it but the tragedy/farce dilemma was resolved in an unexpected and very satisfactory way.

The long walk and the fine meal set the evening up well and The Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary! exceeded that build up, it was the ice cream with glacé fruit piled lovingly on top of the cake.

Christmas at Kew 2022

Christmas at Kew was such a success that I was quick to book again for 2022. I actually booked it in January! In 2021 I had a late drop-out (covid) and the missing person was keen to give it another ago and after a little bit of asking around I got 6 tickets. As a member of Kew Gardens they were only £23 each which I thought was very reasonable.

Again things wen't slightly awry, including a son having his work's Christmas party on that night, but we had a full set of six on the nigh, four of whom were always meant to be there.

The first part of the evening went wrong too. We arranged to all meet in The Railway Tavern beforehand and some of us planned to eat there. We ordered food at 6:15 but at 7pm (our timed tickets were for 7pm) our food had not arrived and so we got a refund and left.

Luckily Kew at Christmas saved the evening.
 

As with 2021, it was a long route through the gardens and it took as about 90 minutes to get around which included one short queue for hot drinks.

There were several large set pieces, like the one above, and lots of pretty lights between them. All of the settings were good and some were magical and I paused many times to take in the experience. And the best bit was walking through some of the displays and being engulfed by them.

I will be buying tickets for Kew at Christmas 2023 as soon as they go on sale. The only question is how many.

Martin Turner Ex Wishbone Ash at The Eel Pie Club

My Google Calendar, which only goes so far back, informs me that I have seen a version of Wishbone Ash 9 times, Martin Turner's version of the band 7 times (at Eel Pie Club 4 times) and heard the complete Argus 4 times. These are all underestimates due to my unreliable record keeping.

So it should come as no surprise that I went to see Martin Turner Ex Wishbone Ash on their lates visit to Eel Pie Club, an event I booked many moons ago but which had been rescheduled due to covid.

The gig was sold out, proving the value of buying the tickets over a year in advance! £17 well invested.

We got in just after the doors opened but were far to late to get a seat, not that we particularly wanted one, but we did get a good standing position on the raised section where we usually stand, the only difference this time was that there were people sitting in front of us. The photo shows how good our position was.

The venue was rammed which made getting to the bar more difficult that it was worth so this was an unusually dry concert.

The music was just as good as expected, and as it always is with this band. They have great material to work with and they know how to make the most of it. Argus was a very familiar treat and they followed this with their subsequent album Wishbone Four. I did not know this as an album but they had played some of the tracks before and it sounded much the same anyway so that was fine.

Martin was in a talkative mood and gave us introductions to several of the songs explaining how they were inspired, composed and recorded. We also got a few jokes.

The good vibes started with the band and spread through the very appreciative audience. It was another excellent evening. And it's only a few months until I am due to see them again.

Richmond to Vauxhall via Streatham

I like it when a plan comes together and this one certainly did, though admittedly it was a rather simple plan.

Streatham had come up in conversation on an earlier walk. It is a place we had both been to a few times but only to specific areas and neither of us knew it at all well so I was tasked with planning a route that took us through Streatham.

We had walked in the Wimbledon area not that long ago and on that occasion we had finished at Clapham Junction so it made sense to aim for Vauxhall this time. The first draft of the route came out at something over 20km so that was job done.

I mapped the walk from home but we met at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park, as we often do, which accounts for the odd spur just after the start. Having met up we followed the road (mostly closed to cars) across Richmond Park to Robin Hill Gate.

Normally we follow Beverly Brook through Wimbledon Common but this time we followed the map's instructions and cut across. Some of the route looked familiar but some were definitely new for us, and that's always good.

Wimbledon looked wimbledony which was good too, and then we were in new territory and hunting for a coffee. Natas Coffee Bar in (probably) Tooting did just what we wanted, which included an almond croissant.

The entrance to Streatham from Tooting Graveney Common was impressive with large house which were built in parkland and still manage to maintain a sense of grandeur despite the busy road.

Streatham itself was a pleasant walk helped a lot by the consistently wide pavements and the lack of traffic on side roads. I like to compare neighbourhoods and would love somebody to invent a simple model which captures the cultural mix and the prosperity or an area but, before then I'll work on instinct. In this case my impressions of Streatham were that it has a vibrant cultural mix and has a reasonable economy but it is a bit middle-of-the-road with few, if any, trendy (does anyone say hipster anymore?) cafes and few scruffy shops selling phonecards for Africa.

Somewhere Streatham became Streatham Hill but the change was not obvious and probably only matters if you are buying or selling a house.

The rest of the walk was familiar territory for me as I worked in Brixton from 2003 to 2006 and it was interesting to see what had changed over the last almost twenty years, obviously that included several new tallish blocks of flats. The street art in Brixton also lived up to expectations though it was sad to see that one had been vandalised.

The final part of the plan also worked brilliantly. We were looking for a basic cafe for lunch and I knew of one near Vauxhall that I had walked past several times when not looking to eat. It turns out that this is Kennington Lane Cafe and the Veggie Brunch was excellent. A great way to end a great walk.

Best of Enemies at Noel Coward Theatre

Picking which plays to go to is a very inexact science and I am inspired by several different things. For Best of Enemies it was the presence of Zachary Quinto who I had been a fan of since Heroes in 2006. The play winning a few awards was the clincher.

I wanted to make something of a special occasion of this evening out so I went for a good seat, A14, in the Grand Circle which cost a fair £55.

Helping to make the evening special was the usual visit to Govinda's vegetarian and vegan restaurant just north of Soho Square where the paneer option did the trick.

The play was set in America during the 1968 presidential campaign and covered the ground-breaking debates between the best of enemies William F. Buckley Jr., and Gore Vidal. This was something new to me which helped as I could appreciate the history lesson as well as the drama.

To reinforce the history lesson, the production cleverly incorporated some video from the time and while this was, at times, a little loud and brash it worked well and was a distinctive feature of the play.

The most distinctive feature was the performance of the two main actors Zachary Quinto and David Harewood who we saw both inside their discussion sessions and outside as they prepared beforehand and analysed afterwards. Perhaps it was my left-wing politics, perhaps it was my predilection for Quinto but I thought that Gore Vidal won the arguments but Buckley was still likeable. The play was a balanced portrayal of the debates and was not simple battle of good v evil.

There was a short coda to the story which was told in the present looking back at the impact of the debates and some of the broadcasting milestones since then. It tried to make a point of the change in approach from using informed analysts telling political stories to using personalities but I am not sure that it was a point worth making, it didn't detract from the play and it did not add a lot either.

Best of Enemies was great theatre and was thoroughly entertaining due to those performances, the neat production and the interesting history lesson it gave.

Harvest Time

Harvest is, I believe still Neil Young's biggest selling album having been first released in early 1972. I got into Neil Young a few years later, with 1979's Rust Never Sleeps and while I then bought everything I generally prefer the rockier albums, particularly those with Crazy Horse, to the more country ones (Old Ways is an exception because it had Misfits on it) so Harvest has never made my best-of list.

Of course a not the vest best Neil Young album is still a pretty good thing, it does have Words on it after all, so I was obviously going to see a film made during the recording of the album, a mere fifty years after the event.

The film had a limited release so I went to a showing a Kingston Odeon and willingly paid £15 for.

The film was delightfully casual with nothing (overtly) staged for the camera and it was like being alongside the musicians as they rehearsed and relaxed.

And because these were proper recording sessions the quality of the music was excellent even if the video was commensurate with the handheld cameras of the time.

The music carried the film and there were long sessions with Alabama, Words (hooray! and A Man Needs a Maid, the later being recorded with LSO in, of all places, Barking Town Hall.

I especially enjoyed the many close-ups of the musicians playing and seeing they ease with which they did so as a group.

It was a nice bonus to see Crosby, Stills and Nash recording backing vocals and a bit of a shame that we did not also get to see James Taylor or Linda Ronstadt who were mentioned in the contemporary introduction to the film that Neil recorded. 

There were some lovely little snippets in the non-music sessions too, such as Neil confessing to being a "rich hippie", saying that he had never heard of Pink Floyd (this was just before Dark Side) and comparing the approach to the final Beatles and Buffalo Springfield albums.

As with the Sparks documentary, The Sparks Brothers (now on Netflix), there was so much more that I wanted to see, things like the composition process and the reasons for working with LSO, but there is a limit to what you can include in a film running to just over two hours and in choosing to focus on the music Harvest Time got the balance right.