Macbeth at The Cockpit

I was looking for a play to take my sister to on one of her visits up from Dorset and most of my more visited theatres either had things that I did not want to see on or I did want to see them so I had already booked for another day. The Cockpit is on my list of regularly visited places and when I saw that they were doing Macbeth the deal was done, who does not like the Scottish Play?!

It also set the foundation for the afternoon and evening which started with a walk around Bedford Park in Chiswick (we broke the journey in to London at Turnham Green station) and was followed by a curry at Lahori Church Street, just across the road from the theatre.

As usual I had done limited (at best) research beforehand so it was a surprise to find that the cast was all female, which was the second time that week following on from Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of).

The play otherwise was actually more conventional that I suspected. It ran for just over two hours so if it was abridged at all then it was minor.

Knowing the story of Macbeth fairly well helped as, due to being set during continuous wars, most of the actors wore battle fatigues (Lady Macbeth was the prominent exception) which made them a little hard to tell apart; Banquo was the one with red hair.

These were actors in training so some allowance could be made but apart from one who spoke a little too quickly at times for my taste I had no problems with their performances and was fairly impressed overall. And I remembered that there was a production of King Lear at National Theatre where some of the actors were very hard to understand.

The production of Macbeth thrived on the gruesome story and Shakespeare's poetic language, which were enough, but it lacked the depth of other productions, which is not surprising.

I enjoyed this Macbeth and though my sister was less enthused it was still a good night out.

A brilliant evening with Dark Vanilla Jungle at The Cockpit

This was a very mixed evening, it ended brilliantly but there were a few hiccoughs along the way.

There are four playwrights that I have Google Alerts set up for and Philip Ridley is one of them. So it irked me somewhat to find out about a production of his play Dark Vanilla Jungle at one of my regular theatre by accident. I forget the details now but I presume it was via Twitter, it normally is.

The Cockpit Theatre used to be a pleasant walk around Regent's Park from my office in Kings Cross but working in Teddington meant coming up with alternative plans. It was a sunny evening so I opted to take the train to Wimbledon, the tube to South Kensington and to walk the rest of the way including a jaunt through Hyde Park. That was a very pretty walk taking in the Serpentine Gallery Summer Pavilion, some sculptures and the Italian Gardens. The plan was working.

I had time for a proper meal and my plan included a curry in a place I had been before. That plan went less well. Conscious of the time I placed my simple order as soon as I got in there but 30 minutes later and I did not even have a papadum to show for it. I had to leave then so I went to pay for the mango lassi that had arrived, they were all very apologetic and offered me a free meal later that evening and I was all very reasonable about it and declined due to lack of time. I forgave them, we parted amicably and I'll be back. Plan B, not for the first time, was a packet of Nobby's Nuts and a bottle of beer in the theatre bar just before the performance.

This was almost 9pm and that brings me on to the last bad point. I do not know who thought that 9pm was a good time to put a play on, particularly one that demanded attention all the way through. This, combined with the lack of publicity, probably explained the low turnout. I don't think that it was the smallest audience that I have ever been in but it was close.

I made my way into the theatre and took a seat in the second row in my usual area (the front row is too low and is like sitting on a child's chair). The stage was bare apart from a desk, a chair and a woman sitting on it. And that is all that there was throughout the performance.

She was writing what I assumed was a statement of some sort and that turned out to be right. This was Andrea and for the next 90 minutes or so she told us her story.

It was a story that leaped around in time, something she apologised to us for, as she told us about how her parents met and how she came to be living with her grandmother, who she did not get on with.

Early on she dropped big hints as to what might come, with references to a soldier, a baby and dark events in Epping Forest, before we converged on the story of her and Tyrone.

That was a pretty dark story too. I think we all saw the sexual grooming coming though the brutality was no less shocking because of that. Andrea's reaction was equally shocking as she tried to reconcile what had happened to her with her love for Tyrone. Things got a little weird after that but remained gripping and absorbing.

Every Philip Ridley play I had seen, this was my fifth, had been so rich with ideas that I am sure that many of them passed me by on a first watching. The time-hoping was the simplest to understand and simply mirrored how we communicate normally, a tale is rarely told chronologically. There were relatively few references to religion and mysticism compared to his other works but they were there. More obvious were the repeated lines, or themes, such as the descriptions of two people meeting for the first time and the ice creams, which is where I presume the "vanilla" in the title came from.

It was a well crafted play, as I knew that it would be, with the themes leaping and mingling while the mood bounced up and down in different phases, like a symphony. One scene that clings vividly in my memory had an angry Andrea scattering c-bombs like confetti having never used such strong language before.

I am beyond praise for Lexie Braverman who played Andrea in the gruelling one-woman show. It was a difficult enough task to do all the talking for 90 minutes and was made even more difficult by the subject matter and more difficult still by the extreme variation in mood required. Lexie was brilliant.

The staging was good too. Like the gymnastics floor exercise, full use was made of the marked out square with Lexie sometimes moving the desk to another part of the stage where it became something else.

The best indication of how gripped I was by the play and the performance was is that I still had some of my beer left at the end of it. Even taking a swig would have been too much of an interruption.

It was late when it finished, 10:30pm to save you doing the maths, and with a difficult journey home (thanks to closing the road to/from Richmond) I was not keen to hang around but I did stay just long enough to say a few words with Lexie. I would have liked linger but then she deserved a rest too, I was exhausted from watching it so I can only guess at how drained she must have been.

Dark Vanilla Jungle was a difficult play to watch because of the subject matter but I am very glad that I did.
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Sumptuous Jekyll & Hyde at The Cockpit

Jekyll & Hyde was on my interest list for a while and I just needed to find a free night on a day that I was working in London, not a trivial matter. In the end it came down to a bad day at work which made going to the theatre the best of the various options I had for that evening.

I was attracted to Jekyll & Hyde by the story, which I knew from various film and TV adaptations rather than the book, and also the prospect of a version that included "sultry Jazz standards with a live pianist". The prospect of going to the Cockpit Theatre attracted too because of the friendly atmosphere there and the decent walk I have from the office to get there.

That walk took me through Marylebone Station where I helped myself to a wholemeal vegetarian pastie, as I had done previously. Unlike previously, I remembered that the road outside the station was two-way and I failed to get myself almost run over. Another difference was on arrival I found that the Cockpit had a choice of Czech lagers, I went for Budvar mostly because it was a bigger bottle.

The theatre was not that busy, but then it never has been in my experience, so I had a good choice of seats. Being first in helped. I went for the middle of the second row.

We were in a jazz club, the music was already playing and a waiter was tending to the tables. The set remained like that throughout the show despite the action moving to several places. A little bit of good acting from the cast and a little bit imagination from the audience was all that was needed for part of the stage to become somebody's house and for a door to appear.

Similarly a slight change of clothes enables the story to be told by just five people, plus the pianist. The waiter here was also a police inspector and the father of Jekyll's fiancee.

The story, the details of which I had forgotten, moved along briskly and I was quickly drawn into it. I cared for Jekyll's fiancee and also for the club singers that Hyde abused. After Hyde made his first appearance we saw little of Jekyll and so Hyde's menace filled the story and made it gripping. Oliver Hume was superb as Jekyll/Hyde.

Adding a pleasant lighter touch were the easy listening classics that the two women sang. These were familiar songs like Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and were sung in short pieces to help to set the mood without turning it into a musical as such. They worked very well despite of, or because of, the contrast to the dark happenings.

Jekyll & Hyde was a real joy and a prime example of what a few people can do with some good ideas and a lot of talent.

Theatre In The Pound at The Cockpit (December 2015)

I had not been to Theatre in the Pound since March due to a series of clashes so it was good to get back there in December. I had missed it.

The Cockpit is conveniently situated just off Lisson Grove which makes it a decent walk there after work and convenient for the tube home afterwards. I walked there the fairly direct way behind Kings Cross, through Euston and then along Marylebone Road. The highpoint of the walk was getting a pasty at Marylebone Station and the low point was being very nearly run over very soon after in what proved not to be a one-way street after all.

No damage was done and I got to the Cockpit around 6:45pm in good time for the 7:00pm start. I headed for the bar and my disappointment in the lack of Budvar (they had sold out) was tempered by the presence of Staropramen. The bottles were smaller though and I was on my second when we went in. I took my usual seat in the front row of the central section ready for the six acts listed on the programme.

Nic McQuillan opened the evening with his monologue Arboretum which took a whimsical view of modern middle-class life, i.e. more or less exactly what Nic was living. The summary (I think!) was that while there is a stereotype that neatly fits 10 million people they are still all individuals with their own stories to tell. I liked it.

OddBod Theatre gave us The Rounds in which a brash American actor was interviewed by a TV presenter (a woman) who was keen to get at some of the darker aspects of his character, notably his anger. There was a sort of cat and mouse game where the cat ultimately won because he was the star and he had brought his lawyers with him. That part was also played very well and that was what impressed me most about this segment.

Sophia Leuner's Save and Quit took us up to the interval. It hit the ground running and never stopped. It told two different stories, a young woman just starting a teaching career in a challenging comprehensive school and a young man coming to terms with his father's death and the implications of that. The two actors were on stage all the time with the spotlight moving between them as they took turns to progress their stories. There was a lot in those stories, good, bad and funny, and I was gripped. In the final moment the two stories came together as she bought an xbox from him.

The script was packed with good ideas, shifting moods and clever construction and this was delivered superbly by the two actors. It was worth going just for those fifteen minutes.

While I did not find this in the least derivative it evoked memories of Blink at the Soho Theatre and Christmas at the White Bear Theatre, both of which I liked. My first, and somewhat clumsy, contribution to the after performance discussions was to say that I had paid good money to see similar plays and I would gladly pay good money to see the full version of this one.

The interval brought me another bottle of Staropramen.

Katarina Rankovic's Rosa and Lawrence Where Here opened the second half with another high point. Rosa and Lawrence were two characters in a script and they needed two performers to bring that script, and them, alive. Two volunteers from the audience came out to read while in the background we saw videos of some previous performances. Having three things to focus on (script, actors and video) made for a nicely layered presentation where we could argue about the relative merits of each, such as whether the characters in the script were more important to the performance than the actors.

As an example of this, one person in the discussion after the piece suggested that the text be simplified as the actors had stumbled over some of the words (they were reading the script for the first time) but then I said that I liked the mistakes as that reminded us that they were actors and not Rosa and Lawrence. There is no right answer to this and it was nice to explore other views on the performance with the rest of the audience.

You can find out more about Rosa and Lawrence on Katrina's website. Here you can see videos of people reading the script and even download the script to record a new video for the archive. I do not think that I will go that far but it was good to see other people have a go.

Dramango then gave us The Post Office, an improvised performance set in which a variety of characters visited the post office with consistent lack of success. They were normally ushered out with the advice to go to the main post office.

It was funny though I, and this is a personal choice, would have preferred some variety in the mood of the stories and I would also have liked them to be a little longer. There were something like ten visitors in the fifteen minutes so it tended to be quick-fire and to use obvious characters that we could appreciate quickly. I am also not much of a fan of improvised performances.

Despite these misgivings it was funny and I enjoyed it.

Letters to Centre Stage closed the evening with an excerpt from their play OLU in which the titular character is a fourteen year old girl arriving in Nigeria from England and starting in her new school. The section we saw included a discussion on why somebody would want to go from England to Nigeria, the reporting of Africa in the western media and the impact of colonialism. There were also some typical teenage rivalries.

I struggled a little bit with this one though some of those struggles eased in a chat over a beer afterwards. Seeing a small part of a full play made it hard to see the context and also to understand what its message was. I made a comment in the feedback session about the simple way in which some political arguments were presented (listening to Africa Today regularly helped me here) and it was only in the response that I learned that the girls were only fourteen (they were played by women in their twenties) and that politics was a very small part of the play and the simplicity of the arguments used was one of the points being made.

After a slow start when I said nothing about the first two acts, I joined in the discussions on all of the others and continued those discussions with cast and audience members in the interval and at the end. All of that is important to me otherwise Theatre in the Pound would just be six short shows that are all deliberately not quite ready for public display.

As somebody who is interested in the art of theatre and not just in the consumption of it, Theatre in the Pound gives me great insights in to how theatre happens and entertains me at the same time. It is a marvellous combination, and it only costs a pound!

Pride and Prejudice: The Panto at The Cockpit was a feast of frivolity

It is not often that I can unreservedly recommend a theatre production but I can with Pride and Prejudice: The Panto at The Cockpit. Of course you have to like panto, but who doesn't?

My diary leading up to Christmas was still a mess with several dates that ought to have had theatres in them still blank and one of those days was this Tuesday. A quick trawl around some of my favourite theatres (I keep a list of links) gave me Pride and Prejudice: The Panto and the simple idea of it was enough to get me to book it. At a miserly £14 it was a ridiculous bargain and an easy decision to make.

The Cockpit is not that hard to get to but it is a little out of the way when compared to most of the other theatres that I go to and, in particular, it lacks a decent local pub that does food. I knew that there was a Pakistani restaurant across the road (Original Lahore) but had never had time to go there before. This time I cheated and took a tube some of the way to give me time to eat. It was my first curry since India and I loved it. I'll be back there.

I slipped across the road to the theatre not long before the 7:30pm start but with enough time to get a bottle of Budvar, as I always do there.

It happened to be the first night (I am far more used to booking the very last one!) but I was not worried about any roughness as it was panto and things going wrong is all part of the fun. In the end the most serious thing that I noticed go wrong was when one of Elizabeth's shoes flew off and this situation was easily recovered by Mr Darcy disdainfully returning it.

For the first time that I can recall, I chose a seat in the second row as I remembered that the front-row seats are very low. The stage was already occupied as we settled down.

Pride and Prejudice: The Panto was many things. It was the story from the book and we had Jane Austen there to tell us about it. We also had a mischievous Charles Dickens trying to subvert things by making the plot more like one of his (Hard Times or Bleak House). We had a few songs, including classics like "Don't cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me". We had a pantomime dame, Mrs Bennet. There were two puppets for the younger daughters and a broom for one of the suitors.

Above all it was a panto with jokes, topical references, the audience shouting "Calm down, Mrs Bennet!" and booing Dickens, a Blind Date, a wet shirt, an unfair comment about my tie, and just enough bawdiness to make it edgy but not dirty.

It was fabulously entertaining throughout. A lot of this was done to the sheer number of fun things packed into the play and the rest of it was down to the excellent cast and creatives, I counted over a dozen people at the curtain call.

With so many stars it is a little unfair to highlight just a few of them, but I will anyway. James Walker-Black as Mrs. Bennet (and other roles, including Cilla Black) was always at the centre of action and the main responder to the audience which required a lot different skills including a few accents and some ad-libbing. Dannie Pye was wonderfully aloof as Mr Darcy and went above and beyond the call of duty in the wet shirt. Freya Evans was cute as Jane Austen and charming as Charles Bingley.

I will make the point again though, this was a panto and a panto relies on a large cast to all play their parts well and here they most definitely did.

The audience reaction was the best measure of the success of the production and everybody else there was laughing, cheering, clapping, shouting and applauding as much as I was.

Pride and Prejudice: The Panto was enormous fun and was exactly what an adult panto should be. Christmas was invented for shows like this.

A different and daring Hamlet at The Cockpit

My Shakespearean encounters continued with another Hamlet, this time at the Cockpit and with a woman playing the lead role, though, unlike Lear, she was playing it as a man.

But first I had to get there. The theatre came at the end of a long day with an interview in the morning and a feast of wedding dresses in the afternoon. Getting from the V&A to the Cockpit, not that far apart as the crow flies, was not simple and I opted for the 46 bus which took me a lot of the way but left a reasonable walk at the far end.

It was a tiring walk on a tiring day so I rested for a while at the Lord High Admiral at the end of Church Street Market which was at the final stage of closing for the day. This was one of those pubs that time forgot and had been unchanged for decades. There was no chance of any food or even of real ale. I had a pint of keg Worthington Smooth, territory I had not trodden for many years, not since beer was re-invented.

I was resigned to surviving the evening on peanuts (not for the first time) and was pleasantly surprised to find that the Cockpit had some Lebanese vegetarian pasties so I had a couple of those. And a Budvar.

When summoned by the bell I went for my usual spot in the front-row on the right side of the entrance. This cost me £29.50 which, by my standards, was a little on the high side but anything under £30 required little justification.

This Hamlet was set in a school and that reminded me of Rinaldo at Glyndebourne. Hamlet was one of the school boys in an small class and Horatio was a teacher. The other classmates were Laertes, Ophelia and Rosencrantz. The only other members of the cast were Hamlet's mother and stepfather.

This Hamlet was also heavily abridged and one of the victims of the cuts was the opening scene with the ghost of his father. That took a little getting used to at first but did nothing to harm the flow or coherence of the story.

As with the adaptation of Hamlet that I saw at the Riverside, this version focussed on one aspect of the play and this time it was the core theme of Hamlet's thirst for revenge and the violent consequences of that. Even strimmed down to this core, this Hamlet ran for over an hour and a half so it was by no means slight. The bits of the play that were left were thick with emotion, both Hamlet's and the other people's reacting to his.

The staging was physical without being distracting. The movement flowed across the full gamut of the stage making the most of staging it in the round. The movement also climbed on to the tables and chairs to give height as well as width and depth. Apart from the furniture, sparing use was made of props so when they did come into play they made more of an impact. There was a memorable scene where large red, blue and white handkerchiefs (the sort magicians have) were used in quick succession to represent blood, tears and semen. That got a laugh; one of the few.

It is hard to go wrong with Hamlet and they didn't. The drama built solidly towards the known tragic ending that managed to remain dramatic despite being known. It was a thoroughly engrossing and imaginative production that was delivered assuredly.

I hung around the bar for a little while afterwards hoping to catch a quick word with some of the cast (I love theatres where you can do that) and was delighted to speak to Hamlet him/herself who looked very different in her post-show shocking red lipstick. A perception testing end to an intelligent evening.

Theatre In The Pound at The Cockpit (March 2015)

Theatre In The Pound at The Cockpit is such a lot of fun and such extraordinary value that it was staggering (to me) to discover that I had not been there for almost a year. It had taken a Summer break and since then it had either clashed with evening meetings or I had worked at home that day and could not face the journey into Marylebone in the evening. I was very glad to get this opportunity to go there again.

The first part of the plan was to work in London (Kings Cross) that day and then walk to the theatre in the evening, picking up something snacky to eat on the way, as I had done previously. The first part of the plan, being in London, worked well but the second part, walking to the theatre, less so.

I had a rough route in mind and the general plan was to walk more-or-less due West from work to the theatre. But this plan assumed that there would be some roads or paths running East-West which was a sadly mistake assumption so I first found myself walking down Park Village East and Stanhope Street looking for a right turn and then up Albany Street looking for a left turn. The end result of this was that I found myself walking across the top of Regents Park (not in the plan) and running too late to stop for food.

At least I was not locked into a housing estate this time and I got to The Cockpit with just enough time for a Budvar and a packet of Nobby's dry-roasted nuts before heading inside promptly enough to secure a middle of front-row seat. Being prompt was required as the place quickly filled and it was as busy as I have ever seen Theatre in the Pound.

I had no idea what was going to be on the bill and the board was not much of a clue. There was a printed programme too but I only looked at that afterwards to remind me what I saw.

First up was Room, a strange almost wordless piece performed by three young women in long white nightgowns who apparently call themselves Created a Monster. This was physical theatre bordering on dance with the story told mostly by movement.

They used few props, a white line on the floor marked the room, a wooden frame was a window and a hatch, and there was a pair of shoes. The other items, like the pictures, were all mimed.

I could not claim that I knew what was going on all the time but the simplicity and strangeness captivated me and I liked it a lot. The audience feed back in the short discussion session after the performance was positive too though in a room full of drama students and graduates (my guess) it was not surprising to hear some suggestions for improvements too. Room was a great start to the evening.

Songs my Mother Taught Me was something very different again. This was a one-woman show with narration and song. The premise was the funeral of Esme Campbell a former singer in Melbourne. We heard first from one of her daughters who told us something about her relationship with her month and then sang a Dvorak song. The second woman told a sadder story about how this funeral reminded her of the death of her son and his funeral.

The intention was to grow this by adding two more voices and to develop it in to a cabaret act. It worked for me.

Another Time was a piece by a group of drama students that looked back at the war in Bosnia in 1992. I struggled with this one as it seemed to be saying nothing new about the conflict and was not saying anything in a new way either.

I also struggled to follow all of what was going on, especially when we had one person sitting in a car to the side while the murderous events went on in the centre of the stage. We learned in a response to a question from another confused audience member that the car driver was looking back in time to when he was in Bosnia in 1992.

This was the low-point of the evening and, even so, it was quite watchable.

The Club was the play from a play within a play. Here two upper-class people pretended to be of a lower-class somewhat unconvincingly while pursuing romantic interests. There was some role-swapping with the man who was pretending to be the man-servant to an Arthur Dent character who was actually his.

It was a somewhat obvious piece, as farce often is, and it was rescued from simplicity by some fine acting and a few good lines.

Of course seeing the play within a play told us nothing about the play but this was a reasonable divertissement and it ended the first half nicely.

Time for another Budvar.

The second half opened with Testimony in which two men from the opposites sides of the street find themselves in jail together and being looked after by a very disinterested jailer.

The rich banker and the homeless man did not get on at all well and there was much amusement from the way that they spoke dismissively of each other. The homeless man was relentlessly happy and used to the situation while the banker tried to use his money to find a quick way out of the cell.

This was a nice little piece that was, again, well acted.

As I said in the discussion afterwards, I groaned when Swans started. The premise here was of a young woman meeting her boyfriend's mother for the first time. This is a situation that comedy has covered many times before.

But not like this. The dialogue soon leapt away from the obvious age-gap gags and went in all sorts of unexpected directions, including an explanation of what MILF means and the mother posing almost seductively for the girl's camera. The surprises kept going and the dialogue kept sharp.

I loved it.

The team who brought us Another Time in the first half closed the show with Identity. Having called Another Time the low-point of the evening it is only fair to say that Identity was the undoubted high-point. It the most complete work that we saw (not that complete works are what Theatre in the Pound is about) and I found it the most fulfilling.

Again the basic premise, modifying people's memories with technology, is hardly new but this way of telling that story was.

We met a number of people who had been, or were contemplating, being altered and they told us their reasons for doing so. At one extreme it was to forget a murder but most of the other reasons were more domestic in nature.

This gave each member of the cast to show-off for a while as they told their story before returning to the back of the stage. Though not directly part of what was happening in the centre of the stage, those at the back held a series of still poses. It was things like that which added to the richness of the performance and mad it so rewarding.

A real high-note on which to end the main part of the evening.

Then it was back to the bar for a final Budvar and some brief conversations with the creatives, most of which consisted of me saying how much I liked their work and them smiling demurely and saying that was sweet of me.

I spent the best part of four hours wallowing in theatre and talking to the people who created it. And all for a pound (plus the beers). The evening really was a good as that sounds.

DIY Horror Play at The Cockpit Theatre was delightfully horrific

This could have been a disaster in so many ways, and almost was. I had to content with maps, gates and French but it was worth it for the sheer exuberance of the play.

A gory but fun horror story in the pulp fiction mold had an obvious appeal and would be rather different from what I usually see. I also liked most of the aims of the performers who said , "Our shows combine intense physical performances with multiple languages and strong visuals and sound." I lied all of that apart from "multiple language" but an exchange of emails with the theatre reassured me that I did not need to know any French.

I did not expect the show to be sold out and so I set off for the theatre confidently and looking forward to the walk, a walk I had done only a few days previously to see The Three Sisters. This time I decided to take a slightly more northerly route including going through Regent's Park. My maps app agreed that it was a good idea but neither of us realised that the park would be shut and I was forced to take a long detour around the top of the park, but that was alright as I had plenty of time.

Then the maps app and I made our next mistake. Somewhere near Palgrave Gardens I avoided the correct left turn as that looked to be a private path through a Council estate and instead turned left immediately before it into what turned out to be a private path through a Council estate. I walked to the far end expecting to find another way out but the only gate there was closed and locked. So I went all the way back to the main gate only to find that closed and locked too. It must have been open to let a car in or out when I arrived there and the automatic gate had closed silently behind me.

It took several minutes for the anger to start to morph toward unease as no other cars came or went to open the gates and the one flat that could see me waving desperately just ignored me. I knew that I would get out at some point but was beginning to doubt that I it would be in time to see the play. Having no luck at the main gate I went back to the pedestrian gate at the far end and was delighted to see that while it was locked it could be forced open, which I did.

I got to the Cockpit with a few minutes to spare, enough minutes to get a beer and a bag of Nobby's Nuts, the evening meal of choice for after-work theatre going. After the ordeal of getting there I was ready for some entertainment.

The set was not very promising as it had absolutely nothing on it, but I took a picture of the view from my seat anyway.

The simple premise of the story was that a woman was being let out of an asylum and this was her last night there. Most of the nuns who ran the place were away attending a wake for a colleague and the lady went around the empty building looking for one person, avoiding others and trying to keep out of trouble so that she could leave the next day.

Lighting and sound immediately played a big part in the show, as they should in a horror story. The stage stayed dim most of the time and clever lighting was used to mark out corridors, which only appeared when somebody was in them.

Lots of bad things were hinted at and some of them happened. One of the people she met did vile things to animals to change their form, such as transforming a dog into a seal by taking its legs off. Luckily there were no props for this but the descriptions were bad enough to evince plenty of groans from the audience. Worse was to come, like the film of addition pieces being sewn into a living brain to make the animal more intelligent.

The ending was pretty gory too.

There was a reasonable amount of French towards the end and while the several French people in the audience laughed more than I did I could at least follow the gist of the story and was not completely lost. It is over forty years since I did 'O' Level French and it was not one of my better subjects.

After the play the three creatives of Two Tongue Theatre, all young women and two of them French, gave a short explanation of how they created the play from two Grand Guignol pieces and how they did some of the gory effects. It was a nice coda.

The play over I went back to the bar for a final beer.I would normally try and get to speak to the creatives at that point to give some positive feedback but they were all busy with friends so I left them alone. It was a nice surprise, therefore, when one of them broke away from her friends to ask me what I thought about the show. I was delighted to be able to tell her that I enjoyed it immensely.

DIY Horror Play was deliciously different and delightfully horrific. It was the perfect antidote to the real-world horrors that had preceded it.

The Three Sisters at The Cockpit Theatre was slow at times but always engaging

I do like my Chekhov but even I though that going to see The Three Sisters for the third time in eight months might be pushing it a bit. It wasn't.

My evenings was very busy at that time and there were a few plays that I wanted to see but had to miss due to lack of time and having to give priority to other shows. The Three Sisters was pretty high up my priority list and so I decided to see it on a day that I was working in London. Not only did that make the logistics easier but it also gave me a nice walk from Kings Cross to Marylebone, pausing for a coffee and a cereal bar in Marylebone Station.

There was a good, and a young, crowd there but they were not interested in the front row so I was easily able to grab my favourite spot. Once again I had forgotten just how low the seats are there and scared myself slightly as I fell down into my place.

This was a new translation of The Three Sisters, by Agnieszka Kennedy who also played Masha, and kept to the original story, unlike some previous versions that I had seen that had moved Moscow to London or had cut large parts out. This may have been my third Three Sisters n under a year but they had all been different adaptations.

The set was simple and effective. The front of the stage was a sitting room with a dining room at the back slightly raised. Some furniture moved around to make different spaces but this was more or less it.

On to that set poured a large and talented cast. One of the strengths of this version was the way that it made the most of all of the characters, even the lesser ones like the old housemaid who struggled with her many chores without a word of kindness from the family.

I tweeted at the time that to get Three Sisters right you have to get Masha right and @TCThreeSisters at @cockpittheatre did with @AgnieCKennedy sweet in the role, which I still think is fair. Life just happened to the other two sisters but Masha made things happen. It is a moot point as to whose tactics were the most effective in a story where (almost) everybody lost.

Other characters that I particularly liked were their brother Andrey who slipped sullenly into a downtrodden life, his wife Natasha who grew from a timid girl to a dominant woman, and Fyodor who loved his wife Masha desperately despite her actions. The only character I struggled to engage with was Masha's lover Aleksandr who started hesitantly and formally when he first met the family but failed to develop from there despite his relationship with Masha. The lack of passion in that relationship could have been a problem if it were not for all the other good things going on.

My only other minor gripe is that this was a very long play, we finished around 11pm, and while it was always engaging and never boring it did drag a little in the final third leading up to the dramatic endings. I probably felt this more that some there as I knew all too well what those endings were and so I had that sense of expectation that took a while to be fulfilled.

This version of The Three Sisters did what I wanted it to do. Not only was it entertaining but it showed me aspects of the play, particularly regarding the lesser characters, that I had not noticed before. It further stoked my interest in The Three Sisters and made me more likely to see another version when I next get the chance.

Theatre In The Pound at The Cockpit (May 2014)

The monthly Theatre In The Pound sessions at The Cockpit have weaselled their way in to my diary simply by being so interesting.

Obviously the £1 entry fee helps but as the evening costs me around £20 once the travel and beers are taken in to account it is the quality and variety of the performances that bring me back.

The set of six pieces that I saw in May against confirmed that the simple concept of 15 minute try-out sessions works.

Party Quirks was a self contained piece that had the potential to be extended. A surprise party was not going well, they even forgot the vol-au-vents, and then got worse when a member of the family turns up and over played his mental health issues to embarrass the others.

The point being made was about them rather than his mental health, that was just an excuse for him to say the sort of things that are often best left unsaid. There was some straight comedy pieces too, with a recurring vol-au-vent theme among them, and it was an entertaining little drama.

Election Night was a look at people in politics with a politician facing an important victory being confronted by a ghost from the past in the shape of a former colleague who questioned his motives.

Other political themes were thrown in to the mix, such as calling the party The Federation of East Atlantic Islanders which hinted at 1984.

This was another self-contained piece with potential.

Revolutionary Road was an acting try-out. Two actors who were about the play a couple wanted to try-out some aspects of their relationship and they performed two scenes from that play. The scenes were set some years apart.

This was my highlight of the evening. I liked the piece a lot. The mid-American accents and the dark undercurrent gave it something of a Tennessee Williams, which was good. But it worked because of the acting. They were a very convincing couple despite looking ridiculously young.

One of the mice things about Theatre in The Pound is that it gives you the opportunity to give feedback to the creatives and I was delighted to be able to tell them what I thought of their performances.

After a short break for another beer (Budvar) we returned to see 2+1. This was a piece of dance exploring some of the impacts a new baby has on a couple, things like the demand feeding, sleepless nights and all that washing.

This was interpretive dance, i.e. there was more dancing and less acting, and it was good dancing too. I asked a question about influences on dancing styles afterwards as the rolling and arm movements reminded me of Russell Maliphant and was interested to learn that a lot of the detail of the choreography had been left to the two dancers.

Perhaps it was because it was a long time ago but the story of the ups and downs of having a new baby did not resonate with me (the many young people in the audience were more sympathetic) but I did enjoy the dancing.

Cut it out! felt like something of a time-shift but that may be because it originated in Australia (sorry Australians) which feels to me as an outsider as though it is still stuck in the 80s, a view not helped by the recent election of Tony Abbott. In this except for a play a conservative senior medic invites a new colleague and his partner around for dinner only to discover that his partner is another man, and one playing the queen outrageously for effect too.

It was funny but, rather like Carry On films, it felt like an old joke from an older time. Old jokes can still be funny and I found myself laughing at quite a few of them.

Earwig was billed as a black comedy which is my sweet-spot. In this middle-piece from a longer story three workers in a package sorting office discover a human head which was a great shock to the new member of the team but which was treated as just an every-day occurrence of no importance by the two long-term members.

Apart from opening and moving a few boxes there was little action and the drama's heart was in its dialogue through which we discovered more about the three workers and this was both funny and disturbing, as promised.

Earwig was a neat little play and a fine way to end the performance part of the evening.

After that there was just time for a final bottle of Budvar and some more discussions with creatives before experimenting with yet another route to Edgware Road tube station.

Hidden at The Cockpit

I had a rare free evening in London so I decided to go to the theatre.

Actually, going to the theatre was the easy decision to make, the hard one was deciding which one. This was made a little harder by my accidental discovery of Theatro Technis in Camden, while on my lunchtime walk, which was doing a Havel play. I also had the option of going to the Arcola but in the end I stuck with Plan A and went to The Cockpit in Marylebone.

I knew The Cockpit from their Theatre in the Pound nights but this was the first time that I had been there for a full performance.

The attraction was the dark comedy Hidden. I like dark comedies.

But first I had to get there. I avoided my usual getting-lost-from-the-tube-station routine by walking there from near Oxford Circus. That proved to be remarkably easy and took me along unfamiliar roads like Wigmore Street, Seymour Street, Seymour Place and Lisson Grove.

I got there too late to have a curry in the restaurant across the road but in plenty of time for a bottle of Budvar and a packet of dry roasted peanuts. It was fairy busy but careful positioning by the entrance to the theatre got me my preferred seat in the front row next to the central aisle.

The theatre was a little cropped from how I was used to it. The stage had been brought forward which meant that almost all of the seating was in the front section with very little at either side. The seats that were in use were almost all taken.

The play started with a surprising voice from the back row of the seats. This was Colin explaining that sometimes when he was in the theatre he was tempted to run on to the stage and drop his trousers, which he then did.

Colin was the first of six characters that we met, three men and three women played by two actors,Peter Carruthers and Laura Lindsay. Their stories were told mostly through a series of short monologues though there were some scenes with both of them.

As they told us about themselves and what they were doing we discovered connections between them, some slight and some significant. For example the check-out girl served one of the men and then went on a date with another.

The scenes gave us interesting perspectives on seemingly small things in life. Such as James' furtive encounters on a morning train that amounted to no more than touching each other's legs which may have meant nothing to the woman but which came to matter so much to him. At the end of that scene we learnt that he was married to one of the female characters and another connection was made.

The scenes also came together to show how these six lives were linked and how each of the characters had aspects of their lives that they kept hidden.

There were some genuinely funny moments and some quietly disturbing ones too and the combination made a compulsive story and good entertainment. I made the right choice in going to see it.

Theatre In The Pound at The Cockpit (March 2014)

My second visit to Theatre in The Pound at The Cockpit was for the same reason as my first in January, and that was because of my loose connection to Eva Gray and Rob Groves. Eva was acting in one of the pieces again and this time it was in something co-written by Rob.

I've still not quite worked out the best way to get to The Cockpit from the tube (I got lost again!) but I managed to get there comfortably before the 7pm kick-off with time to get my first bottle of Budvar for the evening.

The Cockpit was laid out as before, with seating on three sides, and I headed for the front-row in the middle of the far side, just for a change.

First up were Rob and Eva in excerpts from Espionage, a full-length play. This was a teaser to show us the structure of the play, some of the characters and their approach to humour.

We soon learnt that the humour was groan inducing puns, like the should-have-seen-it-coming build up to the punchline "trifle bazaar". There was also a scene where the dialogue seemed to be composed mostly of lines from chocolate sweets adverts, "only the crumbliest, flakiest", etc. Seeing fragments of the play made it difficult to see what the full play would be like but having seen The Unrest Cure from the same stable I was confident that it would be hugely entertaining once completed.

Next up was The Dotty Bride, the first scene in an emerging play. It started with a woman hoovering in a flat. The problem was that she was meant to be at a wedding. Her wedding. She was soon joined by her best friend and bridesmaid who while trying to find out why the bride had fled at the last moment also offered a sympathetic ear. After a little while another bridesmaid arrived. She had planned that day and was busy rearranging things in a very organised way with no interest in the bride's feelings. Others arrived too.

In the open session after the reading we were told that the full play had been mapped out but we were not told whether the bride returned to her wedding or not. I did not want to know either.

I asked my first of several question about this play. The part of it that we saw had five very convincing female characters yet it was written by a man, Kenneth O' Toole. He explained that men do appear later on and that there had been input from the case too.

The third piece was a performance for children (Key Stages 1 and 2) called Geometric City. It was a very active performance with lots of movement and sounds from the two women as they undertook their mysterious journey.

It reminded me a little of We're Going on a Bear Hunt, but somebody else made that comment before I could. It may have been theatre for children but it kept a room full of adults entertained.

During the interval was when the fun really started and I made a determined effort to speak to some of the creatives about what I had seen.

I also managed to grab a minute with organiser and compère Theresa Brockway, pictured here. She impressed me with the questions that she asked and of her knowledge of theatres in Lyme Regis, and I wanted to tell her that.

I also spent a bit of time with one of the bridesmaids and with the children's theatre group.

The second half opened with Fair is Foul, Foul is Fair. This struggled to gain traction because of the unfamiliar subject matter, a Slovenian folk story about monsters called Dogheads, and the unclear delivery of the woman. The beast in the cage was good though.

In the talk afterwards we discovered that this was more an exercise in the author trying to find something about her past for herself rather than as an entertainment for others. And that was fine, Theatre in The Pound was an open stage.

The final piece was also the only complete one. A Balcony in Verona, by Eddie Saint-Jean, was set, obviously, on the roof of a tower block in the East End. There we found a woman in her late thirties approaching some sort of mid-life crisis without much understanding from her husband who was kept busy trying to earn a living wage.

Verona was where she wanted to be, the East End was where she was.

In the end the husband made (an expensive) gesture that resolved the situation.

Then it was back in the bar for a final Budvar and a lot more talking. Apart from Eva and Rob who got me there, I spent most of the time talking to Eddie Saint-Jean about A Balcony, especially it's ending. I had made a comment about that during the open session.

I flit like a moth around the remaining people to make sure that I got to praise as many of the people involved as I could and to explain why I liked what they had done. It was gone 10:30 and the bar had shut before I finally ventured out to try and find Edgware Road Station.

Having dipped my toe in to Theatre in The Pound twice, and liked what I found there both times, I have now put future dates in my calendar. That is not a promise but it's certainly an aspiration. As somebody who likes to see challenging theatre and who would like to understand it better, Theatre in The Pound is remarkable opportunity for me to do both.

Theatre In The Pound at The Cockpit (January 2014)

My experiments in theatre have given me some pretty unusual evenings but not many as weird as this one.

I found out about this from one of the actors in one of the performances and that is how I found myself in the unfamiliar territory of Marylebone on a Monday evening.

The actor was Eva Gray and I joined her group for the evening. This included husband Rob Groves who went to the same school as me (Weymouth Grammar), though sometime after me,  and who was taught by my dad there. Rob also wrote the rather fine The Unrest Cure.

I was expecting some sort of a reading evening of works in progress but it proved to be rather more and rather stranger than that.


The first piece set the scene for the evening.

Dust told the story of two very different women, Joey and Sarah, in words and dance. One is about to be engaged and is fearful of the big step she is about to make and the other is a carefree caterer. Opposites attract and they have a passionate affair.

After the performance Miriam Margolyes opened the short discussion session with the comment that it was erotic, in a good way. I had to agree. It was also good theatre, a nice simple story well told. The dancing could have been better, to be fair this was only an early try-out, but there was real passion in the movement and the two women worked very well together. I loved it.

Whether by accident or design, On a Diet of Tinned Mackerel was almost more of the same. This told the real story of the relationship of two young women written and performed by themselves. No words this time, just movement.

It charted the various moods that every close relationship goes through and, just to give you a feel for how weird and erotic this was too, in one long scene the women slowly scraped foam off each other with kitchen knives.

I found it hard to categorise the performance. It lacked the formal narrative of a story, though it has scenes and moods, and while the movement included some dance the dancing was not the main component of the piece. It was strange but in a nice way. I enjoyed it.

After a short interval and another Budvar it was time for the piece that I went there to see, Someone's Lost the Plot in which Eva played a woman with strong hippy tendencies, especially in the area of alternative healing.

This was an extract from a longer play and we saw the start of the second half where a group of writers come together to discuss their projects.

It was a comedy of characters told through dialogue. It made me laugh out loud quite a few times, and everybody else too. It was funny and well acted but it also seemed very traditional after the first two performances and, as a general rule, I prefer quirky. That is why I do not go to see plays like Duck House.

The final piece was Miss B B Hoops who did tricks with hula-hoops while wearing a 50's style pink gingham bikini. It was impressive, entertaining and surprising.

Then it was back to the bar for the serious work of talking to as many creatives as possible. I managed to talk to a dozen or so people, one of whom asked me "Are you famous?", which made me smile.

The main point of these conversations were to pass on my compliments on the performances and there were also some discussions on how performances could be improved. A consensus seemed to be that Someone's Lost the Plot needed more physical action and I was something of a lone voice in disagreeing with this - Vicar of Dibley made Parish Meetings funny without much movement and I've seen plays ruined by extraneous activity.

Only a few times did the evening come close to what I had expected and it was all the more fun because of that. I saw four very different performances and had the opportunity to talk to the creators and performers about them. And all that for a quid.