Benidorm Live at New Wimbledon Theatre was outrageously entertaining

I have loved Benidorm on TV for many years and so when a live show was announced I was quick to book. So quick that it was over a year before the performance that I claimed Dress Circle Row A Seat 17 for a respectable £43.50.

Judging by the packed theatre my love of Benidorm is widely shared.

I went with reasonable exceptions of being entertained and these expectations were more than exceeded. It was a laugh a minute. And then some. And then some more. It was outrageously entertaining.

Six of the regular stars made the transition from TV to stage and they each made separate entrances to huge applause. This was just one of the many things that the production got just right.

The script was typical Benidorm with a lot of great lines, a genuine story and moments of gentleness.  We had everything from hotel inspectors to Sausage In Cider jokes to a marriage proposal. It was often smutty but never crude.

The familiar characters behaved as we expected, and loved. The new characters soon established themselves too; we had a young couple reluctantly there for a couple of days, a new member of junior staff whose name people kept getting wrong and Jacqueline's gay friend who arrived with a passion for Kenneth.

Neptune's Bar also provided some genuine cabaret entertainment with the singing voice of Shelley Longworth and the tapping feet of Jake Canuso.

Adam Gillen also tried to sing but less successfully! It was interesting to see him back in this role after being knocked out by his performance in Amadeus in the serious theatre. It was easy to see why he was suited to both roles and his movement was one of the other features of the show.

Benidorm on stage was very much like Benidorm on TV but with some necessary changes, e.g. simpler sets and no external locations, and also some enhancements to take advantage of playing to an enthusiastic and knowing crowd.

I have rarely waited over a year to see a show and even more rarely seen one as entertaining as Benidorm Live.

Walking from Richmond to Greenford

One of the things that I am hoping to do more of now that I have retired is walking. I am being helped in this by a friend who has a similar ambition.

Our first attempt was a section of London Loop and while that was reasonably successful we lost our way a little on Hounslow Heath and struggled all the time to find the correct route due to a lack of signage.

Our second walk was on Capital Ring and that was a lot more successful and we did stages 7 and 8, starting at Richmond and ending at Greenford.

What the map does not make clear is that most of this walk was along waterways and in something under three hours we walked fifteen kilometres following the Thames, Grand Union Canal and Brent river.

We also spent most of out time surrounded by greenery and at times in was easy to believe that we had left the city. We had the mud on our boots to prove it too.

There were other times that the traffic roar from the A4 and M4 made it perfectly clear that we had not escaped the city after all.

Of the few built-up areas we walked through Brentford Lock West was the most interesting, not least because it was not even a thing when I last walked there; admittedly that was over ten years ago. The development of new flats around the lock looked attractive enough but I would not want to live there as Brentford is not big enough to be a regional centre and lacks the transport links to get to one.

One of London's smaller transport links started our journey home as we took the 2-car shuttle train, run by GWR (!), from Greenford to West Ealing where it connected to the mainline and we caught a connection to Ealing Broadway. There we had a delicious lunch at The Farm W5 before taking the 65 bus home through the driving rain that had kindly kept away all morning.

Very impressed by There is a Field at Theatre503

I see everything that I can at Theatre503 for one simple reason, the programme there is consistently fresh, though-provoking and entertaining. There is a Field was all of these.

Some things do change at Theatre503 however and this time I had to content with the new booking system that introduced allocated seating. The first result of this was that I missed my usual seat in the middle of the front-row and had to settle for seat B6 instead. That was a fair result but I will have to try and get more organised.

No change on the pricing though and my seat was a bargain at £12 (over 60s).

The poster gives a big clue as to some of the themes of There is a Field with a white man dressed as a convert to Islam and a funeral. Other elements to the story were the relationships between two very different brothers, two long-term friends and two volatile lovers, the financial stress of a young family, a drug addiction and the thieving that fed it, poetry and football. There was a lot going on and that kept the story interesting and unpredictable.

The main characters in the story were an East Londoner who had converted to Islam, his criminal brother, his recently bereaved mother, his best friend and his friends pregnant wife. The five people all knew each other well and the many one-to-one relationships between them were complex and extreme. There was a lot of love in the play and a fair amount of violence too.

Of course you cannot have good characters without good actors and everybody did an excellent job here. There were only five of them so I have the luxury of being able to name them all; Sam Frenchum (convert), Archie Backhouse (friend), Roseanna Frascona (friend's wife), Sarah Finigan (mother) and Fabrizio Santino (brother). Of these the two characters/actors that had the most impact on me were Sarah Finigan's East-end mother who calmly knew how to fix things and Fabrizio Santino's dodgy and violent brother. It was the care put into every shoulder-shrug and jacket adjustment that made Fabrizio Santino's performance the most compelling.

I almost forgot to mention that there were quite a few chuckles along the way too - nothing contrived just the natural banter between people who know each other well.

I was very impressed by There is a Field because of the breadth of interesting and difficult topics covered and the depth that they were covered through rich characters. It was an entertaining and satisfying feast of theatre.

Stones in his Pockets at Rose Theatre was clever and fun

Stones in his Pockets did not appeal to me at first as it was billed as a straight comedy and I prefer theatre with some intellectual meat in it but then  I decided that an afternoon of comedy was a good option and I booked a matinee performance, taking advantage of being retired.

The underused and impracticable pit area of the theatre had been converted to seating and my usual row A had become row J, giving some idea of how far back it is. Seat J28 with a concession for being a Senior Citizen was a reasonable £30. The additional seating reduced the attractiveness of row A/J as the new row in front of it was higher than the previous one. Seat J28 was fine as row H did not extend that far across because of the curvature. I'll be in the centre for the next two shows that I have booked there so I'll get a better idea of any potential problems then. There is always the circle!

To quote the promotional blurb: A small village in rural Ireland is turned upside down when a major Hollywood film studio descends to make a historical blockbuster on location. The story is told through the eyes of two extras.

The two actors also played all the other parts from the film's female star to the grimiest local. They did this with limited costumes changes and made the different characters obvious by over emphasising their different voices and movements in amusing ways. The many quick character changes and the exaggerated characters were a constant source of comedy.

More comedy came from the rich dialogue between the two characters, whichever two they were at the time.

The main story was an unflattering view of how a film is made but there was a dark edge to it which gave it a nice bite; the stones were in his pockets to weigh him down.

Stones in his Pockets at was clever without being too clever and was a lot of fun too, a comedy fit to brighten up a grey Thursday afternoon.

Much to love in Green Lantern

I have never been a big reader of DC comics and these days I hardly read any superhero comics from any company so it took something special to get me reading Green Lantern.

That special thing was the creative team of Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp, both British as it happens.

I have had mixed experiences with Grant Morrison and while I would not call myself a fan as such I really loved his long run on New X-Men and have enjoyed several other of his books.

Liam Sharp having been around for a few years has suddenly burst to the top of the mainstream at DC starting with Wonder Woman and then with The Brave and The Bold. I have loved all of his work.

This page is fairly typical. The flow is imaginative and the detail is incredible.

Also typical is the wordiness, this is clearly not a Warren Ellis comic! But this is good fluid wordiness and not the panel filling wordiness of the early days when authors thought that they had to explain what the artist had drawn. It's a typical Morrison story too and it needs some attention paid to it, which is effort well spent.

We are five issues in now and I understand that there will be 24 altogether. It is going to be a good couple of years.