Strength to strength

Known Paapa coming up seven years now.

My life

Wasn't well enough to go to this yesterday. Don't think I'll be well enough to go to the theatre tomorrow.

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth

Cousin Ria has offered me Aunt Philo's ticket for Lear Lear this afternoon. I'm very grateful but I can't make as I am in Wales.

Besides Branagh hasn't come to see me lately since I've been bad.

Ba Dum Tish!

Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width

Sean at 1pm yesterday the Vince and Michele took me to The Merchant of Venice 1936  at the New Theatre, Cardiff in the evening. Never mind reviews, when you feel as ropey as I do 'two hours including interval' is enough recommendation.

Negative Capability

Last night's unused ticket was for Burnt at the Stake, or The Whole of The Truth at the Globe Theatre. I just couldn't face it after the week I've had. I was going because it was co-curated by Hannah Khalil, a Palestinian/Irish writer and acquaintance. I wonder if she could face it after the week she's had?

The 2023 Rugby World Cup quarter-finals are with us today. Wales kick off against Argentina at 4pm, and Ireland against the All Blacks at 8. In previous years I would have been down my local from mid afternoon until last orders. Not today.

AFC Wimbledon kick off at home against Bradford City at 3, so that is where most of my season ticket holding friends will be. If they get to the Standard for, say, 5 I can join them for Wales' second half before going home.

I have drunk ale from the Country of the Young

And weep because I know all things now:

I have been a hazel tree and they hung

The Pilot Star and the Crooked Plough

Among my leaves in times out of mind:

I became a rush that horses tread:

I became a man, a hater of the wind,

Knowing one, out of all things, alone, that his head

Would not lie on the breast or his lips on the hair

Of the woman that he loves, until he dies;

Although the rushes and the fowl of the air

Cry of his love with their pitiful cries

Prodnose: Well that's chirpy.

Myself (with some little dignity): 'Mongan Thinks Of His Past Greatness' by William Butler Yeats is not aiming for 'chirpy.'

'One has a right to Bunbury anywhere one chooses.'

As of Tuesday all l I had in the showbiz diary next week was ABBA Voyage (Icons passim) on Saturday.

Wednesday morning Ria invited me, via Facebook, to The Brief Life & Mysterious Death of Boris III, King of Bulgaria at the Arcola on Friday.

Wednesday evening, Vera invited me, via Telegram, to The Importance of Being Earnest at the Chelsea Theatre on Wednesday.

Yesterday, Mia my neice WhatsApped ' I have an audition on 2nd October in London and am coming back from Nepal - I was wondering if I could stay with you for a night?'

Mi casa, su casa.  The smell of greasepaint, the roar of the crowd.

{Anthro-pology <

I was out at the Hampstead Theatre last night. Let's get the important things out of the way first.

1. Arabesque, as recommended by Mia, is a great place to eat before watching a play there. They have no problem, for example, in you settling the bill early then chatting and drinking until it is time to leave and walk, without further fuss, around the corner to see the show.
2. Jubilee Line from Swiss Cottage to Waterloo, then the Northern Line to Colliers Wood. Hampstead Theatre joins the exclusive group of theatres I can get back home from on the Tube in time to have a pint in the Royal Standard.

The play is called {Anthro-pology <. I didn't have any very high hopes for it to be honest, which I know sounds ridiculous as I did buy tickets, but having spent a lot of time studying generative AI and large language models I was intrigued to see what a contemporary dramatist would come up with. Lauren Gunderson, her director, cast and crew didn't let me down. It is a terrific piece of work; entertaining and thought provoking.

Have this as an example of roundabout praise for it. I went to the Chat GPT and Other Creative Rivals | Institute of Philosophy (sas.ac.uk) conference on 31 May and 1 June. Geoffrey Hinton (profiled in the essay 'A Potential Threat to Humanity' in ANTHROPOPLY's programme) contributed the, snappily titled 'Qualia are the phlogiston of cognitive science' to the proceedings. 'Oh goody,' I hear you cry.

Watching Myanna Buring as Merril, the protagonist, last night though reminded me irresistibly of  Deepmind's Jackie Kay who gave us 'Embodiment, Intelligence, and the Alien Creativity of Large Generative Models' at the same conference. The persona, the body language, the slightly eccentric phrase construction could have been the same person. 

High achievements, say I, in writing, direction and performance. Guess they succeeded in what they set out to do.

Paapa's Got a Brand New Bag of Spanners (1)

The Spectator : 26 August 2023: Absolute stinker of a review, for all that it is funny,  for 'The Effect' at the NT.  It's by someone called Lloyd Evans. I am glad I didn't book tickets now, and feel less alone as as Jamie Lloyd sceptic.

Two very long hours: The Effect, at the Lyttelton Theatre, reviewed

Lucy Prebble belongs to the posse of scribblers responsible for the HBO hit, Succession. Perhaps in honour of this distinction, her 2012 play, The Effect, has been revived at the National by master-director Jamie Lloyd. The show is a sitcom set in Britain’s most dysfunctional drug-testing facility where two sexy young volunteers, Tristan and Connie, are fed an experimental love potion that may help medics to find a cure for narcissists suffering from depression. Running the experiment are two weird boffins, Professor Brainstorm and Nurse Snooty, who once enjoyed a fling at a conference and whose lust is not entirely extinct. But Nurse Snooty is playing hard to get. ‘Sometimes,’ she tells the Professor, ‘I feel I’m dead but my body hasn’t caught up yet.’ The Professor, a psychiatrist by trade, fails to spot the negative signals here and continues to bombard her with lecherous suggestions.

Meanwhile, in the mixed-sex ward, Tristan and Connie are flirting like mad even though they have nothing in common. She’s a feminist psychology student who likes older professional academics. He’s a penniless half-wit from east London who makes a living by volunteering for medical trials. Yet Connie seems mysteriously smitten with this talentless creep even though he mocks her accent and mannerisms. And she encourages his mistreatment by tittering uncontrollably at his jibes.

To explain her nervous giggles she spouts antique psychological platitudes. ‘Female laughter is a show of submission,’ she says. Since the two lovebirds have swallowed a medical aphrodisiac, their flirtation owes more to pharmacology than to desire and this makes the romance feel contrived and half-cooked.

One night, they break out of the facility and climb the roof of a nearby mental asylum where they continue to flirt by practising ballet twirls and break-dancing. When Nurse Snooty catches them, she delivers a stern warning that sexual congress is strictly forbidden under the terms of their contract. Fair enough, they nod meekly. They promptly dash back to the mixed-sex ward for an eight-hour session of raucous lovemaking which Nurse Snooty and Professor Brainstorm somehow fail to detect. The dottiness of this caper has only just begun. Nurse Snooty takes Connie aside for a girly chat and tells her that placebos are often used in medical trials. Connie gets the hint. Their mutual feelings may not be genuine. Nurse Snooty goes further and tells Connie that she has taken the placebo while Tristan is high on the psychoactive love-potion. Dramatically this makes the story more interesting – but logically it’s senseless. Why would Nurse Snooty endanger the experiment – and her career – by revealing secret data to a volunteer? Answer: the play needs a plot and anything will do. The story grinds towards a lamely predictable conclusion after two long hours.

Jamie Lloyd accompanies the action with non-stop industrial thumping and grinding noises which sound like elevator equipment being tested in a nearby warehouse. The overhead lighting-rig showers the darkened stage with white discs and oblongs of brilliance and although it looks pretty, the colour palette is no different from a zebra, a piano or a nun’s outfit. Every low-budget filmmaker knows this trick: black and white makes boring look classy.

Much praise has been lavished on the performances of Paapa Essiedu (Tristan) and Taylor Russell (Connie) who are commendably fluent and convincing in their roles. But even that harms the show. Watching a pair of loved-up sex-athletes playfully molesting each other for two hours will probably set your teeth on edge.

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1.  'bag of spanners' Urban Dictionary

A product, device or service that appears to work, but when you look deeper turns out to be a collection of badly thought out and badly implemented ideas that is going to cause you no end of grief.

November

I have booked tickets (Icons passim) for the London Jazz Festival's Opening Gala at the Festival Hall on Friday November 10th.

It popped into my head as I finished that, now I had the credit card out, I ought to book up November's once-a-month theatre jaunt. Hey presto Backstairs Billy on Monday 13th has jumped right in there.

Michael Grandage Company presents Marcelo Dos Santos’ new comedy Backstairs Billy which looks at a pivotal moment in the 50 year relationship between the Queen Mother and her loyal servant William “Billy” Tallon. Michael Grandage directs Penelope Wilton as the Queen Mother and Luke Evans as Billy.

"Michael Grandage directs Penelope Wilton as the Queen Mother and Luke Evans as Billy," is all but a Peter Gill celebration

• "Michael Grandage fell in love with the writing of Peter Gill early in his career. Now it's your turn," said the Yorkshire Post in 2002.
• Penelope Wilton is a good friend of PG. I met her when I took him to her sister's funeral.
• A role in Peter's 'Small Change.' changed Luke Evans' life. See Icons passim.

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Donna can't do a band rehearsal tomorrow, as she's going to the first night of Pygmalion at the Old Vic. Maybe PG is right, and Collywood sustains London's theatre all but single handedly.

The 89th play Alan Ayckbourn's opens this week and asks how humanity will deal with artificial intelligence taking over modern life? God there is going to be a glut of this stuff. I've got an excuse for not seeing the Ayckbourn as it is on in Scarborough, but I will be taking my punishment like a man at the Hampstead on Monday.

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Once a month

Slightly left field I will grant you, but I have got tickets to ABBA Voyage for October's 'theatre' trip after a rave review from Ollie H. It should be an interesting follow up to Anthropology in an eccentric zeitgeist seizing way.

‘The night is literally in my hands’: what it’s like to attend an acid house rave – in virtual reality

Using VR and haptic vests to transport users to a sweaty club in 1980s Britain, In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats is so realistic that you might need a lie down afterwards

Sick of poor customer service? 'Luna' could be the solution

Artificially intelligent holograms could be coming to a bank branch near you

The Bomber was telling me only yesterday about attending a house party that the parents had set up as a silent disco.

Tom Basden

Accidental Death of an Anarchist was great last night. So good, in fact, I don't want to spoil it for anyone by talking about it as it is on for another month. 

Here instead is a strange artefact; a longish interview with the writer of the new adaptation of this ebullient satire on police corruption being interviewed by Michael Portillo about it on GB News. I didn't see that one coming.

ANTHROPOLOGY

I built you because this is what I do. It’s my job. These are my tools, I used them, and honestly it’s not that hard – you’re basically a chatbot.

I'm not, truth be told, desperately enthused by this. I may well pop down to the Hampstead theatre though and make it September's monthly theatre visit just to see, given the amount of work I have done on AI, what sort of a fist they can make of a play inspired by it.

Merril is one of Silicon Valley’s leading software engineers, but her life disintegrates when her younger sister Angie vanishes on her way vfrom college.  A year later, when the police have long abandoned their search, Merril assembles all the digital material Angie has left behind and sets about building herself a digital simulation of her sister.  The resultant ‘virtual Angie’ offers her some solace – until, that is, it starts to reveal new details about the real Angie's disappearance…

Resting on his Laureates

August's theatre visit is booked for the seventh. £18 a ticket and no booking fee; not to be sneered at.

Peter, naturally, knew Dario Fo and Franca Rame from the Riverside. The Nobel Prize in Literature 1997 was awarded to Dario Fo "who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden".

Of course it was. Nothing about Mr Gill surprises me any more.

Speaking the Trouf to power

I forgot to record here that I went to see Hannah Khalil's Trouf: Scenes from 75* Years last Thursday.

A living, growing record of life in Palestine, life beyond the headlines, life under occupation.

Trouf: Scenes from 75* Years is an evolutionary play.

A man sunbathes in the shadow of a tank; another desperately tries to buy an onion before curfew. A musician returns to his childhood home, and the queues reverberate to the rhythm of Hedi Jouini and Um Khultoum.

Trouf: Scenes from 75* Years explores another side to life in Palestine, and Tunisia, the stories you don’t see on the news, gathered and discovered by playwright Hannah Khalil from family and the diasporic community alike. Threaded together, these scenes give voice to over 30 characters, in settings from 1948 up to the present day, all asking the question ‘what is it like to live under occupation, or in post-revolution turmoil, where space is always contested?’

The play began life as Scenes from 68* Years at the Arcola Theatre in 2016, to critical acclaim and sold out audiences. Khalil’s text has since evolved through a series of collaborations with Tunisian artists to create a freshly minted text for this UK premiere. 

I was very moved by it, and by two scenes in particular: one in which the girl tricks and teases her grandfather by pretending they can return to the family home, and one in which a Jewish woman does her best to be polite to Palestinian visitors to the house, which used to be theirs, where she now lives. My jaw was on the floor when she offered them one tile left over from redoing their old kitchen. From one perspective both these parables could seem almost cruel, but their domestic settings humanised all the players.

Steve and Rebecca had to go before the Q&A, but I stayed. Getting the thing on at all with recasting and rewrites on Tuesday seemed miraculous. (Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland might have been able to do it in an 'Andy Hardy' movie but no one else could.)

Read Tunisian actor's visa rejection takes centre stage at Shubbak Festival, for the background story.

Essex Girls

I am propped up in bed in the County Hotel in Chelmsford the morning after the night before.

I went to the last night of, plus the ensuing party, of Ria's show last night.

It was amazingly good but I am nursing a 'gentleman's head' this morning and it is easier to let her explain.

Accidental

I read a rave review in the Torygraph yesterday: Accidental Death of an Anarchist: never has this satire on police brutality felt so bitingly relevant. In the wake of the Casey report, this take on Fo's play is acutely topical – and its star, Daniel Rigby, delivers a comic tour de force. (It is here but behind a paywall.)

Looking at the website, I see that it got five stars from the Daily Mail as well, while the Socialist Worker weighed in with "combines biting humour and knockabout fun with a shattering satire on institutional power.’ How's that for squaring this circle? I think we have found August's theatre visit.

Also looking at Paapa in the NT's 'The Effect' for September. Nothing may come of it though as I didn't like the last two things I saw by its director Jamie Lloyd (Cyrano de Bergerac, and The Seagull).

More I cannot wish you

Guys & Dolls at the Bridge Theatre last night. It was great. The immersive production works a treat. While I remember though, there was - as so often these days - a daft virtue signalling inexplicable gay moment in it that served no purpose aside from confusing the plot.

St Illtyd's Anthony O'Donnell was Arvide Abernathy in it, a mere 37 years on from me seeing him in Giordano Bruno's Candelaio for the RSC in the Barbican in 1986.

I also saw him, excellent as the poet-baker Ragueneau, in Stephen Rea's Cyrano de Bergerac at the National in 2014.

It is good to catch up every 17 or 18 years.

More running in the family

John and I went to Central to see Mia and BA (Hons) Acting cohort in a Pinter double bill on Saturday; Party Time / Celebration.

She was in Party Time: a scathing and amusing attack on the increasingly powerful and narcissistic super rich, set against the backdrop of terrifying state oppression.

It was paired with Pinter’s final work, Celebration, a delicious comedy about the vulgarity and materialism of the nouveau riche, bur we didn't see that as she was only in Party Time so we sneaked out before the second one, but she and all the cast were certainly good in the first.

Peter directed a Pinter double bill 'Landscape and Silence' in New York's Lincoln Center's Forum Theater, as long ago as 1970; fifty plus years ago, so we as a family have got form with this sort of thing,

What do they call you up there? They call me Mr. Tibbs!

I went to see Retrograde in the Kiln Theatre the night before last, but couldn't write about it until now as Helen was going to yesterday's matiness and didn't want any plot spoilers.

Anyway I strolled in only to find someone apparently in my place because the ticket was actually for today. I sat down next to her and was displaced only to meerkat up, spot and move to another empty space. I repeated the trick a few times until I ended up in a seat that stayed abandoned and watched the play. It was really good. Here is the theatre's page on it including extracts from its four and five star reviews. The writer is someone called Ryan Calais Cameron who seems to be quite the coming man. I just like him because he is from Tooting up the road from my house.

It finishes on the 27th so you have got no chance of catching it. Come to think of it I imagine the performance when I was playing musical chairs before curtain up was as well.

The Golden Age of Hollywood. Behind closed doors, aspiring actor Sidney Poitier is offered a lucrative contract that could make him a superstar. But what is he willing to sacrifice?

From the writer of award-winning, sold-out, For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy, Ryan Calais Cameron’s explosive new play explores identity, resilience, and integrity as it examines a true event in 1950’s Hollywood and the reality of a Black actor’s journey to stardom.

Next up, once-a-month, Guys & Dolls Bridge Theatre June 15th 2023 7:30pm.

Ryan Calais Cameron

Five stars in the Torygraph, among a torrent of rave reviews, for Retrograde at the Kiln.

"This account of a pivotal episode in the life of Sidney Poitier is so articulately defiant it bears comparison with The Crucible." That's my monthly theatre trip for May sorted then; all done and dusted for Tuesday 23rd.

I googled the author, Ryan Calais Cameron, whose work here "propels him, at a stroke, to the front rank of our playwrights" and found he was born in Tooting, just up the road from where I sit writing. Also, he's got something called For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy on in the West End at the moment, but I can't make it as it closes next weekend.

I'd forgotten I had an account on the Kiln website, but when my email address pointed me its way I could see a list of my other visits to the building.

• THE ARAB - ISRAELI COOKBOOK 13/07/2005 14:00
• PASS OVER 04/03/2020 19:30
• THE WIFE OF WILLESDEN 11/11/2021 19:30

The fourth week of May is shaping up nicely.

• Sunday 21st FAST X
• Tuesday 23rd RETROGRADE
• Thursday 25th TRAUMA AND HOPE