Look Back in Unfocused Anger

Sunset, Limited

2012-01-01T22:03:00.004Z

Bobby the cute biotech scientist drives me to the train station in Palm Springs which isn’t really in Palm Springs but set among the wind farms on its wilder northern edge. Amtrak says to check in at least 30 minutes early but not only is there no place to do this at the unstaffed station, there’s simply no one else around either. It’s just a platform and the rails turning copper in the late afternoon sun.

Two coyotes chase across the edge of the desert and deserted parking lot.

Thanks to a 1-800 automated information service we soon discover the Sunset Limited is already running 20 minutes late which means we’ve effectively an hour to kill but it passes very easily and actually we get to know each other better for it.

There’s a lot of freight. A LOT of freight trains, maybe seven or eight in the time we’re waiting, each with four big diesels hauling about a half-mile of wagons most of which are carrying a double deck quota of containers. Among the Mitsui, China Ocean, Tianjin and similar transpacific cargo companies are several units branded with the Tropicana juice name, suggesting that if they can haul it through deserts in steel containers it’s so chock full of preservative you probably don’t need to put it in the fridge. For years.

The passenger train arrives without fanfare and whilst there are only two or three people boarding here – I’m the only one up the sleeper end, it’s unhurried and a conductor points me towards roomette 11 in coach 230. There I meet steward Yvonne, one of those topheavy black women for whom stretch polyester uniforms were not really designed but she has the broadest of smiles and settles me into the little cabin explaining the light and air controls, and organizes me a reservation for dinner.

Now this isn’t the Orient Express and the tablecloths are paper but the cutlery’s real and there are fresh flowers on the tables. The menu is short but surprisingly varied – besides the American burgerish staples are crabmeat enchiladas, arctic char resting on a bed of orzo pasta and my choice, a tender and delicious piece of chipotle beef with baked potato (baked a while back it has to be said) and fresh vegetables. The ‘no added sugar’ cheesecake may have its peach topping slopped over it as from a bucket but it tastes as good as restaurant fare.

The dining car operates ‘open seating’ which means singles like me are encouraged to share tables for four which is fine. My companions opposite are a white woman from LA in her late twenties chaperoning a pretty but initially sullen six year old girl of a distinctly Amerindian cast. With her dark almond eyes and glossy hair she's a Disney Pocahontas who will grow up to be a stunner but at the moment she needs some coaxing to eat and sit properly. She warms up eventually – actually she eats a huge hot dog, some salad and half her mom’s chicken – and I learn that her name’s Esmeralda and they are traveling together to Tuscon so she can meet, for the first time, her father.

This is almost a Jerry Springer moment as I dare to ask why she hasn’t met him before now – and mom’s gaze is completely level as she tells me they split soon after the daughter was born and he “wasn’t ready till now, but now he’s in a much better place” which the cynical side of my brain interprets as ‘out of prison’.

We’re due into Tucson shortly before 2am and he’s meeting the train, in what promises to be the kind of middle of the night childhood trauma the extended analysis of which should in later years buy her therapist a Porsche.

Our merry foursome is completed by an unshaven gentleman who has arrived for dinner in a powder blue surgical scrub top with almost matching boxer shorts possibly not intended for street wear. He prefers train travel ‘for health reasons’ and ‘because of all that security stuff at airports’ so I mentally X-ray him for weapons (not much concealed in those shorts: definitely no loaded weapon but he may be packing a small slingshot with very loose elastic).

He’s conversationally acute as he describes his itinerary from Los Angeles to some burg beyond Portland, Maine, via a seven hour layover across New Year’s eve in San Antonio and another of five hours overnight in Chicago. He is traveling in a seat, not a sleeper, and won’t arrive home until January 4th having spent five consecutive nights on trains or in station waiting rooms. He is certifiably insane.

Shortly after dinner we skip forward a time zone and at 10pm it seems justifiable to make up the bed in the roomette. I thought at first the upper berth was a proper mattress and the lower one formed of sliding the two seats together but concealed in the upper fold-down is a complete set of mattress, sheets and blankets which make the lower option even more cushy. I like that word, it’s American but I don’t apologise for using it.

It’s certainly relaxing as I watch on my laptop the Christmas special of Downton Abbey whilst we barrel through the starlit mesas of Arizona in a surreal movie collision of the 3.10 to Yuma with the 4.50 from Paddington. I have to catch the conclusion in the morning and Matthew proposes to Mary in the snow with my eyes both squinting from the rising sun and, go on I admit it, misty. I seem to have got in touch with my emotions in the last couple of days.

Sensitive to the needs of passengers not to be disturbed till morning, the train conductor elaborated the rules for coach passengers disembarking before dawn: a coded series of coloured dockets is placed over their seats so they can be selectively awakened just before arrival. It’s all very well managed and I’m barely aware of the stops in the night, except perhaps surfacing momentarily at Tucson to silently wish Esmeralda luck for her first meeting with her daddy.

The rocking motion of the train is both restful and potentially conducive to masturbation but I resist. Got to save something for New Year’s Eve.

Palm Springs Modern

2011-12-26T17:59:00.006Z

It’s that unholy hour between breakfast and the time the sun’s warmed the garden sufficiently for sitting out, which encourages either quiet reflection or a small sense of desperation, I’m not sure which.

I’m really enjoying the house and its facilities, in many ways it’s like being at home – everything I actually need is within reach, but the ticking of the clock is getting on my nerves. I mean the real ticking, of a cheap and rather ugly stainless steel wheel-spoke timepiece in the kitchen, not my life ebbing away. But that too.

I’m spending more time here than planned, mainly because of my own stupidity: my driving licence was due for renewal in early December. When I got the reminder I thought it was just a request to update the photograph and that the currency of the licence would continue normally while the vehicle agency received the picture and sent me a new card.

Evidently not, as the charming man at the Alamo car rental desk in the airport pointed out very gently once he’d deciphered the tiny numerals. Not even pretending there was an American/British differential in the way we recorded our date and month numbers saved me, American 3/12/11 being even earlier than ours. Fortunately Palm Springs is very walkable and nothing’s more than a short taxi ride away.

Ian’s rented a bike and has gone out to re-photograph whichever of the five hundred 1950s modernist buildings in Palm Springs have so far escaped his attention so I have the place to myself. I’m not complaining: travelling with a friend rather than a lover supplies just enough companionship to make it feel as though you’re not entirely alone, but our different circadian rhythms of sleep, eating and drinking mean the overlap is small.

He doesn’t like to compromise on those things, but then again why should he? It’s his holiday as much as mine and for once his preference for a 9.30pm bedtime actually suits this town which for nightlife at least is midway between sleepy and deceased.

So like all gay men with time on their hands, we turn to the internet for amusement. Oh, there is a Cable TV/DVD package in the property but we haven’t managed to turn it on, and the hosts thoughtfully didn’t provide any instructions how to use it: something else I’m not unduly distressed about because apart from anything else it’s meant I’ve learned how to download movies from iTunes.

Back to the internet. This being Palm Springs and me being something of a poster boy for the recentlly-developed category of ‘older gay men’ for which the town is somewhat notorious, I’ve been flattered by the attention.

What I’ve been less flattered by is the format in which the invitations to meet have been couched. They tend to be of the ‘Hot. I’ll be free at 4.45 for an hour if you care to come by’ rather than attended by flowers, dinner, kind or even polysyllabic words.

I am not such an old romantic or recycled Mama Cass as to assume that when love comes to me it will be with rockets, bells and poetry but I’d rather it wasn’t timetabled like a dental appointment and engendering the same amount of pleasure in its anticipation, despite the resemblance not only in the scheduling but also I suspect in the potential restriction of the dialogue to ‘open wide’ and ‘just a little prick’.

So, at least at the time of writing, I’ve resisted such temptations.

Almost everyone online here is trawling for sex outside their ‘committed relationship’, has come to Palm Springs on a sort of sexual tourism vacation to one of the clothing-optional gay ‘resorts’ in the desert (you get the feeling these resorts are automatically prefixed by ‘last’), or is somehow otherwise merely scratching the itch.

I’ve started reading ‘The Velvet Rage’ which is a book by American psychologist Alan Downs attempting to explain why gay men are so preternaturally angry and how our behaviour to each other in sexual and social interaction is so frequently brutal, but I haven’t got far enough into the chapters to reach the one about how to convert pruritic internet interest into actual affection and warmth.

That may need a sequel.

Autres Temps, Autres Moeurs

2011-05-20T13:53:00.008Z

I’m not sure if I can pull all or any of this into a connected thread but three things happened recently to make me think about (my and others’) gay life.

Ken Clarke the Justice Secretary who I’m convinced moonlights as the Churchill Insurance nodding dog barked some stuff this week about thinking there ought to be different categories of rape – but seemed ignorant of the fact this crime can and does happen to men. The LGMC is currently rehearsing to sing in aid of the male rape crisis charity, Survivors UK.

On the excellent author Paul Burston’s facebook thread, there’s been massive chat about how ‘barebacking’ (unprotected anal sex) is becoming what you might call ‘fashionable’ again not just among older participants who consider that even if they got HIV it is unlikely to significantly shorten their span, but among teen and twentysomethings described as waving their arses in the air in clubs and saunas to invite the invasion of what we once called ‘all comers’ but meant it about boxing. A lot of socially conscientious gay men wrote to defend their right to do so.

A 27-year old guy messaged me online yesterday and recalled a day and night he’d spent at my flat, revisiting intricate details from the key rack in the hall, exactly what I cooked for him, the painting in my living room, the sex , several complex things about my work, hobbies and travel plans, the specifics of how we subsequently broke up, to an ancient anecdote I must have told him about an acquaintance visiting a bondage hustler in San Francisco when there was a fire alarm and the building was evacuated leaving him tied to a kitchen table.

Even prompted by a photograph, I cannot remember a thing about him or our encounter, and it’s barely seven years ago when I didn’t entertain so many hot twenty-year-olds that my memory should erase one so very easily.

Of course some water has flown under my bridge since then but I can’t believe that in the ten years I’ve lived in this flat, sex has become so throwaway, and, if you consider what’s happening in the clubs, life apparently so throwaway too.

It’s trite to blame the internet explosion: gay men were promiscuous long before gaydar, Grindr and their subspecies, but even the most enthusiastic slut would have had more work to do to find partners for anything other than a fumble in a public lavatory.

Throughout my twenties, there was only one place for ‘personal ads’ – the back pages of the fortnightly newspaper ‘Gay News’, dull as a parish magazine and devoid of nudity, it still attracted the attentions of Mrs Whitehouse and a private prosecution for blasphemy in which the editor narrowly escaped jail. But, with careful wording, you could advertise your preferences (no photos, no hanky codes, no reference to active/passive or specific sexual choices) and hope for a response – replies had to be sent to a box number, with a loose first-class stamp for each, and the paper forwarded them a week or so later.

I almost can’t tell you the excitement of receiving those letters. I lived in Southampton at the time and a package of a dozen or more responses meant contact, of a sort, with men in more major cities and a window on their lifestyles which was almost unknown to me. Of course they were all handwritten or individually typed – even photocopiers were pretty rare – and generally contained a fuzzy photo booth picture, since anything racier would have had to be taken to a specialist printer as Boots wouldn’t process shots of your bum or genitals. I went to one in Acton High Street once, and it cost a fortune.

If you liked any of your respondents, you again had to craft an engagingly-worded letter, wait for him to receive it and reply either by post, or phone if you were brave enough to give out your (traceable) landline number. And if you were in when he rang, I’m not sure even answerphones were hugely popular in the 70s and their fiddly cassettes often mangled your messages anyhow.

The point I’m making is not just that it took time to arrange to meet, whether for sex or a potential relationship, but that the back-and-forth of advert, wait, responses and reply made you think two or three times, whether in anticipation or anxiety, about the guys and certainly in my case meant I probably only got as far as actually meeting a very small percentage of my suitors.

It was through one such advert that I got courted to stand in the local elections, and for the Conservative Party, which was a bizarre by-product, but an entirely other story.

This is also in the days before the ‘gay cancer’ was identified, and our only condom-favouring anxiety was to avoid pregnancy, and curable STDs like gonorrhea and NSU. I don’t think I used a condom at all before I was thirty, with men or women except for Vivienne Segal, the University bike, but that was because you’d really have been safer with her to keep your coat on. Funnily enough, she became a genetics lecturer.

So is it better or worse that you can turn on your smartphone or computer and find a compatible sex partner in minutes? Or that you can see his dangly bits from every perspective other than that of his personality? I’d be a hypocrite to say I haven’t taken advantage of this, but in all honesty I do miss a bit of mystery, and romance, and perhaps the optimism of how we went about this back in the day.

As for the barebacking – to quote Joyce Grenfell ‘I am not easily shockable, but I am offendable’ and for a new generation to deliberately ignore the naked truth that barebacking can kill, and kill both parties, seems offensive folly - given the number of deaths and the vast back catalogue of campaigning on the subject by gay activists and health workers.

Maybe in his revision of the legislation, Clarke should be considering reclassifying virally-loaded unprotected sex as ‘assault with a deadly weapon’. Or at least statutory rape.

I think what most horrified me was that there’s a whole terminology for young men who deliberately seek to acquire HIV. They have parties at which HIV positive 'gift-givers' are incited to infect them. They call themselves ‘bugchasers’ which attributes a fake cuteness and taboo-breaking impishess to something that’s eventually fatal and ought to be criminal.

I feel dirty. I want a bath, and a cuddle.

The Tempest

2011-04-29T05:43:00.005Z

It’s not often you can say ‘I woke screaming in the night’ but I do admit it. I’m not sure if it was the storm itself or the sound of my own terror that actually roused me, but at quarter to five this morning I was fairly sure the end of the world had come. The lightning, frequent to the point of being constant, so penetrated through curtains, mosquito net, sheet, blanket and tightly closed eyelids that I thought it was actually IN the room and was convinced my corneas were about to be seared.

The attendant thunderclaps matched exactly the intense flashes so the storm was obviously directly overhead and despite the wind and the lashing rain, didn’t sound to be moving in any direction as every blast physically shook my little beach cottage like bombing. I thought of getting under the bed like they did in air-raids but settled for covering myself as completely as possible with blankets and pillows in case of flying glass from the battered windows.

It was getting light by the time it moved out to sea.

I like thunderstorms. I can happily lie awake listening to torrential rain and the rumble of thunder for hours, but the power and intensity of this one, and the sense of immediate proximate violence really did scare me.

Midmorning and you almost wouldn’t know it had happened. Leaves and debris have been neatly swept up by the morning groundsmen, people are swimming, the loudest sound is the waterfall in the swimming pool. But still an occasional offshore rumble warns that the cyclone may not have done with us yet.

It’s the midpoint of my stay, and a chance to assess progress. I’ve dropped 10lbs and whilst I still have love handles at least they no longer look as though they’re attached to one of Emerald Cunard’s bulkier steamer trunks wedged in a companionway on the Queen Mary. How much of that is sweat and expelled alimentary detritus is hard to judge, as is whether it will all return with the first bacon sandwich, but my prime objective was to tackle the diabetic blood sugar levels by adopting the Ayurvedic diet, and any weight loss is a bonus.

They arranged blood tests this morning to check my sugar levels, and whilst the poor man found it hard to find a vein (I have no idea why mine are so deep seated, I don’t recall having been a heroin addict in my teens although I may have blocked it out) the results will be available in 24 hours instead of having to wait two weeks courtesy of the NHS. What I can also say is that whilst my GP takes two or three goes with my blood pressure to find a reading he’s willing to enter on the computer, usually settling for something like 135/85, here it’s been 110/70 five mornings in a row.

I also feel quite well. My mind has stopped racing. The aches and pains on raising or twisting my arm for which I’ve been seeing a chiropractor for a year now seem to have abated, as has the old cartilage problem in my knee, and as I’ve mentioned before the flexibility and freedom of movement in my head neck and shoulders has improved beyond measure with daily acupuncture. Well, not today because Malaka my favourite acupuncturist has gone to visit her parents in Colombo, but we may resume tomorrow. Her temporary replacement is the restaurant dietician who may be equally qualified or judging by the number of clients who have said 'it hurts' may just be an enthusiastic member of the hotel darts team.

I don’t seem to have any cravings, either. Not for favourite foods, or chocolate, and certainly not for alcohol: I saw a facebook photo of friends drinking outdoors in the unexpected English heatwave this week and felt almost nauseous at the thought of multiple pints of lager. Mind you, some of my friends can make you feel nauseous even without a drink in hand. I’ve certainly no intention of giving up but it’s nice to know you can survive a month without it.

If I have a food fantasy, it’s for a bacon and avocado sandwich. Not in itself a great calorific sin, at least not if you grill the bacon and drain it, and use wholemeal bread, low-fat mayonnaise and only eat them occasionally. Unlike the first two years I worked at Canary Wharf when I bought one nearly every day, almost certainly made with undrained streaky and fully-leaded Hellmans.

And the other thing I’d like is a tomato. Yes, that harmless, watery, vitamin-rich, low-fat, low-carb feature of many a Western diet plan is proscribed here, they don’t use them either cooked or cold. Apparently the cheeky little redskins unbalance your doshas. Who knew?

AND THE RESULTS ARE IN ...

Cholesterol down from 4.8 to 3.4

Blood sugar down from 8.2 to 4.4, below the 'threshold' for diabetes at 7.0

All other blood tests in the 'normal' range

and one interesting phenomenon, I'm blood group O Negative, one of the rarest, less than 5% of the global population has it. So not much chance of a transfusion in an emergency ...

still, all in all, a day for celebration.

Vatha, Vatha everywhere ...

2011-04-21T13:23:00.002Z

Last night was the wettest and stormiest night so far, and according to one of the doctors this morning officially a cyclone. It certainly began with one of those ground-shaking thunderstorms that drenches everything in the first five minutes, but fortunately always after dark. So far.

This morning has white skies with a strong breeze from the sea.

It’s apparently a good day for wrapping your head in a tight cloth bandage.

Which is what they’ve done to me following a treatment called Shirodhara – which I thought was one of the Japanese guards in Tenko – but turns out to be Ayurvedic for being poured on from a great height with warm herbal oil, it drizzles on to your forehead and is squelched into and out from your hair by a pair of masseurs before your greasy grey-green Limpopo-smelling locks are finally swathed in the cotton headgear and tightly knotted. Sic transit Gloria.

In my case the Gloria being Swanson except this fashion accessory isn’t quite the full Norma Desmond since it is more Russian peasant than Sunset Boulevard in style: I look like a cross between Mother Courage and the cook on the Battleship Potemkin.

It’s meant to be a revelatory experience, freeing your mind and encouraging deep relaxation although it might have been more stress-reducing if the two masseurs who administered it hadn’t chatted in whispers to each other throughout the procedure. I’ve slept a bit during the day but I can’t say it’s made me feel vastly different although I’m certainly relaxed, and I put that down more to yesterday’s double acupuncture when she inserted about sixteen needles into my neck and shoulders and I’ve never felt more fluid in that department. Sixteen more and I’ll be Linda Blair.

On Shirodhara days you’re meant to refrain from swimming, sunbathing or even washing and if you can’t just think beautiful thoughts it’s OK to do a little light reading. I’ve leafed through the ‘Hello’ I brought from the plane and now know twice as much about Kate Middleton and her make-up habits as I’ll ever find useful, as well as having an opportunity to wonder what is the legitimate earthly purpose of people like Peaches Geldof and Elizabeth Hurley or why cap-toothed Gurkha-crusading arctic-sledging Joanna Lumley has sold her soul as an ambassador for Wrigley’s chewing-gum.

I’ve also found my mind wandering and recalling people I’ve not thought about seriously for years, notably Robert Liederman – for a long time ‘the love of my life’ – an American I met in about 1976 and with whom I had tempestuous and romantic trysts in London, Amsterdam and New York – including the New Year’s Eve his boyfriend tried to kill me - until we lost contact back in the days before you could stalk someone successfully on the internet. Somewhere in a box I’ve still got his letters and I’m horribly afraid also the gushing gauche carbon copies of what I wrote to him.

Carbon copies, that dates me.

Some of my seventies flashback may have been prompted by reading Simon Doonan’s memoir ‘Beautiful People’ about growing up gay in a low-rent suburb of Reading and then escaping to London and the States. He’s now creative director of Barney’s in New York so I can’t say our lives are parallel but we’re contemporaries and much of his youthful experience in Reading is similar to mine in the North. I was quite tickled to realise that I knew his best friend Biddie as well as Biddie’s cabaret partner Eve Ferret, in fact I’d hired them to perform at a succession of office Christmas parties I organised at YRM.

Doonan’s life moved to LA and New York at the start of the ‘plague’ and he lost a lover to AIDS almost before the disease had been accurately named. As I said, I’d lost touch with Rob and heard nothing more about him until about ten years ago when I had dinner with a mutual friend whom I’d also not seen in the intervening time and who mentioned, as though I already knew it, that Rob had also died of AIDS in 1982.

You’d be surprised how devastating it can be to hear of a twenty-year-old death.

When I was in New York three weeks ago, I had brunch with Susan and Rhea at the Fairway supermarket on the Upper West Side and effectively just round the corner from Rob’s apartment, so took a nostalgic walk to find the address on West End Avenue, but too many of the buildings looked similar and I’m not so sure I pinpointed it.

Simon Doonan found fortune and happiness through moving from the English provinces to America at a time when such geographic flexibility was comparatively rare. I do think if I’d been brave enough to do the same then a great love might have blossomed. Then again, I might also have died in 1982.

It’s six o’clock and time for some more foul-smelling medication. The four o’clock libations have been changed and I now have to drink half a bottle of what tastes like the vinegar from the pickled onion jar. Which is a taste I’m familiar with because when I came home from University to critique my mother’s Sunday salad-making and tell her on good authority that smart people made salad with ‘oil and vinegar’ rather than Heinz Salad Cream she promptly dressed a bowlful of lettuce, cucumber and tomato with the juice from the pickle jar and a ladle of oil from the chip pan.

I’ll have been here a week tomorrow, and whilst I’ve lost some weight I don’t want to quote numbers or speculate about the outcome, partly because it’s difficult to assess what counts as sweat and ‘vitiated Vatha’ (which is what you produce on the loo) or to know whether I may yet break out to find beer, chips or chocolate in the nearby village ...

The Curious Incident Of The Drink In The Night-Time

2011-04-21T13:19:00.004Z

temple is tended by very young trainee monks

Sunday was Full Moon day and at 5 in the afternoon they bussed us to the local temple, site of the biggest Buddha in Sri Lanka, a 60 metre modern man-mountain where we milled about with the locals making their offerings at the temple. However anti-religion you are it’s hard to dislike Buddhism because it seems to engender such kindness, and since it’s anti-violence doesn’t tend to wage wars or subterfuge against those who don’t subscribe.

It certainly produces smiling people who don’t push and shove their way to the front of a queue, even to do their devotions, and there seemed to be much sharing of fruit and flowers, including with us: overhearing Lesley and I debating whether we should have bought a garland at the gate, a charming family offered us two handfuls of their beautiful white blooms to scatter at the feet of the statue. Try pinching your neighbour’s chrysanths next Harvest Festival and see how far it gets you.

There were a few retail stalls around the temple, including an incongruous ‘Highland Ice Cream’ van on blocks under a sea-almond tree and a stall promoting an organic green tea ‘guaranteed to cure diabetes in three weeks’. I’ve paid nearly three grand for this trip to reduce my blood sugar and steady my diabetic development, I shall be exceedingly miffed if it could have been cured by a three hundred rupee packet of tea.

When I came back the room attendant was arranging the mosquito net and just as I was leaving for dinner I noticed a bloody great – well, 8cm long – cockroach basking in the netting, on the inside. I told him to get rid of it, completely forgetting that his Buddhist tendencies would mean he wasn’t allowed to kill anything and there then followed ten minutes of pantomime whilst he chased it around the room, up the curtains and under the wardrobe trying to coax it into a sanitary towel bag. Eventually I stunned it with the bug spray and he nudged it into the bag to take away and, I assume, release into the wild.

Like a cockroach Schwartzenegger, it will probably be back.

Another rainstorm broke during dinner and the pounding of the surf and thunder should have combined as a soothing sedative if it hadn’t been for some German banker twunt at dinner sounding off about how this was the sort of weather that made snakes seek refuge indoors and 80 of the 87 indigenous species were dangerous.

So I didn’t exactly drop off to dreamland in an instant, even having checked under the bed and in the shower drain for sheltering serpents, and after some fitful napping realised about midnight that I hadn’t taken my 9pm medicine – even though I’d mixed it with hot water and left it beside the bed. So I chugged it, and the disgusting residual taste meant I had to grab a bottle of water from the dressing table and wash it down with that.

It was only when I put the light on I saw that the bottle contained a milky liquid suspiciously like cleaning fluid that I realised it was probably something the room boy had left earlier.

Panic ensued, not just in me but in the two doctors who arrived within minutes and then later the receptionist, room attendant and cleaner who had all been summoned from their beds by management to give account of how this bottle could have been left in my room and what exactly were its contents. And a fair amount of ranting, largely from me, about how cleaning products should never be put into drinking water bottles and what sort of place were they running that didn’t have proper health and safety procedures to avoid such risks.

In return the doctors had an urgent debate about whether I should be taken to hospital for a stomach pump or just given a total purgative in the morning if I lived that long.

There was a lot of shaking the bottle, holding it up to the light and sniffing it, before anyone summoned up the courage to tip a drop into his palm and taste it – it looked like lemon barley water but had no scent, no flavour and certainly wasn’t corrosive, so we concluded that the balance of probability was that whatever it was wouldn’t kill me, at least not tonight, but the doctor made me drink a litre and a half of water just in case.

Obviously I survived otherwise I couldn’t be typing this now, but I did have considerable anxieties and a pretty bad night.

It was only the next afternoon, when I was taking my handful of ‘Western’ medicine which includes a daily soluble aspirin that I remembered a previous occasion back home when the aspirin once slipped back into the drinking vessel. And clouded the water ...

Sports Day

2011-04-15T16:22:00.004Z

Friday

After a night of glorious thunderstorms I wake too late and have to combine my 6am and 8am medications with breakfast in order to make an 8.30 start on the treatments. It’s the same rituals as yesterday but fortunately the acupuncture’s at the end instead of the beginning and I’m fairly relaxed when it comes round.

The woman on the adjacent slab introduces herself as Lesley, one of the two other ‘English’ guests, although she actually lives in Holland. She’s outgoing and funny, and chatting to her takes my mind off the needling. At lunch she introduces me to the other one, Andrew, on first impression an unreconstructed old-colonial club type of stentorian voice who during the fifteen minutes he talks at me from the adjacent table doesn’t ask me a single question about myself. I must be a ‘good listener’ because at least I don’t allow my glazed expression to transmit to him, but for a man who’s lived in Borneo, Argentina and New York, not to mention travelled to places like North Korea and Mongolia, he’s surprisingly unforthcoming, although he did warm up on subsequent meetings and turned out to be amazingly well-connected.

In continuation of the new year holiday, this afternoon is the staff sports day and they gather, with their copious offspring, to play the sort of games which would have graced a summer fete in England in the sixties. Perhaps in rural villages it still does, but it’s rare and charming to see children queue willingly to be blindfolded to play ‘put the eye on the Elephant’ (work it out) whilst their fathers have an adult version where also blindfolded they have to hit with a big stick one of three crocks of coconut water suspended on a wire. At the edge of the sea they’ve rigged up a log on two cross timber supports and opponents sit astride it with a hand tied behind their back to swing a rag-filled bag at each other and see who’s knocked off first to loud cheering.

The kids compete to drink Fanta from a baby’s bottle, there’s a raucous three-team race to transfer water in cupped hands from a bucket to a bottle, musical chairs, a beauty contest and a fancy dress competition. Everyone joins in with such innocent good humour that in sharp contrast I’m reminded of ghastly hierarchical company picnics at Barclays, or terrifying office Christmas parties with dire food and gut-wrenching cheap wine and 63-year old Tina the Cleaner getting her tits out. Here, there’s no alcohol, or smoking, but a good time is definitely had by all.

My masseur brings his two small sons to shake hands, and makes them speak a few words of English which is brave of them and nice of him: the boys are carefully turned out in their ‘best’ shirts and pressed jeans and their mother has a sparkly sari swathing her ample frame. I’m reminded that in this culture to be larger and rounder is desirable for married ladies, they seem a happy family as the boys each hold dad’s hand and steer him to the next entertainment.

There’s a table laden with parcels wrapped in yellow paper and it seems ‘all have won and all must have prizes’ as Alice was told after the Caucus Race in Through the Looking Glass – again it’s a credit to this family business that not only all the children but all the adults receive something with which they seem to be pleased.
Either I’ve become acclimatised very quickly, or it’s much less humid today and typing this on the terrace of my little cottage (more about the accommodation tomorrow) just after sunset with the breeze from the pitch black ocean, it’s really not unpleasant.

Talking of which, it must be time for some more medicine.

Auspicious Start

2011-04-15T16:14:00.007Z

My driver was quite insistent ‘you have come on the best day of the year’. Best in his view because there’s almost no traffic on the notoriously congested, not to say dangerous, stretch from Colombo airport to the coast resorts and what can take three and a half hours on a normal day is accomplished in just over 90 minutes of mild swerving and horn obbligato. We only almost get killed once. As he says, a good day.

Sri Lankans are big on ‘auspicious’ - apparently it’s Buddhist new year, which is why so much death is being kept off the Sri Lankan roads as most families take a day’s downtime of fasting and rest before a ceremony – at precisely 3.18pm to greet the new year with a meal of sweets which are taken facing North, your first taste of the new year should be something sweet as an augur of good things to come.

Our hotel has replicated the ceremony with what at first seems the ritual attendance of dumpy Germans at the Ceremony of the Removal of the Sacred Cling Film but when the hotel’s lady owner explains the rest of the significance, and invites us to swap a worthless coin for 20 rupees wrapped in a leaf and a small gift – mine’s a lovely handmade notebook with a cover featuring the image of a rather dark and moody elephant, how appropriate - the sense of generosity and inclusion is really rather sweet.

Later in the day I spot her own nephews and nieces come to make the same offering to her and her husband but their obeisance includes the youngsters kneeling to bow and kiss the avuncular feet, something they perhaps thought the Germans weren’t sufficiently telescopic to attempt.

It’s been a long day, preceded by a long night. I left home at 6.30 in the morning to fly on BA to Muscat via Abu Dhabi, itself relatively uneventful since it’s a journey I’ve done before, but then to change on to Oman Air for the ride down to Colombo, a sector I decided to endure in economy on the grounds that it’s only three and a bit hours, for £124 it was a bargain and they had spanking new A330 aircraft with generous 34” legroom, a four course meal (with four choices of mains) that was actually nicer than the bark and grit-filled tikka masala in BA Club World, free drink, hot towels, crew that weren’t bored or argumentative, and the most impressive array of movies and entertainment on a personal seat-back TV screen that was also possibly about the same size as my new laptop.

Of course the downside was that the cabin was mostly filled with migrant workers going home to Sri Lanka and the Maldives and not many of whose armpits had recently been on nodding acquaintance with a wash-cloth. Lest you think mine were two of them, I had a shower at Muscat in the oddest ‘executive lounge’ where the ‘napping cabins’, private cubicles with a relaxation couch in sticky vinyl one happy ending shy of a gay sauna, and a billowing voile ceiling were immediately adjacent to the also roofless and even at midnight rowdily noisy children’s play area. This seems a foolhardy juxtaposition when the airport shops also sell curved Arabic scimitars.

So thanks to the uncharacteristically empty roads, I arrive for breakfast but as my body clock thinks it’s 2.30 in the morning and after four airline meals it’s all I can do to eat a couple of pieces of fruit – I just want my bed. My delight that the room’s available at this early hour is punctured by the fact that, because of the festive occasion, the staff will be taking off early so my medical consultation and first treatments have to be done right away.

Dr Indaka is nice, early thirties and speaking perfect English he’s like an eager batsman in the cricket nets – every time I tell him a symptom he goes ‘anything else, give me another one’ but I run out of topics of medical concern and my over is soon, er, over. But he’s really assiduous and discusses the massages, herbal decoctions and treatments that can help lower my blood sugar, combat stress or increase my haemoglobin – something I didn’t actually tell him was an item of recent concern at my GP’s. I’m too tired and weak to resist when he asks ‘would you like acupuncture’ and actually alarmed when it turns out to be the first of my scheduled treatments and conducted in a slightly communal hall where we’re laid on adjacent slabs as in a mortuary.

The very pretty acupuncturist beguiles me with her turn of phrase, ‘I can needle you softly’ ... oh my dear, if I gave you a list of the people who’d done that over the years, we’d be here till Christmas. Apart from one in a little finger which I moved after it was inserted, it doesn’t actually hurt but I lie there wondering why I have quite so many pins in, or rather through my ears (diamonds if you’re thinking of buying) and in my stomach.

Acupuncturist

The ones in the ears are strange, I can sense ‘things’ rushing towards the locations of the needles, and my neurological pathways seem as busy at the roads were empty. I’m tense though and glad when she comes to take them out.

And so to massage, where I’m led by the (male) masseur, a man of about forty with only a casual handful of teeth but as we start with head massage it’s obvious that he knows what he’s doing and that this really is a therapeutic rather than a cosmetic exercise. For the four-handed full body massage, he’s joined by a mumsy co-worker but her hands aren’t as strong as his and I’m going to need them to swap sides if it’s the same team tomorrow to even out the pressure. I’ve no idea how long it lasted because I was asleep, waking only for an episode when they dab at your loins with hot poultices which smelt and felt like mushroom bhajis but turn out to be cloth pads filled with boiled herbs. It’s all quite culinary though, because the copious oil smells of cumin and turmeric and when I eventually get a chance to rinse out my underpants they’re bright yellow.

After that, it’s a bit of a blur – outside in a garden with running water and shady trees, someone applies poultices, hot or cold, to various joints and fatty areas, and gives me a facial with cucumber slices over my eyes before wrapping me in a gauze cloth. I’m fairly sure I’m now gigot of something on the restaurant menu but sleep claims me again. In the final phase, I have to shower whilst rubbing herbal paste into my loins before lying in a bath whilst a woman rinses me with what Lancastrians will recognise as a ‘lading can’ a lipless cylindrical metal jug holding about a litre of warm hibiscus water swished again and again and again down the lines of your haunches, flanks and rump. The last person to wash me like that was my granny, in her kitchen sink.

I’m done in, and sleep through lunch waking only just in time to collect my medicaments from the doc. Most of the liquids look like syrup of figs, or soy sauce in clear bottles, and the pills and powders come in twists of paper marked urgently with the time to be taken. I have eleven things to be taken with warm water at various times from 6am to 9pm, most swallowed in a single disgusted chug but there’s one of powdered shale that just won’t go down without rinsing the cup out with warm water again and again.

I think it’s lurking on the night table for my 8am feed too.

Forced Milk Wood

2011-03-27T11:06:00.004Z

In the week they buried Elizabeth Taylor it seems appropriate to revisit Under Milk Wood, in which she appeared briefly as Rosie Probert at the height of her partnership with Richard Burton in the 1971 Technicolor version.

Even though playing a bit-part, Taylor was famously difficult, refusing to travel to Fishguard where the movie was being shot. Her scenes were filmed in London over the two days she had available before leaving England to avoid being collared for income tax, and the stills with a cameraman lying on the floor to get the only angle which flattered her low-slung figure and showed off the three Parisian nightdresses she’d demanded which cost half the costume budget.

Both Parisian nightdresses and Technicolor are absent from the Pentameters production. Colourlessness becomes a positive virtue in a play where the sounds are paramount, a day-in-the-life of a small Welsh fishing village seen through the eyes of a blind sea captain.

It starts well enough with a convincing blackout and a few minutes in which to let the imagery of the sleeping hamlet beside the ‘sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea’ unfold in your head. Even without Richard Burton’s impassioned baritone, it works. Unfortunately as the lights come up, the scene is an anticlimax: an all-purpose set comprising a badly painted door panel, the back of a piano and a cheap flat-pack Welsh dresser certainly not borrowed from any self-respecting neighbouring kitchen here in Hampstead.

There are two ways Under Milk Wood is successfully performed: with a vast and colourful cast recreating as authentically as possible in costumes and props a fishing village in the fifties, or on an almost bare stage returning to the piece’s heritage as ‘a play for voices’. This production falls uncomfortably between the two stools with the five actors straining – a lot of the vocals are shouted – to portray in snapshot 64 different characters and using the all-purpose Welsh dresser as everything from captain’s bunk to wild wooded hillside, but equally using all-purpose accents which, even to my one-sixteenth-Welsh ears, sounded occasionally English in their inflections and certainly more random than the quite specific lilt of Cardigan Bay where Dylan Thomas placed the village.

The play has been set to music, by director and onstage participant Tom Neill, but it’s the sort of self-consciously-worthy wheezing and whining compositions you might hear scraped out by a school orchestra and serves only as irritating punctuation while the actors clump on and off stage to their instruments. The music is massively better when the cast sing, finely in two- or four-part harmony for example in the first-act closer of the Reverend Eli Jenkins’ morning service in which Tom Neill and Thomas Heard counterpoint particularly well together.

Even when shared among only five pairs of hands, the material can shine, and the bickering of Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard with her two deceased husbands, or Butcher Beynon’s taunting of his wife with the liver of her pet cat are quite nicely pointed.

It’s a heart-felt production: Pentameters founder Leonie Scott-Matthews introduced the evening with a personal memoir of Dylan Thomas’s daughter Aeronwy, who read and dedicated her own poems on this same stage, and Neill’s affection for the work is palpable. Sometimes the best that a fringe production can do is to indicate that a classy revival is overdue. Hopefully the National or the Donmar will hear this clarion call from Hampstead and give Under Milk Wood the production it deserves.

This review written for The Public Reviews

French Leave ... preferably in the interval

2011-03-25T10:24:00.002Z

Sacre Bleu, Zut Alors, Quelle Horreur, and as for the choreography: Fosse septique … pick your own Francophone diatribes, this is vachement awful.

It’s a shame, because the hand on the Kneehigh Theatre tiller is Emma Rice who helmed their extraordinarily inventive Brief Encounter but to continue the boating metaphors it’s no coincidence that Cherbourg was the port from which the Titanic steered out into the Atlantic, you can’t wait for this leviathan to hit its own iceberg.

Reworked from the Jacques Demy movie which made Catherine Deneuve a star, it's a tenderly simple story of very young lovers parted by circumstance – he’s sent to fight in Algeria whilst she covers her pregnancy marrying a rich bore. He returns, she’s gone, he marries the maid. The central character of the girl’s mother is played here by the much undervalued Joanna Riding as a haughty harridan in a ginger Fanny Cradock wig and the lovers limply by recent Guildford graduate Carly Bawden and Andrew Durand for some unfathomable reason imported from the US to play Guy, despite the fact the West End is crawling with unemployed lightweight younger leading men: shout across the street from the Gielgud to The Yard bar and you’d find a dozen his equal.

‘Internationally renowned’ (although not so much in this country) cabaret artiste Meow Meow – actually a harmless Australian soubrette called Melissa Madden Gray who assumes her fantasy alter ego rather like Humphries does Edna - is contractually obliged to front the soiree in a split skirt, fishnets and black beehive. She also has to hustle the reluctant audience participation so morphs Irma La Douce with Gladys from Hi-de-Hi in a performance which is more cliché than Clichy. Mind you, in the echoing grove of yesterday’s second press night with three-quarters of the seats unsold, not even Ken Dodd could have warmed us up. Her ‘straight’ entr’acte solo ‘Sans Toi‘ is delivered sans taste and with so much eye rolling, r’s trilling and lardoned pathos that the producers of ‘Allo ‘Allo would have cut it from embarrassment.

Veteran composer Michel Legrand reworked his orchestrations for the production – but using the sort of random, stunted, cul-de-sac riffs which make you realise some jazz is basically musical masturbation: enjoyable for the participants but ultimately not really a spectator sport. And it’s through-sung which means banalities to music, and no interruption for some sharp dialogue or even a joke. There’s only one recognizable theme tune (appropriately the made-for-lift-muzak If It Takes Forever I Will Wait For You) which repeats on such an interminable loop the audience feels it’s being battered to death with an especially stale baguette.

There’s a highly mechanized set from Lez Brotherston with tricksy use of model buildings, artful neon and an unexpected skate ramp, colourful costumes, and a seductive lighting scheme by Malcolm Rippeth, but it’s all so much empty effort when the performance doesn’t engage with the audience.

London weather’s so unpredictable but I expect folded Umbrellas before Easter.

Kitchen Sink for the Cornbelt

2011-03-13T07:09:00.005Z

Although set in the remote boondocks of Northern Illinois, on a near-derelict farm, we are not in any new territory with Sam Shephard’s ‘Buried Child’.

The possibility that an outwardly-naturalistic family shelters a dark secret which through the arrival of a stranger is revealed to devastating effect over three drawn-out acts is a theatrical motif so well explored as to have lost its power to shock even by 1979 when ‘Buried Child’ won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama – an accolade which, incidentally, Shepard said gave him less satisfaction than winning a roping contest in the local rodeo.

Shepard’s plays chart the decline of the American dream but more angrily than Miller or Albee, and more autobiographically too: Shepard’s father, a former WWII Air Force pilot, grew up on a broken-down farmstead and supported his mother and brothers from a very young age when the farm business collapsed but later succumbed to alcoholism, living a life that was endlessly disappointing and not able to find another path.

But Shepard is not easy to pigeonhole: his works combine attempts at satire, farce, and cynical verbal attack with images of the Old West, a mourning sense of nostalgia for a lost rural idyll, and a disconnection from familial and spiritual roots.

Possibly Shepard wanted to be a Beckett or a Pinter but merely acquired Pinter’s relentless verbosity and Becket’s obscurantism which makes the play hard to listen to since the dialogue is repetitive and disconnected. This isn’t helped by the variable accents of some of the cast and their propensity to turn upstage on important lines – Tala Gouveia is simply unintelligible a lot of the time.

The ramshackle farmhouse – the location is shown as ‘a squalid farm home’ in the programme - is excellently realised in Martin Thomas’s design, and Howard Hudson’s carefully graduated lighting scheme.

There are some good performances: the play starts well enough with a verbal sparring match between John Atterbury, totally convincing as the old-timer Dodge, arguing with his irritable wife shouting from offstage. His ‘slow’ son Tilde played by Math Sams and grandson Vince by Joe Jameson are also well-studied and persuasive performances of quite unengaging redneck characters.

In Timothy Trimingham-Lee’s lurching production, the actors are required to switch urgently from kitchen-sink drama to Ortonesque farce and back to horror when the parentage of the dead infant is revealed in the too-long-coming third act denouement.

It almost works, but last night’s audience was too readily entertained by the absurd to focus on the dramatic conclusion.

In fact towards the end it was a bit like 'What the Butler Saw' with Vince chasing Bradley round the stage with his prosthetic leg. But too hard to call, the audience was an odd mix of bemused blogcritics and over-volubly enthusiastic friends of the cast: it might have been better if we'd just had a fist-fight ourselves over it.

an edited version of this review appears on The Public Reviews

Covent Garden markets

2011-03-10T10:42:00.002Z

Tuesday morning 11am and one is royally chuffed to be invited with a clutch of bloggerati by the Covent Garden media/marketing team to put ones feet up in the Director’s box at Covent Garden for dress rehearsal of the David McVicar Aida which opens on Friday.

Apart from the close-up view of the singers’ facial expressions and a position right over the pit where we can eyeball Fabio Luisi spurring the orchestra to a spanking pace, we're all captivated by brilliance of both staging and movement.

If you’ve seen Aida before, forget those legions of spear carriers and chorines in white nighties and gold halters, crapping camels or Zandra Rhodes’ pleated silk elephants making the Nile run turquoise with fashion accessories. In Jean-Marc Puissant’s design it’s more Dune than Pyramids, and his motifs are smeared blood, scimitar and samurai. We’re in a darkly exciting metallica world framing the stories of battle, sacrifice – literally, human sacrifice – and conflicted loyalties.

In a brief chat after the performance, associate director Leah Hausman points out that Verdi was writing a serious piece about war: the word ‘guerra’ appears a hundred times more often than ‘amore’ in the libretto, so this is a story of war in which love happens, rather than the other way round.

It looks like Coriolanus but feels suddenly relevant: Amneris condemns the priests as controllers of a rotten society, Radames as head of the army is called upon to save the nation for posterity amid popular chanting and a march of bloodied and butchered foot-soldiers. It could be played out in Tahrir Square.

The grandiose set-pieces are so much more than parades: there’s a fantastic troupe of athletic bare-breasted women whose urgent runs and synchronized thrusting seem lifted from a Soviet spartakiade, there’s ritual disembowelling and corpses dangle from the rafters. Their male counterparts stage Kendo-inspired sword and lance fights in a dance of death under David Greeves’ genius martial arts coaching.

It’s no-one’s fault but Verdi’s that Aida shoots its load in the first two acts and what remains after the interval is the afterglow of the doomed romance between Radames and Aida, and Amneris’s slow-burning disappointment. But this is where the production really delivers as the emotional triangle is explored in scenes of tender and realistic intimacy, due to the powerful collaboration of the three principals: Roberto Alagna, Olga Borodina and Micaela Carosi whose acting is every bit the equal of their sung performances.

It’s edgy casting: Alagna was booed at La Scala in the same role in 2006, Olga Borodina famously walked out of an earlier Covent Garden Aida in a disagreement with ROH music director Antonio Pappano, so it’s a miracle not just that they are both here but that they conspire with Carosi to create such chemistry.

We went backstage for the scene change and some gossip: Swan Lake has had a box office mega-surge due to the ‘Black Swan’ effect with phone calls asking when Natalie Portman would be ‘on’. The box office has a sense of humour because they’re tempted to answer ‘every other night alternating with Billy Elliott’. But the best news is that ROH is trying to reprise its sensational Anna Nicole in 2013, and working on available dates with Eva-Maria Westbroek.

a version of this article appears on Londonist

Dis-Spirit-ed

2011-02-23T22:51:00.001Z

There’s a whiff of mothballs at Richmond, and it’s not all coming from the audience in this starry but stolid revival of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit …

A glossy 2009 Broadway production showcased Angela Lansbury in cracking and crackpot form as clairvoyant Madam Arcati and Rupert Everett in a role he was born to play, the suave and languid author Charles Condomine.

At Richmond on the last leg of its 'immediately prior to West End' tour, a new British production heads for the Apollo in Shaftesbury Avenue next week and features Alison Steadman as the medium, Robert Bathurst and Hermione Norris reprising their Cold Feet pairing as the novelist and his wife, and Ruthie Henshall as the ghostly ex accidentally manifested during a séance.

From the same Triumph/Theatre Royal Bath production stable as the Kim Cattrall Private Lives and helmed by Thea Sharrock who directed the brilliant Daniel Radcliffe Equus, it has all the ingredients of a surefire hit, and yet it doesn’t quite come off.

Even the indulgent Richmond audience wasn’t lapping it up, although they seemed to appreciate the physical comedy better than the dialogue which is only partially explained by the ruckus at the desk in the foyer when several complained their hearing-impaired headsets weren’t working.

It’s smartly costumed with authentic late 1930s gowns, but both script and setting feel stale: a childless and fustian middle class marriage afloat on a wash of cocktails and coffee fetched by servants is all about to be swept away by the war, and whilst there’s no spectre of the coming realities in Coward’s script, this production doesn’t sustain a constant barrage of bright and brittle banter either.

Coward wrote (and Margaret Rutherford made flesh) Madame Arcati as a tweedy countrywoman with an almost professorial interest in the occult – Steadman makes her much more strident which might be effective if it weren’t all on one note, and misses both the charming battiness and the sensitive vulnerability of the character. Perhaps she’s spent too long in easy sitcoms like Gavin and Stacey and Fat Friends but this isn’t her best work and doesn’t compare with the excellence of her last West End outing in Alan Bennett’s Enjoy.

Where Lansbury was balletic and hummed to herself as she danced about the stage, Steadman grunts and feints hand jives that look as though she’s pioneering hip-hop fifty years ahead of its time.

Norris is the most successful in the thankless role of Ruth, the domestically-rooted second wife, but she plays it with less petulance and more elegant authority than the part usually receives and so is more fairly matched with the impishness of Ruthie Henshall’s shoeless and footloose Elvira.

The set, by the usually laudable Hildegard Bechtler has predictable art deco touches but looks cheap with a tackily painted piano and centerpiece terrible green sofa with rigid polyurethane foam cushions which weren’t around till the 50’s.

This review written for Londonist

Phone rings, door chimes, pretend you're out ...

2011-02-09T14:13:00.002Z

Poor Steve Sondheim. During his 80th birthday year in 2010 his works were exhaustively produced and his dramatic entrails more pored over than in any autopsy. There’ll be less of a retrospective when he’s dead. In London, the revivals ranged from a lumpen ‘Follies’ atop a Walthamstow boozer to a puppyishly adoring all-star Albert Hall Prom which was the theatrical equivalent of humping the Great Man’s leg.

As the dustcart follows the Lord Mayor’s show, here comes Southwark Playhouse’s production. Company contains some of Sondheim’s best lyrics, is most autobiographically representative of his own views on relationships, but it’s not the best ‘book’ musical in the canon. Indeed, the script by George Furth is so inconsequential that the show works largely as a song cycle wherein married friends revolve round bachelor Bobby in a carousel of exhortation to find a wife. Updating it with iPhones and MacBooks robs it of a certain 70’s ‘Mad Men’ style and contemporaneous conventions about relationships, but does bring some fresh perspectives.

In his first fully-fledged directorship, Joe Fredericks allows too much unevenness: Siobhan McCarthy’s uncannily accurate impersonation of Bette Davis doing Margo Channing is funny but can undermine the power and pathos in her bravura rendition of ‘Ladies Who Lunch’, Mark Curry’s archly dated portrayal of husband Larry clings more to Mr Clifford in Acorn Antiques than to Broadway, and for a musical so deeply rooted in Manhattan the accents wander widely and the singing projects some very English vowels.

Cassidy Janson as Amy scores highly for her comic timing and vocal precision in ‘Not Getting Married Today’ in which she’s partnered by the strong and charming voice of Greg Castiglioni as Paul. Two of Bobby’s single girlfriends also stand out: Katie Brayben as April the air hostess manages to find the comedy in the script, her dumb blonde resistance to Bobby’s chat-up lines were one of the few laugh-out-loud moments, and Michelle Bishop as spunky punk Marta takes command of ‘Another Hundred People’ with genuine panache.

Bobby is meant to be an enigma, often portrayed as a coolly suave playboy who degenerates into a self-pitying mess, but Rupert Young‘s performance showed less of an arc since his Bobby is a greasy sweaty cokehead from the outset, perpetually dishevelled and disoriented. It’s a more modern reading of the part and emotionally distanced from the audience, but improves in the second act when ‘Being Alive’ was thoughtfully phrased and strongly delivered.

The singing is mostly very fine indeed, but the production lacks pace - you could see the audience’s attention wander - entrances need more immediacy and less clunking over the underlit Bridge-of-Sighs-made-from-scaffolding set - and for the dialogue to crackle authentically, cues need to be picked up much more smartly.

This review written for www.londonist.com

Her name was Lola ...

2011-01-07T13:26:00.009Z

The temperature is now officially half-past fucking hot and the only way to enjoy the beach is for Rhea and I to take a very early morning walk – all the way to the headland between us and Ipanema, and a paddle in the extremely chilly Atlantic before the sun beats us indoors for breakfast. We’d been promised an endless parade of beautifully sculpted Brazilian bodies but what’s passing us either on the sand or the boardwalk is definitely not hot. It’s rather like Miami Beach, and if you’re thinking ‘Golden Girls’ think more the Sophia end of the spectrum than the Blanche.

It’s also an opportunity to assess Copacabana for what it is now and the faded showgirl from the Barry Manilow song is a useful metaphor. I’m struggling to remember the technical term for a once-glorious demi-monde that attracted people from all over the world to its glamorous nightlife and racy atmosphere but is now a shadow of its former self. Oh, right, I remember: shit-heap.

The high-rise narrow hotels which form a fourteen-storey terrace along the seafront remind me of Acapulco without the lush foliage, or perhaps Benidorm. This is not an exaggeration: one block from the front and you’re into decrepit old apartment buildings and tatty sidestreets of which even Brighton (all front and no knickers) would be ashamed.

We walked to the night market, a small parade of booths and stalls on the central reservation of the six-lane corniche selling every possible kind of lurid tourist tat except anything you’d actually want to buy, and it made me wonder if Copa is now aimed at tourists from other, poorer South American countries rather than Europeans or Americans. Although the hotel prices (well over $400 for a tiny room) don’t seem so low-budget.

For our ‘farewell dinner’ we were taken to a restaurant famed, if that’s what you’d call it, for its ‘eclectic’ decor. It’s not so eclectic for Pirates of the Caribbean to meet the Addams Family in an interior that looked as if it could have been installed overnight by a theatrical set-building team, but our group was in high spirits and the waiters in pirate headscarves and Goth boots brought excellent barbecued meats although the evening did feel a bit ‘manufactured’.

On the bus, Carla the tour director announces she is leaving early in the morning to return to her hillside pueblo in Costa Rica, despite the fact the tour doesn’t officially finish until 6pm. We’re in the hands of the local guide Will who’s actually smarter - being a university professor and veterinary surgeon as well as occasional tour guide. And gay. However quite a lot of the clients are annoyed Carla shipped out early since it means residual uncertainties over the checking of the sugar-loaf mountain of luggage they have collectively to transport to the airport.

After dinner, various clusters continue their evening drinking either in the hotel or in local bars but I have an assignation with Jorge and what we then do pressed up against the window overlooking the twinkling lights of Copacabana beach will stay in my memory rather longer than just another caipirinha.

(later)

I have to extend this piece by explaining that Copa is not Rio and Rio is not boring. It’s as much a collection of ‘villages’ as London and the residential areas of Copacabana, Lagoa, Ipanema, or Leblon have as little in common as Chelsea with Croydon. We take a short walk round the historical financial district where many buildings are already being gutted and reassembled for the World Cup and Olympic Games in 2014/16 and the scaffolding shrouds the many others getting their facades sandblasted in a masonic tribute to Rio’s face-lift industry.

We lunch at Confeteria Colombo, a turn-of-the-century landmark with ornate trilled mirrors and Thonet style furnishings but it’s now hedged in with messy shopping streets and many of us loll in the too-hot sun till departure time although Curt indulges in a bout of what can only be described as shirt-lifting with Will the gay local guide since they each return with a bag full of the things.

For the best and brightest views of the city, not to say the coolest and breeziest in a place where hot and still are the perpetual norm, we ascend variously to Sugar Loaf Mountain and to Christ the Redeemer atop Corcovado. I love the ‘Elevador’ funicular ride up Corcovado, it’s reminiscent of Madeira and Lisbon but others are vertiginously subdued.

Otakar, the Czech paterfamilias, and I discover our vertigos are directly similar but that these high balustrade terraces somehow don’t trigger it, so we’re more relaxed. Fellow-sufferer Curt wisely declines the higher platforms and gets time for coffee and to polish off the New York Times crossword. He didn’t miss much, a view is still a view even if you skip the last thousand feet.

As the group dissipates towards the end, we lunch with Bruce and Susan and have a final/farewell dinner with what I’ve rudely but affectionately been referring to as the ‘Jew Crew’ – the inseparable foursome of Wachts and Schechters, so lovely Robin, Rhona, Avi, Howie, Curt and I are booked for Aprazivel restaurant in the topmost suburb of Rio, Santa Teresa.

At first, most taxi drivers decline to take us claiming the route is dangerous, but a hotel car is braver and whilst we drive through a couple of slightly less genteel neighbourhoods on the lower slopes of the hill, as we continue up and up and up AND up, the streets become cobbled and the mansions grander until when we eventually think one more hairpin bend will mean oxygen masks fall from the roof of the car we arrive at a barely marked door in what is quite clearly an echelon above Rio de Janeiro in every sense.

Inside and down steep stairs, it's a delight with area after area of intimate and bucolic seating locations some at ground level and some actually perched in the trees - we were offered several choices and took a ledge overlooking the spectacular view which only improved with nightfall.

This is definitely a Cariocas' location - although there were some tourists, most of the guests speak Spanish or Portuguese and so do the waiters, although we find one fluent in English to help us through the interesting menu as well as with wine choices. Brazilian Gewurztraminer, anyone?

All our dishes were excellent, from the wood-roasted heart of palm - an absolute revelation to anyone who had, like me, only tasted the nasty canned stuff on buffet salads - and to which I am now a complete convert, and the excellent salt-water fish grilled and very lightly sauced with citrus, perfect medaillon of beef in an interesting jus and a wholly original souffle of spinach and banana on the side.

We shared a couple of desserts, my favourite being the tapioca ice cream – and if you’ve screamed the lunch room down as I have at being force-fed tapioca at school, I can promise you it’s completely different as a gelato – atop a delicious sludge of Acai berry. Yum.

And so with some reluctance we toast ourselves and the end of the trip.

L’Chaim.

Both Sides Now

2011-01-07T13:24:00.003Z

Iguassu Falls from Argentina and from Brazil

What's New, Buenos Aires ?

2011-01-07T13:22:00.002Z

New Year in Llao Llao

2011-01-07T13:14:00.001Z

Llao Llao hotel, Bariloche

Sailing Through the Andes

2011-01-07T13:09:00.005Z

And we’re off.

A not-too-early breakfast, bags left inside the bedroom which somehow mysteriously reappear again inside the hotel room at our next destination – this seamlessness is one of the reasons the tour costs what it does, and boy do we appreciate it as boarding passes are brought to us in our seats on the bus and we’re whisked through security to departure lounge without ever seeing a check-in queue. And if the collective baggage is overweight, the tour company pays the excess.

I wanted to put an exclamation mark there, but am editiing this in the transit lounge at Zurich airport where the keyboard doesn't seem to have one. What does that say about the Swiss character?

We’re on Chile’s Sky Airlines, whose fleet appears to be where 737s go to die. At over 30, ours is one of the oldest still flying but with comfortable seats and a tray meal – which has the Americans squeaking with excitement, used as they are to being thrown a bag of peanuts on even the longest US domestic flight – to arrive at Puerto Montt where again the formalities are minimal and we’re quickly on another coach moving towards our lunch destination in Puerto Varas.

The view on the ride down has been sensational – about thirty snow-capped volcanoes studding the cordillera of the Andean range, and now the scenery’s totally different as I’m reminded of the west of Scotland and islands like Arran or Skye where fingers of sea lochs push deep into the low hills of the landscape. There’s as much fishing here too, and apparently the locals will no longer eat salmon because they’re sick of fishing, farming and handling it for the export trade.

On the bus Carla passes round some ‘local’ scarves she’s bought which are allegedly made from Alpaca. When I see the 70/30 label (not to mention the one which says Made in Peru) I ask if we’ll spot any of the Acrylics with whom the Alpacas obviously mated to produce the fibre, but either she doesn’t understand or isn’t amused and her brightness suddenly seems a bit artificial.

Lunch is communal but convivial and there’s some good seafood to start as well as hot dishes we’d selected earlier to save time. It’s also quite Alpine both in the decor of the rustic chalet and the food: I hadn’t expected Wiener Schnitzel to be a Chilean favourites, but it is. Although I wish I’d had the grilled fish because it turns out to be lovely chunky blocks of hake. Wine’s pretty free-flowing so we’re all in a good mood for the afternoon spent around the shops and sights of Pto Varas where my 60 hours of beginner’s Spanish are sufficient for me to help several of the ladies acquire lapis lazuli jewellery in one of the shops.

Siesta, a walk along the seafront with two brilliant volcanoes outlined against the bluest of skies, cocktails, a reasonable dinner and a pleasant sleep in a climate I think of as my ‘own’ since we’re 52 degrees South and I live 52 degrees North.

Next day, the ‘Andean Crossing’ begins in earnest as for the next two full days we’re decanted from bus to dock to boat to bus to hydrofoil to catamaran to whatever in a sort of relay race which brings us across the mountain range and over the Argentine border to Bariloche.

I love it. Even when we’re in the midst of a swarm of ugly horseflies on disembarking at our overnight stop in Peulla, it feels like proper travelling – but with sherpas, since at every change our bags are carted or containerised behind the scenes. The views of the deep green or turquoise lakes and the conical mountains are glorious and we’re extremely lucky with the weather – this stretch can often be cold or rainy – but there are so many photo opportunities and chances to sit and admire the landscape, I never even open the book I brought.

Two long faced Long Island miseries – who fortunately leave us in Buenos Aires – almost spoil it with their moans that this is ‘boring’ but since their favourite holiday was Switzerland I can’t see what part of sparkling lakes, mountains, snow and sunshine is different from the alps: we even have a fondue in Bariloche, and get delicious hot chocolate on the Argentine boat ... perhaps they just liked the cuckoo clocks and watches.

Every tour needs a pair like this, it helps the rest to bond.

Almost Perfect Day

2010-12-28T02:20:00.018Z

We don’t exactly hit the ground running but fuelled by our combined appetites for culture, arts and shopping we strike out by astonishingly smart and efficient metro to downtown Santiago.

The modernity and uber-cleanliness of the stations and trains is momentarily alarming, used as we are to the rackety transport systems of New York and London, but not nearly as alarming for me as the fact that most platforms are furnished with multiple flat screen TVs regularly showing Susan Boyle giving us her rendering (here I remind readers that ‘rendering’ also means to melt down) of ‘Perfect Day’.

I am delighted that my Instituto Cervantes-learned ‘que bruja fea’ gets nods of approval from passing Chilenos.

First stop the Cathedral where we’re thrilled to find a Christmas Day mass in full swing and enjoy the wonderful flowers – immaculate white gladioli and lilies contrasted with bitter dark red roses - and casual atmosphere of a congregation enjoying itself. It’s a beautiful building with some lovely painted decoration but not as over-gilded and domineering as a lot of Catholic architecture, and when I find an order of service and am able to join in with ‘Silent Night’ in Spanish, it’s enjoyable for me for the music and the sense of theatre, and if the faith aspect seems to work for the locals, good for them.

Among the statuary is an elegant modern sculpture of a newly-canonised priest, installed in the last three months. The figure has his hand on the shoulder of a young altar boy and you feel that the distance between them and the lightness of touch has been carefully calculated to defuse the obvious charges.

We fan out to spot other important buildings but everything is closed for Christmas so we wander more or less at random and are pleased to sit down for a cooling juice in the Plaza de Armas just as a Peruvian marching band capers its noisy way past with the brilliant sunlight glinting off the instruments and costumes.

They're stupid beasts, does it say Plaza de LLAMAS ?

By late afternoon the sun has beaten us back to the hotel for some pool time and a siesta. In the bar Rhea spots one attractive half of a two-doctor gay couple from East Hampton, and since his partner is unwell, invites Dr Jim to join us for dinner. He’s a psychologist and perceptive company although as the evening proceeds and he gets further down the red wine the game becomes one of analysing the analyst since he has a tale and a half about a romantic adventure in London which climaxes with him being hunted down by the secret service and puts our various affaires truly in the shade.

Boxing Day and many more things are open so we subway again (Susan Boyle still at it in the stations) and enjoy the Las Domenicos craft village and funky bohemian Bellavista neighbourhood, before heading back to the hotel to brace ourselves for a ‘meet the tour group’ cocktail party.

We had been trying to ‘spot’ members of our tour party in the hotel on and off for two days but our hunting skills are poor and we don’t accurately identify either a promising looking middle aged gay couple or the most overweight man in the hotel who would certainly require two coach and aircraft seats.

We develop a strategy of not becoming too friendly too soon, as Curt had been buttonholed at breakfast by a female predator in polyester plumage asking if he were travelling alone, and among the routine fiftysomething couples from states with square corners there are a couple of more interestingly exotic families, one based on Czech parents and two attractive daughters one of which is married to an English boy, and another mixed American/Korean five piece troupe, which makes us a more cosmopolitan bunch than I’d feared.

Under the tutelage of our resolutely Costa Rican tour director - the looks-like-Lucy-talks-like-Ricky Carla - we have to stand in a semi-circle and introduce ourselves and when it comes my turn and I announce my name and provenance a diminutive couple pounces on it saying that they had been looking for me ... but don’t explain why so I am somewhat cautious.

The following day at lunch it turns out that he is an academic working between Oxford and Texas and that in a year or so they plan to relocate to London and would like some advice on where to live. This comes charmingly wrapped with an invitation to High Table at Balliol, so I am quite happy to help.

It also amuses me that the woman who styles herself ‘an educator’, an English teacher and vice principal of some institution which can barely spare her for the holiday is unaware of any of the Oxford colleges, or the meanings of ‘High Table’, ‘Dean’ and most glorious of all since I am impressed when George uses it in a casual sentence ‘subfusc’. Since despite her literary background she’s clearly never read any C.P. Snow, or G.K. Chesterton, or even Tom Sharpe, we explain it to her in Harry Potter terminology and feel very smug.

Dinner was pretty ropy, and we have to have one of those ‘conversations’ with management which is still paying dividends as platters of chocolates and macaroons and complimentary bottles of Evian keep appearing in our rooms, as well as free cocktails in the bar, and the staff try hard to bring us everything we need.

The tour began in earnest this morning and following a whizz round the city we’re taken to the Maipo valley and the boutique wine estate of Tarapaca with its handsome great house where after a short walk through the cellars with the equally handsome Diego we’re lunching al fresco under huge parasols and even more huge trees and I’m pinching myself to recall that it’s the Monday after Christmas when everyone I know is getting ready to go back to work, and I’m getting sunburned in a vineyard that could easily be Burgundy if it weren’t for the backdrop of the Andes.

Welcome to Santiago

2010-12-25T11:04:00.011Z

I’m awake at ten to seven on Christmas morning.

Either I’ve regressed to the second childhood I’ve been promising myself for some time now, or it’s jet-lag.

Outside the window of the solidly American-vision-of-English-Country-House Ritz-Carlton bedroom sprawls the beating heart of Chile, Santiago. Except it’s flatlining today with everything closed for the holidays and besides it looks nothing like the old colonial capital of a banana republic. With its new but not quite excellent modern architecture, and the buildings reflecting in each other’s mirrored facades, Santiago reminds me of Atlanta. An early empty bendy bus bowls down the six-lane street, a lone sweeper in bright blue coveralls tends the immaculate pavements and planters of the shopping centre. Its six million people must be elsewhere.

It was touch and go if I’d get here.

The atypical mid-December snowfall in the UK and its ability to paralyse our transport system has been well documented and indeed slavered over by the press, so I turned up at the airport with a pillow, a coat to use as a blanket and a couple of sandwiches in case the tabloids were right and I might have to spend two nights on the airport floor invoking the spirit of the Blitz before getting a plane. I’d even prepared a couple of Vera Lynn numbers in case I was called upon to lead community singing. It was, of course, massive exaggeration – two minutes to check-in and two more to be through security and I’m in the Star Alliance lounge with a G&T wondering what all the fuss was about and why I’ve got two hours to kill before boarding.

TAM Brasilian – on whose wings I have flown courtesy of air miles – turns out to be a perfectly competent airline, and whilst their crew don’t speak the conversational English of BA (nor, thankfully, do they address paying passengers as ‘mate’) everything’s lovely. If I was their time and motion expert I might suggest it’s not necessary to perform a fawning at-seat attendance with a wooden boxed display of tea bags every time a customer wants a cuppa, but I’m not arguing.

The personal movie screen was bigger than my laptop although that served to make Julia Roberts appear with even more teeth than usual, in a simply dreadful film wherein she’s a divorcee who first overeats in Rome, then visits an Ashram where she can suddenly read Hindi before giving the benefit of her worldly advice to a holy man in Bali until after spending two hours telling us she’s sick of people telling her she needs a man, ends up with Javier Bardem. Solace-for-shopgirls rubbish from beginning to end, but such predictable and easy rubbish I was able to watch it without the headphones reading the Portuguese subtitles. Even in Portuguese, Julia, this is facile crap. Make a decent movie.

Changed planes in sticky Sao Paulo where the early morning warmth heralded what’s to come and then dozed fitfully for another four hours on the sector to Santiago, waking only for a glimpse of the high narrow ribbon of the Andes as we descend.

The rather classy American travel company with whom we booked this junket has sent not just a driver but also a uniformed host to collect me, and in some state we progress to downtown Santiago where it's great to be enveloped not just by the embrace of a good hotel but by two of my most delightful friends Rhea and Curt who flew in earlier this morning from Baltimore. As they're famished for late lunch I have the quickest of showers and enjoy the kiss of clean pants before we stroll in the sunshine to a smart place specialising in New Zealand cuisine (well, it's all in the Southern Hemisphere) and some rare tuna and glorious Chilean Sauvignon Blanc.

All is suddently well with my little world.

Happy Christmas, more when I can ...

A Star is re-Born

2010-11-24T12:09:00.003Z

Tracie Bennett (yes, Rita's adopted daughter from Corrie) fairly strips the skin and the bones off of that there Judy Garland. The 5* accolade is for an impeccable impersonation, maybe the production and script deserve 4 ... there's clearly a giant, or possibly a Giant, movie to be made from this excoriated life and in giving us only the last five weeks the stage show does Garland a disservice because there's no background or explanation of how she got into this terrible state.

END OF THE RAINBOW

Playwright: Peter Quilter
Director: Terry Johnson
Designer: William Dudley
Musical Director: Gareth Valentine
Sound: Gareth Owen

Reviewer: JohnnyFox

TPR score: 5 stars

Can you imagine what it would be like if Judy Garland were still alive? In her late eighties would she be shuffling from one tacky daytime chat show to the next still living off ancient glories like The Wizard of Oz and Easter Parade, trotting out the same old stories of booze and drugs to any daytime host who’ll listen and favouring audiences with her uncontrolled vibrato?

Or perhaps she’d have got sober, like Elaine Stritch, and be twinkling her way through A Little Night Music on Broadway or could it have been Judy instead of her parodic daughter officiating at the schlock gay wedding in Sex and the City 2?

'End of the Rainbow', Peter Quilter‘s smartly-scripted play shows a snapshot of this giant ego undermined by wracking self-doubt as she heads for a final meltdown in 1968 struggling to repay debts with a five-week season at the Talk of the Town in London buoyed by the romance of her newly acquired fifth husband (and allegedly third gay one) Mickey Deans.

In a gloriously inaccurate Richard Mawbey wig (for London, Garland had cut her hair in a gamine style like Peter Pan) Tracie Bennett has the face, figure, body language and voice of Garland as well as both the flame and the warmth of her fiery, funny character pierced by crystal shards of incessant need for reassurance and fear of separation.

Surely this is an Olivier award-winning impersonation and she carries the evening with power and sinew worthy of Judy’s own survival technique.

William Dudley’s richly pretty set mutates slickly between her suite at the Ritz and the Talk of the Town revealing a band of stunning capabilities thrashed to a frenzy by MD Gareth Valentine when Bennett takes the stage in a range of numbers from brassy You Made Me Love You and the Trolley Song to painfully reflective Over the Rainbow and The Man That Got Away. She’s in such fine, belting voice, that the reverb added to simulate the ‘stage’ acoustic is almost excessive.

In one sense, Bennett fails Garland because in performance she’s just too good. Judy’s London appearances were uneven to say the least: contemporary critics referred to her cracked, flat notes, her apparent lack of concentration, that her voice had ‘taken a beating’, or that the show was only successful because of her defiant personality, enduring popularity and ‘instant hysteria among an audience determined to clap itself silly’.

Although this is only a ‘slice’ of the fruit-loaf that was Garland, indeed - being the end slice it’s effectively the crust, Bennett measures the progress from the funny, smart, madcap Judy excited at the prospect of a season in London to the Ritalin-raddled wreck at the end with tremendous control and such authenticity that when, in a faultless best-supporting actor performance delivered with wit and affection, Hilton McRae as her loving gay pianist suggests a quiet mutual retirement to seaside domesticity, you almost believe Judy might take it.

At 2 hours 30, it’s arguably one ‘I’m not going on’ too long, and there’s a sense of cyclical repetition which is perhaps why Get Happy was trimmed from the list of songs.

Garland’s long dead, and when the audience rose to its feet to hail the star at the curtain call, the cheers were for Tracie Bennett, not Judy, and thoroughly deserved.

This review originally written for www.thepublicreviews.com

We are dainty little fairies ...

2010-11-21T22:38:00.004Z

SASHA REGAN’S ALL-MALE IOLANTHE
Union Theatre, Southwark, London SE1

Book and lyrics: W.S. Gilbert
Music: Sir Arthur Sullivan
Director: Sasha Regan
Musical Director: Chris Mundy
Choreographer: Mark Smith
Designer: Stewart Charlesworth
Lighting: Steve Miller

TPR rating: 4.5 Stars

Whilst The Mikado and Pirates of Penzance have had a number of recent and successful modern treatments, wresting the rest of the Gilbert and Sullivan canon from the dead hand of D’Oyly Carte and its historically reverential staging has proved more difficult, so Sasha Regan and her all-male company at the Union Theatre are to be congratulated on a production of Iolanthe which is quite so inventive and engaging.

If you need to trouble yourself with the plot – well, the ones in underwear are fairies and the ones in dressing gowns are Peers, there’s a half-breed Arcadian shepherd who becomes a member of Parliament, and a ward of court who wants to marry him, and the Lord Chancellor is married to a friend of the Queen of the Fairies who has been banished to live at the bottom of a river … it’s all too silly for words, so relax and enjoy the ride.

And a ride it is – joyous, uplifting, funny, sweet, occasionally sentimental but mostly comic with moment after moment of sheer delight in both the musicality of the performers who strive for high accuracy in their falsetto and coloratura, but mostly for a genius theatrical device which allows the young cast to drive along the story and the musical numbers without bothering to age up.

It’s smart and sharp and whilst it doesn’t emphasise the satire on politicians which Iolanthe often invites, it brings in references from Harry Potter, and Peter Pan and Narnia which make the story even more accessible, and the ensemble numbers enormously enjoyable, particularly with Mark Smith’s complex and fluid choreography.

There are some remarkable voices: Gianni Onori as Strephon the romantic lead has a Scots accent which is sometimes impenetrable in the dialogue, but his singing is elegant and tender and Matthew James Willis, an Australian tenor making his London debut is outstanding as Earl Tolloller, with impeccable diction and a richly resonant tone almost too powerful for the tiny Union theatre.

Although for me the falsetto works best in the ensemble numbers, there are some highly skilled singers among the ‘girls’ – Alan Richardson as Phyliss reaches high and clear into the soprano range and Kris Manuel, in between stealing scenes as the Geordie fairy queen, exhibits a well supported contralto, especially in the aria ‘Oh Foolish Fay’.

Production designer Stewart Charlesworth’s costumes are a highlight, well matched with the battered attic set and carefully individualized for every character in the chorus. There’s no orchestra and on one piano musical director Chris Mundy emulates everything from fairy bells to trumpeting fanfares.

This is a gorgeous evening.

This review written for www.thepublicreviews.com

Thoughts on the Tinterweb

2010-11-15T11:00:00.007Z

photo copyright Laura Babb, www.laurababb.com

Fellow Londonista, professional photographer Laura is working up a project on how the internet has (or hasn't) changes people's lives.

Check it out here

These are the questions she asked me:

What is the main influence that the internet has had on your life?

It’s so much easier in a half-hour to stroke, poke, comfort, cajole, encourage or merely check vital signs for your entire human entourage. I now have to make a superhuman effort to ensure I’m as conscientious with my non-facebook friends in enquiring after their loves, lives, jobs and dogs.

In other news, it changed my love life.

Emerging blinking into the daylight aged 47 from a long relationship about the time of the internet explosion, I had wondered if I’d ever date again but after a period of slutdom - which at times felt like I was hanging a ‘to let’ sign out of my bedroom window like some sort of sexual Foxtons - I was first stalked by then introduced to a partner so different in age, background, interests and energies from anyone I’d ever considered before the web broadened my horizons.

This led to three delightful years of romantic involvement (and resignation from all the dating sites) before I eventually released him back into the internet wild.

Has this influence been positive or negative?

Mostly positive, in terms of feeling connected to the wider world – particularly when travelling, which I sometimes do alone: on a long trip through the Caribbean which I didn’t entirely enjoy, I felt much better about it because I was blogging daily and getting feedback from friends and home.

If it has been positive, have there been any negative aspects?

It’s addictive, not always pleasantly, and too consumptive of time. I don’t seem able to do the internet equivalent of Matron’s ward round and skip through the sites and contacts in a brisk morning half-hour, but keep coming back to the facebook comments, and checking various sites for messages all through the day. I can make myself late for appointments by having one last hit before leaving the house.

I don’t like this, and I don’t like myself for doing it.

If it has been negative, have there been any positive aspects?

It keeps up my multi-tasking skills. As a Gemini I’ve always been able to do two things as once, like read with the television on, but now I can monitor tv, cooking and the internet all at the same time. Although I burn more things than before.

I also think that email/texting and online messaging has brought a smidgeon of literacy to a generation I thought had completely skipped it: now even teenagers can form a sentence, of sorts.

If the internet was a person and you met them in a pub, what would you say to them?

Let me buy you a drink and look over your shoulder to see if something more interesting’s happening.

Pink and juicy, and that's just the rack of lamb

2010-11-15T10:55:00.001Z

Parked midway between the Kit Kat Club from 'Cabaret' and a jollier, ruddier Fat Sam's Grand Slam Speakeasy from 'Bugsy Malone', Burlesque and Blues at Volupte is one of the best things you can do on a Wednesday night in London.

Remotegoat reviews are meant to be about performance, but it's impossible to overlook the delicious cocktails whipped up by the friendliest of bar staff, the restaurant-quality food (pink and perfect rack of lamb, delicious fish) and the whole seductive atmosphere which on a windy and wet Wednesday welcomed everything from youngish couples on date night, to a team outing which could have been an episode from 'The IT Crowd'.

About the time your main course is served, the music starts with Pete Saunders' powerful attack on the ivories, literally driving the rhythms along Route 66, and his own 'Don't Say You Love Me' where stamping every beat on the floor is perhaps unnecessary when you're accompanied by a talented drummer like Jonathan Lee. But the music really builds the mood up to the entrance of Vicious Delicious whose comic timing is every bit the equal of her burlesque.

Also known as circuit standup Leah Shand, Ms. Delicious handles the audience brilliantly, and both her renditions of 'I'm Tired' from 'Blazing Saddles' and a wickedly funny version of 'Ne Me Quitte Pas' were excellent. What's all the more surprising is how well she also interprets the dancing and burlesque, this is a very classy act.

For both Vicious and her partner Bouncy Hunter, the choice of material is intelligent and hugely entertaining: 'Whatever Lola Wants' from 'Damn Yankees' works very well, and whilst Sondheim's 'Making Love Alone' is hilarious, I'd have preferred it taken at a more sultry pace, particularly before the rousing finale of 'Tool Man'.

The costumes and jewelery are lovely, the lighting flattering even to the audience, and the professionalism and confidence of the performers can't be understated.

Clever, funny, charming, friendly, elegant, sexy but not in the least bit sordid, this really is an outstanding evening delivered with charm, wit and polish.

Wanking in a Winter Wonderland

2010-11-04T10:42:00.000Z

The Reindeer Monologues
written by : Jeff Goode
director : Matthew Lloyd Davies
venue : Above The Stag, London SW1
TPR rating : 2.5 stars

Sleigh bells ring, are you listening?
In the lane, snow is glistening.
A beautiful sight, but there’s rape here tonight in Santa’s pervy wonderland …

At North Pole Central, a traumatized Rudolph beats his hooves softly against the walls of his padded cell, Cupid admits his masochistic taste for the whip and describes Santa’s grotesque penile tattoo, feminist Blitzen stages a walkout, kosher Dancer wants time off for Hannukah, ex-hell’s angel Comet finds salvation in St Nick and foxy Vixen explains how she has been taken from behind in the way only Santa knows how …

It’s a brilliant concept, but lamely developed in Jeff Goode‘s script which accuses Santa as a sadomasochistic freak with penchants for everything from bestial rape to child abuse, and his wife as an alcoholic nymphomaniac. One by one the eight reindeer fill in the details of the horrific violation which has led to strike action jeopardizing the Christmas sleigh run.

There are two ways to play this: out and out ‘Jerry Springer’ confessional where the reindeer are snow-white trash dishing the dirt on a monster and the characters exaggerated for comic effect, or here as in Matthew Lloyd Davies‘ flatly directed production where the monologues sound more like courtroom evidence.

Part of the problem is the material which doesn’t seem to have been updated: in 1995 it may have been smart and edgy to use the word ‘vagina’ repeatedly onstage, or to make nudgy jokes about rape and paedophilia, but with a slew of press reportage of everything from Michael Jackson to the Catholic Church, sexual abuse hasn’t exactly retained its rib-tickling appeal.

The structure of the reindeer team is interesting, as are the glimpses of how the Santa industry is run, but apart from revealing that the elves were formerly towel boys in an Irish brothel, there’s very little satire of the Christmas business.

The performances are enthusiastic and earnest: I liked James McGregor’s earthily Northern born-again Comet, and Heather Johnson’s plumply Bristolian Dancer coming dangerously close to the work of Matt Lucas whom she somewhat resembles. Domenico Listorti’s lisping queerdeer Cupid is the easy scene-stealer, but only because the others don’t play up nearly enough and their characters are less obviously drawn.

It’s an evening of missed opportunities: the crime scene is a bare room with three sets of antlers on the walls, the colourless lighting is appalling, there’s almost no music, and the costumes are cheap and dowdy. The audience knows the show’s intentionally funny, but the laughs are few and you can feel the actors straining for them as the monologues grow increasingly repetitive, building too slowly towards Vixen’s anticipated but obvious final testimony.

Sometimes, reindeer don’t know how to fly …

This review written for The Public Reviews

Marx and Spencer

2010-10-28T09:51:00.000Z

I think Jeremy Hardy’s show was very good. Every time I woke up, people seemed to be laughing.

That’s a slight exaggeration of course but despite the fact I’m a big Jeremy Hardy fan and try never to miss his appearances on radio, two and a half hours is a long set for any stand-up comedian, and Hardy doesn’t have the hyperactive stage presence of a Michael McIntyre or Lee Evans to keep the joint jumping. Nor as an observational comedian does he have a bottomless inventory of veteran jokes like Ken Dodd whose first notebook must date from Methuselah’s schooldays.

Indeed, in super-sedate Richmond-on-Thames “it’s really South London but you all probably think it’s still Surrey” and a house filled by his core audience of Men With Partings and Women in Husky Jackets, it’s surprising there wasn’t a little more light dozing going on.

It started well enough with topical remarks about Nick Clegg concealing his smoking habit from the children, and he tested the audience’s receptiveness to his foul-mouthed delivery as an alternative to his somewhat modulated Radio 4 appearances. They lapped it up, F-word C-word and all.

He struck at his usual political soft targets including Vince Cable “tasked with shafting the poor in their own accent” and a neat suggestion that after her demise, Tony Blair might bask in her reflected glory by lauding Lady Thatcher as “The People’s Pinochet”, but the newish Coalition team didn’t seem to provide the same range of hairy old coconuts as New Labour, and some of his balls fell short.

Hardy is the first to acknowledge he’s not a household name, and that his stature and Marks and Spencer beige dress sense are as far from celebrity ‘stage presence’ as you can get. When his material is sharp and topical, it doesn’t matter, but after the interval the Marxist political points were diluted and the anecdotes less ordered – several times he asked the audience ‘what was I talking about?’ and often between the several hundred of us we couldn’t come up with the answer.

Later still, he began to reminisce about his political activism and ramble about his Streatham-dwelling Waitrose-shopping domesticity, so it all felt a bit like Billy Bragg’s dad telling you the highlights of his Saga holiday.

Top priced tickets for the show were around £28, and Hardy’s subversism ran only to saying he thought this show was “worth about £14.75” but not encouraging the audience to storm the box office for refunds.

Mark Thomas would have done.

Sondheim's Airs On A Shoestring

2010-10-25T08:21:00.000Z

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times pic shows what you could do with a bare stage, although not in Walthamstow

The friend I invited to come with me was vehement: "I ****ing HATE it … screw Follies, and screw Sondheim's pappy pastiche score too". That's the problem with 'Steve', he polarises even his devotees and this is one of his most divisive works, combining a banal and disjunctive book by James Goldman with some of Sondheim's best songs.

The 'book' pairs two retired musical stars, and their interchangeable husbands, with their four younger selves meeting in a condemned theatre - here Ye Olde Rose and Crown Walthamstow was particularly convincing - on the eve of its demolition. The songs explore their current and past relationships and reveal much of the bitter compromises made along the 'road you didn't take'. Oh, and someone has a nervous breakdown.

Unless you can afford to throw vast money and stardom at it as in the glossy revivals in London in 1987 led by Julia McKenzie and Diana Rigg, or the immaculate 2007 City Center concert in New York, it works best as a series of showstopping 'turns' for veteran performers to get a crack at fantastic cabaret solos and duets.

Unfortunately, in the Walthamstow production, these are poorly served: Ellen Verenieks' 'Broadway Baby' was crucified and neither 'Ah, Paris' nor 'Rain on the Roof' (admittedly a difficult number) fared any better. Among the principals there's a lot of popping neck veins and red faces as they strain to support their notes - Frank Loman as Ben carrying the heaviest workload but with limited variety in his performance.

Staging and choreography have two settings: clunk on and off atop a hollow wooden catwalk, or enter sideways in a showgirl glide. The high point of the evening was undoubtedly the tap number 'Who's That Woman' where all eight Follies 'girls' confront their younger selves, and an absolute gift to its lead soloist whether JoAnne Worley bringing the house down in New York, Lynda Baron falling out of her frock in London, or as here the magnetic Mahny Djahanguiri exhibiting genuine talent and confidence, as Stella.

Given her own chance to reveal an inner jazz baby in 'Jessie and Lucy', with stolid left and right hand signals, Julie Ross as Phyllis appeared to be directing the traffic on the nearby Tottenham road, and again threw away an opportunity with an underpowered 'Could I Leave You'. Maggie Robson as Sally had some pitching problems but showed real tenderness in both 'In Buddy's Eyes', arguably Sondheim's most genuinely sentimental song, and brought a convincing climax to 'Losing My Mind'.

It's fairly standard practice in fringe productions like this for the director to back up a van to the loading dock of Arts Educational Schools and fill it with all it can hold in the way of aspiring talent. But Follies requires eight vivacious actresses in their fifties or sixties so Tim McArthur's van must have done a double journey to the back door of Debenhams where surely they can't ALL have been demonstrating food mixers in the basement?

Fiona Russell's set and costume design showed ingenuity and caught the period feel, but crippled by the shoestring budget. Paring the orchestra down to four is fine for a chamber production but the entire score was played ploddingly from the book without any variation of tempo to suit the performers, and far too loud, given that the actors aren't miked. Pity too that they couldn't get a real piano up the stairs instead of the electronic keyboard.

For all its faults, 'Follies' is certainly overdue a revival. In fact, I've had an idea - why not re-cast it with the quartet of 'kids' who played the 'young' parts in 1987 at the Shaftesbury Theatre now playing their adult roles? Why? Because in 1987, Young Sally and Young Phyllis were played by Sally Ann Triplett and Jenna Russell.

Now THAT I'd pay to see.

This review written for www.remotegoat.co.uk

Hens in the skirting board

2010-10-22T11:23:00.000Z

In the Victoria Wood 'shoe-shop' sketch, Julie Walters apologises for the haphazard service by telling her customer 'we think we've got hens in the skirting board'. It has the pattern of normal speech, but is patently absurd. The roots of this sort of comedy, in a long line from Monty Python to The Mighty Boosh stem directly from the absurdist writings of 'A Resounding Tinkle' author N.F. Simpson.

The trouble is that in the fifty years since he wrote it, audiences have been exposed to so much more of the same thing in sketch shows and stand-up routines that the original now seems rather less shiny.

Simpson's plays work best when they are delivered with as much naturalism, in set, costumes and acting as possible and you may feel shortchanged in Kim Moakes' production with a mere suggestion of the domestic surroundings of Bro and Middie Paradock. Ben Higgins and Lizzy Mace make a convincing married couple even though their performances may come from observation rather than experience: Simpson was satirizing their middle-class preoccupations rather than middle age, the original actors were also in their 20's.

Mace is best when she steps out of Middie's flatly argumentative character to quiz the audience directly as a white-coated researcher in technical theatre, and this and another couple of short bursts of comedy featuring Alex Morgan and Hayley Richardson as the live 'home entertainment' the Paradocks prefer to the radio are what lift the level of the performance, perhaps because the sketch-like structure and pointed delivery have become more familiar to contemporary theatregoers.

There are two versions of this play: a one-acter compressed into fifty minutes and this full-length extension. In the superfluous second half, the actors become four critics assessing the merits of the play in random accents and drawn-out conversations which undermine the naturalistic dialogue and emphasise how slowly the time seems to pass.

In his ex-pat life in Spain, N.F. is known to his friends as 'Wally Simpson' in homonymic reference to the Duchess of Windsor. This in itself is funnier than the whole of the current production.

This review originally written for www.remotegoat.co.uk

Really dirty kitchen sink drama

2010-10-22T11:16:00.000Z

Clenching your cheeks to maintain equilibrium on a collapsible chair in the teeniest of London's fringe venues, it's not hard to believe you're a visitor to the abject little flat occupied by washed up opera singer John McLachlan in 'Bright Is The Ring Of Words' at Wilton's. After all, we are perched on the grottier edge of Limehouse and walking home in the moonlight I wondered how many similar unwanted and unloved pensioners were stacked in the tenements of Tower Hamlets I passed on the way to the station.

The opening banter follows a familiar pattern between the elderly and defiantly unwashed and the fussily dutiful carer who despairs at the filth and the adandonment of standards. So far so 'Steptoe and Son' except that John Garfield-Roberts plays Stanley as a mumsy recidivist whose combination of Lancastrian homilies derived from his beloved 'Nan' and occasional eruptions of violent anger are both wholly credible and endlessly watchable.

Jeffrey Mayhew never shies away from the actualities of his character's complete abandonment of personal standards. Retching and drooling and occasionally immobilized in a helpless contortion of pain and exhaustion, he engages the audience's curiosity and sympathy but spiked with an intellectual acerbity that keeps it mercifully free from pathos.

Although there are some great lines, and the comic moments are well-delivered, it's the authenticity of the central performances that holds your attention, and both the struggle over the alcoholic's grasp on the vodka bottle and the final catastrophe seemed entirely real to me.

This review written for www.remotegoat.co.uk

Brilliant 'Bells'

2010-10-07T11:03:00.000Z

When you examine the 1956 credentials of Bells Are Ringing: book by Comden and Green, score by Jule Styne near the top of his game three years before his impeccable ‘Gypsy’, originally directed by Jerome Robbins and choreographed by Fosse, and whose kooky comedienne star Judy Holliday beat Ethel Merman and Julie Andrews to the Best Actress Tony award, you wonder why on earth it hasn’t been revived much till now.

The jolly, silly plot revolves around phone operator Ella Petersen who can’t help helping her disembodied clients with advice and support, falling in love with a stalled playwright, and at the same time exposing an underworld gang which is exploiting the answering service for illegal gambling. On its slender back, however, director Paul Foster and the talented cast build a series of slick production numbers and a truly engaging romance.

Best of all, in the Judy Holliday role, is the outstanding Anna-Jane Casey. In a red-tinted crop she seems to have absorbed all Carol Burnett’s comedy skills along with the hairstyle and captures the audience’s affection from the get-go such that you’re willing her to get out there and get her man. Her singing is impeccable, too, from the wistful ‘Perfect Relationship’ and powerful ‘I’m Going Back’ to a version of ‘The Party’s Over’ that's so tremulous it could be David Milliband's theme song.

This is a strong dance show for which the Union has cleared its stage to the maximum width and, as so often in fringe venues the choreography’s cleverer and more powerful than in the West End – here in the inventive hands of Alistair David - or perhaps proximity exaggerates it as when 15-year-old Sasi Strallen’s high kicks threaten to take your eye out. The combination of acrobatics and half-staggering dance moves in the drunken party scene exhibits rare technical brilliance.

The ensemble work terrifically hard doubling and trebling roles as well as keeping the scene changes moving briskly and whilst they are typically too young for the parts they’re playing, and some of the cameos are slightly more Arts Ed than West End, it’s worth mentioning Bob Harms, Tama Phethean and particularly Marc Antolin as names to watch. Prompted by a distant memory of his unusual surname, I Googled Tama Phethean and it turns out I went to University with his aunt Ellen and directed her in Coward's 'Hay Fever' in 1973.

As Ella’s love interest, Gary Milner brings tremendous energy to the role of the lazy writer and bravely defers his character’s warmth to the last moment possible, making for a far more credible romance when it happens. Corinna Powlesland, excellent as Sue the spinsterish owner of the answering service, looks disturbingly like Princess Margaret but dying to burst into song and dance given the slightest encouragement, even watching her move a table whilst her feet ache to cha-cha is wonderful.

It’s a small theatre, and some performances are already sold out, so book now. Even if it transfers to the West End which is highly likely, you’ll kick yourself if you missed it in all its charming intimacy at the Union.

Limp Dicks in Hollywood Shtick

2010-10-07T10:40:00.000Z

Adam Blake and Sid Phoenix in the Courtyard Studio production

With an overlapping plot told partly in flashback, about an ex-Hollywood actor with a 1949 gay past and an unmarriageable son who has acquired an East German mail order bride in about 1989, the first-act setup of 'Secret Boulevard' takes a while. Long enough, in fact to count the polystyrene tiles on the low-slung ceiling of the Courtyard Theatre's studio and reflect how inadequately they protect you from the ruckus of Marat/Sade in the main house where the inmates of the asylum of Charenton sounded to be having more fun.

Dylan Costello's play has the germ of a good idea. His heroes are two closeted gay actors, loosely based perhaps on Lon McCallister, who gave up movies aged 30 after a gay affair, and Rory Calhoun whose career was thrown to the wolves when Rock Hudson's notorious agent Henry Willson revealed his secrets to 'Confidential' magazine to prevent them printing an expose of Hudson's own private life.

Using identifiable named characters like these could have made for a more interesting play, as the ones in Secret Boulevard are somewhat two-dimensional to care about. Sid Phoenix as the ingenue from England is a bright actor worthy of better material. The women are ciphers, Anna Sambrooks is the most convincing as a Monroe-breathy but by no means dumb blonde: her character complains she's not given parts with enough depth and emotional range, and it's equally true for this production which sometimes feels like the book of a musical denuded of its songs.

Two-dimensionality is reinforced by Ilaria D'intinosante's low-budget set which captures none of the glamour of the MGM era and has entrances wedged so tightly against the back wall that the actors enter sideways. Coupled with their difficulties with props, particularly handling the copious smoking, it looks beyond awkward.

The piece picks up in the second half and there are flashes of comedy and the potential for considerable improvement in a rewrite. Talking of flashes, there's full-frontal nudity, but it's surprisingly unerotic and the flaccidity is symptomatic of the whole evening.

Rory Calhoun on whom the story may be based

This review originally written for www.remotegoat.co.uk

World Famous in Australia

2010-09-29T08:49:00.000Z

Going to a one-woman show with a big West End diva. Caroline O’Connor. Who? You know, she’s British but very big in Australia, was in the Sondheim Prom and played the taxi driver in ‘On The Town’ at the Coliseum … judging by Tuesday’s audience it was the most gay, geeky or Australian show-tune fanciers who had beaten a path to Ms. O’Connor’s discounted Garrick door.

We even found one who’d paid to get in.

Which is a pity, because she’s bloody good at what she does. And for those of us who share an allergic reaction to the strain of Strallens currently running through the West End like a norovirus, here’s antidotal relief in a musical star that isn’t a shrill leggy blonde with hyperextended stage-school technique.

Neither a narrative production nor a simple cabaret act, the show incorporates anecdotes - the muezzin’s interruption of Chicago in the Lebanon being one of the best - brilliant spoof movie clips, and medleys from several productions as well as well-sung belted standards like ‘Zing Went The Strings of My Heart’, ‘And the Beat Goes On’ and a lovely affectionate version of ‘I Move On’ from the film version of Chicago.

If you compare their performances as Cassie in A Chorus Line or Chicago’s Velma Kelly, Ann Reinking may be more balletic or Ute Lemper more memorably Weimar, but no-one else better captures the characters’ raw-veined desperation - as O’Connor herself puts it - like a cat falling down the wall, clawing to hang on.

But like everything else in this show, she captures it loudly.

If there’s a fault in the otherwise ravishing orchestrations, it’s that they indulge her capacity for arm-raising crescendo once, or possibly ten times, too often. By the middle of the second half, this feels like a two-hour audition as she gives us her Piaf, Judy, Liza, Into-the-Woods Witch and Merman. Setting aside the fact that by the time Piaf was Ms. O’Connor’s age she was dead, this is possibly one diva too far.

There’s a seven-piece band which would be an entertaining act in itself, led by MD Daniel Edmonds whose Rachmaninov variations on Roxanne were the hit of the night - and the production is richly glossed by Andrew Wright’s inventive choreography, ranging from Fosse hommage to unashamed 42nd Street hoofing and delivered with great charm by the young quartet of Cole Kitchenn protégées.

If it's an audition, it may work: rumour says that there's a West End revival of Kiss of the Spider Woman on its way, and Ms O'Connor is ideal for Aurora.

Bazaar Experience

2010-09-28T11:37:00.000Z

If you’re the kind of theatregoer who likes to arrive ten minutes before curtain, settle into a red plush seat with a box of Black Magic and a programme, this is not the show for you. Or maybe it should be.

There’s been a tidal spate of ‘site specific’ theatre experience in London recently, from Punchdrunk’s Banksy-inspired underworld in the dripping tunnels beneath Waterloo Station to the Menier’s current ‘Accomplice’ in which 10-strong random groups of audience roam the streets round Borough Market chasing cryptic clues and gangland characters until – some of them – solve the puzzle and make it back to base.

Now enterprising collective Theatre Delicatessen has transformed its temporary offices – in the former Uzbekistan Airways building behind Selfridges – into a popup theatrical marketplace with at least a dozen shows, cabarets, and one-on-one experiences in its corridors, meeting rooms, basements and even toilets.

Predicated on ‘the value of money’ the deal is a £7 entrance fee gets you in to the building but you must barter with the performers touting for business in the hallways to gain entrance to their shows, mostly by small independent theatre companies like Straight Out Of Line and Curving Road, typically £1 or £2 is all that’s needed so even if you saw and did everything it’s coming out less than a ticket for The Mousetrap. The bars are also insanely sanely priced compared to captive-audience West End theatres.

Even though most events run five to twenty minutes, you probably couldn’t sample everything but there’s a huge range from a cleverly realistic suite of mirror-image hotel rooms on the top floor for a piece in which a chambermaid, or possibly two, wrings her hands over the corpse of a customer. There’s a casino in which your stake at the roulette table dictates how the next scenes are acted, and whilst a lot of the material is clearly improvised, there’s a genuine attempt to move beyond ‘acting by numbers’ and to present evolved and three-dimensional characterisations.

Sometimes this works, for example in a three-handed about disillusioned employees set in an office purporting to be that of the marketing manager of Uzbekistan Airlines in which plans for the Tashkent-Frankfurt-JFK route are chalked on a blackboard on the office wall. For me this was startlingly realistic - not least because for eighteen bizarre months in the mid-90s I was actually design director of Tashkent Airport working on a renovation scheme with British Aerospace. The space reminded me of one we found in the old terminal labelled ‘Flight Simulator’ which was a classroom of old school chairs and on the wall a fold-out double-page photo spread from something like the Big Boys’ Book of Aircraft with the cockpit instruments of a Boeing 767, for instruction of putative pilots.

I enjoyed the one-on-one experiences best, mainly for their unpredictability, for example a clever fortune telling booth, with a twist, by Barometric Theatre, or the bizarre opportunity to pluck, wax, shave or tweezer a hirsute male model in private, and Keiko Sumida’s gentle shrink session in which your ambition for the next ten years of your life can be safely explored.

The atmosphere’s excellent, and the audience as interactive as the performers – when a young man rushed along the corridor panting ‘I’m looking for the autopsy’ you’re unsure if he’s cast or customer. And without giving anything away, the most thrilling of the pieces starts with Catherine Cusack falling four flights down a staircase, without a body double …

In many ways it’s like a vertical slice of Edinburgh Festival handily shrinkwrapped into one convenient building just off Oxford Street.

Perhaps because it’s an old and unmaintained building there are a lot of health and safety precautions which means the stage management of the whole event is a bit obvious, and whilst you’re encouraged to open every door in finding your way around, some of them are just bundles of actors taking downtime, although at least one is a bundle of actors pretending to be off duty. Or was it? Still, with a couple of bars and a cabaret space, there’s plenty of opportunity for downtime of your own.

Very worthwhile. Without being selfconsciously ‘worthy’.

This review written for The Public Reviews

POSTSCRIPT

I'm quite chuffed to be quoted on the theatre company's own website - think this is the first time it's happened for me.

Stopping By Woods

2010-08-22T22:43:00.001Z

As a child, I was fascinated by the story that Princess Elizabeth had been informed of the King’s death at the exclusive ‘Treetops’ game lodge in the Aberdares national park of Kenya. Forty years later, when I could finally afford to experience it for myself, it turned out to be an arthritically creaking wooden assembly on stilts facing a rain-sodden pit of mulched foliage to which, at sunset, drifted a random collection of forest-floor wildlife.

Soutra Gilmour’s rickety stick-ety four tier set evokes the same image as the cast creeps out of the undergrowth to launch Into the Woods in a blindingly obvious setting that has somehow taken the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre twenty years to realise but in Timothy Sheader’s brilliantly detailed production comes close to a perfect match.

The folklore’s as complex and tangled as the branches overhanging the stage: half a dozen Perrault or Grimm fairytales are Magimixed with an original story about a childless baker and his wife, cursed by a witch and ultimately redeemed in a messily-written second act with a crude motif about everyone needing other people, outing Sondheim as the mawkishly sentimental sap he really is.

The fine cast, strong singing and excellent orchestrations under the enthusiastic baton of Gareth Valentine drive the show, but on a long wet evening you’re uncomfortably aware that Sondheim threw one too many plots into the mix, and that despite the intriguing cadences, too few of the musical snatches mutate into actual songs.

In such a polynuclear script, there are some brilliant turns: Hannah Waddingham first and foremost as possibly the best Witch yet seen in the role: enjoying the crippled disfigurement and working it like Anthony Sher’s three-legged Richard III, then transformed into a page-boy-bobbed vamp disturbingly reminiscent of Fenella Fielding in ‘Carry On Screaming’, but singing throughout with such clarity and distinction it’s like hearing the material for the first time: ‘Stay With Me’ and ‘Children Will Listen’ both quite outstanding.

Not far behind come Jenna Russell, one of the cleverest Sondheim interpreters as she showed in the recent Sondheim Prom at the Albert Hall, as a sardonic and abrasive Baker’s Wife, and Helen Dallimore equally brilliant as an unconventionally tetchy Cinderella with consummate phrasing in ‘On the Steps of the Palace’. It’s harder to warm to Beverley Rudd‘s scene-stealing chavvy Red Riding Hood since she seems directly derived from Suzanne Toase’s clever characterization in the 2007 ROH/Linbury production.

Michael Xavier and Simon Thomas make a pair of preeningly self-absorbed princes, complete with drainpipe leggings and Russell Brand hairpieces, Xavier particularly strong in partnership with Jenna Russell in ‘Any Moment’. It’s also refreshing to see the minor role of Jack’s Mother played by someone who is both an experienced comedienne and a fine singer, Marilyn Cutts (from Fascinating Aida) appropriately wearing a carpenter’s tool belt and nailing this part totally.

In such an exposed setting, you wonder how they’ll ‘manage’ the magic – a beanstalk must appear, a wolf devour a grandmother, a giant tramples the world underfoot and there’s a transformation scene as challenging as any pantomime … suffice it to say that this is where the director and designer’s ingenuity come into their own, and all the devices – particularly the appearances of the giant voiced by Judi Dench in what you could call ‘Dame Ex Machina’, are cracking.

Murder Will Out

2010-08-22T22:42:00.000Z

Ed Fringe 2010: Girl, Constantly F*****g Interrupted
Writer/performer: Celia Peachey
Director: Tim Stubbs Hughes
The Public Reviews Rating: 2 stars

Great title, rubbish play.

I was about to launch into a diatribe against this piece – a sketchy, tentative overlong rummage around the physical and mental attic of the solo character Faith’s brain as she retreats from her murdered mother’s funeral to debate her mental state with the voices in her head. It sounds far-fetched, the voices aren’t well differentiated and it feels rather like an extended audition for accents and characterisations, but not good ones.

But journalistic ‘research’ sometimes leads you up a strange path and I came across the blog and website of the uncredited author and performer, Celia Peachey

Turns out the whole thing is true: her mother was indeed murdered – strangled with a dog-lead by her former lover who was himself a previously convicted killer, and her body hidden in a toilet. Here's the news item. Peachey is going through an angry and uncomfortable postrationalisation in a shroud of psychobabble about ‘the universe’ as well as battling alleged maladministration in the Essex Police, and her own recent grief.

So the faults are really in the marketing – if this weren’t scheduled as a comedy (it isn’t) but as a theatre piece, and if preferably the character(s) were played by someone other than Peachey herself, it might fare much better as a scarily well-informed drama about bereavement, mental imbalance and shock. Maybe bring it back to Edinburgh next year in a fresh treatment, and populate it with more of the living/deceased characters?

Meanwhile, I’d suggest a pre-performance voice-over to identify that this is a true story, as experienced by the actress because that’s not apparent from the performance.

written for THE PUBLIC REVIEWS www.thepublicreviews.com

No Shoes Company? No Stars Review ...

2010-08-22T22:41:00.000Z

A million years B.C., when I was a first-year drama student, we were encouraged to tit about with improvisation and gradually take, from the frankly ludicrous scenarios and inane characterisations we invented every wet Friday afternoon of the Autumn term, some semblance of a skill set which could be useful in actual acting performance, if any of us made it into the profession which at the last count only two of us did. And one of those gave it up after three weeks.

What we didn't do was invite paying customers to observe the painful process, which is the first mistake perpetrated by the No Shoes Theatre Company in its mostly execrable 'Improvised Musical' which shows its shameful face at 6.30pm nightly in C Venues in Chambers Street.

The press release says the 'energetic company' has worked on productions of 'Sweet Charity', Jason Robert Brown's 'Songs for a New World' and 'I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change'. Clearly they learned nothing from this collective experience, since not one of them can put together a coherent melody line or a quatrain of lyrics without dead air pauses, mugging at his fellow cast members and the audience, or dissolving into self-indulgent giggles.

We might have struck them on a bad night. Somebody should.

They invite the audience to propose a title, a theme song, and a location for the show. Our audience chose the location as a Job Centre, on the grounds that it would be good preparation for them, and despite it being a situation which would be largely familiar to most of the population, these actors couldn't posit a plot, or realistic characters, or a song which had any site-specific relevance or commentary. Their lack of imagination was breathtakingly poor and they conspicuously failed to bring the plot to any kind of resolution in the painful hour during which they kicked it around like a dead rat in a midden.

They are hampered by a 'band' comprising keyboard, drums and something which scarcely made an impact, which has a collection of vamps-till-ready so interchangeable and anodyne that there's no possibility of anyone launching into a recognisable 'musical theatre' genre.

The only countervailing comment is that you might admire their tenacity in persevering with a production which so frequently defies their own abilities. They aver that this is part of the 'experience' of the piece, and that there's validity in the activity even on nights when it all falls apart. As an exercise in gestalt therapy for embryo actors, you could agree. But not for paying customers.

The ineptitude is spectacular. And if I see any quotation which says 'spectacular - The Public Reviews' I shall be back to Edinburgh to slap each and every one of them individually.

written for THE PUBLIC REVIEWS www.thepublicreviews.com

Brass Polish

2010-08-22T22:40:00.000Z

Not having had previous exposure to this group, I spotted one of the lederhosen-clad soloists in the bar before the performance. ‘What part of Bavaria are you from?’ I asked in all innocence. ‘Fulham’, he replied.

Part of the wise and worthy ‘Five Pound Fringe’, Oompah Brass’s “A to Z of Oompah” can be found in the GRV venue, on the back steps behind C Venues in Chambers Street.

It’s a gem.

Two trumpets, a trombone, a French horn and a tuba form a band not know for its lullaby potential, indeed their proud boast is that people in the front two rows may regret sitting so close. But there’s plenty of subtlety in their musical arrangements and in the virtuosity of each member: it’s extremely hard to coax high clear and sharp notes from a trumpet, or to make a tuba play the lead line of a complicated melody, but these guys (and one girl) just laugh it off.

Apart from ‘Do you play the Trumpet Voluntary?’ ‘No, only for money.’ there’s scarcely a corny pun or old musical joke not explored in the commentary between the songs, but it’s delivered with such natural charm by Oompah founder Nathan Gash and particularly by the handsome trombonist Patrick Johns who had all the ladies in the audience, and a couple of curious men, swooning when he shoved the bell end of his instrument in their faces.

In their random alphabet, they cover everything from Bach to Megadeath but the focus is on recognizable rock and pop thrashers they can serve up with a Bavarian twist.

They’re all music teachers, but performers at heart since the energy and enthusiasm of the show is infectious, you just want to join in – and at the end, in ‘the greatest pop song ever written’ you get your chance in their brilliant climax. Just make sure you know ALL the words to Bohemian Rhapsody.

written for THE PUBLIC REVIEWS www.thepublicreviews.com

Rea Window

2010-08-21T21:30:00.000Z

There’s a plethora and a half of one-woman shows at the Edinburgh Fringe where the material spills from the uncoordinated ramblings of an early-disappointed or pre-menopausal harpy at the microphone. ‘Look at my awful life’ they rant ‘and feel better about your own’.

In 'Pension Plan' at the Gilded Balloon Teviot, the oddly spelled but also oddly engaging Leisa Rea cherrypicks some of this theme but the structure’s markedly different from the other vaginal monologues on the fringe. Her set celebrates the undeniable but rarely-accepted truth that not everyone can be a Winner, and it’s OK to lose sometimes, because therein may lie the key to your sanity.

There’s some lovely home-baked interactive TV, including on-screen graphics that hark back to the ‘Vision On’ deaf children’s programme in their unabashed clumsiness, and an ‘outside broadcast’ clearly from outside Rea’s back door by ‘the biscuit-eyed lady’ that binds you to her in sisterly affiliation and mutual love for sandwich creams. She makes origami birds out of her medical diagnoses and rejection letters, and in a combination of courage and confectionery encourages the audience to eat a biscuit she’s baked in the shape of a foetus.

Like a lot of self-written and self-staged work at the Fringe, Rea could benefit from an ‘act doctor’ to sharpen the focus and presentation of the material. But the content’s her own, and all the better for it.

written for THE PUBLIC REVIEWS www.thepublicreviews.com

No Shoes Company? No Stars Review ...

2010-08-21T17:45:00.000Z

Bargain Bucket of Sondheim

2010-08-10T22:12:00.000Z

This is not the best week to put on an intimate Sondheim revue.

Overshadowed by the glorious Sondheim Prom at the Albert Hall, by Maria Friedman’s all-Sondheim set at Cadogan Hall and the reputedly outstanding Into The Woods just beginning at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre and you’re on a hiding to nothing.

Throw in the fact that acts in the Camden Fringe have minimal preparation and stage time before strutting their fretful hour in the Roundhouse Studio and the cast of Sondheim by Sondheim more than have their work cut out.

And yet - the Tuesday audience was more than receptive, and for many it was an inexpensive opportunity to hear some of Stephen Sondheim’s less well-known material culled from rarely performed shows like Passion, Evening Primrose, Anyone Can Whistle and Marry Me A Little.

All the performers are ‘actors who can sing’ and the three men do much better than the eight women, particularly Peter Kenworthy, recently excellent as Dexter Haven in High Society at the Gatehouse, although even he has trouble with the top notes in ‘Being Alive’, and the very strong and elegant voice of Michael Stacey who rather outshone his partner in the duet ‘It Takes Two’.

Many of the pieces are performed as an ensemble, including an opening ‘Weekend In The Country’ from A Little Night Music which showed up the cast’s nervousness and felt more under-rehearsed than even the hasty staging of a fringe festival should allow. The later ‘The Sun Won’t Set’ from the same show, and the closing ‘Sunday’ from Sunday in the Park were much stronger and hinted at improvements to be expected later in the week.

Musical Director Aaron Clingham is at the keyboard and unfortunately the balance of voices and accompaniment is uneven, as is the cueing in the ensemble pieces when the cast would benefit from being able to see a conductor.

Sondheim material always works best in its original context, and the same company is mounting one of his best, Follies, long due a London revival, at Ye Old Rose and Crown Theatre from 21 October to 13 November. May even be worth the trek to Walthamstow.

written for www.Londonist.com

Speaking in Tongues

2010-07-21T17:59:00.000Z

'Up a steep and very narrow stairway, to a voice like a metronome' ... well strictly that's 'A Chorus Line' but it could apply to almost any show in the airless attic that is the Finborough Theatre and particularly to Charlotte Randle's shouty performance as an English teacher in 'Lingua Franca'.

I'm sure she's a subtle and sensitive actress, but veteran Peter Nichols' new play doesn't give her free rein to express it as he confines all his characters trapped in a Florentine language school in the 50's to one-dimensional stereotypes: particularly Rula Lenska visibly straining to add a sophistication and depth to her flatly-written Russian emigre countess, Abigail McKern's hard-workingly crude but ultimately uncomical Aussie lesbian, and perhaps most wasted Natalie Walter as a Nazi-sympathising Mädchen just two telephone plaits short of Helga from 'Allo 'Allo.

What saves the production from the scrapheap is the two semi-autobiographical characterisations: Ian Gelder as an ageing monolingual aesthete who turns to sculpture as a substitute for sex, and Chris New playing Steven Flowers now transplanted from soldiering in Malaya in 'Privates on Parade' and with a burgeoning socialist conscience fighting a complicated provincial diffidence.

It's as if Nichols is interested only in developing these two characters as projections of his own self, and that the others are disposable caricatures. It's how all self-centred people see the world and consistent with Benedict Nightingale's review of Nichols' 2000 autobiography in which he found the writer 'touchy, crusty' and 'disappointed with himself'. Gelder has the best material and gives a careful and considered performance, highlighting the fact this intelligent actor is sadly underused.

Apart from one bizarre scene in which the Italian school manager puts his head up the skirt of the German girl in a realistic display of what you could call cunnilingua franca, the play is terribly static, imprisoned in one room of the language school with only scruffy louvres hinting at windows in the low-budget set, although Will Jackson's sound brings cicadas, street noise and music to colour the space, and James Smith's lighting design occasionally projects Florence in all her glory across the blind windows.

Every teacher's entrance seems to be marked by a rummage in bag or briefcase, the extraction of a book or journal which is never read or used, and its careful replacement or repositioning for use by another actor. There are too many monologues and limited interaction since they are such ciphers, so the emotional climax when two women vie for Flowers' attention is unrealistic, and when the German gets stabbed in the eye the quickly-produced eyepatch just begs for her to sit astride a chair and sing Marlene's back catalogue.

What makes it all worth the effort, though, is the opportunity to see at close hand the work of Chris New. Since graduating from RADA in 2006 he has been the most perfect foil of 'Horst' to Alan Cumming's 'Max' in the Daniel Sherman production of 'Bent' before taking a storming lead himself as Joe Orton in 'Prick Up Your Ears'.

As Flowers, he is the ideal suburban Everyman of Nichols' imagination, combining pathos, humour and inner confliction in a performance of subtlety and understanding which makes the audience impatient for his next entrance. In his vocal delivery, he could be the new Leonard Rossiter and I suspect his comic potential has only slightly been tested to date. He has a very confident singing voice, too, which suggests an option to revive Privates.

He's clearly got a sense of humour because he tweeted the excerpt from Billington's Guardian review which referred to 'the sexiest seduction scene on the West End stage' with "Crow, Crow! ... who says gays cant pull off being straight!??"

Perhaps Lingua Franca would work better as a musical comedy, it's not so great as a, er, straight play.

Warsaw Disconcerto

2010-07-19T17:27:00.024Z

I'm back from Europride in Warsaw. In one piece, but with mixed and fractured feelings.

In short, I led a group of 125 members of the London Gay Men's Chorus to Poland to sing in the concert hall Joseph Stalin had given to the People of Warsaw (despite the fact they voted for an Underground railway) and to march in the Pride parade in which some of us were assaulted in the name of freedom. By turns, I've felt proud, angry, frightened, relieved, and ashamed.

I've also felt indigestion from the mammoth meals we arranged including one gargantuan pork-fest at which I calculated fifteen pigs gave their lives, or at least their knuckles, in the name of homosexual satiety, and at which for the first time ever the LGMC was defeated by the quantities of available food.

Idly Googling the subject of satiation, I find there is a 'Satiety Index' invented by a researcher with my surname at the University of Sydney. According to Mendosa.com "Holt's tool" is "what really satisfies" and "tells you when you're full".

I couldn't have put it better myself.

THURSDAY

We flew, it feels a long time ago, and the first day passed in a whirl of e-tickets and counting heads and room keys and on-board gin and tonic. My BA flight had about half our singers on board and not only did it run out of gin, the crew had to raid the bar carts reserved for the return flight, and those ran out of gin too. Thanks to airmiles for upgrades, I'm not hugely familiar with economy class and thought the free alcohol only partly made up for the disgusting pre-digested chicken sandwich which was the only food offered for a two and a half hour flight.

We landed in something like 35 degrees, and the plane doors opened to a wall of torrid heat. I've felt cooler in Singapore.

In the evening, though, we bussed to the amazing restaurant 'Kompania Piwna' in the old town of Warsaw. Coaches can't go right into the centre so we had a lovely stroll through the picturesque squares, to what was essentially a pissup in a very attractive and hospitable brewery.

First courses of salads, pickles, pates and sausages were on the tables and we literally fell on them after a long day thinking perhaps this was a substantial part of our meal. No need, because after a soup course it then started to rain meat.

Delicious, meltingly tender spare ribs in smoky glaze were followed by duck, chickens, peirogi - the curious half-moon dumplings filled with minced meat or with cheese, then fish (dressed in bacon, just in case you thought it might be lighter pork-free option), and huge inverted chandeliers of deep golden crackling.

When the waitress shoved aside dishes of potatoes, sauerkraut and red cabbage to make way for the wooden trencher of massive pork knuckle at my end of the table, I thought she might bring two for the twelve of us.

Wrong.

She brought six.

Now I have seen the LGMC hoover its way through a finger buffet like locusts in a wheatfield, but not even they could cope. A few die-hards gave up eating in favour of more beer, in 1.5 litre steins, and only the hardiest 20 made it through to the strudel. Nobody stayed for coffee.

I've just checked my credit card. The bill for 92 of us was £1962.33 - including two hundred and sixty beers.

FRIDAY

My best day. The tour of the Communist parts of Warsaw I'd organised in vintage vehicles was a big hit with all who took it - as well as his little yellow Soviet-era minivan, Rafal Patla had chartered an old school bus for us from the museum and although it felt occasionally like a metal sauna, when it was moving there was a breeze through the open windows and we trundled around Constitution Square, in and out of social housing blocks, and over the river into the still-unrenovated Praga district where in a funky pub and watched from upstairs windows by bemused Polish proletariat, we consumed vodka, pickle, sausage and jellied chicken before singing slightly raggedly in the street.

I loved the contrasts in the architecture, and even felt that the clean lines and 'heroic' Socialist-realist statuary on the buildings had its own kind of beauty which is still not dated, and the proportions of 7 story facades flanking wide streets reminded me of Rome. We stopped by the Palace of Culture where the concert would be held later, and although despised by Poles because of its association with Stalin, it's a great composition by Lev Rudnev the architect of my favourite building in Moscow, Lomonosov University.

Not many people know it was partly inspired by the Royal Liver Building in Liverpool.

Quite a lot of the boys were as much captivated by Rafal as with his itinerary. It was hard to break to them that the beautiful female guide for our walking tours was his lovely girlfriend Marta.

We also walked through the one street preserved from the Warsaw Ghetto and I was surprised how affecting I found it. The buildings seem decayed on the outside, with large-scale sepia photo banners showing faces of the typical families who once lived there, but nowadays the apartments are expensive and occupied by wealthy Varsovians. However, one of my contacts - the otherwise helpful Marcin Pienczuk from Mazurkas Travel who organised our airport transfers - later said to me somewhat sneeringly that 'only the Jews can find the money for these apartments' in a shocking indication that such prejudice still exists in modern Polish society.

Lunch, and an air-conditioned rest before going to help Front-of-House for the concert. I couldn't sing in it because I'd been trapped in the US by the volcanic ash cloud and missed too many rehearsal to catch up with the repertoire, but I was hugely proud of the boys. In many ways this concert showed up the musical arrangements, and the quality of the singing better than we had in the Roundhouse where the 20-piece band drowned some of the subtleties.

There were five standing ovations, and I was first on my feet for most of them. Afterwards, we almost could not put the CDs into people's outstretched hands and take their money quickly enough. I've never seen them go so fast.

We then walked to yet another meaty dinner, although this time I had perhaps foolishly delegated the organising to Polish friends of one of our second tenors and it was a bit of a disaster. Although seated in a cool cellar of refectory tables, the kitchen simply couldn't cope with dinner for 80, the staff varied between bored and hostile, and despite the fact we waited nearly two hours for our main course, there wasn't enough food to go round.

If they'd just kept us supplied with drinks it might have been more bearable, but clearly 'something was up' as when I went into the kitchen I found the waiters screaming and gesticulating at the cooks, so it certainly wasn't a happy ship.

Such was the level of bonhomie in the Chorus, whilst people were disappointed with the food and service, they treated it largely as a joke and I'm very grateful to Mike and Bob who poured expensive red wine down my throat until three in the morning to help me get over the stress.

SATURDAY

Because of the problem with last night's restaurant, I ditched my own sightseeing plans this morning and went to check out the second restaurant recommended by those Polish 'friends'. When I got there, 'Green Patio' had no idea about our booking, certainly weren't prepared, had no English-speaking staff and the formica-topped tables and fluorescent lighting confirmed my impression that it was actually a juice bar - with a sideline in bicycle hire - rather than the sort of place the LGMC would enjoy spending its Saturday evening.

I cancelled and hastily rebooked for '99' an excellent place with modern fusion cooking close to the hotel.

And so to Pride.

Because he doesn't walk so well, Feroze and I took a taxi to the meeting point in Bank Square, and had a quick (soft) drink before joining the rest of the choir on the march. We had just walked out into the crossroads at the starting point when I saw riot police running to support their colleagues just across the road from us. They were holding back a shouting mob of all-male all-young(ish) skinheads, and we instinctively veered away.

As we were heading for the opposite pavement, I saw another group who had been holding large placards with 'pro-peace' and 'pro-equality' messages carefully peel off the posters to reveal anti-gay slogans beneath. Then the eggs started flying, about forty of them over our heads, one glancing off my shoulder to break on the tarmac. Feroze shouted 'whatever happens, let's not lose each other' and we hustled between one of the floats and a police car until the noise, and the eggs, subsided. There was an explosion of firecrackers and I was suddenly nervous.

In that moment, I thought 'you know who your friends are'. I also learned something about myself. I was angry but not fearful for my own safety and if I could have commandeered a stick or a baton I would have thrown myself at a bunch of fascist skinheads to save my disabled mate.

I know, I'm not even sure of it now that I've written it. But in that nanosecond it's how I felt.

Fortunately the well-drilled police, who had been drafted in from forces all over Poland and received special training, did the job for me and I saw more than one thug dragged in handcuffs and with a bloodied nose that certainly wasn't administered by gay hands, to the police wagon.

As we found the rest of our friends, learned other stories of trouble including one who was hit by a rock, eventually the relentless heat of the day became more of a hazard than the rioters, and I began to think about the heritage of oppression to which we are all heirs: the obvious model being the Warsaw ghetto where fascism penned in the Jews. At least this time it was the fascists who were being corralled by the security forces.

These thoughts don't leave you, especially in the night, and I've since wondered what would I stand up for, and why? Initially, it's obvious that we want to show solidarity with Polish gays, lesbians, bi- and tran- sexuals and to campaign for their equality. But as far as statutes are concerned, Poland is quite a progressive country: homosexuality was decriminalised in 1932, discrimination on grounds of sexuality is banned in Polish employment law, and gays may serve in the military.

So what you're fighting is bigotry, neo-nazism and - how often it's true - Catholic fear and ignorance. I have two illustrations of the complex equation most Poles must deal with in a country where conservatism and Catholicism run in such deep and parallel seams: one of our members picked up a nice young guy in a bar and slept with him overnight. When they were leaving the hotel, I asked if the Polish lad would be at the march - his response was that it was all right for us to swoop into town, parade and perform, and go back to the safety and tolerance of London, but he was reluctant to be 'seen' supporting his own sexuality.

The other was Wojciech, another of our Polish entourage, who was as gay as a goose during Pride but left immediately afterwards on a pilgrimage to Częstochowa, home of the Black Madonna painting and a shrine for devotees of the Virgin Mary.

It then began to bother me just how far we should be campaigning for the freedom of Polish gays. What is it we want them to have? Freedom from persecution, of course. The right to marriage or civil partnership. Naturally. A commercial gay scene to compare with London's with all its associations with organised crime, prostitution, drugs and disease? Maybe not. The 'rights' exploited by one of our more venal Chorus members to suck off mahogany-tanned old men in the steam room of the Radisson Hotel?

I'm not taking a rock or an egg in the face for that.

SUNDAY

Picking my way among the semi-comatose in the lobby of the Radisson, I felt like Florence Nightingale at a casualty dressing station in the Crimea. It had clearly been a heavy night for many, and who can blame them after such a traumatic day, so our numbers for the 'posh lunch' were severely depleted.

Eventually eleven stalwarts made it to the remarkably named restaurant 'U Fukiera' where in a bordello atmosphere of swagged curtains, caged birds, silk flowers and lace trimmings which I dubbed 'Never Knowingly Undecorated' we had a convivial and mostly delicious meal.

The borscht was a super-concentrated clear rubine distillation of beetroot, in its sweetest and purest form, it could have passed for Ribena. However it ran through Chris P and myself like an instant purgative and by the time we got to the airport we both thought we'd had internal bleeding. I also loved the desserts including 'Soup of Nothing' which allegedly is what your Polish grandma makes when there's little in the fridge. Evidently cream, meringue, hazelnuts, strawberries, vanilla and liqueur are considered basic staples in a Polish kitchen.

The group were subdued on the plane home, but generally content with their weekend.

I think it's one of the most significant thing the Chorus has done, and a fitting climax to my ten years with the LGMC.

I'm not sure where else we could go, metaphorically or geographically, from here.

A Lot of Night Music

2010-07-14T09:38:00.000Z

The trouble with Andrew Lloyd Webber …

No, that’s too easy.

The trouble with Apects of Love is that it’s a trite plot centred on characters too self-absorbed to care about, woven with the relentless thread of ALW’s musical recycling. All the new Trevor Nunn production at the Menier Chocolate Factory does is illuminate the weaving flaws.

Apart from the fact the best-known song is hauntingly similar to a theme by Bach, one of the major melodies from Aspects ‘The Last Man in My Life’ is a shameless import from Tell Me On a Sunday, and the second trickles endlessly through Sunset Boulevard like a dose of musical dysentery.

Given this familiarity, and the fact that modern audiences expect less predictable lyrics than Don Black wrote in 1989 - sometimes you can spot the obvious rhymes bearing down on you like double decker buses – this revival of Aspects is less satisfying than perhaps it was when fresh.

It seems a frequent complaint that well-crafted performances are let down by the material, and there are some simply excellent singers in this production: Dave Willetts is outstanding, a beautiful mature timbre to his voice, but wasted on the banality of the music and lyrics, and it is especially refreshing to hear Michael Arden, as Alex, effortlessly hurdle the top ‘A’ in ‘Love Changes Everything’ without Michael Ball’s overexcited coloratura.

The plotting is tedious – self-centred actress Rose bounces between older and younger lovers, themselves uncle and nephew and one of which has fathered her coquettish teenage daughter with whom both men are further competitively infatuated. There’s a side issue of an Italian sculptress who may be mistress of both the uncle and the actress, ooh-er, sapphism Missus, and an uncredited ‘Hugo’ who incidentally has a lovely voice, who may also be shagging the actress. Although he looks like he'd rather do both of the men.

Throw in the wearing of a dress made for a deceased lady of the house, nicked directly from Rebecca, and the older/younger/actress/daughter quadrilateral borrowed from A Little Night Music and the source material becomes more interesting than the resultant musical.

It’s hard to warm to Rose Vibert because she’s such an unlovely character, but Katharine Kingsley’s confident performance shows the calculating coarseness lurking beneath the powder and paint, if rarely the warmth of a genuine romantic.

The production runs 2 hours 45 but you could trim half an hour of that by cutting the pretentious ALW operatic recitative (almost every word is sung) and turning it into dialogue between musical numbers. The set is a series of chipboard doors and picture frames which slide and occasionally reveal scenic implants including an Alpine panorama disturbingly reminiscent of Hilda Ogden’s ‘muriel’ from Coronation Street.

Sir Trevor Nunn is 70.

Feel the knead in me ...

2010-07-08T13:05:00.000Z

You may not know much of Finchley: La Thatcher’s old constituency perhaps you recall, a pimple on the forehead of London’s map-face just before it breaks out in to the bushy afforestation of, well, Bushey and the rest of leafy Hertfordshire.

Be grateful though that someone has thought to fund its modern and enterprising ‘Artsdepot’ complex and to host part of the London International Festival of Theatre where Israel’s Nalaga’at troupe is packing not just the Jewish home crowd but people from all over London to its uniquely experiential show.

Nalaga’at is a company of eleven adult deaf-blind actors, most of whom lost their sensations from birth or in infancy, welded into a performing company by director Adina Tal and delivering an ensemble piece in which the group kneads, seasons and bakes bread on stage whilst telling personal stories and acting out pantomime-like sketches. The set is wonderful, warm with carpentry and golden light - we could be in Mrs Lovett’s pie shop, or the Baker’s house in ‘Into The Woods’.

For the hour it takes for the bread to bake, your mind may wander. Once you’ve accepted that this is a tremendous piece of work to inspire, coach and direct the deaf-blind, leading them with cues from a tambour drum or by touch, and that it took two years to develop and rehearse the show, you are allowed to consider where else this could go and what's the balance between occupational therapy and entertainment.

Showing off that you know waggling your hands in the air is the sign-language equivalent of applause is only part of the range of reactions available, but you will certainly marvel at the varieties of communication through signing, mime, translation of one-person’s hand gestures by his speaking neighbour, fractured speech, and the surtitles.

The whole event is best bracketed with the two hands-on options: BlackOut bar in which, rather like Dans Le Noir restaurant in Clerkenwell, you are led by your blind waitress to eat and drink in total darkness, where every movement has to be tentative and (particularly if you are seated with Henry Hitchings the theatre critic of the Evening Standard) every conversation sounds like double-entendres from a Carry On film.

There’s also a full-service and brightly-lit restaurant run as ‘Café Kapish’ in which charming and totally deaf waiting staff will take your orders in sign language. Best brush up on your charades for ‘Goat Cheese Panini’ …

Of Thee I Sing, but not memorably

2010-07-03T10:45:00.001Z

ASSASSINS

Book: John Wiedman
Music and Lyrics : Stephen Sondheim
Direction and staging : Michael Strassen
Musical Director: Michael Bradley
Lighting: Steve Miller

Reviewer: JohnnyFox
The Public Reviews Rating: [3 stars]

U.S. Presidents get a raw deal from musicals … in Kaufman and Hart's 1937 I'd Rather Be Right George M. Cohan starred as Franklin Roosevelt who despite his polio paralysis sings and dances - at least in Annie he remains confined to his wheelchair whilst the ginger moppet bawls a succession of shaky key-changes into his ear. Contemporary musical satires like Michael Friedman’s 2009 Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, or Obama: The Musical have yet to build on early promise but at least in those none of the contenders gets shot at, as do the nine (count ‘em) potential victims in Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins currently in a new production by Michael Strassen at the Union Theatre, Southwark.

Assassins is a difficult musical to pigeon-hole. Despite comparing its vengeful plot with Sweeney Todd, it doesn’t fall in to Sondheim’s tuneful-and-waspishly-witty category alongside Follies, Company and Into The Woods. Nor is it in the obscure-but-intriguing box with Pacific Overtures, Merrily We Roll Along and Sunday in the Park. Some claim that as a series of sketches about each of the assassinations, it’s more like a revue than a musical – certainly it defeats Sondheim’s ability to make comic capital out of human relationships since the nine would-be murderers in this show scarcely have one between them and losers and loners don’t make for snappy lyrics. It’s the lack of connectivity between the characters that limits the show, and leaves you feeling cheated with only 8 songs in 90 minutes (although this version runs 110 which indicates a need for tightening and cutting).

If it has a theme it’s that in modern America ‘everybody’s got the right to his dreams’ and that even achieving notoriety by killing the President, can legitimise your pathway to fame and a book deal. In this, it shares its theme of unattained dreams and a consequent ruthlessness with Mama Rose in Gypsy, but this music is as far from the pit band jollification of the Orpheum Circuit as possible. There’s a certain cleverness in the way each is matched to its assassin’s historical period whilst still belonging to the Sondheim canon, such as a Sousa March, a Bacharach-and-David styled lounge ballad, barbershop harmony or ragtime, but none can be extracted as a ‘standard’ to survive outside the musical’s context and they don’t stay in your head long enough to hum on the way home.

Despite these structural difficulties, there are some excellent individual performances and a consistently good ensemble. The whole cast sings clearly and accurately without miking, and Glyn Kerslake (as John Wilkes Booth) John Barr as Charles Guiteau (who shot President Garfield) and Leigh McDonald as Gerald Ford’s would-be assassin Sarah Jane Moore, are particularly strong.

Not all the characters are drawn in three dimensions or allowed the full range of emotions, but Nick Holder drew every ounce of humour as well as anguish from his brilliantly realistic characterisation of Sam Byck, a bankrupt salesman in a Santa Claus suit who initiated a plot to fly a 747 into the Reagan White House.

Although there’s no set save the dingy bare walls and floor of the railway arches which form the shell of the Union Theatre, costumes and lighting are of a high standard for what is essentially a low-budget profit-share production. Fresh and thoughtful orchestrations by Richard Bates give new life to the score as played by a versatile six-piece band.

Director Michael Strassen deserves great credit for the illuminated way in which the stories are presented, and for his huge versatility in staging this recondite and convoluted piece as smartly as his much-lauded production of Company in the same space last year.

But now, please - have a go at Follies.

This review written for The Public Reviews

Fig, Off

2010-06-17T16:02:00.003Z

I could blame the Blumenthal zeitgeist, I could bemoan the jaded palates of Islington which demand the culinarily arcane be proffered in their domestic midst, but the main draw to ‘Fig’, a smallish shop-front gastro in otherwise mid-posh residential Barnsbury, is curiosity - chef Christoffer Hruskova has quickly snagged a reputation for alchemical cookery with a Nordic twist. Jeff and I went for what was approximately my birthday.

Unfortunately, the main aroma on entering the place was the drains. Urgently dispatched to investigate, the proprietor ‘solved’ the problem by opening both front and back doors of the restaurant, replacing the sewage smell with cigarette choke drifting from the pub-like courtyard.

Less than half-full even on a non-footy Friday night, Fig lacks warmth, either in décor or charm: service mixes gay hauteur with insouciance, and the lack of engagement between front of house and customers is a flaw in what should be a favoured ‘local’.

Menus are complex but at least in English and we congratulated ourselves on only having to ask one ‘what’s that’ question (Koldskaal is a bland Danish buttermilk soup). Smoked diver scallops with apple flavours was accurate except that the scallops were only just plural and had no taint of smoke other than the fag-waft from the back yard, but the combination of tart and dessert apple, radish and shoots was a lovely foil to the sweet flesh. Four would have been a better portion.

Jeff's starter was wild sea trout which he was informed was served hot. It wasn’t and the tiny tranches of fridgy flesh were wrapped in some salty black substance and each crowned with a fingernail of crisped skin. The barely-attendant carrot, sea buckthorn and rye were subliminal in their involvement with the dish.

Of the mains, my ‘Suffolk roe buck’ (venison) was the star with perfectly cooked loin fillet and a sharply seasoned jellied terrine of the leg, with some interesting mushrooms dotted on the plate including a morel. One morel. His seabass was well-cooked but dull by comparison.

There’s a cleverly-sourced wine-list of unusual varieties including Picpoul de Pinet, Malvasia, Cannonau and Tannat, mostly in the £25-35 bracket. Selling unusual varieties does bamboozle the customer who has no idea what the shop price might be for such obscure wines.

Desserts were again hit and miss, one involving four blackberries and a cream-filled cannelloni was derided in favour of a series of cherry confits, jellies and sorbets which looked fine but weren't saturated with juice or sweetness.

For three courses with one bottle of wine, tap water and no coffee we paid £110. There’s a tasting menu at £45 with wine selections for £35, all plus 12.5% service. Fig is at 169 Hemingford Road N1 1DA, handy for the new Overground station at Barnsbury. www.fig-restaurant.co.uk

Originally written for www.londonist.com

Thursday in the Park with Karen

2010-06-11T09:24:00.000Z

Why should you go to a basement venue condemned for redevelopment to hear a tall slender American woman you probably haven’t heard of sing the works of a long-dead composer and lyricist? Because, trust me, you should. For three good reasons.

One : Karen Akers has a ten-album back-catalogue (much of it available on Amazon, some of it actually on cassette) and a Tony-nominated Broadway pedigree but most of her celebrity didn’t cross the pond and she’s a vibrant and elegant delight still to be ‘discovered’ in London. At 64.

Two : closing in a couple of months Pizza on the Park is the nearest thing we have to New York’s Oak Room at the Algonquin, or Cafe Carlyle, where experienced singers appear in a truly intimate cabaret setting. Since Akers has a beguiling way of catching your eye - when she sings directly at you, it’s almost alarming - this is a connection we simply can’t experience in today’s ever-expanding music venues.

Three : The songs are by Cole Porter, arguably the finest 20th century American composer and lyricist - and one of the few to pen all the words and all the music to almost all his works.

Akers works the lyrics in hear clear, strong, just-above-baritone conversational voice (her speaking and singing voices are close in timbre) only occasionally pressing the point too firmly as though lecturing deaf foreigners. She sings eighteen numbers, and you’ll know at least a dozen from classic interpretations by Ella Fitzgerald or Merman or Sinatra.

Porter’s verse introductions are so ingeniously wordy, and Akers milks them so thoroughly that it’s a bit like a game of ‘Name That Tune’ but those you’ll nail easily include ‘Anything Goes’, ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’ and 'Always True To You Darling In My Fashion'. She spins them too, taking the usually-belted cowboy anthem ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ at a sultry pace and finding new meaning by delivering it softly as a torch song till you wonder why they never chose her version as the theme to ‘Brokeback Mountain’.

It's good too to hear the chattery pattery songs like 'Thank You So Much, Mrs. Lowsborough-Goodby' or the rarely-performed 'Tale of the Oyster' from Porter's (deservedly) rarely-performed musical 'Fifty Million Frenchmen', and Akers obviously relished sharing these with her audience.

Consummate. It’s a good word. Go and experience it, before it’s gone.

PaulinLondon and I made a slightly scurrilous AudioBoo after the show.

Listen!

Black and White Dog

2010-05-28T10:20:00.001Z

A review, for ThePublicReviews of 'Dream of the Dog' at the Trafalgar Studios, 27.5.10

In the living room strewn with tea chests and cardboard boxes it could be cosy Priestley or Coward, ‘Laburnum Grove’ or ‘This Happy Breed’ as an elderly housewife packs away the last of the family belongings before the house move to a peaceful retirement by the sea. But instead of South London we are high on the windswept veldt of KwaZulu Natal where Janet Suzman as Patricia Wiley is leaving the farm she inherited and has sold to developers.

We see her truculent, crude, memory-failing husband Richard, played with brutal intensity by Bernard Kay as an unreconstructed old colonial hand whose bigotry runs deep, before he storms out into the night to do some unexplained task on the hillside. A stranger arrives – another echo of Priestley – the son of one of the farmhands, named ‘Look Smart’ as a boy and whom Patricia had loved like a son and paid for his schooling returning after fifteen years to demand she now face up to some harsh truths about the dreadful event that caused him to leave.

What follows is an hour of possibly the best one-act play seen in London in recent memory.

The writing is so authentic and natural, and Ariyon Bakare as Look Smart has all the fierceness and pride of the emancipated African, but also a far subtler humility when facing an admission of his own self-deception. In other hands, this could have been a predictable exchange of taunts about racism and patronage, but Suzman – who participated in the development of the play with writer Craig Higginson – resists the obvious and in one of the finest performances you can see in London at the moment, delivers an honest and intelligent reading of the white woman who feels responsible for her actions but cannot find the resource to atone for them completely, nor to assuage the pains and isolation she feels from her own perspective on the past.

The strength of Suzman’s acting is palpable when you feel the strain of her frustration in attempting to explain her thoughts and feelings, and realize that this is not stage technique, but actual emotional truth.

It’s true that the plotting is somewhat over-tidy and the political issues familiar from Athol Fugard and other writers, but in an 80-minute piece there must be some compromises.

This is a play about black and white people whose issues are so far from black and white that you must follow them intently to the end which, even if you can see it coming, is enthralling.

Goodnight, Vienna

2010-05-23T22:33:00.010Z

There is an array of all-American talent squished onto the Menier Chocolate Factory stage that is both formidable and incomprehensible. From Mandy Patinkin, arguably the finest Sondheim interpreter of his generation, to Broadway back-catalogistas like Judy Kaye and John McMartin, this is the stuff of dreams for many producers.

I won’t hazard a guess at the total number of awards between them, but it must be over fifty. Some dullard from Leeds will undoubtedly tally up the Tonys, Drama Desks, Oscars, Oliviers and BAFTAS listed in the programme and write in to correct me.

Such a pity, then, that they have been assembled, in the no less luminous hands of Evita-to-Phantom director Hal Prince and prima choreographa assoluta Susan Stroman in a complete barrowload of tripe.

It is impossible to fathom what passed through whose mind when it was first suggested that the Shah of Persia’s visit to Vienna in 1873 would make a viable subject for a musical, that modern lyrics could be welded to genuine Strauss tunes, or that it was a good idea to convince Jewish actor Mandy Patinkin to shave his head and play a fey Muslim eunuch in a performance exactly midway between Alec Guinness’s equally racially unrealistic Dr Godbole in A Passage to India, and Kevin Chamberlin’s Uncle Fester in Addams Family the Musical.

It’s called ‘Paradise Found’ but the only reference to Milton I can find is that you’d have to be blind to see the good in it.

Was Max Biyalistock originally Viennese?

Whilst Nasser al-Din Shah Qajar was a fascinating and cultured monarch – a painter, a poet and photographer who held sovereign power for almost 50 years, outstripped only by Queen Victoria whose reign ran parallel to his own. He was the first ruler to visit Europe and the first to publish his diaries – but in the Richard Nelson script, he’s a randy one-dimensional buffoon played half a degree above Baron Hardup and in a series of cheap lurex kaftans by five times Tony nominee John McMartin who looks understandably bewildered throughout.

The gist of the plot is that the Shah becomes infatuated by the Empress of Austria, and demands his servants procure her sexual favours. To spare the court’s blushes, a prostitute masquerades as the Empress and receives from the Shah a massive pearl necklace. Two, if you count the one she can wear in the street.

There’s a duet about masturbation set to the music of a Strauss mazurka.

So far it’s Kismet crossed with The Merry Widow and a side order of Indecent Proposal.

In the second half those of us who returned to the airless auditorium were rewarded with a further descent into farce as first there’s a prison scene where the prostitute is reunited with her favourite client, a cardboard Baron played with more conviction than the production deserves by the explosive bass-baritone talent of Shuler Hensley. Hensley is most noted in the UK for his outstanding portrayal of Jud Fry in the National’s Oklahoma! where he briefly but powerfully diverted the audience’s attention from its seat-wetting adoration of Hugh Jackman, and subsequently in a string of Broadway hits including playing the Monster in Young Frankenstein.

She’s been in prison, he in alcoholic penury, but they come together as actors in a coarse vaudeville which summarises the plot all over again only to oom-pah-pah music, after which the authors clearly got bored with the plotting and tie up all loose ends in a single scene worth of a provincial pantomime. Three Strauss strains are briefly reprised – even though we’re all now back in Persia - and we stagger out to the bar to try to make sense of it all.

Apart from airfares and accommodation for the cast, it’s not an inexpensive production – costumes, set and lighting are way above the Menier’s usual budgets: the programme refers to a number of producer type individuals as ‘Enhancement for this production has been provided by …’. Presumably ‘Enhancers’ are Angels who haven’t a hope in hell of seeing their money back.

Maybe it’s a tax loss, maybe it’s just an aberration on the part of otherwise competent and talented individuals, but this has the feel of a work-in-progress, perhaps a tryout where the European setting will be more familiar to audiences, prior to an opening on Broadway. If so, it will need the kind of eighteen month long re-write that kept Sister Act so firmly out of town, or closed Imagine This in its second month.

Either way, the presence of so many fine actors and singers is a bait to lure audiences to a production which fails to deliver either as musical comedy or a genuine operetta.

Go on then, they should call it The Strauss-Trap.

Holding the Man

2010-05-12T13:08:00.001Z

Apocalypse Soon-ish

2010-05-12T12:19:00.012Z

Home to Hammersmith is one of my least favourite journeys on public transport. It's the 'wrong' side of London for me which on a good day never takes less than an hour, and on one particularly horrible Saturday during tubular disruptions of an epic scale, two and three-quarters.

Although I like and admire the Lyric Theatre there - an extraordinary Victorian proscenium box airlifted into a concrete shell atop one of the nastiest shopping precincts in England - it's always with a heavy heart that I dither and defer my departure from home to make for a 'just-in-time' delivery in London W6. Scene set, then, for a preview of 'A Thousand Stars Explode In The Sky', a play about the end of the world.

I was reminded of that moment in Through The Looking Glass when Alice is introduced to the Plum Pudding 'Alice, Pudding. Pudding, Alice' and then cannot bring herself to carve into something she's just met - in that my lovely theatre-blogging friends introduced me at 7.28pm to David Eldridge, one-third of the triumvirate responsible for the new playscript.

He appeared a perfectly nice chap and I now feel hobbled that I can't bring the full weight of my puny invective to bear on a play I really didn't enjoy. Not that it would be legitimate to post a proper review since it sent me to sleep within the first forty minutes.

It SEEMED to be about a disparate family, mostly of fatherless brothers - five of them ranging in age from about seventeen to just past fifty which is surely biologically impossible for the mother unless she had the first in her early teens and the redoubtable but grimly aspected Ann Mitchell certainly didn't look that type - and their need to be together, or not, on a pig farm in Yorkshire at the impending Apocalypse which is neatly scheduled for midnight in three weeks from the start of the play.

Things happen. A charming dog appears in one scene and is subsequently beaten to death with a hammer. The fiftysomething man, who suffers from colon cancer and is otherwise a bit artless, is washed standing up in a tin bath genitals and all, by his mother. I might have preferred it if she'd washed the dog onstage and he'd been beaten to death with the hammer.

Certainly washing the dog on stage would have trumped Meera Syal's nightly preparation of chips and egg in Shirley Valentine, as well as provided some leavening laughs to this rather wordy, rather morose piece. 'Pinteresque' is all very well, but not when it emulates Pinter's capacity for logorrheic tedium.

There's presumably some significance to the leitmotif of smoking - the youngest brother is learning to do it, the oldest one has cancer because of it, the middle-middle brother is concealing the fact he does from his wife, then does so openly as an act of defiance - but all the actors handle it awkwardly and the opportunity to figure out their motivations eluded me as by the end of the first half I had lost the plot and caught the tube.

The Buffer Day

2010-03-22T01:14:00.006Z

I sleep soundly till about 6 but am in no hurry to get up since I’ve reserved today as a sort of buffer against travel delays and to acclimatise to the heat and humidity of which there’s clearly plenty even this early in the morning. It’s nice also to take time over breakfast, in the hotel’s lovely courtyard and my first bowlful of truly ripe, truly tropical fruits – I calculate it would have cost about a tenner from Marks & Spencer, but the jewelled blocks of mango, papaya, pineapple, watermelon and banana are just a picture.

Since breakfast is a la carte I have no idea what else to order as everything on the menu is eggs – but they also bring doorsteps of wholemeal toast, with guava jam which is pretty nice. When the bill comes it runs to five figures of colones and I realise I have no idea of the conversion rate. I’m later relieved to discover there are over 800 to the pound.

It’s too hot to sit in the sun and there’s no shade on the roof terrace which is equipped with two boiling Jacuzzis instead of a cool pool, so I later opt for a trip into town. It’s hard to find something nice to say about San Jose ... any description ends up an endless litany of what it’s not – neither beautiful, architecturally interesting, clean or modern it seems to consist of unremarkable buildings from the Spanish colonial era interspersed with a lot of sixties brutalism, none of which has been keenly restored or preserved.

There’s a central market building with typical ordered displays of fish, meat, fruit and vegetables, but nothing so out of the ordinary as to merit multiple photographs. Nor are the people much to look at: even though I work my way through the commercial and political centre, passing courts, theatres, banks and municipal buildings, I don’t see anyone smartly or fashionably dressed, the typical uniform being trackpants and a baggy vest. Men and women.

The prevalence of American retail brands is almost alarming, there’s so little in San Jose to betray its once-proud Spanish heritage – of course you expect KFC and Macdonalds, but all the hotel, bank, chain store and petrol station brands are from the US and it feels like a poor and dirty county town from Iowa or Indiana.

I make contact with my facebook friend Jose Reyes who was once a lawyer with the International Court of Arbitration in The Hague but has returned to practice in his native Costa Rica and since my hotel is alleged to have the best restaurant in town I make us a reservation for dinner.

Jose has other plans, and instead drives me to a rustic finca high on the hills of Escazu and overlooking the whole of San Jose in the valley. From this distance with the stars above and the city lights below it looks almost attractive. The restaurant is interesting with large groups of people sharing some of the tables, I think at first it might be a tourist trap, but these are all locals or from neighbouring Nicaragua or Guatemala come for the food and the genuine folkloric dancing.

I throw myself into the spirit of the place and eat highly spiced beef, frijoles, plantain, yucca and pico di gallo which I spit out because it’s laced too heavily with the dreaded coriander ... whilst Jose chooses grilled chicken and plain boiled vegetables, it’s an odd exchange of our native cuisines.

The dancing seems good and is wildly applauded by the customers, although there’s not a lot of variety. For the girls, the routine seems based on lifting your skirts to your ears, and shrieking a lot. If that’s all it is, I know a goodly number of chorus boys who could join the Costa Rican national ballet.

We have an entertaining evening but by 10 I’m shattered and whilst I sense Jose might like to take things a bit further, he’s a perfect gent and escorts me back to the hotel where we say goodnight.

Do I know the way to San Jose ?

2010-03-22T00:09:00.003Z

I won’t bore you with the details of the journey except to say that flying Continental was less traumatic than anticipated, and despite it not having lie-flat BA seats, the food was particularly good, the movie selection Oscars-fresh and the service attentive so, since airmiles beggars can’t be choosers, I’m not complaining.

I changed at Houston where the unfathomable island that is the United States insists you clear customs and immigration despite the fact you have only one hour and 25 minutes to spend in the airport let alone the country, they seem unable to process airside international-to-international passengers, although my luggage goes straight to Costa Rica and does not pass ‘GO’.

It was perhaps unfortunate my flight from London coincided with the arrival of the Emirates service from Dubai, a sixteen hour nonstop which decants 250 tired and anxious beard and burqa wearers into the ignorant hands of monolingual Texas redneck border officials with resultant misunderstandings, intolerance and delays to we less ‘profiled’ passengers waiting behind. Appropriately enough, the airport is named after George Bush.

On the connecting flight to San Jose I am seated in front of a pair of loud mouthed good ole boys on their way to visit their sport fishing boats and imported Brazilian girlfriends, an indication that a lot of the migrant population into Costa Rica consists of American retirees eking out their pensions. The overheard conversation runs to discussion of finances until the free liquor slugs them to sleep, but not before I learn the cost of living is rising to beat them and they must consider a further, cheaper, destination for their remaining days, possibly Nicaragua.

I’m always quite pleased with myself to arrive in a third world country, particularly late at night, and successfully negotiate sufficient currency and directions to get myself to my first hotel although it’s surprisingly uncomplicated as there’s a fixed-price airport taxi service and I’m soon on my way. The driver has other ideas, though, carefully questioning me about my accommodation before telling me the hotel’s full and he’d be able to find me another one. It takes a certain amount of firmness to insist we go where I know I have a prepaid reservation and he eventually dumps me at the rather elegant Hotel Grano d’Oro, an extended and boutique-ified colonial mansion in an area which seems otherwise reserved for plastic surgery clinics. Perhaps they’re expecting me.

It doesn’t take long to check out the small but charming room with its polished floorboards, iron bedstead, heavy French armoire and ceiling fan – the windows are open but its surprisingly bug-free and I chance it without insect repellent for the first urban night, since after taking a shower I realise it’s now 11pm Costa Rican time and therefore 22 hours since I left home so I am more than ready for bed.

As I drift off, I am aware of the most beautiful birdsong. And we’re not talking squawks and chattering, this is pure uplifted melody from the trees in the garden below my window, I believe from the national bird of Costa Rica, the clay-coloured robin which sings like a louder nightingale, and all night long.

Listen here

END OF THE PEER SHOW

2010-03-06T15:21:00.005Z

Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber is not a well man. His operation for prostate cancer before Christmas led to complications and Love Never Dies may be his last composition, since he’s now producing Wizard of Oz rather than developing new material. I hope not, because the author of Sunset Boulevard and Evita deserves a better epitaph than the load of old rope currently on full-price £65-a-seat preview at the Adelphi Theatre.

We are in Coney Island, and if Lloyd Webber’s claim that the events are set ten years after Phantom of the Opera is accurate, it’s about 1891. The Phantom has become a sideshow illusionist, bringing with him Madame and Meg Giry, and three henchpersons called something like Felch, Squelch and Gargle whose sole purpose is to strut about in Cirque de Soleil costumes. In a barely comprehensible plot, he invites now-famous Christine Daae to sing in his theatre and she arrives aboard the Lusitania with Oscar Hammerstein (who would have been four years old at the time), Nancy Astor (eleven) and Cornelius Vanderbilt (born 1898). Improbable or what?

Christine’s son turns out to be fathered by the Phantom who entertains the ten-year-old in what looks like Michael Jackson’s bedroom, complete with Bubbles the ape maniacally playing a pipe organ. Other elements of scenery are like an Art Nouveau explosion in a resin factory, interspersed with trapeze and rope twirling from a provincial circus.

ALW’s form is distinctly variable: whilst Cats and Evita pushed the envelope of musical theatre his recent appearances on low-rent television stunts like ‘Any Dream Will Do’ have diminished his profile which was equally dented by penning the dire Eurovision entry 'It's My Time' which I have previously suggested took him precisely three idle minutes to write, including standing up, flushing and washing his hands afterwards.

It now seems outrageous that he should be the recipient of a peerage for his contribution to the nation’s musical heritage, an honour not accorded Purcell, Delius or Elgar.

He does, however, deserve some sort of national award for recycling.

The lead-up to Christine’s performance of the theme song is interminable and gives you time to reflect it’s not a new tune. Setting aside the internet gossip which invites comparison between ALW’s composition and the theme from 1960’s Shirley MacLaine movie ‘The Apartment’, ‘Love Never Dies’ is itself a re-hash of ‘Our Kind of Love’ cut from his musical ‘The Beautiful Game’, stripped of its meaningful lyrics, jacked up an octave and given ludicrous operatic pretensions and drowningly lush orchestration.

Whilst Serena Boggess looks stately – the pink crystal-studded frock is simply gawjus – and sings right to the top of her soprano range until you wonder whether bats will fall from the rafters with their wings over their ears, it’s a soulless performance made even less engaging because it’s so difficult to care about any of these characters.

It’s tantalizing to wonder what might have happened if Christine had been made fully three dimensional, and the piece sung in a normal register with emotion by Hannah Waddingham – as she did on Parkinson some years ago - then this could have been the most electrifying sequel.

The pretence that this is somehow an opera score trips ALW up time after time – Ramin Karimloo’s voice seems to have only one setting: ‘stentorian’, and all his interactions with Christine are overblown and overloud. The recitative sounds directly snatched from ‘Sunset Boulevard’ and is endlessly repetitive, whereas a few lines of spoken dialogue and a couple of jokes would have been more than welcome.

The counterpoint popular numbers like Summer Strallen’s Miss Adelaide style vaudeville routine, a fatuous rock anthem, and a chronically forgettable ‘beach’ ensemble seem jarring, as if they belong in three different musicals.

In the bare-stage climax (hm, seen any Bizet, Andrew?) and for no apparent reason, Strallen’s character shoots Christine and a blood capsule explodes in her bra. She dies in the Phantom’s arms as they kiss one last time.

It takes her six minutes, during which she reprises four different tunes before the orchestra wells to the sort of climax normally reserved for the last night of the season at Verona as Tosca chucks herself off the battlements.

Lloyd Webber probably thinks he’s written Carmen.

I think car-crash.

Sex and a Different City

2010-03-04T16:40:00.001Z

Can she or can't she? Most of the first-night audience were secretly betting Kim Cattrall wouldn't be able to shake off the shadow of 'Samantha Jones' from 'Sex and the City' and turn herself into Noel Coward's wittiest and most romantic heroine.

In assailing the best-constructed comedy in the English Language as well as the first to openly portray sexual attraction, Cattrall sets herself the highest of bars: Private Lives has pin-sharp dialogue which falls flat if a syllable is mistimed, her predecessors in the role include Maggie Smith, Greta Scacchi, and Lindsay Duncan, and the whole play balances on the essential chemistry between the co-stars, reunited divorcees on their respective honeymoons who are supposed to be fatally attracted “like two violent acids bubbling about in a nasty little matrimonial bottle”.

This version is more like the YouTube experiment wherein Cattrall is the Diet Coke - fizzy, colourful, sweet but ultimately not ‘the real thing’, and harmless until Matthew MacFadyen provides the Mentos which make the explosive effervescence.

Eschewing the archness with which Elyot is normally played, MacFadyen opts for an earthier, butcher foil to Amanda’s shrillness and once you accept the famous Coward epigrams won’t be delivered with camp theatrical flourishes, his conversational delivery adds depth and credibility to the character, and makes it more magnetic.

Despite looking the part and staring down any discussion of their age differences, Cattrall doesn’t quite match him - hers is a performance with circus skills: when Elyot shoves her she bounces on to the sofa in an acrobatic parabola. She also walks the tight-rope of English diction: never actually falling but the strain is visible. It might have made for a more laconic and nuanced Amanda if she’d played it in her natural American accent.

Casting the new partners, Sybil and Victor, is notoriously difficult: the parts are written as ciphers, but Simon Paisley-Day gave Victor a chocks-away Squadron Leader background Coward clearly hadn’t envisaged, and in the third-act face-off with MacFadyen provided one of the best comic moments.

There are some issues with the set - in the first act on adjoining hotel balconies, the cast had to fight their way through muslin curtains or round tightly-placed wrought-iron furniture, and in the second act Amanda’s Paris apartment looked cheap and gimmicky instead of coolly art deco and stylish. In Coward, style really is everything.

A Load of Cobblers'

2010-03-04T16:39:00.001Z

A sparking well-paced revival brings fresh life to a family drama with feminist overtones in Thom Southerland’s revival of Hobson’s Choice at the cosy but comfortable Broadway Studio in Catford.

The piece follows three daughters of a bullying shopkeeper struggling to achieve independence and identity against a background of male supremacy, alcoholism and Victorian mill-town poverty.

And it’s very funny.

Its author Harold Brighouse might have been inspired by Chekhov’s Three Sisters when he was at Manchester Grammar, but deserves credit for pioneering the ‘Northern Drama’ twenty years before his contemporary J. B. Priestley. What’s interesting is how modern audiences react differently to the ‘issues’ in the play: it would have been considered completely normal at the time for a master to thrash his apprentices with a belt, and highly comical that a young woman should have the temerity to set up in business in competition with her father.

We identify strongly with the self-improving Maggie, played with conviction by Tegwen Tucker and delivering some of the best comic lines - although she could extend the range of her emotions and gestures without losing the controlled determination of the character, and it’s harder to feel compassion for the ‘abuser’ as we’d probably call him today, despite Anthony Wise‘s fine interpretation of Henry Horatio Hobson which is as authentic and vulnerable as possible within the confines of the script.

As Maggie’s gawkily reluctant fiancée Will Mossop, Sean Pol McGreevy makes an excellent start and his body language is perfect, but as the character grows in confidence his accent takes a trip across the Pennines finishing somewhere in the suburbs of Newcastle, canny lad. Otherwise, the Salford inflections hold up well throughout the faultless supporting cast, defying any potential to slip into Victoria Wood parody.

The mauve silk dresses with tight bodices and bustles sported by the Hobson sisters seemed more appropriate for the Wild West than the North West, but the play is set in 1880, the same year as Southerland favourite Annie Get Your Gun which is also about a strong woman making her way in a man's world, and makes you wonder whether there’s a wonderfully surreal combination show to be cobbled together from the two …

… until then, this is a real and refreshing slice of Lancashire life well worth the journey to Catford.

Tiger Baiting

2010-02-21T17:53:00.007Z

Sunday papers are full of crap: I don't get the whole Tiger Woods or John Terry issue. If the CEO of, say, Marks and Spencer slept with the wife or girlfriend of one of his fellow directors, he wouldn't lose his job or damage the brand. Terry should sue, and Woods should just continue being the best golfer in the world and fuck the mimsy sponsors who won't back him.

I'm sure there's a 'squeaky-clean' or 'don't get caught' clause in their complex contracts, but what I don't understand is why Gillette should drop Woods from its ads, assuming that men who like sports and buy disposable razors are somehow horrified because some chest-enhanced 'model' has given Tiger a blowjob in his Mercedes. Surely they'd identify with him even more?

Photo: Paddy Briggs (Wikimedia Commons)

I suspect two things: Gillette's marketing tells them that their razors are bought FOR men but BY women, and it's tabloid-fed women who are 'outraged' by Tiger Woods' infidelities. As, probably, are the wives of directors of Gillette.

The tabloids' hand-wringing over the events is in a class beyond hypocritical. Nothing new, of course, but the way in which they salivate over the details is flesh-eating: after they effectively created the social climate in which 'football hunks' and 'page three stunnas' are so made for each other that every gymslip slapper in Essex invests her pocket money in fake tan, hair extensions and Juicy Couture in an ultimate aspiration to shag a third division reserve player.

A bright friend of mine says 'sports personality' is one of his favourite oxymorons. You could add 'professional footballer' to that.

If I've understood the story correctly, Terry has been stood down from his job as England Captain because one Wayne Bridge, the man whose former fiancee Terry is alleged to have bedded, might be unable to work effectively alongside him in the team, and their football playing might suffer as a result.

If so, they're not professionals because the definition of a professional is to do for a living something to a consistent standard that might waver and vary if you were an amateur. So if that does happen, sack Bridge for not doing his job, don't victimise Terry.

It is impossible to imagine any other profession, except perhaps the General Synod, in which the mating of Man A with the ex-fiancee of Man B should result in action for dismissal from his job. And why doesn't Man B accept that an ex-fiancee is just that, a girl you've finished with who is herself now a free agent. The only person with any rights of disappointment in this whole issue is Mrs. Terry. And she'll be the first to suffer now he's lost his job.

I'd never heard of Vanessa Perroncel, the 'French swimwear model' at the centre of the affair. But she's now represented by Max Clifford which guarantees blasting across the cover of all the cheap gossip mags available for 90p at your local supermarket and bought by women who really should be spending their child benefit on something more nutritious.

Soapstar to Rock Star, almost

2010-02-18T16:48:00.002Z

You could be forgiven for thinking that a sitcom actress who pockets thirteen million dollars a season for Will and Grace might indulge herself with any kind of vanity project including hiring a band and the Vaudeville Theatre for a debut week in the West End.

But this isn’t a vanity, Mullally has worked with her backing group ‘Supreme Music Program‘ for twelve years and her range of vocal styles is extraordinary: from blues to country and Sondheim to Stones she nailed song after song with a deft and personal attack, attack being the operative word when her rock voice reaches a controlled screech in a trailer-trash banger like ‘Fancy’ by Reba McEntyre or Ryan Adams’ ‘Shakedown on 9th Street’, but tender and connected in perhaps her best piece, Randy Newman’s luminous ‘Real Emotional Girl’.

Many of the songs are about death and some of the self-pitying country music teeters on the edge of ironic although the audience remained unsure whether her delivery was straight, or tongue-in-cheek.

Whilst Mullally has successfully laid the ghost of ‘Karen Walker’ in the States, partly through a series of disastrous television projects, it’s harder to escape in the UK where Channel 4 daily repeats keep it fresher - and much of Tuesday’s audience was sibilantly disappointed that this wasn’t ‘Karen with a K’ aping Liza with a Z and giving her camp and bitchy all to an in-crowd.

Sexual overtones spike the whole set, in the post-show Q&A Mullally defended her choice of many songs written specifically for men and for which she resolutely wouldn’t change the gender, partly to attest to the authenticity of the piece, but also ‘If people see me performing as a man - so what’, an attitude loudly appreciated by the substantial sapphic claque in the stalls.

Downside is that this is a lazy concert, Mullally told only one averagely funny anecdote about her boring tour guide in Prague and seemed reluctant to engage with the audience, perhaps for fear of resurrecting Karen. She has pitching problems and it’s hard to tell whether it’s refreshingly honest that she re-started a couple of numbers to find the right key, or under-rehearsed.

She could do with a script, and a director to tighten the presentation, but the music’s mostly a knockout.

Continues at the Vaudeville Theatre 8pm each evening until Sunday 21 February, with two shows Saturday and Sunday at 4pm and 8pm. Box Office 0844 412 4663, top price £47.50.

DEAD ERNEST

2010-02-12T18:10:00.002Z

What are you supposed to feel when someone you don’t particularly like has died?

What are you supposed to feel when someone you perhaps actively disliked dies in a suicide pact with his wife?

In a bored moment I was Googling the names of ex-colleagues when I discovered this article about my first boss, Ernest Lewis, with whom I worked for four and a half years in the Works & Buildings Department of Southampton University.

Unable to contemplate a life apart from his wife who had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, he wrapped the pair of them in a blanket and they drank liquid morphine after typing a carefully worded note and leaving a message for their daughter to call the next day.

I’d like to say he was my mentor, guide and friend but actually he was a rather peevish piece of work – mysoginistic, homophobic, pedantic, Scots and completely humourless and every afternoon at exactly ten minutes to five he lit up a foul-smelling pipe: if he was an example of anything, it was what I didn’t want to grow up to be.

What surprises me is that someone I’d thought of as so mediocre should do something so dramatic to end his life, although the typewritten note and the time-delay message to the daughter have a ring of pedestrian detail that is accurate. And I have a sneaking admiration for how he was able to score two fatal doses of morphine.

If you had to draw a picture of the suburban middle-class man, it would have been Ernest – never Ernie - in his tweed jackets, bicycle clips and whipcord trousers in shades of dun, lovat and fawn rotated by the seasons and I’m fairly sure purchased by mail order from an advert in a ‘respectable’ newspaper.

His middle-middle tastes extended to his Austin Metro Vanden Plas, lifelong membership of the Conservative Party (both he and the wife were tub-thumping Tories, he on the county council, she on the city one) and his protective description of his home as a detached bungalow ‘in one-sixth of an acre’. In Hampshire, where acreages are measured in thousands, this struck me as particularly hopeless.

Somewhat laughably for a small-time Thatcherite politician, he kept in the filing cabinet in our office a bottle of sherry once given to my female predecessor at Christmas by a furniture salesman and exhibited as an ‘awful warning’ against corruption in public service as though by accepting such a cheap gift, one could be influenced in the placing of University purchase orders.

Back in the carbon-paper seventies the hierarchies of our office life were beyond Dickensian, Ernest believed in the perfect order of ‘one man, one girrrrl’ rolling the R’s in his lowland Scots accent as if to emphasise the repetitious misogyny of his attitude to secretaries.

When I opted to do my own typing rather than wait for work to be returned, it was seen as some kind of failure on my part, rather than an increase in efficiency. We had a bit of a run-in once with a rather bluestocking Warden of one of the Halls of Residence, whom he described as ‘perpetual spinster, too ugly even to make a lesbian’ … in a way, reacting against these outrageous attitudes helped to frame my burgeoning liberal opinions and rebellious sexuality. When I came out, and decamped to London for a boyfriend and a job paying three times what I’d earned at the University, he was too bitter to come to my leaving party.

Sad man. Sad life. But sad death, too.

A ROUGH PATCH

2010-01-02T22:13:00.000Z

I’ve had enough now.

Not because the weather is beginning to turn, I love long days at sea and am even enjoying the breeze which is now whipping the waves into whitecaps and forcing the geriatrics indoors, despite the fact it’s still 75 degrees out there. I’ll even like it tomorrow when the waves get up to 25 feet and the temperature drops to zero.

But there’s a different atmosphere since we left St. Thomas for our 1500 mile dash to New York. Even the water tastes different.

Always keen to run what looks like Paddy’s Market on the lower decks with table after table displaying tawdry jewellery or stuffed toys, the ships retail team are having a fire sale with piles of very cheaply-made clothing like ‘Atlantic Crossing 2009’ t-shirts, key rings, glasses, mugs and anything the suppliers can brand with the ‘Cunard’ logo back in their factories in Bangalore and Shenzen.

I haven’t understood the shopping ethic throughout the cruise. If the point of a long gentle sea voyage is sybaritic relaxation, why would you want to be endlessly comparison shopping for jewellery? Must be part of that marital guilt thing. But every port is the same – at the dockside there’s always a shopping mall catering to the keen buyer or the totally infirm who can’t totter more than a hundred yards from the boat. But it always contains the same shops, specifically Diamonds International and Colombian Emeralds. I didn’t even know Colombia mined emeralds, let alone retailed them at every waterside location from Port Canaveral to Curacao. Oh, and a chain called ‘Mr. Tablecloth’, God alone knows why it should be a maritime tradition to come home with a table cover and matching napkins (I’d have nicked mine from the ship’s restaurant) but apparently, at least in Peoria, it is.

Equally beyond me is the gambling. I would have imagined a five-star cruise ship might have blackjack or roulette and my mental picture featured James Bond types in white tuxedo jackets and women like Russian spies. But the overweight slobs slumped at the many many slot machines (some of which accept $100 bills so we’re not talking about shovelling quarters here) confirm my impression that cruising’s not the exclusive preserve of the jet-set. Or the tasteful. Or clean.

Perhaps it’s time to list some of my gripes about this experience – overall, it’s been enjoyable and I have met some delightful people and we kept each other highly amused for two weeks ... but there’s a long list of niggles.

I hate the way nothing is complimentary. Apart from your accommodation and basic three meals a day, everything requires an extra payment whether it’s a coffee in one of the lounges or a bottle of drinking water in your cabin. Eating in the a la carte restaurant (which has the same menu every night) cost $30 per head supplement. It’s good, but I would have expected the main restaurant to be of this standard.

On top of the ‘room and beverage service charge’ of $11 per person per day billed to your shipboard account, everything you sign for carries an automatic ‘gratuity’ of 15% which is not optional, and the extra ‘tips’ box is also left blank on every chit. A couple drinking two cocktails each and a bottle of wine a day will easily rack up $500 in compulsory gratuities. This exhibits a lack of apparent generosity which, if they are not careful, will make Cunard the Ryanair of cruise lines (as its parent Carnival already is) whereby a low lead-in price is effectively doubled by the passenger’s necessary expenses during his trip. I’d rather pay a bit more and have all-inclusive MEAN all-inclusive.

The housekeeping is good, but many trays, service carts, buckets and vacuum cleaners are left in the corridors, often all day. Bed linen is changed only every third or fourth day, and I was shocked one evening to pull out my tucked-in duvet and find a large smear of dried blood which definitely wasn’t mine.

Smoking is allowed on all balconies and some open decks, so there’s blowback into cabins and corridors, as well as in the casino and the ghastly ‘Golden Lion’ pub, by comparison with which the Queen Vic in East Enders looks smart, both these areas being open to the main lobbies.

Lots of things are simply unavailable. There’s no thick toast at breakfast, it’s all thin cold and brittle: apparently it’s impossible for the ship to supply either thick-sliced bread, or even cut an unsliced loaf to order. There’s brown-coloured bread but nothing I can recognise as wholegrain. And no salted butter. Nor is there any semi-skimmed milk, which is only achievable by having a jug of full-fat and a jug of skim and mixing them mid-air over your cup. Although they use it in their cooking, greek yoghurt is unavailable and despite the fact we’re passing through fruit-growing islands, melons aren’t ripe and peaches and apricots are canned. Equally, there’s no fresh squeezed juice, the orange being an especially vile reconstitute.

There’s no choice of vegetables at dinner, nor is the combination to be supplied shown on the menu. And however they describe their potatoes (variously roast, chateau and fondant) it’s always the same barrel-shaped bastard with no flavour and a soggy oven-coloured exterior.

Entertainment didn’t meet my expectations. I thought at least for the Christmas/New Year cruise they’d have sourced one headline singer or comedian but the Entertainment Director explained that the ship doesn’t control its own selections of performers, they’re all sent from a central talent office and all they can do on the ship is package the shows to the best of their ability.

Excursions are overpriced. A simple two-hour coach tour may be $70. In ports as well-serviced for tourism as those in the Caribbean, this seems greedy. It soon became apparent that walking out of the immediate dockside area, licensed and legitimate alternatives were available for a third of what the ship charged. I enjoyed the river tubing and the cave swimming expeditions, but for trips around the bay or to a beach, ad hoc was definitely cheaper.

ST ELSEWHERE

2010-01-02T15:42:00.001Z

St Thomas, 1 January 2010

Post-Barbados, the islands dissolve into a collection of English Parish Churches as in rapid succession we attend service at St Kitts, St Lucia, St Thomas and continuing the Sunday theme, Dominica.

Dominica stands out as one of the poorest islands in the Caribbean, memorable for its long-serving and now late Prime Minister Mrs. Eugenia Charles who regularly came to Britain to intercede with the Queen (to whom she bore a striking, if negative-coloured, resemblance) and petition the European Union to allow the import of Windward Island bananas which were technically too curved for Brussels’ standards.

In brightly-painted ex-army trucks we climbed the crumbling roadways to one of the tall peaks that dot the island, to hike up through the rainforest to a cave used in the filming of ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ where high rocks surround a narrow river and you then swim in warm rain through the cave to a thundering waterfall. So in a sense, I’ve been through Johnny Depp’s cleft.

On St Lucia we just said to the taxi driver ‘beach’ and were lucky to arrive at Reduit where many of the cruise passengers wouldn’t venture because the tide was so high it had flooded the carpark, but we found a welcome at the Bay Gardens Resort with comfortable loungers, crashing surf, cheap beers, an excellent lunch and a great massage in a muslin-curtained cabana on the beach from a girl who did more for my aching shoulder in 20 minutes than I could expect from a month of physiotherapy.

Of all the islands we’ve visited, St Lucia’s the first one I’d think of for a future holiday, so it’s been a useful exercise and possibly saved thousands in airfares, to know I wouldn’t again want to visit so many others.

St Kitts is pretty rundown, all the formerly British-administered islands seem to be, and the weather was overcast and rainy, so the promised carnival in the afternoon got cancelled and I was glaid I had ducked out of the 7-hour sailaway to Nevis. I did have an amble round scruffy Basseterre, the capital, where a presidential election seemed to be in progress, the bright red or yellow banners of the rival parties fluttering from telegraph poles and paint-peeling buildings.

In the ship, the preparations for New Year’s Eve are fervid, with half the crew apparently up ladders rigging equipment for a massive ‘balloon drop’.

For me, this falls deeply into the ‘why bother’ category since I never quite understand the fuss made over the change in date from Dec 31 to Jan 1. I’m feeling edgy at cocktails which is made worse by the provision on the tables of rattles and squeakers which the entire dining room begins to trumpet from 9.45pm onwards. I also find myself becoming irritated with people whose company I’ve enjoyed on every other evening, so it’s clearly the shadow of the night affecting my mood, although Louis did have too much to drink too early and became a bit incoherent as his attention span dwindled to nanoseconds.

Just before midnight we paraded down to the Queen’s room and for once it wasn’t mis-named as we raised more than a few eyebrows by dancing in same-sex pairs although no-one dared to say anything out loud. Since this was also captured on video by the official photographers, I look forward to seeing whether it will feature in future Cunard advertising.

After the midnight countdown, the gang plan to take over the G32 night-club, a space reminiscent of commercial discos from the mid-80’s before the advent of laser light or digital sound, it’s pretty awful. I go back to the cabin about 12.30 to get some cooler air and sit on the bed for ten minutes ... then the next thing I know it’s 3.45am so perhaps I missed some fun, or possibly escaped the meltdown.

Either way, in the morning I’m brighter and more clear-eyed than most of the ship and enjoy a comparatively early breakfast and the fact the decks are all but deserted. The view is of deep turquoise water dotted with yachts and I set out to explore the last island.

St Thomas is arguably the best-kept outpost in the Caribbean with neat beaches and decent-looking houses, since it’s run as a US state and everything’s in reasonable repair and seems to work. I suspect the cost of living is therefore comparatively high although this is mainly on the evidence of being charged $7.50 for a banana daiquiri at one of the stops on the tour. It majors in duty free sales and the whole of the city centre is so completely given over to diamond, emerald, gold, perfume and liquor stores that you wonder how on earth the locals shop for food and essentials.

Still, a cocktail on the sunny terrace of a Plantation Great House is not a bad way to start the year, even at $7.50, and I reflect on my good fortune at being able to do it.

THE EMPTY CHAIR

2009-12-30T15:26:00.002Z

There’s usually no shortage of company for breakfast or lunch, and there’s always the optional madness of the random seating assignment at a shared table, but once or twice I’ve asked for a window seat and a table to myself.

I might catch up with some reading, but mostly I find my thoughts drifting and occasionally focus on the chair opposite and wonder who, in my ideal world, might fill it. This is infinitely harder than knowing who you’d like on the other side of the bed, because it’s assumed that the person opposite is your long-term partner and, at my age, one might say ‘for life’ which is a challenge both to the potential holder of the position, and to oneself.

I can’t do it.

I’ve combed through the various lists of people I keep filed in the dusty card index of my cerebellum and no obvious candidate from either current friends, past lovers, facebook, the dead, or even fantasy fucks makes it to the short list.

Hugh Jackman, at a pinch, but I’m sure we’d get bored of each other eventually. Deefa, my late cocker spaniel, runs him a close second.

I guess Deefa with his characteristics of constantly looking adoringly at you, and being willing to lick you almost anywhere is a better qualification for the other side of the bed than for the table where you’d like at least a bit of unstrained conversation beyond the one-sided ‘sit’ and ‘get down’.

So I look around the restaurant and see how other tables are faring. The couples (male and female mostly of course) divide into two types: those who maintain a low-voltage constant bickering, he trying to make conversation by discussing the itinerary for the day, she using it as a chance to deal the low blow of reprimand that ‘we’ve been through this already in the cabin’ and building up a store of resentment to use as a sexual fire-blanket for later, and those for whom silence is the safer option, each focusing fifteen degrees to port or starboard to avoid the other’s direct gaze over eggs and cold toast.

That’s no way to live. Most of them stay cemented for the practicalities of house, children and suburban respectability, but none seem to be actively enjoying each other’s company. Women form instant bonds at shared tables through their mutual eye-rolling at the perceived behaviour of their respective husbands. Why is it considered so normal to complain about your partner on first meeting another’s? If you don’t like him, divorce him, or chuck the sad bastard over the side – but I think there’s an element of reverse psychology in operation here, that (some) married women maintain a steady trickle of criticism of their husbands as a barrage to resist any questioning of their own role.

Even when ballroom dancing, surely one of the best ways for a couple to express their mutual affection and synchronicity, the men stare over the women’s heads and pilot them round the floor like they were steering a particularly recalcitrant shopping trolley round Asda.

Where are the intelligent, angular, lively alpha-couples you’d find on stage or screen? A sharp-witted Harvard professor and his publisher partner, such as you’d get in a Neil Simon comedy? A successful Cotswolds businessman and his Aga-fiddling wife from a Joanna Trollope novel? Not on this ship, over-run as it is with peevish lower-middle-class English readers of the Daily Mail, rounding the final bend in a lifetime’s marital toleration.

I wonder what happens when they retire to their cabins, he reaching for his Dick Francis and she for her P D James as they seek escape from reality into the pages of a thick novel from the ship’s Library. These people are mostly no older than me, so how did their sexuality die so much earlier?

So on balance, I wouldn’t thank you for many of the men on board, attached or single. And I’m becoming less and less convinced that there’s ‘someone’ for each of us.

I have a lot of friends, and I could fill the Albert Hall with acquaintances, but whilst I think I’m blessed to be so readily surrounded with amiable people, sometimes the emotional loneliness is painful.

And on warm nights when the full moon climbs ever higher in the inky sky over the Caribbean and the breeze and the scent of the sea sweeps over me, it’s all but unbearable that there’s no-one to share this.

Oh Island in the Sun, Willed to me by my father’s hand ...

2009-12-28T22:09:00.001Z

Good old Harry Belafonte. I think that was one of the first records I ever owned.

I was quite looking forward to our visit to Barbados, having heard so much about it from my father who used to visit frequently both for the Test Matches, and for Sharon the Bajan cocktail waitress he was knocking off in the hotel where he regularly stayed. When he was terminally ill, I had to phone her to see how serious was the relationship from her side, in case she wanted to see him, or come to the funeral. She sounded like Bob Marley on the phone.

It wasn’t serious and even though just before we had him sectioned under the Mental Health Act my father was changing his Will in her favour, I’ll never know for sure whether Sharon’s then seven-year old daughter Chantelle is actually my half-caste half-sister. She must be 21 now, funny if I’ve seen her walking about and not known it.

We took a touted tour from the dockside, but it was a desultory experience and at least a couple of the people on the bus were deeply strange, including a very very elderly, very infirm German Jewish gent with the dirtiest crocheted yarmulke I’ve ever seen pinned to his greasy pate with rusting clips. He clamped David into a window seat and was stubbornly reluctant to move when we got to photo stops so after the first we squeezed ourself three to a seat to avoid moving him. He exhibited almost no signs of life until the allotted two hours of the tour was over when he began to punch and kick at the side of the bus to attract the driver’s attention that he wanted to get back to his ship, cleverly titled ‘Mein Schiff’. It’s a low-budget German cut-and-shut made from a converted car ferry with bolted-on balconies and which seems to be following us around from port to port sniffing our sternpipe like a lost Schnauzer.

Also in the back seats were a couple from Massachusetts who seemed educationally sub normal despite being about to celebrate their 41st wedding anniversary. He read aloud every sign we passed, however banal, including ‘Kentucky Fried Chicken’ which seemed to crop up half a dozen times. Perhaps she was illiterate. He also had completely evenly brown teeth which is something you don’t see often, certainly not in States where they put fluoride in the water.

What we saw of Barbados, at least as guided by our driver, was a series of houses built for low-income workers, a glimpse of the deserted Sandy Lane Hotel and Country Club where a pugnacious waitress tried to throw us out, a couple of distant views of coastline, and a ride through the scary downtown centre of Bridgetown where I would certainly not want to stroll after nightfall. Although we’d been offered the option of visiting the beach, we all came back to the ship for lunch and a bit of less traumatic sunbathing.

St. Lucia tomorrow. Must get up and just go to beach, bugger the tours of the island.

RUBBER RING

2009-12-28T22:07:00.002Z

SUNDAY DECEMBER 28, St. George’s, Grenada

I sleep VERY badly. Something ‘important’ keeps waking me and I have the overwhelming impression I have forgotten to do something vital, something for which a large number of other people are also depending on me. This happens three or four times and in the middle of the night I even find a pen and paper to write down what I think is the solution to this pressing problem. In the morning I find I’ve written ‘Griffin’ and ‘McGiffen’ which makes no sense whatever.

So I’m fairly thick-headed when I drag myself out of bed at 8am and open the curtains to see Grenada where I’m scheduled to go River Tubing. Actually, it’s a lot of fun if not very challenging as we are bussed to one of the highest points of the island and a dozen funny and friendly local guys load us into our bright yellow inflated inner-tubes for a sort of theme park ride down the very gentle bubbles of the local Balthazar River. The water’s quite low, and most of us are above average weight, so there’s a lot of chances for them to dislodge us from the rocks. One suburnt tattooed and fat idiot from the Midwest keeps falling in but as the river’s barely three feet deep there’s unfortunately no damage apart from the sight of his flabby white butt cleft when at one moment he loses his baggy shorts.

Grenada’s much nicer than I remember it from seven years ago when I stayed for two weeks. For a country of only 300,000 population, independent from Britain now for 35 years, I’m surprised how it survives and maintains a sizeable international airport, three hospitals and a University with medical, veterinary and academic faculties - and has managed to rebuild substantially after the 2004 Hurricane Ivan devastated much of the island. I’m puzzled how many students the University can have, even if 5% of the total population go that would only be about 500 eligible 18-21 year olds at any one time.

Again, the soft option is an afternoon on deck and in the best sunshine we’ve had so far I take advantage of it including a bit of swimming but my shoulder (what I think is a rotator cuff injury, but only from internet diagnosis rather than seeing a real doctor) is a bit painful and I have to float instead.

To ease my shoulder a bit I use one of the Jacuzzis at the back of deck 8, and am soon joined my another man about my age wearing what look like swim shorts but as he squats on the edge of the tub, I see it’s actually constructed like a skirt with no divider or leg holes and I therefore have a clear view of his personal equipment aimed at me like a small, but visibly loaded, cannon. I get out.

This evening 16 of us are booked in the ‘posh’ a la carte restaurant Todd English, apparently a famous chef in his native Boston and popular on US television, but I can see why Cunard are romancing Gordon Ramsay to give his global branded blessing to the signature restaurant on their newest ship.

David does the dividing of the group and claims for his table the three ‘birthday boys’ from Philadelphia, dapper and totally lovely Hal who is amazingly 83 but looks about 60. Fred, the elder of the ‘couple’ who turns 59 today and his puckish partner Chris who will be 36 in two days. Akjan and I are at the ‘other’ table but are delighted because we’ve got the naughtier group including the wickedly sardonic ‘Jersey Boys’ Louis and George, and the fun couple from Le Meridien in Montreal, Daniel and Marc, as well as the power lesbians.

Fred and Chris disturb me. Anyone who knows me will be aware I have had no fear of cross-generational relationships since there’s more than thirty years between me and Sam, but the body language and actual language between these two is unnerving. I’m pleased to learn from power lesbian psychologist Bianca that it disturbs her, too.

Whenever you have a conversation with Chris, say mentioning what a pleasant day it is, he’ll involve the topic of his partnership, as in “yes, what a lovely day to spend ashore with my gorgeous husband”. They are forever touching and kissing each other like newlyweds, or at least Chris is since it’s 90% his initiation and Fred, I think, indulges him. I’m sure he’s a product of a broken or abused home and is overcompensating with the need for constant reassurance and validation, but he’d be a happier homo if he could just relax and enjoy what seems a stable and mutually committed relationship approaching its third anniversary, rather than make such a twitchy feature of his attachment.

There's conjecture about which came first, Chris’s constant reiterations of his devotion to Fred, or Fred’s multi-million dollar sale of the ambulance business he used to own, but that’s just me being a cynical old witch. Well, me, David, Akjan, George, Louis, Bianca, Sue, Daniel and at least a couple of the Bobs so that’s a cynical old coven really.

Apparently it happened long before they met, but that doesn't spoil a good gossip.

In the champagne bar afterwards Mel, the elderly Jewish yenta, flirts with the undeniably gorgeous and totally fey gay Hungarian barman Csada, whom he has apparently also waylaid on the streets of Brooklyn during Csada’s days off ashore. I make a mental note to talk to Mel some time about what fills his life apart from cruising, booking cruises and mentally undressing the hired help.

I have the recurrent bad dream again, waking several times with the pressure of the uncompleted task. The third time is about 5.30 when I’m so convinced I’ve remembered accurately what it is and what I have to do about it in the morning that I go calmly back to sleep.

Of course when I wake for real at 8, I’ve completely forgotten it.

BOXING DAY

2009-12-28T22:06:00.000Z

Saturday December 26, Willemstad

We park, or moor, or whatever it’s called in Curacao on the Southern edge of the Caribbean and barely 50 miles off the coast of Venezuela. I’m quite early off the ship, again hoping for an internet cafe but the one I find is locked and barred and, bizarrely, also labelled the Colombian Embassy.

Instead I take a sightseeing tour being touted for $15 (and therefore about a quarter what the ship charges for something similar) and several of our gang are also signed up so it’s a nice ride round the colourful Dutch houses of Willemstad, and on to the highlands and a view of the ‘other’ side of the island known as Spanish Water. Our guide is informative and we get lots of facts and figures about the Curacao taxation, education, judicial, government and political system none of which I retained long enough to repeat here except that tax is a flat 5%, so heaven knows how they run a country on it – must be subsidies from the Dutch government keep it afloat.

There’s a little sales break at a Curacao liqueur distillery (although with just one stainless steel vat it’s about as much a working distillery as my back bedroom) and a couple of photo opportunities before I’m happy to return to the ship and an afternoon in the sun. We weigh anchor (see, I’m picking up the jargon) about 2pm and it’s just so pleasant to sit by the rail and hear the sea splosh past and feel the breeze from the movement of the ship.

To be honest, I don’t need ports.

THE QUEEN’S SPEECH

2009-12-28T22:04:00.000Z

CHRISTMAS DAY

Friday 25 December, at sea

Up quite early and down to help marshal the group for our big breakfast – we’ve managed to gather 28 participants and I need to do quite a bit of traffic management to ensure that people sit at tables where they’ll get along with their neighbours, for example ensuring the Chinese guys who speak little English get some Canadians with whom they can chat in French. Only about four of us opt for a glass of champagne but my morning is considerably brightened by the Perrier Jouet and the fact that we have our two favourite serving staff – Giorgy and the very beautiful Maya who everyone keeps saying should be promoted from stewardess to waitress. It’s a terribly layered hierarchy in the restaurant, there seem to be about seven tiers of job title.

A few circuits of the walking deck and it’s time for the Queen’s Christmas Message, scheduled for 12.20pm. The start of the broadcast is badly damaged by the clod who is the captain of this tugboat broadcasting his position and weather announcements over the first few minutes of the Queen. He cuts off very abruptly, presumably because someone got to to him to tell him there’d be a mutiny if he didn’t shut the fuck up. He’s arse-numbingly boring at the best of times, but this gaffe could have got him lynched.

Actually, Her Maj wasn’t on top form and I didn’t think it was one of her greatest hits. Lots about the Commonwealth as usual, including how she’s convinced it’s so relevant to young people. Perhaps she should chat a bit more to those in the UK rather than the lickspittles she’s introduced to in staged walkabouts on a state visit to Umbongo.

We have to bring forward our nightly cocktail party to 6pm because at 7 it’s the ‘spectactular’ Christmas Concert in the Royal Court Theatre. Perhaps because I’ve performed in quite a few Christmas Concerts, I can see the cracks in this one and whilst the costumes and production values are good, the singing’s a bit ragged and the programme has a hastily-assembled end-of-term feel about it combining some performed items with the audience standing to sing O Come All Ye Faithful, Edwina Currie fluffing her lines in ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, and an absolutely excruciating downshifted and high-note-excised version of ‘O Holy Night’ on dry ice and hydraulic platforms.

The Entertainments Director introduces the “orchestra” for instrumental variations on ‘We Three Kings’ but it’s so brassy, discordant and out of time that it’s obvious these are random musicians culled from pit bands rather than the Royal Philharmonic, and most of them peer so desperately at the sheet music it’s clear they’ve had insufficient rehearsal together. Having a conductor might have helped, too.

But again the audience love it, so it must be just me.

And so to Christmas Dinner, where the options of course include Turkey and Christmas Pudding which are banqueting-standard but at least I didn’t have to make them myself. No sprouts, though, shame. Our ‘Secret Santa’ presents are distributed and everyone’s made a great effort. There are some hilarious but tacky t-shirts with slogans, a pack of pornographic playing cards, and a mint-chocolate flavour oral anaesthetic for people who have difficulty deep-throating, although no-one at the table admits to needing it. I’m relieved and pleased to get a rather lovely mug with maps and motifs of the Caribbean which I’ll certainly carry home. But it was all good fun, and the surrounding tables look a bit envious which is always a bonus.

As usual, we’re among the last to leave the Britannia Restaurant and emerge to find the corridors choked with people, as the chefs unveil their massive midnight buffet featuring ice sculptures and vegetables, fruit, fish and cake which have been carved, teased and tweaked into semblances of flowers, birds and cornucopia. Can’t see the point, really, since the second sitting has just eaten, so only the terminally greedy and those who dined at 6pm are even remotely hungry. But there are plenty of people piling their plates as I pass by on my way to bed.

CHRISTMAS EVE, ST MAARTEN

2009-12-24T16:12:00.005Z

Thursday 24 December

I don’t sleep too well and am awoken just after 7 for the second time by small children in the neighbouring cabin clanging about on their balcony. I know it’s Christmas, and small children are excitable but this is Deck 12 not the playroom and I call the Purser’s office who promptly send someone to remonstrate with the parents.

It’s been quiet since.

We moor in half-Dutch half-French territory of St. Maarten at the northern end of the Windward Islands at about 8 and from my side of the ship it’s a picture postcard of blue skies, fluffy white cloud, a green mountain and a turquoise sea. From the other, it looks like a car-park as there are five cruise ships in town for the day.
I’m posting this in a sweet upstairs internet cafe above the predictable tourist shops in Phillipsburg the capital of the Dutch side of the island, and where the overhead fans, rickety furniture and kindly gossiping local staff feel much more genuinely Carib than anything I've experienced so far.

I do my best to look around the town, but it’s all jewellery shops and tourist tat and the nearby beach is narrow and crowded, plus it’s not sunny. I consider taking a cab to Sunset Beach where the airport runway is so close to the sand you can almost reach up from your sunbed to touch the Boeings as they land, but www.flightstats.com tells me the only ‘interesting’ arrival is a Corsair A330 due in less than an hour, and the taxi drivers say it could take 45 minutes or more in traffic, so I give up and head back to the ship just as it starts to rain.

Because it’s too late for proper lunch, I venture into the hideous ‘King’s Court’ self-service restaurant. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t expect to pay thousands of dollars for a cruise and then queue up with a tray for cafeteria meals like a motorway service area – but a surprising number of people do. Among them are Jody and Mr. Jody (someone has reminded me his name is Brian) who I don’t recognise because (a) she’s been in the rain and her formerly-straightened hair is a nest of ratty corkscrews and (b) she’s wearing what looks like a brown baby doll nightdress over sagging swimwear. We chat whilst passing along the servery and I am so unnerved by their proximity that I put tomato soup on my vegetables instead of gravy. They move off, but with what I can only think is a pang of guilt she returns to ask if I would like to sit with them.

I’d rather read my biography of Julie Walters, and say so.

Julie keeps me amused most of the afternoon, then it’s time to glam up for dinner. I go to the Christmas Carols in the grand lobby and join in the community singing which is feeble but greatly enlivened by seeing so many carefully coiffed and dressed dowagers caught out by the fake snow machine. I predict a lot of claims for dry cleaning bills in the morning.

Pre-dinner drinks are lively, our gay social group has swollen to almost thirty and the banter sharpens as we get to know each other. Dinner itself is a bit flat by comparison, no-one’s really had a good time ashore, but after confirming our arrangements for the Big Gay Breakfast tomorrow with Yolanta the lovely Polish deputy Maitre ‘D, David and I have a nightcap in the Chart Room where he flirts pretty hard with the head barman who’s pleasant but unresponsive. And straight, so something of a wasted effort.

OLA, TORTOLA

2009-12-24T16:09:00.002Z

Wednesday 23 December

We anchor in a wide bay off Tortola, the largest of the British Virgin Islands but still barely the size of Malta and with only 17,000 population. I’ve booked a tour but it’s not till afternoon so I don’t take the tender ashore till about 11 when I hope to find an internet cafe. I walk the scruffy streets of the capital Road Town for a hot hour without finding one, and with little else on offer - the cruise staff let me take a slightly earlier excursion.

We start with a boat ride out to the smaller islands surrounding, and it’s nice to be on the waves at a level you can feel you’re on a boat. The young Tortolan ‘captain’ and his assistant are funny and charming and they keep up a jolly commentary about the islands we pass, but nothing’s really close enough to see in detail and once the rum punch comes out, it’s just a pleasant trip round the bay. About 3pm we disembark at the western end of the island in a yacht marina called Soper’s Hole (I have to tell you also that the suburbs of Road Town are called John’s Hole and Free Bottom but I don’t manage to photograph the signs) and are somewhat abandoned there for an hour before open-sided island buses arrive to take us on the land part of the trip.

By this time it’s overcast and hazy and I’m bored so the journey back is dreary, and not improved by the fact the woman next to me, from Aberdeen, is sneezing and wheezing into an increasingly wet clump of tissue. I hope it’s hay fever rather than a cold, but I spend the journey with my head out of the window inhaling diesel fumes rather than her germs. It takes forever and we only just make it back for the last tender to the ship.

It’s probably a taste of things to come, and inescapable that sleepy Caribbean islands aren’t really very interesting unless they have great beaches or natural features like rainforest. I resolve to re-examine the tickets I’ve booked for future excursions and cancel the ones which are just coach tours of the island.
I have a pre-dinner drink with Jeff and Canadian David in a high-ceilinged bar called the Chart Room where they are hugely excited to spot Helen Mirren at an adjacent table.

After quite a bit of ‘no, don’t turn round’ I get a chance to see the lady herself and have to disappoint them by confirming it’s not Dame Helen. Unless she’s put on twenty pounds and rinsed her blonde hair in a mop bucket.

At dinner, I organise ‘Secret Santa’ and hope I’ve rigged it so someone with a bit of imagination gets my name.

HERE COMES THE SUN

2009-12-24T16:03:00.002Z

Tuesday 22 December

At breakfast this morning I’m appalled at the manners of some of the passengers on neighbouring tables and grateful at least that among our group there’s absolutely no issues of questionable dress, manners or personal hygiene.

Some people have no idea how to speak to the staff. The Welshman at the table behind me, his voice roughened with cigarettes and coal dust at the dog-end of a lifetime of hard physical work raises his voice to mineshaft drilling levels but throughout the meal never uses the word ‘please’ or ‘thankyou’ and expresses his every requirement in the ‘I want’ phrasing. The people at the next table over are self-proclaimedly ‘from the Midlands’ which you know means somewhere desperate like Walsall or Smethwick because if they were from anywhere with less knife-crime they’d boast about it, and I’d wager their last upscale dining experience was probably in the local equivalent of the Crossroads Motel.

Their Malaysian server is polite and listens carefully, but with such strong regional accents and idioms even I have difficulty making out everything they say, and it’s understandable if sometimes the staff don’t get the food orders exactly right.

I think there’s a bit of an undeclared hierarchy operating in the dining room because this less-popular area under the sweeping staircase - where I’ve deliberately chosen to have breakfast today because there’s a Russian/Indonesian tag team of waiters who I like because they’re unfailingly helpful, friendly and efficient – seems to be filled mainly with the sort of people who bought their cruises from advertisements in the Daily Express. It’s quite different in the wing where our group is allocated for dinner, we’re surrounded by a more international clientele, and people who don’t necessarily look like they need a wash.

I have to compact this, otherwise we’ll all get bored and in fact after such a busy day on Monday I’m glad to scan the ship’s programme and find there’s very little I want to do, except I need some exercise so I make several circuits of the walking deck, interestingly during the crew’s boat drill where they spend a lot of time standing about being counted, so I use Volodymir as a handy lap-counter (three times past him makes a mile) and suitably warmed-up by the walking go to a simple line dancing class. This is far more enjoyable than I expected it to be, and I remember groups I joined in London and wonder if it’s time to have another go. Makes my legs ache, though, which is probably a good thing.

But otherwise, it’s a quiet day, catching up with the blogging and - oh the bliss – enjoying a first hour in the sun.

After dinner we meet some of the other ‘Friends of Dorothy’ for the cabaret show in the theatre, a song-and-dance spectacular featuring everything from the tango to the Charleston. The dancers work extremely hard and whilst most of the team is Ukranian and the girls look like they chose this career as a fallback alternative to mail-order bride, it’s slick, colourful and engaging and Akjan as a professional dancer is particularly impressed. The four singers are English, and average, but the audience seems to love it.

Still not Shirley Bassey, though.

ALL AT SEA

2009-12-24T15:56:00.003Z

Monday 21 December

With the balcony door propped open and the sound of the sea roaring beneath, I sleep perfectly and am only woken at 8.30 by Volodymir, the tallest waiter on the ship and surely the product of a Transylvanian laboratory experiment, demanding entry with a tray of tea.

This is the first of two full days at sea and the ship’s programme is rammed with appointments every half-hour like a dentist’s but most of which are of the bridge and dancing varieties. However there’s more than enough to fill the day and I start with a seminar on getting the most out of your digital camera. Like so much organised on cruise ships this is a thinly disguised sales pitch and the ‘lecturer’ is the young German manager of the camera shop. I don’t learn much and slip away before the end to get a seat in the Royal Court Theatre for the principal guest lecturer.

I have to say that as cruise ship entertainment headliners go, Edwina Currie is no Shirley Bassey but she does give a funny and candid talk about politicians and the way they lie for a living. Her husband, a swarthy former Scotland Yard detective, sits across the aisle from me in cheap shoes and overcast eyebrows. I can see now why she slept with John Major.

Next, I do something really brave and go to the "Solo Travellers’Get-together with Social Hostess Freda". Freda’s a toughie, but I guess you need to be in that job, and the free champagne has made the solos vociferous. They are uniformly over sixty, all but three are women and I’d say one of the other two men is gay, so the remaining one’s in for a busy fortnight. I don’t see a kindred spirit among them and then it turns out that two of the men are the ‘Gentleman Host’ dance partners. One is so especially vile I can’t stand closer than two yards from him for fear of contamination from his breath, and the other is the dark side of seventy and not particularly steady on his feet so I’m not sure how he’ll fare in the rumba.

Lunch seating is not pre-assigned and you can opt to have a table to yourself or share a larger one. I choose conviviality and am the eighth person at a table containing three residents of a retirement home in New Jersey, two Germans who claim to have lived in Surrey but clearly didn’t pick up the language during their time, and a couple from Scotland of which the wife is pleasant but the tattooed husband prefers to trade football team names with the man from Hamburg.

It’s not a conversation in which I can really participate but that’s irrelevant because the table is dominated by the woman from the mental, sorry, retirement home (the other two are men, one of whom doesn’t speak and the other who is very elderly, badly shaven by a third party with a very unsteady hand, and drooling threatens to rest his head on my shoulder) who keeps up a bright patter about the quality of the soup, the lightness of the batter on her seafood plate and her experiences at theatre in her locality where the tickets for seniors are $8 and the performances so much better than Broadway. She looks and sounds exactly like Roseanne’s mother from the sitcom. Bev, I knew I’d get the name eventually.

I have a very nice boeuf bourguignon but honestly I could cut my wrists with the butter knife. When I share this thought sotto voce with the Scots lady she tells me the most effective method is to slice along the vein rather than to hack laterally across the wrist which is how I would have planned it. So at least I learned something useful and possibly gained a co-conspirator in a suicide pact.

Straight after lunch it’s in to the world’s only Planetarium-at-sea (yes, I can hear you ask ‘why’ but I don’t know the answer either) where Robert Redford, when I can hear him over the whining of American geriatrics who can’t operate the lever which reclines their seats, tells me how our moon was formed in a week from what was basically clusters of boiling spatial waste. When I think of the romantic evenings I’ve seen it hanging low over the river, or one spectacular summer night in Cardiff Bay, I’m sure he’s wrong.

Outside the overheated Planetarium where I had sat next to a woman with asphyxiating perfume, I cool down and ponder my fate in a corridor lounge when I am scooped up by Akjan and David to go to afternoon tea in the Queen’s Room. It’s quite lovely, and we continue together to the meeting of ‘Friends of Dorothy’ in the Commodore Club.

This daily open-to-all meeting for gay travellers is held immediately outside the private room we had our cocktail on the first night, this room now being occupied by the ‘Friends of Bill W’, the recovering alcoholics and members of AA. As each group eyes its neighbour through the glass, it’s unclear which thinks the other is more strange.

About 20 people arrive during the half-hour assigned for mingling, and again they are mostly couples but among them an attractive and outgoing pair of women from Provincetown on Cape Cod, Bianca is a Psychology academic and Sue a real estate broker, and as they travelled on the identical cruise last Christmas (and have already booked for next) they’re helpful authorities on where to go and what to do. The other couples, they’re almost all paired off, are too similar to pick out individuals but I did like Bob who’s a head teacher from a high school outside Toronto, although his partner bears a striking resemblance to Liberace, and there’s a sweet motherly Jewish guy with bright bridgework and rainbow-coloured jewellery who works so hard to bring people together I thought at first he might be on the ship’s social staff but it’s just his personality. He’s also a loyal Cunard customer with lots of ideas on how to get a bargain for repeated bookings, although as this seems to involve selecting a cabin whose view is obscured by a lifeboat, I’m not totally focused on the objectives.

Apart from a weasel type who works the room promoting his own travel company, everyone plays nice and the average age is about 10% younger than the median for the ship. When David and I compare notes later it’s clear we’ve spotted the same people who are lively enough to join for drinks so our 7.30pm cocktails in Commodore Club become a chummy landmark in the cruising days ahead.

At dinner we meet our new waiter, a handsome Goan called Eugene who proves to be much more efficient and engaging than the first girl, and our table visibly relaxes.

Cocktails and dinner were very social, it’s the first dress-up night, and perhaps we have a bit more to drink than previously. As we’re now level with Florida, it’s warm enough to stroll outside afterwards and since we’re on the same deck, Kiwi David walks me back to my cabin door where we kiss goodnight.

This is so sweetly old-fashioned I don’t quite realise what’s happened until I’m inside and getting ready for bed. Suffice it to say that I like him a lot, but I know it won’t go down the romantic road. I think it’s one of those occasions where you have to decide if someone should be a one-night stand or a potential longer-lasting friend, and I think we could be good friends.

But it was nice to be asked.

SNOW PATROL

2009-12-24T15:45:00.004Z

Sunday 20 December

I wake hoping for a white-out but although more snow fell in the night it’s a white shawl over midtown’s grey stone shoulders, not a wedding cake. In the deep blue dawn light an early taxi blinks along Lexington Avenue so I see the city’s up and moving and worry less about getting to the pier. A last breakfast with Curt in Oscar’s at the Waldorf – overpriced at nearly $50 a head – then I bundle up and head for Brooklyn where the Queen Mary is berthed. It’s quite difficult to get a cab, most have their off-duty lights on, and I notice while waiting as a limo is loaded with a desiccated Jewish couple and sixteen pieces of luggage that their labels reveal a cabin assignment seven decks below mine. I feel smug but also apprehensive as the bellman also commented that it was amazing I was travelling for sixteen days with only two cases. Do I have enough clothes, or the right ones?

My taxi driver has been in the city only a week, from Pakistan, but hopefully he has some experience of Himalayan snow conditions as we slither towards the FDR drive from which it’s a clearer run to Brooklyn. Cunard have abandoned the traditional piers in the Hudson in favour of a ‘cruise terminal’ across from Governors Island but the run-down warehouses and businesses which fringe the streets of the district of Red Hook confirm that this is still the working freight and trawler port, and whilst the shed through which we are processed in long tedious lines is not quite scented with fish, it’s only an air-freshener away from Cannery Row.

It’s an opportunity to size up the passenger contingent, and I’m not overly impressed. Immediately around me are lots of low-rent Brits disgruntled that their flights out of the UK have been delayed and they lost opportunities for shopping in Manhattan. One was particularly aggrieved not to have been able to get some item from the Harley-Davidson store in Times Square. I don’t tell her it closed. The nicest person I meet in the terminal is the check-in clerk, a smartly made-up black woman in her early sixties, from Aruba, who tells me her life history including living in London where her landlady was Hattie Jacques. She flirts shamelessly and holds my hand a long time when returning my passport. Unfortunately, she’s a contractor and not working on board and I feel I’ve lost a friend as I head for more and emptier corridors and on to the ship.

No band, no fanfares, but Asian stewards in Santa hats point the way to the lifts and a Brooklyn glee club trills piercing carols in the stairwell. From the outside the ship seemed huge but streamlined – this is a transatlantic liner rather than a cruise ship and the structure’s slimmer and deeper than those floating barges, and it doesn’t look – quite –like a block of council flats resting on its side. Inside, the designers have clearly been ‘inspired’ by the art deco motifs of the first Queen Mary, but the execution’s radically vulgar. Sure, there are brass rails and marine wood panelling but it’s all lacquered like a Korean piano and the too-bright carpets, theatrical lighting, high-reflectance gloss surfaces and plastic laminate artwork make the overall effect just Vegas.

I like my cabin, which I learn to call ‘stateroom’ – about 250 square feet so a bit bigger than my bedroom at home with blond wood fittings in what I first think is anigre veneer till I touch it, but it has pleasing lines and I particularly appreciate the design of the closets into which everything fits with room to spare. The bathroom’s small with the shower moulded into a curved wall and the shower head’s not powerful, but the view over the water to Manhattan and the statue of Liberty is stunning from my 12-th deck balcony, which has the advantage of being so far forward you can also check out the officers on the bridge.

I decide to be uncharacteristically diligent and put everything away with some sense of order and precision, but as one of my cases is among the last to arrive, this takes quite a lot of the afternoon and I’m still in mid-unpacking when it’s time for compulsory boat drill. I’ve gathered my overcoat, head covering, and life-jacket but not the enthusiasm for standing by a lifeboat whilst it’s ten below zero. My sweet cabin steward, from Luzon in the Philippines and who rejoices in the name of Elgin (or possibly that’s the badge they had available when he joined the crew) is cosily conspiratorial and tells me I could just watch it on TV instead.

He gives me a tour of the cabin’s facilities including how to use the phone to summon him by bleeper when ‘I come running’. He also tells me that if there’s anything I need during the voyage, specifically “if anything pops out” I’m to send for him. I think he means pops up, but he has a sideways glance which makes it teasingly ambiguous.

I give him my shoes to clean as a test of his devotion.

About 6.30 the phone rings and a deep deep voice announces itself as Jody, representing the gay tour company which assembled this onboard group, confirming my invitation to its initial cocktail party. There are eight people in the private room when I arrive sat around a long thin table on which you might place a coffin, but it turns out I’m the last – and further that the agency lied to us all about the numbers they had booked.

Jody, I’m amazed to discover, is a woman. At least now. But possibly always because she has with her a central-casting Midwestern-dullard husband in blue blazer, evvaprest slacks and a thin grey moustache. Whilst I think that on her own she’d be raucous with a bunch of gay men, together they lead us in a weepingly pedestrian conversation about the cities we come from and the ships we’ve sailed. No future activities, excursions, parties or adventures are discussed and as the dinner hour approaches Jody and Mr. Jody make a pretty speech that there will be another cocktail on the last night of the cruise, meanwhile they’re off to dine in a different restaurant from us for the duration of the voyage. Thank you and good night.

In a way, this welds the remaining not-so-magnificent seven into a self-supporting group and we further introduce ourselves at our nice round table by the windows in a pleasant side section of the Britannia Restaurant. We are two couples and three singles. Ages seem to range from 45 to 65 but all are sound in wind and limb and no-one’s conversationally shy. The singles have a bit more about them than the couples and I sense we will perhaps as a trio look out for each other. I particularly like David, a tanned fiftysomething New Zealander who’s an airline marketing manager which might one day be useful and whom I suspect despite his Gucci exterior has a dark side. This is later confirmed when he tells me the clubs he’s visited in London. Akjan, a tall elegant Uzbek now living in Toronto is a former ballet dancer turned hairdresser so has great posture and a superb dress sense with a clever range of designer spectacles which match his outfits and provide a notable feature on his smooth oval face.

The couples are older, and more conventional. And Canadian, there seems to be a lot of it about. Jeff is the most outgoing: tall, lean and white-haired with dancing, and possibly roving, Paul Newman blue eyes, he must have been devastatingly handsome when young. Since he also has the drier sense of humour, and is currently a substitute teacher he’s obviously channelling Dorothy Zbornak from The Golden Girls. His partner David is harder to pigeon-hole, he’s much quieter, and I suspect a little deaf: when he speaks it’s mainly about their cosy domestic life in Nova Scotia which he constantly describes as ‘really quite interesting’ as though it needs the reassurance.

The other pair are also fairly reserved, Paul doesn’t even mention it’s his 60th birthday until a waiter arrives with a cake and a raw vocal quartet. His partner Eric is originally Danish and still has a strong accent which makes some of his jokes hard to appreciate, but he’s certainly trying to join in and twinkles in his Jutlandish way. Although a long-standing couple, they live separately in New York.

We discuss the snow and tell banal stories about how we got to the ship – the Canadians drove taking three days, isn’t that interesting – and since several of them have been on the boat before, in this sort of group, I ask how we manage things like buying wine each night and a discussion ensues which separates the moderate-drinking retired couples from the working singles who are clearly keen on a glass or three, but the majority verdict driven by the couples is that everyone buys his own. We’ll see.

David and I try to collaborate on a bottle but our tastes are different and he chooses a Chianti whilst I’m pleased to find Frog’s Leap, a plummy Californian Zinfandel, on the wine list and order that. Apparently they’ll keep it for subsequent nights but I’ll have to neck it in two otherwise it will only be fit for salad dressing. It’s not until I get back to the cabin I reflect that $52 + 15% service + tip isn’t exactly a duty free bargain for something I used to buy for $18 when I lived in New York.

It’s OK but not a great night. The food is very average, plated like school dinners – if you went to a good enough school – and our waitress is flat-footed, charmless, slow and can only parrot the information she’s been trained to give us, she won’t engage in conversation. David and I are delegated (I see a pattern forming here) to represent the table’s complaints to management.

Which we do, and to his great credit Jamie the youngish English Maitre’D takes it all on the chin and promises us either a new location or at least new waiting staff for the morrow.

The ship’s clock moves forward an hour tonight so it’s now nearly 12 and we head separately to our beds.

It’s a start.

NEW YORK NEW YORK

2009-12-24T15:36:00.003Z

Saturday 19 December

In the New York Times at breakfast I spot an advert for a smart gents’ clothing chain having a one-day sale on the basis of ‘buy one get 2 free’ across its range. So guided by the hotel’s concierge I quickly locate the Madison Avenue branch and select some pairs of trousers to try on. Returning from the briefest foray out of a changing room to pick a different size, I find the door locked and an elderly Puerto Rican man inside with my coat, shoes, bag and belongings. I bang on the door and order him out and, in a line which is pure Karen Walker from Will and Grace, instruct him not to leave the store till I’ve checked my wallet.

I then neatly fold the stuff HE’s left in there and put it outside the door, finish my trying on and when I take my selection to the till am met by his lumpen wife, scowling and muttering disapproval at the way I evicted him. The attitude of native New Yorkers is quite infectious and I’m not sure if I’m surprised or faintly proud to hear myself ask her in a Bronx accent if one of the things she’s wanting for Christmas is a fat lip.

I meet my Baltimore friends Curt, Tom and Steve for lunch, and we’re joined by their friends Tim, Troy and Zach for our outing to A Little Night Music – sadly David was deterred by the snows, so we have a spare eighth ticket and there is a momentary frisson when we learn that Zach, who is an opera singer, has offered it to Renee Fleming.

Renee, it turns out, can’t make it and Curt sells the spare ticket to someone in the queue. There’s quite an air of ‘perpetual anticipation’ in the theatre, and for once even I feel it. The staging is the same as the production at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London and even the transition from a 200-seat initimate basement to the 1800-seat Walter Kerr theatre hasn’t damaged it. If anything, the sound’s better and the balance between the small orchestra and the cast has improved. The entrances of Angela Lansbury and Catherine Zeta-Jones are applauded, but not so much as to unbalance the piece.

Lansbury is outstanding, playing Madame Armfeldt as a richly alert observer of the ways of the world, and entirely credible as a past consort of dukes and princes. She finds all the comedy in the role but also the pathos at the end when she realises the significance of what she lost by abandoning her first love is very warm and real. She outshines Maureen Lipman as daylight doth a lamp.

Catherine Z-J isn’t half bad, either. She looks stunning, the high-waisted gowns and piled chestnut chignon suiting both her newly toned figure and her heart-shaped face, she has almost regained some of the wistful beauty of her early days in ‘The Darling Buds of May’. Like Lansbury, she’s far better at the comedy than the singing: her Desiree is coarser and less ladylike than Hannah Waddingham’s and she’s more believable as an old mate of Fredrik’s rather than as the love of his life. Although she sings carefully, she’s not fully in control and loses many of the word endings.

This is quite a gay audience – at interval, the queue for the men’s room is actually longer than the ladies’ - and there’s a real theatrical moment in the second half. The orchestra plays the first bars of ‘Send in the Clowns’ a few lines before she sings it, and there’s a ripple of anticipation as people think ‘here it comes ...’. At that exact moment, a woman about eight rows up in the Mezzanine unwraps a boiled sweet and with the most perfectly executed snap head-turn Broadway has ever seen, two hundred gay men swivel to stare at her as if to say ‘Of all the times you could do this ...’

The rest of the cast are more than adequate with the exception of a new-to-Broadway actress playing the virginal Anne who just isn’t up to standard. Leigh-Ann Larkin, so good as June in the Patti LuPone ‘Gypsy’ is outstanding as the provocative maid Petra, and her version of ‘I Shall Marry The Miller’s Son’ gets thunderous applause. We come out in high spirits, and celebrate variously with cocktails in Blue Fin, a brief chat with Catherine as she comes out of the stage door to welcome some cousin of hers from back home, and taking excited photographs of each other as the snow starts to fall. Sometimes, New York really is magical.

We’re invited to a drinks party at the Chelsea apartment of former TV anchorman Chris O’Donoghue who accompanies us to dinner in his wheelchair, an adventure in itself in the whirling snow, but a positive Winter Olympics event when we emerge from the restaurant into a full-on blizzard. Abandoning plans to meet friends in yet another bar in Chelsea because of the weather, Tim, Troy and I share a hilarious ride up an un-gritted Park Avenue in a yellow cab whose windows are totally iced over and no-one, not even the driver, can see where we are going. If we’d been sober, I think we’d have been genuinely scared but I am immensely relieved to reach the entrance of the hotel.

I do a bit of re-packing and start feeling genuinely excited about tomorrow. I may delete this later but the truth is I even did a little happy dance before going to bed.

Long Haul

2009-12-18T11:39:00.015Z

Usually calm and empty London City Airport is a zoo, with people encamped in the terminal like a casualty dressing station on the Somme.

Because of the early morning snow, most flights cancelled and the air's filled with announcements like "would passengers who WERE flying to Amsterdam please come to the desk behind the escalators to collect their luggage". Among this chaos, though, was a beacon: they had kerbside checkin for BA 001 to Noo Yoik and so I have been frisked and whisked to airside lounge where the snow's piled up against the windows but there does seem to be cleaning and fuelling activity going on around the BA plane although apart from a clapped out old Fokker (no, not me) it seems to be the only one on the tarmac.

It's a bright clear day so I'm not sure why a little white surface dusting has caused such meltdown. London City is quite a simple shed but BA have tricked out one gate-room to look like their classier lounges at Heathrow, although even without my interior design hat on I can see a lot wrong with it. For example there are exactly 32 armchairs which matches them one to a passenger and could be uncomfortable when everyone arrives. I think we're 28 booked today, so four spares one of which I am already defending with two bags and several magazines.

There are no desks or upright tables so everyone's using his or her laptop actually on his or her lap, as designed I guess. At least it keeps our knees warm in the cold. Having almost a master's degree in reading upside down I've already scanned the passenger list printed out on the counter to confirm there's no-one famous on boardm and certainly the dozen already assembled have no star status, although there ios a woman who looks a bit like Vogue editor Anna Wintour, but not very and she isn't barking Devil Wears Prada instructions to a cowering entourage so it can't be she.

Amazingly, there are children. I know BA have discounted this route massively from its headline £4,000 a ticket price but they don't look like a spectacularly wealthy family so I'm guessing it's an off-duty Captain and his brood. Another example, if any were needed, of how British Airways chucks money down the tubes. Must be BA staff, though, because the kids know how to behave, the approximately ten year old is now pouring Daddy a glass of champagne. He didn't learn that at state school.

Announcement: delayed to 2pm. Aircraft diverted to Heathrow early this morning and now being ferried over to City. Stupidly, they aren't planning to use the one already on the tarmac which is scheduled for the same route at 4.30pm. The boy in charge of the lounge says it's undergoing maintenance but since it's got the cleaners on board, seems unlikely. Have sent for management to explain itself.

Management turns out to be one middle-aged man in a bright yellow safety jerkin who won't expand any further on what 'maintenance' is required to the first plane, but his arrival coincides with that of the second A318 so we've now two to play with. As this one's been at Heathrow since 07.30 this morning you kind of wonder why they didn't clean and cater it before now, but with a skill borne of long experience BA staff are immune to rhetoric and sarcasm so there's no point in either and I begin to concentrate instead on the fact I'd quite like the toilet but it's upstairs the other side of security.

Captain arrives for reassuring chat/announcement and the delay is compacted to 45 minutes as we're shephereded on board. It really is a lovely plane, obviously everything is brand new but the seats are very nattily kitted out in dark brownish-black herringbone and encased in smooth white lacquer pods like something out of a John Wyndham novel, I feel as if I am being incubated for something. They're also much more adjustable than the conventional BA seats and it's easy to find a relaxing setting.

Like all BA flights, service is drink-led but since I'm peckish I'm more pleased to see the 'appetiser' served on this first sector to Ireland, which sounds delightful on the menu - sliced duck breast with celeriac, fig confit and something or other but which is frozen solid, I can barely get a fork into it and nor can the bony but smartly-dressed older lady the other side of the aisle who shouts at the crew 'it's like a fuckin' popsicle'.

Mine is replaced from one higher up the permafrost layer in the trolley and I quite enjoy it.

Flying low and slow over the brown wasteland of the West of Ireland it's easy to see why people refer to it as 'going back to the bog' and when we touch down at Shannon, I recall that this is an airport built for political reasons rather than because it's somewhere people want to fly to, or has a large catchment area of people who'd want to fly from it. Historically, it was a staging post between Europe and the oceanic crossing to Newfoundland which became redundant when aircraft developed range over 2000 miles, but why it's still in business is a mystery known only to the Irish Government and, I believe, the Russians who still use it substantially.

It's deserted. We small but intrepid band snake our way round its fourteen-foot wide corridors to a holding pen whilst our luggage is notionally cleared by customs and then through an empty hangar to the cheerful team of US Immigration officers who process us merrily but thoroughly before allowing us back on board. As we waited, the two pilots who had brought us on the one-hour flight from London passed through the terminal with a cheery wave - ready for a three-day layover on full pay and with access to Ireland's finest golf courses, before they resume duty for another flight to New York. Apparently this is because union rules prevent them from flying the whole nine and a half hour service without crew rest bunks in the aircraft.

We're so quickly back on board that the delay has almost evaporated and are further surprised when the new captain tells us by flying higher and faster we'll land almost an hour ahead of schedule. So much tutting and fuming wasted, then.

I fall asleep after take-off and am awakened by the scents of overcooked root vegetables ... I could be at home. The meals on this service are designed by TV-popular chef Laurence Keogh of 'Roast' restaurant in Borough Market but they're clearly produced in the same kitchens as the standard stuff and my dish is a typical BA two-ounce beef fillet with a nasty feathered cap of blue cheese, cooked-to-fluff mashed potato studded with gobbets of bacon, and the aforementioned dice of veg which combine the school-corridor stench of boiled swede with a layer of singeing. Purser (do they call BA ladies of a certain age that because of what they do with their lips) Sandra is apologetic but unsurprised and the lemon cream dessert is actually lovely.

Fast forward - including fast forwarding the movie I had to speed-watch to finish it in time for landing - and we're on the ground at JFK and despite a circuitous route to the exit and a long wait for luggage, my driver's already there and we're quickly our of the airport and into the stalled Friday evening traffic on the mis-named Long Island Expressway.

As we're ahead of schedule and I make it to the hotel by 6, I claim my lovely and heavily-discounted top-floor corner room at the Waldorf Towers although with its high ceilings, cornices, crested carpets, gilt mirrors and pastoral scene curtains so heavily fringed and swagged they could have come straight from La Scala, it's clearly the kind of room some American decorator thinks the Queen Mother would sleep in. There are three huge windows including one in the ornate bathroom with its fancy vanity, ruched blinds, bevelled mirrors and definitely the only gold-plated U-bend I have ever seen.

I walk the half dozen blocks to Times Square as briskly as possible in the sharpening cold, but hampered by the huge crowd at Rockerfeller Center where the gawkers and out-of-towners are queuing for Radio City Music Hall or to see the Christmas tree. At every avenue our way is hindered by New York’s finest controlling the pedestrian flow and I worry I won’t make it before the discount TKTS booth closes.

At the booth there are still plenty of choices of drama and musicals, and figuring a loud musical will keep me awake better than a play, I dicker between two or three and have my choice made easier by two knowledgeable theatre students offering free advice. Not only do they know the plots, cast, running times and review details of everything I ask about, they’re also up on row and seat numbers and when I buy a ticket for Ragtime from an elderly female scalper bundled up like a Russian street-sweeper, for $50, the students reassure me the tickets are genuine and the view is a good one. Which it is, right in the centre of the front mezzanine and ideal for this gig which is played out on three tiers of scenic gantries.
It’s an easy show and both the melodies and the staging are very fluid, blending the stories of Jewish, Irish and black migrants to New York State at the turn of the last century. The Irish hate the blacks, and the blacks all hate the whites, the whites look down on the poor and, in Tom Lehrer’s phrase, everybody hates the Jews. The music’s a bit repetitive and my attention drifts in the second half but is fully reclaimed when Christiane Noll delivers a pitch-perfect ‘Back To Before’, the quite literally eleven o’clock number.

Back at the hotel, I’m thinking of a hot bath and bed when the phone rings with an invitation to a nightcap with a friend from J P Morgan so I dash down to the ‘W’ hotel for a couple of cocktails and when I finally get back about 1.15am, I realise I’ve been up for 22 hours. It’s enough, and I sleep like a babe.

The Shipping Forecast

2009-12-17T13:32:00.015Z

This is me taking up the baton, or possibly the cudgels, of a friend from the States who has just blogged thirty-odd (some very odd) days at sea as a 'Gentleman Host' on a cruise liner from South Africa to Fort Lauderdale bearing, in Masefield's metre,

a cargo of Old Bags, Face-Lifts,
Deadwood, Bad-Hair and Cheap-Gin Gays.

Check him out at www.travelingwithphil.blogspot.com

As my sailing date is almost contiguous with the end of Phil's, I'm setting out with the best of intentions to chronicle the activities aboard the Queen Mary 2 in the Caribbean over Christmas and New Year. Although a paying passenger and without Phil's responsibilities of hosting the professionally difficult at dinner or being a taxi-dancer for geriatric corn-treaders, it could still be grim: I'm dreading the decorations and any forced festive jollity.

Currently the contents of my wardrobe are spread out on the bed, like a patient etherised upon a table (thank you T S Eliot) as I try to determine which of my threads can be successfully combined into 5 x black tie, 4 x semi-formal and 6 x elegant casual dinner outfits, the dragon-encrusted dinner jacket I had made overnight in Singapore in 2004 and which I am amazed to discover I can still wear without popping its buttons, a Venetian mask and enough cufflinks and baubles to barter with the Indians for another Manhattan, sufficient daywear to cover sightseeing, sailing, off-roading and whitewater tubing in various tropical locales where the 90% humidity can reduce a linen shirt to a rag in seconds.

There's fancy dress too: I had to pop out yesterday to buy a rhinestone eypatch for the Buccaneer Ball. I'm sure I'll be less Captain Blood and more like Bette Davis in The Anniversary.

It's further complicated by the fact my trip is preceded by two nights in New York, temperature minus 10 Celsius, and for the first day-and-two-nights aboard, the water surrounding the ship may be quite cold. Whilst I'm not expecting a Titanic-meets-iceberg re-enactment, I also need a warm coat and some jumpers.

Fortunately luggage may not be much of a problem since, despite its current disarray due to the threat of strike action, I'm on British Airways' pioneering new service from London City Airport five minutes from my house, direct to JFK. I am really looking forward to this, they use the smallest Airbus A318 and have installed just 32 sleeper seats instead of the 110 they normally ram inside the tube so there should be ample room for my steamer trunks, portmanteaux and hat boxes.

I fly tomorrow. More from the airport.

spare 1

2009-12-17T13:31:00.001Z

The Play What I Wrote ... part 1

2009-12-07T15:03:00.005Z

me hiding behind a double bass and trying to look happy.
And, yes, they are both men.

I don’t keep a lot of alcohol in the house. In fact, if I didn’t have a cold occasionally that required the addition of Irish whiskey to a hot Lemsip, I’d be almost teetotal. So why the other night was I sitting at the computer at two in the morning swigging a bottle of cooking sherry by the neck?

Trauma-induced memory loss: because after the disastrous panto dress rehearsal I had such an urgent desire to get instantly shitfaced that I downed a whole bottle of wine before going to the pub and knocking back pints. By the time I got home in a taxi, I’d forgotten that part of the evening.

Let’s start at the very beginning, as Julie Andrews – whose shadow has rather dogged my year thus far – was wont to trill. I sing with the London Gay Men’s Chorus. Mostly, I love it. Musically, they improve year on year and now are a really solid male voice choir which can put over a merry show tune with gusto but also turn its three hundred tonsils (they do come in pairs, don’t they?) to Verdi, Rutter and the odd madrigal or chunk of early music. And something in Welsh. Or Finnish. I am not exaggerating.

It’s this very virtuosity that makes it hard to present a thematic concert – they always want to show diversity of musical genres, so every production has to include jazz, blues, madrigal, pop and show tune. Several years ago a couple of members had the idea of wrapping the usual package with a pantomime as a Christmas theme. Since it’s hard to mix ‘It’s Behind You’ with the Coventry Carol, this was rejected at least twice - before, in the absence of any better idea, it failed to go down for the third time and was adopted as the 2009 Christmas show and scheduled for three 900-seat sellouts at Cadogan Hall this week.

Now this might have been OK had it not come with a draft script bereft of a single laugh, ill-fitted to the chosen music with a sixteenth century motet set as background to a scrum in a shopping mall, requiring multiple sets and umpteen characters including Jane Russell and ‘the most gorgeous man the world has ever seen’ which is challenging enough in real life, but beyond impossible in the predominantly adipose LGMC. Someone once asked me if the G in its acronym stood for ‘Gunt’. A covert focus group had apparently reviewed the script and considered it unusable, so in October when choir rehearsals were already under way my writing partner PK and I were given two weeks for a complete re-hash.

One of the first things we needed to do was reduce the cast, since Cinderella’s normally performed with about twelve actors so we sacrificed Dandini, the Lord Chamberlain, white mice, pumpkins and the Wicked Stepmother on the altar of practicality, and cut it down to a half-dozen on the grounds that surely the LGMC had six members who could act. This may have been our first mistake.

So far we have the original concept by Team A, the selection of music by Team B, the re-write by our two-man Team C, the musical arrangement by our own MD and his cohorts as Team D – but none of us were allowed to share information in the creative process. The rewrite had to be kept secret from the original conceputalisers, because the committee was afraid to confront them and once formulated the song list couldn’t be altered. It included six carols and a hymn, a Zulu tribal anthem, the children’s song from 'The Sound of Music', a hauntingly lovely early melody about underage forced marriage, Abba, The Hollies, a bit of ‘The King and I’ and the Shoop Shoop Song.

Pick the bones out of that and wrap it around Cinderella.

In no more than four three-minute scenes.

This somewhat charged situation was crowned with the appointment of a 22-year old director whose haircut and general demeanour instantly identified him as Jedward’s missing triplet, fresh out of the kind of college where you might as well get your drama degree from the paper towel dispenser in the Gents.

I’m sure if he ever becomes famous, we’ll all boast of having worked with him but some of his naiveté was breathtaking. He didn’t understand many words in the script, references to Danny La Rue, Stephen Sondheim and Richard Branson went way over his oddly-tonsured head and in a joke about crystal chandeliers he had to ask what ‘Versailles’ meant.

We told him it was a fetish club in Vauxhall.

I’ve learned a new word recently: Twunt. I think I have the etymology correct.

The Play What I Wrote ... part deux

2009-12-07T14:46:00.005Z

Now I’m not claiming the script was Stoppard, but it did have quite a light word-driven touch, aimed at conversational stand-up delivery in plain English for audibility.

So I was surprised when at the auditions our director asked everyone to do every part in a different accent, all at the same time. He cast two sweet guys as the Ugly Sisters, but encouraged them to exaggerate their native Australian and Glaswegian to a point at which they probably wouldn’t have been understood in either Greenock or Geelong, and the Fairy Godmother role I’d written as wry and observationally sardonic with myself in mind went to another experienced actor, but one whose house style tends to channel Brian Blessed with a rather hefty and bombastic delivery.

At first I was disappointed, but then amused that I must have been so crap an actor I couldn’t even get a part in “the play what I wrote” but once I’d seen the crude way it was elevated from page to stage, relieved.

I’ve written several scripts over the years, and remember the first time one was professionally directed (thanks, Ken Parrott, if you’re still alive) when I got quite a thrill from seeing how an experienced director’s interpretation could improve and extend the comic effect of my crumpled sheaf of A4.

editing on vacation in North Carolina

I think there was one person who’d actually done a panto, and since the director preferred to work on dance routines with a group of four imported girls from his personal entourage, the cast were left rudderless and under-rehearsed.

So last Wednesday when the whole thing was conjoined (music, dancing and acting) it was a car-crash in which the first scene ran twelve minutes instead of four. Our MD had his head in his hands for a lot of it.

It was their first time with costumes, and doing it cold in front of a hundred and fifty highly critical gay men is not a gauntlet many would choose to run if the alternative was, say, self-impaling on sharpened bamboo in a Japanese prison camp.

The costumes were surprisingly good, devised by a Filipino member whose natural predilection for All Things Bling and Shoeshopful could run Imelda Marcos a pretty close second. However, after six weeks rehearsal you’d think they would have known the lines.

Panic set in, and in the Chorus's by now traditional pre-show hysteria a number of spiteful and accusatory emails were allegedly exchanged. On Thursday our MD called me about 10.30pm to ask me to come in at 9 the next morning – opening night – for an emergency rehearsal to work with the actors on picking up their cues and cutting any superfluous material to bring the running time down.

We did that, and managed to trim a few minutes but then there was a meltdown as too much interference was applied and the cast were laden with multiple and conflicting changes and cuts, up to a few minutes before showtime. What made me especially furious was the apparent intervention of ‘committee members’ demanding changes on the day to a script they’d had every opportunity to peruse six weeks earlier.

Of course, every cut was a good joke discarded and every new move separated a set-up from its punchline as the baby-faced director struggled to accommodate their demands.

When it got to the stage it was a cut-and-shut Arthur Daley would have resisted selling, the welds were still warm. At least audience feedback was consistent: bewildered.

My personal pain was compounded by the difficulties of getting to Chelsea, from a part of Docklands consistently isolated from the known world by closures on the DLR and Jubilee Line, and for which I would gleefully erect a gibbet to hang the politicians and contractors who bought two new train lines that needed perpetual mending within two years of completion. What happened to warranties?

So on Saturday, despite an incipient cold and premonitions of doom, to be on time for the matinee I jumped in a taxi. Thanks to Westminster Council’s brain-dead idea of closing all roads to traffic in its special brand of rationally politicised support of the Copenhagen climate change conference that involves a lot of free balloons and face-painting, £43 later he had to drop me at Vauxhall to get on the tube. I’ll consider that my carbon-offsetting contribution, shall I ?

On the way home, a combination of District Line and DLR got me to, er, Blackwall – surely a fistula on the arsehole of London that is the Isle of Dogs, certainly one where taxis never prowl and where I – and an interesting assortment of drunks - were deposited to wait 40 minutes for the first of the two rail-replacement bus services that might take me home.

I live six miles from the centre of London. It took over two hours, I could literally have walked it faster.

Sometimes I need to be reminded this is what I do for a hobby.