August 27th to 29th 2011
It started with the Cambridge Folk Festival, and that was how I came to catch a glimpse of Pete Chiodini after a gap of perhaps 35 years. It finished with London Road, the play at the National (Cottesloe Theatre). An interesting few days.
Earlier in the week I noticed that Sky Arts was carrying some of the highlight acts from the Cambridge Folk Festival, including Richard Thompson. By the time I switched on one evening, it was bedtime, so I watched from the bed. It seemed that I had missed Richard, so I watched what was on offer. First up was the Webb sisters, one with harp the other on guitar. Plangent harmonies as their Webb (sorry) site has it, they had rather ethereal voices and pleasant if mostly standard folk style tunes. Then a very good US black blues oriented guitarist called Robert Cray. After the show I drifted off slightly and Lindsay started channel hopping. Lo and behold she came across a programme called ‘Help! I caught it abroad’. Suddenly I sat up! ‘That’s Pete Chiodini!’ I shouted. Peter was my house physician when I was doing cardiology at King’s. He was a brilliant young man, with a rather comic Chaplinesque moustache, which he obviously retains to this day. He comes over as slightly geeky but brilliant, a veritable anorak of Tropical Disease. Peter had early on decided that he wanted to do Tropical Medicine and, being very good, he obviously had little trouble in working his way to the navel of British tropical medicine, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, subsequently being honoured with a Professorship. In the programme he was a fine advocate for all of the qualities that a good doctor should have – calm but enthusiastic, good with patients, and a good teacher.
Friday 26th was the start of one of our cultural dashes to London. Lindsay had read an account of a play performed at the Young Vic, called ‘The Beauty Queen of Leenane’ which had received the most fantastic reviews. So – bookings made, and off we went. Checked in at the RAF Club, parked in the Vinci car park at the bottom of Park Lane, and off we walked. I went to the exhibition at the Royal Academy, Hungarian photography in the 20th Century. Lindsay went off to the Mephisto shop to try and find some new shoes. The photographs feature some remarkable images, many of which are frequently reproduced. The early ones by Rudolf Balogh show life of the peasants in rural Hungary. Then there are the later ones including fashion photos by Kertesz and Munkacsi. There is a whole section devoted to the war photography of Robert Capa. Exhibitions at the RA, no matter how small, are always worth visiting. We had tea and a muffin in the Friends Room at the RA – it’s not exactly cheap there. Usually seems to be fairly full to me – not quite as relaxing as it would ideally be.
Walking on. Caught in the occasional heavy showers just going over the Hungerford bridge. Dashed for shelter under a plane tree by the King’s College building opposite Waterloo Station. Eventually reached the Waterloo Bar and Grill at 119 Waterloo Bridge Road – the first on our list of possible places to eat, but in the circumstances the one that was the obvious choice. Anna joined us later for a quick supper before we headed off to the Young Vic.
The play is by Martin McDonagh, and it is a revival – first done in 1996. All Irish cast – essential really. How would I describe it? Well it’s like a modern version of ‘The Playboy of the Western World’. Has the same rural and simple characters and a rather tragicomic feel. I haven’t seen the Synge for many years so perhaps that’s as far as I can go in comparison. It is certainly funny, sometimes laugh out loud funny, but there is a desperate, sad, and bleak feel to it. All of the characters are unhappy in Connemara, but it does seem as though this is primarily for economic reasons – none of them have any money. Even Pato Dooley, who is earning some money in England, is trying to get away, and eventually leaves for Boston, USA.
The play centres around Maureen Folan, who has to look after her miserable and manipulative old mother, Mag, who treats her like a skivvy. I won’t spoil the plot in case you manage to see it (the current run is almost over), but don’t expect a Happy Ending...
I should say something about the set and a rather curious and creepy coincidence in the play. All of the action takes place in the single living room of the Folan’s cottage in Connemara. The old cast iron range has a pile of peat or turf beside it. There is a newer gas stove and peeling Formica units. On the wall is a framed photograph of Jack and Bobby Kennedy. On another wall is a tea towel with the inscription ‘May you be half an hour in heaven before the Devil knows you’re dead.’ During the action of the play, a tatty old radio is sometimes switched on to hear the music and whether there have been any dedications (it turns out that Mag is hoping for a dedication from her other two daughters). During the programme, a song starts playing. It is ‘The Spinning Wheel’, a 1939 recording of a Victorian Irish song by Delia Murphy. The song is brilliantly chosen for the action because it deals with a beautiful girl trying to escape her task of spinning to be with her lover while her drowsy old grandmother knits by the fireside. This is a predicament mirrored in the play. But what made the hairs on my neck stand up was the fact that my parents had this recording on an EP record, which was one of our very first purchases when we acquired a 33/45 rpm record player on moving to Fishguard in 1958. I couldn’t say how many times I’ve listened to its gentle waltz theme – but I would say that although we played it to death after it was first purchased – it had probably not been played since about 1961 or 1962, and no doubt found its way into the skip when my parents died. Although she had a beautiful voice, with accurate pitch, I always had the impression that the somewhat burbling sound that comes through in the record made it seem as though Delia was drunk. Later in the play, when Maureen puts the song back on the radio, Pato describes it as ‘a creepy oul song’, and indeed, for me especially, it was.
I can write at more length about the play at the National. It was headed for its last performance on the day we saw it.
We had a leisurely start on Saturday, and Lindsay was able to get to see the RA exhibition, and I bought a new lightweight Sprayway jacket at Cotswold, before we headed off to a pleasant and leisurely lunch at the Mezzanine Restaurant at the National. Then into the Cottesloe!
Now Lindsay had checked this play out and decided that it sounded interesting, and was a sellout. She managed to get tickets at short notice. The subject matter, dealing with the serial killing of 5 prostitutes in Ipswich, reminded me of the time that I came back from the States and hit London for the first time in 20 months. I asked Mike Weaver to get us tickets for ‘Another Country’, a new play, in late 1982. His comment afterwards was ‘Fantastic, but I did ask myself beforehand, do I really want to spend an evening watching a play about homosexuality in a public school? Didn’t really sound like my bag.’ You may recall that this was the play that first introduced us to the talents of Kenneth Branagh and Rupert Everett. My feelings in 2011 were somewhat similar. ‘London Road’ is named after the road which the newspapers in 2006-7 referred to as Ipswich’s Red Light District, after the murder of 5 prostitutes and the arrest of a fork lift truck driver called Steve Wright who lived in the road. So once again I did ask myself, ‘A play about prostitutes in Ipswich, a happy way to spend Saturday afternoon; is this my bag?’ In addition, when I picked up the programme and it said, ‘Book and Lyrics by...’, I had another major sense of misgiving. Oh no! Not another bad musical. However...
If this is ever produced again, and I expect it will be, I would urge you to go and see it. Especially if you are interested in the process of theatre, the evolution of theatre, and novel ideas. Every time I go to the National Theatre however I wonder if other companies could put such a production on. In addition to about five musicians, there are 11 members of the cast. So it’s not exactly cheap to put on, and isn’t Am-Dram material. All the cast members are equal – there is no standout or main character, and in addition between them they play about 50 other characters, ranging from TV reporters to the prostitutes themselves. The basic idea and technique is open to criticism. It consists of verbatim interviews with the residents of London Road and other people in Ipswich, translated into a play which focuses on the lives of the people in the road, and their reaction to the events as they unfolded from December 2006. In many ways this made for a better play than a play about Steve Wright himself, which could have been rather boring, and of course there had already been a play about the lives of several of the girls themselves produced for TV (heavily criticized by the girls’ families). But to me the verbatim technique is really a rather easy way of going about one’s work. It is surely more of a challenge to use the actual words that people say, but to blend them into original material to create one’s own play. This remarkable ability is the reason why many critics consider Harold Pinter to be such a fine playwright – the observation of the way people talk and then its use in original dialogue. Nonetheless, selecting some of the remarkable things that people say, and then setting them to music, the music following the rhythm and cadence of the words, is quite a remarkable feat. Rather than an opera, the piece comes across as a prolonged piece of recitative, but it’s never dull. The music is somewhat jazz influenced. From time to time there is a more choric piece, with multiple repetitions of certain phrases: ‘I have nearly seventeen hanging baskets in my garden...’ I was left wondering however whether it would have been even better with a score by Andrew Lloyd Webber, though the authors say that they definitely didn’t want to create an opera. Lindsay thought it was one of the best things she had ever seen. I thought it was very good indeed. As a piece of contemporary theatre it was excellent. Especially for the theatrical equivalent of a book club. There are many sections which could be worthy of discussion. In the only scene in which we see the prostitutes, three members of the cast, in cheap thin clothing, huddle in the darkness, and then quote statements from the girls, about their lives after the murders. Then they stop talking. They look at us. There is silence. The silence goes on, and on, and on. Why? It’s obviously a theatrical device. Some of the audience have a hard time coping with it. There are one or two nervous coughs. Why the silence? Now Lindsay and I had completely different ideas about this. Lindsay felt that this was a two minutes’ silence for the dead girls. I didn’t feel this at all. To me it was a challenge. A challenge to the audience. ‘What do you think of me? Would you like to have me? Are you as guilty as Steve Wright?’ Maybe I haven’t got the whole story, but I also felt that I was being targeted by the cast – this is a valid strategy in street theatre – interactive theatre if you like. Dumb insolence. The silence may have lasted for three minutes. Then it was broken by musical accompaniment.
The other part that was worth discussing was the ending. The authoress, who collected the reportage, said that when she went back to London Road in 2009 she was amazed and impressed to find a ‘London Road in Bloom’ festival going on, a kind of healing and rebirth of the road. In the programme she states that she felt it was the residents’ way of dealing with what had gone on, of coming together and creating neighbourliness. So the ending amid all the flower arrangements was in one sense redemptive, but to me the phrase that came to mind was ‘Everything in the garden is lovely’, when of course it isn’t... Whether that was intended or just something I alone thought of I have no idea... One of the most true to life parts of the play was the character played by Kate Fleetwood, who near the end, is sitting on a sofa, musing. ‘Of course,’ she says. ‘I personally feel grateful to Steve Wright. He got the girls off the street after all.’ In another scene, where the whole stage is covered in a maze of police tape, one character says, ‘There were police everywhere. Of course, it would be nice if it could be like this every day. Then we’d feel safe!’
Enough of London Road!
Yesterday, Sunday, was a lazy day, and we, or at least I, was transfixed by the football for quite a lot of the day. Spurs 1 – Man City 5; Man Utd 8 – Arsenal 2. So as one wag put it – Manchester 13 – London 3. It was also remarkable for the operation of this new Athletics rule disqualifying any athlete for a false start – and the chief dismissee was Usain Bolt, the fastest man in the world. Although he is rather a cocky individual, it is rather a shame to think that the 100m was then won by the second fastest man in the world. I was rather hoping that The Sun would come up with one of its witty headlines like ‘Usain shoots his Bolt’ but all they can manage is ‘Usain’s Pain’. A trawl of the newspapers reveals only that Bolt has been shooting in other respects, with a barmaid from London and a care home worker from Swindon. The interview with Gemma, of Swindon, is hilarious, and I quote verbatim from the Sun:
“Afterwards they showered together. Gemma said: ‘He told me all about Jamaica and I told him about Swindon. He asked me if the shopping was good in Swindon and I told him it wasn’t great. Once he heard that he seemed to lose interest in Swindon.’”
You can’t make it up, can you? So maybe this verbatim technique for the theatre has got something going for it after all.
Finally, Lindsay and I went for a bike ride today. One of our favourite rides, starting in Wimborne and taking in Shapwick, Blandford, the Melbury Abbas road, then the Tarrant valley, up Windy Hill and across to Witchampton, and back via Furzehill. Lovely drink in the Langton Arms at Tarrant Monkton (plenty of choice; Butcombe bitter, Ringwood best, Purbec, etc) Stopped at the Spar in Blandford. Something of a tradition. Two frozen OJ lollipops please. As I finished mine I said to Lindsay ‘I’ll buy you one more frozen orange juice....’. A fat man wearing a Ferrari T shirt limped by with a stick. ‘Do you think he owns a Ferrari?’ said Lindsay.
Don’t bother looking for other headlines about Usain. The Daily Star had ‘Usain Bolt’s Jolt’. Pathetic. Have you noticed how similar the names Usain and Arsene are? Now Usain Wenger and Arsene Bolt are almost interchangeable, and the result either way you look at it is just as bad.
Until the next time.
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