The Rest of May

OPERA & CLASSICAL MUSIC
Handel’s Giustino, one of his 42 operas!, was given a very rare performance by Trinity College of Music in Wren’s wonderful Royal Naval College Chapel in Greenwich. The staging was a bit hit-and-miss but the singing was terrific. The venue has great acoustics and a wonderful atmosphere, but the pews proved a [...]

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Time & The Conways

I like J B Priestly’s moralistic period pieces, but I’ve never seen this play before. The first and third acts are set just after the end of the first world war, at a 21st birthday party for one of the six Conway siblings, and the middle act 19 years later, by which time the ‘perfect family’ has [...]

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The Observer

This play is set in West Africa where the first election in a fledgling democracy is being observed by an international team.
By the interval, though the scene has been set and you’ve been reasonably well entertained, I was wondering where it’s going. It makes its point well in the second half, but it’s a simple point [...]

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The Great Game : Afghanistan

Now you’re about to think I’ve lost it. Spending a whole Sunday, from 10.45am to 10pm, in a theatre watching 12 plays (plus 6 short linking pieces) telling the history of Afghanisan from 1842 to 2009…..
Even theatres with mega-budgets like the National and Royal Court wouldn’t have the ambition and balls to do this.  What would we do [...]

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Ordinary Dreams

If this comedy, about a man failing to cope with the credit crunch and other monumental societal changes, had opened on the fringe it would have crept under the radar, got OK to good reviews and a few mumblings of ‘promising playwright’.
Opening it in the West End, albeit in the tiny Trafalgar Studio II, with [...]

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Erpingham Camp

Less than 30 minutes after leaving A View From The Bridge at the Theatre Royal, with just enough time for a glass of wine to wind down after the tragedy and cheer up for the comedy to come, I was at the entrance to Brighton Pier.
We were split into three groups (I was a trainee redcoat, [...]

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A View From The Bridge

I was lucky enough to see Michael Gambon as Eddie Carbone in this Arthur Miller classic at the National in 1987, the year in which I was a member of the Laurence Olivier Awards Panel which gave him the best actor award (and a young Suzanne Sylvester best newcomer for Catherine the same play). It [...]

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Resilience

This is one of two plays about climate change running in rep. at the Bush Theatre. Resilience plays out the issues through politicians and their advisors handling an incident and its fallout as a political thriller.
This proves to be very effective, though it takes a few inconceivable and contrived turns to achieve the objective. After a slow start, [...]

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Launguedoc-Roussillon Wine Weekend

This was a weekend organised by someone we met on the South American wine tour back in February 2008 – three days in Languedoc-Roussillon in South West France, staying at Vinécole near Limoux and accompanied by The Observer’s wine writer and master of wine Tim Atkin. The region’s co-operatives are in decline and new (often [...]

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Dido, Queen of Carthage

It took me a while to get into the style of this production. At first it seemed too lightweight, almost sending up the play. As the story unfolded though, you realised it was an important lightness of touch that was very much part of the play.
Christopher Marlowe’s 16th century play tells Dido’s story better than any [...]

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