December 2005 – Page 2 – My London Your London

Month: December 2005 (page 2 of 4)

Theatre Review: Minor Irritations at the White Bear Theatre

December 21, 2005 / Natalie / 0 Comments

Aspiring writers are usually told “write about what you know”, and that is what first-time playwright Sam Peter Jackson has done in portraying 20-something actors coming to terms with the difficulties of their profession and personal lives. But if he is really writing about what he knows, then all of the stereotypes about self-obsession, ridiculous angst and general luvviness are also true.

These are both the strength and the weakness of his Minor Irritations, on at the White Bear Theatre in Kennington until January 8. The audience is ready to laugh at his characters, and when Jackson gives them a succession of delightful one-liners, to really laugh. But this sits rather oddly with the angst-ridden moments of quarter-life crisis that the characters are apparently suffering. Jackson has a real talent for word-play and the comic scene, but needs to lighten up and keep that mood throughout; perhaps what is needed is just a bit more growing up – something that could definitely be said of his characters.

The author plays the central figure of Minor Irritations, Ben, a “resting” actor who’s working in a call centre, auditioning for a chicken burger commercial and yet to get over his ex-boyfriend, Jay (Luke Evans), who’s living in New York and succeeding. Ben’s best friend/fag hag is Harriet (Dulcie Lewis), who cheerfully hams up her role as an air-headed part-time air hostess and Jewish princess who arrives on stage obsessing about her recent purchase of The Big Issue. She says of her interaction with the vendor “I always want to say, ‘Don’t you have Vogue or Vanity Fair?”
Continue reading

Pantomime Review: Jack and the Beanstalk at the Hackney Empire

December 21, 2005 / Natalie / 0 Comments

Hallo. My name is Thea and I am four. I hadn’t been to a panto before so I was very excited when I went to see Jack and the Beanstalk.
It was very, very, very good . I got the chance to jump up and down shouting “behind you” and “knickers Billy” for a long, long time.
Sweets were thrown into the audience and we had to duck when there was a food fight. It was lots of fun.
I thought that the giant was really big and scarey until mummy told me it wasn’t real.
My favourite character was the Sweet Pea fairy as she wore a pretty dress and got married in the end.

Thea’s mummy writes :
In panto there is nothing like a dame and in this production of Jack and the Beanstalk at the Hackney Empire there are a few impressive ones. First up is Susie McKenna, who writes, directs and stars as Broad Bean, one of the baddies.

McKenna’s script has taken some liberties with the traditional story of Jack, a boy who sells Buttercup, his mother’s cow, for some magic beans, which grow into a beanstalk that he climbs to the land of a nasty giant.
Continue reading

Helene Hanff and the Bookshops of Today’s Charing Cross Road

December 20, 2005 / Natalie / 1 Comment

Somehow it seems, wherever and whenever you visit a place, you’ve just missed a golden age. You always should have found this Thai island 10 years ago, “when it was paradise”. And when you read 84, Charing Cross Road, it seems as though just after the Second World War was a paradisiacal age of bookselling, when dedicated experts spent their days sifting through classy hardback editions of obscure classics, just waiting to fill the orders of a New York woman – Helene Hanff, who describes herself as “a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books”.

She complained, in a letter of October 5, 1949, to Marks & Co Booksellers at 84, Charing Cross Road, that decent editions were impossible to obtain in America. That was the start of a beautiful, long-distance friendship between herself and the staff of the shop, and, finally, their relatives, that continued into 1969. Together the collection of the correspondence forms one of the finest epistolary books I’ve ever read.

In such few words, a lasting bond was form, cemented with American food parcels that Hanff sent to obviously hungry post-war Britain. She’s certainly the strongest personality in the book. You can only imagine the reaction in “proper” London of 1949 to the epistle that started: “Kindly inform the Church of England they have loused up the most beautiful prose ever written, whoever told them to tinker with the Vulgate Latin? They’ll burn for it, you mark my words.”

Frank Doel is the chief correspondent from the bookshop side. He starts out all proper, professional English gentleman, but gradually unwinds, while Cecily Farr steps into an immediately friendly relationship and is soon sending detailed instructions for the proper preparation of Yorkshire pudding, to someone who has never seen and tasted it.
Continue reading

Review: Beautiful Minds, the Centennial Exhibition of the Nobel Prize at the British Library

December 17, 2005 / Natalie / 2 Comments

There have been 776 winners of Nobel Prizes – for physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and (more recently) economics – since they began in 1901. Yet were they recognition for astounding, outstanding individuals, or parts of teams and milieus that happened to be picked out of a communal project?

That’s the central question of an exhibition that has just arrived at the British Library, Beautiful Minds, the Centennial Exhibition of the Nobel Prize.

One view starts the exhibition, that of Sir Alexander Fleming: “It is the lone worker who makes the first advance in a subject: the details may be worked out by a team, but the prime idea is due to the enterprise, thought and perception of an individual.” Yet further on you go back to Lucretius in 55BC: “Nothing can be created out of nothing.”

The story certainly begins with one man, the founder of the prizes, Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite in 1867. He proved himself not just an inventor – with more than 300 patents to his name, for goods ranging from artificial silk to aluminium boats – but a brilliant businessman, growing his explosives empire to nearly 100 factories around the globe. Some of their products – or at least one hopes only their packets – are on display.
Continue reading

Review: Lysistrata at the Arcola Theatre

December 16, 2005 / Natalie / 2 Comments

“I loved his willy. I really loved his willy.” This is not the sort of audience reaction you expect to hear outside a staging of an ancient Greek play, but the new show at the Arcola Theatre is Aristophanes, and Lysistrata, and a Lysistrata far closer in intent to the original than the po-faced American translation (Douglass Parker’s) sitting on my shelf in which the introduction proclaims the play is about “Love Achieved”.

Of course it is not about love, but sex, and women exercising the power of their bodies to achieve the highest of goals, peace. So the four-foot-long flourescent tubes rising, and rising, and rising, from the groins of the magistrate, the Spartan ambassador and Kinesias are entirely explicit in their meaning, and the actors, and the text, have no problems with that.

To an ancient Greek audience this was ludicrous fooling, but today it has a more serious meaning. The young women in the audience were cheering on Lysistrata (a powerful performance by Tanya Moodie) all of the way, as she dominated the play, and the men – this is girl power for the Naughties, and a far more admirable model than that offered by the Spice Girls in the 1990s.
Continue reading

The National Portrait Gallery: Eight of my favourite women

December 15, 2005 / Natalie / 4 Comments

There’s a curious conundrum at the heart of Britain’s National Portrait Gallery. The institution collects people, as recorded by art. So as you walk around the rooms, are you looking at historic individuals, or at paintings?

These are certainly not “the best” paintings in British history; they can (by definition at least) be found next door in the National Gallery. (The strong presence of Sir Peter Lely here, and his total absence in the rooms overlooking Leicester Square demonstrate that.) Yet these are not (mostly) a photographic record, rather an image that is a blend of what the artist saw and (usually) what the sitter wanted him to see.

Yet somehow, these two sides of the collection do come together. When I pick out my “favourite women of the NPG” I am looking at the paintings – these are the faces that through which I can find something of the woman behind them, and I like what I find. A little research reveals, however, that they were also great characters, with real achievements to their credit. Somehow you can identify, even from a flattering, fashionable portrait, those who were more than a vapid aristocrat or a lucky courtesan.

This listing is by date, which also conveniently makes a trail through the gallery, starting at the top floor and working down. It is entirely personal – by all means add your own favourites in the comments.

Mary Neville, Lady Dacre (1524-c.1576), painted by Hans Eworth, probably early in the reign of Elizabeth I, after she had succeeded in having the family title restored to her son, after her husband had been executed. Statuesque might be the polite adjective for Lady Dacre; she’s painted with one double chin, which probably meant she had several. Her lush auburn hair is tightly combed behind a lavishly pearled, black velvet head-dress. She looks stern and formidable, but satisfied, like a woman who has achieved her life’s work. A short biography. (Gallery 2) Continue reading

My London Your London