Okay, a slow start today. I need to take a break.

I decided that I have had enough of West End Theatre. Don’t get me wrong, I have enjoyed all of the big West End shows I have seen, and with the exception of Speed The Plow, I have seen them all for half-price or less. But, I realised that I am enjoying the edgier shows found in the off-West End venues even more. These shows, up till now including A Prayer For My Daughter, Grapes Of Wrath and Thin Toes all have been powerful, well acted and well produced, and I haven’t spent more than £15 to see any of them.

So, this morning I went on line and Googled “Off West End” and found myself at Off West End a website run for this unique theatre community. I used their handy tools to narrow my search to shows which would be going on tonight, and found The Living Unknown Soldier, at Arcola Theatre, a show based on a real event which explores the tenuous line between memory and reality.

The show, like the three examples above, was brilliant. It is based upon a written account of a man who from 1919 to 1942 lived in an asylum in France suffering from amnesia following his service in The Great War. The reviewers have uniformly liked it, and I agree with their take.

The script ably tackles the fungible space between reality and perception, memory and truth, and the pathetic (I mean that in the classical sense) circumstance of the poor man at the centre of this exercise. Throughout the play people try to come and claim this lost man as their own father, son, husband. He has none of it. “I feel like an innocent that you are all trying to pin a crime on” he complains at one point. You are shocked at this, because the woman trying to claim him at this point, ten years into his sad lot, is one you really want to be the one.

It is hard to pinpoint any particular performance, or performer, for praise in this production. This has a lot to do with a production choice made by Simple8, the company presenting this show. The cast rotates through the various characters, especially the soldier. It is quite literally a tag-team effort for most of the show, where one actor will touch and trade places with another and take over the role of the soldier. This is an effort to make the audience not think about the particular appearance or physical characteristics of the soldier but rather to focus on his lot. It is painfully effective.

I will draw attention to Tom Mison who for much of the show plays a reporter sucked into the story, and to Stephanie Brittain for her performance first as an asylum nurse and then for an important part of the action as the soldier, and lastly as a maid who comes to claim her husband despite his abusive past. They, along with Tony Guilfoyle as the long suffering doctor, turn in nuanced and complex performances which help to provide the mortar necessary to hold together this otherwise centrifugal show.

I honestly hope that the BBC gloms onto this show and makes a worthy teleplay of it. The world needs to see this show, and it will only ever happen through a public outlet like the Beeb.

A side note, the theatre, Arcola, is a green space, and this show is the first presented, probably in the world, with a zero carbon footprint. The theatre is equipped with a biomass heating system, a fuel-cell power plant and mostly low power LED based theatrical fixtures. It all worked quite well, and I think this is the shape of things to come.

The next production at Arcola is Double Portait and I will try to attend.

I’ve just come from the Pleasance Theatre where I saw the Weaver Hughes Ensemble production of a new play by Laura Stevens, Thin Toes. I say keep your eye out for more from this talented playwright and from Helen Millar, the lead in the cast of three women.

Ms. Millar has appeared in television and film, and can be seen in the film Chemical Wedding due out this Autumn. In Thin Toes she plays Andrea, a talented acerbic young woman hell bent on destroying herself through anorexia. Her performance was engaging, moving, riveting and nuanced.

Sitting in the small performance space with only about twenty or thirty other people, the theatre in the round presentation meant that we all were within feet of these actors and yet they neither dialed down their performances nor acknowledged the audience in whose laps they were nearly sitting. In such an environment it is easy to detect small flaws that a more typical theatre setting might disguise.

The script is artful, with realistic and complete dialogue, an unromantic treatment of the disease and the damage it does to friends and family — in this case the caring, almost clingy friend Lucy, deftly played by Elizabeth Bichard and Andrea’s mother Meg, a self-centred artist well played by Camilla Simson.

It is Millar’s performance, however, which rises from the good to the sublime. She grabs your attention and while she is on stage you cannot look away. As her character wastes away she makes you believe it — six months of emaciation in 90 minutes — and her bold, in your face depiction of a destructive young woman seeking power over her own life puts me in mind of the stellar performance of Katrin Cartlidge in Mike Leigh’s Career Girls.

But she is possessed of an intensity far greater than Cartlidge ever achieved in her short career. I’m made to think of a young Jodi Foster, both by the virtuosity of her performance and her visage. A particularly moving scene is one in which, while Lucy forces Meg to face that Andrea may well die, we see Andrea sitting cross-legged cutting paper dolls. She silently cuts a linked pair of dolls, and then carefully trims away all but the thinnest remains of the arms, legs and torso of one. She is left holding up this pair of dolls, one normal the other anorexic (see photo at top). This all unfolded with Andrea sitting a mere 3 feet in front of me.

Update: Here is a CNN story which features this play, and includes some video of it.

Yesterday it was The Woman In Black, today I am following Werewolves! These are the scary days!

Saw The Woman In Black last night down in Drury Lane at Covent Garden. This show, in its 18th year, is all about scaring the bejeezus out of the audience. It is basically a very well told ghost story of which we watch the developing dramatization. Various gimmicks and effects are employed to shock and frighten us. Well, my first fright was seeing that fully a quarter of the audience were third and forth form students (think American high school junior and senior) . They were quite rowdy, carrying on before the show, and I feared for my enjoyment of the show. They did calm down well once the show started, and I will admit to feeling proud of them for their constraint. They did shriek a lot during the scary bits, but what can one expect.

The show was a treat. It is morbid and a very depressing story, but well done, and a rollicking good time. Next to me were a 20 year old girl and her auntie. The auntie kept telling me how they were both the wimpiest people in their family, and should not have been allowed to come to this show together. They had themselves worked into a twirl before the show even started. On the other side were a young couple who had actually moved back a row during interval. When I asked why they pointed forward to the couple in front of their previous seats and said, “Getting away from the lovebirds.” Ha!

Today I went and got a seat for opening night for the revival of Noël Coward’s “The Vortex” at the Apollo. This regular morning trip to Leicester Square is routine now, but today I found a nice little Italian café which has been in the same locale since 1888 and had a cappuccino and brownie while I waited for the Photographer’s Gallery to open. Raul, over at Heading East tipped me off to a good show there, Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2008. My favourites were the John Holt slide show of his 1970’s trip through the poverty and racial and class tension of the American south. Quite moving.

One of the refreshing differences between the Photographer’s Gallery and most public galleries is the actively maintained and well presented and staffed Print Sales facility. One can browse the portfolios of dozens of the highest calibre professional photographers, including those in exhibition, and buy prints in a variety of sizes, even custom, framed, etc.

A free admission, I was glad to drop a few pound into the collection box. The place was swarming with art students, all furiously writing notes about the photographs. Whenever I see such a thing I am reminded of a quote variously attributed to Frank Zappa and Elvis Costello: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

The swarm of art students was so thick that I actually left the galleries and strolled Chinatown for an hour waiting for them to leave. It was a nice interval, and I found the restaurant I would return to for lunch after the gallery: Lee Ho Fook.

Warren Zevon fans may remember this place from the lyric to the popular Werewolves Of London:

I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand
Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain
He was looking for a place called Lee Ho Fook's
Going to get a big dish of beef chow mein

Ah-ooooo, werewolves of London
Ah-ooooo
Ah-ooooo, werewolves of London
Ah-ooooo

So I had myself a big dish of beef chow mein and came home to read up on Prague and prepare for theatre tonight. As it’s opening night, curtain is unconscionably early, at 7:00. Getting to the West End for a 7:00 show will be a nightmare on the tube, so I may well just walk.

Ta!

I went to see Mamet’s Speed The Plow at The Old Vic last night and I wanted to just give some quick thoughts about it.

The play stars Kevin Spacey, the Old Vic artistic director, and Jeff Goldblum, along with Laura Michelle Kelly. Spacey is magnetic and riveting (dangerous combination, those magnetic rivets…). Kelly was genuine and engaging. Goldblum was dry and enigmatic. I could never quite figure out if he was flat or was it his character.

It is tempting to think that Spacey trolls Hollywood looking for actors with time on their hands against whom he can look strong. If that is the case he found his man in Goldblum. I am a real fan of Goldblum, have been since the early days of Earth Girls Are Easy and the like. In this, however, he just never raises the temperature on stage above tepid, while Spacey can take two steps on stage and sparks fly. In the penultimate scene, when things get rough, I found myself hoping that maybe Spacey would wake Jeff up, but not so much.

I don’t want this to sound like the show is a dud. It is not. Even with Goldblum’s flat performance the script, in all of its realism and intricacy, shines through. That, along with the red-letter performances by Spacey and Kelly, and the capable acting of Goldblum (despite his lack of colour or depth) makes for a brilliant night out.

It is almost 11:00 on Friday night and I am settling back into my chair after a rolicking good night at theatre. What chair? you might ask. I said I would post a photo of my “workstation” so here it is:

That’s my notebook on the stool, with my bluetooth keyboard balanced on top, and my mouse setting on the coffee table down to the left. Needless to say this is “sub-optimal” as we say in the business.

Much happened today. First off, it was a gorgeous day! It was already 10° when I woke up and 12 or 13 by the time I went out. Quite cheery it was. After my breakfast and coffee I once again took the tube down to Leicester Square where I scored a front row seat for “The Lover/The Collection,” a pair of Harold Pinter teleplays from the 1960’s. They were fantastic, as were the company who put them on. Brilliant performances all of them.

After Tkts, I strolled up to Soho and Carnaby Street. Any of that gritty charm it had in the 60’s, as shown in Antoniono’s classic film “Blow Up” are gone now. It is just another tourist trap cum overpriced market. Soho is a schizophrenic district to be sure. It is the centre of fashion and design, but also of sex clubs and seedy shops. It was the trendy spot for kids, but a generation ago, and so now an out of date version of that.

A recent headline in the tabloids proclaimed that a recent survey has shown that the East End is the new West End, and the West End is the new snooze-ville. The West End is only for tourists and your parents, the East End is where it’s happening, and if you don’t know that you’re dead. Well, I can say that if Carnaby Street is your gauge, then they’re right. Here is how Carnaby Street looked to an Italian fashion photog in 1967:

Here is what it looks like today:

Oh, and for the record, the mini is back:

So is the kiss, which is what brought me here. The “Carnaby Kiss” to be specific, at the Carnaby Gallery

There are about 40 images and I must say I liked at least half of them. My favourite was “Handbag.” It is left as an exercise for the reader to figure out what that looks like.

The other fashion trend which is inescapable here, and I commented on previously, is short shorts with stockings and with cuffs. Cuffs. Think about that… really short shorts with cuffs. Strange, and in February.

Found some interesting shop windows at Liberty of London and fancied myself a little photog myself. Here are a few shots:

Out of Soho and into Oxford Street. Got this interesting image off Hanover Square. I am not sure what it’s on about, but here it is:

Must be drugs I figure.

Then it was back uptown, I walked through Marylebone and across to Bloomsbury. Got some lunch at an Indian buffet, then to Regent’s Park where I got one with nature.

Anyway, that was my day. How was yours?

Just so that I am not talking to myself too much, I would like to remind my readers that you can comment on any story by simply clicking on the “Comments” link right down there \/