One month later... ;)
So much for regular updating. How does it go?: the best way to make the gods laugh is to tell them your plans...
So, it's been pretty busy. Job 1 has been going pretty well, and I had a quite positive annual review thingy recently. Job 2 is still hacking me off no end, and the main reason I didn't hand my notice in during the last round of stupidity there is that our remortgage (for which we started the process in November, FFS!) still hasn't gone through (grrr, solicitors, grrr). There are hints that the Chair might be bringing forward her standing down, which was going to be at the end of the academic year, so I shall probably wait and see who is elected in her place before I make a definite decision on whether to give up on it.
More positively, it's been a very busy month on the fun/culture front: a film, two club nights, a gig, an evening of gaming, two theatre trips (three if you count the kind you see in the cinema) and a guided tour of the local cemetery. :)
I'll start with theatre, as that's where I left my last post. Mr Foote's Other Leg was a bawdy historical comedy/tragedy, nominally about how the Theatre Royal Haymarket got its royal charter. It was thematically all over the place, with nob/nudity gags one minute and reflections on the challenges of being an outsider the next, but it somehow worked. An I-can't-look amputation scene here, a drag queen telling jokes there, and then two blacked-up Othellos having a fist-fight while a much more dignified ex-slave looked on in bemusement, or a future king disguising himself as a washerwoman. It was jolly well-written and staged, and Simon Russell Beale was very good as Mr Foote. And, of course, it went down well with London's theatricals, who were the most obvious target market.
To fast forward a month or so, last night I got to see the new show just come in, Bad Jews, which I heartily recommend to anyone who can get to it in the next five weeks or so of its run. It runs about one hour forty with no interval, takes place in single apartment in real time, has only four characters and never lets your attention drop for a second. It's a black comedy, with two characters who are fairly consistently vile to each other and two who are trying to keep the peace, with the fighting about a recent funeral, a tiny fragment of the inheritance, and (actually, when it came down to it) religion and class and ambition and love and all those not-so-trivial things. There were plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, two or three speeches which provoked actual rounds of applause and a few lines which caused sharp intakes of breath. I think it deserves to be a sell-out but, of course, with nobody famous in it, it won't be...
Speaking of famous actors, I failed to get tickets for Les Liaisons Dangereuses when it was on stage in January (at the Donmar, I think it was), but managed to grab one for the 'NT Live' showing at my local cinema later in the month. Despite owning an implausible number of copies of the book in French and in translation and having seen pretty much every film version going, I'd never seen the stage version. It was sooo good, with a great script and Janet McTeer making an absolutely fabulous Madame de Merteuil. It took me a while to get used to Dominic West's Valmont, a performance so unlike the Malkovich version I'd always considered definitive, but I was completely sold by quite early in the second act. Oh, and the programme gave me an answer to the old question of where I'd go if I had access to a time machine: back to the first production of the Hampton adaptation, which had Alan Rickman as Valmont. :)
This post is getting really rather long, so I'm going to pause here and hopefully come back to the other stuff later in the week. It's half term, so I've got less work on and it could happen... ;)
So, it's been pretty busy. Job 1 has been going pretty well, and I had a quite positive annual review thingy recently. Job 2 is still hacking me off no end, and the main reason I didn't hand my notice in during the last round of stupidity there is that our remortgage (for which we started the process in November, FFS!) still hasn't gone through (grrr, solicitors, grrr). There are hints that the Chair might be bringing forward her standing down, which was going to be at the end of the academic year, so I shall probably wait and see who is elected in her place before I make a definite decision on whether to give up on it.
More positively, it's been a very busy month on the fun/culture front: a film, two club nights, a gig, an evening of gaming, two theatre trips (three if you count the kind you see in the cinema) and a guided tour of the local cemetery. :)
I'll start with theatre, as that's where I left my last post. Mr Foote's Other Leg was a bawdy historical comedy/tragedy, nominally about how the Theatre Royal Haymarket got its royal charter. It was thematically all over the place, with nob/nudity gags one minute and reflections on the challenges of being an outsider the next, but it somehow worked. An I-can't-look amputation scene here, a drag queen telling jokes there, and then two blacked-up Othellos having a fist-fight while a much more dignified ex-slave looked on in bemusement, or a future king disguising himself as a washerwoman. It was jolly well-written and staged, and Simon Russell Beale was very good as Mr Foote. And, of course, it went down well with London's theatricals, who were the most obvious target market.
To fast forward a month or so, last night I got to see the new show just come in, Bad Jews, which I heartily recommend to anyone who can get to it in the next five weeks or so of its run. It runs about one hour forty with no interval, takes place in single apartment in real time, has only four characters and never lets your attention drop for a second. It's a black comedy, with two characters who are fairly consistently vile to each other and two who are trying to keep the peace, with the fighting about a recent funeral, a tiny fragment of the inheritance, and (actually, when it came down to it) religion and class and ambition and love and all those not-so-trivial things. There were plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, two or three speeches which provoked actual rounds of applause and a few lines which caused sharp intakes of breath. I think it deserves to be a sell-out but, of course, with nobody famous in it, it won't be...
Speaking of famous actors, I failed to get tickets for Les Liaisons Dangereuses when it was on stage in January (at the Donmar, I think it was), but managed to grab one for the 'NT Live' showing at my local cinema later in the month. Despite owning an implausible number of copies of the book in French and in translation and having seen pretty much every film version going, I'd never seen the stage version. It was sooo good, with a great script and Janet McTeer making an absolutely fabulous Madame de Merteuil. It took me a while to get used to Dominic West's Valmont, a performance so unlike the Malkovich version I'd always considered definitive, but I was completely sold by quite early in the second act. Oh, and the programme gave me an answer to the old question of where I'd go if I had access to a time machine: back to the first production of the Hampton adaptation, which had Alan Rickman as Valmont. :)
This post is getting really rather long, so I'm going to pause here and hopefully come back to the other stuff later in the week. It's half term, so I've got less work on and it could happen... ;)