'Red Side Story' by Jasper Fforde
26 April 2024
Regular readers may remember that I am a big fan of Jasper Fforde’s silly comic fantasy/sci-fi novels (you can read my reviews of 14 Jasper Fforde books at: https://culturaldessert.blogspot.com/search?q=%27+by+Jasper+Fforde). Jasper Fforde’s 2009 novel ‘Shades of Grey’ (reviewed here in April 2011) is perhaps his most ambitious and complex work, depicting a post-apocalyptic dystopian society far into our future in which social standing is determined by your ability to perceive colour – with the majority of the population only able to see grey and just a privileged few families seeing yellows, greens or reds. It has taken fifteen years for the promised sequel to ‘Shades of Grey’ to arrive but ‘Red Side Story’ (which I have just finished reading as an unabridged audio book, narrated by Chris Harper and Jasper Fforde) was worth the wait. I had forgotten much of the complicated setting and plot of the first book, and I found it a little difficult to get started with its successor. But Fforde’s engaging cast of eccentric comic characters draw you in and, as I realised that ‘Red Side Story’ was going to begin to explain how its surreal future-world had come about, I was gripped. This was a much more satisfying tale where there is real jeopardy and you really care about the fate of the main characters.
Labels: Books
'Love's Labour's Lost' by William Shakespeare
24 April 2024
Last Saturday we were at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon to see the new RSC production of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ directed by Emily Burns. I had only seen ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ once before (the 2008 RSC production that featured David Tennant as Berowne - reviewed here in October 2008). It’s not the greatest Shakespeare play but it’s interesting to see him trying out elements that would flourish more effectively in his later works. The bickering between Rosaline and Berowne, for example, feels like an early draft for Beatrice and Benedick in ‘Much Ado About Nothing’. And the shambolic performance of ‘The Pageant of the Nine Worthies’ at the end of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ clearly points the way towards the more complete comic set-piece play-within-a-play ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ at the end of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. Emily Burns’ production is lots of fun, very much played for laughs, with some brilliant comic scenes. She sets the play in the present day, at a luxury Pacific island retreat, with the men as billionaire tech bros. The supporting characters are maybe a little too close to pantomime but the four central lovestruck men and the four women who break their resolution of chastity are brilliantly played, particularly by Luke Thompson as Berowne and Ioanna Kimbook at Rosaline. The RSC is always wonderful at finding amazing young actors: 16 of this cast of 19 are in their RSC debut season. I also enjoyed Tony Gardner as the comically frustrated Holofernes (showing a touch of Basil Fawlty to Jack Bardoe’s Manuel-like Don Armado) - but, like much of the play, these scenes are brief, incidental to the plot and don’t seem to go anywhere. It was a very enjoyable, high-quality production of a play that has its limitations.
Labels: Drama, Theatre
‘Behold Ye Ramblers’ by Neil Gore
19 April 2024
Last Saturday we were at The Place in Bedford to see the Townsend Theatre production of ‘Behold Ye Ramblers’, a new one-person play, written and performed by Neil Gore, which tells the story of the Clarion movement that started in the late 19th century. In 1891 the journalist Robert Blatchford founded a weekly newspaper called ‘The Clarion’ to draw attention to the conditions suffered by working people in industrialised Victorian Britain and to spread a socialist message. But from the start, Blatchford’s vision was of better support for workers, both in the factories and in their recreational and cultural activities. This led to a large network of local Clarion Cycling Clubs, Vocal Unions, Dramatic Societies, Handicrafts Clubs, ‘Cinderella Clubs’ (for children) and Rambling Clubs, which started the struggle for the right to roam freely across open moors on ancient paths. The Sheffield Clarion Ramblers, founded in 1900, is recognised as the first working class rambling club and survived until 2015. The National Clarion Cycling Club still survives today, as does the People's Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne, which began its life in 1911 as the Newcastle Clarion Drama Club. Neil Gore’s play shows the growth of the Clarion movement through speeches, poetry, and music hall songs, making you feel like you are at a Clarion Club meeting through lots of audience participation. He makes clever use of projections of actual Clarion newspaper pages and posters for Clarion Vocal Union concerts, together with colourised early film of working class communities. It’s a fascinating story which demonstrates the strong socialist roots of many of our everyday creativity traditions today. The tale of The Clarion reminded me a lot of ‘The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists’, so it was interesting to discover that a one-person Magic Lantern show of Robert Tressell’s classic book is going to be the next production from Townsend Theatre. https://www.townsendproductions.org.uk/shows/behold-ye-ramblers/
Labels: Drama, Theatre
'American Fiction' by Cord Jefferson
10 April 2024
We first visited The Rex in Berkhamsted, described by the BBC as "possibly Britain’s most beautiful cinema", in 2008. This beautifully refurbished art deco picture house has cabaret tables and large, high-backed swivel chairs in the stalls and rows of the most comfy cinema seats with masses of legroom in the gallery. Last Saturday we were back at The Rex, for the first time in many years, to see Cord Jefferson’s Oscar-winning film ‘American Fiction’. Based on the 2001 novel Erasure by Percival Everett, the film follows Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison, an American academic (brilliantly played by Jeffrey Wright) who is increasingly frustrated as his Greek-tragedy-inspired novels are filed under ‘African-American Studies’ in bookshops because the author is Black. When publishers reject his latest manuscript for not being "Black enough", he writes an over-the-top parody of stereotypical ‘Black’ books under a pseudonym and (inevitably - and to his immense embarrassment) it becomes incredibly successful. The film is a very funny and intelligent literary satire but it's also a moving family drama with an impressive cast playing well drawn believable characters.
Labels: Books, Film
Ribaute, France
5 April 2024
We had a great holiday in France last week, staying in the tiny village of Ribaute on the Orbieu river in the Languedoc, close to the lovely medieval village of Lagrasse - one of Les Plus Beaux Villages de France. We were in the middle of the Corbières wine region with vast vineyards extending across the flat valley, but also just a few minutes drive from the hills to the south. One of our highlights was driving up narrow, winding mountain roads to see the spectacular Cathar castles that dominate this area. We visited the Château de Quéribus at Cucugnan - a ruin perched on a rocky outcrop at the top of a mountain with 360 degree views which looks exactly like the kind of castle a child would draw. We also saw flamingoes on the salt-water lakes at Peyriac-de-Mer and visited the Abbaye de Fontfroide - a huge former Cistercian monastery. And it was great to revisit the fairytale medieval walled city of Carcassonne (reviewed here in September 2018).
Labels: Holidays
'The Motive and the Cue' by Jack Thorne
22 March 2024
In 1964 Richard Burton asked Sir John Gielgud to direct his Hamlet on Broadway - a production which set the play in a theatre rehearsal room. Two of the cast wrote books about the rehearsals and the tussles between the very different approaches of Gielgud and Burton. Those two books provided the inspiration for Jack Thorne’s new play ‘The Motive and the Cue’, directed by Sam Mendes at the National Theatre in London (which we watched at a NTLive screening at the Odeon Milton Keynes on Thursday). It’s a fascinating exploration of theatre, acting and actors, with ‘Hamlet’ and its father-son relationships providing a clever backdrop both to the relationship between Gielgud and Burton and their relationships with their own fathers. Johnny Flynn is great as the volatile Richard Burton and Mark Gatiss is very moving as Gielgud. Allan Corduner as Hume Cronyn (playing Polonius) also stood out in a large cast and Tuppence Middleton almost stole the show as a wonderful Elizabeth Taylor.
Labels: Drama, Film, Theatre
'Drop the Dead Donkey: The Reawakening' by Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin
19 March 2024
When ‘Drop the Dead Donkey’ - Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin’s Channel 4 sitcom, set in the offices of a TV news channel - started in 1990 its unique selling point was the way it weaved in topical news stories (and gags about them) by recording some elements of each week’s show just before it was broadcast. Watching ‘Drop the Dead Donkey: The Reawakening’, the stage reunion of the original TV cast, at Milton Keynes Theatre last Saturday, I was pleased to see up-to-the-minute references to doctored photos of the Royal Family, the Russian presidential election etc. As a fan of the TV series, the stage show was gloriously nostalgic, with all the surviving cast members reprising their roles thirty years on (and a moving tribute at the end to David Swift and Haydn Gwynne). For anyone unfamiliar with the original series I suspect the opening scenes, punctuated by rapturous applause as each character reappeared, was probably a little tedious. But once the plot, and the mystery of why the gang had been brought back together to run a new TV news operation (‘Truth News’) started to get going, it was good fun and quickly fell back into the comic rhythms of a good sitcom. If the satire felt a little tame now, well thirty years is a long time and the news today often feels beyond parody. But it was lovely to see Susannah Doyle, Robert Duncan, Ingrid Lacey, Neil Pearson, Jeff Rawle, Stephen Tompkinson and Victoria Wicks back together again. And interesting to note that, despite the incredibly witty script, it was two brilliant moments of slapstick that got the biggest laughs.
Labels: Comedy, Theatre, TV
