Puppet grinder cabaret

I’ve been to the Little Angel Theatre in Islington a couple of times over the last year, but both times for the launch of a book of poetry rather than theatre. It’s a lovely little venue, and the photos on the walls of past productions have made me want to visit to see some actual puppetry. But as it’s geared towards children, and I have neither children of my own nor any I could ‘borrow’, I haven’t actually managed it.

But at the last launch (Mike Bartholomew-Biggs’s brilliant Tradesman’s Exit) I saw an ad for an evening of ‘adult’ puppetry: Puppet Grinder Cabaret. It looked brilliant. Reviews were read (all very good) and tickets quickly booked.

So last Sunday, Malin and I headed down, unsure what to expect but hoping for the best. It was a brilliant evening: anarchic, rather low-fi, patchy in places but mostly very good and very funny. I wish I’d kept my programme so I could give you a full run-down but sadly, in a fit of trying not to hoard too much, it’s already gone in the bin. That’ll teach me.

Our compere for the evening was stand-up comic Dave Gibson, who was responsible for the great atmosphere and vibe (without him, I wonder if the evening might have been a bit flat). He set the tone – excited, funny, a bit rude – and got the audience warmed up nicely.

I now can’t remember the full programme, which included animation as well as live acts, but highlights for me were Clementine the living fashion doll, a shadow/paper cut-out animation of ‘Suck a thumb’ and the final live act, the Lost Circus, which was totally brilliant but quite hard to describe: basically a collection of found objects (feather duster, ski glove, etc) doing cabaret/circus tricks, all under the direction of a sock-puppet ringmaster. Very odd and very funny. The daredevil ski glove being shot from a cannon is my abiding memory of the night – just brilliant. So brilliant in fact that I can’t remember the other live acts that I enjoyed. I may well come back and add more details if I remember them…

Anyway the Puppet grinder cabaret is now on at Edinburgh, so if you’re up there, check them out – lots of very silly fun.

The Hunt in the Forest

I love John Burnside’s poetry. I’ve actually only read one of his collections, Gift Songs, which I read and posted about last year on my 52 Poets blog here. But this poem, ‘The Hunt in the Forest’, just popped up on my RSS feed from the Guardian poetry page, and I think it’s so wonderful I want to post it here.

How children think of death is how the shadows
gather between the trees: a hiding place
for everything the grown-ups cannot name.
Nevertheless, they hurry to keep their appointment
far in the woods, at the meeting of parallel lines,
where everything is altered by its own
momentum – altered, though we say transformed -
greyhound to roebuck, laughter to skin and bone;

and no one survives the hunt: though the men return
in threes and fours, their faces blank with cold,
they never quite arrive at what they seem,
leaving a turn of phrase or a song from childhood
deep in the forest, bent to the juddering kill
and waiting, while their knives slip through the blood
like butter, or silk, until the heart is still.

All the world’s a stage

I know the Globe theatre’s seen as just a bit of a tourist attraction by lots of theatre folk (and I remember my Shakespeare tutor at college giving a talk there that basically said the whole thing was a waste of time), but I went on Saturday afternoon (as part of a hen do) for a matinee performance of As You Like It – and it was great.

It’s a fun play (comedy, with all the Shakespearean staples: dispossessed dukes, a forest, a fool, cross-dressing, bawdiness and falling in love) and one I hadn’t seen live before. We were groundlings (standing) and it all added to the fun, Saturday-afternoon vibe. The cast was brilliant – props in particular to Audrey, Jacques and Touchstone (the fool), who had the audience eating out of his hand.

And I have to say – the Swan bar, where we had a few reserved tables before/after the play and during the interval, was a lovely place to be on a sunny summer afternoon too. But I think I’m glad I made my excuses before the night got too messy…

Prom #10

Thanks to a bit of encouragement from a friend (thanks, Sean) I’m going to give this another go… I’ve not been blogging for seven months, since the 52 Poets one ended, so I thought I’d try (again) to resuscitate this one.

With more classical music. Last night was concert number 10 in the BBC Proms series at the Royal Albert Hall. I got really cheap seats with a friend – we were way up in the last row of the circle, with a restricted view. The hall was probably only two-thirds full though,  so when it was clear no one else was going to be joining us on the last row we scooted right round and got a really good view of the whole orchestra (albeit from a long way up).

I love the Proms – a huge long series of concerts, a really diverse programme, and of course world-class orchestras, choirs, soloists and conductors. With standing tickets at a fiver it’s an amazingly cheap way to discover and enjoy a huge range of classical music.

Friday’s concert wasn’t on my ‘really want to see’ list (I haven’t managed to make any of them yet, but they’re all broadcast live on BBC Radio 3) but it was a lovely programme:  a mix of French (Debussy, Ravel), Spanish (Sarasate) and Japanese (Takemitsu, Hosokawa) music, ‘tracing musical cross-fertilisations between East and West, and between France and Spain’. It’s always a treat to see a full orchestra play, and Beth and I were wowed by the violin solo in the Ravel piece. Incredible that you can fill a hall with such a small piece of wood… although the violin in question did turn out to be a 1714 Stradivarius, which is in itself pretty impressive.

And we were rather hypnotised by the sound of the shō - a Japanese ‘mouth organ’ that, apparently, sounds like the call of a phoenix. I’d never heard (or even heard of) one before, and it was mesmerising – long series of chords that just went on and on (you can play it inhaling and exhaling). Beautiful.

(Interestingly, the two tallest reeds are silent, but they’re kept for aesthetic reasons – like two symmetrical ‘wings’.)

So, if you’re in London – go and see a Prom. They’re great.

two hands

So, a whole nine months and no posts… maybe it’s time to give up on this blog? I so enjoyed 52 Poets – I don’t know why this one’s been so hard to keep up…

Here’s another try, though. I went to the most amazing concert last Friday, for my birthday, and it seemed just the thing with which to resurrect this blog. We went to see the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall (a home match as it were – they’re the South Bank’s resident orchestra). The programme was Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead – here’s a fantastic introduction to the piece which you can listen to on the Radio 4 website; Mozart’s Piano Concerto no 23, and Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra – which apart from the opening part, was the one piece I wasn’t familiar with.

We had two boxes at the front, and it was so wonderful to have a view. Symphony orchestras are just so fantastic to watch – something like seventy violins, plus the rest! – and what a sound… Nothing compares to seeing music live, and that’s just as true of classical as any other genre. It was just – wow. The Isle of the Dead was probably my favourite piece – it’s so atmospheric. The opening notes had the hairs on my neck prickling.

The Mozart was a real treat too, of course. It’s a very familiar piece of music to me; I like listening to classical music when I’m working, in particular piano music, and I have a few cds of Mozart’s piano concertos, including the one we heard. The really exciting thing for me was getting to see a concert pianist play – I’ve seen symphony orchestras perform, but never a concert pianist. And this one was extra special – it was Leon Fleisher. Now in his eighties, Fleisher was a celebrated pianist until he lost the use of one of his hands, for something like thirty-five years. During this time he played the (somewhat limited) repertoire of one-handed piano music and established an alternative career as a conductor. Five or so years ago he got the use of his hand back, thanks to pioneering treatment (botox injections, apparently), and now he’s performing again. I first heard of him by listening to his lauded ‘Two Hands’ recording – his comeback cd from a few years ago, and it was so exciting to be able to see and hear this brilliant musician. There’s a lovely story in the Times here.

The Strauss was good fun (and of course has that fabulous opening) but I did find my attention wandering a few times; it’s actually not a piece I know at all, and sometimes familiarity helps. Anyway, hurrah for fantastic live music – and thanks to my lovely family for joining me, and making it a very special birthday.

The Straight Story rescore

Enough! Too long! I’ve just deleted all the drafts of posts between now and February that I’ve never finished and published, and I’m starting again, again…

To kick things back off, then, a special screening of David Lynch’s The Straight Story at the Ritzy in Brixton. It was a rescore, done live by Big Chill friends and Sheffield duo Animat, and follows their hugely well received rescore of French animation Belleville Rendezvous. The Straight Story rescore included (apparently – I’d not seen the film before) a lot of the original score by Angelo Badalamenti, who has written the scores for most of David Lynch’s films, I think, mixed in with their own electronica compositions, plus tracks from the dj vaults. Given that it was a very scenic film, with lots of both close-ups of people’s faces, and panoramic shots of huge vistas, I think it was a great one to rescore, and sat well with Animat’s music. My only problems were the quality of the film – it looked like it was a dvd, which doesn’t look all that great on a cinema screen – and that the soundtrack occasionally got in the way of the dialogue. Other than that, enchanting stuff.

 

 

December+January+February

So much for catching up… and of course with a backlog I never get around to what I’m actually enjoying currently, because I have to clear my plate first. No more! Enough!

For completion’s sake, and then it’s done, here are two months worth of highlights:

December saw the consumption of Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, Kenneth Branagh’s The Magic Flute, Disney’s Enchanted, the Lee Miller and craft exhibitions at the V&A, an inspiring talk by Jeremy Begbie at the LICC, comedy from Mark Thomas, dinners at Abeno and Canteen, the Barbican’s Jack and the Beanstalk and the Criterion’s 39 Steps, and Christmas atmosphere at Dennis Severs’ House.

January was much quieter, with a new purchase of an old Rufus Wainright album, Rufus Wainright (brilliant); a visit to the new gem gallery at the Natural History Museum (a little disappointing, with too many exhibits ‘temporarily removed’); the Age of Enchantment exhibition at the Dulwich Picture gallery (beautiful); and my first visit of the year to Kew Gardens.

I might as well clear February out of the way too, while I’m at it: two stunning films – both of which have recently won Oscars – No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood; a jaunt to Barcelona, and to go with it George Orwell’s Fighting in Spain (a very poorly edited – unacceptable from Penguin – extract from Homage to Catalonia); a surprisingly arresting read in Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent; a second visit to Kew; and last night, a spoken word performance from the ever-compelling Saul Williams. Absolutely thrilling.

Here’s to fairer blogging weather in 2008! The poetry project has got off to a good start; I’ll have to see if I can replicate my dedication here…

November

November was a great month. It kicked off with a magical mystery date to Lucha Britannia’s ‘day of the dead spectacular’, which was awesome. Lucha Britannia nights, in their own words, are ‘a mixture of British World of sport/Mexican Lucha Libre wrestling, wrapped up in a bizarre cabaret show set in an Orwellian near future, where the “Yankee Bosch” have taken over the world and banned all forms of entertainment they don’t control’. I’ve always been faintly horrified by wrestling, and I wasn’t sure what to expect from the night, but it was fantastic fun. The wrestling itself was both a lot more entertaining and impressive than I would have expected (a four-way luchador fight plus ladder at the end had the whole crowd extremely excited), and although the cabaret was a little more, er, extreme than I might have liked, it too was quite a show. Best of all was the vibe of the night, with the back-story to enter into and a superbly dressed, friendly crowd (we enjoyed dressing up too). We’ll definitely be going again, although they don’t seem to be happening as often as they did earlier on last year. Here’s a short piece/interview from Time Out and here are my photos on flickr (warning: one photo is NSFW).

Following this great review Dan and I went to see The Counterfeiters, a German film set in a concentration camp where the prisoners’ dilemma hinges on whether or not to comply with counterfeiting the American dollar. It was fascinating, brutal, horrifying and totally absorbing – and based on fact: Operation Bernhard aimed to destabilise the British, and then American, economies by flooding the market with counterfeit currency. Krueger’s Men, published a couple of years ago, looks like the definitive account of the plot; here’s a fascinating article about how the film came to be made.

A quick jaunt to Rome in the middle of the month: my first visit to the eternal city. The weather was beautiful – mild but slightly crisp – and it wasn’t too busy. The whole trip, though short, really deserves its own post (or three), but the two things that remain lodged in my mind are sunny walks just exploring the city and its architecture, and visiting the Basilica of San Clemente. San Clemente is not just a beautiful twelfth-century basilica with exquisite frescoes and mosaics, but is built on top of a fourth-century basilica, which was built on top of a second-century Roman house, which contains a Mithraic temple – and you can walk down into each level. Extraordinary. The day that we flew back news was breaking that archaeologists have discovered what they think is the lupercale – the cave in which Romulus and Remus were suckled by a wolf. My photos from the trip are here.

Back home, the Photographic Portrait Prize 2007 at the National Portrait Gallery. The photograph used for the publicity for this exhibition was so arresting that I decided I had to go and see it, and it was a great little show – just the right size for a Friday night, with some really compelling portraits. It’s on until March; below is the winning portrait.

October

I know, I know. I promised and I didn’t deliver. Honestly, writing this regularly, and keeping it vaguely up to date, is one of my new year vows.

Is anyone still interested in the last three months of 2007? I think I am; I did some lovely things. It was young Daniel’s birthday at the beginning of October, so we headed southwest to sample the various delights of Kew: first, michelin-starred French-style restaurant The Glasshouse (sister restaurant of Chez Bruce and La Trompette). I’d never been before, but it’s one of Daniel’s favourite places to eat in London, and it was pretty special. Sadly I can’t remember what I ate, although I do remember that Dan had one of their signature dishes, the truffled, deep-fried egg, as his starter. It was a real treat, and for food that good, very good value. Highly recommended. Maybe we’ll get a return visit for my birthday next month.

Then a quick trot over the road to the Royal Botanic Gardens, to see the wonderful exhibition of twenty-eight of Henry Moore’s outdoor sculptures. It was beautiful to see so many large sculptures, all together, outside and in such beautiful surroundings. The exhibition’s on until the end of March, and I’m definitely planning to go again.

Rob Ryan is an artist who specialises in cutting paper, and I went to see an exhibition of the illustrations that make up his book, This is For You, at the Rebecca Hossack Gallery near Fitzroy Square. I’d never heard of him before, and I was utterly captivated by his work: it’s both exquisite and whimsical, and somehow reminds me of the books I used to read when I was little. The book is a love story, of sorts, and although the illustrations are reproduced beautifully, I think his work is much better viewed up close. If only I’d had a spare couple of grand to buy one of his beautiful pieces… maybe I’ll content myself with one of his tiles. Here’s a lovely article about him and his work from the Telegraph.

October’s one real disappointment was Punchdrunk’s production of The Masque of the Red Death. I first came across Punchdrunk at the Big Chill festival in 2004, where they put on a totally absorbing version of Woyzek. I’d heard that their 2006 production of Faust was excellent, so I was really looking forward to seeing The Masque, which was staged over the whole of the Battersea Arts Centre. But what started eerily atmospheric and menacing never really went anywhere. The idea is that you happen upon various different parts of the story as you wander round the set, and piece it together as it unfolds around you. In fact the production wasn’t just of Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, but something like ten of his stories (something I only found out afterwards) and there was never a coherent sense of plot – or really anything much happening that you could make sense of at all. I suppose that was meant to be the point, and I know a lot of people loved it, but I found it increasingly frustrating – a bit of a triumph of style over substance, and too little story spread over too large a (mostly empty, even though beautifully realised) set.

Finally, my djing (well, putting one tune on after the other) debut at the Big Chill Bar, off Brick Lane. Definitely the best-paid two hours I’ve ever worked, and lots of fun, if extremely nervewracking. I suppose the best bit about it was the chance to hear my favourite tunes played out, loudly: I started with some Debussy and ended, of course, with the Wee Papa Girl Rappers. Thanks to Jane for helping me prepare and everyone who came along!

September

I’m clearly going to have to get some tips from friends with blogs. I appear to be fully useless at writing this more than once every other month, and I’ve been keeping a long list of things to write about, most of which I’ve now crossed off: I’ll never catch up if I write a separate post for each one, so I thought I’d do a round-up of last month and the month before, and then see if I can’t get into more regular blogging habits. For shame.

So here’s a lightning-quick summary of September’s stand-out stuff:

First up, the Lord of the Rings musical that I saw with various members of the family, to celebrate Dad’s birthday. This isn’t something I would have chosen to go to myself, I don’t think, and I was a bit sad that it clashed with the online airing of my mystery mix (see previous posts here and here), but I really enjoyed it – and it was certainly a lot better than a lot of its reviews suggested. At times it felt like it was modelling itself too closely on the recent Peter Jackson films – both stylistically and in terms of what was included/omitted, and the story did suffer being condensed so much – but in terms of spectacle it was really something, with a few quite stunning set pieces. The set design and the characters’ acrobatics were breathtaking in places, and the sense of both menace and wonder that you get from the books (and the films, especially the first) really came across. My main criticism (apart from the feyness of the elves, something the films almost entirely avoided) would be that none of the songs were catchy enough: if you leave a musical without whistling at least one of the numbers, then I think something’s been missed somewhere along the way… Still, thanks Dad for a great night out.

And now for something completely different: to the 02 arena (previously the Millennium Dome) for some genuine NHL ice hockey, with the LA Kings playing the Anaheim Ducks in the first of two showcase games to open the season. Canadian friends have pointed out how lucky we were to get some top-flight ice hockey over here – it was the kind of game that would have been difficult (and expensive) to get tickets for in North America. I think it was the first professional sports match I’ve seen live, and it was brilliant fun – a real sense of theatre and excitement, and ice hockey’s a very fast, exciting sport to watch. I was rooting for the Ducks, since they’d recently signed my favourite hockey bad boy, Todd Bertuzzi, but sadly they were defeated. Ah well. Here’s a clip of the national anthem being sung at the match opening. Good times!

Hmm. I must have done more than that in September, but that’s all there appears to be of note.

Tomorrow: October. I promise.