I spent All Hallows' Eve watching Macbeth at the Gielgud Theatre and it was probably the best play I've ever been to see. Magnificent and gripping, and steeped in blood and drama from beginning to end. I love the play anyway, but this production is really something special.
I've been going to impro classes with Alex F over the last six weeks and although I'm not the best improviser ever, the class has really taught me to look at drama more carefully and given me a better insight into what makes scenes engaging and interesting. I was appreciating lots of things about Macbeth from an improv point of view tonight. For example, they raise the stakes in this production fast and hard, which makes sense in a play that gets into the business of killing everyone very early on but is still striking. Lady Macbeth walks on for her first scene in Act I literally quivering with evil, beginning the"unsex me here" soliloquy in a slow frightful whisper and then escalating, spitting forth "take my milk for gall" like venom. When Macduff receives the news that his wife and children have been slaughtered, there is a long long silence as he comes right to the front of the stage, no holding back, and then finally cries like a wounded animal.
The setting is like a cross between an abbatoir and a Nazi hospital and the witches are three bloody knife wielding nurses, with loud amplified voices and wild strobe lights. They manage to deliver their tacky chants and songs in a credible way, even doing "hubble bubble toil and trouble" as a strange rap song in a morgue. Banquo's bloody arrival at the feast is spectacular and gory and they play this scene once before the interval and once after, so that you can see Macbeth confronting the real grisly corpse of Banquo, and then see Macbeth confronting thin air, as it appears to the other guests.
Kate Fleetwood is amazing as Lady Macbeth and Patrick Stewart is even better as Macbeth. My improv classes made me notice their constantly shifting emotions and changing status which made them so compelling to watch, as each alternately took the lead in "screw ing their courage to the sticking-place" and then falling prey to fear and madness.
Patrick Stewart is fascinating to watch – he's always doing things as he speaks, making a ham sandwich, opening a bottle of red wine, doing up his bow tie – and by the end of the play he is totally in command of the stage, frequently making the audience laugh with his increasingly mad and scary levity but then switching to intense poignant weariness for "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow".
And the final scene – wow. Macduff arrives to salute Malcolm as king carrying Patrick Stewart's bald covered in blood severed head! It's genius! That Picardian dome means that you can recognise it a mile off! He holds his severed head aloft as he invites everyone to see him "crown'd at Scone" and turns it around to face the audience as the lights go out!
After Valzer, we saw another Italian film, this time a subtle humorous anti-Christian tale of a young theology professor who looks exactly like Jesus, and the film doesn't try to hide that everyone thinks he looks like Jesus too. It's hard to take away any one message or point the film might have been trying to make, but it seems that the professor decides his life spent poring over religious books is meaningless and in one magnificent act of vandalism he drives nails through a hundred priceless books in the lofty library that he and his colleagues share. The rest of the film is about him as he flees to stay with a small squatter community by a village on the banks of the River Po, who fall in love with him as the police close gradually in.
The film is actually quite funny and light, but shot through with amazing moments of lyrical beauty, where the professor will rise to the occasion and bring forth some biblical or anti-biblical truth about life and authentic experience. There's a great line where he asks the sergeant questioning him: "how many books have you read? ten? in your whole life? when you look back through your life what do you see? when I look back, all I see is books"
At that moment I think all of us in audience who have read far too many books suddenly had a pang of abject existential fear!
Alex and I met up with Charles and his friend Fabio at BFI Southbank last night to see Valzer, a cool Italian film shot in one take over the course of a day in a hotel.
The central characters are the hotel staff, particularly a maid having an interesting and emotional confrontation with the father of one of her ex-colleagues. The father has been in prison for years and has been exchanging letters with the maid thinking that she was his daughter. The hotel staff are all doing their best to live meaningful lives on low wages, surrounded by a range of extremely rich corrupt guests, from big Italian busty models to football magnates discussing how to rig their games to a sociological expert who lectures the football magnates on how best to manipulate the common people through sport and TV so that their lives become so cold and empty that they will do whatever they are told.
The film is really good at painting a comic but depressing world of bleak corruption that the drama of the humble central characters is played out against. The decision to shoot it all in one take makes for a particularly engrossing feeling of being sucked into one tight evolving story.
Headed over to Second Life this morning to join in with a virtual version of Matt's Macmillan biggest coffee morning in the world fundraising thing. More fun than I expected. I hung out drinking virtual coffee and virtual orange juice, then someone gave me a couple of dance scripts, so I jived around the room waving my coffee cup like a loon.
Had a lovely collection of people gather in the Pineapple in Kentish Town for my thirtieth birthday. The pub's in the middle of refurbishment, so had a stripped out East Berlin vibe, but with more English drunkyards. I was given lots of presents, which I wasn't really expecting but much appreciated.
I'm off on the train to Morocco tomorrow, and gonna turn thirty somewhere down there in the north African bop night! Hopefully will have some kind of epiphany or something!
Matt's at Manchester Pride this weekend, London was drenched in lovely sludgy sunshine yesterday.
Andy and Jo came round to nick all our MP3s – they ate flapjacks with Mouse. Jordan and Phil came round and nicked all my drugs. What's a guy to do, eh?
Met up with Matt and two colleagues from his work, Eva and Nick.
to see Transylvania, the latest Tony Gatlif film. Like Exils, Transylvania is visually breathtaking, drawing you into a bleak cold hard misty eastern European landscape. Gatlif can make a rubbish dump look beautiful and moving.
In Transylvania, an intense pregnant French girl, Zingarina, is looking for her Romany lover, who she thinks was deported from France but who actually left to escape from her. When he tells her this, she goes a bit mental and starts alternately latching on to people and abandoning them.
She's interesting because on the one hand she is completely unable to look after herself, on the other, she's strikingly independent, wandering off into Transylvania in a trance by herself, relying on her ability to be adopted by people she meets.
At one point she is teamed up with a little beggar girl, who looks after them both but exasperated at Zingarina's trance-like divorce from reality keeps shaking her and shouting: "wake up!"
It all ends quite well, with Zingarina getting together with an itinerant trader, who seems to feel both pleased and somewhat trapped by this fate...
Got up early this morning and met up with Dan and Teresa, and Al, at Putney Bridge, for another bout of the Thames walk, to Kew Bridge. It rained on us quite a bit, but was good fun, lots of nice walking conversation, followed by a nice pint of ale and roast lunch!
Jordan came round on Friday night and we had a Buffy evening! We got through a good chunk of season three, and enjoyed a few other favourites, fuelled by coke and beer, finally getting to bed around 4am...
I was randomly very hungover this morning, but recovered gradually. Jordan hung around, Matt pottered about, and we watched musicals, including the glory of Singing In The Rain, and Brian Sewell's marvellously dirty documentary about Dali. Brian is so good in that documentary - there's a bit where he's talking about Dali's tight arse and recounts about how he purchases him something to help, what he describes with post relish as an "anal dilator".
Finally, the three of us headed into town to Trash Palace for Andi's birthday drinks! Andi and Jon were on good form and I had one of those evenings where lager is just delicious, like necking water when you're really thirsty!
Matt and I saw a lovely film last night at the ICA – I for India. It's a documentary following an Indian family who moved to Darlington in the 1960s, made by one of the daughters of the family and drawing on an amazing wealth of footage from England and India.
The father, Yash Pal Suri, wanted to keep in touch with his family back in India after he moved to Darlington, so he bought two Super 8 cameras, two projectors and two reel-to-reel recorders and sent one set back to his parents and siblings in India. Hence there are all these amazing scenes of English and Indian life from the 60s and 70s, and then the 80s, all skillfully put together into what is both a documentary about immigration and the painful necessity of separating from parents and home, and a sentimental domestic drama that draws you so close to the family that many of us were quietly sobbing by the end of the film.
The weirdest thing was that as the lights came on and we turned to get up, we saw that the mother from the film was sat right behind us in the audience, along with other members of the family from the film!
I really recommend seeing it if you have a chance.
To the Royal Vauxhall Tavern yesterday for David Hoyle. Dan M, James G, Matt, Ben and I enjoyed an evening considering "immigr-ah-tionne" ... complete with sideswipes at London, Britain, the gay scene, people in relationships and Africa. I think my favourite line this time was when he said something like: "Who cares what the person next to you is thinking? Do you care what they think about you? Because quite frankly, unless they are prepared to wipe the shit off your arse first thing in the morning, fuck them!"
On the way home I left my mobile phone on the train! I never do that! But I did last night.
Luckily, a lovely train guard called Robin picked up the phone and will be returning it to me on Thursday. I'll make sure I give him lots of chocolate and cava!
Another night at the Great British Beer Festival ... a big gang of us were there this time. Had a nice time in the Welsh area, before sampling one of my old favourites, the somewhat tart Drie Fonteinen Oude Kriek, and moving on to a cider. I reckon rating 5 is right for the cider - medium dry, but it still has a good sweet fruity edge.
Random great drunken night yesterday. Matt and I met up with Sneh for a film at Leicester Square. We didn't like the look of anything on though, so we went for a drink at a pancake cafe place on the square, then decided to pay £5 and go to one of those comedy gigs they advertise around that area every evening.
So we did, and found ourselves in the Thistle Hotel nearby, with a load of random tourists from all over the place. We too felt like tourists, delving into a different side of London with this collection of middle aged holiday makers, backpackers and very young people.
It was really fun. Our comedian was Inkey Jones, who had an expectant wide eyed delightful face, and his style was to work with any material he could get out of the audience. He found out where everyone was from and made predictable but quick witted jokes around national sterotypes, he homed in on funny voices and big beards, and he totally laid into us as the gay couple, fixing particularly on Matt, who invited it, showed he could take it, and kept throwing him lines. He was more cautious with me, perhaps because in one of his opening lines he accused me of being from "another planet" and I looked at him so blankly that he probably thought I was. But once we had all warmed up, he was calling me a fudge packer like an old friend.
We ended up in the bar, drinking excessively in the way that having Sneh there guarantees, along with Inkey Jones and a random youthful wildlife photography student called Andrew.
We didn't leave till after 2am and then fell asleep on the nightbus, with the driver waking us up at Archway, where we slunk home in shame, burping up the McDonalds we should never have had earlier...
Another Great British Beer Festival in Earl's Court this year. Matt and I met up with Andy, and Luke from Australia, and we sampled a range of ales before gorging on pie.
I tried to drink in thirds this year, to avoid getting pissed too quickly. This was a reasonably successful strategy too. I enjoyed Allendale's Wolf, "beer with a bite" as the description cheerfully advises, Coach House's Posthorn Premium Ale was refreshing and dry, even dryer and quite weird was St Peter's Grapefruit Beer, which smelt exactly like grapefruit, though the flavour was more balanced. I had Leatherbritches Raspberry Belter too, which I also enjoyed in 2006, a great crisp fruity summer beer.
Matt won a blue CAMRA t-shirt in the tombola this year. The smallest size they had was large though! We'll have to use it as a morning after dressing gown style shirt...
To the Royal Vauxhall Tavern after work for more of the divine David Hoyle.
Last night it was an examin-ah-tionne of "crime and punishment", a searing sociological critique of criminality, an indictment of the capitalist system that creates it, and lots of jokes about anal rape. Glorious. Cabaret is one of those things that makes me so happy I live in London. £5.99 of quality thought-provoking entertainment!
A glorious Brighton Pride this year, blazing hot fun in the sun in Preston Park. Lots of us went, we took pills and K, went on the fairground rides, including the mega high soaring ride where you can see the whole park spread beneath you before you plunge down in a heady rush of MDMA glory, took to the beach as the sun was just setting, and Jordan, Alex and I had a quick swim. Then we met up with Adam, Matt and Kayla, who had just moved back to Brighton these last couple of days, having a fond pint in the Barley Mow, fabulous scene of a hundred Bell hangovers. It's really nice to have Adam and Kayla back up in Kemptown again.
Hot on the heels of the Eden Project, work took me to Chelmsford yesterday for the epic 21st World Scout Jamboree! It's huge! 30,000 scouts and about another 10,000 adults of various kinds, in Hylands Park. They are using the huge arena stage that will be used at the V Festival in a couple of weeks time, but for scouting songs and dances. So, at lunchtime all these scouts start singing poppy uplifting songs like One World One Promise, the theme song of the Jamboree, or S Club Seven, or Dancing In The Street. It was all quite glorious, if somewhat cheesy too. I was practically moved to tears by the earnestness of it all.
