It’s starting today

Wonderful Town, that is. You know, the musical at the Lowry, starring Connie Fisher, who seems very nice, despite saying that Maureen Lipman has large feet. Here is a short video clip where Connie will persuade you that you need to come and see Wonderful Town. It doesn’t have to be at the Lowry, but if it is, you get the full Hallé orchestra (first two weeks) as well.

Book now, or it could be too late!

The Doctor, Downton, a Dover bound Poirot and Dolly. Some Cash.

Along with too much food comes too much television. I wouldn’t mind having it spread out more. At least the entertainment. The food might be healthier to get over and done with, and we can go back to porridge and salad. But since I’m in a minority, I’m guessing my careful consumption of television over Christmas will not be noticed at all. Or missed.

Although, since we’re on one of those things that keeps track of who watches what and when, I have to own up to being so technically incompetent that I had the Grandmother watch Dolly Parton last night. She didn’t, but there was no way I could delete her after she went to bed.

So, it was just me and Dolly and most of the O2 arena. Nice blue dress, although having heard that she looks totally different without make-up and wig, I kept wondering what she looks like. Really. Concert was good, but I’d go mad if I had to have those bodyguards escort me everywhere.

I did actually watch a little Johnny Cash afterwards, but found it so painfully embarrassing I had to turn it off. As Roger Whittaker would say, he didn’t have Dolly’s two advantages.

Before the country greats we sat down to Poirot. Couldn’t remember much about The Clocks except for the clocks. Could have sworn that I saw bits of Brighton, and I wonder where the crescent-shaped street can be found? Possibly in Dover. Doesn’t matter. It always looks good, and this time the plot wasn’t too outrageous, either. Watched parts of it twice to allow the Grandmother to catch up with the bits she slept through.

After Christmas dinner and two lots of dishwasher on Sunday, I was more than ready to sit down with the Doctor. Despite its Narnia theme I liked it. How like a childless man to take children through a snowy landscape wearing only their dressing gowns and slippers. The only thing that grated somewhat was Matt Smith smirking ‘I know’ each time the children discovered something they liked.

A good cry was had by all at the end. Nice tree. Nice trees, in fact.

In my next life I will come back as the good Dowager at Downton. Those one-liners are a dream. (In my life as a witch I’m much too kind to utter anything like that. Naturally.)

Didn’t expect Matthew and Mary to get their act together quite so soon. And I still want to know what happened to Patrick from Canada. My hopes for Edith and her beau with the trembling smile have grown a little. Might be a case for the ouija board. Shame about Nigel Havers. He’d have been a good addition to this upperclass zoo.

I’m one of those who didn’t mind all that much about the slipping standards of season two, but it was certainly noticeable how much better the Christmas episode was. We’ll have more of the same for next year, please.

We Are Three Sisters

The winds on Haworth Moor are fierce. They carried all the way to the Quays theatre last night for the new play about the Brontë sisters, by Blake Morrison. Or possibly about Chekhov’s fictional sisters.

Blake has blended the two sister groups so that you can’t tell where one ends or the other begins. You don’t need to know anything about either the Brontës or Chekhov’s play, but if you do, you’ll notice all the details he has stuck in places throughout.

There was a little publicised post show talk in the Quay stalls, where actor and director Barrie Rutter told us about some of the background, before he was joined by all three sisters plus brother Branwell, their father and the curate for some personal thoughts on the Brontës and Haworth and the play.

Last night was their first time on a traditional stage. Previously they have performed the play in a different shape, and in two weeks’ time they will switch to yet another. It takes them at least one night to get used to a new way of doing it.

Blake’s long-standing fascination with the sisters shows, although he has also used artistic license and it’s not all true. The curate for instance, is an invention, and the doctor and the teacher are straight out of Chekhov.

We met the sisters at home in the parsonage. It was Anne’s birthday, and their home was invaded by both the doctor, who was in love with her, and the teacher, who was busy handing out copies of a little book he had written. The new curate arrived and started sweet-talking the ladies. And there really was a Mrs Robinson. She was Branwell’s love interest, and she wore green, and she behaved rather shockingly for Haworth, which turned out not to be like Harrogate in the end.

The servant Tabby wavered from the role of almost mother to the children, to that of someone who was afraid she wouldn’t be allowed to stay. I was struck by the mention of the black spots on the potatoes, which is something I’ve always remembered from Mrs Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte.

Emily, Charlotte and Anne talked endlessly about their dreams for themselves and their writing. Charlotte and Anne went off to London, while Emily stayed at home, angry about all the attention. She didn’t want to write another book and she didn’t want to be discovered.

But for all their differences, they were together at the end, only days before Branwell’s death, which was so soon followed by the others’. But they said, ‘there’ll be our books, and in the end we will be remembered.’

Yes, ladies, you are. And according to Barrie Rutter your lives were not as ‘bloody gloomy’ as Mrs Gaskell made out.

(On at the Lowry for the rest of the week. And I would have loved to have given an unwanted Victorian ornament for them to break. Just didn’t have one spare. They emailed round to ask for ornaments to break, needing one per performance.)

Self Made

Self Made is a painful film to watch. It’s very much not the kind of thing you want to go with your pizza for some relaxation and entertainment. But in fairness, it didn’t turn out quite as awful as the beginning led me to believe. Not quite.

Directed by Gillian Wearing, it features seven people she advertised for to be in a film. To begin with these perfectly normal two women and five men learn breathing and what I can only describe as silly yoga noises, which caused Daughter to splurt orange juice all over the place.

Their instructor is Sam Rumbelow who mostly resembles a strangely dressed psychologist or psychiatrist, and he would never get me to do what those people did. On film.

They seem to be exorcising their (sad) pasts, or at least something inspired by their lives. So there is bullying, bad fathers causing a bout of King Lear, childlessness and loneliness, an Elvis fantasy and a Mussolini impersonation. There is (the idea of) suicide, and a dead pig gets a good kicking. Lots of tears and lots of confessions on camera.

It’s almost impossible to judge what’s real and what’s totally fictional (if anything) and what’s somewhere in between. Two of them got very little screen time. Were they not damaged enough as people, I wonder?

I hope these ‘volunteers’ weren’t used. It was hard to judge. And to be frank, I found this too real for entertainment.

(On at Cornerhouse until next week.)

I knew I knew her

Did I sit opposite her on a train recently? That was the question. I felt I ‘knew’ her so well, the woman who swept down Shandwick Place in Edinburgh on Saturday morning. Daughter and I were going in the opposite direction, but I got enough of a good look at her. I knew I knew her.

But was it the train? I sort of felt it was recently and I sort of felt she was Swedish. Or the train was, at any rate. But what would she be doing in Edinburgh? OK, so lots of Swedes like Scotland and maybe she was here on holiday. But she strode very purposefully, and alone.

If I hadn’t sat opposite her on a train, maybe she was from the television? Yes, that could be it. Once I’d decided that much, I ‘knew’ that it was a crime series. I felt she was the wronged woman, caught up in something. So, was she British after all? But what could we have watched, that was so recent? Besides NCIS, I watch very little. Surely not Doctor Who?

I discussed the conundrum with Daughter, who hadn’t noticed her. (That didn’t make the discussion any easier.) Suddenly I felt sure it was Wallander. The Swedish, Krister Henriksson Wallander. She was his romantic interest in season one. She was the one who behaved ‘badly’, letting poor Wallander down.

But which episode? It took a lot of googling back and forth until I found the right one, and then some more before deciding which was the right female. Armed with the name Cecilia Nilsson it was easy to find her photo, and then you google name and Edinburgh, and hey presto.

There she was, being praised for her one woman show performed in silence (and in the nude if the picture was anything to go by).

So I was right. Except it wasn’t a train. But close.

Pliny the elder

Another year, another photo of Simon Callow. This time a non-shaky (well almost) photo that was not taken by the useless witch, so much better for it.

You could tell someone ‘big’ was about to come by the large number of photographers who had come out of the woodwork. And Simon was only a little late, and was swiftly rushed on to the next session, which in turn had to be swift to allow for there being an event minutes later.

There is another biography of this actor, about whom I know so little. To me it’s enough that he was Caroline Lawrence’s Pliny in the Roman Mysteries.

Case Sensitive

They don’t always get things right when dramatising books for television, do they? Especially not the books you’ve actually read. To watch, or not to watch?

I didn’t have time to catch Sophie Hannah’s Point of Rescue under its new title Case Sensitive over the recent Bank Holiday, but we watched at our earliest convenience the other night. That way we also got both parts at the same time.

Sophie writes long books, so I had concerns that two hours minus commercials wouldn’t be long enough. Needn’t have worried. This was perfect. Probably one of the more successfully dramatised crime novels I’ve seen. The plot had obviously been boiled down somewhat, but not so anything vital went missing. And at first I had looked at pictures of the two detectives and thought they didn’t look a bit like they do in my head. But they did act like them.

I’ll want to see more of them. The only problem with Charlie and Simon were that they didn’t get to begin at the beginning. This is Sophie’s third novel, and the socially awkward event they are both skirting round happened after the first book (I think) and is referred to in the second story. So we can’t very well go back. Or maybe we can? It would have been so easy to have them fall in love, whereas they are both so prickly and wounded and it’s hard to see them ever getting close again. Darren Boyd played Simon Waterhouse better than I could have imagined possible.

The plot is one I first heard Sophie describe at an event, before the book was published, and it’s as chilling as all her crime plots. I’d be scared to be inside her head, but at the same time she is spot-on with her observations on the lives we lead. Not that I go round murdering all day long, but you know what I mean.

More than one husband with more than one dead wife and daughter, and a general confusion of who is really who, all the while there might be an insane murderer out there. Rupert Graves looked suitably suffering as one of the bereaved husbands.

I hope there will be more. Although I have to admit to having read only the first three books. On the other hand I bought the fourth book twice, which might make up for things.

Goodnight Mister Tom

It’s funny how much you can cry at the theatre, even when you know the story well and thus could be better prepared for the sad parts. And it’s not funny at all, when you think of how sad it is and that people have died. In the end it wasn’t the dead people who did for me. It was the word Dad at the very end. So, a hankie would not have been a bad thing to have come equipped with. I didn’t.

This production only had time to fit in the bare bones of Michelle Magorian’s novel. But that’s fine. It was all there in spirit, including the best puppet dog I’ve ever seen. Sammy must count as a first cousin to Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse horse puppets, and he truly helped with William’s transition into Tom Oakley’s home.

‘The Sad Man’ – which is how I always think of Oliver Ford Davies – came into his own as Mister Tom. So much more right for the part than John Thaw was in the film. He had an impressively worthy William in Toby Prynne, who was both small and powerful at the same time.

The villagers milled about as villagers do, but in such a way that you could believe in the friendship with the small and frightened evacuee. Clever use of one actress both as the kind teacher and as William’s mother, bringing their differences into the open. The simple set worked well, adding enough period feel without going over the top.

WWII is popular. The audience at the Lowry on Tuesday evening was mainly ‘old’, although not necessarily old enough to have lived through the war, and with plenty of junior school pupils, presumably doing WWII in history. I bet Michelle Magorian never expected to have her children’s novel put to use as a school book.

Goodnight Mister Tom is a lovely, heartwarming dramatisation of a wonderful book. It might not be the greatest play in the world, but it’s very enjoyable – apart from the sad bits – and I would guess we all went home happy, albeit in tears.

The Guardian’s Lyn Gardner found it too risk free last week. Whatever that means. But it’s a novel first and foremost, and it can’t work in the same way that a play written exclusively for the stage would. There’s a difference.

This was good.

(The William in the photo is not my William.)

Save the Assembly Rooms

You can’t possibly have too many shops, can you?

Yes you can. We have far more of them in most places than anyone could ever want. Now the Assembly Rooms – of Edinburgh Festival Fringe fame – are about to close for ‘upgrading’.

That might be good, were it not for plans to turn it into shops at the front and a posh restaurant at the back. As if Edinburgh needs either!

Please sign the petition to stop these ridiculous plans.

NT getting closer

Now I may no longer have to consider whether I can face the journey to London to go to the National Theatre. They are setting up some magic so that people can go to Cornerhouse in Manchester and see some of the National’s plays live.

They are starting big, with Hamlet on the 9th of December, with Rory Kinnear as the prince. Then it will be Fela! on 13th January and King Lear on 3rd February. Frankenstein in March and The Cherry Orchard in June complete the season.

I have never seen anything like this, so have no clear idea of whether it works well or not. But with the modern magic available, it makes sense to bring culture to the ‘sticks’. And they may as well practise on Manchester before they do…