Parlour Song Almeida Theatre

Very enjoyable theatre trip on Tuesday to see this new play. Was really up to the Almeidas best standards. Toby Jones in particular was excellent and as ever the deign and direction were fab.

Michael Billington in his four star review fort The Guardian puts it so much better than I ever could.

Jez Butterworth's previous plays have taken us from sadistic Soho to remote Dartmoor. Now he forsakes extremes to transport us to one of those new estates, filled with trimly identical houses, on London's outer fringe. But, in the manner of American writers such as John Updike and Richard Ford, he compellingly shows us that suburbia breeds its own madness and melancholia.
His central figure, Ned, a demolition expert, constantly reruns videos of his biggest blasts. On top of this the nightmare-haunted Ned is convinced his teeming possessions, from a stuffed badger to a bust of Aldous Huxley, are being nicked. Ned's wife, Joy, views his progressive breakdown with a mockingly sardonic eye. After 11 years of stifling marriage, she also dreams of escape and comes on strong to next-door neighbour Dale, who hates his car-wash business but is terrified of abandoning his comforting suburban prison.
In a sense, there is nothing startlingly new about Butterworth's ideas. Not only American novelists but our own Alan Ayckbourn have all shown that lust and longing lurk around leafy estates. But Butterworth's play has a wild, contrapuntal humour beautifully articulated by Toby Jones's Ned in two outstanding scenes. Caught by his wife listening to a tape about oral sex techniques, Jones hilariously pretends he is absorbed in a funky Eric Clapton disc. Even better is the moment when the fitness-crazed Ned approaches a barbell with all manner of kung-fu kicks and, finally lifting it above his head, emits guttural howls worthy of King Lear. Jones's performance defines the tragi-comic nature of Butterworth's play.
Ian Rickson's beautifully precise production and Jeremy Herbert's transparent design also evoke a world in which diurnal routine is always in danger of descending into chaos.
Andrew Lincoln's Dale, in the course of inducting Ned into skipping and muscle-stretching exercises, suddenly shoots out his legs as if he were in a Bruce Lee movie. And Amanda Drew as Joy not only maintains an aura of cool disdain but shows her true sexual colours when she approaches her neighbour like one of Pinter's female sirens: A simple line such as "I'm thirsty Dale, why don't you fetch me a lemon?" becomes, in Drew's throaty rendition, an irresistible invitation.
After the more erratic The Night Heron and The Winterling, Butterworth shows that he has a compassionate understanding of the quiet desperation that stalks Britain's new estates. He exactly captures the mundane madness beneath the bland routine of affluence.

Mothers Day

In attempt to avoid feeling downhearted at Mother's Day no one marked. I suggested walk to cafe with Betty and tea and cake. Here are the children and some other photos on the way. Turned out OK no cards but some gifts

Picasso Exhibition

Saw this last Tuesday with Helen. It was good as it followed on from the exhibition we saw in Paris. It was a full retrospective of his work covering 70 years of creativity. His work changed so much in that time but it was all so vibrant and exhilarating

Princes in the Land

Just finished this on my plan to try and read every Perspehone Book. real delight the book keeps saying about how old she feels and she is 46. great insight into how we fail to understand our children. Might choose for book group. Very funny as well

Princes in the Land by Joanna Cannan, our Spring 2006 novel, has the same theme as Persephone Book No 41, Hostages to Fortune, a great Persephone favourite: it too is about a woman bringing up a family who is left at the end, when the children are on the verge of adulthood, asking herself not only what it was all for but what was her own life for? Yet the questions are asked subtly and readably.
Having shown us how everything is made bearable for Patricia if her children can be at the centre of her life and, more important (because she is not a selfish woman) if they grow up to fulfil her ideals, Joanna Cannan proceeds to show us her happiness being slowly destroyed. In Princes in the Land the tragedy of the book is that not only do none of the three children live up to their mother’s expectations, she has to watch as each of them takes a path that is anathema to her. Yet of course, she can do nothing about it; nor, sensibly, does she try.
Joanna Cannan began writing early, and her first novel was published when she was 26 (by coincidence, at exactly the same age as Diana Gardner, our other March writer, was first published). From 1922 onwards she published a book a year for nearly forty years – novels; detective novels, including the very successful Death at The Dog, which is in print in America; and the first ‘pony’ book (first in the sense that the focus was on a pony-mad girl rather than a horse or pony), a genre that her daughters Josephine, Diana and Christine Pullein-Thompson were to make very much their own. Princes in the Land is about an interesting and rarely-discussed theme; it is also evocative about Oxford.
Joanna Cannan ‘lived enthusiastically’ and wrote novels that were ‘witty, satirical, even cynical. She presented clashes between idealists and materialists, with no easy solutions’ writes the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (making Joanna Cannan the twenty-sixth of our writers to have an entry in that great dictionary); this is the book of hers with a thematic bite that Persephone readers will find hard to forget.

What I Do Everyday

If this really is all these things that I have done I really ought to report on the thing which I do everyday and that's take Betty the Dog for a walk early in the morning. We walk along the Alban Way until I look across the allotments and the roof tops to get the glimpse of the Abbey which is in the photograph. It never fails to lift my spirits and it has accompanied me all through the winter. Now Spring is coming it looks even better.

Bought a Camera

Here is the first photo loaded to my blog with the new camera which I bought today. I need to get a lot better than this.

To Kill a Mockingbird

Finished this yesterday. Was such a huge gap in my reading really cannot believe I have not read it before. It is the almost perfect book. Everyone at book group last night gave it a 10. I always thought it was just about race but its about so much more, class, gender, mental health, family relationships and the law to name a few. All of the plaudits for it are totally justified and it really is one of those books everyone should read and I really am glad that I have now.

Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting

Finished this last night in Birmingham. Was inspired to read it when i read a letter from Amy Rosenthal the playwright saying she cried when finishing it. Absolutely loved it. Its sad and also very funny and bitterly acerbic and made me very grateful to be born when I was. The husband is a particularly grotesque figure emphasised throughout by the physical descriptions of him. Cant recommend highly enough

Blurb from the Persephone web site below.

Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting, a 1958 novel by Penelope Mortimer, is about the expectations of women, about a house-bound mother reluctantly (desperately) at home all day, in contrast to her daughter who has escaped, to university and then, we can assume, to a job.
‘The book came out at a time,’ writes Valerie Grove (author of the recently published A Voyage Round John Mortimer) in the Preface, ‘when the impact of the new wave of feminism, which would change everything under the banner of women’s liberation, had not yet arrived’.
In Ruth Whiting’s commuter-belt village ‘the wives conform to a certain standard of dress, they run their houses along the same lines, bring their children up in the same way; all prefer coffee to tea, all drive cars, play bridge, own at least one valuable piece of jewellery and are moderately good-looking.’ Yet Ruth is on the verge of going mad. A ‘nervous breakdown’ would be a politer phrase, but really she is being driven mad by her life and her madness is exacerbated by everyone’s indifference to her plight.

Although Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting is at times excruciatingly funny in its caustic dissection of the people among whom the Whitings live, it is also a profound study of female isolation. As the critic Judy Cooke has pointed out, Penelope Mortimer’s novels were ‘intense, imaginative explorations of an inner world. It is an enclosed world, dominated by fear, in which physical experiences such as sterilisation and abortion isolate her characters from their fellow beings and are metaphors for a deeper spiritual isolation.’

Doubt

Went to see this with Jenny on Tuesday following strong recommendations. I did not really like it very much, thought it was slow and did not really develop the themes at all it seemed very long as well. I would not recommend to anyone to see this.