Peter and Alice

I didn't know what this would be like, other than it would be well acted given the stars are Dame Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw. That sells tickets on its own. The premise is a meeting of 80 year old Alice Liddell (inspiration for Alice in Wonderland) and a rather younger Peter Llewellyn Davies (inspiration for Peter Pan).

Its a good enough play, but don't take your kids. Why? Well the message of the piece is really that life is all downhill from the age of 10. For these two one can see their point of view. Alice ended up wed to a man with a great country house, but her three sons died in the trenches and her husband's financial acumen was lacking, leaving her aged and alone living in a draughty library in a decaying house. Peter by contrast only had one of his brothers killed in the trenches, but his favoured younger brother Michael then committed suicide. Oh and both his parents died of cancer during his teens. Yes one can see why their 10 year old selves were more carefree, even if both the subjects of obsessive attention of adult family friends in Lewis Carroll and JM Barrie. Thankfully this a a rarity in modern plays in not being built on revelations of child abuse. Rather it brings out the sadness of these men who are drawn so much to the fleeting joy of youthful innocence. Their needs are emotional rather than sexual.

Certainly a play that leaves one thinking. 90 minutes with no real action or drama as such, but the flowing dialogue doesn't mean the play drags at all. But one is ultimately left with a sense of deep sadness. Even before getting home and finding England had drawn with Montenegro.

Let there be light

Today I finally made it into the Light Show at the Hayward, which I had been thwarted in doing the previous weekend. One of the advantages of a 4 day week is that it allows one to go to things on a weekday.

I can well understand why this has been so popular. It really has some stand-out works, provided you don't read the twaddle that comes with the pieces. You don't often wander around an exhibition and see kids faces spontaneously break into a smile when they see what's on show, but that's what happens here. Nothing stuffy about this, provided, as I say, you ignore the pretentious blurb.

Of course, light affects are very much part of what I enjoy at music gigs, and this follows in that tradition  some of them relying on artificial mist (equivalent of dry ice at gigs) to get the effect of light playing on the suspended particles.

Difficult to know where to start on this stuff. Maybe with Leo Villareal's "Cylinder II" which is a stunning chandelier of a piece, hanging 19,000 LED lights on mirrored drops which go light and dark on a computerised timer. Frankly you could watch it transfixed for ages. Would make a great centrepiece for an office atrium. It made a good entrance piece to start the exhibition.

Anthony McCall's "You and I Horizontal" was wonderful too, with beams of light shining at you, but as you passed through the beams they seemed to bend and what was a straight line became curved. You have to see it really.

Similarly Carlos Cruz-Diez's "Chromosaturation" is best appreciated by being right in it. Its just a matter of colour, but you feel saturated by the depth of the various pure tints.

Rose also relies on colour and light beams to create a rich effect.

Maybe the one you most need to see, or perhaps feel, is "Slow Arc Inside a Cube IV". This is basically a cage with a light slowly moving within, in an arc. The important bit is the shadows this creates, the mesh of the cube's sides casting moving shadows on the walls and floor. It leaves one with an unsettling effect as you feel motion yourself, or at least your eyes are telling you that the room must be moving.

Another wonderfully clever effect is to be seen in Olafur Eliasson's "Model for a Timeless Garden" in which a series of fountains are arranged across one side of a darkened room. They are lit by flashing strobe lighting (not one for epileptics) but this has the effect of freezing the droplets of water, making the scene like a series of crystal blooms. Beautiful, but the flashing lights are hard to bear after a while.

The most ingenious piece was perhaps one of the least impressive works. Bill Cuthbert's "Bulb Box Reflection" is just one light bulb seemingly reflected in a mirror on the side of a box. But the curious bit is the the light-bulb is off, but its "reflection" is on!

Not all the works are this interesting. Some are just too simple and therefore dull, like Brigitte Kowanz's "Light steps". We are supposed to see a series of floating steps suspended in mid-air, but its all too obviously just a line of fluorescent tubes.

I think what makes this exhibition work while many modern are exhibitions don't to my eyes is the nature of the medium. Its new. The effects with lights wouldn't have been technically possible only a few years ago. So the artists don't have to go bizarre to be new, they just need to understand the technology and imagine the effects. Don't look at this stuff for the meaning of life, just be amused and slightly awestruck. Its also an exhibition that needs to be seen. No catalogue could do it justice. You need to move around in some of the exhibits - to take part as it were.

The Script

There is a theory that if you want to pull you go out with an ugly mate who makes you look attractive by comparison. Couldn't help feeling that the Script used this trick with their support, the Original Rudeboys. Actually it slightly pains me to say that as they did seem a genuinely nice group of lads, if very Irish (or rather "Oirish"). They seemed to be enjoying themselves on stage. Unfortunately they enjoyed themselves rather more than we enjoyed them. A lot more. The 19,000 fans (sorry "Nointeen tousand" - they did have the most oirish accents I have ever heard) treated them very well and they obviously loved being at the O2 in such a big gig, but their rapper couldn't rap, their singer couldn't sing and none of their material had anything much to it. Only their cheery demeanour kept them (and us) going.

The Script however are at the other end of the spectrum. Very slick and professional, Danny O'Donoghue has a very fine voice and with Mark Sheehan on guitar form a formidable presence on stage. With a third album ("3" - not very imaginative title lads) they now have a decent body of work to choose from, and they went down a storm. Danny really worked the room (although I would question the wisdom of getting individual members of the audience to sing (or howl) the refrain on "We Cry" as he seemed to select girls who all had the voice of an Alsatian being strangled). The end of "The Man who can't be Moved" almost stopped the gig, as the applause went on so long and Danny appeared to be welling up at the emotion of it. He felt the love. And being loved by a big crowd must make you feel something. (Of course being a lawyer, I wouldn't know what.)

Danny O'Donoghue

Mark Sheehan

I had booked this with three of our trainees, one of whom had never been to a gig before. James had asked me what I thought would be the right sort of gig to take his girlfriend to, and this was my recommendation. And I still feel satisfied with the choice. A great show, a sedate crowd, a band that can really play and while not exactly the most credible of groups, not a bad one either. A very decent show all round, and all the nicer for having had dinner at the O2 beforehand. In a very cold O2 I should add. Weather was literally freezing. But at least inside we had our love for the band to keep us warm, along with 19,000 other bodies.

Longing

I don't quite get Chekhov. Or rather I don't get what other people see in his work.

Longing at the Hampstead Theatre was a pleasing enough piece, well acted, with a notable cast including Tamsin Greig and John Sessions. Its a play made out of two Chekhov stories spliced together.  But it was neither funny nor dramatic; more whimsical than anything else. A Moscow lawyer Kolya returns to his home town and promises to help friends who have hit money problems because of the adventures of alcoholic waster Sergei. Sergei's wife is despairing at him frittering away her family fortune on hair-brained investments, but her younger sister is more stoic. But she unaccountably falls in love with the lawyer (difficult to see why as he is far from handsome). They are saved from total ruin by the local wealthy arrviste (John Sessions) who buys their estate for the benefit of his awful daughter and her young beau, who in turn falls for the younger sister who is in love with the lawyer  And Tamsin Greig's character is also in love with the lawyer  which is reciprocated except in deed. So in the end, nearly everyone is in love with someone other than the person they are with.

I pointed this out to my companion, who merely said "That's what life is like, isn't it?" God one gets cynical when one hits 50.

Haydn in Harrow

I try all sorts of things. So this evening I went to see an oratorio at Harrow School  Not just a spur of the moment decision. I was invited as a friend and her son were singing in it. Of course it was also a great opportunity to take a peek inside Harrow. Its walls are adorned by a rather better selection of old boys than most schools - Churchill, King Hussein of Jordan, etc. Plus lots of very stern looking ex-headmasters.

The oratorio itself was very professional, the lead soloists and most of the orchestra were actually professionals, augmented by boys of the school. But dull. It was the Creation, and so lyrically very stunted, ie based on Genesis. Lines like "And God made the firmament and and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament." You would struggle to come up with anything duller. But you would also struggle to understand a word of it without a lyric sheet. So strangulated is the singing, albeit with precise elocution, that single syllable words are extended to three or four syllables, making most unrecognisable. And its very repetitive - many refrains being repeated several times. But the skill involved is very impressive, as of course is the setting. No ordinary school hall.

Long Wet Weekend

So what does one do on a cold we grey weekend. Obviously watch lots of football and rugby on TV, so that was Saturday sorted. But man cannot live on sport alone (although many give it a good go) so on the Sunday morning I decided to get up early and head off to the Hayward to see the "Light" exhibition. 

Now the Hayward is probably the most disappointing gallery you can go to in London. While architects might admire the South Bank, to any other person this area is a slum in a prime setting. And the Hayward is the most unlovely part of all. If you were a council tenant you would be campaigning to get moved. Its the sort of place you would expect to house high security  young offenders, a collection of concrete boxes which have weathered badly, and on a  grey day look particularly depressing and joyless. 

 The gallery space inside is equally bland and uninviting, but especially uninviting this morning as I was greeted with signs that the exhibition was sold out for the entire day. How could they do this to me?

So I needed a plan B having come all this way into town. A little potter on the Thames - the South Bank at least offering good views away from it to the London Eye and the Houses of Parliament,

 then cross the Hungerford Bridge, a railway bridge with modern pedestrian access added

As you can see, a VERY grey day. Embankment Gardens are very nice, and rather overlooked, with traditional statues of the now not so famous. Worth a wander if a at a loose end, but the palm trees look particularly sorry for themselves on a day like this.

And then onto my Plan B - the National Gallery. A much more inspiring gallery than the Hayward, inside or out. It contains both areas of nice sleek modernism

 and traditional Victorian splendour.

What I had particularly come to see was  a small landscape exhibition of Frederic Church, an American artist  Never heard of him? No nor me, but this collection of sketches is really beautiful  Would like any of them in my house, and with the exception of a stunning canvas of Niagara Falls on loan from the Scottish National Gallery, they could fit. The paintings of icebergs were my favourites.

 There is also a complimentary exhibition of Europeans landscape paintings mostly from the Gere collection which was also delightful.

I then headed on down the Piccadilly line to the V & A in South Kensington as I thought I might usefully see the Tudor exhibition on there. Which I duly did, but it was rather crowded, so I intend to go again midweek. I then just had a potter through the religious stuff, rather neglected at the V&A as elsewhere as its a bit on the dull side,

 and then through the extensive silver galleries,

  finishing up in the 20th century design stuff in the library.

On the Monday of this long weekend I had arranged to meet an old friend for a walk in Trent Park. It is fair to say I hadn't quite thought through how wet and muddy it would be (very) but it was a nice stroll nonetheless. Not clearly one of the most exciting parks in London (well this is Cockfosters, literally the end of the line if you are on the Piccadilly), but not without its points of interest, including a large obelisk with its views to the old house (now part of Middlesex university) and an attractive little water garden which probably needs a visit later in spring when there is more than the daffodils out on display.

Then to finish off we had lunch at an Italian restaurant in Cockfosters. And who should walk in during our meal but eighties icn Paul Young. Rather weird having someone at a table nearby knowing you have his album on your mp3 player in your top pocket. Definitely Paul Young as (a) still looked like him although he must be getting on for 60 now, and (b) his female companion did say "This alright Paul?" as they entered - so corroborative evidence. I think it fair to say you don't go start spotting in Cockfosters, so a bit of a surprise.

Finally, to cap off the long weekend I went to see the Audience in the evening. This is probably the hottest theatre ticket in town - there was even a long queue outside in the cold and rain for returns. This is the play with Helen Mirren as the Queen, two names that are bound to sell, especially to a US tourist. It has also had rave reviews. Personally I was ok with it, but frankly seen better in the last fortnight. Impeccably acted of course with a clever set, clever scene changes, clever everything indeed, to try and knit together a series of imagined meetings between the Queen and her prime ministers. But it had to be clever to overcome its weakness as a play, that it was just a set of disjointed scenes with no real narrative, not even a chronology.

It worked best as a comedy sketch show. The bits where it tries to make some serious points in the meetings with Eden and Thatcher fall rather flat. The best are with Harold Wilson, as they are most played for laughs. Don't get me wrong - a perfectly enjoyable evening and worth seeing, just not perhaps matching up to the hype.