Omid Djalili

This weekend I had my mate James down from Leeds. (I should just note that I have three friends called James, so when I refer to them, it could be anyone of them.)

Anyway, this James, when I asked what he fancied doing, said he had always fancied doing a posh tea somewhere. I am of course the consummate arranger of such things, so I started the day by collecting him from Victoria, finding a pub for a cheeky pint and then going to the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair for a very posh tea.

On the way we went through Lower Grosvenor Gardens, a little scrap of greenery surrounded by traffic, so hardly an oasis of peace. But their most interesting features are the modern sculptures within.

Anyway, back to the posh tea, indeed a choice of teas, coming with a little egg-timer so that one could tell when your personal tea was properly stewed in its little teapot. Plus a selection of finger-sandwiches, scones with jam and cream, and cakes. All very nice. The weird bit was that in the whole place there was just one other bloke - out with his female partner. Every other person there was female. Otherwise it was a disparate clientèle - all age groups from old ladies to little girls with their mums, and all ethnic groups - a lot of black women for example. Just not gender equality. Whether there should be a government task force set up to try and encourage men to take up fine tea-drinking I don't know. You would think something should be done.

Duly sated we had just enough time to make a quick visit to the nearby Wallace Collection, before heading off to Hammersmith for dinner in an Italian restaurant. By this time I confess I wasn't too hungry after the afternoon tea, but we had to have an early dinner to get around in time to Hammersmith Apollo to see Omid Djalili. I had found he was on in the evening James was coming down, so thought that would be more entertaining than the pair of us sitting in a pub all night.

And it was. Omid always puts on a decent show. Not in the top rank of comics in my view. his material just isn't funny enough. It lacks a certain bite. But talented he is. His silly dances are a trademark, but he also does a great array of accents and has a superb singing voice. And he comes across as pretty genial too.

Although I think the best gag of the night didn't come from him but a member of the audience. The warm-up act, Boothby Graffoe, encouraged the audience to write questions for Omid to read out and answer at the end. A number of comics try this sort of thing - a part of the show to display their spontaneity as opposed to the scripted and rehearsed part.

Well Omid had played all night with the word "OMID" in block capitals behind him. So someone asked "Omid, do you have an older brother called Ohigh and younger one called Olow?" Well we thought it was good.

Stephen K Amos

I had never been too impressed by Stephen K Amos TV or radio stuff, but had enjoyed a live set he had done at Reading Festival, so when I saw he was on at the Soho Theatre I managed to persuade my mate James to come out on a Friday night and see him. A very wise choice.

Stephen's act was interesting in that it could only work in a venue as small as that - about a hundred people. It worked on his charm and rapport with the audience. I don't think I came away with a single joke in mind, but we both laughed away the entire hour. He is definitely worth catching if you can find him playing the right size of venue.

My trainee ironically enough asked if I had a thing for ethnic comedians because I had just booked to see him, Omid Djalili, Paul Chowdry and Reginald D Hunter. I say ironically because actually I am rather wary of ethnic comics as they often play the race card far too much, essentially assuming a middle-lass white audience will lap it up out of some shared guilt for slavery, even if the material isn't that funny. But Stephen's stuff, although a fair bit of it is about being black, is just funny, and friendly. He is just very likeable on stage.

After that, James and I polished off a very decent Chinese meal down the road, and then popped into a pub for another pint to round off a very jolly evening. The sort of evening where one is having such a good time you don't want it to stop. You know, the best kind of evening!

Dead Simple

This play was apparently based on a detective novel by Peter James, one of a series which has sold millions, but passed me by altogether. Not my sort of reading matter.

The cast were largely being sold on their appearances in various long-running soap opera like Eastenders and Hollyoaks, which also meant I didn't recognise the cast either. But for all the unfamiliar material, this was a highly-entertaining evening out.

The victim is a highly-successful property developer who is about to get married to his beautiful fiancee. His best man (and business partner) can't join him at his stag do, leaving the others to stage a mock kidnapping and bury him in a coffin (with a breathing tube) as a payback for the OTT pranks he had played on them at their stag dos. But it all goes wrong when the others die in a car crash and his only means of communication with his abductors - a walkie talkie - is picked up by the mentally subnormal son of the clearance contractor (played like a youthful Johnny Vegas).

His best man suddenly realises that if he keeps quiet about the "mock funeral" he will take-over the rest of the business (of which he is the junior partner) and become fabulously rich. Enabling him to cop off with his best mate's fiancée and a life of luxury - while of course his mate would die a horrible slow death. There are many further plot twists, but needless to say it was a very engaging piece of hokum and you never lost interest. It was a terribly ingenuous plot. But it did make you realise that this was really a book, not a play: the interest was not so much what was going on, but finding out what would happen next. A real page-turner where you wanted to skip over the writing to get to the next twist and eventual denouement.

Stevie

While the Deposit plays downstairs, with an unknown cast, a very well known actress indeed, Zoe Wannamaker, plays in Stevie on the main stage. A bit of a tour de force here as Stevie (ie the poetess Stevie Smith) is pretty much never off stage.

It's a cleverly written play, the story of Stevie's life, partly through reminiscences, from early childhood to her death in 1971 in her late sixties, but with her poetry neatly intertwined into the script. A sort of poetry version of a juke box musical.

It was interesting to me both because I knew little of her poetry, so it was an introduction to that for me, and because she is the only famous person to have come out of my dull little suburb, Palmers Green, where she lived all her life. She was certainly a strange one, both shy and liking parties, and obsessed with death. But for all that I have to say I think the Deposit was the more entertaining, and thought-provoking, evening. At a third of the price!

The Deposit

This was another cracking little play in Hampstead's studio theatre played by four unknown (to me) young actors and with minimal stage props.

Two couples have decided to move in together to a one-bedroom flat for a year, sharing the rent and the cramped accommodation, with a view to being able to save for a deposit in London's ridiculously overheated housing market. The two girls are best friends from university. Predictably the friendly relations soon begin to break down. What was so neat about the writing is the balance of all the characters. No one is exactly in the right or the wrong. Unlike say, the preposterously popular Poldark where the baddies are such pantomime villains that one almost feels the need to hiss when they come on the screen, none of these four young people seem so unreasonable. They just have different viewpoints, and perhaps a bit less tact than would be useful.

Without wishing to give away too much of the ending, it all breaks down in horrible recriminations. The achievement in the writing is how skilfully one is brought from general amity to bitterness and jealously in slow drips.

Oppenheimer

One often talks about brands. In the theatre the brand is often a particular actor or actress. Or it could be the theatre - for some people that might mean the Donmar, and for me its Hampstead Theatre. Even if one knows nothing about the play or the cast, you just know from experience that plays there are more likely than not to be enjoyable.

For Oppenheimer the brand was undoubtedly that it was a RSC production. I didn't recognise any of the (typically RSC) huge cast, and the subject matter - the inventor of the nuclear bomb, Robert Oppenheimer - is probably not enough to bring people in. So it was the RSC trademark which largely attracted me, and it was very good. It cleverly brought in little bits of nuclear physics - probably not the easiest subject matter for a theatrical performance.

It worked by being effortlessly clever, both in script and staging. Scenes rapidly changed before your eyes, characters drifting in and out seamlessly. It was very much plot driven rather than character driven. The story of how this academic took on the task of developing the bomb, the uneasy marriage of scientists with a suspicious military and the left-wing sympathies of many of Oppenheimer's associates, and an unsatisfactory love-life, were all told very well. The one weakness, and probably inevitable to gallop through the story, is that one never felt one had got into any of the characters. This wasn't in depth character analysis - the speeches all too short. As I say it was story more than a biography.

Joan Armatrading at the Barbican

I think the first time I went to see Joan in concert might have been 30 years ago, so it felt right to see her on what was supposed to be her last ever world tour. Indeed, as she announced at the Barbican, on the 120th performance of her last tour.

Joan has always had a quite devoted fan base. And by now it is a quite elderly one too. But she does have a truly delightful stage presence. She is witty and intimate with her audience. You feel you are amongst friends.

One might say she is Britain's answer to Tracy Chapman, but in truth Tracy is only America's answer to Joan. Everything about her seems unlikely. Black, lesbian, Tory supporter from the Black Country who, as she explained in a little photo-montage section, has met Nelson Mandela, has her photo hanging in the National Portrait Gallery ....

...and has played with many of the greats. Her voice has enormous range, deep and powerful at times, but then high and fragile at others. She can do real rock stuff on an electric guitar despite being a lady of pensionable age, but in no way did that seem incongruous. She played most of her hits and, luckily for me, concentrated on her earlier work, with which I am familiar, and not her later Blues stuff with which I am not.

It was just a lovely laid back evening to savour.