Monday saw me visiting another bunch of dead Victorians - or perhaps more accurately dead Georgians who made it into Victoria's reign and some additional Victorians - at Kensal Green Cemetery, more on that below the cut complete with photos; and before you ask, that is the end of my morbid cemetery exploration during this particular London trip.
On the other hand, hitting the London theatres continues; on Monday I also met up with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kangeiko and saw A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney at the National. Neither of us knew anything about the play other than the name of the author, the title and that it was now considered a modern classic. My main reason for wanting to see it was that Lesley Sharpe plays one of the two leading roles. Now that I've watched it, though, I am in awe that a play like this could be created and staged in 1958, by a female author, and so utterly unlike the simultanous plays of John Osborne & Co. In fact, depressingly it still stands out compared with much of today's theatre, tv and cinema output, many decades later. First of all, the main focus is on a complex mother-daughter relationship. Secondly, the daughter, Jo, has an affair with a black sailor, Jimmie, and later has a gay friend, Geoffrey, who moves in with her. The mother, Helen, had Jo when she was young and the two at times act more like bickering sisters than like mother and daughter, with Jo as the responsible one; Helen is also in and out of relationships which more or less provide her income. Inevitably, Jo, too, gets pregnant. And yet: Nobody committs suicide or beats each other up or gets murdered. No one is slut shamed. And not because anyone is living in an idyll or life is kind. The program had a line about the characters being "different types of survivors in a world that doesn't throw anyone lifebelts", and that's true, and yet it is not a cynical play. The characters and their relationships come across as three dimensional and true, and no one feels like a vehicle for the author's rant on issue X. Now I'm all the more frustrated Shelagh Delaney didn't go on to write many more plays (though she did write one more play and some radio and tv scripts, as a quick googling tells me). What a talent! Yes, some writers have only one perfect work in them - see also Harper Lee - but those are the exception; most, given the opportunity, can do more.
As for the production, I thought both Kate O'Flynn as Jo - who is on stage in most scenes and so really needs to be good - and Lesley Sharpe as Helen were fabulous, and so was their supporting cast. The staging and costumes went for the time the play was written in and set, i.e. late 50s, and yet it didn't feel "period" in the sense of feeling distanced; it never played into nostalgia, being too sharp and witty for that. In conclusion: if you're in London for the next two months, try and catch it!
Yesterday was no theatre day because I was invited to a wonderful friend of mine for dinner, a lovely old lady who is one of the most amazing people I've known, and who'll be 90 next year. She's originally from Munich where her father was a very respected lawyer. You may have seen his photo, because when the Third Reich arrived, her father made the mistake believing in justice and complained to the police about harrasment. In response, they made him run through Munich in his underwear with a sign around his neck saying "I am a Jewish pig and will never complain to the police again". (Last year at the anniversary of the so-called "Reichskristallnacht" the photo got reprinted in a lot of Munich-based media again.) Anyway, Bea's parents then got her out of the country via the Kindertransport to England, hence her ending up here. I met her over a decade ago and we've been in contact ever since; she's so full of life and charming and optimistic that you're moved and humbled by her very presence if it wasn't that she's far too animated and drawing response not to enjoy oneself just for the good company.
(I cried once anyway, years ago, because sometimes the awful horror of it all overwhelms you anew.)
Anyway, yesterday evening I visited her and her family, and we had a great evening. It included an anecdote about an encounter with the royals apropos a Holocaust museum/exhibition opening here in London, where Bea and other surviving children who came to England through the Kindertransport had been invited and were presented to the Queen and Prince Philipp. Said exhibition included a model of Auschwitz, with the huts all in white, according to Bea. Says Philipp, gesturing towards the Auschwitz model: "And where do you live now? Not there anymore, right?"
.....
Tuesday was good for hanging out with friends, though; lunch I spent withkathyh at a pub which was an amazing relic of the turn of the (19th into 20th) century full of art deco. Originally we met at the Modern Tate and were planning to have lunch there, but it was too crowded, it being half term in Britain this week, which I hadn't known but which explained all the children I encountered. Generally speaking, I prefer the Tate Britain because of the Williams Turner and Blake represented there, but I did want to see the Richard Hamilton exhibition, which included his series of pictures called "Swingeing London" (sic, it's a pun) using the photo of Robert Fraser and Mick Jagger handcuffed to each other when arrested during the 1967 drug bust, and his design for the Beatles' White Album. (The cover, obviously, is just white, but the exhibition also had the original for the inside poster that came with the LP and was based on a collage of photographs culled from their archives. Today in the age of the cd (well, the age of Itunes, I guess,now), you can't make out individual photos,far too tiny, but in the big A3 size original where all the photos are in their original size, too, you can, and my inner Beatles obsessive was not a bit embarrassed to be able to identify many of them. (Both the original cover design and the original inside poster design were said to be on loan from a "private collection", which I guess means Paul McCartney.)
And now for the graves of Victorian writers (guess who still gets flowers and who doesn't?) and the sisters, wives and best buddies of Mr. Mad, Bad and Dangerous To Know himself, Lord Byron (those would be the Georgians I mentioned earlier. And because they are adorable, some of Sunday morning's pelicans, whose ancestors supposedly came to St. James Park with the Restoration and Charles II.
( Collins versus Thackeray versus Wilde (mother of Oscar) )
On the other hand, hitting the London theatres continues; on Monday I also met up with
kangeiko and saw A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney at the National. Neither of us knew anything about the play other than the name of the author, the title and that it was now considered a modern classic. My main reason for wanting to see it was that Lesley Sharpe plays one of the two leading roles. Now that I've watched it, though, I am in awe that a play like this could be created and staged in 1958, by a female author, and so utterly unlike the simultanous plays of John Osborne & Co. In fact, depressingly it still stands out compared with much of today's theatre, tv and cinema output, many decades later. First of all, the main focus is on a complex mother-daughter relationship. Secondly, the daughter, Jo, has an affair with a black sailor, Jimmie, and later has a gay friend, Geoffrey, who moves in with her. The mother, Helen, had Jo when she was young and the two at times act more like bickering sisters than like mother and daughter, with Jo as the responsible one; Helen is also in and out of relationships which more or less provide her income. Inevitably, Jo, too, gets pregnant. And yet: Nobody committs suicide or beats each other up or gets murdered. No one is slut shamed. And not because anyone is living in an idyll or life is kind. The program had a line about the characters being "different types of survivors in a world that doesn't throw anyone lifebelts", and that's true, and yet it is not a cynical play. The characters and their relationships come across as three dimensional and true, and no one feels like a vehicle for the author's rant on issue X. Now I'm all the more frustrated Shelagh Delaney didn't go on to write many more plays (though she did write one more play and some radio and tv scripts, as a quick googling tells me). What a talent! Yes, some writers have only one perfect work in them - see also Harper Lee - but those are the exception; most, given the opportunity, can do more. As for the production, I thought both Kate O'Flynn as Jo - who is on stage in most scenes and so really needs to be good - and Lesley Sharpe as Helen were fabulous, and so was their supporting cast. The staging and costumes went for the time the play was written in and set, i.e. late 50s, and yet it didn't feel "period" in the sense of feeling distanced; it never played into nostalgia, being too sharp and witty for that. In conclusion: if you're in London for the next two months, try and catch it!
Yesterday was no theatre day because I was invited to a wonderful friend of mine for dinner, a lovely old lady who is one of the most amazing people I've known, and who'll be 90 next year. She's originally from Munich where her father was a very respected lawyer. You may have seen his photo, because when the Third Reich arrived, her father made the mistake believing in justice and complained to the police about harrasment. In response, they made him run through Munich in his underwear with a sign around his neck saying "I am a Jewish pig and will never complain to the police again". (Last year at the anniversary of the so-called "Reichskristallnacht" the photo got reprinted in a lot of Munich-based media again.) Anyway, Bea's parents then got her out of the country via the Kindertransport to England, hence her ending up here. I met her over a decade ago and we've been in contact ever since; she's so full of life and charming and optimistic that you're moved and humbled by her very presence if it wasn't that she's far too animated and drawing response not to enjoy oneself just for the good company.
(I cried once anyway, years ago, because sometimes the awful horror of it all overwhelms you anew.)
Anyway, yesterday evening I visited her and her family, and we had a great evening. It included an anecdote about an encounter with the royals apropos a Holocaust museum/exhibition opening here in London, where Bea and other surviving children who came to England through the Kindertransport had been invited and were presented to the Queen and Prince Philipp. Said exhibition included a model of Auschwitz, with the huts all in white, according to Bea. Says Philipp, gesturing towards the Auschwitz model: "And where do you live now? Not there anymore, right?"
.....
Tuesday was good for hanging out with friends, though; lunch I spent with
kathyh at a pub which was an amazing relic of the turn of the (19th into 20th) century full of art deco. Originally we met at the Modern Tate and were planning to have lunch there, but it was too crowded, it being half term in Britain this week, which I hadn't known but which explained all the children I encountered. Generally speaking, I prefer the Tate Britain because of the Williams Turner and Blake represented there, but I did want to see the Richard Hamilton exhibition, which included his series of pictures called "Swingeing London" (sic, it's a pun) using the photo of Robert Fraser and Mick Jagger handcuffed to each other when arrested during the 1967 drug bust, and his design for the Beatles' White Album. (The cover, obviously, is just white, but the exhibition also had the original for the inside poster that came with the LP and was based on a collage of photographs culled from their archives. Today in the age of the cd (well, the age of Itunes, I guess,now), you can't make out individual photos,far too tiny, but in the big A3 size original where all the photos are in their original size, too, you can, and my inner Beatles obsessive was not a bit embarrassed to be able to identify many of them. (Both the original cover design and the original inside poster design were said to be on loan from a "private collection", which I guess means Paul McCartney.) And now for the graves of Victorian writers (guess who still gets flowers and who doesn't?) and the sisters, wives and best buddies of Mr. Mad, Bad and Dangerous To Know himself, Lord Byron (those would be the Georgians I mentioned earlier. And because they are adorable, some of Sunday morning's pelicans, whose ancestors supposedly came to St. James Park with the Restoration and Charles II.
( Collins versus Thackeray versus Wilde (mother of Oscar) )
