Jamie Lloyd has an ambitious undertaking at the Harold Pinter Theatre. He is putting on a six month season of Pinter’s one act plays. On Saturday afternoon I was taken to two of them: The Lover (1961) and The Collection (1962).
Appropriately, bottles of Jameson and Hennessy rub shoulders alongside the programme for Aristocrats by Brian Friel. I went to the matinee on Saturday.
My memory plays tricks. I thought I watched Upstairs, Downstairs upstairs in the library at Barmeath with a TV supper on this tray and my terrier squashed beside me in an armchair. That was how I watched lots of other TV while my mother and grandparents were downstairs in the dining room.
Yesterday morning’s Ancient World Breakfast Club (AWBC) talk was given by Dr Aggeliki Kompoholi who teaches at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
Nine years ago I’d like to have seen Red at the Donmar. Alfred Molina played Mark Rothko, Eddie Redmayne his assistant (Ken) and Michael Grandage directed. Tant pis, I missed it but it’s on again in the West End now with most of that dream team – Molina and Grandage.
Size isn’t everything. The Jermyn Street Theatre is beneath an Italian restaurant, in what was the waiters’ changing room. This is glossed over in their programmes. They prefer their 1930s heritage as a night club called Monseigneur.
The Jermyn Street Theatre have taken on a project of Wagnerian proportions. They are putting on a cycle of nine one-act plays by Noël Coward. It is the first complete London revival of Tonight at 8.30 since 1936.
Jeff Goldblum and Kevin Spacey in David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow at The Old Vic were stupendous. Mamet’s plays and films are sensational. So it was a no-brainier to go to Glengarry Glen Ross in the West End.