Journos enjoy griping about the shortcomings of the infrastructure in Britain.
They just love to be on a train inexplicably at a standstill in the middle of bucolic Berks, Bucks or Beds. No time to look at the view – a perfect moment to type up a piece about how travelling on the railways was more reliable and quicker in the 19th century and add a postscript about the lack of a buffet car and the shortcomings of the trolley menu (hacks write on whisky); 1,200 words ching ching.
On Thursday I went to Bath with the banker turned terrier club treasurer; one hour twenty minutes from Paddington to Bath Spa, GWR train, reserved forward facing seats, excellent wifi, punctual. Nothing to complain about so I wrote yesterday’s post instead. (The wifi didn’t work on the return journey so I turned to my companion’s FT Crossword.)
Bath is justly famed as a Georgian gem, saved from film set perfection by some jarring 1960s interventions. The dinky Theatre Royal is sublimely small-scale.
It is a perfect space for almost any production except a musical with a large cast and big set and that’s what we saw on Thursday afternoon. Into the Woods (Sondheim) was designed for the much larger Old Vic in London. The theatre staff rebelled against Terry Gilliam’s production, not because of the show’s content but because Gilliam called the MeToo movement a witch hunt – apposite in the context of the musical actually – and the show went west, to Bath.
It’s a good show: excellent plot, plenty of chiaroscuro, and set and costumes that transported me back to the pantos I saw in Dublin as a child. The only problem is a large cast shoe-horned onto a small stage. If the production finds a place in a West End theatre it will be well worth seeing. As it was, it was fun but fell short of perfection.
Were you lucky enough to see Jimmy O’Dea as the washerwoman Biddy Mulligan the Pride of the Coombe, in Christmas Panto at the Gaiety Theatre ?
“My generation is divided into those who went to see Maureen Potter in panto at the Gaiety and those, like me, who went to see Jack Cruise at the Olympia.”
https://christopherbellew.com/dress-to-be-killed/
Maureen Potter was Jimmy ODea’s sidekick for my generation….!
Good heavens – Mrs Mulligan would be affronted to be called a washerwoman. She was an independent lady trading for sixty four years with a stall laid out on the street at the corner of Francis Street and The Coombe selling apples and oranges, nuts and sweet peas, bananas and sugar stick sweet. On Saturday night she sold second-hand clothes from the floor of her stall in the street. On Friday she sold fish spread out on a board the best you would find in the sea but the best were her herrings, fine Dublin Bay herrings so herrings for dinner and tea. Indeed it must never be forgotten how dressed as Queen Anne when she went with her man to the Charladies Ball where she was feted “You’re the bell(e) of the Ball Mrs Mulligan”