The Adventures of Samantha & Paul

A much belated part 2 of time spent in the West End and other fun places, I think I was meant to post this around Decem­ber 20th, looks like that didn’t hap­pen. I rounded off the last post with a trip to see Zorro.

Next stop Alan Ayckbourn’s trio of plays “Liv­ing Together”, “Table Man­ners” and “Round and Round the Gar­den” (seen in that order) as part of “The Nor­man Con­quests” in the round at the Old Vic — a the­atre trans­formed for a 360 degree view­ing expe­ri­ence. Being under 25 offers us the nice lit­tle perk of much dis­counted tick­ets, £20 for each play instead of £40–60, or there­abouts, a bar­gain. The six strong cast con­sisted of Amelia Bull­more, Jes­sica Hynes, Stephen Man­gan, Ben Miles, Paul Rit­ter and Amanda Root.

Going into “Liv­ing Together”, Sam, Jo and I weren’t sure what to expect, our seats were at the rear of the audi­to­rium, where the stage would nor­mally sit, but instead a cir­cu­lar tier of seats stood, carved into the back. We were incred­i­bly close to the cir­cu­lar stage with its ‘model vil­lage come wooden cur­tain’ and light fur­ni­ture set. The three plays inter­min­gle in time, each can stand­alone but together they form a big­ger pic­ture, por­tray­ing dif­fer­ent nuances and natures of the char­ac­ters whilst each incred­i­bly reveals a sig­nif­i­cant plot point sub­tly but real­is­ti­cally ref­er­enced in the other two. (Reg wan­der­ing into the front room, “Ah there it is”, picks up the bin and walks out again).

The sto­ries are deeply tragic; three sib­lings, two unhap­pily mar­ried and the other sin­gle yet equally unhappy. The other three cast mem­bers make up their spouses/possible future part­ners whilst a sick and elderly mother and her promis­cu­ous past resides out of sight, upstairs and bedrid­den. Nor­man is all set to run away for a roman­tic week­end with his wife’s sis­ter Annie, Annie’s poten­tial love inter­est — Tom, the dim wit­ted Vet, believes she is going on hol­i­day alone and that this is partly his fault; Annie’s brother Reg and inter­fer­ing wife Sarah arrive to look after mother for the week­end, in Annie’s absence. Norman’s wife Ruth remains unawares, but isn’t with­out sus­pi­cion. Cue the start of all three plays and with­out wish­ing to reveal too much; the home made parsnip wine, Reg’s clev­erly devised board game he wants every­one to play, Norman’s desire to make every­one happy, Tom’s com­plete befud­dle­ment, the rug, the silence at Break­fast, soup and salad, seat­ing arrange­ments, Ruth’s mis­in­ter­preted advice in the gar­den, the cat stuck in the tree, the tom­fool­ery and East Grin­sted — and as the fam­ily tears itself apart you’ll laugh with every turn, every rev­e­la­tion, every remark and your jaw will ache from the smile plas­tered across your face.

For Table Man­ners and Round and Round the Gar­den we were seated at the top in the mid­dle, a lit­tle fur­ther from the action but still a great view. Orig­i­nally we’d decided to only go to one of the three, but on the strength of Liv­ing Together — which we now believe was the best start­ing place — we booked the next two. If I had to put them in order of favourites I’d put the Gar­den episode first, closely fol­lowed by Liv­ing Together and then Table Manners.

Our taste for plays, come­dies, Ayck­bourn and the Old Vic have been stim­u­lated and we’re ready for more.

Here’s the best shot I could get of the cir­cu­lar stage from where we were:

Before the shows we ate at the Ban­ga­lore Express (with its dou­ble decker seat­ing arrange­ment) and Yo Sushi (where we used our buy 5 plates get 5 free vouch­ers), both of which are in walk­ing dis­tance from the Old Vic.

Fol­low­ing the Gar­den, which we saw on a Sat­ur­day after­noon in Decem­ber, we grabbed the tube to Hyde Park to visit the Win­ter Won­der­land with all of its Christ­mas­time good­ies and German-like mar­kets. Warm­ing up with a tasty steak burger we aim­lessly perused the stalls, try­ing out the mulled wine, the can­died nuts, mini dutch pan­cakes in choco­late, fun hats and Ger­man sausages. With­out real­is­ing it had reached 9pm we mean­dered towards Covent Gar­den before rest­ing at “Fire and Stone”, a fan­tas­tic stone-oven pizze­ria where every pizza is based on a world city, I had a:

Mar­rakech // £8.95
Cumin spiced ground lamb, moz­zarella, mint yoghurt sauce, green olives, raisins & sliced red onion driz­zled with chilli oil.

Worth every penny.

The Bal­let

The next big ven­ture into Lon­don for Sam and I was to the Col­i­seum to see the Eng­lish National Bal­let per­form­ing Sleep­ing Beauty; my first foray into the world of bal­let and dance. Approach­ing the night sleep­i­fied and docile, I wasn’t look­ing for­ward to the three hour per­for­mance despite pep­ping up with a home-made burger from a nearby Moroc­can place off Leices­ter Square.

How­ever, when the cur­tain lifted, the sur­re­al­ism of a 3 hour show with­out a sin­gle spo­ken word, not even for the inter­val, slowly dawned on me, and with it I became qui­etly engrossed in the beau­ti­ful dance and skill before me, the mim­ing tech­niques used for the plot mostly going over my head but for a few obvi­ous exam­ples. My slum­ber had me all but­tered up and I left amongst the extra­or­di­nar­ily posh and the dis­pro­por­tion­ate num­ber of rich attrac­tive girls into the cold win­ter air, with scarf and gloves, ready for Christmas.