The Splitters Split

Reg: "We're the People's Front of Judea!"

Loretta: "Oh, I thought we were the Popular Front."

Reg: "People's Front!"

Loretta: "Whatever happened to the Popular Front?"

Reg: "He's over there."

My sources point to one possible reason for the Tigger's problems. Notwithstanding the succession of ex-Tory females paraded as their leader over the last couple of months it appears that both Chuka Umunna and Chris Leslie thought that the long term solution was an ex-Labour man; in fact each of them thought that it should be him.

Let's end with a quote from Harold Pinter which is relevant not just to the Keystone Cops of British politics, but also to the tangerine sleazebag currently polluting the air over here:

“The majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lies. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.” 

As it is?

And so to the theatre. It is obvious from the comments on my previous post that my readers are a bunch of philistines. Having said that, General Fwa's desire for one of the Trammps' stage suits is understandable, indeed commendable. The subject of dressing up for wargaming has been discussed here before, but going the full disco would be a significant and brave departure. It would, I suggest, work best in multiplayer games where moves, dice rolls etc would be made simultaneously in a choreographed routine by all those on one side of the table, involving a mix of twirls, shuffling feet and syncopated handclaps. This is gold; I haven't been so excited by an idea since the time it was suggested that all competition wargamers wore mankinis.

The relevance of the newly revealed philistinism of you, dear readers, is that I shan't be able to ask you to explain the meaning of Pinter's 'No Man's Land', which I went to see last night. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but must admit that I have bugger all idea what it was about. Memory perhaps? Aging? Marital infidelity? My accompanist for the evening suggested it was about the inscrutability of women, but I suspect that she was merely trying to appear deep and meaningful herself, and in any case there aren't any women in it. Instead, there are four male actors and the words Hampstead Heath and cottage appear a lot, so I'm going to stick my neck out and say there's a gay subtext that I didn't understand any more than I did the rest of it.

I saw the live broadcast  of the production that has been touring the UK before ending up at Wyndham's Theatre on Charing Cross Road, and which features both Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Patrick Stewart. The brief recorded interview with the two shows Picard to be somewhat more of a luvvy than Gandalf, which accords with the views of my ex-wife ( who seems to have suddenly started making a lot of appearances in this blog for no particular reason) who got boomed at by him at a reception when he was Chancellor of the University of Huddersfield. As actors however, I'd give McKellen the edge. One lengthy monologue by Stewart in the second act was completely upstaged by the silent MacKellen simply sitting and reacting; an episode that I think proved again the benefit of watching the cinema version, with its cutting between closeups of actors. Kudos must also go to Owen Teale who made the line "We're out of bread" so full of menace that I was unnerved despite being 200 miles or so away.

It's not cricket

 "Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?" - Harold Pinter

Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?
Read more at: http://www.azquotes.com/author/11692-Harold_Pinter

Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?
Read more at: http://www.azquotes.com/author/11692-Harold_Pinter

Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?
Read more at: http://www.azquotes.com/author/11692-Harold_Pinter

And so to the theatre. Sometimes there is a serendipitous juxtaposition of plays that one sees and so it is that shortly after 'Godot' comes 'The Birthday Party'. Pinter was clearly influenced by his fellow Nobel Laureate despite somewhat more happening in this, his second play, than in Beckett's. Having said that, one is left slightly unclear exactly what it was that occurred, the audience ending up in the kind of mental fog that engulfs Meg Boles throughout. Pinter reputedly told one director that it was all about cricket and was also supposed to have told an actor who asked why his character behaved as he did to mind his own business.

The director and actors involved here had made their own decisions and the piece was finely acted. Comedy - even 'comedy of menace' - isn't easy, and the play's descent from banality to absurdity makes it even more difficult, but their timing was excellent. One quibble might be that McCann is surely meant to be an Irish Catholic, whereas James Bell's accent was absolutely spot-on Ulster Protestant, to the extent that one wondered where the bowler hat was. Making things even more disconcerting for this member of the audience at least was that the actor playing the deck chair attendant chose to make the character spookily reminiscent of a wargaming art-shop proprietor of my acquaintance.

Anyway, to me the interesting thing about art isn't so much that it teaches you anything about how one should live life, but that every now and then there is a flash of insight into how one actually does conduct oneself day to day. For me - and I accept that this may not resonate with others quite as much - Pinter achieves just that here: "You're a big, bouncy woman." says Goldberg to Lulu upon meeting her "Come and sit on my lap.".