With groans that thunder love

"Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" 

- Sir Toby Belch, Twelfth Night

These days for Epictetus, I am sad to say, there are indeed neither cakes nor ale, but, on a happier note, virtue has by no means been the result. The events of the last month have not put a stop to theatre going, but they did put me out of mood for writing about it. It's time to catch up.

As you will have guessed I saw the National Theatre Live transmission of "Twelfth Night" and excellent it was. The currently fashionable cross gender casting (Malvolia and Feste) compounded nicely the cross dressing of the plot and the comedy and cruelty of the play were very well brought out. The director's aim seemed to be to highlight our common humanity regardless of gender, sexuality or race (Sebastian and Viola were played by black actors) which put me in mind of "A Doll's House" which I'd seen earlier in the month.

Ibsen has Torvald tell Nora that she is first and foremost a wife and mother, to which she replies that surely she is first and foremost a human being. One of the reasons for not posting about seeing this play before was that I seem to have been living the plot of it for the last few weeks; real life has had a different ending though. A piece which I have also seen and which most certainly bears no relation to my own circumstances is "Rita, Sue and Bob Too"; perish the thought. This was the original play on which the film was, in part, based. Amusing though the film (strap line "Thatcher's Britain with its knickers down") is, it was provided with a more upbeat ending and the play is darker and better. It also contained substantially more nudity. A real car was on stage for certain, shall we say, climactic scenes and from my seat in the circle it was a procession of bare arses and fannies. I must once again provide a translation for US readers and point out that in British English those two words are not synonyms.

The audience for Andrea Dunbar's play were mainly somewhat raucous (that is a euphemism) women on a night out and many of them looked as if they were interchangeable with the characters on the stage. The same was true for Kay Mellor's "A Passionate Woman", where a more normal bunch of theatre goers watched an amusing take on how a middle class woman lived a life of dreariness until reminded of the secret affair that had once brought love into her life, while her husband turned a blind eye to everything. These last three plays were all to an extent about unhappiness within marriage and, perhaps inevitably, it was the men in them that seemed to be to blame. No comment.

Ragnarøkkr

And so to the Town Hall, Leeds Town Hall to be precise, for Götterdämmerung, the culmination of Opera North's four season run through Wagner's 'Das Ring des Nibelungen'. It was performed there rather than at the Grand Theatre because like the whole series it was a staged concert, meaning that the singers perform in evening dress (except for the chap playing Siegfried who appeared to share a stylist with Meatloaf) with orchestra on stage and with the surtitles expanded into full audio/visual splendour, full of rippling Rhine and blood coloured flames.

Anyway it was good stuff with the band being in spectacular form as they have been throughout the whole affair. It's a good venue too and was referenced to in "Untold Stories", the Alan Bennett play I saw a couple of weeks ago. The author recounted his introduction to classical music had come from the cheap seats on stage behind the double basses: "like watching the circus from behind the elephants". For this performance these seats were for part of the time occupied by the chorus. I myself have been gradually working my was backwards over the years since 'Das Rheingold' and was on this occasion at the end of the back row thus enabling a quick getaway to the pub for the second interval. (The whole performance lasted six and a half hours and featured two intervals; the first was spent in Wagamama with my daughters in an early Father's Day celebration.) I arrived in the Victoria Hotel ahead of my fellow audience members, but still found myself in a queue for service behind the said chorus whose exit had been even speedier and who were now lubricating their vocal chords prior to the final hour and a half. Don't worry though, I did manage to get a pint of London Pride in.

The story makes no sense whatsoever of course and, as an aside, I can't for the life of me see why the Nazis were so keen on it; apart from anything else the hero is out-witted and then killed before fulfilling his destiny to become ruler of the world. Virtually all the characters are unsympathetic and behave appallingly (perhaps that's a clue as to why Hitler approved). Following Siegfried's death towards the end, Brünnhilde performs suttee on his pyre to demonstrate the intensity of her love for him. Now call me pedantic ["You're pedantic!"], but if I've got the chronology right she'd only known him two days. And while I would normally have no truck with bourgeois morality, I find it hard to see beyond the fact that she's his aunt; that's just wrong.

Pot21pouri

So, a whole load of nothing been going on here. I hurt my leg on a Boxing Day walk which has rather restricted my movements. I did go to see the new instalment of the Hobbit. It's a lot better than the first although still far too long.

I'm sure that I've played more boardgames recently than I've written about here. Anyway, today at the Meeples was Zombie Fluxx, The Manhattan Project and Qwirkle. I promised myself that I'd never play Zombie Fluxx again, but fortunately it was one of the shorter games. Manhattan Project was a two hour worker placement game, but far more enjoyable than that sounds. I won, but then I suspect that I was the only one playing who'd ever dealt in WMDs, or any other sort of arms come to that. My tip: a uranium only strategy.

As the Seven Years War is the wargaming focus leaving the old year and starting the new one, perhaps a quote from Frederick is in order:

"It is disgusting to notice the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects, and the amount of money that goes out of the country as a consequence. Everybody is using coffee; this must be prevented. His Majesty was brought up on beer, and so were both his ancestors and officers. Many battles have been fought and won by soldiers nourished on beer, and the King does not believe that coffee-drinking soldiers can be relied upon to endure hardships in case of another war."

You won't have met me, and you'll soon forget me

I seem to have been attending concerts by wrinkly rockers regularly recently. [“Tell me,” the Rhetorical Pedant asks “if you did that deliberately; because it’s not big and it’s not clever.”] Last night at the Royal Hall, Harrogate it was the turn of Lindisfarne, or at least of Ray Jackson masquerading as the whole of Lindisfarne. He did have with him five other musicians who had previously been members of the band at various stages over the last forty years, but only he was there during their first four albums and Top of the Pops phase. The seventh person on the stage was the Great Paul Thompson, previously the drummer of Roxy Music.

They played the hits that you’d expect with the late Alan Hull’s part very ably filled by Dave Hull-Denholm (relation). At the risk of annoying Elkie Brooks’ most passionate fan (hello there Maria), Lindisfarne once again complied with my newly formulated rule that acts of a certain age intensely dislike their most famous hit and end up throwing it away as a singalong. Possibly as the exception that proves the rule this happened not just – as one would imagine – to “Fog on the Tyne”, but also to “We Can Swing Together”. In fact the latter also included truly naff harmonica renditions of a variety of Christmas songs plus “Ilkley Moor Bat’at” as a patronising nod to the crowd and “Blaydon Races” as a patronising nod to Jackson himself. Thankfully “Lady Eleanor”, “Meet Me on the Corner”, “Run for Home” (*) and “Clear White Light” were treated with more of the respect that they deserved. The highlight for me was actually Hull-Denholm’s rendition of “Winter Song”.

And every step I take, takes me further from heaven

In their heyday the band played and recorded an eclectic mix of music and so it was at this concert; encores included tracks more commonly associated with Canned Heat and Woody Guthrie. The crowd however were largely drawn from the folk-rock fraternity, although possibly with a smattering of Harrogate pensioners who had just wandered in to get out of the cold. Anyway, like all folkies the audience fondly imagined that they could sing in tune and clap in time when in fact they could do neither. Thankfully, it being folk rock meant that there was a rhythm section to drown them out. As previously mentioned this included the fantastic Mr Thompson who I always admired in the seventies for the solid base that he provided for Andy Mackay’s wavering sax, Phil Manzanera’s soaring guitar and for whatever it was that Eno did.

* Surely the only instance in popular music of lyrics containing the word 'buffoon'

We are a crusade or we are nothing

After a brief hiatus to allow James not to win the prize for best display game at Triples, wargaming resumed in his legendary salon des jeux last night. Peter had at some point thrown in the towel on the Punic Wars game that we had been in the middle of; probably wisely as it was looking to be a foregone conclusion. So it was the 1st Crusade and a chance to play another of the sets of rules that James and Peter have developed based on Brent Oman's Field of Battle, itself a development of Bob Jones' Piquet.

Peter Jackson and James Roach

The various rules, covering the Punic Wars, the Crusades and the Italian Wars (there is a fourth covering ancient galley warfare, but I have never played those - hint, hint) are all understandably similar, but also sufficiently different that even James frankly often has no bloody idea what is going on and has to resort to reading them. Among the largest differences is that relating to the death or otherwise of one's commanders, but it's just a question of mechanics; they still die with distressing regularity.

Anyway, James took lots of photos and will no doubt post an episode in the Muppet chronicles. For now suffice it to say that despite having three absolutely, stonkingly good commanders and continually rolling high to deny the infidels the chance to rally, that the defenders of the holy city are making a right pig's ear of it - or whatever the halal equivalent is.

Looking good