These are the confessions - such as they are of a non-drinking, monogamous, heterosexual, omnivore.
The Ginger Mumbly is a humorous and humourous, satirical, column. People who like this will probably like reading books.
They'll be interested in second hand books.
I also write about cafes - both in Brighton, where I now live and in Cambridge, where I used to live.
I spend a lot of my time in Cafes and have very strong opinions about what makes a good one.
And sometimes I write about travel, I like Paris, Berlin, Athens.
It's a secular, militantly agnostic site, so there probably isn't much point sending ads for religious organisations.
They will probably like reading authors like Hunter S. Thompson, P J O' Rourke, Saki, Mark Twain, James Thurber, Charlie Booker, Damon Runyan.
They might like TV shows like "The Thick of It", "The Mighty Boosh", "The Wire", "Arrested Development".
The might like films like "A life Aquatic", or "The Big Lebowski"
A Long Spoon and Bigger Pants
The Master and the Margarita
Amateur Drama Club
ADC Theatre
February 4th 2005
Normally when I sit through an ADC show I marvel at the maturity of the
performances. This show flailed and struggled in a way that very much belied
the players' youth. The cast gave the impression that whatever truths there
were in the script were stammering out of the mouths of babes. For kids of
this age, there's no difference in the treatment of Jack the Ripper and Peter
Sutcliffe as guests to the devil's party. Both are moustache-twirling pantomime
baddies. Communism is something you did for GCSE History, not a genuine
blight on the lives of half the world's population or a force that would have
murdered the author of this play had its existence ever been known. Censorship is
something that happened abroad in the bad old days, not something that evangelical
Christians and fundamentalist Muslims are campaigning for, something that home
secretaries are signing into law.
There's a long literary history to prove that old
Nick is a tricky customer to write and perform about. You start out writing a
poem about how great god is and before you know it Mr Sulphur Breath is
upstaging the goody-goodies, getting all the memorable lines and
becoming the archetypal modern hero. It's just as hard if you try to make it
blatantly obvious that your devil really is a nasty piece of work.
Dennis Potter tried this, having his satanic character rape a profoundly-handicapped girl. His
play was banned from television. It's tough, but with Milton, Potter and others like James Hogg and
Jim Thompson (never read Pop. 1280 in an election year), it's worth looking on at the struggle.
Perhaps that's what was so disappointing here. There was no evidence that
the cast wanted to take up the fight. They seemed happy for the devil to
ponce about and do card tricks. Simon Evans'
portrayal of the devil was the stand-out performance of the play. Still he
never seemed to try to ground the prince of darkness's devilry in
any kind of reality. Playing the devil as if he were Frazer Crane was funny but
it dislocates us from the real evils of communist Russia or for that matter Roman
Judea. Only Dan Mansell managed to
lower the temperature in the vertebrae department.
Everybody was acting like fury but nobody seemed to connect. The Master and the Margarita never got their relationship going.
It was like watching Ray Mears try to start a fire by rubbing two damp twigs together. The levels were
all wrong.
Perhaps in an
attempt to stand out from the cacophony, Nadia Kamil took her
clothes off. She is amazing (the program notes were right). In black lacy pants
she's actually jaw-dropping. One of the jobs though, surely of a director is to stop this
kind of grandstanding. Once Nadia had (so to speak) let the cat
out of the bag, the only real chance the play had to regain the attention
of the male audience was that she follow her ambition (program notes again) and
run away to join a circus. Even worse, or better depending on what you thought
you’d paid for, it kicked off a "strip to your knickers"
competition among the female members of the cast. This raged all the way through the second
act and pretty much obliterated the last traces of any drama.
These are the confessions - such as they are of a non-drinking, monogamous, heterosexual, omnivore.
The Ginger Mumbly is a humorous and humourous, satirical, column. People who like this will probably like reading books.
They'll be interested in second hand books.
I also write about cafes - both in Brighton, where I now live and in Cambridge, where I used to live.
I spend a lot of my time in Cafes and have very strong opinions about what makes a good one.
And sometimes I write about travel, I like Paris, Berlin, Athens.
It's a secular, militantly agnostic site, so there probably isn't much point sending ads for religious organisations.
They will probably like reading authors like Hunter S. Thompson, P J O' Rourke, Saki, Mark Twain, James Thurber, Charlie Booker, Damon Runyan.
They might like TV shows like "The Thick of It", "The Mighty Boosh", "The Wire", "Arrested Development".
The might like films like "A life Aquatic", or "The Big Lebowski"