Three Busy Days
10 May

It has been over two years since Ross and I last visited London together.

The excuse, if one were needed, for this little jaunt was to attend the Almeida Theatre for a performance of Blood Wedding by Lorca. Why would our intrepid heroes travel so far for such a theatrical presentation? you might ask. Could it be a love of the works of the Spanish poet? Could it be a desire to visit an entirely new venue? Would sheer perversity fit the bill?

Well, no to all of these. We must confess that the main draw was the participation of Gael García Bernal, the cute Mexican actor we've seen in Y tu mamá también (And Your Mother Too), The Motorcycle Diaries and Bad Education.

Going to see a play simply because of a star name (and particularly one from the world of film) can be a shattering disappointment. Film personas don't generally translate to the live theatre. Voices that are fine for the close miked media of TV and film don't generally carry in a theatre. Star personalities tend to want to be noticed rather than to integrate. Well, I was more than pleasantly surprised. Our boy is an actor and, although the national critics have disparaged his performance, I think that they are dead wrong. For once, I fully understood why the heroine would want to run off with the anti-hero. He may be short but short people come with big packages.

The director, Rufus Norris, had assembled an international cast. This took a little getting used to but the point emerged as the play progressed that, as well as being a quintissentially Spanish play, there was a universality to the grass-roots rituals surrounding the nuptial process and reference was made to many of the traditions of cast members.

I also liked the lack of cod-Spanishness - no clattering castanets, no lace mantillas, no flamenco footsteps. I liked the references to surrealism (Lorca was friends with Dali) - only one critic saw fit to mention this. I liked the references to ancient Greek theatre (this is, in essence, a re-working of a Greek tragedy) - no critic saw fit to mention this. I liked the intelligence of the staging and the passion of the playing. Lorca is one of the most difficult of playwrights to bring off on the English stage. It's the combination of social realism blended with an ardent poetry that doesn't sit well with our national psyche. So, this was a good night in the theatre .

And we liked the chance of seeing Gael García's perky nips and the cheeky swell of his ripe buttocks over the waistband of his hip-height trousers. A great pity that there were no nob moments.

We completed the weekend of arts attendance by visiting two exhibitions. On the Sunday, we headed down to Tate Britain for the Turner, Whistler, Monet exhibition. The underlying theme of the show was to demonstrate the influence of the earlier artist on subsequent generations - and it worked - and it worked well.

Turner, I love. I've loved his work since my teenage years when I saw two of his paintings in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. It's all about light and colour; it's all about breaking down form into the shifting effects of light and colour. Water, steam, fog, mist, smoke, dawns, sunsets, heat, fire; all of these were grist to his mill. You can see the sort of thing in his Burning of the House of Lords and Commons: 16 October 1834 which recorded an historical event.

What became clear in the exhibition was the rôle Victorian air pollution in the development of Impressionism. The fogs and damps produced all sorts of visual effects which painters loved for their visual qualities if not for their health giving properties. It's a wonder no-one has taken on Los Angeles in this fashion.

I'm much less taken with Whistler. It's the Nocturnes that I like best. Luckily, there were a number on display, including the infamous Nocturne: Black and Gold Falling Rocket which provoked the court case with Ruskin over his remark that the picture was a paintpot flung in the face of the public. Actually, it's a remarkably good painting capturing the moment of a rocket burst over the Pleasure Gardens of the south bank of the Thames. The lustrous glow of the colours are simply lost in any reproduction. However, the meticulous placing of all of the effects gives the lie to any flinging of paint. We all had to wait for Jackson Pollock for that.

Manet is much more my thing again. I loved the London paintings of the Thames and, once again, the Houses of Parliament. However, it was three out of this series, Morning on the Seine: Giverny, that really caught my eye. The same view, lovingly caught at different times of the day and year. A real treatise on the possibilities of light.

All in all, an excellent hour and a half well spent in the company of three masterly painters through whom the thread of inspiration quite clearly flowed.

Come Monday morning, it was off to the Sainsbury's wing of the National Gallery for Caravaggio: The Final Years. Only some sixteen paintings on view - but what paintings. Gone are the bravura tricks of perspective, gone is the throbbing homoeroticism, gone is the rich palette of colours. Instead, there is a pared down quality to all of this work. The Flagellation of Christ here is an example of all of that. A concentrated, psychological work of masterly complex simplicity.

It's like Beethoven saying I've shown you what I can do with the 5th and 6th symphonies and the 4th and 5th piano concerti; now watch me in the final piano sonatas and string quartets as I go beyond form and display into quite another region of the human spirit.

Like the exhibition of Raphael's early work I visited in December of last year, this presentation of Caravaggio's final works was a model of what an exhibition can be. It was an excellent way to spend a morning.

A few words are needed about the other patrons at these two exhibitions. They were both well attended. The Tate exhibition, though carefully controlled, was quite claustrophobic. However, by and large, the everyone's behaviour was really quite courteous. No barging or pushing. People standing well back. Wheelchair users promoted to the front.

Only three people really disgraced themselves with selfish behaviour. And to them I say, pah!!

We also spent some time socialising. Whilst Ross slept on the Saturday afternoon, I met up with James and his new partner (Paul is history) for a chat and a cup of tea. And, on Sunday evening, Gill joined us for a meal at an Italian restaurant round the corner from the hotel. We spent nearly three hours chatting and eating an excellent meal.

Gill gave me news of Robert. It seems that work in Germany may have dried up and that his partner, Vivien, has decided that she wants to have some time to herself. So, it could be that, in the space of a week, his world has been turned on its head and that he will be coming back to the UK to follow a different path from the one that beckoned some months back.

All reports says that he is philosophical about this but, in your early 20s, these matters all bite deeply. But that's part of the journey into adulthood. I'm sorry to have missed out on seeing him in Berlin but there will be other opportunities.