Double Britten
9 December

We're heading towards the close of the year.

I'm now driving to and from work with my headlights on and there's been a couple of mornings when I've had to pour water over the windscreen to relieve the frost.

The main even for me has been another Quaker training course in London. I attended another training day in May and, on that occasion, took the opportunity to see Leonard Bernstein's On the Town.

The training comes out of my work with the children's group and, possibly consequently, it was very easy to see a lot of things this week in the light of the relationship between adults and children.

For example, having really enjoyed The Blackwater Lightship earlier this year, I've just finished another novel by Colm Tóibín, The Master. It's a fictional autobiography about Henry James' life toward the end of the nineteenth century about the time that he was writing The Turn of the Screw and What Maisie Knew. It explores the diffident nature of his sexuality and the highly repressed nature of all of his adult relationships. And it reflects these back onto his childhood upbringing and various of his experiences. It's an amazing achievement and very different from The Blackwater Lightship. almost like reading two different authors - which is praise indeed. I shall look for more by him.

Mysterious Skin came into my orbit because of the presence of Joseph Gordon-Levitt who was in Third Rock From The Sun for 133 episodes between 1996 and 2001 (or so IMDB tells me). Despite not yet being thirty, he has a good track record of choosing intelligent material to work with. You don't have to be much of a genius to work out that the background to this film is the sexual abuse of two teenagers by an athletics coach at school. What it contrasts is the way that the two youngsters cope with the experience as they approach adulthood. One becomes a male prostitute; the other follows his belief that he was abducted by aliens. Eventually, their lives intersect and they exchange stories. It wasn't an easy film to watch but it was a good film.

Ross and I missed out on Tim Firth's The Flint Street Nativity last year because tickets flew out of the box office. so, we were delighted when the Liverpool Playhouse chose to revive their sell-out Christmas treat. We booked early. And I'm glad I went. Maybe my expectations were set too high. I thought it was good but not the knock down hilarious evening that the advance reputation had led me to believe. I certainly laughed out loud a number of times but not consistently until my sides ached. There was one stunning coup de théâtre near the end when suddenly the perspective changed from the child's view to the parent's view and the actors became the adults and we suddenly saw the connections between parent and child.

The theme continued when I saw Britten's Albert Herring performed by Glyndebourne Opera on Tour at Sadler's Wells Theatre in London. It's a lovely light comedy and this production (which I first saw at Covent Garden back in 1989) is lovely and light as well. Again, it's all about the difference between the generations and the moment when the younger generation stands up and proclaims its independence. The cast was uniformly good but I should like to mention Susan Gorton, who gave a rich account of the rôle of Florence Pike, and Jared Holt, who was an impishly sexy Sid.

The following night brought an earlier chamber opera by Britten, The Turn of the Screw - one of my all time favourite works. David McVicar's production was sensible and sensitive - a combination of Ibsen and Brecht which supported the work. Loss of innocence and the battle of good and evil for a soul. Rebecca Evans was an excellent Governess and Jacob Moriarty a very believable Miles. Spines were tingled in goodly fashion.

And, whilst I was journeying, I read The Italian Boy by Sarah Wise. this is a difficult book to describe. It is non-fiction and yet written with a novelist's eye for telling detail and emotional content. It's a police procedural work and yet the procedures are completely alien to contemporary eyes - ie the right men are probably condemned but for the wrong murder and on evidence which would be laughed out of court today. But mostly it's about the underclass of the poor in certain parts of London in the early nineteenth century. And particularly it's about how the bodies of young, poor people did not signify as containing souls of value but were worth good money to anyone wanting to sell the cadaver to teaching hospitals who wished to practice dissection and anatomy. It was absolutely absorbing.