London: Trip the First
1 February


Having said that I would like some more interesting work at Connect, very early in the year some has come my way.

I have just spent three days in The Capital running a series of workshops for NHS Waltham Forest - the patient care trust for that borough. The work went well and I now have a report to write as a consequence.

Unlike other colleagues, I did not spend all of my spare time in my hotel room, although on the Tuesday night after the first full day of workshops, it was good to have an extended meal and then relax on the bed.

Entertaining Mr Sloane On the Monday night, I took in a West End show in the shape of Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane. And to be honest, it wasn't all that good. Imelda Staunton was fabulous but she was swimming against the tide. Mathew Horne was a complete cipher in the title rôle even if he looked very pretty. To me, Sloane is a calculating, murdering, abused child; none of these qualities came across in his vapid portrayal.

Simon Paisley Day and Richard Bremmer completed the cast and were good but the whole thing was let down by the central performance and by a directorial stance that seemed to think that the play was still shocking in the same way that it would have been in 1964. Wrong!!

I think that these days you either have to emphasise the grotesque in the play or go for it as a pure fly-on-the-wall documentary. What I saw was very safe and very average indeed. [Two Stars - Average]

I've now seen the play three times.

  1. In April 1975 while I was a student
    at London's Royal Court Theatre
    starring Beryl Reid, Malcolm McDowell and Ronald Fraser
  2. In June 1985 while I was still working in arts administration
    at Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre
    starring Sylvia Syms, Adam Ant and James Maxwell
  3. And now in February 2009 while I am an IT trainer
    at London's Trafalgar Studios
    starring Imelda Staunton, Mathew Horne and Simon Paisley Day

The play itself was first performed in 1964. When I first saw it, that premier was just eleven years previous and Orton himself had only been dead for eight years. On the second occasion, the play was only twenty-one years old. It has been another twenty-four before the third visit.

I suppose that, as you get older, time does that to you.