Sunday, 2 September 2012

Smile, it's Jimmy Cliff


Richard III

Not what I was expecting. Mark Rylance played Richard with humour, self-awareness and self-loathing. I was expecting pantomime villain. This Richard had the crowd eating out of his deformed hand, not baying for his blood. Period costumes, period music, even an all-male cast. Children. No women or animals. The actors got a huge ovation, one of the longest I've known a Globe audience give.

Trigger played Buckingham. There were double roles: Hastings and a really nasty-looking Tyrrell, and the Duchess of York and Richmond.

Perhaps my Shakespeare has reached a critical mass and I can now get by without spending time boning up on what's going to be going on, or perhaps this was a particularly straightforward production of a reasonably straightforward history, but either way it was great entertainment.

It appears that Rylance was the artistic director at the Globe for ten years. No wonder he knew how to get the best from a Globe audience. Apparently his stewardship was between 1995 and 2005 or so and amounted to bit of a rescue mission.


Twenty four years

Wedding anniversary today. Few would put up with me for twenty four minutes.


Finally...

...an Arsenal goal. Two, in fact. In an away win at Anfield. Three games, three clean sheets. There's a long way to go and plenty to prove, for all that, but it's something to enjoy in the here and now.

The cricket team was overloaded with dirty Leeds supporters (for some strange statistical anomaly) a few years ago, and now I often find myself surrounded by scousers, with Rich, BO'S and Motty all supporting Liverpool, so I'm looking forward to bumping into them all on Saturday (if I remember by then – I know I can't count on them to remind me).


Jimmy Cliff

The Harder They Come (CD1 and CD2) was the music on in the car on the way to (via a ridiculous detour trying to find a pay later car park because none of us had any actual cash, via Southwark Bridge, the (no right turns here, my friend) westbound north bank road, and (eventually) Wandsworth Bridge, the i-Max roundabout at Waterloo and the back of the Tate Modern) and back from (via a detour to drop Kiz home, several missed slip roads (“listen to me, not the bloody SatNav, I live here”, which was fair comment, but I was actually ignoring the SatNav at the time, just as well as...) the Queen Elizabeth bridge and all that) the Globe.

As Rich says, it's impossible to listen to good reggae music and not smile.



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