One of the things I promised myself last December was to make regular visits up to London using my Senior Railcard and catch up with a bit of the London Theatre scene. I was even presented with a wad of theatre tokens by the school as a leaving present to make this dream come true.
Yesterday I managed my very first such visit of the year. I had used all the theatre tokens to help me pay for tickets to the season at the Chichester Festival Theatre, a decision I don't regret as it was again another splendid season. I don't know how to finance the 2008 season but I still hope to repeat the attendance.
Yesterday I discovered day tickets for £25 and went to see "Billy Elliott". I travelled on a return ticket for £16.65 (which would have reduced to £13 if I had travelled after 8.00 p.m. In the end I caught the 7.15p.m. back from Waterloo.). I managed to read the first half of "St Nicholas" on the return journey and was thoroughly gripped. I need to read the second half as a matter of some urgency! You can tell it was good because I didn't fall asleep which has been a longstanding tradition on return train trips from the capital.
I enjoyed "Billy Elliott" but wasn't bowled over by it even though I wanted to be. It appeals to me as a subject matter. I come from mining stock on my mother's side and have no difficulty in relating to their dilemma. I feel very strongly about Thatcher the Milk Snatcher and destroyer of several cherished English values. The use of police as army (the use of army as police?) on English streets is unforgivable. The transfer of Metropolitan policemen to subdue North Eastern miners was a blatant misuse of political power. The desire to centrally govern every aspects of our lives was not a Thatcher invention but has rarely been so openly and brazenly applied. The neo-Thatcherites called New Labour still clearly have this desire and social justice and individual liberty have to be sacrificed to economic efficiency at all costs. It is good therefore to see that the economic efficiency so prized and vaunted is coming back to bite them on the arse. Why don't politicians learn from history?
Anyway back to the musical. It has some gripping moments and I like the roles of Billy's Dad and brother. I found them to be quite truthful and invested them with my sympathy and empathy. I liked the dance teacher and the uneasy relationship with the Elliotts. The clash of the middle and working classes is always a good mainstay of English theatre. I liked the anthems especially the one where the miners return to work and descend en masse to the coalface, with their pit lamps blinding the audience. The choreography was excellent if a little repetitive. The solo dance by the young Billy which impresses his father enough to take him to the Royal School of Ballet auditions. I liked the auditions and warmed once again to the father. The music generally though was not very inspiring - loud and enthusiastically played - but not inspiring. The lyrics failed to grasp me and though moved by the swell of music and the enthusiastic dancing the lyrics will not live with me. Older men such as myself always claim to come from a working class background. However we lived in a back to back in Clipstone Street, Bradford, with a toilet out the back down the passageway. It belonged to my Granny Frost and my Mum worked in the Bulmer and Lumb textile mill at the top of Wibsey Bank. I couldn't dance or sing but I think I read my way into the middle class I now find myself in. The storyline of "Billy Elliott" should in theory reverberate strongly within my breast but perhaps the beta blockers etc which now keep my blood thin so it runs smoothly and easily through my arteries have also lessened something of the passion and power of feeling that used to grip me.
It is a pity therefore that my first London theatre visit should be somewhat anti climatic. The second Thursday in the month seems like a good time to go. Yesterday was the 13th and on the 12th January (not a Thursday) a family and friends group is decamping up to the Donmar to see "Othello". The reviews are very good so perhaps this will be a theatrical treat!
I saw "Wicked" this year (that must have been a trip to London theatre as well as I was on my own for that as well. The mind is treacherous and perhaps yesterday wasn't my debut.) and now "Billy Elliott". I found both of them rather empty vessels so perhaps West End musical is not my true scene. I would like to find more chamber sized and new musicals at the Drill Hall for example. I still seek a musical director at the Bench for several projects jumping around in my head. I would also prefer to visit some of the off-West End smaller theatres with new cutting edge theatre. Ah well, who knows what 2008 might bring?
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1 comment:
Your description of the conditions of your youth was dangerously close to Monty Python's 'Four Yorkshiremen' sketch.
What Margaret Thatcher did was mostly necessary. Regrettable, but the country did slide behind Greece in economic health in the late 1970s and we had got into a seemingly unbreakable cycle of high double digit wage demands which fuelled equally high inflation.
Tax was punitive even to those on modest earnings and the country was quite literally bankrupt. We had to go cap in hand to the IMF.
I have voted Labour all my life and in every election since 1979 and I came from a pretty shabby local council housing estate so I am not remembering any of this from a comfy middle class perspective.
Every government of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Labour and Tory, got it quite spectacularly wrong and we were being trounced by every modern, western European state in almost every field of economic and industrial endeavour. We were a mess and our senior politicians were waiting on union barons at number 10 with little trays of nibbles and beers, totally emasculated and without a clue about how to break out.
Industry, such as it was, was led by people who not yet emerged from the paternalistic Victorian mindset and were too arrogant to spend on investment in the face of blistering competition from Japan and Germany and... well everywhere basically. Motorbikes that were dated in the 1950s were still being made in the 1970s and the pinnacle of British automotive design was the Austin Allegro and the Maxi!
Margaret Thatcher (or something like her) was an inevitability and really her crime was the way she gleefully enjoyed the necessary ripping out of the nations diseased bits. She operated without anaesthetic in order to enjoy the pain.
However, someone had to do it and it had to be someone new and someone with the balls to face down the 'old guard' of politics and unions and industry. We needed a surgeon to do the necessary amputations and we got a Mafia hitman wearing a pearl necklace instead.
Churchill led a nation barely recovered from depression and mass slaughter (and in denial) into an abyss of total warfare and managed to win hearts and minds. He was often wrong and his politics were about 90 years out of date and he was a self serving adventurer but he had immense personal courage and a total conviction that he was born to save the country from some awful calamity. Turned out he was right. Just at that time from about 1936 to 1942 and especially the first couple of years of the war.
Of course he was deposed immediately the war was won. Many of his actions over the 90 years of his life are fashionably villified, but there was one brief time when even the most reluctant have to admit he saved Britain from the ruling classes willingness to subjugate us to Hitler and won the support of an unwilling people to the idea of total war against an unthinkably evil regime.
Thatcher will never be remembered as Churchill was. She was petty and vindictive (even in her personal life) and uninspiring and unlovable because she was seen to enjoy the suffering and blamed those who suffered for their own ills rather than blame the forces that caused them.
Just a thought. Please disagree. You have a 12 year advantage on me. I was only 19 when Thatcher came to power.
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