01.31.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 11.21 pm by niltiac
The Old Vic is showing a play called The Soldier’s Tale at the moment. It’s only for a week and tickets were really cheap. I didn’t know much about it but I was intrigued enough to book tickets and the boy and I went along tonight. Big mistake! It was awful! I guess one of the pitfalls of trying to see more theatre and more new theatre at that is that you are bound to encounter some duds like this one. It was pretty dire though.
It was so bad that I would have seriously left at half time but I was compelled to stay so I could write a proper review of it (see below). Compounding my misery was the fact that I really badly needed to cough and couldn’t so I kept emitting muted sounds of distress and then trying to control the impulse with deep breathing.
The evening wasn’t a complete loss however as I was quite excited to glance to my right as I was sipping on my pre-theatre glass of red and discovered I was standing less than a metre away from Kevin Spacey. He stayed there for ages too but I thought it would be too cheesy to go and say hello or god forbid ask for an autograph so I just enjoyed being in the vicinity. I have so much time for him as an actor. I have seen him in a couple of plays at the Old Vic and he is amazing! He neither acts nor directs this one but as artistic director I guess he is ultimately responsible. Oh well! We can’t all be perfect!
Review – The Soldier’s Tale
31 January 2006
Old Vic
The Soldier’s Tale is a play spoken half in English and half in Arabic and it’s no exaggeration to say that the Arabic sections are the best bit. The play is an adaptation and translation of a story by Igor Stravinsky and Charles Ferdinand Ramuz based on a Russian myth about an Everyman-Soldier who encounters the Devil on his way home from war. He is tricked into giving away his violin and when he gets home he finds that he has lost everything – he has been gone three years not three days and in the intervening time his girlfriend has married another man and his mother has gone mad with grief.
The story creaks a little anyway – I can imagine the original must have been quite cheesy. I could cope with this but what really got to me was the awful English translation. It relied on clunky pantomime rhymes like ‘shall I tell you the secret of money? / you can buy a house for your hometown honey’ and ‘I’m running away like a wandering gypsy / I’ve been walking so long I look like I’m tipsy’ and even ‘what will it be, a bride or a beheading? / … blimey! It’s a wedding!’.
The play’s morality message about the danger of avarice was exceedingly heavy-handed. Nothing was left the the viewer’s imagination or interpretation so the net result, particularly at the climax of the first act, was a feeling of being brow-beaten. Yet at the same time some of the plot didn’t make any sense at all!
On the plus side, the set design and staging was pretty good. The stage was covered in sand with broken sand castles to mirror the landscape of Iraq and halfway back there was a wall with a hole blown through it. It looked pretty amazing. There was some cool music, especially the Iraqi violin music, which went with the Arabic dialogue. The concept of every character being played by two actors, one English speaking and one Arabic speaking, also worked quite well, especially as they avoided the trap of having the pair mirror each other completely, which would have been far too trite.
The play is only on for a week so if any of this sounds at all tempting, you have until the weekend to see it. Tickets range in price from £7.50 to £25. But computer says, don’t bother.
Rating: 2/10
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Posted in Uncategorized at 10.14 am by niltiac
I was born in the Year of the Dragon (fire element) and here is what my third Year of the Dog has in store for me.
General Situation
You’ll devote much of your time and energy to the task of bringing to a successful conclusion the projects that you have your heart set on, but some unexpected obstacles will slow down their progress and put your patience to the rough test. Also, you’ll often be set against yourself, for you will have too much ambition and will forgive yourself no weakness or shortcoming. Try to be less tense and you’ll be promptly rewarded, as this year the stars will greatly favor patience and tenacity.
Casual encounters may very well end up as profound friendships. These relationships will prove most interesting to you since, apart from their sentimental aspect, a common intellectual research will give your exchanges a non-conventional character that will delight you. Remember that ‘friendship doubles joys and reduces sorrows by half’ (Francis Bacon).
What Your Element Has to Add
Fire Dragon
Savour pleasure fully as it comes along, however transitory it may be: That’s the philosophic stance you will adopt this time, and you’ll be determined to enforce it in all fields. In love, particularly, you’ll show no desire to ask yourself unnecessary questions.
(Click hereto check what the Year of the Dog has in store for you).
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01.30.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 9.19 am by niltiac
We love having people come to visit us in London. This weekend we had Ben staying with us – he has been working in Holland and decided to have a weekend in London before returning home. It was a double treat because Misty was in London to visit Jules and the five of us hung out all weekend. Unfortunately Leah and Matt were in Stockholm so they missed out on all this but I’m sure they had fun.
On Saturday morning I went to yoga while the boys went off to Borough Market for coffee from the Monmouth shop and grilled cheese sandwiches from the cheese man outside Neal’s Yard. Although London is not renowned for its food and it’s probably infamous if anything for its coffee, it’s no exaggeration to say this is possibly the best coffee and grilled cheese sandwiches in the world. Mind you, it’s hard to decide as the chorizo sandwiches and felafel rolls at Borough are also well worth a visit.
The boys came back hours later, having gone shopping and bought almost matching jackets (Ben’s was blue with white trim and my boyfriend’s was white with maroon trim). We then went to Clapham Common and threw a frisbee around for a while until we got too distracted by watching the kiteboarders. I have tried this once with my cousin Dominic on a beach in Wales and it was hard but heaps of fun. I would like to learn how to do it properly.
We met Misty and Jules for drinks at On Anon, a bar near Piccadilly, and then went for dinner at Noura, a Lebanese restaurant on Jermyn Street. It was a little on the pricey side but amazing food, particularly the desserts, and the service was excellent. We practically had to roll out of there at the end of the evening!
On Sunday morning, Ben and I met Jules and Misty for ice-skating at Somerset House. I went ice-skating in December but it was quite different as it was in the evening and all lit up with the floodlights and the Christmas tree, whereas yesterday was a cold but clear morning with sunshine and blue skies and the Christmas tree had of course been taken down. It was lots of fun! I really do enjoy ice-skating, my only complaint was that it was so crowded and it was difficult to avoid the large numbers of people falling over in front of me. I tried to go around one kid who was looking wobbly but he still managed to plough into me and trip me up. We each got up and dusted ourselves off and then on the next round it almost happened again, except I was now wise to it and managed to hold him up and re-steady him instead.
We then wandered up to Covent Garden for a spot of lunch at the salad bar in Neal’s Yard, then headed over to Chinatown to watch the New Year festivities, before finishing off with some shopping up on at the bookstores on Charing Cross Road and the Virgin Megastore on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. Ben came home with us and we had a quiet evening, with a pint at the pub, a simple supper and rounds of Soul Calibre on the GameCube.
That was all lots of fun. It was lovely to see each other and we are looking forward to our next round of visitors, with both Mike from New York and Zacha from Sydney due to make their separate ways over to our shores soon. And I’ve been led to believe that my Dad and Sarah and Emma plus the new sibling (arrival date 5 February!) will be coming to see us this English summer, which would be fantastic!
Caitlin and Misty ice-skating. 
Jules and Misty on the ice rink.
Ben and Caitlin.
Jules and Misty.
Jules, Misty and Ben in Chinatown for new year’s celebrations.
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01.28.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 1.19 pm by niltiac
I’ve been either busy or lazy depending on whether you want to give me the benefit of the doubt but either way I haven’t yet written about our trip to Prague, which is now two and a half months ago! We went at the beginning of November and while it was starting to get cold, we had some clear days and autumn leaves were lovely. Another advantage is that there were far fewer tourists than in summer though there still seemed to be plenty. It’s a very popular destination for stag and hens’ weekends but since we went mid week, we largely avoided that.
Prague is a bee-yoo-tiful city, as you can no doubt see from my photos below. We stayed in Old Town (New Town is 400 years old!) and had ample opportunity to wander over the Charles Bridge to the castle district or check out the Astronomical Clock in Old Town Square. There are beautiful buildings on every turn and an incredible sense of history and mystery. Walking tours of every description – from ghost walks to tours of communism – leave from the Astronomical Clock every morning and afternoon and are a great way to see the city.
We did a two-hour architectural walk, which was largely a historical walk as well, and covered most of what we want to see except the castle. Our guide, a young medical student, had very good English and seemed to have a genuine passion for her subject. Her best story was about one of the buildings that had statues of famous composers on the roof. When the Nazis came, Hitler ordered the removal of the statue of Mendelsohn. The statues weren’t labelled so the soldiers decided to remove the one with the biggest nose. They got in loads of trouble when it transpired they’d removed the statue of Wagner, Herr Hitler’s favourite composer!
The castle was beautiful and one of the most interesting places was the Golden Lane, which lies within the castle walls. It was the home of the alchemists in medieval times and the location is because they came under royal protection. Later it became a home for artists and writers and Franz Kafka lived there for a time.
We also took a day trip to Kutna Hora, a UNESCO World Heritage-listed city an hour or so away from Prague. It was a rival to Prague in its hey day but is now a bit of a backwater. It’s well worth visiting though as it’s the location of the Ossuary, a 14th century church decorated with the bones of 40,000 plague victims dug up from the cemetery outside. It has a chandelier made from every bone in the human body, columns of the top halves of skulls and four large pyramids of bones. It was absolutely fascinating and I’m so glad to have seen it but I certainly wouldn’t want to spend the night there!
Back in Prague we went to the Museum of Communism, which appropriately enough was set up by an American entrepreneur just after the Velvet Revolution, which ended communist rule in what was then Czechoslovakia. (So named because it occurred without bloodshed – the government was afraid to send in the army without the explict backing of the Soviets and so capitulated to the protesters). It has all sorts of communist paraphernalia, from artwork to schoolbooks, and shows quite a good film on communism in Czechoslovakia. It’s a bit grim but I think it’s important to see as it’s very easy to focus on the kings and alchemists and cool medieval stuff and forget about what a shitty time the Czechs had in the 20th century with first the Nazis and then the Soviets.
We also went to Black-Light Theatre – a weird, peculiarly Czech form of theatre, which hinges almost entirely on the novelty of being able to play with silhouettes and invisibility under ultra-violet light. It has puppetry and mime and the production we saw, Wow, had giant spiders with ultra-violet paint bombs so everyone in the first few rows, including us, got splattered. I was wearing black so I looked like a radioactive leopard but fortunately it’s not at all visible under normal light. I can’t say I’m a huge fan of the genre but it was certainly interesting and it appears to be really quite big in the Czech Republic, a bit like pantomime here in London.
Czech beer is very good and quite cheap and there is also hot wine widely available, which is specially good when it’s cold. Czech food is quite heavy and not brilliant for vegetarians – beef goulash, dumplings, fried cheese, that sort of thing – but there is also excellent Italian around (Ambiente near the Old Town Square was particularly good).
Flights were only £80 return with EasyJet from Gatwick and we negotiated the accommodation down to about £20 a night after seeing how empty the place was.
The Vltava River and Charles Bridge
The Charles Bridge.
Buskers on the Charles Bridge.
Statue of Saint John of Nepumuk, one of many statues along the walls of the Charles Bridge. The story is that Saint John was the queen’s confessor and was put to death when he failed to reveal the queen’s confession secrets to the king. Legend has it that if you touch the statue and make a wish or ask for a secret to remain undiscovered, it will come true. See for the folk story.
The weir.
View of Prague on castle side of the Charles Bridge.
Canal on the castle side of the Charles Bridge.
Prague castle and St Vitus Cathedral
The guards enter the castle gates for the changing of the guards.
The ceremony of the changing of the guards.
St Vitus Cathedral, which lies inside the castle grounds.
Stain glass window in St Vitus Cathedral (within the castle walls).
Treasure from inside St Vitus. This is believed to hold the remains of the tongue of Saint John, which was allegedly recovered from the River Vltava, although scientists later identified it as brain.
Caitlin in the Golden Lane behind the castle, home to alchemists and artists (at different times).
Prague architecture
Riverside buildings in Prague.
Church of St Nicholas.
The Astronomy Clock in Old Town Square.
Statue in Old Town Square.
Renaissance building in Old Town Square.
Cool door, somewhere in Prague.
Old Town Square from above.
The Church of Our Lady Before Tyn.
The Ossuary (Bone Church) at Kutna Hora
The entrance to the Ossuary.
Inside the Ossuary.
Bone structure in the centre of the room inside the Ossuary.
One of four bone pyramids.
Bone chandelier inside the Ossuary, apparently made from every bone in the human body.
Bone shield.
Kutna Hora
Cathedral of Saint Barbara, the patron saint of miners.
Saint Barbara.
Kutna Hora street.
Grand building in Kutna Hora.
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01.27.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 10.07 pm by niltiac
I finished A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce this afternoon and felt that I should immediately turn back to page one and start again. I enjoyed the novel and it’s not particularly difficult to understand but I had this constant feeling that I was missing something, as if I was only scratching the surface and the true mysteries were buried deep and inaccessible to the uninitiated. I think part of this was because Joyce seems to write for mood and resonance of meaning rather than simple narrative, which of course all good writers do but he seems to do more than most.
The novel is about an artist’s childhood, youth and growth into manhood and self realisation as an artist, shaking off the demands of religion and country and family along the way. At times it has some very long passages on the hell fire lectures of his school days or the protagonist’s musings on aestheticism but these are quite interesting and obviously pivotal in the character’s development. The ending, where the narration switches to first person, is triumphant. I would be interested to know how closely autobiographical the novel is.
28 down, 72 to go…
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01.26.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 8.06 pm by niltiac
I’m largely ignoring Australia Day today. I had various invitations to various Walkabouts – a chain of Aussie-themed pubs – but it involves queues and crowds and beer in plastic cups so I decided to give it a miss.
However, I did meet up with Natalie, Tash, Kimberley and Cameron for a drink at the Boardroom Bar & Grill in the City last night to celebrate the fact that it was already Australia Day in Australia. The bar is quite swish but the reason we were there was that it sells Australian beer. I had a couple of bottles of James Boag and a bottle of Cooper’s so I feel that I’ve done my patriotic duty.
We all tried to remember the words to Khe Sanh although Cam was the only one who actually got past the first verse – he claims we’re losing our stripes though Kimberley was of course excused on grounds of being Canadian. What stripes? The only stripes on the Aussie flag are in the Union Jack and I’d be glad to get rid of those. And since when was being a Cold Chisel tragic a mark of nationhood? ‘Twas funny though.
Australia Day for me means summer concerts (like Big Day Out), barbeques and the beach. And depending on your politics it can mean tall ships in the harbour or Aboriginal Survival Day celebrations in La Perouse. But either way, it’s meant to be WARM. And today it was about minus one and I forgot my hat so it’s not surprising I’m not in the mood. I enjoyed drinks last night though.
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01.24.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 10.12 pm by niltiac
No not a baby, but my new Apple laptop has arrived. It’s awesome!
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01.23.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 10.32 pm by niltiac
I was in the Media Week office today. It was a little surreal having to sign in at reception and sit at a different desk and use a temp email address and yet call all my old contacts. However, it was quite a pleasant and productive day and the new news editor seems nice. I’m in all week so I presume I will probably wind up writing an analysis (like a news feature).
Frustratingly, my new laptop wasn’t delivered today as promised. I will have to call them and chase if it doesn’t show up tomorrow morning.
I’m fighting off a cold with a bit of an irritating shallow cough. One of the downsides of an English winter, I guess – it must have been a shock to the system after my lovely hot Christmas.
In other news, I’m thinking about going to Geneva for the Davis Cup with Natalie and Tash.
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01.22.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 5.19 pm by niltiac
The whale has died. Now I am sad.
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01.20.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 1.12 pm by niltiac
I always get terribly impressed and stupidly proud of Sydney’s beautiful harbour whenever I hear about whales and dolphins cavorting just off the shore from the Opera House. But I never thought I’d hear about a whale swimming up the Thames past Westminster. Is it lost? Is it sightseeing? Is it a diplomatic emissary trying to contact Tony Blair? Or is it just doing it for a dare? I hope it’s okay.
Reports seem to disagree on what sort of whale it is. See also the report in The Times.
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