Food Quest

My quest to be the stereotypical jaded-metro-yuppie-Guardianista-Islingtonite continues! So it's off to Borough Market to exercise my hunter-gatherer instincts in search of olive bread and nettle cheese (no, really).

But I go off the rails a bit on the way back, and pop in to the unappealing-looking Lithuanian shop under the arches at London Bridge. It also turns out to be unappealing-smelling, and of course it shakes violently every couple of minutes because of the trains. But it's packed with unidentifiable groceries!

So I am now the proud owner of: a rattan basket of biscuits that look like tiny beige snails and are called "sausainiai riču raču", a bag of glaistyti zefyrai ("coated zephyrs", it says here) which I think are probably chocolate-covered meringues, and an ominous sausage labelled "šaltai rūkyta KRIVIO dešra". Ping is not impressed, so it may all end up as a nutritionally-unsound packed lunch for Picocon. Anybody want a coated zephyr?

Nights at the Circus

Angela Carter's book "Nights at the Circus" has been adapted for the stage, and is currently at the Lyric Hammersmith. Ping and I went to see it the other day.

A quick plot summary, without spoilers: it's 1899 and our heroine, Fevvers the winged Cockney Venus, is working the music halls. She is spotted by Welser, a journalist, who doesn't believe her wings are real. And the rest is a love story, starting in a brothel and ending in a circus.

Viewed as an evening of theatre, it's - er - good in parts. Kneehigh Theatre are an improvisational group, and the show still feels like a collection of workshopped scenes from the book, loosely joined. Ping muttered afterwards about focus, and the way that people were on-stage just because they had to move props about, or because they had a line to deliver in a while and no plausible way to get offstage and back on again. Kneehigh might be able to turn a bucket, a saw and a torch into a tiger, but they don't have the skills of, say, Complicite, who can turn four chairs and a TV into an elephant and seem to be weightless while they're doing it.

I was trying to work out why I liked the show so much, when the reviews have been so variable, and eventually I realised: it's not an evening of theatre. It's an evening of music hall. There are songs. There are knob gags. Clowns do their thing with soda siphons. There are men in frocks, and a Greek chorus of sorts. There are moments of powerful emotion, and some startling brutality, but there's an underlying current of humour to it all. Welser starts the evening in the audience; by the end, he's centre-stage and loving it. The actors are visibly actors playing their parts, and we have to learn to suspend disbelief just as Welser does.

So: the curtain goes up on the music hall stage. A woman with wings is sitting on a trapeze and belting out "I'm Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage". She has an accent reminiscent of the late Arthur Mullard. If you like the music hall as much as I do, then the next two and three-quarter hours will be an evening to remember.