Got there a little early, having taken just 20 minutes to walk from Waterloo, so we were able to indulge in coffee (for her) and white wine and pork pie (for him). The bill came to what we thought was a very reasonable £10 or so and the pork pie, served at room temperature, was quite good. We were entertained by a rather busy trusty busying himself with trying to persuade people, not very successfully, to make use of the rather DIY cloakroom arrangements, on account of the shortage of leg room in the playhouse.
Different seats again, to the immediate left of the stage, in a more or less full house which included a lot of young women in addition to those of vaguely arty appearance. Plus, of course, the pensioner contingent to which we belonged. Close enough to the stage to be to observe how many black marks it had acquired in its short life, marks which BH thought were the result of careless cleaning up of wax dripping from the chandeliers - which were all very pretty - but how on earth, in this playhouse chock-full of dry wood, did they get them past the health and safety people? Do they have some special pull with the men from the ministry?
The story was nicely presented with the Irishmen in period costume, which included, in the case of the reader, what I presumed to be what used to be called a boiled shirt. The reader sat, which looked right with the piano, but went with a rather conversational delivery which, for me but not for BH, felt a bit flat in the first half. Certainly I found the seat rather hard, but, with the addition of my scarf to the cushion at the interval, things went much better. Both quality and quantity of piano music were about right, enough to provide a bit of colour without getting in the way, but I did wonder about the choice of music, music which sounded rather dainty and French to me and which did not go with the story very well - although, to be fair, it was hard to see what they could have played which would have done better. Maybe the reader should have stood to a lectern, given the thing a bit more wellie and done without the music? At least he could read, unlike Armitage (see reference 1).
A rather abrupt end to the first half, possibly because there is no convenient break in the text. But as I say, the second half went much better, with the tension rising nicely to the rather sad conclusion.
A spinkling of odd words. So we had screwed for drunk, which one could guess and I liked. Stirabout for porridge which one did not guess but which was in OED. Pansy for a sort of dress-making material which one did not guess either and which did not make it into the OED, although what there was there suggested that it might be a sort of purple velvet, coloured for the purple of the original pansies. One use of language which irritated me, was the placing of the two square supper tables end to end. Clear enough what was meant, but squares do not have ends and that jarred, on me anyway (see page 180 in the Penguin edition of 1973).
Reading the story for myself when we got back home, I thought that the world so well evoked was perhaps all too foreign for the younger portion of the audience. We could remember when things were rather like those in the story, while they could not. Which perhaps accounted for the usual crop of nervous laughter in what I (as usual) felt to be the wrong places.
My take was good effort. Came over fairly well on the whole, but came over much better when one read it for oneself. It is not, after all, as if it was a difficult read. The pace of the thing seemed all wrong when read aloud and the humour, of which there was plenty, did not come over very well at all. Aloud it all seemed too loud and intrusive, out of keeping with the story as a whole - which it is not.
Good effort I think sums up, for me, the whole playhouse venture. Interesting to have seen three quite different things done there, but I wonder how it will go on. Will they be as successful in getting people in as they have been in the Globe proper? For ourselves, I think we will give it a rest.
Home, taking 30 minutes on the return journey to the station along the (prettily illuminated) river, to just miss a Wimbledon train at Blackfriars and to just miss an Epsom train at Waterloo, eventually catching a rather delayed train to Guildford. The posh wine bar above platform 1 was shut, so I made up with a couple of small bottles of red from the more reliable 'Whistlestop' below. Also thoughtful in that they supply a bag in which to hide the Boris-forbidden alcohol and a plastic glass. About half the price, by volume, of that from the Globe.
This morning I think of Joyce's contemporary Aldous Huxley, also interested in the way that two people, who perhaps know each other very well, can be together, but to be moving on parallel tracks, coming into real contact just occasionally. In different worlds for the rest of the time. Perhaps it will come to me in which of his stories he uses this image of tracks. The two of them met, I think once, at a literary lunch in Paris.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/sir-gawain.html.
Refrence 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/smp2.html.
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