Bad, immoral and crazy

Today was the first edition of the Talking Newspaper for 2014…although there’s been two week’s of papers. Subsequently, I had to prepare two editions of the printed paper. While this was very good for the amount of stories available to us, it had one serious drawback in that there was a record amount of deaths to announce.

Generally, there’s about 15 on average but today I had to read through 42! I started off by explaining to the listeners that it was not because of some epidemic. You can never be too careful.

It’s obvious that the births and deaths rarely give any scope for humour (though I am, at times, sorely tempted) but today there was a wonderful little rhyme that went with one. It read

Bill Welton died peacefully at Alton December 20, 2013
There was an old man from Bayview,
by nature good humoured not lazy.
He did all the things that he wanted to do,
mostly bad, immoral and crazy.

So his life was not wasted,
Adieu

I always like it when I can read something more about someone than just their name and age at death. I really like Bill, he sounds like he was quite a guy.

The recording went well, although during the What’s On section I went off into one of my meandering moments when I couldn’t find a telephone number. After the recording, Malcolm, the engineer asked me if I wanted it edited because he thought it was very entertaining. I left the decision with him.

Back at home, I rushed around doing housework before once more leaving the puppies to fend for themselves as I headed off, into Guildford. I was off to the theatre with Dawn, to see a play called Aunt Dan and Lemon, at the Mill.

The play was first performed in 1985 at the Royal Court Theatre and was directed by Max Stafford-Clark. I wish I’d seen his version because I reckon it would have been a good deal better than the one we saw last night!

However…I should state firstly that as we were walking back to the car afterwards, Dawn told me she thought one of the actors was really good. Oddly, it was the one I thought was the worst. When I burst into laughter while gasping in disbelief, she looked into the sky and said she should know better than to go to the theatre with me because I’m so critical.

Now that that’s out of the way…the production wasn’t THAT bad. I mean, basically, I’ve seen a lot worse. However, I really think it was beyond the director. While she didn’t take any risks (apart from the choice of the play), she also made a lot of simple errors…well, to be absolutely fair, her cast made lots of silly errors and she didn’t pull them up on them.

Possibly the worst thing about it was the interminable speeches by Aunt Dan. When a character has to speak for ages in a rather static scene (sitting at a table, sitting on a bed, just sitting) it’s very important not to lull the audience to sleep with the recitation. I’m sure what she was saying was very clever and important but I was just fighting to stay awake.

I’m not going to mention Mindy because she was just awful. Interestingly, the original Mindy was played by Lyndsey Baxter who Nicktor and I have been watching in Chancer on Tuesday nights.

Of the whole cast (which was seven) I thought Martin Rossen was the best on the night. (Dawn disagreed, thinking he was too nervous. While I agree that he was, I still think he was the best and it was the opening night.)

Mish Duffy, as Lemon, deserves some praise for her memory, if nothing else. She only made a couple of small slips, which were understandable (and not annoying at all), in a part with long pieces of rambling words. The only problem with her was the direction. Back and forth, back and forth…she reminded me of Day-z wandering endlessly around our coffee table.

I’m not going to say any more about the play except that I had no idea that Raimondo was a policeman until I just read it on Wikipedia. We both thought he was a small time thug.

Much better than the play was our dinner at Yo Sushi! Dawn’s first time, both with Japanese food and a conveyor belt delivery system. I really enjoyed it. I’m not so sure about Dawn.

If nothing else, I thoroughly enjoyed seeing her.