Getting back to you as promised on the Palin show. I was front row, directly below him. He's still OK to look at but never mind that. The first half of the show he talked about his new book Erebus which was one of the ill fated ships on Franklin's North West Passage expedition. In the second half he just told stories from his career from being at Oxford to his last trip to North Korea. It ended with the German version of the Lumberjack Song & then we all got to sing the Lumberjack Song with him.
Oh, and he mentioned Genesis along with Zeppelin & Floyd when he talked about the financing of Holy Grail. It turned out the guy next to me was a big Genesis fans & has been on a couple of Steve's cruises & will be seeing Phil in January at the show I'm attending.
Sorry for the delayed response, it was good to read about the Palin show. I've seen him do a couple of similar shows and he is very good. And a Genesis mention into the bargain!
Earlier I mentioned a performer Daniel Kitson who does live shows that aren't easily categorised, being somewhere between stand-up comedy and theatre, and that he occasionally tours his shows in Australia. He's bringing his latest one over, called Keep. In this one, as he often does he's playing himself as a character, this time who has indexed every single object in his house and garden and the show is him sitting down to read out every single one of the thousands of cards to us.... But things quickly take an unexpected turn.
I saw him do the show in London and while it's not one of his best, even when he's slightly below par he's still very funny and engaging.
Last week I saw a stage adaptation of the film Berberian Sound Studio. As with the film, it's about an engineer brought in to oversee the sound effects of a gory Italian horror film in post-production. Through his increasingly surreal experience we see how he has shut himself off from the world and the effect of this isolation on his state of mind. It was an excellent well-staged show with very good performances.