Live theatre

  • Getting back to you as promised on the Palin show. I was front row, directly below him. :love: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.

    Abandon all reason

  • Luckily it stayed dry for the open air production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night at Chilham Castle in Kent last week. Only 8 actors in total so lots of doubling up, with men playing women & vice versa. The 2 drunken knights were Irish & their victim, the idiotic steward, was Australian!

  • As my usual Edinburgh apartment isn't available for the 2019 Fringe, I was having to look elsewhere and not succeeding. Good, reasonably priced places get booked a year ahead. But I managed to find one today so that's me sorted for my 2019 fix. Yay!


    (And by the way, the owners of my usual rental have reserved it for me for 2020, the first time I've ever booked something 2 years in advance).

    Hmmm well obviously that's not happening! August and no Fringe.... It'll be very strange.


    Theatre is one of the things I am most missing along with cinema and visits to cafes bars and restaurants.

    Abandon all reason

  • Hmmm well obviously that's not happening! August and no Fringe.... It'll be very strange.


    Theatre is one of the things I am most missing along with cinema and visits to cafes bars and restaurants.

    It is going to be a strange feeling here in Edinburgh in August with no festivals going on. The place is usually buzzing but it is going to be eerily quiet

    “Without music, life would be a mistake”

  • It is going to be a strange feeling here in Edinburgh in August with no festivals going on. The place is usually buzzing but it is going to be eerily quiet

    Yes I've been thinking about that. Some will of course welcome it but many businesses will suffer even more than they already are. I suspect even some residents who annually gripe about the crowds will miss it.


    The accommodation agency I go through are great. They've repaid my deposit, rolled my booking over to the equivalent dates next year and won't take a deposit until April. So when I thought I was booking 2 years ahead, little did I know it'd be three....

    Abandon all reason