The far sides of theatre

I've been treated to the theatre this weekend, which is a rare thing indeed -- both to go to the theatre (too rare, to my shame) and to be treated -- a new friend I met on the Martin Parr weekend very generously invited me to go with her to see The Architects by Shunt, the London-based site-specific company.

The production stretched the etiolated theatre-appreciating parts of my brain to their maximum extension, a feeling I love. But, put simply, it was completely bonkers. In a pretty good way. It took place in an empty biscuit factory in Bermondsey. (As an aside,  before the theatre I was very excited to visit the unbelievably trendy foody 'quarter' under the railway arches at Maltby St, including the St John Bakery that, hitherto, I had only read about on Spitalfields Life.) Bermondsey is not only 'up and come', it seemed to be pulsating with confidence and a sense of its own coolness.
     We stepped into the biscuit factory through a very unassuming door and found ourselves in a plywood labyrinth which reduced the very high ceilings of the space down to human height. It most reminded me of the temporary structure built to house Peter Blake's pop-up Museum of Everything in Primrose Hill last year. That's the trouble with novel experiences, these days we're exposed to such a rich mix of thrills and novelties, in an effort to engage our jaded minds, that it's hard to find a space in our heads where things feel truly fresh. The main 'point' of The Architects is, I think, to disorient and bewilder, to give the audience a bit of a spooky frisson, but, although I really wanted to be spooked, I just stayed ploddily unmoved, which made me feel disappointed in myself, my leadenness -- presumably this was not really the idea.
     I don't want to give too much away about the production as any potential for thrilling that it has will be eroded by people knowing too much about what to expect. It's a very strange, incoherent riff on the myth of the Minotaur but perhaps also an attempt to create a Ship of Fools. And it includes a long speech about architecture which doesn't seem to relate to very much else that's going on. And there was some darkness and some bizarre tableaux and then it was over. No one told us it was over and there was no applause. We just kind of seeped away by silent consent. I couldn't help wondering if we had been a particularly lumpen, unresponsive audience or whether it's the same at each performance: people bemused, keeping themselves to themselves in case some sort of outrage is perpetrated against them. The only 'outrage' was a kiss, but I'm saying too much. The cow with the velvet insides at the top of the post was a prop which referred to Pasiphae's predilections from which the Minotaur resulted...

In stark contrast to this fascinatingly weird piece of theatre, a couple of weeks ago I took my daughter to see Swan Lake performed by the Royal Ballet at the Royal Opera House as a birthday treat. It was as much a treat for me as for her. I haven't seen many ballet productions and had never been inside the Royal Opera House before. It was extremely sumptuous. I felt a little bit like a street urchin who had been admitted into the grocer's shop and given a sugar plum because it's Christmas -- in fact during the second interval D was a little bit cross because a splendidly affluent couple asked us if we'd like their leftover smoked salmon sandwiches (a bit too pricey for us to indulge in and anyway we'd been for a very nice meal beforehand...) -- I on the other hand was delighted. I'm not too proud for charity.

There's a point to this comparison... I enjoyed the ballet immensely. I thought it was magical. The sets and costumes were intended to make it seem contemporaneous to Tchaikovsky's music and Petipa's original choreography, so late 19th century. It was rich, cluttered, with stiff suits for the men and heavy brocade gowns for the women (not the swans who as you can see were downy and ethereal). I loved all the set pieces -- the way each dance is like a 'turn' for the pleasure of the others watching onstage, theatre within theatre. My engagement with it didn't flag once. But the next day I looked up reviews of the production, in the Guardian, Telegraph and so on and they were all pretty negative, saying the sets were awful, the production tired and uninspired, wasn't it time to retire it altogether? This was very interesting to me as it showed me I lack the critical capacity to make these sorts of judgements about ballet. I just haven't seen enough of it. To me it was as though I'd been transported back to an evening in 1876 and a performance of a wonderful new work with exquisite dancers.
     So while I feel confident in voicing my misgivings about the Shunt piece (though this interview fills in some of the blanks), when it comes to ballet I'm the critical equivalent of a naive child. Something like this:

from a wonderful set of photos here

What is the floor for?

Aren't these flooring samples beautiful? We've been planning to put in some new flooring for an area to do art in and I had a strong picture in my mind of a lot of white walls and shelves with a jewel-bright floor. I sent off for lots of samples. The big pieces in the picture are linoleum from Gerflor. The Colorette range looks great but they're not quite so vibrant in the flesh.

Colorette from Gerflor

The smallest squares in the top picture are vinyl samples from the aptly named Colour Flooring Company. Their colours are actually brighter in the flesh than on their website:

Antelope range from the Colour Flooring Co.

The middle sized squares in the top picture are from Harvey Maria, who get extra points for their witty name and also sell lovely Cath Kidston vinyl. Their colours are divine.

Harvey Maria Colours collection

The green is much lime-ier when you see it in the flesh. When I'd got my six samples from Harvey Maria I was completely flummoxed. I loved them all. I spent ages staring at them in isolation from each other, trying to imagine a wide sea of cherry red or deep, mustardy yellow. I imagined myself lying in a patch of sunlight, head on a cushion, reading a book on the soul-nourishing floor colour. But I couldn't commit to just one colour.
     In the end I was veering towards Raspberry Pink as the most statement-like colour and push was going to come to shove. Then a discussion with my daughter put paid to the whole (long!) process. She said the pink would give her a migraine every time she went near it and that it would colour the whole room and everything in it pink. Is that really what I wanted for an art room? I had to admit there was something in her argument.
     So we've ended up choosing this:

I'm a tiny bit sad but it's probably for the best. By the way, the above is also vinyl but looks so woodlike I think it's better than actual wood. No splinters for a start-off.
     As a by-product, the process I went through to arrive at this point fed my colour-chart habit very satisfyingly and has also left me with the lovely little pile of samples that I'm sure I'll be able to do something with one of these days.

Books for Hipsters

I love this!

Radi-Aid: Save the freezing children of Norway

http://www.africafornorway.no/

Have you seen the excellent video put out by the charity Radi-Aid? Those poor Norwegians are freezing cold so Africans are helping by sending their unwanted radiators. Yes, it's a spoof, but with a purpose -- to turn around cliched images of helpless Africans who we only ever think of as victims.
     Now I really want a Radi-Aid t-shirt. So do a lot of other people, it seems -- I bet they start selling them before the end of the weekend. This thing is moving fast.

The Sad Case of David Hockney's Stump

The twelve-foot-high tree stump which featured in several of David Hockney's wonderful paintings in his show at the Royal Academy earlier this year has been vandalised and cut down, which has understandably upset the artist (and me -- more than I would have expected).

'Winter Timber' by David Hockney

He was quoted in The Guardian as saying, "It is something that has made me depressed. It was just a spite. There are loads of very mean things here now in Britain." He has been to see the damaged stump and is doing drawings of it as a way of dealing with the saddening turn of events.

The tree was spraypainted some time before it was actually hacked in two. Here's the stump at full height but grafitti-ed:

It does seem incredible that this block of dead wood, which had particular meaning for Hockney -- he referred to it as his 'totem' -- should have been singled out for deliberate spoiling. It seems to suggest someone with a reasonable degree of awareness of modern art but also a bent for vandalism. I'd like to think those two things would be would be incompatible but it seems not.
     Apart from Hockney's own beautiful artworks to memorialise the tree, there's still another way to see it.  If, as I'm wont to do, you go travelling on Google Street View, you can visit the location of the tree stump and see it still standing, in rather lovely wintry sunlight. It's in Sands Wood, on Woldgate, the road from Bridlington to Kilham.

How well do you see colours?

screen-grab of the x-rite colour test

How accurately do you discern colours? As someone who loves art and loves to paint, I'm very aware of colours and I like to think I can see them accurately. But can I? Have you ever done the x-rite online colour challenge? Click on the link to have a go. You have to use your mouse to sort the little squares of colour into the correct order -- from pink to green, green to turquoise and so on. Then when you think you've got them into perfect order, you click to see your score. Here's the test I did just now:

It turned out to have 8 mistakes on it. The less mistakes you make the better your score. My best ever score is 4. But for the life of me I can't actually see where the errors are in the lines of colour -- I've just reached the limits of the subtlety my eyes are capable of.

The results page shows you where you got it wrong. I find it completely fascinating. Why don't you have a go and see if you can do better than me?

Just me and Nigel Slater, then?

a still from Teddy Gray's Sweet Factory, a 20-min film by Martin Parr about one of the last old sweet factories (click link to watch)

Are you like me and now believe that the Internet more or less mirrors reality, that everything is 'out there' somewhere, if you can just find the right search terms to put into Google?

Up until now, the only thing I can think of that I couldn't find any reference to online was the 'curse' I have to say every time I see a lone magpie: 'Evil be to thee, good be unto me, get thee gone where thee should be'. Surely I can't be the only person to say this, or even the only person to mention it online? (Having just searched again, I still didn't find it but found instead the tradition of saying 'Devil, devil, I defy thee!' to lone magpies, which must surely be related?)

Now I've found something else dear to my heart which almost no one else seems to remember: Parkinson's Fruit Thins. I must have eaten a hundredweight of these in the course of my childhood. They were beautiful, individually wrapped, inch-square thin panes of boiled sugar. The shape just didn't fit comfortably in your mouth and that was a great part of the pleasure, somehow: pressing the four corners up into the tender roof of your mouth with your tongue or using it to lacerate your cheek when it got to a wafer.
     I've been haunting one or two vintage confectionery sites (such as A Quarter of) for years, waiting in vain for my favourite square (or, in fact, slightly rectangular) sweets to reappear.
     The photo above is the only one I've found that might possibly show an early version of Thins. Otherwise, nada. Then my latest fruitless search brought a mention of Thins by food-hedonist Nigel Slater, who includes them in his new book, Eating for England:

This is the reference, close up:

Just me and Nigel dreaming of Thins, then? I share his nostalgia for sweet shop sweeties and would urge you to watch Martin Parr's short film about Teddy Gray's old-fashioned sweet factory.

Talking of nostalgia, I've absolutely loved the comments on my last post, about saveloys and pease pudding. Jane from Jeeandme shared memories of eating many of the same foods as me growing up in Bristol, altering my picture of the North-East having been a culinary law unto itself. She also remembered eating pigs' trotters, stuffed hearts, faggots and chitterlings. I think I got away lightly.
     Lesley at Printed Material remembered making rollmops but hankers after Farley's Rusks! Some kind of regression thing going on there, maybe, Lesley? Like me with Heinz tomato soup poured on top of a pile of buttered bread cut up into little squares so it makes a bowl of red mush.
     Cathy at Me... Musing amazingly shares my love of Fray Bentos pies but admits to a thing for Spam and those (sorry) horrible little sausages in tins of Heinz baked beans. Let's not even start on Campbell's meatballs (except to say that Campbell's was too posh for our house...).    
     Joanna at Fiddlesnips! remembers eating beef dripping on toast -- me too! Unbelievable, isn't it? Did you also get to scoop out the marrow from the end of the lamb joint on a Sunday with the wrong end of a teaspoon? Shovel on the salt... mmm.
     Finally, Jill at Third Age Musings wrote what I can only describe as a love poem to Golden Syrup and sugar. Me too! Do you sneak a slurp straight out of the squeezy bottle when no one's looking? Syrup on fried rounds of suet, syrup on Yorkshire puddings, bananas dipped in sugar, tomatoes sprinkled with sugar (me, only when cooking them), and sandwiches made with lettuce, sugar and vinegar -- but that combo is what we used to call 'Yorkshire salad' and we had it every week with our Sunday joint, except that I always shunned it as I didn't like the combination of hot and cold on the same plate.

     I leave you with the memory of Chocolate Lovelies which you were supposed to defrost but which I always ate frozen, and lemon Choc Top yoghurts, which I loved even though the 'choc top' was just a thin layer of fatty stuff on top of an indifferent yoghurt. So bad it was good... And the best chocolate bar EVER: