Saves You Buying The Observer

In the last couple of weeks we have been Cultured. 

And now I shall tell you about it. 

We went to the theatre, for a start; proper theatre, not a jukebox musical or a comedian’s vehicular revamp of something old (though there’s nothing wrong with either of those), but proper arse-numbing, tiny auditorium, Something Important To Say theatre. And we quite enjoyed it. 

We found one of the actors (of which there were only three) to be pitching his performance a little large for an 80-seat theatre, but he was the one off the telly and may have been the one the punters had come to see pre-arts-section-review, whereas post-arts-section-review they’d have come specifically for the play itself and for another of the actors, who was pitch perfect in a rather difficult role. 

What we enjoyed most, though, was realising, during the interval, that if we opened a certain door we could - and did - step out onto a tiny, narrow balcony some way above the street  but concealed by the theatre’s very own logo, and from there, hiding behind the neon block capitals, throw the ice cubes from our orange juice (four quid apiece, mind you) at the gits below. 

Why should we do this? Why perform so unsocial an act on a balmy Friday evening? If I tell you the play was The Witness by Vivienne Franzmann (her mother’s a friend, so the enjoyment was tinged with duty just as the choc-ice is tinged with future diets), and that it was at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, and that this theatre stands feet from some awful place filled with exactly the type of people you would expect to be drinking in a Sloane Square bar on a Friday evening, and that this Friday evening was quite pleasant, almost balmy in fact, and so these people were drinking al fresco, and were the kind of people who not only drink al fresco in italics but also say al fresco in bloody italics as well... Well, if I tell you that, I’m sure you’d not only sympathise, but offer to buy me more orange juice. Or some knives. 

Also, as we were there on what turned out to be The Playwright’s Mother Has Bought Every Seat Tonight And Filled It With Her Friends Night, the theatre was rather full of ladies of a certain age, so making me, for the first occasion in a very long time, something of a toyboy. 

The play? Quite excellent apart from the slight oversizing mentioned above;  asked a few uncomfortable questions about the exploitation of the Third World by developed countries, and whether the crumbs of individual help we throw are tossed purely to assuage our own guilt, and whether those crumbs, once tossed, give us the right to impose our ways onto those countries and then get upset when they begin to reject our guidance. 

That’s what I took from it anyway. 

Oh, and I got one ice cube to land right on some long-haired git’s head. Result! 

Next: au cinéma!