A night at the theatre

One of my favourite small theatres is the Lyric, in Hammersmith, South West London. It's quite an intimate venue, at several plays I've sat two or three rows from the front. Last week I took The Boy there for the first time. Normally I book my tickets on their website, but with The Boy's wheelchair I needed to book over the phone. The service was excellent, booked in five minutes, and an email sent straight after to confirm.
The tickets were held for us at the box office, and the theatre is fully accessible with lifts to every floor. We were escorted to our seats by the manager, who made sure we were settled before disappearing to do work elsewhere. We were the furthest back I have ever sat in the stalls, but still had a good view of the stage.
We were there to see Lovesong, written by playwright and screen writer Abi Morgan (The Hour, Iron Lady, Shame etc). It was beautifully staged, written and performed by a cast of four. If it's on somewhere near you at any point, go and see it. The play told the story of a couple's relationship as they reached their sad end, with the other actors playing their younger selves, seen almost as ghosts at times by the older couple. The projections on the back wall helped tie things together, and the dance sections were incredibly moving.
I admit I was moved to tears by the tenderness and love the actors portrayed. The idea of being loved so much for so long is really lovely, and something I want for myself. *Confession: I cry easily, and am not really allowed to watch sad things as they often affect me*.
After the play ended, with no interval it was still quite early, we were escorted down in the lift and to the exit by an usher, making it feel very personable and friendly.
We made our way home, discussing the play and the previous shows I have seen there.
Next on their programme is A Midsummer Night's Dream, and we will be booking tickets for it very soon!

The Dark Tower sequence - Stephen King

I'm a huge lit geek, and one of the things I enjoy is when writers play little games to amuse themselves and their readers. I've recently been reading the Dark Tower Sequence by Stephen King, in which he does this a lot.
Now I'm not really a Stephen King fan, I've only read a few of his books before, including the short story which became The Shawshank Redemption. The Boy bought me a copy of The Stand a little while ago, and I really enjoyed it. He suggested I borrow The Dark Tower books from him and read them, and so I did.
I found the first book, The Gunslinger, a little dull and heavy going, despite it being a slim volume, but once other characters began to enter the plot in the second volume, then I began to enjoy it a lot more. The characters are fun and realistic, the plot sprawling and multi-layered. Occasionally it's a little confusing, and can get a bit frustrating; especially once the author entered the plot as a character.
There are loads of clever meta-textual references, to other Stephen King novels, to the Wizard of Oz, and dozens of other books. It's inspired partly by the works of Tolkien and also Robert Browning's 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'.
If you like epic quests, brave heroes, and cute little animals who talk, I recommend you give them a go. There's also a series of graphic novels based on the novels, which I will be reading next.

The Dark Tower Sequence

• The Gunslinger
• The Drawing of the Three
• The Waste Lands
• Wizard and Glass
• Wolves of the Calla
• Song of Susannah
• The Dark Tower

Review: Beyond Black - Hilary Mantel

Confession, I've had a copy of Hilary Mantel's Booker winner, Wolf Hall lying around for ages, but this is the first book of hers I've read.

Beyond Black tells the story of Alison, medium and psychic. Making the rounds of psychic fairs and conventions with her various colleagues, Alison meets Colette, who decides to become Alison's manager, and make her peculiar talents go further. Alison is haunted by the ghosts of her past, the majority of whom are rather unpleasant and slowly her own forgotten past comes to affect her present.
I quite liked Alison, despite being a complete sceptic, and the brisk way she tried to deal with the dead who kept bothering her. Colette is brittle and not very nice, impossible to feel for, unlike Alison, who I felt quite sorry for when her childhood comes back to, well, haunt her.
It took a little while to get into the book, but once I was I whizzed along, to the conventions and shows, where the psychics gather to be quite rude about their punters after hours, the long car trips the two women take between venues, returning to their home, filled by evil ghosts and menacing nightmares.
This book is quite fun, and not too heavy going, with some quite comic bits. Well written and interesting. I recommend it.

Book Review: The Knife of Never Letting Go - Patrick Ness

I finally got around to reading this book, winner of The Guardian's Children's Fiction Prize. It's the first in the Chaos Walking trilogy, and takes place on another planet, New World, in a settlement called Prentisstown. There are no women or children left in the town, and Todd is the last boy. There's something called the Noise, which means everyone can hear what everyone else is thinking. Shortly before his birthday, which will make him a man, Todd stumbles on a secret, one which will change his life forever and means he must run.
I quite enjoyed this book, it's written in Todd's voice, complete with misspellings, which adds to the rounded characterisation Ness has created. I don't want to spoil it for those who haven't read it, so without giving anything away... read it. It's fun, clever and well written. If you know any young readers, get them a copy.

Book Review: Kraken - China Mieville

Mieville's latest Embassytown is out now in hardback, but as I haven't yet read it, I thought I'd review his last book, Kraken, out now in paperback.

Kraken starts in the back rooms of the Natural History Museum in London. Young archivist, and cephlapod expert Billy Harrow has been put in charge of preserving the museum's latest acquisition, a giant squid. Only it's gone missing. Thrusting Billy deep into London's cult underground.

With various cults, gods, talking statues, apocalypse worshippers and other assorted craziness, Mieville's underside of London is akin to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.
Billy is not entirely believable as a naive scientist, he occasionally becomes slightly annoying, and some of the side plots and characters could probably be done without. Having said this, I'm a Mieville fan, especially of his Bas-Lag books (Perdido Street Station, The Scar & Iron Council), and I quite enjoyed this romp through an alternative London, the darkness that many writers have explored. You can't have a city of officially 7 million and not have scary stuff bubbling away underneath.
Mieville is a tremendous writer, The City & The City was my starting point, and I thought that was brilliant if a little mind-boggling. His only book for younger readers, UnLunDun also looks at another London beneath the real one. Presumably it's a theory he'll return to at some point.
If you like fantasy writing, mixed with a little realism, crime spliced through with conspiracy theories, then I suggest you give Kraken (and the rest of Mieville's stuff) a go.

Culture Vulture: Mogadishu

Last Thursday, my theatre buddy and I headed off to the lovely Lyric theatre in Hammersmith, where we have seen some blinding shows, Punk Rock and Blasted among them. We were going to see Mogadishu, script by Vivienne Franzmann, directed by Matthew Dunster.
It's a play about what happens when a lie is told, and spins wildly out of control, when all you can do is keep lying and what happens when it unravels and you're left with the consequences.
Set in an inner city school, Jason is a bully, and when caught bullying and told to stop by a teacher, Amanda, instead pushes her to the ground. Faced with expulsion for his violent behaviour, Jason claims Amanda assaulted him, he is black and she is white. His lie, which he forces his friends to go along with, becomes something much larger when his father gets involved and an investigation is launched.
The largely teenage cast were absolutely brilliant, Malachi Kirby is an intense Jason, full of anger and pain, lashing out around him, and Shannon Tarbet as Amanda's vulnerable and equally angry daughter, Becky is definitely someone to watch.
The adults were good too, Julia Ford, as Amanda, conveying the mix of frustration and hopelessness of people trapped by bureaucracy was very good. She doesn't want Jason to get in trouble, saying he didn't mean to push her, he was angry, yet knowing all the time that she couldn't protect him.
If you're in London, there's time still to see it. I highly recommend you do. Absolutely brilliant piece of theatre. Much like the rest of the output of the Lyric.

Bookworm: The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barbery

This is a rather sweet little story about the residents of an apartment building in Paris. There's Renee the concierge, Paloma who lives in one of the apartments and is planning to kill herself on her thirteenth birthday and new resident Kakuro and the bonds they forge. Paloma is trying to be a philosopher, and writes her philosophical thoughts in a notebook. Renee is trying to hide her true intelligence and passion for life, literature and film inside the stereotype of the surly concierge. Kakuro's arrival starts to change their lives and change the people they're pretending to be.
The ending is a bit sudden, and it is a little slight, I wanted to know more about Renee and about Kakuro before they came to the building. But if you want something light and quite lovely (and set in Paris!) then perhaps you'd like to find out what makes a hedgehog elegant.

Brooklyn - Colm Toibin

This was longlisted for last year's Booker and won the Costa Book Award, so it has form. And it was really good. Until the end, which I thought was really weak and didn't really resolve anything. But apart from that, it's a good read, quite short, but interesting. It follows Eilis Lacey, as she moves from Ireland to New York in the 1950s and begins a new life, full of possibilities. Eilis is a likeable, sympathetic character, you feel for her when she suffers from homesickness and loneliness, and as she learns how to be part of the new society she finds herself in. There are sad moments, but balanced out with the happiness Eilis finds in Brooklyn.

Watch Your Mouth - Daniel Handler

I really liked Handler's first novel The Basic Eight, and I was hoping for more of the same. But this is a very weird book. The narrator starts off by explaining that everything you are about to read may or may not have happened and gives a selection of potential openings. It's supposedly set out like an opera, or so Joseph Last-name-changed-to-protect-the-innocent claims. But is anything as it seems. By the end I still wasn't entirely sure what was going on. Most unsatisfactory. And odd.
Trivia fact: Daniel Handler is also Lemony Snicket, author of A Series Of Unfortunate Events.

The Children's Book - A.S. Byatt

I loved this book. I wasn't sure at first, I didn't enjoy Possession at all, and it took a while to warm to this one. But once I did, oh boy! I'm not sure about the title, it doesn't give anything away, which is good, but at the same time, it's not something that adds enticement.
The story is rather epic, covering the late Victorian period upto and including WW1. It centres on several families, the Wellwoods, the Cains, the Fludds, the Warrens and their friends. Following the growing up of the children in these families, Olive and Humprey Wellwood's seven, their cousins, and friends as they try to work out what they want to be and who they are in the early years of the 20th Century. It's beautifully well written, delicious old-fashioned storytelling, with some poignant and tragic moments. Not to be read in one go, but slowly and savoured. It was nominated for last year's Booker prize, and it's a shame it lost. On my 'to read' list is the eventual winner Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, but I wonder if I'll enjoy that as much as I did this.