Just For Lookin' Thru

Four married couples feature in this play which presents their very different relationships over the course of one farcical evening, on into the early hours. Delia and Ernest are celebrating their wedding anniversary while Malcolm and Kate are having a housewarming party. Nick has a bad back so has to stay at home in bed; his wife Jan goes to the party without him, where she bumps into old flame Trevor who is having a row with his depressed and distracted wife Susannah. The stage set cleverly presents three bedrooms; lighting and action moves audience attention from one to another, and there is an intelligent use of space and timing. Moments of intensity from neurotic Trevor and Susannah are relieved by comedy, while Jan and Nick’s bickering and jibes are also offset with some humour. Herford directs a well known cast but it is always apparent that they are acting. Only James Midgley and Natalie Cassidy work with perfect comic timing, which makes an audience forget they are delivering ...

Atkins weaves graphics, documentary and news footage, personal stories and information about legislation to expose the deeply disturbing changes that have come about in the UK over the last ten years. Comments are from human rights organizations, politicians, academics and lawyers, and the film focuses on ordinary people who have had enough. They feel compelled to protest and complain about the loss of civil liberties such as freedom of speech, (which has always been sacrosanct in Britain), being presumed innocent until proven guilty, our rights to privacy, the illegality of torture, and the rest. The Police are used as Government tools to control the unruly population who, when peacefully protesting, are now considered a security risk and a terrorist threat. One busload of women on their way to a peaceful protest were imprisoned in their coach and escorted back to London by a motorcade of police outriders and vans. They were unable to get off the coach for a toilet or dri...

Just spent a happy few days at the Festival of Words and Ideas at Dartington. Hard to know whether the talks are more fascinating than the audience. Am sated with stimulating conversation. Heaven on earth to spend time with other writers and avid readers, people of passion. On Resurgence Day we were treated to talks by Brian Goodwin and Satish Kumar. Goodwin says he is ‘embedded in the evolutionary process’ and his desire is to articulate that ‘culture is embedded in nature’ not something separate, a construct, apart from it. He emphasizes that, at Schumacher College, study is focussed on the ‘meaning’ in the natural world, which is different from studying the natural world in order to control it. In nature, all is death and transformation. His argument that meaning tends to be associated with language and culture rather than the existence and life of things implies a chasm between the two, that thought and the intellect have moved to inhabit a separate sphere from nature. He says ‘we ...

Okay. Another interest rate rise. The market has ground to a halt here. The smart people had put their properties on the market in May, to avoid having to have the HIP. If they accepted offers then, they’re alright now. The market has become saturated with properties. Overpriced, unattractive properties down here. So, it’s a buyer’s market. There’s so much to choose from that no-one’s choosing. However, in an auction I attended last week, a 3.8 acre parcel of pasture land sold for 60K. Buy land, they ain't makin' it anymore. In fifty years you could maybe get planning permission for your grandchildren. I’ve only been in this job for nine months and, in that time, we’ve gone from being rushed off our feet and selling houses before we’ve had a chance to get them advertised in the paper, to being stuck with hundreds of them. My own job, doing all the Saturday viewings, has changed from racing about like a headless chicken to try and fit in all the appointments, missing l...

Set in Australia and based on a short story by Raymond Carver, ‘So Much Water So Close To Home,’ Jindabyne is a slow moving psychological drama. The town of the title is small, enclosed, and stifling. Everyone knows everyone’s business yet there is sense of real unease percolating through every piece of dialogue from the beginning. There is no soundtrack; the film is shot in silence and minimal dialogue, but singing overlaid on the landscape shots is very disturbing. Hostility is everywhere. Stewart and his friends go off on a weekend fishing trip, and, on the Friday, find the dead body of a murdered woman floating in the water. Their decision to leave her there, and not report the crime until they return is a mistake in judgement that has repercussions which reverberate throughout their community on their return. Misunderstanding, failure to tell the truth, and the apportionment of blame are the themes here. Laura Linney is superb as Clare, Stewart’s wife, who has also ma...

There’s a lot of excitement in the Press just now, with two car bomb threats averted in London and another at Glasgow Airport. It strikes me as deeply chilling that the London bomb attempts were targeted near nightclubs where hundreds of young people and, in particular, slags (sic) would have been killed or maimed. This is not a terrorist attack against capitalism or even Christianity, or a general lack of faith in the UK but an attack on our women. In the same newspaper I read an article about a magistrate who is apologizing for his unprofessional conduct when he walked out of the Courtroom because a young Muslim woman appeared before him in a hijab with a mere slit for her eyes to peep through. I have no idea what she had done to require a presence before the beak, but identity must surely be called into question in Court. She is apparently hurt and outraged at being asked to unveil where men are present. However, anyone could have been under that veil, her uncle for instance, sent a...