First thing this morning I modified yesterday's post. As originally written it previewed our trip to the theatre today, then I decided not to do that, but forgot to change the title. Never mind, I've seen worse errors on the websites of national newspapers.
We went to a matinee performance at a recently opened theatre in north London. It was entirely the Systems Administrator's idea, which touched me deeply since I am normally the one who organises arty trips, and I knew nothing about this theatre, or the play. The SA heard a review on Radio 2, and said that it sounded good. After we'd gone through the pros and cons of getting ourselves to north London and back, the SA came up with the revised scheme of going to a matinee, this Sunday, which is also our wedding anniversary, and going out to lunch first. I was utterly charmed.
Our destination was the Park Theatre, which has been shoehorned into an old office block very close to Finsbury Park tube. It has two auditoriums, seating ninety and two hundred people, a space for rehearsals, workshops or what you will, a cafe and a bar. Of these we saw the larger auditorium and the cafe. It opened in May of this year and still smells of new carpet. The play was a new play, too, Daytona, and this run was its world premiere, though it is now going on tour around the UK. The three actors were Maureen Lipman, Harry Shearer (who I think were the main draws for the SA) and John Bowe (who almost stole the show according to the Telegraph review).
I do my best, but my life does seem to come out more Mr Pooter than Vita Sackville-West. The small child lying on the seat across the aisle across us on the train to Stratford was suddenly and copiously sick shortly after leaving Colchester. It was not a full train, as thankfully the army of teenagers on their way to Chelmsford's V festival had scrambled on to the intercity at the last moment, rather than getting the stopper, so we moved seats. We got to Highbury and Islington without further incident, but couldn't get out of the station, because the barrier rejected our tickets and there were no platform staff at all. We asked at a window saying Information, and were sent to a different window, where someone summoned a member of staff to the barrier, who expressed his extreme mortification that we were stuck inside the station with a gleeful, sarcastic humour that would have had Mr Pooter writing a letter of complaint to someone. He then explained that the barriers could not cope with combined mainline and London overground tickets.
After that we could not find the restaurant. It was only about a hundred and fifty yards down Upper Street, and we must have almost reached it, albeit on the other side of the road, before losing confidence and retracing our steps. It was partly my fault, because I'd swapped two numerals when I wrote the number down, but the Systems Administrator has seen enough transposition errors to know that is a mistake that could happen to anyone (the difference between the two will be divisible by nine, but that didn't help us find the place). The main problem is that the street numbers in Upper Street go up one side of the road and then back down the other, but we didn't know that, and expected 265 to be pretty close to 257, not several minutes' walk away on the other side of the road. Having found 257 we spent some time searching around Highbury Corner, before doing what we should have done in the first place, and consulting the web.
The restaurant is called Gem, and specialises in Turkish and Kurdish dishes. The food is very good, assuming you like eastern Mediterranean herby and garlicky food, which we do, or we wouldn't have gone there. The prices are astonishingly reasonable for London, and I thought they deserved to be busier than they were (three other tables apart from us in all the time we were there). Halfway through lunch a smiling Asiatic wearing dark glasses came in, disappeared out the back with the man I took to be the manager, and left saying he would see him next week, which was a bit Sopranos.
Finsbury Park is not a long walk from the top end of Upper Street, provided Arsenal aren't playing at home. If we were going to the Park Theatre again we'd happily combine it with lunch in Gem. The cafe at the theatre was very crowded and cheerfully chaotic, also rather hot. We knew the auditorium would be air conditioned, though, because one of the actors had commented in the interview that it was just as well given that he spent the whole of one act wearing an overcoat.
I can't really tell you anything about the play, apart from the fact that Maureen Lipman is wonderful and the play is very good, since the plot twists around like an eel, and it is impossible to say anything about it without delivering the most massive spoiler. We bought a programme as we filed in, and then discovered that rather than having the usual advertisements for local solicitors and schools like they do at the Mercury, it consisted of half a dozen pages detailing past work of the main contributors, and then the entire text of the play. Or rather, the text as it existed at a late stage in rehearsals. I read it on the way home, and saw a few places where it had been tweaked.
It was a lovely day out. I guess that the fact that we navigated the vomit, the being locked in and the getting lost without once getting ratty and snapping or screaming at each other is one of the reasons why we are still married after twenty-nine years.
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