"Duet for one"

Too rarely do we support our local theatre, as I have confessed before. But last night, we went along to see Tom Kempinski's two-hander - and came away raving about it! Was this because we were part of such a small audience, and determined to compensate for all those empty seats? No, I believe this was genuinely an outstanding evening of theatre, something to mark it out as worthwhile in spite of the rival attractions of the multi-screen Cineworld, or just staying at home with the TV or the iPlayer.

The play is clearly based upon the gradual decline into ill-health of Jacqueline du Pré, rather poignantly still alive at the time it was written. The musician (played by Haydn Gwynne) at one point accuses Alfred Feldman, her psychiatrist (the very English William Gaunt) of putting on his German accent. Acting that was other than excellent might have provoked a smile from the audience at this irony: as it was, it only occurred to me subsequently.

Henry IV Part II

The 2010 Globe Theatre production of one of my favourite Shakespeare plays came to our local Cineworld last night. It was a long evening, as we had a false start - they put the wrong tape in, so we began with the first scene of Henry IV Part I ("So shaken as we are, so wan with care..." - rather a bonus). The production by Dominic Dromgoole was noisy, vivacious and only momentarily moving ("If I had a thousand sons..."): there was no foretaste of Chekhov as in Peter Hall's so-memorable RSC version in the early '60s, with Hugh Griffith and Roy Dotrice as Falstaff and Shallow. But the Globe gave us the marvellous, rumbustuous Roger Allam as the not-too-fat knight and a totally brilliant William Gaunt as Shallow. These apart, though, and save when it went down Gloucestershire way, the acting was one-dimmensional.