![]() ![]() Harlequinade follows one theatre company as they’re putting finishing touches on their production of Romeo & Juliet, opening later that night in a midlands theatre. The forerunner of the Arts Council, CEMA was the ‘Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts’, bringing theatre to the masses after the war. The play itself was preceded by a short film projected onto the safety curtain explaining the role of ‘CEMA’ after the war. Harlequinade Kenneth Branagh and Miranda Raison. At the end she was left staring into space when the curtain came down – taking her bows after the second play. I hadn’t realised that this short play was such a serious piece, but Wanamaker pulled off this ‘duologue’ marvelously, movingly. She pretends to be her late husband, putting on a deeper Yorkshire-ish voice and a bit of a swagger to reply to her questions the way she thinks he would have. Margaret arrives home after a party, attacks the whisky decanter with obvious relish, before starting to talk to her dead husband, who had died on the sofa one night after she had gone to bed. This short play was very reminiscent in style of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads – some great comic one-lines, but underlined by tragedy and with a sting in the tale. It’s hard to believe, but Wanamaker is now 66, but still looks twenty years younger! She was the perfect casting to play Margaret Hodge, the middle-aged widow in her empty nest in Hampstead. And so, to the theatre… All On Her Own – starring Zoe Wanamaker A quick view of the tree in Trafalgar Square and a brief foray into Waterstones there until the theatre doors opened saved waiting in the drizzle, but didn’t help our by now very tired feet. ![]() My daughter and I spent the whole drizzly day in London, first going to Camden – where we ate street food for lunch followed by a nitro ice-cream from Chin Chin Labs (the smoothest ice-cream I’ve ever tasted, frozen on the spot with liquid nitrogen), then on to Oxford Street (meh!) and Covent Garden and the London Graphics Centre (yay, pen heaven!), before a pre-theatre burger at the original Ed’s Diner at the end of Old Compton St. The two plays, Harlequinade from the 1940s when Rattigan was at his critical peak, and All On Her Own, a twenty minute monologue originally produced as a radio play in 1968, were performed back to back with no interval and lasted just 100 minutes – we were home well before 11pm! I went to see Kenneth Branagh’s new theatre company perform a double-bill of one-act plays by Terence Rattigan last night. (republished into its original place in the time-line from my lost post archive)
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