Started off across the central reservation from a young couple, gent. in bright blue hoodie, cuddling away, not much inhibited by the presence of other passengers. I thought the girl was starting to feel embarrassed when a couple of people sat down opposite them, the carriage being fairly full, but no; she soon recovered her poise and carried on.
On to Clapham Common where we found a log to sit on for our sandwiches, in my case chopped egg on home made white. As a result of which I now know that egg sandwiches need baker bloomer white to work properly, just like bacon sandwiches. Something about the texture of my home made white, while perfectly OK in itself, good even, was destructive of the egg sandwich experience. Perhaps chopped egg - made with egg, pounded black pepper and quite a lot of Heinz salad cream (traditional, full strength variety) - was invented in the US at a time when all white bread was factory white. Certainly my family with Canadian influence had it, while the all-English BH family did not.
The bar at the Clapham Picturehouse (the target cinema) was a bit crowded, so we took refreshment in the cocktail bar next door, Venn Street Records, possibly once a public house. The pleasant young lady who served my whisky told me that she did indeed do cocktail pouring exercises in advance of management inspections. Which was good, but I was annoyed, having sat down, that I could not remember how the cocktail pouring exercises went, despite having had them demonstrated in Wimpole Street, not that long ago. But it was OK, as reference 1 revealed all.
Onto the show where it turned out that we got half an hour adverts, talking heads and beards - much the same sort of rubbish that one gets in the front of regular films, but rubbish which I thought these live screenings dispensed with. The small cinema - one of a number carved out of what had been a full size cinema - was fairly full, with a lot more people of working age than such a show would pull in Epsom. Probably a lot more people altogether.
The play proper started with a chap being hung. All a bit messy, something of an advertisement for abolition. Then a clever bit of scene shifting took us to a very convincing replica of a public house, up north, in the mid sixties; a public house run by the hangman who had just officiated.
Most of the shooting was in close up, there was no framing proscenium arch and one had little sense of being at a play - much less than on previous visits to live screenings of this sort. Plus, the actors seemed to be shouting the whole time, possibly the result, it was suggested, of their not having learned how to do voice projection properly.
It all seemed to drag. Far too much time for the amount going on. There were certainly some very funny lines, but they had certainly been stretched out a bit. A lot of smoking and a lot of bad language - which last might well have been the language of the time and place, but which I found rather tiresome. All in all not a success and I cut my losses at the interval, thinking that the play would have done much better as a one hour drama (including advertisement breaks) on the television.
PS: having failed the cocktail test, there was a further memory failing in that I thought that the other hangman, the one who was only the presence behind the play, rather than the presence in the play, Albert Pierrepoint, ended up as an alcoholic who committed suicide, a theory which seemed entirely plausible, but which turned out on checking with Cortana to be entirely wrong. Both Pierrepoint and his wife lived to ripe old ages. The subject of a film which we saw in the Isle of Wight shortly before blogs were invented.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/yu-kosuge.html.
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