Out at Waterloo, to find a large hen party making their way down the ramp - maybe as many as fifty ladies, all with overnight bags and one with an inflatable pink phallus. The bride to be did not appear to be a blushing young virgin. We wondered how they planned to spend the afternoon and what sort of a state they were going to be in by mid-evening. BH thought they were gypsies - in which case my understanding is that the ladies might be forward and raucous, but also, in essentials, well behaved.
Took our picnic in the Festival Hall where there was an energetic young choir master putting a choir through their paces in the Clore Ballroom. Quite a lot of laptop enabled meetings. Quite a lot of mothers with small children.
Onto the theatre, for BH to be rather put out by the realistic if oversized & gilded sheeps' skulls decorating the auditorium. More or less full, including quite a lot of children, although, after the event, we did not think that the material was particularly suitable for children. They would understand the words, but not much else - this being my feeling about my own precocious reading as a child; maybe a good thing to get into the habit, but maybe a bad thing in that it encourages talk beyond one's years and understanding.
The illustration turned up by google gives some idea of the set, a house perched above some derelict land. A house which could open out to reveal the party in the interior and could also fall over to mark the cataclysmic ending. A clever set no doubt, but one which I found rather irritating until one had been swept into the action of the play. Plus there was something of a mix-up over time: the play is supposed to be set before the first world war, but a lot of the trimmings of this production were from the second world war and its aftermath.
But the play did sweep one along. It had retained its power despite our having seen a television version back in 2015 (see reference 1), which meant that we knew most of the answers right from the off. And it carried a good lesson for all those greedy people who inhabit the upper reaches of our society; a reminder that we are supposed to be a community, not every man and woman for themselves, never mind who you have to climb over on your way up. With the only catch being that I don't suppose many of said greedy people turned out for it.
Casting good, including the oldest luvvie I have ever seen treading the boards, with Diana Payne-Myers packing in nearly ninety years. However, about half way through, I decided that the inspector was the same chap as the main policeman, the one with a regional accent, in the Geraldine McEwan version of the '4:50 from Paddington'. Quite put about when Cortana failed to confirm this on the way home and when, once home, google came up with two quite different people. Not the first time that I have conflated two luvvies, but irritating when it happens.
Overall verdict, slow start, good middle and bad ending. Bad in the sense that the various possibilities opened up at the very end seemed contrived and with the actual end being something of an anti-climax.
Having done black and blue at Borough (see reference 2) we took dinner at the Archduke. Very satisfactory meal, with the cheerful & efficient service one has come to expect in London. Only let down by having to pay the full price for their Chablis. And, on the way out, we noticed that there was another branch of black and blue within a hundred yards or so. It seems that the Archduke, as a place which had been there a long time, was the only member of the family not to be called black and blue.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/an-inspector-calls.html.
Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/the-archdukes-daughter.html.
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