It has been a funny old day. Funnn eeeee as Oscar used to say when he was very small and not mortified to be related to me.
I spent a lovely morning in a tea shop in Rugby with my friend Paula, shooting the breeze and eating shortbread studded with Belgian milk chocolate.
I was so spoiled by this, and my weekend away, that the thought of going home to face the eleventy jobs that awaited me did not appeal, so I bumbled about for the rest of the afternoon doing nothing much of anything except deliberately not going home.
This was a bit stupid as when I got home with the children I had to do homework and dinner at the same time because I was going out later and none of it could wait. While talking to Tallulah about the countries that had taken part in the Second World War, and whose side everyone was on I made a truly terrible chickpea and chorizo stew which I absentmindedly overspiced with smoked paprika to the point where it was virtually inedible. I ended up chucking an entire carton of Greek yogurt into it to dampen down the hideousness. It was edible but not pretty, and by the time I’d finished with it there were about fourteen pints of it. Which was a shame.
I was also making something different for the children who are not fans of chick peas even when I cook them properly. I bashed some chicken breasts until they were thin, marinaded them in buttermilk and then fried them in bread crumbs. It tasted great but was exceedingly messy and did not go well with finding what used to be Jugoslavia on a modern globe for Tallulah while chatting about chromatography with Tilly.
Who says I’m not a renaissance woman?
I’m just a very badly organised renaissance woman.
I got hot food on the table, and all homework done as best we could before I flew out the door.
Andrea and I were off to Warwick Arts Centre to see a play called Schrodinger in their studio space.
We were hoping for something like Theatre de Complicite’s ‘A Disappearing Number’, which was a stunning, powerful and thought provoking piece of theatre about the relationship between two mathematicians Srinivasa Ramanujan, a poor, South Indian Brahmin, and G.H. Hardy, a Cambridge mathematician.
Even if you don’t know anything about pure maths, it is possible to watch this piece of theatre and be totally and completely absorbed in what is unfolding before you and to be carried away by it.
Sadly, Schrodinger was about as far from this as it was possible to get without it being performed by my children on the back lawn of our house.
I’m absolutely sure it would have made more sense if you knew a lot about Schrodinger, other than the fact that he had a box, and possibly a cat, and he may or may not have been quite quantum, which is all I know about him.
I can tell you that I know no more about him now I have sat through this performance than I did when I walked in. I am distinctly unenlightened.
It was what Andrea and I like to call a ‘no interval’ piece of theatre. We have seen quite a few experimental plays which have no interval. We have come to the conclusion after many years that it is deliberate on the part of the writers and actors, due to the fact that they have a strong sense that were they to let you out for an interval, you would be unlikely to return for the second half.
Which in this case was a very justified fear.
It was one of those po faced productions which was terribly serious and meaningful. People stalked about on stage, staring and standing forcefully in corners. CLUTCHING went on. One woman, who was obviously considerably more bendy than the others, spent vast quantities of time shinning up ladders and hanging from the ceiling looking gently distressed at the unfathomable and repetitive nature of the universe whilst displaying very trim ankles.
There was physical theatre to such an alarming degree I would not have been at all surprised had someone broken out into a black leotard and some extremely pointy shoes.
There were expressions of ANGUISH and ANGER and DEEP THOUGHT.
Thought so deep that the makers of Botox could have used them as a before photo in an ad campaign.
There was little need for words. Words merely confused us. Pinter had nothing on the pauses between words here. Whole Pinter plays have been performed in the pauses between individual words in this play.
Several lifetimes passed as the actors shouted the word MOUNTAINS repeatedly whilst forcing themselves through small windows cut into a black, plywood box (Schrodingers. He’d let them borrow it. THE FOOL).
There was an extraordinary amount of chalk in the performance. The box had been painted with blackboard paint and the actors went through packets and packets of chalk, making deeply meaningful marks on the walls and floor. One man was very heavy handed with his chalk and was so earnest about his need to draw wonky water bottles all over the walls he kept snapping his stick in half.
I bet they make him pay for his own chalk he goes through so much.
And I dread to think what the dry cleaning bill is like as they rub up against the dusty walls in a a melodramatic fashion hour after hour.
There was also a lot of water drinking in the play. Bottles and bottles of water were consumed, mostly by one very skinny man with a slight nasal twang and a nasty tweed jacket. I wonder if they’d picked him because he obviously had a bladder like a camel. I’m just glad it wasn’t me. I’d have had to nip off to the lav every ten minutes, and the sound of distant flushing would have totally ruined the ambience in the meaningful pauses.
The other thing that struck me as deeply symbolic was the fact that not only did they drink about seventy litres of water, they munched their way through roughly three pounds of Granny Smith apples between them. You can tell how engaged I was in the action by the fact that I found myself wondering whether they got indigestion after the play.
What with the chap with the camel bladder probably reaching the point where he needed the loo every five minutes, and the rest of them drenched in a kind of chalk dust and water paste, chugging down Pepto Bismol and complaining of gut ache, I bet the after show party was a a barrel of laughs.
No wonder they were so good at looking anguished.
I suspect that the first performance was much more upbeat and chatty, and now they hate each other and are all nursing duodenal ulcers, which is why it’s become much more morose and monosyllabic.
It was a hugely entertaining evening, but for all the wrong reasons, and unless you enjoy terrible theatre as much as we do I cannot, hand on heart recommend this to you, and if I do, with my best serious face on, you will know that I really do not like you and it is my way of subtly suggesting that our friendship be severed irrevocably.
