A Life in the Theatre

I shall blog now, just in case my suspicions are confirmed tomorrow morning and I have ‘flu. Spent most of the day struggling with a particularly persistent adware trojan in Madrid: Unsuccessfully as it turned out. I swear I have never been a great supporter of the death penalty – even for crimes such as murder – but the people who write these software parasites I would happily kill slowly and painfully with my own bare hands.

The storm of chorus politics has now passed through the high fever and is into the slow recuperation phase I think, with more balanced emails on both sides this afternoon.

This evening I met Ping for ‘dinner’ at Ed’s Diner in the Trocadero and we caught up on his trip home to see his family and moaned a bit about Chorus politics. Brett arrived in due course and had a burger too before we went on to the Apollo Theatre to see A Life in the Theatre.

The show was not what I expected. It was a series of many (sometimes very) short scenes – almost like sketches in a variety show, just Joshua Jackson and Patrick Stewart on stage. As Ping observed: the story didn’t build to anything; there was no drama so there was no climax. However through the course of ninety minutes, there was a subtle but continuous shift in the relationship between the two characters as Jackson grew from the awkward beginner to the confident performer and Stewart declined from master of the theatre to a relic.

Came straight home from the theatre, through a rather pretty but cold snowstorm, as I was feeling all the symptoms heralding the onset of ‘flu. Have taken some Vitamin C and drunk a fair bit of water and am now going to get an early night.