G.W. Clift entertainments log from Manhattan, Kansas, written January 16, 2009

On the first night of the National Theater revival of Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, we had seats three rows down from Tom Stoppard. (www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc46.html) I was afraid for a second that he and I were going to be walking side-by-side when we exited the theater after the successful seventy minute performance. What would I say to him. "Thanks for entertaining me many times?" "Thanks for maintaining the standard of things in the arts?" "What's with the man bag?"

But the playwright made a neat exit very quickly, so I didn't have to stand beside him, terribly self-conscious. Instead I talked to Cheryl and Johnny and thought to myself how much different things had been for us while we were in London that January week. 

Back home, the weather had been colder. I'd been going to the movies every night, and eating in the Ville. About the only thing out of the ordinary about my life had been that I was reading Holden. And re-reading him at that.

Wherever I am, whenever I tell a good poet where I live, he always tells me how much he has admired Jonathan Holden's The Rhetoric of the Contemporary Lyric. I enjoyed re-reading this 1980 book, but was surprised to find that poetry even in my limited knowledge has moved past some of the professor's subjects. For example, there's a chapter about "found" poetry. Generally speaking, though, the book holds up well. Prof. Holden (http://www.jonathanholden.com) can be clear and intellectual at the same time. His examples are evidence of his substantial research and reading. And the first chapter, "'Affected Naturalness' and the Poetry of Sensibility," does as good a job of summing up what happened to poetry in the second half of the century as anything could. This is an admirable and likable book, and even those only casually interested in the subject ought to take a peek at it.

I finished that just before we flew to London on January 7. On the 767 I read most of Angela Thirkell's 1942 Marling Hall. Because I was reading pretty fast and going from book to book, I was more aware than usual how much Thirkell's prose figures in my willingness to amble along with her through familiar social satire. MH is actually pretty long for Thirkell. It is also a little more consciously plotted than the later books are, telling the story of how war widow with children Lettice overcomes an attraction for a cousin in the RAF and finally manages to provoke the declaration of a nice Army officer. There isn't so much about the silliness of wartime volunteerism as in Northbridge Rectory, the series book just before this one. MH is more about the psychology of eligibles in the small world of county landowners. The author's prose will draw one along, and the gentle wit works very well here.

In London I got to reading Colin Watson's Charity Ends at Home, another of the Flaxborough Novels about Inspector Purbright, small town police detective whose cases are always funny and usually in some way sexy. This is not one of the best books in the bunch, but it does feature Miss Teatime, a recurring character whose career has not always been free of controversy, and the usual set of odd secondary personalities. Here things get going when letters incomplete but suggesting that the anonymous writer expects to be murdered show up in the mail of several prominent men shortly before the owner of the typewriter on which the missives are written is found dead with her head in her own outdoor goldfish bowl. The bruises on her ankles suggest her head was held underwater. Light and amusing.

And then, by way of contrast, Margery Allingham's Black Plumes is heavy with atmosphere. This post-war, non-Campion book follows a young woman who lives next door to her family's famous old London art gallery. Her brother-in-law is trying to force her to marry an odious fellow who supposedly saved him during a Himalayan expedition. So a friend of hers, a painter, offers to become engaged to her to take off the pressure. She seems to be falling in love with him. And he seems too much involved in a run of vandalisms and murders in the gallery. Familiar, but effective.

I was reading those books on the Underground and at night after we came back to the Strand Palace for showers and shut-eye. During the days we visited museums, took a couple of walking tours, and ate at favorite and famous restaurants--Hing Look in Lisle St. (fried shredded beef with carrots in sweet and sour sauce), Dr. Johnson's Cheshire Cheese (baked mac and white cheese with a little salad and the usual hard London roll), and Mr. Pickwick's George and Vulture (batter-dipped fresh cod with french fries and peas for about $25 a bone china plate) which is hidden in an alley in which construction blocks most access. The pound was just under $1.40, so I was able to buy a first edition of Waugh's travel book, When the Going Was Good, for something under $30 from Bertram Rota (http://www.bertramrota.co.uk), Fred Higginson's old bookseller up in Covent Garden. The man there told me the partners used to set up a desk with a typewriter for Prof. H to use during his visits while he was working on the Graves bibliography.

We visited some old favorite exhibits in the National Gallery and the British Museum (http://www.britishmuseum.org/). But Lindow Man wasn't at the B.M., and I was told he actually belongs to the Manchester University Museum. He was making a stop up there before returning to London. The B.M., with the most fabulous collections of any museum in the world, doesn't need to be dropping bits of contemporary art into the middle of George III's library or in a room of Plain's Indian buckskins, but they are, for some reason. Oh well..

Cheryl and I went to Vinopolis (http://www.vinopolis.co.uk/), a wine tasting museum sited in an old warehouse just west of Southwark Cathedral. For about $27, a visitor attends a session where he is trained to smell, look at, and taste wine. Then he goes from room to tasting room asking questions of the knowledgeable and enthusiastic staff and sampling wines. Four or five more glasses are included in the cost, as is a cocktail (made with Bombay Sapphire). I learned things and liked the presenters. But I'm never going to be a wine man, I'll tell you.

We fulfilled a long-held joint aspiration to go on a tour on the closed and over-grown western side of the Highgate Cemetery (http://www.highgate-cemetery.org/index). It would have been atmospheric as, say, the Cheshire Cheese except that our guide seemed a younger clone of Ray Davies of the Kinks--Cockney, well-informed, always joking. And what a terrific Victorian Cemetery Highgate West is, with trees and vines growing up everywhere to knock granite vaults and limestone headstones all catty-wumpus and to block out the sky on that tall hill near where Whittington heard Bow Church's bells tell him to return to London and become Mayor. There were about a dozen in our 11:00 Saturday tour party, and all of them were young.

London employs a lot more young anglo-saxons than ever before in my memory. Fewer Pakistani shop keepers and West Indian Underground employees and more thin, pale, and increasingly tall young Caucasians. The hotel maids were Poles.

And then the whole crowd at the Spies walking tour (which cost something like $10) was young couples, mostly English. What we heard about was Burgess and the Cambridge traitors who sold out most American and British interests and agents to the Soviets during the Second World War and thereafter. The best of that, besides seeing the new Bentleys over in Mayfair, was hearing a story about Ian Fleming's friend and the producer of the early Bond films Chubby Broccoli. He was in Las Vegas waiting for a restaurant table and was invited to flip a coin for another fellow to call, with the loser buying a drink each time for the winner. The other guy called thirteen straight and introduced himself as "Hughes, Howard Hughes."

I drove us out to Bristol on Sunday. Avis sent us a blue Mini, and we went looking for skateboarding places and parks. It was a little damp at Chipping Sodbury's nice concrete park. The famous 50-50 skate  shop was permanently closed, as may have been a well-known graffiti spray-paint shop. But we did see some of the work frequently lauded by fans of these volunteered (and in many cases very complicated) streetside illustrations. The indoor park down by Temple Meads Railway Station was overrun with BMX riders. But at least it was open. London's great Bay Sixty-Six park (formerly PS2), which is under an elevated roadway out at Portobello Road market, was closed one day we were there because of rain. Anyway, we all liked Bristol. And on our way home we ate supper at Sally Lunn's 350 year-old restaurant in Bath.

The show of Byzantine art at the Royal Academy (http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/) was expensive to see but fairly comprehensive. They were good at metal work and ivory carving. But as one would expect, the most impressive things were the icons and mosaics, including some micromosaics that actually were icons. I picked up a little more history of the eastern empire as I went through the show, too. The new fountains in the entry courtyard are worth looking at if you're walking up Picadilly.

We also went to the newly re-sited Saatchi Gallery (http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/) of contemporary stuff, near Sloane Square in Chelsea, naturally. The building is terrific, an old barracks with unstained pine floors, not over-packed. The show was Chinese Pop-Art, recent stuff that was only different from Warhol and his copiers in having Mao's face in most of the paintings. Wait a minute--Warhol used Mao's face this same way. Nothing new. The best two exhibits were a set of world capitol buildings made out of unrolled rawhide dog treats and a set of life-sized dummies dressed as world patriarchs, apparently napping, and sitting in motorized wheel chairs that moved constantly, turning into each other and to those who walked into the gallery.

Five plays we saw. August: Osage County was a Steppenwolf Theater (http://www.steppenwolf.org/ ) original imported into the National Theater's Lyttleton Theater complete with cast. It started well, but was still trying to introduce its central complication late. At over three hours, it felt more ungainly than fresh and original, but it was pretty well acted. And never under-acted.

For a couple of years a stage version of Hitchcock's film of Buchan's novel The Thirty-Nine Steps has been running in the West End. It is funny as it goes scene for scene and line for line through the movie (a little like the 1990s Psycho re-make film), with most of the humor arising from the doubling and tripling of members of the four person cast. Then there is a little forced silliness added at the end in case you've missed the point that this is a send-up of period thrillers. Modestly amusing.

More fun was the Twelfth Night, with Sir Derek Jacobi playing Malvolio. He got off some good readings, as when he gestured to his privates for "some rich jewel," and I loved his sailor suit (with shorts to show off the cross-gartered yellow sox). The rest of the production was only o.k. Liked the tall, blonde Aguecheek. The Fool was very musical if never very foolish. Fast finishing.

We saw the second preview night, or the second press night, or the second night of the huge new Oliver! at the Drury Lane. Rowan Mr. Bean Atkinson is the draw, and they've sold more dollars worth of advance tickets than any West End show has ever sold before. People won't be disappointed. The show has half a dozen really terrific songs--"Food Glorious Food," "As Long As He Needs Me," "Consider Yourself Well In," "Its a Fine Life," "Who Will Buy?, and so on. The cast is big and talented, with a winning five year-old pickpocket and a seven-or-nine-year-old Artful Dodger who can dance. The Nancy can sing. The Bullseye can run. Enjoyed it. And if the music under-emphasizes the music's rhythms, the pace is terrific.

Which brings us back to Do, as in Every Good Boy Do-serves Favor. That was a solid production in the NT's big Olivier Theater and featuring the revolving stage drum. The orchestra was on stage the whole of the show, though the last part (at least) of the Previn score was pre-recorded. And six dancers sat with instruments in the band only to break out half-way through. The cast--including an Ivanovich who thought he was in an imaginary orchestra and his Ivanovich asylum cell-mate who believed the Soviets sent dissidents to mental hospitals--were fine. What surprised me was that the music was good. It was either right out of the main stream of the 70s or was itself very influential. We saw the first night performance.

I didn't get a chance to make a fool of myself in front of the play's author. But I have gotten a chance to report to you here. Two weeks from now I'll be back with info about arts and entertainments here three blocks west of Aggieville. And a long way west of the West End.