As I am very cultured I headed to the Royal Festival Hall to see a show in the current Festival of Mime. I have to admit that this wasn't something that I would usually want to do, but my friend had invited me and it beat staying and watching the live feed of Celebrity Big Brother. I am sure that many of you, like me, have a bit of a preconception about mime and think that it mainly involves wankers with white faces pretending to be trapped in invisible boxes or
even bigger wankers who just paint themselves gold, stand completely still and don't even have the decency to pretend to be trapped in an invisible anything.
But the show I went to see was really nothing like either of these experiences.
It was called Twin Houses and was by a Belgian theatre company called Mossoux-Bonte and involved a Belgian woman and loads of life size puppets which she cleverly manipulated around so they appeared to be other people. Sometimes her own arms were used to be the arms of the other characters and sometimes the characters at false arms. To be honest it wasn't a million miles away from the ostrich work of Bernie Clifton or the Emu manipulation of the late great Rod Hull. But it wasn't as funny as either of those mainly because none of the mannequins had beaks which they could have used to peck at members of the very middle class audience.
I didn't really understand what it was about, though technically it was often very impressive and in the half light the mannequins seemed eerily real and occasionally it was hard to tell which head actually belonged to the actor. But I hadn't really slept well last night and waws very tired and the theatre was really dark and there were numerous lengthy blackouts and I did very nearly fall asleep. It wasn't my kind of thing at all, but it's good to try things like this out and it was still fascinating to watch even though I was pretty clueless about what I was meant to be thinking. Apparently I was meant to be thinking who is in control and who is being manipulated, but I was mainly thinking, what am I supposed to be thinking and what is going on?
But the show was on in the Purcell Rooms which I have only been in once before when I was about 14 and the Kings of Wessex Brass Band of which I was a useless member (third trumpet I believe) got to some final of a Band competition. I had actually played on this stage in this posh venue and I was a bit preoccupied with remembering that exciting trip to London as a child. I had been really bad at the trumpet and I think mainly just pretended to play without making a sound, but I must have blown down the thing occasionally as my main memory of the day was that I accidentally missed the cue for the final note and blew an off-key noise a full second after the rest of the band had stopped playing. Which might sound embarrassing and stupid, but to my mind I played a solo on the stage of the Purcell Rooms and I am thus up there with many of the great classical musicians in the world.
My other memory of that trip is that I managed to buy my first ever non-pub beer. In the afternoon we'd been allowed to go and sight-see and me and Ben Harrison and a couple of others decided this would be an excellent opportunity to have an alcoholic drink. It was decided that I looked the oldest of the quartet (though I think looking back the others were just chicken and thought I was stupid enough to give it a go. As you've seen recently even when I was 18 I looked pretty young). I got a four pack of Heineken and took it up to the check out and the cashier didn't question me at all, not even to say "Someone likes beer." Apart from the bum note the taste of that first sip of beer is pretty much all I remember from the jaunt to the city. It was disgusting. I can still remember the taste and even though I like the taste of beer now (though I don't drink it any more) the way it tasted bad to me then has stuck with me and is actually a different taste than I now associate with beer. I wonder which taste is the true one.
