Greenwich Playhouse is the closest professional theatre. Three stops up the line to Lewisham, then three stops on the DLR and you're there, right beside Greenwich station; only takes fifteen minutes. So it's not much of a journey. Of course, it being London, and public transport, one has to leave healthy margins for failure, so I arrived very early. But that's alright, that just means more beer.
The pub above which Greenwich Playhouse lives is no longer the Prince of Orange. In its transformation into St Christopher's Inn, it has lost all its English beer, so I have to stomach cold foreign beer, again. I am expecting a new companion tonight. As she is also foreign, this might make her feel more at home.
I have persuaded a member of my writing group to savour the 'up close and personal' joys of studio theatre. I'm hoping to persuade her to write about it, so I can get another perspective on this particular passion of mine. Since this is a restoration comedy, with a cast of eleven, classic 17th-18th century theatre, spectacularly unsuited to this setting, it will be doubly interesting to get another view.
When she phoned to say she could make it, I had to book another ticket online, and I discovered a quite surprising feature of TicketWeb, who manage the online booking for Greenwich Playhouse (or Galleon Theatre as it seems to be branded online). When I repeated the booking of a single ticket for the same performance, it wouldn't let me do it, on the grounds that I had already done it. Now I can see the benefit of a warning like that: we can all double-book from time-to-time. But I actually wanted to do what I was doing, and it simply wouldn't let me. I had to use another credit card to defeat it (you can always beat a computer). What was TicketWeb trying to enforce? It must have been some kind of anti-fraud security, but I can't see what it achieves.
Anyway, Lions Part, who were producing the play, had provided a splendid set of program notes to put us in the mood, so I had something to do while waiting in the bar. I now know what a scrivener was, the evils of playing the card game basset in 18th-century England, and how ladies dressed in Queen Anne's time. Perhaps best of all, I discovered what Daniel Defoe thought of Vanbrough's theatre, "How Vice's Champions Uncontroul'd within / Roul in the very Excrements of Sin". That really is a phrase worth remembering, isn't it, "rolling in the very excrements of sin"?
The performance started with some splendid period music, played on the fiddle and whistle, the whistle player changing occasionally to what looked like a largish viol. They carried on with incidental music from the stage manager's box, which must have been testingly cramped.
The play was done with suitable gusto. Vanbrough is concerned with explaining why everybody wants to get their leg over everybody else, how that gets them up the social ladder, and how much it costs to extricate themselves from the messes they make. He also makes a big point about how this sort of conduct empowers the servants. The main characters are the scriveners' wives, the 'city' wives of the title ('city', I think, as opposed to 'court'), concerned with what we would now call swinging and retail therapy. With this many characters, I had the delight of following the badinage like a tennis match, head swinging from one side of the room to the other. In plays like this, no-one is actually talking to anyone else, they're just declaiming their attitudes, although sometimes they talk directly to the audience. Talking to the audience really works well in this space. And so, surprisingly, did the declaiming.
It is always hard to tell with professionals (and so it should be) but the actors and musicians seemed to have a good time. So, it appeared, did the audience. And I certainly did.
On the way home, I just missed the DLR, which runs every 10 minutes at this time of night, so that nearly doubled my journey time. I elected to get the bus from Lewisham. It's right beside the DLR, and it saves me walking up the hill. And it came almost immediately.
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