Categories
Acting

There’s Been a Run on The Marmite

If anyone had any doubts that the supply chain is in serious peril, just try to get hold of a jar of Marmite.

When I lived in Manhattan I was close to two excellent retail outlets of traditional British foods: Digestive Biscuits, P G Tips tea, Golden Syrup, Fish n Chips, Sausage Rolls, Tiptree Jams, Bangers … to name only a few … all of these British adaptations of Nectar and Ambrosia could be had at Tea And Sympathy on Greenwich Avenue and Myers of Keswick on Hudson Street.

And I’m delighted to tell you that back in the day I found a closely similar emporium just a mile or two south of West Palm Beach in Florida. More than that: here in Westchester our local supermarket has a discrete section of three shelves dedicated to such British superfoods as Heinz Tomato Soup, Heinz Baked Beans and Hob Nobs.

The relationship between Great Britain and the United States has endured in various forums and alliances since 1776, and it’s my firm belief that if Marmite were more widely consumed in the  Americas it could only benefit the Republic. This works both ways of course. For example I have seen baseball played in Regent’s Park, and the ubiquity of the American vernacular now gives us the younger British royals peppering their speech with the word “like”.

I mention all the above because it’s well known that comedy shows are now approximately the only remaining source of genuine news. We know too that the few remaining people who can reliably and regularly speak truth to power are those characters created by gifted comic actors.

To their ranks I nominate my old friend and fellow-student, Matilda Thorpe who “manages” Celia Walmsley-Clarke. Celia’s material is given in convenient bite-size nuggets on Facebook, and this month she has kindly agreed to appear in The Guest Spot here to explain the burden of privilege that is being a member of the British aristocracy.

None of this can disguise the fact that supplies of Marmite have dwindled. The presenting reason is a global shortage of yeast but many of us know that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is to blame.

Fortunately there is a vegetarian alternative from Australia:

Vegemite!

Images by unsplash

Categories
Acting

Can’t Go to the Theatre?

At the moment the inside of most theatres is like this:

Announcing the Guest Spot. Please take a look at the content there. You may not be able to go to the theatre in the present circs. Three varied niche pieces come to you!

Categories
Acting

And in other News

If you’ll take a look at the Video page you’ll see an interview with me by Margaret Ledford who helmed the Engage@GableStage project, which has commissioned a series of projects. The short 15 minute film we’re talking about will be premiered exclusively at GableStage.org on Friday September 18th.

So… the focus of this blog… was acting and allied subjects… hmm… the issue, as I’m sure you understand, is that live theatre depends upon lots of paying customers in close proximity to each other and within breathing space of the stage…

No sign of that returning just yet.

In which case what shall we talk about? While you’re here please sign up for the blog so as to find out!

 

 

 

 

Categories
Acting

The Bard Off-Planet

I will be guest speaker on Tuesday June 30th 2:30 pm Eastern USA/7:30 pm UK at:

Aquarius Rising: West of Scotland Astrological Association

My topic is:

Shakespeare was an astrologer

(Or if he wasn’t, he knew people who were)

Courtesy of The Birmingham Museums Trust, UK

Here is the blurb:

This talk is an astrological exploration looking at the chart of the Bard and his work. For example, it’s well known that the seven ages of man speech in As You Like It takes us from the Moon through to Saturn in order of orbital period. But did you know that there is a Jupiter signature in The Tempest, or a Saturn one in Romeo and Juliet, or that Sonnet 15 echoes the Duke’s speech at the top of act 3 in Measure for Measure? Mars figures in all the history plays, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream is as lunar as it gets. Shakespeare was at home in the solar system and he wrote the plays to prove it! 

If you’d like to attend as a guest (no need to join the group although you are welcome if astrology is an interest), here is the zoom link and the date again is, June 30th 2:30 pm Eastern USA/7:30 pm UK https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82665096141

They do ask for a donation of five quid!

See you there!

Categories
Acting

Funny How the Immune System Works

Even the most reclusive of us must be aware that there really is nothing funny about what is going on at large in the world at the moment. However medical authorities from The Mayo Clinic onwards recommend giggling, sniggering and laughing as a great tonic, so whether appropriate or not at this time of trouble, here goes…

Sir Thomas Beecham the conductor, is on record as saying, “If I was Prime Minister I would require every man, woman and child between the ages of eight and eighty to sit down and listen to Mozart for a quarter of an hour every day for five years.” Bearing in mind recent Prime Ministerial performance one can think of worse edicts.

For the literary equivalent I nominate the works of P G Wodehouse. To name him in full, Pelham Granville Wodehouse. He chose to be known to family and friends as Plum – and who can blame him?

The daily application of one chapter of P G Wodehouse read aloud has given great results so far in our household. And here’s a thing; being as the man was afflicted with as unrelenting a work ethic as any three or four twentieth century writers put together, there is for practical purposes a more or less unlimited supply of his work. He wrote some ninety novels, about two hundred short stories, as well as plays, musicals, and film scripts.

Right about the cusp of the last third of his lifetime, i.e. a few months before he was sixty, he was interned by the German army and spent almost a year in confinement in various locations ending up in what is now part of Poland with other men deemed to be of fighting age. Of the location he wrote, “If this is Upper Silesia, one dreads to think what Lower Silesia is like.”

And then he made a breathtaking mistake for which he paid dearly for the rest of his life. He agreed to make five radio broadcasts for the Germans. This was in 1941.

The content of these broadcasts was gently satirical, here’s a brief excerpt from the first:

Young men, starting out in life, have often asked me “How can I become an Internee?” Well, there are several methods. My own was to buy a villa in Le Touquet on the coast of France and stay there till the Germans came along. This is probably the best and simplest system. You buy the villa and the Germans do the rest.”

The full text of the five broadcasts with a bullet point account of what happened to Plum during the war can be found here: https://www.pgwodehousesociety.org.uk/wartime

Agreed to…? The evidence is that he was tricked into it. I also reference here a wikipedia article which gives a full and detailed account and a youtube video which has a brief excerpt from a sympathetic film featuring Tim Pigott-Smith and Zoe Wanamaker as the Wodehouses, with she confronting him. The full film, Wodehouse in Exile, used to be available on youtube, I hope it’s still around somewhere.

What did this sorry event cost him? Well, after decades of high earning success, Plum was instantly reviled in the war-time British press as a traitor, investigated by the British secret services, and driven into self-imposed exile in the USA never to return to his beloved England.

His work however, remained enduringly popular. Jeeves and Bertie Wooster appeared on television in the 60s personated by Ian Carmichael and Dennis Price, later revived by Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. There are adaptations and recordings of other parts of his oeuvre, although few of his other creations – among them, Psmith, Ukridge, Mr Mulliner, The Oldest Member, Lord Emsworth, Sally… achieved quite the prominence of the aforementioned double-act.

Plum was granted a final rehabilitation in British national opinion with a knighthood in the Queen’s New Year’s Honors List 1975 (just about six weeks before he died), but was at that time too frail to travel back to his native land to receive it.

Since the end of the Second World War, Wodehouse has been defended in print and on screen by such diverse apologists as George Orwell, Anthony Lane and Stephen Fry. Isaac Asimov in a foreword to a collection of Plum’s work admits to a forty year ambition – to dine at the Drones Club. The late Tim Pigott-Smith stoutly defends Plum as a harmless old duffer completely unaware of the consequences of what happened.

I agree with Tim Pigott-Smith. Apart from Plum’s peculiar innocence, it would be hard to find a more patriotic man at heart.

I have been laughing on the borderline of total loss of control at Wodehouse’s work since I discovered him just over fifty years ago, (I’m sixty-two as of this writing). Back then I had to stuff my mouth with a sheet so as not to wake the rest of the household when I was reading at night.

I once played this comic hero of mine in a play called Plum by Roy Smiles. This was in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2014.

All of this is a long way to get to why I’m posting this. As Plum might have put it, “The essayist with points to make or history to include, must get on with it or he will fail to grip and his audience will soon drift away to the bar for a second Gin and Tonic.”

A quick glance at the search engines says that laughter is generally acknowledged to be a great tonic with benefits to the immune system. These days I take a home-made folk-recipe anti-viral tonic: equal parts garlic, ginger, lemon and manuka honey. But I reckon a daily dose of Plum and his laugh-riot prose boosts my immune system just as much or more. As people who write references based on the resumes of job applicants, “I have no hesitation in recommending him to you.”

Evelyn Waugh puts it rather better, this quote of his was for many years on the back cover of all Penguin editions of Wodehouse: “Mr Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from a tyranny more irksome than our own.” Isn’t that a sentiment that feels strangely apt just now?

If you’re new to Plum and his works, start with Bertie and Jeeves and go from there!

That’s me as Plum on the left.

That’s the real thing on the right

Oh, and should it amuse, there’s an astrological view on Plum and his wartime misadventures here.