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With a single dessert and just two glasses of wine our bill was kept in check - but the effort of doing so was not much fun
Babbo
Film
This is a film with beautiful performances and a visual style that urges you towards reflection
Bright Star
Theatre
Although the first half of Kwei-Armah’s production is pacy, funny and intelligent, the energy level then drops off
Seize The Day
I loved this film from start to finish. Take the girlfriend, tell your mum - I'd see it again tomorrow and will buy the dvd.
I saw this last night and can't remember the last time I was so moved in the theatre.
I have been to many of London's so-called best Japanese restaurants and none have been as good as the food that I've had at Aqua Kyoto
London,
Nicholas de Jongh's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Jonathan Church.
Cast: Susan Hampshire, Bertie Carvel, Anna Farnworth, Richard Lintern, Jack Power, Adam Redmayne, Philip Voss, Chartiy Wakefield, David Yelland
Description: Susan Hampshire stars as a woman who abandons her family to run away with a politician in Somerset Maugham's drama exploring the conflict between romance and responsibility. Directed by Jonathan Church.
Burned out: Lord Porteous (Philip Voss) and Lady Kitty (Susan Hampshire), the adulterous couple whose passion is now spent
What a devastating confidence-trick Somerset Maugham played on 1920s theatre-goers. The Circle, as Jonathan Church's deft revival reminds us, masquerades as a comedy of sexual and social manners, designed to flatter audiences into applauding their stage counterparts as witty and pretty. Beneath its polished, sub-Wildean veneer, though, you can discern a savage critique of upper-class Anglo-Saxon morality and behaviour.
Simon Higlett's spectacular design for the pillared, chandeliered Dorset drawing-room of Arnold Champion-Cheney, a thirtysomething Conservative MP, sets the satirical tone. It has the anonymous air of a Heal's furniture department, with marbled floor, silver-embossed chairs, chandeliers and sofas. The air of sumptuous decorum is shattered by the arrival of Arnold's mother, Susan Hampshire's Lady Catherine - Kitty - whom he has not seen since she eloped to live permanently abroad decades ago with Lord Porteous, once a promising politician and best friend of her betrayed husband, Clive.
Richard Lintern's superficially rendered Arnold never conveys the MP's angry sadness as a result of being abandoned by his mother in infancy and then growing up in a sex scandal's aftermath.
Maugham paints a grim black-comedy picture of the old couple, their youthful passion faded into a partnership of mutual displeasure and a quasi-marriage of inconvenience. Philip Voss makes a brilliant, querulous Porteous,his face frozen in an expression of dyspeptic resentment and is powerfully matched by Susan Hampshire, whose air-headed, radiantly winsome Kitty cares to see no further than the end of her vanity-mirror and shows more concern for her mislaid lipstick than her lost son.
Once David Yelland's suave Clive appears, the scene is set for an English display of civility that masks much grief. Maugham's focus, though is on the future, incarnated by Clive's vacuous wife, Elizabeth, to whom a shrill-voiced Charity Wakefield lends a simpering artificiality. Elizabeth is poised to repeat the past by running off with Bertie Carvel's charismatic Edward Luton, while Richard,simply objects to his wife's defection as a bad career move for him.
The final spectacle of the old couple encouraging the young ones on their adulterous way and towards, no doubt, a terrible future, is fraught with cynicism. If only Church had cracked the play's sexual code and made the antiques and interiordesignloving Arnold into the closetqueen Maugham intended then the circle of this haunting, state of the upper-middle classes comedy, would have been perfectly closed.
Until 29 August (01243 781312).
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
What does Nicholas mean by the comment "anonymous air of a Heal's furniture department?" I have worked for Heal's for 12 Years in the Tottenham Court Road Flagship Branch. We have won numerous awards for our innovative designs. Every item of furniture is clearly labelled. Each designer has become leaders in their particular field such as John Reeves. Anonymous is certainly not a fair description of the furniture department, a better description would be design leaders with often the backing of the Royal Academy. We have Heals Discovers which is taking up much floor space to reveal many new and exiting furniture designs. At the heart of the Heals ideal is the beautification of the home through contemporary design. This is not an empty desire but an active reality through the vigorous promotion and realization of the potential of contemporary furniture. I am sure if Nichols came to the Flagship store he would be pleasantly surprised by the Heals continuing commitment to advancing contemporary design, which could never be described as being anonymous. Kind Regards Graham C Lindsay Despatch Furniture and Inventory Supervisor
- Graham C Lindsay, London England
