“The Painkiller”: On Thursday night, we went back to the Garrick Theatre (with Linda) to see the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company’s production of “The Painkiller”. It was hilarious. The play was adapted by its director, Sean Foley, from a farce by the French writer Francis Veber. It is set in two hotel rooms with a connecting door. In one is Dudley (played by Rob Brydon), a depressed photographer, in town to take pictures of a big trial across the street, who is planning to kill himself if he cannot convince his wife to return to him. In the other room is Ralph (played by Branagh), a hired killer who is there to assassinate the defendant in the trial as he arrives at the courthouse. What could go wrong? Well, pretty much everything in this wild farce. There the dialog is very funny and there is a large amount of truly brilliant slapstick humor. Branagh is constantly being hit by doors or other objects or kneed in the groin. At one point he is mistakenly given a shot of a narcotic (intended to calm down the suicidal Dudley) and has a stretch in which he is barely able to stand and slides down seats lands on the floor in a number of riotous ways. It all goes on at an appropriately breakneck pace, which accelerates when a policeman comes to ask about someone who was seen out on the ledge of Ralph’s room (one of Dudley’s suicide attempts) and the arrival of Dudley’s wife. The lunacy is punctuated by appearances by the hotel clerk (played by Mark Hadfield, who we had seen earlier in the year in “The Meeting” at Hampstead) who seems to arrive just as Dudley and Ralph have fallen in to a position of apparent sex. There is no point in trying to describe the action any further, since it is so antic and so much of the humor is pure slapstick. The leads were wonderful, as was Hadfield and rest of the cast. It is just great to go to the theatre once in while and laugh hysterically.
More on the Freemasons: So it turns out that those big briefcases that the masons were bringing to their big meeting (see the prior post) contained their aprons, which apparently you wouldn’t want to wear dirty or wrinkled to such an event. According the site for the Freemason’s Hall in London (I have to go to visit the museum and library some time):
The Masonic apron is the badge of membership for Freemasons. It symbolises the protective apron worn by stonemasons and in its original form was a complete lambskin. When a member joins he completes three ceremonies or ‘degrees’. After finishing the first he receives a plain white apron, for completing the second the apron has sky blue rosettes on the lower corners. The master mason’s apron with its sky blue edges and rosettes is the sign of completing the degree ceremonies. If a mason progresses through the ranks of freemasonry the apron becomes more elaborate with upside down ‘T’ shapes replacing the rosettes for lodge masters and dark blue and gold decoration for more senior ranks. These more senior ranks have two aprons, one richly decorated in gold embroidery for best and one in blue silk embroidery for normal wear.
So I’m guessing the guys with huge square cases were the senior masons with the really snazzy embroidered aprons and that having one of those big, fancy, leather cases is a masonic status symbol.
The Hillsborough disaster: Sometimes stuff happens here that creates a huge response and I have no idea why it is such a big deal. Earlier in the month, the comedienne, writer and actor Victoria Wood died and commentators were near tears. I had no idea who she was. More recently an inquest verdict about the Hillsborough disaster got banner headlines and CNN-like news coverage. Again, I had no idea. It turned out that about 27 years ago, 96 people died at a Liverpool football game when too many fans were allowed into the stands, leading to fans being crushed to death. The whole thing was initially blamed on drunken louts and hooligans. But what really happened was that the police had mistakenly left a gate open and allowed too many people into one part of the stands, which were terribly designed. The inquest not only established this, but found that, almost as the incident was occurring, the police began a cover up that was designed at denigrating and blaming the dead and injured for the the police incompetence. It goes very high up, including some Conservative politicians, although there may not be enough evidence to show that the politicians were complicit in the earlier cover up. It is pretty disgusting and the newspapers, which printed all the awful things the police told them, are falling over themselves apologizing. It is all pretty disgusting. Some officials, including the Chief of Police at the time, are going to end up going to jail.
Not a Good Time to Get Sick: The junior doctors went out on strike this week. They had been staging smaller actions for the past few months, but this was a full-scale strike. The Tory Health Minister is Jeremy Hunt, a typical rich twit whose main claim to fame is that he co-wrote a book on how to dismantle the National Health Service (NHS). He is predictably attacking the doctors, even as he has ignored all efforts to reach a settlement of the dispute. (Perhaps he views the doctors to be like the miners in the 1980s and thinks that this is his Thatcher moment.) The underlying problem is that the Conservatives have been gradually cutting support for the NHS. leading to a shortage of doctors, without any plan to train new ones or to allow for immigrant doctors. So the doctors, especially the junior doctors in the hospitals where most of the NHS action takes place, are terribly overworked and the patient experience is gradually degrading (which some argue is exactly what the Conservatives want since it will allow them the privatize the NHS more easily). The current dispute is due to the government imposing a contract without the Doctors Union’s agreement, which will require doctors to work more on the weekends. The theoretical excuse for this is that the death rate is higher on the weekend (but that may be because sick people stay in the hospital over the weekend, while healthier people are generally released). The doctors point out that this change will only make them work even longer hours or decrease the number of doctors during the week when most patients are there. Either is bad for the doctors and terrible for the patients. It has been suggested that the Conservative theory about weekend death rates be addressed in some sort of trial rather than changing the whole NHS structure, but Hunt won’t agree, which makes the theory that this is part of an insidious Tory plot to destroy the NHS seem plausible.
nickinshoreditch 