Theatre Review: The Full Monty

This week The Full Monty, directed by Daniel Evans, hit the Theatre Royal in Bath. The Saturday show was sold out but me and Mum managed to secure some last minute £6 tickets by queuing up that morning.

The play is based on the 1997 film, screen written by Simon Beaufoy. It follows Gaz and best friend Dave, who are struggling on the dole in Sheffield, the former 'City of Steel'. After being faced with loosing his son Nathan in a messy custody battle due to his failure to pay maintenance and encouraged by witnessing another Chippendale's striptease at a local club, Gaz comes up with the ingenious idea to form a male stripping act, along with six other unemployed steel workers.

                   

Some cheeky photos I managed to take of the beautiful theatre in Bath complete with chandelier. At the interval we treated ourselves to some Honey and Stem Ginger Ice Cream, which I always find tastes better eaten out of one of those little pots with a plastic spoon!

The play features several of the songs from the film and reaches its hilarity as the seven men, hardly heart throbs in the physical sense, strip and parade around fully naked on the stage, much to the delight of the audience, filled with hundreds of rowdy, slightly drunk women, vying for a glimpse of the 'Full Monty'. 

The play was great fun, although not as funny as the film in my opinion.  The cast also put on a brilliant performance, my personal favourite was the character of Lomper portrayed by Craig Gazey, remember him as the hapless Graeme Proctor in Coronation Street?!

Bath was the play's last stop before opening at the Nowel Coward Theatre in London's West End. 

A Somerset Ramble

So it's Reading Week at University, which is basically a grown up name for Half Term, meaning that I have a week off to do as I please! Wishful thinking on my part as I actually have a heavy book list to get through.

I'm lucky enough to call Bath in Somerset my home and this morning I went on one of the many beautiful walks surrounding the area.

Luckily we were given a bit of respite from the rain (Somerset has been one of the areas heavily affected by the recent flooding), and woke up to beautiful blue skies.

After breakfast with a view, we headed out in the car to Horton Village just North of Bath.

Mum was fashioning a Bear Grylls style attire. Just what was in her rucksack? 

The February sun was surprisingly warming, maybe Spring really is on its way. 

The green rolling hills of Somerset bathed in the Sunday sun were a comfort to my eyes.

We soon hit a slight hitch however. 

Weeks of rain had clearly taken its toll, leaving me stuck in a quagmire! Luckily I had my Hunters on, an essential item of any Somerset girl's wardrobe. 

They are particularly useful come Glastonbury time!

After being rescued we continued onwards...

Before coming across Horton Parish Church and Horton House, one of the oldest in the country and now owned by the National Trust. 

How lovely is this little cottage?

After mounting the hill we reached the top, only slightly out of breath, to survey the wonderful views of the Church below. 

As a reward for reaching the top it was revealed what was hidden in Mum's backpack.

A hot drink enjoyed overlooking the hills below.

In the company of our new found friends.

A stylish house for owls we came across on our descent back down. Do you think it can be rented?

We finished the day off with a delicious homemade apple crumble. 

Film Review: The Invisible Woman: Dickens' Secret Lover

The rain continuing to pour down over Bath, we decided an afternoon trip to the cinema was in order.

The Invisible Woman is a BBC film directed by Ralph Fiennes, based on the book The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin. 

Available here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/

I was eager to see this film as I wrote my dissertation on Dickens’ Bleak House and became quite fond of him in the six months I spent writing and researching it. 

Ellen Lawless Turnan, known as Nelly, was an actress, better known for being Dickens’ mistress, whom she first met in 1857 when she was just seventeen: Dickens was 45. Although he eventually separated from his wife Catherine a year after meeting the vivacious Nelly, she continued to be kept a secret from the general public, hence the film’s title. 

After Dickens’ death she went onto marry again and the couple ran a boys school in Margate; the film features several scenes of Nelly walking along the Essex coastline, venting her inner torment on the sandy dunes whilst the sea rages in the background. 

The affair reaches its peak as Catherine Dickens visits Turnan on her eighteenth birthday to present her with a ruby bracelet meant as a gift to the young actress from her lover, sent mistakenly to Catherine instead. Awkward or what. 

It is thought Dickens based many of his later female literary creations on Turnan, including Estella in Great Expectations. 

I can certainly testify to the fact she was kept invisible, veiled from public knowledge, as despite the vast amounts of research I conducted for my dissertation I never came across her name, although I was aware his marriage to Catherine, with whom he had ten children, had soured towards the end of his life. 

The old tiresome wife always seems to loose out to the youthful and beautiful girl. 

I wasn’t expecting to enjoy the film as much as I did; I thought it would follow the course of all the other period dramas that grace our screens, but I was pleasantly surprised and kept entertained throughout. I definitely recommend a trip to see this, especially if you are interested in Dickens and his work. One of the first examples of 'celebrity culture', Dickens lived out most of his life under intense scrutiny from the public eye and as a result was often misunderstood. 

Coming out of the darkened cinema we were greeted by a welcome surprise: sun! The rain had momentarily given way to bright blue skies, perfect for a little stroll around the city.

Film Review: August: Osage Country

Ever thought your family were dysfunctional? Think again. 

John Wells’ latest film, August: Osage County, based on the successful Broadway play and featuring no shortage of well known faces, centers around one family’s trouble with suicide, incest, abuse, depression, alcoholism, addiction, illness, the list goes on...

George Clooney was one of the film’s producers which perhaps explains the star studded cast including Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Ewan McGregor, Chris Cooper, Abigail Breslin (remember Little Miss Sunshine), Juliette Lewis and Benedict Cumberbatch. 

The setting is Osage County (the title gives it away somewhat), in the height of an unusually hot August, the rising temperatures only adding to the heightened tensions at the Weston family home, as three daughters rally around their cancer stricken mother following the suicide of their alcoholic father.

The desolate, flat and dry landscape of rural Pawhuska, Oklhoma, does much to add to the bleak depiction of modern family life. 

Having all gone their separate ways and departed the family nest, the family crisis brings them back to the Oklahoma house they grew up in. 

The matriarch Violet is played by the ever brilliant Meryl Streep, whilst Julia Roberts, Julianne Nicholson, and Juliette Lewis play her now grown-up daughters. Barbara (Roberts) is her eldest and arrives from Colorado with her husband Bill (McGregor- who has a VERY questionable American accent), from whom she is separated, along with their tenacious fourteen year old daughter (Breslin); next is Karen (Lewis) the middle child who has relocated to the sun state of Florida and is engaged to her latest boyfriend, whom we learn has already had three previous wives; finally, the youngest daughter, Ivy, still lives locally and is involved with her cousin, Little Charles, (Cumberbatch), who later actually turns out to be her brother after it is revealed the girls' late father had an affair with his sister in law Mattie Fae (Margo Martindale).

Families hey? 

The drama reaches its peak as the family sit down to a dinner following the funeral where Violet's brutal "truth telling" reveals the full extent of her addiction to prescribed medication. 

After managing to alienate all three of her daughters, they depart the family plot one by one, leaving their mother alone with only the maid Johanna for support. 

The tension is momentarily lightened by brilliant comedic outbursts, leaving you unsure as to whether you should be crying or laughing. For me, the film reached its height of ridiculousness and hilarity when Karen’s fiance is found fondling Barbara’s daughter in the back yard after providing her with marijuana; he is then hit over the head with a shovel by the hired help, a Native American woman Johanna (Misty Upham). By this point my housemates were definitely bewildered and unimpressed that I had persuaded them to spend a valuable Orange Wednesday ticket watching this with me...

The film is incredibly dark and the problems encountered in this one family sphere seem never ending, verging almost on the ridiculous, which also provides the comic undertone throughout.

Whilst certainly never boring it veers slightly towards over the top silliness as one drama after the other is revealed, resulting in viewers having to suspend their disbelief. Aside from the initial suicide nothing much happens: this is not a plot driven narrative but one where individual grievances slowly unfold to form a larger picture of one family’s intense dysfunctionality. 

Released just after Christmas it probably gave viewers a chance to reflect on their own problems following the festive period, where long periods of time cooped up together always ensures that family tensions are to emerge in one way or another.

I'm still unsure as to whether this was comic brilliancy or sheer weirdness, but definitely go and watch it and decide for yourselves. 

Fanny Burney: A Mastectomy: Surgical Treaty and Sentimental Fiction

Turn away now if you're squeamish.

For my other class this semester, Regency Women Writers, we have been looking at the issues facing female authors in the Regency Period, in terms of their literary heritage and production.  

This week our female of focus was Fanny Burney, who was interestingly born in Kings Lynn Norfolk (near me in Norwich) and later moved to Bath in Somerset (where I grew up). 

Burney was somewhat of a celebrity in the Georgian period and was part of King George III's inner circle. 

In 1811 she underwent a mastectomy in France to remove a cancerous tumor, without anesthetic, which doesn't even bare thinking about. The pain would have been absolutely excruciating, but she somehow managed to survive to tell the tale. 

This week I had to read the account of that operation, which Burney details in a letter to her sister. 

The letter reveals the interesting power dynamics at play in the operating room. Burney had to quite literally give her body over to the seven male surgeons performing the operation, stating that her room was "entered by seven men in black", whilst on the other hand, they would not have wanted her to die in their hands, the notable figure that she was in high society. 

Burney's private body is violated and made public through the invasive act of surgery and her narrative forms a reclamation of the agency lost during the operation. It narrates the act of violence through the construction of sentences, organising the fear through words. Writing in this way becomes a form of therapy, something that is widely credited today with being a way to interpret and come to terms with traumatic events. 

The mastectomy, which is described in gruesome detail by Burney (the knife she feels scraping against her chest bone is one particularly haunting image), becomes a symbol for the position of women at this time and the forced loss of control the female sex are faced with as part of a patriarchal Georgian society.

Burney's essay is one of the first to put scientific medical treaty into conversation with sentimental confessional letter, thus creating an interesting juxtaposition between female and male realms of writing. 

A narrative of mutilation and disfigurement, Burney's account of her mastectomy is not easy reading, however it is an incredibly important piece of literature in terms of female writers at this time, presenting, as it does, the intersection of medicine and  literature. It is inconceivable how someone could have gone through an operation like this with nothing to limit the pain at all and it certainly makes me thankful for the advancements that have been made in medicine and science since then. What an incredibly brave woman. 

A Mad Hatter's Tea Party

My January Blues seem to have stuck with me this year all the way into February, the gail force winds, unrelenting rain and gloomy skies probably have something to do with this. 

If you're feeling the same don't despair as I have something that just might cheer you up.

Have you ever wished you lived in the good old days back when it was acceptable to spend afternoons leisurely drinking tea and gorging on scones heaped with jam and cream? Yep, me too. 

Yesterday evening I got to play pretend for a while as I headed out to Biddy's Tearoom in Norwich for an afternoon tea party. It was actually late evening and not the afternoon, but let's not break the illusion.

Doesn't it look warm and inviting?

We probably could have flown their with our umbrellas Mary Poppins style, but instead we decided to take the car, which proved to be a good decision as even the quick walk from car park to café left us with frostbitten fingers and windswept hair. After recomposing ourselves (we were going to a sophisticated tea party after all so elegance was a must) we descended on Biddy's.

Biddy's is a vintage tearoom hidden away in one of the winding 'lanes' of Norwich city centre. The teahouse is a popular destination for tea-loving locals and tourists, which often makes finding a table tricky. Luckily we pre-planned and booked the whole café out after hours to accommodate thirty of us. 

For £10.95 (well worth it I assure you) we enjoyed a three course afternoon tea menu with our very own tea lady Pip. We were even given a bell to ring (Downton Abbey-esque), upon which Pip would magically appear and provide us with more tea. 

After taking off our various layers we began with a fruit punch to warm us up. I'm not really sure what was in it but it tasted Pimms-like, just without the alcohol. In any case it was lovely and refreshing; the fresh fruit and mint floating on top left me dreaming of summer months...sadly the rain battering at the tearoom windows quickly reminded me that we are still very much in the midst of winter here in England. 

Next to tackle the main item: the tea. We know Britain is a tea-obsessed nation (did you know Brits drink 165 million cups a day according to the UK Tea Council?!) and Biddy's certainly is a testament to this fact, having a menu of teas that spans nearly five pages. You can choose anything from strawberry and kiwi to a plain old no flounce 'Builders' tea. I went for 'Lady in Waiting', which was a traditional afternoon tea infused with a citrusy twist.

As all of us ordered a different type, served directly to our tiny table in beautiful ornate vintage tea pots. As a result we found ourselves playing that well known game of how many teapots you can fit on one table. Try it, you might be surprised. 

Ravenous by this point the next item on our menu was finger sandwiches.

Fillings included cucumber and cream cheese, coronation chicken, Norfolk ham with brie, tuna and sweetcorn and my personal favourite Egg mayo with cress and mustard, the mustard adding an interesting kick to your traditional egg sandwich. 

In between courses I had a snoop around the place which has a traditional English teashop feel, decorated with handmade crochet table covers and bunting hung from the beams. 

Upstairs has more of a café feel with tables and chairs, whilst downstairs there is a cake counter and sofas to lounge around on and do some light reading whilst enjoying your daily brew. 

With low ceilings and china teapots dotted everywhere this is not the place to bring the more clumsily inclined amongst us! You really feel like you're in a doll's house, especially as you are forced to duck your head when making your way up the narrow wooden winding staircase that leads to the second floor. 

Filled up on savory it was now time for my favourite part. Freshly baked scones. They had a selection of sweet and savory on offer; I went for a sweet cinnamon one dotted with raisins, with dollops of freshly whipped cream, blueberries, and homemade jam.

If you weren't already feeling slightly green by this point there was just room for a cupcake. The varieties included Eaton Mess, Pink Lemonade and Chocolate Chip. I chose a Pistachio number with swirling rose water icing on top. 

All the cakes at Biddy's are handmade on the day and downstairs they even have a shop selling antique china and collectables for the real tea fanatics. 

The tearoom hosts regular events including a 'Bitch and Stitch' evening, which, you guessed it, involves knitting and chatting, with some cake eating added in for good measure. They also hold a Bake Off event where you don't even need to make a cake to be part of the fun; instead, you can pay £5 to sample the cakes everyone else has made...sounds too good to be true right? 

We left completely stuffed (just have a look at the demolished table), ready to face the outside elements. 

Tea for two if you please 

For more info or to book your own private party go to http://www.biddystearoom.com/apps/blog/

The Corruption of Innocence and the Mad Governess: Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw"

This week for my American Gothic class I have been reading Henry James' chilling ghost tale The Turn of the Screw.

James' screw turns around the themes of innocence, corruption and madness. 

Probably the most famous of all his novels, The Turn of the Screw was written in 1898 and was a departure from James' usual genre. 

Although classed as 'American Gothic', the novel is set at a country estate in England- the fictional Bly- allowing James- an American who spent the majority of his life in England- to write into the European gothic tradition of haunted castles and damsels in distress. Bly, described as a "great drifting ship", is an old manor house set in vast grounds with winding turrets.

The story is told through the use of a framing device, where the unnamed narrator listens to a manuscript read to him by a man called Douglass. The manuscript is the handwritten account of a governess who is employed to look after the orphaned niece and nephew of a "handsome" gentleman known only as the "master" and who must mysteriously never be contacted. The children, Flora and Miles, at first appear to be sweet and docile angels on earth, but soon the governess comes to believe that they have been corrupted by the evil influences of the previous governess, Miss Jessel and her lover, another employee of the estate, Peter Quint. It is suggested that Jessel left her post as governess after falling pregnant with Quint's baby. 

The ghostly element? She's supposedly dead. 

For the remainder of the novel the new governess continually sees the malevolent phantoms of Jessel and Quint around the house and believes they are out to harm her wards. Unable to contact her employer and battling frantically to save the children from harm, her only ally is a Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper.

James does not permit his readers to be passive receptacles of his text. Rather we actively engage with what we read, wanting to know whether the governess' account is reliable (James was a great lover of unreliable narrators, think Daisy Miller), or whether Jessel and Quint are ghosts at all? Perhaps they are mere figments of the governess' overactive imagination- it is questionable as to whether any of the other characters actually see these apparitions. 

Critical response to the novel is vast. The Freudian analysis suggests a psychoanalytical reading that argues the governess' actions are driven by what has previously been repressed in her psyche. Dreaming of a romantic encounter with the children's Uncle, she conjures the ghosts of Jessel and Quint, projecting her guilty desires onto them. In this way, they become the doubles for herself and the master. Thus the ghosts are the governess' hallucinations stemming from what is sexually repressed within herself. Her constant fear that the children are going to be corrupted is a fear that they will be sexually corrupted; she projects her own fears and desires regarding sex onto the children resulting in disastrous conseuquences. Flora is sent away on the verge of hysteria whilst Miles dies at the house. 

Other readings claim that this is a story of pedophilia and that the governess, madly in love with the Uncle, channels her infatuation onto the young Miles and his death comes after she smothers him in a mad fit of passion. 

The novel is also a comment upon the precarious position of the governess at this point in history and reminded me of  Brontë's Jane Eyre. With little other avenues available to them, educated women were often forced into this role and expected to maintain a position of respectability in a society that condemned female passion and sexuality. 

Whether James intended the ghosts to be real or not has long been debated. In my reading I conclude that James combines ghost story and psychological thriller to show us that what is in fact most scary lies within our own overactive imaginations. It is the governess' mind that is haunted and not the castle of Bly. She in turn projects this darkness onto the children.

The success of the story and the reason it has provoked such strong critical attention is because it is ultimately impossible to interpret definitively and it is this that gives it its bloodcurling element. 

I'd like to hear how you interpreted the story...

Also have a look at the BBC adaptation from 2009: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pk76h

Film Review: The Railway Man

The Railway Man is an unbelievable story of ultimate forgiveness.

Directed by Jonathan Teplitzky and based on the autobiography of the same name, the film depicts the heroic struggle of Eric Lomax, a British soldier whom, along with his comrades, becomes a Japanese prisoner of war after being told to surrender in Singapore. 

Sent to a Prisoner of War Camp, he becomes part of the team working on the Thai Burma Railway. Notoriously known as the Death Railway, the line was built to support Japanese forces in World War II and was constructed largely from the forced labor of Asian workers and allied prisoners.

During his imprisonment, the young Lomax, portrayed by Jeremy Irvine and later Colin Firth, is tortured by the Kempeitai for his role in constructing a makeshift radio used in a desperate attempt to listen to broadcasts from home. Like Germany’s Nazi Gestapo, the Kempeitai functioned as a sort of undercover military police and it is here that the film depicts harrowing scenes of physical abuse as the captured soldiers become an “army of ghosts”. As a skilled engineer, Lomax escapes the horrific physical labor forced on the emancipated frames of the soldiers whose task it is to dig out the inhospitable landscape to pave a way for the tracks. 

The horrors are inconceivable.

The film is really two stories brought together, that of a man’s personal revenge in setting out to find those responsible for his torture, as well as the love story between Firth and Nicole Kidman, who plays Lomax’s wife. Still haunted by his harrowing experiences, the romantic frame story follows Lomax and his wife Patti as they attempt to deal with Lomax’s post-traumatic stress. The war might be over but he is still “fighting a war within himself".

Lomax channels his trauma into an obsessive devotion to trains and their timetables, an obsession which began in boyhood and it is on a train to Scotland that Patti and Lomax first meet. Trains are a constant backdrop to the film's narrative, reminding us of the human lives sacrificed for industrial and economic development, not just in this instance, but throughout time.

The abrupt shifts between scenes set in rain battered Scotland and tropical Thailand mirror the flashbacks of Lomax’s tormented mind.

The film cumulates with Lomax returning to the scene of his persecution to confront his abuser, Japanese officer Takashi Nagase, portrayed by Hiroyuki Sanada, who is still alive and working in a museum dedicated to memorialising those killed in the building of the railway. The hate we should feel for his character is set against the portrait of an equally disturbed man: like Lomax he is a mere fragment of his former self, living out a dispossessed existence due to the unrelenting regret of his past actions, carried out under circumstances none of us will ever be able to understand. Indeed, the film's success lies in its questioning of morality and acquittal. We are angered that Nagase is able to escape retribution, never having been tried for his crimes, but if Lomax can forgive his abuser then surely we can?

What follows is an incredible true story of human compassion and reconciliation.

The real Eric Lomax and his former torturer 

Whilst the subject matter makes this film difficult to watch and at times there are graphic scenes of human torture, it is definitely worth seeing, even if it is a little slow to take off in parts. 

Waffles Anyone?

Have you ever fancied a Oriental Vegetable & Cashew Stir Fry waffle? Or how about a Potato, Cauliflower, Spinach & Puy Lentil Dhal waffle?

I haven't gone mad I promise.

These somewhat unusual combinations are available to order at The Waffle House in Norwich. Established in 1978, the restaurant offers a vast array of dishes, all served with, if you hadn't already guessed, a light and crispy waffle. 

Who knew that a waffle could be so versatile? Their menu shows that a waffle can be the perfect base for just about any topping, sweet or savoury. 

Their delicious breakfast menu makes it the perfect destination for a weekend brunch. I chose grilled banana and smoked bacon ontop of a wholemeal waffle base, whilst my Taiwanese mentee, Alice, went for traditional scrambled eggs and bacon. 

With lashings of maple syrup of course.

All waffles are made to order with a menu of seasonal specials also available. 

In addition, they have a vast selection of sweet treats, including a Banoffee Pie Waffle and a Hot Dutch Apple Waffle. Are you drooling yet?

Their choice of waffles include plain and wholemeal, as well as a basmati and wild rice combination for savoury toppings. 

I suggest an early arrival as The Waffle House is extremely popular and well known throughout Norwich. By the time we had finished our breakfast, there was already a long que of people outside, eagerly awaiting to see what all the fuss is about. 

Our waffle cravings successfully satisfied we went for a wander round the Norwich lanes in the early February sun. 

For more info and bookings go to : http://wafflehouse.co.uk/