SomersTownLisa

London Life
2022-03-29 16:28:17 (UTC)

Alarms And Excursions

Fri 25/03/2022
I was still catching up with stuff, mainly the Top 100; I hadn’t even updated the log after last week. I saw that Cadbury’s had a pop-up vegan chocolate shop in Soho, so Jack suggested we cycle down there and also visit the vegan Burger King at Leicester Square. I’ve never been to a Burger King, and I don’t usually like fake meat, but Jack wanted to try it, so I got something which didn’t mention any kind of meat and it was kind-of all right, nothing very tasty. The Cadbury shop, off Dean Street, had the idea of putting anti-vegan trolling statements on the chocolate packs, but I didn’t want to read them even if they have been re-purposed. They were giving out large free vegan chocolate bars, with a choice of “milk” and caramel, so we both chose caramel. On the way home we got ice creams from Morish, which we had to eat while wheeling our bikes, due to lack of time.

Jack wanted to get the 18:02 to Greenwich as it was a direct train from St Pancras, and we had to run to catch it. We walked around Greenwich and down to the river, didn’t find a suitable café except one in the college which used Starbucks, so returned to the theatre. Even inside the theatre it was cold, I kept my jacket on throughout, and they didn’t do soya or oat milk so I didn’t get a drink.

We had cheap tickets to see ‘Alarms And Excursions’ by Michael Frayn, whihc was very sparsely attended. It was an old-fashioned series of plays, involving middle-class couples. The first sketch, a farce, involved a dinner party, a smoke alarm, other noisy gadgets such as a doorbell and cooker alarm, and a landline with transferrable outlets in different rooms. The second was about a business meeting/social with staff having to juggle notes and drinks to keep in touch with the speaker. The next was set in two adjoining hotel rooms, with two mismatched couples, with Shereener Browne and Lauren Drennan getting to change in and out of revealing nightdresses, and sometimes just wearing underwear. It was quite funny when they were trying to avoid meeting each other when leaving in the morning, but like all the sketches it was too long and got repetitive.

The next playlet wouldn’t have worked if all the characters had mobile phones; a husband had gone to meet a visitor at the airport, but they couldn’t find each other and weren’t sure if they were at the right terminal. Turned out one was at Gatwick and the other at Heathrow. They then had trouble meeting the man at Victoria, while the wife’s mum also turned up and was trying to contact them. All communication attempts were made via an old-fashioned home answering machine.

The final play was a continuation of the first. The whole thing seemed older than 1998, when it was actually written. That was the year we got a mobile phone, even in our family. I realised I’d not had any food since lunchtime but got some expensive veggy crisps in the interval, before realising I had some emergency crackers in my pocket. We lost each other going into the station, but met just in time to catch the direct train home.




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