Andrew is on sabbatical but Phil is soldiering on to help you decide between the Merlot and the Marlowe and generally putting London's West End theatre to rights
Picture this. The Whingers at the Young Vic, seated between two fat ladies (88), forcing them to squeeze their legs (11) tightly together before getting their eyes down for Bingo.
Partick Stewart stars; what else could it be but a full house? Read the rest of this entry »
The Whingers were once described by someone quite influential as “moderately influential” but the truth of this throwaway remark was stretched – like the waistband on Andrew’s elasticated slacks – to breaking point when it came to obtaining tickets for Waiting For Godot.
The Whingers had talked about seeing it on tour before it came to the Theatre Royal Haymarket but just didn’t get around to it, there being no teams of horses wild enough to drag Phil back into the provinces.
So the Whingers decided to call in a few favours. But it’s funny how people who “owed them one” suddenly suddenly stopped returning their calls. One (and he knows who he is) went as far as laughing in Phil’s face. Imagine that.
Things were getting desperate.
Phil hatched a plan to get elected as an MP, fork out cash to a tout and charge it as an expense, disguising it amidst his general ornamental duck house-related receipts if necessary. Andrew even considered the possibility of stalking and then seducing someone connected with the show, perhaps in a ghastly travesty of Mrs Robinson. But Phil believed this plan was likely to go tits-up by the time it got to the soft music and négligée and probably long before that. Read the rest of this entry »
Yes, yes, we know it’s not the West End and that it’s Shakespeare, but it had to be done.
Done by Andrew, anyway. Phil refused to be dragged away from his metropolitan “lifestyle” (Let us hope that involved him doing something about the state of his fridge for there is surely something rotten in it) for a trip to Stratford-upon-Avon.
Even now Phil insists that it is necessary to change trains to get there and refuses to listen to Andrew’s account of the contemporary transport arrangements. He utterly refutes Andrew’s report that there are no longer such things as third class carriages. Andrew has held his tongue.
Oh well, every dog has his day and so, it was that Sue K (Clarification: Andrew is the dog in this analogy, not Sue) stepped into Phil’s fill-in mode. And the first thing to report is that an evening at the theatre apparently does not necessarily involve bickering. This was something of revelation to Andrew who found the entire outing both intellectually stimulating and emotionally restful. Read the rest of this entry »
A West End Whinger 