Livre d'Or

Apart from Arrival, I managed to find a bit more time over Christmas than usual to watch shows.

( brief reviews, including very broad general spoilers for _Rogue One_ )

Also, Ghoti suggested that if she'd dragged me into watching Christmas movies, she should reciprocate by watching a chanukah movie with me. Which is a really sweet thought, but I'm not sure if there's such a thing as a chanukah movie! Does anyone have any suggestions? I mean, that whole New York Jewish custom of eating Chinese food and watching a movie on Christmas Day, is there any particular film that's traditional? Or failing that, perhaps a Jewish themed film (I thought of Yentl or maybe the film of Potok's The Chosen, which I haven't seen), or one that's about identity and resistance to assimilation and rebelling against an oppressive régime. Preferably not Holocaust-related, that really doesn't seem a suitable topic for a date movie. It did occur to me that Rogue One could be considered a pretty suitable thing to watch during chanukah, since it's about a miraculous victory for a no-hope strike against an oppressive empire...

So my brother was in town at the weekend and Dad suggested we could go to the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival performance of The Tempest. ( fun weekend )

So gwyddno wanted to get angelofthenorth tickets to a show for her birthday, but hates musicals, so he had the brainwave of inviting me to go with her instead (cos it's hardly fun going to a show on your own). And we ended up seeing the musical of Legally blonde at Swansea Grand Theatre, which was an excellent night out all round.

I was aware of the film version though I hadn't seen it. But generally I liked the concept of women's empowerment that actively rejects femme-phobia, and it seemed the kind of ridiculous plot that would be well suited to a musical. In fact it was a thoroughly excellent production, I believe it was put on by a theatre school but seemed really professional.

( detailed review )

angelofthenorth found a dear little French restaurant right by the theatre, Bouchon de Rossi. They have a completely non-functional booking system involving leaving messages on an answering machine, but we managed to get a table anyway as we showed up very early on a weekday evening. Service was very good, food was pleasant but a little over-priced for what it was, and didn't really seem very French to me. Very, very nice Loire white, though, and excellently indulgent desserts.

Basically we had a completely glorious evening and left with that happy excited feeling you get from a really well done, light-hearted and dramatic show.

One of the reasons Cambridge is such a desirable place to live is that there's always masses going on culturally, theatre, music, talks, random cool cultural and informative events. Lately nearly all our spare time has been taken up with attempting to move to Cambridge, so we haven't really been able to take advantage of most of it. Still, this week I was WFH Monday and Tuesday, so we had Monday evening free to take in a bit of Cambridge culture, and the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival is on at the moment.

We decided for no very strong reason to go for Richard II at Downing. So after I finished work I made a picnic and headed into town, and we sat on Parker's Piece in the sunshine and talked about cultural stuff and not about house-move logistics, and it was really nice. And drank bubble tea, Cambridge is getting way multicultural these days and has a proper bubble tea place.

( play review )

Also, thank you to Kerry for some excellent commentary on the characters of Richard and Henry, that really helped me get more out of the play.

So my dad's best friend from university, who has known me all my life and is pretty much an aunt to me, has a real passion for amateur theatre. This season she's directing Sophocles' Antigone, in a translation by another member of that set who is now a classics professor. I really wanted to see this production, but I have no free weekends and getting to London for a weekday evening is a bit impractical. But then it turned out that I needed to be at a one-day conference in London today, and there's no sensible way to get to London without travelling up the night before, so all of a sudden I was going to be in London during the run.

A bit at the last minute, I invited khalinche to join me, and as I'd hoped she was actually free for a spontaneous theatre visit. And it was a really cool production, I'm very glad I went. Amazingly khalinche didn't know the play or the underlying myth at all, just imagine coming to Sophocles completely fresh! I haven't studied Antigone specifically, but I do know a bit about Greek theatre in general and my head is full of every kind of interpretation from Freudian analysis to Anouilh's version. I suspect my case is more typical of the kind of people who go to see Antigone in small amateur theatres.

I found the interpretation extremely successful; the play was done pretty straight, but reasonably naturalistic, without a pedantic emphasis on Authenticity. The costumes were sort of vaguely twentieth century with a Greek flavour, rather than being set in a particular period. The translation was poetic but not forsoothly, all the lines sounded completely natural, though in a formal register which I think works better for the play than a very colloquial translation. I particularly liked what my not-aunt did with the chorus; she had just four actors, speaking most of the lines in unison but with naturalistic acting, and occasionally breaking out to give a particular line or section solo. You really got the sense that the chorus was the voice of the narrative and a human group of Theban elders at the same time. Antigone tended slightly hysterical, though to be fair most of her lines are basically about how wretched she is and everything is terrible. Adam Sutcliffe's Creon was seriously impressive, you could absolutely believe him as a tyrant. He managed just the right combination of imposing with ultimately weak, really superlative acting. I've seen considerably weaker pro productions, and I'm not just saying that because of the family connection!

It was a wonderful evening in general. I felt a bit guilty about dragging khalinche all the way out to Ealing, but it was such a glorious spring evening that walking through the suburb with a friend was pure pleasure. And my not-aunt, in spite of the usual ration of directorial panic, was able to come and sit with us and invite us for a drink in the theatre bar after the show, along with some other friends from university and some of their children as well as me. I really hope my crowd will be like that in 30 years' time, still hanging out together and talking about anything and everything. Even travelling alllll the way across London to get back to khalinche's place was a treat, because it gave us such a good opportunity for conversation.

The conference was not as good a networking opportunity as I'd hoped, partly because all the sessions overran so we didn't actually have any mingling time, and partly because I had to leave ludicrously early because the last off-peak train is before 3 pm. Also because I was a bit silly and spent the only free ten minutes I had getting into conversation with people who work for British American Tobacco (I have a family connection with them too, you see), and they are utterly useless for networking because all cancer funders forbid their scientists to have anything to do with tobacco companies. But still interesting and fun; there was a very cute talk about using a slime mould based model for predicting which compounds are going to be too disgusting-tasting to be usable. Possibly only pseudomonas and coalescent will get why I find Dictyostelium endearing, but you know.

I feel amazingly lucky that I could just turn up here and slot into jack's social life. Thank you, Cambridge geeks, for being so welcoming to an outsider.

( fun week )

The only downside to being back in Cambridge and in reach of lots of fun conversations and culture is that I can't actually breathe here. But hey, I'm actually doing better than normal so it's well worth it.

I would like to catch the tail end of the Cambridge Shakespeare festival this week. Anyone want to join me? There is Measure for Measure in Robinson, or The Tempest in Trinity, both 7:30 pm on Saturday night. MfM also has a charity matinée, 2:30 on Saturday afternoon. Tickets cost £14, which is a little steep but the Shakespeare festival have been pretty good in the past. Plus, outdoor Shakespeare in college gardens in period costume is always fun.

I really want to write about the most wonderful summer holiday ever, before I forget the details. But for now, this week has been a lovely transition between holiday and mundane life. I'm back at home, but hatam_soferet is here, which makes it far more fun. And I'm back at work, but I'm getting started gently.

The rest of Stockholm seems to be in a similar state; enough people are back that the city is actually running more or less normally, but the weather is still good and people are still in a holiday mood, and there are summer-type activities going on. This led to the most wonderful shabbat ever yesterday:

( heavenly )

In other news: my new cousin was successfully born, and as far as they can tell with a newborn is a healthy girl, but I don't know any more than that.

And we have sorted out the connectivity issue here; it turns out that the reason I hadn't made a note of my wireless password is that it's written on the bottom of the router. D'oh! Thanks to everybody who made helpful suggestions. Now hatam_soferet is typing away industriously just across the room as I am posting this.

Oh, and in between eating glorious fresh fruit straight from the trees in my garden, we have been out to a really excellent dinner at Fenix with fivemack, and we are planning to go to Hermans this evening with SA. Yay.

Midsummer eve was yesterday, and my colleague RS invited me to join in with the full traditional Swedish thing. So in the morning I went to a park with RS and her kids, and watched the whole process of decorating and then setting up the big, er, fertility symbol thing and then dancing around it. I didn't dance, because that midsommarstång is some weird hybrid of a cross and an asherah. There's a (somewhat huge, I'm afraid) image below the cut showing what I mean. If you click on it it links to a selection of the photos I took; the set involving children being adorable is friends-locked because I don't want to get in trouble for posting pictures of other people's children online.

( erection of the pole )

Then on to the more adult part of the occasion, a barbecue at the home of another colleague. We ate and ate and ate. Traditional midsummer things like smoked salmon (which the hostess sculpted into a model midsommarstång!) and pickled herring and potatoes and strawberries and cream, and lots of other food just because it was nice to eat. Lots of tasty salads, and the whole gamut of breads and crackers and the like, and a plethora of cake and icecream, and homemade elderflower cordial and wine and beer. I enjoyed the barbecue vicariously because it smelled delicious!

There was a lot of good conversation, and another impromptu book swapping session. This means I am no longer short of reading material, and we've provisionally agreed to get together over the summer and do this on a larger scale. It was an interesting experience going through my books today and deciding which ones I could stand to put into the general pool for the anglophone community; doing this is a good antidote to my hoarding tendencies.

One sour note: it seems that now it's my second summer here, I've become sensitized to the local allergens. I have the most rotten hayfever I've ever suffered from, but to be honest, feeling as if I'm permanently about to start a cold (the bit before you actually feel sick though) is far less horrible than not being able to breathe.

Tomorrow Sweden celebrates Lucia, which is technically the feast of St Lucy, but has no recognizable Christian content. So we had a nice party at work for the eve of the festival.

( cultural experience )