pumpkinstrokemarrow

On 21st November I noticed some rather fine oxtail. Over the past couple of days achieved replication, albeit with some heart-searching and fuss-and-bother. Buy two oxtails, cost some £17. Not a cheap dish at all. Boil up the half dozen or so thin bits with onion and celery for two or three hours to make a fatty brown gravy. Place the larger bits in a pyrex dish, the sort that comes with a lid. No liquid, powders or anything else. Crumple a bit of foil into the lid to act as a sort of condenser and put lid on dish. In the middle of the night, place dish in oven and put oven on slow, that is to say 90C. By the morning the oxtail had turned a pale brown and was resting in about an inch of fatty water. Rubbery to the poke with a knife. Clearly not edible at this point. Not sure what to do. Should I have boiled first then roasted? After some hesitation, poured the gravy from step 1 on the oxtail in the dish, removed the foil from the lid, replaced the lid on the dish, replaced the dish in the oven and turned the heat up to 120C. Cook for a further 4 hours. At the end of this time the oxtail was a deep, shiny brown. Just like in the Brazilian cafe. Pour off gravy and set aside. Serve the oxtail with, in our case, mashed potatoes and slivered then boiled white cabbage. Very good it was too. A bit more chewy than our usual stewed version but with a lot more flavour. FIL even had seconds for once.

The gravy now settles in the fridge. In due course I will remove the centimetre of so of fat and use the slimming remainder to warm up the two left over pieces of oxtail for a supper dish.

All in all, a successful, if rather expensive replication. In fact, not much cheaper than the cafe.

Fortified in this way, off to the Ovalhouse (http://www.ovalhouse.com/) to see a two person production of Hamlet. A part of town which contains a lot of old housing, some of it looking to be 200 or more years old. The theatre turned out a multi-function (polyvalent to the French?) arts centre; the sort of place which is probably worrying about next year's grant. Part of the centre was the large Victorian house which saw the nativity of the baby who subsequently became Viscount Alamein. Did he bequeath his natal house to the service of diversity theatre in inner London?

The play was called 'The Madness of Hamlet' and used, unusually, the bad folio as a text. Either for this reason or otherwise it introduced the twist of Ophelia being pregnant then abandoned, a twist I have not come across before. Or even thought of, despite its being entirely plausible. The two persons were two young actors, originally from Zimbabwe. Very talented chaps. Very mobile and expressive faces; maybe reflecting a background in mime. Voices with a big range. Great sense of fun and comedy. Tremendous sense of rhythm and timing which must have made the wannabee white dancers in the (thin) audience green with envy. I wonder if this is a talent which wears thinner with distance from African roots? However, unlike the Filter version of 'Twelfth Night' (20th November), the production would not serve as an accessible introduction to the play proper. Indeed, one would not have made much sense of it at all without prior knowledge of the story. A fair amount, particularly the singing, was in Shona. At least that is what the programme notes suggested. A language which seemed to have none of the clicks that the Zimbabwean whom I know from Tooting employs when she speaks her native tongue. A production which was very focussed on death, burials and graves. The programme notes talk of the Shona attitude to the spirit world, an interest which fitted well with the attitude of the personnel in Hamlet to Hamlet's father's ghost.

Performed on a bare stage with two props, a mat and a yellow bowl, maybe 10 inches in diameter. Perhaps a calabash? No music, other than that provided by what we had thought was just a bowl. Which made a pleasant change and which made for, counter-intuitively, a much more effective contrast between soft and loud. The bowl, on closer inspection, turned out to contain a thumb drum and the rim of the bowl was ringed with metal washers, perhaps the diameter of milk bottle tops (for those that can remember what they looked like) and which, rattling as if in a tambourine, served as the drone to the thumb drum. At least, that is what I thought was happening. As it happens, we happen to own a thumb drum, purchased some years ago from a shop in the vicinity of Warren Street. It is a bit out of tune and we never learned to play the thing. But one of these actors certainly could.