pumpkinstrokemarrow

To escape from such nonsense, on Tuesday to the half full Rose to see 'The Importance of Being Earnest', a play which I thought I had been to before but was sufficiently strange that I must have been mistaken; just taken in several TV versions. Not bad, but I felt that the thing was a little dull, the humour a little forced. Needed a bit more sparkle and zip. The thing had only been open for a few days so perhaps it will sharpen up as they get into the run.

One problem was that the play being not much more than a vehicle for a string of epigrams (if that is the right term for a couple of sentences neatly turning some gem of conventional and/or conversational wisdom upside down, putting it into reverse as it were. OED a bit vague for once; I just learn that the epi bit means upon and that the gram bit means write. Vaguely the same root as grammar), it does not help if the epigrams themselves are a little tired, having been heard too many times before, and if the delivery is a little overdone. I notice in passing that the same brand of epigrammic humour is the mainstay of the Alex strip in the DT.

And turning philosophical, I notice that most proverbs work in reverse too. Which is perhaps related to that other fact that you only say that something is good if there is the possibility of it being bad. So something being good or bad is a matter of opinion or circumstance. Furthermore, chemical reactions do it. One could go on.

Another problem was the programme which advertised, in addition to the importance another important play, a world première no less, called 'Farewell to the Theatre', apparently a short piece of one act. The programme left me with the impression that we would get two plays for the price of one. I was further confused by the barman asking whether I wanted fortification for the first or the second interval. I plumped blindly for the second, but then scoured the programme for information about intervals. BH eventually ran it to ground in small print at the bottom of a purple page headed 'cast'. Oh for the days when programmes included a timetable printed more or less in the middle of a page where you could find it: Act 1, Act 2, Interval of 15 minutes, Act 3 sort of thing. But we were still unsure about whether it was one play or two and our lady usher was none the wiser. Luckily someone in our row knew that it was one play, the earnest one. To think that we paid £3 for this not very helpful programme.

Then last night a DVD of a romcom, a genre which I would not usually touch, but this was a special occasion, the DVD of the book noticed on 25th September and good fun it was too. I have decided that I like Reese Wetherspoon; not her fault that she is named after a chain of pubs. She is also the star in our version of 'Vanity Fair' - a version which I liked enough not to have noticed her US accent. Also fun to work out how the book had been tweaked to make the film; certainly large chunks of the former had been lost from the latter, although the compression ratio was the relatively high 2.956 pages to the minute. Washed down with an amusing little Rioja, bottled in Viana (the Spanish one) and sold at Kiln Lane.

PS: working out which of the many 'epi' words are derived from the same Greek stem is left as an exercise for the reader. OED lists around 12 three column pages of them, so the reader may be away for some time.