“Noises Off”

We’re just back from a matinee performance of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.  To the best of my recollection, I’ve seen only two plays by Michael Frayn, and they are about as different as could possibly be conceived.  I’ve seen Noises Off twice before, I think, and it’s about the most slapstick farce imaginable.  Lots of action.  Hilarious.  By contrast, Copenhagen, which we saw here in London years ago, is a very serious play that is focused very serious ideas.  Almost no “action.”  Just conversation.  I would love to see it again, but only if it featured a superb cast.  (It has only three characters — Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and, coming onto the stage only from time to time, Margrethe Nørlund Bohr, the wife of Niels Bohr.)  I regard Copenhagen as one of the greatest and most memorable theatrical experiences of my life.

We toyed with the idea of going to see Sir Kenneth Branagh’s production of King Lear, in which he stars and which he directed.  My wife once performed as Cordelia in a BYU production of Lear, and she has a special love for the play.  But the reviews of it that we read were pretty uniformly negative, tickets to it were quite expensive, and, anyway, we need to be up quite early tomorrow for our return flight home to Salt Lake City.  So we opted for the Noises Off matinee, instead.

And, as it turns out, the Theatre Royal Haymarket, which dates back to 1720, making it the third oldest still-functioning theater in London, was the very first theater to do matinees.

Prior to walking to the theater, we strolled a little bit around the area of Trafalgar Square.  We had actually planned to spend some time in the National Gallery, but we decided, first, to dip into the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields — and we were hooked.  (I had heard of the church long before visiting it for the first time, many years ago:  I was and am very fond of the chamber orchestra recordings created by the late Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.  Today, Joshua Bell is the Academy’s Music Director.)  An a cappella mixed quartet drawn from St. Martin’s Voices were practicing.  A bit of Renaissance polyphony, I think, that I did not recognize.  It was exquisitely beautiful.  And so we stayed for the 1 PM eucharistic service, at which the group were also singing.  Today, by the way, is All Saints’ Day.

My admiration for Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye is deep.  That’s one of the reasons why I invited her to write a personal essay in Interpreter for Easter 2020.  (See “Christ and the Work of Suffering.”). Now I look forward to reading her new book, Sacred Struggle.

I posted the item below on Monday and again on Tuesday.  I’m posting it yet again just to ensure that Everybody’s WC has had full opportunity to see it.  When I first encountered his explanation that he hates me because of my supposedly vicious campaign to harm an anonymous friend of his, I thought that he might, for once, be expressing a sincere (if mistaken and misguided) sentiment.  That’s still a theoretical possibility, I suppose.  Given his long track record, though, I’m much more inclined to believe that he’s either been played by somebody or — by far the more likely explanation — that it’s just another of his malignant fictions about me:

I’ve been mildly puzzled for years now about the hostile personal fixation that some pseudonymous folks over at the Peterson Obsession Board seem to have on me.  Well, I finally have a clue with regard to one of them — the one that I’ve identified here as Everybody’s WC — who claims that he hates me because of a multiyear crusade of defamation and slander and ceaseless personal attacks that I conducted against his best friend in an attempt to get that friend fired.  Having seen the stress, the hurt, and the frustration that his friend and his friend’s family suffered over those years, Everybody’s WC has concluded that I am, in his words, “pure evil.”

That would be a somewhat understandable reaction, I suppose, if a bit overwrought.  But I have literally no idea what he’s talking about.  I can think of no such case.  Even after searching through all of the dim recesses of my mind, I can’t think of any instance in which I’ve ever sought to have anybody fired.  Moreover, I can’t even imagine myself doing such a thing.  What on earth does he have in mind?

I really would like to know.  Seriously.  So I invite him, or some surrogate for him, either to contact me privately or to post something here in the comments section so that I can understand his accusation.  As it is, I haven’t the foggiest idea.

And here are three bloodcurdling horrors from the inexhaustible Christopher Hitchens “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™:

• “JustServe officially launches in Chile: An event in Santiago let organizations and volunteers know how to get started using JustServe in Chile — the 14th country to have the free community service platform”
• National Geographic:  “The Effect is Dramatic”  “It sounds too good to be true: What one move can improve sleep, brighten moods, decrease depression and anxiety—and give you better skin and a healthier gut?  The answer: giving up alcohol. The change is noticeable quickly, Nat Geo reports. And that’s not counting the rejuvenation of your organs and the reduction of carcinogens inside you.”
• The singing of St. Martin’s Voices at the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields at Trafalgar Square (see above).

Posted from Bankside, London, England