Skylight

Michael Billington reviews David Hare's Skylight in The Guardian, which played in the West End in 2014. I think it is a miracle that I can go to my local theatre and see this play.

For us in Calgary, it is playing on Thursday.

Keenly attuned ... Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan in Skylight.
Photograph: Tristram Kenton

I have been trying to see everything in every theatre:  music, dance, drama.  It doesn't work.

Tonight I went over to hear the John de Waal Quintent.  A jazz drummer joined by four oner Calgary musicians.

Right evening, but wrong venue.  I should have been downtown at the National Music Centre.  Now that was disappointiong.

Sunday Tonia, Kelvin and I went to see the HD Live Museum Series called The Vatican Museums.  I don't know why this was such a disappointment.  "Too short," said Tonia.  "I had settled in for two or three hours and suddenly it was over."  I thought the cinematographer and the writer were working too hard to show us the wonder of the pieces.  Those works of art speak for themselves.

I was alone at the Le Noze de Figaro on Saturday.  Well, alone with everyone else in the theatre.  At half time people began chatting in so many international languages.  I don't know what surprises me the most at the opera series: that it is often full; that 90% of the people have white hair; that over half of us are on walkers, crutches or at the very least, rock our bodies back and forth a few times before we can get up.

The staging was beautiful.  The pantomiming so clever.  How do those opera singers go double forte while laying on the ground with someone else pinning them there by sitting on their stomach.   These performers are not the cardboard stereotypes of opera singers of the past.  The artists can sing, act and dance.

Tomorrow the University Drama Department opens their production of Jebat by Hatta Azad Khan (stories of the Malaccan warriors Hang Tuah and Hang Jebat).  I may drop in and see it twice.

Retirement is wonderful.

Arta

PS.  Another wonderful review, this time by Susanah Clapp of The Observor.

Question for Ducan or Alex.

When was the last time you were at a play when the audience spontaneously broke out in applause over a speech one of the characters makes?  That is going to happen in this play.