La Bête at the Comedy Theatre, London

Molière, the real one.

Written in 1991 by David Hirson, La Bête is set in 17th-century France and apparently aims to be a light take-off of plays by Molière. It is a comedy with a serious undercurrent, namely the age-old debate of quality versus commerciality in the arts. Now, I know virtually nothing about Molière (my only contact with his plays has been an abridged version of one that I saw whilst doing A-level French), and so can't comment on how it compares with the more esteemed playwright's work, but this didn't detract from the experience. In fact, my relative ignorance may have even enhanced my enjoyment of the play, as it was by far at its weakest when trying to have a 'message' or 'deeper meaning'.

The play opens to the scene of a dinner party, the guests of which are members of an acting troupe retained by a Princess who sees herself as a patron of the arts. However, all is not well and the troupe’s leader Elomire (can you see what Hirson did there??) soon stomps off to sulk in his library, where he proceeds to moan to his loyal friend. The cause of his disgruntlement is soon revealed: the Princess has declared that a new playwright and actor, Valere, must join the troupe. This Valere is not, however, a purveyor of the kind of 'high art' that Elomire likes to produce, rather he is little more than a street clown.

The audience doesn't have to spend long wondering if Valere can really be as bad as all that; within scant minutes he bursts onto the scene in all his dishevelled, tramp-like glory. We quickly become sympathetic to Elomire’s point of view as Valere embarks upon a drunken monologue that, astonishingly, lasts a full half-hour. During this time the clown doesn't just talk, he also relieves himself and hides away in a box. Elomire just stands there, his expression becoming increasingly pained.

Thirty minutes seems like an awfully long time for one actor to be speaking, especially when you combine this with the fact that the entire play is written in rhyming couplets. Remarkably, it works, and it works extremely well. This is mostly due to the skill of Mark Rylance, the actor playing Valere, who is superb throughout. With his raucous delivery the script becomes laugh-out-loud funny. David Hyde Pierce is also excellent as Elomire, even if all he has to do a lot of the time is look annoyed.

Any play written and performed by Valere is almost guaranteed to be awful, hence we are left wondering why the Princess would wish to employ him. The reason becomes clear when she first enters the scene: she is really rather silly herself. The original script called for a prince, but in this version the part has been rewritten as female in order to accommodate Joanna Lumley. Here, Lumley is rather out-acted by her co-stars, but she is nonetheless perfectly adequate. It would be hard for her to be otherwise; in a role as a ditzy aristocrat she is essentially playing herself.

The action unfolds on a truly sumptuous set. Crammed bookshelves take up three walls, rising ever upwards, concealing hidden doors that lead to, amongst other places, the toilet. A lot of effort has also been put into the costumes, most notably the wigs, and, I suspect, Valere’s teeth! I was sat as usual in the upper circle, in a seat with a slightly restricted view, but this wasn't much of an issue - such a stage setup will look good from any angle.

The play's message is one that we have heard many times before, and the whole thing is hardly a work of genius. Without such high quality acting it would undoubtedly struggle. However, in its current form at the Comedy Theatre La Bête makes for a thoroughly entertaining evening out and therefore is to be recommended.

Three small butterflies

Lawns are not very interesting. Green, freshly mown grass may be good for walking on, for playing sport on, and for admiring from afar if orderliness is your kind of thing, but it isn't so useful for creatures. Short, neat stumps of grass aren't great for hiding amongst and don't provide much to munch on, and hence if a field is so manicured that it could be mistaken for Astroturf, it is unlikely to have much living in it. Let the grass grow just a bit longer however, so that the ends tickle your calves as you walk through it, and as if by magic the previously-barren spot will be teeming with life.

All manner of creepy crawlies like to hang out in long grass, from tiny ants and flies to bumblebees and dragonflies. Most colourful, however, have to be the butterflies, which flutter skittishly from perch to perch in search of tasty nectar. Larger varieties such as the Peacock and Red Admiral are easily recognised due to their distinct patterns, but just as attractive are some of the less well-known smaller species. I managed to spot three of the latter recently.

This little fellow is a Brown Argus Butterfly. Confusingly, it is a variety of blue butterfly, despite it not being in the slightest bit blue-coloured (the undersides however are similar). They are most commonly found in the south and east of the UK, preferring to spend their time in chalk and limestone grassland. With a wingspan of only about 25 mm they are about half the size of a Red Admiral and so can be tricky to spot in dense vegetation. If you do manage to clap eyes on one however, you won't have to worry too much about losing it for these are truly lazy butterflies. They rarely travel more than 200 m from the site where they emerged, and like nothing better than to lie around soaking up the heat of the sun. Interestingly, their caterpillars are tended to by ants: the ants provide protection in exchange for a honey-like secretion from the caterpillars’ 'Newcomer’s' glands.

This is another butterfly from the same family, but this time at least the males are actually blue! Such Common Blue butterflies are, as the name suggests, regularly seen all over the UK. They are not fussy about their habitat, and will happily live in gardens, on verges, or even on sand dunes. Similarly, they will contentedly guzzle nectar from all kinds of sources, with thistles and clover is being just two examples of the many plants they feed on. During the day they flap around casually from flower to flower, then at night they become quite sociable, and it is often possible to find a whole group roosting on the same grass stem.

This final specimen is the ominously-named Gatekeeper butterfly. There is however nothing remotely unsettling about it, it is simply a very small (20 mm or so) creature that likes to frequent scrubby grassland. The males tend to pick a shrub they like the look of and from there establish a little territory. The females find a mate and then set off to lay their eggs, of which there may be a couple of hundred. Unlike other butterflies, which tend to get through several generations each year, Gatekeepers only go through one cycle, which peaks at the beginning of August. This time of year is in fact when many butterfly populations peak, meaning that the countryside should be swarming with them. Go out and find some!

Selby shines, but Perry and Carter fail to ignite the Crucible

Snooker’s most prestigious tournament, the World Championship, is currently taking place at the Crucible theatre in Sheffield. It’s a fantastic, intimate venue in which the very best players are on show, and hence tickets get snapped up as soon as they become available. Fortunately I managed to put up with the theatre’s ear-gratingly bad hold music for long enough to secure some, and so yesterday morning four of us found ourselves tucked up in the back corner of the back row ready to watch the second session of Mark Selby versus Stephen Hendry.

The atmosphere at snooker matches is always great, but at the Crucible it is perhaps even better. The crowd of students, middle-aged men and silver-haired grannies mingles together happily, with the occasional player or referee casually thrown into the mix. Snooker is a sport where fans can get close to their heroes: I strode alongside Willie Thorne for a good few paces on the way in; my friend Mike walked past Rob Walker at the train station; as we left we spotted Jan Verhaas chatting up a couple of ladies in a nearby Starbucks. It's all about the action on the table, however, and we had what could turn into a good match on our hands: a star of the future versus a star of the past.

The first session had turned out evens, with Selby and Hendry having four frames apiece. However, the situation became rapidly one-sided as the Jester from Leicester started to demolish his opponent. Hendry did start reasonably in the opening frame, but then the first of what was to turn into a series of avoidable errors allowed Selby to get straight back in, and he took no hesitation in powering through a break of 96. And so it continued. Hendry for a moment looked like he was going to get a frame on the board, but a bad miss let Selby in, and the younger player ruthlessly cleared up. Hendry sat in his seat with his head hanging low, unable to watch as the frame that should have been his inexorably slipped away. The score was now 4-8 in Selby's favour.

Any hopes that the 15 minute mid-session interval would allow the former champion to get himself together and put up a fight were quickly dashed. He did manage to come out tops in one frame, but Selby's cueing just got better and better and Hendry found himself unable to respond. Up in the commentary box Willie Thorne was getting increasingly excited about Selby's cue ball control, waxing lyrical about 'deep screws' like there was no tomorrow. This control, combined with some superb potting, earned Selby every remaining frame in the match.

We walked out pleased to have seen a player on top form, but disappointed that it hadn't been more of a contest. Maybe the afternoon session would hold more promise: Joe Perry and Ali Carter should be quite evenly matched and so surely we could look forward to some good safety exchanges and the odd dash of drama. We grabbed an improvised lunch of satsumas and Club cake bars from Somerfield, then strolled back to the Crucible.

Carter had established a decent overnight lead, and at 10-6 he had just three frames left to win in order to progress to the quarter-finals. However, he seemed to have left all his form in his hotel room and struggled hugely to pot anything. Perry was better, but not by much, and together they made a complete mess of the table for the first few frames. We looked at each other and shook our heads. This was not good snooker.

It didn't help that on the other side of the theatre there was a cracking match between Ronnie O'Sullivan and Mark Williams taking place. It also didn't help that our commentating team was Neal Foulds and Terry Griffiths. Now Neal can be okay when teamed with someone able to add a bit of excitement to proceedings, but Terry's utterly inane observations, delivered in his usual soporific tones, soon had us all yawning. One by one we either took out our earpieces or switched over to listen to John Parrott and Dennis Taylor discussing the action on the other table.

How we wished the dividing screen would just go up! It seemed that Ronnie was having a good day, and that Williams was playing superbly. Alas, unless the action was taking place around the yellow spot (which we could just about see from our back-row position), we were unable to get a glimpse of it. Oh, the frustration!

Back to our table, and things did admittedly improve a little. Whatever Ali Carter did during the mid-session interval, it woke him up and he remembered how to play. In the first half of the session Perry had caught up to level the score 10-10, but a century break, followed by a solid 82 took Carter back into the lead. The final frame was again scrappy, but Carter clinched it, and with it the match. He may be through to the quarter-finals, but he'll have to play a lot better if he hopes to defeat Shaun Murphy later today. As for us, we got up, stretched, said goodbye to the Crucible and began the long drive south.

Snooker on the BBC

Snooker and ice hockey: a comparison

On Sunday I went to see an ice hockey match. No, not Canada vs the United States at the Winter Olympics, although that was taking place at a similar time. It was the rather less glamorous line-up of ‘Guildford Flames’ vs ‘Milton Keynes Lightning’, taking place at the Guildford Spectrum leisure centre.

Ten years ago or so I used to go and watch hockey matches quite regularly, supporting what was then known as the ‘Swindon Chill’. Alas, this team was as lousy as their name and the attraction of seeing them lose every week soon wore off. Nowadays they appear to have reverted to the infinitely better name of ‘Wildcats’, but are alas still languishing near the bottom of the league.

Ice hockey is a rapidly-moving sport in which the players alternate between highly skilful puck passing and beating hell out of each other. Only the most blatant infractions are called up by the referees, who then give out penalties with wonderfully euphemistic names: ‘hooking’ appears to mean jabbing a stick violently into an opponent’s stomach and trying to haul them backwards, ‘holding’ can mean physically sitting on another player to stop them from moving, and my absolute favourite ‘roughing’ means attempted murder.

As I watched what was a very entertaining match it struck me that ice hockey is the diametric opposite of snooker, the ‘sport’ (yes, I know that any game with Stephen Lee as a top player can’t really be called a sport) that I go to see most often. Now, this may seem a senseless comparison, what with hockey being a team game played on ice and snooker being a rather more sedate affair played on a posh table, but I’m going to make it nonetheless. I also can’t confess to knowing a great deal about ice hockey, but then again I’m not convinced there is a great deal to know.

My first point regards tactics. Snooker matches are as much down to clever thinking as they are down to skill with the cue. Players have definite strategies and plan out several shots in advance. When taking a shot the goal isn’t simply to get the object ball in the pocket; in addition the white needs to land in the perfect position for the next pot. If no pot is obvious then the white needs to bring a ball into a pottable position and finish neatly lined up with it. The precision required, and the rapid calculations of velocities and angles, are extraordinary.

In ice hockey on the other hand, any tactics employed are rather less obvious to a casual observer. The aim is to get the puck into the goal. That’s pretty much it. There don’t appear to be any great over-arching strategies, and indeed there is no need for there to be. Play moves so quickly up and down the rink that there simply isn’t any time for carefully planned-out formations. The players don’t have the opportunity to consider their next move; they have to react at almost the same instant that they receive the puck. Hesitate for even a second and they’ll find themselves bashed up against the wall by an opponent.

An entire ice hockey match is over in 60 minutes of play, separated into three equal periods. Given the constant stops and starts, and the need to resurface the ice, it does in reality take rather longer than this. However, it's still pretty short for a sports match. One of the reasons for this is that it's a supremely knackering game. The players charge up and down the rink at ferocious speeds and bash into each other at full-force. To allow the team to cope with this constant exertion there are plenty more players available on the bench than are needed on the ice at any one time, and they chop and change constantly.

For the snooker player there is no hope of a substitute when feeling Tired. Here the exhaustion is mental not physical and the match is very much head to head. It also lasts for much, much longer. Ronnie aside, most players take a good few seconds over each shot, and can deliberate for well over a minute if it's a tricky snooker. In the same period of time in ice hockey there could well have been two goals and a handful of penalties. Snooker frames can be over in 15 minutes if one player dominates and has a good run of the balls, but the majority will contain more safety play and so will last for rather longer. And of course one frame is not the entire match; the final of the World Championship is the best of 35 frames. 35 frames! That's insanely long.

Another difference is that struck me was the behaviour of the crowds. At the ice hockey there was constant cheering and chanting and bashing of drums, and the rink positively exploded each time a home goal was scored. In contrast, snooker audiences keep incredibly quiet, bursting into applause after good shots but rapidly quieting down lest the referee turns and tells them off. I can't imagine any hockey referee complaining to a fan unless they actually chucked something onto the ice, and even then if it was something small and fluffy they’d probably get away with it. After all, the refs are too busy trying to stop the players from committing grievous bodily harm to pay much attention to such minor matters.

Strangely, and despite the differences of the loud and brash versus the quiet and collected, the atmosphere at both sports is really rather good. The ice hockey crowd is more obviously entertaining and being entertained, but the tense excitement at a snooker game can't be matched. Both are niche sports and have small but dedicated fanbases which give events a real welcoming feel. Personally, snooker appeals more due to its more cerebral nature and the sheer variety of play from match to match. But when I want a good burst of adrenaline, I'll certainly give ice hockey another try.

‘Waiting for Godot’ at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket

Samuel Beckett's 1953 play 'Waiting for Godot' was one of the West End’s hot tickets last year; its pairing of Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart proving so popular that every seat for every performance was sold. Luckily for the likes of me it has been revived for an additional eleven weeks this year, still with McKellen as Estragon (or Gogo) but now with Roger Rees as Vladimir (or Didi). Tickets now seem to be rather less in demand, which worked out beautifully as I was able to procure Royal Circle tickets for the princely sum of £20 each. Used as I am to sitting in the Upper Circle or the Balcony, I found this whole experience rather novel: going to see a play and not being several stories above the action? Being able to stretch my legs out? Sitting in a seat with a padded back? What luxury! I'd better not get used to it, or things could get expensive.

Anyway, to the play. It's an odd one, this. I can understand why many people don't like it, seeing as the entire plot can be described as 'two old tramps wait for a man called Godot to turn up'. That isn't a summary, by the way, it's all that happens. Most tales can be said to have a beginning, a middle and an end; 'Waiting for Godot' cannot. We simply watch Gogo and Didi over two days, two days that are essentially identical. Then it stops. The audience doesn't need to see any more; if there were to be a third day it would simply be the same as the first two, and so there is no point in carrying on.

Put like this, it all sounds terribly dull, but somehow, and I'm not exactly sure why, it isn't. It definitely helps that the two tramps are quite entertaining characters who keep a veneer of comedy to hide the tragedy of their lives. They are rather like a musical double-act that has fallen on hard times, an impression reinforced by the ruined-theatre setting (the script originally called for a country road) and the little dances and hat-switching routines that they perform. Neither managed to completely conceal their deep-seated despair, however. For Gogo this manifests as grumpiness, resignation and thoughts of suicide. Didi, on the other hand, expresses his discontent in animated monologues and restlessness.

The pair mostly seem to pass the time with brief, intense conversations and by trading insults. Each day this interaction is interrupted by the arrival of the rich, larger than life Pozzo and his slave Lucky. Pozzo, who is played with great gusto by Matthew Kelly, has a rather strange relationship with Ronald Pickup’s dutifully obedient Lucky. The two are linked by a rope that runs around the latter’s neck, and although Pozzo is clearly the dominant one it would seem that neither could do without the other, much as is the case for Gogo and Didi. Pickup has a wonderfully crumpled old face and an impressive head of long, white hair that is probably a wig but that I wish was his own. Most of the time he is left to stand, eyes to the ground, as the action (such as it is) carries on about him. He is not without his moment of glory, however. This comes when he is asked to dance, and then to think, at which point he lets out an incredible, barely-comprehensible monologue that is really rather exhausting to listen to.

There are many themes that could be said to run through 'Waiting for Godot', from the religious to the political, from the existential to the absurd. Many trees worth of paper has been consumed in its analysis, a process that I find rather mystifying especially given that even Beckett didn't seem too clear on what it was about. For me, it was a great evening out at the theatre seeing an interesting, impeccably-acted play in which not a lot happened. That's all it was, and in my mind that's all it needs to be. I would thoroughly recommend it.

Waiting for Godot

The Walnut Orb-Weaver Spider

I found this spider crawling around on the side of a shed last summer. With its dark, leathery, flattened body and disconcertingly slow movement, it seemed rather, well, sinister. It certainly appeared much meaner than most of the spiders to be found in the garden: a sneaky, dangerous-looking creature with something of the night about it. Concerned that it might be capable of a nasty bite, I left it well alone.

In fact, this little beastie is a perfectly ordinary, harmless garden spider. Despite being extremely common it is rarely seen as it is mostly active at night. During the day it squeezes its thin body into crevices, often under bark, hidden well out of sight of any predators. Then in the evening it emerges, cautiously, and spins its flat, circular web. Once it has finished this construction it will move to the web’s centre and stay there perfectly still, waiting for unwary flying insects to get trapped.

If the spider feels spooked during the night it will return to hide in its crevice, slowly following a guideline of silk. Before the sun rises it completely dismantles its web, leaving no trace that it was ever there. Given that the webs can reach 70 cm in diameter, this daily cycle of building and demolition seems like an extraordinary waste of effort. Maybe all this work just fills the time, or maybe the webs are actually a bit naff and so wouldn't last more than a night anyway.

If you spot one of these spiders it's likely to be a female. These are bigger, at up to 15 mm long, and are active all year. Males on the other hand only ever grow to 9 mm and are only out and about during the summer. Interestingly, if you pick up a male it may bite you, although however hard it chomps down it won't do you any real harm. The Walnut Orb-Weaver would seem therefore not to be the villain it appears. It does 'live in the shadows' as its Latin name Nuctenea umbractica implies, but this is simply because it is too cowardly to come out during the day.

Have the Brecon Beacons ever looked so good?

The Brecon Beacons National Park is an area of outstanding natural beauty beloved of British Army trainees, who frequent it for weekends of exercise, fresh air and teamwork.

Or maybe not.

Maybe it's an area that can look quite attractive on the rare occasions when the cloud lifts and it stops raining and you can haul yourself high enough out of the bog to get a look. And maybe the reason the Army uses it so much is that getting round the place is quite hard work, but not such hard work that they can't load up their recruits with ridiculously heavy bags and still expect them to run for 12 hours non-stop.

The hills themselves are quite strange beasts; their broad, plateau summits and perilously steep sides give them the impression of being vast mountains that have had their tops lopped off. On paper they would appear to be quite easy to conquer, and although they are certainly no great behemoths those flat areas are no walk in the park. Rather, they are a walk through a peat bog. Now, don't get me wrong, bog hopping can be quite good fun if you haven't done it for a while, but its appeal tends to wear off rather suddenly the instant you find yourself thigh-deep in brown, smelly goo. Gaiters will of course help to lessen the effects, but there will almost always be a bit of damp, runny mud that manages to trickle its way into your boot, down your ankle and onto your already-cold toes. And that is not a pleasant feeling at all.

So, as we set off to south Wales last Saturday morning we were expecting to spend the weekend trudging through the mire. We weren't particularly concerned about this as it's what we end up doing a lot of the time, and strangely we do quite enjoy it. However, as we drove further west the world became whiter and whiter. Snow! Amazing! My excitement was tempered somewhat by the fact that I was on hold to the Crucible Theatre box office in an attempt to get snooker tickets and the music they were forcing down my ear was really quite piercing, but by the time we reached the National Park proper the tickets were booked and my attention was turned fully towards the hills. Darn, they looked good!

Our initial plans were for a rather long day out. We parked next to Talybont Reservoir (SO 099197), with an out-and-back trip to Pen y Fan as our goal. As we trudged up through the ever-deepening snow to Allt Lwyd (078189) however, it became clear that this was a little on the over-ambitious side. Not to worry though, the day was quite simply glorious and we didn't really care about tagging summits as we had, after all, been up them all before anyway. We were out and about, with blue skies and sparkling snow, and hardly anyone else was up there with us.

As we ascended a fine ridge up to the first plateau of the day it almost seemed like we were in the Alps, so impressive was the view. Once up on the flat we meandered around in a general north-westerly direction, hoping that the looping tracks we were leaving would make a good pattern when viewed from above. Amusingly, on our way back we discovered that people coming afterwards had used our tracks as a guide, thereby wasting themselves huge amounts of time if they had wanted a direct route to the next hill! We carried on through the col at 057206 and onto the next area of plateau, at which point the view really struck us:

Wow! Pen y Fan looked like a monster! A huge, snow-covered beast with sharp ridges, plunging cliffs and precarious cornices. I desperately wanted to hurry on and climb it. Except, hang on a minute - what's that?

Yuck! People everywhere! Clustering like flies all over the mountain’s towering glory. Maybe we would give it a miss, after all.

You see, a major part of the attraction of the hills for me is the sense of solitude. We live our lives in towns and cities, surrounded by other people, crowded and hemmed in, and so every once in a while (actually, as often as possible) it's good to get away, to stand somewhere in the countryside and have no one else in sight. I am too antisocial to enjoy walking up a hill in a line with tens of others; I want it to be my hill, with my view, and I don't want to share it with anyone other than my close friends. Selfish, I know, but that's the way it is. So I was happy to leave Pen y Fan to the masses and instead enjoy getting knee-deep on Gwaun Cerrig Llywdion.

We did go and tag Fan y Big (036205), mostly because we are shockingly immature and find its name hilarious. But otherwise we were happy to stumble about on our plateau, keeping to the centre so as to avoid the people following the line of the paths which skirt the edge. It was hard going pushing through untrodden snow, and walking through the peat hags felt rather eerie, but I was happy. The hags themselves may have been imposing, but the icicles forming on their sides were beautiful. I broke one off to try as a free 'lolly', but didn't get very far through it as, somewhat predictably, it tasted rather too much of grass and peat.

We wandered back through the col and onwards to the eastern edge of the hill, where we had a decision to make: same way down, or different? Obviously we plumped for the different way, which turned out to be a most excellent choice. The first part of the descent was fairly steep and fairly uninteresting, but then the gradient became even more extreme. There was no way we were going to bother walking down that. Not when we could slide! Richard pulled on his friction-reducing waterproof trousers, I jumped into a survival bag, and we were off!

Initially, Richard was having a great time sliding rapidly downwards, but unfortunately for me we had gone at about the same time and it was all I could do not to slam into his back. Even with my elbows jabbed into the ground to try and brake I was gaining on him. Just as I was about to lose control I lurched over to the right, pulling myself clear. I then careered at an incredible speed down the hill, going faster faster faster. This was better than any rollercoaster ride! After what must only have been a handful of seconds, but which felt much longer, the ground flattened out and I spun myself to a halt. That had been amazing! A university group had watched our descent, and I could tell they were impressed. Casually, we packed the survival bag and trousers away and continued on back to the car.