This morning everyone left, thank heavens, and the house is quiet again. The Gentleman Friend and I went to see a matinee of Blank at the Donmar Warehouse, first stopping at one of these newfangled food courts that seem to have erupted everywhere. Similar to Hutong at Lot 10, or a Singaporean hawker centre, I suppose, but much more pricy. We were greeted by about six different over-trained waiters and waitresses, each eager to explain ‘the concept, which we also found printed on the menu. They really should have hired a copywriter for it. We had a poor ceviche, an ok pair of tacos (perhaps unfair to have these in London after just returning from Latin America), a quite nice but too-salty pide, and finally a very tasty croissant filled with ginger custard and roasted peach. This last was very good. The place as a whole seemed to have been designed by a marketing AI, most strikingly the loos. The women’s toilets had no hooks for bags, which just seemed weird to me, and the stalls were so cramped one had to open the door simply to turn around. And I am certainly not very large.
The weather was not nice. Earlier it had been fresh and blustery, now it was rainy and blustery, so we made our way to the Donmar and after collecting our tickets, to Monmouth for coffee until it was time to take our seats.
The play was enjoyable but not engaging as a whole. It’s a set of scenes strung together from a much larger catalogue, all women cast in it, very diverse and playing with their own names. So it was refreshing to, for instance, see a desi actress who was playing a character called Zainab – usually colour-blind casting means that she would have been called Sylvia or something. Not that there was much acknowledgement of diversity in culture, my usual complaint, but baby steps, baby steps. Some of the scenes were very good and some of the performers were excellent. I was surprised to see that there were two very young child actors involved, and later someone involved with the performance told us about the child protection measures they have to take, such as making the children wear headphones during more challenging scenes. Still, it’s a bit weird to me. The climax of the show was a scene written especially for this performance, an upper middle class dinner party of a kind I’ve been to millions of times, to which one of the attendees had brought a new partner who was from a different tabka (to use the Urdu word). I could certainly sympathise with her, as I’ve definitely felt like the one watching these dinner parties and the conversations at them. It made me very glad I was leaving soon. I am finding the UK very trying already. Anyway, the dinner party was very heavyhanded indeed and even had some moralistic speeches.
Afterwards we met a friend associated with the play and this person took us to the Club at the Ivy, where neither of us had been before, and where the clientele lived up to my dearest desires. Behind us was a flotilla of beautifully maintained older women, well Botoxed and blowdried who, when hearing an apologetic (if immaculate) waiter warn her in advance that their card machines weren’t working, demanded to see the manager at one. Behind us was a minor British celebrity, and generally there were little sofas with older men and beautiful younger women talking earnestly. Also an American family with children. As I used the loo I reflected that I might well be following in Emma Thompson’s footprints.