Meet the Author

We went along to see Liberty on the other night. Direct from Shakespeare’s Globe, it was as near as I’m going to get to there this year.

A new play by Glyn Maxwell, based on a novel by Anatole France (no, I’d never heard of him either), it’s the story of a sub-Robespierre revolutionary and his journey from idealist to supporter of the ‘Terror’. As a play, it was very ‘wordy’, but enjoyable, and there were some very strong performances, from Kirsty Besterman as an actress from the National (bet they had fun with that on the South Bank – it fell a bit flat in York!), and John Bett as an ex-Duke.

At the interval, we had a bit of a wager on who was for the chop. It’s a measure of it’s unpredictability in that we got it wrong in some cases. I was very disappointed with the size of the audience, but they did give the cast a warm reception. It’s only on for three days, so I’d expected a better turn out, but then I guess it’s quite a hard sell. I’m sure Flashdance, the Musical is doing much better business down the road at the Opera House.

Afterwards, rather than stay in the theatre bar, we went to the Lion and Lamb, which has recently opened. Corinne and I had tried to get in a few weeks ago, but couldn’t find a seat, but this time we found a separate room overlooking the street. Decorated with lanterns, and old prints, with huge wooden tables and pew like seats, we commented that we could still be in the play.

The next thing we saw was the actors entering the room, and sitting at the next table. From overheard comments, it seemed they felt at home too. We exchanged a few comments with them and returned to our conversation. A few minutes later, we heard the actors going ‘author, author’ when another man entered. No prizes for guessing who he was then (and no prizes for guessing that they wanted this to be noticed)!

He turned to us as asked what we thought of the play. It was one of those moments where you don’t quite know what to say. You can’t rave about it, but it was interesting, and had some good characters. The theatre snob in me paused for a moment. The others were less troubled by this and were complementary.

Turning to me, he asked ‘did you find it dense, and hard to follow?’

‘No, not at all – but then I do know quite a lot about the French Revolution*’

*Thanks to A level History all those years ago – so ‘quite a lot’ is perhaps a bit excessive.