Spiral Notebook: Going up in the world

"Do you think I'm competitive?" I asked. "Oh, yes," she said without the deliberation that a verdict weighing evenly in the balance was due.

"Annoyingly so," she added under her breath and with feeling.

I recalled this brief exchange as I headed for the exit with my Tesco trolley. I found myself in competition with a fellow escapee who had departed their check-out earlier and so had the advantage in our Le Mans style standing start.

Or so they thought. Once I had applied determination, speed and a sly leeward nudge, she was left in my wake, tweety birds circling her defeated noggin. I made fresh air as she was still gulping down the Saturday night fish fug.

Of course, she was an unknowing participant in the race. Indeed, she was bewigged - to cover sparce threads of silver hair - troubled by a stiff hip and lacking any meaningful aerodynamic stylings.

So unfocused was my foe that she had been guided by her middle-aged daughter tugging on the trolley at the front end.
I'd beaten both of them. Result.

If one were to follow the musings of Attenborough and Darwin, one would conclude that such competitiveness was a fundamental essential for existence. Opposable thumbs are not "annoyingly" competitive but the product of generations of humanoids requiring a good grip on a Tesco trolley.

Evolution abhors a vacuum. I create rivals out of bystanders and if none are to hand, I cleft myself in twain and get up in my own grill. You say, disassociative personality disorder, I say life insurance.

And if competitiveness is hard-wired in us all, it follows (as the creators of Skynet would ruefully reflect) that competitiveness would be a facet of the things we create.

Which brings me to my point.

The dulcet-toned lift in my apartment has no rival, unless you include the stairs (which are solitary and peevish and generally not keen on team sports).

The lift is driven by a sense of obligation that is not whetted by performance reviews or the prospect of podium finishes. She cannot edge out a rival, like the Canary Wharf shaft-prowlers, and thus, in the race for life, she is a likely candidate for extinction.

So evolution has found an answer. She has split herself in two. Two voices vie for my attention. They talk over each other. They spar and spit. They do each other down.

"Ground fl-," says one voice. "Doors opening," says the other before the first has chance to finish.

"Doors clo-"

"Go-"

"Going up."

Steady girls. No fighting over me. (Oh, if you must.)

Faulty wiring, says the maintenance man, scoffing at my theory.

Really? Let's take this down to Tesco town, Otis. See exactly what's what.

Spiral Notebook: Fancy a bite to eat?

Somewhere in the lower field, a cockroach crowed.

Murray yawned. It was a short step from his bed to the kitchen which overlooked the lower field.

He was drowsy but he was brought to wakefulness by the attentions of Rex and Felixia.

Rex would leap upon the bed, lick Murray's face and indicate his eagerness for breakfast.

Felixia was more sly. She would find an aperture in the covers and slide in, clawing her master's leg until he could bear the pain no longer.

Then again Felixia was feisty for a naked mole rat and her frequent duels with Rex made her crabby.

While the elephant bacon sizzled on the griddle and the ducklings bubbled in the pan, Murray stared at the sunrise. There was work to do.

His herd of horses, muck spattered but docile in the barn, were heavy with milk. He had separated out the foals only a week earlier and he reckoned that at market he could fetch a tidy sum, such was the metropolitan craze for foal fettucine.

Rex scratched at the back door. He was a working skunk, loving the challenge of rounding up the meat cats that spent the night in the upper field.

In fact Rex had won rosettes at the county show where he had commanded the arena. Murray himself was a mean wrangler of badger, riding his stag with a mix of dexterity and violence.

He loved the show - the duck baiting, pin the club on the seal, the monkey shy, the cow dressage.

Puppy hunting was banned now, of course, but the local meet slipped through a loophole, smearing a fox in puppy grease and chasing that instead. Everybody hates those finger-lickin' vermin.

Murray decanted rhino horn from its tortoise housing onto his rabbit blood pudding. He needed a quick libido boost ahead of his big dinner date with Molly that night. Molly would have no truck with his usual diet.

She was a raregan, only eating animals from the IUCN Red List Of Threatened Species.

Her inexplicable faddiness ruled out his usual dating fall-back: peacock and ham soup, cocker vin with dolphin potatoes, followed by instant whippet.

So now he had been forced to ask George to see if he could land him a couple of tiger/prawns - she loved that surf and turf combo. Maybe a mild chinchilla con carne or something otter. Not PoodleTM.

She didn't drink alcohol so it would be washed down with a nice Oranu-Tango or sparkling Terrier water. Then koala coffee and marzipanda snaps by the open fire.

She was a devil to cook for, all those fads and emotions.

The things we eat and don't eat, laughed Murray to himself, mugging a meerket for its shoulder meat. Made no sense. There ought to be a system.

Stage review: The Agony & Ecstasy Of Steve Jobs

STAGE
The Agony And Ecstasy Of Steve Jobs
Waterloo East Theatre
★★✩✩✩

IN A NUTSHELL
An interesting and important exploration of the exploitation of Chinese workers by Western technology firms loses its way.

REVIEW
Writer and activist Mike Daisey has something very important to say about the link between slave labour in China and our addiction to technological catnip provided by Apple and its spiritual leader Steve Jobs.

His is a mission, a quest, an unrestrained fury. But Daisey wisely subsumes his desire to hector and gives his words to an actor - in this case Edward Fromson.

With discipline restraining his demagoguery, writer and actor begin well, painting pictures of a visit to a phone hacker, creating characters who strip down a MacBook for fun.

It is witty and sharp and they take us with him. All the way to Foxconn, the disturbing Chinese manufacturer of the iPhone where 430,000 inhabit a vast, silent plant, living, working and, often, killing themselves, within its heavily-guarded perimeter.

Bright Chinese youngsters, with degrees, who have escaped their fishing villages, consign themselves to this perilous workhouse. Here, they make iPhones by hand - cheaper than machines - and some inhale the neurotoxins until they're finished at 25.

Then writer Daisey loses it. He cannot help himself. He is just so mad (rightly so). He dumps the theatrical experience, the characters, the portraits, the wit and starts with the lecture.

It doesn't help that the performer, Edward Fromson, sits at a desk and reads mostly from a script (a virus, we're told, wiping out rehearsal time).

He can do the actorly bits but polemics and passion are beyond him.

He steps gingerly from one line to the next, utterly lacking in confidence, not sure if he should be crescendo or diminuendo so settling for a soft, soporific newscaster drone that just, well, peters out.

Until Feb 23, waterlooeast.co.uk.

Spiral Notebook: Good neighbours bad

I often wonder if I found London or London found me.

I visited the country to see a friend at the weekend but she had last-minute plans on the first evening. "Pick the keys up at No.7," she said. "You've met them before. It's Daniel and Amanda. He's a broker and she works in a nursing home."

I had met them before. At a village bonfire gathering. But I couldn't place them because, well, you don't do you? There are 8.2million of us in London, no point cluttering the hard drive.

"If it's Daniel* say 'hi Daniel'. If it's Amanda say 'hi Amanda'." (These instructions are neither patronising nor superfluous. She knows me well.) "Amanda makes the most amazing hard apple cider. She'll invite you in for a glass. Be nice. Say yes."

This bothered me. Much the better option was to scale the cottage walls via trellis and tenuous ivy, reach the tiny bathroom window that would scrap leg and tear trouser and forward roll into a bath-tub of doom.

Even at the heavy end of the cider spectrum, things did not look good.

My neighbours don't even share the same tongue let alone bottle. Those awkward lift silences? That's our entire lives in London. In a crowded city, you just want to be alone with your thoughts.

I shouldn't have worried. Your face becomes you. I have a London face now. You don't invite me in, not for hard apple cider, not without a warrant.

The keys were swapped in a jiffy and I had no chance at a "Hi Amanda" even if such an greeting were within my repertoire of fake sincerity.

My friend is made for the country. She could nip into a baker's, emerge with a bloomer, a low-down on the baker's love life, a confession that he wanted to be a candlestick maker all along and a pledge that right now - right now - he's shedding the apron and reaching for the tallow.

She has a galvanising aspect, a priestly confessor's face and a convivial air that suggests conversation, while not efficient, is also not pointless.

That's the kind of person she is. I'm the other person.

I'd emerge from a baker's with no bread. Bakers? A whole shop just for selling bread? WTF? We ain't in Tesco Express any more Toto.

I'm better in London. Earbuds, isolation, online, cold shoulder and simmering resentment. Should community break out, it's only because of riots, or fire, or snow, or apocalypse not because, you know, it might be nice. *shudders*

And once the emergency passes, we move on, faintly embarrassed at our lapse. Like a drunken one night stand. Or Britain after Diana.

We can't go back to how it was, so let's not go there in the first place is our thinking. London. I love it.

* Names have been changed because, frankly, I've forgotten the real ones.

Film review: Hitchcock (12A)

FILM
Hitchcock
(12A) 98mins
★★★✩✩

IN A NUTSHELL
An amusing take on Alfred Hitchcock is over-reliant on non-existent menace and barely-there suspense.

REVIEW
Standing outside the auditorium of one of the few screens where Psycho was allowed to play, an arm-waving Alfred Hitchcock conducts the audience within.

Listening through the door, he raises them to a crescendo of screams, he cues the stabbing violins and punches in the next round of screeching. He is in total command of his material, total command of his audience.

The same cannot be said for the enjoyable but disjointed Hitchcock, which tells of the making of his seminal film and his relationship with Alma Reville, his underappreciated wife and collaborator.

The book on which this movie is based is an exhaustive slog through the creative process and the producers admitted the first challenge was to bring a tautness to the work.

Perhaps they should have stuck to the index and a few footnotes. Writer John J McLaughlin and director Sacha Gervasi try different avenues into the core of the story but never have the courage of their convictions.

The dry, droll humorous approach is by far the most effective - it is in keeping with Hitchcock's delicious black humour - but others come and go like the fridge Post-Its of a hesitant therapist.

We have some nightmare sequences, a suggestion of paranoia, pseudo madness, conversations with a phantom Ed Gein, (the real-life model for Norman Bates) but Hitch doesn't lend himself to a dark Lector-type investigation (even though Anthony Hopkins is on hand to provide voice and menace).

That is not to say the film is not fun. It's tremendous fun. But not fun for long enough or often enough.

Anthony Hopkins bathes in the role of the most famous director in movieland, licking his rubbery lips at the prospect of taking on the Hollywood establishment. The behind-the-scenes stuff is invested with period charm, authenticity and insight.

Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh and Jessica Biel as Vera Miles go mad in the dressing-up box and the nod and a wink to the audience is delightfully played with the director addressing us, the cinema audience, as he would before his TV specials.

With Hopkins dumping words like they're cockney tree stumps, Helen Mirren has to do the heavy-lifting on the acting front. As usual, she is superb, with the right level of brittle schoolma'am weariness.

Together they are great too. The chemistry suggests a long marriage, forgiving and scornful. The script tries to suggest dark undercurrents and psychological complexity but from the outside it looks very much like garden variety over-familiarity.

Hitchcock once said: "Film should be stronger than reason." Someone thought way too hard about this.

Stage review: Quartermaine's Terms, Wyndham's

STAGE
Quartermaine's Terms
Wyndham's Theatre
★★★✩✩

IN A NUTSHELL
This well-executed and bleak tale of loneliness and English reticence is a necessarily subdued performance by Rowan Atkinson

REVIEW
St John Quartermaine, the gnomic and rooted teacher at Cull Loomis School of English for Foreigners, is as one with his staff room chair.

Few actors could instil such passivity with such presence and potential as Rowan Atkinson.

An Aardman smile, signifying nothing, a waspish swash of those U-bend wrists, a darting tongue moistening lips, Atkinson in repose is as others are at the height of their athleticism.

But the unprepossessing Quartermaine is a disaster as a teacher, poor as a friend and empty as a vessel. No Mr Chips then, our Mr Bean.

Simon Gray's 1981 study of '60s loneliness leaves questions unanswered - has he a hinterland? Is he cultivating his vacancy? Is he pitiable or content? He does little to alleviate the solitude but his colleagues are hardly an advert for conviviality.

He sits as a fulcrum while around him swirl infidelities, sadnesses, depression and frustration, presented to him like apperitifs for a meal he will never consume.

Atkinson is front and centre, but in his absence, this is an ensemble piece.

Conleth Hill is amusing as the clownish Henry, while Matthew Cottle is nicely anguished as a wannabe writer. Felicity Montagu as a frustrated spinster is moving, Malcolm Sinclair, grandly pompous, Will Keen, wincingly suburban and Louise Ford sharply buttoned-up.

Director Richard Eyre presents them framed, as in a portrait, each seeking a keener resolution of themselves.

This all moves towards an inevitably bleak conclusion, via farce, melodrama, and comedy but the end never entirely justifies the means.

The play is brilliantly constructed but, like Quartermaine himself, mostly irrelevant and rarely moving.

Until April 13, go to quartermainesterms.com.

Film review: Flight (15)

FILM
Flight
(15) 138mins
★★★✩✩

IN A NUTSHELL
Denzel Washington is head and shoulders above the story he inhabits, which, despite bells and whistles, is a story about a self-pitying drunk.

REVIEW
Despite a terrifying plane crash that sees hero pilot Whip Whitaker lauded for his life-saving actions, this is not a conventional disaster movie.

That is because the disaster at its heart is Whitaker himself. The wreckage is not a trail of gnarled metal ploughed into a field in Atlanta but a string of neglected loved ones who have long since given up on the veteran pilot.

An anachronism of flight jargon results in talk of "lost souls" rather than fatal casualties. They mean the same thing, but not to Whip who lives, but heartlessly, and with demons.

For William "Whip" Whitaker is an alcoholic. And the heroism at the start of the movie is an unfortunate piece of luck that looks likely to keep his well-constructed deceptions in order.

Director Robert Zemeckis makes the terror of the crash real and impressive. But, this event, which book-ends the film, is a sideshow.

Ultimately, this is a heavy-handed tale about a drunk, an unappealing anti-hero who has exhausted the patience and loyalty of his friends and colleagues and is running out of time.

As investigators begin to probe how the accident happened, so John Gaitlin's sharp script - drawn from his own experiences of addiction - asks how it didn't happen before. Whitaker is a whip-and-top, bouncing wildly from one near-miss to the next.

Zemeckis said: "The suspense in the movie comes from the uncertainty of what the characters are going to do, how they are going to respond. The anticipation comes from not knowing what the characters will do from scene to scene."

Victims of his sozzled, pitiful charm include Nicole, a recovering addict played with touching vulnerability by Kelly Reilly, and union rep Charlie Anderson (Bruce Greenwood) who stands by his pal long after he's lost the right to ask anyone for anything.

There are few people who can hover between good and bad and keep us guessing like Denzel Washington, who takes a third Oscar nomination for his journey into the heart of darkness.

We've seen Washington in uniform before, with moral authority and courage, we've seen him as an everyman against the odds, and we've seen him as a fast-dealing shyster. We've seen that winning, thousand watt smile a thousand times.

He calls on all these attributes to make Whip complex, compelling and, occasionally, sympathetic character.

This is all is to his great credit because Whip, of course, is not complex. He is a boorish, cruel drunk, steeped in the ways of denial and always, always taking the path of least resistance, especially if it leads to a vodka bottle.

The movie is flawed because of this. We get the thrill of a plane crash. We get the brief witness stand drama but at its heart, this is a film about a drunk, being drunk, occasionally trying not to be drunk but conceding to drunkenness too often to be of any use.

Stage review: Di And Viv And Rose, Hampstead

STAGE
Di And Viv And Rose
Hampstead Theatre
★★★★✩

IN A NUTSHELL
Great performances and goodwill paper over any cracks in Amelia Bullmore's lively ode to female friendship.

REVIEW
Viewed from sufficient distance, the planet is featureless. The crevices and eddies of the surface are invisible and inexplicable to an alien.

And such it is with men viewing female friendships. We are clueless outsiders, blindly marking subtleties we cannot fathom. We are still bitching about A when A has been forgiven. We're busy praising B's steadfastness as B heads to cold exile.

Female friendship has a high drag coefficient, swift and slick, while men's sensibilities on the matter are more like a portly buffalo in a headwind.

Di And Viv And Rose does not illuminate the underpinning of such friendships but does present the reason they are worth fighting for. Mutual memories make meaning.

We follow the bustling threesome from an '80s uni house share through the grubby doings of everyday life for the next 27 years - all set to a cracking soundtrack.

Separations, sadness, sex, no sex and men attempt to slice and dice the triumvirate but their bond is not lightly broken.

Writer Amelia Bullmore pulls predictable plot levers to test their loyalties and the soapy traumas come too thick and fast but it's all done with such generous spirit and at such speed that cackling, crying and cluelessness roll into a single bubble of glee.

The cast are a joy. Anna Maxwell Martin is utterly beguiling as the gently promiscuous Rose but there are engaging performances from Tamzin Outhwaite as lesbian Di and Gina McKee as feminist-lite Viv.

There is little here that will linger and it's certainly not without flaws but, like Space Dust and Love Cats, it's all delightfully poppy.

Until Feb 23. Go to hampsteadtheatre.com.

An alarming time

There were a number of fiddly cross-matched plans I was due to execute the next morning, all reliant on there not being a sticky white meringue atop the railways of southern England.

So it was unsurprising that, come the middle of the night, an alarm sounded in my head. Or so I thought.

Once I had cleared my mind of buzzing Plan Bs, it turned out the alarm was real, emanating from a neighbour's flat.

My first thought was "drunken midnight sausage sandwich".

I never thought fire. Who ever thinks fire? I think heartless snack makers, marinated in Mackeson's, drifting off to Poker TV as sausages blacken in the grill.

(It is to the credit of the London Fire Brigade that, despite the cuts, they do not assume likewise.)

A sleepless night ensued. The sound was only lessened by toilet paper in the ears and a pillow over the head - not the way I dispatched the stout-infused sausage scorcher, you understand, but how I eased the pulsing irritation.

The day's plans thwarted by snow, I made myself at home. As did the alarm, which nestled irksomely in the aural milieu like a herniated fox at the breakfast table.

Contacting the estate manager, I kept silent about my sausage theory, which was unlikely to promote the door-splintering response I required.

Instead, I played upon the vision of smouldering corpses lying undetected while flames probed and prodded at neighbouring walls.

Someone should investigate, I said. He would see what he could do, he said.

By early afternoon, the alarm stopped. Silent applause. For it is a remarkable task, stopping a smoke alarm intent on alarming - requiring tenacity, guile and, generally, a hammer.

Alarms are connected to the mains and back-up batteries and yet when yanked violently free from both they continue to chirrup, like a beaten boxer who won't stay down.

It is as though the ready flow of electricity and dustballs of DNA have shocked into life a new species of highly-strung yelping roof turtle.

After the bomb, it will be the cockroaches and these nervy shell-topped terrors inheriting the earth, gorging on immolated pork products.

So the alarm stopped. Or did it? The high-pitched tone had now smuggled its way into the bandwidth of my tinnitus, acquired by years of nightclubs, rock gigs and roller coasters.

I couldn't be sure. I applied toilet paper and pillow again and still it was there, just above the hum left by Noel Gallagher at Knebworth sometime in 1996.

I hear it now. Real or imagined? I shall investigate once I've made myself a nice sausage sandwich.

Stage review: The Judas Kiss, Duke of York's

STAGE
The Judas Kiss
Duke of York's
★★★★★

IN A NUTSHELL
Rupert Everett is on blistering form in David Hare's witty and perceptive examination of the woes of Oscar Wilde.

REVIEW
For most of this absorbing masterwork, Rupert Everett's Oscar Wilde is seated. Or, more likely, slumped, deflated, a sack of clothes beneath a blubbery face.

He was not an old man during the course of the play's events - pre-arrest, post-jail - but he has an old man's physique, gait and prospects.

Should he take a deep breath and bellow away the gloom all would be well, it seems. But he sips just enough oxygen (and brandy) to fuel his brain and his quips and nothing more.

This gauche and tottering clown is in deliberate contrast to his fiendish and fierce young lover, Alfred Douglas, who is the very essence of youth - energetic, arrogant, petulant, cruel, passionate and, usually, plotting.

How much Bosie knows of himself - that his precocious power plays are merely childish goads to his family - is difficult to tell. But perhaps it is his vitality in conflict that leaves jaded Wilde enraptured, against all advice.

That advice comes from staunch friend Robert Ross (Cal MacAninch) who believes Wilde must distance himself from the young man to restore his fortunes.

Instead, says David Hare through an enthralling and clever script, it is for the preservation of his credo, for art and beauty, that Wilde chooses to float, impotently, towards ignominy.

For beauty encapsulated by Bosie, of course. And, for art, also, because he recognises that he is caught up in a narrative and his story demands a fittingly tragic end.

Everett is simply enormous as Wilde. Physically, yes, but psychologically too.

Forget the idle bon mots that trip from both actor and acted, this Wilde is infuriating, rigorous and mournful (but never sentimental). Everett marries the stoic curmudgeon to the rich prancing wit and hides all behind a haunted mask.

Freddie Fox finds enough in Bosie to make his patter convincing, to himself at least.

He exudes great presence and expends great energy to appear sincere and it is not inconceivable that this preening sulk would entrance the outsider Wilde.

The staging in Neil Armfield's production is ungainly and the nudity distracting but we are left, thankfully, with the retina scar of Everett's epic stillness - capturing a man broken but never quite defeated.

Until April 6, go to judaskiss.co.uk.

Film review: Lincoln (12A)

FILM
Lincoln
(12A) 150mins
★★★✩✩

IN A NUTSHELL
Daniel Day-Lewis is towering as Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg's pernickety take on the President's battle against the slave trade.

REVIEW
The Gettysburg Address is recited casually back at its author by muddy soldiers presenting their purpose for doing battle. From the outset, this is a lesson in undercutting the myth of Abraham Lincoln.

A biopic would have seen the figurehead in moments of triumph, scooping up the wounded and leading a nation, tattered flag in hand.

Spielberg and writer Tony Kushner have, instead, focussed on the last few months of his life as he engaged in the distasteful but necessary horse-trading required to see through the 13th amendment, abolishing slavery and ending the Civil War.

This, as aficionados of The West Wing would testify is a "process story". And aficionados of The West Wing will be the most eager supporters of this narrative tack.

In 1994 fictional Jed Bartlet commissions Josh Lynam to get him the votes. In 1865, Lincoln commissions the Secretary of State's unsavoury wheeler-dealers to issue bribes, jobs and jabs to bring over the waverers.

Deliberately dour and low-key, the movie is enlivened by speeches but nevertheless remains throughout more Commons tea-room than Fort Sumter.

Daniel Day-Lewis towers over the film. He is Professor Yaffle, stooped, mannered, wooden (in movement) but mellifluous and wise to his bones.

Above all, he is a man on a mission, not the model for a memorial. He infuriates his wife, scolds his son, favours another, mourns for a third and wants to get the numbers to work come what may.

He is prepared to prolong war to seal the deal and prepared to obfuscate to hide that discomforting fact.

Lovely cameos from the likes of James Spader, Jared Harrison, Sally Fields, David Strathairn and, most wonderfully, the cantankerous abolitionist Thaddeaus Stevens, as played by Tommy Lee Jones, illuminate the candle-lit dark while eloquence takes party rancour towards poetry.

But, still, that is the lot of the lengthy film. Vote-counting, shin-kicking and U-bend beards. The Thick Of It in the gloaming.

Spielberg, a man of images, lets Tony Kushner's rich and illustrious words do the work while Doris Kearns Goodwin's in-depth research carries the history lesson.

The director is left to create crescent moons from faces half in shade; to imbue brief battle scenes with Saving Private Ryan-esque authenticity; and to shoot Washington as Legoland.

Nation building is not all glory and principle. It is mucky compromise in smoke-filled rooms by roughnecks and dreamers who should know better.

Spielberg makes that film impeccably. Whether that is the right film to make is another question.