No Shit, Sherlock!

The Hound Of The Baskervilles is probably the most famous Sherlock Holmes story. If you don’t know the story, well, see, there’s this dog, right…oh, go and read it! This version (for there are many) is a new adaptation for the stage by Clive Francis.

First, of course, there is the important question of where to go for dinner beforehand. Last week, those good chaps at Logan Brown emailed me with a  special pre-theatre bistro offer…but sadly, that was last week, and this week no such offer was forthcoming. So I abandoned my Logan Brown-ward thoughts and consulted my Entertainment Book for inspiration. We decided to visit Hummingbird on Courtenay Place as we’ve not been there in a while and it looks like they’ve got a revamped menu.  

This adaptation is for four actors, all of whom play Dr. Watson, and share the rest of the parts between them. So, for example, when only Watson and Holmes are in a scene, there are in fact three Dr. Watsons on stage, sometimes sharing the dialogue, sometimes doing it all together. Then one of them will nip offstage to do a costume change to become another character – Mrs. Hudson, say, or Barrymore the butler. All of them got the opportunity to play one of the female characters, with slightly disconcerting results!


Another aspect of the production is the back projection, which, as well as being used for scene changes, provides the animation of the hound itself, with blazing eyes and mouth.

The story is pretty faithful to the original, with boot thefts, beards and escaped convicts on the moors.

Matterhorn

Matterhorn has long been a bastion of the Wellington dining scene. It regularly features in the world’s best bars list. Now the chef who took the restaurant to pre-eminence in the noughties has returned, and signalled a change away from the more casual dining and "sharing plates" that it has become, to bring it back to its former glory. Importantly, you can now once again book a table.

So we booked a table for a mid-week dinner. We met up and had cocktails to start, then both selected from the raw entrée menu – tuna with wasabi, hijiki and yuzu  for Nicola, whilst I went for Scandinavian salmon, served with sour cream and cucumber sorbet.

We followed this with the catch of the day and beef rump/beef cheek. The cheek had been slow-cooked for, well, days I suspect – falling apart and tender and juicy, whilst the rump was cooked rare. It was served with a creamy caramelised garlic puree, which was delicious. Nicola’s fish – terakihi – was done with crab and  shellfish, wrapped in leek. This is modern New Zealand cooking at its best.

Afterwards I went for the inevitable chocolate ganache, served with raspberries, liquorice sauce and milk sorbet, and Nicola had the strawberries with goat fromage frais and mint ice cream.

And with an Entertainment discount, it all came to a  reasonable price. It’s nice to know that it’s back, and bookable, and I’m sure we’ll be back for more. 

Limboland

Bill Bailey has returned to New Zealand to tour his latest show, "Limboland".  Unfortunately, Nicola is currently representing her country at an international event in Baltimore, so was unable to attend. Would I let this deter me? No, I would not, and I was accompanied by Siobhan, a friend from dancing.

First, dinner. I consulted my Entertainment Book and decided that Shed 5 would be the optimal dining experience before the show. Shed 5 is part of Simon Gault’s Wellington empire, and has recently (-ish) halved in size to accommodate his new venture, Crab Shack, which now occupies half the building and is also a very nice place to dine…but it’s more casual, and also they don’t take bookings, so as we were on a schedule, Shed 5 got the vote. The menu is 90% fish-based, so we had fish – snapper and tuna, respectively, with salads for starters. It was, as expected, high quality nosh.

We toddled down to the Michael Fowler Centre in time to be seated, and then Bill Bailey came on. If you’ve ever seen Bill Bailey, you’ll know that his show is a mixture of comedy, ramblings, and musical interludes. Belgians featured heavily, as did British self-deprecation, when he compared how an American would describe their weekends (“Awesome!”) compared to how a Brit would (“not too bad, all things considered”). With brief interludes for music (Abba’s “Waterloo” in the style of Rammstein, “Wrecking Ball” by Kraftwerk…really, he’s got a thing about Kraftwerk, as you’ll know if you’ve ever seen this), and why certain accents don’t work in death metal. There was also a long involved story about a goose, which tied in with his concern for animal conservation. That it also included armed undercover policemen should come as no surprise, really.

I left the theatre with tears rolling down my face. Not too bad, all things considered.

Isaac's Eye

In the Dominion Post, there was an article about Isaac's Eye, a new play about Isaac Newton. At the end of the article it said "Tomorrow until 15th November". How strange, I thought, I'm sure I booked it for tonight. So I checked my email booking confirmation, and sure enough, it said 17th October. I checked the theatre's website, which also said 18th October. Curiouser and curiouser, I thought. I called the theatre. It turns out that tonight was the preview show, and yes, it's definitely on. Phew!

We went to Muse On Allen for their pre-theatre menu, as they had recently been advertised in the Entertainment Book with a new offer for this very thing. Now, whilst their menu on the internet shows a choice of chicken or fish, they'd changed it slightly. the choice of starter was now chicken or lamb, and the mains were lamb or chicken. So I had chicken and lamb, and Nicola had lamb and chicken. A little more variety wouldn't have gone amiss. We both had pineapple for pudding.

A quick walk across to the Circa Theatre, and we were there in plenty of time for the start. We were in Circa 2, the smaller, studio theatre. The actors were all on stage before the play begins. The set was made up of a series of black-painted walls, on which were chalk drawings of various sets: an external view along a tree-lined road, with a city in the distance; internal views of a library and an apothecary shop. Parts of the wall were covered in drawings relating to Newton's work, particularly in relation to light.

The play starts with the narrator, Sam, telling us that some of the events are true, and some are not. To help us, he says he will write anything that's true on the walls, and starts off by giving us some examples, such as the fact that Isaac's hair turned white at a very early age, when he was in his twenties. At this point he sprinkles chalk dust over Isaac's head to give him white hair.

The play covers the supposed interaction between Newton, Robert Hooke and Catherine Storer, an apothecary in Woolsthorpe, where Newton lived. She was Newton's...what? friend, possibly lover. Catherine wants to marry Newton, but he hasn't proposed; he also harbours ambitions to become a fellow at Trinity College, which forbids its fellows from marrying.

But first he must become a member of the Royal Society, and to that end, he contacts Robert Hooke, who is Curator Of The Experiments, and also knew Catherine's father.

A great deal of the play is about this meeting, and its consequences and aftermath. Sam doesn't chalk any of these events on the blackboard so we know that it's all fiction - although he does occasionally interject with some true stuff.

The play is delivered in a modern language and style - even down to Newton's little "yay!"s when someone agrees with him, and also deliberately breaks down the "fourth wall" with Sam directly addressing the audience.

Go see it if it's on near you.

The Lead Wait

On a chilly Friday evening in Wellington, we went to St John’s Bar and Restaurant for a pre-theatre dinner. This was assisted by our good friends at the Entertainment Book, who helpfully took care of one of the main courses. I had a Chinese duck pancake to start, followed by Wagyu steak, and Nicola had a crayfish raviolo and pork belly with scallops. All very nice, and a waitress who knew about wine, to boot. We didn’t linger for dessert and coffees, as we had a show to see.

Next door at the Circa Theatre, we’d booked to see The Lead Wait. This is an NZ play first produced in the 1990s, now having a revival. It centres around four characters and the relationships between them – some of which are explicit, others only hinted at. It also involves all four characters undressing and having a bath at various points during the play. The set is a house in the midst of renovation – to the extent that the bathroom door and walls have been removed – I leave the rest to your imagination (something that we were not required to do)! It also involved one of the characters gutting and cooking a fish on a griddle, so our clothes will probably smell of fish now.

It all ended rather abruptly and we left in a somewhat confused state of mind about the meaning of the final line, worrying about the death of the canary, and wondering what it all meant.

Culture Vulture

On Wednesday night we headed to the Downstage Theatre for our first taste of New Zealand’s Thespian arts…viz, their production of The Spy Who Wouldn’t Die Again. (Watch this, it's a Youtube thingy.) This is a spoof James Bond (durr!) done with a particularly NZ flavour, and included such memorable characters as Gerald Bloke, and Spare Person. It was lighthearted and quite funny, with a few LOL moments and some jokes that clearly referred to Kiwiana that went right over our heads (who *was* that suited man?)

Afterwards we went for dinner at Hippopotamus, the restaurant inside the Museum Hotel, and one of Wellington’s finer fine dining restaurants. It contains some frankly odd décor – can’t make up its mind whether to be olde worlde or modern – but the food was good, nay, excellent. As usual I have some gripes about the service – something that NZ just doesn’t seem to get right, for reasons unknown.

We have joined an organisation called the Scientologists…nah, just kidding! We’ve joined an organisation called the Entertainment Book, which gives discounts on restaurants from fine dining to takeaways, as well as entertainment, activities, days out, hotels, car hire, all that kind of thing. This was done through Nicola’s choir, and we used it to good effect at Hippopotamus, almost recouping the cost of joining in one fell swoop! One more dinner and we’ll be in profit, and from then on the world is the seafood mollusc or arthropod of our choice. We shall continue our exploration of the Wellington dining scene, and report back here. Hopefully I’ll find somewhere that measures up to my exacting standards (other than Matterhorn, which has so far been faultless).