The Tempestuous

The Tempestuous is described as “A Shrew’d new comedy by Will Shakespeare and Penny Ashton”. Penny Ashton I’ve heard of, but who’s this other fella? It's currently showing at Circa Theatre.

Yes, Ms. Ashton is back! This time working in collaboration with William Shakespeare. Those of you with long memories may recall that she has worked with Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility, Austen Found, Promise and Promiscuity), and also Charles Dickens (Olive Copperbottom), and also that we’ve been to see all of these shows, as well as listen to her present at Te Papa. We’re definitely fans of her work, and with her taking on Shakespeare, this is definitely a must-see.

In the ordinary course of events we’d wait until Nicola was allocated a night of ushering at Circa, and I’d go along that night. However, Ashton is a huge draw card and I couldn’t risk the possibility of the show being sold out on the night she was working, so we booked ourselves in to go and see it on a non-working night. It did of course subsequently transpire that Nicola will be ushering later on in the run so she’ll get to see the show twice.

Although we’d arrived early with the intention of dining at the in-house facilities, these were somewhat thwarted by the fact that the kitchen is currently closed as they complete the rebuild of the theatre. All they had was cabinet food, including some pies. We considered going out elsewhere, but (a) we hadn’t booked, and (b) it was raining, so we contented ourselves with said pie and a muffin.

Circa Two now has allocated seating – it used to be a mad scramble for the best places - and as I’d booked early we were centre in the second row. As the show’s blurb hints, it’s loosely based on The Taming Of The Shrew, in that it involves a woman who does not wish to be wed, and certainly not wed to Duke Olivano, the candidate picked for her by her uncle Enzo, now king of Sicily. There’s a lot of allusions to other Shakespearean plays, with witches abounding, murders and poisonings, cross-dressing, a fool and a competition. Penny Ashton sings and dances all the roles, putting on different voices, affectations and poses, even a false moustache, to indicate who she is playing each time. This includes the main character, Rosa, her mother, Queen Carlotta, her father and her uncle; three suitors; a fool, a baker, and a nurse; and the witches. At one stage she co-opts two audience members into her coven to mix a magic potion; and later, brings another on stage to be one of the suitors, unfortunately knocked out in the first round of the game-show competition devised to select her husband, called “The Chaste”.

Shakespearean language, filthy jokes and modern references also abound (there’s a lot of abounding going on) and the whole jolly jape lasts around 90 minutes in a non-stop whirligig of action, drama and fun, (nearly) all in rhyming iambic pentametric verse! Go and see it if you can!

 At the end of the show Penny was outside selling merch, notably the now-infamous fridge magnets (or “meat safe magnets” as they are designated in the programme), and tea towels.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry is a national treasure, and a very funny actor, presenter, writer and personality. But is he an actual comedian? He’s touring New Zealand at the moment with his one-man show, but it’s not exactly stand-up comedy. I guess you’d call him a raconteur. We thought we’d go and see his show. 

But first, as always, dinner. The show started at 8:00pm so we had plenty of time, and I’d booked us well in advance so that we could go along to Dragonfly, as we haven’t been there in a while. It’s a pan-Asian place with the usual shared plates ethos. I’d arrived a bit ahead of time as Nicola was finishing up her secretarying at Friends of Te Papa, so ordered a cocktail whilst waiting. We then went for seared sesame tuna, coconut squid, sticky pork belly and salmon two ways – all very delicious; and followed with chocolate & coffee mousse and panna cotta.

We made our way across to the St James Theatre, and took our seats. The show was advertised as lasting 2 hours, with an interval between 8:50 and 9:10pm. This was completely wrong.

In the first half, he came on stage, took his seat, and proceeded to tell us about his childhood growing up in a country house in Norfolk, miles (12 of them!) from the nearest city, and his time at prep school and then at public school. This included various anecdotes about family and fitting in at school (he didn’t), and his discovery and early love of Oscar Wilde; he then moved on to how he was expelled from school, and all subsequent schools he attended, and the crimes he committed along the way. The story is both horrifying and hilarious. Somehow he gained a scholarship to Cambridge University where he met first Emma Thompson, then Hugh Laurie. These meetings changed his life in a way he completely didn’t expect, and he then regaled us with stories about his life on the road and acting and performing as a comedian, and how he’d once been inveigled into reading for the audio book edition of some children’s story.

All this took us up to around 9:30pm. We then broke for an interval. He had enjoined us to scan the QR codes liberally festooned about the theatre, which lead one to a site on which you can pose questions, and it was to these that he responded in the second half of the show. This included stories about celebrity gossip, even royal gossip when (then) Prince Charles came to visit, and then took on a more serious and darker tone as he discussed mental health issues, both his own and those of other people. He discussed his previous visits to New Zealand and working with Peter Jackson on The Hobbit. He also gave us a reading from one of his books, Odyssey, a modern reworking of an old story. He also spent a bit of time talking about his interaction with Steve Jobs of Apple, and also his old friend Douglas Adams.

Another 80 minutes flew past, and it was well after 11 o’clock by the time we were released into the spring night. Definitely a worthwhile show.

 

Lemon Marmalade

When life gives you lemons…

I’ve made marmalade in the past, from oranges, grapefruit and even lemons. I turned to trusty Uncle Google for a recipe, and there seemed to be conflicting messages about lemon to sugar to water ratio, and also how to extract the pectin. So I’m going it alone. Let’s see how my recipe works:

1kg lemons

2kg sugar

2l water

I sliced and removed the pith and pips from the lemons, and put them in the water to soak overnight. To extract the pectin from the pith and pips I placed them in a small sieve in a small container of water. Most of the recipe books say “place the pith and pips in a small muslin bag” but who has those lying about the house? I mean, really? Hopefully this will work instead. And yes, the water is included in the 2l of water mentioned above. 

The next day, I added the pectin-rich water to the mix, and boiled the whole lot up for 1½ hours. At this stage it’s wise to put a saucer in the fridge for your set testing. I then added the sugar. At this point I put the jars into the oven to sterilise. Then I returned it to a fast boil for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally to stop it catching on the bottom of the pan; and started testing for a set by putting a small amount on the saucer, letting it cool, and seeing if it wrinkles when you push it with a spoon – the classic way to check that it will solidify when it’s cooled. After three goes, it set, so total cook time was 2¼ hours. 

I let the mix cool down a bit before putting it into jars, which is always a messy business…for some reason some of it always dribbles down the outside of the jar. It made six jars. 

Crowded House

Crowded House last performed in Wellington in 2021 in a concert delayed by pandemia, after reforming a couple of years before (checks notes) back in 2019. We went along to see them then. Their second album since reforming, Gravity Stairs, was released earlier this year and they are now touring this album. They’re playing the TSB Arena in Wellington, so of course we got tickets to go see them.

 

Did I say “got tickets”? Therein lies a tale. Normally, the process for getting tickets is: go on ticketbastard, buy tickets, download tickets to Google wallet…job done. But Crowded House have, both this time and last time, issued souvenir tickets for you to stick in your scrapbook or whatever. They look like this: 

All well and good, but on the morning of the gig, I received the customary “important information about your concert” email from Ticketbastard, and I thought I’d better download my tickets, forgetting that they were sent by mail. I found this out as I checked my account. And, on the morning of the gig, no sign of any tickets! Contacting Ticketbastard is necessarily hard, as they don’t want you bothering them once they’ve got your money, but I persisted with their dreadful hold music until I got through to someone. They assured me that the tickets had been sent, and that they would email me a copy anyway, and if that didn’t arrive in time I’d be able to pick up ordinary tickets at the box office at TSB Arena by giving them my receipt number. OK then.

Here’s what actually happened: the email never arrived. The tickets did, in the Saturday morning post, which is cutting it a bit fine if you ask me, given the reliability of NZ Post. Anway, we had tickets.

I’d booked dinner at Bin44 as I’d been a bit remiss about booking things early. It’s an OK pub-grub style diner, with burgers and the like. I had a Korean chicken burger and Nicola went for the prawn risotto.

Across Queen’s Wharf to get to the TSB Arena and we arrived in time to watch the support act, Mel Parsons. She’s actually been around for quite a while, releasing six albums in the process. She performed a half hour set to sporadic polite applause.

Then on came the main event, preceded by Bowie’s Five Years over the speakers…because they reformed in 2019? Maybe. The set list contained quite a lot from the new album, naturally, and also some from albums I don’t have so there was a bit of unfamiliar material in there as well. But they soon got down to the classics and gave us all the old faves as well. 

And, as ever, when they came back on for an encore, they gave us a proper encore – five songs in total, four classic crowd-pleasers and one from the new album, and of course finishing up with the inevitable Better Be Home Soon. This may have been due to the fact that they’d deviated from the original set list when they started playing requests from the crowd towards the end of their performance, as some of those encore songs were probably scheduled before the break. The set list in full can be found here.