Tom At The Farm

“In Ted Huffman's hands Tosca is so much more than a "shabby little shocker" and if it is "a drama of coarse emotional events, without poetry" that is almost certainly what gives it so much bite. Within that simplified and exaggerated storyline was all the space Puccini needed to pack in powerful emotion, and the audience are taken through envy, jealousy, desire, torture, attempted rape and even murder, followed (of course, this is Puccini after all) by true love perfectly juxtaposed against tragedy and death. Playing with archetypes, Tosca uses violence, shock and horror to capture the audience's attention, much in the same way as Caravaggio or Quentin Tarantino and yet there was an exquisite harmony to this production, which captivated the audience from the start. Despite the last-minute substitution, Lucio Gallo was a masterful Scarpia, and the way in which Atalla Ayan's Mario and Caitlin Gotimer's Tosca sang together was practised and superb. Was there a dry eye in the house? Before the performance guests valiantly struggled for shade in the magnificent but parched garden, keeping up the picnicking tradition; fortunately the situation had mellowed by the time the long interval arrived. While darling old ladies in powder blue and serious jewels kept the standards up, alongside other pillars of the establishment, it does seem that the festival has found the vital younger demographic and in the grounds I overheard the most remarkable thing. A young woman reciting a John Cooper Clarke poem to a friend in between opening bottles of Bollinger, punk poetry in such hallowed grounds. Expect the unexpected at Glyndebourne!”

“I'm seriously late to the party, but I've finally seen Arcadia in the West End. I've never needed convincing of Tom Stoppard's brilliance, but seeing this one live is something else entirely. Written in the early nineties, the play is built on chaos theory, thermodynamics and Fermat's Last Theorem (whatever that is). The play follows two sets of characters in the same country house, two hundred years apart, and its themes are mathematics, landscape gardening and romance. An unusual pairing, you may be thinking. But what makes it so moving is Stoppard's insistence that the way we divide the world into head and heart, reason and feeling, is a false split: the two were never separate at all. I should confess that I was lost roughly 28% of the time, as were my friends, and it did not matter in the slightest. Once I stopped chasing the equations, I was free to follow the play's heart. It is also, unexpectedly, very funny, with a mind-boggling performance by young star Isis Hainsworth. Would I pass a quiz on it? No. Did I feel things? Deeply. It has only a few more weeks in London, go!”

“Nothing gets an audience roaring quite like an outrageous dinner party scene. Add slapstick and chaotic choreography and it might as well be Christmas Day. By the time the dinner in the Old Vic's new production of How The Other Half Loves reached full crescendo, audience members were gripping their chairs and stomachs for relief. Alan Ayckbourn's 1969 farce traces the fallout of an affair between a married man and his boss's wife. Its rapid-fire, overlapping dialogue (which paved the way for decades of British sitcoms) is a soufflé of a script: get the timing even slightly wrong and the whole thing sinks. On the page, some of the night's biggest laughs would barely register. So, what a treat to witness West End legend Roger Allam in full throttle as Frank, barely needing to lift a finger to trigger bellows from the stalls. But that is the beauty of farce: delivery is king, and boy did this cast deliver. Bring the dad who still quotes Fawlty Towers. Or don't: I am a thirty-year-old woman and I was in stitches, as was Rob Brydon, seated directly in front of me. Either way, this is a night of gloriously light-hearted fun.”