Friendship is...

If love is never having to say you're sorry (which I actually don't believe), then perhaps friendship is not having to say anything at all. I think of this because one of my favourite ways to spend time with friends and loved ones is in companionable silence.

The day we left America, Our Gracious Hostess and I sat at her dining room table drinking herbal tea, she looking up scrapbooking websites and me writing my diary. We hadn't seen each other for a long time and didn't know when we would see each other next - it could be years - but there was no need to babble on.

It reminded me of those times during our childhood when we sat quietly for hours flipping through magazines, painting our nails, drawing pictures, reading books... Occasionally we would look up and share a snippet of information, but most of the time we just worked quietly together.

There is a type of person who you know so well that there is no need for words. A look, a smile, a sigh or a gesture says it all. When I was a child I would often take a book into my brother or sisters' room and just sit on the floor or propped on the bed reading while they did their homework or listened to their records. It wasn't that I wanted to say anything, but I did want company. My cat is really good at this. He comes and sits near me, flicking an ear every now and then to let me know he's aware of my presence, but he doesn't say a lot. I like it.

Often we fill this silence with empty chatter - almost overcome by a need to say something, to prove our wit or our existence. We are almost afraid of silence as though it is somehow impolitie to be with someone and not talk to them. But when you have grown up with someone or shared so many experiences, there is no need for phatic communication.

I'm not good at small talk and I hate 'networking' or going to parties where I don't know anyone (this picture is not typical of what happens to me at such events) and I have to pretend I'm interested in what they've got to say. Sometimes I am, but often (especially it involves their children - which it invariably does with women over the age of 30 - or their salary to mortgage ratio) I'm not, and I can't bear the whole 'smile, nod, interject' routine.

This becomes even harder as I get older, and I fear I don't make new friends as well as I might. I miss being around my old friends and family - people who know where I went to school and what's my favourite colour and the terrible relationship mistakes I made. They know all that and accept it, so we don't have to go over it all again.

We can talk about things we really want to talk about, have pointless conversations, such as the definition of a sit-com; why religion and politics mix in America but not Britain; how easy is it to live without seasons; or we can simply say nothing at all.

My Newest Favourtie Thing: Bliss Super Minty Soap n' Scrub

It’s been a while since I’ve had a new favourite thing. That’s not strictly true, but it’s been a while since I’ve written about one. So, my newest favourite thing – discovered while visiting Our Gracious Host & Hostess – is Bliss super minty soap n’ scrub energizing exfoliator for the body.

Wow! This stuff knocks your socks off – that is, if you are wearing socks in the shower, which would be a little odd. It zings (but not stings), taking your breath away and leaving you feel ‘clean to the extreme’. The website suggests it is good for a post-workout wash, and while I can attest to this, it is also fabulous simply for getting up in the morning if, like me, early mornings are not your best time.

It’s a jet-lag beater and you just feel fresh and ready to cope with anything once you’ve bathed with the ‘jojoba bead packed and peppermint cooling soap scrub paste’. Breathing in the fumes is like standing on the side of the coolest glacier – you feel pristine and glowing once you step out of the shower. The pale blue and white tubes carry a warning to use sparingly around ‘intimate areas’, which is advice worth noting.

The website (www.blissworld.com) has a range of other enticingly named products including lemon and sage soapy sap, blood orange and white pepper body butter, and vanilla and bergamot bubbling bath and shower gel. There’s a cute ‘tried and blue travel kit’ and a handy ‘sinkside six-pack’. Incidentally, why are all miniature things considered cute? That’s just a random aside.

You may well feel this is going a bit over the top for what is effectively soap, but try it! I had to bring some back with me in my already over-stuffed suitcase as I didn’t know if it was available in New Zealand. It’s not. I’ve been looking for a new favourite bath product since The Body Shop sold out to L’Oreal and I may just have found one. Now I just have to find people to go to the US, Canada, UK and Ireland to bring me the stuff!

Under a Big Sky

This is almost the final instalment in the Great Tour of America and Italy from last year - I just thought I'd capitalise that to make it look Big and Important - a trick learned from A.A. Milne. I'm going to need to go on another trip to get some more adventures about which to blog. In the meantime...

Lone Pine apparently used to have an iconic pine tree which has since blown down, so the town should really be renamed No Pine.

We have missed their 19th film festival by a day. This festival celebrates Westerns and famous actors such as Gary Cooper, Hop-along Cassidy, Kirk Douglas and the bloke who played the Lone Ranger. The surrounding mountains have been used as scenery for many a film.

John Wayne stayed in the very same hotel as we do. Our room is old-fashioned with a Wild West feel – there are stencilled images printed on the wooden furniture, a green and purple flowery carpet, and a friendly receptionist.

Dinner at the Merry-Go-Round restaurant is delicious. In keeping with the area, I have pea soup and then filet steak with beans and twice-baked potato. We share a bottle of Pepper Grove cabernet sauvignon which is a Californian wine imported from Napa. The restaurant is in a building like a tent or an octagonal big top and the food is excellent. I enjoy the atmosphere and it is the perfect end to a great day.

The next morning we wake up to the most amazing scenery. Wow, what a view! We’re flanked by real cowboy mountains; jagged peaks haunted with boulders and topped with snow. Him Outdoors discovers the trail up Mt Whitney is one that can be walked in a couple of days and he is itching to get up there.

Unfortunately we haven’t got a couple of days so we quickly explore the town (which sells crystals, rocks, wood carvings, pottery, moccasins, cowboy boots, belts, fringed jackets, cowboy hats and crockery) and have breakfast at a diner where the owner collects butter churns. Her admission of this fact leads to an unsolicited conversation with a punter who collects random antiques from radios to roller-skates.

We drive on again through towns such as Big Pine and Independence, the administrative centre of Inyo County complete with a courthouse and, according to its brochure, ‘a patriotic flag-waving Fourth of July celebration, featuring an early-morning flag-raising, pancake breakfast, a 4km/10km run/walk, a nice small-town parade, delicious home-made ice cream and pie social, kids’ activities (including a frog jumping contest), an arts and crafts show, deep-pit barbecue and, to complete an exciting day, a sunset fireworks show.’

Bishop is less dramatic. As well as the usual Denny’s, Burger King, MacDonald’s, Taco Bell, KFC and Karl Jnr, the town boasts such gems as Spellbinder Books and Coffee, Brock’s Flyfishing Specialists, Anne Marie’s Wedding Register, El Dorado Saving’s Bank, Giggle Springs Gasoline Market, Jumpin Juice and Java, Erick Schatt’s Bakery, and The Meat House.

This is an outdoor paradise with its clean air and bright light. We are in the High Sierras where people come to fish, hunt, shoot, trek, cycle, hike, and generally revel in the bluest skies I’ve seen outside Queenstown. We approach Sherwin Summit (7,000ft) where the steep sides of the archetypal American mountains are clad with pine trees and a sprinkling of snow.

Road signs promise twisting roads and bounding deer for the next umpteen miles. There are signs to Tom’s Place and an exhortation to report drunk drivers to the police. The landscape of boulders and trees is dotted with wilderness lodges, and paths wind through the scenery, beckoning runners to follow. Him Outdoors says, ‘This is my sort of stuff. I like this.’

All the world's a stage

We moved into the theatre this week, two weeks ahead of the opening of Necessary Targets.

There is something so special about a theatre space. It can be an area in the round, a stage thrusting beyond a proscenium arch or simply a black box. And with each performance it can be transformed. That's the magic of theatre to me.

Just move the seats, construct a set, add some lights and you are in another world. I say 'just' but it is far from a simple achievement. The crew who build, paint and dress the set, and who design, plot and focus the lights are the craftsmen and artisans of old. Their work is incomparable.

In the short space of time that I have performed in the Gryphon it has been a 17th century New England courtroom and jail, a middle-class Suffolk drawing room, a French convent in the early 1600s, and a Bosnian refugee camp in the mid 1990s.

Each time it has been wholly believable and the actors and audience alike suspend their belief and are transported to whole new worlds. I am of course reminded of the chorus' words in Shakepeare's Henry V when he begs the audience's indulgent imaginations.

"Can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?

Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass:"

By this time, people are tired and a little grumpy - there are conflicting needs and priorities as the crew beaver away to get the production looking and sounding right while the cast are desperately trying to give them something good to work with.

But the shift into the theatre dissolves some of this tension as the lights come up and you know you're not far away now. It's exciting waiting in the darkness of the wings for your cue which will allow you to take flight to another place. And that's why we do it.

Transporting theatre

The Thirty-Nine Steps, Auckland Theatre Company
Maidment Theatre, February 12 – March 7

From the moment that Mike Edward steps on stage as Richard Hannay looking dashing in a suit, this is a top-notch performance. Like an action thriller crashed into a farce, it is fast-paced, constantly amusing and excellently timed, as one episode follows swiftly on the well-shod heels of another.

I could tell you about the far-fetched plot, which involves a conspiracy to murder the Greek premier Karolides, ‘the one barrier between Europe and Armageddon’ and plunge Europe into war, but it’s really incidental to the play. It is 1914 in Britain; there are spies and espionage a-plenty alongside references to the Balkan powder keg we all learned about at school. It’s not really giving anything away to confirm that actually Karolides is assassinated and war does break out, so as saving-the-day-heroes go, Hannay isn’t essentially all that effective.

Author, John Buchan claimed that this novel was his first ‘shocker’, by which he meant an adventure combining personal and political dramas, where the events in the story are unlikely. Director, Ross Gumbley has taken this to extremes and smashed the illusion of theatre with a sledgehammer.

The ‘special’ effects are fabulous – the anti-CGI back-lash has the potential to be as forceful as the anti-political-correctness espoused by the likes of Life on Mars. Whether hanging from a bridge, undertaking a high-speed car chase, running alongside a train or being pursued by a bi-plane, the staging and setting of these scenes is fantastically ludicrous. There is an element of Spike Milligan in the use of stage doors and ‘swimming’ across the stage, which the audience appreciates with laughter and applause.

These gestures work so well, because the cast play them straight. It would have been tempting for Edwards to play Hannay as Hugh-Laurie-as-Prince-Regent-esque (and the play itself is a little bit The Fast Show meets Blackadder), but he remains steadfast. His asides to the audience are delightful, as he fills them in on his thoughts and plot developments; ‘verification arrived with my boiled egg’. Even when the characters come into the audience, they are never a part of it, and when one of the audience members is kidnapped as a hostage, he is later heckled by the cast when he is released and returns to his seat.

There is also a dream-like quality to some of the sequences, begun with the ‘turbaned wonder’ Marmaduke Mesmer (Cameron Rhodes) who hypnotises Hannay into a suggestible trance. Cameron Rhodes also plays Franklin P Scudder, who sets off the chain events by revealing his suspicions to Hannay, with an ‘accent West of Swindon’ (it’s American) in terms that ‘could out-metaphor a Kipling’, and then being mysteriously murdered in a dramatic death scene.

When the actors take their final bow, it is hard to believe that there were only four of them – Lisa Chappell and Stephen Papps making up the fantastic foursome. This is testament to the way they people the stage with myriad incidental characters from the leering milkman to the psychotic brattish schoolgirl or the passengers on a train. Whether butlers, policemen or navvies, each one is entirely persuasive.

In his programme notes, Gumbley writes that the set – a steel box with hidden doors – was designed to capture Hannay’s paranoia, ‘sense of being trapped and constantly pursued’. It certainly succeeds, and for all the laughter and mockery, this is a darker undercurrent running through the play. It is farcical to see people popping out of doors and the physical theatre of drugged-up wobbly legs is hysterical, but the dreams can turn to nightmares as ‘we never question what we expect to see.’

The Thirty-Nine Steps confronts a number of expectations, not least what and where are the titular steps themselves? Hannay, who cuts his bread into soldiers, mocks the Scottish accent and is bored back in England after living in the ‘strange dark continent’ that is Africa, is described as being ‘very clever – or very stupid’. In this play the line between the two is blurred.

When he has to make a speech from the hustings under a mistaken guise, he stumbles through his oratory but nevertheless delivers moments of passion, although he is told he ‘started poorly, flagged in the middle and tailed off at the end’. He plays the stuffed shirt Brit admirably and appealingly. To the strains of Holst’s Planet Suite a German attempts to seduce him into his dastardly plan (involving, I think, lighthouses, submarines and airships) cajoling him to ‘be on the winning side for once’. ‘Never!’ he answers, without a trace of irony.

I arrived at the theatre after spending an hour in traffic and road-works, searching for a place to park. Why is there nowhere to park at the Maidment? I heard other late-comers complain about this too, and the production started 15 minutes late to accommodate all those other hot, bothered and harassed audience members. The front-of-house staff were frantic and disorganised, leaving me stressed, with a headache, and in a bad mood.

This was all totally dissolved by the spoof-like entertainment before me, which is what good theatre should do – it took me out of myself and transported me to another place, or rather, places.

G&T - Perfect combination

Four - nil against Real Madrid! That's five-nil on aggregate. We thrashed them! It doesn't get much better than that - unless we were to do the same thing to Man Utd. at the weekend, ('I would love it' etc.). I can't see that happening and it's pretty much all over bar the shouting in the Premiership, but let's not allow that cloud to darken our sky, for today in my football-land all is sunny and bright.

Did you see that first goal? Fantastico! 'Fernando Torres, Liverpool number nine' indeed. Pass and move - it's the Liverpool groove, and the cut backs worked excellently throughout. It was like shooting fish in a barrel and it could have been more, were it not for their keeper, who pulled out some of those what I believe are known in the business as top drawer saves.

Admittedly if I were a Real Madrid supporter (and thank God I'm not) I would have felt aggrieved at that penalty decision. I don't think that was hand ball and it was a bit unfair for their player to get booked for it. Nothing dodgy about the execution though. That was a sweetly taken spot kick (will ESPN please stop calling them PKs? I thought that was a type of chewing gum).

And then the third goal was just Liverpool gold. That's why we love them. I've always though G&T to be a great combination - and now we have a new contender - Gerrard and Torres - simply sublime. When they had both been substituted to rest up for the next big game, even Babel and Mascherano played nicely together - but B&M doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

And what about Jay Spearing who came on in the 74th minute and made a few incisive runs up the pitch. Brought through the youth academy, having captained the Under-18s to the second of their successive FA Youth Cup victories in 2007, this lad had the Kop chanting his name - 'There's only one Jay Spearing'. How great would it feel? Pretty damn good. We love you, Liverpool, we do...

My Fringe Bits

The Frogs Under the Waterfront
2-7 & 16-21 February

We mill around outside Mac’s Brewery on a fine summer’s day – it’s so tempting to give in to a Sassy Red, but I am here for the theatre. Upstairs past the brewery itself – those hops are calling to me – we are given a safety briefing and a smelly lifejacket. Our safety comes first, apparently, which is nice to know.

Back down to the waterfront where we sit on wooden steps and squint into the sun as Simon Smith struts his stuff as Dionysus. He is excellent in a Hugh-Laurie-as-foppish-Prince-Regent-in-Blackadder-the-Third sort of way. This similarity has actually been pointed out in almost every review I’ve read of this play, including one by John Smythe, so it must be true.

Smith has a lion skin draped around his shoulders as he pretends to be his half-brother, Heracles. This enables him to engage in a ‘dramatic pause’ when Heracles (William Arthur McDougall) actually turns up Heracles who is far bigger, gruffer and hirsute. It’s funny and ridiculous while engaging and Smith appeals directly to the audience, while alternately abusing and ignoring his slave, Xanthias (Michael Ness) – a herald of things to come.

A gaggle of schoolgirls perch around the perimeter of the set, dangling their legs above the water and admonishing others to be quiet so they can eavesdrop on proceedings – teenagers actually blagging their way in? That’s not like your usual dramatic performance. ‘Frogs’ begin ‘ribbitting’ their way around the edges of the audience before diving into the water in coloured wetsuits. Again, somewhat out of the ordinary.

We get into pedal boats to be ferried across the water, under evil-smelling piles covered in crusty mussels and curious slime. The leader of this flotilla is Amalia Calder as a sort of ferrywoman welcoming us aboard in imitation Cockney. We were given pebbles at our briefing with which I suppose we are meant to pay for our passage, but no one collects them.

We are all hooked up together and the croaking amphibians haul and guide us to our destination – a beach area underneath Circa. It’s a strange, damp atmosphere lit with flaming torches, and the underworld has a new home. Dionysus is still pretending to be Heracles but is alarmed when his reception isn’t quite as planned. Pluto (Matt Clayton) threatens to torment him, so he swaps his lion skin with Xanthias, who is warmly received by a comely maid (Lucy Edwards) so Dionysus demands his fake identity back.

There’s a lot of flailing about in the water, deliberately drenching the spectators – we were warned not to wear nice clothes. Songs and poetry abound and Abacus (Scott Ransom) is as confused as to who is whom, so he ‘tortures’ them to find the truth – one is a God and they don’t feel pain apparently. Dionysus reigns and is required to judge the poetry competition between Aeschylus (Rob Hickey) and Euripides (Luke Hawker).

We are ferried about to the next act where Aeschylus sits suspended above the water in a Lazyboy sipping whisky and discoursing on theatre and the nature of verse. Meanwhile Euripides hurls himself about in a safety net and wails Coldplay and U2 lyrics as modern variations on poetry. These are scoffed at and rejected – there was a time when art was limited to those that could – now everybody’s at it, and it’s all Euripides’ fault apparently.

It’s fun; it’s irreverent and it’s jolly good theatre. At the Fringe awards, it won Best Outdoor, and was a finalist in the Most Original Concept and Best of the Fringe categories. As Lynn Freeman wrote in her review, ‘If any show epitomizes the best of a Fringe festival, it's Frogs.’ She’s right.

Read other reviews of Frogs

Read my reviews of other plays I’ve seen at The Fringe:

The Mountain

Keep it Rural

tick, tick...boom!