Art and Culture, London, Plays

Jaha Koo’s Haribo Kimchi, the play, at the Southbank Centre

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A few days ago, Ellie & I watched South Korean playwright Jaha Koo’s play/performance Haribo Kimchi at the Southbank Centre in London. We both were rather excited, when we were queuing with around 150 ethnic South Koreans (many, no doubt, with a British passport) and roughly the same number of audience members from British and other backgrounds. JAHA KOO’S HARIBO KIMCHI SOUNDED LIKE A MUST-SEE PERFORMANCE What we had heard about the play had sounded intriguing: a performance involving audience members, which combines video, robots, smells, sounds, music and traditional theatre, staged in a fully operational street kitchen where food is being prepared throughout the play by the main actor, who also happens to be the playwright, director, composer, video artist, robot designer and operator, and composer. We had been told that the street kitchen within the story is located in a working class district of Seoul, the time is […]

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Art and Culture, London, Plays

The brilliant Martin Freeman in The Fifth Step at Soho Place

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Last night, Ellie & I watched David Ireland’s latest play The Fifth Step at Soho Place. The darkly comic two-hander is being directed by Finn den Hertog and – by definition – has only two actors involved. Both of them are considered to be top-end thespians. The fabulous Martin Freeman, whose development from the “I’m not a pervert” Bruiser sketches to Hollywood A-lister I followed closely and with great interest. As well as the also highly successful & talented Jack Lowden, who I know my good wife loved in Slow Horses. Last year, when the play premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival, Freeman’s role had been played by Sean Gilder.    All pics (c) Johan Persson except where otherwise indicated. Feature pic (c) Neal Street Productions. THE FIFTH STEP’S VENUE: SOHO PLACE We’ve started to grow really fond of Soho Place, who keep on surprising us with excellent productions, since […]

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Adventure, NWP Expedition

YSS Article about ‘my’ Northwest Passage Expedition

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[One of the two caving clubs, I’m a member of, the Yorkshire Subterranean Society (YSS), recently very kindly asked me, if I’d like to do a little write-up for their magazine about my participation in Leven Brown’s Northwest Passage Expedition. Too good a chance to miss out on, so I said yes. The following is an exact replica of my article, which was published as part of YSS Magazine, edition 473, on 7 April 2025. The photos are also identical, with the feature photo above also being the magazine cover. The only difference is that I added headings to each paragraph. The headline had been created by the editor of the magazine.]   SHIPWRECKED IN THE ARCTIC – YSS MEMBER STEFAN HACKER ABOUT HIS ATTEMPT TO ROW THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE   End of May last year, I was eyeballing my twitter feed and noticed that one of the people I’m […]

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Art and Culture, London, Plays

Mohamed-Zain Dada’s play SPEED at the Bush Theatre – My Review

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Ellie & I recently visited the Bush Theatre in SheBu for the first time, to watch the play Speed, whose setting is a speed awareness course. We had regularly heard about great plays being staged at the Bush Theatre, but we had always been too late to get tickets or too busy to make it. MOHAMED-ZAIN DADA’S PLAY SPEED IS ABOUT A SPEED AWARENESS COURSE GONE WRONG Only a year ago, I had been sitting through an online speed awareness course, because some complete moron had decided to keep the temporary 30mph speed limit on the M4 just outside Cardiff near Exit 33 in place, despite the fact that the construction works had long been completed and all gear and barriers removed. I had been caught doing 33mph on that empty motorway late in the evening. 6 years prior to that, I had had the pleasure of sitting through another […]

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London, London restaurants

Barshu Restaurant – Delicious Sichuan Cuisine in Soho

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When it comes to Chinese food, Sichuan cuisine is probably my second favourite out of the eight main cuisines of China, right after Cantonese, and it is certainly one of Ellie’s top three. Recently, the good people of Barshu restaurant in Soho, a stone’s throw away from London’s Chinatown, invited us to check out their Sichuan cuisine. So we did. SICHUAN – A FASCINATING PROVINCE Sichuan is one of the more interesting provinces in terms of its history, geography, and nature, not just its cuisine. The Western part of the region sits on the Tibetan Plateau and used to form part of Tibet over many centuries. Today, less than 2% of the population of Sichuan are ethnic Tibetans. The tallest mountain is Mount Gongga. With its 7,556m of elevation, it is the third highest mountain outside the Himalaya/Karakoram range. The forests are teeming with giant panda bears. Well, there are […]

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