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

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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The brilliant Martin Freeman in The Fifth Step at Soho Place

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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Barshu Restaurant – Delicious Sichuan Cuisine in Soho

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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A Knock on the Roof, the play, at the Royal Court

Ellie & I recently watched A Knock on the Roof at the Royal Court, and it was one of the best plays we’ve seen in a while. The play was written by Khawla Ibraheem, who also performs this one-woman show. It has been developed and is being directed by Oliver Butler, who had previously directed another highly acclaimed solo show: Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution means to me. The stage set is simple but effective: a chair in front of a brick wall, onto which videos, mainly shadows and shades of colours, are being projected on occasion. KHAWLA IBRAHEEM, PLAYWRIGHT BEHIND THE PLAY A KNOCK ON THE ROOF Ibraheem is a Syrian actor, who lives under Israeli occupation in the Golan Heights, when she’s not performing abroad. She is a regular at many theatres in Palestine, including the Palestinian National Theatre, El Hakawati, the Al Jawal Theatre, and the Freedom […]

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KYOTO, the play, at Soho Place – Surprisingly good! Just don’t get your hopes up.

Ellie & I recently watched Kyoto, the play by the Royal Shakespeare Company, at Soho Place. And we thought it was surprisingly good. We really only booked tickets, because the idea of making a play about something as mind-numbingly boring as an international political conference (the 1997 Kyoto Climate Conference), sounded so absurd we had to see what they had come up with. KYOTO, THE PLAY, AT SOHO PLACE REMINDS US THAT POLITICS ARE IMPORTANT In my younger years, I used to study international relations, with an ambition to work for an international organisation. I completed internships at such organisations and at NGOs, organised protest marches, spent hours each day discussing politics with my buddies. Only to end up working in finance instead. For the past seven years, I’ve not read a single newspaper, not watched a single news programme. I have given up on politics. A few times a […]

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