Going Gently

Streetcar

I must had sat through half a dozen or so productions of Streetcar Named Desire in my time but I have never seen one as honestly brutal as the production we have just seen at Theatr Clwyd tonight.
With an uncensored rape scene, and a raw protracted viewof a florid mental illness it was an exhausting watch which made my sister sigh " I need a lie down in a dark room!" When it was all over.
The final scene when Blache ( an amazing Kelly Gough) crawls out of a stylised bathroom where she was trying desperately to shower her anxiety away literally breaks your heart and when she is finally led away to the asylum as fraught sister Stella ( another fantastic turn by Amber James ) looks on , I am sure there was not a dry eye in the house

Wedding

The is a wedding in the village this afternoon. I know the family, they are a nice lot.
Mrs Trellis had parked herself by the lychGate with her camera a good hour before the church bell started to toll.
She loves a good wedding.
Off to the theatre later with my sister.
A Streetcar Named Desire .....

lust in the dust!

Contratiempo

Great to see a more mature hero taking centre stage

A wonderfully strong , tense performance by Ana Wagener

Now if you fancy a convoluted, classy and satisfying Spanish thriller which has more twists than the Monaco Grand Prix go and see Contratiempo ( The Invisible Guest), its great fun, even though it's got more holes in its narrative than a lump of Swis cheese.
Now I need to take a deep breath here as the story is comwhat complicated.

Successful, married entrepreneur Adrian Doria (Mario Casas) is accused of the murder of his mistress (Barbara Lennie) after he is found unconscious next to her dead body in a locked hotel room in the mountains . With time running out before his trial a witness preparation expert on her last case ( a statuesque Ana Wagener) has just three hours to come up with an impregnable defence, but it is suddenly made clear that the murder has been made more complicated by the accidental killing and subsequent cover up of the death of a young man and a desperate investigation by the man's grief stricken parents to find the truth.

Like I said this is a cracking thriller that had Nuala and I shrieking at the screen in the tense excitement of it all and the final reel twist is so satisfying even Alfred Hitchcock would have been proud to say he had directed it.
9/10

Casas and Wagener

Camp

" May I have a word?"
This phrase seems such an innocent one doesn't it? But when a patient's next of kin says it with her head around your office door, you know that something awkward is about to happen.
I motioned for the relative to come into my office and I got up and closed the door.
"What can I do for you" I said in my best charge nurse voice
The woman was in her fifties , well dressed and confident
" I'd like to see if we can change my husband's primary nurse?" the woman stated, a polite smile on her face.
Now her husband, had been only recently admitted to the ward following spinal surgery and unlike most of the patients on the Ward he had the luxury of walking out of the unit on his own two legs.
His allocated nurse was an experienced gentle Filipino nurse called Stan.
Stan was as camp as Christmas.
The relative cut to the chase immediately
"my husband feels somewhat uncomfortable having such a flamboyant carer" she said bluntly
I smiled a big smile
A BIG BIG FALSE smile
My reply went something like this
" Your husband has been allocated a talented , well experienced nurse to over see his care, , he has been admitted to a centre of excellence and has even been given a room of his own. We have a long waiting list for admissions here and your husband got a bed without too many problems,
I'm sorry I'm not changing any of his nursing care"
I was shaking like a leaf inside
But ..........it felt........ Soooooooo goooooooood

Aliums & Aquilegia

It's my birthday next Friday.
I will be 56 years old.
Even without a calendar I know I'm almost there because the alliums and aquilegia have just flowered in the garden. The blue iris should bloom by the first of June too.....
Blue iris lift the heart.

Several bloggers out there have picked up that I've not quite been myself as of late and of course they are right.
I am not quite myself.
But I hope that a normal service will be resumed at some stage soon.

Sulk

I picked the Welsh terriers up from their kennels this morning.
They had been away a week.
Seven days.
And Mary decided that she was sulking.
When we arrived home she took herself off to the bedroom window seat where she gazed off into the far distance with the pinched look of a young Scarlett O'Hara.
This lasted until 19.20 pm when she found me reading on the back patio
I was reading about wartime potato Peel pies and she looked at me for a long long time
And finally jumped up into my lap for a cuddle