Week 38

As the festive period is in full swing, not much time left for culture when you have all those parties to attend. Nevertheless, I found some time in my packed diary for the brilliant Les Parents Terribles at the Trafalgar Studios, part of Donmar's West End season. I can't remember the last time I laughed so much. The main lead acted by Francis Barber was fantastic. Barber’s Yvonne is a Parisian bourgeois mother with Oedipal syndrome - her son Mikey is her life. However, he is 22, falls in love and is ready to leave the gypsy caravan, as their home is known. The twist is that father, a failed scientist, had an affair with the same girl. All the secrets and scheming is conducted by Yvonne’s sister, whose precision and love for order contrasts with the mess in everyday life of this family. The playwright Jean Cocteau created Les Parents Terribles in 1938 and borrowed many devices from Chekhov and Molière. Originally the play caused an outrage and even in this modern production the family looks sinful.

Another week, another prize winner book. This week I read Anita Brookner's 1984 Booker prize winner Hotel du Lac. A lyric little story how a woman in her late thirties escapes London to a sleepy Swiss resort and solves her unimportant problems. I appreciated Brookner’s style, but there was so little action and I couldn’t feel sorry for any of the upper middle class characters. Thinking about it, out of all Booker prize winners I read, only a few were great. Mostly the winners are quite mediocre… but maybe it’s just my taste.