shark_hat: (Default)
shark_hat ([personal profile] shark_hat) wrote2006-06-23 03:33 pm
Entry tags:

Wednesday and Thursday

Last night I went to see The Cowards at the Hen and Chickens because they were pretty good on this week's 28 Acts In 28 Minutes on Radio 4, (a cunning idea. If an act's rubbish, just wait 30 seconds and the next one will be on.) and weren't at all bad; I was going to the H&C anyway to see the later show. The later show ended up being full, but the Cowards were good, anyway!

Their sketches seemed to specialise in a sort of whimsical look at inane social chit-chat and general uncomfortable situations, if the ones chatting were horses, or kidnap victims, or stuck on either side of piranha-infested streams, or inside a dream. I also liked Winnie-the-Pooh with an anger management problem. All well-observed (cringingly so sometimes), well-acted, and funny- possibly a bit less surreal than my favourite stuff tends to be, but a good evening.

I went to an improv night at "Funny Side of Covent Garden" on a whim on Wednesday A large team, maybe 8? It was good, anyway.

I read The Midnight Folk a few days ago and am now on to The Box Of Delights. They're both good books, I particularly like the dream-logic, and the rich sensory descriptions (the magic in these really feels magical), and the touches of humour- the marine cellarmen, and the way Abner and Sylvia Daisy quarrel while calling each other "my Astuteness", "my Inspiration", "my starlike Abner", "my blue and my yellow Sapphire".
Somehow Box never seems like a sequel to Midnight Folk to me, though- it's more as if Midnight Folk is an alternate history to Box (the very different way they use magic and dreams may be behind this, or that one is set very much around Seekings house and the other ranges far more widely; but Caroline Louisa, Abner, and Sylvia, in particular, feel like different characters with the same names.)

Post a comment in response:

This account has disabled anonymous posting.
If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting