Heartfelt letter received yesterday, regarding my portrait of Bush Jnr. above. Brilliant.

Dear Mr. Brown

The disrespect you show for the highest office of the land in the United States of America is reprehensible and the lowest, cheapest form of denigration imaginable.  How disgusting that you would choose to interpret the former President of the United States in such a way.

Absolutely appalling!

I was very impressed by the caricatures of other famous people, too bad you are so immature.  No matter what my politics are, I would never treat the present President in such a way, regardless of whether I agree with his beliefs or not.

Signed,
Susan Abernethy

(Picture by local artist)

Advance warning. You heard it here first. Do not, repeat DO NOT miss out on this one. They very rarely come to London, and they’re the best magic show in the world. Penn & Teller – the eternally cool bad-boys of magic – are rocking the Hammersmith Apollo from 14-17 July. Just a few nights, and it will pack right out. I saw it in Vegas a few years ago with Andy and Coops and we found ourselves gasping out loud and utterly mesmerised. It’s ingenious, funny, heartbreaking and provocative, and if there was ever a must-see in the world of magic, this is it.

The link is here – tickets go on sale on Friday.

Get in there quick, and if you find it sold out, keep trying for returns.

Dx

After the raucous delights of Northern audiences, it was down South to a very different sort of place. Again, the energy of the city was reflected in the audience, which is always so interesting: this time quiet and attentive, quite different from the previous nights. I spoke about this with a lovely couple who come to see the show a lot, back at the hotel over post-show booze and soup. The lady, a resident of Milton Keynes, insightfully pointed out that as a new town, MK has no real sense of community, no generation of people having grown up there, and correspondingly there was no sense of the audience as a solid, living entity in the same way there is in, say, Sunderland or Edinburgh where we had recently played. Instead, I felt, the MK crowd were (thankfully) polite and awaited their cues from me: a ‘vertical’ line of communication with little happening between them: little ‘horizontally’, as it were.

Acoustically the room held back a lot of the reactions too, so all in all the first night was a slight culture shock. The second night, as happens, felt warmer (in part, it was, and in part I had got used to the room). The nights were a pleasure to play, and volunteers were bright and fun. I have though been lulled into enjoying attentive and courteous audiences: tonight I am in Belfast, where once again there is a rich and powerful sense of community (or perhaps more strictly, communities), and much more tendency to heckle (not that I get much of that). Doubtless I’ll have a little shock again, and then tomorrow I shall ride it with ease.

I have spent the afternoon with a couple of talented friends from the mentalism world (Belfast’s David Meade and Toronto’s Thomas Baxter), chatting in part about some of the magnificently awful ways the medium Doris Stokes would garner information about her audience. Friendships with some of her touring party yielded some juicy secrets.

I must leave for the Waterfront. The crew have been there all day putting up the show in this massive concert hall: perhaps not aesthetically the best environment for the show, but a great room and a lovely in-house crew. If you’re coming tonight, I can’t wait to see you.

x

Three lovely nights in Sunderland. Great audiences and a lovely theatre. Thank you very much if you were there. After the fun with the broken mic and a cut finger the first night, the other two went pretty smoothly.

We stayed in the Newcastle Malmaison, which was just fantastic. A bottle of champagne and a concerned letter were awaiting me from the Edinburgh management which had come across the blog. That was very sweet of them, and made me feel a bit guilty.

One of the many delights of the Newcastle hotel came in the form of an unnamed Martini. I sometimes like to request a chocolate martini, asking the barpersonage to make whatever he or she feels fits that term. Sometimes you get clear, subtle versions; sometimes thick gloopy brown lovelinesses. The fun is never knowing what you’ll get. You might like to try it. The talented and splendid Aoife brought back three wildly different versions which we all tried after our late soup and sandwiches. All three amazing. We decided on the brown version, and set about discussing names for the cocktail. I suggested a ‘Brown Maltini’, liking the name of a drink named after me. Understandably, the ‘Brown’ bit felt a little cloacal for a drink name. We couldn’t decide, so I suggested that I might open it up to my bright and enlightened blog followers to suggest a name.
The picture attached shows Aoife with the drink (after I had quoffed half of it), and she has kindly allowed me to share the recipe:

Aoife’s As-Yet-Unnamed-Martini
1 half (ah, may be one-and-a-half) shot Remy Martin
1 half (hmm, ditto) shot Kahlua
1 half (surely must mean just half) shot creme de cacao

Garnish with choc powder.
Shake with ice and strain into martini glass.

Very tasty. Not a true Martini of course, of which I am very fond too, but a great, if outwardly girly, treat at the end of a long night.

If you have any suggestions for a name, please email alice.richardson@hotelduvin.com; you have about a week to bother them. No guarantees that any of the suggestions will make the menu, as it may have just been one of those 1am conversations that sounded like a good idea at the time. Rather like that small business you were going to start up with a friend. But they’re happy to take suggestions, and they’re the loveliest people.

Thank you, Newcastle Mal. Sting was staying there as well, apparently, which is pretty damn exciting in my book.

We’re now in Milton Keynes and I have my face in a big steam inhaler. Just had the 30 min call. Must dash.

x
PS I realised that in the blog about Bradford, when I said that in previous years ‘Dublin Olympia kept their bar open too’, it sounded like I was saying ‘as well as Bradford’. Poor and ambiguous wordage on my part, and apologies to St George’s Hall for not checking and re-wording. Meant only that Dublin left the bar open (understandable for what is really a music venue) as well as had people getting up to use the loo, which I had just been talking about. In fact the two go hand in hand…
Dublin will be extra fun this year anyway: a spanking new Grand Canal theatre we’re all eager to see. Ta-ta.

Bradford boasts one of the finest Waterstones in the whole U of K, and it was a treat to tuck myself right up inside it for a hot choccy and a bally good read. St George’s Hall is a lovely, cramped and creaky old place, but sadly not quite suitable for the show, which looked far from its best. (Many of the important bits and pieces the theatre were supposed to provide were not in place, so I imagine we may switch venues next time we play Bradford).

The audience was definitely not a theatre-savvy one (plenty of getting up to go to the loo and so on), so I caught myself glaring uncharitably at some offenders who were shattering the atmosphere for the audience at the wrong moments by noisily getting up and squeezing past people in their row. Such things don’t affect me on stage, but it’s infuriating to put all the work into the show and then have a few people spoil it for large blocks of the audience by treating it like casual TV watching. You have my permission to throw your drinks at these people if they annoy you. Rant over.

Despite this gripe, the shows were fun. It feels like a very intimate venue and everything went well enough. The audiences were comparatively quiet but I enjoyed both nights.

Went to see Clash of the Titans on the second day, which, despite its infuriating confusion of mythologies (Arabic Djinns? In Ancient Greece?), and re-envisioning Acrisius as Perseus’ father (to presumably help work in the now exhausted Hollywood father/son reconciliation cliché), I enjoyed a little more than Jennie and Iain, who are deeply devoted to the original. Performances not great, but it feels affectionately done and there are some fun sequences to keep it from dragging. For whatever my thoughts are worth on the subject: which is next to nothing.

The huge Sunderland Empire gave us a great first night: still a few boisterous and incontinent audience members but a fun show. It’s a tall place: the people up in the balcony must have been suffering from all sorts of vertiginous nasal hemorrhaging. My microphone died on me and Coops came out to fix me up with a new one, while the audience watched, presumably convinced it was part of the show for some reason. Apologies to any of you for that. Keeps us all on our toes, though.

About to head off for tonight’s extravaganza. What japes. If you’re coming, have a little wee first. Cos we’re now not letting you back in if you go out…

x