On finding Jerusalem in Sloane Square

I had managed to forget how utterly draining it is to be part of a creative process. This is the end of our first week of rehearsals for Popo Gigi, the new musical that opens at the Ashcroft Theatre on September 14th, and I'm all wrung out. As an early birthday treat, Amber got tickets for us to see the new Jez Butterworth triumph at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, but I was truly worried that I would be the girl snoring and drooling in the front row. How I've giggled inwardly when, from the other side of the footlights, I've seen elderly gentlemen in the audience blissfully snoring through Chicago, or King Lear, and even, impressively, Popcorn, which features live gunfire. We raided Partridges on the Kings Road for salmon quiche, juicy peaches and baked goodies and ate al fresco in Duke Of York Square in the waning sunshine. The girls tripped by in things I only usually see behind glass on Sloane Street, and one ambitious lady was wearing the kinky inverted wedge heels that made me turn the pages of Vogue 90 degrees the first time I saw them. I love the fact that people dress with such care in that part of town. The denizens of Sloane Street do not throw on people-shaped bits of cloth and go shuffling down the street; everyone is trying to beautiful, to say something striking with their look, and the grooming elevates the act of dressing to an art form. We fought our way through the scrum of hipsters and shakers in the theatre foyer as the bell was clanging. From our front row seats we could hear the excitement rising to boiling point on both sides of the safety curtain. Its the same moment I adore as the one in which the plane's thrusters shove you, breathless, into the back of your seat. Then began three hours in which I was never in any danger of falling asleep. Such productions are rare, and life-changing. This is what people go to the theatre for. From the opening, a montage of three gleefully contrasted scenes culminating in the charismatic central character drinking a hangover cure of raw egg, milk, cocaine and vodka that he had mixed by sticking the glass in his waistband, to the moment when he was struggling not to be seduced by the fifteen-year old girl dressed as a fairy and counting down the final minutes of her reign as the May Queen, and the closing moments when, blood-streaked and freshly branded by the town thugs for daring to humiliate their leader, he cuts his five-year old son's hand to show him the precious blood that flows through his veins too; I was with it every breath of the way. Jez Butterworth is a great writer. And the cast was magnificent. But in particular the actor Tom Brooke; he played a sweet, sensitive and rather lost boy off to Australia to find himself. His entrance from out of a sofa where he had ostensibly been asleep while the other characters were unaware of his presence is one the funniest entrances I've ever seen. Then he stopped the show with his character's mental stumble over the phrase "And then, right..." which reduced the audience to helpless laughter for a couple of minutes. As an ensemble member, he was impeccable. His utter absorption in the world he was playing in was perfect and while he never pulled focus from where it needed to be, he was fascinating to watch. I hope to see a lot more of him, and to work with him would be thrilling. Afterwards, we walked through Sloane Square to where we had parked our bikes and Amber lent me her cardigan to get home through the suddenly chilly night. I'm still reeling from the things I saw and felt, and can't stop returning to that evocative world. The bar is so much higher than I thought it was, but I want to be able to broaden a girl's view of the world and people in it as this play was able to broaden mine. That's why I can live without Prada shoes and a new sofa.