Review: Favour

The universe works in mysterious ways. I’ve mentioned multiple times in previous theatre reviews that I’m constantly searching for the “next play to blow me away”. And while I’ve definitely seen some good pieces – last production notwithstanding – there hasn’t been anything truly worthy of that coveted description.

Until now. Without expecting much, I booked tickets to see Ambreen Razia’s Favour at Bush Theatre this past weekend. I came away spellbound.

The storyline was gripping, the performance captivating. It was often understated, showing rather than telling – until the last scenes, where I did feel the writing was a bit too on the nose, but it still somehow worked. The actors were able to convey such strong emotions with ease – when the mother comes home from prison and grabs her daughter to hug her, I had tears in my eyes.

While most of the issues raised – favouritism, injustice, community – resonated, I felt the topic of religion was underdeveloped. There was a moment in the beginning where the daughter, sixteen year old Leila, puts on a hijab, but it’s never mentioned again and her hair remains uncovered for the rest of the play. While it could’ve offered an interesting perspective, it didn’t seem necessary and distracted from the main theme of intergenerational relationships.

As an audience, we understood the characters, their motivations – they were real. I even overheard the girl behind me saying “it’s just like my family”. Even before I saw her in action, I wholeheartedly believed in Renu Brindle’s character of a Pakistani grandmother. I was surprised to learn that she had been a dentist and only turned to acting recently. She was phenomenal. 

Luckily, I managed to see Favour at the very beginning of its run – a rarity for me – so I’m able to make a recommendation with enough time for anyone interested to take me up on it. 

Favour is running at Bush Theatre until 6 August.

Going Self-Custodial: Setting up Ledger

Having been in the crypto industry for the past two and a half years, I’m very familiar with the phrase “not your keys, not your coins”. 

For the uninitiated, however, here’s a quick recap: when you own cryptocurrencies, you own a private key that verifies your ownership and enables you to transact on the blockchain. When you use centralised wallets or exchanges, you’re entrusting them to be the custodians of your funds and act in good faith. A non-custodial wallet, meanwhile, cannot access or control your assets. 

As a product manager, I’ve even worked on not one, but two non-custodial wallets: the Wirex Wallet and NOAH. So it’s a bit embarrassing to admit that the majority of my crypto was in custody. 

Of course, there are small amounts scattered in the wallets I worked on previously or am currently working on. Sure, I’ve got a MetaMask with some ETH dust. And yes, I’ve even got some on-chain sats in my Umbrel node. But the majority? Earning yield, locked away with a crypto custodian.

The worst part is that not all of it is even immediately accessible. But in light of recent industry events – the Terra crash, the Celsius collapse, the problems at Coinbase – it seemed irresponsible to not take charge of my keys. Enter: Ledger.

Ledger is the next level of wallet security. Not only is it non-custodial, it actually takes your keys offline by storing them in what is essentially a heavily encrypted USB device. So even though, admittedly, I don’t have hoards of bitcoin to store, I invested in a Ledger Nano S.

The process of setting it up was incredibly straightforward. I downloaded Ledger Live from the Ledger website, connected the device to my laptop, followed the instructions to record my private key, set up the relevant cryptocurrency accounts, and transferred in. It’s worth noting that the Bitcoin account uses a native segwit address, an update to the Bitcoin protocol implemented in 2017 but surprisingly not yet adopted by all exchanges.

Luckily, the exchange on which I kept my bitcoin previously recently introduced segwit support, so I had no trouble transferring the funds to Ledger. Now, even though my Ledger is disconnected from my laptop, Ledger Live shows me the value of my holdings, which, given the current market climate, just keep going down and down. But I guess it’s as Brandon Lee says in The Crow, “it can’t rain all the time”.

P.S. I told you this wasn’t a theatre blog.

Review: Summer Solstice

I’ve been disappointed by plays before. Ages of the Moon lacked depth. Orlando came across as amateur. Bliss spent more time on the logistics of stage decoration than the plot. But it’s rare that a performance is genuinely painful to watch. 

The premise of Summer Solstice was promising – an escapist fantasy wherein a man and a woman meet, forge a connection, but are unable to be together but for one day of the year. Given that both characters are married, I expected unfulfilled longing, burning desire, and unassailable guilt.

Instead, from the moment they meet, Theo and Alba give no consideration to their spouses. After the most awkward yoga encounter imaginable, they immediately go on a date, kissing without a second thought. This progresses into a decades-long affair during which neither party appears to experience any remorse.

If the dialogue had been more engaging, if the lead actor hadn’t mumbled all his lines, if there had been at least a spark of chemistry between Theo and Alba, perhaps we would’ve sympathised more with their supposed struggles – an alcoholic wife and a distant husband, respectively.

Comic relief in the form of the waiter who serves them year after year and ends up writing a novel about their relationship falls flat. While the actor is by far the best of the three, he nevertheless stutters through his lines as though he hasn’t rehearsed. His jokes did get a few pity laughs, as well as a hysterical response from the woman in front of me, who I don’t think was able to believe she’d actually paid to see this.

Summer Solstice truly lived up to its name – the longest day of the year felt like an eternity as we waited for intermission to get the hell out of there. I had invited my recently arrived Ukrainian guest to the performance, thinking it would be a wonderful occasion to introduce her to the London cultural scene, but ended up apologising profusely.

Luckily, our fortunes improved once we’d left the theatre. It was a beautiful evening, the sun was just setting, and the South Bank was aglow. We took a picturesque walk along the Thames, appreciating the London landmarks, which she was seeing for the first time, and soaking up the relaxed atmosphere.

Summer Solstice is playing at the Union Theatre until 25 June.

Review: Jitney

Writing this review has given me a much deeper understanding of Jitney than I had after watching it performed at The Old Vic last week. I can only assume that it’s because the context is very specific to the black community in Pittsburgh in the 70s, because not only was I unfamiliar with the word “jitney”, but I wasn’t aware of a jitney’s purpose.

A jitney is an unlicensed taxi, specialising in providing service to areas underserved by traditional taxis. In Pittsburgh, this was the historically black Hill District, whose heyday in the 1920s and 1930s boasted a vibrant entertainment district. In the second half of the 20th century, however, the area lost 71% of its residents due to redevelopment and economic decline.

Suddenly, the play makes a lot more sense. Even the alcoholic former tailor Fielding becomes infinitely more sympathetic in light of the injustice he has faced. The tensions between the characters are better understood in the context of not only mass geopolitical events, such as the Vietnam and Korean wars, but also the local redevelopment.

Perhaps because playwright August Wilson wrote, first and foremost, for his local audience – Jitney is the eighth play in his “Pittsburgh Cycle” – it didn’t strike me as powerfully as it could’ve. Instead, I was preoccupied with the performances of the actors themselves, most of which took until the second half to warm up and become compelling.

Having said that, Wil Johnson in the role of Becker was phenomenal. The emotionally charged scene between him and Blair Gyabaah playing Booster was masterful, conveying the pain and disappointment of a life unlived. I’d almost say it’s worth seeing the play for this scene alone. 

Jitney is playing at The Old Vic until 9 July.

Travels through Finland: Jyvaskyla

There are so many things that go unsaid in this blog that I worry I’ll end up looking back on it and wondering if they ever happened or it was just something I dreamed up, much like that time my second ever Snowdonia trip disappeared out of consciousness. 

So when, for example, I dedicated my last post exclusively to Starcrossed and failed to mention I’d also gone to see comedian Travis Jay at the Underbelly Festival that very evening, I wondered if it would be something I’d search for in the future. 

Therefore, even though I don’t have much to tell beyond the not very exciting “read a lot, slept a lot, played some tennis”, I decided to make a post about my recent few days in Finland with the family. For posterity, if nothing else.

And hey, there were some good photos taken. Mostly of the same photogenic dog who inspired the highly misleading 2019 post How to Photograph Your Dog.

But for the sake of my reputation, I’ll throw in some interesting facts that I just discovered by reading the Jyvaskyla Wikipedia page. Did you know, for example, that Jyvaskyla is the third largest city in Finland and has been called the “Athens of Finland”, which I assume was more flattering in the 19th century.

Jyvaskyla University boasts the only faculty of sport in Northern Europe – which, incidentally, is how my mother ended up in Finland, met her husband, bought a house, and now invites me over to read, sleep, and play tennis on a biannual basis. 

I leave you with a wonderful Finnish phrase I learned during my visit: vesimeloni pelottaa minua, mita et ymmärrä?

Review: Starcrossed

Whoever commissions pieces for Wilton’s Music Hall seems to have a thing for Romeo and Juliet. Both times I’ve been there, it was to see reimaginings of the centuries old tale of woe. 

The first one was back in November 2019, though I don’t appear to have written about it, bar a passing mention in my Sierra Nevada adventure story. In it, the title characters survived against all odds and are now forty-something, staging a public therapy session in an attempt to resolve years of marital strife resulting from the pressures of their story coming to epitomise romantic love. It was brilliant.

Saturday’s performance, meanwhile, refocussed our attention on the untold tragedy of Tybalt and Mercutio. Reusing much of Shakespeare’s original text, Starcrossed sees Mercutio disarming an aggressive Tybalt in an unexpected way – with a kiss. Only that kiss has consequences, and as the two leads fall deeper in love, they are pulled apart by a deadly family feud and a world that isn’t ready to accept them.

The performance was in the very essence of Shakespeare – comedic and tragic in equal measure. As fantastic as the lead actors were, Gethin Alderman in the role of “everyone else” was simply phenomenal. He played to the crowd with such skill that even the actor playing Tybalt could barely stifle his laughter when Alderman appeared on stage dressed as Juliet and curtsied to the audience.

One of the five star reviews for Starcrossed suggests to “run, not walk, to get your tickets” and I must agree. Starcrossed is playing at Wilton’s Music Hall until 25 June.

Hiking through Snowdonia: Glyder Fawr and Glyder Fach

The Queen’s been reigning for 70 years. Oh, the things she’s seen in her lifetime… but for us commoners, the main cause for celebration is the additional bank holiday for a four day weekend. And what do we do on bank holidays? Go to the mountains, of course! Supplies were bought, the tent was packed, and the dog prepared for a 6am departure to Snowdonia.

I’d done some research after our April trip to Snowdon – mysteriously absent from this blog, but it’s likely I was still coping with the aftershocks of the war – and the Glyder Fawr and Glyder Fach circular came highly recommended as a challenging-yet-dog-friendly route. I hadn’t realised I’d actually been there before, but that was probably for the best – the sheer amount of scrambling would’ve probably put me off attempting it with the dog.

As I was oblivious to the challenges we would face, we confidently headed to the Ogwen Car Park, found ourselves a spot and set off for the peaks. Glyder Fawr is the third highest mountain in Wales at 1001 metres, but as we’d already tackled Snowdon and dog survived, I figured it shouldn’t be a problem.

The car park was overflowing and people were plentiful at the start of the route, but as soon as we turned off at Llyn Idwal for Glyder Fawr, there was almost no one. We made our way up the mountain surrounded by serene beauty, absorbing the breathtaking views. The GPS was slightly delayed, which led to a very brief attempt to push dog up Devil’s Kitchen, but luckily we came to our senses and found our way back to the path.

Given the difficulty of walking up a mountain holding an impatient dog yearning to run ahead, I made the mistake of trusting him to behave and set him free to walk a few metres ahead of me. In fairness, he did very well – until he saw something move on the mountain top and set off, leaving me – already breathless from the steep ascent – to run behind him. Try as I might, I quickly lost sight of him, and began to panic. Dog had disappeared and no one was around.

Luckily, shouting for him did the trick, and he eventually appeared, running out of nowhere, only to discover that he will never be let off lead in the mountains again.

We then set off for Glyder Fach, bypassing the striking Castell y Gwynt and looking for a way down. The only path we found was incredibly steep, requiring us to hold on to the stones and occasionally lift the dog to avoid him injuring himself by attempting to scramble. Still, we were fairly quick, and soon the car park came into view in the distance. We had a long way to go, but at least the destination was in sight.

It was here where we realised that we’d overdone it when the dog took a flying leap and nearly collided with a boulder. It seems the boundless energy does have its limits after all. We tried to stop regularly for him to catch his breath, but border collies have no “off” switch, so he mostly spent the supposed rest pacing.

Luckily, the walk turned gentler and an actual path appeared. Soon, we rediscovered civilisation – crowds taking photos, little girls in fairy dresses, long-distance cyclists, tourists with ice cream. But for us, it was back to the car and to the campsite to pitch up our tent, cook our barbeque, and have a well-deserved beer.