The Grapes of Passive-Aggression

Last Friday, I went to see a play. It was one of those spur-of-the-moment, I-wonder-if-there-are-still-tickets-available situations, and there were, so I bought one and went.

Plus, it allowed me to start a project I’ve been meaning to get off the ground for some time now, the ‘When they say ‘restricted view’, just how restricted do they mean? project’ (I’m still working on the name). Will a few square feet in the corner of the stage be hidden from view, or are we talking seats behind pillars, where you’d have to be next to someone you know really well to do the sort of leaning necessary to get a decent sight-line?

Now I’m not launching this project in the name of science, you understand; it’s purely self-serving. My quest is to find, at each of my local venues, the exact location in the theatrical Venn Diagram where lowest price and most acceptable view overlap, so that I can sit in it. Don’t worry; it’s not that I’m short on hobbies and one step away from taking up raffia-weaving. It’s that I usually buy tickets when there are only 8 seats left on the only night I can go, and I want to be speedy and efficient and feel that I’m snapping up a bargain, rather than taking what I can get.

*NB. This all comes after the Hamilton-booking shit-show, where my friend and I spent an impressive amount of time considering the relative restrictedness of a £30 ticket in a £50 zone vs a £50 ticket in a £70 zone vs a £100 ticket in a £howmuch? zone, before getting so overwhelmed at the potential for expensive disappointment that we opted for unrestricted seats to save our collective sanity.

At HOME in Manchester, it turns out that Circle Row B Seat 8 for £10 is in fact a pretty good seat (view only properly restricted in one scene for approximately 38 seconds, where I just pretended the actors were having a conversation off-stage-right).

The reason I know it is a pretty good seat is that my view was such that I recognised the actress playing the drama teacher as Steph Barnes from Coronation Street, who the rest of you would probably recognise from Happy Valley Season 2 (I still haven’t watched it yet, alright), but who I haven’t seen since she was married to Des circa 1994. Recognising facial features 24 years later? That’s a pretty good seat.

The play was Circle Mirror Transformation, and it was great. Set in Vermont, over a six-week drama class in a community centre, Steph Barnes (actual name Amelia Bullmore, if you prefer) and her 4 students gradually get to know themselves and each other through the magical world of drama – they didn’t quite play Slap the Butcher, but there were some nice moments where I was reminded of Mr G.

My real treat, though, was witnessing the solo meta-drama coming from the guy next to me. It was a play within a play, Silent Angry Man, from the moment he traipsed in behind his (probable) wife, to his visible upset when he realised there wasn’t going to be an interval and kept looking murderously at those audience-members brave enough to nip out to the toilet / bar.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen such quiet yet determined anger. He wouldn’t take his coat off, which was weird, but turned out to be useful as each new seethe caused him to rustle slightly, meaning I was alerted to his full litany of rage, which went as follows:

      Phase 1. Huffing and sighing.

      Phase 2. Fidgeting.

      Phase 3. Refusing to look at the stage for a full 20 minutes.

      Phase 4. Practically crying every time the cast played the game where they 

                   try – and fail – to count to ten.

      Phase 5. Frenetically tapping a leaflet on his knee.

      Phase 6. Falling asleep.

The only time he perked up was when one of the characters was talking about how he used to have a stuffed animal toy of a snake in his childhood bedroom. And the only time he acknowledged his (probable) wife was when the characters had to each write down a secret that no-one else would know, at which point he and his companion looked significantly at one another. Both of which speak to much darker things, if you ask me.

So thank you, Angry Man. I hope you figure out your unresolved issues about improv exercises and / or community centres. Or maybe I should just make a note that Circle Row B Seat 7 isn’t quite as nice as Seat 8.

An Excessively Random Act of Kindness

Funny thing happened to me today. I needed to generate a £1 coin from a £10 note so that I could use a locker at the swimming pool. Not exactly a Sherlock Holmes-level of intellectual conundrum, but nevertheless; life cannot always reflect art, now can it.

So there I am, pondering just what I can buy, that will cost between one and two pounds, or between three and four pounds, thus ensuring my handful of change definitely contains a £1 coin. I’ve upped the level of my personal maths-problem game, you see, and I don’t want to risk spending, say, 95p on a loaf of bread, and then being landed with a fiver, some shrapnel and two £2 coins. That would be a failure, leading to an awkward conversation with the shopkeeper, in which I ask if I can change one of my £2 coins for two £1 coins, and the shopkeeper looks down his or her nose at me and refuses.

I’ve worked in retail; I know that £1 coins are like gold-dust, and must not be given away willy-nilly or, indeed, if someone asks politely. They are always the first coin to run out in the till, and it is a pain in the arse when that happens. You’ve probably got to ask Jane to go and get more pound coins from the safe upstairs, which will take an age, and the angry customers waiting for their £1s in change will have started to look remarkably like villagers with pitchforks.

Also, in a land where the customer is always right (haha), you really value opportunities where you can say, ‘No, I’m sorry, I really can’t spare any change,’ when what you actually mean is, ‘I would rather beat myself over the head with this barcode scanner than open the till again to give away my tiny stock-pile of gold. Also, why aren’t you paying by card like any normal person, thus minimising the physical and verbal contact we have to have with one another.’

I digress.

So, I’m planning my £1.50 purchase of bananas or post-its from the supermarket, when I catch sight of an ON-THE-STREET BOOK STALL right outside the swimming pool building. This is PERFECT, I think to myself. Not only can I indulge my weakness for second-hand books (inherited from my dad; totally not my fault), but I’ll get my change into the bargain.

Now here is where I experienced the oddest act of kindness I think has ever happened to me. I found a great book for the princely sum of £2, presented it to the book-purveyor-gentleman with my shiny new £10 note, only to find out that he has no change either. Which is when I find myself leaving the book-stall with the book, my £10 note plus a £1 coin given to me by the book-seller, who said I could just pop back later and give him £3.

Now I’ve just moved back from France, and I’m not saying that such a thing would never happen at a French second-hand book-stall, but I am saying that I think it’s pretty unlikely. And I know that I probably looked very trustworthy and honest in my sensible middle-class trench-coat buying my sensible middle-class book about castles, but still. This bookseller really put some faith in the human race with this gesture. This was a win for people being nice and helping one another out. And while we’re at it, aren’t Northerners just the loveliest?

So there we are. I experienced altruism. I got to go swimming. And more to the point, I got hold of my £1 coin without recourse to maths or shopping; instead, I essentially stole a book and was given a pound by a man in the street.

The fact that it got stuck in the locker because the swimming-pool hasn’t updated since the new-style coins came out, and apparently I should really have kept one of the old-style ones if I ever wanted to go swimming, is neither here nor there.