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To the Old Court Theatre this evening to see Beautiful Thing with Trevor, Jon and Paul. The theatre had left four complimentary tickets at the box office to thank me for doing some promotion. It’s not Chelmsford’s most comfortable theatre by a long shot - it was a court once (as the name suggests, and perhaps why it is opposite the prison) so there is no sloped seating, and you end up sat on school chairs with the thinnest cushion you could imagine. The lighting people stand up in what was the public gallery, just behind the bar.

Fortunately Beautiful Thing is fairly short. The last time we were there it was for the Torch Song Trilogy, which ran for three hours and inflicted considerable numbness.

It’s five years, at least, since I last saw the film of Beautiful Thing, and I’ve never seen it on the stage, even though it was originally written as a play, but I recognised a lot of the lines, and you could spot where they had updated it from the original (references to S Club 7, Victoria Beckham and so on). It was very, very well done and on the whole the acting was excellent.

Quite a mixed age range in the audience, which was surprising, but the jokes got good laughs and the applause went on for ages. It was well deserved.

We dithered somewhat over whether we should have a drink in the bar afterwards but Trevor offered to take us to the Police Headquarters instead to see the area where all the 999 calls were answered. It was very impressive. A large hexagonal room with a high roof and soft, reflected lighting. Flat screens all over the place, and around the walls the names of the towns and villages of Essex served by each area. At the back was a display showing the success rate for answering 999 calls on time. It was less than 100%.

We gawped through the viewing window for a while, then drove back into town for some food, settling on Thai. Somebody said they vaguely remembered seeing a Thai restaurant above some shops near the multi-storey - perfectly positioned as it was now starting to rain.

We found it behind a dusty red door that led to some very noisy stairs with a distinctly council house air to them. The restaurant at the top was surprisingly large, and the food and service were excellent. As ever, we ate too much, and it was gone midnight by the time we got back to Paul’s for tea and chocolates.

So much for early nights this weekend.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 27th, 2002 at 7:06 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.