Home from Home in Madrid
Chance encounters of the preferred kind: the last theatrical I bumped into before going to Madrid for a few days was Julian Clary on the 24 bus to Camden from the West End; he’d just come off stage in Cabaret and was sitting quietly on the top deck.
I expressed surprise that he was not ferried northwards from Shaftesbury Avenue in a luxury limo, but he muttered something about the pleasures of working for Bill Kenwright and changed the subject.
Leaving theatre behind for a few days I set off for Madrid and a tour of the museums — where I promptly ran into Nicolas Kent, artistic director of the Tricycle, in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. He urged me not to miss the Leon Kossoff painting of Kilburn Underground ticket office, nor did I, in a nice little English room of Hockney, Michael Andrews and Lucien Freud.
Nic was in town to visit a local production of his Stephen Lawrence tribunal play, in which he said the actors removed black costumes to reveal white ones underneath, or perhaps vice versa; I was still struggling with the concept of the issue being raised at all in different cultural circumstances.
Only when I got home and watched a television news report of the racist shenanigans at the Spanish Grand Prix course, with Lewis Hamilton subjected to “black face” taunts from his rival Alonso’s supporters, did the penny drop.
It was also Carnival weekend in Madrid (when is it not, you may well ask) and progress to a drink in the wonderful old Cafe Ginon along the Recueltos was interrupted by a frenzy of devils, Bolivian masked furies, brass bands on floats and painted tumblers.
Thing is, though, it was all a bit of a mess. We do these things much better in Britain, notably in Notting Hill. That’s because a carnival is an exception to the norm, whereas for the Spanish it’s a continuation. Most people lining the streets were in drag or fancy dress anyway. Spanish men really do love dressing up as women, no doubt about it.
Nic Kent’s other great tip was a bus outing to Segovia, which proved magical. In fact, the Romanesque churches of Segovia, yellow stone glowing in the winter sunlight, and Goya’s “Black Pictures” in the Prado, were the absolute highlights.
There’s a lot of theatre in Madrid but nothing you really want to see, except for camp. I toyed with the idea of Jesucristo Superstar with the disciples in black PVC and Pontius Pilate in a red leather miniskirt and suspenders but decided on dinner instead.
And what food we had! You have to find the home-cooking restaurants with dishes like bean stew, stuffed pimentoes, sweetbreads, whitebait and cabbage salad, but the Time Out city guide is pretty good, and we hardly made a mistake.
I even managed to arrive home without meeting anyone else I’d ever given a bad review to. Sad to learn of the death of Edward Wilson, though, Michael Croft’s successor as director of the National Youth Theatre. Like most people these days, he seemed to die far too young.
I shall always remember how modestly and astutely he followed Michael’s rumbustious act, and I’m glad the Arts Council got one thing right at least in increasing their support of the NYT. Apart from anything else, not to do so would have been an insult to the pioneering and inspirational work started by Croft and continued by Wilson.
