At 116 miles, it’s one of the longest stages in the race – more worryingly, it’s the first major alpine test.Between the start line in Gap and the finish in the ski resort of Alpe d’Huez are three very serious mountains. The race organisers confirmed last week that this will be in London – the five-mile against-the-clock “prologue” starts in Whitehall and finishes on the Mall.
Alternatively, you can apply for a place on this summer’s Etape du Tour, which will be a little more demanding.The Etape is an annual event organised by France’s V? Magazine, offering thousands of amateur cyclists the chance to complete one of the official stages of the Tour, on closed roads, just a few days before the professionals race over it.It’s supposed to be fun, but don’t even think about entering unless you’re prepared to put some serious training miles into your legs.This year, the organisers have chosen Stage 15 of the Tour for the Etape. However, this wasn’t a rant, which was a pity, as a bit more passion may have given her one-liners more bite.There were moments of clarity, however. “Why run a tight ship when you are living in a sewer?” the comic lamented, identifying the political apathy she sees around her. Meanwhile, back on the family hearth, where she built her reputation, Barr shows she still has the recipe for domestic wisdom: “I love being a grandparent and using small children to get even with my daughter.” For a large part of the show, however, gags are well-worn more than home-grown, such as the male recognition that one inch on a map equals a hundred miles and the parallel with claims about his manhood size.Perhaps it was too much to hope that Barr, after a decade away from public consciousness here (and arguably in the US), could come back all guns blazing. Certainly, Barr is under no illusions that her star status has seen better days, and played on this tonight, appearing in the deliberate persona of a fading starlet.
Enveloped in leopard-skin-patterned pyjamas, Barr explained that her one-hour show had a simple message – that the world is imminently going to end. It seems that touring with Michael Moore during the presidential elections in 2004 not only whetted Barr’s appetite for a return to live performing but also for a healthy dose of liberal doom-mongering.On Barr’s imaginary “The End Is Nigh” placard are the nuclear capability in rogue states, the stupidity of world leaders, the faddish diet industry, the mercenary pharmaceuticals industry, and the extremism of Christian fundamentalism.
Her life is strewn with personal mishaps, public relations disasters and, more recently, failed projects including a chat show, a cooking show and a reality show based around doing the cooking show. Nearly 20 years ago, Roseanne Barr’s US sitcom arrived to fill UK screens with her subverted Midwest version of home-cooked wisdom, her punch lines aimed at prejudice, pretentiousness and, well, people in general. Tonight her British audience was somewhat smaller at De Montfort Hall but no less anticipatory of her wicked wit as the 53-year-old American comedian returned to her stand-up roots
On paper, at least, Barr has no shortage of material. But as the action develops, the roles are time and time again reversed, up-ended, mutated.If anything, roles are reversed rather too often: towards the end of its unbroken two-hour span, the play starts to feel a little random and repetitive, and you wonder quite where it is going.May gathers up her coat to leave once or twice too often and while a late-arriving plot-twist confirms that Harrower isn’t trying to replace the audience’s easy certainties with certainties of his own, it also feels slightly effortful.In Peter Stein’s production, a final tableau shows Ray and Una wrestling in a car park (complete with real car, and real exhaust fumes).It seems startlingly clumsy for a director of Stein’s international status, and considered purely as spectacle it is ludicrous but it does serve to pull the focus back a little, clarifying and broadening the play’s purpose: it’s about the way that any sexual relationship can be shadowed by abuse and collusiveness.Harrower, it seems, is still ready to tackle the same timeless questions.. Instead, he creates an uneasiness about the categories we impose on relationships, an anxiety that our vocabulary is rarely up to the job.The two actors, Jodhi May and Roger Allam, are both assured and disconcertingly changeable – to begin with, she oozes sexual confidence and righteous indignation, while he is all constraint and anxiety. The action takes place in the functionally furnished, garbage-strewn locker-room of a manufacturing company on an industrial estate somewhere in Britain (nicely realised by Ferdinand Wogerbauer’s set).Here, Una, a woman in her late 20s, confronts Ray, the man with whom she had a sexual relationship years ago, when he was 40 and she was just 12.At first, he assumes that she is seeking vengeance, or closure or some such but it soon becomes clear her motives are far more complex – indeed, that for both of them their former relationship was much more complicated than a simple dichotomy of abuser and victim.She, she assures him, wanted and valued sex with him; he, for his part, has never had sexual feelings for any other girl that young.Would it make sense to call their relationship an affair? To say that they were in love? It would be too easy to call Harrower’s play “challenging”: he is never that direct.
And she doesn’t take on a role if she doesn’t want to.’Honour’, Wyndham’s Theatre, London WC2 (0870 060 6633) to 6 May. David Harrower’s first and best-known play, Knives and Hens, was a drama of jealousy and a sexual power-struggle set in a sparsely drawn medieval society, and written in a language so austere and limited as to seem almost abstract. She doesn’t watch much TV (reality TV, she thinks, demeans its participants and is watched, in the main, by people who despise humanity.) She goes to the theatre (“I’m shameless If I have to drop a name to get seats, I will”) She plays bridge, drinks Campari, smokes. In comparison, Blackbird, set in a recognisably 21st century British landscape and dealing with the perennially urgent subject of child sexual abuse, seems almost frantically topical: and, since its premiere at the Edinburgh Festival last summer, anxieties over teachers on the sex offenders’ register have made it seem only more relevant.
Watching Peter Stein’s production revived in the West End last night, though, the question arose of how far this new topicality is an illusion. “I’m travelling; I’m in my house in France, which I am still working on.” She has a Jack Russell, Mabel She learns French.
Not to say that one wouldn’t want to do something about it – raise money for charity or whatever – but acceptance of it is a part of the Indian outlook I understand that.”Rigg enjoys life outside work “When I’m not working, I’m perfectly happy,” she says. I found out that one of the last women to commit suttee had done so that day I picked it up from the gardener, or the ayah. The goddess Kali, creation and destruction in a great big fireball – what a wonderful idea.”You know how people find the poverty in India appalling, the beggars appalling, the misery appalling? Well, I don’t I don’t find any of it appalling It’s absolutely explicable in terms of that continent. Maybe it goes back to growing up in India.”We had a terribly ghetto-ised childhood, never allowed out to the bazaar unaccompanied, you know – but I think you still pick things up Children do. I remember in Jodhpur, I must have been about five or six, my brother and I used to go down to the bottom of the garden, to try and look over the wall at the world outside.
