The EIF programme was released a couple of weeks ago and they organised a few taster events around town to whet our appetites.  Here we are waiting for the rain to go off so that some young dancers from Scottish Ballet can strut their stuff in St Andrew Square.  They eventually did so to the severe detriment of the grass.  Had it been football the pitch would have been declared unplayable. 

I've booked only half a dozen EIF shows.  I'm sure there are more that are worth seeing but I'm holding my fire for now.

It's taken a while but Hamilton, which premiered in 2015, has now made it to Edinburgh.  It's garnered five stars reviews everywhere it's been and the Edinburgh run has sold out.  It's undeniably a magnificent spectacle but, leaving aside George III whose cameo was great, it wasn't until the second half that I began to enjoy the show.  Prior to that it was all too loud and my brain found it hard to pick out the rapped lyrics from the frenetic kerfuffle so that following the story wasn't that easy.  They appeared to repeat the wedding scene for instance and I suppose that was explained but I didn't make out why.

Now there was still loud stuff after the interval but not all the time.  It was much less shouty.  And there was more variety of pace, more of a tale to follow and emotions to feel.  So I left the theatre feeling that my money had not altogether been wasted.

I've seen Bartok's opera described as a gripping psychological drama.  It may well be although I think the stony-hearted cynic in me might find it, as I found Emma Rice's Bluebeard at The Lyceum, a not very engaging melodrama.  

The Motive and the Cue on the other hand whilst it leant towards caricature was a more polished melodrama with some fine acting particularly I felt from Tuppence Middleton as Elizabeth Taylor.

I'm a longtime Shostakovich fan and his Fifth Symphony has always been a favourite so I knew I'd enjoy an evening at the Usher Hall in which it featured.  And so I did but it was paired with a piece I'd never heard before and which I'm keen to hear again.  This was the Scottish premiere of Mark Simpson's Violin Concerto and fittingly it was played by Nicola Benedetti for whom it was written.  Tremendous stuff.

I had the opportunity to hear another favourite, Maxwell Davies' Orkney Wedding  with Sunrise also at the Usher Hall. It's ending with a fully kitted out pipe major parading through the hall and onto the stage is a surefire crowd pleaser.  On that evening there was also a new short choral piece by James Macmillan, a setting of a Burns poem, that was very sweetly sung.

Socially I celebrated Ross's 50th birthday at a pleasant dinner party and tried to have a chocolate drink with Siobhan at a new place called Knoops.  It was however stowed out so we settled for a coffee over the road at Victor Hugo until they threw us out as they drew the blinds down at 4pm when we repaired to Contini's.

Rehearsals for Arkle's Cyrano de Bergerac are keeping me busy.  Opening on April 24th get your tickets here.   

 

I had an interesting couple of hours at the synagogue recently thanks to a visit organised by the Friends of the City Art Gallery.  I've always thought it a fine building from outside and it proved to be equally fine inside.  We had a talk about the history of Jewish settlement in Edinburgh and the development of their places of worship that culminated in the construction of the synagogue in Newington.  

Instrumental in the building of the synagogue in the 1930s was Salis Daiches whose son David, became a much admired literary critic and historian and occupied academic posts here and in the USA.  He wrote a beautiful book called Two Worlds about his childhood in Edinburgh.  The two worlds of the title are of course the Jewish and Gentile societies of the inter-war years.  

I read it years ago but it's most likely out of print nowadays.  Libraries have it and second-hand copies can no doubt be found.  You can also read it online here.  I thoroughly recommend it for anyone who has ever been a child.

Glimpses of old Edinburgh have appeared in my neighbourhood recently when the refurbishment of Vittoria's and of a shop nearby revealed the gold lettered titles of the shops that occupied their premises in earlier years.  Stationery and Fancy Goods Warehouse was one I particularly liked and I was intrigued by the partial title Portmanteau......, the rest being illegible.  Another was Cabinetmaker &.  And what I wonder.

Illegible I would have thought to most spectators and TV viewers was the advert for sports betting that appeared intermittently on the electronic boards around the pitch in Arbroath when they played Raith Rovers there a few weeks ago.  It was written in Katakana, one of the two phonetic scripts used in Japanese.  The cameras didn't ever focus on it long enough to let me write it down accurately but this is roughly what it looked like スポーツ・ベティング.

Maybe there's a large appetite for Scottish football in Japan but if there is I'd have thought it would have been for those teams in the Premiership like Celtic and Hearts that have Japanese players in their squads rather than for a tussle between the top and bottom teams from the Championship.

That's why I, who don't have much interest in football, was watching.  My hometown team were in an excellent position to return to the Premiership at the end of the season after 27 years absence and a game against bottom of the league Arbroath  would surely not impede their progress.  When they went two nil up a win seemed assured but plucky little Arbroath, as we surely must style them, didn't roll over and came out 3-2 winners.

My lounge and hall have moved up to the top league after repainting and recarpeting.  What an effort it was to get stuff moved out and back again.  I'm taking the opportunity to get rid of books and other things though.  I agonised for a while over a carpet choice and although I was very happy with my choice in the showroom my heart did a bit of a double take when they came to install it.  Now furniture etc is back in place I'm much happier with it.  

The logic seemed to me to have the painting done before the carpeting but handling the carpet produced quite a lot of scuffs on the walls.  The fitters treated the worst of them with pads called wonder wipes that just made them worse and I've ended up painting over them.  The end result is not wonderful.

On a cheerier note I've enjoyed a lot of music in the last few weeks.  Good jazz from the SNJO and the TSYJO, an entertaining combination of the Big Noise from Wester Hailes with the SNJO and a couple of excellent concerts from the SCO.  They played Beethoven's 7th Symphony at one.  That's surely amongst the brightest and most joyful music he ever wrote.

Another of their concerts with Pekka Kuusisto was magnificent.  It brought five stars from the Guardian and I wouldn't disagree in any way. 

I've seen more from the Japanese film festival that is showing films throughout the UK, from Kirkwall to Exeter.

Hoarder on the Border (断捨離パラダイス)  This was a mildly amusing story of a guy who's not making it as a pianist and gets a job with a company that clears out rubbish strewn houses.

Sabakan ( サバカン)  A really lovely film about two ten year old boys who become unlikely friends and their activities together during one summer.  It's framed by one of them as an adult remembering the past.  

Ice Cream Fever (アイスクリムフィーバー) Like Winny, for some unaccountable reason this was shown in a small square aspect ratio on the Cameo's already small third screen.  That's a shame given that the colour and costume and set design are strong points of the film.  The story or stories are about the relationships between the characters.  A niece and her aunt; a former designer working in an ice-cream shop and a customer. I enjoyed the film's style and mildly enjoyed the narrative.

Finally here's an ad for the play I'm rehearsing now.  My parts are very small so stay awake and alert if you come or you'll miss me.

 

This fearsome creature in its tropical looking setting is in fact in Logan Gardens near Stranraer.  I made a little expedition there one weekend when they were open for the Scottish Snowdrop Festival.  There were snowdrops but I didn't find them terribly splendid.  However I enjoyed the visit to the garden which I last visited in 1967.  It's one of those gardens that benefits from the influence of the Gulf Stream though judging by some photographs of it covered in snow that's no guarantee of year round balmy weather.

I was lucky with the weather for my visit.  It was a lovely afternoon although the rest of my brief stay in Stanraer was not so blessed in contrast to my visit to that other Gulf Stream influenced garden, Inverewe, in November when it was lovely all weekend.  We met recently to discuss when we could take Osgood up to Wester Ross again and fixed on a date in June only to find later that it doesn't suit the venues that want to host the play.  Project postponed sine die.

There was a very interesting talk at the French Institute about the time Zola spend in England.  Because of his involvement in the Dreyfus affair he was sentenced to a prison term but fled to England where he spent about a year in various hotels and houses around Norwood.  The French lady who gave the talk had lived in that area and had followed Zola's steps taking photos of places he had photographed (it was his hobby), recreating them to the extent of having people pose in them where there were people in the originals.  She managed to get a blue plaque put up at one of the locations.  We also learnt something of Zola's tangled personal life in the talk.  There's a Guardian review of a book about Zola's flight and the Dreyfus affair that will tell you more.

The following week I went to another talk at the French Institute, this time about Mary Queen of Scots and this time accompanied by Siobhan who is a fan.  She I think stayed awake throughout the talk whereas I dozed off.  Thankfully, for it was very dense and very dull and intoned without light or shade.  

Fortunately the evening was redeemed by a poetry event at the National Library where the wonderful Len Pennie entertained with readings from her first published collection, Poyums.  We then repaired to the Bow Bar fur a wee swallie.

The SCDA held its One-act Festival this weekend.  I went along on Saturday to support the Grads' entry and it turned out to be a worthy winner.  Taiwan by Martin Foreman (who is himself a member of the Grads) was quite a bleak tale set in some sort of dystopian future.  A young woman turns up at a lonely house occupied she believes by a solitary oldish woman with a story about her car breaking down.  This is not true. We learn that the young woman wants to move in with her husband and children to escape the growing problems of the city.  Things turn violent, her husband arrives, the older woman's husband who the young couple didn't know about also appears.  The play advances to a grim conclusion.

Good writing very well staged and performed.

As was Two Sisters at the Lyceum.  Quite an engaging tale about forty year old sisters taking a break at a holiday park where they spent their sixteenth summer.  One sister, the serious and settled one, is there to focus on writing.  The other is looking for temporary shelter from the impact of her affair(s). The caretaker at the site is the same young Swede, now older of course, whom she had fallen for and dreamt of sharing a hippie lifestyle with back in the day.  Will romance blossom again?  Will the serious sister be diverted from her righteous path?

A twist is added by the presence of a group of teenagers who take part in the action but also read out at points memories of being sixteen provided by members of the audience before the curtain went up.

Last year the Dunedin Wind Band played at Sci-con, the event where punters dress up as characters from various science fiction works as varied as Harry Potter and Starwars and are entertained by talks and the presence of their heros and buy all sorts of merchandise and just wander arround admiring one another.  We played again this year and the gig went really well.  I wonder if we will be invited to play at a different but similar event, Comic-Con, being held in October at Ingliston.  Do they perhaps include Beano and Dandy lovers amongst their clientele?

There's a Japanese film festival on around the UK over the next several weeks.  Six films are being shown in Edinburgh and I've been to the first.  Winny was not a winner for me however.  I wasn't much interested in the subject matter despite recognising the question that it exemplified and which recurs throughout history.  Does the inventor bear any responsibility for the uses to which his invention is put?  

I have a lot of time for Japanese public toilets.  I appreciate their abundance and their cleanliness and often their architecture, so a film about a Japanese toilet cleaner sounded just up my street.  Perfect Days is not part of the festival and is directed by the redoutable Wim Wenders which one might consider a warning in itself.  Nevertheless I went to see it. Did I enjoy it?  Sort of.  I can see all the virtues that this Guardian review lays out and to a degree I share the protagonist's joy in tranquillity and simplicity.  But on the whole, especially when I go to the flicks I like a bit of action and drama.

Shostakovich's Chamber Symphony Opus 110a played by the SCO provided lots of action and drama at the Queen's Hall in its brutal and furious passages.  Even when it's quiet it's bleak. I was sure I hadn't heard it before but some parts seemed familiar.  I found out later that it was actually an arrangement for larger forces of a string quartet that I have heard several times.  On the same programme was a modern work by Magnus Lindberg that included some amazing violin playing by Pekka Kuusisto.  He always brings something wonderful with him when he comes to Edinburgh.

Unlike this reviewer I thought the encore to the Saint Saens Piano Concerto at the RSNO's Valentine's Day's concert was very well chosen and it was delightful how Trpčeski stepped back from being virtuoso soloist to almost self-effacing accompanist. 

Some of the goodies on sale one recent Sunday morning at Stockbridge market.  Every now and again I wander over that way, often via the Botanics and Inverleith Park or, as on this occasion through the New Town.  Both routes provide lots of interest to look at for the leisurely stroller.

Were I a weegie I would probably find lots of interest to look at on a stroll around the West End but as a visitor I generally make do with a virtual stroll by way of Alasdair Gray's mural at Hillhead subway station before setting off to find an eatery or to get to Kelvingrove or wherever because I always seem to have an objective when I go to Glasgow.  

Lunch with Andrew was my objective last time and we ate at a place called Brel in the aforementioned West End.  I started with onion soup which was unfortunately over peppered, but perhaps that's where Begian onion soup differs from French.  The risotto that followed was however delicious so I wasn't totally disappointed but we decided to have coffee elsewhere.

We didn't go far.  Just the other side of the lane in the very pleasant Grosvenor cinema's bar.  In the cinema itself Alasdair Gray popped up again in the form of the film of his extraordinary novel Poor Things.  We contemplated going to see it but instead strolled up to Oran Mor where we took a few snifters to the sound of a folkies afternoon jam session.

I caught up with Poor Things back in Edinburgh one evening.  I had read the book just before Christmas but whatever pictures in my mind accompanied that reading were outclassed by the phantasmagorical settings of the film.  I agree with every word that Peter Bradshaw had to say about it in The Guardian but maybe, just maybe, the book was enough for me.

Another gem of Scottish literature is Jekyll and Hyde which I saw at the Lyceum in a version adapted for performance on the stage by one person.  Fair enough you might say given that Jekyll and Hyde were just one man!  It was an excellent production technically and extremely well played by Forbes Masson.  On the other hand it was  one of those occasions when I ask myself whether all that skill, expertise and hard work could not have been better employed breaking new ground.   Dine provided Ross, Siobhan and I with a tasty tea before the show.

In January it's hard to avoid the work of Robert Burns.  I didn't try to avoid it.  Indeed I brushed up my knowledge of Address to a Haggis in anticipation of being asked to recite it at the Burns Supper that Claire is wont to organise.  I'm sure the pleasure of those present was not diminished by the omission of that recitation.  Company, chat and extremely fine haggis and trimmings made it a grand evening.

I have at last got around to visiting the new rooms in the Scottish National Gallery that have been created to better display Scottish art.  I was familiar with most of the works on display but enjoyed seeing them in the new setting and finding other works that I didn't know.  I found the sloping floors and different levels a bit odd though.  I can't see that they lent anything to the experience so I assume they must be due to something about the site.

Painting has featured at home as well.  I've had the lounge and hall painted and await the laying of new carpets.  I hope I don't have to wait too long because my spare room, my bedroom, the kitchen and even a bathroom are playing host to the furniture and other junk that filled hall and lounge.

 

It was a very dull and drizzly day when i went up to Dundee to visit the Tartan exhibition at the V&A.  Before going in I made a number of attempts at taking a picture of the Discovery none of which turned out very well.  Rain on the lens, lamposts in the way etc., so I've cropped one to get what I think is a tolerably decent shot of the rigging.

I had heard a talk about the Tartan exhibition some time ago that excited my interest but I was less excited when I went round it.  The item I liked best was a film clip from Gregory Burke's wonderful play Black Watch.  It was the scene in which a soldier is dressed by his comrades in a sequence of uniforms from the beginnings of the regiment to its deployment in desert camouflage in Iraq.  The soldier takes no active part though he talks throughout.  The others handle him as though he were a doll, turning him this way and that, upending him and righting him as required.  Tartan features in the sequence of course.

Accompanying it was a short video of Burke and John Tiffany, the director who made so much out of the powerful text, in discussion with some senior school pupils in Dundee.  One girl asked why the characters used such "forceful" language.  It's a term I intend to use from now on when effing and blinding fills the air.

Anyway the exhibition was ok and I had a pleasant snack lunch with a tasty glass of white before I got the train home.

I had a similarly pleasant fish tea, sans wine, before going to Scottish Ballet's Cinders where the wine deficit was made up.  There was an interesting talk beforehand that gave us an idea of the complexity of the endeavour.  The ballet itself was enjoyable.  The story had been tweeked a little and in some performances Cinders was a young man and the Prince was a Princess but not the night we were there.  I can't say that I felt it a great loss.  

The SCO concert I went to the other week had an eastern european feel to it with Ravel's Tzigane and Mozart's so called Turkish violin concerto and the like.  The piece that caught my ear was by Ligeti.  His Concert Românesc is on Youtube.

Arkle's Spring production this year is a version of Cyrano de Bergerac. There was quite a big crowd at the audition.  I went along in full knowledge of my nose being too small to play Cyrano and my age being too great for a Gascon cadet.  I thought maybe the baker would be within my range but instead I have been cast as the ham actor Montfleury.  That will obviously demand a great deal of acting out of character.  I'll even have to act fat!  I'm also to be a priest.

I had a very sporty day on Sunday.  It started with Djokovic's long and arduous first round match at the Australian Open.  It took him four sets and four hours to conquer the young Coatian qualifier Dino Prizmic.  He was full of praise for Prizmic after the match.  Then Ronnie O'Sullivan took the stage in the afternoon session of the Masters snooker.  He came out of that even-stevens with Ali Carter.  After some exciting downhill skiing in Austria it was back to snooker and despite Carter's best efforts Ronnie switched on his genius in the latter stages and whacked Carter 10-7 to win the Masters for the eighth time. 

I've watched a bit of tennis since then, basically just what's on when I get up since choosing a match can involve nocturnal activity thanks to the time difference.  Luckily I've seen a couple of good matches involving British players.  Katie Boulter had a convincing win over a fancied Chinese player and it was good to see Emma Raducanu back in a grand slam, clearly enjoying herself and beating Shelby Rogers.  Mind you Rogers contributed a good number of unforced errors towards that win.  It will be interesting to see how Raducanu gets on in the next round.

The unforced errors I mentioned figure in statistics that the broadcasters display at the end of the set or match together with percentage of first serve success etc.  A line new to me now appears and for which I have found, but perhaps not appreciated, an explanation.  It's "hunting 3rd shot forehands". This it seems measures the number of times the server plays a forehand stroke as their first post serve hit, indicating their desire to dictate the point.  Well did you ever?

Happy New Year to all my readers, though it's not such a happy occasion for my Japanese friends.  The picture is of me looking at a map of the Noto peninsula.  There was a small earthquake offshore there a few days after I left in April but now it’s the epicentre of a humdinger of an earthquake with effects being felt along the western coast of the country as far north as Hokkaido and as far south as Kyoto.

The peninsula is a short drive out of Kanazawa where I spent April.  It’s where my Air B&B host comes from and on that day he’d taken me on a little sightseeing jaunt with cherry blossom viewing as the main objective.

I've been following the earthquake news on Japanese television and seen pictures of damage in many places including Kanazawa.  A tsunami is likely to follow and in Kanazawa port within a few hours of the quake waves 90 cm high were already arriving.  It puts the recent bad weather and travel problems here into perspective.

Despite not having been at many band sessions this term I took part in our Christmas concert.  Friends who attended reckoned it was pretty good and an improvement on previous occasions.  I'm not much given to New Year resolutions but I'll try to pay more attention to the band for the next two terms and see if that makes our June concert even better.

This having been the festive season I've been wining and dining thanks mainly to Claire who amongst arranging other festive events insisted that having missed my 80th that my 81st should be celebrated in its stead.  So she organised and cooked a birthday meal.  It was a jolly little party and was crowned by a birthday cake made by Siobhan.  I blew out all the candles with one blow.  Mind you there weren't actually 81 of them.

Hogmanay was similarly jolly though I overindulged a bit and suffered from a gippy tummy today that kept me indoors away from the treats on offer from Edinburgh's winter festival.

About five years ago I decided that being a member of both The Cameo and Filmhouse was more of an overlap than need be so I cancelled my Cameo membership.  But Filmhouse has been out of action for a while now and although steps are underway to bring it back to life films do crop up that I'd like to see and which don't get a screening in the big multiplexes.  So I rejoined The Cameo, finding to my surprise that my account still existed.  I've seen three films there so far.  Anatomy of a Fall, which has screened elsewhere but which I missed.  Its reviews were relatively enthusiastic.  Mine would be more tempered although I enjoyed it.  

The other two were Japanese, animation to boot.  I really prefer live action but I'm opening up to animation and those two films helped.  Part of my reluctance to animation is that the films are generally for children.  Tokyo Godfathers was not and I thought it was great.  It's a story of three homeless people; an alcoholic, a transvestite and a teenage runaway who find a baby abandonned with the garbage on Christmas Eve and set out to find its mother.  Based says The New York Times* on a maudlin western it's more on the gritty realism side despite being unreal.  It has become something of a Christmas classic in Japan and the current screenings outside of Japan are in celebration of its 20th anniversary.  The Guardian, Wikipedia and The Japan Times all have interesting things to say about the film and its director Satoshi Kon who died at the age of 46 leaving only a handful of films behind.  

The Boy and the Heron is more obviously a chidren's fantasy adventure film which I must say I enjoyed very much but places like Wikipedia find a lot more in it in the way of messages and moral lessons.  Don't let that put you off.

The Royal Institution Christmas lectures are also aimed at children with the admirable aim of both arousing curiosity and interest in science and of explaining it.  I tuned in to BBC4 to watch this year's series on AI with the latter aim very much in mind.  I found things to wonder at and enjoy but I'm not sure that I understand much more from the first two of the three lectures.  In particular the mechanics of Large Language Models escape me.  But the Royal Institutions explanations are more fun than the likes of this.

I had a splendid visit to the zoo with Claire and Ross.  Since I was last there they've amassed a grand collection of this sort of thing --

Zoos are keen to flourish their conservation credentials but I think it's a bit late to get into the dinosaur conservation business.  

Of the real animals we saw I was particularly taken by the giant anteater. He (she?) put on a great display, running about, rearing up on its hind legs, scraping bark off trees and so on.  It was most interesting but it operated so fast that every picture I took is blurred and doesn't merit reproduction here.

With the pandas having gone back to China old favourites like the penguins will keep the crowds coming and I got quite a nice snap of what I believe they call a "keeper experience".

Here's a young girl doing a keeper's job for a bit and loving it.

 *  Linking to the article here doesn't allow access but if you do a Google search for "Tokyo Godfathers reviews" and find The New York Times in the results list you can get access.

There's been no snow in my neighbourhood yet but out of town there's been a little.  This is a snowy field in Roslin where I went to visit the chapel.  I believe I'd been before but that was when I was a student over sixty years ago when it was in a fairly distressed condition.  Now, partly thanks to Dan Brown's book, it's lovely.  The carved interior is beautiful and they've built an excellent visitor centre.

Commissioned in the middle of the 15th century by William St. Clair, (William the Worthy),  you'll learn from the official website of the family connection to Dysart.  Those of you who know the area will think immediately of Sinclairtown.  The progenitor of that branch of the family was known as William the Waster.  I cast no aspersions on the good people of Dysart. 

From a later period of Scottish history came a talk at the National Library, one of my favourite spots in Edinburgh, about James VI and I.  This presentation of a new book about him was very interesting and entertaining.  I enjoyed it but didn't lash out on the book.  It's sure to have been snapped up by the library if I ever fancy reading it.

Later that evening I heard the SCO in a programme that featured Schubert's Mass in A♭ which was new to me and which was truly lovely choral singing.  Other singing I've heard in recent weeks came from the RSNO chorus in James MacMillan's Oratorio and from their junior chorus in music from the Nutcracker Suite.  Who knew that the latter had singing in it?  Not me, and in truth the kids sang for only a few minutes and their singing consisted solely of the syllable "ah" in various pitches and durations.  But by heaven it was heavenly and I daresay the presence of a hundred choristers brought in mums, dads, grannies et al to swell the receipts.

At another concert the RSNO welcomed a new principal cello by throwing him in at the deep end to play out front - Shostakovich's cello concerto - one of my many favourite pieces of music.  He was able to relax in the second half of that concert and listen to his bandmates captivate the audience with their performance of Sheherazade. 

I should note that thanks to an RSNO scheme to attract audiences I was able to give a friend two free tickets to a concert of their choice.  Unfortunately their choice of MacMillan's Oratorio failed to be their cup of tea.  

A pity it hadn't been tickets for the SNJO's Ellington concert.  They were exceptionally well turned out in black suits, maybe not quite tuxedos, white shirts and black bow ties in the style of the dance band era.  The music was excellent and the young singer who guested with them was very good.  I'm sure we'll see her again.

The King's panto has a reputation for pulling in the punters and giving them a great evening.  While the King's is undergoing refurbishment the panto is playing at the Festival Theatre and I was invited to a drinks and panto evening there.  It's a glittering production whose lights, sound, pyrotechnics, costumes and general stagecraft are to be marvelled at. The cast go about their business with great gusto, especially the triumvirate of known names, and the chorus add great dancing to the mix.  But it was not altogether my cup of tea so let's just say I'm glad I had a free ticket.

Absolutely my cup of tea was Leith Theatre's production of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  The novel is an absorbing story drawn from Muriel Spark's imaginative recreation of her Edinburgh childhood in the 30s. She portrays the interplay of the lives and relationships between teachers and between teachers and pupils against a background of the straitlaced attitudes of the time and the increasing tensions and political ideas that burst into warfare.

The play to my mind does justice to the novel and to its extravagant heroine whose influence over her pupils leads to tragedy and to her downfall.  

This production was very very good.  Was it as good as the production that Fiona and created in 1975?  I'm very probably the only person in the entire world to have seen both productions and my word can't be relied upon so I won't answer my own question.

Despite its ultimate darkness there is plenty of humour in Brodie as there is in The Death of Stalin.  Armando Iannucci's fertile imagination that produced this laugh a minute film that kept me out of my bed till 1a.m last night almost conceals the tragedy of the Stalinist period and indeed pretty much all periods in the USSR/Russia up to and including the present day.  The end credits bring you back to reality.

I also enjoyed on late night TV a showing of The Wicker Man followed by a documentary about it.   Despite it having been a cult movie for 50 years I'd never seen it.  If you haven't, get onto iPlayer now.  It's great.