Four stars for Festen http://alledinburghtheatre.com/festen/

I spent some time this morning grappling with the most recalcitrant, user unfriendly ticket selling website I've seen in my puff.

Eventually after several restarts ab initio and by giving in to the system's insistence that my date of birth was 25/11/2001 I got a ticket for each of the three days of the Davis Cup tie between GB and the USA that's to be played in Glasgow in March.

I played golf yesterday for the first time in months.  Absence has not made the game grow stronger.  On the other hand I didn't seem to play much worse and I only lost two balls.

It's difficult to measure how you are doing when you are hacking round by yourself, playing two or more balls on a hole if there are no players pressing behind.  You need the discipline of competition and a scorecard.  I expect that discipline would have made me feel more disappointed.

Tomorrow we move into the theatre for next week's production of Festen.  Part of the effort to publicise the show is to create little video trailers that are tweeted and distributed via Facebook.  These in this case consist of the characters talking about the birthday party they are about to attend and which is the context in which the play takes place.  They are being released one a day and mine hit social media this morning.  For the unsocial media savvy here it is.

A conservatoire according to Collins dictionary is "an institution or school for instruction in music", so when the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama changed its name to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland you could have been forgiven for thinking that they had decided to get shot of their role as a drama school.  Not so. Theatre training continues and produces excellent results.

I popped over to Glasgow recently to see two productions by the final year acting students. They were both excellent.  One was The Hypochondriak, a version of Molière's Le Malade Imaginaire. His comedies always seem to work well in Scots and this was no exception.  The other was an absolutely first class production of The Country Wife.  The Herald gave it five stars and it deserved every one.  

Another great play and fine production that I saw last week was Bondagers.  It's an exploration of the lives of a group of 19th century female agricultural labourers that premièred at The Traverse a little over 20 years ago.  I was stunned by that production so the Lyceum's was inevitably a little bit of a let-down but only a little bit.  The harshness and fragility of the life people led in rural Scotland at that time has thankfully gone but the characters drawn surely still exist in different guises throughout modern society.

My neighbour in the Usher Hall on Friday opined that "she fair draws them in" referring to the fullness of the house, the fullness of the Caird Hall the previous evening and doubtless the fullness to come of Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall on Saturday, brought about by the presence of Nicola Benedetti.  For it was she we had come to hear play Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto.  I'm sure there are other violinists who play it well but we all believe that our local hero is the best.

A few people seated in the organ gallery could be seen shuffling out during the piece, their loyalty to Nicola (if indeed that's what brought them) not sufficient to stand up against Shostakovich's brutally beautiful phrases wrenched from the extremes of the instrument.  I love it.

As the news of Acker Bilk's death came through I was practising his great hit Stranger on the Shore which had been dished out as homework by the clarinet evening class tutor.  I do hope that my mangling of the tune neither hastened his death nor caused any turning in the grave.