The Book Festival started yesterday and was absolutely overrun with punters queuing up for the event I was going to at 2pm.  Who knew so many people were interested in mathematics?  Or was it rather the dandyish figure of Cédric Villani with his long hair, fob watch, large floppy necktie and charming French accent that had drawn them?

Whatever it was they got a treat. He was an engaging and brilliant speaker whose purpose in writing Birth of a Theorem was not to explain mathematics, nor even his own work, but to give the layman a glimpse into the process of mathematical invention.  Indeed in answer to a question he said that only a very few people would understand the maths in the book and this is borne out by the review that I've linked to above.  But everyone should understand the joys and despairs that accompanied the process.

There was barely a trace of despair in Nell Gwyn: An Epilogue but plenty of joy. It's a one woman romp in the round around Nell and her relationships with King Charles II, the actor Charles Hart and others, told vividly by an excellent actress in a room that holds hardly more than a score.  She engages a number of the men in the audience in the tale, somewhat to their embarrassment but it's all great fun. 

The venue in which Future Honey was played could have held several score but only half a dozen people turned up and gallantly they all stayed till the end.  Not that it was bad.  Indeed the opening video sequence extolling the virtues of a "mood repair" software product was a superb parody of  advertising videos.

But the rest of the show was, to me at least, barely comprehensible.  Three girls dressed in Startrek like outfits did various things.  For instance mimed what I took to be their daily routines and while teeth cleaning and door opening were easy to spot I'm afraid 90% of it passed my understanding even although it was repeated ad infinitum or at least until the power in the golden armbands they wore went wonky and there was a lot of thrashing about followed by some sort of gameshow compered by an offstage amplified voice.

Two of the girls were eliminated somehow from the game leaving one alone but they came back in dark glasses gibbering somewhat and held a picnic and tried to get the third girl to choose between the foods (represented by squares of paper) that they held out to her.  She resisted and tore some bits of paper to shreds.

Well this sort of thing went on for close to an hour and then it stopped.  We were invited to join the cast off-stage for a discussion on the piece but I scarpered and suspect that the rest of the small audience did likewise.  Need I add that it was devised?  Nuff said.

Willie and Sebastian had a sell out audience who were sensibly not allowed to drift in and choose their seats at random but were herded by stern young shepherdesses filling each row in turn. And there were a lot of rows.  I got quite an advantageous end seat so could stretch my legs rather than crush them against the row in front.

Why such a large and tightly packed crowd?  The play was written by Rab C. Nesbitt's creator Ian Pattison and stars two widely regarded comic actors Andy Gray and Grant Stott.

Willie (Andy Gray) spends the early moments with his figure hugging Y-fronts inches away from the front row punters, leaning on the shoulders of one as he recovers a gobstopper sized lump of drug from somewhere deep in the rear recesses of those Y-fronts.

That rather sets the tone and provided you don't mind full frontal effing and blinding it's very funny as the rivalry of the two men over the affections of the one woman ( Michelle Gallagher) leads to comic confrontations.  There are some very clever lines but I can't for the moment remember a single one.

At the end of the show Thom Dibdin was ushered onstage and presented Andy Gray, to his obvious surprise and pleasure, with The Stage's award for acting excellence.