The university language students habitually put on plays round about this time of year and I saw the Italian one the other night.  It was a first class production of a Goldoni comedy about two families and their friends organising themselves for a summer holiday.  The acting was suitably over the top and the fun was fast and furious.  It was exceptionally well directed with lots of clever little ideas.

I enjoyed it so much I thought I'd seek out what the others were doing.  I couldn't find any trace of the French but the Spanish and Germans both had shows on offer.  Whether by accident or design their shows were on exactly the same three evenings as the Italians and I couldn't make it to either. Mind you the German one would have been well out of reach linguistically.

Subsequently I've discovered that an exhibition is being held in April to celebrate 50 years of Les Escogriffes, which is what the French lot call themselves, so although they seem to be dead on the internet and on social media maybe they are alive in the real world and still producing.

My clarinet class had an outing to the Usher Hall to hear Mozart's Clarinet Concerto.  Very nice it was too and now Julia has got us playing a tiny extract, just sixteen very straightforward bars but recognisable as the main theme of the slow movement.

Having enjoyed a modern production of La Traviata on stage in Genoa in December I was interested in seeing the Metropolitan Opera's version, also non traditional, when it was broadcast to cinemas at the weekend. I enjoyed it a lot and adored the staging which reminded me of a wall of death arena from the Links Market of my youth, though it was rather more tastefully clad. The vast chorus all wearing identical masks peering over the edge was just one of the beautiful and powerful pictures that abounded.  The large clock half covered with a floral cloth temporarily halting Violetta's decline to death as her and Alfredo's love was at its height was another. The Observer tells you all that I can't.

There is another production, this time from The Royal Opera House, coming to cinemas soon but I've maybe had enough tubercular tragedy for the time being.

Man made tragedy featured in Viceroy's House, the film by Gurinder Chadha of Bend It Like Beckham fame about the partition of India in 1947.  It's a large, lush and beautifully shot film in the British costume drama tradition with an inter confessional love story woven into the blood and slaughter of the movement of Hindu to India and Muslim to Pakistan.

Film critic Mark Kermode in The Guardian has warm words about the film which I echo but its political analysis blaming Churchill and exonerating Mountbatten is hotly contested in The Mail by historian Andrew Roberts.  He argues his case powerfully and I know nothing either way.