Birthday girl!

yesterday was my birthday - a big number, yes. It's always difficult for people to muster much enthusiasm two days after Christmas for another celebration so I've pretty much settled on doing my own thing.

Still, my family were there and we had a nice day - we went to Kew Gardens and saw the Henry Moore exhibition - it felt like there was another mysterious metal creature around every corner... some pieces I liked more (moore) than others, especially the huge white mermaid thing that squats opposite the palm house and the tall bronze sarcophagos thing that has a woman trapped inside it - themes of birth and death all very appropriate for a birthday. When I was leaving there was a young girl of about eight - her family were singing her 'Happy Birthday' on the way in - entrances and exits - stage on/stage off - I had to smile.

we had a lovely meal on Kew Green in The Botanist with a bottle of 'Cloudy Bay' new on the wine list thanks to a New Zealander on the staff and then went off by taxi to the West End to see Alan Bennett's play 'The History Boys' which I missed first time round. It's much the best thing he's done, a big play about how we learn and what we learn and how we teach other people - how we 'pass the parcel' as they say in the play.

As I owe a lot to my teachers who helped me be the first in my family to get to university - I recognise the need for young people to pass exams if they want to get on. But it's not the whole story - my parents took me across the world by ship when I was 11 years old so who can tell how much that trip gave me by way of extra education? A questioning attitude and the ability to think your way creatively out of corners has got to give you more resources at the end of the day than being able to memorise facts and/or other people's ideas and regurgitate them on an exam sheet.
All this would be an easy to accept if Bennett hadn't morally skewed the argument in his play by having the most gifted and chaotic teacher also about to be given the chop for molesting his sixth form boys. A lack of boundaries is his downfall - which suggests that knowledge without some kind of discipline or moral structure won't get you very far... in fact, it gets this character a rather too easy exit, tragically crashing his motorbike and disabling another.

So I guess the question we need to ask at the end is - how much good does a person do and how much harm? Previously referred to as karma - not a word we have an equivalent of in English - meaning what we carry into the afterlife...

For more interesting plays, check out our list of authors on: www.aurorametro.com
Our latest addition is Neil Duffield's acclaimed adaptation of 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens - manages to tell the whole story with only 6 actors and several children. One for the stocking...