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What a great surprise!  An early birthday present from my very thoughtful wife.

I’d always wanted to see Rod Stewart in concert.  Jayne bought the tickets months ago and kept it secret until the day of the show.  I didn’t even know he was due to appear at the Echo Arena in Liverpool.

The concert was great.  Rod Stewart truly deserves the much misused term “Superstar”.  At 8pm on the dot the curtain went up and we were launched into two and a half hours of Stewart classics.  No second rate support act.  Just the man himself with his fantastic band of accomplished musicians and backing singers.

Best of all, we managed to sneak a camera past the Nikon Police!

The lady who searched Jayne’s bag told us we’d have to “leave the camera with that man over there” in one of the locked cages.  Yea right!

We were jostled in the crowd. Jayne headed for the loo and no one chased after us.

It really annoys me that because a camera looks like professional equipment, you are not allowed to take it into these venues.  Yet they never enforce the ‘No Photography’ rule.  People were firing off their built-in flashes left, right and centre with no intervention from the security personnel.

All in all it was a good gig and we were lucky enough to have good seat right alongside the stage.

Hope you enjoy the pictures.

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Next time you feel smug at having nabbed the last space in a Merseyside car park, you’d better hope the other person who had her eye on that space wasn’t Sylvie Gatrill, or you could get back to find your car’s been cut in two with a chain-saw!

You see, Sylvie ‘knows people’ - mainly stage hands and scenery builders in the region’s theatre-land – who are quite adept at the art of vehicle dissection!

And if proof were needed, the play that has just finished its run at the Royal Court, Night Collar, featured a black taxi cab with its roof and side removed to give the audience a clear view of the action, and now a caravan has been afforded the same treatment for the latest offering at the Theatre Royal in St Helens.  Both plays were directed by Sylvie Gatrill.

Four Girls and a Caravan is a brand-new comedy written by Liverpool actress Lynne Fitzgerald and her partner Steve Simpson.  It explores the relationship between four friends as they embark on a fateful holiday in the welsh hills.

All seems rosy as the brash and rather ‘worldly’ Stacy and Danielle (played by Lynne Fitzgerald and Lynn Clarke) and the pseudo posh Rhonda (Claire Bowles) hilariously recount their adventures and past conquests to their younger and more naive travelling companion.

Played by former Brookside actress Suzanne Collins, Amber Hawthorn’s first lesson was that however good you look in tiny pair of tight shorts, coupling them with expensive designer boots is not a good idea as you traipse across a rain-swept hillside.  Cow dung is not the most alluring fashion accessory!

But there was more, much more, for this dizzy blond to learn in what was to become a baptism of fire.  Quite literally actually, as Scene One ended with the caravan being blown to bits in a gas explosion!

There can’t be many stage plays where the four main characters die a third of the way through.  The thing is, these girls didn’t realise it until the end of the second scene which they spent, quite literally, in limbo.

The second half of the show saw the four at the Pearly Gates negotiating their fate with a three-foot tall Saint Peter who – if you didn’t already know – is a scouser! The same actor, Shaun Mason, then performed some sort of celestial transformation to become a six-foot game show host in the fourth and final scene.

Helped by the obligatory game-show eye-candy in the form of Chantelle Nolan, the Huey Green like character took the four girls through a truth-or-dare type confessions game.  As each of the dead friends vied for a place in heaven, the revelations shocked all four!

I won’t spoil it for you with the details, or reveal whether they went ‘Up’ or ‘Down’.  Suffice to say, there was a guest appearance from God (albeit on the silver screen) in the form of Radio City presenter Pete Price.

Four Girls in a Caravan is a great new comedy and it’s a shame there are only four performances in this it’s first run.  It deserves a longer showing and there would be no better venue than the Royal Court in Liverpool with it’s larger audiences who love, appreciate and expect this kind of raw scouse humour.  I do hope the caravan gets towed there soon!

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Connections:

You can hook up with the characters on Facebook. Amber, Rhonda, Stacy and Danielle

The play runs at the Theatre Royal, St Helens until Saturday 10th July 2010

More on the Liverpool Echo website

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Click on the images to enlarge.

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Just ignore the date of this post -  it’s nearly Christmas!

Well at least it was last night in Liverpool’s theatre-land where Night Collar was enjoying its second airing in eighteen months.

A second but much shorter airing, running for just two instead of the four to six weeks that is usual for comedies at the Royal Court.

Maybe they were unsure whether the comedy would work so obviously out-of-season.  To be honest, I had expected it to have been rewritten to take place during the summer months.  After all, with the exception of the reluctant Santa, none of the of the characters were particularly tied to the festive season.  The Elvis impersonator, the prostitute, the naked stag-night victim, the tranny and the warring drunken couple could be typical punters for any scouse cabbie on practically any weekend of the year.

That said, a lot of the one-liners had been brought bang up to date and the play was very funny.  It was almost a packed house – good for a Thursday – and raucous belly laughs were in abundance.

Former Brookside actor Louis Emerick did a fine job throughout, portraying the cabbie, as did Eithne Browne playing a brash prostitute one minute and a poignant cancer sufferer the next.   Danny O’Brien had a small part as the naked reveller (well it was supposed to be cold ) but to his credit he did play it large. He also turned his hand equally well to playing the tranny and a Jack-the-Lad character.

But for my money the Royal Court Oscar went jointly to Linzi Germain and Alan Stocks whose portrayal of the drunken husband and his equally drunken ‘woman scorned’ was nothing short of brilliant! They were so so funny – and oh so believable!

We see  so many badly-acted drunks on stage and screen but Alan in particular is always very convincing.

In fact I later mused that the only time I’ve ever seen him sober is at the bar after the show!

To sum up:  As far as “Royal Court” comedies go, it didn’t disappoint,  and yes, I would recommend anyone who enjoys a good laugh to go and see it.  I just wish that, having decided to stick with the Christmas theme, they had taken the bull by the horns and gone to town on the scenery and stage set to inject a real Christmasy feel to the night.  One of the best Christmas parties I  ever attended was actually held on a summer solstice night – so it can be done!

Night collar runs until 10th June – don’t miss the taxi!

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* Please excuse the quality of the mobile phone pic (no cameras allowed in the auditorium). My dropped hints about going to dress rehearsals for some decent shots have fallen on deaf ears up to now!

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See also on the Daily Post and Liverpool Echo websites