Alan Bennett and Mike Leigh

"When sorrows come they come not single spies but in battalions"
Hamlet

This week has been a good week for going out.

First, on Tuesday, B and I had an evening out at the Theatre Royal in York to see Alan Bennett's double bill of spies. This was preceded by a very good dinner at a new North African Kitchen (whose name escapes me). Very good nosh, the merguez sausages and butter beans dish was particularly good.

The double bill of spies is called "Single Spies". It is two short plays, "An Englishman Abroad" about Guy Burgess living in Moscow, and "A Question of Attribution" about the naming of (Sir?) Anthony Blunt as a Russian spy. Great performances, entertaining and real, given by Theatre by the Lake company.

Tuesday was a very satisfying night out.

Later in the week I went to Cityscreen Cinema for an afternoon showing of Mike Leigh's new film "Peterloo". The news media has been carrying stories that not many people know of the events at St. Peter's Field that became known as The Peterloo Massacre. I was born and went to school in a cotton town and St. Peter's Field is on the other side of Manchester from us, so we were told about the Peterloo Massacre at school. Estimates are that around 100,000 people gathered on the field to demand voting rights and representation. These days the meeting would be described as a pro-democracy event, similar to the Arab Spring. The meeting was charged by the local Yeomanry and other troops, 18 people were killed, hundreds wounded. Mike Leigh takes his time in getting to the event, using the film to tell several different strands of stories of how people got there, the orators, the families, the authorities, the journalists. For me, this is first class history telling, real people, real events.


And it were grand to hear folk talking proper.