An Ideal Husband at White Bear Theatre

TLDR: An Ideal Husband at White Bear Theatre was excellent and you should have gone.

Now for the full story ...

I first came across Dan Rebellato (a playwright and Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London) via his play Beachy Head at Jackson Lane in 2011 which I described then as "one of the very best things I have ever seen in a theatre.". Since then I have seen and heard more of his plays and followed him on social media which tells me that we have been to many of the same plays but never at the same time.

It was because of his knowledge and love of the theatre that I followed his advice to go and see Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel at Battersea Arts Centre in 2023, and I loved it.

When he recommended An Ideal Husband at White Bear Theatre I bought tickets immediately, wife and sister having no say in the matter!

White Bear Theatre in Kennington used to be one of my fairly regular venues but that was when I was working in Kings Cross and it was more-or-less on my way home. Times change and I had not been there for almost four years, May 2022 for Harold Pinter's The Dwarfs. It was good to go back.

With the three of us travelling separately it made sense to meet and eat in the pub and that worked well. We sat in the large dining area where the theatre used to be before it moved upstairs,

It was unallocated seating and being very experienced at that I was first in and we claimed three seats in the middle of the long side of the "L" shaped seating.

And this was our view of the stage.

Clearly this was a modern production though just how modern was let to be seen.

At the core of the play was Oscar Wilde's flamboyant quote-laden script from which I give just one example to make the point "Lord Goring, I never believe a single word that either you or I say to each other."

The Oscar Wilde script alone was enough to make the evening good.

An Ideal Husband is a play with little action (apart from moving form one formal room to another) and so its need strong dialogue and characterisation. Wilde's script provide the base and this was built on substantially by the cast of actors who made each character distinct and interesting. Again, to give just one example to prove the point; one of the English gentlemen was played as an American complete with cowboy hat and shades.

The staging was the final element and there was a great deal going on here from amusing props (e.g. a roll of sticky tape for a diamond broach) to the off-stage characters watch intently from the sides. As always with clever staging there is a balance to find between adding to the play and distracting from it and for me the staging definitely worked.

All this meant that you could simply enjoy the play as written, or go a bit further and appreciate the way that the actors brought the characters to convincing life or go a bit further still and understand how the whole production (I forgot to mention the lights!) worked together to deliver a good play brilliantly.

An Ideal Husband at White Bear Theatre was excellent and you should have gone.

I averaged 21,517 steps a day in 2025

While the headline, 21k steps a day, is true the graph shows that there is more to the story than a single number.

After averaging almost 29k steps a day in 2024 I set a goal of over 30k steps a day for 2025 and for the first five months I achieved this comfortably.

Then the health issues kicked in.

My health story is long, complicated and unresolved. I would be as bored telling you about it as you would be reading it so all I will add is that the drugs are helping and I am now back up to 20k steps a day. I even managed 40k steps one day recently.

Many of the walks have been to new areas and new streets as I build my CityStrides LifeMap and this remains a great way to discover new things and to build a sense of achievement as the number of streets walked in each area (city/town/borough) grows.

I have set more modest targets for 2026 and these include the reasonably modest Go Jauntly Walk 2026 Challenge and  Two Million March.

I also hope to redo London Capital Ring (anti-clockwise this time) and London Loop; hopes carried forward from last year.

Rainbow in Rock at The Cavern (20 Dec 25)

Another very welcome gig by Rainbow in Rock at The Cavern in Raynes Park. Superficially it was the same as all the other Rainbow in Rock gig I have been too (and that is a very good thing) but I did nake a few mental notes during the evening.

The setlist, which always changes, seemed to be geared more toward the newer Rainbow material rather then the older Deep Purple songs. There were a couple I barely recognised and there was no space for songs like Burn, Mistreated or Stormbringer.

The keyboards were more prominent that before.

The bar staff were quietly efficient. The service was always quick and friendly, they remembered what I was drinking too.

It was worth going for Stargazer alone, it is possibly the best song ever written, though Like A Hurricane is a contender too.

NT LIVE: The Fifth Step at Olympic Studios

While a play staring Martin Freeman and Jack Lowden was tempting it was not tempting enough to get me to pay west end prices so I skipped the run at Soho Place but it was tempting enough when it transferred to screen under the NT Live umbrella.

I chose my usual cinema, Olympic Studios in Barnes, where central seat F6 cost a modest £18.5.

The timing worked well with a matinee performance at Bush Theatre I was able to stroll down slowly to Barnes pausing for coffee and cake along the way before arriving at Olympic in time for an unhurried soup and a beer,

By chance, both plays were about therapy sessions though this one was framed around alcoholism and the AA 12 Step Programme where Step 5 is "Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.".

For me, The Fifth Step failed almost immediate in comparison to the earlier After Sunday as these sessions seemed contrived and unnatural. I also found it hard to care for either character.

Jack Lowden initially played the alcoholic going through the programme with a lot of nervous energy but as he went through the multiple sessions he gained composure and almost became his Slow Horses character.Martin Freeman play the session leader as a man who was never in control of the process with lots of hesitations and mumblings. It was almost as if he had not learned the part fully. 

The staging tried to stir some life into the production with some light effects and rearranging the chairs(!) between scenes but these were more of a distraction than an enhancement.

The Fifth Step was a disappointment with only Jack Lowden's acting in the early stages leaving a good memory.

After Sunday at Bush Theatre

My theatre going changes over time due to factors like where I am working, artistic directors changing and, obviously, Covid but whatever the reason Bush Theatre in Hammersmith had drifted slightly off my radar and I only sent to see After Sunday because an email from the theatre said that it had a good review from Morning Star!

The synopsis on the website included "Ty, Leroy and Daniel have signed up to a new Caribbean cooking group. But when you’re locked in a secure hospital, too much food for thought can be a bad thing.". This sounded exactly my sort of thing so I am surprised that I had not picked up on it earlier.

Still, no serious damage was done and I got seat A6 fort £20, very much in the no need to think about it price range.

It was good to be back amongst the buzz at Bush and back to a seat in the front row.

While the basic premise of the play was simple, four inmates in a secure hospital attend weekly cookery classes with an Occupational Therapist, the insight to group therapy sessions was unpredictable and engaging.

With the five characters having different pasts and expectations their stories went in different directions and, as with therapy, some of them had significant moments but none of them ended.

Over an hour and a half we had interesting stories rich in all sort of emotions. Stories and characters that I cared about.

After Sunday sounded exactly my sort of thing, and so it proved. I loved it.

The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown at The Lexington

My list of "must see" bands is sadly reducing as we all get older so I was delighted to have another opportunity to see The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. 

The venue this  time was The Lexington in Islington, a place I had walked past many many times but had never visited before, so that was something to look forward to too.

Another bonus was that despite having walked all around that area when working by Kings Cross there were a few roads that I had not ticked off on my CityStrides Life Map, either because they are dead-ends or simply because I was not mapping my walk when I had been that way, so I spent an hour or so before the gig filling the gaps. That was another fifteen streets completed.

I even had time to grab a coffee and a sandwich from the local Pret before heading to the pub and in the pub I had time for a pint of Black Sheep Bitter before heading upstairs for the music.

I was quick enough upstairs to get to stand right next to the stage, something I had not managed to do with Arthur Brown for a little while. That let me take a few close-up pictures like this one.

The performance was much like the ones I had first seen in Lewes in 2023 snd twice since then. It had a lot of songs that I did not know, as well as several classic that I did, all of which were presented very theatrically. Obviously Time Captives was my stand-out song as it was entry into the crazy world of Arthur Brown way back in 1973.

It was another great evening and to cap it all off it finished in time for me to get back to the Grey Horse in Kingston for a couple of pints of The Naked Ladies.

I have walked 20% of Greater London

I used MapMyWalk to record each of my exploratory walks and CityStrides to summarise them all in one place. 

CityStrides also tracks the number of roads that I have walked on each town or city. Of most interest to me are the totals for each of the London Boroughs (I have walked every street in three of them) and the total for Greater London overall.

I have just completed 20% of Greater London. This is in terms of the number of roads walked (7,964 of 39,362) rather than, say, total distance.

The map below shows where I have walked and, more depressingly, those I have yet to do with some large areas hardly touched (there are a few gaps where I did not map my walks, such as the top section of London Loop).

My vague plans is to keep plugging away and to use every opportunity to walk new roads. For example, I have been to Royal London Hospital a few times recently and have walked quite a few new roads around Whitechapel and Stepney,

While walking 20% of London is some achievement iy is only fair to point out that I am only 4th in the CityStrides leaderboard and those ahead of me have managed 27%, 31% and an astonishing 68%. I do not expect to catch any of them.

I have walked every street in Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames (again)

My claim back in May that  I have walked every street in Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames got a slight setback this week. Not that unexpected but unwelcome none the less.

The app I use to keep a record of everywhere I have walked, CityStrides, is based on OpenStreetMap which is maintained by a community of users, including myself (much as Wikipedia is) and it gets updated both with changes to the physical world, e.g. new streets, and by clarifications, e.g. marking streets with locked gates as private.

These changes get uploaded to CityStrides periodically and when these changes create unwalked roads (or parts of roads) the unwalked sections appear as red dots.

The latest update for Kingston upon Thames created a few red dots for me, as shown here.

Frustratingly none of these were new roads, just roads newly marked s walkable, and I would have walked them when in those areas had they been marked as walkable at that time. Still, things are what they are and so I set out to walk them all.

More frustratingly, some of the dots were at the very southern tip of the Borough (I live on the northern boundary) so it was a longish ride on two buses to get me to Malden Rushett. 

From there is was a pretty dreary walk up A243 all the way to the large junction with A3, an even drearier walk along both sides of A3 to the border with Surrey and back then further along A3 to Tolworth and just beyond. That accounted for three of the four groups of red dots.

Then I was lucky. I was expecting to continue along A3 to the final group when I learned that I could directly there on a 265 bus, so I did.

The final group was a little bit more of annoying A3 but the final two streets in my quest were in an exclusive private estate so I had lots of impressive houses to look at while tracking the final dots.

And that was it, I have now walked every street in Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames (again).