Let's All Lose Our F***ing Minds At The Normansfield Theatre, Teddington!!!

 A seasonal tradition I haven't experienced in decades now is the Going to the Seeing of the Thing. One didn't Go to See the Thing because one would enjoy it, one went because it was only once a year. What exactly the Thing was now I can't remember – a nativity play maybe, or something you parents' friends from work put on – but I have the shadowiest memories of Time itself occasionally dying before my eyes as I sat bewildered in the unheated darkness with no hope of escape now, because Time was dead. I also remember outgrowing this nightmare pretty quickly, and learnt in my teens an adult's talent for appreciating something on principal regardless of the actual happening. It is perhaps in that spirit that this video is posted.

 

  And I genuinely enjoyed Lizzie Wiggons' piss material. And the pipes of John Rawnsley. There was always something in the Thing to enjoy. The Normansfield's proscenium is a beauty too, but it shares with my memories of the Thing  – as I notice I texted Max Hutchinson back when he first alerted me to the space while planning how to beat Covid by staging A Midsummer Night's Dream on cricket pitches – 'a very evocative "why the fuck did I come here" acoustic'. That's why I could only post this around the longest night of the year, because that's when this is needed. Few of us have been able to Go and See a Thing this Christmas, and I've a battered boater in the flat, an even more battered topper, and a bowler hat too small for my head, all doffed to the Paper Moon.