Why should you go to see it? Here’s what director Nigel Charnock says: “We thought people might see the title and say, `Oh, that might tell me how to live’. And indeed it does – or at least, it gives you a few clues.”Steven PooleOpens tonight, 7.30pm, Watermans Arts Centre, 40 High Street, Brentford (081-568 1176) £8.50/£5.50 concs To 25 Mar. The wonder of How To Live is that it plays with Ibsen’s drama without parodying it; the magical ending preserves in full the poetry of his best work. From then on, Volcano’s four extraordinary performers hold the attention with charismatic ease, stripping bare the theatrical illusion and bitching about each other before stepping smartly back into character.
Perhaps it is unfair to choose a star from such a uniformly strong team, but the superb Jane Arnfield’s unforgettable scene involving a filing cabinet full of plastic babies has the audience crying with laughter. Gradually, lines are repeated, echoed and fractured while the cast begin throwing themselves around the stage with abandon, combining textual creativeness and sheer kinetic energy. A 1994 Edinburgh hit now transferring to London, the piece starts off in a highly stylised naturalistic way, played with hilarious earnestness.
Volcano Theatre Company’s latest production, How To Live (with Fern Smith, right), is an extraordinary fusion and deconstruction of Ibsen’s works, done in the astonishing, reckless physical style that has come to be their trademark. You don’t go to a production of Ibsen to have a raucously good time. And you don’t necessarily go to a “physical theatre” performance to have your grey matter stretched Until now, that is. Among the very cheap, very fresh and very good food that will flow from the kitchen might be twice-fried aubergine in Sichuan pepper sauce, a Cantonese egg custard in a spicy stock and lightly battered then deep- fried vegetables Best to notify for vegetarian meals Opening 12noon until “end of dinner” Mon-Sat Best to book on weekend Cash and cheques only Approx £9 Unlicensed BYO. Then, last year, he started cooking five- and seven-course Chinese meals for locals out of the back of his bakery.
These became so popular, he is down to one life and a thriving family business: Fatman Kitchen, 43 Woodgrange Road, Forest Gate, E7 (081- 519 3126) A menu lists 171 dishes, but regulars simply ask to be fed. Open lunch and dinner Mon-Sat; cash and cheques onlyLEYTONBob Ramzan (aka Fatman), a Macau-born chef who has lived in England these last 20 years, used to get up to the culinary equivalent of Bunburying: he would leave his rather lacklustre bakery in Forest Gate, East London, and nip over to Stratford to cook steak diane and various flambs in what he describes as a “European” restaurant. Evidently, when reading Time Out aloud (and loudly), she affected never to have heard of Francis Ford Coppola A local pensioner rumbled her Approx £7. The walls juddering when the mixer is turned on to make zabaglione. Regulars who eat here because they are poor do not take much guff from slumming hipsters: Kathy Acker’s visit in the mid-Eighties, shortly after her profile on the South Bank Show, was particularly poorly received. The friendly muscle with which you are jammed into booths with strangers The flaming zambucca.
Access, Visa, AmexSOHOIf you qualify for a banker’s card, you are probably too rich to usurp a seat at Pollo, 20 Old Compton Street, W1 (071-734 5917). This is an old Soho hangout where food is cheap, wine is thin, service is hectic and fittings are decaying Fifties period pieces So why mention it? The cheery greeting at the door. The quattro stagione with extra capers is the staple meal of our travel editor (£4.50 to eat in, £4.95 take-away) Open 12noon-11pm Mon-Fri; 5-11pm Sat Approx £10-£12 all-in. This family pizza restaurant fills up with a cross-section best summed up by their hair-dos: afros, tall, blonde and teased, skin-head, Princess Di blow-dries, Rapunzel locks, Vidal Sassoon blunt bob and short back and sides.
The pies are OK (a bit doughy) but it is the verve and cheer of the staff that keeps the place packed out. Major credit cards and SwitchELEPHANT AND CASTLEWhat a nice restaurant like Pizzeria Castello, 20 Walworth Road, SE1 (071-703 2556) is doing in a dismal concrete jungle like Elephant and Castle is obvious: raising the tone. Not bad treatment for a barn of a theme restaurant that fills up with footsore tourists and hen parties Ah, avoid the salads Set-price two-course lunch and dinner £5.95 Approx £10-£15 Open 12 noon- 11.30pm daily. Visa, AccessCOVENT GARDENNow Cafe Piazza, 16-17 Russell Street, WC2 (071-379 7543) is a place where it is unlikely an authentic, genuine Briton from London, England, will be recognised, except by the genius of a manager named Salvo Alfano. This dashing gent might whisk you off to a table, wing a huge and perfectly cooked disk of pizza bread to you, and after your meal introduce you to the wonderful hazelnut liqueur called Nochino. Or a Sunday night might produce my favourite pair: a man and woman whose frank flirting has a wonderful lethargy.