The Daily Novel

Last night I went up to deepest Finchley to sample their night life at the Arts Depot, near Tally Ho Corner. I thought I was going to hear my nephew, Pete Rosser, who is a jazz composer and musician, play the Roderick Road rag, a work that was composed when he was staying in my house and which, he told me, is meant to reflect the feelings he can gets when he stays here. It was not easy to get to my seat in the middle of the back row. Although it is a modern theatre the gaps between the rows are narrower than they were in the gods of the old St James’s theatre which was demolished years ago. People have to climb back on their seats in order for you to get by.

By the time I had settled in my seat the lights had gone down. There was a not very clear voiceover going on about Argentina while three giant screens were moved into position and a crude outline of a map of the world was projected on to them. Then a bunch of actors, none of whom I knew, came on the stage and started dancing. By this time I was beginning to think I was in the wrong place. Happily the young woman sitting next to me had a programme.

I learnt that I was watching a performance of Romance D’Carnival by Tiempo de Tango, and that it was a story of tango, carnival and passion. The programme told me that Tiempo de Tango is the UK’s only professional Latin American collaboration of multi-disciplinary performance artists, mostly dancers and musicians. The musicians were another group, Tango Siempre, which is the group my nephew developed in order to pay the rent.

A bit of context here for foreign readers. Britain no longer rocks and rolls to the kind of jazz music I used to listen to at 100 Oxford Street in the 1950s. The modern passion is for tango. Up and down the country people are forming clubs and learning the formal style of tango dancing. Tango Siempre is ‘a unique and eclectic style of tango, jazz and contemporary music’ to which they dance. (Just to show that I am not completely stupid, the last time Pete was in London he was doing his old-style jazz gig, which is the kind of music I still prefer.)

Nevertheless, I settled down to listen to the music which was on offer. At that moment the band came out of the darkness along the aisle to my left, led by someone bashing the big drum. Following in the rear was a man on stilts covered by a gigantic paper mache head looking to me rather like President Peron. I learned later he was actually a brutal Argentinean military leader, General Vidella.

The story, based on fact, spans some 70 years of Argentinean history starting in the 1930s. It is partly a love story. El Nino Bien, a young aristocrat, is about to marry his sweetheart Malena. At the carnival she gets caught up with the spirit of abandon and dances with a working class man. El Nino stabs him to death in a fit of jealousy, for which he gets twenty years in prison. When he comes out he has to deal with the ups and downs of his country’s history. By the 1970s the dictators were not only kidnapping and murdering their opponents they were introducing all sorts of measures to keep the working classes in line. Including the banning of tango! Apparently the vigorous acrobatics of the dance arouse the spirit of political revolt.

It had been my intention when I went to Finchley to do a blog on the gig. But while I was there I realised that I could not find words to describe music which would convey anything to readers. So I decided to stick in this article to what I can do. To talk about what goes on in the minds of journalists.

Reviewers frequently start writing the review of the play, the ballet and the concert in their heads during the performance. Lots of other journalists when they go to the theatre are writing in their heads. If they are working on a big story, which is unfolding day by day, they rush to the theatre in a taxi, already remembering what they have not had room for in today’s story, and starting to write paragraphs in their head for tomorrow’s story. Because the human mind is so extraordinarily versatile it is possible to do this while also paying attention to the play or to the music.

The finale came accompanied by rousing and exhuberant music. The applause from the audience, which nearly filled the stalls of the theatre, was long and enthusiastic. Suddenly I was aware of my nephew, as he led the encore, on his accordion. And the tears started to stream down my face.

Which faced me with another problem. How do you report on an emotion? I was certainly having some powerful feelings, but what were they? I can only conjecture. Tears are usually associated with grief. I was certainly not feeling that. What I was feelings was a complex of emotions some inspired by the music, which is a powerful releaser of emotions, and some by my relationship to my nephew.

The thing that I was impressed with in the moment he started the encore was enormous confidence and exuberance. That was the only thought I had. But maybe the emotions work in a quite different way and manage to access in the instant the memories of forty-odd years. So that I felt in that moment the baby I first saw in my sister’s arms, the boy who was not very articulate, but gradually developed a mastery of the piano keyboard, and the man who had many years of struggle to go on creating his music and to earn sufficient to support himself, his partner and his children.

This is not very satisfactory but tomorrow I may return to this subject because I am due to go to the Freud Museum to a book launch by one my neighbours, Patrick Casement. He is a Freudian shrink and, according to the neighbourhood gossip, he has been known to weep in front of his patients. The great Sigmund always insisted on sitting behind the patient and never betraying any of his emotions at all.

Oh, for any of you living within range of North Finchley whose interest has been aroused by this non-review, the performance is being repeated tonight at 8 PM. Tickets £16.