Anglo-Russo-Japanese alliance

Forged, not least, by what Hiyoko's website describes in quaint English as 'the famous confection loved throughout Japan for its pretty baby chick shape'. I received my first box of these beautifully-presented delights from a former Goldsmiths student of mine now back in Japan, Yumiko Nunokawa, who travelled all the way to London with Shin-ichi Numabe, at the evening to remember Noelle last Thursday.

More about the serious stuff shortly, but can I trouble you with Hiyoko's legend about its chicks, information about which I am grateful to both Shin-ichi and Christopher Cook's partner Mitsuo for supplying?

'About the famous confection Hiyoko

'Hiyoko is produced in 1912 by Shigeru Ishizaka, the owner of a confectionary shop who wishes to make a Japanese sweet that will become a favorite of sorts among many more people unlike ordinary circle-shaped buns. Now, after a hundred years since then, Hiyoko is loved and well known to everybody in Japan.


'Commitment to ingredients

'The secret of Hiyoko’s daintiness is the carefully selected ingredients. The savory bun is made of flour from Kyushu to give a distinctive flavor. Mildly sweet yellow filling is made of fine choice of haricot beans. We select well-grown beans only and mush them deliberately. After our experienced confectioner puts the bun and filling together and bakes it in an oven until it becomes moist, melting texture, a delicious ‘Hiyoko’ is ready for you!'


Here at home, though we both loved their little staring eyes (with just a hint of the blandly malevolent penguin Feathers McGraw in Wallace and Gromit's The Wrong Trousers), we are divided over the deliciousness of the Hiyoko chicks. I like them very much indeed, J does not, but he was quite wrong that the various recipients wouldn't care for them either.

Though this was the most delightful surprise of my all too brief meeting with Yumiko and Shin-ichi, they came bearing even more valuable intelligence. I had already had a fascinating email exchange with Yumiko about Prokofiev's duo partnership as pianists with the French-Belgian violinist Robert Soetens, during which I saw a photo of them playing together which was completely new to me.

Now we know that perhaps my favourite photograph of the young Prokofiev


was taken not in 1915, as the archive and my book both have it, but in 1918 on his visit to Japan, as both the white suit and the same background reveal. For here is the young wizard meeting his greatest Japanese supporter, Motoo Ohtaguro (right), and A N Other on 2 July 1918.


Noelle, who wrote an article in an early Three Oranges journal called 'getting it right', would have been delighted.

After the big event last week, the obvious next step was to go and hear what Matthew Bourne had made of Prokofiev's score for Cinderella. I didn't see that production the first time round, when it was regarded as a bit of a mess. And to my mind it still is, though my Arts Desk colleague Ismene Brown thinks otherwise, and doesn't even worry about the over-amplified, pre-recorded orchestra. Granted, the idea of setting the fairy-story in the London Blitz of 1940, around the time Prokofiev composed the score, yields increasingly beautiful ideas amid the confusion.

The best thing in Act 1 is bespectacled Cinders' routine with a tailor's dummy that turns into her dream airman. Here are Sam Archer and Kerry Biggin in the first of four production photographs by Simon Annand for New Adventures Productions.


Quite how the airman's wounded self ties in with the Fairy Godfather's plans I didn't quite grasp. And the flight through the strafed streets is confusing, too, though the 'Autumn' variation of Prokofiev's seasonal divertissement - the wistful 'Winter' number is unique in getting the chop - strikes a not inappropriate note of terror as gasmasked 'dogs' create havoc.

Loud explosions and timewarp chaos reign in Act 2, too. It's clever how the Godfather turns the clock back on the carnage at the West End's Cafe de Paris and lets his Cinders make her glammed-up entrance down the big staircase.


Incidentally, one of the last times I danced around someone's handbag (and to that terrific Kylie number then all the rage) was at the Cafe de Paris, many hours into an absinthe-fuelled Gotterdammerung for the consultants of the cable radio station I used to opera-advise, Music Choice. The lethal alcohol plied by a small personage dressed up as Toulouse Lautrec left several folk unconscious, though having knocked back only three glasses I just about got home in one piece.


Anyway, as in the Bourne Nutcracker, Act 2 'was only a dream' (as four-year-old Carla said very loudly the second time we went to see that wonderful show). Bourne's coup is really the last act. Like that even wackier genius of the stage, Richard Jones, he can pull haunting theatre out of a composer's less inspired moments.

I felt Jones did that with the very sinister party scene of his Queen of Spades, and Bourne is determined to claw back the world-travelogue dances Ashton and most others cut from Act Three. And here the narrative tightens up, as the battered airman runs around London with the single lost slipper - down the Underground, where tarts straight out of the film Waterloo Bridge strut, and along the Embankment. Lez Brotherston's quick-change designs really come into their own here. And then there's a very disturbing scene in a hospital, for which, sadly, no press images had been approved. Frightened they might scare the punters away? Well they might be.

All ends well, and better than the visual inspiration, Brief Encounter, at Paddington Station. I wished they hadn't done an encore to 'In the Mood', which dispelled the disquieting aspects of Prokofiev's music in a feelgood sham. The recording was much too loud, muffled and boomy, but from what I could make out the woodwind soloists played especially well for that conducting doyen of New Adventures, Brett Morris. And though there's even less real ballet than usual in Bourne's choreography, he is always sensitive to the score's finer nuances.


Like I said, many good and striking ideas derived from the Blitz setting, but for a more coherent homage to A Matter of Life and Death et al I'd have to give the palm to the supposedly more impressionistic and very low budget brilliance of Pants on Fire's treatment of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the best thing I saw at Edinburgh and indeed in the theatre during the whole of 2010. And, hurrah, they've finally got their publicity act together with a brand new website, production photos and a little film they've put on YouTube which should whet your appetite.



Pants on Fire take up their prize visit to the New York fringe in January, and then they're back on tour, with only one performance in London at Islington's Little Angel Theatre in March. More, please, much more: this show deserves a proper West End run.

The end of Scotland Street?

For me, certainly. It's the Big Brother misadventure all over again. In that instance, I got hooked early on, told all the disbelievers how much it could reveal about human nature in the long term, how much more kindness was dispensed than vile behaviour, etc. Then decadence quickly set in and I stopped watching, except for the 'celeb' edition with Shilpa Shetty. And all those disbelievers said, 'told you so'.

Thus it is now with the latest of Alexander McCall Smith's 44 Scotland Street novels, serialised in The Scotsman (better point out straightway that's not Scotland Street up top but Northumberland Street, close enough in Edinburgh New Town terms). It was bound to resonate: Edinburgh as I'd known and loved it, with recognisable types, not least in the shape of two characters who wore out the quickest, anthropologist Domenica and washed-up artist Angus Lordie. We all fell for perennial five- or six-year old Bertie, and the high watermark for me was his trip to Paris in Espresso Tales where he falls in with a group of existentialist students and makes his profound pronouncement on Melanie Klein, force-fed him by his mother Irene: 'she's rubbish!'


Downhill thereafter, I fear. The homilies get preachier; the characters have stood still, good only for cheap pot-shots (what's the point of baby Ulysses throwing up over mummy Irene because he, like the rest of us, can't stand her?) Bertie still touches the heart, but there's not enough of him this time. A colleague of AMcCS implied he's got a bit grand: the chauffeur and the limo sit outside the coffee shop on Dundas Street while he conducts interviews. And he thinks he's writing for ladies from Colorado. Hence the odious myth of a perfect Italy which is the damp-rag climax of the latest and most disappointing in the sequence, The Importance of Being Seven.

Anyway, the novels may stand still but Edinburgh has just enough dynamism to change a bit and yet stay itself. We only had a day and a half there - staying just a block up from my happy home of nearly three years in Dundas Street - after visiting the godson and family in the Borders, but I think I chose well for the three events I saw on the Friday.


Much the best was Pants on Fire's stunning 1940s revue-style treatment of Ovid's Metamorphoses, which I duly five-starred for The Arts Desk. I doubt if I'll see a more bracing or consistently inventive piece of theatre this year. The review, like the successful theatrical attempt at Gesamtkunstwerk, got a bit buried under all the comedy, which strikes me as marking out another kind of decadence for the Festival Fringe, but each to his own. After a late lunch out in Gilmerton with darlin' Ruthie, who's been putting some of her work to good use on her terrace



we headed back for a low-key but consummately done hour with Diaghilev in the shape of veteran Tony Tanner's one-man show Charlatan (reviewed under the Ovid in the Arts Desk wadge). And on to a curate's egg of a Scottish Chamber Orchestra concert, rounded off by haggis and chips from the Alba d'Oro ('established 1975', it proudly proclaims, as if that were history, five years before I went to Edinburgh). Wasn't because of that, I don't think, that I was sick four times on the train to London - all contained, you'll be glad to know; just part and parcel (and plastic bag, on the one occasion I couldn't make the loo) of an especially hideous cold, which may be the result of veering between heatwave Zurich and freezing late night Rosslyn.

At least I got to welcome all the pleasures sans the impediment that struck on the way back. And managed to give my second Rake's Progress talk at Glyndebourne on the Sunday without losing my voice completely - even if I sounded, as I apologised at the start, more like a cracked Nick Shadow than a clarion Tom Rakewell.