Lemonade

I spent part of the morning finishing chapters one and two of the dialogue report. Then I headed to the West End to find a play. I tried Phantom but the line was so long I figured there wouldn’t be a return ticket left by the time I got to the front. So I went to The Birthday Party, a Harold Pinter play. Pinter specialises in the depressive aspect of the British character. But while the play wasn’t cheery--and was somewhat surreal and hard to comprehend--the work of actor Stephen Mangan was spellbinding.

Here’s one reviewer: “Mangan is electrifying, by turns matey, delusional, bombastic, charming. He is the psycho-guest from hell but you cannot take your eyes off him as he flashes a megawatt smile.” I liked him so much more than Paddy Considine in Ferryman or Killian Donnelly in Les Mis. Maybe it’s the range of emotions, or the pure menace, or that he’s very good looking. I just found myself thinking, “now that’s acting.” He was like a freight train tearing through each scene.

Back to the other drama in my life, here’s a snippet from chapter one of the report on the dialogue: "The strongest message from the dialogue was a paradoxical one, that addressing climate change head-on was counterproductive in Asia. This, despite the dialogue opening with stark warnings about the impact that climate change would have:

• ‘Asia is, on a number of dimensions, the region most at risk from climate change. Between 1996 and 2015 six of the countries most affected (loss of life and economic losses) by extreme weather events were in Asia’

• ‘Asia’s population is increasingly urbanised and coastal, making it particularly vulnerable to sea level rise (SLR) by 2100. IPCC estimates are 30 to 80cm of SL rise, but more recent work adds considerable high-end uncertainty, especially on slightly longer timescales'
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