Watts had taken as his child bride the teenage actress, Ellen Terry, in order to protect her from the same fate, or so the story goes.  The marriage failed.   It was supposedly never consummated. According to the amusing fiction by Lynne Truss, Watts just wasn’t interested in her that way.  Released from Watts’ protection, Ellen soared upwards to become the most famous actress of her generation. 

The Seagull possesses the usual Chekhovian themes; the country house, a self indulgent Russian bourgeoisie, decadent, bored and in decline,  the threatening clouds of the oncoming revolution  And the actors have the same familiar roles, the ageing actress and matriarch playing to the balcony while the theatre crumbles around her,  the elderly and ailing uncle, the owner of the estate, representing old Russia about to vanish forever, the frustrated and bullish farm manager, fed up with the old ways and wanting progress,  the desperate young author, the naive and fragile girl, and the doctor, perhaps Chekhov himself, a reflective observer, not entirely engaging with it all.  Soon all will be scattered.  Seen from this perspective, the seagull presents a broader perspective on the oncoming crisis,  a fragile but beautiful way of life soon to be chopped down like The Cherry Orchard.  Of course, the characters seem hysterical and self centred, they are all in love with love as a form of escape, the end of their world is coming; what else can they do?  It wouldn’t be theatre if they all behaved sensibly and worked together. 

The Seagull is currently playing at the Arcola Theatre in Stoke Newington; not an area I know well but accessible via the London Overground.  The theatre is a converted warehouse.  The set and seating are rough and ready but the cast and direction is as accomplished as many productions you might see in the West End.  Geraldine James plays the actress and matriarch.  The doctor is played by Roger Lloyd Peck, recently seconded from the Dibley parish council.  Chekhov billed the play as a comedy but nobody in Stoke Newington was laughing.

The Watts Gallery opened at Compton on the North Downs outside Guildford on June 18^th.  It is said to be the only major gallery in the country devoted to a single artist.  Watts was immensely popular in his heyday; two rooms were devoted to his paintings in the newly opened Tate Gallery at Millbank but the fashion for Victorian art changed and by the nineteen fifties you could pick up his paintings for less than a hundred pounds.  His museum at Compton fell into disrepair but was rescued by coming second in the BBC’s Restoration programme and then getting a 4 million pound lottery grant.  Watts’ paintings are not exactly cheerful.  The most famous are allegories of themes like hope, poverty and despair.  They are sombre and intense; Watts saw his mission to produce work that encourage young people to think about moral issues.   

Lynne Truss didn’t treat Watts kindly.  In her novel, Tennyson’s Gift, which described with humour the characters that circled the bard of Farringford, she portrayed him as self obsessed and sexually repressed.  Who knows, if he had been more responsive to Ellen’s allures, she may never have felt the need to escape to the stage. 

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‘She looks like a woman with a past, doesn’t she?  

Most pretty women do.  But there is a fashion in pasts just as there is a fashion in frocks.  Perhaps Mrs Chevely’s past is merely a slightly décolleté one, but they are extremely popular nowadays.’    

So is she a clever but dangerous woman who lacks any scruples to get what she wants, an adventurer, a dangerous seductress, a victim?  

‘Oh I should fancy Mrs Chevely is one of those very modern women who find a new scandal as becoming as a new bonnet, and air them both in the park every afternoon at five-thirty.’ 

Bored, frustrated and manipulative, her intelligence and sexuality are but instruments in a game of power and influence.  She seems so far into it that she has forgotten how to feel. 

‘She wore far too much rouge last night, and not enough clothes. That is always a sign of desperation in a woman.’  

She blackmails Sir Robert Chiltern into protecting her investments by threatening to expose him.  She has in her possession a letter proving that His Majesty’s Foreign Secretary kick started his career by selling secret government plans to a speculator. 

‘I think that in life, in practical life, there is something about success, actual success, that is a little unscrupulous; something about ambition that is always unscrupulous.’   

But Sir Robert’s young wife, as beautiful as she is uncompromising, has put her husband on the fourth plinth, making it perfectly clear that her love for him is purely a projective identification of one with perfect morality. 

‘I remember having read somewhere that when the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.’

In so doing, her principles damage Sir Robert far more then the bribery and manipulation of Mrs Chevely could ever do.  

‘And is Lady Chiltern as perfect as all that?  What a pity!’

Sir Robert cannot face telling his wife the truth.  He knows it would destroy their marriage. Mrs Chevely knows this and is prepared to destroy both his career and his marriage.    

The fact is we all have our dark sides, the things we are ashamed of.  It never does to have such high principles (one wonders what is being defended). 

‘Well, the English can’t stand a man who is always saying he is in the right, but they are very fond of a man who admits he has been in the wrong. It is one of the best things in them.’

Lord Goring is the catalyst in Oscar Wilde’s wittily observed play (The Ideal Husband).  He’s rather like Falstaff or the wise court jester, but in this case it is the dandy philosopher, brilliantly played by Eliot Cowan.   He enters as a louche and dissolute character, but he understands the flaws of human nature; everybody is capable of doing wrong. 

‘Nobody is incapable of doing a foolish thing.  Nobody is incapable of doing a wrong thing.’

Idealisation is a very fragile basis for marriage.  Acceptance and forgiveness are more important.  As Sir Robert complains:  

‘Why can’t you women love us, faults and all?  Why do you place us on monstrous pedestals?  We all have feet of clay; men as well as women, but when we men love women, we love them knowing their weaknesses, their follies, their imperfections, love them all the more for that reason. It the imperfect, not the perfect who have need of love.’

But is it that gender specific? 

An Ideal Husband, probably Oscar Wilde’s best play, is currently at the Vaudeville Theatre in the Strand and stars Samantha Bond, Rachel Stirling and Eliot Cowan.  It doesn’t deserve a half empty house.  

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Shocking, intense and bleak, the poem is a minutely observed encounter between two middle-aged one-time lovers.  She is bright, kind and sensitive, but she can afford to be.  She has moved on, married a successful author, she has made something of her life.  He has not.  In the fifteen years since they last met, his soul has been corroded by disappointment and bitterness.  He remembers their affair with a desperate longing, but he is too vulnerable to show it.  Instead he affects a vacant sarcasm, pretends he doesn’t care and gets drunk.  He can’t bear to engage with the ghost.  She understands and reaches out to help him and there is a moment when you imagine they will leave and go to bed. No, that would be too much to bear.  He looks away, stares at the waitress’s bottom and drinks more wine.  He tries to pour some for her but she places her hand over her glass.  

You wonder why he wrote suggesting they meet for lunch, why she accepted, why they met here of all places.  Was it just that he wanted to rekindle a spark of life in the ashes of his existence, to rediscover the meaning he had lost?   Did she want to witness his capitulation, his final degradation? 

He gets up to go to the toilet but falls asleep on the roof.  She pays and goes.  But later as he leaves the empty restaurant, he sees a tired old man eating alone in the corner.   Massimo, the owner, one-time life and soul of an everlasting party, promoter of dreams, is now just a grey shadow. 

The Song of Lunch was broadcast on BBC 2 at 9pm on October 8th.

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He is one of those slightly odd  anti-heroes who confound and irritate the hell out of those who take themselves too seriously.   Playing tennis, he  has his own idiosyncratic method of serving, a back and forth movement of the racquet as if he was putting a pizza in the oven and then a smack, leaving his more professional opponents muttering darkly.  But don’t we love him just because he has a go?  His  car breaks down at the funeral gates but when he opens the boot to get his tools, the inner tube rolls into the wet leaves where it is mistaken by the funeral director as a wreath and hung on the tomb.  The wreath deflates but the mourners pretend not to notice and come up to shake M. Hulot’s hand for his courtesy.   And of course, it‘s Monsieur Hulot who gets to dance with the pretty girl, but there is no hint of guile or seductiveness is his behaviour.  He is just enjoying the innocent fun of being  Monsieur ‘Ulot on ‘oliday.   

If it wasn’t French, we would say that Monsieur Hulot’s holidays is a charming example of British humour,  the precursor of Mr Bean and Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but it’s more subtle than either of those.  M. Hulot is not so much a belly laugh as a whimsical set of observations of people doing the sort of things that people do on holiday.  We are laughing at ourselves.  Jacques  Tati has a wonderful girt of mirror to all of us and saying with a slight smile,  ‘aren’t we all a bit absurd when we think about it?’

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And in love, what is the real thing?   Stoppard is a much greater teacher on the mysteries of love than any of the psychoanalysts; he shows us what it is like.  Henry is arch Stoppard,  graded, defended, cynical, witty, prompting Annie’s comment  ‘You want to wait until it all goes wrong and then you will decide you were right all along.’

The script fizzes with insight and emotion.  Hannah Morahan as Annie captures the barely contained lust, a dangerous impulsiveness, as she goads Henry on to take the risk that will prove he truly loves her.   ‘Touch me!  Anywhere!  I dare you to.  Do it now on the floor. Let them find us.’  And when she returns with the dips and gives him her finger to suck, the look on Henry’s face reveals just where that finger has been.  It’s raw stuff.  The shift from the thrill, the excitement to the most dreadful pain is expressed so well.   So is there something about the thrill that just captivated Henry.   ‘Once you have loved, can you ever do without it?’

There is a dreadful compulsion about an affair, the awful conflict,  the compulsive danger of playing with fire, ‘All that lying.’ ‘Happiness expressed in banality and lust.’, passion fuelled by the fear and jealousy.  ‘Why aren’t you jealous?’ It bothers me that you are never bothered’  Annie complains.  Of course, if Henry were jealous, it would demonstrate the power she has over him.  Exclusive love is colonisation’.  And isn’t that the source of the excitement, the thrill of it all?   Annie wants Henry to prove she is loved, is loveable; she is so insecure,  she can only exist in her lover’s gaze. ‘The exclusive voracity of love.’ 

Henry eloquently explains being in love as colonisation, I write just for you.  I write just to be worth your love.  It has taken him over, subsumed all of the meaning in his life.  He lives with Annie in their own bubble of happiness.  ‘Love is knowing and being known’  So is being in love an enhanced image of self, air brushed and in soft focus.  Aren’t  lovers really in love with themselves, as seen through the gaze of the other.   ‘When its there, you are happy and nice to know, but when its gone, you count for nothing and all you have is pain.   So Henry is dependant, even though he fights it.  They both are.  They have given each other power over their lives, the power to destroy each other. Anything you think is right; what you want is right. This is the extent of the dependency.    But human relationships cannot be confined as Annie says when she admits her infidelity – this is not a commitment,  just a bargain – a deal and it gets complicated when you have an affair and enter into a deal with two people.  Maybe being in love becomes a performance, an obligation that you have to act out, because the threat of loss is so great.  It’s better to destroy the hope than to live a love that gives false joy. 

As  Annie says, ‘I have to chose whom I hurt more’  You are stronger, you can take it.  But I love you, I’m yours.  Henry finds it demeaning to be suspicious and jealous; he struggles to respond in what Stoppard calls ‘dignified cuckoldry’.   The unwritten rule of a relationship seems to be to respect the other’s privacy.  You must not trespass behind the make believe.  You must not try to discover the real thing; the ambivalent attachment of most human relationships. ‘What free love is free of is love!’   

The Real Thing was written in 1985 and has been playing at The Old Vic with Toby Stephens and Hannah Morahan as Henry and Annie.  Stoppard tackles an intense and important topic with insight, wit and style.  

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David and Joan married in the twenties, a frivolous, romantic excursion from the horrors of the Great War.  They were rich, well connected, they could afford not to take life too seriously.  So they partied, they drank, they made love; their whole purpose was to have fun. For fear of being thought too intense and to avoid the depression that could bring, they masked their true devotion in a relationship of mutual, just-good-pals flippancy.  But there is a serious side to David that Joan failed to nurture;  he is a writer, a would-be historian, a romantic, he plays Chopin badly and he is depressed.  He anaesthetises the sense of his own pointlessness in alcohol, poisoning himself with self disgust and slowly dying of cirrhosis.   And now, as the Nazis march into Poland, he  dictates his tedious dissertation on a previous German dictator of much less significance and drinks more whisky.   

Redemption materialises in the sylph-like Helen, a trim zealot who has fallen in love with the idea of saving him and is quite prepared to destroy his marriage in order to achieve her mission. When David falls in love with her, you can smell disaster. 

Joan, David’s wife, learns on the evening of her party that he is going to leave her.  Just for old time’s sake, she makes David play ‘Avalon’ one last time, slips through the curtains on to the balcony and kills herself.  A week later, Britain declares war on Germany. 

Rattigan sees the glimmering meaninglessness of these not so bright nor young things.  He feels their sadness, understands the need to evade reality, but is critical of their somnambulistic trudge to catastrophe. As the one dour party guest, a refugee from the Mayfair set and one-time fiancée of Joan, points out, ‘They ran away from reality after the last war. The awful thing is that they’re still running away’.

The cast are superb. Benedict Cumberbatch conveys not just the surface smoothness of the self-destructive David but also the intelligence of a man who realises he is a wastrel. Naomi Carroll as Joan is stoically jaunty. She carries on with courage, but you can see she is not waving but drowning.    Carroll captures the subtle poignancy of their doomed relationship; she knows she got it wrong.  Faye Castelow  as the trimly seductive Helen, conveys a combination of naivety and  determination and a hint of acid that makes her the angel of their destruction.     

John, (Adrian Scarborough) is the most likeable character.  He is like Shakespeare’s fool, a bibulous court-jester who creates an art form out of his subtle self deprecation, but he also has the wisdom and empathy to warn of the disaster that is about to come. 

Everything about Thea Shurrock’s production works, from the orgiastic glee of the ageing socialites, the ghastly over-the-top Moya and her wooden toy-boy,  even the glimpse of oral sex on the balcony, and especially the use of a haunting 1920s foxtrot, Avalon, which seems to express the sadness of make believe.   

Rattigan’s play opened in August 1939.  It was a sell out, but when the reality of the war started to come home to people, the audiences dropped off, the play closed and was not rediscovered until  60 years later.  

Rattigan’s early life was unhappy.  His parents were diplomats but his father lost his position after an argument with the foreign secretary, Lord Curzon.  Terence was sent to live with his grandmother who was cruel and controlling.  He was very unhappy, but then discovered the theatre and also that he was homosexual, which was of course criminal at that time.  Many wondered a gay man could have such deep understanding of women.  I’m inclined to say ‘how could he not?’.  Surely that is part of the essence of homosexuality; many gays form a much closer identification with women than men; so much so that some are caricatures of women in a man’s body.  It is Rattigan’s men who are stiff, like cardboard cut outs in their parted hair, their sculpted moustaches, sports jackets and flannels. This is the emotional repression in the English psyche that often turns heterosexuality into a love that dare not speak its name.

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So, Karin doesn’t stand a chance.  If madness and meaning are defined according to cultural norms, whatever they are, Karin holds on what is generally accepted as reality is tenuous.  She was never properly encultured by her parents; her mother was already in a different reality and her father had shut himself away in his own world.  Even her husband, Martin seems all too keen to turn her into a patient; he is so grounded in the autism of medicine that Karin cannot access him. Only Max seems to understand but Max is more part of the wreckage than would be rescuer.    

‘ What if you looked in a mirror and there was no one there?’ 

There is a nothing more frightening as not to have any meaning in your life.  Karin is confused, terrified, she cannot sleep and she doesn’t really know what is real any more.  She has the acute sensitivity of the neurotic; she can detect bullshit at 100 paces.  The words Martin uses seem to make sense but she doesn’t believe them.  He is more dangerous than the elusive father.  We can see only too clearly why she is mad, but at the same time can understand why the system does not want so much to cure her with understanding as to lock her up.  Unable to gain a foothold on meaning from those around her,  Karin has to get her reality from elsewhere; from the birds, from her voices, from God.  And because her reality is different, it is deemed dangerous; she is declared mad and has to be subdued and separated, lest she contaminate others.       

But there is hope. The maverick sixties psychiatrist, RD Laing, author of The Divided Self, once wrote  ‘Madness need not be a breakdown; it can be a breakthrough’.   It was Laing who stood out against the biological drift of psychiatry by explaining the process of going mad as the rational consequence of a person’s family and social environment.  He argued that there may be positive value in allowing a person’s psychosis to develop.  He could then engage with the patient’s psychotic world and lead them into a reality more attuned to their societal norms, give them something to hold on to. 

‘I would wish to emphasise that our normal adjusted state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities that many of us are only too successful in acquiring a false self to adapt to our false realities.’  (Preface to The Divided Self by RD Laing)    

‘Through a Glass Darkly’ was written and directed as a film by Ingmar Bergman in 1961.  Now Jenny Worton has adapted it as a play, which was premiered at the Almeida this June to mixed reviews.   But this is not a play that entertains, it has a disturbingly powerful message that merits much deeper reflection.  The cast are superb.  Michael Attenborough’s direction is sensitive and entirely credible.  But it was the performance of Ruth Wilson  as Karin that blew me away.  How could such a young and seemingly fragile actress turn in such a major performance of such a difficult role.  I watched with mounting horror as Karin slowly descended into madness and felt despair.  Such is the power of great theatre. 

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‘Every Good Boy Deserves Favour’ was written at around the same time.  It was Andre Previn’s suggestion that Stoppard write a play for orchestra while he write the score.  Stoppard originally thought of building it around a triangle player who imagined he owned an orchestra.  But Russian dissidents were being imprisoned in mental institutions, so conceived the idea of having two men imprisoned in a mental institution, one, the triangle player, who was really mad and the other, just politically insane.  Madness is always a cultural diagnosis.  If it weren’t, all devout Christians would be considered mad. 

The orchestra becomes a theatrical device, not to say, gimick.  It not only expresses the emotion, but when the musicians are abused and their instruments smashed, it shockingly depicts the state sanctioned assault on feeling and truth; the madness in the system.    Alexander Ivanov is an embarrassment.  He refuses to retract his criticism or to admit that his treatment has worked.  He refuses to save himself, even when his son pleads with him to do so.

Human behaviour is predominantly driven by emotion.  Civilisation and its institutions; medicine, the law, government, protect us against uncontained emotional reactions by setting rules and customs for behaviour.  But what happens when those rules break down into anarchy and when those responsible for maintaining the rules ignore them or commit atrocities themselves?.  Then people become conditioned to corruption and brutality; they cease to notice any more. Terrorism and war can do dreadful things to men.  Remember the SS, Smersh and the guards at Abu Graib and Guantanamo Bay as well as terrorists anywhere.  They become brutalized.  The veneer of civilization is scraped off leaving the rust of repression, the erosion of fear.    

My companion at breakfast was from Johannesburg.  I asked her how she survived the constant threat of attack.  ‘You get used to it,’ she said. ‘Very few muggers or thieves get prosecuted.  Many of the police were freedom fighters and they just turn a blind eye when it comes to arresting ‘their own.’   

But strangely, Stoppard’s play failed to shock me – perhaps because the theme seemed too familiar or perhaps because I’ve become too cynical.  I am less easy to shock these days.  .   

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour is currently playing at The Olivier Theatre with the South Bank Symphony Orchestra. 

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Richard Eyre summed up the qualities of good actors.  They must be conscious of themselves but not self conscious.  They must be narcissistic on stage, but humble off it, they must live the role but then forget it.  They must have a perfect balance of good sense and warmth, rationalism and emotion.  They must captivate their audience, but then become anonymous. They must create empathy in people’s minds and leave.  They should feel the part, but never try to go beyond the feeling.

Courage is essential to a good actor, death to a bad one.  Actors must present a buoyancy of spirit even though their heart may be breaking.  Eyre described finding Ralph Richardson looking glum after rehearsal. He asked him why. He replied ‘Oh dear boy, I just learnt today that my brother has burnt to death, but’, he added thoughtfully, ‘there’s one consolation; it can’t happen again.’ 

Actors must learn to contain their emotions, avoid being too worried about their performance, work as a team and but never imagine they are the play. It’s a route that runs close to madness. The psychotic actor, seduced by celebrity and fame, can imagine that they are the stage, upon which others play out their emotions.   

It seems to me that acting is not too different to psychotherapy.  The effective  psychotherapist enters the clients world sufficiently to set up a confident and trusting therapeutic relationship  They have to understand, empathise and be compassionate, yet maintain a detachment. It’s a delicate balance that cannot be prescribed, only felt. The quality of any therapy depends on the quality of that engagement. Like the actor in relationship with the character, the therapist must maintain an observing, intelligent mind. They must not descend into their client’s abyss, they must remain on the brink, in communication, connected, yet able to see the possibilities of freedom. There is no redemption, no rescue, if both get lost.

But doesn’t the same principle apply to all relationships?  We are, after all, social creatures. We need to engage with other people but we must not become them. The joy of human relationships is that we bring our independent selves to any relationship, creating the possibility of insight, growth and the joy of discovery. Merger may seem like stability, security, but it’s stagnation.  We mustn’t seek to confine others with bonds of obligation and dependancy. 

But what of falling in love; that wonderful delusion of discovering ourselves in the other?  Therein lies a madness; a suspension of reality in the service of the dreadful seduction of the feeling.  People can fall in love with falling in love and often do. They can be completely lost in the abyss unless they maintain the observing eye of the director that can see how the play could work out. But what would happen if they fell in love with the director?     

And what about actors who play the same character for years on the radio or in television soap operas?  Norman Painter, who played Phil Archer, died last week aged 86. Three days previously, he had recorded an episode for November. He had said he wanted to die in the role. So had he become Phil Archer?. Therapy too can go on forever. The patient may get out of the abyss into the therapist’s safe house, only to find herself unable to leave. Many couples persuade themselves and others that they are in love forever. So why can this seem so boring?  Have I just become an old cynic?      

Afterwards, finding Sir Richard alone with a glass of wine, I explored the idea that  directors combine the characteristics of therapists and actors.  They work with the company as well as the play, coaxing the correcting nuance out of the actors, calming their insecurities, interpreting plot and character.  In this God-like status, I added, warming to my argument, was there not a danger that they could become the stage, upon which others play out their emotions, like the charismatic conductor of a symphony orchestra?  Perhaps I had gone too far. Eyre looked alarmed. He replied, somewhat huffily, that he never analysed what he was doing; it was intuitive.  In any case, the director is not the stage. The plays the stage.  A-ah!  I could have pursued this, but at that point, some ‘lovies’ came to the rescue and I departed, stage left!

Sir Thomas Beecham was immensely narcissistic, but he recognized the knowledge and talent of his musicians and did not attempted to impose his will  on the orchestra, merely guide it.

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The talk over the long breakfast table at 22 York Street was about other wars; Iraq, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe; brutal, unwinnable, neverending wars.  There have been 250 major wars since the end of the second world war and over 23 million people have been killed. But why? Who really understands why we are fighting in Afghanistan or why we really went to war in Iraq?  Bush’s war against terrorism is a tautology. War against terrorism is like war against war!  It doesn’t make any sense.  And there are no winners in this war. It’s war for the sake of war; completely futile. Nobody gains the moral high ground. We were shocked by the atrocities committed by our boys (and girls) at Abu Graib prison, but why? Of course our troops would commit atrocities as much as the enemy.  It has always been so.  Frightened people do the most awful things.  And war degrades humanity; murder, theft, rape and destruction becomes a way of life.  Soldiers become inured to feeling. It’s dog eat dog.  When the Duke of Wellington inspected his troops in the Peninsular War, he was heard to comment,  ‘I don’t know what they do to the enemy, but by God, they terrify me.  But it’s not only the enemy that is injured, mutilated and killed, it’s innocent civilians as well.  And there are always people like Mother Courage, ready to make a quick buck out of it all.    

The attendant at Anish Kapoor’s exhibition, a young man from Bosnia, said that many people had been offended.  Every twenty seconds, a cannot shoots a pellet of soft red wax across the room through an archway to splatter against the war of the next room.  Kapoor claims not to have any preconception of the meaning of his work, but you really don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to understand how it uses sexual metaphor to explore he brutality of war.  The large erect penis shooting its bloody  ejaculate through the doorway, stains the virgin-pure white walls of the Royal Academy, leaving a large crimson mark, that resembles brutalized female genitalia. Blood stained labia enclose the gaping wound like a scream, and the matter that slithers from that gruesome gash forms a mound, which winds like a crimson glacier, from the dead, white, empty womb. It is a shocking, yet compelling image.  The twenty minute beat of the cannon will continue until January.  By that time the Academy will be awash with blood. 

Fiona Shaw is brilliant as the feisty, calculating, yet  indomitable Mother Courage; a woman with balls!   The play, like war itself, is unrelenting in its dark brutality, the music by Duke Special and his band, a thumping accompaniment.  It is wonderful performance that shocks and disturbs.  Anish Kapoor’s exhibition is at The Royal Academy until January.  It is art on a big scale, shocking and impressive.  22 York Street is in Alastair Sawday’s book.  It provides an interesting and enjoyable stay just off Baker Street and within easy access to the west end. The long curved breakfast table with abundant coffee and a variety of fruits, cereals, croissants, pastries and preserves, is conducive to conversation.  By yourself in London?  What a good way to start the day, even if all the talk is about war!

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