Word: islington
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Union chapel, a stately congregational church in the upscale London borough of Islington, is often rented out for summer events. So the crowd of concertgoers who gathered there on a breezy evening last month was nothing unusual. Except, that is, for the guy with the accordion. A portly man with long, thinning hair pulled into a ponytail, undaunted by the smart set in their $100 jeans and retro shirts, he stood in the main entranceway trying to hawk his damaged instrument. Politely ignored at first, he finally hooked a young woman and carefully played a tune that somehow avoided...
...found not in the West End but behind the doors of two tiny fringe theaters. One is the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden, headed by Sam Mendes, whose film debut American Beauty won him last year's Best Director Oscar. The other is the Almeida Theatre in Islington, steered by director Jonathan Kent and actor Ian McDiarmid - familiar to movie fans as the Emperor Palpatine in the Star Wars series. These two hotspots have assumed a place-to-be-seen buzz among theater-goers...
...more ambitious of the two - geographically at least - is the Almeida. Last year it produced Shakespeare's Richard II and Coriolanus starring Ralph Fiennes, not on its own stage but at the derelict Gainsborough Film Studios. Now, forced to leave their 300-seat Islington base while $6 million in renovations are carried out, Kent and McDiarmid have spent $1.2 million fixing up a long-closed bus station at King's Cross as an alternative home. The result is one of the most unusual and invigorating spaces in London...
...daughter Tibba, named for a 6th century East Saxon princess, and Louise, his frumpy, incompetent, adoring assistant. (The manuscript is imaginary, and Wilson, who has taught Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, has fun cooking up swatches of 13th century English.) Giles and Tibba live in a bare house in Islington ruled by the dictates of his morbid sensitivity. There are no newspapers, and the radio is strictly a music box, Vivaldi preferred. Tibba thinks that the Whigs are still a political party and has never heard of the Social Democrats. Her embittered father believes that "if you said cynical things people...
...fastidious person in the throes of love is a rich source of mirth. Tibba spends a weekend with her boisterous aunt and uncle and promptly falls for a rich, spoiled youth, whose brazen mother pushes her way at once into the Islington redoubt. Giles is swept into Louise's ample embrace and hauled off to a humiliating weekend in Cambridge, the place where he failed to get tenure years before and where her thesis was summarily rejected more recently. As their lives get messier, father and daughter start to turn on each other...