How to hold your breath @royalcourt @acgrayling @ZinnieH @maxinepeakenews

A little group of us met at the Royal Court to see How to Hold Your Breath, written by Zinnie Harris and with Maxine Peake in the lead role.

Before the play, we attended the related Big Idea talk, 'How to find the Good' presented by Oxford teacher of Philosophy A.C. (Anthony) Grayling. He defined ethics and morals using classical stories to espouse ways to answer the Socratic question of how should one live one's 1000 months well. Grayling promotes humanism, whilst drawing in this talk mainly upon the gods and philosophers of Greece to illustrate his points.

I like his ideas around secularly finding one's own path although there needs to be a basic supportive context in which to achieve this. He talks of resisting habits which simply consume living without creating high points and of the need to spend the most productive 250 months well. In 45 minutes he was able to open many lines of thinking. A spike to add to my life collection. If we all light up we can scare away the dark.

And then, after pause for refreshment and chatter, I took up a front row balcony seat as the devil had a one night stand with Dana the customer relations expert. Now the devil doesn't like being in debt, but his attempts to pay Dana were rebuffed and led to a ratcheting spiral of descent for Dana in what became an increasingly fractured Europe.

This devil has a Mephistophelian scar across his chest where his soul has been removed. Unlike in Faust, we see Dana apparently having an upper hand because of the debt. In Goethe, Faust is trying to find the essence of life (ahah, an AC Grayling connection) and Mephistopheles manipulates the world to help him see it. In this we see equivalent manipulations as the devil attempts to extract the 45 Euro debt repayment from Dana.

And this devil plays hardball. After low-key initial attempts, he just keeps increasing the pressure. We see the ruin of economic Europe, personal tragedy and horror as the play unfolds.

There's some set-piece staging too, with interventions from a difficult librarian who mainly seems to stock 'how to' guides. There's also a Greek chorus of interviewers for what could be Dana's next job.

Maxine Peake's performance is extremely strong, and the immediate accompanying cast of her sister(Christine Bottomley), the devil(Michael Shaeffer) and librarian(Peter Forbes) all play well. Other characters are less developed and are there chiefly as instruments of the production. In a play that mixes together a wide range of plot-lines, Zinnie Harris creates many themes to deal with in the 2 hour continuous run-time.

When we chatted again afterwards, I said I was really pleased to have seen this - which has been written with quite some ambition. It wasn't what I was expecting, and because of the many different strands, we could take away different elements from the production's ideas. Like Grayling suggested, it's important to have the right personal character to take away the right action from a situation.

blogladi bloglada

After a diagnonal hike across the city we found John waiting outside the Corney and Barrow with cellphone poised and so three of us entered and disappeared underground into the smart subterranean world of arches.

We quickly found the roped off area for the Blogladi Bloglada session and said "Hi" to Andy Bargery who had performed another selection of genius as well as co-ordinating around 80 free sprits who had said "Yes".

Also a chance to say "Hello" to Melanie Seasons, who I had last met at the Camel and Artichoke soon after she had first begun her UK adventure over from the USA.

Time to hit the bar and remake a few acquaintances as well as to say hello to new London Bloggers making a first appearance.

A tipple or two later, Melanie was up on stage to talk entertainingly about her experiences and contrasts between US-based PR blogging and what she had found in the UK.

Let's just say the Brits came out quite well and sort of catching up with the US-scene, although the whole vertical categorisations, PR links and monetisation of blogs seemed to be more prevalent in the States. Brits clearly like chatting in pubs and the blogging is the camouflaged reason.

I liked that Melanie explained that she had set up fakeplasticnoodles.com more as a networking tool than with any thoughts of any great commercial advantage. It had certainly worked and she was well linked and twittered in to the UK scene.

Animated questions - even supplementaries and some practical advice about remembering to leave comments when wandering around the blogosphere.

The session ended with plenty of warm applause.

The evening was a well balanced blend of chatter, networking and an interesting presentation. Altogether well run - thanks to Andy, Melanie and of course the great gang that attended.

My moo cards runneth over.