Advice from someone who understands these things. Contact the administrators of the tiny pension fund that my employers and I paid into for nearly three years until I retired for the third time last June and ask to withdraw the cash under the 'small pot rules' (whatever those are). Pay tax on 25% of it and have fun with what's left. I think I like that advice.
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This evening: two short plays by Terence Rattigan (Table Number Seven from 1954 and The Browning Version from 1948) acted by Sian Phillips, Nathaniel Parker and others.
Spoiler alert
Table Number Seven reverted to Rattigan's original script, where the shocking offence at the centre of the play was 'homosexual importuning' rather than harassment of women at a cinema. Apart from the fact that, at the time of its first production, references to homosexuality were not allowed on the British stage, the critic Kenneth Tynan said then that the rewritten version was 'as good a handling of sexual abnormality (sic) as English playgoers will tolerate.'
Both plays gently prised apart human frailty - repressed emotion; insecurity and what we do to satisfy our need to be appreciated; vulnerability and what we do to protect ourselves from being seen as weak - then looked at these from various perspectives, including the viciously judgemental.
Rattigan's explorations of emotion through a genteel, public-school-educated lens were ousted from favour by the angry young men of the middle 1950s. But human psychology transcends class and, as well as being a view onto the repressed attitudes of the 1950s, both plays remain emotionally relevant. Acted utterly convincingly this evening, they were profound and touching.
(I also moved some bricks, obvs.)
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