Diary

12 December 2009

Veronica Wadley opens her diary

To the National with my 88-year-old mother-in-law to see Our Class, by the Polish playwright Tadeusz Slobodzianek, I warned her the play would be harrowing: it’s about the massacre of Jews, women and children in a small town in 1941. Having been brutalised by Vienna’s Nazis, she had escaped in 1938 on the Kindertransport. But, not for the first time, I underestimated her. Nothing shocks that generation. And to the Tricycle in Kilburn for Seize the Day about London’s Obama moment. It is quick-witted and clever, just like the author, Kwame Kwei Armah. I have had a soft spot for him since 2004 when I gave him the Evening Standard’s Most Promising Playwright Award. The café is packed before and after the performance, a model of a small local theatre that works every inch of its space. Subsidy junkies take note.

On Monday I ring the Arts Council press office to check how many organisations they currently fund in London. It’s on answer-phone. There must be over 200. I plan to visit them all over the next six months. Tonight I am off to the Arcola in Dalston — and thinking that the working title of my autobiography should be, ‘My Life as a Tea Bag’.