alison

Welcome to the forum, ninamargaret, and thank you for your contribution. Perhaps on public booking we are usually spoiled by Friends not necessarily wanting to claim their entire allocation? Incidentally, not only Watson and Osipova may be main draws, but also it will be Yanowsky's final performances in a full-length work, I think, so that may have attracted people.

Are they doing Fille in Wimbledon again? It doesn't seem that long since they last danced it there.

I must admit, I sometimes find the titles of triple bills very annoying when it sounds as though it's just something the marketing department has dreamed up to sell tickets. "Power, Passion and Treachery", that sort of thing (okay, that might work as a subheading for La Bayadere, actually ).

Kudos to Jann Parry, who travelled to Basingstoke to review the company's production: http://dancetabs.com/2017/01/russian-state-ballet-of-siberia-la-fille-mal-gardee-basingstoke/ (Thanks to the indefatiguable Links team for the link from earlier this week)

That thought had occurred to me. And of course it is. Wonder if anyone does a correlation of Friends who attend rehearsals and so on and those who don't. That's the trouble when you have so many Friends, of course. I'm sitting here fantasising about the ROH setting up a "shop a tout" confidential phone line, along the lines of Crimestoppers

Me too!

As I have said already, Viagogo are *not* an agency. And as I quoted a couple of months back in another thread: "From the ROH site: "Are there any other authorized ticket vendors? The following ticket outlets are the only agents used by the ROH: Albemarle Abbey Box Office Theatre People (Encore Tickets) Discount Theatre (Encore Tickets) Lashmars Love Theatre See Tickets Ticketmaster All other ticket outlets, agents and websites are not authorized to sell ROH tickets. Any tickets bought through other outlets are invalid and may be forgeries. Find out more about the importance of using authorized vendors." (The last bit of bolding is mine)

I'm beginning to think that the £4 markup plus transaction fee charged by SEE tickets may not be so bad

I need to point out once again that Viagogo is a ticket resale site, not an agency. The purchasers of the tickets decide what price they want to put the tickets at, and hope that some mug will pay them. If not, the prices drop. However, I am pretty certain that reselling tickets at a profit must be a breach of the ROH's terms and conditions, so the question is, how are they getting away with it, and is the ROH monitoring the situation? Are seat numbers being specified? If so, the ROH can invalidate the ticket - in theory at least. Row F amphitheatre, for example, could be anything from a good central seat to a somewhat restricted-view seat on the side. I think Viagogo now does at least list the face value of the ticket before you commit, so if you found out that the row D ticket you were being asked to pay £100 for actually cost £6 you might change your mind. The trouble is that if the ROH has outsourced ticket sales to agencies presumably they have no record of who has bought what. Penelope hasn't said it as such, but I suspect that she, like me, is wondering whether this profiteering is at least partly responsible for the shortage of tickets available for various Mayerling performances.

How gratifying to see the run is almost sold out - well, it isn't for me, since I've had to dump most of my tickets so far - but good for the company.

Oh, Jacqueline, you remind me of the trip from hell I did once, from Ostend back to Dover. Turned into a force 9 once we were at sea, although there were at least bits of the deck we could still get at, and I was all right with some fresh air, which is more than I can say for others. But we couldn't get back into the Dover Eastern (or maybe Western) Docks, and I think had to go round to the other one.

Yes, I think it's like line judges: you have to change frequently or the concentration goes. Russell Fuller is very good, as are several of the others, especially Jonathan Overend, when he still does it. (Useless piece of information: conference interpreters, I understand, change every 20 minutes, because of the sheer concentration needed. And the subsequent interpreter sits in for the previous 20 minutes to get a feel for what's being said. I wonder if the tennis commentators sit in for the whole of the previous set?)

Let's hope so.

Thanks, Trog, very cheerful (and just what I needed). I did try Full Editor, but that didn't work either. Wonder if it's browser-dependent, because I've definitely seen a paperclip button at the bottom of the PM form previously.

FLOSS' comments do apply equally to any other dancer, of course. Personally, I doubt I'd buy a Mayerling DVD based on who was dancing Mary Vetsera (although I recall Sky Arts promoting the recording as "Mayerling starring Darcey Bussell", despite the fact that she was dancing Mitzi Caspar, who only appears in one scene )

Have we somehow lost the facility to attach files to private messages? I've just tried to do it and failed.

Wow. Let's hope it manages to produce some good results.

I don't think I've ever bothered doing this before, but because of the lack of live coverage by BBC TV (only 1 1/2 hours of highlights later on) and the historic nature of the event I recorded the radio coverage of this. It's fascinating listening to it - but I'm still amazed that anyone can do ball-by-ball commentary on a tennis match when everything happens so fast. (You should try it sometime: I can't get the words out fast enough) It was quite brilliant.

I've never tried cruising myself, but believe I've read somewhere that some of the cruise companies do sort of "mini try-out cruises", maybe Southampton to Santander or something, so you can get a feel for what it's like and whether it appeals. Not sure that would apply to river cruises, though.

Some very rear amphi tickets have come online for the first and last of the Watson performances ...

I know two sets of keen tennis viewers who had actually arranged weekends away this weekend because they were assuming it just would be another boring Murray/Djokovic final. Oops.

Fonty, don't worry. He's clearly on the way back, too - I mean, it's a good couple of years since he was last in a Slam final. I'm sure his run will have done his confidence a tremendous amount of good.

I always thought the original company was supposed to be a Ballets Russes equivalent.

He surely needs to take his cue from the management, doesn't he? If he doesn't have backup from them, things could get nasty.

Roger Federer, you legend! To come back from an injury-enforced break and win your first Slam back is something I never could have imagined.