OK. Maybe I need to slow down.

Part of my coping strategy for dealing with illness is, frankly, to ignore it.

Two weeks ago I switched to a new chemotherapy drug called Taxol. It was supposed to be easier than the four FEC treatments that had proceeded it. But, just to add to the continuing contrary nature of my body, the Taxol hit me hard with a combo of bone and muscle pain that left me feeling like an arthritic 90-year-old badly in need of regular naps for the whole week after treatment. Plus, I'm still dealing with the cold and coughs that haven't left me since December. Looking back over what I've been up to over the past fortnight, you'd never know it.

First, there's work. We're dashing toward the end of the financial year, which is my deadline to roll out the most comprehensive graphic design system my company has ever had. Really quite an enormous deal and one I'm hugely proud of, especially considering that I planned a wedding and got cancer at the same time I conceived and ran the project. Like anything this big, the weeks up to the launch have been crazy.

Crazier still was driving down to Eastbourne for a digital media conference the week immediately after the chemo. Obviously, I didn't expect to be feeling like a cripple. I soldiered through, with the help of an hour in the Grand Hotel's whirlpool.

By the next Saturday I'd recovered enough to get through a full day's cooking class at Newlyn's without too much trauma ... though standing up most of the day was a bit of a challenge. One well worth the effort. "Butcher it, cook it, carve it" was a meaty feast, focusing on understanding the process from carcass to plate and improving individual skills for meat preparation. We spent the day with Newlyn's head butcher, watching him take both a whole sheep and half a pig from carcass to all the individual cuts, talking us through quality, cooking and shopping tips as he cut and sawed away.

Moving to the "doing it ourselves" part of the class, Piers and I can now debone a lamb shoulder, stuff it and tie it into a cushion shape that bakes and yields cake-like slices. We can score pork crackling into a decorative diamond pattern. Slicing breasts off a pigeon hardly requires thought. My greatest new skill, though, is being able to de-bone a whole chicken with just one slice along the back. This leaves you with all the meat, still held against the skin, that can be stuffed, wrapped and rolled.

And that was just week one. Picking up steam, I rolled into a frenetic week leading up to the next Taxol jolt. More packed work days, of course. Punctuated on Wednesday by medical appointments and a business lunch at Orrery. (Foie gras parfait followed by pork medallions, tempted off my Lenten wine abstinence by an irresistible Mersault.) As delicious as ever and enhanced by the bizarre warm and sunny weather that found us eating outside, basking in the sun despite it only being the 28th of March.

By Friday, time for more chemotherapy. But the oddity of this treatment is that the side effects don't set in until Monday. The first 48 hours is a breeze. So I might as well keep busy, right?

Post chemo, it was off to Arbutus for the best Michelin-star deal in town. Pre-theatre, 3 courses for £20.95. Great Mediterranean food. Porchetta, ricotta gnudi, blood orange parfait. served with prompt and attentive service that gets you in and out before the curtain goes up. Then to the penultimate night of David Haig's critically acclaimed performance in The Madness of King George. Great stuff.

Saturday morning, back in Basingstoke, we piled in our first three potential house viewings. We're a couple of months away from buying, but the initial foray tells us that there's good stuff in our price range. Much optimism. A few hours' rest at home, then it was back to London for a reception at the Savoy for visiting Northwestern President Morton Schapiro. A delightful man who delivered a great report; the place is in good hands. Off then with Hillary to Terroirs, a French-inspired tapas place just off Trafalgar square. Delicious, but a bit meat heavy and probably not the best value for money. (The three of us shared five savoury tapas plates, one cheese platter, one sweet and two bottles of moderately-priced wine and came out at £50 each.) If we try it again, we'll go for more traditional starters and mains.

Trying to slow down a bit, we decided to spend the night up in town at our club. The first time at the Lansdowne since the wedding. I missed the bridal suite, but we compensated for that by a room service breakfast in bed. Off to St. Mary's Bourne Street for the dramatic Palm Sunday service, featuring a musical passion of Christ with three priests singing the lead roles and the choir as the Jewish crowds. Next, to Madsen's with the London Bencards for the traditional Scandinavian Sunday lunch. Herring, smoked salmon, Jerusalem artichoke soup, beer and aquavit. Much merriment. And the warm, sunny weather continued.

Quite a fortnight. Which could have produced ten separate blog entries: reviews of four restaurants, one play and one seaside hotel, an insightful look at the future of digital media in the marketing space, a full entry on the Newlyn's class, details on house hunting and maybe a bit of philosophising on cancer care. But I did all of that while, I now admit, being quite ill and completely exhausted for more than half of it. So you get a round up instead.

And for the fortnight ahead? I am admitting that the Taxol was a bit harder than planned, and promise to take it easy.

Well, easier. We're off to Devon for the Easter break on Friday...

Forget Prozac, buy yourself some tickets to the London revival of Singin' in the Rain

I discovered the prescription to instant happiness in spring of 1984.

It wasn't drugs, alcohol or conspicuous consumption. Thankfully, it was a lot cheaper than all of those. It was simply watching a musical.

I was suffering from some crushing romantic blow at university ... now long forgotten ... when my pledge daughter, Kathy Tilden, offered the answer. (Pledge daughters being pre-initiates in a sorority who choose you as their older mentor in the house, and who usually become especially dear friends for life.) It was a Saturday night and we were both without plans. We claimed the sitting room and its big TV, ordered a pizza, and Kathy slipped her copy of Singin' in the Rain into the VCR.

I had, of course, seen clips of the best bits. Like most little girls in the '70s I'd devoured the That's Entertainment film franchise, which included the iconic title number with Gene Kelly stomping in puddles, Donald O'Connor's romp through Make 'em Laugh, and the trio (adding Debbie Reynolds) dancing around the world and over a couch, in Good Morning. The complete film turned out to be two hours of pure happiness, and in all the years since, I've known that if I wanted a jolt of joy, I only needed to watch it again.

Imagine my anticipation, and speed to box office, when the Chichester Festival's highly acclaimed production transferred to the West End's Palace Theatre. Last night was the big outing, shared with London Northwestern sisters, Hillary and Lisa.

Don't assume, just because I'm a rabid fan of the film, that I'd be an automatic advocate of the stage show. I went in with critical expectations, and a deep fear they'd muck with perfection. Nope. I had a smile on my face from the first strains of the overture to the curtain call and, despite the cramped legroom of our discounted front-row balcony seats, could have taken a short break and watched the whole thing again, immediately.

They've done a great job copying the film onto the stage. Clever adaptation gets around the challenges of the too-complicated-for-stage scenes like the flashbacks during Don Lockwood's opening "dignity" speech, Don's spring over a moving trolley car and into plucky heroine Kathy Seldon's convertible, or the lavish montage of early movie musicals. A screen built into the stage offers us views of the films we're watching our characters make, and is instrumental in the final scene. The book is, for the most part, a line-for-line pick up of the film.

The casting is excellent, given the challenge of meeting the original. Adam Cooper as Don Lockwood was a risk, given that he didn't come from a musical theatre background. A former Royal Ballet principal, he is as strong as you'd expect on the dancing and shares Kelly's long, lean, dark good looks. Surprisingly, he can sing, too; a pleasant if not memorable West End tenor. His acting lacks Kelly's charisma and the chemistry between Cooper and his Kathy Seldon couldn't match the original. Cooper's Don Lockwood was a bit too smug, never evoking the fundamently-nice-guy-with-insecurities that Kelly brought to the part. (The Kelly-Reynolds charisma is a testament to great acting, BTW; evidently the 40-year-old, ruthlessly professional Kelly scared the hell out of the 19-year-old Reynolds and once criticised her so severely she retreated beneath a piano for a good cry.)

Scarlett Strallen doesn't quite nail Reynolds' magnificently innocent, chipper and strong American girl, seeming a bit too old and mature. But her singing and acting are fantastic enough for you to fall for her charms quickly. Daniel Crossley's Cosmo Brown is probably closest to the original, providing solid laughs throughout, mixed with dynamic singing and dance.

Accents can often be the toughest challenge when iconic American musicals come to the London stage. This British cast did a nice job, slipping only occasionally. And if Katherine Kingsley's Lena Lamont went a bit too far into cartoon caricature Bronx-speak, it works with the role.

There are a couple of extra songs, presumably to round up the running time of what was quite a short film. The first has Don professing his attraction to Kathy on first meeting, a bit of song and dance to replace the chase/trolley/car scene that didn't translate to stage. The second was a whole added scene that has us watching Lena go through a bit of self doubt as she wonders why people don't rate her. I could have done without this. We don't need character depth; the show works better without giving us empathy for our villainess.

A great improvement to the film, however, was the Broadway Melody sequence. This 12-minute insert to the original film, where the boys imagine a modern dance number for the film they're making, allowed Kelly showed off more sophisticated dance move with Cyd Charisse. (At the time, Reynolds had no dance experience.) It's a gorgeous number, standing admirably on its own as a mini-musical, but it stopped the film's plot trajectory cold. The director wisely keeps it in the stage show to make the most of the music and dance potential, but trims it down.

Another brilliant addition is the whole cast joining a final reprise of Singin' in the Rain as those water jets come back on, dumping more of the 12,000 litres a night of water onto the stage. A good quantity getting splashed into the first few rows. Every musical must end with a big dance number, of course. This one achieves its intent, sending the occupants of those 1,200 sold out seats tap dancing and singing (badly) down Charing Cross road as they spill out of the theatre.

Sixty years after its film debut, Singin' in the Rain is still injecting pure joy into all those who see it. Perhaps, rather than all their other schemes, the government should just send everyone in Britain to see this. The ensuing bolt of optimism might bump us right out of recession.

Lion in Winter and First Actresses make fine theatrical-themed holiday treats

Theatre is one of the exceptional glories of London. I'm not talking opera, ballet or musicals (though there are plenty of those), but proper plays, well produced and often anchored by stars of global renown. It is a point of guilty regret that I only seem to get to one of these a year.

The show that got me to the box office in 2011? The Lion in Winter. Its film adaptation would be one of my "desert island videos", and though I was aware it was based on a stage play, I'd never had

a chance to see it live. The Theatre Royal Haymarket indulged me, and all other fans of cutting wit and verbal repartee, with a revival anchored by Robert Lindsay and Joanna Lumley.

This is the ultimate dysfunctional family story; a very modern exploration of damaged relationships set in a distant past. It's 1183. Henry II gathers his family for Christmas. He's cobbled together the greatest empire since Charlemagne, but he's troubled by who will follow and the legacy he'll leave. Joining him is his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, once his great love match but now a political enemy held prisoner for a decade because she backed a rebellion against him. They each have different ideas

about who should take the throne next. Eleanor supporting the eldest, Richard, Henry backs baby John and nobody supports clever middle son Geoffrey. A parental division which, of course, puts all the sons at each others' throats while making them distrust their parents. Joining this tense gathering is the young king of France, who's elder half-sister has grown up in the English court, betrothed to Richard since she was seven but who is now Henry's mistress. In one intense, 24-hour period plans rise and fall, alliances change, secrets are revealed and relationships falter.

What makes The Lion in Winter so special to me is the sparkling writing. This could have been a straightforward, tense, dark, drama. But it's a glitteringly clever comedy, too, with all those moments of sharp passion cut by wry one-liners. (Eleanor, after a particularly bitter confrontation during which all the relationships have imploded painfully, shrugging her shoulders and saying "oh well, all families have their ups and downs.")

It's brave actors who even consider following in the footsteps of Richard Harris and Katherine Hepburn in the film version. Though not quite as good as their mighty predecessors, Lindsay and Lumley have the talent to carve their own identity on the roles. I've been a Lumley fan since her Ab Fab days and have an enormous respect for the travel programmes and political campaigns she appears in as herself. But I'd never had the chance to see her on stage. She was a more flirtatious Eleanor than Hepburn, who was all iron. Lumley's portrayal offered more of the feminine wiles that covered the master politician. Lindsay, on the other hand, I'd seen in a great version of Richard III in 1999, when I first discovered his tremendous range. (He's known more as a comic TV actor here, but his dramatic heft is impressive.) They each capture the sense of ageing without grace that's so essential to the characters, and make the love/hate relationship between them entirely credible.

It was only after seeing the play that I read the reviews, which are universally poor. Crit

icisms of facial expressions and costuming I can't agree or disagree with; we were in the balcony. But from there, everything looked fine. All of the reviewers bashed the play itself, and several used its likeness to Blackadder as a criticism. And there's the difference. It's precisely because this is Blackadder turned serious drama that I love it. So I'll leave you to make your own decision from there. If you're a fan of historical drama, wit and clever banter, it's on 'til 28 January.

Just around the corner at the National Portrait Gallery is another theatrical treat. The First Actresses: Nell Gwynn to Sarah Siddons gathers together the depictions ... many of them quite famous ... of the actresses that rose to prominence on the London stage from the first legalisation of female acting in the Restoration through the Regency period. As ever with the NPG, while portraits are the visual fodder, the exhibition explanations and catalog help you to understand life stories, and through them, the times themselves.

Acting was a scandalous profession, something no fine lady would consider, and yet the stories revealed here make it clear it was packed with vivacious, intelligent, powerful wo

men. Women who channeled their exceptional charisma into acting then, but might have easily been politicians or corporate executives as much as media stars today. Though they may not have been considered "good" society, most had fascinating lives, and they certainly didn't all have bad ends.

We start with Nell Gwynn, who ended up a popular mistress of Charles II and, through him, matriarch of two English aristocratic families. (They're still around. I once spent an evening knocking back port in a cellar with one of them.) Another aristocratic line comes from the union of William IV and Dorothy Jordan, whose three dramatic portraits here leave you no doubt that she was gorgeous and interesting. While her royal children did well she ended sad and strapped for cash; she'd stayed faithful to her lover, but when he became king he was forced to put her aside, after more than a decade, and marry. Mary Robinson (pictured here in Hoppner's famous work), was also known as "Perdita" from one of her more famous roles, did slightly better after briefly being the mistress of William's brother George IV when he was a prince. She went on to be a poet, playwright and respected authority on the Georgian arts scene.

In fact, most of the women in this exhibition did fairly well for themselves. Some married into the industry and retired to management (Elizabeth Ann Linley, who married the playwright Sheridan). Some were so alluring they got the full marital prize from their admirers. Lavinia Fenton became the Duchess of Bolton, Elizabeth Farren the Countess of Derby. Sarah Siddons, after locking her reputation as the finest tragic actress on the London stage, went on to become tutor to George IIIs daughters. Her full length portrait here is as dignified and stately as any Jane Austen heroine. Of course, there are the tragic young deaths, a few addictions and plenty of sexual impropriety on display as well. A fascinating preview of our modern age, as is the cabinet of little statuettes of the actresses in some of their leading roles, and the display of first editions of their memoirs. Clearly, the cult of celebrity is nothing new.

The show spreads over just four galleries and, like most NPG shows, isn't very crowded. There are exhibition catalogs scattered on benches throughout, allowing you to linger, read the stories of the various women, look into their engaging faces and speculate on what they were really like. This show is a lot less known, but a heck of a lot easier to get into, than the far more famous exhibit around the corner. That's coming next.

Siegfried's high on adventure, but unconvincing in romance

After a month of almost consistent rain and chill, the sun emerged in all its glory on Saturday. A day after the afternoon I'd planned sitting next to a pool. Instead, it was the same time I was due to spend four hours in a dark theatre taking in the third opera in the Ring Cycle. Which really leaves me wondering, is God a Wagner fan (sending good weather to bless the occasion) or a Wagner foe (offering sunshine as a clear signal I would have spent my time better outdoors)?

We shall never know for sure. We certainly have evidence, however, that the London critics are fans, at least as far as Longborough's production of Siegfried goes. And though I doubt I'll ever be in the first rank of Wagner fans, I'll concede it was enjoyable enough to be worth the sacrifice of a few peak tanning hours.

Siegfried is probably the most accessible of the four parts of Wagner's ring cycle, even though it's the one least likely to feature any music the average person has heard before. It's a an adventure with a dashing hero who forges a magic sword, slays a dragon and rescues an enchanted, sleeping maiden. Good triumphs over evil and there's a happy ending. Of course, it takes three acts and about four hours of performance time to get there, so the faint-hearted should probably just give Sleeping Beauty another spin in the DVD player.

Part of the length is due to the fact that this opera, though part of a larger cycle, could easily have been broken into three independent dramas. Act 1 is a coming of age story, as Siegfried confronts his evil guardian, discovers who he really is and establishes the foundation of his power. Act 2 could stand alone as a rip-roaring dragon quest. And Act 3 is both our princess quest, and a fascinating exploration of the fears of an independent woman ... the valkyrie Brunhilde ... who is terrified she's going to lose herself when she gives in to love. (I doubt Wagner intended the feminist interpretation, but these days it makes the last act unusually modern and relevant.)

The Longborough company delivered to the standards we've now come to expect, with innovative but low budget staging, fantastic singers and acting that connects directly to the audience. The last is particularly important in this former chicken shed turned opera house, where the most distant seat can still see facial expressions without artificial assistance. Particularly noteworthy was American tenor Daniel Brenna (pictured above), who played Siegfried as brash yet loveable, innocent yet dangerous ... the dumb jock whose skill gives him more power than his intelligence knows how to handle. It worked brilliantly for me in the first two acts, though was a problem in the last. How, I wondered, could the magnificent Brunhilde fall head over heels for this self-centred lug?

And here, Wagner's music doesn't help. He does drama and passion well, but when it comes to romance he leaves me cold. Siegfried and Brunhilde's discussion (I can't call anything that long a duet) as they are falling in love is bombastic and powerful, but in no way was I convinced these two people actually cared for each other. It's the same reaction I had at last year's performance of Die Walkure when Siegmund and Sieglinde (Siegfried's parents) were supposedly bonding for life. With apologies to my Wagner-loving fiance, I still argue that Wagner can't touch the Italians for putting true love on stage.

In many ways, now that I've seen half the wring cycle live and been exposed to the rest of it on TV, I think Wagner was born to early and working in the wrong medium. I can quite clearly imagine the man producing, writing and directing a 12-part operatic mini series on HBO, with the full-fantasy look of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings or the recent Game of Thrones.

You may think that's too niche to see the light of day, but the modern trend in Wagner is wildly avant-garde. We recently watched a production on Sky Arts that saw the vakyries sheathed in rubber, flying in and out on cherry pickers in front of a giant video screen flashing space images behind them. It made Longborough's sparse, industrial set look practically traditional. The Wagner community is up for risk, so why not?

Stoppard's Arcadia sets brain fizzing with delight

I cannot remember many stage plays, no matter how engaging, that I would have immediately rewound and sat through again if given the opportunity. On Tuesday night, however, I walked out of the Duke of Yorks theatre with just one thought in my mind: "I want to see it again. Now!"

The play is Arcadia, Tom Stoppard's 1993 romp through landscape architecture, mathematics, love, comedy and drama. Yes, it's all in there. Delivered with sparkling wit and rapid-fire repartee that pushes your brain through a proper workout, while delighting it at the same time.

There's no denying that you have to be a bit of an intellectual to appreciate Stoppard. Certainly a great many of the jokes in Arcadia fall flat without some grasp of garden history, the life of Byron, algebra and chaos theory. The more you know to start, the more amazed you'll be by the way Stoppard has wound all his clever threads together. I'm rock solid on the first two topics, flunked the third in ninth grade and have only a dim comprehension of the last.

The beauty of Stoppard, with this level of awareness, is that you can pat yourself on the back for knowing about the bits you know, and feel educated by the bits you don't. I loved the wordplay so much I believe I might have comprehended algebra ... or at least understood why the hell I was forced to study it ... if Stoppard had been my teacher. There are a lot of parallels between this work and Shakespeare in Love. That was a fun story, but the more you know about the bard, the more you appreciated the nuances. If you liked the film as much as I did, you'll probably be an Arcadia fan.

Arcadia explores a mystery in an English country house, bouncing back and forth between the present-day academics who are researching the past, and the Regency family living the real story. The two-time period historical mystery has become a bit hackneyed today (seems like every paperback I pick up these days has the same set up), but when Stoppard introduced this play it was still fairly fresh. Much of the humour comes from the audience being one step ahead of the academics; because we are watching the past unfold, we know how they're going wrong, and what fools they may soon make of themselves. Besides telling an amusing story in magnificently clever language, Stoppard gives us devastatingly incisive character sketches. The precocious child growing to adulthood, squabbling academics, the socially awkward English aristocrat, the fawning bourgeois begging for aristocratic favour; all the stereotypes are here, but injected with new depth and truth.Of course, no matter how good a play, it's only as good as its production. And this one fulfills all the potential of its author's brilliance. The veteran cast presents no superstars, but rather familiar faces with long CVs you've seen in plenty of television and movie productions. (Interesting to note how the Harry Potter series is developing British talent. Two of the young leads are familiar from those films.) I first saw Arcadia in Dallas. I loved it then, but it was only in a production filled with a top quality British cast that I picked up all the nuances of social class. I don't think Americans, without living here for a while, can grasp or adequately present the mannerisms on show here. Much less the accents. I was particularly fond of Ed Stoppard (yes, the author's son ... above left), who did the emotionally stunted English public school boy with a painful believability, and of Dan Stevens' tutor (above centre), who balanced the rapier-like wit and sexual adventuring of the Regency playboy with a poignant underlying sensitivity.

Despite the need for fiscal responsibility, am seriously considering getting tickets to see Arcadia again before the end of its run. I am sure that, no matter how much I was drinking in the dialogue, at least 30 per cent of it rushed through my fizzing brain before I could grasp and appreciate it. In the mean time, I'll just pour myself a glass of wine and pop Shakespeare in Love into the DVD player. Either way, my brain will be delighted with the exercise.