2004-06-07 - 6:34 p.m.

Last night I was six yards from Kevin Spacey.

Close enough to ask to borrow his mobile phone and then mug him in a completely un-cruising-related incident.

Although I almost certainly would have been apprehended, as I was in the second row of the stalls at the Old Vic theatre at the time.

I went to see The 24-hour Plays. (http://www.24hourplays.com/) This was a charity evening which consisted of six short plays, each conceived, written, rehearsed and performed during the previous twenty-two hours. Hence the name, the, er, the 24-hour plays.

The Master of Ceremonies was A Bug's Life's Kevin Spacey. He introduced the plays, mispronouncing an average of one writer or actor's name per play. To be fair, some of them were tricky, SEE MOUSEMILK'S LIST OF THE DAY! But he is after all K-Pax's Kevin Spacey and should be sufficiently professional to deal with a few tricky names that he's had all day to practice.

The first play was about a group of seven- to nine-year-old children playing soldiers. The comic finale involved the children re-enacting one of the photographs of American soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners. This tableau provoked gales of laughter from the audience. Of course, tragedy + time = comedy. The time in this case seems to be about three weeks. I also laughed, although it was more of a light breeze than a gale, because Jim Broadbent in a pirate hat pretending to be a nine-year-old pretending to be a soldier pissing on someone is, without question, intrinsically funny.

The second play, Dead Hand, featured Matthew Lillard, best known for his portrayal of Shaggy, the marijuana-addled dog-owning dropout in the Scooby Doo film series. In Dead Hand he played a man who discovers the woman he is about to marry is actually dead. This character bore a strong resemblance to Shaggy, the marijuana-addled dog-owning dropout in the Scooby Doo film series. Sadly he forgot some of his lines in a play that could have done with some better jokes. Or just some jokes.

Still, it had more laughs than play three, po-faced but well-written and acted piece essentially about Dr David Kelly (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/uk_politics/03/hutton_inquiry/key_players/html/dr_david_kelly.stm) which featured Bill Paterson and Lennie James, who regularly appears in brilliant but unwatched televsion programmes.

Play four was an essentially structureless piece of four people talking shit in a flat. It had some good laughs.

Play five concerned an about-to-be-released prisoner being given last-minute sex lessons by his self-styled mentor, played by Brian Cox out of Manhunter. Brian Cox was the only actor to read from a script, thus defeating the whole point of his involvement in a piece of theatre which is unique solely insofar as the actors have all had to learn their lines from scratch in the preceding few hours. Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed's Matthew Lillard may have forgotten his lines, but at least he had the courage to go onstage without a script. Rendering his involvement redundant's Brian Cox, however, showed no such bottle and I condemn his sweaty form to theatre hell for eternity. Speaking of which, I must remember not to book tickets for Thoroughly Modern Millie.

Finally, Penelope Wilton and Harriet Walter appeared in Cuba, a quite sweet and very well performed piece about oppressively middle-class middle-aged women looking for love. For some reason this play seemed to find particular favour amongst the audience, who co-incidentally were largely oppressively middle-class middle-aged women. What they were looking for I couldn't say, but judging by the way they set upon the free after-show buffet like locusts who'd accidentally selected the vegetarian option on an El-Al flight to the moon and back, I'm pretty sure it wasn't weight loss.

As for The Murder of Mary Phagan's Kevin Spacey, it turns out all those names he was misreading were made up. He was just reading them off the noticeboard behind my head. I tried to catch up with him as he limped away from the theatre, but he mysteriously broke into a fast walk and I couldn't catch him.

Mousmilk's List of the Day:

Names A Time to Kill's Kevin Spacey had to say last night:

1.Benedict Cumberbatch

2. Ingeborga Dapkunaite

3. Sophie Okenedo

4. Kwame Kwei-Armah

5. Brian Cox

Profilage - Previosity - Nextitude