Independent 7,487 by Tees

I tend to enjoy Tees’ puzzles these days, but I struggled a bit with some of this one, so it’ll be interesting to hear how other folks got on.

Spotting the Nina helped: we have TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA around the perimeter, and a reference to it in 16/9/34. There may be other thematic material but Shakespeare is not among your blogger’s strong points.

*=anag, []=dropped, <=reversed, hom=homophone, cd=cryptic definition, dd=double definition.

Across
6 HATCH – H + AT + CH.
8 PLANTAIN – (L + ANT) in PAIN, which is French for bread. Pierre Gagnaire appears to be a French chef, so this is quite a nice reference. I hadn’t heard of him, but it’s easy to spot that the point is, he’s French.
10 ABLE – from the famous palindrome: Able was I, ere I saw Elba, supposedly spoken by Napoleon. “Able” isn’t intuitively the “end” of it, the front end maybe.
11 RESULTANT – SULTAN in (RE + T).
13 ODE – D in OE.
14 NORM – N OR M. N being a letter, and M being the one previous to it in the alphabet.
15 INDISCREET – I + (TEN CIDERS)*.
19 OXEN – [ri]O XEN[xem].
20 STAIR – I in STAR.
21 SEAL – dd.
23 ROYAL TRAIN – TAYLOR* + RA + IN.
26 EPEE – [fo]E + PEE.
27 GUVG + U + V.
28 DROP A BOMB – (O + PAB[l]O) in (DR + MB).
32 EDAM – D (Roman numeral for 500) in MAE< (West). The cheese that is famously made backwards.
33 ESCAPIST – IS in ASPECT*.
Down
1 THE BRONX – HEBRON in TX. A borough of New York, famous for its cheery disposition.
2 WHERE IT’S AT – (IS THE WATER)*.
3 OPUS – (SUP + 0)<.
4 GALL – G + ALL.
5 ETNA – E + ANT<.
7 THEOMANIA – THE + OMANI + A.
12 TEC – TEC. Short for detective, thus “private dick”. T is Troy, a unit of weight for things like gold, while EC is the postcode area for The City.
16/9/34 DRAMA IN THE ROUND – (UNMARRIED AND HOT)*. A reference to the Nina, as mentioned in the preamble.
17 SPRING BORN – Spoonerism of “bring spawn”.
18 RIS DE VEAU – DRIVES* + EAU. A new term for me, but eminently solveable from wordplay and checking.
22 ADELAIDE – A + DEAL* + IDE[a].
24 ORDOS – [fyod]OR DOS[toevsky]. This beat me: I’ve never heard of it, and “one for” doesn’t seem to suggest a substring to me.
25 LOP – O in LP.
29 OLAV – 0 + LAV.
30 ASIF – AS IF.
31 OTTO – I got this from the checking and the Nina, but cannot explain it at all.

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