Cultural Highlights

In the demented frenzy of the provincial visitor, I went to as many plays and films as I could while in London. I saw Playboy of the Western World at the Old Vic, a theatre I'm very fond of. I'd read the play at university but never quite got the point of it. I'm not sure I still do, although at least I now understand that it's an extremely black comedy - I'm ashamed to say that I didn't entirely pick up the joke back then. It had some good lines, my two favourites being  a) when one character admonishes another for 'shaking the fat of my heart' and b) when another, (a creature entirely without passion, in fact), describes his fate as to be 'simmering in passion until the end of time'. Also-rans were, 'It's true mankind's the devil when your head's astray', and 'There's a great gap between a gallant story and a dirty deed'. The play was performed with gusto, although I'm not sure the lead boy was perfectly cast.

I also went to The Tempest at the Haymarket, because it is my favourite of Shakespeare's plays and also the first play I remember seeing in a theatre - we were taken from school in the late sixties to the then dazzlingly new Chichester Theatre to see a wonderful production.

I pity any schoolchildren who have been introduced to the theatre or to Shakespeare by the production I saw on this occasion though. Ralph Fiennes played Prospero as if he were Caliban, mixed with Coriolanus, in which part I'd seen him on film the night before, Ariel was played as if he were a gabbling drag queen who'd taken Lyn Barber's mother's elocution classes (see note below) - only his 'You are three men of sin' speech had any resonance and that was largely due to the fact that it was amplified by loudspeakers, which is not my idea of good acting.

Miranda was like something out of the kind of play that you might see at a school where Gussie Fink-Nottle gives out prizes. She managed to stress every line badly, her hands held stiff by her side, jabbing down to emphasise each phrase, her whole body bent forward stiffly as if the words were being forced out like squirts of toothpaste. 'What brave new world that has such people in it', she blurted, looking round, with a little giggle and then grinning inanely as she shifted from foot to foot. Oddly, the comic scenes, which are usually a little pathetic, were the best bits of the production. I think the fact that, in a performance of the play that contains some of Shakespeare's greatest poetry, the bits of nonsense about drunken sidekicks stood out probably demonstrates just how dire the evening was.

The costumes appeared to have been dredged from a very ancient dressing-up box, and for some reason Prospero's cloak seemed to have been constructed from those American Indian dream-catcher things that hippy shops sometimes sell. Most of the cast gave the impression that they considered it miraculous enough that they'd managed to memorise their lines without prompting and that to expect them to acknowledge the extraordinary poetry of the play was really too much to ask. Depressingly, the audience, mostly foreigners, agreed with this assessment, rewarding Fiennes and his cohorts with a quite undeserved standing ovation at the end.

What I wished was that Lydia Rose Bewley, who I saw at the Jermyn Street Theatre, (which I love), had played Miranda. She was playing the part of a young girl in a revival of a 1950s play called Riverline and she had that rare magic quality that allows a performer to light up a theatre. The dilemma is that she is not a slim woman and I am torn between thinking that it is most unfair that she will probably miss out on parts because of her weight, when she is so clearly a really marvellous actress, and recognising that, good though she is, my first reaction, and that of other people I overheard talking at interval was, 'Isn't that girl rather fat?' As soon as she opened her mouth she completely transcended that impression, but the trouble is that current fashion is against the meaty and all for the thin.

(This is from Lynn Barber's memoir, An Education and mirrors exactly the kind of performance Ariel provided: "For elocution competitions and exams, it wasn't enough just to recite a poem - all the words had to be accompanied by gestures. Thus, references to moonlight, sunlight, stars or any form of weather involved looking upwards; references to storms, rain, frost, involved pulling an imaginary shawl round one's shoulders and blowing on one's nails. (Does anyone, in real life, ever blow on their nails? I have never seen it.) Weeping or even mild regret meant wiping one's eyes with the back of one's hand; laughing meant much shaking of the shoulders, a la Edward Heath. Elves and fairies always started their speeches in a crouching position and then leapt up, spun round, and dashed madly across the stage with arms outstretches. Skipping was sometimes required. Searching for anything or even just looking necessitated a hand above the eyebrows shielding the eyes, accompanied by a pointing gesture.'"

I Thought They'd Change Their Minds

I read about the plans for it months ago, but, until this week's confirmation that the Globe Theatre really is going to spend its next season performing all of Shakespeare's plays in languages other than English, I didn't completely believe it. Now that I realise it's really going to happen, I find it hard to escape the conclusion that the English have lost all commonsense.

The seasons kicks off, apparently, with Troilus and Cressida in Maori and continues with a Polish 'drugs-and-strippers' version of Macbeth, a performance of Cymbeline in Juba Arabic (a language spoken in South Sudan), a Comedy of Errors in Dari and on and on and on.

I have only one question: why?

Same Again

The floods in Queensland are still on my mind. Yesterday's paper carried reports from Toowoomba, including a description of a woman in a car 'that was swallowed by the "tsunami" that erupted from East Creek ...The woman climbed onto the roof of the car and grasped the outstretched hand of a bystander, who could not hold her.' She was washed into a storm drain and her body has now been recovered. Sadly, there is no trace of three children who 'were last seen on a corner of downtown Russell Street as the flash flood bore down'.

As a slight distraction, I've been trying to think of films or books or plays that include rain as a major feature. There is, of course, Peter Weir's Last Wave. I also vaguely remember that The Year of Living Dangerously unfolded during monsoonal rains.  There was a play I saw in London called, I think, Three Days of Rain. I'm stuck for novels at the moment. I'm sure I'm missing lots of obvious things - any suggestions?

Who Started It?

Driving out of London the other day, we happened on a radio station that was broadcasting a recording of TS Eliot reading The Waste Land. As we inched our way up the Edgware Road, we heard this bit:

"When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said -
I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself,
HURRY UP PLEASE, IT'S TIME
Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,
He said, I swear, I can't bear to look at you.
And no more can't I, I said, and think of poor Albert,
He's been in the army four years, he wants a good time,
And if you don't give it him, there's others will, I said.
Oh is there, she said. Something o' that, I said.
Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.
HURRY UP PLEASE, IT'S TIME
If you don't like it you can get on with it, I said.
Others can pick and choose if you can't.
But if Albert makes off, it won't be for lack of telling.
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
(And her only thirty-one.)
I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face,
It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
(She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.)
The chemist said it would be all right, but I've never been the same.
You are a proper fool, I said.Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, I said,
What you get married for if you don't want children?
HURRY UP PLEASE, IT'S TIME
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot"

I don't know why I've never noticed before, but isn't this very Pinteresque? And, if it is, doesn't that mean that it is in fact Eliotesque and Pinter was just a pale imitation?

Shakespeare

When I went to the theatre on Monday, it was the Bell Shakespeare's King Lear that I was there to see (and John Bell in the role of Lear was stupendous - the theatre critic John McCallum said of one of Bell's earlier performances, 'One day you'll be able to tell your grandchildren that you saw John Bell act,' and that was how I felt after watching him on Monday afternoon, [now all I need is grandchildren]).

Anyway, on the way home I was thinking about how extraordinary Shakespeare was (always one for the original thought, me) and reminding myself that I must read more about him. I remembered that, despite Spike Milligan's definitive analysis of the question (something along the lines of, 'I don't think the plays are the work of William Shakespeare - just of a man of the same name') there'd been an article in one of the weekend papers looking at the age-old topic of the playwright's identity.

When I got home, I dug the paper out and read the article carefully. It quotes Mark Rylance, an English actor and the first Artistic Director of the Globe Theatre, who supports the idea that Shakespeare was not just one person. Fair enough, I thought, except that he does not base his view on history or evidence. The reason he gives for his belief is that 'he finds the idea of the single genius at work very damaging to the confidence of younger playwrights.'

Blistering barnacles - it's this sort of thing that brings out the Captain Haddock in my personality (an aspect of my character that I usually like to conceal). What is this nonsense? In another article in the same paper, someone describes a Kurt Vonnegut story called Harrison Bergeron. It is set in a society where everyone is equal - the intelligent are forced to wear things on their heads that let out high pitched sounds every few seconds "to stop them 'taking unfair advantage of their brains' and dancers are weighted by birdshot or scrap-iron calibrated to the size of their talent.'" Vonnegut's satirical vision seems to be the world Rylance aspires to, a world where being awed and inspired by the magnificence of another human being's achievement must be avoided because it might be detrimental to lesser mortals' self esteem.

Thundering typhoons, what sort of lily-livered landlubbers are we breeding? Shakespeare shouldn't be '...damaging to the confidence of younger playwrights'; his example should just make them all try harder. Next you'll be telling me that Herge was not one individual but a committee of Walloons.

Outing to the Theatre

We went to see The Walworth Farce last night. It was not a very long play so when we got home we made some dinner and turned on the television and watched Midsomer Murders. Strangely enough, both dramas - The Walworth Farce and Midsomer Murders - dealt with the theme of children and overbearing parents and the impossible struggle to escape. One was more entertaining than the other though. And, while I know that entertainment should not be my only requirement, I do find it easier to take hard medicine in a palatable form. Just as oats are good for you, but taste better when mixed with raisins and dried mango to make muesli, so tragedy is easier to bear when a few laughs are thrown in. Unfortunately, in The Walworth Farce the laughs were - like the bits of dried mango in most muesli - rather few and far between.

At Last - a Good Reason to Miss London

Simon Russell Beale. I forgot about him. I won't be able to go down to the National Theatre or the Old Vic and see him on the stage. And now I've gone and done it. Oh, what was I thinking?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wgWEhCrnoI

King Lear

King Lear is coming to our town (as opposed to Our Town coming to our town - it isn't, but it will be in Sydney later in the year, and I'm looking forward to it even though I don't agree that the play is, as Andrew Upton says on the STC website, 'a moving interrogation of the American Dream and the shadow of mortality'; I disagree partly because I think using 'interrogation' in that way is an indicator of wooly thinking and an affront to all English speakers [right up there with having 'issues' 'around' things and 'privileging' things - I have to go away now and lie down for a bit, ugh] and partly because I think 'the American Dream' is a meaningless cliche.)
But back to King Lear. I spent years and years without ever getting a single chance to see King Lear. There are fashions in Shakespeare (and, indeed, in literature generally - none of my children ever studied Keats at school, for example, although no doubt that will change, thanks to the film Bright Star) and if one of the plays is out of favour, you can wait decades for it to be put on at the theatre. But in the end it is rehabilitated and before you know where you are the formerly shunned work is elbowing all the others off the stage.
Currently Lear is the play being smiled on by theatre management. I first became aware of its new popularity when the RSC did a production in 2007, in which Ian McKellen famously took off his underpants. He must have thought this added something to his interpretation of Lear - and in a way it did, if distracting large chunks of the audience with alarming thoughts about what would happen to them if McKellen ever took a shine to them could be said to be a plus (mysteriously, McKellen did hint in a New Yorker article that he might have been wearing an extra large prosthetic - although he didn't explain his reason for doing that.) A few months later the Globe Theatre did the play, with John Calder making a much better job of Lear, while keeping most of his clothes on. And now the Bell Shakespeare Company is putting it on, with John Bell in the title role.
I love the Bell Shakespeare Company. About ten years ago they did the worst Antony and Cleopatra I've ever seen - the set was unspeakable and the costumes straight out of Abigail's Party - but generally their productions - although possibly concentrating marginally too much on spectacle at the expense of language (not really my view but one expressed by some of the more learned members of my family) are marvellous. Even so I'm hesitant about going to Lear this time. The thing is, do I want to be harrowed again? Do I want to sit through another ineluctable tumble into misery? Do I actually want to witness tragedy any more? I can face another Antony and Cleopatra, because in that the disaster is outside of the protagonists' hands, as they are overcome by carnal passion, but I'm not sure I'm up for Othello and Macbeth and Lear these days. They are all stories of poor decisions, missed opportunities, misunderstandings. There's a sense that everything could have been easily avoided - the characters are not swept away by something, they simply make a few mistakes. If the audience just yells 'Look behind you' loud enough, it should all turn out all right - 'Look Lear, look at your daughter, she's grimacing when you're not looking,' 'Hey Othello, look at Iago, his face is twisted with bitterness and spite.'
I've never been much good at tragedy anyway, but now I'm out of adolescence (to put it mildly) I'm no longer certain I need reminders that we humans are to the gods 'as flies to wanton boys'. Experience has told me that often enough already, unfortunately. And I'm not sure I can sit through another eye-gouging either. At the Globe, the scene was so bloody that someone actually fainted when one of the 'jellies' shot across the stage. ('How wet', said a woman near me in the audience, her cut-glass accent carrying across the auditorium as the fainting woman hit the ground.)
What worries me too is that the new Bell Shakespeare production, according to The(sydney)magazine (and can one really take anything a publication with a ridiculous title like that tells us?) is taking 'its cues from Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic novel "The Road"'. Hang on a minute, a Shakespeare production needs 'cues' from Cormac McCarthy? Shakespeare needs help from - yes, the world has definitely turned upside down.

Six Characters in Search of an Author at the Sydney Festival

Thrilled to read in today's SMH that Six Characters in Search of an Author hasn't been selling well. I'm pretty certain it's the same production I saw at Chichester last year. Having read the play at university 25 years ago, I was very excited to see it at last. What a disappointment. I was so disgusted I wrote about it at the time, in the hope of letting off steam. It didn't make me feel any better. Actions do speak louder than words it turns out and what I really needed to do was go and punch Rupert Goold on the nose, but unfortunately we've never been introduced. Anyway here's what I wrote then, in my futile attempt to get 'closure':

Director Rupert Goold describes his method as ‘conceptual buggering around’ but what he has done to Six Characters in Search of an Author is bugger it up. Pirandello’s 1921 play deals with fiction and reality and – particularly poignant so soon after WWI – the immortal nature of fictional characters. Goold ignores this and instead makes the play a vehicle for an examination of the dilemmas of television documentary/docudrama making. Splendid performances from Ian McDiarmid, with his Commedia dell’Arte mask of a face, and Denise Gough, circling the stage on one roller skate, a blonde harpy seeking revenge, cannot disguise the weakness of the resulting production. Despite his trademark moments of gaudy fairground horror, there is no hiding the fact that Goold has trivialised the work. Flashing lights and spectacular onstage throatslashings may be just the thing to bring in audiences though. If so, Goold deserves an Olivier award for crowdpleasing.

Anyway, pleasing to note that throatslashings don't bring in Sydney audiences - and the New Year's fireworks mean they've had enough of flashing lights for a while. So yah boo sucks Mr Goold. (And his latest production at the ENO got utterly trashed, hurray, hurray, hurray.)