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Post by Nicholas on Nov 17, 2019 12:29:18 GMT
She’s a great writer. This is a terrible decision. It’s not her. It’s her position.
We’re in the 21st century; theatre criticism isn’t. UNLESS you’ve got 50 years of experience seeing Olivier behind you, writing a review overnight is a waste of your, mine and the theatre’s time. No other medium is so backwards and formulaic. Film critics – esp. independent critics – are changing what film criticism is. Think of the podcasts singling in on film music or performance or stories behind production; video essays analysing moments; blogs with a genre niche; festivals written about under adrenaline; AND bogstandard weekly write-ups. We want film criticism to be MORE thoughtful. What does theatre criticism have? “Live reviews”. LESS thoughtful overnight reviews. Just what we want. Thanks, George Osborne, thanks.
Personally, I think the future of theatre criticism is community – multiple critics across the country working and writing together. You could argue that that’s what Exeunt does, but I think Exeunt (excellent as it CAN be) does it too problematically. Firstly, there are too many voices. It’s often hard to know which voice is reviewing what, where their biases are, where their passions lie, and thus whether this review is a fair barometer of my opinions. Secondly, there are too few diverse voices. Looking at its roster that’s true literally, but I mean diversity of taste; their podcast was unlistenable as it was a bunch of middle-class hipsters agreeing over how progressive something at Battersea was, as opposed to, for example, giving that new David Mamet West End disaster a piece of their mind, or being open-minded about the surprisingly enjoyable pleasures of some touring musical. I don’t know one person outside of theatre who trusts Exeunt like they trust Quentin Letts or Ann Treneman’s mainstream reviews. That’s worrying.
I think people are have had enough of non-experts. In art, music, film, all things, what we want isn’t some bloke (usually a bloke) to say what they thought ten minutes after leaving; we want positivity and negativity, opinion and analysis, intelligence and experience, diverse voices from all over. As such, hiring ANYONE to replace Billington is backwards looking. They should hire someone, instead, to overhaul the antiquated form of criticism.
****
I do think this issue – the lack of diversity, accessibility and expertise – is an issue which has already harmed theatre AND criticism. This year, unexpectedly, had one of the most important shows for critics EVER in the West End, as it needed not just SERIOUS critical analysis but DIVERSE and especially YOUNG analysis – nonetheless it got NONE of that. This iconic show? Bitter Wheat. Really. This was one of the first mainstream, major artistic responses to the MeToo movement; David Mamet is the first bona fide artist and public figure to take on Weinstein publically. This should be as major as She Said in books and Bombshell in cinemas, for better or worse – it thus needs the analysis that the books about the MeToo movement are getting, or the criticism weird commissions rightly get. It needed the diversity of young voices, perhaps from outside the theatre completely, to see this in the cultural, not theatrical, context. Did it? Pfft - so one of the biggest cultural responses to MeToo went utterly unchallenged. Why? Why did no editor worth their salt send a cultural commentator to cover MeToo’s iffy West End debut, or no critic of this generation attend and attack it (but for the Exeunt review which was fab)?
It’s because we don’t know what criticism is anymore. Are the reviews simply to say “Buy/don’t buy a ticket”? To sell papers over popular/populist shows? Are they actual artistic analysis? THEY SHOULD BE MORE. A great critic CAN be a great writer. Pauline Kael was. Michael Billington still is, for a month. I don’t think any critic writing today – at Exeunt, independently, Arifa Akbar – has the opportunity to be a great writer; they have the potentiality and the talent, but not the platform for the 21st century.
Who would you say is a good reviewer? Nicholas on 'ere. Best in the business Awwwwwwwwwww. I’m flattered. I wish. I’ve drunk enough to take that seriously (it’s Sunday, don’t look at the clock) but sober enough to write (unlucky you), so let me tell you why that ain’t gonna happen.
Money.
Oddly enough, when I was a student, theatregoing was cheaper, as I studied in London (whilst great for theatregoing, the isolation of central London can be terrible for your mental health). Nonetheless I never dared try blogging or writing independently, simply because I had no idea where I’d be after I graduated, what I could afford, and whether this could go on. And… As I expected, after uni, I was living with mummy and daddy, still just theatregoing, paying waaaaaaay too much on trains to London, and subsidising this passion by – I sh*t you not – performing as a musician at a funeral parlour. This wasn’t enough. Until I got a job, and a deposit, and a flat, all in/near London, regularity couldn’t be guaranteed. Oh boy. That’s a lot of money.
(and that’s to say nothing about wanting to write about regional theatre, and afford cross-country trains… There are a great number of great bloggers writing about their region, giving great insight into a much-needed niche, but we need a community to highlight these works and bring these writers together)
I’m sharing this because this inaccessibility for young theatregoers especially (admittedly, I was a cowardly young theatregoer) proves worrying when we think about who can go to the theatre, who can regularly write about it, and what that means our gatekeepers will be.
This is why theatres need to think about who gets free tickets, and why. It’d be infantile to say “Any blogger gets tickets”, BUT the more voices encouraged to see theatre BY theatres, and challenge it critically, the richer theatre will be! Let’s have young voices talking about old plays, the voices on stage in the audience, disadvantaged communities deliberately bought in and some positive discrimination. Let’s have a review of Iphigenia in Splott written by Effie. Theatres should themselves seek out diverse critics, and even non-critics to judge these shows in the real world. Until we do that, criticism/blogging will be the sole occupation of wealthy established Londoners. That’s dangerous.
This has apparently already come to head at the Fringe. It’s known that putting a Fringe show on is stupidly costly, and thus the talent it brings out is often that bit posher. Who, though, are the arbiters of taste up there? Either people established by big magazines, or people going independently – and those people are a bit posher. Edinburgh critics are a microcosm of the problems independent criticism is going to face – who can afford to be a critic or not.
I also have a horse in this race. I’ve banged on the Working Class thread because that’s my roots – almost no critical voices I read are, or if they are they hide it. As such we see frankly offensive portrayals of these communities, but no critics criticise. To give a very specific example, wonder.land was sh*te anyway – but particularly offensive if you went to a state school and saw that life patronised so hideously. And this is NICHOLAS – a cis white boy from f***ing Berkshire – saying we need someone as diverse as ME in our critical communities. Diverse young voices from a breadth of Britain struggle to attend theatre in the first place; why would THEY make the sacrifice to become an independent critic?
My story ends with jobs, money and life taking me far far far from London – though there’s NT Live and I return from time to time (usually just for the theatre, last time just for Patti, occasionally I say hi to family and friends too, I’m a terrible human being). I don’t know whether I’ll ever write about theatre seriously again, but I’ll always love it more than anything. There are shows that travel in my heart – I wouldn’t be here and happy with Nora, without Chekhov, without McBurney, without Clean Break, without theatre that I think about and cry about every day.
Thinking out loud, mind… These shows were accessible to all but encouraged by none. The Shakespeare Trilogy were on the Beeb, A Doll’s House on digitaltheatre, Angels on NT Live, Nell Gwynn touring – but no critical voice used their platform to encourage more people seeing these shows when they were accessible. A radio show, a podcast, could; a weekly diary better than a nightly review section. Appealing to less-able theatregoers would make more theatregoers! That none of our critics reach out to communities is, honestly, tragic.
We do need to seriously think about how we encourage new critics as much as we encourage new talent; how we encourage diverse critics as much as we encourage diverse talent. I’m being so autobiographical because if someone as lucky as me struggles in this field, what of the breadth and best of Britain, diverser voices, making theatre-writing let alone theatregoing accessible to all theatregoers?
Anywho, that was an overlong naked personal ramble about a throwaway comment stroking my ego. It was definitely money, and not my own flaws and lack of talent, that held me back. To be fair, I know I have many, many, many inadequacies, so to blame everything on money and accessibility permits my own cowardice, laziness, aversion to risk and refusal to try. It’s easier to blame money than myself. Nonetheless I’m chuffed. Maybe one day…
I think Arifa Akbar is a really good writer. I think this position should be retired alongside Billington, and the Guardian – pioneering as it is in other fields of journalism – should have hired Akbar to redesign what criticism in the mainstream is. I imagine Akbar will do the best with her position. Her position is not enough.
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Post by Nicholas on Nov 17, 2019 12:04:20 GMT
Billers is THE voice of 20th century – and early 21st century – theatre. Whilst times change, and Billington is (or should be) the last of his breed, I’d argue that he’s served as a remarkable last of this breed; frankly he’s produced a better body of literature than half the bloody playwrights he’s been contemporary to.
When I saw Harry Potter, it happened to be Press Night/Day. I bumped into Quentin Letts, grumpily drawing attention to himself, and very much had to hold my tongue. However, in the corner, was Billington standing there, eating his interval ice-cream, grinning like a schoolboy. Of everyone in that auditorium – most of whom were, like me, enthusiastic fanboys – ONE PERSON had the right to call this a theme park, decry his theatre being taken over by populist claptrap, be a snob. Instead, at the time, this septuagenarian was clearly getting into the younger swing of things, and seeing this piece of theatre as exactly what it was. He then posted an eloquent and thoughtful review barely a day later. That mindset, that enthusiasm, that writing – that takes skill, that takes passion. Of his reviews, I’m a particular admirer of how he contextualises the genre expertly but excitedly highlights the new in The Flick, and beautifully commends why this interpretation of the Shrew touched him so. That ability – to capture both analysis and emotion, and always be looking for the positive in the new – is something I hope to have when I’m 80.
Funnily enough, I disagreed with Billers oodles of times. I loved both the Maxine Peake and Andrew Scott Hamlets and knew before I read a word that Billers wouldn’t, simply because they weren’t political enough – THERE’S MORE TO HAMLET THAN JUST JAN KOTT. I think he has a couple of ideals of plays, esp. Shakespeare (too negatively) and Pinter (too positively), which clouds his view too much – his recent appearance on Front Row was VERY fuddy-duddy-ish. The imagined female critic in his book was, um, a choice.
However, a great critic is not someone with whom to agree or disagree; nor, I would argue, is it someone to compare opinions with. It’s a writer. When we remember Pauline Kael, we don’t ask whether we agree or disagree; we enjoy her turn of phrase and deft way to turn praise into literature. I’d compare Billington to her. No-one better documented the evolution of 20th century theatre and we should reviews for that – but because he knows how to contextualise whilst being emotional, we should celebrate his reviews as Pauline Kael’s were at her centenary this year. One Night Stands is a good read. His contemporary reviews are still good reads. I think he should be remembered like that. And to do it all overnight... He’s the last of his kind. He’ll be missed.
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Post by Nicholas on Nov 17, 2019 11:58:00 GMT
Blushes, you’re too kind. I hope it doesn’t sound cocky to say, but I’ll never write a sentence as good as the NoviChockle Brothers. I’ve peaked. I retire.
Great review, Nicolas. I think what you are saying isn’t far from what I also felt, that there is a play here about the Litvenenko tragedy but instead of letting that speak, and it wouldn’t have many laughs, it is dressed in a polemic which we frankly don’t need. I also agree the Putin character tricky. I know Charlie Chaplin famously ridiculed Hitler at the time but I am not sure we can do the same to Putin..yet..or ever... I dont think we are clever enough. Before I get into pretentious political stuff (I’ve quickly unretired), my first thought it is – whether we can or whether we can’t, I’m not sure Litvinenko’s life story is the platform on which to do it. EITHER A Very Expensive Poison should be about the political systems that assassinated Litvinenko – in which Litvinenko can play a part, as can Skripal and Dawn Sturgess and Nemtsov and 6 Novaya Gazeta journalists and a scary number of others, but not be the hero. OR it should be about the Litvinenkos, in which placing Putin on stage in the first place immediately draws attention away – for example, they used May’s voice but didn’t have the distraction of an imitator on stage, and for Putin perhaps the same thing was better. In fact, for this story, I’d look at how Good Night and Good Luck used archive footage – rather than imitate or parody or satirise and distract, I’d use the real deal. I’d also reiterate, mind, how great Shearsmith’s performance scary and well-observed characterisation was – I’d love to see him on the Olivier stage. My feeling is this managed to give the Litvinenkos a lovely second life and deservedly end their investigation, but by having Uncle Vova on stage the scales were tipped dramatically and the focus muddled; therefore their life story was compromised by Putin a second time over.
Now, the pretentious political stuff. Can we satirise Putin? Probably not. Can one satirise Putin? Yes with a but. I think it was Peter Pomarentsev who said that one reason the Kukli puppet show closed down was this unforgettable moment: when, overnight, the president of Russia changed from a man with so much to parody, to a man with so little on the surface to parody… And if you’re thinking “But what about him shirtless on a horse? That’s funny!”… What was initially impossible to caricature – his precision, his KGB history – is now SO parodied that he does things to make us parody him and stop talking about him as a politician. It works. He’s a compelling character, indisputably – but as a politician he puts on his trousers one leg at a time and that’s the politician we should talk about. However, instead of an inconsistent leader, we talk about his image more than we do about Litvinenko or Dawn Sturgess. It’s embarrassing. To satirise his façade gives us Tonight with Vladimir Putin, which is not just crap comedy, but harmful – it suggests a flawed politician’s biggest flaw is his image (and also, NONE of that show rang true satirising the surface anyway!). Just to name one serious policy flaw, Russia’s going to miss its climate targets; why are we taking Brazil and China and other states seriously for climate betrayals, but we aren’t we taking Putin seriously as a politician in the G20 with global commitments that affect our children? Partly, it’s how superficial our Russian coverage is, which is perfectly encapsulated by our aimless parodies. To satirise him, we need to go to more than the superficial – and that takes in-depth knowledge of the last 50-odd years of Russian history and contemporary Russian society. The fact that ON THIS BOARD people are still using terms like ‘comrade’ about a country of whom only 11% voted Socialist and whose leader say “liberalism has outlived its purpose” shows how uphill that will be.
(in fact I came across this by Jonathan Jones – “So let’s laugh at Vladimir Putin too, and fail to take him seriously, and let the consequences of our cowardice play out. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen?” That was from 2015… Yeah, can’t think what the Russian government’s done newsworthy since then)
You mention Chaplin, but there are a few key issues with that comparison. One is the propaganda that they parody. Amidst the debate of whether the Reifenstahl movies are good art, bad art, and the art can be separated from the culture, one thing gets forgotten – they’re really quite stupid-looking. That over-the-top-ness is VERY easy to parody. We did it. Disney did it. They hold up because they’re true and accurate in their satire. It’s why “Springtime for Mussolini” wouldn’t have worked, but oh boy, this just feels accurate. What musical would best parody Putin? That’s the problem – there’s not a lot to parody in Putin’s Kremlin, not visually, at least – and that’s clearly stage-managed.
Perhaps more importantly, though, The Great Dictator is also about a young Jewish German in ordinary Germany – and the reality of THOSE scenes make the political commentary sharper. The scenes of the Jewish ghetto, and everyday life, are really sensitively drawn – they’re dramatic, not comic. Through this we can both see who the dictator really is, how he’s cast his convincing spell on his country, and how the ordinary people of that country live, believe, and fight. Could we convincingly portray ordinary Russia? I’m not sure we have the knowledge. As this MYOPIC response attests, our view of Russia is a simplistic bitty collage of stereotypes, outdated stereotypes, and politics – some are true, some limit our perspective, and some simply aren’t. Politically, Russia is more than Putin. Apolitically, Russia is more than Putin. Yes, as this play attests, his fingerprints get everywhere, especially politically – but satirising him takes a more holistic approach.
That’s where I was disappointed by A Very Expensive Poison sometimes being about ordinary Russia, but only superficially – it would have been much richer had it really looked at the ordinariness Litvinenko loved and had to escape, not just the politics.
The overall plot that made The Great Dictator timeless is the fact that it was already a timeless story – the Prince and the Pauper. The two scenes that are always remembered are a) the dictator with the globe (god, it’s still so funny) and b) the ordinary man preaching for love. As A Very Expensive Poison somewhat attests, we’re pretty good at the former with regards to contemporary Russia, but not that good with the latter – and until we get the portrayal of ordinary life right, we can’t get the satire of the top.
So, in short, what we need is an insider to write us a Price and the Pauper story from inside the system but all about Putin. That would surely be the greatest film ever made...
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Post by Nicholas on Oct 11, 2019 12:17:36 GMT
I bloody love Naked Attraction. Big fan of tattoos? Big fan of naked people. These days, I take what I can get.
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Post by Nicholas on Oct 11, 2019 12:14:33 GMT
Monday was Vladimir Putin’s 67th birthday, and the 13th anniversary of the unsolved murder of Anna Politkovskaya. Wednesday would have been Boris Nemtsov’s 60th birthday.
Seems an appropriate time to talk about this comedy!
(In advance, because there’s a LOT to chew on, this write-up is much too long and all over the place. Hey, that’s in keeping with the play! I decided not to trim down, just because (smug git that I am) I’m pretty chuffed with it, but in trying to place it both in a theatrical and political context there’s a lot that’s contentious, so apologies if it’s OTT)
At best, this gives Litvinenko not just justice after death, but a brief and beautiful second life. At worst, this laughs with, not just at, the men and monsters who committed this crime. A Very Expensive Poison is a tremendous mess – sometimes just tremendous, sometimes just messy. But how do you literalise a world like this? Like this? Prebble’s answer is to, well, adapt every part in every possible way. It’s amazing that one of our biggest most historic theatres plays host to this hearing of that verdict, and amazing that they actually put that man, at his worst, on stage. It’s a shame that the play around it is the mess it is. Overall I actually hugely enjoyed it. The problem is in tackling so explicitly such a terrifying moment of contemporary history, and putting THOSE real people on stage, Prebble and Crowley make us demand more than enjoyment: they make us demand answers, demand justice, demand closure, demand humanity. Fun though this is, they don’t quite succeed.
Aptly enough, this is at its best when focused on Litvinenko himself. I do think, after Enron, The Effect, this challenge, and great TV performances, Lucy Prebble is a form of a genius – and that’s on display in her political savvy here. She’s at her best when recreating more solid ground here. Young Russia – of old traditions, new ways of living, and Litvinenko’s secret service asking “to KGB or not to KGB” – gives her JUST ENOUGH to exaggerate: paranoia, betrayal, and patriotism but to what? She wisely sidesteps any Le Carre clichés (and I love Le Carre) for a paranoia that works, however exaggerated. Even when puppets invade Litvinenko’s flat, Soviet sing-songs occur, or we’re reminded of the truth of Soviet history, they stand for something – the TV and the state. There’s a lot of exposition (it’s indisputably overlong), but in initially portraying the Litvinenkos as ordinary emigrants, then extraordinary young Russians in young Russia, the tone – almost Gilliamesque – absolutely serves the story.
However, as it evolves to cover, well, everything, the play stops being, well, something. For swathes of Litvinenko’s life story, he’s ignored so the oligarchy can exposit, his killers can comically naff off, and minor compatriots entertain us more than he does. When Prebble and Crowley’s style can be comic, Kafka-esque, or Russophobic, it is – then style absolutely overtakes substance. The spider’s web this play weaves, with oligarchs and politicians and police all entangling this moralistic spy at the centre, unravels as it tries on a different style to serve each different character; the centre cannot hold, and our hero ends up ignored.
Nonetheless, this exaggerated bonkersness largely entertains, even if it detracts from the truth. At best it serves it – how better to literalise the flawed masculinity than a giant golden penis? – but often it feels like, as the true story grows outrageous, the play can’t keep up. I was reminded of Chimerica – an absurd political world beyond most of us, thearicalised as abstract and arch, steeped in traditions of Kafka, but also doing the reality of the system justice through clear delineation and real surprising heart. Chimerica’s bonkers stagecraft was unforgettable, but anchored by two rich lead characters who were never lost by Kirkwood’s plot. Here, Prebble serving every master individually and not our protagonist – the character who most needs serving – the play can’t be what it is at its best – a study of Litvinenko’s character, and how that character led to this mystery and this tragedy. The play can’t have a moment as moving as Benedict Wong fraught and alone. This overdid the abstraction, and left its characters at sea. Structurally, this is a mess, and I couldn’t help but feel it’s the characters who suffer.
This feels particularly unfortunate, as the play is (nominally) based around Marina Litvinenko. For hours of the second half, she’s barely there (instead we watch the assassins fart around for kicks), which strikes me as at best a structural issue and at worst a thematic mistake. By focusing on her, the politics of the play matter doubly. By thus ignoring her heart and soul for Inspector Clouseau muck-ups with the assassins – by giving them richer characters and home lives than she had – Prebble does both Alexander and Marina a disservice.
If this were simply an excuse to restate the verdict and restage the crime, this would still be an excellent play tackling the institutionalised cruelty of the Putin regime and demanding justice for Litvinenko – and a Nicholas Kent-esque trial would have been enough – and perhaps making it male-only would skewer the strange masculinity Putin plays into and Prebble superficially explores; therefore, perhaps Marina shouldn’t even be in the play at all. Better, instead, she should be in EVERY moment, to remind us of the human cost to these atrocities – thus her absence is a problem. Proving the Putin government is corrupt is important, and reading out that verdict on a West End stage is bold and brilliant – it’s also like hearing that the sh*tter in the woods was… that bear. Reminding us that this corruption hurts living innocent bystanders, tears apart families, causes daily pain – that is profound, and this is something only a playwright can do. The meta-fictional audience participation at the end, instead, even has Marina replaced on stage by MyAnna Buring (who is, incidentally, very good). Due to her inclusion it’s a celebration of everything she still stands for; due to her often exclusion it’s a messy play that’s often left ignored.
The murderers fit an easier stage trope. Prebble and Crowley (perhaps particularly Crowley) clearly enjoy playing them off as comic, as in the tradition of dumb double acts. Now, is that a bad thing: an irrelevant, irreverent take? I hope this isn’t an unfair thing to say, but (to get tin-foil-hatty) one of Putin’s tactics is to make his crimes seem absurd. For many (including most Russians), the sight of two assassins telling such blatant, absurd lies about snow in ‘beautiful’ Salisbury was morally outrageous. For those in Russia who bought into it, what could they do but enjoy the absurdity…
Is portraying these two as the NoviChockle Brothers, thus, in keeping with the strange (and sick) satire these events provoke? If so, it’s oddly brilliant, but needs A LOT more context. Is it, instead, to satirise them, and to make us see the violence of the Putin regime as nonsensical but cruel? If so, it’s a bit wishy-washy – neither assassin seems cruel, which seems a mistake, when they’re assassins murdering our play’s hero; the satire doesn’t skewer the system. Is it, oddly, to make them and the setting likeable? If so, it works – but to the play’s detriment, and to Litvinenko’s detriment. As farceurs, Prebble and Crowley make the point that the assassins were bungling, but they make this simple point early on; having so many scenes of them, they instead end up celebrated. Some of the satire works, but when it comes to satirising VVP himself it’s a wee bit aimless then a wee bit toothless, perhaps because his leadership is both beyond satire and too cruel to satirise, and when it comes to these two, it over-enjoys it.
The final embodiment of where this succeeds and fails is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. First things first – Lucy Prebble dramatises Putin, Crowley directs him, Shearsmith exquisitely performs him and Warchus let it happen. All of that is EXTRAORDINARY and they all deserve absolute admiration. However, the way in which he was re-enacted deserves very serious contemplation.
At first, I thought Shearsmith’s performance as Putin was exceptional. It was far, far, far from imitation – the KGB precision replaced with palpable, nervous uncertainty, not costumed up by any means – but by visualising this aspect of his governing something true is revealed. Putin was just a low-rung politician bought in to be uncontroversial, and largely DID make it up as he went along. He still does. Putin, a half-decent actor, plays the Soviet hardman, but arguably in actuality is more President Schwarzenegger than President Stierlitz. Literalising that aspect – a terrible imitation but an expert characterisation – seemed the best way to portray him.
As the history chugged on, however, and Putin developed from nervous middleman to killer head of state, the show didn’t know what to do with him, except have him heckle in the balcony like a sinister Statler and Waldorf. Exaggerate this uncertainty? Replace it with faux-exactitude? Make us fear him? Laugh at him? Ridicule him? Even like him? All of these. Called Vladimir Vladimirovich in the play and The President in the programme and occupying Putin’s place in history, but the word ‘Putin’ deliberately avoided, this was having its cake and eating it. Not being ‘Putin’ per se, the show didn’t need to portray Putin himself, so avoided trying to juggle his strangely contradictory public persona – which is a shame, as (as Shearsmith showed) exaggerating characteristics can be more revealing than attempting an imitation. The man he is today is a fascinating gift to an actor – a spy, then a nervous amateur in a flawed government, then an accidental leader to a young country, then the most powerful man in the world; initially too boring to go out in public with Yeltsin, then too careful with his public persona for satire, then so broad with his persona his ridiculousness often overpowers the reality. These characteristics, more than the position of the president, indisputably played into this poisoning. We don’t want or need a humanised Putin (although that would be fascinating), but we need a human face on the Putin government and specifically on Putin (a human face on the real man would be nice too, stop with the plastics Vlad!). The underdeveloped ‘character’ we’re lumped with this, I felt, let Putin off the hook. Again, theatre has the power to portray – why not REALLY portray, exaggerate, criticise the leader he’s become?
The show seems thus to prefer decontextualising Putin – ‘The President’ – whilst only marginally contextalising the individual accused of ordering this crime head on – ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich’. Is it truly ever Putin? And what is lost by that? It’s a shame that the character of ‘The President’/Vladimir Vladimirovich thus avoids exaggerating or explaining the man he actually is. Shearsmith’s performance never lost its nervous scariness – I think it’s one of the performances of the year (and imagine the Olivier going to HIM!) – but the role itself is what lets him and the show down. Overall, Putin and the Putin regime remain oddly unsatirised, oddly unchallenged, oddly unscathed. Therefore the Litvinenko verdict loses its sting.
After the play ends – after about twenty false endings, a major structural flaw as it tries to read out a verdict a la Nicholas Kent, give its fictionalised characters what for, reveal the real contemporary history, and wrap up the Litvinenkos’ life stories – its problem become absolutely clear. There are lots of plots, lots of genres, lots of targets this goes for – but it’s therefore inconsistent, messy, and misses several targets. As a farce it mocks two bungling assassins apolitically; as a satire it’s messy with its targets; as an exposé it somewhat works, but the comic tone detracts. Laughing at Putin’s assassins makes the fact that Putin uses assassins on foreign soil almost charming. Simply, it lacks bite as a political play – but worse, there’s not one unified play. We as theatregoers get a good but mixed bag.
Worse than that, because of this, Litvinenko – and especially Marina Litvinenko – come out at a loss. Yes, finally, that verdict is given the huge platform it deserves, but getting there pushes him to the sidelines in his own story. It makes his verdict not justice earned, but the happy end of a sick entry into the Goes Wrong series.
Despite all the madness going on around it, one moment that touched me really deeply was when, after the puppetry was done, Alexander and Marina were left alone dancing on stage to Fleetwood Mac. After having gone through all the mess and madness of the crime and its theatricalisation (some of which serves the mystery and the corruption, some of which doesn’t), the couple were given one final little moment to be exactly that: a couple. It’s what his legacy and her life deserve. It’s a shame the balance between retelling his story and re-interpreting the history wasn’t even: stylistically, the genre twists, moments of humour, moments of horror, metatheatrical Putin, mystery plot, fourth-wall breaking and final verdict verbatim theatre all serve Litvinenko’s death to various degrees – but the love story serves Marina and Sasha’s lives.
P.S. I saw this on its first preview, and simply haven’t had the time to express my thoughts. I dread to think how many changes there’ve been, so if any of this is irrelevant bear that in mind – I’d also love to know what they changed. I hope they’ve settled on fewer endings. My least favourite ending was the slow audience participation. My favourite ending was the rush to the doors as we all missed our last train home.
P.P.S. These are pickets held across Moscow, and town to town across Russia, this Monday, not for Putin’s birthday, but demanding justice for Anna Politkovskaya. Where it should have been Nemtsov’s birthday, this was the scene at the site of his assassination. I’m sure that if Alexander Litvinenko, or even Dawn Sturgess, had larger profiles in Russia, there’d be similar memorials to them. That’s something else I felt this play touched upon, but didn’t delve into, and a reason its mess matters more than just theatrically. Russia isn’t “Russia”; Putin isn’t Russia. Marina Litvinenko, those still fighting for memory and justice today – this is Russia.
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Post by Nicholas on Oct 11, 2019 10:33:11 GMT
I just about got to the end of episode one of Fleabag before I chucked the remote at the telly in anger. The show was incredibly funny, provocative, exciting – and unwatchable. It’s odd – why? L337 is hilarious – she and Freddie Fox in Blithe Spirit were electric, her SNL this week had some tremendous high points (not least her monologue). The jokes made me belly laugh throughout. From THAT opening set-piece, its lack of boundaries gave us nowhere to hide. So why was I so angry at a very funny show? The problem is, from the framing of her humour to the standard of life she lives, the bubble Fleabag lives in is patronisingly two-dimensional. Posh, indisputably, privileged, but more than that – the asides, the winks, these all implied we were in this together, in a world most of us couldn’t dream of. Her failures in the show are bubble-wrapped by privileges most of us can’t have, prettified up – where they should be embarrassing to watch, they’re not only framed as exciting, but (accidentally?) treated as aspirational. I keep meaning to return to the TV show (gotta get in on that Hot Priest zeitgeist), but first I was intrigued as to whether these problems occur in the stage show that began it all.
The stage show is Steve McQueen’s Shame, rewritten by Richard Curtis as a Mr Bean sketch. Some of that is inevitably very good. Some of it isn’t.
(Some of you are going to hate me for this review, so I should add that when I get on my soapbox my tongue is in my cheek, and I do think L337 is an incredibly talented writer and performer. I’m mostly, simply, going to criticise her for a couple of her blindspots – now, do you think I have any blindspots? Nevertheless…)
Towards the end, Fleabag says “either everyone feels like this and no-one says anything, or I’m f***ed up”. With this line, it’s confirmed that Fleabag is L337’s translation of Everyman, from the anonymous naming that allows us to easily replicate ourselves, to the hero’s journey through vice and loss, to the fact it asks us – literally asks us, face-to-face – to see ourselves in the character. This is not intrinsically a bad thing. Much of what Fleabag goes through is explicitly, painfully relatable. Fleabag is indisputably an honest, bold, good show.
However, just as the NT’s Everyman lost its everyman credentials by turning a medieval saint into Patrick Bateman, Fleabag loses is Fleabaggy credentials by keeping Fleabag in her bubble. Fleabag, for example, doesn’t say she lives in London – it’s just assumed – doesn’t everyone? – and then after a night out, daddy buys her a taxi to the other side of London; yes she loses her job, but her sister’s £5,000 loan is the real problem, not her. Her bubble is not a deliberate choice but a blind spot, and the asides, assuming everyone can connect with uncharacteristic non-self-awareness, prove it. Fleabag’s messy life is messy by VERY SPECIFIC parameters, and acknowledging those parameters (asking in an aside whether this really is everyone, or just her world) would elevate this, break her out of her bubble, challenge her. Fleabag, however, remains almost entirely unchallenged throughout the play. Fleabag’s life is so sterile, in her apartment the smell of sh*t is an aberration.
One such thing, for example, is her cruelty. Perhaps in the TV show, to see her sister be called ‘anorexic’ and that hurt helps take Fleabag off her pedestal. Here, Fleabag says it because she thinks it’s relatable – and that’s not questioned. Being judgemental is fine (who isn’t?), and with some objectivity that flaw could be seen as nasty, but universal, but nasty. Instead, Fleabag just comes across as unnecessarily nasty, because she’s coooool. And just as Boo’s suicide is only seen as shocking because upsets Fleabag and not ruined Boo’s life, Fleabag’s cruelty is portrayed as ‘saying the unsayable’ in the way lazy right-wing shock-comics do.
You know what would be fascinating? This mess in, um, the real world. In the play, the poshness is less oppressive here than it was on the telly – here a lot is implied which there was annoyingly inescapable and unmentioned. I still found the privilege grating, though – the privilege marred with universality. I’d love for Fleabag to have been set not in a Hamster Café, but in a library, or a school, or a boring office – one where turning up hungover has serious consequences to other people – a bit like Boo’s suicide had consequences to other people. Because of L337’s blind spots, Fleabag has the ability to act almost unchecked. Perhaps that’s why she’s so iconic now. I think it would be fascinating to put checks on her; instead, her life so bubble-wrapped, her viewpoint so solipsistic, her world never challenged, Waller-Bridge plays a more realistic character in Solo than in Fleabag.
All of that said, L337’s performance, inevitably, deserves the raves. I felt some of the accent work was a wee bit OTT (the dialogues were more compelling from just her perspective and they came across as PWB being performative herself as opposed to Fleabag performing), but the 100 minutes of her darting through life did bring her character’s exuberance to life through her talent and her talent alone. She’s also, clearly, a great silent star, the best moments being a mime, resignedly going through the motions, bringing her surroundings to life. Indisputably L337 is a great performer.
The success of Fleabag is fascinating to dissect. Firstly, its global success, whilst astonishing, hasn’t captured the entire zeitgeist – it’s rare to read about Fleabag in any raggier papers than the Guardian or the American Snobby Press, or hear her talked about in communities but those of relative privilege (hell, owning Amazon Prime in the first place takes privilege!). In my own bubble, most people feel like me – Fleabag is funny, but we all have HUGE reservations about the telly show because the its two-dimensional posh world being portrayed as the whole world. I would argue more extremely, that the success it has had is self-defeating. People don’t see Fleabag as a fleabag; they see her as a fashion icon, a great modern wit, an ideal. Her jumpsuit sold out immediately – the fact that its biggest societal impact was on fashion shows where its true allegiances lie.
(Incidentally, possibly, a TV camera CAN offer objectivity in the way a one-person show can’t (not easily). I wonder if, in those initial three-star reviews from Edinburgh, critics picked up on the demonstrable flaws in this enjoyable show, and the TV show rectified a bunch of those to great artistic success – also, the second series (Hot Priest) seems to have captured the imagination far more than series one, and seems to challenge Fleabag more. Now, with hindsight and broader characterisation behind her, the stage show gets standing ovations for being the superior TV show in microcosm, whilst still being a three-star stage show itself. Is that fair?)
Nonetheless, the show is messier than the character by a loooooooooooooooong way. If Fleabag was a fleabag, her success would be very different. People would see themselves in her, whilst raising their own eyebrows. Instead the emulation she’s gotten – the fancy dress she’s become – shows that from the title downwards, Fleabag has failed at creating a fleabag. She’s despicable, but aspirational; she’s messy, in a sterile world; she’s pathetic, but boy is she privileged! Rather than a truly insightful, character-driven, considered study of a messy modern woman, Fleabag is an ironic, sexy-Halloween-costume version of a messy modern woman.
So, three stars. L337 can put together a good set-piece, and is a very, very funny performer. Fleabag on stage is a good if underdeveloped story of a woman enjoying her freedom. ‘Owever, freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
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Post by Nicholas on Oct 11, 2019 10:17:59 GMT
“One Second and a Million Miles” is, simply, gorgeous. Operatic yet casual, it’s such a glorious sweep of a song: JRB’s pianistic showy-offy-ness, moody Midwestern guitars, exquisite harmonising, and two passionate voices matching two passionate characters. That said… this eight minute long duet does almost nothing for plot or character progression – it’s literally one second long. Nonetheless, not one guitar strum of those eight minutes/one second feels wasted – to spend time in this gorgeous unhurried company is enough.
Such, overall, is The Bridges of Madison County. Often more concerned with charming cameos and mini moments of mood than really re-evaluating a relationship, Bridges never swings for the fences, as JRB does at his best (controversial opinion: that best is still Songs for a New World), but whilst the show never truly digs into emotional depths, it charm nonetheless. Like its lead, its laid-back romance warms your heart, and you want to go with it – unlike its lead, it doesn’t prove hidden artistic depths, but perhaps that doesn’t matter. This production’s workmanlike construction somewhat mirrors the show’s lack of worry over depth and nuance, but sets it in a home you end up feeling homey in. Sometimes, you just want to curl up in front of the telly, watch pretty actors fall in love and break their hearts, and cry. Sometimes you want to travel far and pay £50 for the privilege. Sometimes, you want beautiful music too. This miniature romance is what it is.
The score may not be vintage JRB, but it is rather lovely. His usual pianistic flourishes and those glorious arias remain, but there’s a hint of Glenn Campbell, of Jimmy Webb – music of the Midwest that can’t be rushed. JRB appropriates these songs surprisingly well, mixing them with his syncopation and style effortlessly. It lacks the punch of his best work – often the laid-back songs are too laid back to serve much purpose. Nonetheless, that it’s too relaxing is hardly a complaint, and for a story like this the melancholy of his best work wouldn’t work. The setting fundamentally doesn’t quite work for a JRB piece – he’s trying to spin the plates of a two-hander, a family drama, a soppy romance, and a musical style that doesn’t want to rush, whilst not wanting to write anything TOO challenging, and the show ends up far more mood over meaning – but nonetheless it’s charming.
Sir Trevor’s stiltingly literal set doesn’t help, however. Clunking in and clunking out, Sir Trevor’s odd decision to bring every prop into coherent reality ends up hampering the pace and, worst, dampening the magic. The intimacy this show demands is met by the Menier, but challenged by the insistence to make every setting and every scene as photo-realistic as possible. Perhaps that was his intention, but the awkward pauses and OTT sets make it over-real. At its best, the characters sit, sing, romance and win our hearts. Sir Trevor’s decision to direct it like a DH Lawrence drama is odd, but when he allows his cast to be themselves, there is a real magic.
Bridges could have been quite profound if – as is bubbling under – it had argued that within the middle of nowhere, operas can bloom if given have the chance. In, for example, the rather lovely “When I’m Gone”, the implication is that that relationship – an unchallenging marriage-of-convenience from the outside – is actually as dramatic underneath its initial simplicity, is built on true timeless love, and he feels fears as profound as anyone – simply, instead, tied to something superficially simpler. If you squint I think this interpretation holds up – think how Clint’s character isn’t given an expository song, but his wife is given a ghostly mood song instead. The book, however, presses nothing quite so interesting. JRB’s musical argument is perhaps that there is as much romance in a Glenn Campbell scene as there is in a Rogers and Hammerstein scene, as the two musical motifs intertwine, but the concern seems more on establishing mood than meaning. We never truly inquire into why towns like these are ripe for romance – we just accept it and, amidst a glorious score, get swept up in it.
Largely, this is because the book is uninterested in elevating Robert James Waller’s book to anything. Francesca and Robert are lovely but perhaps don’t make timeless star-crossed lovers – she, in particular, is given the chance to truly express that artistic side of herself that longs to be free. The thing is, hokey as a plot like this is, it’s lasted for a reason. When two actors as charming as these get together, and music as gentle yet simmering with syncopation as this is sung, it would take a heart of stone not to go with it. It’s a winning romantic formula, especially when performed by performers who get the mood. Jenna Russell’s greatness has always been in being at home in soap operas or rock operas, and her ability to convince both as a bored housewife and so romantic underneath is what makes her character shine. Edward Baker-Duly makes a surprisingly good Clint Eastwood (better than Clint), an unforced charm helping the time pass by. I actually felt the two children nailed their performances, taking roles that could otherwise drag the plot or fall into cliché and, like Russell, grounding them in absolute reality, whilst delivering such charming music.
Overall, my little heart melted at this, despite it being far from great. JRB’s score is charming, but not amongst his best, and Sir Trevor’s production treats it as a museum piece already. Nonetheless, I was very much won over to its romantic charms. It’s populated with beautiful performances that give the piece wings, and the simple fact is a plot like this, when given the romantic sway of a Jason Robert Brown ballad, can’t help but charm. It’s fluff, for sure, but it’s fluff that works. Operatic yet casual, it wins you over.
P.S. Jenna Russell was great, but her best work? Um… Fun Home?
P.P.S. Having gone on a Glenn Campbell and Jimmy Webb binge since invoking them, they really were quite extraordinary, weren't they?
P.P.P.S. I didn’t buy a programme – what did JRB say about the novel? My mum read it recently and enjoyed it – she enjoyed the show more than I, I didn’t mind the flaws whilst I don’t think she noticed them – so I’d be interested to know why he found it bad – and why he then adapted it! There are so many romances out there – why this?
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Post by Nicholas on Oct 11, 2019 10:06:46 GMT
This is GREAT. It’s lovely, isn’t it, when a show from humble beginnings ends up a sensation, on the simple grounds of being really bloody good? The only other example I can think is The Play That Goes Wrong, the global takeover of which from its pub theatre beginnings is just heart warming (they deserve it, obvs).
Finally seeing this, I was bowled over. This ‘concert’ set-up sneakily looks populist, crowd-pleasing, singalong – and boy is it – but its trick of twisting the knife (both in individual songs, and overall over the 75 minutes), its sly comments on sexism, and slyer ability to get us onside before implicating us in its societal critique too, is just so powerful. Musically it shamelessly rewrites the great 90s songbook, but the authors know that accessible does not mean lowest-common-denominator; with these two precise and pointed and seemingly unrelated moments of society (Tudor gender roles and pop gender roles) they’ve written a show which you want to sing along to, but feel challenged for singing along to. It’s bonkers, but bizarrely insightful. The brilliant things the show does with dramaturgical historiography and sexist reappraisals of history are never dumbed down through those fantastic hits – instead context elevates music and vice versa. Oh, and to begin with, the songs are just really, really, really, really good.
The 75 minute run time, and the simplicity of the set-up, didn’t bother me. I don’t think there’s anything the show wants or needs to say that it doesn’t do, often via implication, in that time (the only issue there comes in pricing, and hey, that’s less an issue of theatre and more an issue of economics). In fact I think it’s far punchier for its brevity. Maybe some EXACT historical content is lost, but it’s not Wolf Hall The Musical; given the point the show is saying through modern music, who cares?
I should make no bones about this. I’m exactly of the generation who grew up with this music. The sheer, classy attention to detail bought to every song is just spot-on, poppy but never pandering. What’s extra brilliant is the level of self-awareness that’s been brought to otherwise genre constructs (Britney sexy pop, Eurotrash, Lily Allen-y self-confidence) that makes it a bit of a nostalgia trip, but a re-evaluative one, which asks anyone who grew up with naff pop music to re-evaluate that world too – most effectively in All You Wanna Do, which begins as such a perfect recreation of that sexy Britney style and really, really, really builds up beautiful discomfort until its unbearable end – unbearable for both the character, and those of us invested in this music, this world. Cabaret, Kander and Ebb, would do that too, and I think that comparison isn’t unjustified. Depressingly, the show argues that certain sexist constructs – the virgin/whore motif, promiscuity equalling evil – never go away whatever society we have, but are simply being rewritten centuries apart, and amazingly this parallel absolutely holds up.
Being so specific, will this still hold up in ten, twenty, fifty years? Yes – because the dramaturgical construction is just that damn good. People much older in the audience (like, in their late 20s old!) were having a whale of a time. It doesn’t, however, either get bogged down pretending to be a history lesson, nor overindulge 90s kids with their musical nostalgia. It’s not dissimilar to Nell Gwynn in that way – strip the amazing fun away, and that’s an astute point, put in a perfectly entertaining context, that matters, and shakes you up.
I could not have enjoyed this show more. Watching it I had an absolute blast. The knife-turning that comes as the songs open up their characters is haunting – when I sing along with All You Wanna Do (which I do a lot) I never know if I’m doing so joyfully or guiltily. The self-aware script is as adventurous as anything I’ve seen in ages. The criticisms it has of lazy gender constructs are hard to shake. And the music! Five stars no question. It’s one of the best things I’ve seen in yonks, but it’s also the one that’s made me the most excited too.
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Post by Nicholas on Oct 11, 2019 10:01:27 GMT
Newbury is a surprisingly astute setting for a show as political as this. Something, like nothing, happens anywhere – and in the nowhere of Newbury, a LOT of something has happened. As this play implies, it’s a city of contradictions, especially political ones. What is it known for mostly? The Greenham women, and the terrible bypass. What is it known for now? A racecourse, and mebbe featuring in Star Wars. For years, its two MP candidates were David Rendel (one of the only Lib Dems to fight the coalition) and Richard Benyon (the wealthiest MP), extremes of political ideologies fighting it out – and suddenly FORMER TORY Benyon’s a rebel to boot. Jack Thorne went to the same school as Aaron Banks – the first state school to win the Polo Cup (I went to a couple of schools along – that’s why I know so much about this arse-end of nowhere – where one of my alumni was Henry Bloody Bolton). To illustrate the contradictions of family and political opposition, there are actually fewer better places. It’s a town of political contradictions, making it the perfect setting for a show like this. Why do people contradict themselves? Why do generations contradict family? You won’t find anywhere richer to set this than, oddly and depressingly enough, Newbury.
The End of History is not really about any of these things. It’s about a family, and their sitcom-y bickering. There are even catchphrases!
Does this matter? Yes and no.
No, because The End of History is still an enjoyable fart about a funny old family. Who amongst us hasn’t been embarrassed by our parents, gone home as an adult but still felt like a child, found it hard to square differing familial politics but still loves their family? Made me laugh/made me cry.
But it’s called The End of History and is about political disagreement. Jack Thorne has introduced such a rich seam of ideas about family and what it means to raise one and leave a legacy, that to handle it so half-heartedly is profoundly disappointing. In its setting – a strangely divided political town at a time when the world was politically uncertain but potentially bright – the strange situation we’re politically in can be diagnosed. In its title, a contentious political issue (permanent liberalism and even peace) can be challenged by the reality of everything post-Fukuyama. In these three children – the dull posh daughter-in-law, the sell-out daughter, the unfulfilled potential – a series of questions arise about apples falling far from trees, and how possible it is to unconditionally love people who grow into our enemies. Thorne has set up an open goal politically, set it in a seemingly dull but surprisingly astute town, and populated it with such charm. How did society change, as the millennium approached, the Cold War seemed over, Liberalism seemed complete, and after 1996 things could only get better?
Analysing the complex rollercoaster of British politics through this story of two liberal oldies, coming to terms with their post-historical world still unpleasantly turning, coming to terms with their children’s growing conservatism (both small-c and big-C), is a great state-of-the-nation play. Sadly, despite this great set-up and hints to this effect, this is a sitcom about children being stroppy. Analysing family life, and how political disagreement is squared with unconditional love, is a great intimate character study. Sadly, whilst these stroppy children are themselves great fodder for this topic of disagreement, of where politics end and relationships begin (we often define ourselves by both our family and our beliefs, so when those are SO at odds, what do we sacrifice, and what pain does it cause us?), this is ignored, perhaps in case exploring it DOES tear the family apart. It’s strange and sad that Thorne – from the title downwards, from the family in the middle, from the setting upwards – paints such a curious and complex political picture, then populates it with the perfect family, then just gives up to affectionately noodle with these characters. This might sound odd, but I think Thorne likes these characters too much.
At the end, David Morrissey (who gets awkward dad-i-ness just right) reads a list of facts, without emotion or editorialising. There’s no better illustration of the play’s failure. Lesley Sharp having been such a presence – her performance a delightful whirlwind – I was saddened by her absence, and her death and life story did raise a lump in the throat. But I was reminded of Visitors, ending with a personal poem, thus daring to make us cry. Here, it’s a VERY strange conceit, to end a play with an unemotional list of historical moments a fictional person never lived. Presumably, this ties to the title – that whilst we’re living through ‘the end of history’, history keeps occurring, both politically and personally. Sadly, though – perhaps because Thorne simply likes these characters too much to editorialise – all we get is a list.
“The End of History”, Fukuyama’s ridiculous essay, implies that everything that happens after the 90s is post-history – politically, we’re perfect now! Is Thorne’s play named after it because, in setting a play amidst a politically divided family still fighting for freedoms and against corruption, he explores how the reality of post-history affects us all? Is he doing so because the threat of the bomb seems worlds away from this sleepy little town, yet just up the road from Greenham and in the range of Aldermaston, even dull school days have such a close proximity to history? Is it to contextualise this political family’s ordinariness? Or is it a fairly random miss? The family Thorne draws are too sitcom-y – even charming, certainly solipsistic – to make some grand statement on post-history; they focus on politics too much not to. There’s a great three-hour long play to be written exploring the contradictions of political disagreement with familial disagreement, the contradictions of living in the arse-end of nowhere yet being so politically somewhere, and how living in our perfect liberal post-historical world is, in fact, every bit as terrifying and unresolved as pre-Fukuyama both in city-wide protest and familial disagreements. This 100 minute play, sadly, is just a sitcom.
P.S.
Oh yes, was going to say that the first act (running joke that the mother can't cook, surly teenage / early 20s children, grumpy husband) was very reminiscent of "Butterflies" Butterflies has really held up. I think it’s because it takes as much time as a drama as a comedy – the use of not-Albinoni, for example, long stretches of serious contemplation. I hope that mention wasn’t disparaging, as it’s well worth a revisit.
P.P.S. Bugger it this has closed too hasn’t it? Oh bollocks.
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Post by Nicholas on Oct 11, 2019 9:44:11 GMT
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood sets its stock out in its title. It could either be a mythologizing statement a la Sergio Leone, or a light-hearted fairytale. In some ways, it’s successfully both. It’s a fascinating mythologizing of that era of Hollywood, which then segues into an alternative history which, oddly enough, in how it firstly frames then validates Sharon Tate, feels warm hearted. Most of its (overlong) three-hour run time cast a woozy spell over me – its use of music and cinema hypnotic – but then when Tarantino needed to say something about why this era of Hollywood matters, I feel he’s left us with a statement that might be the defining love letter and historical document of this moment. It’s not just a fairytale, but specifically a bedtime story – a dream, meant to inspire dreams.
Firstly – Brad Pitt is SO GOOD in this movie. He’s always great, but here, largely with mere physicality, he portrays a has-been, a once-great titan, a physical threat, an unknowable menace, a man’s man, a man not to be trusted. There are scenes that, I think, Tarantino wanted to be funny – Bruce Lee, Pitt’s wife – but Pitt made scary. The way Pitt portrayed menace in masculinity denied those moments any humour. When he had to be likeable, though – it’s Brad Pitt! The rest of the cast are good, but it’s Pitt’s movie, and maybe Pitt’s best movie.
Nonetheless there are demonstrable flaws – or mebbe iffy moments – in the movie. It’s too long. It’s waaaaaaaaaay too long. The Dicaprio plot’s less interesting than Tarantino thinks it is. With threw shrew wives, two of whom have murders attempted against them, I’m not sure I’d be happy to have just married Tarantino, and I think Tarantino is not a feminist. The Bruce Lee scene is a mess. Whilst most of the mud thrown at the wall sticks, some doesn’t.
Where this worked for me where, say, Basterds and Django didn’t, is the framing of the villains. I have a sneaking suspicion that Tarantino secretly admires style over substance, and that does characters like Waltz’s smooth-talker (who happens to be a Nazi) and Dicaprio’s exuberant ham (who happens to be a slaver) a LOT of good. Cinema loves villains, and the style of the Reservoir Dogs is fine and dandy for cinema – but applying that cool to Hans Landa, the most stylish, the most quotable, the most intelligent character in a largely forgettable movie, is iffy. In one scene, he’s put against Pitt’s nominal hero, and his use of language and peacockery is something framed as cooooool. Here, though, Tarantino’s idea of cool may still hinge on violence and masculinity, but in every way, it harks back to Reservoir Dogs – that movie cool is different to real world cool, movie violence different to real world violence, and understanding the difference makes both worlds richer. Rick Dalton isn’t a stylish man, he’s a stylish TV hero (in fact, in the real world, he becomes less stylish as the movie goes on, only heroic at the end when recreating the movies). Where I think Tarantino’s been a wee bit undisciplined with styling history before, here he’s almost moral.
The last act, then, should go in the dictionary for ‘sticks the landing’. My entire cinema held its breath when “Out Of Time” came on – knowing the scene to come, knowing the ways it could go – and when Brad Pitt happened, firstly ridiculousness then judicious, the triumph in Tarantino’s success was palpable. Hollywood serves as the last statement on these characters being losers. It’s almost beautiful in how it shows just how pathetic this kind of violence ultimately is (admittedly, by showing another kind of violence (Hollywood violence) is better?). Whilst I think the extremity of the violence is a bit Old Testament (Tarantino doesn’t care about brainwashing by Manson, for example), I think the reasoning behind is to honestly display the cruddy cult cruelty of not just Manson but every such cult before or since as the empty, unnecessary, ugly evil it is. It is brilliant not in terms of how it rewrites history, but in terms of how it frames the reality. There’s surprisingly deep consideration for the victims; this not just gives them their moment in the sun, but now gives their perpetrators a permanent record of their worthlessness. No line will EVER crack the Manson myth better than “I am the devil” – “No, it was dumber than that”.
The more I think about it, the more I like this film, and find myself siding with it – and I use that terminology deliberately. I think Tarantino takes this horrific moment in pop culture, and posits not just a perfect alternative history, but a perfect framing of the ugly reality. Overall there’s no doubt that bits of it are iffy – but its ‘fairytale ending’, its odd sentimentality, its weirdly good heart, all add up to a film that absolutely cast its spell on me. It’s the most charming movie with that much ultraviolence. Four stars, because it’s too long, but brilliant other than that: challenging, controversial, and strangely considerate too. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a film this in love with being a film.
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Post by Nicholas on Oct 11, 2019 9:39:13 GMT
Now this is on DVD, it gives us an excuse to drag this thread up again, which for me is great, because… Well, Sunshine on Leith is still the greatest film ever made, but Rocketman is the second greatest. I just adored this film. It’s such a beautiful adaptation of Elton’s Life and music, mostly because it’s amazingly also a story any smalltown kid can relate to. Dexter Fletcher is a veritable genius – he always sees and portrays both the best and fullest of his characters, and in doing so has already made two of the best English musicals ever.
The kernel of its genius is that but it finds something truly universal in this story, something relatable to anyone, and incredibly empathetic to those in need of its help. Strip everything away – Elton’s life or Elton’s legend – and it’s a deeply personal, intimate film about wanting to be loved, by our family, by our loves, by our ‘brothers’ – it’s an optimistic film with artistic depth, true integrity, and empathy for anyone in such a situation. Whilst lazier rock-docs* climax with the biggest gig of a career, Rocketman walks out of Madison Square Gardens, and peaks with a hug. That hug, that scene, could be you or me.
*You know what I’m talking about. I finally saw it. It’s a bunch of toothless hagiography with miming in between. Rami Malek’s good but the script gives him nothing to do. Watching his last twenty minutes of carefully recreated lip-syncing, all I could think is: Bohemian Rhapsody is just drag for straight people.
The way Lee Hall and Dexter Fletcher – controversially – makes this musical a musical is remarkable. As a biopic it’s a thorough and insightful way to tell Elton’s story, but in every musical choice they also tell Reg Dwight’s story, making each song as relevant to disposed small-town kids as to fans of big pop numbers pays dividends, in a story that musically fizzes, and emotionally wrings us out. By making “Crocodile Rock” literally fly, the film recreates the experience of hearing the song for the first time, floating in awe, joyous and exuberant and NEW. The framing of “Your Song”, conversely, is almost painterly; that biopic staple “genius makes his work of genius” scene is hard to do, but by having established Elton’s ease of writing, and then framing it with Bernie so present, the genius shared, little laughs here and there, it hammers home the beauty and musical brilliance of that partnership – the champagne pop finale is a musical touch in and of itself. Finally, “I’m Still Standing” using/recreating archive footage might look simple, but use of reality in this fantasy was every bit as incisive as the archival footage end of Mad Men – placing our hero’s expression in a real world. Everything Dexter Fletcher did was exquisite.
Best cast of the year? Billy Elliott’s a great film, but who’d have thought Jamie Bell would be the versatile great he is today? One of my favourite moments was before the Albert Hall concert, with his resigned acceptance of Elton’s apology – it’s a perfect encapsulation of that sort of love. His final line of “You’re my brother” beautifully reiterates one of the film’s familial morals, unexpectedly calls back to “Border Song, and perfectly ties up that friendship. It’s the attention to detail in those smallest moments that makes this so lovely.
Richard Madden is hot. I’m sure he’s a great actor but I was distracted.
At one of Stephen Graham’s lines I laughed so much the cinema started laughing at me.
At its heart, Taron Edgerton gives an extraordinarily layered performance. Young Elton has a shyness (“shy”, incidentally, being a euphemism Alan Bennett’s family used a lot to describe him as a young gay man, something I think Lee Hall brilliantly runs with), and even when Taron Edgerton’s tarted up in Queen Elizabeth garb or stripped completely naked, that shyness runs through him like a stick of Blackpool Rock. It’s an unshowy performance that doesn’t draw attention to itself, but really shines in Elton’s excesses. Come award season he’ll be remembered or else. Hopefully Dexter Fletcher will be too.
Incidentally, whilst Eddie the Eagle isn’t a great film, and certainly no Sunshine on Leith or Rocketman, I think it’s Dexter Fletcher’s mission statement. His characters may not always win, but boy will Dexter Fletcher let them try, and boy is Dexter Fletcher on their side. I think he’s a great cinemamaker, but I think he’s probably a great friend too, and that shines through most profoundly watching Davy and Ally readjust to Glasgow, or watching Elton just want someone to hug him.
I saw it three times in cinemas, which is a record for me. I still walk down the street and think of the “Honky Cat” scene and just burst out grinning, or the penultimate scene and have to hold back crying in public. The reason I’ve kept coming back to it – and will now it’s on home entertainment – is because it’s a film that acknowledges the difficulty of overcoming our pasts, but highlights the importance of new family, friends, ‘brothers’. Making such an insightful and universal film from such a mainstream source – and serving both masters perfectly – makes this such a glorious piece of work.
Only one caveat – who hires Sharon D Clarke for a musical, and doesn’t have her sing? Still, if you loved it, now go watch Sunshine on Leith.
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Post by Nicholas on Oct 11, 2019 9:34:00 GMT
This is such, such, such a special play. It’s hard to think of another time where a playwright laid out such a personal, powerful, passionate thesis for why plays matter, what legacy entails, and how events years ago matter now, must be revived, must be remembered. It’s a boldly personal, particular work – its focus is almost so specific it could have backfired – but by using his Doll’s House reappraisal as a jumping-off point, Samuel Adamson has written a profoundly important story – nay, manifesto – about the way art itself should be a jumping-off point, for us to see ourselves in allegory, see our strengths, understand our history, and fight for a better world.
I’m only a paragraph in and I’m already in tears. I really loved this play.
Through how four disparate generations find themselves repeatedly mirrored on stage, by the same damn long-dead text, Adamson mirrors the fascinating, angry LGBT Britain we’ve worked towards and continue to work towards; in his most contemporary story, Adamson acknowledges we all still have work to do. By using A Doll’s House, sometimes a lynchpin, sometimes merely as a scene-setter – not a traditional ‘gay play’ – Adamson asks us to look beyond the obvious veneer of a piece of art’s origin, and find our own opinion on the universality of art; great art with a kernel of truth remains powerful, because art with sympathy and art with purpose will always be relevant. It’s up to us, as viewers in difficult political times, to make this relevance mean something.
Brilliantly, this is both specifically about Nora, but more about inspiration. A small part of me wondered if this has the universal-est of universal appeals, or if you need investment in Ibsen – ultimately I think it works better if you agree how good A Doll’s House is, but only in the same way Stoppard works better if you agree on Shakespeare. In fact, this play’s specificity is what makes it so great – Adamson’s passion about A Doll’s House runs through every passionate line of dialogue; being about one specific play gives Adamson FOCUS on theatre’s timelessness, why reinterpretation works, why art chimes across history. Its specificity doesn’t limit its appeal; its specificity gives it its fire. And this is a fiery play.
Indhu Rubasingham’s production has a nice echo of her production of Red Velvet, which similarly used theatre-within-theatre to normalise the art form, and bring inherent theatricality to history and discursive theses. It works in letting a fab cast unleash their characters’ passions, and make this play-about-a-play leap off the stage. Especially in the 80s scenes, her choice of somewhat stereotypical gay music of the time, underscoring Joshua James’ exuberance over why this old Norwegian play could and should also be a gay classic, is a gentle and subtle way of implying that, perhaps, gay culture should be what we want it to be, not just what cliché has made it. Amidst a consistently stellar cast, the two performances that have left the profoundest impact are the two generations of Ivar: Joshua James’ young, over-confident livewire almost bursting into the audience with too much passion and too little self control, and Richard Cant as the older but paradoxically less wise man who needs to, like Nora, find himself.
(As an aside – I remember watching Joshua James and Seth Numrich one-up each other, subtly but brilliantly, in Fathers and Sons, treasuring every moment of two actors, potentially greats of their generation, using Brian Friel’s genius to egg each other on. He’s just bloody great)
Adamson’s play argues that we all have to close our own doors on our comfortable yet claustrophobic presents, and fight for a better future. The idea that LGBT history is filled with Noras is a beautiful way to look at global LGBT fights past, present and future. Wife argues that Nora, Ibsen and A Doll’s House are not mirrors or manifestos, but starting points – and if and when we see ourselves in Nora, it’s time to take her attitude into our lives. Wife is not just a great play – it’s a love letter to another great play, it’s an exploration of why great plays still matter, and a manifesto to bring great plays’ fights into our lives where we can, and must. It’s personal, heartfelt, inspiring, optimistic and beautiful.
Simply put, I adored this. I truly too feel inspired by it, but I also simply really, really, really adored this.
P.S. I’ve said before that A Doll’s House is still the show I hold dearest, but I don’t exaggerate when I say that, when one of the biggest decisions of my life presented itself, it was my memories of that show – Nora’s door slam – that made me make the push. When I say that that show changed my life, it did in truly profound ways. I’ve often wondered why that kid I was then found such a mirror in a century-old Norwegian woman, and here we are – a play exists exploring just that. The fact that this play exists – let alone tells its story so well – makes me very very happy. If I ever meet Samuel Adamson I’ll buy him a drink.
P.P.S. I haven’t been on the forum much in 2019 – the last six months have been impossibly busy, going to try and catch up before Christmas – but keeping half an eye on it, it was you guys who inspired me to fill a free evening with this. I’d not have known about it, nor risked it, without you. So thank you!
P.P.P.S. I know, this closed months ago, and likely won’t have a second life, but… The script is so good it’ll stand on its own terms so GO READ IT – you’ll miss the brilliant performances, but Adamson’s superb argument will shine through. I hope it also inspires you too. And I don’t see much theatre these days and I really loved this just let me gush.
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Post by Nicholas on Oct 4, 2019 19:55:41 GMT
The assumption is that the play can be about AND ONLY ABOUT that issue. Personally that strikes me as a lack of imagination. Unfortunately, though, it does normally turn out to be not only true, but relentless. I agree there are exceptions ("Lungs" should be interesting) but there is, I find a certain mentality of approach that is hard to shake for many in that field. True! I think I've just been hurt before here. In that old thread about working class theatre*, I wanted to say that any play could be "working class" if cast well and in the right theatre - but I got tired of people basically assuming there was only one plot and one ideology for this "issue". Given that the climate crisis is a very broad and human issue - perhaps too new and big to have been tackled much, but one subtly mentioned in plays like Chekhov and Ibsen - I wanted to highlight that this shouldn't be any hindrance to theatrical brilliance. Shouldn't be. Apologies for bigging up Lungs so much. I really did love it mind.
More broadly, I think this press release a good thing in theory, obvs - largely because once you've made a statement it's in the public's hands. Now you and I have the power to pursue Rufus. If he's all talk and no trousers when it comes to carbon costing his shows, let's complain. If he fails to put on suitable shows, let's complain. And if those shows end up as two dimensional and sh*tty as you worry - and given I'll bet you a fiver Sir David DOES attempt to adapt Greta Thunberg, they very well might be! - let's complain. But now it's up to us to enforce!
*Wanted to pick you up on something you mentioned over there, actually:
"Naked Attraction" is literally reaching "rock bottom," isn't it. As some comedian mused, will there one day be "Celebrity Naked Attraction" - if so, the barrel has truly been scraped. I bloody love Naked Attraction.
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Post by Nicholas on Oct 4, 2019 14:56:25 GMT
Sadly, I've just read their 2021 programming. It includes: Uncle Electric Vanya. Animal Wind Farm. War Horse-power. The Sustainable Cherry Orchard. Wild Organic Honey. I know you’re being facetious, but…
This discussion comes up EVERY TIME a political issue comes up. The assumption is that the play can be about AND ONLY ABOUT that issue. Personally that strikes me as a lack of imagination. One of the best shows I saw tackling climate change (albeit indirectly, through tribal displacement) was The Encounter, and so imaginative was it that I honestly don’t know what was real, what was illusion, and what was imagination. Another great show tackling the climate crisis is An Enemy of the People – and that was written 200 years ago.
There's only one bad climate play I've seen - but it, um, wasn't a play. One of the dullest shows I’ve ever seen was 2071. I’ve actually reread it a number of times – it became the centrepiece of my university dissertation 100 years ago – but I fell asleep in the theatre, due it being, well, not theatre. I 100% understand why Billers gave it five stars, and politically I was chuffed that climate science was given this push, but it just was not theatre. I’d urge to Royal Court and Katie Mitchell to go back and complete her trilogy of science plays. I’d just urge her to make it a play this time.
Lungs is about to be on. Lungs is 100% a climate crisis play, written before we used the words climate crisis. It’s also a deeply human play. I wept at the end of it. It’s that perfect thing – unapologetically political, but deeply human. With his insistence on humanising issues, Ibsen could have written it.
Worry ye not, mind. 99% of shows at the Nash will be as is. When they next revive Twelfth Night, will Malvolio’s garters be flooded by melting ice caps? Yes, if they do put one ‘issue play’ on every year, there is also the issue of, you know, the plays being good – will we gets Lungs, or will we get 2071? Sir David Hare’s probably writing something extremely tedious as we speak, and given his fame we’ll have to endure it; it’ll be dull not because of its topic, but because it’ll be I’m Not Running Water. Rufus does have a duty to commission committed people to write his issue plays.
However, not only has theatre always been political, but, as with the Ibsen, it has the rare power to put a human face on issues that otherwise are beyond us. Climate plays? People vs Oil is David vs Goliath. The tragedies of air pollution outside schools are intimate stories of family loss. Simon McBurney should adventurously adapt Merchants of Doubt (that’s a gift Simon - ed: no, do The Lost Words).
At the moment immediate crises are happening to tribespeople in Siberia and in the Amazon. I want to see those stories. Crises are also happening in London schools. I want to see those stories. Crises are happening by indigenous tribes trodden on by big oil, and by middle-Americans being trodden on by big oil. I want to see those stories. If Katie Mitchell can do something half-decent this time, I want to see actual scientists telling stories too.
But nonetheless, this'll probably be one play, via allusion, every two years. If you're going to boycott, that's only £7.50 a year you're saving!
If you’re worried about how climate science will ruin theatre, go to the Old Vic. Is A Very Expensive Poison unnecessary political sloganeering, or a challenging piece of (admittedly messy) theatre? Go back. Watch Lungs. When you come out weeping and in love, you tell us that plays shouldn’t tackle the climate crisis.
P.S. Having said 2071 was that dull, I’m nonetheless still haunted by its closing words – the only point the play becomes theatrical, implicating us as theatregoers. Actually, it does imply the breadth of stories theatre can and should tell on this issue. More importantly, it does remind us that we have a duty when we go to the theatre, and theatremakers have a duty when they inspire us:
By being here tonight - by travelling to this theatre, by using these lights, the heating, the amplification of my voice - we have contributed to the amount of CO2 in the Atmosphere. There will be carbon atoms that were generated by this event that will still be in the air in 2071, in the air that my granddaughter will breathe. That’s our legacy. Science can’t say what is right and what is wrong. Science can inform, but it cannot arbitrate, it cannot decide. Science can say that if we burn another half-trillion tons of carbon the atmospheric content of CO2 will go up by another 100 parts per million, and that will almost certainly lead to a warming of the planet greater than two degrees, with major disruption of the climate system, and huge risks for the natural world and human wellbeing. But it can’t answer moral questions, value questions. Do we care about the world’s poor? Do we care about future generations? Do we see the environment as part of the economy, or the economy as part of the environment? The whole point about climate change is that, despite having been revealed by science, it is not really an issue about science, it is an issue about what sort of world we want to live in. What kind of future do we want to create?
Oh, and also, stupid of me to miss - Uncle Vanya! Character and ecology, beautifully at one. You can burn peat in your stoves and build your sheds of stone. Oh, I don't object, of course, to cutting wood from necessity, but why destroy the forests? The woods of Russia are trembling under the blows of the axe. Millions of trees have perished. The homes of the wild animals and birds have been desolated; the rivers are shrinking, and many beautiful landscapes are gone forever. And why? Because men are too lazy and stupid to stoop down and pick up their fuel from the ground. [To HELENA] Am I not right, Madame? Who but a stupid barbarian could burn so much beauty in his stove and destroy that which he cannot make? Man is endowed with reason and the power to create, so that he may increase that which has been given him, but until now he has not created, but demolished. The forests are disappearing, the rivers are running dry, the game is exterminated, the climate is spoiled, and the earth becomes poorer and uglier every day. [To VOITSKI] I read irony in your eye; you do not take what I am saying seriously, and—and—after all, it may very well be nonsense. But when I pass peasant-forests that I have preserved from the axe, or hear the rustling of the young plantations set out with my own hands, I feel as if I had had some small share in improving the climate, and that if mankind is happy a thousand years from now I will have been a little bit responsible for their happiness. When I plant a little birch tree and then see it budding into young green and swaying in the wind, my heart swells with pride and I—[Sees the WORKMAN, who is bringing him a glass of vodka on a tray] however—[He drinks] I must be off. Probably it is all nonsense, anyway. Good-bye.
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Post by Nicholas on Oct 3, 2019 13:25:58 GMT
Why on Earth is this chat on a theatre board? How it affects the arts? Whether in or out of Europe, we will always need to be building – and repairing – bridges. Sometimes the arts can be the only way a connection can be made across turbulent waters. www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/jun/24/arts-hit-back-at-brexit-i-feel-nothing-but-rage
Ivo van Hove: Europe has always been a source of energy for my theatre company. I don’t think, being Belgian, I should stick to my own country. My identity comes from much more than that. English theatre has opened itself up to Europe and to the world: I’m an example of that, I’ve had the opportunity to work at the Young Vic and the National.
ROH: the Royal Opera, the Royal Ballet and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House are internationally renowned, employing hundreds of artists from across the world, including many from within the EU. Opera and Ballet are both art forms with a truly global audience, rooted in European culture, and a vital part of the UK’s artistic life. We will work our hardest to ensure that our ability to enrich people’s lives through these wonderful art forms is sustained.
Rufus Norris: Our continued success depends on the free exchange of ideas, talent and creativity, and we remain committed to increasing our collaboration with friends and colleagues across the UK, Europe and around the world. After this referendum and the divisions it has highlighted, it is essential that the arts work even harder to give voice to all parts within our society. We must be fearless in using the arts as a crucible in which we come to understand who we are as individuals, as communities and as a nation.
David Lan: whatever happens, we shouldn’t accept another lie: that the cultural and artistic life of this country ever has been or ever could be separate from Europe. We’re not twins. We’re not even conjoined twins. We’re one body expressing one momentous idea about the potential of every human being to achieve individuality as part of a collective.
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Post by Nicholas on Oct 3, 2019 12:08:26 GMT
Johnson’s final offer. [...] Who on earth is this supposed to convince? His supporters. It seems to me that Johnson's whole "thing" is to play the thwarted hero. His plans won't work and are never intended to. They're intended to get shot down by someone that Johnson can then paint as an enemy hell bent on destroying his great vision. Not only are you right, but he's scripting the part right now - anyone who says words don't matter, bear in mind how specific - one could say uncompromising - Johnson's been with his language.
Benn is "surrender". This deal is "compromise". Presumably that makes no-deal "take back control", which he can build up to if needs must. Thwarted hero? Perhaps. If you're an MP called 'uncompromising' because you demand we 'surrender', on the other hand, maybe this thug will force you into signing it, making Johnson not thwarted, but the triumphant leader who never surrendered (at, lest we forget, a "war" he rhetorically started). I think he'd prefer thwarted, mind.
Either way, then, he can call Remainers "surrenderers" (truly terrifying to employ that language) or he can bully them with this rhetoric into making him pass a deal, for fear of being painted as uncompromising at best and surrendering at worst. Either way, his script for the next week will be "Compromise or surrender". The bastard's been setting this up. When the deal doesn't go through - which it probably won't - he'll either go to the electorate claiming that one half of the opposition wants to thwart Brexit and the other to 'surrender' to the EU's demands - or he'll go no-deal, because we tried to compromise, but we'll never surrender.
The worst thing is this'll work. Even as I disagree with "compromise or surrender", I realise how effective it is. If only he'd spent as long writing Seventy Two Virgins.
To Johnson's thuggish leadership, though, we all need to say "humbug".
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 27, 2019 13:34:27 GMT
Ah, reasonable Mr Corbyn and his equally reasonable pals who do things like: Support the IRA Befriend Hamas Preside over a rise in antiSemitism within the Labour party and tried to deny it was an issue Think the likes of Venezuela, China, North Korea and Soviet Russia got it right Didn’t believe Russia could possibly be behind the Skripal assassination attempt Want to get rid of our nuclear deterrent Don’t value our security services Plan to ravage middle earners for tax to put money behind crazy socialist schemes that will do more harm than good I’ll stick with Johnson, thanks! We need to talk about this.
1) 'Support the IRA' - wanted peace in Ireland and, um, Thatcheresque behind-the-scenes negotiations to secure peace. 2) I think the word 'friend' was wrong. Granted. The intention of dialogue was right, but the rhetoric was wrong. 3) Agreed. This was bad leadership by him. I think this casts the largest shadow. See, he's not perfect. 4) No he doesn't. He believes in hard-left politics, not Gulags or starving your own people. That's a reduction ad absurdam. Criticise his left-wing credentials, sure. Don't pretend he believes in Gulags! 5) I want to come back to this. THIS isn't just wrong, it's dangerous, and honestly how dare you say Johnson is safer than Corbyn in this situation. 6) Wants to get rid of nuclear weapons, and use our position as fifth sixth biggest economy to prove it can be done to, say, Russia. Idealistic? Mebbe. Principled? Absolutely. Wrong? I'd prefer fewer global death machines meself. 7) Hmm. 8) Oh boy. Your wording there is... iffy.
Let's come back to Skripal.
Corbyn didn't say "It's not Russia". He said "Let's wait until we have a little thing called evidence, and then we'll judge".
Some bloke - I forget his name - instead barged in and said "Oh, it was Russia, we've got proof". When challenged, he said "Oh, sorry, I lied about the proof. We've got no proof it's Russia. Sorry!".
With this lie, Russian media was able to use him as an example of western Russophobia. Without proof, without patience, the English would blame Russia for anything. As proof did come out, we were still catching up from the fallout of this cultural insensitivity and mistruth.
Corbyn's caution would have seen justice for Dawn Sturgess, and when Petrov and Boshirov were found would have seen the law used well. That lie, on the other hand, dangerously made our later accusations seem futile and flimsy. Corbyn's questioning was safe and would have secured justice. That lie was dangerous and saw no justice for an English assassination. Corbyn's patience could have won us the moral victory. Instead, with Skripal and this rushed lie, we lost the media war.
Oh, I remember the person who told that lie.
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 27, 2019 12:49:52 GMT
I'll grant you that, forgot those (honestly can't remember the specifics). Repeating myself - inciting violence is wrong, immoral and illegal. If they did so we all unreservedly condemn that.
Just to repeat, and emphasise, though - leaders set higher standards than the rest. Johnson's words have larger, even global, repercussions. A leader saying death threats don't matter - that matters.
Anywho, I have HUGE problems with Corbyn. He's infinitely better than Johnson, but personally I'd like to see a new leader before the next election - albeit one who continues principled left-wing politics for a principled left-wing party.
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 27, 2019 12:34:12 GMT
Interesting thoughts from Nicholas. I wonder where you’ve been while Remainers have been insulted by all and sundry, and when Labour supporters/members/ministers have used openly violent language against Tories? Very strange that people only seem to care about this now when they can bash the Tories for it. Sigh. Couple of things.
The anti-Semitism in Labour HAS been despicable. Part of it is the inaction, through speech, by Labour's higher-ups - which washes hands, subtly condoning. Personally, I think Corbyn should have taken more responsibility for his inaction therein. I think, in the last four years, Corbyn's language has been lacking - not dangerous, but nonetheless not powerful enough.
Individuals using violent language against each other is hate speech. Simple as. If a Labour member incites violence against a Tory, that's morally wrong and illegal to boot. I condone that. Off the top of my head I can't think of any Labour MPs doing so.
HOWEVER, leaders lead. Boris Johnson holds the highest office in the country. Our standards should come from him downwards. His language is dangerous, but when it was simply Telegraph columns it could be dismissed as fringe. For him to use his position so dangerously is terrifying.
P.S. One thing we do agree on, politics or theatre, what a fine writer is Nicholas. Could read his musings all day Blushes. I have actually been to the theatre once or twice this summer, I will talk about theatre again at some point, I promise!
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 27, 2019 12:21:39 GMT
Absolutely. The language he used last night was absolutely sickening (and for the sake of my sanity I'm very glad I wasn't watching it live). My expectations of him, God knows, are rock bottom, and he managed to stoop even lower than I thought possible, and his party cheered him on. There's a gaping moral vacuum where the Tory benches used to be. Something terrifying, but telling, was that, yesterday on Question Time, James Cleverly was confronted with Johnson’s rhetoric, and consistently replied with “What Johnson means by that is…”.
So, what Johnson meant by “Death threats are humbug” is “Oh, violence a serious issue, but to place it all on Johnson’s shoulders is taking it to an extreme, and Labour are insensitively mischaracterising Johnson. Humbug.”. That’s not what he said – but it’s what he meant. Obviously!
That gives Johnson the immunity to say anything. This is TERRIFYING.
If his words mean what they mean, he’s a danger at best and an authoritarian at worst.
If his words don’t mean what they mean, he’s an idiot who doesn’t understand Key Stage Two vocabulary.
Either way, his party will be there to rewrite his script. But his can’t prop him up every time he makes a mistake. They certainly shouldn’t.
“When he calls it a surrender bill, he doesn’t mean we’re at war and surrendering, he just means he disapproves of a slight delay to secure trade between Ireland – it’s innocently political. However, he’ll still use Churchill's language of war about it, which is stoking us-and-them divisions which often lead to violence, just, ya know, because. He’s using a dangerous word incorrectly, but that’s not what he means, so it’s all harmless, of course.”
NO! Let his words be his words. Let his rhetoric be his rhetoric. If he’s a bad leader, oust him as leader. If he’s a good leader, let him represent himself with his own damn words.
My hunch? He’s honestly that thick. Well done, Eton.
It’s also terrifying that the newspaper front pages are quite so extreme, and I think that we need press moderation – that newspapers should be prohibited from using over-inflammatory language, or language with the potentiality to incite violence (which means that, if epithets like “Will of the People” have been employed by less-than-savoury regimes, by anarchists and assassins, they should probably be used with caution about milquetoast moderates). Most people don’t pick apart why Johnson is using the word ‘surrender’ (to pettily ape Churchill albeit confusing Mr Benn with Adolf Hitler) – they just hear the word and assume its warmongering meaning.
It’s important, therefore, that our press NEVER repeat, but report – which means moderating when our leaders go too far. It also means moderating themselves when they go too far. Only this controversial week, many have gone too far – that headline conflates illegal Johnson with legal compromise, and to conflate the two, in the context of reporting the truth, is terrifying.
Whatever else, Brexit isn’t a war, and frankly shouldn’t be divisive. THIS is something we should all agree on – that no-one has ‘surrendered’, nor will, nor can – but those who use that vocabulary ARE stoking violence, ARE stoking war. If there are enemies in this situation, it’s those who use the word ‘enemy’. Brexit is only a war if our leaders and newspapers want it to be. With his rhetoric, our Prime Minister wants it to be.
The long and the short is I’m truly, truly terrified – Cardinal Pirelli , I would say shellshocked myself – in a way I wasn’t 48 hours ago. The man we saw on Wednesday, the rhetoric he’s using, is full of violent connotations, yet immune to criticism. Our leader believes that language of violence is “humbug”, despite often using carefully chosen loaded words, at other times being dangerously careless. His party then rewrites his words, rewrites his meaning, rewrites our language. These events could have dangerous, violent consequences. We can't let the lies of "he means something different" let Johnson off. This is how violence on the streets starts, violence amongst families, violence against the state. Worse, it’s not just Johnson – it’s his party accommodating his idiocy.
I cannot believe I’m typing this, but we need a leader who will not break the law, who doesn’t stoke violence against his own country, and who knows what basic words mean. I don’t know what we do, but we need Johnson’s party to apologise for not explain this rhetoric, and Johnson out ASAP, before his words really do have consequences. In some situations - "she just went to Iran to teach journalism" - they already have.
Words have meaning. Words have consequences. Any Prime Minister using the word 'surrender' at that dispatch box knows exactly that words have history. His party knows this too, and have the option to challenge or to condone. Whether intentional or idiotically unintentional, what words incite cannot be brushed away when inconvenient.
Or, to quote a great historical trial about the repercussions of language, "At best what you do is offensive, at worst it incites harassment and violence" - "That was popular for a certain demographic of people".
Dapper Laughs was held up to higher standards than our Prime Minister.
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 25, 2019 21:17:52 GMT
Johnson’s performance today is one of the most chilling political things I’ve ever seen.
Having said the prorogation was not about Brexit, he rambles on for fifteen useless minutes about how the Supreme Court etc are trying to thwart Brexit – in short, proving them right. At the VERY LEAST, he turns his political mistake (i.e. BREAKING THE LAW) into a partisan issue.
Yes, he would never have said sorry. However, he could have been moderate. That's the tone he needed to take - understanding of the law, appreciative of his country. He was contemptuous of the law and contemptuous of our country.
At his final flourish, the party behind him ovates. He’s had to reconvene parliament as he illegally lied to his queen and country, and not one person behind him feels that reflects badly on their party.
His language has always been tasteless – the use of the word ‘surrender’ is the most infantile way to ape Churchill, taking the context of war against Nazis and using it against careful economic planning by the Lib Dems – so in today's context it’s particularly us-and-them, again making our constitution and OUR LAW a partisan Brexit issue.
And then, “Humbug”. To THAT question. To THAT issue. To THAT family.
Johnson is a danger to the country. How do you think people around the world – not just in Europe, but in future trading partners – see the Tories’ apathy to criminal use of parliament and prorogation? How should we see this chilling response to death threats to our elected officials, let alone tacit encouragement thereof through 'die in a ditch' rhetoric? Why do we let him use the language of war to refer to our own referendum, to speak AGAINST our own hard-working principled elected officials? How can we stop him from doing that to the Conservative Party, to our government?
The worst factor is that his party is as unrepentant. They heard the ruling. They have to stand with their leader or their country. In choosing their leader they’ve turned their backs on you and me. And the leader is a criminal and a thug.
This is one of the scariest days in UK politics.
However, never not time for cheap smut, eh, so...
So much of this was Theresa May’s fault....didn’t try to build consensus after the vote, just blundered along trying to keep everyone in the dark. And then made a pig’s ear of the job. Better than what Cameron did with the pig.
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 20, 2019 12:58:01 GMT
Greatest respect, but to those cynics belittling people skiving off school… You’re wrong. That’s the case with any youth action, and it’s – again, greatest respect – an attitude that immediately disqualifies the anger, fear and legitimate politicisation of a generation.
When the tuition fees were raised, what do you remember – thousands taking to the street, old and young, to protest austerity changing fundamentally the principles of education, or the bloke who threw a fire extinguisher? Suddenly, raising fees to £9000 was not a serious breach of educational norms, teenagers be teenagers. Years later, with universities struggling under financial pressures they can’t make, young professionals slaves to debt, education a devalued commodity, universities businesses devaluing academic subjects – after all that, maybe we should have listened to the thousands.
Rather than focus on, say, the apathetic few people who drive to and from the protest, let’s listen to the people who’ve put in great effort and time to make a point that matters. I can guarantee, therefore, that today, most of the people you see are committed and passionate protestors, not slackers. Why wait until September 20th to slack off school, and spend your hard-earned day-off marching with a placard? To travel to and from the protest takes time and money, to prepare yourself for it takes time and research, to bring a placard with you can add hours to this too. Frankly most protests are boring, you stand still then you walk a bit. Why, oh why, would you skive off school for that? It’s only September 20th – what homework deadlines are worth skipping this early? It’s frankly nonsensical to think that the people taking pains to attend something more difficult than school are doing so for the easy route.
I’m only in my twenties, but going to these strikes, meeting up with people just a little younger than me is becoming, well, embarrassing. We knew these facts ten years ago, we knew the seriousness of climate change. Yes, we made changes to our lives – and hey, for example, using less aerosol HAS had a huge impact, so never say individual actions count for nothing – but we worked on the assumption that good would be done on a global level by someone else. Ten years later and nothing.
This summer, I went to a picket regarding the Siberian wildfires. It was a last-minute global thing, with people all over the world negotiating which embassies to go to, how to publicise the event, how to stay on message across continents. It took great effort to negotiate, and the teenagers who went knew so much about the issue it was astonishing. That was on a Friday in summer, a beautiful sunny day, where a 16-year-old could be doing anything in their young lives – I was the oldest person there by a long way – these were teenagers spending their pocket money and wasting a day of summer to protest wildfires in Siberia. To discredit their disbelief that our forests could burn, on the basis of distrusting a few opportunist teenagers…
As such, I am behind every single person off school today, and will be striking myself. Later there’s a picket up my way and I will join in. I vaguely know the student who’s organised it, and let me tell you, the effort that’s gone in to co-ordinating this, making sure the message is accurately conveyed, making sure a place is found that’s prominent and stark enough… They are getting the science exact, down to getting in touch with scientists. This isn’t slacking off. This is serious, serious work.
P.S. As for the latest cause… Shouldn’t we have banned the bomb – are you not worried by some nutjob in North Korea who might get bored and wipe South Korea off the map, or some nutjob in America who legitimately thinks nuking hurricanes on home soil is a wise idea? Didn’t women’s rights, um, help women with rights – and aren’t the current women’s marches equally prescient descendents thereof, which couldn't have occurred without earlier protest too? Isn’t Rock Against Racism still valid, and arguably not just alive but mainstream in how Black Lives Matter implements contemporary pop? I think one reason this generation is stressed is because, actually, most protestors from the past DIDN’T achieve their all. The list of potential apocalypses doesn't change, but simply increases. We can either get overwhelmed, get cynical, or fight.
P.P.S. Regarding protesting China – as I just said, people protested Russian wildfires, including, um, in Russia, so they want to make a difference both at home and abroad. People are protesting Brazil, and, um, Bolsanaro doesn’t take to global protests kindly. But individual actions make a difference. Local councils take the issue of single-use straws to their MP, who take it to parliament, who present it on PMQs, who make it a law, who declare a global climate crisis, which publicises the issue, which incentivises people across the world, including a little country called China… I can’t go to China and ask them to lower emissions, and I can’t culturally change how people in China feel, but perhaps we can inspire enough people there to fight for it, or inspire our government to take Xi to task. You – little you, in your little town, in your little country – can tell mighty China what to do, simply by pushing hard enough. So, why aren’t you?
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 18, 2019 10:58:51 GMT
This is a strange, inherently flawed list, not because it’s wrong, or bad, but because it’s unclear whether it means “the best works of drama apropos of their staging” or “the best pieces of theatremaking”. The mention of specific performances (Tim Piggott-Smith MADE King Charles III) suggests productions elevated the scripts (a bit like, you know, theatre). The inclusion of Punchdrunk, or The Encoutner, or even Hamilton, show how impossible it often is (and should be?) to separate the live, performed experience from the mere existence of its text. The decision to only choose texts written after 2000 just for their text is thus bizarre, misses the point, and limits how post-2000s theatre can be understood, for the worse. The list seems to be “plays written after the year 2000 and perhaps with the benefit of a good production”. The problem is that’s isolationist at best and meaningless at worst. God, I’d forgotten how pretentious I get when I come on here.
I think it’s hard to disagree, for example, that theatre was profoundly changed, for the better, by the appearance of A View from the Bridge in the West End and on the NT Live – specifically, its post-Young Vic life. It was a stunning production, still haunting to this day – but even above that I really do think it has held up as a line-in-the-sand production like Brook’s Midsummer, occupying a position in theatrical history. By selling out the West End and Broadway, and doing so well in cinemas across the world, this extraordinary, strange, European, artsy-fartsy production touched many many people in many many ways, fundamentally changing what ‘mainstream’ can be. In a list of vital theatre shows since 2000, its omission is ridiculous. But obviously it must be omitted from this list.
Its exclusion, though, ignores what’s made post-2000 – and especially post 2012ish – theatre so exciting. The best contemporary playwrights – Simon Stephens, Duncan Macmillan, Caryl Churchill – clearly write with space for their directors to direct. I loved Visitors (which I had assumed MUST be on this list, but apparently no) – a seemingly quite conventional modern masterpiece – and even then Barney Norris was fairly upfront about how his collaboration with Alice Hamilton gave his early shows (also Eventide) the brilliance that Laurie Sansom’s Nightfall lacked. To praise the text, and only the text, ignores how the text came to be and why the text works. I just find that sad.
I also thought the Guardian was legally obligated to call Fleabag the best everything. Whilst I personally didn’t really like it, it’s been so influential – and clearly has merit – that its omission does seem like that, an omission.
Lungs also should be on this list. My guess/hope is that too few of the contributors saw its original run, and will kick themselves come November. You guys seeing it at the Old Vic, you’re in for a treat. It’d be in my top ten new texts, and probably ten new productions regardless.
It’s hard to argue with Jerusalem as number one, nor Hamilton as number two. Great to see things like London Road and Fun Home and Mr Burns remembered. In some ways it’s a good list. However, it’s just a deliberately incomplete, misleading list, over-praising playwrights for what made great theatrical experiences, ignoring how and why contemporary theatre – artistically and culturally – is changing for the better.
They’ll probably do a top twenty revivals soon anyway, so this rant is meaningless. God, I’d REALLY forgotten how pretentious I get when I come on here.
*** If I had to do a top ten Best Theatre Shows of the 21st Century (since you’ve all asked me to do it…), personal preference aside (to an extent), I would go: - The Shakespeare Trilogy – indisputably – profound and insightful Shakespearean interpretations, the brunt-bearer of early wrong-headed criticism of further pioneering gender-blind productions, also class-blind, age-blind, body-blind, race-blind, utterly revisionist and remarkable in their ownership of Shakespeare, a bold use of time never seen before or since, sensitive and provocative studies into our justice system, a vital collaboration with Clean Break, Harriet Walter storming away heading an extraordinary committed cast, transmitted on the BBC, free for under-25s, blisteringly good productions. Egalitarian in every way, brilliant in every way. New plays framed around Shakespeare, or revivals finding the newness therein? Genius and game-changing either way. This will always be one of the most special experiences, theatrical or not, of my life.
- Hamilton
- A View from the Bridge
- Oresteia
- Jerusalem
- The Encounter or mebbe an earlier Complicite that was more influential but bugger I loved this one
- London Road
- The Jungle (as an umbrella for David Lan’s political and theatrical fire)
- Black Watch, with Harry Potter as a footnote
We Will Rock You A Doll’s House would be my personal choice – but thinking more broadly than my tastes, I’m torn at to what takes the last spot
So, what deserves the tenth place? Something mainstream, important, and door-opening, like Marianne Elliott’s War Horse, or Marianne Elliott’s Curious Incident? Fleabag, a fine fringe show that became a global phenomenon, including back on stage – or The Play that Goes Wrong or the spectacular Six for similar reasons? His Dark Materials, which really pioneered the best of Hytner’s hugely influential NT (and what a cast!), or Harry Potter reinvigorating/ruining that franchise? Should we, too, include the Twitter-trending Iliad? The Globe-to-Globe festival then the Globe-to-Globe Hamlet? Three Kingdoms more for the discourse it provoked? NT Connections more for the doors they open? A show like Queens of Syria, or Belarus Free Theatre, or театр.doc, putting unbearable distant real lives within our world? BP or not BP taking to the stage, grassroots protest theatre that HAS made a difference? What about We’re Here Because We’re Here? The Michael Sheen Passion? The 2012 Opening Ceremony? All of these deserve focus. But let’s pick A Doll’s House because I love it.
I’m also a wee bit tempted by Phedre, simply by virtue of being the first NT Live. However, I think A View from the Bridge was SO influential because it got onto the NT Live, so its inclusion is cap-doffing to the influence and importance of global transmission (and why it beats Roman Tragedies). It’s arguable too that Oresteia was a great beginning but Hamlet found the biggest audience – Oresteia’s shocking newness has the edge though.
My list is also weighted towards the last ten years, because I’m only ten years old, although I do also think that’s because that’s when fringier theatre got more outwards-looking and the West End more daring, and the influence of David Lan and Louise Jeffreys trickled down. It’s also a bit biased against shows I was scared of like Punchdrunk despite their influence. There are pplenty of great shows I simply missed, or maybe even forgot. It also breaks my heart to exclude a show like Fun Home or Nell Gwynn or Lungs (thus far) because they didn’t have that breadth of influence. I’d comfortably concede to changes. I’d not concede the top three, however. Those are all extraordinary theatre, and extraordinarily influential.
Whilst I do think that’s a half-decent list, I’m not sure that’s true to everyone. What show brought most people into the theatre? What show really changed theatre? What show transcended its theatre? Far more people were affected by We Will Rock You – sh*te but popular – than Fun Home – magisterial but largely overlooked. Break my heart though it does, one almost would have to choose We Will Rock You over Fun Home or London Road and maybe even Hamilton as with bums-on-seats the biggest – thus, arguably, best – musical since 2000. Hmmm.
In short, all lists are arbitrary, but mine’s better.
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Post by Nicholas on Jun 7, 2019 21:28:29 GMT
Happy Pride Month, good old forum! Just wanted to highlight this, and talk about Tbilisi: It is 50 years this year since the Stonewall Riots kick-started the Pride movement and we still need to fight for equality. You only have to look at recent events at the schools in Birmingham and Manchester to see what needs to be done. Plus the fight for marriage equality in Northern Ireland is ongoing. And then more globally, we have Brunei and many other countries taking regressive steps. We still need Pride marches - part protest for what still needs to change and part celebration for what we have achieved. London Pride is, depressingly, as essential this year as ever. Every Pride is as essential as ever. As long as there is at least one homophobe in the world, we need Pride parades, and recent news stories have shown that, both home and abroad, there is at least one homophobe. The more Prides in the world, the better. With that in mind, let’s celebrate those countries having their first Prides, and celebrate/mourn/hugely f***ing celebrate one place in particular – Georgia.
Georgia’s relationship to LGBT rights is… better than its neighbours, but given its neighbours… This year’s Tbilisi Pride, therefore, promises to be one of the more important parades around the world. There aren’t many Soviet Prides – even though the people clearly want them – so the fact that Georgians will proudly march is cause for such celebration…
…except that the government just announced that they shouldn’t have the Pride March. Security can’t be provided. Apparently someone in the government has been actively pressuring them not to have it at all, but that’s hearsay. What’s fact is that they’re not having any support.
Tbilisi Pride’s response? Absolutely bloody amazing. After June 23rd, let's see how this amazing event went.
There’s a petition that was just announced, so the more people who sign it the better. go.allout.org/en/a/tbilisi/.
Beyond that, there’s no great call-to-arms here, beyond awareness. Despite it amazingly being discussed in parliament, I don’t think there’s enough awareness of the event, let alone the Georgian government's sudden decision, let alone the amazing response of the organisers. I only have three actual friends in the real world, so I hope you don’t mind me sharing this non-theatrical matter on a theatre forum, but those of you planning on attending London Pride, I’m sure this is of interest to you. The more people who know the incredible stakes Tbilisi Pride is going against – and that they are going ahead at all, despite this all – the better. That petition is worth sharing as much as you can. The more awareness, support, and love, the better.
But anywho, enough of that. Honestly it's late on a Friday and I've drunk too much to know how to end this point. Happy June to everyone here, and happy July 6th too.
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Post by Nicholas on Mar 3, 2019 18:40:19 GMT
All very puzzling to me. My first Shakespeare was Richard III about as far as you can get from my origins, class, ethnicity, income level etc... I was gripped. I was fourteen. I don’t need a play to be about me. In fact when I have been to a play about the kind of person most people would say I am now, I’m usually disappointed. How far could I be from, for example, the AIDS crisis in New York , but I very much appreciated The Inheritance. So why should plays be about 'working class people' to attract 'working class ' people?When I was also a nipper, say sixteen, I discovered books like The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and that led to modern writers, contemporary novels and so on. I wasn’t royal, I wasn’t a Borstal inmate. Just good plays, just good books. The thing is taking children to the theatre and getting them to the library.
But our budget doesn’t bloody cover books! Being represented in the theatre or the library is one thing, but more bloody importantly – How can we take children to the theatre or the library?
For me, our school theatre included Black Watch (Scottish squaddies), Endgame (Beckett’s nihilistic afterlife?), My Fair Lady (well I guess that’s about class) – two of my favourite productions ever there, and a musical I love, all about people VERY unlike me. But a) we paid for most of them ourselves and my mummy and daddy have money (though blimey did they scrimp and save for me), and b) I lived in Newbury so being taken to the theatre was no issue. Given the economic diversity of my state school, it was clear that even then, as 14-year-olds, class and money was dictating who would and wouldn't get access. And that's Newbury. Move to Manchester and your only option is Home – if it’s helping underprivileged people see The Producers, that’s wonderful news. Move to Penrith, Sunderland, S****horpe, how can you afford it?
The only answer I can see is a real question in how we subsidise the arts, and who for.
So personally, I’d love to see part of my tax money go to the National Theatre to make another Angels in America or Here We Go, but part of it go on a Richard III that can tour the country. I’d be very happy to half the number of Entry Pass seats for wealthier 16-25 year olds, but have shows that can reach 16-25 year olds in their community centres or libraries or schools across the country. I’d happily – happily – not see the NT Macbeth so that my local school can.
(That goes for an older generation too, I’d really like to see a theatre company to stage Richard III or The Inheritance near/for jobcentres and food banks)
Just to repeat myself, this is important as more than a hypothetical. Look at the science behind communal arts. This isn’t just an issue of “Theatre needs to reflect people” (though it does, sometimes), it’s also “Theatre NEEDS (for the NHS, community, and economic prosperity) to be accessible to people”. Shouldn’t getting Richard III actually into schools (esp. 'working-class', dare I say poorer ones) be a priority? And if it comes out of your tax money – or it disadvantages you from seeing more shows at the Nash – how would you feel?
But regarding origins, class, ethnicity, income level… I’m wetting myself about Jack Thorne’s new play – you know why? He went to the school next to me (we never met), and is clearly going autobiographical. I’ve seen shows about people like me, but “Newbury 1997” – THAT IS MY ORIGIN, CLASS, ETHNICITY, INCOME LEVEL! It’s terrifyingly exact! But you know who can’t see it? Most people from Newbury 1997. Not everyone’s mummy or daddy had or has money - back at school that REALLY did dictate library and theatre access. Newbury to London is £30, cheapest tickets are £15. Newbury's a fairly divided city class-wise (just look at our MP), so whilst some people I know can go (largely those whose mummies and daddies had the spare £50 to take us to the theatre as kids), none of my school friends, still living in Newbury, or co-workers from my past life can afford to go - and they're OK financially, unlike other Newburians. Even my mummy and daddy can't really spend £45 on a whim, even they as Newburians are priced out. Amazingly even kilometres away, people of the EXACT origins, class, ethnicity and income level are out of the reach of that origin, class, ethnicity and income level. If (also after Poet In Da Corner similarly impressed Sloane Square types and not Dizzie Rascal types) that doesn’t give us pause for thought about finance and accessibility…
So that’s it – I now feel that the only option to secure what you want (diverse theatre for young people) is subsidised theatre to fundamentally change WHAT is subsidised. This will, thus, price you and I as regular theatregoers out of great shows, but I feel it’s a sacrifice worth making. I’d love to know your thought on your tax money. That’s not personal…
All in all, I hated Mary Poppins 2 because property is theft.
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Post by Nicholas on Mar 3, 2019 16:49:09 GMT
Pamela is not a good book. 600 pages of letters of a teenager fainting until her attempted rapist reforms is not riveting bedtime reading. However, its place in English literature and society, especially in how its two characters represent their genders, remains academic, at least.
For example, as a tale of (cough cough) female autonomy, it remains odd. Professor Judith Hawley recently claimed that Pamela is one of the few novels where when she says “no” to a man, he hears “no”; admittedly she ignores the fact that he gaslights her until she says yes. Mr B, too, is portrayed as the worst of men, but mellows to please the woman he loves; it helps when the woman you love is kidnapped in your house. Thus Pamela is 1 part female psyche and 9 parts chauvinism, 1 part purity and 9 parts leeriness, a strange mix of sexually complex and embarrassingly retrograde.
If it was sensational then, it is problematic today. In an age of recontextualising our educational heritage, of greater understanding of sex and gender, and other questions about our literary and societal foundations, it’s worth asking whether an historic book like this – that doesn’t advocate kidnap and attempted rape, but doesn’t not! – is a book we should treat as foundational. Where does it leave us now, and how should we feel about it? Provoked?
Like when Robert Icke used The Kindly Ones to explore how easily Ancient Greece’s political attitudes translate to now, it’s worth making a provocation of Pamela. It’s a novel about cruelty and tenderness…
***
This is where Crimp comes in – or is it?
Martin Crimp’s new play, When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other, is about modern gender politics, traditional gender roles, and role play. Rape is both a threat and a come-on. It’s hard to know if it’s condemnatory or kinky or both. It’s also hard to know whether it’s forwards-facing or stereotypical, given both how formal its gender roles are, yet how fluid they are. Man (Dillane/Blanchett) and Woman (Blanchett/Dillane) play Male and Female roles – master and maid, breadwinner and homemaker, dominant and submissive. He criticises her feminine passivity and she mocks his macho posturing. Amidst this, Man plays Woman and Woman plays Man.
The script, thus, is an odd hodgepodge. Fluid, free and frisky, much of what Crimp writes about is the discourse of 2019. Overtraditional and outdated roles, other parts are from 1740. Costumed and caricatured, and occasionally clearly to be mocked, is it perpetuating these gender stereotypes, or subverting? With Dillane both dominating Blanchett with rape threats, being mocked for his inactivity about rape by her, and him often dressing as her… well, is this fluid masculinity, or is this solid masculinity and performative bewigged femininity? Both characters play both genders, but either gender has such binary, inflexible associations.
Take, for example, the dom/sub relationship. There seems something very fluid about Dillane playing the dominated maid whilst Blanchett, of course, straps on and straps in. With lines like “I’d rather be raped than bored” coming out of Blanchett’s mouth, though, and Dillane emasculated through a sexy French maid costume, therefore, is Crimp saying that it is inherently female to be dominated? Is he saying that people are gender-fluid, or that characteristics are gendered so to be fluid requires roleplay? Certainly, as Mitchell directs, Dillane (dishevelled beard and bald spot) is meant to be comic cross-dressing – why: is it because it’s a panto-dame-Emmanuelle, or because it’s a middle-aged rich man willingly demeaning himself? If we’re meant to be surprised or giggle at a man in a dress and a woman with a willy, everything is gendered, transgressions are possible, roles are conservative – paradoxical provocations. At times, this production asks questions it doesn’t seem to clearly know how to ask, let alone answer.
Then, at others, Stephen Dillane steps forwards and says “fat people are poor and icky”, or Blanchett steps forwards and says “men like girls not women that’s creepy”. Whilst it’s possible to read the gendered, subversive dominance of the end in numerous ways, a line like “Rich people can do anything” really only has one meaning. Mitchell rarely gives Crimp’s questions easy answers – indeed, she often puts the women in sexual situations but the most unsexy context, to distort and make discomforting – but at others, a character stands still and speaks the moral. Regarding gendered roles, Crimp offers no easy answers. Regarding class, regarding pornographicisation of youth, Crimp just lets the words out, sometimes beautifully, often bluntly.
Largely, for this to be coherent, maleness is equivalent to strap-on penises (biological) and power (sociological), whilst femaleness is equivalent to dresses (societal), much of which harks back to literary traditions. Crimp then suggests that Man can be Woman and Woman Man, but by these identifiers, not inherently. There’s deeper this needs to plough into this, unless it’s simply a cute little love story with S&M roleplay and strict binaries, in which case it’s just not well-defined or, well, sexy enough.
There is a strange mix of obviousness and complexity; spelling it out and making nothing clear. Confusing all of this is the possibility that it’s all a kinky game anyway, and inherent in THIS is the fact that the gender roles go back hundreds of years. Around 279 years.
***
So, to Pamela, the book which told women of its day that kidnap is kinky but no means no. Does Martin Crimp update the novel, and bring its problems into modern headlights? Does he leave it where it is and ask us what its legacy means today, a modern day Shamela? Does he simply take topics it tackles? All of these, to some extent – and thus, to some extent, none.
“That’s not my name”, says Blanchett when called Pamela, writing her own history herself on her laptop (another idea of identity introduced, inherent in epistolary Richardson, never completely concluded). Yet just like her Richardsonian ‘namesake’, this woman/girl is locked up, constantly watched, the victim of attempted assaults, so she IS Pamela. Then Dillane is Pamela. Dillane is in a dom/sub relationship today; his sub is Richardson’s girl. So much is in here about legacy of our literature and how we take this on – but so little about Pamela (the novel, the character, the Blanchett) gets into this. It's just there.
By drawing direct parallels between a stale English garage and the first English boudiour novel, with Mr B’s rape threats and landowning amidst Amazon parcels and karaoke machines, Crimp asks us to deliberately draw parallels between now and 1740, but only one speech – Dillane’s “in fifty years… you will be a child and I would still be a man and I would still have the power” – draws any such comparison across time. Again, are these gender roles inherent forever (implied in Dillane’s angry speech, only subverted with his cross-dressing costume) or invented (suggested by Dillane’s need to ‘novelise’ his wife by calling her Pamela and, in an act visualised as rape, dictating her blogging her happiness)? Fascinating question, interesting to analyse its legacy; no conclusions are drawn.
Oddly enough, the show isn’t backwards-looking enough to say where Richardson’s ‘feminism’ ends and where Crimp and Mitchell’s critique thereof begins. Is this, thus, a ‘provocation’ of Richardson’s awful book, or a provocation of where we are now? Again – both, and thus neither.
***
And a brief personal diversion. Pamela is not a famous book, but is an academic one. Firstly, the first novel ever (depending on who you ask), is a fascinating way to discuss society’s fundaments. If this is a provocation of literature’s gendered legacy, why so specific; if this is a provocation of Pamela, why so non-specific?
Secondly, I think Professor Judith Hawley probably known to a couple of you too, based on inference about your uni days (for what it's worth she was a fab teacher). When I studied it a lifetime ago, it was perfectly fine for us to discuss its politics in a flippant way our current culture is challenging. Smarter younger minds than us are taking issue with issues like this and making them known. Our curriculum provokes them, they provoke it right back. If we want to talk about why PAMELA – and not, at random, The Watsons oh please make that transfer – is worth a contemporary provocation, we should look at not just what it said, but what it’s saying now, and to whom – who are the gatekeepers of Pamela, of our cannon?
Crimp’s play is set in a no-man’s-land of time and culture, and thus says too little about Richardson’s then and too little about our now. I wish a historian, and a contemporary student (or Laura Wade and Jane Austen), had collaborated with Crimp. Instead Crimp doesn’t historically locate his critiques historically, nor does he challenge them for 2019. He simply pours them out.
***
The real victims of this are Blanchett, Dillane, and us audiences trying to get a grip on whether we’re meant to feel sorry for Woman, to feel sexy about it, or to see her as simply a cipher. Two mercurial performances by two mercurial performers amount to little when the characters they play need framing. In another confusion, I think Mitchell’s direction never quite makes clear enough where roles end and roleplay begins – when is Dillane, and when is Dillane’s Man, playing female, playing Pamela? This is where it’s hard to give the gendered, dom/sub, ‘literary’ scenes their correct reading. It’s a strange lapse in judgement. Given that it’s impossible to know whether Man and Woman are the same character, are divisions of the self, or kinks, it’s hard to process what this story is – a love story satire, an S&M romance, an analysis of gender norms, a critique of Pamela? I wonder if, like Phantom Thread beautifully and sentimentally managed, this wanted to be a tender love story told via submission and dominance, but failed to stir the emotions. I don’t know which emotions this should have stirred – if its roleplay was a kinky romantic scene, or if its gender roles are torture – but it stirred little.
***
All in all, In the Republic of Happiness 2: Electric Boogaloo is just a bit blah, forgettable. Its lack of focus and definitions means that overall it’s never boring, but never exciting either. Whilst watching it I was never offended, confused, or – for a provocation – provoked. People will remember the ballot more than they remember the show.
Ultimately, thus, the show is a few interesting missed shots. I think Crimp says some really fascinating things about the ways in which money and power have been gendered since 1740’s first novel, ‘roles’, and the need to free ourselves from that.
But I don’t think contemporary gender theory, Crimp, and Pamela make great bedfellows – the first feels at arm’s length, the second could be more provocative and discursive on his own, the third could be challenged more interestingly head on a la Shangela’s Shamela.
Still, it’s a provocation of a provocative book, intended to provoke today. It’s hard to come to one definitive conclusion. All I can say is this is what I pegged it as.
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Post by Nicholas on Mar 3, 2019 16:26:20 GMT
Finally saw this (because everyone wants my opinion over a year too late, right?). It’s not good at all, is it? It fails in every way as a musical. It’s just a dozen “Be yourself” cheesefests are knitted together by the least factually appropriate, most underdeveloped protagonist. The book is badly written, the song structure is all over the place, the songs have no relationship to the action. The marriage between book and songs is the biggest flaw in this lazy, lousy work; lyrics like “a zombie in a maze” or “when the bullets fly (from muskets?)” are pathetic anachronisms, whilst ideas integral to Barnum’s character – showmanship and self-confidence – never appear in the words themselves. “We are bursting through the barricades” – THAT’S THE WRONG MUSICAL!
Ultimately, this terrible musical is a low-end jukebox musical – Pasek & Paul wrote twenty-odd platitudinous pop bops, then strung them to whatever plot came their way (they more or less admitted, on Neil Brand, that they deliberately wrote stand-alone pops to get the gig). Find the word “circus” or “freak” in any of the songs – it’s about circus freaks, it should be easy! You can’t, can you? It’s a really bad musical.
HOWEVER… It’s not a musical. It’s clearly an MTV special. “This Is Me” is not “I Am What I Am”, it’s “I Don’t Give A f***”. And you know what? Swallow my pride. It’s actually a very good MTV special. There’s a reason an album of stadium-rock songs with messages like “I am who I’m meant to be” and “Our love will rewrite the stars” has bested Sgt Peppers – they’re quite good stadium-rock positivity anthems, music everyone likes with messages everyone needs but music no-one is making anymore*. Its precedents AREN’T Cy Colman et al, to which it embarrassingly pales in comparison, but Thriller and Trapped in the Closet, and, um, low bar to leap there, moving on…
*(I think it’s no coincidence that this and Bohemian Rhapsody – with those reviews, but with those standalone stadium-rock scenes – did well in the same year. It’s been a stellar year for diverse musicals (A Star is Born, Mamma Mia 2, Song of the Tree)*, but a better year for bombastic rock concerts (Bo-Rap, “Encore” A Star is Born, and this), and I think the lessons to be learnt from these movies aren’t cinematic, but musical. People will pay to see music they like, even in the cinema, whatever the cinematic quality. Film producers aside, music producers should leap on this.)
Through this prism, the direction is brilliant. The OTT choreography throws trapezes and elephant when it suits, and breakdancing when it doesn’t, with our televisual short attention spans never bored, often amazed. Better still, the camera moves with the motion as music videos have innovated, some surprising camera choreography zooming between time and place, fantasies and realities, in ways the stage can’t – fantastically, impossibly, entertainingly – with slo-mo and CGI emphasising the emotions as only cinema, or MTV, can. I truly believed in the Zac/Zendaya romance, despite the book giving nothing between them – the choreography and camerawork did the trick and filled those gaps. Slick, stylish and sexy – Michael Gracey is Busby Berkley meets Michael Bay – whilst this is just a bunch of music videos, they’re good music videos.
And is there a movie star today who’s as much a MOVIE STAR as Hugh?
(And if I’m honest… Much as I hate the phrase ‘guilty pleasure’ and the terrible book offers no pleasure… Oh boy, I hate this as a musical, so I hate myself for saying this, but I really do like this. I’ve been to amateur shows where they’ve opened with “The Greatest Show”, and forget Hugh opening the O2 with a dance-along, a stranger in a top hat gets me dancing along! These are perhaps the WORST songs for a Barnum musical – which is why this is a terrible musical – but they’re not bad songs in and of themselves – which is why it’s a successful music video.)
So there we go. As a movie musical I’d give it one-and-a-half stars, and would be hyperbolic enough to call it a) the worst book of a musical ever, and b) the worst mismatch between situation and songs in a musical ever. But to call it a movie musical is to misunderstand its genuine pleasures and its runaway success. The songs are fun, the visuals zippy, and the messages (though platitudinous) are positive. So what to make of it overall? Well, it’s so self-aware of its clumsy obviousness that its pretentious critic swallows his pride and says “I didn’t like your show, but…”. And however much I hate myself for falling into that trap, I didn’t like The Greatest Showman, but…
And they are quite good platitudinous songs. Perhaps that’s what people need now.
*When I say “A stellar year for musicals”… Seriously. Seriously. From America – A Star is Born; Greatest Showman; Bohemian Rhapsody; Poppins; 1/6 of Buster Scruggs. From our shores – Mamma Mia 2; Anna and the Apocalypse; Been So Long. From the Philippines – a four hour opera. From Portugal – a Ken Loach musical. From France – rockin' nuns do Joan of Arc. From Russia – fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa. From Kyrgyzstan – the FIRST EVER Kyrgyzstani musical, and a bloody masterpiece to boot!
Plus, whether the reprises of Renee Fleming and Townes van Zandt in Three Billboards or Baby Driver’s choreography, the actual Fred-and-Ginger number in Shape of Water, or the Citizen Kane of musical numbers in a non-musical, more and more films seem to be using the high emotions of the musical number in non-musical films, and getting away with it!
So has there been a time for movie musicals since their golden age like there is now?
And maybe not a movie musical, but the best movie of the year was a musical movie:
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Post by Nicholas on Mar 3, 2019 15:29:36 GMT
Yeahhhhh y'all won't be getting anyone bigger than Sheridan in the show it seems.
You clearly haven't seen the new marquee at the Palladium. Unexpected, but fair dos given most of his attitudes come from the Old Testament. REALLY don't want to imagine him in a loincloth, mind...
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Post by Nicholas on Mar 3, 2019 15:24:09 GMT
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Post by Nicholas on Mar 3, 2019 15:20:23 GMT
Mary Poppins Episode II: Attack of the Clones
Sorry to say I absolutely hated this. Plenty of small things disappoint, but foundationally it’s got something really iffy at its heart – especially after everything about charity and family that the original stood for. It fundamentally betrays the ideology, the poetry, and the cinematic inventiveness of the original. It’s hateful.
Before I begin, I’m patently wrong. Whether children wowed by their first cinema trip or grandparents reminiscing theirs, the world loves this film. Whatever I think, the joy it’s bringing has to be celebrated.
But IT’S sh*t the writing is bad, the direction worse, the subtext offensive, the moral hideous, and the ending ruins the first movie.
***
Other than that… It’s only right to begin with the good aspects (there are so many bad I’ve had to delegate them into this pretentious structure): • Emily Mortimer and Lin-Manuel are fun. • Dick van Dyke is joy incarnate. • Costumes are pretty. • There are 2 ¼ good songs. That’s it; now the negatives.
There are 2 ¼ good songs The Shermans, like fellow Americans Lerner & Loewe, got London 1910 – “King Edward’s on the throne, it’s the age of men” – spot on. “Step in Time” is “Knees Up Mother Brown”, Flanagan and Allen influence “Jolly ‘oliday”, Banks’ maid Elsa Lanchester could have sung “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”. But amidst the Pearly Kings, the Shermans take very surprising detours. In the middle-eight of an arpeggio-led lullaby, “Feed the Birds” overlays almost a Gregorian chant – not something English, but subconsciously evoking morality. “Chim-Cheree”’s chromatic base and minor-key bounce evoke (yet predate) Michel Legrand’s haunting chansons for Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, mysterious, foreign, romantic. It’s a complex musical picture they paint.
To make a Poppins score, original musical adventurousness matters. When Stiles & Drew gave “Being Mrs Banks” its yearning insight or “Brimstone and Treacle” its villainy, they judged this nicely.
Shaiman & Wittman didn’t. Song for song, every note they write has a precedent in the original. The London opener is the London opener (but twee, not mysterious); the magic intro is the magic intro (but fake-looking); the lullaby is a lullaby (with none of the wit). Admittedly “Turning Turtle”’s Slavic, but it’s another s-word and, really, another ‘on the ceiling’ song? Cheap copies of the Shermans, none of these songs earn their own emotional weight. One of the original’s most moving moments is Mr Banks’ night-time walk, grandiose church chords reprising deep thematic beats; a similar night-time scene here evokes nothing, without even shallow thematic beats to reprise.
(It’s interesting that, with Hairspray and Bombshell, Shaiman & Wittman are great imitators, not innovators. Remember, Ashman and Menken were off-Broadway enfant terribles before Disney, Stiles & Drewe off-West-End. Which young off-Broadway talent should Disney have snapped up?)
“A Conversation” deserves a conversation of its own. It’s sweet, sold well by Whishaw. It’s independent from “The Life I Lead”, its predecessor and the best song in the original – come its final reprise. In its original iteration it’s a sarcastic scene-setting; in its first reprise Mary subverts it; and in “A Man Has Dreams” Banks subverts it himself. How that leitmotif/character develops is a beautiful musical microcosm of the movie’s arc, up there with Judas’ “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” or “Let Me Entertain You”’s strip as one of the most surprising reprise reinventions. When “A Conversation” is reprised… oh, it’s not. No songs, no emotions are. Worse, when it has cause to be – at the ending with the kite’s patchwork – everything the song stood for is dropped mid-sentence. Shallow movie that this is, we never return to any musical ideas, nor emotional ones.
So, what of the good 2 ¼? Of course the animated sequence is the animated sequence, but the first time I smiled was when Emily Blunt growled “Royal Daulton MUUUUUUUUUUsic Hall”. Whilst Julie can do vaudeville, her Mary never would; this new style is a lovely expansion to the musical world.
With its next song, the standout “The Cover is Not the Book”, they surprise further, wonderfully; Mary from behind that modesty sheet isn’t just vaudeville, it’s risqué, burlesque! I LOVE this unexpected naughtiness.
So the best part of Mary Poppins 2 was when Mary looked like a 1930s stripper.
And “Trip a Little Light Fantastic” (not coincidentally, Lin-Manuel’s other song) may be this movie’s “Step in Time” (how tedious to be retreading), but this song is more hummable and charming. It also leads into that stunning tableau, and a great dance sequence begins! Until the first cut, when I whispered “Oh no”. The good ¼ of a song was over. Now for the bad ¾…
The director of Nine is a bad director …which is Rob Marshall’s style. Rob Marshall cannot direct.
Chicago isn’t a good movie. As many critics commented, Marshall’s frenetic editing-on-movement, instead of capturing the dances’ characters, is too unfocused, rendering everything unimpressive. Compare Fosse’s camera choreography to Marshall’s, and there’s no contest.
In their dance sequences, “Step in Time” has 68 cuts in 5 minutes; “Trip the Light Fantastic” has 148. This matters.
As any 19-year-old film student who’s watched Touch of Evil and Russian Ark will pretentiously tell you, the longer the take the greater the immersion. For dance movies it ups the stakes too. “Step in Time” has well-choreographed miniatures – on the chimneys, over the rooftops – which, uninterrupted, always impress. “Trip the Light Fantastic” has an edit for when the dancer jumps and when the dancer lands. That’s how you edit non-dancers. The choreography of that scene is evidently fantastic – the lampposts and levels inventively used – but nothing impresses when Marshall edits like bad dancing is edited. Marshall fudges it.
Aside from askew visuals, his direction has other problems. Marshall’s Into the Woods is a good not great film, its flaw that it never tackles subtext. Whilst the woods should represent an ‘other’ to normality and civility, in Marshall’s hands, the forest looks no different to the Baker’s town. What lets down ITW is what ruins Poppins – Marshall doesn’t understand subtext.
The writers don’t understand subtext either “Let’s Go Fly A Kite” is not a Sondheim-level metaphor to unpick. It does so itself: “With your feet on the ground you’re a bird in flight”. It’s the pleasures of playtime, a simple action transcending itself. “Nowhere To Go But Up”, however, is irritatingly literal from the off, then the camerawork is too. How stupid do David Magee and Rob Marshall think we are?
(Plus, George Banks sings “Fly a Kite” solely in the second person/“us”, whilst Michael Banks sings “But Up” solely as “I” – it’s subtle, but it shows their values)
“A Spoonful of Sugar” has just “the job’s a game” to explain its imaginative visuals and playful idea; “Can You Imagine That?” being about imagination is ironically unimaginative, then it spells its title out in a CGI mess.
Mary Poppins 1 is Baby’s First Metaphor – it never explains anything, but its words are simple and few. It’s a fable. The new movie’s moral – well, it has none, as seen by how little the songs mean.
“The Place Where Lost Plots Go”, despite its charming tune, is the worst offender. “Feed the Birds” was Walt’s favourite song – “That’s what it’s all about” – showing how even the smallest act of kindness – “tuppence” – has profound repercussions. It’s its own fable. But far from “the steps of St Paul’s”, “The Place” is where? This generality makes it aimless. “Do you ever dream or reminisce?” Who doesn’t! Their dead mother and “my best spoon”? It’s too non-specific to be a fable, too vague to be meaningful.
The book isn’t great at subtext either. Whether that hideous line “Everything is possible, even the impossible” (“Anything can happen if you let it” works MUCH better), or “until the door opens” (“until Spring has sprung” is surely more magical and relevant?), it speaks down to its audience where the original speaks up.
Where this lack of intelligence offends is in its two Banks women.
Kate Banks is bad at antiquing, and dead After the mess of “Turning Turtle”, there’s a brief dialogue about the worthlessness of the bowl. “But our mother said it was priceless!” “Yes, I am sure it was – to her”. Ooooh, why was it priceless? Maybe, Michael painted it for her! Or it’s a gift from (dead?) George and Winnfired! Or it’s for her children’s futures! Mini-moral inevitable, can’t wait to see how these twenty minutes on her memento pay off, emotionally!
Oh… Dead mum just sucked at Bargain Hunt. It’s not priceless. End of subplot.
Why do we focus on her bowl for so long for no pay-off? Because – as the patched-up kite proves later – the film knows the price of everything... It never looks at the emotional value. The mother proves this. Kate has her last mention at the end of “A Conversation” – song two – then not once again does her ‘heartbroken’ husband address her, even by implication, never by name. The bowl – priceless to her – means nothing; by association nor does she. For the emotional Macguffin, she exits the film after ten minutes. She’s seen at the end, on the kite/shares – and price/value, what happens then?
More on that later; for now, let’s talk about the other Banks child.
The lesbian Jane Banks is this movie’s best character. Admittedly, British socialism in the 1930s was going places (as were British Banks, incidentally), but after her mother we had another fierce, politically minded, independent woman. Their positivity and politicking make them great side-characters – neither has, nor needs, a dramatic arc, being self-contained and complete…
…until Jack says “I leered at you as a child” and Jane says “OK let’s bonk”. Oh the chemistry sizzled.
Jane Banks seems a self-confident, contented lady. Why was she shackled off at the end? That made me uneasy, for one of two reasons.
Sexism: Jane is single. Alone bad. Friend good. Disney felt uncomfortable leaving a woman unmarried, out of tropes, pity and sexism. Or…
Homophobia: What do characters like George in Famous Five, or George in Nancy Drew, or Harriet the Spy, have in common? It’s a modern imposition, but tomboys in trousers in 20th-century literature tend to be (perhaps over-simplistically) read as lesbian. Jane Banks strolls around London looking like a refugee from a Sarah Waters novel (not just me), her independence (whether hetero or queer coding) inspirational. Can you imagine someone at Disney’s PR realising the subtext they’d accidentally invoked, and nipping it in the bud with this hasty, unnecessary romance? Perhaps I’m overthinking the corporate machine, but however you read it, this romance isn’t good.
but the cast aren’t bad This was exacerbated as Emily Mortimer was a ray of sunshine. She played Jane with childish cheekiness, self-assuredness, and real joy. The film should have been about her.
Lin-Manuel Miranda is predictably the next best thing, largely too due to the grin on his face and glint in his eye. Jack is the most fun character, and Lin’s fun is contagious.
Everyone else… Ben Whishaw’s reliably sensitive. The children are really talented. Julie Walters does Julie Walters but badly. Meryl was awful, awful, awful, playing late-period Johnny Depp – a wig with an accent (how can she have both the worst and best three-minute cameo in a 2018 musical?). David Warner is fine as Admiral Boom, but did we need to know he’s suffering from dementia?
And the star of the show herself?
Mary Poppins does nothing in Mary Poppins Emily Blunt is good, when she’s allowed to be good; with this shallow script, Dame Julie wouldn’t have been practically perfect. In original moments – “Music Hall” – Blunt shines. In lesser moments, she simply can’t.
Early on Mary says “I would have thought I’d taught you better than to comment on a woman’s age”. It’s a clunky telling-off, it can’t roll of the tongue, thus Blunt delivers it like an impersonator. Later, Mary is asked “How much do you weigh?” and gasps, at which I laughed. Give her well-written, natural sass (“Oh, I haven’t sung in years – D-flat major”) and Emily Blunt is brilliant and original. Give her bad lines, and Blunt can’t do much but moan. This makes Mary Poppins irrelevant to the story.
Speaking of which… Mary Poppins is irrelevant to the story. Take Mary Poppins out of Mary Poppins, and what happens? The plot barely changes (Jane and Michael get a nanny, Mr Banks keeps his job) but the heart does: the family don’t grow together. But take Mary Poppins out of Mary Poppins 2, and neither plot nor heart change. Having seen Saving Mr Banks and subtext being hard, Mary says “I’m here to look after the Banks children” about the adults, then barely helps Michael and never Jane. Michael plays hide-and-seek with a receipt, and wins. The children already dote upon their father so no rift to heal there. Take Mary out, and they’d pay off the debt together in the self-same way. Mary Poppins is an irrelevance to Mary Poppins Returns.
*****
All of these are ultimately relatively minor quibbles. Many come from the impossible standards of the original, which could never be met. All this film needed, as its own fable and following the greatest cinematic fable, is the same charitable heart. Not the exact opposite…
The Ending – Nowhere To Go Bert Up Quick question – where’s Bert? He cleaned chimneys; he painted streets; he made music; he’s Mary’s friend. He seemed to exist magically, simply to entertain the occupants of Cherry Tree Lane.
The Balloon Lady is Mary’s magical friend, a magical entertainer on Cherry Tree Lane.
So… After Julie Andrews said no, but Dick van Dyke said yes… WHY WASN’T THE BALLOON LADY BERT?
Regardless, the Balloon Lady should have given balloons to the children first (wasn’t Michael always head-in-the-clouds, whilst the children do the groceries and financing, adult before their time?) after which, with OTT cinematography, the jollity feels forced and the arcs unfinished. But the movie’s passed its most horrific moments by then anyway.
The ending is evil and ruins Mary Poppins Mary Poppins 2 supposedly sits in ‘nicecore’, a genre with a simple morality where goodness begets greatness. How their conflicts end show their values:
• In Paddington 2, Paddington needs to buy his aunt a lovely book, then doesn’t The End • In It’s A Wonderful Life, George Bailey needs to return home with $8,000, then doesn’t The End • In Mary Poppins, George Banks needs to quieten down his troublemaking children with a sensible nanny, then doesn’t The End • And in Mary Poppins Returns, Michael Banks needs to find collateral with the bank, and does.
The morality of these films is positively Biblical – kindness will be rewarded manifold. George Bailey’s altruism begets $25,000+; Paddington’s goodness brings his aunt to London; George Banks’ familial love promotes him. In Poppins 2, Michael’s victory is wholly transactional, a minimum of kindness with a minimal reward. They don’t find the shares by working together or outwitting the bank; they do so by luck, then run subserviently to pay.
Kate is an important part of the ending, in her final appearance. At the climax, Michael is given his childhood kite, patched up by his son with the only known image of his wife. It’s a moment that should hammer home how family is who, not where. Does he pause for thought, get emotional at his dead wife’s image, reprise “A Conversation”? Price of everything/value of nothing, course not. Suddenly, there’s gold in them thar hills, he sees the shares behind his wife. She is worthless to him now and he runs to the bank to chuck her away and pay everything off. He stops talking about her mid-sentence, and never mentions her again.
To his lost wife Michael sings “Where’d you go?”, and about the shares he says “I’ve just lost something very important”. Finding both at once, his priorities are clear; the former doesn’t matter and the latter really does.
Michael Banks grows up to be a manchild capitalist pig who shafts his dead wife to stay sleeping in his childhood bedroom. Had he said “Our family should remember us together”, Mary could have magically helped. Instead this ending is akin to George Bailey selling Zazu’s petals for $8,000, doing the bare minimum unkindly. For the superficial smiles of Poppins 2, there aren’t a lot of good deeds performed, not by Michael, and not by Mary.
This is where Michael’s “A Conversation” arc ends – shunting his wife for prime real-estate. But of course, he’s saved by something else:
“There was little boy named Michael who wanted to give his tuppence to a bird lady - but in the end, and after a little persuasion, he decided to give it to his father instead. Michael’s father - your grandfather - gave that tuppence to this bank and he asked us to guard it well. We did just that, and thanks to several quite clever investments - if I do say so myself... (Turning to Michael:) That tuppence has grown into quite a sum!”
The original doesn’t have a boo-hiss baddie as this has Colin Firth, but if it has a villain, it’s the Fidelity Fiduciary Bank. Thus, to quote from their ‘villain song’:
“If you invest your tuppence wisely in the bank/Safe and sound… you'll achieve that sense of conquest/As your affluence expands”
The bank wins. They’re now the heroes of the original. Mary Poppins once sang about giving your tuppence to the needy instead. “Feed the Birds” is now bad advice. Julie Andrews was wrong.
This ending is horrible. This film is horrible.
*****
And this is why I’m FURIOUS about the film. The original has those immortal lines “Come feed the little birds, show them you care, and you’ll be glad if you do”. This has the line “Look at that – all of us together in front of the… wait… “Certificate of shares!” This is it! This is what we’ve been looking for!”. This is the difference in outlook between the two films in a nutshell, between their hearts, and the reason I fundamentally love one, and the reason I fundamentally hate the other. Unforgivably, Mary Poppins Returns is uncharitable.
*****
Thank you for reaching the end of my Marxist/moralistic/queer close-reading of a children’s sing-song. In my next TED Talk I discuss the psychosexual ramifications of being a lonely goatherd. Whilst I’m clearly the minority, clearly wrong, the positivity about the film baffles me; I would love someone to point-by-point prove me wrong – please, please convince me that this is a nice film. What is its moral? But it’s fundamentally based on principles not of kindness but of capitalism. Its ending, its heart, are horrible.
It’s almost like Poppins 1 and 2 are alternate version of the same film, where Mary Poppins was made in Bedford Falls, whilst Mary Poppins Returns was made in Pottersville.
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