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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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Post by Nicholas on Mar 3, 2019 14:43:44 GMT
This again! After reading the UN’s eye-opening report on extreme poverty (it’s a 30-minute read and will be the best 30 minutes of your year), I immediately wanted to come on here and ask “Families must choose between food or heat, parents must starve for their children, mothers are forced into sex work – how can we get these people to see & Juliet?”. It may sound flippant to consider the theatre or the arts in the context of our country’s extreme poverty; instead, with its benefits, we should be asking more about arts access. I’d like to, ultimately, ask you a question about priorities, to which I don’t know the answer.
To list just the central gist of the UN report: swathes of our country simply don’t have the money to live. Food and bills can’t be both paid. Only parents or children get a full meal. The jobs aren’t there, nor are the benefits. Sex work pays for school clothes. Schools aren’t helping out, because they can’t afford it. Obviously, further opportunities cost more thus aren’t available.
Why isn’t it flippant to veer from this to La Traviata? Because choral singing is better than morphine. The health benefits are astonishing, the benefits of community profound, and the skills of teamwork and hard work and are great for everyday life. The UN touch upon community as a need, not a luxury. Any time arts funding is debated, the benefits raised are indisputable; are the benefits felt by everyone?
One issue that the UN also mentions, especially regarding the B-word, is identity. As another report suggested, after decades of feeling embarrassed about our working-class identity (shrinking not expanding what ‘Englishness’ means), we asked our country “Would you rather be English or European?”. That went well.
More pressingly, perhaps, many suggest issues like knife crime – on the increase after nine years of austerity – are the results of the closing down of libraries, community centres, and school facilities – ultimately, closing of opportunities. Rather than expand their identities via the arts or sports, young people’s identities close off into violence and gangs. Sincerely, the lack of drama classes (etc) may be responsible for young lives cut short, not metaphorically, but on our streets.
And one final issue here. Identity is often formed at school, via class, classes, classmates. Identity is also intertwined with opportunity. If your school has the chance, you can see yourself as an Oxbridge graduate, as a doctor, anything. If your school has none of those ‘little extras’ like books or pencils, your future identity is restricted. For children and especially late teens, a lack of long-term future opportunities means that there are few long-term risks to your behaviour now. Nothing offers opportunities more than the arts.
One reason ‘theatre’ fundamentally fails the working class, thus, is because theatre is perhaps the greatest medium to explore identity. Even only going to the theatre, you’re asked to pretend you see horses in a Wooden O. Furthermore, the skills you develop by making theatre are skills that lead to you becoming better: confidence, creativity, questioning. Playing Rosalind, a young girl both has to see Rosalind in herself – what makes her a royal, a rebel, a hero – and see herself in Rosalind – that her voice and face are the voice and face of this hero. Devising a piece about contemporary Britain where the Brexiters play Remainers and the Remainers play Brexiters (demanding empathy), whilst the political problems wouldn’t be solved, some of the ideological ones would be less stubbornly held. Every day I take the confidence, the inventiveness, the extroversion I developed in school drama lessons and apply them to day-to-day life. Too, most of my personality has been shaped by seeing so much theatre, and forcing myself into that imaginative, empathetic state. That the opportunities to act and to attend are untenable for swathes of our population – almost solely down class lines – should make us sick.
So arts aren’t just ‘a little extra’. Theatre for working class communities is important; this goes to all the arts. Choral singing can be the difference between wellness and remission, or develop a positive community path. The Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra did wonders when poorer children were encouraged into violence (because Venezuela is obviously the place to emulate), and similar schemes work here too. Surely giving every school a strong music department will have long-term benefits from career opportunities to the NHS?
Libraries are perhaps more important, and more tangible. In my first post I mentioned the class divide here, whereby poorer schoolkids were two years of reading behind, and how (OBVIOUSLY) a lack of access to books means a lack of opportunities for short-term academic progress and long-term academic (and potentially real-world) success.
All arts – photography, dance, baking, rapping – are door-openers and health-benefitting (sport too), and theatre’s performative and empathetic skills should be celebrated too.
School budgets, the EBACC, have been criminal with regards to the arts. It has actively discouraged people from doing things that help the country, help the economy, help themselves. Arts aren’t funded in schools. Instead, arts funding goes, almost entirely, to big buildings in the middle of an expensive city. All arts, including theatre, fail the working class, due to our subsidies; this failure has a trickle-up effect for our NHS, our safety, our referenda, our future.
The question I’d like to ask, thus, perhaps I shouldn’t ask at all. Were we living in a well-balanced, strong-and-stable economy, we wouldn’t need an either/or. Of course schools and arts should get due funding; however, we should ask who that funding helps, and if it can be used to help more people. As it is, though, it is an either/or, so:
Where should arts funding and subsidies go – theatres, or communities? As best I understand it – please correct me if I’m wrong – arts subsidies go not to the distribution of art, but the making of it. Therefore free museums, and subsidised theatre, are funded by the have-nots’ taxes but attended by the haves, and all the benefits (many of which are most beneficial at the bottom of the economic pole) are felt by the elite. Therefore:
Should funding go simply to theatres to make the biggest and best theatre they can, to appeal to regular theatregoers? Or should some of a county’s theatre funding go to the county’s schools, arts charities, community centres, and anything that offers the less well off the access and opportunities? Or, perhaps, should theatres/schools/charities that work with working-class and less-well-off people – Joan LIttlewood then, Anna Scher now – get as much funding as big buildings and national institutions? A collaboration, maybe – theatres should get funding for their in-house staging, but only if they use the funds to bring in, or tour to, their local ‘left behind’ communities?
And this is true of all arts funding – to galleries, concert halls, opera houses, literary funds. Is it enough to fund the buildings and the institutions, or should arts funding incentivise its orchestras and artists and actors to go to libraries and schools and estates and bring the arts where they’re needed?
Or, broader - if the arts are so important to our health, how can we make them for all, sans subsidies? What can we do to bring our theatre to where it's actually needed?
I’ve mentioned school a lot, but choral singing has health benefits for all ages. Books, whatever age, are empathy machines. Many am-dram groups aren’t young wannabe actors, but people later in life realising the benefits of this complex and questioning medium. Therefore, shouldn’t we be looking at arts subsidies for struggling communities? Mobile libraries and reading groups SPECIFICALY for, say, jobseekers and food-bank users? Community choirs where community centres have been closed? And of course theatre groups and theatre trips for people financially and geographically priced out? Obviously it’s not either/or exactly – but perhaps a county’s arts budget should be, say, between 50/50 and 75/25 theatre/community.
Personally, I can see both reasons for both sides, but I’d clearly veer towards communities. I do truly feel that arts funding spent better could save lives, boost the economy, help the NHS; all the evidence is there. And whilst people often cite and celebrate the financial and health benefits of the arts, no-one questions whether the benefits are accessible to the right people.
If the NT had to boost ticket prices (pricing me out of a show or two a year) to allow working-class communities (esp. those in extremer situations) access to the arts – and the social opportunities and health benefits that entailed – I’d happily miss a Common or a Macbeth here and there, and let the benefits of this great medium be broadly felt. Would you? We shouldn’t be in a situation where it’s an either/or to schools having libraries or not, but that’s where we are.
But it’s a passing thought. I’m sure many of you feel the exact opposite. There are many good reasons either way. I’d love to know your thoughts.
P.S. Also, semi-regular grumble about blogs and money – unless bloggers (who are better critics than ‘critics’, Letts and Treneman dear god) get paid, bloggers/critics (gatekeepers) are financially secure regular theatregoers (obvs middle-class), which preserves our blind-spot of failing the working-class. Perhaps funding should go to, say, an NT scheme that subsidises ten diverse bloggers for a year?
P.P.S. It’s also been about a year since Lyn Gardner wrote her article, and whilst I felt her article was a fascinating statement, I feel that this is an issue we ignore in the long term. Things are getting better (the Royal Court and Donmar are working with Kestrel and Clean Break so the opportunities and benefits are spread; companies like Cardboard Citizens do great work) but good enough? We should be asking this question – both in terms of on-stage representation but also offstage opportunities – more regularly. I’d love to know what Gardner thinks about the issues she raises, and what her interviewees think too. Looking at the last year, and the year to come, who is on our stages, and who is making the shows – and is it enough? And again - what can we do to help these institutions?
P.P.P.S. I can easily argue “Fundamentally a theoretical budget should go into a non-existent food-bank community-choir” to an insular forum of like-minded people and feel I’m doing something. I’m not. I want to. I’m probably not alone in being embarrassingly ignorant of companies and charities that are working to demand or implement action in this area. In any way – simply setting up a standing order, or hands-on involvement – I know some of you do charity work, school work, actually understand these issues in practice. If anyone has any practical advice on how to help with an issue like this – especially being evangelical about the arts, especially theatre – I’m sure many would appreciate hearing it. I really would.
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Post by Nicholas on Mar 3, 2019 14:37:47 GMT
WOW. This is a PERFECT production – interpretation, experiment, re-evaluation – of an unsolvable masterpiece. Maybe from 1971 onwards, with Bobby’s story so specific, trying to keep Company relevant is a fool’s errand. Marianne Elliott is no fool. Using this flawed masterpiece as her jumping-off point, Elliott’s given us – surprise surprise – an astonishingly intelligent, emotionally wrenching reinvention of it. Because of her, I ended up, somehow, MORE enamoured of a show I’ve found too narrow-minded over time, because rather than smooth its rougher edges, she’s bought out the roughest best in them.
Marianne Elliott’s Company (no-one defers to Sondheim more than me, but this show is HER (and Craig’s) masterpiece) takes the questions the original poses, and doesn’t so much answer them as reframe them. Sondheim’s Company is a funny beast – whilst incisive and nakedly emotional, it’s also rather quaint and quite of its time (“I could understand a person if it’s not a person’s bag”…). Bobby lives such a solipsistic life, his friends in such a rich New York bubble, so narrow in ideas of family, that much of their arguments are irrelevant to anyone outside. But oh that score… The show is like a family member – something I will always always always love (perhaps more than any other, better Sondheim), but boy can I hate it on a bad day. With Bobby’s small window onto the big world of love and marriage, I sometimes think that Furth and Sondheim ask some of life’s biggest questions of monogamy to a small man, only to come to some pat answers.
Why look for answers where none occur? This is why I LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE Elliott’s production. It’s not about the easy answers of “Whaddaya wanna get married for?”. It takes many of the oddities and inconsistencies of the original masterpiece and magnifies them – making it more aggressive and more inquisitive and more uncertain than ever, more relatable and more haunting as a viewer. She changes the pressure to societal in a way a bachelor would never face. She changes ‘Tick Tock’ from some bloke worried about a receding hairline to far more profound pressures. She makes PJ a cock, thus a ‘bad decision’, in a way none of Bobby’s three girlfriends ever were (and yet it’s the same bloody lines – how did that asshole line ever work?!?!), changing Bobby from a suave ladies’ man to you or me wondering why we made, and make, our bad decisions. Perhaps I wish the show gave more focus to the eternal pleasures of the single life, disposable boyfriends, than lip service (yes that was a cunnilingus pun), but even the staging of that scene was comic in its juxtaposition: asking whether having Richard Fleeshman going down on you is really worth missing out on marriage (um…). For reasons others have said better than I, the gender switch reaps huge rewards. My boorish blokey interpretation is that, actually, it’s easier to relate to her – a male Bobby can be just mopey, his pressures all individual and internal, but given that Bobbie’s pressures are largely put on her by society via people who ‘love’ her, ALL the relationships change and the drama zings better. Far from just questioning Bobby’s bachelordom, we’re now even questioning – due to modern life, societal norms and specifically female attitudes – why we’re looking for answers where none occur...
Rather than the over-conclusive arc of the original (Q: “Whaddaya wanna get married for?” A: “Someone to hold me too close…”), this asks us why we even ask that first question in the first place. Rather than try and update everything to work, she lets some things remain iffy and problematic, and thus asks us to look critically at the whole situation. Rather than (as productions that I LOVE do) end with some conclusive statement about whether Bobby is lonely or hopeful, “Being Alive” is more a question mark than a full stop. There are f***ing multitudes in this show.
And… “Another Hundred People” (alongside “The Miller’s Son” one of my favourite Sondheim songs). Whilst George Blagden doesn’t have quite the belt or brass that the song has previously asked for, the miniature everyday ballets happening in the background are an expressionist, subtle rebuke to the specificity of Bobbie. Shadows going about their day, to suddenly burst into tableaus of love and lust, a positively Gene Kelly-esque display of extraordinary emotions in invisible faces… So bold in its visual storytelling, everything that miniature ballet says about the little moments where love can be found turns Bobbie’s story into the story of every hopeful lover. It was so beautiful I began to cry.
(Also, ignoring the obvious, I hadn’t realised how funny the smaller moments in this were – and the rewards this reaps! The shift into that line “you’re always sorry” was an unexpected giggle with pitch-perfect timing, then the rest becomes more sentimental with this contrast greater. Plenty of subtler moments throughout. Marianne Elliott is such a good line-reader, isn’t she?)
And where she wants to preserve everything magisterial about Company, Elliott just lets that cast do their magic. Jonathan Bailey is extraordinary at neurotic, loveable, surprisingly tender and teary, and bloody hilarious – what else can you say, we all fell in love. We fell in love with Richard Fleeshman too but for different reasons. Really fond of Mel and Gavin Spokes’ touching ordinariness. And for extraordinariness, Patti… It’s Patti! Can’t put into words how great SHE was. I loved Elliott’s setting of THAT scene – seated and trapped, an intimate, less showboating, more pointed conversation – but my god, it’s Patti!
At its heart, though, phone rings door chimes in comes Rosalie. Bobby has always been an incredibly reactive role – one which requires the performer to watch other couples singing their hearts out, without truly expressing their own; many of Company’s biggest numbers, FANTASTICALLY done here – “Ladies Who Lunch”, “Getting Married Today” – are only tangentially Bobbie’s story; never watching Rosalie Craig does it feel anything but. She can go from comic to shocked in the same laugh, sure of herself to confused in just a step, and by (almost like a fourth-wall-breaking sitcom) taking us into her confidence, her smallest worry hit the back of the auditorium. She has such an ability to turn on a dime and reflect the fights and frictions – more than a mere bystander, you can often see the cogs turn as she turns others’ emotional outbursts towards herself, or unsuccessfully tries to deflect her emotional response to the madness around her. We just catch her looking, and looking… and we look right back. And this is just her NOT singing and acting! When that voice gets “Marry Me A Little” or “Being Alive”, bloody hell… However much Bobbie is meant to have closed that door emotionally, Rosalie Craig is such an emotionally accessible presence; having her play someone as emotionally inaccessible and confused as Sondheim and Furth’s apathetic and indecisive hero complicates Bobbie – now her emotional stuntedness is self-doubt and society and real depth, a muddle of giant emotions hidden behind smaller apathetic indecisive ones. And all this from how she mouths the word “wow”! Quite simply – I know I’m going out on a limb here, given some of your reactions, but sod it – I would put Rosalie Craig’s performance up there with Hattie Morahan’s Nora, Rooster Byron, and Imelda’s Mama Rose, as one of THOSE performances. She’s that good – but there’s something special about the way she brings this to life.
(Also, some actual family members saw this, knowing nothing about the musical’s past, and loved it as a ‘new musical’ – it just works)
One last thing – seeing it closeish to the end of its run, I still felt the air of an ‘event’ around it. Perhaps that’s just breathing the same air as Patti, I don’t know, but the audience seemed buzzing. I can’t remember an atmosphere like it for a while.
I hope it’s clear I was really overwhelmed by this. It’s extraordinary. Rough edges intact, Elliott changes the focus from questions about Bobby’s bachelordom to questions that are gendered and satirical and specific, and questions that are general that hit me in my personal life – and, rather than tie them up in a bow, forces us to leave the theatre, like Bobbie, emotionally rawer and wanting answers and personally vulnerable. I haven’t stopped thinking about this since I saw it – haven’t stopped trying to consolidate Bobbie’s uncertainties and society’s pressures, haven’t stopped thinking about THAT extraordinary performance of THIS Bobbie.
P.S. When I was younger, my simple dream in life was to see Elaine Stritch, Bernadette Peters, and Patti Lupone (and yet, somehow, my parents didn’t twig anything). The first of course never happened. The second moved me to absolute tears, from the back row – the very cheapest, very last seat – of the Southbank Centre. For Patti, I thought I was missing this and it was breaking my wee heart, but luck bought me to London, the day seat queue and – to see someone I’ve idolised for years – second bloody row. She looked at me. There were moments towards the beginning when I was just completely and utterly in awe. Even now I still am.
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Post by Nicholas on Feb 17, 2019 13:41:46 GMT
We are talking about the way male roles are written in romantic films specifically. I watch a lot of films.
Because the genre writes women so well...
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Post by Nicholas on Oct 27, 2018 10:52:22 GMT
Yesterday it was five years since A Doll’s House played its last show in London (a performance I was lucky enough to attend). Five years later that show feels no less nerve-shredding, tear-jerking, real, inspiring.
I truly believe that art can change your life, perhaps none more so than theatre – that brief time within touching distance of great dramatic figures. Sometimes the impact is obvious. You see a show about a Doctor and apply to medical school, see Mark Rylance and apply to RADA, see a musician and pick up an instrument, see a Chekhov and go to Russia, see something political and campaign for change. You study theatre. You learn something new. We all have that first show that’s our first love. Of course these are “life-changing”. But I believe that an encounter with great theatre is like a brief encounter with a mystery soulmate, gone afterwards but never forgotten – that one show like a lost love for you. It’s subtler, gentler, but no less powerful and always there. There’s such connection in that one moment that, years down the line, you can’t help but think back on it, call on it for help, love it. When life lobs big decisions your way, you’re inspired by friends, family, advice, experience – and those encounters, and that show.
I’m lucky to have a list of ten or twenty shows that stopped my heart and opened my eyes – cinematic inner lives in The Flick's small talk; Black Watch; the inevitable tragedy in everyday work in A View from the Bridge; all the encounters within The Encounter; the people places and things of Barbra Marten and Jeremy Herrin and Duncan Macmillan and Denise Gough; the Wooster Group’s one good show Gatz; the love letters redefining theatre of Farinelli and the King, Chekhov’s First Play, and Ellen Terry with Eileen Atkins. Oblique Ostermeier and Lisa Dwan and Pinter; also Les Mis. Plenty more. SEE CHEKHOV’S FIRST PLAY. It still goes on – just this year Fun Home gave voice to our unvoiced repressions; last year guess which seven hour epic still unfolds? For all the crap, and the majority of mediocrities, just one show a year like this – maybe even one moment – and that makes it all worthwhile. What will be next year’s?
But there are those certain shows that speak as if only to you – years later, these nights are key parts of your life. My other one/three is The Shakespeare Trilogy. Superb shows – Caesar so strong about control and revenge, Tempest so strong about imprisonment and redemption – these redefined who Shakespeare speaks for and who theatre belongs to, with brio and bravado and genius. Hannah’s ongoing imprisonment, brought new meaning by the Bard, will stay with me to my dying day. And over almost five years, a unique way of storytelling... And sod it, I loved loved loved loved loved Nell Gwynn and secretly it’s still my favourite show ever. Heartfelt and hilarious song-and-dances don’t stay with you unless they say and mean something; Nell Gwynn said and meant so much. And a dog too!
But the first time I saw A Doll’s House I stumbled out as if winded, whilst the second time I stumbled out fully knowing this show was a part of my life. Why? There aren’t words; there was everything there. I’d read it before so it’s not just Ibsen. It’s the richness Stephens’ speech had; the baby; the faux-familial set later a cage, a boxing ring, a carousel; Nora’s dance; the humanity Cracknell brought to everyone’s smallest moments; the ignorant sensitivity of Krogstad and Torvald’s performances; Act III; Hattie Morahan…
Whatever the reason, whatever the objective merits of the show, there’s something more – far more subjective, instinctive, absolute. I truly believe I’ve taken paths in life – outside the glitzy West End, regarding people I love and places I’m at – because of the shows that linger in my life. In the last five years five years of life has happened, and there’ve been times when I’ve been unconsciously imitating old shows, and decisions deliberately influenced by the domestic façade the Helmers put on or by Nora’s tentative self-aware semi-courage. When I say the show changed my life, I mean that.
Alan Bennett wrote “The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.” Personally I think that in theatre – where the dead awaken and that hand is reaching out in front of you, before the moment is lost forever – that feeling will always be more poignant, more profound, and more personal. I’ve seen some great shows – and of course A Doll’s House is a technically great show – but moments like this, particular to you? For you, I hope there’s at least one. For me, it’s this.
Anywho, this is a long-winded and extremely pretentious way of saying that the greatest show produced in my lifetime is wonder.land A Doll’s House.
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 29, 2018 20:54:33 GMT
" in a scenario no doubt familiar to highly-strung thespians – must be kept apart lest they try to kill each other." Interesting trivia! They're using the same policy and techniques as with Keeley Hawes and Sheila Hancock. I’m more interested by the line “he’s a bit of a fidgety-bum”. Do snakes have bums?
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 29, 2018 19:50:01 GMT
The product of theatre’s something I’d like to address. The product of theatre:
So…
The reason why some people are not going to the theatre because the product doesn’t appeal to them. We can dress it up as much as you want but that’s the fact of it. That’s like Jack Wills saying “Working-class people aren’t buying our clothes. They mustn’t hate our version of the product. They must hate the product: clothes”. Or a vegetarian restaurant wondering why they almost never attract carnivores.
I’d argue that most people see theatre (like cinema, like going out for a meal) as an occasional treat a handful of times a year, and we should divide the product into literary/political/theatrical and populist. Does it matter that Cats isn’t Das Kapital – Proletaricats? It’s escapism, for a treat Les Mis is better than London Road. That people choose to go when it’s GILT or Kid’s Week or when they can proves they like the product. That Coriolanus, War Horse, Phantom, and Billy Elliott all stormed the box office based on one day in UK Cinemas proves people want theatre - even SRB’s Lear would have out-done Captain America that week (obvs we can't break this down by region, and NT Live’s still stupidly costly, but it’s fair to assume most of these audiences are theatregoers who can’t go to the theatre) - that’s quite a diverse list of shows people are flocking to! That Jamie and Kinky Boots are thriving where Made in Dagenham and The Girls and Stand Up Stand Up Stand Up and Sing flopped proves that when people have choice, they choose (in the case of the great MiD, wrongly). But it proves that people like the product.
And also, isn’t the product associated with London, trains, the whole shebang? I love theatre but often hate the four hours it takes to get there and get home. My local is still 40 minutes away. I could afford the time and money, I felt at home in London theatres. Not everyone can, not everyone does. We can make the product better.
Do you want to know what REALLY got this subject under my skin? No no-one cares shut up already It was the smash hit show Act Without Words II at the Barbican. The cast was two. The set was a piece of cardboard. The theatre was the foyer of a block of flats. And yet, this accessible exciting ‘theatre’ was a London-centric snob-fest where a bunch of middle-class consumers commuted in and paid £20 per person for this privilege. This could have been for everyone so easily! But it wasn’t. Why not?
Last year, artistically, Punchdrunk took it further. But rather than tell a story about contemporary London to contemporary Londoners, it told a story about ancient theatre to ancient theatregoers – for fifty f***ing pounds a ticket.
And in 2011, The Passion electrified Port Talbot by being free and inclusive, prominent and progressive, and with the right audience in mind. Oh...
It’s not ‘the product’. It’s what the product sells, where it is, how much it costs. Bring revivals to the streets – as that Beckett did – and it changes things. Bring new plays to the streets – as The Passion did (without any clichés or politics of class) – and the people flock! Whilst it obviously incentivised some new theatregoers, not everyone involved in The Passion is now passionate about theatre, but whether as a theatre bug or random escapism, people like the product for different reasons, and for many Michael Sheen’s Jesus nailed it.
I can thus imagine that a promenade show about Grenfell, say – written semi-verbatim by someone like Vivienne Franzmann, cast with actors from that community, set and staged in council flats touring across the country – would be amazing, accessible, and so powerful in its message and its medium that it implements real change. I can also imagine it being the theatrical bug that bites its audience – that Fanny and Alexander and Follies are suddenly filled with families from Scun-thorpe [edited, because apparently S****horpe doesn’t get through the censors...] who fell in love with this. But how does theatre actually present relevant London working-class stories? In Islington for Islington. The Tricycle stages an immediate response, and so affected are its audience it that they themselves riot. ‘The product’, you say...
(This show just premiered. It seems intent on taking theatre away from theatres and into its right location, telling an important story to its intended audience. I’d love to know how it’s engaging in outreach, accessibility, and bringing in its target audience. We’re seeing a few shows like this - companies like Clean Break, Cardboard Citizens, Kestrel, which work within a disadvantaged community to represent it - but often they end up trapped in conventional expensive inaccessible buildings, Royal Courts or Royal Exchanges, told to the wrong audience. I mentioned Cathy, which played the Barbican but played prisons too. I loved Franzmann’s lived-in livewire Pests which played upstairs at the Royal Court, so felt like a story knowingly told for an outside audience - sensitively, but not inclusively. Whilst good starts, Helena Thompson’s The Burning Tower seems the best mix of medium and message and mission statement thus far. Perhaps it’ll fail, perhaps it’ll be unpopular, perhaps it’ll prove that yes this audience hates theatre - but at least it’s going out of its way to prove that. And if it succeeds? Well, it’s sold out. I was boooooooooooooooorn by the river…)
You CANNOT produce THREE Importance of Being Earnests this decade and then earnestly go “Why isn’t Earnest appealing to the same audiences who prefers Eastenders – it’s not us, it’s them?”. You CANNOT limit perfectly accessible shows to London alone, and complain that poorer regional residents – hell, poorer Barbican residents – aren’t forking out for it. You CANNOT blame the audience for disliking the ‘product’ when look at the product!
Frankly, any medium that presents three Earnests in a decade is failing everyone anyway.
I don’t even know what working class is any more. Does it mean you have to work to live? That would be 90% of us. Is it an income level? Is it social mobility? What exactly IS working class?
Oh, easy question...
Income? Definitely yes – but not just that. Accent? Loaded with assumptions. ‘Work’? We all work! Family? So it’s hereditary, like porphyria – mebbe, but then what about social mobility? Community? Kind of… State of mind? Yes – but what the f*** does that mean? Cultural standing? Perhaps, but isn’t that depressing if it’s permanent. Social Mobility? I’d argue in some ways you move classes and in other ways you don’t. A chip on your shoulder which you pass on to your children? Clearly something my mother didn’t have and nor do I… Wanting to seem cool? Apparently. Voting for Brexit? Statistically yes, but…
One thing Gardner’s article raises, that I decided not to tackle, is “white working-class” BECAUSE WE JUST NEED MORE WHITE PEOPLE ON STAGE. The differences (economically, culturally, geographically) between a former miner and a second-generation immigrant in East London are profound – but both come under this class umbrella. Compare Windrush and Brexit, two working-class issues. Can you define both with one term, then write a two-hour play solving both concerns? And this is where it gets really tricky. “Does theatre fail them both?” – for various reasons, yes. “Does making Maxine Peake associate artist in Manchester ‘succeed’ either?” – no, of course not! But does Maxine Peake continue to provide working-class successes in theatre? Yes! In simply asking “Does theatre fail…” we’re oversimplifying, and in reaching for one solution we’re going on a wild goose chase.
So to help with your definition, regarding theatre – class is all these things and more except when it isn’t. Accent isn’t class but in some situations accent is class, mostly in situations where class isn’t an issue. And sometimes saying nothing is positive. All clear now? Good, let’s move on…
Maybe at a tangent, maybe not, but Britain is known for "class division" and making people feel they are not wanted in certain environments. What happens in other countries where the culture isn't quite so divided, or at least, not so explicitly? Well, read this! This article is perfect. It’s relatable. It’s this struggle. It’s Australian.
So… What does that say? Is it a global issue? Apparently… That author doesn’t write about the culture of theatre, but the language. So, do we have to discuss the language of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Strindberg, Simon Stone, and Neil Simon? Maybe we do. Maybe it’s relevant. Kill me now.
And you know what? Somewhere in Australia, someone was reading that going “Oh, woe is you. Try being me – an aboriginal theatregoer”.
(My only caveat, though, would be NT Live. Shows ‘transfer’ not just across the country but around the world thanks to NT Live – and I broadly think a) it’s wonderfully done and b) it’s a miracle that Angels In America and Jamie and A View from the Bridge are global. However, NT Live is UK Theatre 2018. What does this list say about today’s Britain? What class hang-ups does make global?)
Nicholas, thank you for this. So many points to consider we should convene a conference. I think you might have been thinking about this topic for a while. One small point I would take up with you. About classroom teaching: I’m told that sometimes this is pretty dire. I myself taught Shakespeare, brilliantly of course. I see your point about leaving your own 'context' for want of a better word at the door and this not being a good thing. But consider how doing exactly that can free you. In the classroom you can be Macbeth or Mark Antony or whoever you like, male female, old, young, happy, sad, in love, jealous. You can explore blame, responsibility, relationships in a safe place, within a play. My experience is that this is liberating for all children. You can shake off your gender, your class, your level of wealth and actually enact the consequences. This applies to other dramatists too of course but Shakespeare allows it more, offers more and questions more. IMO. 🤪 Oh, only about twenty years.
That’s beautifully put! My only contention is that most syllabi ask us not to put ourselves into the texts, but to preserve them in formaldehyde. I’ve dug out my GCSE coursework – ““Mercutio is an insignificant, comic character in ‘Romeo and Juliet’. How far do you agree with this statement?”. I just repeated what we were taught in class – Mercutio’s like Mercury, there’s a lot about sex (that proves it – I’d definitely left my 'context' at the door if teenage me was writing anything about sex). So, as a kid, was I that academically informed about the Greek messenger God? Or was I parroting my teacher to tick enough mark-scheme boxes to get a C-A*?
“Mercutio is like Mercury” gets you a C; “Mercutio is like me” doesn’t. Which is better for kids and for theatre? Who cares; which is better for your school? Ideally, every teacher would be as talented and caring and enthusiastic and inspiring as you (and this is how I get the grades...), but not every teacher can be. Worse, to get the school’s necessary pass-mark quota, no teacher needs to be – they just need to teach the mark scheme. When we’re marked on dull historical fact, is it any more than a historical document? Besides, is there the simple ability to ‘stage’ the plays in a classroom of 20+? You’re 100% right and your image of Shakespeare in the classroom is ideal – but that’s if these playing opportunities are there. Otherwise, you copy Dr Miller and Lord Olivier.
And by the way, gotoashow.wordpress.com/ is wonderful! Thanks for flagging it up, that’s a kid with real flair and real talent!
It’s not like anyone *needs* to head to a theatre to be entertained these days. You can access top-notch entertainment literally anywhere with a decent internet connection using a device that a great many people routinely carry in their pocket. If you haven’t been bitten by the theatre bug then it takes something special to get people out of the comfort and convenience of their home-based entertainment routines. “Reason not the need!” I’d argue, though, theatre fails the working class; but they don’t ‘need’ the theatre - theatre ‘succeeds’ for me, an obsessive who ‘needs’ it - and theatre ‘succeeds’ for my brother; who’s a bit meh on the topic. At best I go 100 times a year; at best he goes 10 times. We have so many identical formative theatrical experiences, but he doesn’t care and I care too much (he watches a LOT more Netflix than I). So why has it succeeded that non-theatregoer? Yeah, he didn’t ‘need’ to see the Alan Yentob musical where I was wetting myself at the idea; but he had the choice. Both he (occasionally) and I (obsessively) feel a) comfortable at, b) geographically close to, and c) represented in the theatre. For us, theatre is as accessible and fair as that device in our pockets (that said, to this day, we both tidy up our accents in the theatre, presumably subconsciously, just to fit in at these ridiculous buildings, so even we still feel some subconscious discomfort). For working-class audiences?
Being bitten by the theatre bug is one thing, and I do think great potential theatregoers/theatremakers are being denied this by a) not having the opportunities to go, b) not seeing themselves and their stories on stage, c) not having the opportunities to make and tell their own stories on stage, and d) the financial and geographical issues regarding regular theatregoing.
But any old entertainment? Yeah, Angry Birds is entertaining on your phone, but that’s letting self-perpetuating London-centric snobbery off the hook! If you live in a regional council house (say Cornwall/Norfolk/Newcastle), maybe the Hiddlestonanus is up your alley, because he gets half-naked. Is there enough follow-up entertainment? I think 50/50. NT Live* is good, but would be great if its representation was – how many Cornish or Norfolk or Geordie accents or actors or characters have there been on NT Live, oh right, virtually none. Tours would be good, but most post-London tours are B-casts. And if the best escapism’s in London, look up a train from Cornwall or Norfolk or Newcastle to London… Now, bless the likes of Sheridan Smith, Tom Burke, Carrie Hope Fletcher. Bless Bill Kenwright, who makes musicals cheap and accessible. And bless Icke and Imelda and Mischief Theatre for doing theatre on the telly. Obvs, huge imperfections here - mostly that many of these theatrical experiences aren’t actually live theatre - but it’s a start.
And anywho, you can watch A Doll’s House on a device in your pocket! Obviously that’s a different form of entertainment to the Young Vic, but a positive overall - but if we’re showing how great theatre can be on your phone, shouldn’t tours and NT Lives show how great theatre truly is? Couldn’t that device in you pocket be the best introduction to theatre, if a broader, cheaper, representative form of NT Live was THAT accessible? I’m not sure - and I feel it’s spiteful to introduce theatre like this and then go "Come visit us in London" when train prices...
And as we know from recent movie blockbusters, representation in populism matters. So sure, maybe you just wanna see Starlight Express, but even then a train sounding a bit like you matters.
The next time you go to the theatre, though, let me know whether that show is accessible to that hypothetical kid in a council house in Cornwall or Norfolk or Newcastle (I keep saying kids, it’s not great for their grandparents...). If not (and the answer will be no), tell me whether the NEED of the person sat next to you is truly greater than that kid’s need. If not, it’s a postcode lottery and a snob’s medium. Horse to water, of course – bring that kid to London, they might hate it! But it’s the opportunity to do so for which we should be fighting. What do you have on your device that you don’t have at the theatre? Opportunity and representation. If theatre fails the working class, that’s how I’d define succeeding - opportunities to visit that you don’t have to take, and representation in the shows. And then, if Angry Birds on your phone is better? Your opportunity! Your choice! Your loss...
*Which NT Lives are popular, nationally and globally? The ones with posh people as kings (because mostly celebs esp. in theatre are posh, it self-perpetuates, kill me now). How is the UK represented in terms of multiculturalism and the coding of accents? Most leads are white (more so than the London stage overall, I’d guess), most non-RP accents are coded as villainy or idiocy or the like. I think NT Live is less diverse than the NT or overall London/national theatre. This is the theatre we present to the regions and to the world. I love that we send artistically daring shows, and shows about topics controversial in other countries, to other countries - that in a country where Jamie being out and proud might be illegal Everybody's Talking About Jamie gets staged. But in other ways, regarding class, race, diversity, opportunities, I’m really not comfortable with what our National Theatre Live says about our nation…
Final few quickfire points. At the moment, Poet In Da Corner is on. Mightn’t this be the bug that bites? Dizzie Rascal broke a ceiling there, became a real voice for urban Londoners, and his generation paved the way for mainstream grime, Plan B’s movie, comic re-interpretations, perhaps Kate Tempest, and of course the great Stormzy. The telly took note. Movies took note. The world took note. The proms took note! Theatre’s taken note – 15 years too late. That’s unforgiveable. I’m not arguing “Every show needs to be GRIME!”, I’m arguing “90% should Maybe, instead, three or four shows a year in London, and more in the regions, should be told by a broader array of artistic, cultural and regional voices – especially contemporary ones – whilst we also revive Salad Days and The Winslow Boy, because, you know, theatre can be a broad church and cater for everyone…”. That’s it. But it shouldn’t have taken 15 years for a show like this to emerge as one part of a broader season.
And, you know, money and London. Perhaps Poet In Da Corner – like its album – is the ‘something special’ that gets people out of the comfort zone, perhaps it's just entertainment for Dizzie fans… but hobnobbing in f***ing Chelsea? The London-centric arrogance and blind spots of theatremakers would be laughable were it not failing most of the nation, even where it’s this close to succeeding.
On accent, on Shakespeare. Can King Lear be working-class? That should be today’s GCSE question. I’ve spent a lifetime thinking this through, and… I don’t know. A king can’t be, they’re the ruling class! He can have a traditionally working-class accent – but accent isn’t class. He can be coded with working-class signifiers in clothes or characteristics or trinkets, but then isn’t that judgemental? We can locate it in a working-class community, but doesn’t that fundamentally change and lessen the national tragedy? You can cast a great working-class hero of an actor like Pete Postlethwaite – but then isn’t it offensive to take a Hollywood career as great and diverse as his and say “Even at 60, after all that, playing Shakespeare, he’s still him off of Brassed Off and Labour Ads, he’s always working-class”? Can contemporary class politics come into a 400-year-old play? A large part of me thinks “No”.
The Fool, however, is often presented as working-class – often having a traditionally working-class region’s accent, being made to look poorer, to carry class signifiers, and to be laughed at because of contemporary class politics. The killers in Norris’ Macbeth spoke funny, wore “chavvy” clothes and drank lager from the can – loaded with class coding, to be laughed at and disliked. You can define working-class as money, societal position, accent, culture: the comic, mock-able characters in Shakespeare in 2018 usually tick these boxes.
And genuine question - how would you feel if Goneril was Geordie, Reagan RP and Cordelia Cornish? If we can have place-blind casting, you shouldn’t bat an eye. If accent isn’t class (and it isn’t) these accents mean nothing. But why haven’t we had this kind of diversity on stage?
Final footnotes. I appreciate that my original post was ridiculously long and many of you didn’t read it (good thing this is shorter...), but if you didn’t, I’d hugely appreciate if you read my second point – about schools – and my final point – about NT Live. That’d only take you five minutes, and I think (more so than my loved-up defence of Sunshine On Leith as this generation’s What Is To Be Done?) they’re good microcosms of blind spots.
Gardner’s article is very much about who makes theatre. It’s indisputable that most people who make theatre are not working-class. On stage, this self-perpetuates, which is why we can comment. Change oodles off-stage, though, and we’re doing better. We need positive opportunities backstage.
Finally, you. You, too. Be selfish. When did you last see a working-class new play? How diverse are the revivals you see? Are theatrical leads cast with national diversity? Do you really hear a diverse range of stories on stage? How come all the best actors today happen to sound Eton educated? Do the actors in today’s theatre represent the country today? By limiting what stories are told and who by, theatre’s failing to tell the most relevant, broadest and best of stories. Sod the working-class, theatre is failing YOU!
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 9, 2018 13:43:12 GMT
Yeah, s’ok.
RSC meets RZA.
Even going in with the highest expectations, I found myself surprised and expectations exceeded. Lin-Manuel Miranda made one of the most glorious, joyous moments of theatre I’ve ever known from a powercut! Now he’s tackling the founding and history of America, of course it was going to be good…
Might just be me, but I’m coming at this show as me – a pretentious British theatre snob – so to begin I’d like to talk quickly about why I found the staging so exciting: because the precedents it follows are the radical, revolutionary theatre we’re still following today. If you don’t mind (mods, I think all these photos are official):
Hamilton, and Jesus Christ Superstar, 1971:
Hamilton, and two typical prductions of Brecht's Epic Theatre: Threpenny Opera and Caucasian Chalk Circle:
Hamilton, and Peter Brook's Timon D’Athènes:
And the image that stuck with me most. Hamilton, and the production that immediately preceded/inspired Les Mis by Nunn and Caird at the RSC, another example of Brecht’s epic theatre theory in practice, David Edgar’s Nicholas Nickleby:
I don’t think for a second that Hamilton was based on specifics here – but I think it was inspired by this type of theatre. Why would they stage Hamilton with the back wall so visible, the sets so minimal and the multi-rolling so transparent, if not to follow the traditions of these theatremakers? It deserves to be placed in THIS theatrical history as much as as the next Bye Bye Birdie. Yes great transgressive (and conventional) musicals are in its DNA, but more than just that, Brecht’s Epic Theatre, Brook’s Empty Space, Nunn and Caird’s Minimalist Musicals are in its DNA. I felt (and I felt this, differently, during In The Heights) that thrill of the demands theatre places on its audience – to imagine together, to risk together, and to be together. I think that’s why this has touched such a (inter)national nerve – because it’s a staging that puts us on equal footing to George Washington and King George, via these stripped-back precedents. Whether Miranda or Thomas Kail, it’s amazing to watch a musical take after the empty space.
The final duel, for example, is nothing but a Wooden O, an uncostumed actress as a bullet, time standing still, Hamilton narrating outside the narrative. I struggle to think of something else so bold and bare in its storytelling theatricalism and honestly the last thing I can think of is Brook’s Battlefield. THIS IS NOW A BLOCKBUSTER! Or, more thrillingly, the moment of the show, “Satisfied”. On an empty stage, we’ve got few signifiers and nothing literal, but a story vividly retold via its casting – and then from mixtaping, that rewind comes in, leading into an extraordinary quickfire rap rewrite of everything we saw before as that Wooden O rotates and roles are recast and rap rewinds together! It comes what, 30 minutes in, but it revolutionises everything that comes before – and sets way for an ending which suggest that, however much we may “erase ourselves out of the narrative”, we still have a story that deserves to be written about. It’s ingenious. You could watch Hamilton with no sound and it says it all!
But, um, seeing Hamilton without the sound… The lyrical genius of In The Heights is that “When You’re Home” or the Finale pack an awful lot of self-reflection and profound musings on home and family into seemingly conversational situations. The genius of Hamilton is it packs an AWFUL LOT of self-reflection into a) a 600-page biography and b) a potted history of America via American music. And yeah, Lin-Manuel’s a smartypants. But its several messages – of national identity; freedom; family; and biography itself of a sort – wouldn’t work if it was merely meretricious. I couldn’t begin to pick apart the influences and references that litter this, but I didn’t need to to have my heart broken by this. It’s never cleverer-than-thou. (And I’ve not got great hearing, and I’d estimate I caught 95% of it – so hooray for whoever’s helping with diction and mixing the sound!)
And something else I’ve noticed about Miranda – at least from his two masterpieces – is he gives his piece an overall musical shape, then every character a) a leitmotif and b) a musical voice, and weaves these together. I think the rap/balladeering of "When You’re Home" is still my favourite example, but here, isn't that true too? (I'm cutting this short as I wouldn't know where to begin when discussing rap/hip-hop. I only learnt about rap when, back at uni, one of my professors proved how relevant Homer was by rapping untranslated Iliad over Illmatic. This might sound like I'm trying to create a smartarse pun. I'm not. This happened.)
Obviously I saw this a lot later than most of you, but I thought Weston’s performance was really nifty. He’s got this lithe and versatile physicality, and through that I really thought we saw him age – young scrappy and hungry at the start, but tall and established from act two onwards. Alongside dancing/rapping, which he did with brilliance and conviction, I felt he aged and adapted to adulthood with great sophistication. Compared to him Sifiso Mazibuko as Salieri (saw the understudy) is a rock, ‘adult’ when we meet him and flawed because of his inflexibility (up until "The Room Where It Happens", what a canny number) – and I loved THAT contrast (is Terrera like this?). I also did think Pennycooke probably deserved the Olivier more than George III (also saw his understudy), his LaFayette the accessible pantomime this intelligent show needs and his Jefferson a cool mid-point between the extremes of Burr and Hamilton and actually the most fascinating man on stage. But this late in the run I’d argue it’s totally Weston’s show, telling his story to the back of the circle with total physicality (although, bless this show, John McRae should have won).
That’s my conclusion, as I desperately try to say something original about Hamilton years after the fact. The foundations upon which Hamilton are based are so steeped in this rich and radical history that, years from now, it will work and work and work, still feeling theatrical (as amongst other blockbusters, I’d argue, Prince’s Phantom doesn’t work anymore but Nunn and Caird’s Les Mis still does). And selfishly, as someone who’s been going to the theatre for so long and now sees THIS and THOSE INFLUENCES as the hot-ticket in town, GET IN! It’s an astonishing piece of total theatre. Lin-Manuel Miranda is two-for-two on the genius scoreboard for me (contemporaneously, I think only Annie Baker’s his equal there). This story of the life of Alexander Hamilton is the story of the American ideal and making history itself, but the telling of this life (with all those precedents) makes it an emotional gut-punch, a masterpiece.
And then. That ending. It’s a show that, in its final Schuyler song, completely retells what came before. The medium has been the message, in casting it’s spent two hours asking who lives who dies who tells your story. Yet it ends with Eliza – trusting, kind, silently resigned – as this song’s protagonist, and thus this musical’s protagonist, arguing that everyone on stage has a revisionist musical to be told about them. Whether we erase ourselves out of the narrative, or future historians don’t focus on us for race or gender or class or era or any reason, Hamilton asks us to look around, look around, and ask who else in current narratives needs to stand centre-stage. It’s just mind-boggling. Suddenly it’s about who quietly leaves a mark on history too. That final tableau, Eliza front and centre stage, relocating the entire story to the quietest yet most vital person on stage, absolutely broke me.
So, yeah, quite good, quite clever, three stars. Think Lin-Manuel might do quite well for himself.
P.S. To avoid spoilers, I’ve completely avoided this board. Does that mean I really spent, oh, five-six hours reading this whole thread on pricing and understudies? Course not…
P.P.S. I haven’t read the Hamilton hubbub, but I do want to read esp. about its creation. So got some qs. 1) Does anyone know the order in which the songs were written – I’m thinking especially was that last song always the last song? 2) Does Chernow’s biography end similarly? 3) What are the best things to read/buy about the show? Christmas is around the corner so recommend expensive things please!
P.P.P.S. If people are laughing at George here, but not in America, SO WHAT? Theatre changes with its audience. I’ve no doubt certain lines meant more to Americans, what with it BEING CALLED Hamilton: An AMERICAN Musical. Besides, What comes next? You’ve been ‘freed’. Do you know how hard it is to lead? You’re on your own. Awesome. Wow! Do you have a clue what happens now? Oceans rise. Empires fall. It’s much harder when it’s all your call All alone, across the sea. When your people say they hate you Don’t come crawling back to me You’re on your own… After June 23rd 2016, these lines mean a different thing over here.
P.P.P.P.S. Also, after the renovation, lovely loos! Very old fashioned cubicles. I am not throwing away my sh*t.
P.P.P.P.P.S. Because In The Heights seems a slighter work, I hope the genius of that show isn’t completely overshadowed. In The Heights broadens and expands the inner lives of everyday New York immigrants to the highest, most important, and most enjoyable of arts, and that’s as exciting as doing it for Kings and Presidents – indeed, it takes a certain mind to take “negotiating debt plans” and “running a dispatch box” and make equally stunning musical numbers from these moments. However good Hamilton is, one of my favourite individual moments of theatre ever will always be the Carnival.
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 9, 2018 12:24:10 GMT
It’s an interesting Othello – streamlined, precise, strong – but also one that’s strangely inert, simple, and (confusingly) not wholly suited to the Globe’s beautiful shared space. There’s much to admire and like, but it just didn’t manage to locate the play, to locate its politics, to locate its titular character. Perhaps down to its minimal set, its stripped-down run time, I was never really transported to a Venice that meant anything. Good things happened on stage, but it felt a wee bit stagey. Whilst many other problems were fascinatingly solved, it didn’t quite sell Othello: the great character, the great play.
It’s all about Iago here, who plays it for laughs, but unexpectedly so. At the beginning, as Rylance runs through those words at such a pace, this Iago seemed to be an evil Cyrano de Bergerac – unable to flirt himself, he makes others his mouthpiece, specifically about ‘romance’ – but whereas Cyrano uses his power for good, Rylance’s Iago is a selfish, nasty player instead, and where Cyrano can love, Iago can’t. It’s all about sex, or lack thereof – talking about his wife’s infidelity stops this sad Iago dead, but when dancing with Emilia his attitude isn’t lust but control (stopping her dancing with anyone but him, but not dancing himself) suggesting him sexually incapable, sexually frustrated. Unlike the other knights with their shiny pointy daggers, Iago has a baton, phallic but blunt and useless. I do think that permeates his performance. No motiveless malignity, he only slows down when describing Othello sleeping with Emilia, and the distinct silences after make this loud and clear. Whilst I think this is his motivation, he does seem to make it up as he goes along (shocked when Othello agrees to kill Emilia), and it’s this that’s interesting about his Iago – because then, these aren’t the actions of some revenger or even some malignity, but of a failure: a weaker, less clever, impotent soldier, surprising himself and relying on luck. It’s an interesting interpretation, especially from an actor who so easily invites audiences into his confidence – yes, he played things for laughs, but he did as the class clown who uses humour to hide his own deep inadequacies, a pitiful grin masking his loneliness. He’s pathetic, but never deserving our pathos. This makes Iago a hard character to warm to, but makes for an interpretation easy to admire quite a bit.
Incidentally, I LOVED Rylance’s Richard III. It might actually be my favourite Rylance role ever (no, still Endgame). It was all about the joy of evil, as if told by a friend who DID deserve pity, and Rylance connected to the crowd on such a chummy level it was soooooo thrilling murdering together. Whilst this approach would have been great for a Globe Iago, I’m kind of glad Rylance played him so unloveably pathetically – it made an interesting contrast.
Instead, it’s Sheila Atim who runs away with this production (Emilia’s the best role in the play anyway). Always dressed in gold (thus always the most visible person on stage), she’s a literal trophy wife for Iago, a woman he married for show not love. However, Atim gives Emilia energy and autonomy even when silent, through motion and through strength. Where Iago is pathetic, Emilia is always engaging to watch sing, dance and be herself. In a crowd scene she’s great at drawing attention to herself (unlike Iago), when talking with Desdemona she seems eloquent and paced (unlike Iago). She’s a good musician (unlike Iago) and she’s clearly still got a romantic appetite (unlike Iago). Rylance’s relative age is also played up, his baldness deliberately hidden yet often displayed – comparatively, Emilia’s youth makes her more autonomous and him more pathetic. A trophy wife but never on the shelf – if she was unfaithful, then, frankly, good! This Emilia struck me as as poetic and powerful as the man she was married to (and potentially no less morally dubious), but clearly more complicated, considered, and interesting, maybe moral too. I don’t think this is because van Kampen wanted to set Emilia up as Iago’s foil – I think that’s because Atim’s that good. Maybe Atim should soon play Iago? (she should definitely release a CD)
Andre Holland, great though he can be, gets short shrift, because if the production plays up Iago’s paranoia, it also underplays Othello's. Holland’s a lovely, earnest speechifier, and his slow sexual doubts nicely mirror Rylance’s – or would, were these two closer. We never see enough of Holland and Rylance together; it felt like most of the cuts were to Othello rounding out his character. Rylance often watches Othello (an interesting choice) but rarely talks thus Othello never has reason to trust, like or know Iago (a duff choice). Instead Othello's offstage infidelity becomes Iago's motive, not Iago becoming Othello's; thus Othello’s merely the MacGuffin in Othello. I’m attributing this to the two hour thirty run time, and this is the first time I’ve ever complained about a show being too short.
But just to make a quick comparison with the Hytner – Lester was better than Holland in and of himself, but in no small part this was down to the military setting, where his vulnerabilities had to be hidden with macho bravado, a self-suppression Lester played beautifully but wholly in the DNA of the setting. Here, what is Venice? A wooden O. Without so strong a setting, where is this Othello and what does he lead? (how was Ejiofor, and crucially also how was Grandage?) Here, too, smaller roles – Cassio, Rodrigo – were generally played for laughs, which didn’t help ground the show or give context to Venice. Even the full ensemble scenes emphasised Iago and Emilia – sadly sidelining Othello and the military themselves.
Now, my expectation of “Mark Rylance plays Iago at the Globe” were that Rylance would crowd-surf his way through these scenes, clown us into liking him, and darken the story as it went on. Instead, Rylance gives a really interesting, insular, counter-intuitive but inventive performance – and nothing on stage really leaps off the stage, Atim aside, Iago’s villainy included. Expectation vs reality? Perhaps, but I admire and like the textual ideas – I just didn’t engage with anything beyond its interpretation of Iago and especially Emilia. Indisputably this Othello: The Moor of Venice downplays Othello and Venice. But it’s good too: I’m happy to write all these things I found really, really, very interesting about how Iago’s a funny failure; how Emilia’s his exact opposite; how an old and impotent Iago is as dangerous as a young and virile one; and especially how, in fact, a sexually frustrated (involuntarily celibate?), racist, sexist, past-it wannabe soldier bullying their way into the big leagues is as topical an Iago as you could get. In theory I LOVE that – but why can’t I say I liked Othello? Perhaps because these were all readings of the text, and not, as the Globe always does best, playings.
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 9, 2018 12:06:13 GMT
Saw Fun Home with my dad. That was fun. My brother took my mum to Oedipus, mind, so he still wins.
“All happy families are alike. Every unhappy family is unlike in its own way”.
What I found hard to watch in Fun Home is that Fun Home is about “happy families” (or to rephrase that, fun homes...). It’s about families who smile for the cameras, with daughters in pretty dresses, who “polish and shine” – and what we have to repress to get there. Fun Home is one of the best shows about repression and unresolved lives you could hope to see; about family and all the mess that comes with; about love too. I found it a wringing look at how we lie to ourselves and each other, then a fantastical musical about why we should accept. Ultimately this all converges a message of hope, love, mess and reality. It’s complicated, and messy, but uplifting, optimistic, gentle, and wonderful.
“Chaos never happens if it’s never seen”. This line is through what I read the piece: keeping parts of ourselves unseen – because we consider it chaotic – and what that does. No other artwork deals with emotional repression so horribly accurately, yet so subtly. How many sentences, lines in song, are left unfinished? In fact, how many moments – the siblings playing games, Alison watching TV – are interrupted? More psychologically, what about Alison’s diary entries: “Saw a dead body today. Went swimming” – the necessary emotional response itself is interrupted. Compare in an early song “He wants, he wants, he wants…” with Teenage Alison’s own “I want I want I want I...”, or with Young Alison’s later “I feel… I want… to… I mean…” – most musicals have an ‘I want’ song, but to have the crucial ‘I want’ unfinished, repressed, explicitly unable to be expressed... What’s its other leitmotif? “Maybe not right now”. Thoughts aren’t given time to be thoughts, emotions are left unsaid then unfelt – for Bruce because of small-town America, for Alison because of Bruce, for Helen because of her family. Through both being so deeply closeted, we see where this repression ends up – self-doubt at best, suicide at worst. Of course this converges with the telephone wire duet, a fantasy all about hindsight and the realisation that, ultimately, what is left unsaid right now may always remain unsaid – which is why to keep Helen so repressed but for one song tells more than her singing twenty songs could (everyone is hurt by someone else’s repression), and why to end this on a contemplative note is ideal. In Alison there’s hope, but in all of it there’s great psychological realism. In behaviour, Bruce later expresses jealousy of Alison’s freedom to come out, but how many false starts did Alison have before she was able to feel free – and is old Alison free of Bruce? For Bruce, society represses him, whilst for Alison family does, the self does – both bring different horrors. Thus through Bruce it’s a broadly political piece about why societal prejudices are so dangerous, and through Alison it’s a study of the unconscious and unspoken but ever-present prejudices of those we love, and fear – and the juxtaposition of father/daughter shows how interlinked, and dangerous, these two repressions are; about how dangerous any and all repression is. Having written that, I really think this oversimplifies it, and makes it more of a ‘think piece’ than a ‘character piece’ when it’s both – and as a character piece it’s bloody heartbreaking from beginning to end, its book almost documentarian in how easily it portrays its characters’ home lives.
The genius of musicalising, not dramatising, is that chaos never happens if it’s never seen – but heard? A documentarian drama about repression remains repressed – the music liberates it. Like all families (like Tolstoy), to leave something unspoken seems safe, but by having romantic strings under Bruce’s nervy flirtations, metronomic control under Helen’s lines, that doorbell arpeggio leitmotif to let us enter the fun home, the chaos unseen is nonetheless felt through every unfinished musical melody. Anyone who has ever hidden anything from their family – or who has had something hidden away from them – can recognise the setting, the speech, the scenario, but hear the inner yearnings in the music.
Except the funeral parlour song, that was just badass.
This cast, incidentally, is perfect – all have form at playing characters saying it all behind the eyes. Bruce is portrayed with strange, unpredictable unknowability, yet Varla lets us understand him and care despite keeping his distance, from his stilted precision earlier to his manic open-eyed floundering as it finished, both twisted forms of the free person he wants to be. Jenna Russell can play everyday so well (perhaps the most difficult thing to do) and broke me in “Days and Days”. All three Alisons have a curiosity and eager determination that, as that curiosity becomes more adult and grounded, feels like the evolution of one person. I also loved the simplicity of the intimate staging, and especially what seemed deliberate allusions to comic-panels – very two-dimensional blocking, especially with shadows against a white wall (just occasional fleeting visual cues, thought that was very cute). My reading of the late set reveal was that, when the children were children, none of it actually mattered – the family really mattered more – but the more Bruce developed the house the less he developed himself, thus building quite a hideous cathedral to his own repression – “polish and shine”. Or possibly it’s just a metaphor for Alison now seeing things as they are in reality, though I prefer to read it as Bruce not seeing things as they are.
At its heart, Fun Home is an absolute celebration of freedom and being yourself, because on the surface it’s the inverse of this – a wrenching study of kowtowing to the pressures society, family, convention demand. The book itself tells a story only half-spoken, but the music speaks for the family’s suppressed emotions. Whether it’s Helen unable to come to terms with what Bruce can’t finish, or Adult Alison unable to do the same… And incidentally, I don’t think I’ve used the word ‘lesbian’ once, because so simply does the drama accept Alison and Bruce as gay and the drama is about the worlds prohibiting them from coming out, repression a villain and homosexuality a given – and that makes it high amongst the best piece of LGBT art I’ve ever seen. I have a tin ear for ‘be yourself’ works, but the difference with Fun Home is it never pretends that being yourself, for anyone (Bruce/Helen/Alison, gay/straight, male/female, whatever job or hobby or lifestyle), isn’t chaotic, but to ‘polish and to shine’ for society is to begin on a path with more chaotic consequences. Instead, it argues, always see – never repress, always accept.
P.S. Quick note that the sound balance in the first song or two wasn’t great, but was a lot better afterwards, so kudos to whoever’s on the soundboard for picking up on a problem and solving it.
P.P.S. Also, I’ve been going to the Young Vic for years, but never eaten at the Young Vic. It’s lovely! Had a delicious grapefruit lemonade, an exquisite vegan burger, and a cheesecake which is apparently a tribute to The Inheritance.
P.P.P.S. I’ve got to say somewhere that David Lan is a genius and a hero of mine and will be much missed.
P.P.P.P.S. All of that said, it’s still only my second favourite musical based on a comic book…
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 9, 2018 11:45:03 GMT
Friend of a friend worked at Oxfam, and her description of this was that it was uncanny in its accuracy – for her, walking into this set was déjà vu.
In 2016, two great works about the migrant crisis came out. Exodus: Our Journey to Europe was this story told by the immigrants themselves, their words their films their lives. It put you alongside the chaos and confusion of being on an overstuffed dinghy or nightmarish truck, negotiating the exploitative mob rule of buying your way across Europe, leaving one unwelcoming city and entering somewhere differently unwelcoming. It had no voiceover, little editing, no comment – it just looked. The other great work was Queens of Syria, about which Susannah Clapp wrote everything that can and needs to be said. What unites them is that they are both told by the people experiencing this without politicising or commenting, merely humanising an often too-distant news story. I watched Exodus on my sofa, and Queens at the Oxford Playhouse, stunned. Both of these had real people, describing real situations unimaginable.
Theatre, though, can do two things above all other media: immerse, and story-tell.
From the second I entered The Jungle I almost had to cover my nose. Being in the Jungle becomes a really shaking experience. The sound of a meeting or fight or who knows behind you, the constant hustle and bustle from before we even begin, the (edible!) food, the risk that you might (as I was) be moved or manhandled… Daldry and Martin and Buether turn us into extras in these lives, fellow residents, occasional friends, and equally desperate people, of course with the caveat that theatre can never TRULY recreate something like this, but it's as good a facsimile as can be. The sense of reality, the mess and chaos all around, is a triumph by Daldry and Martin. It really captures the sense of camaraderie, the sense of placelessness, and the sense of uncertainty. There really is no better way to tell this story than being this close to being there.
Storytelling makes anything palatable. As children, we make sense of a nonsensical world through stories, whilst we adults know simple narrative can’t make sense of everything. The Jungle is Safi’s narrative to a child, as he constructs a knowingly constructed narrative about how countries are created and communities thrive, about who immigrates and emigrates and why, and about the harsh, sometimes journalistic facts of the Jungle. It’s a different way to look at this situation, and one that’s valid and incredibly powerful, due to its construction never hampering its reality, and its child on stage a hideous reminder of the stakes of everything. Murphy and Robertson’s script is beautifully done. That it’s peppered with newspaper articles, clips on the TV, then goes into an epilogue about Safi’s untidy reality, reminds us this isn’t just his narrative.
We felt we were living in The Jungle; we learned about living in The Jungle. Most news stories are, if we’re honest, unimaginable. I can’t imagine what an Oxfam worker goes through when visiting corners of the world. I really can’t imagine living in a camp like this. Here you don’t need to imagine.
Does it matter that it was occasionally over-expository? Does it matter that key emotional moments were then footnoted with time-and-dated references to news articles or political releases, moments overexplained, scenes stopping to discuss political success or new terminology or distant laws? Does it matter that some of the experiences before the Jungle began, about why people are there, weren’t fleshed out fully, and the ideal of England was slightly underexplored? No. None of this mattered. There are a couple of points where I wanted characters like Salar and Okot to comment and judge (Was A.A. Gill attention-grabbing or patronising? When exactly WAS the time/place for the volunteers to be there?), and sometimes I felt that the show asked ME to comment and judge specifics but I lack the necessary experience and baggage to. But these minor issues are mostly in service to this immersive storytelling. It’s a show that felt lived-in before it started, from the Cliffs of Dover to the Afghan Café; where I wanted MORE information it would have been artificial to include, and where it (artificially) included too much it did so to thoroughly source its political blows, and did those blows land. It’s mostly an exquisite script, sensitive, broad, and rich, never pulling punches about the worst of the camp, the imperfections of the immigrants, and the pros and cons of the volunteers who went over to help (the authors themselves included; if it occasionally had to sound clunky to serve its purpose, so be it. It worked. (and I’ve always had a soft spot for theatre that is child-like storytelling, and this works here: both with having a narrator story-tell, and a heartbreaking child who deserves happier stories than this)
That The Jungle is cast with people who’ve lived these lives, and written by two who lived there, matters. Everyone on stage – with foibles and hidden depths – put their faces on this often faceless story. From the food smells to the music played to the accents we heard to the lives themselves, this matters.
At the end, this lived-in recreation gives up the façade, and turns to documentary footage. As I’ve said, of the pieces of work about immigrants, something that’s stuck with me, and will until I die, is Exodus. More than The Jungle, by presenting without critique footage from immigrants themselves, this presents a reality as it is. But the documentary can’t actually put us there. The Jungle does, it presents a reality as it is – and I think Buether does so with accuracy and success despite the obvious metropolitan limitations. It’s a great script, and Daldry and Martin’s theatrical triumph, but one we pay for and can leave at any time. Until the end. Then it’s no longer theatrical. Real footage of what we’ve been living in for two hours means we can’t chalk our experiences down to canny immersive theatricality, or a very strong script. We leave lucky to leave. Of course it ends with cathartic applause (a standing ovation), but before that it denies any true catharsis by reminding us that there is a real Jungle; this is only theatre for us, not for everyone. The Two Joes write an important political story, and the two directors lets the immersive Jungle itself take you there, but then that final footage from Calais today reminds you that it’s not a story at all.
P.S. The late great John Berger published in Ways of Seeing:
Watching the opening of act two – as the interrogation continued proper, and the brutality of escaping Calais was unforgettably laid out – this passage came back into my head, as the person in front of me downed her G&T, then slowly sipped her champagne.
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 9, 2018 11:35:41 GMT
Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is a wonderful wonderful wonderful piece of work, an absolute celebration of all its characters from sensitively putting its bullies in their place, to true family, to making Jamie the superstar he really is. It’s also the best British Musical since The Grinning Man Girl from the North Country The Clockmaker’s Daughter American Psycho London Road Matilda OK actually the British musical is in pretty rude health but Jamie is bloody wonderful – and the best musical about being British I think I’ve ever seen. Definitely the best mainstream British musical in yonks, mind (since Made in Dagenham?), and that’s worth celebrating. Saw this at a cinema abroad and the experience of sharing this celebration of Britain’s tolerance and wit and working-class life with the world was one I’ll treasure.
There are two things I particularly loved about this. The first is its rounding out of its main character, and willingness to make him even, occasionally, a wee bit annoying – bit of an ego, bit of a show-off – and DEFINITELY teenage, whilst also celebrating him totally – makes him more angsty, more real, more loveable. It doesn’t wear its politics on its sleeve, though I’d argue it’s quite political – it just uses them as background to Jamie’s life. Its closest precedent is Billy Elliot, obvs, which also keep class a background element but an all-important one, makes society its villain and not people, and celebrates being yourself – but Gillespie-Sell’s musical style is far more unique and developed, and represents Jamie and Jamie’s school better than John’s music does Billy and his family. On paper there’s not much to the plot, so it relies on characters alone – and what great characters Margaret, Pritti and Jamie are!
Personally, I also think it’s fab to have a musical so celebrate the English school – full of the high melodrama teenagers make of everything. You can tell the people making this know modern schools well and feel that awful nostalgia for those idiotic years (although is ‘minger’ still an insult? I swear that was old when I was at school). Especially, the last musical I saw set in an English school wasn’t Everybody’s Talking About Jamie but everyone loves Charlie everyone loves Charlie everyone loves Charlie everyone loves Charlie everyone loves Charlie everyone loves Charlie everyone loves Charlie everyone loves Charlie.
But this is symptomatic of why the show works – it’s immersed in its characters’ lives, in their reality. For a real boy in Jamie’s (fabulous) shoes, school won’t be cliquey but familiar, home is comforting, and attitudes the problem. Jamie’s mum’s songs had a lovely different calibre, a little bit Carpenters, as if songs from her musical not his, and this style vs the more pulsing younger songs shows how deeply Gillespie-Sells cares about reflecting the reality of these characters – slightly wistful for her, but the teenage songs have teenage energy, passion, optimism and full steam ahead. Because of this sensitivity and exuberance of ESPECIALLY the wonderful lead actor, the minor issues are papered over (couple of scenes too long/repetitive, older drag queens didn’t quite ring true, not quite enough plot for two hours thirty), and whilst Margaret’s songs are unlistenably poignant (I cannot get to the end of My Man Your Boy in one piece), for the most part you feel like the best parts of being a teenager again.
But what I really loved most about this was the absence of an ‘antagonist’ per se – a boo-hiss baddie to make life simple. Yes there were the bullies, the teacher, the father, but who had the big villain song? There wasn’t one. What made this richer and truer was that, instead, the ‘antagonist’ was the ease with which homophobic opinions could be spoken and shared and accepted, divided amongst everyone but just there in this society. Dramatically, having villains as ciphers for the hate is easy, but unrealistic – having everyone from bullies to strangers to teachers to family expressing bigotry, and Jamie’s subsequent own self-doubt, all mean that at the end the ‘antagonist’ (normalised homophobia and bigotry) is far from beaten, but the battle is totally won. "Out Of The Darkness" is such a great song.
Jamie takes a documentary which celebrates English school and northern culture and the freedom to be yourself, and doesn’t soften the hard edges, but changes them into something more mainstream and sing-a-long-able – it’s a great celebration of being gay, of being yourself, of standing up to those who aren’t willing or able to love you, and of being in a loving family and making family yourself. A bit like the hugely underrated mini-masterpiece Mermaid a few years ago, this spoke up to teenagers not down, elevated teenage hormonal melodrama into high drama and high art. Especially, of course, because of the brilliant brilliant brilliant John Mcrae who – God love Hamilton – was robbed at the Oliviers. It’s a celebration of just how to be a teenager, and the most fabulous teenager you can be.
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 9, 2018 11:21:44 GMT
Well. When they announced the sequel, I was worried it would be some naff reunion, the old guard back with no new faces. Then Cher joined the cast. That’s a new face.
I was surprised at just what an emotional kick I got just seconds into the film, with Amanda Seyfried’s older (Hollywood older) Sophie back in her hotel on her island. I’m not a huge fan of the original which I’ve only properly watched as a cinematic piece of art once and have big problems with; I do admire it for Phyllida Lloyd’s gender politics, mind. However, since then, how many times have I seen clips, how many parodies have I watched, how often have I listened to the soundtrack, how many parties with the soundtrack have I been to? It’s become a feelgood classic, Pierce Brosnan’s singing has become a ubiquitous joke (albeit a well-spirited one), and that film’s naffness a touchstone. If it’s on TV, however far in, channel flipping, that’s my evening. We’ve since had Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan and theatrical genius David Bowie dabble in the genre, not to mention the Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals Sunshine on Leith, but when you say ‘jukebox musical’ people think of Mamma Mia, and when people think of Mamma Mia they smile. Over the last ten years, Mamma Mia has become no better a movie, but it’s become much, much bigger than a movie.
Here We Go Again is, too, much bigger than a movie – but it’s actually a bloody good movie too.
The genius of Mamma Mia is that it’s a Phyllida Lloyd joint and does to Hen Night entertainment what Lloyd did to Shakespeare. Yes, it’s just silly celeb karaoke, but to quote Skarsgård: “Colin Firth, Pierce Brosnan and I were the bimbos. We weren’t expected to have an interior life, we were just to come in and be a little sexy and a little silly. So making Mamma Mia!, I understood how actresses normally feel.” As escapism goes, Abba karaoke’s great, but having James Bond, Mr Darcy and the Max von Sydow of his generation all still in love with, and sexually attracted to, a sexagenarian, and making (and showing) arses of themselves – there’s something subversive (for Hollywood) in there (Lloyd, of course, has form in reframing well-worn narratives to refocus on the female). The problem is, nothing’s at stake, it’s too happy-clappy, it’s objectively sh*te. “Slipping Through My Fingers” aside, by trying too hard to make sure you’re always grinning, it grates. Here We Go Again leaps over that first film’s great problem – there’s everything at stake here. In both new timelines, there’s greater love, more painful loss, and that ending that is just, completely, beautiful. And, where Mamma Mia was a hen night directed by a stage Shakespearean, Here We Go Again is written by a rom-com maestro and directed by a cinema man – on screen it’s a proper movie with more fanciful choreography and camera work, and in the script, characters now get bigger, better backstories that pack, oh my god, so many emotional punches. Both Mamma Mia and Here We Go Again are karaoke parties and boy do I love karaoke parties, but Mamma Mia sacrificed stakes for slush, whilst Here We Go Again was unafraid to give pause for sadness, sentiment, sacrifice and, even, reality. It also uses “The Name of the Game” which is currently my fave Abba song. In my (un-air-conditioned) sold-out cinema, you could tell everyone was HUGELY enjoying it (no singing along, but sporadic applause for songs and some for Cher and LOTS at the end), but the silence between songs was the silence of people fully focused and fully invested. I think this film satisfies its target audience’s need to laugh AT what’s on screen (helloooo Colin Firth stop pretending you’re not enjoying every second), but because Curtis and co don’t mind letting heartbreak be heartbreak and loss be loss, this will stay with me a lot longer than the original did – we can both end on a megamix and end on a note of loss and closure and hope and Meryl and oh bugger it I’m crying again
But as I say, Mamma Mia is more than a movie – it’s a party to which everyone (EVERYONE – old, young, shy, outgoing, gay, straight, disabled, racially diverse, any body type – EVERYONE) is invited. And so is Mamma Mia: Here WE Go Again (to which, again, EVERYONE is invited). When we return to Sophie, to Sam, to young Donna, and very, very crucially NOT to Meryl, it’s perhaps like seeing how tall Dan and Rupert and Emma had gotten since the last film, or even more pertinently, recreating that romantic pang of returning to Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Where are they in their lives now, actually older as we all are? Sky and Sophie are together, having problems, but aw he still loves her! She’ll be a mother, exactly like her mother! Donna’s friends are still Sophie’s friends! Harry and Bill and Sam have become true fathers! Sophie’s grandmother’s forgiven her and found love and yeah this subplot would be ridiculously underdeveloped and makes no sense but oh my god it’s Cher! Sam’s doing “SOS” again badly, but so iconic-ly bad is the original (“When you’re gone” “WEN YAW GUN”) that it’s strangely Proustian hearing that tune in that voice, memories cascade… For all the praise rightly heaped on Lily James, and religiously heaped upon Cher, I think Seyfried is the film’s emotional centre by dealing with Sophie’s loss and adulthood with poise and realism, and Seyfried navigates that with a sudden sense of adulthood that first film didn’t need, but which Sophie now does and oh bugger it I’m crying again
Don’t get me wrong – it’s objectively sh*te. Sometimes we zoom from one hit to another hit after three lines of dialogue not because emotion demands it, but the soundtrack does. The three young fathers are totally underdeveloped except maybe Bill but he’s the eye candy; Donna’s also somewhat underdeveloped by her ‘world trip’ being “Oxford, Paris, sex, Greece, sex, wanderlust satiated” (this problem could have solved by making the film five minutes longer with years of Donna’s travelling life a montage under this). The visual style of “Waterloo” is from an entirely different movie, this was the only song I didn’t like. Like all jukebox musicals there’s awful clunkiness in introducing specific pre-existing emotional beats (though given the film embraced it, I wish they’d referred to Andy Garcia as Fernando throughout, just to string us along until…). And to be wholly detached, some killjoy can try and logically explain the timelines. But here’s the thing. Like a hen night at a Nandos, Mamma Mia was objectively sh*te, but once you get into the party spirit who cares – and if you didn’t get into the party spirit (as Lloyd’s stagey production values made it occasionally hard to do) it was two hours of Abba Karaoke and where’s the fun in that oh wait that is my ideal Friday night. But whilst Here We Go Again was absolutely the party of the year (“Dancing Queen” with Colin Firth doing Titanic! Cher does “Fernando”!), compare the (equally jubilant) hotel party scene in Part I with Part II: Donna singing with the Dynamos got the party started, by being wish fulfilment and defying ageist Hollywood but just being a laugh really, whilst Sophie singing with the Dynamos (two of whom are still defying ageist Hollywood) got the party started, but by touching upon a deep emotional nerve ten years in the making it said something very sweet and surprisingly profound about family and loss and dreams and oh bugger it I’m crying again
Why see Mamma Mia 2 when I say I didn’t like Mamma Mia? Because I don’t like Mamma Mia as a film that much, but it’s become more than a film, a strangely iconic point in the sand – like the Harry Potter saga or the Pixar films, it’s a topic of conversation or a party theme or a way of life – and I love the legacy it’s left. And now Mamma Mia 2 is like Harry Potter 8 or Toy Story 3 – our inexplicable sentimentality returned to, aged and matured, paid off, chapter closed. My main issue with Mamma Mia was that its naffness felt over-egged and the lack of stakes too careful – but boy it is fun. Mamma Mia 2 is fun fun FUN, but more than that, it made me laugh and opened my heart and oh bugger it I’m crying again
P.S.
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 9, 2018 11:20:10 GMT
Waiting for the Telegram saw Alan Bennett perfectly prod at, yet praise, the worst and best of hospitals and their care of the elderly – the paradox that a place of healing is also a church of death. In Waiting for the Telegram (way ahead of its time), dying young and living old sit side by side, both an unimaginable hell, yet the kindnesses in these hospital buildings is unimaginably optimistic. This might be Bennett’s best Talking Head and one of Bennett’s very best works. Thirty years on, Allelujah! is that piece’s spiritual sequel, and sees Alan Bennett back on form – almost.
The Trotsky of Betty’s Tea Shop, as ‘Alan Bennett’ has become via his self-serialisation, has never quite written a play like this – overtly this political; thematically this morbid. Ten years after his masterpiece, the complex and conflicting The Habit of Art, and six years after People, an old man ranting at country houses but with a Tour De La Force performance, this mixes Bennett’s new, angry, political persona as cultivated via the LRB, and the sadistic masochistic Bennett, best seen years ago when Bennett’s cosy British institutions were intruded by a penis-obsessed Kafka and a penis-obsessed Joe Orton – two of Bennett’s bona fide masterpieces. The end result here? Gleeful, ridiculous, exciting, misguided, all over the place, a mess, a treat.
“We’re going to the judgement day”. Allelujah! is about death. Sadistically so. Had Derek and Clive written Here We Go, here we’d be – the awful reality of needing your nappy changed, losing your mental functions, albeit here with knob jokes. It’s as if the Reaper turns up in the living room, like Kafka did, out-of-place and ill-at-ease; Bennett brings the profound into the cosy, as he does at his best, brutally so. What Allelujah! captures best is that series of paradoxical emotions we all hold about hospitals – to love the NHS but hate hospitals, to want a great hospital but never want to go there. With the geriatric ward in his crosshairs, Bennett asked the profound question “How can we feel passionate towards a house of death?”. From Intensive Care to Talking Heads to especially the last scenes of Cocktail Sticks, Bennett’s always loved hospitals, but never liked them – and Allelujah! continues this. What do creature comforts matter, when they’re VERY temporary? How is success measured, quality or quantity of death? What is a good death – is death, ever, good? Bennett juxtaposed song-and-dance with immobility – it’s bleak. Bennett has onstage self-defecation and lots of it – it’s bleak. Bennett creates a community choir but argues that hell is other people – it’s bleak. As a study of death, this was absolutely nihilistic. Never has Bennett been as unsentimental as this – and by being so chirpy, it’s amongst the darkest humour he’s ever written. It’s a privilege to watch.
But of course it is a political piece too. The political ‘Alan Bennett’ of the diaries since 1988’s The Lady in the Van is as much a character as, say, Auden or Kafka or (perhaps the most fair comparison) Miss Shepherd herself – but despite subverting national subjects I’ve felt a certain reticence to stage politics. Suddenly, not. Bennett’s anti-austerity drum-banging is wonderfully on the nose, and Bennett clearly loves the NHS despite its faults. That Bennett all-but spells out his targets, esp. cuts and target-meeting, and pulls no punches is joyous to watch. I admired Bennett for managing to criticise the notion of the geriatric ward’s tweeness whilst literally singing its praises. I also always love it when he’s unsubtle with his criticism.
Via the Samuel Barnett and Jeff Rawle characters, I felt Bennett’s interest in the local was explored too – what is community? Bennett’s hasn’t really written about a northern community in theatre in years – but by presenting an aging community and the next generation, here I was haunted by questions of where you live and with whom you die. Bennett’s presented lifelong communities before, and here takes them to the end – whilst, in the Barnett character, asking whether Rawle’s desperation to call one place home is better than Barnett’s exact opposite.
Had this wrapped up five minutes before the interval I think the wool would’ve been pulled over my eyes and I’d wholly have loved it as cynical sketch satire, even his most fantastically cynical since Kafka’s Dick. My main issue, ultimately, is structurally – with ‘the twist’ that ends Act One. There’s a great polemical farce to be written, Arsenic and Old Lace meets Peter Nichols, about murdering patients to meet targets – had this been the Act One twist in a four act play, we would have had time to explore it proper (both plot-wise and politically). Withheld until the curtain, this comic exaggeration – about which I think Bennett has more to say – end up rushed and overloaded in the final interrogation, interesting but underdeveloped. Up until then his focus has been simpler – NHS, home, death – and there’s enough to be said in simple NHS love, Tory bashing, and nihilistic glee. Adding “Sister Killer” sooner would have mined more comic potential and explored the theme of euthanasia in sickening yet satirical detail, but adding it so late felt… forced, rushed. It’s a sign of the play’s sketchiness – too many dramatic arcs are sacrificed for five-minute funny ones, and this sinister idea deserves more than that.
Stylistically, Bennett himself called it a revue, and its sketches are its blessing and curse. In its bleak singalongs I sensed the ghosts of Lindsay Anderson and Joan Littlewood haunting this – serious politics made fun of via song. It harked back to his old collaborator Anderson, and look at how Anderson himself portrayed hospitals. I laughed at the dances, I winced at the medical moments, I marvelled at the politics – but I did all this with Beyond the Fringe which is just sketches not a story; I don’t think this was that coherent a play. Is that a problem? Yes and no – perhaps it’s easier to be political, philosophical and comical in short sharp jabs, but it’s harder to have Barnett and Rawle as their opposites, Findlay as the best/worst of ‘efficiency’, the porter as yoof today, or it to really land its political blows, when its best moments are so slight. That said, this revue style makes the death and pooping on stage even more subversive – to gleefully juxtapose gleeful routines with senility and incontinence and dropping dead… It’s a sketchy piece dramatically, but it’s an interesting callback to Bennett’s earlier dramatic lives, and one that works better, I’d argue, in mocking the incontinent than mocking the incompetent (ridiculous dancing to mock the Tory government? Late to the game there Alan).
Also, I uncrossed my arms at his fourth-wall-breaking Brexit-Windrush polemic, but it is embarrassingly on-the-nose and thematically belongs in a different play, politically it fits albeit uncomfortably – I’m quite forgiving of very blunt political speeches in plays (because I’m thick and it’s helpful), just here it felt that Bennett wanted to strike Brexit whilst the iron was hot whether this was the right play or not* – and why not? – but it felt a step to the left of the play’s central, eternal, fatalistic themes (because Brexit isn’t eternal and fatalistic, not at all). *Weirdly, a bit like Smiley in Le Carre’s fascinating last. Not a ridiculous connection – two octogenarian authors underrated in academia down to their genre choices.
(Also, given the way Bennett writes these days – giving Nick Hytner unfinished ideas and working it out together – one wonders quite what Hytner sees, and when Hytner sees them as ready. I’ve praised every idea in this play, just not the structure. Yet The Habit of Art is exquisite. We know it started a muddle (not even a play-within-a-play), yet from that a two-act layered masterpiece emerged. From this, something sketchier than ever emerged, and one wonders whether this is intentional or not. I’d love to know more about his relationship with Frears and Eyre and earlier collaborators)
Oh, and Deborah Findlay can do unshowy like no-one else. Without any actorly mannerisms, whenever she turns up on stage she always bears the life that character’s lived subtly but unmistakably. Yes, Alma had a speech later on to explain herself, but I think we could have guessed her difficult childhood and lifelong service just in how she handled herself. She’s an absolute bloody treasure.
Allelujah! is a bit of a revue, and like all revues some sketches work better than others. However, also, Allelujah! is the brutal, unsentimental work of a radical author, banging his newest drum. Bennett’s actual masterpieces aren’t quite as scattergun, up-and-down, and slightly unstructured as this – think the Pirandellian overlaps and sentimental memorialising of The Habit of Art, the pervy focus that pervades Pr**k Up Your Ears as biography and about biography, or even the self-contained scathing satirical sketches of Beyond the Fringe. But Alan Bennett’s masterpieces also let him let rip, politically, institutionally, philosophically – and thus the unsentimental Allelujah! may be the most characteristically ‘Alan Bennett’ play the great man’s ever written. As a play I wish it had felt more dramatic, coherent, whole. As a political diatribe, it’s on the money but a bit messy. But as a study of death, it’s bleak and bloody brilliant.
Four stars. I’m sentimental, especially when Bennett isn’t.
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 9, 2018 10:45:12 GMT
Are bears guilty of sh*tting in the woods?
Gardner’s article is vital, but there’s so much more to say. From my experience, it’s a variety of (occasionally illogical) reasons as to why people feel failed by theatre. Since Gardner, Maurine Beattie, Maxine Peake, Eddie Marsan (amongst others) have all chipped in from different perspectives – but all write in a bubble. It all needs to be compared. It’s all linked. It all matters.
So no apologies for dragging this up – it’s been on my mind for a while and we need to keep this conversation going. And before I begin: I know I’m oversimplifying/generalising, but isn’t this long enough? Short answer: YES. Long answer: it’s school, it’s normalised, and look at NT Live for a microcosm. Full answer: fasten your seatbelts…
*** “…and if it takes a whole day and wipes out their savings, then so much the better. Because it matters! It matters, damnit! We’re talking about the sublime.”
(At Hampstead, watching The Moderate Soprano, this got a round of applause. I squirmed in my cheap seat (£15), waiting for my off-peak train (£18), wondering “Does Sir David hate me?”)
Sir David’s un-inclusive outburst encapsulates a lot. Theatre is sublime! Tickets are stupidly expensive. Trains are worse. Theatre seems London-centric, and too much is.
16-25 schemes are essential for teenager/student theatregoers. What about retirees? Zero-hours contracts? Families on free school lunches? The Shakespeare Trilogy needed a diverse audience, but only discounted for young people, not people like Hannah herself. And, without much advertising, those 16-25-year-olds were, largely, booked ahead, already on board.
There are schemes such as the Arcola and Nottingham’s pay-what-you-can. I think it’s successful; it’s certainly welcoming. Could this work in the West End? I’d genuinely think that if cheapest tickets were, say, £15 or PWYC, people like us would pay “full price” £15 and others wouldn’t feel patronised.
And theatre is a terrible medium to see last minute, and if your job’s unpredictable and not just 9-5 (say, zero-hours) you’re unlikely to book ahead and can’t spontaneously attend.
Oh, and a train from one side of London to another costs £6. That’s nearly £25 for a family of four. Outside of London…
Theatre excludes working-class theatregoers, thus theatremakers: Sir David proclaims that art should be inaccessible and his audience cheers! Before talking theatremaking, we must talk accessibility for all. Mostly we should be militantly political about trains.
*** But this assumes an interest in and familiarity with theatre.
Joan Bakewell recently said: “Older people who go to the theatre are the ones who’ve got nice retirement pensions and can access the theatre easily and feel comfortable there after a lifetime of visiting, so they tend to be middle-class – I think the division between wealthy and poor accelerates as you get older, and so I don’t think you’ll get many retired older working-class people accessing the arts because they feel it’s passed them now.” (Bakewell said that on Front Row – a magazine show. A different discussion mentioned how magazine shows like Zoe Ball’s Book Group re-encouraged reading by being unpretentious. Can/does theatre encourage so? Can theatre make a Richard & Judy Book Group, esp. with NT Live, for new older audiences?)
If you’ve never encountered any Shakespeare, any Simon Stephens, any Sondheim, how do you begin? For familiarisation, entry schemes should be for all ages – beginner’s shows should be a thing.
(and (off-topic) Bakewell’s We Need To Talk About Death is FAB)
But why has theatre passed older working-class people? I believe a rot sets in a lot earlier – Rufus does too. I might be putting two and two together and making five, but please bear with.
Drama is taught wonderfully. Did you perform Shakespeare at school? It’s an empowering leveller, or just a bit of art in a child’s life. We know the arts are being excluded from the curriculum, and thus it’s middle-class parents who’ll subsidise schools’ loss. If drama clubs become optional or expensive, of course it’ll exclude. We need drama in schools.
English is taught… problematically. Did you study Shakespeare? Of course you did! Was it theatre, or was it torture? We read lines out loud – struggling with archaic vocab – and also occasionally watched movies. As a Reading boy I connected with Branagh’s Much Ado; I connected less with Othello as played by Anthony Hopkins.
Representation matters. Representation in school and children’s literature matters most. As kids, we don’t just want to see ourselves – we need to. Children connect best with books about people like them. It’s common knowledge that children’s literature skews towards white middle-class texts, and people are challenging this. Children’s theatre? For most children that’s not the Unicorn or even panto, that’s the Shakespeare you watch in school. Does it skew white middle-class? WE WATCHED A WHITE WELSH OTHELLO!
If we’re going to make Shakespeare part of the Key Stage 3 curriculum we need to place him in that context. “If you are from a minority background, it’s implied that you leave your cultural capital at the door of the classroom,” claimed Farrah Seroukh recently, and (white) working-class is a background left at the door with the theatre we study: Priestley, Bennett, Shakespeare. With no representative productions, what cultural capital can a working-class child bring to the Bard?
Can we nominate a playwright for 2019’s laureate?
Children and YA literature must serve as either mirror or window; windows showing lives you’ll never know, mirrors showing you. Theatre does too. Watching Cumberbatch, Mirren, even Dicaprio, or the bulk of the BBC Shakespeare, working-class schoolchildren never see mirrors. This is one reason why everyone needs to speak the speech themselves, in drama, SO DON’T CUT IT FROM THE EBACC. Otherwise, what is theatre, but archaic vocab and posh movies? Hell, I’m from Reading and went on many theatre trips, but with few mirrors, that’s certainly how my old classmates still see theatre…
Maybe I only love theatre because Branagh’s Ivanov was from Reading. That’s depressing. Thank you Reading.
Theatre is literary. It’s Shakespeare in the classroom. It’s Pinter, Beckett, O’Neill, Shaw, even Dario Fo. Three dimensional literary criticism. Words words words.
Literacy in the UK: www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2018/mar/02/working-class-children-born-to-fail-teachers-disadvantaged-pupils. The stats here are shocking.
It may seem comparatively insignificant – “working-class children are two years of education behind, they might miss Spamilton!” – and it is. It’s also obviously contentious and exaggerated. Theatre’s not literary, wholly. Even Victor Hugo isn’t literary. Or TPTGW. Or Stomp. But Stoppard, or Sondheim, or Shakespeare? I wonder: if “high income households are more likely to read books frequently than low income”, does that harm low-income interest in literary playwrights, like Priestley, Bennett, Shakespeare?
And secondly, Gardner’s article is about who makes theatre – “If you work in theatre and are constantly surrounded by people who went to private school and Oxbridge [which, shorthand here for ‘not working-class’, is telling] you start feeling inadequate”. “England also does relatively badly on equality of opportunity – in terms of the degree to which social background influences skills attainment. The only country where the parents’ level of education has a greater effect on children’s skills attainment in literacy and numeracy is the Slovak Republic.” Low-income households aren’t privy to the opportunities of high-income ones, especially in the arts, due to literacy – and we wonder why creative teams are predominantly from high-income families!
And for God’s sake, it’s families who can’t afford to buy books whose children have lower levels of literacy. Do we really bloody expect these families to buy a bundle of tickets to War Horse? Not only should we be protesting discriminatory library cuts, we should be bloody staging Shakespeare in them.
Without an education system instilling that drama is worthwhile, with a diverse and representative theatrical curriculum, we tell all children – especially working-class ones – that the stage and the arts aren’t for them. We have been for years. I’d argue that in drama we make theatre and in English we study it; if we cut drama, theatremaking becomes middle-class, and if we study English poorly, theatregoing becomes unwelcoming and discriminatory. Theatre in schools is neither a mirror nor a future for working-class children.
*** You lot. Sitting back, taking it easy, waiting for me To – what? Impress you, amaze you, show you what I’ve got?
These are the opening lines to Iphigenia in Splott, one of my least favourite recent shows (Sophie Melville is mesmeric, mind). Effie begins by acknowledging that she’s the only working-class person in the room. Us and them.
I had HUGE problems with Iphigenia. I felt that Owen appropriated working-class clichéd misery to preach an easy political point to a converted choir, a middle-class pantomime. If Effie attended Iphigenia she’d feel misrepresented. Why wasn’t Effie welcome to attend her own story?
Today, if we want working-class theatre, we do one of two things. Either we look back. “Why do they need to revive [Road]? Why isn’t the Royal Court putting on new plays that are dealing with the lives of working-class northerners today?” Do read this article, which goes on to aptly ask “when was the last time I saw a northerner on stage” and note that at the Court, “with its reputation for being at the forefront of every theatrical shift, RP remains the standard”. Whatever you thought of Road, it is amazing that there are no contemporary plays like it at the Court – indeed, Rita Sue was the ONLY working-class story told there last year, eventually... It’s a backwards-looking blind-spot.
Or we appropriate. “Brexit and events such as the Grenfell Tower fire highlight the growing gulfs between the haves and have-nots”, asserts Gardner; Gardner’s former Grauniad stomping-ground commissioned Sir David on Brexit, a have on the have-nots. Hmm. Some shorts are good (Gary Owen’s is thoughtful and thought-provoking), most aren’t (Charlene James’ is based on the twist that a sexy person is a Brexiteer); but who wrote, directed, performed in these, and who was their intended audience; aren’t Sir David, Headlong and the Guardian “block[ing] access to the opportunities and jobs that the middle class take for granted”? Anywho, the NT tackled Brexit, Rufus and Dame Carol; Rufus also set wonder.land in a contemporary state school with help from a middle-aged multimillionaire. Haves and have-nots.
But Grenfell, I recently saw Broken Dreams, and despite some imperfections, this was the real story told by the right people. You don’t need to live a story to write it, theoretically, but authenticity matters. Yet who is being commissioned to tell stories of contemporary working-class life? Could Andrea Dunbar break through today? Discuss.
“We critics are still a homogeneous bunch: no longer dead, white males perhaps, but still all middle-class and university-educated, still all white”. TV and cinema being accessible, working-class misrepresentation gets quickly seen and criticised in letters or on Twitter. Theatre being inaccessible, critics are our public voice of dissent, and if they’re homogenous, can they criticise?
And whilst I loved that blog about Road, I’m very upset that blogging = criticism. Criticism should always be paid. Not for the reasons snobby Shenton says – because if it’s unpaid, only people who can afford the time and money and comfort will critique, thus excluding working-class writers further. It’s cyclical.
How to change? How did Dunbar and Cartwright break though? Broader directing/writing schemes? Financial support for low-income creatives? Teach drama in state schools and, more importantly, have it performed there? So it’s governmental? Yes and no. When was the last competition for specifically working-class playwrights, especially mentoring for young writers; Stormzy’s recently, publicly started encouraging diverse authors and poets – great! – but why nothing similar for theatre, why never anything similar for theatre? Discuss.
Effie concludes “What is gonna happen when we can’t take it anymore?” This wasn’t a “shattering, angry call for immediate revolt” (how’s that revolt going, Guardian?). It was us-and-them again; a miserablist story about an inauthentic life told to a middle-class circle-jerk. Afterwards as the audience drank wine and discussed Aeschylus, I thought about the people I knew like Effie – this wasn’t their story. People like Effie can speak for themselves. There are ways to get Effie to tell her story. Collaborate with Effie, don’t write for her. Bring Effie into the theatre to watch, not to be watched.
P.S. Sophie Melville – the incredible star of this show – even believes that theatre comes across as inaccessible, saying of how she felt at 16 before coming across Owen’s earlier (better) plays and recognising herself in them: “I was just scared of [acting] being posh and it being Shakespeare and not being able to understand what was being said”.
P.P.S. Given how many careers can be kickstarted up there, how much does it cost to stage a show in Edinburgh?
*** Now, after the practicalities, entry points, and storytellers, I’d like to focus on four working-class classics: 1) Les Mis, 2) Cathy Come Home, 3) Sunshine on Leith, and 4) Henry IV. What goes on stage? What does that say?
1) Does Les Mis have something to say about class? Sod that, it’s a blockbuster. “Wanna see Les Mis?” – it’s a treat. “Wanna see working-class great Kenneth Cranham in a French puzzle-box about dementia?” – less of a treat. We can bang on but, for many people, theatre is a day out and that’s that.
But this links to London-centricity. I think that a show being a treat is great! The Father is not a treat. That it only played in Bath and London limits its audiences; financially/geographically, plays like this are ghettoised as London, metropolitan, middle-class. They need to leave London. But blockbusters? By now Les Mis is like Big Ben.
Quick comparison to cinematic blockbusters – Fast-and-Furious blockbusters are most popular than Bergman-y arthouse, yet London theatre struggles with Fast and Furious and stages Through A Glass Darkly/Fanny and Alexander/Persona/Scenes from a Marriage, TWICE/Bergman The Musical. “Theatre isn’t literary” he said… I’m not convinced theatre caters to the broadest of tastes…
But for many, theatre’s just the blockbusters, and why not? We must protest inordinate prices, but being in London makes for a capital day out, and ya snobs this is something tours like Kenright’s redistribute excellently.
(and, with Toneelgroep’s Blockbuster Musical around the corner, what a time for the big guns!)
2) Of all the great working-class plays – Wesker, Osborne, Cartwright (and their contemporaries...) – I’m mentioning Ken Loach for a specific reason. I Daniel Blake was a sensation – Loach’s 2nd Palme D’Or, referenced in parliament, it drew national attention to the issue of food banks. It’s a masterpiece. It peaked at 9th in the UK box office. On the other hand, Noel Clarke’s Brotherhood opened, just a month before Blake, to over £1.5 million more.
I’m moving to cinema, not theatre, because of accessibility, so success is easier to gage. “If we really wanted more of the white, working-class in our theatres we’d be making work that bounced off the sorts of stuff they do flock to engage with… the big and bold and tribal and gut-wrenching,” Gardner quotes, “But we don’t. We revive Chekhov in translations by David Hare. We do not want working-class people as they are, so we do not really want them at all.” Loach (politically) and Clarke (locally) tell lived-in, authentic, big bold tribal stories. The audiences turn up, esp. for Clarke. And whilst Blake and Brotherhood are gut-wrenching, both Loach and Clarke also made charming comedies. With Eric Cantona! People flock.
If you felt reflected in Kidulthood, where’s your reflection on stage now? And I wonder, was the audience of I Daniel Blake people like Daniel Blake?
Well, Cathy played both Barbican and borstals, which says it all – these stories can be great theatre for metropolitan theatregoers and visit their target audiences too, they reflect their audience, and they reach out to their audience, where there’s a will.
That’s Loach; Clarke? Why don’t we see these stories more often, or urban stories ever? Production snobbery. Kidulthood the Musical clearly WOULD be popular. If it plays the Noel Coward Theatre, it’s located/priced out of its audience. Touring it is less prestigious and not Olivier-eligible. A very urban modern story probably won’t play Broadway or warrant a revival. It takes courage to make theatre just for the here-and-now. Like Cathy.
So the twofold answer is simple in theory. 1) Have more working-class talent on committees – but Gardner details the unease there – but it’s step 1. 2) Broaden not just what’s commissioned, but where, for whom, and why; the RC or Hampstead or NT staging Cathy would be self-defeating without taking it further; look at Love, clearly vital, akin to Loach, but sadly inaccessible; the infrastructure for completely portable (and even non-profit) theatre (from regional schools to the West End) must be there. SO MUCH of this comes to government arts funding. Simple!
Start with someone established. Noel Clarke should make theatre! And Ken Loach! Nothing there could go wrong…
(“We revive Chekhov in translations by David Hare”. And by Icke, who anglicises to Uncle Johnny. And Anya Reiss, who sings along with Common People and adds ‘only after you’ve f***ed a woman’. And Dead Centre, who order a takeaway (at the BAC, MUST SEE, the best show about theatre I’ve ever seen). Yet I’ve never seen a Chekhov with Vanya’s line “What do you say’ll happen to us, me mam, and our Sonya?” That sounds like something my family would say; now there we are in the greatest ever play. But no, he’s always posh. On this, guess who’s leading the way? Gary Owen! Translators are not purists when it comes to setting, era, character, exactitude, plot, words. But why are we purists when it comes to accent and class?)
3) Sunshine on Leith is my perfect working-class play. It tells of two squaddies getting over the war and getting with their girlfriends. Somewhere in the background, they’re working-class. It’s never mentioned. It doesn’t matter. But they don’t flatten all the vowels and throw the R away.
“I often wonder why middle-class audiences want to pay to hear me tell stories about working-class life,” quotes Gardner, “And why is it that so seldom we are funded to tell the stories of working-class success?” I believe that’s because creatives perceive ‘working-class life’ as ABOUT working-class – that working-class people wake up and think “I am working-class”. Thus we revive A Taste of Honey, and leer at Effie’s middle-class appropriation, like well-acted Guardian articles. Theatre wants working-class politics, classics and clichés. Effie BEGAN by saying “You lot”, ‘othering’ herself.
Jamie doesn’t! Musicals have a better track record at keeping class in the background – ETAJ, Blood Brothers, Billy Elliott, Perpetual Succour, The Girls, Made in Dagenham, even Kinky Boots, even London Road (and even wonder.land). Why are musicals so far ahead? I’d assume that it’s because they’re often big-budget, crowd-pleasing fun: celebrating title characters (like Iphigenia?) who shout “Some of us belong to the stars”! We’ve not had a play doing this since when, Pitmen? Jamie is about coming out, Billy the miner’s strike, London Road collective trauma and redemption, but Sunshine on Leith is totally low-stakes – it’s your everyday boy-meets-girl – and yet it’s everything: a tried-and-true love story, authentic, happy. And working-class.
The telly does this too to roaring success. So there are clearly hugely talented, hugely popular writers and performers who want to tell straight drama/comedy about working-class success.
When we talk working-class stories, at best it’s Four Yorkshiremen and at worst it’s poverty porn. But it’s a discriminatory lack of imagination that leads us there. Why can’t your basic comedy/history/tragedy be any class? Why can’t any working-class story go from misery to happiness today a-ha a-ha a-ha a-ha?
…because writers write what they know, and most theatregoers are middle-class thus write with unconscious bias. It’s cyclical. But in theory why not?
4) In Playing the Part, Ian McKellen bemoans losing his Bolton accent because there was the preconception that the Dane needed to be posh, the Bard’s words RP*. Why, he asks, when Tom Courteney, Albert Finney, David Warner didn’t? Good question, and one he can’t quite answer.
Just this year, with Andrew Scott’s Hamlet a palpable hit, I lost count of how many people said “Interesting to hear Hamlet with a different accent”.
“How someone speaks is one of the markers for class, so it’s perhaps not surprising that some working-class artists find it easier to try to fit in by coding and putting on what Scottee calls “the arts version of yourself”.”
If accent is a marker for class, and it’s unusual to hear non-RP Shakespeare, Shakespeare is middle-class.
*A personal note. Born in Berkshire but parents from up north, I decided that losing any accent would be more like the theatre I saw, so spent my teenage years trying to sound like Noël Coward (who himself exaggerated his accent to impress in theatre). In many ways, it did make a better impression when going to uni, and going to the theatre; I heard very few accents like my family’s, I sounded the part. What does that say about a) inclusivity, and b) me? But that’s not my accent and doesn’t represent me – and you can never go home again, I can’t now lose this fake voice. It’s funny how crucial voices – literal, spoken voices – are to identity. Had I had more heroes in the literary world – more characters in Shakespeare or Chekhov on stage – with the accent of my parents or grandparents, I’d proudly speak like them. But now? What do I have? Is this my voice?
Group therapy over, back to the point…
Macbeth is another Shakespeare McKellen played posh, in 1976. His Porter was Ian McDiarmid, who dials up a daffy Scots accent to ‘other’ himself. In 2018, Rufus Norris put on his Macbeth. His Porter was Trevor Fox – a stunning Shakespearean actor – who “dials up his natural Geordie to squeeze laughter out of the Olivier audience”.
“‘Working-class character as detonator.’ The character in question will have little to no emotional life of their own and will exists purely to generate chaos or, less egregiously, to hold a mirror up to the other characters – to generate narrative tension.”
Wasn’t that McDiarmid in 1976? Isn’t that Fox in 2018?
What’s more damning is that Anne-Marie Duff – one of our finest actors – still has her East London accent. She’s lost it, though, to play a Lady. Fox keeps his, to play a Fool. Coding.
Natasha Tripney’s ‘detonators’ include Consent and Amongst Friends, and I’ve argued that the entire Iphigenia script was ‘working-class detonator as character’. Theatremakers know, expect, hope (?) that their audiences will be predominantly middle-class and feel comfortable using ‘working-class’ as a shorthand for ‘laughable’, ‘dangerous’, or ‘dumb’. ‘Other’.
“Those from working-class backgrounds often get typecast as working-class characters who are not only often caricatured and offensive, but are often also secondary roles and therefore less well-remunerated,” quotes Gardner. This is true from Consent to Coriolanus; how class is weaponised says a lot.
This is why, to me, Phyllida Lloyd’s Shakespeare Trilogy is our Hamilton: who lives who dies who tells your story (05:01). Both take a text that underpins our nationality (the Constitution for the US; the Bard for us), and both shout that these are for everyone – those who reflect our nation today. Yes, Lloyd’s trilogy was all-female, but think about the diversity of ages, races, nationalities, classes, cultures, body sizes, sexuality… Shakespeare – our National poet – belonged to everyone.
Wonderfully, I think that since all-female casts were compared to “a dog’s walking on his hind legs”, we’ve only gotten Glenda’s Lear on Broadway and Matthew Tennyson as Salome because of Lloyd’s pioneering brunt-bearing. But a production where Harriet Walter’s son was Claire Dunne and her daughter was Leah Harvey was about more. It wasn’t all-female – it was all-inclusive. Where else are Cynthia Erivo, Jade Anouka, Ashley Maguire, Cush Jumbo, Sharon Rooney warriors, wizards, kings, family?
Most productions are middle-class, but use regional or working-class as ‘other’. Lloyd threw this out the window. Few have followed her here. Why?
What is a working-class story? Prince Hal vs Hotspur. ANYTHING in British history is a working-class story. Almost anything in world theatre can be too. Cast it right.
If we cast all Shakespeares as Cumberhamlets and Hiddleston-anuses, we reinforce our quaint London sensibilities. Does that make Maxine Peake’s Hamlet working-class, her Winnie working-class? Not at all, accent isn’t class – but it means people from her working-class background see and hear themselves as heroes. The wonderful Trevor Fox is the ONLY Geordie actor I’ve ever seen on stage. Growing up I didn’t hear people who sounded like my mum on stage and I still don’t; I wanted to ‘fit in’ and still do. Had I known back then that Hamlet’s soliloquies could sound like Maxine Peake... That matters. What did Peake herself say about being inspired by Victoria Wood? “She sounds a bit like me”.
I don’t know how many people got to see The Shakespeare Trilogy on TV – my only mini-bugbear was despite amazing outreach, its temporary theatre was in London, not tour-able – but I hope enough people watch it and recognise the Bard’s words in their voice, and their voice in the Bard’s words.
Play these shows in schools.
*** Everything is interconnected. NT Live is a near-perfect second-best. The Olivier can ‘transfer’ to any cinema. It’s accessible! A national treasure like McKellen is classless – September 27th will ignite many first-time theatregoers worldwide (of course, his Fool has an othering regional accent because of course he f***ing does). I will fight to the death for it.
The RSC go one better, screening into schools for free.
However, this is the current NT Live season: Follies, Young Marx, CoaHTR, Julius Caesar, Julie, King Lear, George III, Allelujah! – and, aforementioned, Macbeth. Season 8: Deep Blue Sea, Threepenny Opera, No Man’s Land, Amadeus, Saint Joan, Hedda, Twelfth Night, R&GaD, Obsession, WaoVW, Peter Pan, Salome, Angels, Yerma. Diversity?
In those 23 productions, how many regional accents are going regional? Reliably Alan Bennett; other than him, 2 (David Morrissey and Trevor Fox). And no lead roles.
More Oscar Wilde plays have been transmitted in the last year than working-class plays in the last ten.
Instead, we get Macbeth, and its aforementioned problems, told to the world. Thank you Rufus!
The RSC is better (compare their Macbeth) but most of the RSC shows I’ve seen have still had this RP-accent bias. Showing THAT in schools is only so progressive.
We have to go back to 2011’s revival of The Kitchen (1957) to find the ONE working-class story, out of nearly 100, transmitted to the world.
So, why is the National not transmitting working-class stories? Well, what can it transmit? Rufus gets one thumb up with Love, Nine Nights and Barber Shop Chronicles (despite wonder.land, Iphigenia and Macbeth). Hytner had Elmina’s Kitchen, Pitmen and London Road (which took 5 years to get to Ipswich – and only via a not-good movie). Anything else? Across London? Oscar Wilde again? Is NT Live genuinely the best the Nation has to offer?
(Well, I think SRB in Collaborators was meant to be a working-class detonator, so maybe twice, via Stalin, hooray ? ? ? ? ?)
I’ve always loved NT Live – the National Theatre is finally National, and International. I saw Everybody’s Talking About Jamie at a foreign cinema, and to see that story go global made me cry. But how come the regions who only see NT Live never see their regions or lives? I want to love NT Live, but it’s that word ‘National’ that sticks in my throat. We should be in uproar.
*** There. 6 months after the fact, everyone needed my overlong opinion on the subject… It’s that NT Live statistic that sickens me most – yet it’s the best of UK theatre’s bad job. There’s such a rot at every level. When that’s so normalised, what does that say about theatremakers, and us as theatregoers?
Two quick postscripts. We in the UK have chips on our shoulders, but theatre is global. Toneelgroep in London attracts a middle-class metropolitan audience – in Amsterdam? Of course Broadway is elitist, but United States? “Bringing my working-class relatives into the middle-class space of the theatre; getting my blood family to meet my chosen family” sounds familiar – yet it’s about the exact same problem in Australia! Is this a global issue?
Let me end with one final, historical note. The Mystery Plays were theatre for the working-class, by the working-class, about the working-class. The actors and the audience were workers from York, from Leicester, from the locality. And who are the main characters? God and Jesus. Imagine such class-blind casting today! In British theatre’s beginnings, working-class stories were the Alpha and Omega.
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Post by Nicholas on Aug 4, 2017 16:25:59 GMT
Isn’t it strange to say that THIS is how to do a Bob Dylan play?
Early on, this Hamlet says “Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt... thaw”. He corrects himself! It’s an almost insignificant moment, but remarkable, and it sets the scene perfectly. What makes this production soar is how fresh it feels, how new, how it turns much of what makes Hamlet Hamlet on its head, for profoundly affecting reasons. And it’s touches like this, teeny performance techniques, that show how sensitively, wonderfully, expertly it’s all been done. I loved this Hamlet – for its freshness, for Icke’s innovativeness, for its intelligence in all aspects. And I loved it for moments like this, a moment of seeming newness, freshness, unexpectedness, and heart.
“Denmark’s a prison”. So says Hamlet, so once said Kott, so bangs on Billington. Here, Icke’s interpretation of that is both wittily up-to-date and relevant to all. This is true of all of Denmark, not just Hamlet’s – it’s a world in which Hamlet is the eavesdropper as much as the eavesdroppee; where Ophelia and Gertrude and Claudius too are as much a victim of this perverted public living as Hamlet; where even Claudius struggles to find a peace he needs, he deserves; where even the Ghost’s appearance is first found through illicit observation; and where, crucially, we’re implicit too.
From the beginning, this is a 24-hour Elsinore, an Elsinore always under watch. It opens with rolling news. It actually opens with CCTV. Before we’ve even gotten into the observation of the play itself, we’re watching observations. Before we’ve even gotten to Hamlet being spied on, Elsinore is being spied on. By the time we get to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern being used as inside access to Hamlet’s mind, the level of observation is almost oppressive. Of course, the key to Hamlet is that he’s observed, and with the TVs on and off, the CCTV always there, the walls like glass barely hiding anything, we’re never allowed to forget this. But the key to Hamlet is that if Elsinore is a prison, Hamlet isn’t the only prisoner. Indeed, this eavesdropping, ever-present Hamlet imprisons Polonius, Claudius and Ophelia as much as they imprison him. It’s a fantastically disconcerting balance, which enriches the supporting characters so much.
And then there’s us. It begins with us watching intrusive news, almost paparazzo like. We then keep watching. And keep watching. And whilst Icke doesn’t suggest the fourth wall isn’t there (mostly), he never lets us forget we’re voyeurs into private grief, intruding into this poor man’s privacy. At some point in the first half, I realised I was feeling really uncomfortable watching this, all due to the way in which there is no escape from observation – that, for his sake, we should look away. But can’t. At a few points, particularly as Scott’s all-too-relatable grief is relayed to the country (and crucially, too, to us eavesdropping in the audience) and Claudius advises him to hide his grief, I was reminded of that photo we all know all too well of the Princes marching behind their mother’s coffin, grief on display, but forced not to feel. When Hamlet jumps into the audience, it suggests an awareness of some audience – not that Hamlet knows he’s in a theatre; just that Hamlet (always on TV, always on CCTV, always on guard) knows that his Denmark is watching him, always, as a prison.
Not to say this is some Brechtian immersive mumbo-jumbo, but (as he did, much less successfully, in his 1984), Icke uses filming and technology and our observation as paying punters to suggest that even the fourth wall has a sense of complicity. It’s canny modernity, not there through pat reference or obvious allusion, but through thematic similarity alone – in the same way that Icke’s Vanya did little explicit to change a lot, this does too. And if I was reminded of the images of the Princes, that’s because I was equally reminded of how often we’re reminded of it as outsiders to the Royal Family, almost forced to watch their lives by the complicity of rolling news. In this Elsinore, I went mad almost watching it. The brilliant thing about Icke’s egalitarian Hamlet is that Elsinore is said egalitarian lead – and through a focus on that, every person here has their own arc, drawn more densely than usual, Hamlet himself only one aspect of this wonderful show.
Amidst this prison, it’s clearly the best ensemble I have ever seen in a Hamlet – I’ve never seen a Hamlet where every arc is so beautifully drawn. Because all of them have such a strong set to bounce off us – such a strong sense of uncertainty – all become more than mere ciphers to Hamlet’s story (as has happened too often in other productions), as all have their own part to play in this peculiar landscape.
The Polonius family (surname?) are such a tight-knit clique that the breakdown of that family, again, is painful to endure. Peter Wight’s performance perfectly judges a parent only his children could love – whilst tedious to outsider Hamlet, there was such affection towards this daft old bear of a man from the two children; the famous line flub, too, hinted at a real darkness there. Luke Thompson had a sensitivity that mirrored his sister, he’s a great actor. Standing out even further, the autonomy Jessica Brown Findlay brings is crushed so much by this oppressive world that her descent into madness is as compelling as Scott’s (and mirrors it nicely too). She’s loving, wise, and sensitive, in a world and at a time where such behaviours are brutalised and crushed – her madness, a still sadness in response to this, is grounded in real heartbreak, real humanity. Findlay, too, has a delightful rapport with Scott – when Hamlet dives into Ophelia’s grave, this was the first time that I believed Hamlet. Aptly, this was an Ophelia for whom death was quite romantic, for whom I felt so afraid.
Even more revelatory was the interplay between Gertrude and Claudius – through their early interactions, the play’s dynamics are wholly shifted. Was the argument of this entire production, actually, that Gertrude should have married Claudius to begin with? Possibly, as this couple very palpably hit it off in a way that made the ‘wrong’ relationship feel that between Gertrude and King Hamlet in the first place. In Wright’s performance, I felt we were watching a man who killed for love and inherited power, instead of a man who killed for power – I found Wright judged that character to a tee – the way that embarrassing dad-dancing and sleeping on the sofa led directly into international negotiations suggested he was never to be a leader proper. Crotty was a perfect match – someone whose sexuality clashes horribly with Rintoul’s ghost’s stiltedness, someone who manages to convince with sensitivity towards Scott, and who truly sizzles alongside Wright – although, equally, someone who reacts with very human horror to the very inhumane actions Wright very inexpertly orders. He was perfect as a sad old man dancing along to Dylan (I have family. I know). From the beginning, Icke repositions the central tragic murder of Hamlet being not about hate, but about love – and more daringly, about true love, reciprocated. It’s is the boldest decision, and it pays dividends – just in beginning with a tacky little dance, Icke repositions the play entirely to be about the destructive nature of love as much as anything else.
And so to our Hamlet? Where Icke’s imprisoning Elsinore works well is using this trap to try and conflate a complex man into one word. We like to condense Hamlets down to one characteristic; but how does one condense a man clearly struggling in grief, observed from every angle, having a great task thrust upon him, struggling with love, all into one word? Scott and Icke play with this. Icke’s Elsinore is the main character here – in the middle of this oppressive, voyeuristic state, how could anyone to thine own self be true? Going through grief, ghastly invasions of privacy, and ghostly visitations, any person would feel a multitude of emotions – and the way Scott’s Hamlet evolves (as too do Ophelia, and Gertrude, and Laertes, and rather movingly even Claudius) is far more complicated than one mere epithet. It makes Scott’s Hamlet feel far more three-dimensional, whilst equally remaining far more penned-in than other Hamlets – it’s this perverse dichotomy which feeds the play its energy. The fact that he’s allowed to correct himself, to be smart sometimes and not others, to be brave sometimes and weak others – perversely, it’s daring to let Hamlet be Hamlet, to let him be contradictory, to let him be human.
“What a piece of work is man!” he cries. “How is this piece put together?” he seems to ask again, and again, and again. If I had to summate him to one word, it would be, wonderfully, “fleshy”. Shakespeare’s Hamlet muses a lot about what death might be like. Scott’s Hamlet becomes biologically fascinated by what death IS like. Touching the ghost did more than elicit an emotional connection – it elicited a tactile connection, too, between living and dead, and that’s what drives this Hamlet. There’s a mirror between touching the dead but spiritual ghost, and later touching the dead but physical Polonius – two tactile encounters with death, one mental and one physical, traumatise this Hamlet, and frankly traumatise us. Later his response to Yorick is that of curious disgust, or disgusted curiosity – through having to be in physical contact with the posthumous plains – and similarly, having to come face-to-face with Ophelia no longer living is much the same.
Hamlet muses about what death might be like again and again and again and again and again. Naturally, he comes to no conclusions. Rather than focus on these maybes, though, Icke and Scott force him to encounter what death IS, in its physical, down-to-earth factions. And forces us to watch. It’s a hard watch, but it’s revelatory.
In being so resolutely about death, though, it’s very much about life – and THAT’s why this production absolutely sings (on the subject of singing – some of Dylan’s best vocals in there too – Desire!). What interests this Hamlet is the material facts about death as much as the mysteries of it – and by being so touchy about this, Hamlet has to be aware of the actualities of living too. And just as Icke repositions the central murder to be not about hate but love, so he repositions the central theme not about death’s uncertainty but life’s certainty.
Scott’s Hamlet’s tactile responses to death only work due to his equally tactile responses to life. His too, too solid flesh fascinates him, as he watches each finger move, each sinew do its work. His relationship with Ophelia is, undoubtedly, physical (as is Gertrude and Claudius). And this show loves every tactile moment of motion, of movement, of life. This is a world in which – whilst death is not the end – the mysteries of death, those mysteries that define these monologues, are tempered by the fact that life matters much much more – death is the absence of movement, a reduction of a man down to his basest lamest materials, whilst life is the joy of motion, of movement, of feeling, of flesh. If this is a Hamlet who loves to move, who loves to touch, who loves to hold and sense and feel, then giving all this up is more than musing on heaven – this matters here and now. Of course there’s still a mystery to death – but there’s an urgency to life.
Why does the end of Hamlet normally move us? Is it because we’re sad to see him die? Is it because we’ve all learnt lessons about the futility of revenge? Last time, it was because I was bored to tears. But this time, it’s because we’d seen death not as what it might be, but what it actually is – not life, not love, just nothing. Has Horatio ever come across as anything but a damp squib, after the melodramatic mayhem of the duel? Yet here, Hamlet’s invocation to live on matters. We’ve seen that there’s an afterlife, but we want to celebrate life first. Here, that juxtaposition of the ghosts going on – the dancing, the forgiveness, the best emotions of life being their legacy; that’s love – and Horatio actually living on, bearing the whips and scorns of time – well, that’s heroism, that’s triumph; that’s life.
We’ve a trend for confining our Hamlets down to that one characteristic we can take away. Once Frances de la Tour was the woman, Jonathan Pryce the haunted madman, David Warner the unknown teenager, Alan Rickman the underpowered braniac; recently Maxine Peake was the woman, Michael Sheen the haunted madman, Ben Whishaw the unknown teenager, Benedict Cumberbatch the underpowered braniac. For goodness sake, “the Grunge Hamlet”. What Icke and Scott seem to argue is that Hamlet is a man, take him in all in all. To observe him perpetually would of course be to drive him insane, as it would anyone – as it seems to do to Ophelia and Claudius and Polonius, victims of Hamlet’s eavesdropping as much as Hamlet is of theirs, here all contenders for protagonist. And to confine him to one characteristic – “ghost/devil, acting/madness, be/not be” – is to rob him of the chance to grieve, to grow, to heal. We see him as we see a whole. This – this all encompassing production – shows him as the man, in the world, in this reality. Other Hamlets I can remember through scenes, through moments, through descriptions – but this Elsinore is one I remember in its totality, in everyone’s totalitarianism, in its inability to be taken down to one element, beyond, surprisingly, life.
Except of course, amidst everything else I’ll take from this Hamlet – its take on eavesdropping, its take on madness, its various loving relationships – one striking thing stands out: it’s a hopeful Hamlet, a Hamlet about love, a Hamlet about life. I loved this Hamlet. Behind every beautiful thing, there’s been some kind of pain – and painful though simply watching this suffering go on is, its end result is one of pure and true beauty.
This Hamlet also has kickass taste in music – as does Claudius. That helps too. Desire at the Harold Pinter Theatre, Street-Legal at the Old Vic – my cup runneth over. Hopefully Nina at the Young Vic will feature this or this, and if someone could organise a showing of Pat Garrett at the BFI, and persuade Anne Marie-Duff’s crow to sing “Every Grain of Sand”, that would be rather nice too.
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