A month of ‘virtuoso eccentrics’

Hockney’s landscapes at the Royal Academy was the most joyful art exhibition I have ever been to. C and I spent three and half hours there, and thought that if there was a way to measure the happiness levels of visitors at the beginning and again at the end, there must be an increase.  Plenty of reviews have said that there was simply too much in this exhibition, of varying quality, but I didn’t feel overwhelmed by the volume, or bored by the recurring themes.  Hockney is observing the tiny details, the subtle yet dramatic changes occurring as the seasons pass, and invites the viewer to take pleasure in stillness, in the magnitude of the tiny.

‘It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven’  E.M.Forster

Hockney does do bigness of course, both in his use of multiple canvases and his perspectives on the Grand Canyon and Yosemite.  But I think the multiplying effect shows his fascination with the one square mile, and that it is by appreciating each part that we can wonder at the magnitude.  The majority of the pieces in the exhibition are of Yorkshire, the place of his childhood, and whilst it seems odd there are no grey skies, no muted shades, his bright colour palette creates a feeling that is celebratory, riotous.  He is in his 70s, and his workrate is prodigious.  That in itself is admirable.  Perhaps there is too much.  Perhaps his eye is not what it was.  But his joyfulness and vigour are ‘ebulliant to the point of jubilation’, and jubilation is the feeling created for the viewers.

Chick Corea and Gary Burton have been playing together for 40 years, and they seem almost to be reading each other’s minds when C and I saw them at the Barbican.  I know almost nothing about jazz, so had no idea what to expect.  I might have worried I’d find it a bit boring or inaccessible.  It was neither, I was riveted by their musicianship, and lifted by the sense of fun created by these two jazz legends.  A week or so after that, C and I finished our month of ‘virtuoso eccentrics’ with Camille, also at the Barbican.  “You’re my favourite French lady,” yelled one audience member, “will you be my girlfriend?”  She is unlike anyone I’ve ever seen on stage, vital and sexual and fun.  Her voice is an instrument, she makes musical noise with it, as well as straightforwardly singing.  She is a performer as well as a singer, her set is almost like a cabaret.  She borrowed an audience member’s socks to show off her moonwalk, and did a terrific cover of Wanna Be Startin Something.  Her own songs were joyous and playful, but never twee.  Wet Boy seemed to be both sexual and maternal, and her version of Too Drunk To Fuck was filthy and funny.  She is incomparable.

A Masterful adaptation

Andrew Lloyd Webber is one of many to have been (thankfully) defeated by plans to stage The Master and Margarita. The interweaving strands of 1930s Moscow and the Jerusalem of Pontius Pilate, magical realism and social realism coexisting in the same storylines, not to mention a naked woman flying across the night sky towards a huge, opulent and hedonistic ball hosted by Satan, make any potential staging of this novel a daunting challenge. Simon McBurney and his theatre company Complicite are known for their experimentalism and innovation, and their production at the Barbican in April was both. The stage was bare, the furniture minimal. The extraordinary lighting and laser projections did the rest. Paul Rhys as Woland and The Master was sinister as one and tragic as the other, Sinead Matthews as Margarita was fearless and committed.  Behemoth was a life-sized puppet, foul-mouthed and Liverpudlian-accented. The Variety Theatre scene used the audience, filming the first few rows and commenting on the clothes and shoes of audience members, modernising and adapting the source material.  It was an experience of ‘total theatre’, intense and compelling, and without being cowed by the source material Complicite did justice to Bulgakov’s masterpiece.  As B and I stepped out into the Barbican, B commented on how ugly a place it is.  I have mixed feelings about it, but the architecture that suggests at a utopian communality and dystopian brutalism seemed like an apt place to stage such a production.

Birdsong

I first read Birdsong when I was in my mid-twenties.  I thought then it was powerful, serious and (I cringe) erotic.  I read it again last year, as part of my university course.  I found it plodding, pretentious and the sex scenes squirmingly badly written.  Faulks is signalling to his readers that this is Serious Literature, but a closer reading shows overlong sentences, florid imagery and descriptive passages that could be cut back to a couple of sentences.  When I was younger and not so widely read, I thought overwriting meant real writing.  The Road by Cormac McCarthy proved to me that is never true.

On rereading, I still found the sections of the novel set in the tunnels to be the best, Faulks strips his prose back and manages to capture the terror of being in a space little bigger than a man’s horizontal body, tens of feet underground, fearing explosions or discovery by German soldiers.  He writes of the stench, the smell of blood, urine, sweat and dirt, the lack of light and air and the constant claustrophobic horror of dying underground.  It it compelling and uncomfortable reading.

The television version both improved upon and lost something of the book’s storytelling.  Abi Morgan (is there anything she isn’t writing at the moment?) takes away the redundant and unconvincing section in the 70s, and transforms the entire heavy tome into a screenplay that is surprisingly light on dialogue.  The love story therefore becomes more believable, more natural and carnal and free.  It is telescoped, of course, but that improves the book ponderousness.   The first part of the adaptation seemed a huge improvement on the book.  The second part however, focussing more on the final stages of the war and Stephen’s time underground, lost the intensity of the book.  The reader’s imagination will create the particular hell of those tiny, squalid tunnels, and a television version (or perhaps this version) cannot create the same experience.  The make-up department seemed unwilling to add any significant disfigurement to either Clemence Poesy or Eddie Redmayne, so this soldier seemed to make it out of the underground tunnels looking like an upset and slightly grubby Burberry model.  In the book, we have a sense of the physical degradation of a man trapped underground for several days.  In the book it takes Stephen several backbreaking and soul-destroying days to make it out of the tunnel, and after having made a promise, he drags Jack Firebrace on his back, bent double or crawling. Even when he knows the man is dead, he will not leave his fellow soldier underground.  At this point, the novel is almost unbearably moving.  The television version didn’t really come close.

The television version gave the story pace and energy, a lightness of touch when needed, and even moments of humour.  Poesy is very good and Redmayne is terrific, his is a very pretty face but he registers very subtle changes of emotion with his eyes.  He conveys the youthful lust of the earlier sections as well as  the dead-eyed trauma of the wartime sections.  It is just a shame that the book’s strongest section was telescoped and anaesthetised, the horror muted and the power diminished.

To be or not to be

It is a lifetime’s journey – watching versions of Hamlet.  Different actors, different directors, different times.  Olivier’s Freudian Hamlet was a sensation, Branagh’s stage version a sombre Edwardian affair.  Ben Wishaw was a teenage Hamlet, David Tennant was wild, witty and impressive.  My mother reminisces about Peter O’Toole, I wish I’d seen Simon Russell Beale.   Recently, I saw Michael Sheen at the Young Vic, directed by Ian Rickson.  It is set in a mental hospital in the early 80s, the audience enters through the corridors and rooms of this secure psychiatric unit.  The Young Vic is tiny, and we were in the second row, voyeurs as much as audience members.  Sheen is electrifying, disturbing, pathetic.  But this is high concept stuff, and the concept begins to show the strain.  Is Hamlet imagining this?  Are the other characters inmates or staff?  Are Gertrude and Claudius really his mother and uncle?  When Laertes goes to England, he really leaves the place, but when Hamlet goes, has he just been heavily sedated and put in isloation?  So the politics have gone, and so, for me, has the weight of responsibility on Hamlet’s shoulders.  There is little at stake here, there would be everything at stake were he in a castle, pondering the magnitude of killing a king.

This is a truly creepy production, James Clyde’s Claudius is sinister and oleaginous, and Vinette Robinson gives the most convincing portrayal of a complex and nuanced Ophelia I’ve seen.  I enjoyed the final sleight of hand, finding it entirely consistent with what had gone before.  But this production does away with ambiguity, with context and for me, loses more than it gains.

From Malick to Davies: anything by a Ter(r)ence. Gay love stories from LA to Nottingham.

We look at Rachel Weisz through the eyes of Terence Davies.  It’s similar way to watching Penelope Cruz via Pedro Almodovar.  The gaze is sensual, erotically charged, reverential.  Beautiful women photographed by gay men, the characters living out emotional torments and ruined love affairs.  Perhaps there is something about the suffering, the vulnerability of these women that is particularly resonant for men who (at least in these cases) would have spent a good deal of their adult lives loving and desiring in secret, or at least not in public.  The Deep Blue Sea aches with lust and regret.  Rachel Weisz is incandescently beautiful, and Tom Hiddleston is fecklessly irresistible as her lover Freddie. Simon Russell Beale as the judge, her jilted husband, is dignified and generous.  The final shot, of Hester opening the curtains of her grotty flat and looking at the view of a blitz-flattened street, is both a framing device (echoing the opening shot) and a suggestion of ruination and the rebuilding that is possible.  Davies has had a uniquely difficult time getting his films made and his visions on to screen.  The Deep Blue Sea shows the doubters that he is a British auteur we should treasure.  Ter(r)ences don’t come along very often.

A Single Man shows the final day in the life of a gay man in the early 60s, a man who has recently lost his partner of 16 years in a car crash.  Unable to grieve publicly, he has become hollow, an echo chamber.  George (Colin Firth) decides to take his life, but first must go through his day, almost as usual.  Every experience is heightened, gorgeous, sensual, slow.  He notices everything, feels everything, experiences everything.  As morning is almost breaking, he has decided not to kill himself, but his weak heart gives up, and he dies thinking of his lover.  It is a beautiful film (everyone wants a life photographed, designed and clothed by Tom Ford), poignant and tender and rich.  Weekend is filmed on a council estate in Nottingham, in a flat filled with charity-shop furnishings, inhabited by Russell, a quiet and reflective man in his 20s.  He meets Glen in a bar, they have a one night stand that, over the course of a weekend, turns into something more meaningful.  These are men for whom George’s struggles are at once in the past, and yet also present.  Gay sex is no longer illegal, and civil partnerships have brought a degree of parity to the place of relationships in society.  However there is still fear, and bigotry, and telling of parents to be dealt with.  Weekend is about the fear everyone has of opening up, of risking hurt and humiliation, of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, or saying nothing and letting the opportunity pass by.  They are films made by gay men about gay men, but a love story is always a love story.

It is a tree of life to those who hold fast to it

I first saw The Thin Red Line when I had just left university.  I don’t remember why I wanted to see it, perhaps I’d read a good review.  It seems an odd choice for my 21 year old self.  The film was unlike any other film I’d seen before then, and perhaps set some sort of standard for me.  Four or five years ago was The New World, with the same tropes and style.  Pocohontas was wrestled out of Disney’s clutches and given a story that, whilst flawed and no doubt also romanticised and fictionalised, attempted to capture the terrible strangeness of Europeans’ first encounter with America and its native inhabitants.

I went to see The Tree of Life last night, alone.  I prefer to see alone films that I know will affect me deeply.  I prefer to leave the cinema in silence, walk home in silence, and remain in the world created by the filmmaker for a bit longer.  So it was last night.  It’s a masterpiece.  It walks the tightrope of pretension (all of Malick’s films do) and perhaps there are moments of portentousness.  I think he is allowed that, because of the emotional truth of his filmmaking, and because he has earned this.  Malick reminds the audience that cinema is above all an artform.  It has become a deeply conservative artform, both in outlook and in structure.  He doesn’t care about straightforward linear narratives, or about reality, or worrying that the audience won’t ‘get’ what’s going on.  His vision is clear, and his execution is unflinching.  The result was visually arresting, emotionally devastating and unlike anything in mainstream cinema at the moment.  I say mainstream, because I went to see the film in my local multiplex (I know, I should be supporting local independents, but on this occasion it was convenient and I could use my student discount).  And the fact that alongside Tree of Life were the usual Hollywood offerings, dull and brainless, made the experience all the more heartening.  This is a filmmaker who expects that his work will be widely available, and that people will want to go and see it.  It’s not niche.  It’s got Brad Pitt in it, and Sean Penn.

Not every film requires a directorial signature that is so unmistakeable.  Some films are fine to be told as a story, beginning, middle and end.  Some films are designed just to entertain, and that’s also important.  But some films are made to remind us that cinema is not the poor relation of other artforms.  It can change us.

Much ado about un peu de tendresse

I went to see Much Ado About Nothing with David Tennant and Catherine Tate. It was the second or third performance.  The recent reviews have been glowing, so perhaps I saw it before things had settled down. The audience was full of Dr Who fans, and they were very vocal and very interactive.  I found that strange, annoying, but S said, rightly, that these days we revere Shakespeare far too much, and the original Globe would have been full of shouts, clapping and audience participation. 

The production was a romp, set on Gibraltar during the 80s.  It was funny, lewd, fast.  I enjoyed the spectacle of it.  The cast made the language come alive, the intonation and rhythm felt modern, conversational, accessible.  But I felt as if I could have been watching anything, not specifically Shakespeare.  For me, even in the comedies, there is a darkness, or a poignancy, or an emotional resonance.  I felt like this was played only for laughs, it was too broad.  It’s a difficult play for modern audiences, Claudio’s rejection of Hero is almost impossible to stomach, and can only be balanced by Beatrice and Benedick’s conversation afterwards.  Beatrice’s instruction to ‘Kill Claudio’, should send a shiver down the spine, and one of my favourite lines,  ‘O God that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market place’, should leave the audience in no doubt of Beatrice’s fury, impotence, and also her power.  Instead these lines seemed without depth, context, force.  For me, Tate didn’t have the dignity or the gravitas to make a great Beatrice, and whilst Tennant fared better, he still seemed a little too in love with the audience’s reactions.

But… I am a snob, and perhaps a narrow-minded one at that.  I feel strongly that people are turned off Shakespeare by lacklustre teaching, and a dull choice of GCSE set texts.  It doesn’t seem relevant, important.  So if a production featuring TV stars means that people who might not have watched much classical theatre can love Shakespeare, that’s a good thing.  I just feel that with a bit more subtlety this production could have been an investigation of human experience, rather than much ado about not very much.

In contrast, I saw ‘Un peu de tendresse bordel de merde!’ last week.  Dave St Pierre is a French-Canadian choreographer, whose biography (living with chronic ill-health) is quietly inspiring.  His production (A little bit of tenderness for God’s sake!) is hardly quiet.  When S and I took our seats, the stage lights were up, as well as the house lights.  A naked man in a blonde wig was sitting on a chair, squealing at the audience like an overgrown child.  It was discomforting and a bit embarrassing, not the nudity but the infantile noises.  The stage gradually filled with these baby-men in blonde wigs, and they were joined by fully-clothed women.  The very sexy compere, a performer known as Sabrina, gave a commentary on proceedings, on life, on dance theatre in general.   

The performance was all about breaking the fourth wall, very post-modern in all its innovation and all its annoying self-referential smugness.  The naked men climbed into the audience, even up into the second circle where S and I were sitting.  They squealed at audience members, flinging their own members in front of people.  It was funny, shocking, and very unsettling.  Audiences feel uncomfortable being singled out, given attention.  The role of the audience is to sit in darkness and appreciate the performance, not to become part of it.  So this was a clever way to discombobulate and disorientate.  Meanwhile the women on stage were attacking each other, ripping each others’ clothes off and simulating sex. 

The rest of the performance was a Freudian, post-modern assault on taste, delicacy and composure.  It was sometimes funny, sometimes boring, sometimes sexy, sometimes embarrassing. The dancers were not otherwordly creatures, they were professionals with dancers’ bodies, but they looked more liked real people than classical dancers.  The movement was more subtle than first appeared, but it wasn’t the focal point of the experience. It was quite the strangest thing I’d ever seen on stage,  I was enjoying it, but I also wondered what the point of it was.  Towards the end, the dancers stood on stage with bottles of water.  Sabrina teased the audience, asking us if we knew what was going to happen next.  I’m sure the first few rows of the stalls were bracing themselves for a soaking.  Instead, the dancers poured the water over themselves, and on to the stage.  They all moved to the back the stage, into darkness.  In the spotlight, Sabrina took off her clothes (she’d been fully clothed throughout) and started to roll around in the water.  She was then joined by the other dancers, emerging from the darkness, also naked.  The lighting changed to a soft orange, so the dancers’ bodies were in relief against the black stage.  To strains of Arvo Pärt, the naked dancers slid across the wet stage on their tummies, on their backs, on their sides, gliding alone and together.  It was adults finding their childlike innocence, it was joy in the beauty of movement, after all that had come before it was a scene of serene tenderness.  I’ve cried at films and plays before, if something is sad I’m crying in empathy.  I’ve been moved by visual art as well.  But I’ve never experienced a complete cathartic release (not a euphemism) at a peice of theatre before.  Tears were pouring down my face, although I wasn’t sad.  As the dancers slowly slid towards each other, forming couples, wrapped around each other, what they were demonstrating, and I was experiencing, was that despite the alienation we can feel, despite the cynicism and discomfort and overstimulation of modern life, what we all seek and move towards, is beauty, serenity, a little tenderness.