55 Days

Hampstead Theatre, 22 October 2012

Charles Stuart, the central character, played by Mark Gatiss

The contemporary relevance of the English civil wars is missed through a misguided attempt at tragedy.

Watching a dramatisation of the trial and execution of Charles I, we can expect to feel something in addition to whatever we feel when witnessing a tragedy – and in fact, this production wasn’t particularly tragic, for reasons I’ll come to.

That additional feeling must be related to the broader significance of the times, of these events. Perhaps some in the audience are satisfied with learning more about the most famous case of regicide in UK history, especially in the year celebrating Elizabeth II’s sixtieth anniversary.

Author Howard Brenton aims for more than this. In one of several clumsy expository scenes before the trial, characters explain that what they are doing is unprecedented. Monarchs have been replaced before, by force, but not through the rule of law. The dilemma is how to use a legal system that assumes a king is its final guarantor of justice to remove that same king?

Characters debate three possible political systems, still directly relevant to us now, with power resting finally either with one man, through his use of a veto (monarchy, but also presidency); resting with an elected parliament (republic); or resting directly with the people (democracy). 

It is possible to see these events as the moment when our current preconceptions about justice fitfully took form – that no single person guarantees (or embodies) the law, which gains legitimacy somehow from the will of the people, though ‘somehow’ is the key word here: few people have ever lived in a genuine democracy. 

To reiterate: there had been tyrannicides before, but they were backward-looking, claiming the tyrant was illegitimate according to the previous order.  Oliver Cromwell and company can be seen as the sharp edge of our emerging contemporary idea of governance.

Brenton doesn’t push this aspect, instead opting for a less demanding conclusion – that the current form of governance in the UK, constitutional monarchy, is the eventual outcome of the trial. I feel this misses out on the wider significance, and focuses on an outmoded, parochial aspect of our politics.

This mist, obscuring the wider interest, gets thicker when the trial starts. Charles takes centre stage, literally in this production, and his eloquent self-defence pushes the drama in a more personal, tragic direction. Incidentally this may help explain why the monarchy was subsequently ‘restored’, and stays with us, though in fact Charles chooses death before conceding to be such a weak monarch.

Here, if anywhere, is the tragedy. Charles is an anachronism (dressed as such in Howard Davies’ production). He dies for an ideal that held sway for centuries, but which is generally despised today, although we still support ‘strong men’ in say, Rwanda. This suggests he is not obviously wrong, and much could be made of his approach.

Unfortunately, Charles the man must take understandable precedence over his ideas. Brenton – and actor Mark Gatiss – make the most of him, but I didn’t feel too sympathetic, perhaps because Charles is not quite given enough room; he is the central character but only first among equals, a strange irony.

Focussing on the trial is therefore extremely damaging to the drama. It doesn’t give us quite enough Charles to make him tragic in himself, and it clouds the broader political interest as the personal interest must take precedence.

In addition to jarring exposition scenes, Brenton indulges in two terrible ideas: having Charles and Cromwell ponder what the other man is like, then having them meet. If either idea is to distract from its obviousness, it needs to be handled much better than it is here.

The production was unhelpful, seeming to take place in a contemporary school gym. This works wonderfully if the idea is to undercut any possible significance of the events.

Bronze

Royal Academy, 15 September - 9 December 2012

 

The dancing satyr, one of the highlights of this exhibition
Image from the website of Mazara del Vallo, where it was found.

More a temporary museum of bronze than an exhibition, but containing many powerful and thought-provoking objects.

During the thousand years of the Ancient Olympics, there were no prizes for coming second, much less third. But ‘getting a bronze’ would have been the greatest success an athlete could achieve, for it meant a statue of himself (rarely herself), supposedly immortalising his achievement.

Endurance is one of the characteristics of this exhibition: the endurance of bronze, but also endurance on the part of the spectator. Dozens of items, covering thousands of years and a vast geographic range (large parts of Africa, Asia and Europe), ranging from the mundane to the spiritual, and in size from tiny jewellery to huge statues, the only unifying factor being that they are comprised of a copper alloy.

The Royal Academy may need no further justification for this exhibition: the variety on offer, and the technical comments on making the items, would no doubt be helpful for any aspiring sculpture.

For non-specialist audiences, it’s still a curatorial nightmare – how to best organise this material? It has been arranged thematically in loose groupings, allowing items from different centuries and cultures to sit next to each other. The catalogue has been ordered chronologically, giving a very different journey through these items.

This exhibition has a museum feel, and as in other museums, a series of fairly random observations come to mind, rather than a coherent ‘review’:

Does bronze really endure? Where are all those statues of the athletes? Destroyed, along with so much else from their period. Astonishingly, beautiful items are still being uncovered, as with the frenzied figure above, found in 1998. But this is a melancholy thought, that so much has vanished.

Artists are rarely ‘true’ to the material. Metal sculptures can permit a wider range of forms than stone, and in depicting the human figure could allow greater feats of flight, almost literally. Whereas stone statues require a lot of weight on the ground, so are typically sombre, bronze people can do handstands, or rest on one foot. Yet across every culture, dignified – earthbound – postures are the norm. So why use bronze?

Satyr and satyress, attributed to Desiderio da Firenze.
Musée National de la Renaissance, Château d’Écouen.

Artists are more truthful to materials when it comes to sex. The image above is one of several items in the exhibition utilising the properties of bronze to depict a frozen moment during sex, including a wonderful Chinese coupling whose image I sadly can't find online.

Big is better. Bronze jewellery simply doesn't appeal to me as much as gold or silver. Whereas huge metallic statues or incense burners, or whatever, seem imposing and majestic. This might be a flaw of the curating, though - the temptations of the large always block out the tiny, whne they are next to each other.

Nigeria is really really trying to get its bronzes back. One of the nerdy joys of the exhibition was the simple variety of lending institutions, many of them tiny and so presumably losing significant attractions through these loans. The number of Nigerian loans, including one not in the catalogue, made me wonder if there might be an ulterior motive.

Filmaktion

Tate Modern, 16-21 October 2012



Sicherheits, by William Easterley, shown in the Tanks

(more videos have been uploaded and available from YouTube)

An exciting failed attempt to find meaningful alternatives to narrative cinema.

When I think of a major contemporary art gallery, at least the municipal galleries used to celebrate the culture of some city or other, I think of cavernous rooms and large installations or video art. It’s as if the building, needing to be big to make the appropriate statement, requires these art forms in order to justify itself.

A parody, I’m sure. But Tate Modern, already dominated (oppressed?) by its Turbine Hall, now has further caverns to fill, in the Tanks.

Last week, the task of entertaining visitors to these spaces fell to Filmaktion, a group of British pioneers of ‘expanded cinema’.

One of these pioneers, Malcolm Le Grice, is also a theorist, and his essay in the Expanded Cinema book published by Tate, is fascinating, an attempt to define different aspects of his art that is both clear and though-provoking.

Le Grice develops ideas from two assertions – firstly that narrative cinema is a special case of the options open to filmmakers and audiences, and secondly that narrative cinema is oppressive.

Le Grice is extremely interesting on the different types of non-narrative cinema, both when writing and also in putting these ideas into practice. But it isn’t clear that these artworks truly go ‘beyond narrative’, for I find myself providing a narrative, something Le Grice admits is possible at the very end of his essay.

I have greater problems with the second assertion, that narrative cinema is intrinsically oppressive. This is also a fatalistic assertion if it turns out to be impossible to create non-narrative cinema. Yet I'm still thrilled to witness artists exploring a new approach in order to free us from oppression, whether or not this happens.

This sense of doing something liberating and important is present in the artworks, though humour and lightness are also present, so that I didn’t find anything portentous, though I did find some of the works pointless.

An example is 'Chase Film with Clocks' by William Raban, where an alarm clock is shown on a screen, and a further two are present in the gallery itself. The sound of ringing is on loudspeakers so appears to come from everywhere, but images on the screen and use of a flashlight in the actual gallery suggest that first one, then another of either the physical clocks or the filmed clocks are the culprits.

I explained that artwork in detail because that description is pretty much the whole of the effect of the work.

Being present as spectator seems unnecessary. It is extremely conceptual, and identifies several areas that might be interesting, such as the relationship between sound and vision in a cinema, and the links between ‘screen reality’ and ‘spectator reality’ and so on.

But like other conceptual art, it is like a skeleton awaiting flesh, or better yet, life. My experience is similar to that of watching someone solve a puzzle – I might admire the ingenuity, but I am uninvolved. I didn't see how it could be liberating, except in the facetious sense of 'liberating' myself from any meaningful aesthetic experience.

Is any of this non-narrative, or just a different type of narrative? For centuries visual art (paintings, frescoes, sculptures, etc) implied a narrative, even if that was just ‘I was here, I existed’. For the last hundred years, artists claiming to be modernist or something similar have tried to create non-narrative, abstract visual art. But it seems to me that something is still communicated, even if it isn’t a full story (and what is a full story anyway?)

Perhaps instead of seeing narrative cinema as a special case of all the options, we should see all art as communicating something, and then the special case would be a simple story conveying precisely what the storyteller wished.

Directly opposing that special case would be another special case, where the artist had no clear idea or ideas to communicate, and didn’t attempt to communicate anything. And the spectator subsequently filled in all the gaps. A close approximation to this second case would be the aphorism, a literary device for appearing clever while actually leaving all the hard work to the reader.

I suspect conceptual art is a better example, and sadly while Filmaktion artists are pioneers in creating different ways to tell a story, their apparent belief that a story is a bad thing means their work is conceptual in this exhausting way.

Maybe someone will pick up Le Grice’s first assertion, with its interesting technical implications for expanding narrative, and neglect the second assertion. Then these artworks will genuinely be pioneers of a new approach to cinema.

Missa Solemnis

Barbican, 17 October 2012

 The beginning of the 1991performance conducted by James Levine.

Beethoven’s music is so dramatic, seems so communicative, that I’m often frustrated he didn’t ‘pin down’ his feelings with words. Given his unhappy experience of opera, we are left with just this intense setting of the mass. 

 

It is not for every day, and as conductor John Eliot Gardiner pointed out before this performance, it is inconceivable it would be used in a church for an actual mass.

 

It is extremely demanding, and easier to love in the abstract than in performance, where the composer's grappling with the core concepts of Christianity becomes the listener's struggle to appreciate this lumpy, hysterical, urgent, sometimes sublime work.

 

Unlike any of his other pieces, Beethoven engages completely with the setting of words, and the phrases of the mass dictate the musical accompaniment, or atmosphere. But as the music also thrusts forward with characteristic dynamism, the listener (at least this listener) can feel buffetted and exhausted by the regular switches in mood.

 

The long credo section is the extreme example of this – every word seems to warrant its own mood, and the transitions between these moods are a fiendish challenge for conductor and audience. The melting loveliness of the phrase ‘et incarnatus est’ contrasts so strongly with the music before it that I was jolted into tears. That is surely exactly what the composer intended, and he must have intended many more such violent reactions, all very difficult to achieve in performance.

 

With the Monteverdi Choir, we could be sure that the purely choral side would at least sometimes be magnificent, as in the ‘et incarnates est’. But the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique was a more mixed blessing – brass seemed to be in another room, and startlingly ugly; when the organ started playing I thought someone’s mobile phone had started beeping. On the other hand, I feel Beethoven benefits from some cragginess, some ugliness, some oddness.

 

Unfortunately John Eliot Gardiner’s overall conception is a small one, meaning both in terms of the sound and in relationship between the various sections of the mass. Each section seemed self-contained, which only increases the exhaustion of the listener. I was reminded of the music of Berlioz, and its sensation of bustle without forward movement.

 

In a work like this, a lot of things have to go right, and some of these seem impractically demanding. For example, the Sanctus, with its transition from low growling tones to the high flights of the violin solo. The violin tune is so beautiful it might have featured in a concerto. We need a Jascha Heifetz playing the tune, but are unlikely to get it. 

 

It is more likely we can get great solo singers, and unfortunately we need them, as we can hear from those recordings blessed with them. For example, the tenor entry in the Kyrie demands at least a Domingo, and it is cruel to complain that the singers in this performance did not match that. They sounded well-fitted in ensemble, and were committed.

 

I left feeling delighted, but also exhausted, and neither of these responses felt appropriate. Perhaps Beethoven's reach exceeded the grasp of even committed interpreters.

Mother Courage and her children

Greenwich Theatre, 13 October 2012

 

One of the key moments in Mother Courage. Production photo from Blackeyed Theatre website.

 

An anti-war satire that escapes its limitations and becomes harrowing thanks to a strong central performance.

By loosely locating their drama during Europe’s Thirty Years War (1618-48), Brecht and Steffin may have wanted to satirise the self-perpetuating logic of war, as they have a parson uncharacteristically put it. Thirty years is a depressingly long time, and the action takes place in only the first half or so of the conflict.

 

But there are other reasons to set it so specifically, and it’s a pity these weren’t picked up by the authors. Unlike the 1914-18 European war, which was surely guiding their pens, several countries were able to participate in the earlier war without being devastated – some seem to have benefited handsomely, on first glance.

 

The ordinary person might not have benefited, more likely the opposite, but it wasn’t quite the same situation as after Napoleon’s wars, when tyranny was imposed across most of the war-crushed European population. It is strange that the authors missed the chance to highlight that some of the poor may have done very well out of others’ misery, as this otherwise fits with their overall concept.

 

In short, if we need a satire on the horrors of the Thirty Years War, we might be better looking at the contemporaneous novels of Grimmelshausen, the source for Mother Courage. This piece works better as a more general satire or exposé of war, though as with other satires it leaves me feeling powerless, rather than angry and likely to do something.

 

Thankfully, there is a powerful emotional centre to this otherwise cynical drama – the title character, and the noble, fatal, flaws of her children.

 

Noble? I think so, though this aspect is downplayed in the text. Eilif could be misguidedly heroic, rather than a cunning thug. Swiss Cheese could be naively honest, rather than stupid. And Kattrin could be sensitive and eventually desperate to help someone, rather than sentimental. Each can be seen as a tragic study of courage in a realistic war situation. But except partially for Kattrin, the drama tends to agree with their mother’s view of each of her children. 

 

Perhaps a director will someday redress this critical authorial misstep. Curiously though, even the title character has proven difficult for some productions, though I think this may have more to do with the star actress usually taking the part.

 

At little Greenwich Theatre, Janet Greaves showed how to do it.

 

A great performance, the key being that every word, every move, conveyed the character’s uneducated poverty. Here was a self-possessed woman forced to make her own way in the world, a tough migrant worker desperately hanging on to her children, but losing them through her own errors and through the war that she relies upon.

 

Whichever actress takes the part, the moment when the mother has to pretend not to recognise her dead son is shattering. But with Greaves there were enough moments to conclusively prove the greatness of this drama lies more in its emotional appeal than its ability to make us think.

 

All else was excellent, with one small exception: the songs. Most were unmemorable and much worse, the lyrics were generally inaudible. Can future productions emulate Robyn Archer, please?

Three Sisters

  Young Vic, 12 October 2012

 

Sisters having fun (Young Vic trailer) ie no relation to Three Sisters whatever

 

Appropriately draining experience despite an irritating production, thanks to some potent acting.

The biography of Chekhov in the programme / translated text tells us that his dramas were so ahead of their time even the great Stanislawski, his contemporary, struggled to direct them. This implies we have caught up with Chekhov, that we know how his dramas should ‘go’ now. 

 

I think this misunderstands his astonishing achievement. Far from being ahead of its time, Three Sisters is as close to a realist novel – the pre-eminent nineteenth century art form – as can be realised on a stage. 

 

Chekhov has sympathy for every character, and more importantly can make us feel the same sympathy, creating an almost unbearable sense of identification with their unhappiness. This is regardless of how petty they seem – I see myself reflected in them all, somehow. 

 

And pettiness is the overriding feeling, even over the characters’ other negative traits such as idleness, self-loathing, or self-regard. The worthlessness of these lives, acutely felt by various characters, is the most painful aspect of it all, and provides the effect of great tragedy without the usual accompaniments of a grand historical setting, or a gunshot.

 

The text achieves this novelistic effect through some devices that present difficulties for the director and actors. In an actual novel, an author can focus on one character at a time, and we ignore the others, even if they are supposed to be in the same room. But we cannot ignore actors on a stage. When Chekhov moves the spotlight from one character to the next, as it were, the other actors need to be doing something.

 

And when actors fully engage with the situation, as Vanessa Kirby did, to gut-wrenching effect, when Masha realises she is trapped with her husband, it can be jarring to have the sisters almost immediately afterward start talking in the abstract.

 

This grating, dissonant effect recurs in Benedict Andrew's adaptation and production at the Young Vic. Before addressing his faults, I should stress the director achieves wonders with his cast. This results in the awe and awfulness of a tragedy, and it does seem unfair to ask for more.

 

But the overall concept does not match the acting. A white space, with a mound of dirt at the back, a set comprised of desks upon which the actors walk and which is slowly whittled away in the second half, as the drama reaches its conclusion. I felt the characters were in purgatory, but this encourages a sense that the characters are ciphers, in an abstract place, rather than real people in a real society.

 

This feeling of displacement was strengthened when the whole cast singing Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. Having even the elderly nanny join in suggests a deliberate attempt to highlight the unreality of what we’re watching, whether or not you share my intense dislike of the song.

 

No reason to end on a sour note – with acting this good, Three Sisters is indestructible.

Phantom of the Opera

Her Majesty's Theatre, 9 October 2012 



Beerbohm Tree's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, at Her Majesty's Theatre, 1900.
(Shaw witticism here, where I found image)
Lloyd Webber is the modern equivalent for reasons deeper than loving the same theatre, and hating the dash.

One thing should be immediately obvious watching Phantom: its creators are in love with theatre. In particular, the dressing-up and stage transformation side of things. It has the perfect setting in the 100-year-old Her Majesty’s Theatre, commissioned by Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who used it for his own brand of revolutionary stage magic.

From the moment the chandelier swings out and over the audience, while the set change, we might as well be back in the nineteenth century, where spectacular stage effects were expected, especially at the Paris Opera, which witnessed a volcano erupting during one of Meyerbeer’s spectaculars.

For the rest of the work capes swirl, men are elegant, women gorgeous, rooftops have magnificent night-time views, candelabras emerge from watery mist, and everything looks like tremendous fun.

Unlike other mega-musicals, all inspired by this team, the spectacle seems appropriate, celebrating the Second Empire almost as effectively as Offenbach, though with much less mordant wit.

I saw the recent production of Sweeney Todd, and it came as a shock to recall that Harold Prince directed both musicals. Sondheim and Lloyd Webber / Mackintosh are on opposite ends of the music theatre spectrum, though this is for reasons different than the usual association of the former with serious art and the latter with entertainment. 

Although Sweeney is a powerful music drama (and Phantom isn’t), it is less linked to its medium. You can imagine a successful film of Sweeney Todd, while it’s no surprise the film version of Phantom was disappointing.

Film, especially Hollywood film, can fulfil a similar function as spectacle, but Phantom proves that something about good theatrical spectacle remains indivisible from the theatre.

The weaknesses of this work become more prominent in the second act. We’re asked to sympathise firstly with a mass murdering psychopath, then believe in his redemption through love, though it’s a peculiar form of love, as Christine has no intention of staying with him.

I found this situation sickening, exceeding the sentimentality of even the melodramas popular at the Paris Opera of the period. Christine – and the audience – gets to appear virtuous by ‘bravely’ kissing a deformed man, while of course she couldn’t be expected to love him in the normal way, and he must renounce her. Then disappear into the sewers forever, presumably.

Music can transform anything, but the more unappealing the situation, the more it needs to work to distract us. If we are to believe something so vile, the music had better soar like Gounod. I didn’t feel that, though it seems many in the audience did. 

There are other problems. Loosely parodying the conventions of opera is risky stuff, when the alternative is supposed to be the conventions of musical theatre. Christine’s excruciatingly bad “Wishing you were somehow here again” is made even worse by the actress’ melodramatic gestures.

Ironically the producers employ singers for the ‘bad opera stars’ who sing perfectly well, and so expose Christine’s supposedly more realistic singing as affectation. It doesn’t help that Sofia Escobar’s Christine sounds better in the trills of her operatic Hannibal aria than in being the pop singer her character subsequently becomes.  

And after 26 years, some staleness in the production could e expected, and I think the masquerade opening the second half was the prime candidate for renovation.  

Otherwise, the dated aspects are inherent in the work itself. The cast were excellent, though amplification did its usual job of making them look as if they were miming to a soundtrack.