The homeless people’s magazine in Gothenburg is called Faktum. It’s the equivalent of The Big Issue and similar street paper’s elsewhere. For this Christmas, Faktum has published a calendar for 2011 with large, black-and-white photos of 12 homeless people dreaming of the jobs they would like to have (would have liked to have had perhaps) “when they grow up”. The sequence of photos is called “När jag blir stor” which translates exactly as “When I grow up”.
The photographer is Patrik Andersson, a son of Gothenburg now living in New York, who has made a name for himself with high fashion, commercial and celebrity photography. He’s photographed the likes of Bill Clinton, Mick Jaggar, Jennifer Lopez & Kate Moss. This commission (which he is doing pro bono) is a bit out of his usual way, but he brings a clear eye to it even so.
The subjects are photographed dressed in the clothes or together with props suggesting their dream profession, but the pictures are much more portraits of real individuals than this suggests. (For example this to the right – a man who would be king.)
All twelve photos are currently on display in the central square (Gustaf Adolfs Torg) in Gothenburg, where most of my illustrative pictures were made. Here to the left is a picture of the exhibition in the square.
The calendars are being sold, at 150 Swedish kronor per each, by the same homeless men and women who sell Faktum (and who have acted as Patrik Andersson’s models). You can view all the photos, and buy a copy of the calendar over the Internet from Faktum‘s homepage here (but you’ll need to read Swedish – or trust Google’s translation engine to give you a fairly accurate idea of what you’re doing!) [Sadly, you can no longer see the photos from the calendar on Faktum's homepage. The good news is, the calendar sold out! (April 2011)]
And here below is a picture of my own copy (still in it’s plastic cover till 1st January). As you see, in this illustration I’m trying to be creative and not just reproduce the front cover photo. (Bertil Johansson, 74; Dream job: Priest; Homeless since 1994.) The two pictures here are of the same subject, the right taken with a flash, the left taken without.
On Wednesday last week, the post brought the latest edition of Granta number 113: “The Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists”. Granta is launching a Spanish language edition and marking the occasion (and promoting it) by publishing in English translation the contents of the first Spanish edition.
As it happens I had just read the last story in my most recently received edition of Interzone, had nothing else in the pipeline and was able to pick up Granta and start reading directly.
For the uninitiated I should say that, at present, I subscribe regularly to just these two literary magazines. Granta according to its tagline is “The Magazine of New Writing”, and publishes a variety of literature, much in the belles-lettres genre, and reportage (and generally, though not in this edition, one piece of photo-journalism). Granta is a nice thick paperback, comes quarterly, and I’ve been subscribing since the 80s, since number 4. (Though there was that long hiatus after I had a falling out by post with the former editor, Bill Buford.)
Interzone, by contrast, is a magazine of the science fiction and fantasy genres. Almost Britain’s most successful magazine ever, in the field. (In saying this, one is always aware of New Worlds which hovers somewhere on the edge of consciousness out in an Oort Cloud of the mind.) Interzone was started by people I knew when I was a student, and I’ve subscribed without a break since the first edition. Interzone is also a good deal thinner than Granta; on the other hand, it comes bi-monthly.
So, with the last story in Interzone still reverberating, I picked up Granta and read the first story. Interesting contrast, interesting similarity in my reaction.
The Interzone story was “Millisent Ka Plays in Real Time” by Jason Sanford; the Granta story was “Cohiba” by Lucia Puenzo (translated by Valerie Miles).
Now, there’s not a lot on the surface that links these two stories, beyond the fact that both circle around creativity and are set in environments in which creative artists (might) exist. The authors are of a similar generation, both Americans (Sanford from the USA, Puenzo from Argentina), both successful in their respective fields, but I’m not sure that’s relevant. They both address current concerns, even though “Milliscent Ka” is set in a new-feudal future Los Angeles while “Cohiba” is in the very recent past (and set in a modern-day Cuba which, inevitably I suppose, feels trapped in a time-warp).
In “Milliscent Ka” newborn children are deliberately infected with additional, genetically engineered DNA, which allows a kind of internal bookkeeping. Every expense one incurs in life is recorded as debt in ones DNA; debts are repaid by indentured time-service to ones patron.
Milli … learns to play a viola donated by the Lady Lord … only 10 seconds of debt per day … and she learns to read in the donated school, a few minutes of debt for a day’s learning, and she plays basketball on the courts, five seconds of debt a game …
It’s not an attractive future, but it doesn’t seem implausible either. The situation is well set up and the fictional (science-fictional) economic premise on which Millisent Ka’s society is based is well established. To begin with, at least, Jason Sanford manages to avoid the common information-dump pitfall that traps so many SF writers. (The necessity to explain the complex scientific/pseudo-scientific premise on which the society of the story is grounded leads too many SF writers – and film-makers – into interminable exposition.) I got quite excited about this story and enjoyed it, too – for more than the first half.
In “Cohiba” we follow the narrator (who may be an avatar of Lucia Puenzo since she is obviously some sort of a film writer) around a film festival and masterclass in Havana. In the first scene she is in a crowded movie theatre watching a film that could be Supersize Me when the man sitting next to her opens his flies and masturbates, ejaculating on the back of the seat in front of him (and on the hair of the person sitting there). It certainly caught my attention. The man, whose name we learn is Cohiba, appears to be stalking the narrator, but ends up with “the Brasileira”, her roommate from the masterclass course.
This story is wonderfully descriptive of the experience of rushing from venue to venue of the festival in company with the narrator’s masterclass coursemates, the Brasiliera, oozing sex, the Basque with one leg shorter than the other, the giant Hungarian whose “stories are as exuberant as her body”. The crowds, sweat and smell of Cuba are well evoked, and there’s humour too, for example in the narrator’s response to the maestro.
Garcia Marquez is already seated at his desk. The Argentinean woman who arrived late, he says. I want today’s big idea. I tell him the story of a student who – for lack of ideas – decides to murder her maestro. He interrupts me immediately …
But, as the story progresses, I realise Cohiba is supposed to be a malignant character. I begin to pick up on the author’s belief that she’s describing an Havana suffused with menace. The problem is, I can’t feel it. The final sentence of the story is, I’m sure, supposed to echo in the reader’s mind, but my reaction was more of a mental shrug.
Much the same shrug, actually, as the one I gave at the end of “Milliscent Ka”.
Looking for a reason for my disappointment in each case, I come back to the story, the plot, the “big idea”.
There’s one fundamental difference between the two stories. For all the brilliance of his original idea, Jason Sanford is writing a commercial story. Lucia Puenzo is writing a self-consciously “literary” story (not to say she doesn’t want to sell it, but to a very different market).
Jason Sanford has found a “big idea” – in fact he has by my count at least four – but he’s trying to shoe-horn them all into the same small space. The format is wrong.
Lucia Puenzo makes fun of the “big idea”, but she has one nonetheless (possibly two or three). For some reason, though, she can’t convey them. (To be fair, it’s possible the translator is letting her down, but the descriptive passages are otherwise so good, there are no rough edges that I can find, the language flows. No, I think this is a probably a faithful translation. The problem isn’t there.)
In “Millisent Ka” it seems at first that the big idea is up at the front with the chromosome-encoded debt, but this is just the premise for the society in which Milli lives. After a bit you discover the big idea is actually that a genetic mutation in Milli herself erases her debt. She is able to take other people’s debt on to herself, and then allow her body to erase it. In this way she can set people free. This makes her a threat to the established social fabric of her world. She is found out and condemned to death.
Because this is a commercial story, though, Jason Sanford just can’t allow himself to end on a downbeat. It turns out that Millisent’s mutation is not natural but contrived, and by the same geneticist who devised the original debt-encoding DNA. Furthermore, the geneticist is still alive. (This immediately, and incredibly, foreshortens the period of time it must have taken for the society described to have come into being.) Beyond this, the geneticist is one of the feudal Lords and she devised the genetic mutation as a way to retain economic control.
Milliscent is a guinea pig, but she is also The One without which many a commercial SF tale cannot exist (see The Matrix). At the same time, she is also a damsel in distress who has to be rescued by a knight in shining armour – sorry, by her boyfriend who she has cleared of debt, but who voluntarily returns to servitude to save her life. And his selfless act combined with the musical talent that Milli suddenly, mysteriously acquires (after having been described as a mediocre player throughout the story) causes the feudal lord to have a change of heart and everything ends happily ever after.
In “Cohiba” the big idea is that Cohiba, who teaches at the University is a dangerous sexual predator, probably a murderer and quite possibly a paedophile with an unhealthy interest in his own daughter. I’m sure a commercial writer (Jason Stanford, perhaps) would be able to make an episode of an American TV criminal series out of all this, but Lucia Puenzo is determined not to be commercial. The result is that her story – in stark contrast to all her incidental description and characterisation – falls completely flat. I cannot believe in Cohiba as anything more than a 30 year old man with a retarded, adolescent interest in sex. At one point: Fear creeps up in the middle of two coffee plantations, but nothing otherwise builds or sustains fear in the story.
In the eyes of this reader, both these stories fail. Puenzo’s because she is so keen to avoid being commercial that she fails to build the story successfully to the punch line. While Sanford’s story collapses under the weight of its ideas and the author’s desperate efforts to provide an upbeat (commercial) ending.
Fortunately, all is not lost. Traditionally, SF short stories are testing grounds for ideas that may then be developed in novels. Some of the ideas in “Millisent Ka2 are well-worth pursuing and exploring. If Sanford can block his ears to the siren song of the formula ending, the novel might actually be worth reading. And suppose he could develop the novel in collaboration with a literary writer (Lucia Puenzo, for example) what a fascinating co-operative endeavour that might be!
Meanwhile, Lucia Puenzo is not just a “Young Spanish Language Writer”, she’s also a movie director with at least two internationally acclaimed films to her credit (XXY and El niño pez). I can well imagine this story as a film, and perhaps in that context – in co-operation with a good actor – she would be able to let herself infuse the character of Cohiba and the city of Havana with the menace they so singularly lack in the story.
There are some great lines in Fantastic Voyage (some of them cited below), but I ended up going for a cheap joke at the expense of Raquel Welch and Donald Pleasence. I was inspired by the strip in the middle of the postcard above here, which is a still from the DVD. (What she’s actually doing is zipping her wetsuit closed preparatory to leaving the submarine to help unclog intake filters.) In my defence, the film-makers blatantly included Ms Welch in the cast only for her well-endowed chest – she has minimal acting duties.
Now the Oscar-winning special effects seem dated. The sea of arterial red corpuscles looks suspiciously like a back-projected close-up of a lava lamp. But lense flares (for example in the picture below) do hint at one of the effects JJ Abrams was trying to recreate in his recent ‘re-envisioning’ of Star Trek. (See here.)
A further source of memory confusion is that I almost certainly read Isaac Asimov’s novelisation of Fantastic Voyage (in which he corrected all the more gross scientific errors) before I saw the film.
Still, the scenes with the miniaturised submarine voyaging through a human body to deliver a surgical team to an otherwise inaccessible blood clot impressed me no end. It was one of the things that motivated me to achieve the high grade I did in my Biology O-level when I was 16. (Grade 2. I did better in Biology than in English Language. Which may not surprise any of my former students who have had the pleasure of studying English with me!)
Here are some of the great lines from the film I could have used but didn’t:
Arterial wall to the left!
They’ve crossed over into the jugular vein through an arterial veinous fistula!
That puts us right here which means we can head for the subarachnoid cavity.
The semilunar valve should be on our left any second now.
One other thought: In American films and TV series, 80% of the time, if one of the characters speaks in a British English accent, you know that’s the villain. Fantastic Voyage is no different. As soon as Donald Pleasence opens his mouth you know he’s the bad guy.
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The Internet Movie Database page for Fantastic Voyage (1966) here.
The second DVD out of the box as I work through my birthday present to myself, is JJ Abram’s Star Trek from last year (2009).
Taking this film as my subject here also gives me an opportunity to brush off and republish my original review. (‘Review’ doesn’t seem quite the right word, but judge for yourself here.)
Star Trek is a film with a wonderful flora of quotes, but so many of the good ones are in-jokes for fans of the original series. I choose to illustrate instead one of the most puzzling features of the future. The lack of development in prosthodontics.
Poor Leonard Nimmoy, the original Spock, reappears (through one of those handy wormholes in the time-space continuum that Science Fiction films thrive upon), sucked away from 24th century, and masticates his lines through what appear at times to be rather ill-fitting dentures.
In my imagination I hear him advising his younger self.
Live, floss and prosper.
Oral hygiene, young Spock, oral hygiene. Even in 2387 dentists still can’t make false teeth that actually fit.
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The Internet Movie Database page for Star Trek (2009) here.
As my own birthday present to myself, I bought a box of DVDs (mostly Science-Fiction related). I anticipate working my way through them bit by succulent bit (inclding, of course, all the Extra Material) and boning out some favourite quotes. Which I plan to share here in postcard form.
As chance would have it, the first film I watched was Tim Burton’s remake of The Planet of the Apes from 2001. It’s not a better film than the 1968 original, but it’s not nearly as poor as the reviews made out – those I read when it first came out and which put me off seeing it on the cinema screen.
Some of the actors behind the mask produced some really fine performances. Tim Roth and Paul Giamatti were outstanding, I thought, and Helena Bonham Carter was pretty damn good too, though her mask was less convincing.
Anyway, my nomination for the best line from the film has to be this one. Spoken by Paul Giamatti as the orangutan slaver, Limbo, who is selling humans as slaves:
The young ones make great pets. Just make sure you get rid of them before they mature. Believe me, the last thing you want is a human teenager running around your house.
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The Internet Movie Database page for Tim Burton’s film here.
The IMDb page for the original (1968) Planet of the Apes film here.
Helena Bonham Carter’s makeup/mask at The Make-up Room here. [Ah sad to say that link seems to be broken ]
Interview with  Helena Bonham Carter about her role in The Planet of the Apes at Cinema.com here.
I am reading my birthday presents, two books by Nigel Slater. A big, fat, beautifully illustrated hardback called The Kitchen Diaries and a slim paperback called Toast. The former is about seasonal foods in a combination of diary entries and recepies, the latter a biographical sketch of the author’s childhood in the 60s told by reference to his memories of food.
Both books are wonderful and inspirational, in terms of the foods they discuss and in terms of the writing style.
The Kitchen Diaries describe meals Nigel Slater makes with fresh vegetables or fruit from his own garden or with (mostly) locally produced fresh ingredients bought at shops and markets near where he lives. The food is seasonal and that means I have a hope of emulating some of the recepies here in Sweden (something my sister, the giver, had in mind I suspect), if I allow for the spring-time lag and the autumn acceleration. Slater seems to live in the south of England – London – so especially his spring and autumn are longer, more drawn out. Gothenburg lies on the same parallel as Aberdeen, but tends to have more continental-style winters: longer and colder.
Toast (sub-title: The story of a boy’s hunger) is broken into short, evocative chapters. Mostly these have titles like “Christmas Cakeâ€, “Rice Puddingâ€, “Butterscotch Flavour Angel Delightâ€, but occasionally there is a title that is not the name of a food. “The Lunch Box†is about Josh the gardener, “Percy Salt†turns out to be the name of the grocer’s where Nigel’s mother does her shopping. Each chapter encapsulates a food-related memory and opens a glimpse into a boy’s childhood in the 1960s, which bears close comparison to my own childhood memories also from the 60s. Very satisfying.
I am so captivated by both these books that I have to read sections of them aloud over the dinner table. We are eating a spaghetti carbonara with a typically Swedish salad of grated carrot and thinly sliced summer cabbage which I have enlivened with rounds of a red spring onion and a simple vinaigrette dressing. (Nigel Slater: His influence!) So I read Slater’s account of his family’s first and only attempt to make spaghetti bolognese. This sets us off remembering.
I too remember the long blue packets of spaghetti, “for all the world like a great long firework†and the way the strands, dumped into a pan of boiling water “splay out like one of those fibre-optic lightsâ€. But my Mum had had an Italian boyfriend before she married Dad, so she knew how to cook spaghetti, and to make a bolognese sauce that didn’t come from a can. Like Slater’s family, though, we also had powdered parmesan shaken from a cardboard drum, and I also remember thinking “this cheese smells like sickâ€.
Agneta’s memories of spaghetti in tomato sauce are all from her bamba (barnbespisning = school dinner hall).
We put away a bottle of red wine between us (this is still the lag of celebrating my birthday) and I think how much fun we’re having with these memories and how easy it would be to emulate Nigel Slater and write a book about Swedish food as a memory trigger. About how it would be popular on both sides of the North Sea.
Ha!
The following morning, sitting here at my keyboard, I can’t remember clearly a single anecdote or incident. Curse that red, red wine!
Agneta’s memories of spaghetti in tomato sauce are all from her bamba (barnmatsbespisning = school dinner hall).
You’re about to hear a review of the National Theatre’s direct-feed broadcast of Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art. The broadcast was made on 22nd April 2010.
The text and recording of the review are by John Nixon, The Supercargo of www.thesupercargo.com
You may freely redistribute all or part of this review for non-commercial purposes provided you acknowledge The Supercargo and include a link to The Supercargo homepage.
——————————————————————— The Habit of Art
It’s been nearly four weeks since I saw Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art in a live broadcast from London’s National Theatre at the Bio Roy here in Gothenburg. I fully intended to write and record a review soon after, but circumstances dictated otherwise. I did manage to scribble down some notes, though, and before the experience quite evaporates from memory I thought I should at least attempt to say something.
This preamble is appropriate in one way. The Habit of Art is about many things, and one of them is age and another is memory.
The premise of the play is that some time in the late 60s, the poet WH Auden and the composer Benjamin Britten meet in Oxford. Meet again I should say since they were creative partners before the Second World War, collaborating on among other things, The Night Train, [actually The Night Mail] one of the early film documentaries. Auden, the elder, was the librettist. Britten, (in this retelling of the story) was in awe of his more famous companion, shy, and felt he had to struggle to keep up his side of the partnership. But it was a productive and creative partnership that resulted in several works.
The last of these was Britten’s opera John Bunyan, written at Auden’s suggestion specifically for an American audience and first performed in the USA where Auden was living. It flopped. Britten blamed Auden, and Auden accepted the blame, but Britten could never forgive, and broke off all contact with the poet.
Apparently this was something Britten did. Old friends who had let him down in some way, he regarded as dead. For this reason, in later life, the two Britten and Auden never really did meet.
In this play, Alan Bennett supposes otherwise.
In the play, the elderly Auden has returned to England, to Oxford, as a Professor of English. He is respected as an icon, but disliked as a person for his rudimentary personal hygiene, his behaviour (pissing in the sink), the fact that he employs rent boys for sex and his boring repetitative conversation at the college high table. He writes, because he has the habit of art, but produces nothing of interest.
Meanwhile, Britten who is similarly revered as a Grand Old Man, has also passed his prime. Young musicians now are inspired by other, younger, more daring composers. Britten they think is staid, predictable. In reaction to this, because he also has the habit of art, Britten is composing a new opera, based on Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice. It is not going well. People he trusts around him do not like the subject, though they go through the motions of helping him. The creative sparks do not fly. Auditioning boys for the role of Tadzio in Oxford, he takes the opportunity, after 25 years of estrangement, to seek out Auden at his lodgings.
The Habit of Art, though is not just a representation of this meeting. Instead it is a play within a play. The play in which Auden and Britten meet is being rehearsed in a rehearsal room at the National Theatre, with some of the actors, the stage manager and her assistant, the writer. This is the first run through. Not all the lines have been decided. The actors speak their lines in character, but also break out of character to argue with the writer and the stage manager, complain about the absent director, criticise and tease one another, discuss Auden, Britten, and Humphrey Carpenter (apparently the narrator of the Auden/Britten play).
This structure allows Bennett to stand back from the play, and to make fun of his characters, of the pretensions of actors and writers, to allow the compass of the play to go beyond poetry and music to include performance and playwriting, and to explore issues such as the creative process, aging, music, poetry, theatre, fame, homosexuality, loneliness.
The actor who carries the biggest role in The Habit of Art, playing both “Fitz†and “Fitz as Audenâ€, is Richard Griffiths. He performed brilliantly and showed what a very good actor he is. Switching easily from the mannered enunciation of Auden to the more natural voice of Fitz (though Fitz – as an actor – can ham up his performance with accents too). Fitz (though not Griffiths) is an actor past his prime, whose memory is a bit patchy and who nods off from time to time.
The Habit of Art - Collage
Playing the slightly effeminate “Henryâ€, the actor performing the role of prissy Britten, is Alex Jennings. As Britten, he seems to be trying to rediscover the fire of his youthful creativity. Re-building the bridges he has burned with Auden. At the same time proud of his achievements and bitter and more than a little confused to find himself sitting on the establishment benches, sidelined by composers like Michael Tippet. The poisonous delivery of Tippet’s name sticks with me.
In this context, it is interesting to consider how these three well-known British actors are presented to their Swedish audience. The touchstone, I’m sorry to say, is film and, more particularly, Harry Potter. Richard Griffiths is “known to Swedish audiences as Harry Potter’s unpleasant uncle.†Adrian Scarborough is “Ron Weasly’s father from the Harry Potter films.†Alex Jennings, who doesn’t seem to have a Harry Potter credit (yet) is identified in our Swedish programme leaflet as “Prince Charles in The Queen.†He was good in that role, true, but he is better in this.
Another performer without a Potter credit and so virtually unknown in Sweden, Frances de la Tour, plays the role of Kay, the much tried stage manager. It is a wonderful performance. Her character’s efficiency and good nature, as well as the delight she takes in reading in for absent minor characters, are compelling. The scenes where Kay talks about actors and directors she has worked with, Richard Eyre, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, and about the National Theatre itself, and in which the younger cast members listen with fascination, were so believable. Actors fascinated by the lore and the history of their own craft. Despite Bennett’s joking about actors and acting, there is a deep love for the craft and its performers, which wells up especially in Kay’s role.
At the end, Kay gets to switch off the lights and end the play, too. It was a nice touch, and I don’t know how Frances de la Tour did it, but in the simple action, and the pause just before, as she looks around the now empty stage, there is a wonderful feeling of contentment mixed with a kind of bitter-sweet longing.
Or maybe I was just reading too much into the scene.
Technically, this NT Live broadcast was very satisfactory. There was no sound delay (as in All’s Well that Ends Well) and the Lyttleton stage felt to be the right size for the performance and for the broadcast. It helped the atmosphere in Gothenburg that the cinema was filled, (though not to overflowing). It was a better turn out than for either All’s Well or Nation, about on a par with Phedre.
It was good to be able to hear the reactions of the audience in London, as they helped cue reactions in Gothenburg. I’m sure most of the audience here were fluent users of English and a number will, like me, have been native speakers. But for the Swedes, even though the actors delivered their lines with clarity, it’s still a bit more of an effort. When one is used to subtitles one forgets how much of a crutch they are. I think most people got most of the jokes. The only times I particularly noticed our audience out of phase with London were when Donald defends his character Humphrey Carpenter and stresses how he “practically started Radio 3â€. That got a laugh in London but fell flat in Gothenburg. And then when Auden claims to once have been compared to a Swedish deckhand, that got a much bigger laugh here than in London.
The Habit of Art - Programme and portraits
What didn’t work? Well, once again (as in All’s Well) there were several characters who were almost never picked up by the camera, apparently because they had little or nothing to say. This did not detract from the enjoyment of the play, but did raise a few eyebrows in the interval or on the way home. The Dresser? Oh yes, he had a line or two. The Chaperone? She sat at the back in the first act.
So, I come to the end and I realise my memory (with the help of my notes) is not so ropy after all. Of course, I’ve missed mentioning several of the other performers. I’m sorry, chaps, that’s the way of the world!
What more to say? The introduction, the little conversation/interview in the open air on a balcony of the National with the Thames and the North Bank in view behind, is so much better now. The camera angles have been worked out and we don’t see interviewer looming over interviewee as in the very first broadcast. The little documentary info film about the real relationship between Auden and Britten was also appropriate, interesting and helpful.
I definitely want to see more, and I’m looking forward to the next season (and keeping my fingers crossed that Bio Roy will continue to show the broadcasts). I’m not sure about the extra broadcast, London Assurance, on the 28th June. The date might work for me, but I was very negative to some of the technical aspects of the previous broadcast from the cavernous Olivier stage. Still, it would be nice to see if those problems can be overcome – or if London Assurance is a more appropriate play for the stage. Maybe.
In the meantime, it’s time for me to wind this up with thanks to Alan Bennett, to the performers, to the backstage staff and to the broadcasters for a funny, witty, moving, engaging and very well acted play. Thumbs up!
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Thanks for listening!
That was a review of the British National Theatre’s production and direct-feed broadcast of Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art made on 22nd April 2010.
This text and recording are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-Share Alike license by John Nixon, The Supercargo of www.thesupercargo.com This work by John Nixon, The Supercargo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.thesupercargo.com/contact/. ———————————————————————- Illustrations
The illustrations are all taken from the Internet site of the National Theatre. In “The Habit of Art – Collage”, the pictures show Top: (l) The stage with actors; (r) Griffiths as “Fitz/Auden”, Scarborough as “Donald/Carpenter”, Jennings as “Henry/Britten”. Bottom: (l) Griffiths; (c) Jennings; (r) de la Tour as “Kay.” These are all copied from the Production Gallery for The Habit of Arthere. Photographs by Johan Persson.
The the “Programme and portraits”, the illustrations show (l) Programme/poster frontpage with Jennings and Griffiths as Britten and Auden; (r top) Alan Bennett; (r bottom) Francis de la Tour. The two black and white portraits were taken from other pages on the NT site. ———————————————————————
You’re about to hear a review of the British National Theatre’s production of All’s Well that Ends Well, seen live in a cinema in Gothenburg last week on Thursday 1st October. This review was completed on 8th October 2009. The text and recording of this review are by me, John Nixon, The Supercargo of www.thesupercargo.com. You may freely redistribute all or part of this review for non-commercial purposes, provided you acknowledge The Supercargo and include a link to The Supercargo homepage.
I’m cross with myself for not getting around to this sooner. I managed to review Phedre within 24 hours, but time has not been at a premium lately.
For anyone who just wandered in, the National Theatre in London has joined the ’live streaming’ movement and started broadcasting high definition, surround-sound films of on-stage performances. These are broadcast by satellite link to specially equipped cinemas and shown simultaneously to audiences around the world. At least that’s what I thought was happening, but I’ve just found out that some places are recording the broadcasts in order to show them at more reasonable local times.
Here in Sweden, we’re one hour ahead (when it’s 6 p.m. in London, it’s 7 p.m. here) so we get the live feed.
Phedre was fantastic. My first experience of the technology, but also a very gripping play and a wonderful performance by the cast. All’s Well That Ends Well was the second of the NTLive broadcasts and I was looking forward to it very much.
Perhaps too much.
It immediately seems unfair to say that. Unfair on the actors, on the people back-stage and on the performance. So I need to draw distinctions between what was going on in front of the audience in London, what was going on in the cinema where I sat, and what may have been going on in the spaces between.
Let’s start by saying that I thought the performance was very, very good. In particular, Michelle Terry made a wonderful Helena. It’s a big part and holds the whole play together, so it needs to be acted with authority, which is just what she achieved. George Rainsforth’s Bertram was just as good-looking, immature and shallow as he needed to be and Conleth Hill, as the bragging coward Parolles was a fine comic performance.
[FairyTale - l. to r. Bertram reluctantly takes Helena's Hand at the command of the King. Helena as Red Riding Hood and as Alice. Photos from the NTLive Internet page for All's Well.]
All’s Well is a topsy-turvy version of a classic fairytale. The poor hero, who performs an impossible task to win the hand of the princess and live happily ever after, becomes the poor girl (Helena) who cures the king and wins the hand of her count (Bertram) only to be rejected. She’s neither pretty nor noble enough for him, and besides, he doesn’t love her. They marry because it is the king’s will, but Bertram leaves Helena, the marriage unconsummated, and sets out on his own fairytale adventure, to win renown in the wars. She follows him and wins him back by guile, and so the play ends well. So all’s well, isn’t it?
(The uncertainty about the ending was nicely highlighted by the wedding photo sequence at the very end of the performance.)
The National Theatre’s staging made very good use of the fairytale elements in the story as well as the way Shakespeare brings them into conflict with reality. (Ok, stage reality.) Lots of references to fairytales and nursery rhymes in the costumes (Alice in Wonderland, Little Red Riding Hood), in the shadow plays and animations at the back of the stage (in particular, Dulac’s illustrations from Perrault), in the lighting (Gothic in France, golden in Italy).
But plays – and Shakespeare’s plays in particular – can be helped along only so far by good staging. Eventually everything comes back to the words, the sense and the delivery. As I’ve said, there was nothing wrong in this performance with the delivery. But now I’ve read it through as well as seen it, I have to say that don’t think All’s Well is one of the bard’s better efforts. Some parts, especially in the first half are really difficult to follow. Wordy. Obscure.
I still don’t know what the Countess and her Clown were going on about. It didn’t seem to move the action along. I suppose in Shakespeare’s day it might have been side-splitting and helped people over the sticky bits, but if so it hasn’t aged well. Not that Clare Higgins as the Countess and Brendan O’Hea as the Clown weren’t giving it their all, but I really feel this performance would have been helped by some judicious pruning.
There were a number of puzzled and not a few glassy eyed looks in the foyer during the interval on 1st October as we all trooped out to stretch our legs.
The pace, though, picked up in latter part of the first half, and after the interval it bowled along nicely. Generally, everyone I spoke to after was satisfied and didn’t feel their evening had been wasted.
Technically though, there were aspects of the broadcast that were less than satisfactory.
The thing I was afraid of before seeing Phedre, and which I thought was completely buried by that experience, was that filmed stage performances can be so static. All’s Well has partly dug that back up. To some extent it’s the play, being so slow and sticky in the first half. But it could also be that the Olivier Stage at the National is just too big for these broadcasts.
I’ll try and explain. The most delightful things about seeing both Phedre and All’s Well in these filmed versions are all the close-ups of the actors’ faces. Much of my experience of live performances in big theatres has been, of necessity, from the cheapest seats at the back of the stalls or up in the gods. In these filmed performances, seeing the actors’ expressions as well as their body language is just wonderful. But what you gain on the swings you lose on the roundabouts.
The close-ups give an intimate theatrical experience, but at the same time, they take away the audience’s options to see what else is going on on-stage. In Phedre, that didn’t seem to matter, but in All’s Well, with a larger cast, I think it did. Now, I could see that the Director for Screen was trying to include middle distance and wide shots as well as tight close-ups, but I don’t think this worked out as well as it might have, perhaps because the stage was so large.
Yes, we did occasionally see people on stage reacting to whatever event was in focus, but only enough to realise that we were probably missing much more. I for one would have liked more, wider shots. But I would not have appreciated more of the fish-eye lens.
Where a wider shot of the Phedre stage was able to capture the whole space without much distortion, the (mercifully few) fish-eye shots of the All’s Well stage gave me the feeling that I was looking through the wrong end of a pair of opera glasses. Actors and set were swallowed up by the empty boards and the looming back wall. Only the person standing centre front stage was identifiable, though as a rotund and rather squat version of him- or herself.
I think this problem did not help the play in the first half. The long shots isolated the performers in an expanse of distorted space and the tight close-ups, excluding other business on stage; both contributed to making an already slow action seem more stilted.
Here’s a thought. How about experimenting with a split screen? Show a medium distance shot alongside a close-up. I think it could enhance the theatrical experience by giving the audience the opportunity to look elsewhere than just at the central characters. At the same time eschew the fish-eye lens. Please.
Unless you really want to stress Brechtian alienation.
Another technique to alienate the audience, I should think, is to have the sound out of synch with the actors’ lips.
There’s a noticeable delay over the Internet. Video-conferences quite frequently involve watching someone saying what you have already heard them say in your headphones. It was another thing I was afraid of when I went to see Phedre, but there was no problem of that sort at all, then.
Unfortunately, I was aware of just such a delay throughout all of All’s Well. To be sure, the pre-performance interviews and documentary were far more seriously out of synch than the performance itself, and over the course of the play I adjusted to the delay, but whenever there was a sharp noise I was reminded of it. Someone slapped table, and then the hand went down. I should say, though, that my companions were divided about this, some insisted they couldn’t detect a delay in the play, so it may be a matter of individual sensitivity.
And what about those interviews? Just as my wife and I were regaling our friends with a description of Jeremy Iron’s terribly awkward interview before Phedre, up on the screen comes an equally awkward performance introducing All’s Well. I have the impression that the interviewer and interviewee are squashed into a space that is too small for them, that they have neither of them rehearsed what they are doing, and that the interviewer is a terribly shifty looking fellow who towers over his interviewee. The interview indoors with director Marianne Elliott was less awkward, but her body language made it so obvious that she had no wish to be there.
Well, I suppose it contributes to the feeling that everything is “live†and that things might go wrong.
The little pre-performance documentary about the play was nice to see though, and especially to hear a much more relaxed Marianne Elliott confess that she was as ignorant of All’s Well as I was before she started to direct this production.
The interview on stage during the interval with the designer Rae Smith was interesting too, but I’d have been happier if it had been incorporated into the pre-performance documentary. Not least because she didn’t seem to know where in the action of the play the interval had come. I thought that was a bit odd.
I could say more, in particular about the freezing draught, poor local advertising and consequent poor turnout at Bio Roy in Gothenburg where I saw the play, but I think that would be to try your patience.
Instead, I’ll sum up. I enjoyed the play, though I would encourage Mr Shakespeare to re-write the first act! I thought the staging, performance and interpretation were excellent. The choice of camera angles was not always as fortunate as it might, perhaps, have been, though the Olivier stage may be inimical to live filming of this nature. The biggest technical disappointment was the out-of-synch sound.
I’ve got fewer stars in my eyes about live streaming now, but I’m still enthusiastic. What I said about Phedre still holds true. I still think its wonderful “here, in Gothenburg, in Sweden, to be able to see a performance direct from a stage of the National Theatre in London. A no-holds-barred performance, not dumbed down for a provincial public, or subtitled, or with actors performing at anything less than their professional peak.â€
And I’ll certainly be back on the 30th January for the next NTLive broadcast, Terry Pratchet’s Nation.
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Thanks for listening. That was a review of the British National Theatre’s production and direct feed broadcast of All’s Well That Ends Well, made on the 8th October 2009. This text and recording are licensed under the Creative Commons attribution / non-commercial / share-alike license by me, John Nixon, The Supercargo of www.thesupercargo.com.
You’re about to hear a review of the National Theatre’s direct-feed broadcast of Phædre made on 25th June 2009.
The text and recording of the review are by John Nixon, The Supercargo of www.thesupercargo.com
You may freely redistribute all or part of this review for non-commercial purposes provided you acknowledge The Supercargo and include a link to The Supercargo homepage.
[Illustration above is from a screenshot of the National Theatre's page for Phèdre. Link here: http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/45269/productions/phegravedre.html]
I’m still feeling buoyed up by the experience of seeing Phædre yesterday evening. What a fantastic performance! And what a fantastic use of technology! Here, in Gothenburg, in Sweden, to be able to see a performance direct from a stage of the National Theatre in London. A no-holds-barred performance, not dumbed down for a provincial public, or subtitled, or with actors performing at anything less than their professional peak. The images were almost always crisp and clear and the cutting from camera angle to camera angle was choreographed almost to perfection. In the auditorium of the cinema we had a better view of the actors’ expressions than I’d guess many people sitting at the back of the theatre in London did. The sound quality was also generally very good, and with surround-sound we could hear and share the reactions of the live audience.
People who have seen the operas that have been broadcast in this way may not have been so bowled over by the Phèdre experience, but this was my first taste of modern direct-feed technology and I found it captivating.
Of course, it helped that the play was so gripping, the language so powerful and the actors, all of them, so brilliant and working so well together. I came, I admit more than half because of Helen Mirren, and she was magnificent as Phèdre. The older woman consumed by her incestuous desire for her husband’s son, confused by her feelings, desperate to resist them but unable to do so, torn and poisoned by them, sometimes the perpetrator sometimes the victim. Mirren gave the character life and depth.
But this was an ensemble piece. If any one of the principals had been performing under par, it would have drawn down the quality of the whole.
Dominic Cooper as Hippolytus, the young prince of fast principles who is the object of Phèdre’s desire and the focus of her jealousy, was a revelation. (In the Swedish language flier ticket buyers received here he is “known from Mamma Mia! … as Meryl Streep’s son-in-law-to-beâ€. I didn’t find that helpful.)
Hippolytus represents youth, nobility, restraint and moral probity. The son of the hero Theseus and his first, Amazon wife Hippolyta, but not himself the stuff of legend. Set aside by Phèdre and displaced from succession by her children, Hippolytus is yet not resentful. He honours his father, even though disapproving of his reputation as a womaniser. It can’t be an easy task to play this role without making the character seem either anonymous or a prig, but Cooper manages to make Hippolytus both believable and likeable. Essential for the play to work, of course, since the tragedy turns on Hippolytus’s reaction to Phèdre’s advances and then to her false accusations of rape, and to his father’s rejection and curses that ultimately lead to his death.
Cooper’s efforts to make Hippolytus likeable are helped, of course, by his love for Aricia and the love she holds for him. Aricia is the last surviving heir of an Athenian family that Theseus has all but wiped out. Although she is innocent of any blame, and so cannot be killed, Theseus still fears her and has left Hippolytus instructions to guard her well.
Aricia, played beautifully by Ruth Negga, is a young woman who, in the course of the play, is taken from a condition of fear and uncertainty through the giddy experience of freedom and sudden love to the very edge of despair.
Hippolytus, keeping his word to Theseus, waits until receiving what he believes is reliable information that his father has died before revealing his love, releasing Aricia and promising to help her take what he believes is her rightful place as Queen of Athens. A modern audience may well find itself wondering why he waits; if he truly believes his father is wrong to hold Aricia, if he truly loves her. Again, this could easily come across as weakness, but Cooper’s performance, helped by Negga’s, makes all this reflect positively rather than negatively on Hippolytus’s character.
Oenone has more stage time and is more intrinsic to the story, although she is the first character to die. Oenone only wants the best for her girl and cannot see that the actions she encourages Phèdre to take lead to disaster. She has some good scenes, but her final appearance was gripping, when she realises she has lost Phèdre’s affection and, perhaps, comes to an understanding of the tragedy she has partly caused.
Oenone’s departure from the stage is the only criticism I have of the editing choices made by the technicians. At the end of her scene she crossed front stage right and presumably leapt to her death from the balustrades. But the camera allowed her to pass out of shot and we neither saw her jump nor leave the stage. I thought this was a bit clumsy.
Finally there is Stanley Townsend’s Theseus, who returns triumphant from the shores of death to precipitate the tragedy.
Neither Phèdre nor Theseus can see Hippolytus’s true worth. Phèdre falsely accuses Hippolytus of rape in the belief that she is pre-empting his own accusations. Theseus, who has seduced so many women in his time, and whose most recent dice with Hades started out as an escapade to help an old friend cuckold another ruler, chooses to believe Phèdre’s falsehoods rather than accept his own son’s assurances. Like any modern cynic, he finds it easier to believe in corruption than in innocence. And so the stage is set for the final tragic outcome.
As I say the story, the language and the acting combined made this a play that would have been gripping to see in any theatre. In a way, I wasn’t expecting anything less. But I did enter the cinema with some doubts.
What I was expecting was a filmed play. I was expecting it to be rather static, to be viewed from just a few camera angles front of stage, for the actors to be in the middle distance, for the sound to be muffled at times and for the microphones to pick up and amplify inadvertent sounds (breathing, rustling of clothes, bangs, clicks or footsteps). My expectations went mostly unfulfilled.
Of course, Greek tragedy is rather static, even transmitted via Jean Racine and Ted Hughes. It is difficult to ignore for example the unities of time and place which are so alien to modern drama. Still, because of the camera angles, the close-ups and the way the cameras could follow the actors about, I did not feel the play was at all as static as I had feared. The sound quality was generally very good (though a bit over-loud in places and especially during the first 20 minutes or so). There were changes in sound quality at times, but nothing like as significant as in many filmed plays I have seen. I don’t think there were any words I could not hear, and yet the performance was very natural without anyone over enunciating.
Above all the actors seemed comfortable, not as though they were playing for the cameras.
The cinema Roy on the Avenue, Gothenburg’s main street, started to show direct-feed events about a year ago after closing as a regular cinema. It is part of a chain of digital cinemas across Sweden run by the People’s Houses and Parks movement (Folkets Hus och Parker) offering alternative venues to the commercial cinema. Up to now, their stock shows seem to have been operas – at least those are the shows I’ve mostly been aware of. Opera has a limited, but often a more dedicated audience and music is a more universal language, so I can understand how it might have more appeal in a country where English is not the mother tongue.
Of course, many Swedes understand English to a high level, but I did have my doubts about this. A dense, complex and relentless stream of language without subtitles. How would the audience react? The first ten minutes or so were difficult for some at least. The woman in the seat in front of me was paging through screens on her mobile phone until I tapped her on the shoulder. (And I’m not talking about teenagers here. The average age of the audience at Roy was a good generation older than the average age of the audience in London as far as I could see.) But this is where the quality of the acting made itself felt. Even if people did not understand every word or even every sentence, the power of the acting carried the message across and after about ten minutes the audience was captivated.
In the end, as the audience in London applauded, so did we, and at least some of us kept on applauding as each of the actors took their bow. From the response I read on Twitter after the play, mine was not the only cinema audience that reacted with applause. I wish the communication had been two-way so the cast in London could have seen and heard the impact they had around the world.
There are three more direct-feed plays scheduled from the National over the coming year and after this experience, I will do my best to get to see all of them. And spread the word. Roy was not full by any means and I want this exercise to be so successful that more plays will be offered in the future and more theatre companies will be encouraged to invest in the technology to broaden their audience in this way.
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Thanks for listening!
That was a review of the British National Theatre’s production and direct-feed broadcast of Phèdre made on 25th June 2009.
This text and recording are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike by John Nixon, The Supercargo of www.thesupercargo.com
Yesterday evening to see Star Trek. Very satisfactory!
(Italicised text below quoted from the Star Trek trivia section of the appropriate Internet Movie database page. Pictures from the IMDb’s collection of photos or taken from stills from the film’s trailers on the Star Trek Movie official site.)
To make the film appeal to the casual audience, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman cut down on the technical terms, increased the action and named it simply “Star Trek” to indicate to newcomers they would not need to watch the other films.
On the other hand, for those who remember the original TV series, there are plenty of nostalgia nuggets to spot. Such as …
Majel Barrett, the wife of “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry, has a role in this film as the voice of the Enterprise computer.
A role she played in the original TV series and several of the spin-offs. She completed recording two weeks before her death on December 18 2008.
The film is dedicated to her and to Gene Rodenberry, Star Trek’s daddy. Above: Zoë Saldana who plays ‘Lieutenant Uhuru’ (middle left) also played a character in The Terminal (2004), an immigration officer who is a Trekkie in her off-time (far left). New Zealander, Karl Urban, was shot to world stardom as ‘Eomer’ in The Lord of the Rings (far right) – looks a bit different as ‘Dr McCoy’ (middle right).
Zoe Saldana never saw “Star Trek” [the original TV series] … However, Saldana’s mother was a Star Trek fan and sent her voice mails during filming, giving advice on the part.
Yeah. I’m sure that helped!
Karl Urban is a longtime self-described “religious” fan of the Original Series. He used to watch it on Saturday mornings in New Zealand with his dad.
My dad wasn’t at home and my mum thinks SF is just silly. And I still turned into an SF fan – how’s that? Above: When the credits rolled I couldn’t for the life of me work out which character Winona Ryder had played. Had to check on the IMDb. She is ‘Amanda Grayson’, Spock’s mother. That’s her, in character on the right. On the Extra Material, somebody regrets losing a scene where ‘Amanda’ gives birth to Spock, because “it’s the only scene where here ears aren’t covered and her humanity is revealed.” (As opposed to the vulcanity of Spock’s father). But as you can see from this picture, (still from the DVD) the curve of her human ears are plain – for a brief moment at least – under her headscarf.
Simon Pegg who plays ‘Montgomery “Scotty” Scott’ (in the strip above centre left) is better known in England as a comedian and comic actor. He played ‘Shaun’ (far left) in the zombie spoof Shaun of the Dead (2004).
Years before, Simon Pegg’s character in “Spaced” (1999) joked about every odd-numbered Star Trek film being “shit”. Now he says: “Fate put me in the movie to show me I was talking out of my ass.”
This film is number 11.
Scottish fans have complained that Pegg is English – they think the role should have gone to a Scot. This ignores two facts:
1) The original ‘Scotty’ was played by James Doohan, a Canadian of Irish extraction. 2) Neither Zachary Quinto nor Leonard Nimoy – who both play ‘Spock’ – are, in fact from Vulcan. (Not many people realise this.)
To develop the female characters, the wives of J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman were consulted. In fact it was Katie Abrams’s approval of the strong female characters that convinced her husband J.J. to sign on to direct.
This statement just leaves me speechless. What “strong female characters” – there is Uhuru and then there is … ? In this respect the film shows its socio-historical roots very obviously. But if you’re going to re-make a 1960s boy’s adventure with the original assembly of characters, what can you expect?
The girls – and I use the word deliberately – are there, but in the background (and in very short skirts). There are also two mothers. ‘Kirk’s’ and ‘Spock’s’. One gives birth to the hero: “He’s beautiful”. The other is protective and proud of her son. They’re positive images I suppose, but clichés. And they don’t occupy much screen time.
Oh yes, and the baddy is motivated by the death of his wife who we also see briefly. Visually (above) it is very striking.
Production designer Scott Chambliss used the layout of the Enterprise bridge from “Star Trek” (1966), but gave it brighter colors to reflect the optimism of Star Trek; (J.J. Abrams quipped that the redesigned bridge “made the Apple Store look uncool”).
Taking advantage of the 35mm 2:35:1 anamorphic stock film, cinematographer Daniel Mindel caught as many lens flares (a photographic effect where light sparkles everywhere) in the film as possible, to create a sense of wonder that enhanced the film: “There’s something about these flares, especially in a movie that potentially could be incredibly sterile and overly controlled by CGI, that’s just incredibly unpredictable and gorgeous.”
The homeless people’s magazine in Gothenburg is called Faktum. It’s the equivalent of The Big Issue and similar street paper’s elsewhere. For this Christmas, Faktum has published a calendar for 2011 with large, black-and-white photos of 12 homeless people dreaming of the jobs they would like to have (would have liked to have had perhaps) “when they grow up”. The sequence of photos is called “När jag blir stor” which translates exactly as “When I grow up”.
The photographer is Patrik Andersson, a son of Gothenburg now living in New York, who has made a name for himself with high fashion, commercial and celebrity photography. He’s photographed the likes of Bill Clinton, Mick Jaggar, Jennifer Lopez & Kate Moss. This commission (which he is doing pro bono) is a bit out of his usual way, but he brings a clear eye to it even so.
The subjects are photographed dressed in the clothes or together with props suggesting their dream profession, but the pictures are much more portraits of real individuals than this suggests. (For example this to the right – a man who would be king.)
All twelve photos are currently on display in the central square (Gustaf Adolfs Torg) in Gothenburg, where most of my illustrative pictures were made. Here to the left is a picture of the exhibition in the square.
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