Hayes

RANDOM NOTES late January 2012

2012-02-01T04:56:00.000-08:00

'WarHorse', the play, opened back in autumn 2007. Since then it has beenhugely successful at the National Theatre on the South Bank afterwhich it moved to the New London theatre and has continued to play tofull houses. In the meantime, the National took it to New York whereits success has continued. And despite the opening of the StevenSpielberg film version there are plans to continue with productionsin other parts of the world. I was entertained by the wonderfulpuppetry when I first saw it and moved by the story of the horses inthe Great War. Seeing the horses as puppets suffering is one thing,seeing real horses appear to be suffering on the big screen is quiteanother. The film looks like succeeding as the play has and thestory of the making of it is also interesting and impressive. Ihave extracted (and edited) some things from the copious and bloatedproduction notes which are distributed to those of us who go topreview screenings.

"1 million horseswent into battle with the British during the first world war (the warto end all wars) and only 62,000 animals returned.

Publishedin 1982 as a story for young adults, the book was quickly embraced byreaders around the world and was a runner-up for the Whitbread BookAward. In 2007, when the novel was adapted into a stage play atLondon’s National Theatre, audiences went mad for it and for itsthemes of human-animal friendship.

To adaptthe novel the producers brought in British screenwriter Lee Hall, whowrote the triumphant “Billy Elliot" then, to add more layers,they brought in another Brit, Richard Curtis, whose films include“Four Weddings and a Funeral” and “Notting Hill” as well asthe TV series “Blackadder,” a comedy set in the trenches of WorldWar I.

JeremyIrvine, a 20 year old actor (who plays Albert, the horse's friend)embarked on a period of intensive training, riding up to 10 hours aday at the Hertfordshire stables, where the horses included starsfrom such films as “Seabiscuit” and “Black Beauty.” There, helearned to think the way horses do. “The horses were sosensitive,” he remarks. “It was a joy learning to ride with thesemagnificent creatures. And it’s incredible how quickly you can pickit all up when you’ve got the very best people teaching you.”

Ultimately,a large equine unit was forged, comprised of over 100 horses underthe aegis of horse master Bobby Lovgren, who had also worked with thehorses on “Seabiscuit” and is known for taking the art of horsetraining to new levels. Lovgren in turn recruited trainers fromAustralia, Spain and the U.S., as well as a team of groomers,handlers, transporters, a vet and even an equine hair and makeupunit,

Fourteendifferent horses played Joey in his progression from colt to adult,and they were tasked with stitching together a portrait of a horsethat is every bit as naïve but ultimately as noble, loyal and braveas the young man who trained him. The horses included Lovgren’s ownbeloved horse Finder (whom he purchased after training him for“Seabiscuit”), who took on Joey’s most serious acting scenes."

When I saw theplay I found it both entertaining and moving .. and I enjoyed themovie very much. It is not possible to compare the play and thefilm, they are different 'beasts' and these two are equallysatisfying.

I remember seeing 'TheHurt Locker' at a preview and proclaimed it 'a masterpiece', andpredicted it would win the Best Picture Oscar - it did. I havejust watched it again on DVD and am, if it is possible, even moreimpressed. It is a war film and I am rarely attracted to thatgenre but over the years there have been several that have beenoutstanding. 'All Quiet on the Western Front' and' Platoon' forinstance. 'Hurt Locker' takes place in Iraq and focuses onsquaddies who defuse IEDs. It is that activity that producesperiods of unbearable suspense and which stretches the nerves ofthose men to breaking point. It is a film that goes like anexpress train from beginning to end and leaves the viewer (well atleast, me) silent and exhausted.

Muchof television is pap, I think we would agree on that, but despitewhat Groucho Marx said back in 1950 when he saw TV for the firsttime, "This is a fantastic invention. Wait for 50 yearsand you will have a nation of idiots", there are still manyhours of content which are enchanting, stimulating and, dare I sayit, entertaining. Sadly these days 'entertaining' often meanstrash.

And so to thepost Christmas TV schedule. Three new episodes of the brilliant'Sherlock' starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman wereoutstanding. They have the pleasure of delivering the deliciousscripts with lots of wry, clever and understated dialogue. Iwallow in it. But there are only three episodes each 'season'. The trouble is that the stars are very busy and can't afford to giveup their theatre and film commitments to do more than that. Each of the 'Sherlock' episodes is 90 minutes long which is thelength of a movie and Martin Freeman for instance is off to theSouthern hemisphere (New Zealand) to star in 'The Hobbit' films.

It is Dickens' bicentenary year and so there is a lot of hisstuff in various forms around. We've had an excellent 'GreatExpectations' which was beautifully directed, shot and acted but inthe second of three episodes they dumped a lot of the plot and itshowed. Never mind, it is a long and complicated novel so Isuppose something had to go. I wish it had been longer withmore of the plot detail but today I am being reasonable andunderstanding, don't tell anyone. The other Dickensdramatisation so far has been his unfinished mystery, 'Edwin Drood'which I saw as a play sometime back but I didn't like this one atall. A great cast but the production was leaden and I gave upafter about half of the second (of 3) episode. I didn't carehow it ended. Of course whatever the ending was, it was theinvention of the writer of the television script because the esteemedMr. D. didn't finish it. There have been other Dickens based TVas well and there will be a lot more before the year is over. Idon't know how they will fit it in, what with the Olympics andeverything.

Other TV: An interesting and worthy drama,'London's Burning' based on the London riots of last summer; itfocused on firemen and some of the 'young people' involved. David Morrissey was a fire chief. I don't think it workedreally, too messy and confusing (just like the reality), too much forTV. There are quite a few of the police and crime dramas thatthey do so well and a couple of particularly interesting dramas aboutwell known characters of the genre, for example Inspector Morse atthe beginning of his career. It was a single 2 hour episodewhich was excellent and the critics have rightly argued for it tobecome a series. The young actor playing 'Endeavour' (Morse'sfirst name) was really good. The other was not crime, it wasabout the early days of James Herriot, the vet of 'All CreaturesGreat and Small', a three parter set in Scotland back in the 1930sand telling the story of a young man's passion for veterinary scienceand in particular his love and respect for animals. I don'tknow whether the original series was ever shown in America, a bit toocute and British I would think. There was a series about theGreat Barrier Reef of which I saw a couple ofepisodes but I gave up. Withoutbeing too trivial .. seen one coral reef, seen 'em all. There was of course the brilliant David Attenborough documentaryseries 'The Frozen Planet' which took us through the seasons at theNorth and South Poles. Beautifully filmed, as usual, and withsome interesting revelations. There was a little controversyover the last episode which dealt with global warming. Noproblem here but there were rumblings from the American partners inthe production and the stations carrying it because they were worriedthat their audience may think it was biassed .. which is a bit madbecause all he did was report and show examples of dramatic changestaking place in the frozen north and south of this great planet ofours. Let those who criticise make a documentary of their ownand show that it was not the case. Anyway the fuss died downand so that saved them the bother.

Recent movies: 'TheIron Lady' in which Meryl Streep is stunning as Thatcher but theconstruction of the film is a bit weird and unnecessary (an agedThatcher suffering from dementia looking back at her life andimagining that her husband is still alive .. etc.) But therewere some good pieces along the way and it is worth seeing. Sois the first of the 'Girl with .. ' Swedish dramas. 'The Girlwith the Dragon Tattoo' is faithful to the original film with goodperformances from actors including Daniel Craig and with the skilfuldirection of David Fincher who did 'The Social Network' (one of thebest films of the past couple of years). There is a lot oftension which builds up beautifully to a dramatic conclusion. There is some violence but it is worth going and closing your eyesfor those bits'

Theatre: Not much of it andwhat there was was disappointing. Maybe it's me, perhaps I'm abit jaded. It does happen occasionally when you perhaps see toomuch but the balance is soon restored. So I will move on to aConor McPherson play called 'Dublin Carol' which was part of a DonmarNew Directors season at the Trafalgar Studios small upstairstheatre. I enjoyed this very much. It was about booze,family, religion .. in other words it was Irish. There werethree characters, a father who is an undertaker, his long lostdaughter and a young man who is about to join him as an assistant. He is full of remorse about the crap way he has conducted his life,she is rather angry about that same thing and the young man is in astate about his relationship with his girl friend which is in amess. It is almost but not quite, a series of monologues .. allbeautifully written and delivered. It is one of those playsthat you think much more about after you've seen it; later thatnight, next morning etc. It was rather beautiful.

Andthen there was the last of that season, 'HuisClos' ,the director of which should be shot at (or before) dawn. Calling this piece a dreary bit of theatre would be complimenting it. It was originally produced in London as 'No Exit' in 1949 withAlec Guiness and Donald Pleasance in the cast. It is by thefashionable (at the time) writer and philosopher, Jean Paul Sartreand is apparently the origin of the term 'hell is other people'. I think the play itself is probably worth doing but this time it wasbadly directed and more obvious to the audience, appallingly acted. I wanted to step on to the stage and hit each one of the threeperformers.

Anovel called 'The Ghost' by Robert Harris was about a writer who was'ghost writing' the biography of a British Prime Minister (not unlikeTony Blair) who had been called in to take over after the originalone was found dead on a beach. I missed the film when it cameout but caught up with it when it was shown on TV recently. Iquite enjoyed it, Ewan McGregor was appealing as the writer, PierceBrosnan less so as the former PM. Strangely what I did noticewas that the locations were almost exactly as I imagined them fromthe descriptions in the book. I felt that I had been to eachplace. Uncanny.

And another 'HAMLET' comes along.

2011-12-27T06:58:00.000-08:00

I was quite excited at the prospect of seeing Michael Sheen as the Danish prince at the Young Vic. It was directed by Ian Rickson who guided 'Jerusalem' from the Royal Court to the West End and then New York. I suppose all directors and actors want to leave their mark on 'Hamlet' and this time they made his madness the important thing. I've always thought he was just upset at the death of his father and the subsequent appalling behaviour of his mother and uncle. Anyway we were directed to enter the theatre from the rear and follow passageways past treatment rooms, play areas, a dispensary etc., to indicate we were entering an institution. All rather unnecessary I thought but we must let them play, musn't we? It was staged almost 'in the round' and there was no set .. all of which may suggest that I am going to tell you I didn't like it. Well, I'm not. I liked most of the acting and the verse speaking was particularly good. So I enjoyed the performance but I repeat I didn't care for the psychiatric angle .. nor did I like women playing Horatio and (either) Rosencrantz or Guildenstern; I think that sort of casting is silly. And I thought Gertrude was awful and unlikeable which perhaps pandered to my dislike of the character. (Whereas Julie Christie in the Branagh film was attractive and played sympathetically - much more interesting.) So summing up, Michael Sheen was very good, at times brilliant and the production was, I suppose, interesting but I didn't really like it. Plenty to talk about afterwards but there was no time because it was 3 and a half hours and everyone wanted to catch trains to get home.

A caution from The New York Times:

2011-12-04T07:12:00.001-08:00

This is worth reading but perhaps a British newspaper should have said it first:

December 3, 2011

Britain’s Failed Experiment, Repeated

A year and a half ago, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain came to office promising to slash deficits and energize economic growth through radical fiscal austerity. It failed dismally. But no lessons were learned, and instead of reversing course, Mr. Cameron’s Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition plans to make the pain worse by pushing even tougher austerity measures on the weakening economy.
Unfortunately, neither Europe nor the Republicans in Congress are learning from Britain’s bad outcome either. Grim new data released last week show that British growth is still flat-lining, unemployment is still rising and the ratio of government debt to gross domestic product is still climbing faster than predicted.
With slower growth and consumer demand depressed by fiscal austerity, the Cameron government has had to push its deficit reduction targets years into the future. It now pledges to make deeper annual spending cuts, extending the austerity plan until 2017. By then, Britain will have endured more than seven years of starved public services and lost potential growth.
Official forecasts now project output shrinking by 0.1 percent in the current quarter and rising only 0.1 percent in the first quarter of 2012. That is technically not recession. But tell that to Britain’s 2.6 million unemployed people, the highest number in 17 years. More than one million of those are 16- to 24-year-olds, a dismal portent for Britain’s economic future.
Some of Britain’s economic woes can be attributed to the world financial crisis. The catastrophic mismanagement of the euro zone — of which Britain is not a member but which buys 40 percent of its exports — has been a drag on recovery. But the biggest factor has been the Cameron government’s determination to pursue an untimely strategy of public spending cuts in this adverse economic environment. With export markets threatened by the euro zone crisis, it makes even less economic sense to reduce domestic demand. The government needs to look for ways to increase demand when the private sector isn’t vigorous enough to do this on its own.
Wiser policies, mixing short-term stimulus with longer-term deficit reduction, should have been embraced last year. Britain’s debt burden, measured against its gross domestic product, is not nearly as high as Greece’s or Italy’s. And Britain still has its own currency. By effectively devaluing the pound, it can significantly improve its export competitiveness.
Instead, the Cameron government persists on a failed, irresponsible course that is unlikely to lead to recovery anytime soon.

Mid November 2

2011-11-13T10:33:00.001-08:00

'No Naughty Bits' is the name of a play I saw recently at the Hampstead Theatre. It tells the story of 'Monty Python's' battle with the ABC (U.S.) network over the use of colourful words in the series when it was broadcast in the States. It went to court and everything. It is an interesting story and is an excellent background for some typical Python humour. Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam are characters in the play because they were involved in the two court cases. The play is quite inventive, very funny and even moving. I'm not sure whether there are any further plans for the play, for instance whether it will transfer to the West End. I doubt it will travel anywhere else. Just as Americans didn't 'get' the original show they are unlikely to get the play.

The 'flavour of the minute' director, Rupert Goold (who did ‘Enron’ and that wonderful 'Macbeth' with Patrick Stewart) runs a theatre company called 'Headlong'. He commissioned a number of writers to come up with short plays as responses to 9/11. He then edited them together forming a kind of theatre tapestry called 'Decade' and performed at a site near Tower Bridge which was converted into a sort've large restaurant with views over New York. The whole thing, in my opinion, was a disaster. The site and the setting made it impossible to really see everything that was going on because despite there being a raised stage in the middle, a lot of action took place on table tops in different parts of the space and even on a walkway high up one side. If I've confused you with all this then you will get some idea of how we felt watching the damn thing. Of course there were some good moments, some of them shocking and some were even boring .. but over all it was a very patchy mess that made me quite angry. The bloody thing is going on a world tour - the sooner the better. What a wasted opportunity. Oh, the writers included Simon Schama, Abi Morgan ('The Hour') and John Logan ('Red').

Much more entertaining (albeit very different) was 'Terrible Advice' at the Menier Chocolate Factory. It is an American play about men, women, relationships and sex and with a superb cast, it is played inches away from your seat (it is a small theatre space) so you can't help being involved. It is written by Saul Rubinek who was born in Germany, brought up in Canada and then the U.S. and has appeared in top shows like 'Frasier', directed plays and performed one man shows all over the place). He says his first public appearance was in Leicester Square here as a busker. The director is Frank Oz and the cast is led by Scott Bakula (American star of top U.S. Shows like 'Quantum Leap' and 'Star Trek' but does most of his work in the theatre). The other three in the cast were British; Andy Nyman, Sharon Horgan and Caroline Quentin .. all well known in both the theatre and TV .. and in this case they had superb American accents. It was quality all the way. And it was clever and funny, so it made up for the debacle of the night before.

Two visits to art exhibitions last week: At Tate Britain, John Martin's spectacular but ultimately boring epic paintings from the 19th century. His work was popular in his day but a bit out of place these days .. and a couple of days later this time at Tate Modern .. a great collection of the work of German artist, Gerhard Richter whose versatile work goes from very simple but almost perverse portraits which looked a little like blurred photographs .. to wonderful abstracts, some of them huge.

Mid November 2011

2011-11-13T10:14:00.001-08:00

I went to a couple ofmovies last week, both excellent. Number 1 was 'The Idesof March', directed by and (not exactly) starring, George Clooney. Ryan Gosling played the lead role in his rather minimalist way. It takes place during the primaries andreminds us of the skulduggery and back-stabbing that goes on in thispolitical process. The only thing that took the gloss off myfeelings about it afterwards was the knowledge that we'll be goingthrough the whole damn thing for most of next year. In fact,we're already tainted with it. Wasn't Rick Wossname great whenhe couldn't remember the third government agency he would eliminateif elected? Most politicians would be able to flanneltheir way through such a gaffe, but apparently not the 47th Governor of Texas. Oh well, plenty more to come.

The other movie was Woody Allen's latest, 'Midnight inParis' with Owen Wilson playing the Woody character, who is in thiscase, a young wannabee author in Paris with his fiancee and herappalling Tea Party parents. To escape them he wanders theParisian streets late at night and finds that at midnight he iswhisked back to the twenties where he meets Scott Fitzgerald, ColePorter, Ernest Hemingway and Picasso among others. It is aconfection and a delight from start to finish. Such situationsusually offend our artistic sensibilities with clunky dialogue like.. 'Oh, I would like you to meet some close friends of mine .. HerrBeethoven and Wolfie Mozart .. they're composers'. But eventhough there was a sinking feeling when we first met ScottFitzgerald, it soon disappeared as we found ourselves in a whirl ofsuch encounters, loving it each time.

There are a few morefilms I will seek out in the weeks to come.

All this Eurocrisis business is depressing and bewildering. And it bringsout the worst in some people, particularly those who don't like theEuropean Union at all, thank you. Luckily I don't reallyunderstand the details of it and so don't need to have an opinion, Ijust say something like, 'I'm sure that eventually it will all workit itself out and we will wonder what the fuss was all about'. The trouble with it, well one of many, is that just as in 2008 withthe banking crisis (the fall of Lehman Bros. etc.,) it has an effect on manyother countries elsewhere, outside the Eurozone (such as ourselves)and outside the EU. And I, and some friends of mine, observethat it doesn't seem to stop huge crowds getting in the way in theWest End with their huge bags of expensive goods from the bigdepartment stores.

My reading recently has featured severalexcellent novels .. Julian Barnes' 'The Sense of an Ending' (it wonthe Booker Prize), which is set in the author's world of reasonablywell off people getting on with their comfortable lives but notalways perfectly, it is a satisfying read. Then there was 'Snowdrops'by A.D. Miller (also on the Booker short list) which is set in modernday Moscow and follows a young British lawyer who gets involved withthe seedy, corrupting world of today's Russia. The title refersto bodies found in the snow. It is an interesting combinationof lively city life and the violent and horrifying layers that rarelyare reported. Also, very good to read. As is 'TheMarriage Plot' by Jeffrey Eugenides. I have only read the firstthird of it and am enjoying the lives of a number of young studentsat (I think) Ivy League learning institutions, some of whom areinsufferable of course. It is beautifully written. You may recall the author wrote 'The Virgin Suicides' which I lovedand 'Middlesex' which I didn't get around to reading.

JamesMurdoch appeared in front of the House of Commons committee againthis week and although he was a little more confident than last timewhen his dad got in the way, he did not deal satisfactorily with manyoutstanding issues. There followed quite a row with accusationsbeing thrown about alleging lies and obfuscation. I have afeeling that the Murdoch empire will suffer a great deal in the nextfew years. Of course the death of Rupert at some point willbring many things to a head. Because the so-called empire ismany headed, it will be field day for lawyers. Wendi will doalright though, don't you think?

Have seen the Australiantelevision drama called 'The Slap'? It is based on a book byChristos Tsiolkas which was apparently quite successful in Oz. The 8 part TV series is an ABC production and is quite stylish; well made, well acted. But almost all the characters arehateful and the lifestyle presented is ugly. I have seen threeepisodes and will follow it through. It is hard to decidewhether I am enjoying it or not. I sit in front of the TVhating everybody and everything they are doing but I am drawn tocontinue watching it. This will tell you a little more aboutthe plot:

"At a barbecue in suburbanMelbourne, a man slaps a three year old boy across the face. Thechild, Hugo, has been misbehaving without any intervention by hisparents, "the steely-eyed Rosie and the wimpish Gary. Theslapper is Harry, cousin of the barbecue host and adulterousbusinessman whose slightly older son, Rocco, is being threatened byHugo. This event sends the other characters "into a spiral,agonising and arguing over the notion that striking a child can everbe justified. Some believe a naughty boy should be taught somediscipline, others maintain the police ought to be brought in toinvestigate a common assaultwith a range of positions inbetween."

The Good, the Bad and the ....

2011-10-17T08:25:00.000-07:00

Monday 17th October 2111

'No Naughty Bits' is the name of a play currently running at the Hampstead Theatre. It tells the story of 'Monty Python's' battle with the ABC network over the use of colourful words in the series when it was broadcast in the States. It went to court and everything. It is an interesting story and is an excellent background for some typical Python humour. Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam are characters in the play because they were involved in the two court cases. The play is quite inventive, very funny and even moving. I'm not sure whether there are any further plans for the play, for instance whether it is transferring to the West End. I doubt it will travel anywhere else. Just as Americans didn't 'get' the original show they are unlikely to get the play.

The 'flavour of the minute' director, Rupert Goold (who did ‘Enron’ and that wonderful 'Macbeth' with Patrick Stewart) runs a theatre company called 'Headlong'. He commissioned a number of writers to come up with short plays as responses to 9/11. He then edited them together forming a kind of theatre tapestry called 'Decade' and performed at a site near Tower Bridge which was converted into a sort've large restaurant with views over New York. The whole thing, in my opinion, was a disaster. The site and the setting made it impossible to really see everything that was going on because despite there being a raised stage in the middle, a lot of action took place on table tops in different parts of the space and even on a walkway high up one side. If I've confused you with all this then you will get some idea of how we felt watching the damn thing. Of course there were some good moments, some of them shocking and some were even boring .. but over all it was a very patchy mess that made me quite angry. The bloody thing is going on a would tour - the sooner the better. What a wasted opportunity. Oh, the writers included Simon Schama, Abi Morgan ('The Hour') and John Logan ('Red').Much more entertaining (albeit very different) was 'Terrible Advice' at the Menier Chocolate Factory. It is an American play about men, women, relationships and sex and with a superb cast, it is played inches away from your seat so you can help being involved. It is written by Saul Rubinek who was born in Germany, brought up in Canada and then the U.S. and has appeared in top shows like 'Frasier', directed plays and performed one man shows all over the place). He says his first public appearance was in Leicester Square here as a busker. The director is Frank Oz and the cast is led by Scott Bakula (American star of top U.S. Shows like 'Quantum Leap' and 'Star Trek' but does most of his work in the theatre). The other three in the cast were British; Andy Nyman, Sharon Horgan and Caroline Quentin .. all well known in both the theatre and TV .. and in this case they had superb American accents. It was quality all the way. And it was clever and funny, so it made up for the debacle of the night before.

Two visits to art exhibitions last week: At Tate Britain, John Martin's spectacular but ultimately boring epic paintings from the 19th century. His work was popular in his day but a but out of place these days, subjects like the apocalypse painted in the style of a gothic novel don't really have the same kind of market now. .. And a couple of days later this time at Tate Modern .. a great collection of the work of German artist, Gerhard Richter whose versatile work goes from very simple but almost perverse portraits which looked a little like blurred photographs .. to wonderful abstracts, some of them huge.

Betty Blue Eyes

2011-09-28T08:02:00.001-07:00

Earlier this year a new musical opened which, according to the reviews, would be resident in the West End for a very long time. It was called 'Betty Blue Eyes' and was based on the film, 'A Private Function' which starred Maggie Smith and Michael Palin and was written by Alan Bennett. It was a 'sweet' story set in Yorkshire in the period just after the war when food and some other things were rationed. The present Queen and Prince Philip were about to be married and there were celebrations up and down the country with many towns holding special 'functions'. In this case in this town they thought they could get over the meat rationing by hiding a pig owned by one of the local councillors and then bring it out to feed the guests at the banquet. However some of the lesser folk heard of that little wheeze and stole the pig. So you can see it was essentially a romp of a plot and it was genuinely funny. And even the songs were rather good, if cliched. When I heard that this much praised show was closing I decided I had better go to see it before it disappeared. I was horrified by what I saw .. but glad I went. For some reason they had taken away all the sweet quirkiness of it and the gentle humour and PLAYED IT LARGE. They seemed to think it was 'A Chorus Line' or 'Chicago' and they belted out songs and did all those music hall, vaudeville moves that work wonderfully in the right show and especially in pantomimes but were not really required here. What a disappointment. It closed on Saturday night.

Farewell 'News of the World'

2011-07-08T07:24:00.000-07:00

'The News of the World'was said to be the biggest selling newspaper in English in the Western World. Even with those qualifications it is still amazing that such a newspaper had such a grip on the English public. It was born 168 years ago and its death will be noted as Sunday 10th July, 2011. But I suppose it all depends on what you mean by 'its death'. When James Murdoch announced the impending death on Thursday 7th it set in motion a competition to see who, among the media commentators, could be the most cynical. The trouble is it appeared that everyone was a winner in this competition because it was a case of no matter what you said ('It is because Murdoch wants to launch the 7 day 'Sun'; It is an attempt to ensure he is able to buy the part of BSkyB that he doesn't already own; It was a fit of pique enabling him to show just how powerful he is, etc.) there was some truth in it.

I go with the first of those three (7 day Sun). Rupert Murdoch is very good at grabbing opportunities and when the 'phone hacking' affair got out of hand and could have permanently damaged the 'NOW' brand he saw it as a chance to kill a big problem and hasten the arrival of the 7 day operation. It became known that domain names involving the words 'Sunday' and 'Sun' had been bought earlier in the week.

But perhaps the most important side of this affair is the political shock waves which have occurred involving the media, police and government. Labour leader Ed Miliband was quick off the mark and was very tough on everything and everyone. But of course, his position was easier to occupy than David Cameron's. He had to respond but also to show a practical lead which he did by making specific announcements about enquiries, investigations etc. And he said that the action he outlined should begin straight away. An announcement about Murdoch's bid for BSkyB will be delayed for a few months. What he didn't, and I suppose, couldn't announce, was the departure of Rebekah Brooks as chief executive of News International the parent company of Murdoch papers in the U.K. She offered her resignation to James Murdoch, but he refused to accept it. Mr. Cameron said that he would have let her go. The betting is that the die is cast and she won't be running things at Wapping for very long. I don't think I am the only one a little puzzled about why Brooks didn't appear publicly anywhere. When you think of what her paper would say about those who refuse to be interviewed it is, to say the least, hypocritical.

There is a lot more to come. You may have to be patient. You'll be waiting for some time for the full story.

Wimbledon

2011-07-03T09:40:00.000-07:00

So, my annual love affair with tennis is over for another year. And it was clear during the match that the right players made it through to the Gentlemen's Final, as the All England Tennis Club calls it. Although Murray played very well against Nadal on Thursday and has beaten him many times in the past, he was not really ready for the final. (Oh, listen to him, he's an expert on tennis now .. )

I supported Djokovic today because I was fed up with the commentators banging on about Nadal being almost unbeatable. Actually I am fed up with the commentators generally, mainly because they talk too much, indeed they often talk themselves into a corner and take to slagging off their colleagues in an effort to save face. It is an unpleasant spectacle. (I exclude McEnroe and Becker from my criticism. They are excellent and their insight into the game is invaluable).

But, back to the match. There was some really brilliant, athletic tennis from both of them. It was very exciting watching their fortunes rising and falling. Frankly I don't know how it is done. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be on the receiving end of a Nadal or Djokovic serve. I think I would just give in and then run for safety. It would be a bit like being faced with the horse that I was about to ride in the Grand National.

Other points: I wish the grunting (even from the women) and the clenched fist on winning a game, would go away. They have become cliches, which, as you know, should be avoided wherever possible. Another matter related to the media coverage is the cultural cringe of interviewers when they ask players how important Wimbledon is to them - forcing them to say that Wimbledon is the best of the world's big tournaments and the one they 'dream' about winning. That may be true but that bullying of sportsmen is embarrassing. (The Empire encouraged Britain's arrogance about, well - everything and it is time that they accepted its new, less significant place in the world).
There was a time when we could be sure that Wimbledon finals would be played by Americans and Australians, but not these days. (Tomich - Australian, was this year's exception) Pat Cash was asked about this and said that Australians have lost interest in the game, transferring it to other interests, computer games perhaps.

Here's to next year. Perhaps we will still have Djokovic and Nadal or maybe Murray will make it through to the final. We can dream, can't we?

Albee and Pinter

2011-07-03T09:31:00.000-07:00

Last week (week commencing Monday 27th June 2011) took me to plays by two masters of theatrical writing, both of whom I admire. First there was 'A Delicate Balance' (1964), the Albee play that came after 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf' (1960). 'Virginia Woolf' is almost perfect so it was quite a challenge for Albee to match it. And to be blunt, he didn't, even though it is an excellent play with more subtlety than its predecessor. This was at the Almeida Theatre in Islington, the home of many excellent productions including other Albee plays. On paper, a good cast with Penelope Wilton, an actress I admire) as Agnes, the clever, articulate matriarch with a very sharp tongue and Tim Piggott-Smith as hubby, Tobias. However I was disappointed and I think it wasn't up to the mark because the two leads were miscast. She didn't dominate as she should and he was a little too vivid and didn't get the calm that Tobias uses to good effect. This meant the play lacked the right energy and it tipped the balance of their relationship. The best performance was by Ian McEIhenney as Harry the male of the couple who came in the night to stay with their best friends because they were suddenly afraid in their own home. His character is reticent, quiet and second fiddle to his wife, Edna played by Diana Hardcastle .. until the decision to go home is announced in the closing scene. I remember a really good production at the Playhouse in Perth, Australia, with Pat Skevington as Agnes and Neville Teede as Tobias in about 1968 which was so good I saw it twice. My disappointment with this staging was, I suppose, partly because it couldn't compete with my memory of the Perth one. Never mind, it is my memory and it can do what it likes.

And then a couple of nights later came Harold Pinter's 'Betrayal' which I saw a couple of years back and loved. It is the one that is played backwards, from an affair being over back to the time when it started. It was based very loosely on Pinter's affair with the journalist Joan Bakewell, who to this day is as great. Kristin Scott Thomas is luminous as Emma as the character is called in the play, The Pinter part, Jerry is played by Douglas Henshall and Emma's husband is Ben Miles. This is a beautiful production, easy to watch and easy to enjoy. The only weakness was Douglas Henshall's Jerry and it is hard to explain why. I think it was something about his uncompromising Scottish accent which I would normally like but somehow it jarred a little bit ... That's the best I can do really. And I am probably only one of a very small number who thought this. And so I would recommend it to anyone who likes classy drama. I would also recommend you discard your knowledge of the real life story that inspired it.

I should be grateful, shouldn't I, having such good drama to be picky about?

Update on Demand (Midsummer 2011)

2011-06-28T04:43:00.001-07:00

Rory Kinnear's 'Hamlet', was a good way to start a new year of theatregoing.. What a fascinating play Hamlet is. Every production I see is different and this one seems to be meticulous in its attention to detail. The director, Nicholas Hytner tries everything. Setting it in a modern police state is very well done but I thought unnecessary. And the attention to detail in the early stages was a little too careful. It sometimes gave the impression of tip-toeing through the text trying very hard not to disturb the 'Shakespeare' in it. But this didn't last very long, the arrival of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern heralded, for me, a brightening of the performance with Rory Kinnear relishing 'Speak the speech ... ' and especially later 'Get thee to a nunnery .. ' (brillliant.) My problem was that my seat wasn't as good as I am used to, it was further back and to the side and my eyes were not up to the task set by the play. I missed detail and my ageing hearing suffered a little too. If I could get another ticket I would see it again.

And so to Chicago where my son and his family now live. Every time I travel I remind myself of how much I hate air travel. From the moment of arrival at the airport and the search for the right place to 'drop my bags' (that could have several meanings) right through the security haranguing, and the indifference of the flight attendants to the tedium of the flight and the further haranguing of the Department of Homeland Security .. it is a trial I would rather not have faced but it was necessary to see my new grand daughter.

I really should have left my visit to a little later in the year. The extremely cold weather was very restrictive meaning it wasn't easy to do anything other than 'be' around the house in the warm. Apart from a visit to the Apple Store to sort out a keyboard problem (when it was warmer) we went to the cinema to see 'The king's Speech'. The following days were much colder, down to about 10 - 15 f.

Spending a concentrated time with a new baby is illuminating. first there is a baby and it looks like babies usually do but after a day or so you see small indications of what the child and then person, will be. I couldn't see any clear likeness to her mother or father but there was a sort've combination of them both. Never mind at the end of this rainbow there was a tiny, vulnerable, anxious to grow, beautiful baby girl. I know they kind've all look like babies but when you see them up close over a period of time you can see a little something of the person they will become.

Crikey, American television is awful. My son has a million inch plasma television and occasionally when luck is on our side we found something that deserved our attention for more than a few minutes and then it was a pleasure to watch. But most of the time we were on a desperate search for real TV, the sort we get on, say, BBC4. But no. Not a chance. The American shows that we sometimes watch on Channel 4 seemed even worse when seen there.

Despite the cold we went to see the much praised film 'The King's Speech', a nearly excellent film. Colin Firth did his job of acting extremely well. But I thought some of the pacing in the film was so laboured that it was irritating. And I am not sure that in 1937/8 the functionaries surrounding the King's broadcast to the nation would have applauded him as he left the room where he recorded it. We watched a fair bit of the Australian Open from Melbourne where it was 29C; we of course imagined that some of the warmth made its way to Naperville to help us survive. The coverage on ESPN was a strange mixture of Australian, American with a little South African thrown in. Such championships always provide some dazzling tennis, so it was worth some of our time.
In the final Andy Murray fought bravely but not bravely enough and lost to Novak Djokovic, 6-4, 6-2, 6-3. Oh well, there's always Wimbledon.

The night after my return to London I sat in the Barbican Hall listening to the L.A. Phil conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, the young whirlwind conductor from Venezuela, playing wonderful music by John Adams, Leonard Bernstein and Beethoven. He (and the band) were better at the two American composers' work than the German one. My view could be described as a cliche ... but it is my honest opinion. There seemed to be a bit of a mismatch with the Beethoven. He was calling for drama and detail and the orchestra didn't seem to be able to give it to him. However I loved every second of the concert and despite the freezing cold wind, I went home with a merry step, if you can imagine such a thing.

In early February I went to Stratford in the East End to see how the Olympic site is progressing. The main stadium looks almost complete even though it is still a huge building site. And the Velodrome and the striking Swimming venue, I think, are complete. It is still difficult to envisage how the whole thing will look when the Games commence. I'm expecting the British press to use acres of newsprint to pick it to pieces, that's what they do to all big new projects. Mind you, radio and television are not completely innocent.

'Vernon God Little' a book about a fictional school massacre in Texas won the Booker prize some years back (in the 90s I think). It was a fascinating read and there is now a play based on it which I saw at the Young Vic. It may be difficult to imagine that such a subject could be the basis of an entertainment which uses a lot of comedy - but it is. I should explain that it is about a young man who is accused of being the killer but he isn't; a close friend of his was. However he took his own life and wasn't there to accuse so our young hero seemed a good enough target for the hick town to kick around. The young man who played the central character was extraordinarily good and I think will go far. And there were other good performances but I didn't like the style of the production very much. It involved much improvisation, country songs and extreme accents. It is perhaps worth pointing out that I think it was aimed at a young audience.

Then to the Tate Britain gallery for a members' view of a new Watercolour Exhibition. And it was very enjoyable with a few dramatic new large watercolours by superstar artists (like Anish Kapoor) who are not usually known for work in that medium. I always thought that watercolours were wishy washy pale works that were really only done by amateurs but I suppose that is because I remember doing them at school and wondering why they didn't look any good. It turns out that the best of them involve other materials. One artist mixed his paint with treacle for a certain effect. The star of the exhibition was a British artist, Edward Burra (1905-1976) who did, among other words, a triptych of war paintings which had a carnivalesque surrealist air about it.

I didn't see the Oscars (end of February), partly because of the time it takes place (in the early hours of our morning) but also because I usually find the whole event rather nauseating. It is not that I don't like the hoopla it is the sick-making soppiness of most of it. But, down to business; I'm pleased that Colin Firth won his Oscar but I don't think that 'The King's Speech' should have been best film, that award should have gone to 'The Social Network', the director of which, David Fincher, should have won the best Director Oscar. And although Natalie Portman was impressive in 'Black Swan' her performance was forced on her by the role (dancing, crying, going mad). But thank god for Colin Firth who in the midst of all that 'living the dream' crap, crying, thanking mother and the make up artist, he was cool, amusing and dignified. His remark that he thought he had 'peaked already' was the quote of the evening and an excellent example of British understatement.

In March the much heralded production of 'Frankenstein' by Danny Boyle at the National/Olivier opened to mostly favourable (some raving a bit) reviews. We went a few days after it opened and enjoyed it very much. Of course nothing is perfect, in this case I think the script by Nick Dear occasionally hit the wrong note. Perhaps he tried too hard to be true to the Mary Shelley novel. However the production was at times, exciting, and the acting was excellent - particularly in the case of the principals, Johnny Lee Miller as the creature and Daniel Ings as Victor Frankenstein (who replaced Benedict Cumberbatch who was among several of the cast who were ‘indisposed’). Later it was shown in cinemas around the world, just as well because the season was sold out and the extra performances in the next NT season were sold out in minutes as well.

Occasionally it is good to experience something which is a bit of a challenge. This one was billed as 'Hibiki Resonances from Japan - Sho: The Sound of Eternity', intriguing eh? The central performer was Mayumi Miyata, she plays the Sho.

Hall One at King's Place is a very beautiful space with excellent acoustics and is mostly used for recitals and sometimes small chamber orchestras notably the London Sinfonietta. It is near King's Cross station and is in the same building as The Guardian and Observer newspapers. I have been there several times for interesting concerts.

The music was minimalist in nature with the sho's sound being similar to a flute with harmonica-like secondary notes. It has two mouthpieces; Ms. Miyata held it in front of her face so it was difficult to see what she was doing but I gather from a Wikipedia entry that she would have been breathing in and out.

One of the pieces which was for sho and oboe (by John Cage) would confirm all your worst fears about contemporary music. It seemed to consist of yelps, growls, squeaks and howls in no particular order and it was the most alienating piece of the evening. The others were either solos or with oboe, accordion or harp, the latter being very interesting and accessible. As I sat there my thoughts went from, 'what am I doing here' to 'this is beautifully relaxing and calming'.

At my age I have a rather good idea of what I do and don't like in music but I am reassured by the realisation that I can still hear something very different, challenging and not be turned off (with the possible exception in this case of the John Cage yelping and growling opus.

The eldest son of Princess Diana had been 'going out' with a young lady called Kate Middleton for a few years, they met at University. They decided to get married at the end of April. To celebrate the event I was engaged to present a three hour programme for ABC Radio National (Australia). It was apparently the first time ABC had commissioned an independent production. A former colleague and friend of many years, had been working for the network in Melbourne and somehow persuaded them to commission the London based company, UNIQUE, to produce a programme called ‘Not the Royal Wedding’, an alternative and irreverent companion to their main coverage of the event on their News network.

It was hailed as a success. I always find however that my feeling about a show I have done is more complicated and is related to how I felt about it before, during and after its broadcast. This is peculiar to 'live' (not recorded) programmes. This time it was more difficult because my physical state was having an effect on everything I did (I had a bad fall the weekend before and was in a lot of pain). Over the years I have done hundreds of programmes like it but the big difference was that they were daily and had a rhythm and a pace which I had built and were already there. A one-off requires such rhythm, pace .. plus tone and style to be created from scratch. And because we were doing it in isolation from the rest of the network we were not as aware as we should be of how we were fitting in. I did prepare a bit for that by listening to ABC Radio National in the period leading up to the broadcast.

So I arrived at the day not having done a live show for a few years feeling a little wary. But I was prepared of course and apart from being a little rusty it went quite well. When you are contributing to as well as doing straight presentation, interviews, recorded interviews and archive material together with live links to a big event, your brain has to operate on many levels. The experience reminded me of, not how difficult, but how complex it is. And that is something that will really only happen when doing it anew. All things considered I did quite well. ('At the end of the day', it was just another radio programme.)

Then, a gem of a play called 'Clybourne Park' by American writer, Bruce Norris. It came to Wyndham's Theatre from The Royal Court with a slightly changed cast. Much is made of the continuing waves of racism in America (in this case). And rightly so because there will be no change if there is no discussion . Using humour is also a good device and in this case it is used with devastating laser-like accuracy. It also serves to reveal a lot about the audience. Of course we squirmed in embarrassment, even shock. Certain jokes bring about particular reactions. For instance there was one which included the 'C' word in its punchline and that brought relief in that a large proportion of the audience thought 'oh, we can all laugh at that' (perhaps out of feigned shock) but then ignored the real content of the joke which was about feminism. The script is outrageously clever.

The cast was made up of mostly relatively unknown actors but they were all marvellous. The director had turned every character into a caricature through the use of heightened dialogue delivery. That also helped the actors to be confident with their American accents.

In a way we all left the theatre slightly humbled because we realised we were all exposed in some way but instead of doing ourselves an injury we smiled when we remembered the laughs. I saw Norris’ ‘The Pain and the Itch’ (set on the night of the U.S. Presidential election) a few years back and loved it as well.

Then, a few days later, it was Terence Rattigan's last play, 'Cause Celebre' which is about a celebrated murder case in 1935 in which the husband of a flighty woman was accused of his murder, but it could have been her young, dim but hunky driver. The subject and the plot is fine but the play is very creaky and the production was bad. I enjoyed parts but overall it was a huge disappointment.

I was looking forward to Miro at Tate Modern and went to the members' private view. This is a big new exhibition of Joan Miro (he insisted on using the 'Joan' spelling rather than 'Juan' as an indication of his Catalan identity, he was born in Barcelona). There is work from his early years at the beginning of the last century right up to just before his death in 1976. I have liked his work for a long time. He has been called the most astonishing of Twentieth Century artists and one of the Surrealists said he was 'the most surreal of us all'. We’ve all seen some of Miro's pictures. I thought they were always interesting and provided many challenging hours of trying to work out what all the objects, colours, lines and squiggles meant. In the end it didn't matter because I just decided what I liked and what I didn't. My guest on this occasion was my friend Patricia, the artist who is the ideal companion for such an excursion because she can tell me what I am seeing. We spent about 5 hours at the exhibition with a bit of lunch in the middle .. .

A couple of weeks ago I saw a production of 'A Magic Flute' which was done as a 'play with songs' rather than an opera (Mozart). lt was directed by Peter Brook who is based in Paris. It was all in French and German (surtitles). It was a beautiful production and despite my linguistic handicap I enjoyed it very much. Then last night I saw 'The Tempest' which was the work of an English director and designer and a cast from Moscow who spoke the whole play in Russian, again with surtitles. It reminded me how amazing theatre can be. It was so creatively presented by a very talented team that I forgot that I couldn't understand the language. And so was great.

The Royal Court has an honourable history of presenting new theatre. We went to see the play, 'Wastwater' by a prolific English writer, Simon Stephens. It is a triptych, three plays linked but not directly. I enjoyed it even though it is unsettling and you leave the theatre wondering about a lot of aspects. The problem for me was it mentioned briefly and in passing certain things which had links between the two plays. I might have been happier if they were made in a more pointed way. Perhaps it is because I am a little dim and need things to be flagged up more. Never mind, I have the script which they sell at the Royal Court instead of a programme. It has all the cast details etc. as well as the script. The ‘Independent’s’ review said in part: “Simon Stephens's new play, beautifully directed by Katie Mitchell, charts the muddy relationships of people in and around child care in a triptych of inter-linked plays that are as haunting as the distant drone of the aircraft over Heathrow, where the plays are also set. People come and go, definitely not talking of Michelangelo.” And, “a farewell to start with, and a tentative greeting at the end. But Stephens seems to be saying nothing deep or lasting is guaranteed in these adoptions of convenience. In highlighting various problems he is inadvertently arguing for natural parenthood. Damage is going to be done on both sides of these unnatural equations.
But in the middle play, the strongest panel in the triptych, Stephens touches on the sensitive area of how irreproachable should anyone be in order to oversee children. For most of us, this is a no-brainer. Joe McInnes's sex bomb lady copper is a former heroin addict and part-time porn star, and she's in child protection.

Oh, speaking of the Royal Court, I note that 'Jerusalem' has opened in New York .. there was a very good review in the NYT this morning by Ben Brantley who I'm often not a fan of. But when he agrees with me, I bless him for a few days. When we
saw it on its opening at the Royal Court we were bowled over, especially by Mark Rylance.

One of the most nauseating things on television recently was Piers Morgan on CNN 'interviewing' Sir Donald Trump. He repeated his absurd observation that because he hasn't personally seen Mr. Obama's birth certificate, SIGNED, he can't comment on the assertions by certain Republicans that the President is not American .. thereby commenting on it. (And why does he wear a wig?) (Later the issue was cleared up by the release of the actual signed certificate. You would have thought that would have been enough for the doubters, but no. What a sad world).

On the other hand, Piers Morgan (on his U.K. show for ITV) did a fairly good job interviewing Andrew Lloyd Webber and bringing out lots of the good things about the musical Lord. His extraordinary art collection for instance, how he writes music, the amount of money he has put into the West End theatres that he owns (Cameron Mackintosh has done the same) and that he wants to give away all his wealth before he dies. He said that his children will inherit the business but not the money. I'm not sure how he will separate them but that is his business not mine. He came over as a very competitive and artistic man with excellent taste.

In May 'London Road' at the NT/Cottesloe Theatre was a good example of experimental theatre:

5 STARS Evening Standard, Financial Times, Metro, Independent, Independent on Sunday, Time Out

London Road chronicles the real-life events of 2006, when the quiet rural town of Ipswich was shattered by the discovery of the bodies of five women, and the immediate community grappled with what it meant to be at the epicentre of this tragedy.
The writer and composer took the real speech from the various characters in the area around the house where the murderer lived and converted it into songs. That probably sounds really strange and at first it was but gradually it became normal and it turned into something like an opera. Very creative and very entertaining. It was one of those theatrical evenings that can lead to long conversations even weeks later. Brian Logan in ‘The Guardian’ said:
“The play's journalistic format — it meticulously recreates the actual speech of residents interviewed by Blythe – yields abundant pleasures, even if its portrait of cheerful neighbourliness built in the shadow of violent death is an unsettling one.
What strikes you first is the incongruous clash of colloquial speech and choral singing: Blythe's verbatim script has been set to music by Adam Cork.
These aren't orthodox song lyrics; these are demotic utterances, set to music with every "um", malapropism and repetition intact.
"Begonias, petunias, um, impatiens and things," runs the first number, a celebration of London Road in Bloom.
"Everyone is very very nervous and very uncertain of everything, basically," is the catchy refrain from a later song, as the killer remains at large.
The effect can be highly comical, even if – because these are real people – one doesn't always feel comfortable laughing. And there are moments when the inarticulacy gets frustrating. It's left to Cork's songs to do the dramatic spadework, mining the impersonal interviews for emotional substance.”

Then some news everyone welcomed. Osama Bin Laden had been tracked down to a large ‘compound’ in Pakistan and killed by U.S. Forces. And on the television news we saw Americans cheering triumphantly, singing ‘God Bless America’ and saying how proud they were. Pride isn’t the feeling I would have thought was appropriate. It is shameful that it had taken since 2001 to do anything like finding him and capturing him - not necessarily shooting him dead. The situation now is that he may become a martyr and possibly more dangerous. There was a BBC Report saying that the news (without the Bin Laden detail) had been broken by Twitter.
“An IT consultant, living in Abbottabad, unknowingly tweeted details of the US-led operation as it happened.
Sohaib Athar wrote that a helicopter was hovering overhead shortly before the assault began and said that it might not be a Pakistani aircraft.
He only became aware of the significance of his tweets after President Obama announced details of Bin Laden's death.”
A social network strikes again.

Sometimes there is a week with very little in my diary and it was at the beginning of such a week that I looked at the list of movies at my local multiplex and noted that 'The Adjustment Bureau' was playing there and because Matt Damon was in it and the story sounded interesting I trolled off there yesterday in the late afternoon. It is based on a story by a much admired science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick and is about a strange force that controls our lives. Matt Damon plays a politician heading towards the White House whose meeting in Manhattan with ballet dancer Emily Blunt leads to his discovery that the world is being monitored by a benign conspiracy. Its representatives dress uniformly in 1950s-style fedoras and Brooks Brothers suits and are led by John Slattery, one of the stars of Mad Men. It doesn't sound brilliant but it was enough to tempt me to go and see it. Well, sadly it was nearly boring. Mr. Damon, who has been good in most of his films I have seen was fine but not very interesting, Emily Blunt is delightful but she was up against it too. I think they, director, producers etc., thought that the idea was strong enough and they didn't push it. It really needed to be more exciting. But still, as I always boringly say, you've got to see the stinkers to recognise a masterpiece when one comes along. And people don't deliberately make bad movies, do they?

Events recently took me back to the Poll Tax riots in the late 80s when central London was trashed. This time there was a very big demonstration led by the TUC (the association of trade unions) against the government's plan to reduce the deficit .. 'CUTS' to give it its shorthand, tabloid name. After the official march from the Embankment to Hyde Park where speeches were made, the violent, anarchist, 'mad dog' wing of the crowd took to the streets. They went from Hyde Park up Piccadilly smashing things like the front of The Ritz, Fortnum and Mason's and a couple of banks. All very childish really because they helped cancel the legitimate message of the Hyde Park rally by ensuring that their acts of violence would make the headlines on rolling TV news and the next day's newspaper front pages rather than their cause. Then I suppose they got a bit bored, went for a few drinks and decided to occupy Trafalgar Square, which would have been nice because the Police would have just let them do that as long as they were reasonably peaceful about it. But that, of course, was not their aim despite all their predicted protestations (mainly saying that they were provoked by the fascist police).

It was just as well that I wasn't at a friendly bar that I frequent in Central London which is sort've half way between the Piccadilly area and Trafalgar Square. Instead I was at an opera at the Barbican. When I was travelling there by the tube, overcrowded by the young folk leaving The Boat Race and probably some of the nice well behaved demonstrators, it didn't occur to me that on the surface hell was starting to break loose. I knew nothing about it until on the the last leg of my journey home I heard the driver and a few others saying that there was a riot in the centre of town. When I arrived home at about 11, I switched on the TV to see shots of people wearing 'hoodies' (as they call them), police in their protective gear and flames and fireworks. It became apparent that although it looked bad there was very little actual violence. Of course I deplore the trashing of any part of central London but the truth is that all that can be repaired because it is not mortal damage, when people are trashed they can often be fatally damaged.

Another new play at the National: It is called 'The Holy Rosenbergs' (not to be confused with Ethel and Julius Rosenberg who were American communists who were convicted and executed in 1953 for conspiracy to commit espionage during a time of war.) No .. this was about a family In Edgware a part of North London where Jewish families have settled for many years. This play is done in the round and is set in the living room. The father, David, is played by the wonderful Henry Goodman who was dumped from the N.Y. production of 'The Producers' where he had been cast as a preparation for his taking on the lead role in London.

As big-hearted patriarch David clings to a deal that could save both his ailing catering firm and his cherished standing in the Edgware Jewish community, his children are at loggerheads.

"You must’ve heard him banging on about the long line of Rosenbergs, stretching back to the Bible. He reckons some ancient relative catered the Last Supper"

While eldest son Danny fights for the Israelis in Gaza, his sister investigates war crimes in that same conflict. Their brother drinks and brawls and refuses to join their father’s business. But when tragedy strikes, each family member is forced to confront head-on the clash between individual identity and the demands and expectations of community.

I enjoyed the play very much despite the fact that I could see a lot of things wrong with it. Put simply, the writer tried to deal with too many issues in one play. If I went into any detail it would be a close run thing as to who was bored first, me or you. The other members of the family and a couple of outsiders were played by very good actors, the troubled son in particular was so good that I wanted to slap him.

I think the reason that I liked it so much is that I always enjoy plays where people stand about talking and arguing intelligently and entertainingly, as was the case, for instance, in 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf'.

That nice Mr. Obama visited London in late May. Having arrived from Ireland a little earlier than planned on the 24th because of the need to avoid any delays which could have been caused by the latest volcanic cloud from Iceland, a country previously best known for the cod war of the seventies and the hot clubbing scene in Reykjavik in the years since. The President attended a State Dinner in his honour at Buckingham Palace that night which I am sure was a lot of fun. That's all very well but when such events land on us, like the recent wedding of the now Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, they cause a certain amount of traffic re-alignment, i.e., chaos and a lot of helicopter noise. Of course we refer to this as the President's visit to the U.K. and bang on about the 'special relationship' but it is really only one stop on his tour of Europe. Even that is to play fast and loose with the description because only four countries were on the itinerary; Ireland, U.K., France and Poland. What is it all for? Simon Schama and Niall Ferguson, both British historians, tried to explain on Radio 4, but failed.

Penny Junor, who once wrote a royal biography of somebody said of the preparations for that State Dinner on the radio: "The horseshoe-shaped table will take an astonishing seven hours to prepare, some of which time will be taken up measuring the distance between place settings so they are a uniform distance apart (anything else would be vulgar). Good topics of conversation with the Queen are dogs and horses. Luckily Obama has a dog. Junor also tells us: "The royal family is not that interested in wine, they are more spirit drinkers."

Recently at the Riverside Studios we saw an Alan Ayckbourn play that we hadn't heard of before called 'Haunting Julia'. It was intended to be part of a trilogy he called 'things that go bump'. It is not so much a scary thriller as a story about a father's obsession with his daughter, a musical prodigy referred to by the press as 'Little Miss Mozart. She took her own life 12 years ago and he has made her small top floor flat into a memorial exhibition. In the play he has invited a psychic (he denies that description) and her last boyfriend to the flat to experience the strange cold atmosphere and a number of scary things; voices etc. . There are a couple of jump out of your seat moments but most of it is talk about whether she is present in spirit, why she would have committed suicide and the father's obsession with her. It is quite absorbing with solid performances by an excellent cast of three but (I hate to say this) I thought the writing was not quite as good as I expect from the wonderful Mr. Ayckbourn; there were too many long speeches which ran the risk of becoming boring. (She did away with herself because she could no longer bear her father's smothering attention.) However we enjoyed it very much. But not as much as ...

The next night, one of the greatest nights I have spent in the theatre for many a long year! (rare use of the exclamation mark there).
Based on a Goldoni Comedia dell-Arte play of about 300 years ago called 'A Servant of Two Masters' but updated to 1963 with a new name, 'One Man, Two Guvnors', it is now packing them in at the National Theatre. It uses all the comedy tricks both verbal and physical, that are used in the theatre but this time rather than a few .. there are many with a bit of ad-libbing with the audience thrown in. There is music hall, pantomime, farce, vaudeville; all done brilliantly. We in the audience rocked with laughter from beginning to end. Everything else will probably be an anti-climax for some time.
It stars one of the several young actors from the original cast of 'The History Boys', James Cordern who really was brilliant. (Two of the others will shortly star in a new Trevor Nunn production of 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead') Corden has also co-written a very successful sit-com called 'Gavin and Stacey'.
The only thing I can remember that came close to this in terms of making me laugh, was 'The Producers'.

After reeling from the comedic dexterity and sheer theatrical excitement of 'One Man, Two Guvnors' I knew there would be a price to pay.

A few nights later, Nikolai Gogol's mid 19th century play, 'The Government Inspector' was a huge disappointment. I have seen this play in other versions several times over the years and nearly always enjoyed it. In case you don't know, it is about a mayor of a small Russian town hearing that a government inspector will be visiting, icognito. And so every stranger is suspected of being that inspector. One such person is identified as such and so they indulge his every whim, to the extent of giving him wads of money. We know of course from the very beginning that he isn't the inspector .. otherwise there would be no play. But the situation allows for lots of comic situations. So why wouldn't it be enjoyable (as it was when I saw it on those previous occasions)? The answer is simple but disgraceful. This new version by a respected playwright was updated a little (mainly in language, it was made less ornate) but the producer and his cast didn't take it by the throat and make it work. There was no subtlety or nuance, characters were not defined very well and the set was awful. I thought it was rather like a school or amateur production with everyone having a part to play and the direction in the hands of an enthusiast or a teacher. The director in this case has some great shows to his credit; operas, musicals, plays - he's done it all. But if I am to be honest, I have always found his work less than satisfactory and certainly uninspiring.

In early June, to the Bush Theatre, formerly above a pub in Shepherd's Bush and with a good reputation for discovering new drama. It only does new plays, no revivals. It is now housed (thanks to the Council) in a building which was the borough library; a new one has been built around the corner. They won't be officially in business for a few months but in the meantime they are trying to find out from local theatregoers what they think of the theatre area, its acoustics, lighting, seating etc., so they commissioned three short plays which are being staged in three different configurations; thrust, in-the-round and 'end on' as they call the usual arrangement in a proscenium arch theatre. There were performances, donated I think, by some leading actors and supporters of the area including Francesca Annis and Hugo Speer. The first play was not much more than an extended sketch, a silly one at that. The second was a two hander which required a bit of acting and was rather good .. the third was very well done but it wasn't really a play, rather an extended double monologue. The whole evening came under the title, 'Where's My Seat' which was appropriate to our having to find a seat in each of the configurations - which of course, provided a little of the evening's entertainment. The rather grand Victorian building they now have is terrific with lots of space, I only hope they have the funding to maintain it, ticket prices will only be a drop in the 'ocean of need' they will have.

Then to the Royal Court in Sloane Square to see a revival of Arnold Wesker's play, 'Chicken Soup with Barley' which was premiered in Coventry in 1958 and then came to the Royal Court in 1960. It tells the story of an East End left wing Jewish family living through the turbulence of the period between 1936 and 1956. When I say left wing, they were Socialists and in some cases, Communist; it was acceptable in those days, keeping in mind the presence of the Fascists in Spain, Germany and Italy, not to mention here in the U.K. (not many but enough to cause trouble.) I definitely would have been a Socialist or even a Communist had I been an adult in those days. In my first years here there was a lot of perfectly respectable left wing activity. In the wonderfully written play there was a lot of talk of idealism and visions of a future of more equality. The family disintegrated along with the Western world. At the end the mother was the only one who stood by her Socialist ideals. I found the play a joy to watch and listen to and as it went on, very emotional. The acting performances were outstanding and Samantha Spiro who played the mother is sure to get an award. Arnold Wesker's plays are not done very often, which is a shame, because they may be a bit old fashioned but they are about serious matters and they are literate. Luckily another of his plays, 'The Kitchen' is being done at The National Theatre in a couple of months. I have booked.

I've written about a couple of really great pieces of recent theatre I have consumed lately. And a dud. Here is another one of the latter category. Tennessee Williams plays have always fascinated me with their wierdness, some have been good and others not so good. But I hadn't heard of 'A Cavalier for Milady' which was apparently written not long before his death and has never been performed. What a shame someone decided it was worth doing now. Here is part of one of the reviews:

Penned towards the end of Williams’ life, this portrait of madness and lust provides us with a harsh depiction of his own mother, and a more sympathetic one of his beloved sister, Rose, who, like Nijinsky, suffered from schizophrenia. It’s quite experimental and self-conscious in style. At one point, Williams jokes with the audience on the subject of apparitions – suggesting that they are ‘maybe only possible on a stage, in a play written by a madman’; a nod towards Williams’ fears of falling prey to the mental illness that plagued his sister.

There are some tender moments in director Gene David Kirk’s production and it all gets a bit nasty towards the end, but it’s not enough to make up for the essential lack of drama and despite the actors’ best efforts, the characters aren’t really given the opportunity to be anything more than one-dimensional.

Actually it was ten times worse than that. Appalling direction, rotten acting and a crap set. But as I always (perhaps boringly) say .. you've got to see the rubbish so that you recognise the great stuff when it comes along.

I don't regularly watch 'Newsnight' on BBC2, the Jeremy Paxman 'show' .. but when I do I become quite absorbed. And this was the case a couple of times recently. It is an excellent addition to the news programmes. Some really boring subjects like the financial woes of Greece are made really interesting and even clear. Perhaps I will have to change my television priorities.

Yesterday I spent several hours in the West End and nearly got myself lost .. because there is so much building and rebuilding going on that whole areas are blocked off. A new rail system is being built that will go from beyond East London to beyond Heathrow on the other side and when it goes through Central London vast reconstruction is required at existing stations to accommodate the new trains. Much of the work will be finished in time for the Olympic Games which is really lovely for the visiting hordes and I am sure we will appreciate it too. I hope they spend enough money to justify the cost of all the work.

London Theatre

2010-09-08T07:47:00.001-07:00

After seeing Neil Simon’s 'The Prisoner of Second Avenue' recently, with my companion I went to the stage door in a dark street. at the back of the Vaudeville theatre. Someone came out of the dressing room and was immediately surrounded by a crowd. I couldn't see who it was. It became clear that It was Ricky Gervais and he attracted an enthusiastic crowd twice the size of Jeff Goldblum, the star of the play. By the way this excellent Neil Simon play was disappointing on this occasion despite the best efforts of the cast.

At the moment the Apollo Theatre, Hammersmith, is sporting a huge sign at the front .. it has a one word sigh which fills the entire front of the building; that word is 'GERVAIS'. To think that a few years ago he slunk into my studio to talk to me for a few minutes (as long as he could be amusing). And so the world moves on.

Then there was a new play by Mike Bartlett called ‘Earthquakes in London’ at the Cottesloe Theatre which was configured especially for the play The audience was placed either side of the ‘stage’ and in the performing area itself, some on bar stools, some standing. A kind’ve bar top snaked its way from one end to the other. There were also small proscenium arch spaces at either end. The narrative moved through time but the main thrust of it was told from the present day. The writer has a good record and the director (Rupert Goold) is the wunderkind at the moment having directed the excellent ‘Macbeth’ starring Patrick Stewart and ‘Enron’. But the combination didn’t come up with the magic I expected. Its episodic nature didn’t flow despite the lively mobile nature of it with moments of action from several time periods and bursts of dancing to lively pop music by, among others, Arcade Fire and Underworld. There were some very good performances. Some reviewers went on about the perpetual motion of it all, I’m afraid I didn’t see it like that, I saw a lot of disconnected sequences (with occasional flashes of excitement) that led to an unsatisfactory tacked on ending. Never mind, they can't all be winners.

But 'The Beauty Queen of Leenane' certainly was. It is by the London born writer of Irish parents, Martin McDonagh who has cornered the market in seeing Irish life as the blackest of comedy. He has now moved to the US.S. His first American play, 'Behanding in Spokane' starring Christopher Walken ran in New York early this year. I'm not sure whether he is going to stay in the States. However, I digress. The play I saw at 'The Young Vic' was about a mother and daughter living in a cottage in Galway. The mother had cruelly smothered the daughter making her a bitter, disappointed and ultimately unsatisfied woman in her mid 40s. It has a tragic ending. And yet, believe it or not, it is also extremely funny. He always seems to pull off this trick, telling bleak and tragic stories but using horrifyingly black humour. Not to everyone's taste perhaps. The run of this play was quickly sold out.

Next was the Broadway revival of 'Hair' which won last year's Tony Award. I was looking forward to it, if only for nostalgic reasons. It was a ground breaking show when it first appeared in the late sixties and changed the nature of musicals until Sondheim came along. I found it occasionally great but often monotonous with many of the songs sounding like short jingles on social and political issues, which I suppose is what they were. There were the favourites of course, 'Aquarius', 'I got Life', 'Easy to be Hard', 'Good Morning Starshine', 'Let the Sunshine in' and my favourite 'Frank Mills' but they suffered a bit from that modern technique of screeching which was not helped by amplification which didn't sound to me as if it was up to the job. Despite all that, I made myself enjoy the evening.

There is a much praised production of Arthur Miller's 'All My Sons' pulling in full houses at the moment. I went to see recently and when you enter the auditorium the first thing you see is a stunning set, a two story old house surrounded by big trees (willows etc.) and with the light from the sky shining through the trees. It was really stunning. I had to look several times to confirm that what I was seeing was indeed in a theatre in the centre of London. David Suchet and Zoe Wanamaker led an excellent cast. It is based on an incident in Ohio (just after the war) in which a daughter turned in her father to the FBI when she discovered he had been selling faulty machinery to the army. A version of that incident is what provides the drama in this, Arthur Miller's first successful and satisfactory (to him), play. As families do, they didn't talk about it until forced to. My only quibble was that the dialogue whether about trivial, gossipy matters or momentous incidents was delivered at the same intensity. And as the play went on it annoyed me more and more. Arthur Miller’s plays are always of a high quality and so I still enjoyed this play very much.

I have just seen a performance of 'State Fair'. The venue (Trafalgar Studios) was smaller than a pocket sized handkerchief, I had to be careful to ensure that I was not under the dancing feet of the vigorous chorus. This stage version of the film musicals of 1945 and 1962 by Rodgers and Hammerstein boasted a cast that was very enthusiastic. The singing and dancing, good but because of the small space it had the air of a very good amateur show and was none the worse for that. I am a fan of really good songwriting and Rodgers and Hammerstein were the best ( I silently sang along to some of the excellent songs). The writers in that genre today do a different thing; their work is closer to opera or at least, what they see/hear as opera.

Book Shortage

2010-03-31T05:17:00.001-07:00

I have been partially sighted for the past year or so because of a diabetes related eye condition. This has deprived me of one of the great pleasures of my life, reading. I have always enjoyed reading for both professional and recreational reasons. It never occurred to me that one day I wouldn’t be able to read books, newspapers and magazines because it was no longer possible to prescribe glasses that would enable me to. I have tried various forms of magnification but none has proved satisfactory, all I can really manage is using my computer to read online where I can enlarge the print to whatever size I need. But of course this is only partially useful because many magazines are not online and it isn’t satisfactory to read a book in such circumstances. The new E-readers such as the Sony Reader, Amazon’s Kindle and maybe the iPad could be an answer if not the answer.

Friends often suggest audio books and I may have to rely on them in the future. but I don’t use them very much at the moment because listening to someone else reading a book aloud is a totally different experience. Even a great book read by an excellent reader delivers someone else’s interpretation of the author’s ‘voice’, I would rather not have the middle man, so, I imagine, would the author. But I am not giving up on them, i am now concentrating on getting used to this experience.

The truth is, there is no substitute for relaxing in an armchair with a favourite novel. My local library offered a glimmer of hope with its ‘large print’ section and I have enjoyed a couple of the books from their shelves. The trouble is that they don’t have many of them. In several large bookshops in London, I have asked to be directed to their Large Print section. ‘I’m sorry, we don’t have one’ they replied. That surprised and disappointed me. A quick check of the site of one of the well known online booksellers revealed a quite lengthy list but without being too picky, there were very few that appealed to me, I like contemporary fiction, biographies and books about society and politics. What I found was quite a few reference books, many crossword, sudoku and other puzzle books, Mills and Boon and other romances, lots of bibles, self help books and Harry Potter. If I was desperate I’m sure I could go through the complete list and find one or two that appealed, but that’s not good enough for a voracious reader.

Surely there are enough partially sighted readers to warrant a Large Print section in the big bookshops and a larger choice in our public libraries.

Booklovers love browsing in a bookshop, handling the books, sampling a few pages of a new Philip Roth or Martin Amis novel or perhaps an old Graham Greene favourite for re-reading. There is a great feeling taking a package of two or three choices and then, on the way home, reading a first chapter of one of them on the train.

I would like to be able to do that again.

Green Zone

2010-03-16T09:44:00.001-07:00

You've probably heard and maybe read, about the film 'Green Zone'. I saw it last week and thought it was excellent. I liked the Bourne films, two of which were directed by the same British veteran of current affairs television programmes, Paul Greengrass. He uses some of the techniques from that world in the two Bourne films he directed as well as 'Green Zone'. It may confuse some people to see Matt Damon (who played Jason Bourne) as an army guy looking for WMDs in Iraq in 'Green Zone' but that is their problem.
Films about war are not at the top of my list of favourite movie genres. However,I think there must be a part of me that likes being in the thick of the mess and confusion of war action in films. 'Platoon' some years back was excellent because it seemed to me the first time that my feeling that war must always be one mess after another.was confirmed. And that is the case here. Not surprisingly the political nature of it also interested me. There has been some snooty stuff written in our press about it not being strictly accurate. Of course it wasn't, if that had been the case it would have actually been a documentary and not an action film aimed at the entertainment market. Greengrass wanted to appeal to both the mind and the senses of the audience.,
There was an interesting interview with him in The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/mar/08/paul-greengrass-betrayal-green-zone

Tate Galleries (March 2010)

2010-03-16T09:28:00.001-07:00

A journey to Tate Modern was overdue but the day I selected about a week ago turned out to be the wrong day. The walk from Monument underground station, even in the cold was er, bracing and enjoyable but it was different when I started to wander about one of the exhibitions, 'Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde'; I quickly realised that my mind was not engaged. Who knows why? However, I went through the motions for a while, then had a cup of coffee and strolled around the gift shop.

I made up for it at the end of the week by going to Tate Britain where there were two exhibitions that interested me. The first was some of the smaller works of Henry Moore. It is interesting to see some of these and to be reminded of how strange and sensuous his human figures (mostly women) were. His sometimes ugly versions of human form don’t please everyone and without the silky smooth limbs they might even be offensive. Several larger works were reminiscent of Easter Island statues and were therefore more like the many great public sculptures which are familiar in the streets, parks and gardens around Britain. The curator of the exhibition said that Moore’s works were often grim and on occasions, tragic.

The other show I wanted to see was by Chris Ofili who won the Turner Prize 12 years ago. His paintings are striking in their use of African imagery. His intricate brushwork has the additional use of resin, glitter, map pins and magazine cut-outs and of course his trademark balls of elephant dung which are applied to the canvas and used to prop up the paintings. There is a great deal of humour of the belly laugh kind used as well as subtle observation of his, mostly African, subjects. It is a very satisfying, entertaining exhibition which I intend to see again before it closes in mid May.

Theatre, movies, concerts ....

2010-03-02T07:02:00.000-08:00

In a spirit of adventure, to Covent Garden where 'The Rake's Progress' was a disappointment. I'm not really surprised, opera was not Stravinsky's strong point, he excelled at music for ballet. It came over as a 'not very good' musical without hit songs. The singing was pretty good, the staging was up to Covent Garden standards and the orchestra was good but underworked.
I decided to treat myself to a glass of wine in the delightful Paul Hamlyn* Hall at interval. It was execrable. I initiated a conversation with an urbane couple seated behind me just before the second act. Their view of the opera was about the same as mine and we swapped notes on things we had seen lately. I'm not sure what he was apart from being a bit louche, but she was an excitable Italian woman who demonstrated an enthusiasm for life.
(*I peferred the old name, 'The Foral Hall'. We seem to be adopting the American mania for naming everything after the big donors. The Art Institute in Chicago has just about every room named for someone.)

Then a night of heaven. Just me sitting in the dark at the Barbican Hall and the (approx) 100 members of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra .. they were performing Sibelius' second symphony, I was absorbing it into my nervous system. They tell me other people were in the auditorium but I wasn't aware of them.
Especially now that I am partially sighted, books are not one of my main pleasures and so music has taken on an even greater role in my life. And we are truly blessed in London to have about six major orchestras with regular visits by ‘tourists’ like last night when we could choose from the NY Philharmonic, and the Berlin Staatskapelle (they played Schoenberg and Beethoven under Daniel Barenboim); what a choice. Barenboim has been doing a season of concerts and getting great reviews.
Friday 4th February
The play we saw at the Donmar was John Logan's 'Red' with Alfred Molina as Mark Rothko and Eddie Redmayne as his assistant, Ken. It was set in his studio in The Bowery in 1958/9 when he was working on the commission for the 'Four Seasons' Hotel restaurant in the Seagram Building. Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe had asked him to do it. Rothko was tortured, it seems, all the time over his philosophy of art but more so with this commission because the restaurant would be full of rich people who only saw art as decoration. The world knows that just before it was to be installed, he rang Johnson and said he was withdrawing the pictures and would return the money. His assistant was used as a sounding board for his bullying, shouted exclamations about his art and how it was better than Jackson Pollock, Warhol and all the others of that time who were too concerned with the commercial side of their work. But as the play went on, Ken who was an art student started to argue with him and gave as good as he got. The play was about an hour and a half long and was a very good way of getting to know Rothko and his work. Many people simply see his pictures as slabs of paint, sometimes seeing it as one colour. I first saw Rothko's work in an exhibition at the Tate in the mid 70s and liked it immediately. I didn't know then that he had donated the paintings for 'The Four Seasons' to the Tate and they were part of the exhibition. An absorbing play, beautifully acted and with some very busy business with huge canvasses and buckets of paint. It has been a huge sell-out success and I hear will transfer to New York.

Another night, another play. This time a diverting piece called 'Midsummer' at the Soho Theatre (which has an annoying unreserved seating policy). The play, by David Greig, is from Edinburgh and is entertaining in a gritty (and witty) Scottish way, telling of a divorce lawyer and a petty criminal who get drunk on a rainy Friday night leading to a night of you-know-what followed by a hangover Saturday and a weekend adventure involving a spending spree and a night in the city's poshest hotel. The two performers are excellent, versatile and include songs in telling the story. The predominantly young audience liked it more than yours truly. My loss, I suppose.

So to a production at the Lyric Hammersmith of ‘Three Sisters’ which was a disgrace. It was produced by the lyric in association with a company called ‘Filter’ which claims that it involves actors and all other staff in the production of plays which they say use innovative methods. In this case that led to ragged acting, the sisters having different accents, some sound effects and dialogue being amplified and the use of inappropriate music. It seemed to be in a contemporary setting although all the costumes didn’t appear to belong together. The first act made me angry with its setting on a vast stage with low lighting and poor projection of speech. The second half, acts three and four were a marginal improvement, there were fewer gimmicks and in the last act there appeared to be evidence of Chekhov, they failed to completely destroy his masterpiece, indeed there was an Edward Bond flavour; no bustle, individual characters moving across the almost bare stage and making some sense of the historical nature of the play. I am not afraid of innovation or experiment as long as it serves the play. There was a lot of experimentation in the fringe theatre here in the seventies and often led to quite striking work. Especially, Charles Marowitz,ex RSC who then created The Open Space Theatre and created new plays out of ‘Macbeth’ and several other Shakespeare plays to great effect. And there were others ‘innovating’ as well.

LSO (London Symphony Orchestra) concerts are usually a bit special. Recently at the Barbican under the excellent Russian conductor Yuri Gergiev they were ordinary until interval giving us Bartok and a the Strauss Horn Concerto, both respectable pieces but we were subjected to uninteresting playing. i hurried out at the interval and wandered around the building trying to look forward to the second half. It was the inclusion in the programme of Richard Strauss' 'Ein Heldenleben', that attracted me to the concert in the first place. It is a spectacular orchestral piece with lots of power and beauty which requires fabulous playing. And we got it. It got me back on the rails. Not a moment too soon, eh?

After weeks of dithering I went to my local cinema to see the 3D 'Avatar' of which we have heard a lot in the past few months. I learned with dread that it was 2 hours and 40 minutes long, my ideal length for a film is 90 minutes. I enjoyed it with a lot of reservations.
I am still disenchanted with 3D, it darkens the screen and the glasses are annoying, however it was sensibly and impressively used in that the most dramatic effects didn't seem to be gratuitous, i.e., spears shooting past your left ear simply for effect. It has a lazy plot involving a disabled ex marine, Jake, played by Australian actor although born in the U.K., Sam Worthington, going from an ecologically devastated Earth .. to a distant planet called Pandora. Jake's avatar has to infiltrate the people there so that we noble earth people could have access to their bounteous natural resources especially the ludicrously named element Unobtainium. Anyway, he falls in love with a local girl and 'turns native'. So there's a battle and he wins with the local folk.
The appalling script had a lot of that macho quasi military slang that Americans like, you know, all about smashing things, winning (WINNING!!!), whipping ass, etc. But it wasn't all bad, some of the acting was pretty good considering the mayhem that was going on around the performing artists. The music was by the same composer used by James Cameron for his earlier blockbuster, Titanic .. and it often sounded like the same music. There is no question that it looks great and the design of Pandora, its flora and wonderful fauna is very inventive.

Quite recently at the NT Cottesloe theatre I saw a play by a new young writer, called 'Very Old, like 45', a very clumsy title I agree but it is to be commended for trying to do something with the challenge facing Western democracies in dealing with the growing ageing population. In itself it is not a bad thing of course, but it does have frightening prospects for the pensions system. The play was very good in the first half with lots of joshing about how quaint but annoying old people are etc., stuff we have all heard, but when it got down to the serious business of, not necessarily coming to conclusions, but at least clarifying the questions, it failed. It introduced the idea of care homes which offered a pleasant life for those who were reasonably healthy, thanks in part to drip feeding them drugs which eventually lead to their demise. A brave try by the writer but the end was a cop-out and ultimately disappointing. The production and the acting were very good.
Then, about a week later, Ibsen's 'Ghosts' in the West End. This is a good play about very serious matters like syphilis and incest and even has some 'comedy', a word I put in quotes because we're talking mostly irony here, so no belly laughs, only chuckles and sniggers from the likes of me. The trouble here is, that despite a mostly very good cast, the production was not good enough. It was directed by Ian Glen, the excellent actor who played Pastor Manders, one of the principal roles. I think he took over from someone else so it is possible that there is an excuse but that is not something that should concern we theatregoers, it is either up to standard - or not. In this case, not. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't bad, I enjoyed it, but I was disappointed. I need perfection.
At the end of last week at the Richmond Curzon, the film, 'A Single Man' directed by Tom Ford and starring Colin Firth as a gay man whose partner was killed in a car crash. The death was at the beginning of the film which was based on Christopher Isherwood's novel which dealt with his real fears that his partner would suffer such a fate. Firth was outstanding and won the BAFTA (British Academy Award) last weekend for it. The rest of the cast was very good as well, mostly English, but Julian Moore, an American actor I like very much, didn't quite get it right. However this didn't really spoil it one bit. In the spirit of the Isherwood book, Tom Ford was correct in making the whole thing cool and stylish and never going for our emotions. We can do that all by ourselves. However I do admit that some people would not like that approach. And of course Mr. Ford made it look great but without overdoing it.

Green and pleasant land ..

2009-08-01T07:14:00.000-07:00

Another play about England and this time it has all the signs of being a hit. Jez Butterworth's 'Jerusalem' (as in the Blake poem) is at The Royal Court in Sloane Square. It is a portrait of a A hippy rebel and the life(style) he has created for himself in the countryside in the West Country. As we meet, he is not a happy bunny. The piece of countryside that he is occupying is threatened with development as a housing estate. He (Johnny Byron) lives in a caravan and plays host to a variety of locals, he is also being pursued by the local police who want him to leave so that the New Estate can be built. Throughout the course of the play there are sounds from the outside world coming through the trees, a summer fair is under way. Johnny is played brilliantly by a bulked up Mark Rylance, an outstanding actor who brings an individual take to every character he plays. This play of three acts is rather too long. For the most part it is very funny. However, the third act nearly comes to a grinding halt when it takes on the task of painting the bigger picture, 'this ancient land' is in peril and is in danger of losing its soul. This is what the play is about so it is right that it is spelled out clearly. My argument is about the style and method used. The pace seriously falters and so runs the risk of losing its point.

Despite that it was a play that I would recommend.

Back to London's Cultural Scene

2009-07-11T06:38:00.001-07:00

After about a month in Perth, Western Australia (my home town) and brief stays in Shanghai and Tokyo) it was back to London's cultural scene.

'Peer Gynt' (a fresh take on the Ibsen saga by the National Theatre of Scotland) which was not to my taste, Handel's 'Agrippina in a concert version by the Zurich Opera who visit the Royal Festival Hall each year which was excellent and 'Waiting for Godot' with an amazing cast: Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Simon Callow and Ronald Pickup. This was great theatre with McKellen's performance having the edge over the others. Of course it wasn't a competition but with such a cast it is very tempting to give them grades. The play, I'm told is not to everyone's taste but the full house gave it a cheering ovation. And there was also 'Madame de Sade' written by Yogushi Mishima the prolific Japanese writer and suicidee. This play tells the story of the Marquis through the experiences of women; his wife and her sister (both of whom claimed him) Madame (the mother of the wife, played deliciously by Judi Dench), a whipcracking Contessa (another delicious performance by Frances Barber) and a housekeeper - oh, and there's a nun too. 'He' never appears but is turned away from the door at the end. The critics didn't like this play when it opened, they said it really wasn't a play but a parade of costumes in a lovely set. They didn't accept that it was a play in the style of Racine, whose plays always (or often) featured characters talking about incidents and characters who never appeared. It told me a lot about de Sade that I didn't know and did it with great style and wit. And it is true the set was dazzling and the costumes dramatic and scene stealing. I liked it.

Wallace Shawn whose dad was the editor of ‘The New Yorker’, is a pixie like man who is an actor and writer. His acting is most visible in the movies, he has appeared in hundreds of them. His writing for the theatre consists of a small number of plays which, since the first in the 70s, have attracted criticism for their alleged pornographic content and charged political argument. The Royal Court has been home to a season of his work recently. I saw ‘Aunt Dan and Lemon’ which was first produced in the mid 80s in both New York and London. In this production Jane Horrocks plays Lemon, an anorexic woman who seems to exist on fruit and vegetable juices; the play starts with her justifying Hitler and Nazism. She believes the Nazis were honest. And it becomes apparent that these tendencies came from Aunt Dan (Dannielle)who wasn’t her aunt but a friend of her mother. Most of the play is taken up by Aunt Dan mesmerising Lemon with her stories of a louche life in London and more particularly her ranting about right wing ideas. There is a long section devoted to how right Henry Kissinger was during the Vietnam war and how it was appalling that people didn’t appreciate him. I liked the play because it forced me to deal with all these right wing ideas. I noted that several people left during the Kissinger rant (remember the Royal Court has a left wing tendency). One critic described the play as an assault on the liberal conscience. And it was. But it was a useful one in my view.

Arthur Miller wrote several of the best plays of the last century and I think ‘A View from the Bridge’ is one of them. This production had a good run at the Duke of York’s theatre and then went is on tour, I saw it at the Richmond Theatre. Ken Stott played Eddie, a decent, hard working Brooklyn dockworker. Two young Italian men who have entered the country illegally move in with Eddie, his wife and niece, Beatrice. One of them, Rodolfo, fancies her and this displeases Eddie who is in love with her himself but refuses to admit it. When the couple decide to get married, Eddie loses it and betrays the young men to the authorities. It is classic Greek tragedy really. The performances were good, especially that of Elizabeth Mastrantonio who played Beatrice. A very satisfying evening.

Racism

2009-03-27T05:08:00.000-07:00

‘England People Very Nice’ has been at the centre of accusations of racism since it opened at the National Theatre (Olivier) a few weeks ago. According to some bloggers and activists it uses racial stereotypes to reinforce racial attitudes . I disagree. It is true that there are racial stereotypes in this sprawling play but the writer uses caricature and cartoons to tell a fast moving, unfolding historical story. I don’t think that they reinforce racism. A group of asylum seekers are putting on a devised play about four waves of immigration. Each new set of arrivals is absorbed into the Bethnal Green community, and then resents its successors. Protestant Huguenots are followed by Irish Catholics, who, in turn, are hostile to the Jews, and they feel displaced by the Bangladeshis. The funny but sometimes crude humour is used to point out the ridiculous behaviour of people towards newcomers. It is sadly a part of human nature to be, at least, wary of the outsider but we need to be reminded that we are all outsiders in some way. If we are shown how absurd it is it helps us to understand it. It is a fast moving, rollicking entertainment that does its job with a great cast, a brilliantly designed set and clever projected animation. The writer, Richard Bean, has responded robustly to the criticism by saying that he was once told he should avoid writing about ethnic minorities, because "you don't have their experience". It's an idea he finds infuriating. "England is an immigrant culture. We're all immigrants. If you can't write about young Bangladeshis - they are English, they were born here - then what you're saying is that a living writer can't write about England

Radio

2009-03-17T04:55:00.000-07:00

Recently I was asked to do a programme for BBC Radio Four in their 'Archive' series about the history of radio advertising in the UK. It was broadcast on Saturday 14th March. Here is a piece I wrote and which appeared in a different form on the BBC Magazine website:

Whether we like it or not, advertising is an important part of radio, without it a significant part of our broadcasting landscape would not exist. In fact, many of us remember a time when it didn’t.

A radio jingle heard on a breakfast show can stay with you all day whether you like it or not. I’ve been listening to lots of them preparing for ‘Radio Sales’, this week’s Archive on 4. It took an intensive diet of Abba’s Greatest Hits to rid my brain of the Ovaltinies jingle, a too memorable example of the genre. Sean Street of Bournemouth University says that anybody of a certain age will still be able to sing the League of Ovaltinies jingle. “I think it’s probably the most successful advertising jingle of all time.”

There are fads and fashions in all industries and there are those in radio advertising today who say that the age of the jingle has passed. Andrew Ingram, co-author of ‘Better Radio Advertising’ told me, “Jingles have almost been outlawed in advertising at the moment. It's a slightly dirty word. Jingles are fantastically powerful, they do make you remember things. The Germans have a lovely expression – ‘ohrwurm’ - which translates as ‘earworm’ - the idea that something goes into your ear and wriggles around in there and you have to use a hook to get it out. Jingles are like that, the most famous one on these islands is ‘You can’t get quicker than a Kwik Fit Fitter’.

But top ad man Tim Delaney says, “..they are kind’ve the lowest form of life” and Nick Angell who produces commercials tells me “the jingle is doh! - don’t mention the jingle because they’re very passé”. However, jingle lovers, all is not lost. Along comes veteran DJ Tony Blackburn on his white charger, “Anyone who says jingles have had their day are completely mad, the jingle does work very effectively. The fact that I can’t remember many commercials that we play nowadays but I can remember a jingle from the sixties that told me to start my day with Weetabix must say something.”

So what do the ad men use instead? Tony Hertz came here from the U.S. in the early seventies to bring an American perspective to radio ads here and says now they use ‘sonic brand triggers’, which are essentially jingles. The Intel sound and British Airways use of opera music by Delibes are good examples of what he means. Producer Nick Angell thinks these devices are much posher, “we use carefully crafted or specially selected music to underpin a script or provide some sort of attachment to the product.”

Early in my career on commercial radio in Australia I remember how jingles for soft drinks, petrol and toothpaste competed with the station’s own identification jingles. They were uplifting punctuations in any show and the best ones were arranged to suit the time of day as well as the product. ‘You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent’, ‘things go better with coke’ and ‘go well, go Shell’ remain with me to this day.

Another tool used by the ad men is comedy and some of the best commercials using comedy were for Hamlet cigars (before they were outlawed in 2005). Ad man Tim Delaney likes to use comedy because it brings perspective to a product. He used it to award winning effect in a commercial for Philips in 1982 which used the talents of Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones poked fun at the British admiration for everything Japanese in electronics at that time. Remember the man who had a Hoki Koki 2000 television and wanted a videocaster with all the functions? He was shown a Philips (Firrips).

But some say that jokes are only funny the first time you hear them and so people wouldn’t be bothered listening to them again, that’s the view of Benny Brown, Radio Luxembourg DJ. If the ‘Firrips’ ad and others are anything to go by that isn’t so. Even Peter Sellers did some radio commercials. He played all the roles in a very funny ‘Mastermind’ sketch for Camping Gaz, including Magnus Magnusson and contestants like Major Faucet Mildew. And the highly praised American series of commercials called ‘Real Men of Genius’ for Bud Lite beer, uses both comedy and jingles.

Radio commercials can lift your spirits with singalong jingles, they can make you laugh and they can drive you mad with lists of phone numbers and website addresses. If you don’t mind being shouted at, you are well catered for. As in all artistic endeavours there are very few masterpieces, if I can use that term here, but you can’t say they don’t try to be noticed or aspire to greatness.

A lot of money is spent on making the ads, even more on placing them on radio stations, so it seems reasonable to assume that they make business sense. No one admits to having bought something because they heard it advertised but surely they must otherwise what is it all for?

Timid Beginning

2009-03-09T03:33:00.000-07:00

My first post was a timid beginning to this blog. I am still in the process of formulating its identity. What will it be about? I suspect it will be a 'magpie' collection of all kinds of stuff from the passing parade of people and issues that make up our daily digest of news - to the trivia of my daily life. I am a regular theatre and concert goer so there will be a certain amount of criticism and comment and like most people I suspect, I shout at television programmes a lot; some of my shouts may be something I can share with others. Be prepared for the timidity to continue for a short time. Oh, add to my interests, reading. I will prepare a book list to add further material for discussion.

Pitmen

2009-03-09T03:00:00.000-07:00

I saw a brilliant play last week at The National Theatre, 'The Pitmen Painters' by the author of 'Billy Elliot', Lee Hall.

In 1934, a group of Ashington (in the Newcastle area) miners hired a professor to talk to them and maybe teach, art appreciation at an evening class. They moved on rather quickly from talking about art to doing it, they began to paint. Within a few years the most avant-garde artists became their friends and their work was bought and displayed but still every day they worked, as before, down the mine.

In the course of the play we learned a lot about art, the group of miner/painters who were wonderful characters - and the history of the coal mining area of the North east. It was funny, beautifully acted, simply staged and very moving.

Just as I thought I was entering another jaded stage, I was saved by this gem. Of course in our discussion afterwards I had some criticism, nothing is perfect, but it could not take any shine off the play.