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Behind the Beautiful Forevers

21/3/2015

It has been a little while since our last outing to watch a play under the NT Live banner, and it’s probably true to say that a theatre piece set in the slums of Mumbai didn’t immediately get me racing for a seat - the clincher was probably the fact it had been dramatised by David Hare. His play, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, is based on American Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo’s non-fiction work of the same title. Katherine Boo, married to a man with Indian citizenship, spent three years gaining the trust of the people whose lives she sought to record for her book.

She focused on the men, women and children who are forced to live by their wits in Annawadi, a makeshift slum area close to Mumbai airport and its adjacent luxury hotels . It has a large sewage lake lying just beside it, and when you look at photographs of the place it’s hard to believe how the structures, so far from any concept of vertical, can ever stay upright. The people here collect the rubbish discarded by those who live in the other Mumbai with its billionaires and global ambitions. I can’t speak for the book because I haven’t read it, although it is now most certainly on my To Read list.

The play reminded me of the kind of work we were regularly presented with on British TV in the 60s and 70s through slots like Play for Today. Thank God for NT Live and subsidised theatre, because how else could such a large-scale production be possible? TV it seems to me has largely given up its remit of educating its audience in this way. David Hare’s writing is seamless, as was Rufus Norris’s direction - there were times when I actually forgot I was watching a piece of theatre; the set design lighting and production were all top-notch as was the ensemble playing of an excellent British Asian cast. It was unremittingly dark at moments as it depicted the desperate lives of these men, women and children who exist by their wits in this often truly grim place.

As we left the Odeon Tunbridge Wells and drove home in our nice car to our comfortable home we still felt shocked and perhaps a little bit ashamed that such places as Annawadi exist in this world that we are all supposed to share - well, we are, aren’t we?

Definitely worth seeing if you get a chance. There is another NTLive transmission on 2 April, and the last performance of the play is at the National Theatre on 5 May.

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Buddy Reading 'Strangers on a Train' by Patricia Highsmith

13/3/2015

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I read four out of the five Ripley novels by Patricia Highsmith a few weeks back - I drew the line at Ripley Under Water because the reviews by many of her die-hard fans were far from celebratory about it and I hadn’t enjoyed The Boy Who Followed Ripley (the penultimate Ripley book) at all. The Ripley series is undoubtedly patchy. From what I’ve read about her, Patricia Highsmith had a serious problem with alcohol, which is so often the the cause of decline or degeneration in the work of many great artists. Make no mistake, Patricia Highsmith, when on top of her game, is second to none as a writer of the psychological novel. I say novel rather than thriller because I think it rather underestimates the quality of Highsmith’s best work to describe it as mere thriller writing - not that there’s anything wrong with a darn good thriller. The two best titles in the Ripley series (almost universally agreed by all it seems) are The Talented Mr Ripley and Ripley’s Game, the former I’d describe as a psychological novel, the second I’d describe as an effective psychological thriller.

I discuss books quite a lot, on Goodreads, Twitter, Facebook or sometimes on this blog - I guess they’re a way of life. My old Biology teacher from school (nicknamed ‘Charlie Biol’ a little unimaginatively) used to like to lecture us boys on the merits of reading, “Boys, if you have a good book, then you’re never without a friend!” He was absolutely right of course, and all my life I’ve kept my ‘friends’ close by. I mentioned reading the Ripley books to someone on Twitter, a self-confessed book addict, who said she’d enjoyed The Talented Mr Ripley but hadn’t got on with any of the others. However, she did express an interest in reading Strangers on a Train - Highsmith’s first novel. I proposed a ‘Buddy Read’. This is something I don’t normally have time for, not because I don’t enjoy them, but simply because I always have an alarming TBR pile. My wife decided to join us, so on 1 March (St David’s Day) we three arrived at Highsmith station and set off on our journey together!

What an astounding first novel! This book is sixty-five years old but remains to this day a considerably shocking edge of the seat read. And I don’t mean that it contains graphic violence or gripping action sequences - not at all. This book is a psychological novel that gets deep under the skin of its two main characters. We plough straight into the story from page one; we’re suddenly there, in the train compartment where our strangers meet. Believe me, what ensues is increasingly tense and quite unnerving. The compulsive way this novel is written makes the reader feel like they too are trapped, just like the book’s main protagonist Guy Haines, in an unceasing nightmare. As trains are driven along an irrevocably permanent track, we its readers, often squirming with anticipation, observe two increasingly desperate men reach their inevitable destinations. As in The Talented Mr Ripley, Strangers on a Train has a strongly understated homo-erotic element lurking just underneath the story’s surface. I’m assuming this would have made the book unpublishable in 1950 if it had been more overtly stated. If you like exceedingly well-written, utterly compulsive and rather disturbing psychological novels/thrillers, then I can highly recommend this one.

My ‘Buddy Read’ pals and I are now thinking about our next outing - it’ll probably be in the Autumn. The only criteria: a book previously unread by all; a book we all fancy reading! Just let me know if you’d like to join in!

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A Trip to Wales and Another Good Welshman

4/3/2015

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The wife and I spent the weekend in Wales - most appropriate of course, to be back home for St David’s Day! We stayed with a newly reacquainted long-lost relative in Cardiff. One of my first engagements as a professional actor was for a theatre company, long defunct, based in Cardiff, called the Welsh Drama Company. I enjoyed working in the city then and have continued to do so whenever work or play have taken me back there. It has continued to improve as a city. When I worked there initially the magnificent St David’s Hall was simply a building site and the whole shopping area around it was in the process of being redeveloped. A great deal of Cardiff was rather grey, just as much of post-industrialised Britain looked back then. Its heyday as a port, at one time one of the world’s largest exporters of coal, was past, and this once economically vigorous city was struggling to find a new role for itself in the world. Of course Cardiff has seen many more great building projects since the late Seventies, including the redevelopment of the whole Bay Area which includes the Welsh Assembly Building and the Millenium Centre. And of course our national passion (bordering on obsession) for the game of rugby is now catered for at the magnificent Millenium Stadium, right in the heart of the city.

Any visitor entering Cardiff’s Queen Street from the Castle end is met by the statue of Aneurin Bevan (1897 - 1960), or Nye as he’s more affectionately remembered in Wales. He was born and raised in the valleys town of Tredegar, the son of a coal miner. He left school to work in the pits himself at the age of thirteen, where he soon became active in the trade union movement, which sent him to Central Labour College in London. It was here that he gained in confidence as a speaker and began to overcome the stammer that he had been afflicted with since childhood. In 1929 he stood and became elected as the Labour MP for Ebbw Vale, and he was to remain in this seat for the next thirty-one years until his early death. He is perhaps best remembered as the founder of the National Health Service, which became fully operational on the 5 July 1948. He defined a civilised society as one that takes care of its weak and vulnerable. Those of us who have grown up in a happy time where health care was provided unquestioningly by the state have Nye Bevan to thank for this. The National Health Service wasn’t born without suffering the pangs of childbirth and was vehemently opposed by the Conservative Party, the British Medical Association and by some in Bevan’s own Labour Party.

The National Health Service is, we are currently told by too many of its workers to be just scare-mongering, splitting at its seams. It is one of the finest institutions this country has, and we would all be far poorer for its loss. I for one will almost certainly be considering it as one of the foremost issues to be considered when the time comes for me to cast my vote in the general election in May. My Great Aunt Mary had lived almost sixty years before the National Health Service and the Welfare State were fully in place for the protection of all British citizens. I was often amused as a young boy when she expressed her darkest fear of ending up in the workhouse - it seemed preposterous to me then; workhouses belonged to the world of Oliver Twist and Charles Dickens! Actually, the workhouse system was only abolished in 1930. But the kind of poverty experienced by the working classes of the past isn’t possible today, is it? Again, I am reminded of Food Banks and the 900,000 British people forced to resort to them last year.

In 2004 Aneurin Bevan was voted No 1 by the people of Wales in a poll to name 100 great Welsh men and women. After my recent visit to Wales, and seeing as it’s customary for this blog to present to its readers a Good Welshman or Welshwoman on St David’s Day - I give you Nye Bevan: “The National Health service and the Welfare State have come to be used as interchangeable terms, and in the mouths of some people as terms of reproach. Why this is so it is not difficult to understand, if you view everything from the angle of a strictly individualistic competitive society. A free health service is pure Socialism and as such it is opposed to the hedonism of capitalist society.”

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Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Buddy Reading 'Strangers on a Train' by Patricia Highsmith

A Trip to Wales and Another Good Welshman

M J Johnson

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