Category: Theatre

Turner, The Sea and Therese

17/4/2014

National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

If, like us, you enjoy a wide range of interests, then you’ll appreciate the regular dilemma in the Johnson household is simply choosing what to prioritise out of the many great things always available to see and do. Judith has been pointing out since last November how much she wanted to visit Turner and the Sea at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. We managed to get there about a week before the closing bell - the exhibition ends very shortly on 21 April. A lifelong admirer of this great English painter, I am so glad that we didn’t miss it. As a schoolboy who pursued Art as a main subject, I was deeply captivated by his paintings, more so probably than by any other British artist. I was mesmerised by the painterly virtuosity he possessed. He seemed to own an ability to bend light, to create both movement and momentum in his works, to blend, morph and fade his palette almost to the point of abstraction. He is unique, and it has always saddened me that there isn’t a Turner Museum entirely dedicated to his work and the large legacy of paintings, studies and sketches he bequeathed the Nation in his will. There is of course a large changing display at the Clore Gallery at Tate Britain.

It was marvellous to experience this current Greenwich exhibition, entirely dedicated to Turner’s lifelong fascination with the sea. In 1796, aged just twenty-one, Turner exhibited ‘Fishermen at Sea’ at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition - the first of many marine paintings he produced throughout his fairly long life. I suppose the sea as a subject is not altogether surprising for someone of our island race, where it’s never possible to be more than seventy miles from a coastline. Incidentally, the majority of Turner’s sea paintings were concentrated in the earlier and later years of his life.

On the same day, we managed to get across to the Finborough Theatre, Earls Court to see an excellent musical adaptation of Therese Raquin. The novel is of course by Emile Zola, a book which I’m sorry to say I’ve not (yet) read. I mentioned that we were planning to see this production to a friend who is not only very well-read but also a great aficionado of musical theatre. However, I couldn’t persuade him to come along with us, his email back read, “Oooh, I read the novel at university, it’s an awfully dark subject for a musical ...” My wife, Judith, who has also read the book, was equally quite intrigued at the prospect of seeing it staged in this way.

The show, I am pleased to say, exceeded expectations. We were totally drawn in and captivated by the action. The production design managed to conjure up the grim claustrophobic environment where these lower middle-class Parisians act out their sad drama of betrayal, repressed sexual passions, murder and hellish despair. It’s hardly any great surprise that Zola’s novel was considered scandalous in its day - it is still immensely powerful stuff!

The main roles are fully inhabited by Julie Atherton, Tara Hugo, Jeremy Legat and Ben Lewis. The singing, by a surprisingly large ensemble cast for such a tiny venue, is excellent. I imagine the ease with which the drama appears to unfold before its audience, only goes to demonstrate the skill of its performers. I am no singer myself but I know enough to understand how technically demanding performing this work has to be. The musical score is composed by Craig Adams with book, lyrics and direction by Nona Sheppard. It seems a shame that such a powerful production, due to close shortly when it comes to the end of its allotted run, can’t be re-mounted in a bigger venue for a larger audience to appreciate what is a wholly impressive piece of work from everyone concerned.

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The Stinker!

20/3/2014

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What is ‘a stinker’? Well, in my own personal definition it’s a play or film that is so bad you wish your name could be erased from any association with it. Every actor has a stinker or two (or three) lurking somewhere, much like the proverbial skeleton in the closet. I recall my father, who never minced his words, coming to see some scenes from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure early on in my training at RADA. The production was really awful “Don’t act ... feel the moment ... let the words play the scene” the director had implored us every time our survival instincts kicked in during rehearsals and we tried to raise the thing out of the doldrums. Dad, after watching my performance, exclaimed later in private in his honest Welsh valleys unvarnished way, “RADA training! That was the worst thing I’ve ever seen on a flippin’ stage in my life!”

He was right of course. However, the thing about being in ‘a stinker’ is that the performer has to go on and do it again the next night. And I wasn’t yet ready to acknowledge and accept it as ‘a stinker’. I think I may even have waffled on about the underlying esoteric significance of the scenes and what we were trying to achieve. “Rubbish!” Dad reaffirmed.

He was right.

The College Principal, a marvellous man by the name of Hugh Crutwell, blamed the director and vowed that the man would never set foot in the Academy again, which I don’t believe he ever did.

That was my first brush with ‘the stinker’. I met a few plays later on in my rep days that were pretty undistinguished. The thing is, whilst rehearsing ‘the stinker’ you and the rest of the cast endlessly reassure yourselves that you’re doing something really important, yes different perhaps, but most definitely very worthwhile. However, when the curtain finally comes down on the last performance and you see the same relief you feel inside clearly etched on the faces of your fellow performers - you know then, without a shadow of a doubt you’ve been involved in ‘a stinker’! You head for the bar and commiserate with your colleagues. As you weave your way (often unsteadily in days past) towards your theatrical ‘digs’ you feel like a great weight has been lifted from your being!

What made me raise the subject of ‘stinkers’? For my wife’s birthday this year, one of the presents I gave her was a box set of Sidney Poitier films. In the Heat of the Night probably ranks as one of our all time favourite movies: great title song, title singer, script, acting and direction - a tick in every box! So imagine how delighted we were to finally have the chance to watch its sequel They Call Me Mister Tibbs for the first time. Oh dear! You can probably take every single item in the list above and replace the tick with a thick red line. Every performance and every throw-away line was delivered like it was a Hamlet soliloquy. Everyone, including Sidney Poitier, looked really bad; the car chase just looked silly; the reasons behind a character’s speech or actions seemed to make no sense whatever at times; a foot-chase with Poitier hunting down a bad guy looked like out-takes from a Naked Gun movie; the cast, tried and trusted paid-up members of the acting fraternity looked like veterans of a bad daytime soap. Ed Asner, an actor I generally admire, was lousy in two categories, for his performance and his terrible wig. Poor ol’ Sidney Poitier - the ignominy of landing himself in ‘a stinker’ after playing the same character in such a great classic. I did wonder for a moment if someone by the name of Max Bialystok was the movie’s Executive Producer.

But like I said at the top, nobody in the performing arts can elude ‘the stinker’ forever. My father-in-law, himself an actor of some distinction in his heyday, once told me a story of his own regrettable brush with an ill-fated production. It was his first major appearance in London’s West End. He proudly took a box for his family and friends, booked a table at the Savoy for afterwards and invited his cousin the British Ambassador to Moscow to the first night. It is easy to imagine his chagrin when the audience began boo-ing the performers whenever they appeared. The only good thing that came out of the night, he informed me, was that the show closed immediately.

Yep, ‘a stinker’!

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Coriolanus and Julie

6/2/2014

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I’ve been driving all about me a little crazy lately by constantly humming along to “Brush up your Shakespeare” from the musical Kiss Me Kate.

The reason, you ask?

The song, an earworm, lodged itself firmly into my cerebellum once I knew I was going to see an NT Live transmission of Coriolanus.

Still not fully made the connection?

You may recall there’s a line in the song about getting booted up the ‘Coriolanus’. Thing is, I seem to have a musical black-hole in my brain when it comes to lyrics, e.g. “Brush up your Shakespeare, start quoting him now, brush up your Shakespeare, da da da da da da da da” - then a whole lot more ‘das’ before finishing with “Da da da Coriolanus”.

Perhaps you’re beginning to understand how weeks of this might drive the latter-day saints that surround me into contemplating a little arsenic or ground-glass topping on my muesli!

Anyway, relief came when the night of the (exorcism) performance finally arrived and we went along to see the show. Coriolanus is not a Shakespeare play I am well acquainted with, having only seen it performed just once. This was at the RSC in Stratford back in the early 1970s.

The Donmar production, directed by Josie Rourke and with Tom Hiddleston in the titular role, was highly accessible. I found myself engaged throughout the entire performance and was honestly left open-mouthed by the abrupt, quite viscerally shocking final scene. I don’t know why, but I am still endlessly surprised by Shakespeare’s universality and greatness as a playwright - you’d think I’d know this by now, wouldn’t you? Isn’t it amazing that four hundred years on, Shakespeare can still leave an audience feeling emotionally drained and speechless?

The designer Lucy Osborne used the space simply but effectively, creating something powerfully evocative by subtly incorporating graffiti designs reminiscent of those seen in the ancient Roman world. The cast brought the play to life with a consistent energy and dynamism and all deserve praise; however, Tom Hiddleston, Mark Gatiss as Menenius and Deborah Findlay as Volumnia were outstanding. The production runs at the Donmar Warehouse, Covent Garden, until 13 February. Check the NT Live site for possible encore dates at a cinema near you!

The second theatrical venture of the week was a visit to the E M Forster Theatre in Tonbridge to see Julie Madly Deeply, which received excellent notices when it ran in the West End until very recently. The show is written and performed by Sarah-Louise Young with support on the piano and an occasional interjection/ad lib from Michael Roulston, who is also the musical director. The show is unashamedly a love letter to Julie Andrews and goes through her life from child singing sensation, on to Broadway and the movies, right through to the surgical mistake that tragically robbed the world of that iconic voice. It is a fun and funny piece of cabaret and Sarah-Louise Young managed through her wittily sharp banter with the audience and highly competent singing talent to get the house completely on board and on her side. This is a very entertaining evening, and whether or not you’re a massive Julie Andrews fan, I honestly can’t imagine anyone not enjoying it.

I thoroughly recommend seeing this one too!

The show is currently touring the British Isles and you can search for a venue near you by taking a look at this website Julie Madly Deeply

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Art and Gravity

13/11/2013

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Over the past week my wife and I have had the pleasure of visiting our local cinema twice. The two pieces of work we saw had relatively few things in common: they were projected onto a screen; they were well crafted; they were both excellent. However, that's about it as far as the similarities went!

The first was The Habit of Art by Alan Bennett in the NT Live season. This was an encore performance - so not exactly 'live', as it had been recorded a few years back. And I am so glad we managed to see it. Anything written by Alan Bennett is always worth seeing in my book, and it was lovely to see the late Richard Griffiths in what must have been one of his last stage performances. He played the poet WH Auden in the latter years of his life and the play culminates in an imagined meeting between Auden and his estranged friend and former work collaborator Benjamen Britten (Alex Jennings). The play is very funny, yet touching at the same time. The structure Bennett has chosen for his play is fascinating, because he has set the piece in a rehearsal room. The real actors are portraying fictional actors in a rehearsal space, preparing to put on a play about an imaginary meeting between Auden and Britten. The stage manager, whose task it is to take charge of the 'run through' on the instruction of its absent director, is played with great warmth by Frances de la Tour. The play was directed by Nicholas Hytner and the supporting cast, many of whom are familiar faces in the NT repertory, were all very accomplished. All round a superbly crafted piece of theatre.

Our second visit to the Tunbridge Wells Odeon a few days later was to see Gravity. This has only just been released in the UK, stars Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, and has quite deservedly received nigh-on a hundred percent perfect notices from all its reviewers. I tweeted shortly after watching it that it is the first 3D movie I've seen that I actually really liked. I normally find the rigmarole of wearing the glasses and waiting for the next bit of 3D action to make me go 'Oooh' or 'Ahh' simply annoying (my wife has implied on occasion that I'm a 'grumpy old man'! To this I say - Hurumph!). However, I'd never seen a 3D movie before that totally engaged me from its opening to closing credits. Although I'm sure this movie would have done so in 2D too! Its stars are both excellent, particularly Bullock, who is on screen for about ninety percent of the picture. The dialogue is sparse and lean, the CGI effects are truly astounding, yet it's the human story (another thing in common with The Habit of Art!) unfolding before our very eyes that really commands the audience's attention. I can't imagine Sandra Bullock not receiving an Academy Award nomination as Best Actress for this, and it may well prove a fruitless year for any other film actress about to put in a career best performance. It was directed by Alfonso Cuarón, who I suspect will be up for an Oscar as well. And I daresay the film will be nominated in several other categories too. This is definitely a movie worth seeing on a cinema screen as it is truly spectacular.

So all in all a week when any personal requirements for mental and visual stimulation were met most satisfactorily.

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Ghostly Encounter!

31/10/2013

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Terry Jackson, Robert Blythe, Terry Mortimer (me levitating!)

As it's Halloween, I thought I'd relate a personal incident I've always looked upon as a ghostly encounter. It was certainly a strange experience and one I've always found hard to completely rationalise. I'm not trying to sell you a ghost story here; perhaps it was simply a string of coincidences, along with a nightmare engendered by conversations that evening. Who knows? I'm simply going to state how it came about, and let you make up your own minds as to the rest. The 'event', for want of a better term, happened to me over thirty years ago and if there are inaccuracies in my account (there quite possibly are!) I apologise; these are simply down to the baleful effect that time has on memory and aren't a deliberate attempt to mislead.

I left drama school in 1976, picked-up an Equity ticket doing TIE (Theatre in Education), and in the Autumn of 1977 began working for the Welsh Drama Company. The company was the impoverished sister of the established and highly successful Welsh Opera Company. Both companies worked from a large customised warehouse in an otherwise largely derelict area of Cardiff. The Welsh Drama Company's fortunes were actually in the doldrums (sadly never to recover!), their funding having been greatly reduced by the Arts Council. The company, once quite ambitious in its scope, was by now little more than a community theatre company. We toured Wales, playing mostly single nights at small venues, community centres, church and miners halls etc. In larger towns we'd play for a few days at a time. The stuff we performed was specially written by Phil Woods, and our first play was called 'Ghost Stories', directed by Gruffudd Jones. It was a comic piece, 'a sealed house drama' where six characters are brought together and one by one relate a 'ghostly tale'. As the evening develops, they realise that they are unwittingly all caught up in a ghost story together. The whole thing was basically just good-natured fun. I played a comically sinister character called Gregory Hammond who had Satanic inclinations, and in one scene, I not only hypnotised everyone else on stage, but started to actually levitate, then tossed off a quick incantation and conjured up a demon - all in the best possible taste! People always wanted to know how the levitation was done. It was visually quite convincing. All I'd admit to enquiring members of the public was that it took a lot of practice. This wasn't actually true; it was in fact, an incredibly simple trick. However, not one person, though they eagerly advanced imaginative theories, usually involving wires or mirrors, actually figured out how it was done. And guess what? I'm still not telling!

One of our venues was a place called Clyro Court. The village of Clyro is right on the Welsh border, about a mile from its now famous neighbour Hay-on Wye. Clyro Court was a stately home that had been converted into a luxury hotel. When one of our party first saw the large house as they came along the drive, they were heard to remark that it looked like Baskerville Hall from the Sherlock Holmes tales. This was a remarkably perceptive observation, because Clyro Court was indeed the home of the real Baskerville family. Apparently Conan Doyle had often visited his Baskerville friends at Clyro, and with their permission used their name, which he put together with a local legend about a large dog, but for discretion's sake set the tale in Dartmoor. Back in 1977 it was owned and managed by a chap whose first name I recall was Colin - the surname I forget.

You can imagine our delight, all young actors, invariably strapped for cash, not only getting to play a tasty venue like Clyro but having our accommodation there too! It was a big treat, as we were generally only in the market for the cheapest 'digs' in town. Something I should tell you about the hotel, Clyro Court, back in those days, was that it didn't have any room numbers - but every room had been awarded the name of a country. I discovered myself in 'India' - a smallish room with exotic wallpaper and a four poster bed. It was very comfortable. I soon discovered, however, that a number of my colleagues had done far better than me. Some of them were in rooms that seemed to my youthful eyes to be as broad as football stadiums, bearing untold luxuries - like water-beds et al (I hadn't got out much by this time!). I recall visiting our stage manager, Sean, who was giving public audiences from a sunken bathtub, reclining amongst hillocks of bubble bath with a glass of champagne and a large cigar stuffed into a corner of his mouth! His room was 'USA', I suppose the red and white stripes of the wallpaper and the blue paintwork were meant to suggest the US flag. The weekend at Clyro seemed like the perfect opportunity to invite my girlfriend (later my wife), who I already shared a flat with in London, down to stay. She arrived on Saturday afternoon. We'd already played one performance at the venue on Friday evening - so I'd slept one night in 'India' by the time she got to us!

After the second evening's performance we all congregated, as we generally did, in the bar. I recall our table was near a stone plaque, laid by Thomas Baskerville when the house was new. We were all sitting at a table with Colin, Clyro Court's owner. He had an interest in all things to do with the occult and possessed an object he referred to as a 'gnome stone'. Yes, our tongues were firmly fixed in our cheeks too, gentle reader! This stone, rectangular in shape, approximately eight inches by twelve, looked to me like an undistinguished slab of sandstone. Anyway, Colin said he was able to 'read' this stone and that it could be asked questions concerning the future. We were each allowed to ask it something, for this we had to focus our minds on our question - the response would come via the 'Gnome Stone's' medium, Colin. Actually the answer I got to mine turned out to be fairly accurate, but then it was also rather generalised. At midnight, Judith and I left the assembled company and turned in for the night.

I felt remarkably tired and fell asleep quite soon - this is almost reversed behaviour for us, as I was ever a poor sleeper, while Judith has always been swift off the mark to run into the arms of Morpheus. However, she told me later that she'd had a really strong conviction that it would be unwise for her to fall asleep. She couldn't have rationally explained it, because she felt completely safe herself but just couldn't shake off the notion that I was in some kind of personal danger. She was convinced that she must remain awake - and watch over me as I slept!

Two hours later, at 2 am (the time is relevant!), whilst laying asleep on my back, I began to groan, then I started thrashing from side to side. It was, Judith described later, like watching someone trying to turn over or get up but who is being held by invisible bonds and therefore immobilised. In fact, this describes exactly what I was experiencing in my nightmare, or whatever it was. I was actually 'seeing' it all too: observing myself (though fast asleep you understand!) in bed, fully aware that I was in the room 'India', I could even see Judith lying troubled and awake beside me. The reason why I couldn't rise or turn was because a youngish woman, dressed in the kind of embroidered lace nightdress worn by ladies in the nineteenth-century, was actually standing on my torso, and although I sensed no weight bearing down, she had me literally pinned to the spot. Her arms were reaching out towards me, and I knew that she was calling me to come to her. My willpower to resist seemed to be diminishing fast, as the energy was leeched out of my sleeping form and drawn up into her.

I don't know, and don't really want to know what the 'spectres' intended outcome was. Fortunately, Judith shook me quite firmly until I was wide awake!

I told her I'd had a nightmare and explained the gist of what I'd experienced. Nightmares have never really concerned me too much, so I went straight back off to sleep. Judith didn't tell me until the next day that she hadn't felt it safe for her to fall asleep earlier - I suspect getting back off to sleep again might have been less easy if she had! However, once this 'event' had occured, she felt with a conviction as unshakeable as she had known before, that I was no longer in any danger, and allowed herself to settle down and sleep too.

In the morning, over breakfast, my friends in the company said they wished they'd left and gone to bed at the same time as us. They explained that after we'd gone off, things had got a little weird and rather freakish down in the bar. Colin, our host, had brought out a ouija board and had suggested they hold a seance. Those who were present described an uncomfortable rather stifling presence in the room during this seance. Colin announced to all that a female ghost had materialised before them; the name Elizabeth was spelt out on the ouija board; then, without any warning, setting everyone's nerves firmly on edge, there was suddenly a great crash - a window had blown out on the ground floor of the building! My actor chums found the experience all a bit too much to take, they said they were suddenly very tired and quickly beat a retreat.

"What time did all this happen?" Judith asked.

Someone said they'd glanced up at the wall clock when the woman's name was being spelt out on the board and that it was 2 am. It was only at this point that Judith explained how she had sensed I was in danger and had resisted sleep herself.

Whilst with the Welsh Drama Company, I happily performed and stayed at Clyro Court once again. Nothing untoward happened, however, on this subsequent visit we all stayed away from seances and ouija boards. I was relieved when arriving at the reception desk to be given a key for 'Greece'. My pal Terry Jackson had stayed in this room on the previous occasion and he assured me that I'd get nothing but a good night's sleep. He was right, I did. Nobody stayed in 'India' on this our final visit.

And there you have it. Was I actually haunted, or had our imaginations simply constructed something out of all the other-worldly stuff that was going on about us?

You decide.

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Hiraeth to Hamlet

23/10/2013

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We've had a busy few days recently and several late nights - but who cares? I no longer possess a complexion worth getting to sleep early to conserve!

Quite incredibly, it's been nearly a year since my mother passed away, and although my emotions aren't as raw as they were in the weeks immediately following her death, there remains a great sadness when I think of the almost constant loneliness she suffered during her final years. I have an old bureau that was originally purchased by my grandfather around the time of WW1 and which always held a prominent position in our family home. I associate it with my parents, and since I've inherited it, whenever one of its glass doors swings open unannounced (a matter of a worn-out locking mechanism, not ghosts!) my wife and I always greet it with a cheery, "Hallo Mam!" Occasionally both doors open simultaneously and when this happens we welcome my Dad too. It's comforting to own a piece of furniture that connects me to family - its very presence brings to me an incontrovertible sense of belonging at least somewhere in this great big world! I can only imagine how devastating it must be for refugees fleeing from an oppressor, still an all too frequent reality, people running for their lives and forced to abandon all else.

Yes, Tommy Cooper was born in Caerphilly!

Because of my long adopted practice of visiting my mother for several days at a time every six weeks, I'd recently found myself experiencing the phenomenon we Welsh call 'hiraeth' - it translates into English as 'longing' but this doesn't nearly do it justice - the word conjures-up in us 'Taffs' an umbilical link to hearth and homeland. Anyway. the opportunity to return home arrived by way of an invitation to a birthday party in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire - near enough to Wales to plan a long weekend! We left late on Thursday evening and stayed for two nights near the town of Caerphilly in south-east Wales. On Friday we explored the town and were both struck by the friendliness of its people. In the afternoon we visited Caerphilly's impressive, moated Norman castle, built by the immensely powerful Gilbert de Clare in 1268. We agreed that the quite extensively restored areas enhanced the experience positively, as too did some highly imaginative audio/visual presentations. It was well worth the visit and comes highly recommended. Later on that afternoon we got ourselves pretty much lost on top of a mountain whilst trying to navigate our way to Pontypridd. The mountain sheep eyed us with disinterest, a hill runner gave us a cheerful wave as we drove by, and the only car we passed stopped for a humorous exchange in true 'valleys' fashion.

On Saturday we drove the twelve miles into Cardiff, enjoyed its marvellous shopping precinct and met up with some friends for a chat. We were very lucky with weather, and just as it began to rain with a not unprecedented ferocity for Wales, we were fortunate enough to be heading east along the M4 towards our new accommodation in Wiltshire for Saturday night. We were given impeccable directions by our hotel receptionist to the birthday party's location, which turned out to be a terrific evening. The entertainment was provided by a really accomplished local band called The Dubious Brothers. They must've known I was coming because they covered just about every one of my favourite songs from the last four or five decades! We drove home on Sunday morning and after picking up the week's shopping, didn't overtax ourselves for the rest of the day.

Yesterday we had another late night as we'd booked to see 'Hamlet', an NT Live encore production to mark the National Theatre's fiftieth anniversary. We were told that the showing marked exactly fifty years since Peter O'Toole's performance as the Dane in the National's very first production of the play, then staged at the Old Vic and directed by Laurence Olivier. The central role in our version was comfortably inhabited by Rory Kinnear, Patrick Malahide brought the corrupt Claudius to sleazy life, James Laurenson was a powerfully moving ghost and David Calder brought much warmth and humour to Polonius. I shan't go on with listing, it was directed by Nicholas Hytner with crystal clarity, and for this reason might have been especially worth seeing for anyone coming to the play for the first time. I for one found myself totally engaged throughout the entire performance.

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Othello - N T Live

2/10/2013

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Last week we saw Othello in the NT Live Season at our local cinema. Quite incredible to think that when it was first performed during the reign of James 1, the number of bodies the theatre could physically hold (at a guess perhaps 500 - possibly 1000?) were all who could have experienced it. Last Thursday however, because of some incredible technology, it was broadcast right around the globe (no pun intended!) and played in just one evening to something like 100,000 souls.

It was good to see a large number of teenagers at the showing. I often wonder at NT Live performances why they are so badly attended by people under the age of thirty (at our cinema anyhow), especially as Drama is such a popular subject in schools. When I was a teenager I know that my friends and I would have sold our devoted Mums into slavery for the opportunity to see world-class theatre for little more than the price of a cinema seat (Oh, the callousness of youth!). Presumably the increased attendance last week was because the play is a text for some examwork? It certainly was when I was at school, I recall studying it for my A Levels. However, I didn't get an opportunity to actually see the play performed until last Thursday evening - so, for me, it was a first! And it was, I am pleased to say, definitely worth waiting for. The play's message rings out with crystal clarity across the four hundred years dividing us from Shakespeare's life and times. The writing is truly wondrous - sometimes it seems a bit unfair on the rest of us just how brilliant he was. My wife pointed out how many book/play titles and sayings we take for granted and are accepted as part of our English tongue, which have been simply lifted from 'the Bard'. He seems to understand and explain the human condition like no other playwright. Unfortunately, four hundred years hasn't seen much alter in the way of human nature. The play's themes of suspicion, jealousy and hate are sadly as relevant today as they were when the ink for Othello was still wet on the page.

The roles of Othello and Iago were superbly portrayed and brought to life in this excellent National Theatre production, directed by Nicholas Hytner, by Adrian Lester and Rory Kinnear respectively. The leading actors are supported by a very good cast,and the passage of time hasn't by any means diminished the play's power to shock and move us. It remains a thoroughly disturbing experience to watch a good man being fed lies, until his mind has been utterly poisoned against his faithful and adoring wife, culminating in the most appalling tragedy. The character of Iago has always intrigued me, in particular his lack of a really solid motive for his malevolence. At times during the play he soliloquises and gives us different reasons for his hatred of the Moor. Yet, they are never completely convincing: Cassio was preferred for a recent promotion over him; he says he has heard a rumour that Othello may have slept with his own wife, Emilia; at one time he tells us that he himself is besotted with Desdemona. However, these pronouncements lack much weight and conviction it seems to me: I suspect Iago's true motive is simply hate.

I put a quote from the final scene of Othello at the beginning of my novel Roadrage, a psychological thriller that is itself concerned with the corrosive power of hate and intolerance. I chose it too (without giving anything away) because my 'baddie' has quite a lot in common with Shakespeare's great malcontent. The words are as chilling today as they doubtless were when first spoken by an actor back in 1604:

Othello:
Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil,
Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body?

Iago:
Demand me nothing: What you know, you know:
From this time forth I never will speak word.

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The Saturday Night Laurel and Hardy Came to the Rescue

29/5/2013

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In our home television is something rarely watched. Not because we have anything against television, it's great, but we rarely find time during the week, and at the weekend we generally catch a film on DVD. My wife Judith and I definitely like reading best of all. However, as I've mentioned a number of times now in these columns, we are very partial to visits to our local cinema when they show plays transmitted/streamed 'Live' from the National Theatre on London's South Bank. The last one we watched was a few weeks back, and a truly exceptional example of ensemble theatre it was too. So much so, that it would seem unjust to mention any individual as outstanding, the entire cast was working very hard indeed and acting their collective socks off!

The play was This House, a brand new comedy by James Graham set in the Houses of Parliament. Believe me, I wouldn't have considered it likely to spend an evening surrounded by uproarious laughter, watching a play about the respective Whips' offices of the Government and its Opposition - but this was how it was! It's set in 1974, a time when a Labour government held on to power with the tiniest of majorities. It was a period of social upheaval, of ferocious rivalry in Parliament yet with little ground ever gained to show for it. Not much could be achieved politically because it was always necessary for the government to strike deals with the minor parties at Westminster - a kind of political doldrums existed! People were rushed in to the house to vote on Bills from their hospital or even 'death' beds. The wealth of North Sea Gas and Oil, that would shore-up and sustain the years of Margaret Thatcher's government, had not yet started flowing into government coffers. It would have been a difficult era to have been in power for a government of any persuasion. However, strangely, as I look back at that decade (I was nineteen in '74) there was a sense of equality and classlessness in British society that I have not recognised there since. I don't recall anyone in those times boasting about which prep school they went to, or even letting on they'd even been to one - cut-glass public school accents were most definitely toned down. The time of 'getting' was about to be born in the Eighties with a zealousness previously unknown in 20th century British life. Politicians are opportunistic by nature - leaf back through the pages of history and it is generally the timing of their ascendancy to power that enables them to acquire their reputed 'greatness', I think.

Unfortunately, the production of This House, after two highly successful runs at the National, has finally come to an end. However, you may be fortunate enough to catch an 'encore showing' at a cinema near you. I believe there are also showings at different and varying times right across the world. I highly recommend this production.

So, I hear you thinking, where do Laurel and Hardy come into things? Well, last Saturday we'd had a busy day and decided to sit down and watch a DVD. We chose something that promised to be entertaining and undemanding, but which turned out to be pretty crass and cliched. The apocalyptic ending was, despite an attempt at a bit of positive spin, rather depressing. Judith had made the choice (I'd suggested something tried and tested, 'When Harry met Sally' in fact). She looked at me at the film's end and said dolefully, "Mmm, feel a bit depressed now ... should have listened to you." It was then I remembered my Laurel and Hardy collection - a Christmas gift from a couple of years back. We're gradually working our way through them. The classic L & H short we watched was Laughing Gravy, filmed in 1931. It's not hard to imagine the joy this pair of buffoons brought to people during an era of hardship and global depression. We laugh at their stupidity, yet we love them for their innocence. Nobody but Stan and Ollie could manage to get themselves from a sleeping bedroom to a boarding-house roof and evicted within the lifespan of a short film. We watch with delight as they concoct one of their familiar hair-brained, doomed-to-fail plans, to rescue their little dog, the eponymous 'Laughing Gravy', from being cast out into the snow by a tyrannical landlord!

Neither of us recalled ever watching this one before and we were still chuckling about it at breakfast next morning.

Pure delight! Sheer genius!

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People - NT Live

27/3/2013

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The more out of touch I become with mainstream cinema and its movies that are extended trailers for forthcoming computer games, the more I thank my lucky stars for NT Live! Several times a year the wife and I skip along to the cinema (which I love) to see stage plays that are invariably worth watching. People, a new piece of work by Alan Bennett, was shown at our local Odeon Cinema last Thursday, and it was a delight from start to finish.

At seventy-eight, Bennett hasn't lost the wicked edge to his comedy writing. People as a play probably isn't up there with some of his finest work, but heck, if you're Alan Bennett that's quite a tall order! In my opinion if Bennett rewrote the marketing blurb on a box of cornflakes it would make it worth reading.

The wonderfully lugubrious Frances De La Tour plays Dorothy Stacpole, who has inherited a great crumbling pile from a rather dissolute brother who allowed the family estate in South Yorkshire to fall into serious disrepair. Dorothy was once a jet-setting fashion model, but we learn that she stepped out of the limelight at the height of her fame because of a great sadness in her life. She has become almost reclusive in the once great house which she now shares with Iris, a part hilariously performed by Linda Bassett. Iris has her own personal attachment to the house which we discover during the course of the play. Selina Cadell plays June Stacpole, Dorothy's archdeacon sister. The part itself is more earnest and less immediately likeable than the other two female characters, but Miss Cadell brings her to life with great aplomb. I am not going to mention any more names but the supporting cast are excellent.

Basically, Dorothy is penniless, burdened with a crumbling house and needs to find a solution. To sell would incur vast sums of money in death duties and her sister June favours donating the property to the National Trust. There appear to be other options in the guise of a shady consortium who would like to dismantle the house brick by brick and relocate it to some warmer clime, like Dorset or Hampshire. Dorothy is tempted by the promise of a renovated lodge and an en-suite bathroom with hot water on tap. A third option appears in the guise of an ex-lover ( possibly a little contrived but still funny) who now directs porn movies and who might use the house regularly as a film location.

Bennett makes us laugh but he wants us to examine our values. How we now see everything as wearing a price tag. As a society over the past forty years we have allowed countless libraries to close and watched a decline in the general standard of education. He takes a swipe at the National Trust and parodies the way it packages 'England'; its intention here being to preserve the house and provide its visitors with an interactive, multi-media experience. Dorothy points out in one of her speeches that the house itself doesn't represent 'England' or 'Englishness' and never did; she basically just wants to live in a little comfort without hordes of people tramping through her home.

People is definitely worth watching. Check out the NT Live website and catch one of the many encore performances showing around the UK during April, and also see timings for performances broadcast at different times right around the world. Get to see a terrific new comedy, performed by a cast of highly accomplished actors under the able direction of Nicholas Hytner - for the price of a cinema ticket!

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The Magistrate

23/1/2013

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The wife and I have been fans of the actor John Lithgow for many years, probably since we took our son to see Bigfoot and the Hendersons when he was a lad. It's always a bonus to discover this actor's in the cast of any movie we're about to watch. His TV sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun, in which he plays Dick Solomon, the leader of a group of aliens on an undercover mission to study human behaviour (invariably putting two and two together and making five!) remains an all time favourite of ours. So, when we discovered that John Lithgow was going to take the title role in the National Theatre's production of The Magistrate we were with child ( as the old saying goes!). We considered booking tickets and seeing a performance at the National Theatre itself, but eventually decided to watch it in the NT Live season. This was a wise decision as it turned out, because December and early January were pretty hectic for us and, as I've said before, being able to see great live theatre transmitted onto our local cinema screen is to my mind a wonderful opportunity.

The Magistrate, a farce by Arthur Wing Pinero (1855 - 1934) was written in 1885. Although hugely successful in his day, with over fifty plays to his name and being only the second person to be knighted for services to British theatre, his popularity had already waned somewhat by the end of his lifetime. I have only ever seen one other Pinero play myself, his comedy Dandy Dick which I saw at the Churchill Theatre Bromley many years ago and which featured my late father-in-law James Hayter among its cast.

This NT Live performance of The Magistrate was truly a delight from start to finish. Lithgow and Nancy Carroll, who is equally comic as his wife Agatha, are supported by an excellent cast in this enjoyable production, directed by Timothy Sheader. The set is designed like a pop-up book and works very nicely along with some quite exotic hair designs and costumes. The scenes are introduced by a chorus of strangely stylised characters who look like they've escaped from a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, singing lyrics written by Richard Stilgoe. This was the National Theatre's Christmas show and it is very much meant to be enjoyed. It seems unsurprising to me that farce is firmly back in vogue again - in these economically fraught times, we all need something to give us a good laugh! We watch the characters in Pinero's play wriggle and squirm and attempt to extricate themselves from the little white lies they have told, which instead of disappearing, simply multiply and grow.The great artifice of the farceur is to make one error/misjudgement build into a house of cards that defies gravity as it increases in size to monstrous proportions and deliciously teeters in mid-air before our very eyes. Farce is a theatrical-form that the German word Schadenfreude ought to have been invented for!

We watched this show last Thursday evening at the Odeon, Tunbridge Wells, Kent. It was quite unusual, but a real joy, to hear, all around us, the normally reserved Tunbridge Wellians roaring with laughter. The Magistrate is still on at the National Theatre until 10 February and will be broadcast to cinemas around the world at various times over the next few weeks. My Twitter pal, Susy, has booked to see it in Brisbane shortly. She hadn't realised that the NT Live performances extended outside of the UK, and when she checked on their website she was pleasantly surprised to find a venue nearby. I'm sure they'll enjoy it. I can highly recommend it!

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