Alarums, excursions. Hautbois under stage - part 3

Love's Labour's Won (aka Much Ado About Nothing)

Royal Shakespeare Theatre, RSC, Stratford-upon-Avon

The conceit behind the current RSC pairing of Love's Labour's Lost and Much Ado About Nothing is that they are a matching pair of plays. Apparently, there is some historical support for the existence of a "missing" play called Love's Labour's Won. The two plays are similar romantic comedies, and LLL ends with the men departing for a year of absence from their lovers; MAAN starts with the men returning from war. Whatever the reason, RSC have programmed the two to run in rep over their current season. The plays are performed by the same company - we saw them as a Saturday matinee and evening show.

As well, this is the centenary of the start of WWI, and RSC has made the decision to mount the plays in Edwardian dress. The generally light tone of the plays fits well with the decision - with the somewhat darker moments of MMAN coinciding with the return from the Great War. The setting for both plays is the same - based on a local grand country house, Charlecot, near to Stratford-upon-Avon. In MAAN, it has been pressed into service as a hospital for the war-wounded, and the women of the play are in service as nurses. A touch of Downton Abbey comes to Shakespeare.

The performances are beautifully measured, with some great clowning and slapstick in several scenes. Whilst I love the play, it remains problematic in my mind. The savage denunciation of Hero by Claudio, that lies at the dramatic heart of the play, is so unaccountably savage, and his later recantation so immediate, to strain belief. As well. He gets away with it. In this production, once again, I find it hard to buy Claudio's labile  behaviour. However, the chemistry between Beatrice and Benedict carries the day.

Alarums, excursions. Hautbois under stage - part 2

Love's Labour's Lost

Royal Shakespeare Theatre, RSC, Stratford-upon-Avon

Another unfamiliar play; but this is Stratford, and potted, pre-digested anything about Shakespeare is easy to find. The story is slight - silly men renounce wine, women, food and sleep for three years (WTF?). The most worldly of them thinks this is a crock, but goes along with it. Then, unexpectedly, temptation arrives in the form of four women. Big surprise. The blokes are smitten. Again, big surprise.  Follows a section stolen from Cosi Fan Tutte, involving dressing up as Russians to test the affections of the ladies, but with the men in disguise directing their affections towards another than the one they really favour. You can't make this stuff up. Anyway, after a bit of this shenanigans, everyone is paired up, but the men agree to wait a year, to prove the mettle of their love. A more-or-less happy ending.

Except ...

This is England in 2014 - the centenary of WWI. References to the Great War are everywhere. RSC is staging this play, in company with Love's Labour's Won (aka Much Ado About Nothing - more on that to come). Both are set in Edwardian times, with LLL taking place immediately before the onset of war. When the men return on stage to take their leave for their year of exile, they are in uniform. In the background, just visible, are the red poppies of Flanders field. I found this moment intensely moving - we know what is coming, in a way that these young, innocent, unworldly men do not.

The play is delightfully performed, with a light and dexterous touch, and played for the laughs in the script. The verse is well spoken - which holds for all the plays web see in Stratford - so that the result is very intelligible, sounding like natural speech. A lot of fun.

The Wonder House of Spitalfields

Dennis Severs' House, Spitalfields 

"Authenticity" is a curious thing. A Holy Grail of house museums, but an elusive quality. Some house museums take a very prescriptive, purist approach to their collection, and others end up being a random selection of flat irons, old cricket team photos, and dusty snake skins. Dennis Severs' House in Spitalfields is a unique house that subverts conventional museums, yet creates a sense of domesticity that is remarkable. Created by Dennis Severs over an extended period, he sought to create "still life drama" that taxed the viewers' imagination and immersed them in a total experience.

It lives in an 18th Century townhouse in a quiet street in Spitalfields, in the inner East End. We are met at the door and given a brief intro. Turn phones to silent; no photos; no touching; the tour proceeds in silence; the house is lit only by candles - don't set yourself on fire. The conceit behind the experience is that the house is that it is lived in by a family of Huguenot silk weavers - the Jervis family; each room is set as though the occupants have just stepped out. We hear them, but never quite see. Thus we proceed, in silence, through rooms from basement to attic, through set pieces - kitchen, where a pudding is in preparation and a loaf partly sliced; parlours for both the men and the women of the house, where both genteel and riotous behaviour is underway. Bedrooms for the family, servants, and, at the very top, lodgers - taken in when the family has fallen on hard times.

The rooms are a series of sets with detailed, intricate art direction. As well, each room has a distinct soundtrack - of muffled voices, pets, passing foot and horse traffic, clocks. Most unusual and involving is the "olfactory" landscape - the smells of cooking, fires, mould, damp, and dust, that change from room to room.

I loved this place. The soft candlelight seems gloomy at first, but our eyes soon adapted. We visited at twilight, and the soft, gentle dusk filtering in the windows was entrancing. The total experience was unlike any house museum I've visited before. The sense of habitation is palpable. Authentic? I can't say. Effective? Definitely.

Alarums, excursions. Hautbois under stage - part 1

Three plays in two days at the Royal Shakespeare Company,

The White Devil

John Webster

Swan Theatre, RSC, Stratford-upon-Avon

A dark, brooding vision of evil. 

Webster's play is completely unfamiliar. The plot is very complex, and at times I found it hard to follow some of the intricacies of the action, but this wasn't a major turn-off. In this way, it reminded me of some of the more Byzantine film noir plots, where, unaccountably, yet another armed man enters the room. The detail stops mattering - it's the developing mood of dark and disquiet, pessimism and cynicism, that counts.

The plot flows around a high-octane lifestyle party set, fuelled by power, sex, drugs, rave parties. There's adultery and cuckoldry, the selling of favours and influence, and the manipulation of others for its own sake - the naked exercise of power and ambition. The body count is Tarantino-high. What's more, it effectively conflates sex and violence, in a very effective and chilling way. At the end, we see this whole rotten world being absorbed by the younger generation. Violence and the abuse of power becomes an inherent part of the human condition.

I liked this production a lot. The play is notable for some very strong leading roles for women, and Kirsty Bushell and Laura Elphinstone bring great power to the main roles. Set and costumes are slick and very stylish - performed on a very pared-back stage, in modern dress - the play clothes of the Über-party set. The Swan theatre is a great space, reminiscent of a Shakespearean theatre, with its deep thrust stage, tiered backstage chambers, and tiered seating on three sides. Every bit of the room was used, with action coming on from the wings, from the balconies, and from the auditorium. Impressive about this production - and also Julius Caesar at the Globe  - is the number of actors on stage. These are casts of over twenty players. That's a lot of actors getting steady work 

The production is spectacularly full of life, imagination, excitement. The on-stage sex is hot, exciting - something we rarely see. Vittoria's incarceration occurs in a monochromatic, slow motion, phantasmagoric space, eerily reminiscent of the world of Marat/Sade, given life by this same theatre company 40 years ago; Camillo's murder happens at a BDSM party. Everywhere is a heightened world of corruption and systemic abuse. The connection made between sex and violence is especially disturbing.

I felt that John Webster would have been very pleased with this production.

The Beat Goes On

It's Literature Week at London's Southbank, and there's a bunch of events with a literary flavour. In the serendipity of travel, we went to a poetry reading that had, we were told, potentially good DNA.  From the blurb: 

"The world premiere of a specially commissioned new poem, read by the poet herself. In Greek mythology, the Dawn fell in love with Tithonus and asked Zeus to make him immortal, but she forgot to ask that he should not grow old. Unable to die, he grew older and older, until at last Dawn locked him in a room where, several thousand years later, he still sits babbling to himself. This is an account of his babbling, written in real time, through a series of dawns from spring to midsummer 2014. It is a poem about survival. The performance begins in darkness and lasts 46 minutes (the length of dawn in midsummer)."

So - some promise, perhaps. What we got was one of the more curious moments of theatre I have seen for a while. The first 5 minutes were conducted in total darkness. A lone voice in the darkness. The poem owes a lot to the beat poets, and was clearly partly improvised, with lots of repetition about a theme.

The idea of coming out of darkness was potentially effective, except I nodded off after a few minutes - it had been a long day. So did a number of audience neighbours. I missed the transition to half light - the start of dawn - but am reliably informed that it was clunky and not particularly effective. Under the gradually brightening lights, the poet persisted on her chosen course, interrupted at times by improvised music from a bowed dulcimer-like instrument, fitted with various electronic delays and loops. It was as soporific as the verse.

After 46 minutes of this, it just stopped. No sense of climax, or arrival. No sense of "performance" either. A production desperately in need of some theatrical direction. The most telling thing, for me, was that, despite a few startling images captured in the moment from the incessant word stream at the time, a few minutes late, I couldn't recall a thing.

The original Wonder House

The Victoria and Albert Museum

So ... Where to begin coming to grips with this behemoth - the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects. A collection that grew out of the Great Exhibition of 1851. A lifetime of study couldn't do it justice. We have allowed just two hours ... In the end, we spend all day there, focus on a few rooms, and leave - elated, satisfied, inspired. The theatre and performance galleries - an obvious draw card - are inexplicably closed. No one seems to know when they may re-open. But we see some fabulous objects, anyway.

The fashion gallery has some wonderful items, including a beautifully cut 18th Century woman's riding jacket, and a complete Pierre Cardin ensemble in bold pink. The only Mary Quant and Vivienne Westwood on display are not immediately eye-grabbing.

In the jewellery display I am interested to see items made of Whitby jet, which has intrigued me since reading AS Byatt's 'Posession'. But for me, the show-stealer is the set of peridots given by the Prince Consort to the governess of his daughter, Charlotte. There is an entire unspoken back-story implicit in the very discreet caption: "So there's this Princess, right, and her name's Charlotte, see, and she's a real baggage, right? She's got these governesses and their aunt, and they're really awful, right? Charlotte calls them 'Famine & the consequences', OK, and she's really down on 'em. She's such a laugh about 'em. Anyway, her father the Prince Regent is all making eyes at one governess, and sending her these jewels, and we're all 'Hello, what's going on here, then?'. He wouldn't be doing that unless he was getting a bit of the other, right? Anyway, then Charlotte dies, right? Which just goes to show you can be a Princess and it can still go pear-shaped". Anyway, peridots are my favourite gems, and these are winners.

In the 20 Century gallery I enjoy seeing the Aalvar Alto bent plywood stools - a design classic. I'm very familiar with these from my visits to the Alto house and studio in Helsinki. I also liked seeing the classic Arne Jacobsen 1957 stacking plywood chair, made famous by Lewis Morley's iconic 1963 photo of Christine Keeler.

Too soon, we are out the door. We pause on our way, and see the damage on the side of the building, facing the Natural History museum. Big scratches and gores in the stonework, a result of the Blitz. I am moved beyond imagining, that such destruction came so near, but in this case narrowly missed this remarkable and important part of our shared world heritage. 

**********************

A brief note

I am writing this using Blogger software on an iPad. It is driving me to distraction. Text editing - even the simplest tasks - is nigh impossible on that combination of infernal devices. I will now give up all attempts to properly format these posts, and will just dump all the pix at the end. Otherwise I will turn to Strong Drink, and vast amounts of London will, sadly, remain Unseen. And that would be a shame.

The Wonder House of Lahore

A walk through some London museums.

In "Kim", Rudyard Kipling starts the story with Kim and his friends playing outside the Ajaib-Gher—the Wonder House, a museum of antiquities and local arts. He describes the contents with a sense of awe:

"In the entrance-hall stood the larger figures of the Greco-Buddhist sculptures done, savants know how long since, by forgotten workmen whose hands were feeling, and not unskilfully, for the mysteriously transmitted Grecian touch. There were hundreds of pieces, friezes of figures in relief, fragments of statues and slabs crowded with figures that had encrusted the brick walls of the Buddhist stupas and viharas of the North Country and now, dug up and labelled, made the pride of the Museum".

The museums of London are wonder houses of similar style, contains some truly marvellous pieces. Here is a bit of what we saw.

*************

Anselm Kiefer, Royal Academy

Kiefer was a young boy in Germany at the end of WWII. His work is filled with the heavy burden of guilt and uncertainty that affected that generation. The show has paintings, drawings, and mixed media works that range from small pages to vast, gallery-filling canvases. The smaller works showed a delicacy and intimacy that I found very moving. His art is distinctive, symbolist, allegorical, and often quite disturbing. A series of pictures purport to be landscapes, filled with eerie, floating, classical statuary. Tucked away in each, off-centre and out of notice, like the figures in Jeffrey Smart paintings, are self portraits of the artist as a young boy, wearing his father's army greatcoat, and making a Hitler salute. They were very powerful. Kiefer was controversial in Germany, at a time when people avoided talking about the Third Reich. He said that as the Nazi's appropriated art to further ideology, it was important for artists to reclaim it, to fight back. I found this show fascinating and very moving. The looming U-boat pack in the forecourt was especially menacing.

This wooden O

Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's Globe, Bankside

When I first heard, some years ago, that "they" we're going to rebuild a theatre like Shakespeare used to work in, roughly on the same site, I was incredibly excited by the imagination and vision of such a project. One of my early cinema-going memories was, with my parents, seeing the Olivier Henry V. There is much to savour about this film, and my 14-year-old self was very taken with the clever breakout to, and return from naturalism, that the film employs. It starts and ends with a performance in a Shakespearean theatre. But in between, they film in the real out-of-doors - your actual vasty fields of France - that Prologue works so hard to sketch before us - we gentles all:

"And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work".

I was captured by the bold, preposterous, imaginative leap that Shakespeare asks his audience to take, to fill the stage with imagined castles, armies, steeds, Kings:

"Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide one man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass".

So, I was captivated - utterly subscribed - to the idea of a theatrical world of the imagination, where the text cleverly sets the scene and we, the gentle audience, go with it. As school went on I became increasingly captured by the wonder and art of Shakespeare, and theatre in general. I had a modest understanding of Shakespearean performance practice - not through formal study, but just from watching plays.

And so, the notion of a theatre doing plays more or less in the way Shakespeare saw them played, captivated me. I never thought I'd actually get to attend the Globe. I was just happy in the knowledge that such a place existed.

But, yesterday, all that changed. We went to Shakespeare's Globe. And saw Julius Ceasar. This is a play that has been a favourite of mine since 4th form high school. I was incredibly lucky to have a couple of English teachers who instilled in me a great love of reading. One was Mr Cloran, who talked with great love and insight about Julius Caesar, and made the text come to life. So, when we were planning a trip to London, Shakespeare's Globe was at the top of the hit list. Number one, with a bullet. And we determined immediately to get the whole, "authentic" experience, by going as groundlings - the punters who stand at ground level to view the play. The plebeian crowd who came for Shakespeare's low comedy, rude mechanicals, and the violent downfall of their betters; who'd definitely like a slice of Schadenfreude with that. So, we were aware that groundling tix meant a few hours of standing still, in a crowd. But, for only five quid it was a badge of honour we were ready for. (Later, in the shop, we see a T-shirt that says "Groundlings - proudly standing since 1599". We grab one.)


The production makes great use of the possibilities afforded by the geography of a Shakespearean theatre. The play starts with a rabble moving through the groundling pit, leading an audience chant in support of the upstart Julius Caesar. The play repeatedly enlists us groundlings as the mob; most notably in Mark Anthony's funeral oration, where Shakespeare cleverly turns the tables on the conspirators and demonstrates the fickleness and malleability of the mob.  The production also benefitted from a great use of music, and costume design that was largely Elizabethan, with only touches of "Roman" in places. Acting was generally fine - in particular Christoper Logan's fey, gay Casca gave strong point to the ignobility of the conspirators' cause. I also liked the twist of using Julius Caesar in the role of Strato, who assists Brutus' suicide. Thus us Caesar's revenge on the conspirators complete.

We were totally engaged by this performance. Being in this setting is part of the total theatrical experience, and I loved it. Is it "authentic"? Well, I'm not a Shakespeare scholar, and no doubt they've worried that question to death. Certainly it was dynamic, moving, committed, and very believable. I can't wait to see Henry V in this theatre ...


The other thing I really enjoyed about this was seeing Shakespeare, in this theatre,mosur founded by English men and women. This is their living heritage, and I found it very encouraging to see them enjoying it with rapt attention. A bunch of young teens ran the gamut from close attention to total boredom. I loved that.

The play's not over until the blood's mopped up.
*    *    *     *
Coda: On the way home we ran into a big demo. Kurds protesting against IS had occupied a major intersection in northeast London - traffic was log jammed and buses were stopped. We had to walk through the noisy demo to get home. Having just seen the volatility of a mob made clear on stage, it caused a moment's hesitation. We survived.

All the World's a Stage

Some moments of London theatre ...



Charles III
Wynham's Theatres, Leicester Square
Saturday 4 October 2014


Charles I, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, came to a sticky end, when he was executed at Whitehall in January 1649. His son, Charles II, lost the Civil War to Oliver Cromwell, in 1651, and remained in France until Cromwell's death, and the restoration of the monarchy, in 1650. And that's it for Charleses. Charles III will become king on the death of the current queen, Elizabeth II. She's 88, and doesn't seem to be going anywhere Real Soon Now. Charles will, at the same time, become Charles III, King of Australia, unless we get our act sorted.

This very entertaining play looks at the nature of that succession. Charles is now 66 and has basically spent his life hanging around, waiting for his go at the ermine. The play opens with a funeral  - "The Queen is dead. Long live the King!" But pretty soon, he has sparked a constitutional crisis over his actions on a bill of the Labour government to limit press freedom. The play cleverly puts various sides of the problem - which all have some merit - and it shows how difficult a resolution of the uncoded powers of monarchy - to advise, encourage, and warn - could be.

The play is cleverly plotted and moves along snappily. An unexpected delight was the use throughout of the rolling cadence of Shakespearean iambic pentameter, which is spoken well here, and sounds entirely natural. The scope and wit of the play - which is very funny - also gives it a Shakespearean edge - it could fit neatly into the run of Wars of the Roses plays. This is further emphasised by the spare staging. And at times, characters dip in and out of Shakespearean "types". Charles, for instance, is at various times, reminiscent of both Hamlet and Lear; Kate channels Lady Macbeth, Harry has a touch of Falstaff and Prince Hal. Diana's ghost stalks the battlements. Great performances all around; kudos to Tim Piggott-Smith for a puzzled but determined Charles.

The Wyndham's Theatres on Charing Cross Road is a delightful, bijou cinema of the old style, designed by the architect W G R Sprague in the Louis XVI style. All gilt and plaster, steeply raked tiers of circles and boxes, proscenium arch, labyrinthine corridors. It opened in 1899, and has staged over a 100 years of premium theatre, including performances by the notorious Tallulah Bankead, John Gielgud, Alec Guinness, Ralph Richardson, Vanessa Redgrave, Joan Littlewood, & Judy Dench. A bit of London theatre history. It was my first ever West End theatre-going experience. Utterly astounded by the dense crowds around Soho on a Saturday night. Loved it.

At the top of the dial

This is the Home Service. Welcome to London.

We got here. And here is a special song for you all:

http://youtu.be/EfK-WX2pa8c

More to come. Soon.