Roderick Random

Theatre Review : She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith - Olivier Theatre (dir Jamie Lloyd 30/1/12)

2012-02-05T22:55:00.000Z

The plot of She Stoops to Conquer is as insanely clever as theatre has ever devised - Mr Hardcastle (Steve Pemberton) would like his daughter to be married to Marlow, the son of an old friend, so invites him to his house. However, Hardcastle's loutish step-son Toby Lumpkin (David Fynn) intercepts him, and tells him that Hardcastle's home where he will stay the night is in fact an inn. Marlow has an unusual impediment, in that he can freely chat up women of a lower class but is completely tongue-tied in the presence of ladies of quality. Which makes him fortunate to think that he is staying in an inn, and that Hardcastle's daughter Kate (Katherine Kelly) is a serving girl.

Goldsmith's satire is very effective. In mistaking Hardcastle's house for an Inn, and Hardcastle for an Innkeeper, Marlow and his companion Hastings (John Heffernan) treat both with the disrespect to be expected at the time, and it is still today fresh and funny. As is typical in plays of the time, Hardcastle's wife (overplayed deliciously by Sophie Thompson) has aspirations above her country station, and all the humour derives from the confusions of upper versus lower class, and rural simplicity versus urban sophistication.

The humour is drawn out by the cast quite rightly overplaying everything - this is not a play to benefit from subtlety. Marlow switches easily from tongue-tied lover to skirt-chasing rogue, whilst Kate moves with equal facility from charming young daughter to sluttish serving girl.

Jamie Lloyd's production uses the Olivier's revolving stage to great effect as he switches seamlessly from inside to outside Hardcastle Hall, the only downside being the rather twee song and dance numbers which fill the gaps during the set changes.

After a slow start (this was the first preview) both cast and audience got into the rhythms of the humour and the cast seemed to feed on the laughs they were receiving from the stalls. By the end, part of the audience was on its feet, and, if that was perhaps an overreaction, it was certainly a most enjoyable production of a play that still retains its freshness more than 200 years since its first production.

Theatre Review : The Madness of George III by Alan Bennett - Apollo Theatre (dir Christopher Luscombe 26/1/12)

2012-02-05T22:14:00.000Z

King George III, one of the more decent monarchs to have graced the British throne, was unfortunate to suffer from a recurring illness - probably porphyria - which manifested itself in prolonged outbursts of what appeared to be madness. Alan Bennett's play studies the impact on the King of the first such outbreak, the barbaric methods used to try to cure it and how it affected the court politics of the day. Being written by Alan Bennett, it is a story told with humour, pathos and sensitivity, but also hard-edged and shocking.

Of course, most people are familiar with this story today, largely as a result of the success of this play when it was first staged.There is a risk in reviving such a well-loved work, which has successfully made the transition into an equally well-loved film with a much-missed national treasure in the title role. The lead part is so pivotal that comparisons with Nigel Hawthorne are unavoidable - yet such is the power of David Haig's performance as George III that within a few minutes I was totally involved in his performance and not attempting to make any comparisons.

I was once in a restaurant before a show and David Haig was eating with some companions on a table nearby, and he is one of these people whose charisma fills the room. Yet in many of the roles in which I have seen at the theatre or on television, he has played characters who are either bumptious and officious, or downtrodden. This may be testament to his acting ability, but neither types really allow his natural charisma to shine through.

This role, however, has put that right. Haig dominates the stage as a monarch should, even one beset by this dreadful malady, which makes his suffering as he loses his reason and is beset by blistering and binding by his doctors all the more poignant. He is well-supported by the large cast, especially Beatie Edney in the unattractive role of the monarch's plain but much-loved wife, Queen Charlotte and by Clive Francis as Dr Francis Willis.

The play itself looks a bit baggy in places. There is too much of Fox and Pitt and the machinations of the would-be Prince Regent, too much history lesson and not enough characterisation of the lesser roles. Parallels with contemporary politics are spurious and forced. But this is all about one man, and the play comes alive when contemplating the true nature of kinghood, born to the purple, right down to his porphyria-stained urine.

Book Review - The Night Watch by Sarah Waters (Virago Press 2006)

2012-02-05T19:49:00.001Z

It's 1947, and lives are reaching out for normality after the dislocation of war. For some this is difficult, unable to replicate the adrenaline rush of falling bombs and saving lives. For others, the relationships which made sense in the unnatural intensity of the war years no longer provide security and satisfaction.

Sarah Waters' novel follows the interlinked lives of five people in these dismal years. Helen and Viv work in a dating agency. Helen lives with the sophisticated Julia, whilst Viv has been having a long-term affair with Reggie. Viv's brother Duncan works in a factory and lives with Mr Mundy, but is hiding a secret in his past. Kay lives alone and walks the streets without purpose. But why does Viv become so animated when she sees Kay walking in the street?

Structurally, this book is a bit like a classic detective novel. You are introduced to the story in the middle at the scene of crime, and the action unravels both forwards towards dénouement and backwards as the criminal and their motivations are revealed. In 1947, you learn about the characters, but subsequent sections are set in 1944 and 1941 and as we rewind backwards we find out why the characters are who they are and act how they act.

Sarah Waters is adept at creating a sense of time and place, and her picture of wartime London is highly evocative. The ebbing and flowing of relationships is sketched out with care and sensitivity. Yet there is something at the heart of this novel which didn't fully work for me. It's as if it were somehow not a true story of a series of relationships, but a technical exercise in showing how a book about relationships could be written in reverse chronology.

Perhaps that's unfair, perhaps one is just too conditioned to the unflowering of the plot, of the novelist's relentless drive towards a conclusion. Certainly, there are many novels where one has appreciated the storyline but the ending leaves one disappointed, and by this device of reverse chronology Sarah Waters has avoided having to finish with her characters facing the humdrum normality of peacetime at the end of the book. But because of the structure of the book, we know who survived the falling bombs, the back-street abortions, and the slow reveal of why Helen has silk pyjamas and Viv wants to give Kay a ring does not provide an adequate motive force for the book as a whole - which is unfortunate, as many sections are compelling and the period and interrelationships are delineated with such care.

Book Review - The American Future : A History by Simon Schama (The Bodley Head 2008)

2012-02-04T23:15:00.000Z

In 2008, America stood on the cusp of a change which even just a few years earlier would have been unthinkable. Barack Obama, a black American, had a realistic chance of being elected President of the United States. His vision of change was providing an inspiring alternative both to a discredited Republican regime and Hillary Clinton's Democratic Party machine. Establishment politics had failed - the long years of easy credit and economic boom had come crashing to an end, whilst American troops struggled to make an impact against nebulous foes in Iraq and Afghanistan. If ever there was a potential political watershed, this was it.

Simon Schama's TV series and book were an attempt to take a long perspective on America's most pressing issues, mixing historical aperçus with contemporary analysis to brilliant effect.

When West Point Academy for officers was founded, the study of French was compulsory for the practical reason that many of the textbooks were written in French. But the principles of mathematics and engineering that were instilled allowed the Army to play a major role in the Civil Engineering of the new nation. They helped create, for instance, the levées that protected New Orleans until contemporary negligence contributed to their breach in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Switch to the retired General who, when asked if the Army could have done more to fix the infrastructure of Iraq, said that that is not what the Army is for.The Union's success in the American Civil War was largely due to the success of West Point graduate Montgomery Meigs' clear-headed and incorruptible approach to logistical management. Switch to Iraq, where "Construction companies awarded no-bid contracts had bungled the job after pocketing front-loaded operational budgets". No explicit contrast is made - none is needed.

For a country founded on immigration, America's attitude to new immigrants has often been ambiguous. Discrimination against Chinese workers in the West is contrasted with American migrants to Mexico in what is now Texas. The first part of the American history is the search for land, as settlers pushed further and further west, and the American army made gains to the South. Treaties with American Indian tribes are torn up with impunity by Andrew Jackson, the hero of the Mexican war. Rewind to Schama's meeting earlier in the book with Generals Freddy Valenzuela and Ricardo Sanchez, all-American heroes in a Hispanic military café in San Antonio, Texas.

For the American history is a complex history, ebbing and flowing from highest ideals to naked greed and corruption. What Schama manages to do is to select examples that not only encapsulate how America came to be what it is today, but also to underline its complexity. He moves easily back and forward through the history of the Meigs family and the history of the nation, but eschews easy answers. As the past four years have shown, the problems that contemporary America faces are too deep-seated simply to be solved by well-crafted words, but this book is a fine attempt to shed some understanding on its most intractable issues.

Book Review : The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (Virago Press 2009)

2012-01-21T18:23:00.000Z

It may be an exaggeration to say thatBritish novelists write of little else but class, but it is certainly the casethat a number of significant recent novels have examined class-incompatibility and the decline of theEnglish gentry over the course of the 20^th Century. Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Stranger’s Child”charts the decline of one part of a wealthy family through the rise and fall ofits poet-son’s reputation. The crux of Julian Barnes “The Sense of an Ending” arises essentially out of a sense of class-based inferiority. Meanwhile,Sarah Waters’ “The Little Stranger” charts another gentry-class family’sdecline in the immediate aftermath of the second world war through the unusualmedium of a ghost story.

As a child, Faraday had visited the Ayresfamily at Hundreds Hall where his mother was in service. Now that he is adoctor in the local town, he is called to examine Betty, a young servant, andstrikes up a friendship with the members of the family. Mrs Ayres is nowwidowed, and has two surviving children, her eldest daughter having died fromdiphtheria. Her surviving children are now in their twenties. Roderick wasbadly burned during the war, whilst Caroline is rather plain and unmarried.Hundreds Hall itself is badly in need of repair – the income from the estatehas diminished, and financial anxieties are crowding in on Roderick who hastaken over the running of the Estate since the death of his father.

Betty has claimed that the Hall frightensher, but there is no evidence of any malign force until a dinner party whereGyp, Caroline’s docile Labrador, suddenly savages a neighbour’s child. Afterthis, strange occurrences take place with increasing frequency. Roderick isconvinced there is an evil spirit in the house – but could this just be thestrain of his injuries and the family finances taking their toll? Mrs Ayresagrees there may be a spirit – could this be her beloved daughter trying to reachher?

Meanwhile, Faraday has struck up atentative relationship with an uncertain Caroline, and is becoming more involvedin the problems of the house. His medical experience is invaluable as he dealswith the consequences of the strange manifestations in the house. As aneducated man, he is sure there is a rational explanation for what is occurring. Could it be psychoneurosis, or has Roddy's subliminal self somehow broken loose from his conscious personality and returned to the house, as his colleague Seeley suggests?

The narrative is told from Faraday's perspective,but could he be more implicated more than he reveals in the narrative? Before each major crisis, he hasbeen in the vicinity of the house, sometimes drinking, always upset and on the morning afterwards has sufferedbad night’s sleep? Who is the “you” to whom Caroline refers? He is not entirelya pleasant character, having a temper and a suspicious nature, and has clearlynot got over the perceived disadvantages of his poor upbringing. He is gettingmore frustrated with the barriers to his relationship with Caroline. Has hefully resolved his feelings towards the family for whom his mother spent timein service? A mischievous spirit or arational explanation? - Sarah Waters leaves conclusions to the reader.

Coming from the doctor’s perspective, thebook is written in flat, businesslike prose. Description is kept to a minimum, yet the time and placeare brilliantly evoked. The sparseness means that when the crises occur, thedescription of them is all the more shocking – and I can guarantee that onceyou get into the book it is so gripping that it almost impossible to put down.Yet the class-based ambiguities at the heart of it mean that this is no merepage-turner but an extremely sensitive, thought-provoking and intriguing story.

Film Review - The Artist (dir Michel Hazanavicius)

2012-01-15T21:48:00.000Z

Let's be honest. This film is a predictable piece of romantic schmaltz filled with a compendium of some of the biggest movie clichés of all time, complete with a cutesy dog. It's a rehack of the well-worn tale of the fading star being eclipsed by his pretty young protegé, who belatedly comes to appreciate what he had done for her. Not only that, but it's silent and shot in black and white - did anyone mention that? And d'know what - despite the silent movie gimmick being hyped beyond belief, despite every scene being telegraphed beforehand and despite anthropomorphic animals in cinema making me cringe - despite all that it's absolutely wonderful and well worth all the noise.

Part of the reason for its success is the sheer élan of the film-making. This is a labour of love and it shows. As soon as one sees the distinctive art-deco credits faded at the edges, one is reminded of so many films of the late twenties and early thirties. And this continues throughout. Almost every scene elicits a thrill of recognition, even if it is for recognition of a well-worn cliché.

Being primarily a silent movie gives it great scope for sound-related coups de théatre which Hazanavicius exploits to great effect. After the opening dance number the music ends and we expect to be engulfed by the audience's applause, but instead we are envelopped by silence. I note that the Alliance of Woman Film Journalists have voted "The sound of glass clinking on the table" from this film as their unforgettable movie moment of the year, and without giving the game away I quite agree.

Jean Dujardin as fading star George Valentin is superb, a hint of vulnerability always at the corner of his twinkling eye, and Bérénice Bejo radiates exactly the charisma that one would expect of up-and-coming movie icon Peppy Miller. Both are nearly eclipsed by a pitch-perfect John Goodman hamming it up for all he is worth as the producer Al Zimmer, but the star of the show is undoubtedly Uggie as Jack, a dog of acuity, insight and undeniable attractiveness. A lot of nonsense has been written about his eligibility for Best Supporting Actor awards. Of course he is simply fortunate that he has been trained well and looks cute - just like many of his human counterparts.

There are so many allusions, references and in-jokes that this is probably a film best appreciated by dedicated cinéastes, but its sheer ebullience makes it a pleasure for all who enjoy romances, films for film's sake and who don't need a raft of flashes, guns and special effects. Forget 3-D, silent films might be the future.

Book Review : A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes (Picador 1990)

2012-01-15T20:25:00.000Z

On first sight, this is not so much a novel as a collection of disparate short stories linked by recurring motifs but not linked by any big idea or common themes. But Julian Barnes has insisted that the book was conceived as a whole, and in actual fact you need to stand quite far back to appreciate the architecture of the whole.

This is a history of the world from Noah until the end of time. In the first chapter we encounter a cynical, all-knowing woodworm which has stowed away on the Ark, decrying Noah and his drunken exploits. In the final chapter, we discover an afterlife in which all desires are satiated to such an extent that the dead eventually tire of the state of bliss that they exist in, and opt for nothingness instead. In the intervening 8 1/2 chapters, we encounter the woodworm gnawing through the legs of the throne of the Bishop of Besançon, trying to eat the letters sent by an actor in the South American jungle and possibly destroying the remains of the Ark on Mount Ararat. Reindeer which on the Ark had a sense of foreboding are buried in the fallout from a nuclear catastrophe. Meanwhile, the Ark recurs in the guise of an Achille Lauro-type liner stormed by Arab terrorists, who execute the prisoners of the unclean nations two by two, Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, some logs tied together in the South American jungle and a possibly delusionary craft in the Pacific.

The overarching theme is similar to that of his recent Booker-prize winning novel A Sense of an Ending. It is the fragility and unreliability of the historical narrative and how it is framed by the perspective of the narrator. The woodworm, who, as a destroyer of narratives par excellence exemplifies Barnes' theme, relates his worm's eye view of a biblical narrative that is unreliable per se. The deaths of the terrorists deprive Franklin Hughes of the justification of his behaviour and his girlfriend never talks to him again. Kath Ferris's journey across the Torres Strait could have been a fantasy or delusion - or the consequence of sunstroke. The story of the Medusa is the story of the survivors.

There are two significant exceptions to these stories about the fragility of history. The first is the tragic story of the ship St Louis, which sailed to the United States carrying 937 Jewish refugees but was denied access at numerous ports in the Americas, finally returning to Antwerp. This is a shocking fact: only the ultimate fate of its passengers as they are dispersed once again throughout Europe is unknown.

And then in the half-chapter, Parenthesis, Barnes finally confronts the reader directly and brings everything together. In the midst of a disquisition on the nature of love, he states that "History isn't what happened - history is just what historians tell us." They impose a pattern, plan, connections.

"The history of the world? Just voices echoing in the dark; images that burn for a few centuries then fade; stories, old stories that seem to overlap; strange links, impertinent connections... We bury our victims in secrecy (strangled princelings, irradiated reindeer), but history discovers what we did to them."

As short stories, each Chapter would stand up well by itself. Written in a variety of styles, voices and tones, they are exemplars of the short-storyteller's art. Yet don't let the engaging nature of many of these tales and the accessibility of Barnes' style deceive you - this is a deadly serious and hugely ambitious book.

Book Review : Pure by Andrew Miller (Sceptre 2011)

2012-01-14T02:20:00.000Z

1785, and the French state is rotten, putrefying. Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young engineer, is summoned to a decaying Versailles to be given a task by a government minister, the clearance of the cemetery of les Innocents by Les Halles in Paris, which is full to overflowing and filling its surrounds with stench and disease. Apparently there is an elephant somewhere in Versailles.

The elephant is the impending French Revolution, whose presence looms over this book whilst only ever being acknowledged in the prophetic street graffiti of the mysterious Bêche. And, as wide-awake readers will note Jean-Baptiste is preparing the way for the upheaval, and that "Baratter" means to agitate vigorously, they will realise that we are in the realm of complex extended historical metaphor. However, don't let that put you off - this is page-turning book, cleverly written, engaging and entertaining, and one can enjoy immensely it without all the cleverness. But dig away at the surface like Baratter's men from Valenciennes, and so much more opens up...

The title announces the theme: purification - of the graveyard, of the district, of the state, of la pute autrichiènne with whom Baratte will live. A day is coming when the last trompette-stop of the organ will sound and the innocents shall rise up from their graves. Jean-Baptiste travels to Valenciennes via Amiens (incidentally home to relics of John the Baptist) to employ Flemish miners, working men, simple but loyal, to excavate the bones of les Innocents and transport them to the catacombs below Rue d'Enfer. Miller captures the sights and smells of this unpleasant task in brisk, tight elegant sentences whilst continuing to toy with us.

Salome-like, the naked daughter of Jean-Baptiste's hosts tries to sever his head. Fortunately he is rescued by all-seeing Marie before he has shed too much blood. Call on Dr Guillotin who has expertise in such cases. It can be possible to over-interpret. As fire rages all around them, Jean-Baptiste finds Flemish miner Block (=stone = pierre =Peter??), gives him a key and tells him to take his followers to the river.

As a novel, it is not without its flaws. Structurally it is unkempt, events occur for little apparent reason, Jean-Baptiste is the only character of interest.Yet as an entertainment, an exciting read, historically astute, well-written and playful, it excels. Since finishing it, I've found myself musing on the theme and the apocalyptic parallels it develops, which is worthy tribute. And the elephant? - it was lying dead in Versailles, rotting away.

Book Review : Staring at the Sun by Julian Barnes (Picador 1987)

2012-01-09T23:40:00.000Z

In his recent Booker Prizewinning The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes' middle-aged character tries to make sense of a pivotal event in his life many years ago. Barnes had written about an elderly character looking back on a life once before in Staring at the Sun, one of his earlier works written in 1985, and the difference between the two books is instructive. Both are massively ambitious. Whereas The Sense of an Ending explores the nature of history, Staring at the Sun tries to tell whether you can "tell a good life from a bad life, a wasted life."

Jean Sargent did not lead an exciting life. Brought up before the second world war, she drifted into a loveless marriage. It was only the prospect of her son's birth that made her leave her husband and drift around various poorly paid jobs and rented flats. Looking back on her long life from a vantage point in 2020, she reflects on her dodgy Uncle Leslie, who fled to America during the war, and fighter-pilot Tommy Prosser, who was grounded when he lost his bottle.

She looks back on bringing up her son, Gregory, whose existential crisis causes him to interrogate the General Purposes Computer's Absolute Truth module why he is afraid of death. And she reflects on travelling in her middle age, when she went to China. There someone asks how you can tell good jade from bad and is told "you look at it and by looking you can tell its qualities."

There are two main problems with this book. The first is that it is over-determined, a bit too writerly. Significant metaphors recur with a clunk. As a child, Jean sees a print of a mink with the caption that "the mink is excessively tenacious of life," and the phrase returns to Jean at all of life's major junctures. Similarly aeroplanes - Uncle Leslie takes her on an aeroplane to cure her whooping cough; Tommy Prosser gives the book its title by flying into the sun; Gregory makes model aircraft that cannot fly.

The second is a problem of tone in the final section of the book. After two largely realist parts which follow Jean in her youth and as a mother, we suddenly fast-forward to 2020. The General Purposes Computer is a fine example of why writers must always take care when writing about the future, since Barnes obviously hadn't envisaged as all-encompassing a vehicle for the sum of human knowledge as the Internet. Gregory's interrogation of the GPC makes for interesting intellectual cut and thrust, but it is out of tune with the rest of the book.

By the end, as Gregory and his mother embark on an aeroplane and all the metaphors come together, one feels as if one has completed a particularly complex intellectual jigsaw and not a work of literature. This is a shame, as the book is beautifully written, as is always the case with Julian Barnes, and genuinely thought-provoking. However, when compared with The Sense of an Ending one can see how the mature Barnes has dealt with equally weighty issues with so much more subtlety yet directness.

Book Review : The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape 2011)

2011-12-29T22:35:00.000Z

2011 has been topped and tailed by two very similar short novels, both by experienced master-craftsmen, both looking back on events of the protagonist's youth which weren't fully understood at the time, both written with a taut, spare economy and barely a word out of place.

Philip Roth's Nemesis was a simpler piece of story-telling; Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending is an altogether more ambitious work. Within its slight frame it dissects the unstable nature of history. As Adrian Finn says, quoting Lagrange, "History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." Barnes' book is an exploration of this thesis.

Tony Webster and his friends Colin and Alex are ordinary schoolboys in the sixties, intellectually curious and hung-up on girls. They are joined at school by Adrian Finn, whose intellectual fire-power immediately marks him out as Scholarship material. Tony looks up to Adrian, as do both his friends and the Masters at his school.

When Tony goes to Bristol University he starts to go out with Veronica, his first girlfriend, He is taken to meet her parents and their solid middle-class self-confidence immediately makes him feel inferior. It turns out that Veronica's brother is at Cambridge with Adrian, and after Tony and Veronica split up he gets a letter from Adrian requesting his permission to go out with Veronica.Tony's reply has unexpected consequences.

Fast-forward to today, and Tony is surprised to receive a bequest from Veronica's mother on her death. Veronica has some documents which have been left to him but which she is reluctant to release, so he tries to track her down in order to understand what happened when she split from him - yet his memory is unreliable and he is shocked to discover the picture of his younger self which emerges.

Barnes' characterisation has the precision of a stiletto. Tony is not naturally reflective, he is selfish, complacent, stolid and insensitive, yet cannot see it. He has caused damage that he cannot start to contemplate, but despite everything thinks he is an inoffensive nonentity. Veronica tries to penetrate his shell, but her pain is too great. The mystery is Adrian - to what extent does his theory of individual responsibility mean that he is unable to ascribe blame where it is due?

This is not a large book - only 150 pages - but its themes are massive. It does not feel slight, but rather it is as fully satisfying a read as many much larger novels - in fact, any further development would only detract from its key themes. Just as in Philip Roth's Nemesis, the sparsity engenders an emotional intensity and focus on a theme that would be lost in a bigger book. Both these master-craftsmen have the experience to know exactly when less is more.

Book Review : The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson (Bloomsbury 2011)

2011-12-29T17:41:00.000Z

I hesitate to start to write this review, as I feel a bit like Treslove, the main character of this book. Julian Treslove is a disappointed unmarried middle-aged man working as a celebrity look-alike whose two best friends are both Jewish, and both have recently lost their wives. Samuel Finkler, a friend of Treslove since school, is a successful philosopher, academic and TV pundit, writer of "The Existentialist in the Kitchen". The elderly Libor Sevcik was their teacher. Both may be Jewish, but they have conflicting attitudes to the conflict between Israel and Palestine, Libor supporting the Israeli government's position, whereas Finkler takes the lead of the ASHamed Jews who are opposed to Israeli aggression in Palestine.

Julian has always had an ambiguous relationship with the confident, successful Finkler, defining his attitude to Jewishness through him (to Treslove, all Jews are "Finklers"). However, after being the victim of an possibly antisemitic attack in London, he starts to learn more about the religion before striking up a relationship with Hephzibah, Libor's niece. Nevertheless, despite trying to learn Yiddish, contemplating circumcision and recognising rising antisemitism on London's streets, Treslove never quite manages to fully reconcile himself to his nascent Judaism.

This is such an intimate, affectionate portrait of the varieties of Judaic experience, that, like Treslove, the gentile reader feels as if they are an onlooker, peering in to lives that are similar yet different to our own, trying to understand yet always conscious that there is a gap - religious, political, cultural, historical - that is impossible to transcend. In Treslove's case this is partly because he seems emotionally deficient at times, but a non-Jewish reader can only imagine the complexity of feelings and responses generated in Jews by the Palestinian conflict.

This is also a book about families and of death. Finkler and his wife Tyler coexisted up until her death in what was basically mutual enmity driven by Finkler's numerous infidelities (Treslove is surprised to learn that she wasn't originally Jewish, but converted on her marriage). Libor, on the other hand - and despite being intimate with Hollywood's most beautiful actresses - was always loyal in his heart to his beloved Malkie. Both find it difficult to come to terms with their loss. Treslove, meanwhile, fantasizes about a beautiful woman dying in his arms.

It is not easy to summarise all the themes of such a sensitive, intelligent novel. Jacobson eschews easy solutions and trite answers. Themes are argued back and forwards but none of the characters find easy resolutions and neither does the reader - questions are simply raised and left hanging. All this is done is the most beautiful prose by a master of the well-turned sentence and ironic juxtaposition. This is not laugh-out-loud funny like previous works by Jacobson, but it demonstrates a wry humour throughout.

However, this is not meant to be a funny book - it's a deadly serious one. In Treslove's terms The Finkler Question is nothing less than the Jewish Question, a fundamental set of issues for a Jewish writer such as Jacobson. With its subsidiary reflections on life, love and death, this is as serious as it gets.

Book Review : The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco (Harvard Secker 2011)

2011-12-21T22:42:00.000Z

I remember receiving The Name of the Rose as a Christmas present back in the 1980s and finishing it around 5am on Boxing Day, captivated by the cleverness of it all, so allusive, playful, dark and learned. After Foucault's Pendulum was released, a fellow Eco-afficianado and I rushed to the Musée des Arts et Métiers at lunchtime whilst on a training course in Paris in order to gaze at the Pendulum itself, and the site of the novel's dénouement.

Since then, Eco's works have frustrated as much as entertained. All have displayed his vast erudition, yet none has captured the energy and inventiveness of his earlier narratives. His last book, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, even sought to recapture this lost elan through discarding medieval texts in favour of the cartoon storybooks of Eco's childhood, with only partial success.

The Prague Cemetery, however, promised to be a return to familiar territory, the conspiracy theories and secret societies so effectively spiked in Foucault's Pendulum. It is the tale of a spy and master-forger, who is responsible in part for all the most important conspiracies of the late nineteenth century from the reunification of Italy to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Being Eco, all the characters except for Simonini, the antisemitic protagonist, really existed. Being Eco, though, one needs a fair knowledge of 19th century history in order to separate fact from fiction from conjecture and invention.

The historical parts of the novel are great: they race along engagingly, and, as Dan Brown knows, there is a ready appetite for even the most bizarre conspiracies, factually based or not. Simonini plots with the Carbonari, follows Garibaldi's troops through Italy, is the mastermind behind Leo Taxil's antimasonic Satanic fantasies and writes both Dreyfuss's incriminating letter and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, whilst introducing us to several of the most unsavoury peripheral characters in France and Italy in this period. In actual fact, Eco carefully charts the links between Freemasonry and the movement for Italian reunification, and how it subsequently become linked with anti-jewish propaganda through the works of Maurice Joly via novelists Dumas and Sue, and Taxil's wilder fantasies, culminating in the Protocols. Even allowing for some flights of fancy, notably some murders and a racy black mass, this is heady stuff.

The problem, though, is with the novel's superstructure. It is supposedly the recollections of Simonini, interspersed with the diary of a Jesuit priest by the name of Dalla Piccola with whom Simonini shares a flat but who may only be an alter-ego or a figment of Simonini's imagination. You know that there is an issue here when Eco presents us with a table in an appendix to try to tie together the diaries, recollections and actual events. It simply doesn't work, and detracts, especially in the first part of the book, from the otherwise engaging narrative. There is a sense that Eco actually has several themes he wants to write about - il Risorgimento, the Paris Commune, Freemasonry and the anti-Jewish conspiracies, and this is the only way that he can shoe-horn them together, when in fact it is unnecessary. Eco doesn't generally do character much and this is no exception, and ultimately the endless successions of names becomes overwhelming. Which is a pity as the material unearthed by Eco is fascinating, and with better organisation it could even give Dan Brown a run for his money, perish the thought...

Theatre Review : Hamlet - Young Vic (dir Ian Rickson 19/12/12)

2011-12-21T00:16:00.000Z

My earliest serious theatregoing was to the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow in the 1980s when it was led by magnificent trio of Giles Havergal, Robert David MacDonald and Philip Prowse, to which I wholly attribute my love of adventurous, iconoclastic productions and a good working knowledge of Brecht. I remember back around 1983 going to see a production of Hamlet, directed by Havergal and Prowse, set in a lunatic asylum, with the play being acted as group therapy. It may even have been the first time I had seen Hamlet live, but we had studied it at school so I was familiar with the text; however, I was disappointed with the production. As everyone was acting out the play as therapy, then the key question of how and when and to what extent Hamlet was mad was blurred as he was - by definintion - mad to start off with. Having saddled itself with the concept, the play itself then struggled to break free of it

So it was with a sense of trepidation that I made my way to the Young Vic, ready to experience the new route into the supposed Psychiatric Unit in which the play had once again been set (although to be honest I thought this was more a cheap gambit to get everyone into their seats on time in the tight Young Vic auditorium). The stage is bare apart from a coffin, and backed by glass panelling leading into an office, NHS chic. The lights drop and in the dark the ghost stalks Elsinore's battlements. However, when the lights are raised again, and even after Hamlet took the stage, one couldn't help being influenced by the sterile, aseptic hospital environment. Claudius, Gertrude, Hamlet and Polonius sit around as in group therapy, the King and Polonius doubling as hospital figures of authority. But the play wasn't catching fire and the audience was flat despite strong performances, especially from Michael Sheen as an angry, threatening Hamlet.

But suddenly the Players took the stage and everything changed. They were led by a bearded,bewildered Player King (Pip Donaghy), and a leaping, bawdy Lucianus, lubriciously rubbing avacuum-cleaner head between his legs. As Hamlet provides an increasinglyderanged commentary with megaphone and flashlight, the murder of Gonzago isenacted, Claudius (James Clyde) and Gertrude (Sally Dexter) fled from the stage, the audience suddenlyengaged and the play came alive. It seemed to take this scene to break theproduction from its anchors in the mental hospital and gave it the imaginativefreedom it needed.

The second half was superb. Hamletoverhears Claudius’ praying for forgiveness in the office through the intercom.Ophelia (Vinette Robinson) sings to the music of PJHarvey, unbearably affecting. The heart of the stage is raised to show thegravedigger in a sandpit, which effectively split the stage and preventedClaudius from reaching Gertrude as she sipped from the poisoned chalice.

Michael Sheen captivated throughout. HisHamlet was not some ineffective dreamer but hot-blooded and impulsive - in fact, he was grounded in an angry reality,and couldn’t be further from the psychiatric case predicated by theproduction’s superstructure. His verse was spoken with lightness and clarity,wringing all the natural rhythms from Shakespeare’s words, and broughtfreshness and vitality to the great soliloquies.

But whilst Sheen dazzled, the productionitself frustrated. There were lots of good ideas (the female Horatio (Hayley Carmichael) and Rozencrantz (Eileen Walsh) added some tender nuances), but the whole lacked coherence. Why, for example, in a productionwhich had generally been trimmed intelligently and focussed on the intimate,had traces of Fortinbras been allowed to remain in order to facilitate a minorcoup de théatre at the end? Was this a final confirmation that the play itself hadbeen an outworking of the prince’s damaged phyche? If so, then Rickson mighthave had the courage of his convictions throughout. As it was, we had a greatperformance from Sheen, some interesting ideas and a production that held itsaudience throughout the second half. But as a coherent whole it missedits mark in the end.

Book Review : The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst (Picador 2011)

2011-12-11T22:49:00.001Z

Five celebrations, five portraits of a family, five windows on the passing of time. Alan Hollinghurst’s fifth novel is his most ambitious yet, a dissection of the impact of the passing of time on a family as their reputations rise and fall, but also on the nature of biography as family secrets are withheld or revealed - or could they even be fabricated? - as the past is picked over.

Cecil Valance is a poet, beautiful, carefree, charismatic, who just prior to the First World War visits the suburban house of his friend and lover George Sawle and kisses his young sister, Daphne. He celebrates the visit by writing a poem to Daphne, “Two Acres”, which later becomes much anthologised. Like Rupert Brooke, on whom Valance is clearly based, his poetic reputation is enhanced by his heroic early death in the trenches. Churchill quotes “Two Acres” in his obituary. His body is brought back and entombed in the Valance’s private chapel in their house at Corley Court, whilst cabinet minister Sebastien Stokes reaches out for the memories of his friends and family in order to write his memoir.

Yet time is a harsh critic, and as it passes Valance’s poetic reputation is re-evalated and his Georgics, seemingly so elegant before the War, seem insipid beside the masters of his age. He is remembered as a dashing romantic figure, a breaker of hearts and for his tragic early death, not for what he wrote. Ironically, his unattractive brother Dudley, whose insensitive alterations have ruined the interior of Corley Court, emerges initially with the stronger literary reputation on account of his acerbic memoirs. Meanwhile shy, suburban George has the sad fate of being known to a generation of schoolchildren thanks to a history textbook he wrote with his wife.

A generation later, and biographer Paul Bryant is trying to uncover the truth about the Valances. He pieces together information from his own boyhood, from a reticent Daphne, from an increasingly senile George. But what information is to be trusted, and can Paul be trusted himself? “And year by year our memory fades”...

Hollinghurst plays with the reader as with a powerful fish – successively letting out line collusively, then reeling in sharply. He writes so carefully with subtle phrases, little hints, that one feels complicit when a character reveals his weakness, shocked but not surprised at the manner in which it is made manifest. Yet, as one moves to each new period, characters from the past are revealed only reluctantly, from their hiding place behind married names and titles, as the reader has to reconstruct their backstories from sparse hints and snippets of information, though at the same time the reader is knowingly aware of information that the new characters are not privy to, such as when the schoolboys reveal Sir Dudley’s sword for their museum, one recalls what use Sir Dudley put his sword forty years before. It is a style at once both subtle and explicit, one cannot escape the sense that one is being playfully manipulated.

The truth is never quite as simple as it appears on the printed page - all the memoirs of the family are unreliable in some way, everyone has an angle. Much is hinted at but little is explicit - not even Hollinghurst's trademark gay sex. But there is an unmistakable sense of sadness and decline that pervades the whole book. It is only latterly that you learn that the mighty Vallances, with such a Norman sounding name, have only received their baronetcy as a result of the fortune created by the first baronet in grass seed. Within three generations the family heir is living in a ramshackle cottage, but apparently not without means.

But their is also a counterpoint - the book is also a celebration of the liberation of gay men over the course of the twentieth century. The hints and occlusions in the early memoirs are an attempt to hide the illicit secret of Cecil Vallance's bisexuality. Harry's love for Hubert is never fully understood until many years later and the George's marriage of convenience to the unappealing Madeleine contrasts with the apparent satisfaction of later relationships such as Peter and his civil partner Desmond.

Hollinghurst never gives his readers the satisfaction of an easy resolution. The trajectory of the family, of their reputations, their properties and the instability of the means of their evaluation all remain elusive right to the end, and you are immediately wanting to go back and reread, to search for further clues. To reread would be a fitting reward for an exceptional book.

Book Review : The King of Inventors by Catherine Peters (Martin Secker & Warburg 1991) / The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins by William Clarke (Sutton Publishing 2004)

2011-11-30T23:11:00.001Z

Compared to the conventions of Victorian morality as presented in the literature of the time, many Victorian novelists had private lives which may have raised some eyebrows. Dickens separated secretly from his wife in favour of the young actress Ellen Ternan, George Eliott lived openly with G.H. Lewes who was already married to someone else, and Thackeray confined his wife to an asylum in France due to her mental illness. But none had as unconventional a private life as Wilkie Collins. From 1858, except for a brief period, he lived as man and wife with the widowed Caroline Graves, and from 1864 he set up a second household with Martha Rudd, by whom he had three children. Caroline did leave Wilkie in 1868 to marry Joseph Clow (Wilkie attended the wedding) but by 1871 she had returned to him.Caroline managed the bills and paid Martha's rent, and the Martha's children were welcome visitors to their household. Yet this remained a secret to Wilkie's reading public.

Not that Wilkie Collins was a conventional ladies' man - he was short with tiny hands and feet, an odd misshapen forehead, overweight and unfit. Yet he loved women and they loved him in return - he was kind and charming, and, in his own way, very honourable.When Wilkie, his brother Charles Collins and John Everett Millais heard a woman scream whilst walking by Regent's Park, it was Wilkie who went to investigate what was wrong. It may be that this was when he first met Caroline Graves, but it is more likely that it provided him with the genesis of the dramatic first meeting with Anne Catherick in The Woman in White.

Throughout the 1860s, Wilkie Collins was the most influential English novelist barring Dickens alone. The Woman in White defined the sensation novel which dominated this period, The Moonstone gave the genre its most lasting modern incarnation in the shape of the detective novel. From 1870 onwards, Collins' powers started to decline, partly due to the loss of his close friend's Dickens' influence; partly due to an increasing desire to write issue-based novels (Swinburne wickedly wrote
What brought good Wilkie's genius nigh perdition
Some demon whispered - 'Wilkie! have a mission' (Peters pg 313));
partly due to an increasing dependency on Laudenum to alleviate the pain of "rheumatic gout". Whatever the cause, he never recaptured the heights scaled in the 1860s.

Two contrasting books examine his life in detail. First published in 1988, William Clarke's The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins focusses almost entirely on the man, his life and that of his family. Clarke, who died earlier this year, was a leading financial journalist whose wife was a great-granddaughter of Collins. This family connection enabled him to access Collins' bank accounts and to try to explain why, despite the careful construction of his will in a manner worthy of one of the plots of his novels, both sides of his family saw little benefit from the wealth that he had accumulated. Clarke shows that in all probability the family was swindled by his lawyer/son-in-law Henry Bartley.

For all its meticulous research and in some cases the first-hand testimony of elderly family members, the Secret Life largely passes over the novels themselves. The King of Inventors by Catherine Peters remedies this shortcoming. Peters sets out the thesis that Collins was haunted by a second self, a double that was often behind him, especially in his later opium-influenced years. This double manifests itself in his novels which are primarily concerned with questions of identity. Certainly, doubles feature largely in his works, from Anne Catherick and Laura Fairlie in The Woman in White, to the multiple Alan Armadales, to the twin brothers Oscar and Nugent Dubourg in Poor Miss Finch. And even when doubles are not involved, the novels usually resolve round questions of identity, literally in The Law and the Lady, or as a question of legitimacy of birth in The Dead Secret or No Name, or of marriage in Man and Wife.

Peters combines a perceptive reading of the novels with a thorough and well-researched construction of Collins' life, and, whilst she doesn't have all the access that William Clarke has obtained, her use of the texts of the novels to illuminate the biography is much superior. As an example, Peters describes three aspects of Collins' own character revealed in The Law and the Lady. Physically he is akin to husband Eustace Macallan, with his gentle eyes, beard streaked with grey and limp. As a ladies' man, he is represented by the elderly roue Major Fitz-David, and as a writer and fantasist by Miserrimus Dexter. She goes on to show how further extreme aspects of this his most bizarre creation were to be seen in his temperamental actor-friend Charles Fechter, who was also a heavy-drinking, food-loving extrovert. Clarke, however, dismisses The Law and the Lady in a paragraph.

Yet Wilkie's private life ultimately remains a mystery. The circumstances in which he first met both Caroline Graves and Martha Rudd remain matters of speculation. Why Caroline Graves should choose to get married in 1867, and then return once again to Wilkie, is also out of the reach of the biographers. And most mysteriously of all, why should someone who dedicated his life to writing about identity, illegitimacy and the problems inherent in legal ambiguity choose not to attempt to legitimise in some way the two families for which he was responsible.Both Clarke and Peters attempt explanations, but in the end, Wilkie's own life proves the one intricate plot incapable of resolution.

Theatre Review : Death and the Maiden by Ariel Dorfmann - Pinter Theatre (Dir Jeremy Herrin 28/11/11)

2011-11-29T20:09:00.001Z

Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfmann wroteDeath and the Maiden as several South American states were emerging from theshadow of the brutal military dictatorships of the 1970s and 80s. As the ArabSpring takes hold, and the headquarters of the Secret Police are swept open in Tripoli and Cairo,Dorfmann’s play is frighteningly relevant. Sadly, it will probably continue tobe so.

In an unnamed South American state, Gerardo Escobar is aliberal Civil Rights Lawyer, who has just been nominated to a Truth-and-Reconciliation commission following the re-establishment ofdemocracy. Paulina Salas is his wife - beautiful, intelligent, yet scarred by her tortureand rape at the hands of the military during the dictatorship. She is dismayedto hear that Gerardo’s commission will investigate only those who have died, denyingher the opportunity of some form of catharsis.

Gerardo is visited by a stranger, a doctor called Roberto Miranda who has stopped to help him on theroad. Paulina believes she has heard his voice before, as the doctor who oversaw hertorture and rape. She captures Roberto at gunpoint, ties him up and threatens tokill him in order to force him to confess his crimes, whilst her husband arguesthat such actions will only perpetuate the cycle of violence in the country. As Paulina’s story is told, pieces of information emerge, but what is true and what has Roberto made up in order to secure his release?

This is a complex, intense work, bettersuited to a small studio such as the Theatre Upstairs where it was firstperformed than the Edwardian Pinter Theatre, although it is appropriate thatsuch a work should grace the stage which bears Harold Pinter’s name.Perceptions of the characters shift throughout – Gerardo’s liberal values arechallenged when he doubts Roberto’s innocence, Paulina’s pain is undoubted, but is thisthe only way in which she can achieve release? And is Roberto as he says an innocentman? But why does he have a tape of Death and the Maiden in his car, the musicplayed by the Doctor who tortured Paulina?

Both Tom Goodman-Hill and Anthony Calf give powerful, nuancedperfomances as Gerardo and Roberto respectively. But this play needs at its centre someone who can reveal the painand despair that Paulina has carried for 18 years, they must be capable of openingup their soul. Thandie Newton as Paulina is very good but she doesn’t really havethe depths that this part requires. She is too pretty, too well manicured. Herhair stays in place, her voice doesn’t crack from pain, you just aren’tconvinced that she has suffered as she describes. And without that necessarypain at its heart, the play loses its undoubted power (though that is not helped by a half-emptyhouse and an unnecessary tension-killing interval). Which is unfortunate, as this production is probably the mostthoughtful and relevant piece of theatre currently showing in a dismal West End.

Theatre Review : The Comedy of Errors - Olivier Theatre (dir Dominic Cooke 23/11/11)

2011-11-25T21:50:00.001Z

Solinus, the Duke of Ephesus, has had a falling out with Syracuse. As a result, any visitor to his city from Syracuse must pay a fine of 1000 marks or face death, which is bad news for Syracusan merchant Egeon who is visiting Ephesus looking for his son. He did have identical twin sons and identical twin servants, but one of each was lost at sea, so the others took their names, Antipholus and Dromio, in their memory.

Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse have settled in Ephesus since their shipwreck, where Antipholus has married and become a respected citizen. When an identically attired Antipholus of Syracuse arrives with his Dromio, needless to say, mayhem commences.

This play is not one of Shakespeare's great reflections on the human condition, and don't let anyone persuade you that it is a reflection on the nature of duality, of divided consciousness or anything like that. Instead, it is an unashamed comedy, usually best played with liberal doses of slapstick. Dominic Cooke's good-looking production makes full use of the the resources of the Olivier stage to develop an endlessly protean modern Ephesian cityscape, but the staging is always in danger of dwarfing the action. There are times when it works well, such as a madcap chase scene when all four twins are pursued by some mad medics round a revolving stage, but more often the scenery hogged the stage and gave no space for the humour to breathe.

Lenny Henry is a charismatic lead as Antipholus of Syracuse, and it was always going to be difficult for Chris Jarman as Antipholus of Ephesus to equal his presence, although he manages quite well. Meanwhile, I could never remember which of the Dromios was which, despite the fact that Lucian Msamati and Daniel Poyser, both bedecked in Arsenal shirts as Dromios of Syracuse and Ephesus respectively, didn't look particular similar. The excellent Claudie Blakely as Adriana, however, couldn't even tell her husband from his brother, and the scene where Antipholus of Syracuse is locked out his modern penthouse flat whilst Antipholus of Ephesus has been dragged to bed protesting (not too much) by Adriana is particularly well done.

There are many good points to this production. The opening scene where Egeon explains why he has two sons and two servants with the same name is usually a drag but is imaginatively dramatised as the Ephesian tenements transform into tall ships. The ambulance disgorging an army of paramedics is very funny. There is a wonderful point where you realise that music being played by some Eastern European buskers is in fact modern pop classics about madness such as Black Sabbath's Paranoid and Gnarls Barkley's Crazy sung in something like Serbo-Croat.

However, I've seen this done better. Overall it is just a bit too earnest, too over-designed to really hit the funny bone as this very modern play is more than capable of doing. The complex stage mechanics paradoxically make the action more static than it might otherwise be, and the good performances from the leads never have the space to develop into something better. The Olivier's revolving stage is a wonderful resource for any designer, but there have been times recently when it has been in danger of becoming the star of the show itself, rather than the actors and their words. The National Theatre must take care to use this resource judiciously, focus on the plays themselves and leave the staging pyrotechnics to the musicals.

Book Review : The Law and the Lady by Wilkie Collins (Oxford World's Classics 2008)

2011-11-19T21:48:00.001Z

Having introduced the Victorian reading public to the professional detective in Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone, in The Law and the Lady Collins turns to what is probably the first full-length novel to feature a woman trying to unravel a mystery. Valeria Woodville has recently married, but she discovers that Eustace, her husband, is hiding a secret from her - in fact, she may not be married at all, as he has been using a false name. Naturally concerned, she starts to investigate Eustace's past, and discovers that he has been tried in Scotland for murder of his previous wife, and found not proven. Convinced however of his innocence, Valeria sets out to clear his name.

This is also the second of Collins' novels to try to address what he saw as being the iniquities of the Scottish legal system. The verdict of "not proven" is a distinctive feature of Scottish justice, indicating that the jury felt that there was insufficient evidence to secure a conviction. Whilst the accused on receipt of this verdict is free to walk from the court, it was perceived that it was not without a certain stigma.Collins felt that this ambiguity was a weakness in the Scottish legal system, yet does not examine the probably fatal consequences for Eustace if the jury had found him guilty. The "not proven" verdict had in recent years been topical due to the notorious Madelaine Smith trial in Glasgow, where the pretty upper-middle class woman had been accused and found "not proven" of poisoning her lover.

As Valeria feels her way towards the truth, she meets Miserrimus Dexter, one of Collins more extraordinary creations. Strikingly handsome with long flowing hair and beard, yet born without legs, Dexter hauls himself around in a chair that he is capable of moving with great speed. He lives in a bleak mansion cared for by his devoted, subjugated sister with learning difficulties. Dexter has come straight from a gothic novel - he is a poet, improvisational actor, cook and aesthete, yet bizarre and unstable, given to extreme behaviour and mood swings which culminate in a clumsy attempt to kiss Valeria, who must nevertheless control her revulsion if she is to uncover the secret of the death of Eustace's wife.

As ever with Collins, this is a gripping, fast-paced and intriguing adventure, the labyrinthine plot creating sufficient false leads to fool at least this reader for part of the novel. Collins gave his female characters more independence and autonomy than most of his male contemporaries (compare with Dickens' anonymous heroines) and although Valeria is not as well-defined as Marian Halcombe or Magadalen Vanstone, she is yet another strong, stubborn headstrong female lead from this great unconvetional Victorian.

Theatre Review : Juno and the Paycock by Sean O'Casey - Lyttleton Theatre (dir Howard Davies 14/11/11)

2011-11-17T22:46:00.001Z

This was my introduction to the great Dublin trilogy of plays that made Sean O'Casey's name, and given that the production was coming direct from the Abbey Theatre Dublin with a superb cast, I was expecting something very special. However I was disappointed.

The action is set in the dilapidated tenament flat of the Boyle family, the ceiling showing the traces of 18th Century forgotten grandeur. Bedrooms are simply partitioned or curtained off allowing little or no privacy for Juno Boyle (Sinead Cusack) her workshy husband Captain Jack Boyle (Ciaran Hinds) and their children pretty Mary (Clare Dunne) and Johnny (Ronan Raftery), who has lost an arm in the Irish uprising against the English.

Whilst Captain Jack paycocks round the town avoiding the risk of being asked to do any work, Juno holds the family together. Mary sets eye on schoolteacher Charles Bentham, who has his eye on her in return, especially when it transpires that Captain Jack may be the beneficiary of a will due to the death of a relative. However, the will is not what it seems and the family who have spend extravagantly on credit on the back of it soon see all their goods recovered. Wrestling with the spectre of poverty are these of the Civil War and the harsh morality of the times. Johnny has betrayed a "Die Hard" neighbour and is living in fear of his life as a consequence, whilst Bentham's absence in England is explained when Mary announces that she is pregnant. In a final poignant scene, Captain Jack staggers around drunkenly, unaware that everything that he had has been lost.

The play is undeniably powerful, yet this production failed to inspire. The first problem is a simple one of intelligibility - the powerful Dublin accents take a long time to get used to, and much of the first half was barely comprehensible.Whilst I don't believe that audiences should be patronised with easy theatre, there is still a minimum threshold of intelligibility that must be met. But the second problem was much more fundamental - the central performances simply lacked the depth that their characters required. Admittedly, I was watching this at a first preview and the cast may still be adjusting from their transfer from the more intimate Abbey Theatre to the caverns of the National, but I just couldn't believe that Sinead Cusack had the strength to hold the family together, or that the normally wonderful Ciaran Hinds could do anything other than shout, whilst Ronan Raftery looked more like a love-sick teenager than a wounded soldier in fear of his life. I will however exclude Clare Dunne from this criticism, as she held the stage as a tenement girl who is capable of attracting such a catch as a solicitor must be able to do, Risteard Cooper as the disreputable rogue Joxer Daly, who is capable of stealing his best friends last bottle of stout, and a wonderful cameo from Janet Moran as Mrs Maisie Madigan, the Boyle's earthy neighbour.

The production simply lacked the power from the central characters to drive the play's dramatic trajectory first up as they come to terms with their supposed wealth and then down into the depths as the truth about the will is revealed - the first half in particular was very weak, the second half improved as this is where O'Casey's most powerful writing is concentrated.But by this time the damage has been done, you simply don't care enough for the central characters to be able to properly feel the nature of the tragedy. And this is a great shame, as you can see the palimpsest of a great play peeking through.

Book Review : Poor Miss Finch by Wilkie Collins (Oxford World Classics 2008)

2011-11-13T19:34:00.001Z

On the surface, this sounds rather unpromising.

Lucilla Finch has been blind since an early age. When shy young bachelor Oscar Dubourg moves into her neighbourhood, she quickly falls in love.Oscar has a brash identical twin brother, Nugent, who likes Lucilla but the feeling is not reciprocated.Oscar is hit on the head causing debilitating epilepsy, but this is cured by using nitrate of silver - the only problem is that it turns his skin blue, and Lucilla, despite being blind, has a dislike of dark colours. All of which would not have been a problem if it wasn't for Nugent introducing her to the oculist Herr Grosse, who believes he can cure Lucilla of her loss of sight. Nugent spots the opportunity to supplant his brother in Lucilla's affections.

Following hard on the heels of his detective story The Moonstone and the legal drama Man and Wife, Wilkie Collins confounds his admirers by once again switching styles to a domestic drama, albeit one with a mystery to resolve and replete with Sensational elements.

It is interesting to compare this novel and its lead character to his early work Hide and Seek, which features Mary, a deaf and dumb girl. Mary is impossibly idealised, incapable of any wrong, and a passive recipient of the affections of others. Lucilla Finch is a much better realised character - whilst pretty and affectionate, she is also headstrong and the possessor of a fine temper which predispose her against listening to advice. In addition to driving the plot, this makes her a much more believable and engaging character.

In fact, all the main characters are well-drawn. Oscar Dubourg superficially is weak and vacillating, but he is loyal and has an inner strength. Nugent's brash overconfidence alerts the reader at outset, but he also wavers between selfishness and remorse so that one is never sure whether he would carry through any action to trick his brother. Mme Pratolungo, the narrator, has an engaging, conversational tone and a fiery continental temper as well as unreliable republican sympathies.

Herr Grosse is an eccentric German who has made his reputation in the United States, and is introduced by Nugent, so one instinctively mistrusts his dirty appearance, his snufftaking and tobacco-smoke and his murdering of the English Language. However, appearances can be deceptive. On the other hand, the bumptious, arrogant and self-important Reverend Finch is the recipient of all the animus that Collins can summon up against clerical hypocrisy.

In his previous work Collins devoted his energies towards investigating the weaknesses in marital law across the United Kingdom. No such elevated subject drove him to write this novel, but he still did not stint on his research - he carefully studied cases of blind people who regained their sight and the subsequent physical and psychological impact upon them. He also looked at the effects of Nitrate of Silver on the skin of epileptics. Through careful study and explication, Collins made a basic plotline which sounded superficially ridiculous believable and engaging. This is not a great work of literature, but it is a very readable and enjoyable novel.

Book Review : Man and Wife by Wilkie Collins (Oxford World's Classics 2008)

2011-11-04T00:04:00.002Z

Despite the success of The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins did not follow up immediately with another mystery or detective novel. Having defined the Sensation genre and laid down the basics for proper detective fiction, he promptly changed tack once again and wrote Man and Wife, his first and probably his best "issues novel". Not that this was a complete departure from Sensation fiction - this still has all the usual sensational elements intact: bigamy, murder, jilting husbands, imprisoned wives and ghostly, malevolent dumb cooks. But the plot itself was this time overtly constructed around two contemporary issues - the ambiguous state of marital law in Scotland and Ireland, and the moral risks posed by a focus on a healthy body when not balanced by a healthy mind.

Anne Silvester was governess to the aristocratic Blanche Lundy, but as she had been placed in an "interesting" situation by the "Honorable" Geoffrey Delamayne, she plans to utilise ambiguous Scottish marriage laws which rely purely on witnessed consent and not the full sacrament sanctioned by the Church and State in England by escaping to a remote Hotel and have Geoffrey address her as "wife" before witnesses. However, Geoffrey is called away to his dying father, and asks his friend Arnold Brinkworth to stand in for him, knowing that Anne will be ejected from the hotel if approached by a man who is not her husband. So Arnold innocently poses as Anne's husband. Meanwhile, Geoffrey gets a better offer, and tries to wriggle out of his commitment.

Geoffrey is a cad, but an athletic one with a finely tuned body which he has devoted much time to honing.Collins' assertion is that in spending so much time on athletic pursuits, he has neglected his moral development through reading books and following the arts. Unfortunately he overstates his position since, bone-headed though certain denizens of the gym may be (and many are not too, I hastily add, as I hide away my bicycle clips), few are brought to the verge of death or cold-blooded uxoricide through their obsession.

The Scottish marriage laws, however, are much more conducive to Collins' enquiry. In fact, they could almost have been designed for would-be Sensation Novelists as within their ambiguities lie boundless possibilities.Collins lays bare the problems inherent in them, whilst nicely contrasting through the story of Hester Dethridge the iniquitous way in which English matrimonial law forced women to surrender all their rights on marriage, placing them beyond the reach of the law.

By now, Collins has refined his craft and despite the above-noted flaws in conception Man and Wife is never less than a compelling read. The complex marriage plot is handled lightly without too much need for didacticism, although Geoffrey's foot-race is trite and the final few chapters descend into melodrama.

The story is aided by some of Collins' best drawn characters. Sir Patrick Lundie is a shrewd, wry Scottish lawyer, permanently at odds with the impossible snob Lady Lundie. The roguish head-waiter Bishopriggs has walked straight out of the pages of Sir Walter Scott, and Geoffrey Delamayne starts interestingly before descending into the role of a steroetypical cad. These outweigh the blandness of Arnold Brinkworth and Blanche, whose escape with her Aunt from Ham Farm is the only interesting thing that she does.And the mysterious dumb cook Hester Dethridge is never really convinces.

Unfortunately one cannot see what the shy, sensitive and virtuous Anne Silvester sees in Geoffrey Delamayne at all, and least of all why she might get herself pregnant by him. And this is really getting to the heart of the problem with the novel - why should Anne get herself in the position she finds herself, and is it really in character for her to devise such a devious plan to be wed? Similarly, one cannot understand why Hester Dethridge acts as she does in the final chapters, even if she is being blackmailed by Geoffrey. However, one is prepared to overlook these points, as Collins never lets your interest flag once you start to race towards the conclusion of this interesting book.

Aside : The European Sovereign Debt crisis

2011-10-28T00:16:00.000+01:00

So, a deal has been done and the European Financial system has been saved. The markets, in their infinite wisdom, have endorsed it with the FTSE up 3% on the day, everyone staggers back from the breach, breathing heavily. However, I'm not so sure...

The deal seems to as follows :- lenders to Greece take a 50% haircut, which, if it is big enough, is OK as long as it is voluntary so Credit Default Swaps don't kick in; European banks impacted must make a provision for €106bn recapitalisation by June 2012, which is OK as long as they don't do so by reducing credit lines and starve the economy of the investment needed to stimulate growth. No, my issue is with the way in which it is proposed that the European Financial Stability Facility is expanded from its current remaining €250bn to €1tn.

We are told that this will be done in two ways - by allowing investors such as China to invest in it, which is reasonable as long as no-one asks the awkward question "Who won the Cold War, Daddy?", or by using the existing EFSF to provide insurance to buyers of new Eurozone debt in order to drive down the cost of borrowing and make it less risky to investors. This is a fine idea. So fine, in fact, that it was essentially the idea behind the Monoline Insurers, who originally insured American Municipal Debt before expanding into CDOs in the 1990s. The big banks insured their Super-Senior Debt with the Monolines, so that CDOs became theoretically risk-free - that was, until the entire US mortgage market started to implode and the ratings agencies reduced the Monolines' credit ratings ...

So what is different this time? Well, the EFSF is underwritten by countries with AAA credit ratings - like France. If France is downgraded, so is the EFSF and the cost of borrowing goes up. And its only part of the bonds that is insured - the top 20%, the riskiest portion. Needless to say, the financial whizzes have already worked out that both parts of the bond can therefore be priced separately, which negates the point of leveraged insurance in the first place.And then, if there is some general move to default, which is in my opinion would be not only possible but likely if another country heads the same way as Greece, the insurance would not only be inadequate,but would stoke the contagion that would rip like wildfire through the unprotected part of Financial System and leave the Policy Makers with no time for an adequate response.

There is an alternative - for the European Central Bank to print enough money to cover all losses on the bond market. But the consequences of pumping a couple of trillion euros worth of new money into the system would be anathema for a German banker with an inherent fear of hyperinflation. However, sometimes the threat of overwhelming force is what is needed to bring calmness to a situation - the threat of mutually assured destruction has limited the scale of international conflicts over the past sixty years, whilst it wasn't until there was a pair of policemen on every street corner of every city in England (and some exemplary punishments swiftly handed out by the courts) that the riots were calmed this summer. Maybe this is what is required - the threat of overwhelming force to force some sanity in the form of lower costs onto bond markets and to allow politicians some time to put in place policies that may generate the growth that is required to get us out of this mess.

However, as far as I am aware this is not what is proposed. Politicians and Bankers have an interest in talking up the rescue mechanism, but I'm not convinced, and I don't think it will take long before the cracks appear. This is one Equity market rally that I would avoid with a gilt-edged bargepole.

Book Review : The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (Penguin Classics 2010)

2011-10-24T23:36:00.000+01:00

Few books can claim to be more influential. The Castle of Otranto is generally recognised as the first Gothic Novel, and as such its influence can be seen everywhere - in Gothic Novels themselves from Castle Rackrent to Dracula, in the historical romances of Sir Walter Scott, in the Sensation Novels of the 1860's. Hammer Horror films of the 20th Century are direct descendants, as is the current fad for everything vampire-related. Even Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey and Emily Bronte in Wuthering Heights demonstrate its all-pervasive influence.

Yet the book itself is almost unreadable.

On the day of his wedding to Isabella, Conrad the son of Manfred is dashed to pieces under a giant falling helmet which has appeared from nowhere. A peasant called Theodore observes that the helmet is like that on the statue of the former prince Alonso, for which Manfred imprisons Theodore under the helmet. Fortunately the point of the helmet digs a hole in the ground through which Theodore can escape into the subterranean passages under the Castle. Meanwhile Manfred tries to ensure his dynastic succession by announcing that he will divorce his saintly wife and marry the now-available Isabella, who is not enamoured of this prospect.

What would become in time the clichés of the genre are met here first - the evil ruler who must have his way, the virtuous princess, the peasant who is really a prince, the prophesy of destruction of the family, thunder and lightning, inexplicable events...All fine in their place. Unfortunately, they are thrown together here in a completely indigestible mass. The falling helmet and the giant limbs are too silly for words. There is not a character who isn't a parody, who doesn't act in a predictable manner, there is no coherent plot but what is seemingly a stream-of-consciousness succession of incomprehensible events.

One must give credit to Horace Walpole for putting together such an original work in the first place - but one must also give him credit for knowing when to stop as this was the only book that he ever wrote.

Book Review : The Maniac in the Cellar - Sensation Novels of the 1860s by Winifred Hughes (Princeton University Press 1980)

2011-10-22T19:24:00.000+01:00

In this approachable academic analysis of the nature, origins and impact of the Sensation Novels of the 1860s, Winifred Hughes examines the primary works of Charles Reade, E.M. Braddon, Mrs Henry Wood and Wilkie Collins in detail, before making a strong case to show how the spirit of the Sensation Novels continued in a much more literary vein in the works of Thomas Hardy.

She sees their roots in the Gothic novels of the late eighteenth century, the romances of Sir Walter Scott and the Newgate Novels of the 1830s. However, whilst Gothic novels had the elements of romance, adultery and murder which Sensation Novels would appropriate, they lacked a contemporary context. The fact that Sensation Novels were not set in a medieval Italian castle but in middle-class England gave them a thrill and immediacy that was all the more shocking. Newgate novels were contemporary, but they dealt with a criminal underclass whose activities might as well have been as distant as Scott's warring clans to their readership.

She examines the nature of the criticism levied against Sensation Novels, much of which was for the way in which adultery, bigamy and murder was apparently condoned by the authors.Underlying this was a sense that books such as these were democratising the novel, bridging the gap between the penny-dreadful and serious literature and offering dubious moral examples to readers of the lower classes, just as characters such as Aurora Floyd or Magdalen Vanstone move with apparent ease between social classes. Equally, Sensation Novels threatened to usurp the traditional role of the Woman within Victorian literature.Rather than being the emotional lynchpin of traditional melodrama (or - in an area not explored by Hughes - the fulcrum and motive force around which all Women's literature from Jane Austen through the Brontes to Elizabeth Gaskell revolves), women become for the first time forces of moral ambiguity (in the case of Lady Isabel Vane) or evil (as per Lydia Gwilt).

Hughes locates in Wilkie Collins the Sensation Novel's key place as the transitional form between early Victorian romance and melodrama and its successors in twentieth century thrillers and detective novels. In tightly-plotted but essentially open constructions such as The Woman in White and Armadale, characters are still subject to external supernatural forces such as dreams, fate and coincidence. Collins' great insight was to enclose the construction of The Moonstone by making it a mystery to be solved. By limiting the scope, Collins reduces the dependence on the supernatural and thus transforms the melodrama into a form that is suited to the emerging materialistic society. The runaway success of detective fiction as a genre in the twentieth century validates this choice. In this respect, Hughes' highly perceptive coda on Thomas Hardy recognises his work represents a return to a more traditional melodrama, but one that takes place in a universe stripped of moral absolutes. As such it represents the bridge from the Sensation Novel to the literary nihilism of the Twentieth Century

Book Review - East Lynne by Ellen Wood (Mrs Henry Wood) (Oxford World Classics 2005)

2011-10-22T16:07:00.001+01:00

East Lynne was one of the most popular novels of the 19th Century, yet, as is usually the case, its critical reception did not match its popular sales. Certainly it is moralistic, overly sentimental and Ellen Wood's writing style seldom rises above the workmanlike. Yet it is also extremely well-plotted, fast and intriguing, and introduces us to someone who to my mind is one of the more interesting heroines in Victorian literature. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

First published in serial form from 1860 to 1861, it is one of the books which helped define the "Sensation Novel" of the 1860s, yet - despite the heroine's adultery at the heart of the novel and her subsequent return heavily disguised as the governess of her children and the arrest of the corpse of her father- it is less extreme than many other books of this genre. This is because of what I consider to be the skilful handling of the central character.

Lady Isabel Vane's mother has died, and her deeply-indebted father, the Earl of Mount Severn, is forced to sell his house East Lynne to his lawyer Archibald Carlyle, who nevertheless keeps the sale secret and allows Lord Mount Severn to remain there, where he inconveniently dies.Lady Isabel discovers that she is penniless and forced to live with her Uncle and his wife, who despises her for her looks and sweet nature. Fortunately, she is rescued by Carlyle's offer of marriage, much to the disappointment of Carlyle's neighbour Barbara Hare. Carlyle is secretly assisting Barbara's brother, who is on the run following an accusation of murder, and his frequent close discussions with Barbara arouse Lady Isabel's jealous suspicions. These are exacerbated by the nefarious rake Sir Francis Levinson, who is staying incognito at East Lynne whilst Carlyle tries to sort out his tangled affairs. Finally, Carlyle declines a dinner engagement pleading pressure of work, but Lady Isabel sees him with Barbara Hare as she returns. She learns from Levinson that Carlyle has been with her all evening, and in a jealous rage, she elopes to the Continent with Levinson, leaving Carlyle and her children behind. She is not gone long before she realises that she has made a terrible mistake.

Wood's dilemma is to ensure that Lady Isabel retains the reader's sympathy despite her being an adulteress who has abandoned her children. This she does by very carefully constructing the reasons for her jealousy. Carlyle is a heroic character, almost too good to be true, but not given to great introspection. He has no idea how his work to assist his old friends the Hare family could be perceived. Levinson though ensures that Lady Isabel is aware of all his clandestine meetings with Barbara Hare. Crucially, Lady Isabel deeply respects Carlyle, and hopes that she will come to love him, but does not do so yet. She doesn't have parents or any close relative or friend to offer moral guidance, and she feels estranged in her own household by the oppressive presence of Carlyle's opinionated sister.

So she snaps, and regrets it for the rest of her life. The rest of the book follows her search for expiation. Carlyle marries Barbara Hare, and, badly disfigured in a train crash, Lady Isabel returns as Madame Vane, a governess who has to endure the torment of seeing her now-beloved husband being caressed by Barbara Hare, who is called mother by her children. The depth of her torment, and the knowledge that she had been manipulated by a bad man, ensures that she remains a sympathetic character.

Meanwhile, the other strands of the plot come together. Levinson ill-advisedly decides to stand against Carlyle for Parliament. The truth about the murder of Hallijohn slowly emerges. Justice appears to be done.

The success of the novel depends on Ellen Wood's ability to construct a believable set of reasons for Lady Isabel to be driven to elope with Levinson, and this she does with skill. To my mind the second half is weaker since her return unrecognised as a governess does stretch credulity a little far. However, by this point some genuine Victorian tear-jerking sentimentality has kicked in, and, coupled with fast-paced satire on the electoral and judicial processes, conspires to carry the reader breathlessly to the end.

Book Review - The Dead Secret by Wilkie Collins (Oxford World Classics 2008)

2011-10-10T16:08:00.000+01:00

The Dead Secret is Collins' last work before he struck gold with The Woman in White, and it marks a considerable step forward from the novels which preceded it. On her deathbed, Mrs Treverton, the wife of the wealthy Captain Treverton, dictates a confession to her maid, Sarah Leeson, to pass to her husband and makes her swear that she will never destroy the letter or let it leave Porthgenna Tower. Leeson, however, hides the letter and flees, and Captain Treverton dies without ever discovering the secret. However, his daughter Rosamund discovers there is a secret locked up in the mysterious Myrtle Room, and sets her mind to discover what it is.

Sarah Leeson is the most interesting character in the book. A shy and weak character, she is haunted by her past and the responsibility placed on her by Mrs Treverton.When she reappears as Mrs Jazeph, Rosamund's temporary nurse, Collins carefully manages her behaviour to make it both creepy and suspicious, but also sympathetic. As her past is slowly revealed, all Collins' skills are deployed to ensure that what may be ostensible faults of character to a Victorian audience never come between Sarah, Rosamund and his readership.Rosamund is a sparkier heroine than the bland Mary Grice in Hide and Seek. She is headstrong and has a temper, and although she and her husband Leonard Frankland (who is blind for some reason, as it has little impact on the plot) are of such unimpeachable uprightness and morality that they restore Andrew Treverton's belief in humanity, she is also believable as she comes to terms about the unexpected change in her circumstances as the Secret is revealed.

The novel works on several levels. Collins handles the Secret with great skill, ensuring that the reader is intrigued from the first chapter, and then gradually building the tension through the interplay of the main characters as Rosamund firstly finds out about the Secret, then Sarah tries to hide it once again. It is also very carefully balanced in terms of characterisation. Any oversweetness on the part of Rosamund and Leonard is balanced by the misanthropic Andrew Treverton and his manservant Showl.The intensity of Sarah Leeson is balanced by her engagingly eccentric Uncle Joseph.And finally, it is morally engaged, subtly showing the iniquity of Victorian laws on marriage, illegitimacy and inheritance, perpetual themes of Collins. Compared to Collins' other early works, this is really the springboard to his masterpieces such as The Woman in White, as by now all the key elements are in place - the sensation, the drama, the pathos - for Collins to make his mark on the Victorian novel.

Book Review - A Rogue's Life by Wilkie Collins (Dodo Press 2007)

2011-10-07T21:35:00.000+01:00

This early work of Wilkie Collins is little more than a novella, and completely lacking the finely architectured plots that we come to associate with Collins' novels, but it is nevertheless remarkable for the cynical, worldly tone adopted by the first-person narrator.

Collins is capable of writing well, but he can also be a very functional writer with flat prose driving forward a complex plot, as in the following example from "The Dead Secret" :

The nurse who was in attendance on Mrs Frankland had suddenly been taken ill, and was rendered quite incapable of performing any further service for at least a week to come, and perhaps for a much longer period...Mr Frankland suggested telegraphing a medical friend in London for a nurse, but the doctor was unwilling for many reasons to adopt the plan except as a last resort.

As can be seen, the tone is flat and functional, without any frills except those relevant to the matter in hand.

A Rogue's Life is different, as the narrator's passage below demonstrates.

After I had left school, I had the narrowest escape possible of intruding myself into another place of accommodation for distinguished people; in other words, I was very nearly sent to college. Fortunately for me, my father lost a lawsuit just in the nick of time and was obliged to scrape together every farthing of available money that he possessed for the luxury of going to law. If he could have saved his seven shillings, he would certainly have sent me to scramble for a place in the great university theatre; but his purse was empty, and his son was not eligible therefore for admission, in a gentlemanly capacity, at the doors.

The cynical, smart, sarcastic tone is ideally suited to the feckless Softly, the narrator, who dedicates what wit he has to schemes for getting rich quick and getting to know the beautiful Alicia Dulcifer. Unfortunately, his get-rich schemes come to naught, until he discovers Alicia's father's secret.

By this point, Collins command of tone has waned, and the novel becomes plot-driven once again, which is a shame as what plot there is is nonsense of the highest order and not really worthy of further discussion. However, it shows what tools Collins had at his command as a writer when he put his mind to it, and gives us a foretaste of bravura rogues such as Count Fosco in his later books.

Book Review - Hide and Seek by Wilkie Collins (Oxford World Classics 2009)

2011-10-07T20:54:00.002+01:00

By no stretch of the imagination can thisbe counted a great novel: at best, it is engaging, tightly plotted, reasonablywell-written with some interesting satire on the art market. However, it isalso full of unbelievable coincidence, over sentimentalised, with a leadcharacter so irritating that one could cheerfully throttle him. It certainlyoffers no great insight on the human condition. Compared with Basil, the controversial novel whichpreceded it – and despite Basil's many faults – this is a step backwards.

Collins is a master of the slow-reveal, theplot which reveals its secrets layer by layer, and this is a good example. Mysterysurrounds the background of saintly deaf and dumb girl Mary, known to all - heavy symbolism alert – as Madonna, who hasbeen obtained from a circus, where she was being mistreated, by artistValentine Blythe. Blythe wants to hide her so that she cannot be reclaimed fromhim by her real family, but unfortunately his ne’er-do-well young friend ZackThorpe has met with a mysterious character in a punch-up in a London drinking den who is also on thelookout for Mary.

Zack is an impetuous, rash young man:rebelling against his repressively strict father he is much given to carousing,but his heart is in the right place. He is however totally unreflective and has a mouth on overdrive that gets wearing after a while. Valentine is probably the most believablecharacter in the book, not a particularly good artist, but one good enough tomake a living from those who didn’t know any better. Having an artist-father (avery good artist at that), Wilkie Collins knew what he was talking about here.Valentine’s wife and Mary herself are simply too good to be true. However, itis the mysterious Matt that dominates the second part of the book. Is Zackbeing naive in trusting him? Is he a force for good or evil? What is his linkto Mary?

Throughout his writing career, Collins is aconsistently harsh critic of hypocrisy. As the father of at least threeillegitimate children himself, his respect for such children’s opportunities inlife and contempt for those who seek to evade their responsibility for them is clearlyshown through all his works. Eventually, the mystery of Mary’s origins areexplained, whilst – unlike in Basil –Victorian proprieties are respected. Whilst this is a neat resolution, thenovel lacks the real cutting edge that one associates with Collins’ bestfiction.

Art Review : Joan Miro : The Ladder of Escape (Tate Modern 9/9/11)

2011-10-03T00:12:00.000+01:00

The turbulent history of Spain in the Twentieth Century can be quickly summarised - the instability of the early years erupted into violent civil war in 1936, which led to the dead hand of Franco holding the country in thrall for the next forty years, until his death in 1975 and the rebirth of Spanish democracy. Any artist who has chosen to live in Spain through these years must be viewed in the context of such upheaval. What is brilliant about this exhibition is the way it uses the political context of Spain and specifically his native Catalonia to contextualise the work of Joan Miró.

Tête de Paysan Catalan

by Joan Miro
Tate and Scottish National
Gallery of Modern Art

It starts in Mont-Roig - the home of Miró's family near Barcelona, which he depicts lovingly in paintings which already set out essential aspects of Miró's vocabulary, such as the ladder between earth and the stars which recurs throughout his work and gives this exhibition its subtitle. Miro's work is rooted in his Catalan soil, and when in 1923 General Primo de Rivera comes to power in a coup and bans the Catalan language and flag, Miro subtly responds with a series of paintings based on the heads of Catalan peasants, all of which feature a highly stylised barretina, the traditional headware of the Catalan peasant but also associated with the Revolta dels Barretines, where 17th century Catalan peasants rose up against oppression from Madrid.

As the tanks rumble into Barcelona, Miro escapes with his family to Paris, where he works on the Spanish Republican pavilion. Yet he doesn't produce an overtly political masterpiece like Picasso's Guernica. Miro's work is difficult to interpret, reaching for a vocabulary which has been developed over several years.Yet his title "Le Faucheur" - The Reaper - is an explicit reference to Els Segadors, the Catalan national anthem (incidently, as a protest against the banning of the Catalan language, Miro always gave his paintings French names).

For many years under Franco, Miro painted little, concentrating on pottery. He lived on Mallorca, enjoying international fame but little recognition at home since he refused to participate in state-sponsored shows. When a major retrospective was put on in Barcelona, Miro countered with a project entitled Miro Otro in which traditional dynamic of a multi-work exhibition was challenged by a vast, temporary collaborative mural constructed with young radical artists.

Even as an old man, focussing on a starling series of meditative triptychs which have been heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism, he responds to political repression in Catalonia, and in particular the sentence to death of Salvador Puig Antich, by painting The Hope of a Condemned Man.

What this exhibition does so well is to demonstrate in broad terms the way in which Miro's work has developed, but then to use the political context as a means to highlight aspects of his art. The political is never overplayed, the art is paramount, and this is exemplified by the way in which The Hope of a Condemned Man is displayed alongside explicitly non-political works. The net effect is to make a significant and highly intelligent enhancement of one's understanding of such an important aspect of Miro the person, the artist and of his works.

Art Review : The Vorticists (Tate Britain 2/9/11)

2011-10-02T22:20:00.000+01:00

What is the purpose of an exhibition? Usually, it comprises a number of art works brought together in such a way as to present a different perspective on the artist, movement, genre or collection. My preferred way to "do" an exhibition is to go round slowly, trying to understand each work on show on its own terms, then reading any explanatory cards and listening to further explanation on the audioguide. Then I buy the catalogue to read at my leisure, thus giving myself ample opportunity to understand the main themes that the curators wish to develop.

However, I left the recent Vorticists exhibition feeling that I was missing something, and it's difficult to identify exactly what the gap was, as this was an interesting and well-constructed show. Perhaps it was simply a lack of historical context in the exhibition itself, which was covered in greater detail in the catalogue.

Certainly in this case, context is all. The Vorticists may have been a largely British art movement, but they were entirely of their time and could not exist without the impact of cubism, futurism or the various strands of early 20th Century modernism. At the exhibition itself these themes were hinted at, but it needed the catalogue to fill in the background detail. I hope this doesn't presage a trend towards less information being on display in the exhibition hall itself.

Newcastle c1913
by Edward Wadsworth
Johanna and Leslie Garfield Collection

The Vorticists themselves were a mixed bag, dominated by Percy Wyndham Lewis. Of the paintings on display, his works and those of Edward Wadsworth are really the only Vorticist works of interest (that is, excluding the works of David Bomberg and CRW Nevinson who never counted themselves amongst the Vorticist ranks). Wyndham Lewis's work has a rough, jagged energy which aggressively confronts the viewer. Many of his paintings are now lost, but his power - and the influence of cubism - is best seen in his Timon of Athens lithographs. Wadsworth is more restrained, yet his black and white woodcuts of northern towns combine a stark modernist vision of industrial Britain with immense sensitivity of execution.

However, the most powerful work on display for me was the sculpture of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Jacob Epstein. Both were deeply influenced by native sculpture reaching Europe from Africa and the Pacific Islands, and the way in which this was starting to be used by Picasso, Modigliani and others. Epstein was never formally part of the Vorticist group, although he did exhibit with them. The Rock Drill that confronts you when you enter the exhibition encapsulates the Vorticist aesthetic: modern, angular, aggressive and sexual. Meanwhile, Gaudier-Brzeska's Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound represents the High Priest of modernism as monumental, instantly recognisable, and decidedly phallic.

Vorticism's philosophy was encapsulated in the periodical Blast, only two issues of which were produced. It is undoubtedly Wyndham-Lewis's creation, pretentious, provocative and wilfully contrarian. The exhibition attempts - rightly - to put Blast centre-stage, but it is difficult to appreciate a wordy production in such a context. It is obvious that much effort has been made to display Blast's philopsophical, literary and artistic aspects in a coherent manner.

Ultimately, the Vorticists rage against the modern world was subsumed in the First World War. Their posturing appeared irrelevant in the context of the slaughter of the trenches. Wyndham Lewis and Wadsworth joined up and fought with distinction in the war, whilst Gaudier-Brzeska's death at the Front is commemorated in the second issue of Blast. Ultimately, the Vorticists were too derivative - and, let's be honest, not talented enough - to make a significant impact beyond British shores. Their art took from Cubism, their philosophy from Futurism and the pot-pourri of modernist groups trying to understand the new century. This exhibition is a worthwhile attempt to place them in their proper context.

Book Review : Armadale by Wilkie Collins (Penguin 2004)

2011-09-20T22:10:00.001+01:00

Now listen carefully, I will say this only once...

In Barbados, Allan Armadale disowns his son Allan Armadale and passes his fortune to his cousin Allan Wentmore on condition he takes the surname Armadale. Armadale-Wentmore hires Fergus Ingleby as his clerk, and sails to Madeira where he has been promised his relative Miss Blanchard in marriage - however, Ingleby, who is of course the disowned son Allan Armadale in disguise, has got there first and married Miss Blanchard. Armadale-Ingleby sails for England with Armadale-Wentmore in hot pursuit. Twenty-one years later, and young Allan Armadale is being brought up by his widowed mother in England. He befriends a young man of similar age named Ozias Midwinter - but that is not his real name.

Wilkie Collins is the master of the convoluted plot, but the explication in this novel is of a Byzantine complexity that completely outdoes all others. The above is only for starters - when the devious Lydia Gwilt discovers Ozias' secret, she embarks on a scheme of her own which is even more bewildering, which culminates in a denouement which presages all these films where the baddie has devised a long-drawn out end for the hero, when a quick shot to the temple may have been less elegant but much more practical.

That is not to say this is not a good book - it is. It takes time to develop, but once it gets going it is compelling. In the young Allan Armadale Collins created an engaging if infuriating hero, charming but impetuous, who needs Ozias Midwinter and the Reverend Brock to keep him out of trouble. Armadale has fallen for Eleanor, the daughter of his tenant, Major Milroy. But Lydia Gwilt has her eyes on Allan, has obtained a role as Neelie's Governess, and Jane Eyre she isn't.

Lydia Gwilt is a masterly creation, an attractive lady of dubious background but well-educated, few morals but a talented pianist and much more cultured than the oafish Armadale. She has no compunction in using her looks to influence the men around her, especially the pathetically besotted Bashwood. A creature of pure will, yet she wavers when confronted by the forcefield for good that is Ozias Midwinter. Collins implies that Gwilt's immorality is a product of her ambiguous background, how she was badly treated as a child and as an adult. But Midwinter has an equally ambiguous background and has been equally badly treated, yet is innately good.

This is a deeply subversive novel about the ambiguity of surface appearance, of superficial morality. Few characters are exactly who they appear to be - young Armadale has to be instructed how to behave as a gentleman, the villagers of Thorpe-Ambrose shun him accordingly yet welcome Lydia Gwilt. Mother Oldershaw is superficially respectable and Doctor Downward's sanitorium is reviewed approvingly by his fellow Hampstead residents. Yet interestingly given that the novel was written in the 1860's, Collins makes little of the possibility of any perceived discrepancy between Midwinter's creole skin and his gentle nature.

In the end, the weight of Collins' plot weighs the novel down. That is unfortunate, since the novel contains some of Wilkie Collins' most finely drawn characterisations in Bashwood and Lydia Gwilt, and offers much sharp social satire. He makes a telling critique on the weaknesses of Victorian matrimonial law whilst never failing to entertain. Yet the complex plots of The Woman in White or The Moonstone have a lightness which Armadale lacks and it is this over-earnest explication which keeps it from attaining the heights of the other great Wilkie Collins novels of the 1860s.

Book Review : No Name by Wilkie Collins (Penguin 2004)

2011-08-31T00:10:00.001+01:00

Magdalen and Norah Vanstone are the much-loved daughters of Andrew and Mrs Vanstone, who live comfortably with their governess Mrs Garth in Somerset. Norah is quiet and sensible, but Magdalen is high-spirited, a natural actress and who has fallen in love with the boy next door.But when Andrew Vanstone receives a letter that causes Mrs Vanstone and him to travel at short notice to London, all starts to unravel, as their parents are hiding a secret that neither of the girls suspect.

Within a short time, their parents have died tragically and Magdalen and Norah are cast out of the family home with their fortune passing, against their father's intentions, to their uncle - who believed that he had himself been cheated by Andrew Vanstone many years ago, and so was disinclined to help the girls. Norah accepts her fate, but Magdalen cannot, and with the help from the "moral agriculturalist" Captain Wragge, she sets out on an audacious journey to try to reclaim her rightful fortune.

For me, one of the biggest surprises in this novel of shocks is why this book is not as well known as The Moonstone or The Woman in White, as to my mind this book is easily their equal. It is classic Collins - densely plotted, twisting and turning - as he draws on his legal training to chart a convoluted course through the Victorian laws of inheritance that would have satisfied all at Dickens' Court of Chancery.

Magdalen Vanstone is a superb heroine. Collins contrives to ensure that whilst she is acting in a way that is, superficially, morally reprehensible, she has sufficient justification for her actions to keep her audience onside. Equally ambiguous is Captain Wragge, who, after some initial equivocation, shuns exploiting Magdalen when he could have easily done so. But much more subversive is the way in which characters glide with apparent ease between the rigid strata of Victorian society - the rapid fall of Magdalen and Norah, and Magdalen's subsequent donning of roles above and below her station - even, at one point, encouraging her lowly maid to impersonate a Housekeeper.

Equally ambiguous are Noel Vanstone and Mme Lecount, his faithful housekeeper. Noel Vanstone is a miser, a coward and a fool, yet he has come by his fortune honestly and is in a way unfortunate to inherit the baggage in the shape of Magdalen that comes with it. Mme Lecount may be icy and calculating, yet nevertheless she shuns the opportunity to manipulate Noel Vanstone's will for any more than what she feels she is due for many years of service.

Several of the minor characters are a delight - Mrs Garth and Mr Clare, both straight-talkers in their own way, and the bluff Admiral Bartram, scared of offending his cook, and Mazey the drunken coxswain. Only the mentally deficient Mrs Wragge, essentially an affectionate figure of fun, makes the modern reader uncomfortable.

But there are also two bigger shortcomings, familiar to readers of Collins' other books. Magdalen's sister Norah and Commander Kirke are both simply too good to be true, and consequently of little interest. And the coincidences required to effectuate the conclusion are simply too much to be able to accept - it's as if the author had simply run out of energy and invention by this point (Collins was in fact very ill when completing the novel).

However that is beside the point. One senses that Collins' delight was in the intricacy of the main body of the plot, which had been by now resolved - the final irony is that it is the passive Norah not Magdalen who effects this resolution. One cannot blame Collins for running out of steam at the end - true to the tradition of Sensation Novels, the pace of this book has never slipped, and if its moral ambiguities were too much for a Victorian audience, it suits it even better to today's readership.

Book Review : Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet (Faber and Faber 2001)

2011-08-22T22:24:00.000+01:00

Think of the Victorians. Do you conjure up pictures of sexually repressed patriarchs who covers their piano legs to prevent their wives, daughters and servants developing impure thoughts? Or do you have visions of stench and squalour, new railway lines being thrust through putrid slums whilst dark satanic mills belch the fumes of unfettered capitalism throughout the land? Or, for that matter, do think of Oscar Wilde and his aesthetic friends, sipping absinthe and giggling over improbably-endowed satyrs in Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations. Or Jack the Ripper, carving his way through Whitechapel?

All these pictures are valid, and Matthew Sweet explores each in his engaging work on Inventing the Victorians. His thesis is that time has distorted our vision of the Victorians and in actual fact they were very similar to us. They were less stuffy about sex than we imagine - the covered piano-legs in fact originate in the United States, and it wasn't Queen Victoria who first lay back and thought of England, but a certain Lady Hillingham in 1912 (although as a counter-example, the form of body-piercing known as a "Prince Albert" was actually the invention of an American proprietor of a string of body-piercing parlours around 1970.)

Despite the book's publicity which focusses on sex and serial killers, it also delves into less extreme byways, such as the nature of Victorian advertising which was, if it can be conceived, even more intrusive and less truthful than today, interior design, or the remarkable feats of the tightrope walker Blondin, who cooked dinner above the Niagara falls, and took a lion in a wheelbarrow on a wire slung between the towers of the Crystal Palace. Apparently spam mails originate in the nineteenth century, as does the first Indian Restaurant in Britain, which predates the first Fish and Chip shop by 54 years. It is an eclectic, enjoyable mix, with the emphasis on the interesting anecdote rather than the thesis which does get rather lost as Sweet gets carried away describing in detail the debauches of the Yellow Book set, or Charles Dodgson's attitude to little girls.

Sweet's conclusion is that the Victorians weren't as stuffed-shirt as we would like to think they were. To be honest, I don't think that most people actually think that - the cliché today, buttressed by numerous Sensation novels both of the 19th century and today, is of the hypocritical veneer of the Victorian patriarch whose outward respectability hides a penchant for prostitutes and pornography. However, let that minor cavil not detract from a most enjoyable romp through some of the less-well known byways of Victorian life.

Book Review : Basil by Wilkie Collins (Oxford World Classics 2008)

2011-08-14T22:13:00.001+01:00

Basil is Wilkie Collins second novel, and the first in which the characteristics of what would become the Sensation Novels of the 1860s are apparent. However this book is a strange affair, both compelling and baffling, daring in its subject matter yet ultimately descending into trite melodrama.

Basil is the youngest son of an ancient family, a dreamy writer. One day, he sees a young lady, Margaret Sherwin, on an omnibus and immediately falls in love. He follows her and discovers that she is the daughter of a draper. After a brief conversation he decides he must marry her but must do so without his father's knowledge, however he is told by her father, eager that the family should win such a prize, that he must therefore marry immediately but keep the marriage secret and unconsummated for a year. However, unbeknownst to Basil, Mr Sherwin's confidential assistant Mr Mannion has his own plans for Margaret.

Basil is one of these characters that you want to give a good shake. It is obvious that Margaret Sherwin hasn't a thought of merit in her empty head, yet Basil ploughs on regardless. He disregards his father and his sister, he disregards the hints from Mannion, and when he finally realises what is happening he resorts to a surprising degree of violence.

If all representatives of the lower classes were as odious and materialistic as Mr Sherwin, then Basil's father's snobbery could be tolerated. As it is, the class bias underpinning the book repels, since, with the exception of Mannion who bears his father's sins, all the genteel characters are good, sensitive, reflective characters, whereas the arriviste drapers are empty-headed and materialistic.

There's a lot here that is promising, though. Like all of Collins books it is well-plotted (except for an unbelievable and over-hasty ending) and strongly patterned, with striking contrasts set up between Margaret and Basil's sister, the virginal Clara; Basil and his reformed hellraiser-brother Ralph; and the propriety of Basil's father compared with the grasping Mr Sherwin. Mannion in particular is a finely-drawn picture of menace early in the book.

However, as the coincidences mount, the pace becomes more breathless and in the end it all rather predictable. I couldn't help wondering how the basic premise might have turned out in the hands of a Dostoevsky, where the penniless young author, a nihilist estranged from his family, sees a girl on an omnibus and marries her simply because he can. Now that might have been interesting...

Book Review : The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (Penguin 1998)

2011-08-06T23:15:00.000+01:00

I can't really discuss this book without giving away snippets of its wonderfully labyrinthine plot, so if you have not yet read The Moonstone but plan to do so, may I suggest that you look away now, as the conclusion of this wonderful book retains its ability to surprise even today.

The Moonstone is so often cited as being the archetype of all detective novels that one is surprised in the first place of how little Sergeant Cuff appears in the novel, and how insignificant his role in the denouement. If one is forced to pigeon-hole this novel, then it is definitely a Sensation Novel in which a detective appears, rather than a Detective Novel with a sensational plot. However, over the course, Wilkie Collins establishes a number of the conventions of the Closed House detective novel which endure to this day.

Rachel Verinder has received The Moonstone - looted from an Indian temple - as a birthday present. However that night it is stolen, and all the inhabitants of the house are suspects for Sergeant Cuff, who has been summoned from London to replace the incompetent local police force (in this detail, there is a striking parallel with Inspector Whicher, upon whom Cuff was supposedly based, and the Road Hill House murders). Cuff is a solitary man with a melancholy face and, like so many of his successors, an eccentricity - in this case, an obsession with roses.

His suspicion falls on Rosanna Spearman, the servant with the plain face and crooked back who has been rescued by Lady Verinder from a home for women with criminal pasts. Rosanna is a genuinely interesting character as she has fallen helplessly in love with the charismatic young gentleman Franklin Blake. This unrequited infatuation across the class barrier is, as far as I am aware, quite unique in Victorian fiction, where love affairs between men and woman of differing degrees of gentility are quite common, but seldom involve the serving classes.

Eventually, Franklin Blake's quest for the hand of Rachel Verinder places the onus of revealing who had stolen The Moonstone on his head, and he is in for a shock.The denouement where Blake unlocks his memory of what happened a year ago under the influence of opium is exciting if not believable in the slightest - although as a seasoned habitue of the drug, Collins is in a better position to write about its impact than I am. However The Moonstone itself has not yet been retrieved, and indeed the final scene of novel sees a resolution which is both satisfying and subtly subversive in a colonial context.

Since writing The Woman in White several years previously, Collins writing style has improved and he is in greater control of his material. Sergeant Cuff, Rosanna Spearman and the loquacious old House-Steward Gabriel Betteredge are finely drawn, but Franklin Blake and Rachel Verinder hardly fly off the page as a romantic duo, and Godfrey Ablewhite is such a do-gooder that one wonders where's the catch. But the plot compels, it drives the book forward at a ferocious pace and it still retains a genuine ability to surprise - 150 years on, it is still a cracking good read.

Book Review : The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (Penguin 1999)

2011-07-22T23:10:00.000+01:00

Having decided to read up on the emergence of 19th Century detective fiction, I am naturally drawn to The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. But first, Collins' other great blockbuster, the original and best Sensation Novel - The Woman in White. It was first published in weekly serial form in Dickens' All the Year Round, where it created a sensation itself akin to modern Harry Potter book launches, with crowds forming outside the offices of All the Year Round on the days of publication, and William Gladstone cancelling a theatre engagement in order to continue reading it.

Even today, the reaction is understandable - it is very compelling. I was reading it on the train to work and was very reluctant to prise myself away mid-chapter when my station arrived, and Collins was the master of the cliffhanger which would end each weekly edition. Excitement, titillation (by Victorian standards), a labyrinthine plot, compelling characters - it all made for a heady brew.

However, perhaps the first surprise is that however great a plot-constructor Collins may be, he is certainly not a great stylist. He may not quite be in the Dan Brown mould, as he can write fluently, but even atmospheric passages are lightly sketched, seldom more than one or two sentences long, with the emphasis always on driving forward the plot. But what a plot...!! Summarising it could not do it justice: suffice to say that it relates to a pretty young heiress who is married to a rogue who needs to perform some legal gyrations to get his hands on her money, and the efforts of her companions to protect her.

The other glory of the book is its characters. As ever, the goodies are weaker than the baddies. Marianne Halcombe is not an attractive lady, but she is intelligent, loyal and courageous. Her sister Laura Fairlie has all the personality of a wet lettuce leaf - but she is beautiful, very rich and betrothed to Sir Percival Glyde, although she is falling despite herself for her painfully honourable art teacher Walter Hartright, who swiftly absents himself to Central America in order to escape the feelings he is harbouring for Laura. Sir Percival appears to be very solicitous, but he displays some nervous tics and has a lawyer who plays hardball in drawing up the marriage contract, so all is not what it seems.

But standing bestride the book like a colossus is Sir Percival's companion Count Fosco - one of the truly great creations. We first meet him and his wife when Laura returns from honeymoon to Sir Percival's deeply indebted estate, Blackwater Park. Immensely corpulent, yet compellingly handsome with steel-grey eyes and a face like Napoleon's, he is both menacing and gentle, letting his white mice climb over him and his birds climb up his fingers. His orotund speech and elaborate courtesy mask a steely will - but in extremis will his chivalry outweigh his icy determination? Fosco is a genuinely complex character, beautifully drawn, who overshadows all the other rather one-dimensional personalities in the story.

As literature, The Woman in White doesn't really hit the top notes of Collins' many great contemporaries. As a great thriller novel, however, it is of the first order. So much of today's densely plotted thrillers owe much to Collins' elaborate stories, and in doing so Collins contributed to the democratisation of quality mass-market fiction.

Theatre Review - A Woman Killed with Kindness by Thomas Heywood - Lyttleton Theatre (dir Katie Mitchell 18/7/11)

2011-07-20T00:20:00.000+01:00

The National Theatre seems to have been trawling the archives of rarely performed plays of late – first we have Ibsen’s rarely performed Master and Galilean, now we have Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness, a tragedy from 1607. One must ask what a revival of a play such as this, which would struggle onto the second tier below Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson, seeks to achieve – it certainly informs, as an example of what sort of drama was being produced in Jacobean London outside The Globe; in its exposition on the role of women in 17th Century society it educates; but crucially for modern audiences – does it entertain?

Essentially it is a straightforward morality tale of the good and the bad woman. John & Anne Frankford are recently married. Frankford welcomes his guest Wendoll to his house and tells him to take what he finds as his own – Wendoll takes him at his word and starts an affair with his wife. When Frankford (Paul Ready) discovers the couple in flagrante, he chooses not to kill his wife but turns her out of his house. Repenting of her ways, she starves herself to death. Meanwhile, the odious Sir Charles Mountford has run up three thousand pounds in gambling debts, and is imprisoned. Sir Charles Acton offers to pay off his debts if he can marry Sir Charles’ sister Susan, but as a chaste maiden, she is unwilling. However, unlike Anne, she knows her duty to her brother and agrees to marry in the end.
As the synopsis shows, protofeminist classic it ain’t, which makes Katie Mitchell’s decision to adapt it relocating the period to the 1920s more intriguing.

The set is both sumptuous and inspired. We are presented with sections of two elegant one-storey country houses side by side. Both houses have a bustle of activity upstairs and downstairs, with the audience being directed from one house to the other by a trademark Katie Mitchell buzzing light-switch, this ensuring the comparison between the two women is permanently foregrounded.

The first problem, however, is that the two parallel stories, are not dramatically equivalent. To be honest it is difficult to see why Wendoll (Sebastian Armesto) would fall for a pregnant Anne, as, despite the best efforts of Liz White, her part is written with so little personality shining through that it is difficult to see why he might choose to make the effort. Sandy McDade as Susan has more of a spark, but the subplot is so convoluted, and her brother (Leo Bill, overacting splendidly) such an odious weed, that one wishes she would protect her honour and let her brother rot. It is in the Frankford’s household that the action is happening and the interest lies. The double-entendres of the card-game Between the Sheets are splendid, the discovery scene very powerful.

The second problem is that of the temporal relocation. This is a play whose whole raison d’être is to contrast the bad wife and the virtuous sister. Usually when directors change a play’s setting, it is either to make it more relevant, as brilliantly done in One Man Two Guvnors, or to emphasise the universality of the themes in the play – as Katie Mitchell herself did in Iphigenia at Aulis. Yet what is a morality play to a Jacobean audience is deeply misogynistic to one from the 21st century, and even in the 1920s Landowners did not threaten to kill errant wives. As is the case in productions of The Taming of the Shrew, this is a problem that the director must confront, and in my opinion Katie Mitchell’s solution fudged rather than resolved the issue.

However, Katie Mitchell always challenges – she may not always succeed, but one never leaves her productions without being provoked. This was a worthwhile production of an interesting if not a great play, which casts an interesting light on 17th Century Patriarchy. The choreography of the scene changes, the dappling piano accompaniment, the movement and energy of all the characters all ensured that, despite lacking the poetry or subtlety we associate with the likes of Shakespeare, Webster or Fletcher, it never ceased to entertain.

Theatre Review : Dream Story by Arthur Schnitzler - Gate Theatre (Adapted and Directed by Anna Ledwich 20/6/11)

2011-07-14T22:32:00.002+01:00

Combine oneirology with Vienna, and you have a powerful Freudian combination. Add a strong cast, Anna Ledwich’s excellent direction and the claustrophobia of the tiny Gate Theatre, and the resulting cocktail is very heady indeed.

Dream Story is based on the novella of the same name by Arthur Schnitzler, on which Stanley Kubrick also based his final film, Eyes Wide Shut. Fridolin (Luke Neal) and his wife Albertina (Leah Miller) relate to each other experiences they had during their recent holiday in Denmark. This destabilises the buttoned-up Fridolin, and he sets out into the evening to make some calls but also to seek some adventure. In three scenarios, with a vulnerable young patient, with a sexually active young woman and a prostitute (Rebecca Scroggs) his sexual nature is challenged. He meets his former colleague Nachtigall (Jon Foster), is humiliated by his greater confidence and demands access to a secret party that Nachtigall has told him about.

But then we revisit the scenarios, faces reoccur and the boundaries between dreams and reality become more and more blurred. This is handled very skilfully by Anna Ledwich – these boundaries are never clear right from outset, as you could interpret the entire story as a dream, or just facets of a decline into mental instability. The doubling of the cast in various roles adds to this hallucinatory effect.

All the cast of four are equally strong – Luke Neal and Leah Miller as the couple disintegrating both individually and as a couple are excellent, as are Jon Foster, who exudes alternately bonhomie and menace in his multiple roles, and Rebecca Scroggs as patient, prostitute and nymphette. The imaginative set changes from bedroom to bordello keep the pace going and as a result the play – which sometimes slips towards the Freudian-didactic in places – never loses its speed or interest.

Book Review - Edgar Allan Poe : A Critical Biography by Arthur Hobson Quinn (John Hopkins Paperbacks 1998)

2011-07-08T22:01:00.000+01:00

Having just read Edgar Allan Poe's works, it is only natural that I should want to find out more about the man, especially when that man is so enwrapped in mystery. There are many books about Poe available, but Arthur Hobson Quinn's biography, first published in 1941, still bestrides the stage like a Colossus.

Poe's life requires a patient man who is able to sift the fact from the fiction from the downright lies. He was born in 1809 the son of an actor and actress in Boston. His mother Elizabeth was well-respected in the theatres of the Eastern seaboard, but his father David was not - possibly as a result of a drink problem - and he disappears completely two years after Poe's birth. Elizabeth dies shortly afterwards at the age of 24, and Poe is sent to live with John Allen and his wife, who take him to live in Stoke Newington in England where he obtains a classical education before retuning to the United States.

The mysteries of Poe's life are many, and one of the most perplexing is why his relationship with his Stepfather broke down so completely. Certainly, Allen deprived Poe of necessary funds whilst at College and then at West Point - although whether this was the cause or the result of Poe incurring debts is difficult to determine. In any case, by the time that Poe had engineered his dismissal from West Point their relationship had deteriorated beyond the point of redemption.

On embarking on a literary career, Poe moved in with his Aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia. He fell in love with his cousin and they were married, despite her only being thirteen years old. She remained the love of his life until her untimely death from tuberculosis at the age of 24. Poe's reputation as a writer, poet, editor and critic grew, but at the same time his acerbic pen made him many enemies in literary circles. His increasing tendancy to turn to drink became an issue, especially following the death of Virginia, and references in correspondence to Poe being in a state of "excitement" become more common. A potential second marriage to fellow-poet Sarah Whitman falls through, and finally on 3rd October 1849 Poe is mysteriously found in the dockland area of Baltimore dead drunk and dies a few days later.

Poe made the great mistake of appointing as his literary executor the Reverend Rufus W. Griswold, a man who bore a grudge and who Poe had given every reason to resent. Griswold is responsible for many of the myths that have grown up around Poe's life. The great merit of Quinn's book is the exhaustive way in which he has trawled through numerous archives in order to pull together every last shred of evidence relating to Poe's life, and then clearly sifted the fact from the fiction. He painstakingly shows that Griswold forged a number of Poe's letters in order to show himself in a better light or Poe in a worse one. He was responsible for the claim that Poe's marriage with Whitman was broken off because Poe had turned up drunk at her house days before the wedding, for example, but Quinn patiently goes through the facts available to show that this is not the case.

In fact if there is any weakness in this book it is Quinn's tendancy to give Poe the benefit of the doubt too often. There can be no doubt that Poe was susceptible to weaknesses, albeit less so than Griswold suggests and less than in the Legend. But Quinn is always seeking an excuse for his actions. It would be interesting to read a book published more recently to see how Quinn's analysis of the evidence which he has obtained matches that based on more recent scholarship. Certainly, some facts will now have emerged when Quinn was only able to conjecture. But what can be sure is that any modern biography of Poe will use Quinn's book as the starting point, and for its scholarship, clarity and critical acuteness it remains one of the most exemplary books of its type.

Book Review : The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings by Edgar Allan Poe (Penguin 1986) / The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Stories by Edgar Allan Poe (Marshall Cavendish 1986)

2011-07-08T16:49:00.000+01:00

Reading “The Suspicions of Mr Whicher” has prompted me to explore the origins of the 19th Century detective novel, and thus I find myself reading not only “Murders in the Rue Morgue” but also the rest of the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe with whose work until recently I had been unfamiliar.

Please note the following discussions include descriptions of the ending to the works in question.

Poe’s detective stories feature polymath and master of deductive reasoning C. Auguste Dupin, a recognisable (and acknowledged) prototype for Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, and are related by his companion. Following a gruesome but mystifying murder, Dupin offers his assistance to the Parisian police who are perplexed as to how the murderer of two women in the Rue Morgue could escape from a locked room. In this first story, Poe is feeling his way. Needless to say, Dupin solves the riddle, but the deductions made by him are scarcely credible, the fact that the murderer turns out to be an orang-utan who has cut the woman’s throat in imitation of his master shaving, which may be the first but almost certainly the most ridiculous solution to a murder mystery in the history of the detective fiction.

But the story was a success, and paved the way for M Dupin to bring his acumen to a real-life case. In 1841 New York, a young shop worker, Mary Rogers, was found drowned in the Hudson with foul play suspected. Newspaper reports contain speculation as to the murderer, which Poe considers inaccurate. He therefore transposes the murder to Paris, turns Mary Rogers into Marie Rôget and sets the facts before M. Dupin. The resulting “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” is a curious hybrid. It actually reads quite well, despite a fair degree of tedious points-scoring, as a piece of quasi-journalistic forensic work, but as a work of art it falls short. None of the characters are developed, nothing comes to life. 19th Century sensibilities are such that the fact that Mary Rogers may have died in a botched abortion is only hinted at obliquely. But from a historical perspective the attempt to solve the murder mystery is an interesting application of the latest techniques of detective science.

However “The Purloined Letter”, Poe’s final story to feature Dupin, is undoubtedly one of his finest. Dupin is requested by the Parisian Prefect of Police to help solve a problem. A compromising letter has been obtained by a corrupt minister, and is being used for his advantage. Searches of the minister’s apartment have not uncovered the letter and police are bewildered as to where it can be. Dupin works out that the safest place for the letter is not to hide it, but to store it in plain view of all, and manages to switch the letter with another in order to entrap the minister. Whilst the psychology employed by Dupin may be flawed, there can be no doubt that this is an elegant solution to the problem, and one that has been reused in a modern Sherlock Holmes TV episode.

Poe turns out to be a pioneer in many ways. His characters journey to the moon by balloon long before Jules Verne. They employ cryptography. He suggested a solution to Olbers’ paradox (if there is an infinite number of stars, why is the night sky not white?). His poetry pushed the boundaries of traditional verse forms. However, he is best remembered now for his gothic short stories, all exquisitely written and some still very creepy.

Looking at the stories as a whole, they are masterpieces of tone. Generally they will build slowly to a rapidly delivered surprising dénouement. Characters rarely develop, relationships are either one-dimensional or warped in some way, but it is as a master of atmosphere that his reputation is based. “The Fall of the House of Usher” commences on “a dull, dark, and soundless day” “when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens” over “a singularly dreary tract of country” when “the melancholy House of Usher” came into view causing “a sense of insufferable gloom” to pervade the narrator’s spirit. Two sentences in, and you have a picture that has been replicated by directors of horror films ever since, and that is repeated, layer upon layer, until the reader is suffocated by the claustrophobia of history that the house itself provokes.

In “Ligeia”, the layers are of another kind – a description of the beauty of Ligeia, whose eyes “were even fuller than the fullest of the gazelle eyes of the tribe of the valley of Nourjahad.” Yet there is “no exquisite beauty…without some strangeness in the proportion” and a coldness except when “a prey to the tumultuous vultures of stern passion”, and bearing in mind that Ligeia boasts knowledge of “the most abstruse of the boasted erudition of the Academy”, and despite being forewarned of her death, the reader knows that this is not the end of this exquisite story.

Death pervades his writing, but rarely does the blood flow in Poe’s stories – he was one of the first writers to ply his craft at the psychological level. His ability to conjure atmosphere from a couple of words makes him ideally suited to such innovation. Overall his quality can be uneven – some stories are baffling, some ridiculous (see “The Spectacles”, for example), although the quality of his sentences rarely drops, which is remarkable considering that he was often writing to put food on his table. As poet, author, critic and innovator, Poe was one of the most remarkable men of letters of the 19th Century.

Theatre Review : The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan - Barbican Theatre (dir Deborah Warner 7/6/11)

2011-06-22T21:41:00.000+01:00

Deborah Warner is one of my favourite directors. Her vision of Mother Courage at the National Theatre was undoubtedly one of my theatrical highlights of 2009 – musically inspired, funny, biting. She is one of the few directors consistently able to stage exciting and visionary reinterpretations of Shakespeare, such as her big-scale Julius Caesar, and an extraordinary Titus Andronicus. So it was with eager anticipation that I went to see her interpretation of Sheridan’s School for Scandal at the Barbican.

On entering the auditorium to thumping rock music, the actors are taking part in what appears to be a modern fashion shoot, gossiping and taking pictures of the audience with their mobile phones. Signs are held up, which presumably highlight some of the character traits we are about to see in the play. When the action proper begins, Lady Sneerwell (Matilda Ziegler) and Snake (Gary Sefton) are both in 20th Century underwear being dressed with 18th Century clothes. So far, so very Brechtian.

The problem, however, is that this is not a play by Brecht. Brecht’s plays are generally quite linear in exposition, their plot lines relatively simple. This is not the case with Sheridan – his plot lines are famously convoluted, and rely on some heavy exposition early on to make them work. This is where this production failed, on two levels. Firstly, there were too many distractions that diverted attention to what was being explained, and secondly the delivery by several of the cast was so flat that it was difficult to focus attention on the explication. So by the time the action picked up towards the end of the first half, I was utterly bewildered as to what was going on (I was not previously familiar with this work) and the humour was passing me by. This was a pity, as, by the third act (we have the numbers of the acts and scenes on banners on the stage, naturally) the momentum had picked up and the stage-business was becoming very amusing.

At the interval, I repaired to the bar and read the synopsis in the program which enabled me to work out who was doing what to whom and why, which meant that the second half of the performance was significantly more enjoyable than the first – but it was too late for many fellow theatregoers, judging by the empty seats after the break. One shouldn’t need to rely on a program synopsis - if Deborah Warner had focussed attention on Brechtian devices which enabled a clearer exposition of the plot, then this could have been a triumphant production.

It seemed to take the cast a while to get going as well, as if they had been put off too by the silliness at the start. The Surface brothers (Aiden McArdle as the devious Joseph and Leo Bill as the dissolute Charles) stood out. Once the momentum picked up, both extracted maximum humour from their roles, ably and effortlessly assisted by a gruff but sensitive Alan Howard as Sir Peter Teazle and John Shrapnel as Sir Oliver Surface carrying on regardless of what was going on all around him. Gary Sefton proved a visual stand-out in the unpromising role of a drunken Gentleman with elastic limbs and Katherine Parkinson was a suitably flighty Lady Teazle, although generally – and surprisingly - the female characters did not come over very strongly.

Like any good Regency comedy, this production resolves to a satisfactory conclusion, and the second half is splendid entertainment. It is such a pity that so many of the audience had been lost – physically or emotionally – by this point. Sheridan is a playwright who is still funny and relevant today, and this production represents a lost opportunity to bring home this relevance to a contemporary audience. There is nothing wrong with an adventurous modern production, but that cannot be at the expense of proper pacing and clear exposition. It’s such a shame, as this was so close to working so well.

Theatre Review : Government Inspector by Nikolai Gogol - Young Vic (dir Richard Jones 20/6/11)

2011-06-22T21:25:00.000+01:00

Comedies of confusion appear to be à la mode in London this summer, but whereas Carlo Goldoni’s A Servant of Two Masters, so successfully transformed into One Man, Two Guvnors at the Lyttleton, is essentially a piece of highly entertaining fluff, Nickolai Gogol’s vicious satire Government Inspector was sufficiently provoking to the Tsarist government for it to ban the play and send its author into exile.

The basic premise is simple. The mayor of a provincial Russian town hears that a Government Inspector is due to visit his town, and is worried that he might arrive incognito. When he hears that a gentleman from St Petersburg has arrived at the Inn he assumes that this must be the Inspector. However, it is in fact the penniless chancer Khlestakov, who is at first bemused when the mayor pays off his debts, but quickly works out how to turn the situation to his advantage when he learns that the townspeople wish to shower him with bribes and the mayor’s wife and daughter are overcome with the wit and sophistication of the gentleman from St Petersburg.

Gogol’s original play is sublime, spearing the corruption and pretensions of mid-19th Century Russia. However, this wonderful new production by Richard Jones, based on a fresh translation by Ian Harrower, takes the play into a new dimension entirely. This is Gogol-as-cartoon, fast and brash and bright and stylish. The set is the interior of a house which disappears rapidly into an impossible perspective, the costumes are from CbeeBees, the characters grotesques. Visually it was superb, every angle and mannerism maximised for comic effect. But it captured the manic surreality of Gogol perfectly, and the exaggerated movement allows the action to hurtle along at a cracking pace.

Louise Brealey (Maria), Doon Mackichan (Anna)
and Julian Barratt (Mayor) in
Government Inspector at the Young Vic, London

Photo: Tristram Kenton

Kyle Soller as Khlestikov is superb, his increasingly manic machinations driving the comedy, and he is well matched by Doon Mackichan and Louise Brearley as the mayor’s wife Maria and daughter Anna, Anna tottering in her short skirt and high heels or slumped on the seat in teenage ennui, Maria with fan and leg outstretched indulging in “sophisticated” small-talk. The bit when they hear that the so-called Inspector from St Petersberg will stay at their house and both run around screaming is perfect. All the supporting cast are very good, hamming it up for all they are worth, Amanda Lawrence as the inquisitive postmaster in particular.

The only disappointment, however, was Julian Barrett as the Mayor. Barrett’s previous experience on stage is as a comedian, and on television. As far as I can discover, this is his first major theatrical acting role, and one could tell. He looked the part, his movement was very good and some facial expressions very funny, but his delivery was a bit flat and lacked conviction when compared to the manic, exaggerated projection of his fellow actors. In other productions this may not have mattered, but here he was exposed and it left a bit of a hole in the middle of the show.

However, this was the only weakness in a tremendously good production, one which was as visually striking as anything I have seen in years. Fast, funny, clever, stylish, this really demonstrated – vide my comments on Deborah Warner’s School for Scandal – how to make an old play relevant for the 21st Century, as all the youngsters around me seemed to love it.

Theatre Review : Emperor and Galilean by Henrik Ibsen - Olivier Theatre (dir Jonathan Kent 13/6/11)

2011-06-19T17:56:00.000+01:00

The Olivier Theatre is the best theatrical space in Britain, the thrust stage bringing the audience up close to the performers, the sightlines perfect (except from the very back) and the hydraulic revolving stage allowing directors and designers tremendous flexibitity in how they present large-scale dramas. Seldom have I seen it used to better effect than Jonathan Kent's creation of the Roman Empire from glittery Constantinople to darkest Gaul in this striking production of Ibsen's Emperor and Galilean.

Apparently, this is the first time that this sprawling historical drama has been produced on the British stage, Ibsen's original Closet Drama (i.e. having not been written reading and not for performing) about the life of the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate having been trimmed from a mighty eight hours to much more manageable three and a half. But three and a half hours is a long time to sit in the theatre if the play is a duffer - after all, there must be a reason why it has not been performed over all these years. However, there was no reason to worry. Jonathan Kent and designer Paul Brown were not going to stint on any opportunity to maximise the spectacle on show as the drama moved from the Christian Court of the Emperor Constantius to sacrifices to the gods in Ephesus to the final battle in the Persian Desert.

The play is frighteningly topical. It is an examination of the nature of faith and freedom in the context of State power. Emperor Constantius (Nabil Shaban) has a tenuous grip on a newly Christian Empire, and keeps his nephew Julian (Andrew Scott) under close suveillance. Julian has doubts about his Christian faith, which are confirmed by the pagan priest Maximus (Ian McDiarmid). When the Roman Legions overthrow Constantius and propel Julian to the Imperial throne, he promises a return to the pagan religion whilst tolerating Christianity. However the corrupting nature of power corrodes these ideals, and soon the Christians of Antioch are being subject to persecution. Having been told by Maximus that he will fall on the field of Mars which is in Rome, Julian becomes convinced of his infallibility and invades Iraq. Needless to say, tragedy ensues.

Ibsen refers to this play as his most important work, and one can sense glimpses of his conception of the nature of individual freedom, however the play does not articulate these clearly. Having not read the full script I cannot say if this is a shortcoming on the part of Ibsen or Ben Power who made the adaptation. In fact towards the end, the play sounds like a paean for the Christian faith which I don't think was Ibsen's intention at all. It is structured as a tragedy, but in comparison with Shakespeare's great historical plays (think a combination Richard II's idealism with Richard III's megalomania) the characterisation of Julian falls a long way short, and the tragic denouement is weak.

However, this does not detract from a spectacular theatrical experience. Andrew Scott brings power and presence to Julian and Nabil Shaban is a striking Constantius. The staging is dramatic, beautifully designed with striking use of music, metal and fire. It's difficult to depict pagan celebrations without resorting to cliched cavorting, but the powerful scene where the Roman Army persecutes the Christian villagers in Syrian Antioch had a contemporary resonance which Jonathan Kent could not have foreseen. As the production ended, I was surprised that the audience reaction was somewhat muted. On the contrary, I felt that Jonathan Kent, Ben Power and Andrew Scott had triumphed in making a spectacular, accessible and thought-provoking evening with such difficult material.

Theatre Review : One Man Two Guvnors by Richard Bean - Lyttleton Theatre (dir Nicholas Hytner 23/5/11)

2011-05-29T21:49:00.000+01:00

For me, the acme of theatrical comedy is Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, a structural masterpiece which takes a mundane farce, turns it inside out and builds into a magnificent finalé which cannot be beaten. All other modern comedies are measured against this, and usually fall short by a long way. One Man, Two Guvnors at the National Theatre, however, came very close.

The play is a reworking by Richard Bean of Carlo Goldoni’s “A Servant of Two Masters”, itself a very funny late commedia dell’arte piece – but don’t let that put you off. One Man Two Guvnors simply uses Goldoni’s basic plot – a cheeky chappie with an insatiable appetite gets hired first by one master, then another and has to keep them both going without each other’s knowledge so he can be paid twice. Needless to say, confusion ensues.

One Man Two Guvnors transposes the action from Venice to Brighton, with Francis Henshall (James Corden) in the employ of gangsters Rachel Crabbe (Jemima Roper), disguised as her twin brother, who was due to marry Charlie "The Duck" Clench (Fred Ridgeway)’s dim daughter Pauline (Claire Lams) (though she loves actor Alan Dangle (Daniel Rigby)) - and Stanley Stubbers (Oliver Chris), who has killed Rachel's brother and is in love with Rachel. The plot is taken directly from A Servant of Two Masters, it's complicated and completely irrelevant.

The action revolves round a series of activities that Henshall is asked to do first by one guvnor and then the other. This reaches a crescendo as he tries to serve the same meal to each of his bosses in separate private rooms in a restaurant, with help from a very shaky 87-year old waiter (Tom Edden) and an audience member, whilst satisfying his own insatiable appetite. The result – without giving too much away – is one of the funniest set pieces I have seen for a long time, a masterpiece of timing, slapstick humour and surreality as Henshall gets pulled between one room and the other.

The second half isn't as good as the first, but its still very funny. As in all good farces, the lovers end up with their trousers round their ankles - as in all good Commedia del'Arte, the loose ends all get tied up in the end. There is a bit of self-referentiality when James Corden muses on how his Harlequinesque character traditionally uses the satisfaction of his baser urges to drive the action forward, but this is not aimed at theatrical historians, instead it's just an excuse for lining up another set of gags.

What the line does highlight is that this is not just comedy gold, but actually very clever theatre. Goldoni's original play is never overt, but in fact the plot sticks to its outlines very closely and maintains traditions of Commedia del'Arte - character stereotypes, the breaking down of the fourth wall, the asides to the audience and improvisations (some intentional, some not). The Brighton pub is The Cricketers Arms, from Brighton Rock.

The performances are without exception sensational. I loved James Corden in The History Boys, despaired at some of his subsequent career choices but he is charming, charasmatic and very funny in the lead role. Oliver Chris as the posh gangster Stanley has all the best lines, delivered to perfection, and Daniel Rigby overacts superbly. The skiffle music by Grant Olding and The Craze, ably supported by members of the cast (Daniel Rigby topping everything) is excellent, but the show is stolen by Tom Edden as Alfie the elderly waiter.

This may not be to everyone's taste. If you don't enjoy slapstick, farce or general silliness then it may not be for you. But I don't think that spare tickets for this superb production will be on sale for long. I laughed so much my sides hurt, the man next to me even more so. I hear that addional tickets are coming on sale soon, so I urge you to book up immediately for one of the most enjoyable evenings I have spent at a theatre for quite a while.

Book Review - The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber (Canongate 2002)

2011-05-29T18:47:00.000+01:00

This is a Victorian novel, both in subject and in scope - though emphatically not in content. It tells the stories of Victorian Perfume manufacturer Henry Rackham, his wife Agnes and his mistress Sugar, a prostitute whom Henry removes from her brothel and installs her own house in Marylebone, not far from his own house in Notting Hill.

Henry has been brought to his wits' end by Agnes, whose behaviour is becoming progressively more eccentric - indeed, the menacing Doctor Curlew recommends that she is sent away to a asylum. Henry is also concerned about his brother William, a repressed religious obsessive who with his ladyfriend Mrs Fox is attempting to rescue fallen women. Meanwhile, he is becoming more and more reliant on the insight and business advice of Sugar, who despite her trade is both intelligent and well-educated.

This is a book of themes and contrasts, of the gulf between rich and poor, between educated and uneducated, the principled and the hypocritcal and the rigidity of the class system. However its principle theme is the exploitation of women both on the streets and in the brothel, but also in the bosom of the Victorian family. Agnes was raised to be proficient in social accompishments, but her education did not stretch as far as to explain the monthly demonic affliction which caused her insides to discharge blood. Eventually her behaviour is such that she becomes that Victorian cliche, the Madwoman in the Attic, restrained at the whim of her husband and her doctor.

Sugar, meanwhile, fares better than her fellows on the street - partly as a result of her accomplishments, but mainly as she will do "anything, anything" that is asked of her. Henry Rackham installs her as his mistress, and she seems to develop a genuine tenderness for him - but she is always aware that she is there at his whim and could just as quickly find herself back on the streets. It is therefore yet another unequal relationship being played out, and Sugar must work on attempting somehow to restore the balance.

In fact the only equal relationship in the book is that of William Rackham and Mrs Fox of the Rescue Society. Mrs Fox is a widow, which gives her a certain advantage, and William strives to remain celibate - but sex, or the absense of it - is always lurking in the background.

This book has recently been televised, and I have read it in readiness for watching the series. If the book is anything to go by, it should be highly entertaining, attentive to the detail of Victorian society, sexually very explicit, but also a deep and nuanced examination of the fissures and hypocracies of Victorian England.

Theatre Review : The Cherry Orchard - Olivier Theatre (dir Howard Davies 16/5/11)

2011-05-26T22:48:00.000+01:00

It’s not the plot you remember from Chekhov plays - it’s the tone, the suffocating sense of loss. You think they all take place on still summer days when no air moves – but they don’t, the plays are all spread through the year, but you are left with a feeling, an impression…

More than any other playwright, Chekhov was a visionary. He saw the changes in Russian society hurtle towards him, yet he wrote before the Revolution of 1905 when Tsarist power remained monolithic. It is difficult to watch his plays without the prism of the events that followed, since The Cherry Orchard is a revolutionary play. Ranyevskaya is an absentee landlord, a frivolous, vain woman. She has returned after ten years to her estate simply because she has run out of money – hence the necessity of the sale of the cherry orchard. The new order that replaces the old is a product of economic determinism as much as that of individual will.

Yet Chekhov never preaches. No character is sympathetic, but none are entirely unsympathetic either, all their failings are gently and humorously picked away. You want to give most of them a slap, tell them to get their act together. Its that indeterminacy which is the greatness of Chekhov – you don’t have the bleakness of Ibsen, the characters railing against the moon, or the screaming moral turmoil of Strindberg.

This production captures much of the lightness of Chekhov, but without the suffocating tone. Howard Davies tries to retain the historical context, whilst eschewing Chekhovian clichés. The result succeeds up to a point – it is a clear, lucid production but without anything that sets it apart as being magical. The same can be said of the cast – Zoë Wanamaker is well suited for the role of Ranyevskaya, the headstrong romantic helpless in the face of economic necessity, unable or unwilling to make the decisions she needs to take. Conleth Hill is very good as a ranting Lopakhin, exultant and despairing at his purchase. Best coup de theatre of the evening is courtesy a startling Sarah Wooward as the performer Charlotta, and Kenneth Cranham captures the pathos of the forgotten Firs. All are very good, but the heights remain elusive.

The Cherry Orchard will always fascinate. This is a good production, ideal for someone coming to it for the first time – but it lacks anything to set it above and beyond the several other productions of this play that we have seen in London in recent years.

Book Review - The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House by Kate Summerscale (Bloomsbury 2009)

2011-05-14T15:24:00.000+01:00

In 1860, the gruesome murder of a small boy in an affluent middle-class household gripped the nation. The four-year-old child had been taken from his cot in a room where his nurse slept, carried downstairs and out of the house where his throat was slit and his body bundled into a privy in the garden. All members of the household were under suspicion - the father Samuel Kent, unpopular local sub-inspector of factories; the mother of the boy Mary Kent, who had been governess to Kent's older children before their mother died and she married Kent; the children of Kent's first marriage; the nursemaid and other servants.

The crime took place in the village of Road, on the borders of Wiltshire and Somerset, and was investigated by the local Wiltshire police. However, such was the national interest that the Home Secretary instructed Scotland Yard's recently formed Detective division to take over the investigation (just as, this week, the Prime Minister, under pressure from the press, has instructed the Metropolitain Police to review the investigation into the disappearance of Madelaine McCann). Commissioner Mayne sent his best man, Detective Inspector Jack Whicher.

This real-life case, one hundred and fifty years on, could have been drawn from the writings of any number of our great crime writers. The suspects are the inhabitants of a locked country house, any number of which could have had motives for killing the child. Class divisions loom large - the factory inspector has alienated the local workers. The local police do not trust the London detective foisted upon them. Suspects are brought before the magistrates, but evidence is inconclusive, the mystery deepens.

Kate Summerscale marshals the story with great skill, patiently setting out layer upon layer of evidence drawn from the court records, the archives of the Metropolitain Police and newspaper reports of the day. But she doesn't just focus on the case in hand. This period saw the development both of the detective force and its corollory, the detective novel. Summerscale places this case firmly in the context of the evolution of the police force, but also shows how its reporting reflected the new genre of detective fiction, and how the case directly inspired the writers who were to create the first great fictional detectives, Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, who were both familar with Jack Whicher and whose Inspectors Cuff and Bucket shared key characteristics with him.

From her description of the factory system in Trowbridge to the impact of the Oxford Movement on the Church of England, Kate Summerscale fills in the background detail with precision and clarity. Whicher is drawn as a character who could engage in a library-full of detective stories - he even, as in all the books, has his sidekick, Dolly Williamson, his steadier, less-inspired companion (who nevertheless went on to become Chief Superintendant of Scotland Yard). The Kent family, so respectable, nevertheless has many secrets hidden behind the walls of Road Hill House. These are finally exposed in a proper unputdownable manner as is the case in all the great Detective novels.

Book Review - Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation : The definitive gude to the evolutionary biology of sex by Olivia Judson (Vintage 2003)

2011-05-13T21:10:00.000+01:00

The premise sounds toe-curlingly trite - animals supposedly writing to a sexologist for advice on what would appear to be their species' sexual eccentricities from an anthropomorphic point of view. The reality is a book that is engaging, funny, and as clear an explanation of the evolutionary biology of sex as one could wish for, with each fact meticulously annotated, despite the light conversational style.

This could easily have been a disaster. However, the writing throughout has a surety of tone which perfectly encapsulates what appears to be the absurdity of some animal mating techniques, as we can see at the start of the alarmingly titled chapter "How to Make Love to a Cannibal"

Rule number one - Never get eaten during Foreplay

Dear Dr Tatiana

I'm a European praying mantis, and I've noticed I enjoy sex more if I bite my lovers' heads off first...they go into the most thrilling spasms. Sometimes they seem less inhibited, more urgent - its fabulous. Do you find this too?

Apparently, Dr Tatiana advises, male praying mantises are boring lovers. The loss of their head, however, causes them to lose that inhibiting part of the brain, turning them into passionate lovers. The fate of the male mantis seems positively benign compared with that of the species of midge, where the female sinks her proboscis into the head of the male whilst mating, injects him with an enzyme that turns his insides into liquid and sucks him dry. Yet there are very few males who kill the females during mating, for an obvious reason - the male sperm is needed to fertilise the female eggs, and so the females' role in reproduction in many species is not yet over. So if the male were to kill the female, the species would quickly die out.

Judson's starting point is the proposition of A.S Bateman, who in 1948 posited that males of most species tended to be fundamentally promiscuous, and females fundamentally chaste. Judson effectively shreds this theory. Many of the more extreme examples of male behaviour - such as male bees whose penises explode and break off during copulation in order to block access to the queen from any other male bee, are in response to female promiscuity.

All sexual behaviour has one simple goal - the furtherance of the species. Judson explains how various behaviours may have evolved in order to deliver this goal - even if it involves, as in the case of the mite of the lesser mealworm beetle, both incest and matricide. In most cases, the health of the species is maintained through mixing two healthy sets of genes - but even then there are examples, such as the bdelloid rotifer, which has reproduces entirely through creating clones of itself.

From masturbating Marine Iguanas to homosexual octopuses to dolphins which try to mate with eels (!!) - the natural world has more sexual variety than you could ever hope to imagine. I will leave the scientific explanations to Olivia Jusdon, and applaud her for this wonderfully engaging work, deservedly shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize.

Book Review - Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (Abacus 1997)

2011-05-02T22:52:00.001+01:00

where to start..?

In this massive, magnificent study of addiction in contemporary America, it is entirely appropriate that the reader should be compelled to return again and again for fixes of hypnotic, hallucinogenic descriptions of a near-future society bifurcated into political, economic and social haves and have-nots, where broadcasting, sport, advertising and waste-disposal have evolved through their own inherent contradictions into bastardised versions of what they are today.

To attempt a plot summary is to do Wallace a gross disservice. Much of it takes place in the near future in the Enfield Tennis Academy, Boston, founded by alcoholic avant-garde film director James O. Incandenza. Nearby, in Ennet House for recovering addicts, Don Gately has taken the pledge to break away from prescription drugs. Meanwhile, the Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, wheelchair-bound fanatical Canadian nationalists are searching for the Master copy of Incandenza's film Infinite Jest, which is so transfixing that anyone who sets eyes on it will never take them off again, and finally expire in a state of neurasthenic bliss.

This is one of these big books that for the first hundred pages you think you've made a big mistake. The many plotlines have no apparent connection, radical concepts - such as the Organisation of North American Nations (Dorothy Parker's canary would have approved) - are unexplained. The novel careens backwards and forwards from plotline to backstory to digression and back - but slowly it comes together and you slip into the magnificent rythmns of Wallace's writing, mainly present tense, immediate, long, loopy, slangy sentences packed with idioms and idiosyncracies, footnotes and uncompromisingly difficult words.

Essentially, this is a novel about addiction and its impacts. J.O Incandenza was an alcoholic. His eldest son Orin is addicted to sex, his younger son Hal to Bob Hope (dope). All the residents of Ennet House are recovering addicts. The viewers of Infinite Jest become addicted to the film itself. Yet it is also a bleak vision of contemporary America. Those addicts of the future are being fucked up - to use Larkin's term - by their moms and dads today, way before the current calendrical system is given over to its sponsors.

Wallace may be likened to Pynchon in many ways, but his vision is bleaker. He itemises but does not glamorise drug use. His descriptions of life on Boston's underside is bleak and disturbing. Many characters come to deeply unpleasant ends as bodily functions break down as a result of their addictions, or of actions undertaken as a result of these addictions. Unlike Pynchon, Wallace's characters are not constantly pursued by figures of authority; in Wallace's Boston, the finest appear only incidentally. Only the A.F.R bear any resemblance to a Pynchoneque conspiracy nightmare. Wallace's characters are more likely to be pursued by demons entirely of their own making.

Don Gately is the most sympathetic character in the book - a recovering addict, but also a burglar and killer with an anger-management problem. He has come to terms with the impact of his addiction, and is now a trusted member of the Ennet House community. The kaleidoscope of characters at Ennet house give scope for sympathy, but most of them are too damaged and fragile for the reader to hold them close. Only Gately lets you get close enough to understand why he deserves redemption.
There are certain key events which stand out, where Wallace's descriptive powers and invention reach a crescendo. The game of Eschaton is one. To call Eschaton a mathematically enhanced game of Risk with tennis balls is to do it a grave injustice. Only Michael Pemulis knows the computer code which can calculate the impacts as the younger tennis players at ENA engage in the ultimate game of global strategy. As Hal, Pemulis and Axford get stoned, J.J. Penn claims that the snow falling on the tennis courts will impact the nuclear weapons he has at his disposal, thus unleashing a breathtaking chain of events which lead to the theoretical annihilation of all life on Earth, and carnage on the tennis courts, in a bravura extended section of writerly genius.

Wallace's satire is not overt. There are some but not many places where Infinite Jest is laugh-out-loud funny - it is too dark for that. The Assassins des Fauteuils Rollent - the Wheelchair Assassins of Quebec - are as sinister as any able-bodied terrorist organisation. The creation of the Great Concavity where all the USA's toxic waste is disposed is a satirical invention, but too close to the environmental catastrophes playing out today to be anything other than disturbing. There will be some marketing executive somewhere contemplating the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment and thinking - what a great idea!

This is a massive book of vision and contrasts, of the finest writing and incomprehensible jargon, of brilliance and frustration. Its vision of the future picks at the scabs of America today. It warmly deserves the place in the literary Pantheon for which it is already destined.

Aside : The Referendum on the voting system

2011-05-02T19:42:00.000+01:00

First Past The Post is undoubtedly the electoral system that the United Kingdom deserves. Old-fashioned, rooted in the past, not one new democracy in Europe with the benefit of a blank slate and no vested interests has chosen FPTP as their electoral system. FPTP has delivered a complacent House of Commons, where time-serving MPs, confident in the inevitability of their re-election, have no incentive to serve their constituents or to challenge the decisions decreed by their party leaders. In a country which can still come to a halt to celebrate the nuptuals of the fortunate young man who by a quirk of fate will one day give his assent to the passage into law of those Bills approved by his legislators, it is entirely appropriate that these legislators should themselves be selected by a system that largely perpetuates the two-party status quo and effectively disenfranchises all these voters who don't have the good fortune to be cast into a Key Marginal.

The Alternative Vote is not the perfect solution - it is not proportional, it will still favour artificial majorities in Parliament (and if anyone claims that coalition or minority government cannot work, I point them in the direction of mature European democracies from Scotland to Scandanavia to Germany, Benelux and Spain who would seem, by and large, to be making quite a good fist of it). However, it will ensure that all Elected Representatives will have broad-based support, burnishing the tarnished legitimacy of Parliament and effectively ending any electoral aspirations of extremists on both right and left (that AV encourages extremism is quantifiably a bare-faced lie that the No campaign should have been thoroughly ashamed to have propagated). AV fails to enforce intraparty competition like my preferred option, the Single Transferable Vote in multimember constituencies used in Republic of Ireland General Elections, and Northern Ireland Euro elections where it conveniently generates the correct result for all parties. AV maintains a constituency link but no top-up lists as in Scotland to ensure proportionality.

However, it would refresh political engagement within the United Kingdom. General Elections would be fought across a wider swathe of Britain, as parties adapted their message to engage with second and third preferences. Tactical voting would largely (not exclusively) become something of the past as votes cast their first preference with their heart and their second preference with their head. And yet, the arguments in favour of AV have been poorly articulated in what has basically been a dismal electoral campaign all round. The traditional Labour left has, for reasons best known to itself, cast aside the best opportunity in years to ensure progressive views do not cancel each other out at the Ballot Box, whilst the existing system has served the Conservatives very nicely for years thank you very much, even though they would benefit themselves from AV if UKIP and the far right increased significantly in popularity.

The vox pops on the News tell their own depressing story. Outside the chattering classes, a politically unengaged electorate does not have the energy or wit to examine the arguments on offer, it doesn't see whats in it for them, it has not been confronted with a compelling argument one way or the other. There has been no debate on television, the newspapers have taken their own predictable stances. Meanwhile electoral turnout falls and the level of political disengagement increases. Parliamentary legitimacy will diminish and other means of protest from the politically disenfranchised will be sought. We have seen in Britain and elsewhere how unpredictable these protests might turn out to be.

Theatre Review : Macbeth - Clerkenwell House of Detention (dir Alexandre Wright 28/4/11)

2011-05-02T18:30:00.000+01:00

The audience is led through darkened passages past the injured Captain declaiming his praise of Macbeth to a shadowy underground hall where three ghastly, blood-soaked apparitions meet Macbeth and Banquo. The action moves swiftly through the arched chambers as the audience follows, breaking up and reforming like a small flock of starlings as it seeks vantage points. Noises are heard off and some head off in pursuit, but then Macbeth appears, acknowledging the witches' prophesy, and the audience recoalesces around him.

The play is set in the damp and darkened vaults of the Clerkenwell House of Detention, formerly a prison dating back to the seventeenth century. This is the perfect venue for Macbeth, a dark and claustrophobic play, remarkably intimate considering it deals with the affars of Kings. After the opening scenes the witches are lurking in every shadow determining the action of the play, their spirit summoned by the haunting motif that announces their presence. Characters metamorphose from behind pillars and passageways and from within the audience, the darkness and movement conspiring to allow the play to be performed with a remarkable four actors only.

Dominic Allen was the one constant, Macbeth with an evil presence and a sarcastic smile. He was possibly too conscious of the necessity of keeping the up the pace of the production as his lines were delivered slightly too quickly to allow easy comprehension in a difficult space with the shifting audience. He should have followed the lead of James Wilkes' Lady Macbeth, whose pace and delivery was, to my mind, perfect. Wilkes and the other cast members metamorphose easily from one character to another with blood and shadows. The cleverly cut and rearranged text telescopes the action into a mere ninety minutes (farewell to the Porter and to a large part of the interminable scene with Duncan and MacDuff in England). The effect is not to uncover previously unexpored aspects of the play, but to heighten and sharpen the theatrical experience.

The success of companies such as Punchdrunk have made these types of production very popular. They don't always succeed as there is a necessary compromise between comprehensibility, directorial intential and immersive experience. This is as much about the audience's overall experience as the play itself. However Belt Up Theatre succeeded in keeping a young audience largely engrossed and terrified in equal measure in this atmospheric and intelligent production.

Film Review : The King's Speech (dir Tom Hooper)

2011-04-29T11:53:00.000+01:00

Being almost the last person in the country to have seen The King’s Speech, there is very little that one can say that has not already been said. The film is as finely shot a period piece as one would expect from Tom Hooper, full of browns and sepia tints. David Siedler’s screenplay tugs all the correct emotional strings as a Good Man triumphs over Adversity, the prince and the commoner (Australian to boot!) reach a mutual understanding in the face of a hostile establishment and save the country from Naziism. Colin Firth gives a bravura representation of the stammering King George VI (although personally I thought the subtler registers of A Single Man was a finer performance), Geoffrey Rush as speech therapist Lionel Logue was superb as ever, and Helena Bonham-Carter played Helena Bonham-Carter as though she was born to be Queen.

If I sound a bit off with the film I don’t mean to be – I enjoyed it thoroughly, and haven’t seen any film in the past year which I felt could seriously challenge it for the honours it has won. I do think however that there is one aspect of the screenplay which demand deeper analysis – namely, in a period film based on true events to what extent is the writer justified in altering the facts in the interest of heightening the emotional impact of the drama?

Certainly, altering dramatic facts has an exemplary pedigree. Shakespeare played fast and loose with his historical sources: telescoping events, altering characterisations, changing the whole nature of historical incidents, and no-one denied him the right to his dramatic licence. In The King’s Speech, all the above devices are used for dramatic impact. Is this justified?

There is a compact implied between the Director and the Audience whereby certain genres deliver certain degrees of historical accuracy. So, for example, the restrictions of the theatrical form necessarily imply an interpretative freedom even though the playwright is scrupulously remaining true to the facts as he sees them – as you can see in some of the works of David Hare, for example. On the other hand, documentary – when not being subverted by the likes of Chris Morris – implies a faithfulness to the facts no matter how they are represented. In these post-modern times, markers traditionally set out by the director by which the audience can evaluate the level of historical veracity which has been employed in developing a storyline no longer can be trusted. However, The King’s Speech sets out to convince the audience that its story is true through its preamble, its realistic style, its grainy brown filters, its strong anchors in recognisable characters and events and even in its metafilm – its marketing and pre-publicity.

Yet facts have been altered for dramatic purposes [facts taken from the wikipedia article on The King's Speech section on historical accuracy]. Contrary to the timelines in the film, the then-Duke of York commenced working with Lionel Logue in 1926 to his immediate benefit. The displacement of this improvement to the time of the abdication crisis in the film is non-material and makes absolute dramatic sense. Churchill is repeatedly shown fussing around government circles in 1936 when in fact he had been banished to the Wilderness at that time, for no very good reason other than the fact that he is a recognisable character. There were no applauding courtiers (unrealistic and condescending in my opinion) or cheering crowds outside Buckingham Palace after the King’s Speech – that was rather cheap emotional grandstanding on the part of the filmmakers.

However, intrinsic to the truth of the film is the nature of the relationship between Logue and the King. Logue is represented as a maverick, who used swearing as part of his therapy, and who insisted on calling the King “Bertie” and the King calling him “Lionel”. Logue’s grandson Robert claims that this is not the case. If this is indeed the case, then I feel that it destroys a critical aspect of their relationship and thus the pillars upon which the film is constructed. Without the subversion of their relationship as King and Subject, the film becomes a much less interesting speech therapy case-study.

So is it a film based on an error, and much the worse for that? Well, firstly we do not know if the recollections of Robert Logue are accurate themselves, and secondly it still succeeds as a drama, potentially ahistorical though featuring historical characters. But the filmmakers in their initial compact with the audience have implied that this is a dramatised version of the truth of George VI's relationship with his Speech Therapist, and if the fundamental facts of this relationship do not hold up then the truth itself will have been subverted. William Wallace was never Braveheart before Hollywood intervened, Krakatoa will always be East of Java, and Lionel Logue will always be remembered for encouraging Bertie to swear at the top of his voice. And it is the intrinsic truth of that relationship which is important from a dramatic point of view, not whether Churchill was present during the abdication crisis, as that is what the film is ultimately about, and if it is not true about that then the film is not being true to itself.

Theatre Review : The Tempest - Barbican Silk St Theatre (dir Declan Donnellan 11/4/11)

2011-04-12T20:01:00.000+01:00

There is a freshness at the heart of Cheek by Jowl’s earthy, physical – but always text-driven – interpretations of Shakespeare, which is why Declan Donnellan’s company is now an international powerhouse, constantly performing their repertoire of mainly classical works across the globe. This latest version of The Tempest at the Barbican Silk St Theatre, performed in Russian by the Chekhov International Festival Theatre, demonstrates Cheek by Jowl at their best.

Nick Ormerod's set is minimal, bare boards and a curved back wall with three doors. An aged, weatherbeaten Prospero (Igor Yasulovich) conjours the winds and the two side doors open to reveal little vignettes of the sailors fighting the storm. In an arresting image, the centre door opens to show Ferdinand (Yan Ilves) upside down as if he is swimming underwater. The storm subsides and Miranda (Anya Khalilulina) enters - beautiful, naïve and wild, running on two feet then crouching and crawling on all fours. However, as the stern Prospero prepares her to meet Ferdinand, his tenderness is evident as he combs her hair and tells her how he came to be on the island.

This is classic Donnellan – the set which just contains enough for the Director to use imaginatively, the physicality of the movement, the attention to the text and the true sense of the words, even if they have been cut and rearranged in their translation to Russian and back. One gets a sense of the rough rhythms of the Russian verse even whilst one is straining one’s neck to read the surtitles.

Ferdinand (Yan Ilves) piles logs (in the
form of Ariel (Andrey Kuzichev))
at the behest of Prospero

Water is a recurring theme, poured liberally around the stage. It rains on the sailors in the storm. Multi-facetted Ariel (Andrey Kuzichev), in his multiple forms, tortures Trinculo (Ilya Iliin) and Stephano (Sergey Koleshnya) by pouring water on them in ever-more imaginative ways. Miranda and Ferdinand are both cleansed in water, Miranda innocently stripping off her shirt before Caliban (Alexander Feklistov), whilst Prospero purifies Ferdinand before his marriage to his daughter.

The production pays witty homage to its Russian roots in the usually-tiresome masque scene, where Iris, Ceres and Juno are Russian peasant women joined by sickle-wielding dancers sing the praises of increased agricultural production whilst striking poses familiar from Social-Realist posters and stamps. And when Trinculo and Stephano are offered new clothes, they dress in suits and sunglasses like Russian mafiosa in a glitzy Moscow shopping mall, discovering to their delight that their credit cards work.

From being severe at outset, by the end of the play Prospero has expended his fury on those who betrayed him. He forgives the Duke his brother. He frees the faithful Ariel. And even at the end, before leaving the island, Miranda rushes back to Caliban and throws her arms around his neck. As we leave, Ariel is resting his hand on Caliban’s head in a gesture of compassion.

We have hope for those who remain on the island – perhaps more hope than for those who return to Italy. Prospero has abjured his rough magic – he must now rely on Ferdinand and the audience for succour and protection as he returns to Milan where every third thought will be of his grave. The magic and innocence of the Island has passed, he must return to so-called civilization to end his days, and we must return ourselves to the quotidian after losing ourselves in this spellbinding production.

Book Review : The Hare with Amber Eyes : A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund de Waal (Vintage 2011)

2011-03-24T14:02:00.000Z

Edmund de Waal is one of our most gifted workers in ceramics - his minimalistic works grace galleries and collections throughout the world. As a young man, he was given a scholarship to work in Japan where he was introduced to his Uncle Ignace - Iggy - and his collection of netsuke, the beautiful carved belt-toggles for kimono. These netsuke had travelled full-circle, having first been purchased by Iggy's uncle Charles Ephrussi in Paris at the end of the 19th Century. This book is the story of the netsuke - but it is also the story of a family and of the 20th Century itself. It is a work as delicate and sensitive yet tough and resilient as the netsuke themselves.

Charles Ephrussi was the youngest son of Leon, the head of the Paris branch of the Ephrussi banking family. The Ephrussi were originally a Jewish merchant family hailing from Odessa in the Crimea. Like the Rothschilds, they had successfully set up office the major cities in Europe - London, Paris and Vienna - and flourished. Charles was more interested in Art than in banking, and he became an influential writer and collector in the Parisian art world of the late 19th Century (you can see him in a top hat towards the back of Renoir's "Le Dejeuner des Canotiers"). As Japan opened up to the West, and the "devaliser" of Japan fed the craze for Japonisme which was sweeping Paris, Charles bought a collection of 264 netsuke from the dealer Philippe Sichel.

De Waal writes about the netsuke with the sensitivity of someone who works creatively with his fingers every day. He describes not only their appearance, but their feel, their texture, their balance. He believes that they must held, played with and explored by children, enjoyed daily. Charles, however, has no children, and you can sense that De Waal approves when they are given as wedding present to his cousin Viktor in Vienna, when he marries the beautiful young socialite Emmy Schey von Koromla. The netsuke end up in her dressing-room, where her children play with them as she spends interminable hours with her devoted maid Anna every day ensuring that she is dressed according to the latest fashions.

Viktor has just had the magnificent Palais Ephrussi built on the Ringstrasse, and the family seems unassailable. But the convulsions of the 20th Century are about to strike imperial Vienna. The bank fares badly in the First World War. But this is nothing compared to the horrors of Vienna for Jewish family following the Anschluss. How the netsuke survived is one remarkable part of the story.

But this is a multi-layered book - the fate of the Ephrussi family is much more poignant, and explains how the netsuke came to be owned by the son of a Church of England priest. This is a story of a collection, of a family, and of a personal search as de Waal unpeels the history of the Ephrussis and in doing so explores out what it meant to be a rich Jewish family in Middle-Europe in the 20th Century. And if this isn't enough for the reader, it is written in a most beautiful, limpid, approachable style - this book really is as much a treasure as the wonderful netsuke that it describes.

Book Review - Solar by Ian McEwan (Vintage 2011)

2011-03-20T21:30:00.000Z

In one of these bizarre decisions that International Award Ceremonies occassionally throw up, Ian McEwan, who must be the consistently feted British author of recent times, has only won the Booker Prize for fiction once, for Amsterdam - at the time McEwan's only stab at comedy, and to my mind a singularly unsuccessful one as it lacked the lacked the nuanced control which typically characterise McEwan's best novels. It was therefore with a certain amount of concern that I read that McEwan's latest novel would be another comedic venture. However I needn't have worried - this is the master back at his very best.

Michael Beard is a nobel laureate for physics, his Einstein-Beard Conflation setting out the theoretical basis for extracting energy from sunlight and water. This honour, conferred in Beard's early career, has ensured his fame, a series of comfortable sinecures, and his continuing attractiveness to women despite his small stature, expanding girth and generally unappealing nature.

As in many McEwan novels, the main character of the book, usually an urban professional, is threatened by an encounter with someone of lower professional or social status. So, as Joe Rose is threatened by Jed Parry in Enduring Love, and Henry Perowne by Baxter in Saturday, Beard is threatened by his earnest subordinate Tom Aldous in Solar. Aldous is committed to the possibilities of photovoltaics which utilise Beard's theories, and can see commercial possibilities. Unfortunately Beard is distracted by the fact that his fifth wife is having an open affair with her builder, notwithstanding the fact that in the short time since they were married Beard has managed at least eleven affairs himself, so he pays little attention to Aldous' theories, or to Aldous himself except when he returns home early from a short stay in the Arctic to find Aldous in his living room wearing his dressing gown...

Beard is a superb comic creation - a vain, arrogant, complacent, devious old lecher whilst still remarkably retaining the reader's sympathy as a generally hapless victim of the circumstances surrounding him, which are generally of his own making. He stumbles from one crisis to another, but always seems to survive, even while the forces are stacking up around him. McEwan has chosen a broad range of easy satirical targets, but does spear them quite effectively. From academic life (the social scientist who believes genes are socially constructed is superb) to the environmental movement, from the nature of celebrity to the way in which the press attacks its victims, there is nothing new in what McEwan is saying, but he does say it very elegantly and effectively. However, what humour there is revolves around Michael Beard. It is not the Press per se which is funny, but how it behaves in raising up and then tearing down Beard.

As always, McEwan's sentences are beautifully balanced, adjectives and subordinate clauses neatly packed in triplets, utilising volcabulary just too obscure to be comfortable : "But the Michael Beard of this time was a man of narrowed mental condition, anhedonic, monothematic, stricken. His fifth marriage was disintegrating and he should have known how to behave, how to take the long view, how to take the blame." Equally typical are the bravura descriptions of a complex technical subject: in Saturday it was neurosurgery, in Solar it is quantum physics, which provide a basis for complex extended metaphors throughout the book.

But don't let the prospect of difficult science deter you. This is McEwan at the top on his form, so perhaps it is understandable that this clever, funny, compassionate book never even made the Booker long list.

Book Review - Parisians : An Adventure History of Paris by Graham Robb (Picador 2010)

2011-03-12T22:55:00.000Z

Paris is like the Parisians themselves – a fascinating acquaintance, but impossible to know intimately. For a city with such an elegant, sophisticated exterior, it has a dark underbelly. Its tree-lined boulevards are little distance from the fleshpots of Pigalle. It is synonymous with art and literature and metropolitan sophistication, yet in the 1960s its Police were capable of massacring unarmed Algerian protesters, whilst Portuguese and North African immigrants scraped a living in the bidonvilles, the unofficial townships of corrugated iron which circled the city itself.

I have lived in Paris myself, I have been charmed by its history, its sense of style, its vibrancy. But you are always conscious that you are an outsider, that no matter how much you have come to terms with the language (in my case, not much) you will never understand the way the city lives and moves and breathes like les parigots themselves.

Graham Robb has known Paris for many years and recognises this problem. So in writing about the city he loves, he doesn’t attempt to compile a chronology of Parisian development. Instead he focuses on a series of vignettes, each of which turns the microscope on some tiny aspect of the “adventure history” of Paris, some of which, à la Joyce, are written in a manner appropriate to the subject and the period itself.

It is an engaging if not entirely successful approach. We learn of the reasons for the construction of the Paris catacombs under the appropriately named rue d’Enfer; of the master-criminal Vidocq who became head of the Sureté and founder of the world’s first Detective Agency; of Proust and his relationship with modern technology (although Robb cannot keep up his initial Proustian sentences); of Juliet Gréco and Miles Davis in the manner of a Nouvelle Vague filmscript.

Yet, whilst lavishly praised in other quarters, I didn’t feel that this book entirely came off. The first reason is stylistic. One feels that Robb is trying too hard to ensure that his tales are “adventures”. Subjects are obscure until the point of revelation, which, in the tale of how Napoleon lost his virginity is not until the last page of the essay. Exposition can be clotted and difficult. One needs to read and reread in order to understand what exactly has transpired – not necessarily a bad thing, but in this case it is superfluous. The stories stand by themselves. One of the best essays concerns the riots of 2007 and is written in a lucid contemporary style.

The second reason is structural. Motifs and characters, such as the rue d’Enfer or Baudelaire, recur and link the tales, yet there is a lack of a unifying theme. Paris does not emerge as a city, Parisians remain mysterious and unknowable. The stories focus largely on people of fame, power and influence – in other words, not true Parisians at all – but only on minute, peripheral, aspects of their lives. Add the mix to the stylistic variations and the result is a succession of fascinating tales, but the whole never exceeds the sum of the parts. Which is a shame since, highly engaging though this work may be, and beautifully written in places, a more conventional approach may have yielded some valuable insights.

Book Review - Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon (Vintage 2010)

2011-03-08T00:15:00.000Z

After sailing with Chums of Chance over the Olympian Heights of Pynchon's imagination in the remarkable - but formidible - Against the Day, we return in Inherent Vice to stoner California familiar from Vineland and The Crying of Lot 49.

Doc Sportello is an L.A. private investigator at the tail end of the sixties, for whom hard-bitten bourbon has been supplanted by dope in all its myriad varieties. The hippy dream is dying - Manson has struck and bombs are falling on Vietnam. Needless to say, when his ex-girlfriend turns up seeking his assistance, it means trouble. The LAPD in the shape of hippy-hating Bigfoot Bjornsen has its eyes on Doc, as have the Feds and some neo-nazi bikers whilst in the background the mysterious and terrifying Golden Fang unites the sinister forces of organised crime and dentistry, optimising heroin's vertical supply chain by supplying both the drugs and the drying-out clinics.

To try to summarise the twists and turns of the plot that follows would be beyond me, and would be missing the point anyway. The plots of the hard-bitten genre which this satirises were never great on the plausibility front - noir was all atmosphere and attititude, and Pynchon is not about plot either, as anyone who has tried and failed to make head nor tail of V will tell you. Pynchon is all about the journey - a paranoid, dope-fuelled, character-filled flight with the instruments of State repression and international conspiracy networks in hot pursuit.

This is undoubtedly Pynchon's most accessible work since Vineland. No need to understand the Riemann Hypothesis here, most of the action takes place in a planer dimension, albeit one that has been warped by a vast quantity of dope. In fact, one could almost say that the novel, whilst undoubtedly entertaining - and with these flashes of incandescent prose that are such a Pynchonesque trademark - lacks a certain substance. But Pynchon's works in general are like the songs of Bob Dylan post-1965 - anyone digging too deeply for meaning will find much material to excavate but much frustration and disappointment. Yes, the works all cross-reference each other (The Corvairs play in both Vineland and Inherent Vice), and the countercultural references keep an army of dedicated wikiists busy for months after each new tome (see the splendid Inherent Vice wiki alongside those of all the other Pynchon novels) - but is this a triumph of dizzying, mind-blowing style over any real substance?

No matter. Doc Sportello for his myriad faults is a splendid creation, and this rollicks along, frequently laugh-out-loud funny. The name of each new walk-on character is a pleasure - see Trillium Fortnight, Burke Stodger for example. The Warriors Against the Man Black Armed Militia (WAMBAM) are Pynchon's creation, but the LAPD's Public Disorder Intelligence Department (PDID) really did exist, although not in the Pynchon form of P-DIDdies. The story careers along with too many characters and subplots and conspiracies to make much sense, but is always exhilirating nonetheless. There is a hint of melancholy that times will change, the forces of conservatism and repression are winning, but whilst the journey is underway - just sit down, skin up and enjoy the ride.

Book Review - Listen To This by Alex Ross (Fourth Estate 2010)

2011-02-20T22:43:00.000Z

The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross won the Guardian First Book prize in 2008 and a National Book Critic's Circle award, which was a remarkable achievement given that his subject matter was the forbidding realm of 20th Century classical music. And this wasn't just Elgar and Sibelius and Shostakovich's more tuneful bits, but an uncompromising exploration of the 12-tone revolution through Schoenberg, Berg and Webern through Boulez and Messiaen to Ligeti and beyond. Elgar never even got a mention. Yet Ross writes like an angel, as befits the music critic of the New Yorker, and the stories of the the composers themselves and the works they created were always fascinating, and there can be no higher recommendation than the fact that he persuaded me to listen and appreciate (if not always enjoy) some very daunting and difficult 20th Century classical music.

His new book is less ambitious. It is largely a collection of essays from the New Yorker covering all aspects of music - mainly classical, but also rock, folk and blues. The spacious New Yorker format is ideal for detailed explorations of subjects ranging from Brahms to Bjork, allowing Ross the scope to range backwards and forwards across the history of his subject.

His standard formula is in many ways symphonic. To take his insightful piece on Radiohead for example - he develops his theme by describing how he followed Radiohead on tour for several days, during which time he interviews the members of the band and allows their portraits to be developed. But then he looks back at the history of the band and how their music has developed, all with the keen eye of the classical critic, examining their rhythmic structures and how their typical compositions orientate around "pivot points". At various points he recapitulates his main theme of the tour, finally climaxing at a concert in Radiohead's home town of Oxford. Fans will find much more in this essay than in many back-numbers of NME.

The book is not restricted to artists. Ross writes passionately about the Marlboro Retreat, and about the fate of music education in schools. In a keynote essay at the start, he traces the development of the Spanish Dance called the Chicona, and of how it intersects with a four-note descending bass line called the Basso Lamento which can be found everywhere from Monteverdi to Led Zeppelin. He then skillfully points out in passing in his essays on Mozart, Brahms and Bob Dylan how the Basso Lamento keeps reappearing throughout musical history.

One of the particular pleasures of this book, especially for a non-musical expert like myself, is an accompanying website which has multiple clips highlighting many of the aspects that he is talking about, from the difference between a Chicona and a Passacaglia to the difference between an early cylinder and disc recording. When wanting to understand what he means by a chromatic basso lamento, there is an example from Cavalli's opera Didone. And if, having listened to a short clip, you realise that John Dowland's Lachrymae of 1600 not only has a basso lamento, but is also one of the most ravishingly beautiful pieces of music ever written, then you can always turn to Spotify to listen to the whole work.

For that is the pleasure of the book - it takes the trouble to explain but it also entertains.The pen portraits are beautifully drawn but at the heart of the book is music, and Alex Ross's enthusiasm for his subject is encapsulated in the title - Listen to This. He wants you to understand so you can go to artists like Mozart and Bob Dylan who may be familiar, or to Bjork or John Luther Adams who may be less so, and to listen and to appreciate and to enjoy. In this he has succeeded admirably.

Book Review - Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (Fourth Estate 2010)

2011-02-10T22:49:00.002Z

Website The Millions voted Jonathan Franzen's last book, The Corrections, as Book of the Decade "by a landslide", and there are certainly few new books that I have read in the last ten years which have made such an impact on me personally. The problem for any author having had such a widely acclaimed success is how to follow it up. Jonathan Franzen has succeeded nine years on by writing a book the form of which draws on much what made "The Corrections" so memorable, but by investing it with a content which once again dissects the American family, however this time the family are liberal environmentalists in George W Bush's America.

The Corrections looked at the State of the Nation through the lives of a Mid-Western family gathering together for Christmas at the behest of the their elderly mother as their father declines through Parkinson's disease. Freedom is similar in many respects. The Bergland family live in Minnesota. They are younger than the Lamberts, their children being of college age. Needless to say, all is not well - mother Patty's behaviour is becoming more and more strained, less able to relate to idealistic liberal conservationist husband Walter. Son Joey has hooked up with the daughter of the Bergland's poor republican next-door neighbours, and is showing distressing right-wing tendencies himself.

Matters come to a head when Walter's former college room-mate, Richard Katz, now himself a priapic angst-ridden musician for whom Patty always held a flame, comes to stay. However the only person that Katz truly loves and respects is Walter, and this impacts in turn how he relates to Patty.

Franzen's great skill is his ability to dissect relationships, how human beings succeed or fail in interacting with each other. There is a compelling logic to the way in which all characters behave, no matter how extreme or how bizarre. This is coupled with an acute authoral sensibility which shines a piercing searchlight into the psyches of his characters. You cannot read a Franzen book without some painful pangs of recognition. And yet, this is not some overwrought angstfest. Franzen observes with humour and a wryness of tone. His tongue isn't quite in his cheek, but his eyebrow may be raised.

We therefore understand in detail, beautifully observed, the origins of Patty's neuroses, her relationship with her family, and how and why she felt as she did about both Walter and Katz. Structurally, a large part of the book is Patty's autobiography written at the behest of her therapist - but we also get to understand what is in the minds of Katz and Walter and the Berglund children.

In what is the only false tone in the book, Walter gives up his Minnesota conservancy job for one in Washington trying to preserve the habitat of the Cerulean Warbler through Mountaintop Removal at the behest of a dodgy Texan with links to Cheney and Mineral Extraction Rights in West Virginia. This is an excuse for some rough satire, like the Lithuanian episode in The Corrections. Franzen's jaundiced view of Capitalism neocon-style may is both funny and acute, but the satire is a sideshow once again to the impact of Walter's work on the family dynamic.

By the end of the book, the main characters' flaws have been laid bare. You sympathise deeply, despite these flaws, because you understand who they are and where they have come from and what made them what they are (needless to say, Philip Larkin was right all along). Yet this is not a work of introspection - you have been entertained throughout through simple, balanced prose and the occasional sentence to die for ("From a distance of many parsecs, he heard her start crying").

And Patty wasn't the only one - I was snivelling on the train as the book came to an end, because you really do care for what the future holds for the Berglunds. Jonathan Franzen has succeeded triumphantly - he has managed the almost impossible task of writing a book as good as The Corrections.

Book Review - Nemesis by Philip Roth (Jonathan Cape 2010)

2011-01-30T15:14:00.001Z

It is 1944. Bucky Cantor is a 23 year old Playground Director in Weequahic, the Jewish quarter of Newark, New Jersey. A polio epidemic is spreading through the city. Cantor is dedicated to his job and to his charges, who in turn idolise him. Poor eyesight has prevented him from enlisting with his friends, much to his distress, as he is brave, athletic and dutiful. When Italian roughnecks come to the Playground "spreadin' polio" Cantor faces up to them and forces them to leave.

But polio does come to Weequahic and fatally strikes some of the children of the Playground. Panic spreads around the community. Cantor dutifully visits the anguished families of the bereaved. When he is asked by the family of Alan Michaels to come to his funeral he does so, despite that not being his original intention. This impulsiveness and willingness to oblige is the fatal flaw in an otherwise exemplary young man. Later, as the epidemic strengthens, his girlfriend pressurises him to foresake his job with the Playground as she has obtained a vacancy for his at an idyllic Summer Camp in the mountains far away from the polio epidemic. Should Bucky Cantor turn his back on the children of the playground in the face of the epidemic and take an easy option to be with his girlfriend?

This is not a long book, no more than a novella, with a single theme from which it never deviates. Yet it is remorseless, challenging, terrible. Like no other book I have read for a very long time it sets out the nature of fate, of responsibility, of contingency. To what extent is Bucky Cantor's future, and the future of those around him, determined by his actions, by his understanding of the nature of duty and by his weakness. And what is the role of God smiting the good and the worthless indiscriminately with this terrible disease. Is he in actual fact an "evil genius?"

Philip Roth's prose is simple and direct, using the heatwave to develop a sense of claustrophobia in the city in which the polio can fester, and contrasting that with the freshness of the mountain camp. There is very little that is superfluous, so the few descriptive passages make a big impact. The story is so simple, so basic, that the denouement strikes you with the force of a train. Looking back, you realise that you have been manipulated by a master at the top of his game. Economy, directness, impact. This short book will stay with you for a long long time.

Book Review - Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd (Bloomsbury 2010)

2011-01-29T22:20:00.000Z

William Boyd's books seem to follow intermittent themes. First there were the books picking out eclectic passages from Africa where he was born - A Good Man in Africa exploring colonial life and An Ice Cream War following the little-known engagements in East Africa during World War One. Brazzaville Beach demonstrated his ability to engage on deeper themes, as it explored Chaos theory and the parallels between aggressive behaviour in Chimpanzees and in humans. It was one of three ambitious middle novels - the others being The New Confessions and Any Human Heart, the life-stories of characters involved in movie-making and Art Criticism respectively - which seemed to set him out as one of our most important chroniclers.

Yet, latterly, his attention seems to have focussed on a series of less-weighty but intelligent and finely-crafted thrillers. His last book, Restless, was a page-turning tale of espionage and duplicity set during the second world war, and his latest novel, Ordinary Thunderstorms, has many parallels with Armadillo, his highly-successful TV adapted work of 1998, both being set in London and featuring the quirky hero being pitched into a dark and dangerous world of greed and violence.

Ordinary Thunderstorms is the story of Adam Kindred, a research climatologist who, through no fault of his own, on the run in London pursued by the Police, a multinational pharmaceutical company and a psychopathic hit-man. He joins the ranks of the homeless and has to rely on his wits and London's underclasses in order to stay alive and to clear his name.

Boyd's main interest seems to be the extent to which a man can disappear in a City like London, and then recreate an identity which allows him to recreate a new life. Kindred drops out of sight by living rough, switching off his mobile phone and not using credit cards. Vladimir obtains a dead man's passport, and through that a credit card and a job. Turpin has multiple wives and lifes. Mhouse has simply changed her name. Kindred becomes successively John1603 and Primo Belem.

Undoubtedly, this is a taut, exciting thriller which engages the reader from the start to an extent that belief in the improbabilities of the plot to be - as is traditional in the genre - suspended. The biggest improbability is in the basic premise, that an intelligent lawabiding citizen when confronted by a body in a room and a hitman in pursuit of him should decide that the best course of action is to sleep rough in Chelsea. Once one has come to terms with this, it is a small step to believe in Kindred's unlikely romances, the fortunate death of Vladimir and only a small leap to find credible the excesses that a multinational pharmaceutical company would go to to ensure a profitable drugs launch.

Boyd as ever writes with style and economy. If Ian McEwan were to introduce a research climatologist as main character, then by the end of the novel we would be fully immersed in the vocabulary of the profession. Boyd, however, limits himself to making some passing references to cloud formations and an explaination of the title of the novel. Vocabulary - apart from a passing reference to borborygi (stomach rumbles to you and me) - is generally stripped down. He can't resist his occassional authorly jokes, however. Drugs company head Ingram Fryzer shares his name with the murderer of Christopher Marlow. Zembla appears in Nabokov's Pale Fire and John 1603 is the most quoted verse in the bible.

Yet for all its pace and elegance of execution, one cannot help thinking that Boyd is writing well within himself. It is as if he has set himself a target of dashing off a genre thriller with certain stylistic parameters. It is well-written and enjoyable as all William Boyd novels are. The plot twists, whilst not always believable, are always satisfying. The picture of London's underclass is as threatening as that of the drugs companies is improbable. The denouement is neat. It would make a great film, and Boyd is an accomplished screenwriter so he might have had this in mind. But that's for the pension fund - one can't help think that William Boyd is still capable of much more significant works than this.

Art Review : Gauguin : Maker of Myth (Tate Modern 14/1/11)

2011-01-24T20:33:00.000Z

"Gauguin : Maker of Myth" which recently closed at Tate Modern was apparently the Tate's most popular exhibition ever, which underlines Gauguin's resonance with the British public. The reasons for his visual appeal are immediately apparent - his exotic themes, his big bold colours and senuous lines, paintings which are mysterious yet accessible. Yet part of the appeal is also Gauguin the man : the stockbroker who took up painting, who quarrelled with Vincent van Gogh and then set sail forever to live and paint surrounded by scantily-clad Tahitian beauties in his South Sea Island paradise.

Yet the story of Gauguin the man is in part one of his most careful artistic creations, part-truth and part self-mythologising, a complement to his work on canvas. The object of this magnificently conceived and curated exhibition is to demonstrate the extent to which the paintings can only be understood in the context of Gauguin's self-projection, and that his life is an integral part of his art.

Gauguin's early works are unremarkable - a talented impressionist, closely mimicking the syle of his mentor Camille Pissarro. The stock-market crash of 1882 persuaded him to take to painting full-time, but his circumstances declined rapidly and he moved from Paris to Rouen to reduce his living expenses. Shortly after, his Danish wife Mette returned to her family in Copenhagen and he was free to follow his artistic inclinations.

Vegetation Tropicale
by Paul Gaugin (1887)
National Gallery of Scotland

Autumn in Glencairn
by James Paterson (1887)
National Gallery of Scotland

Gauguin liked to portray himself a savage, part-Inca. In actual fact he was born in Paris but brought up in Paru to where his father travelled in exile following the revolutions of 1848. In 1887 he sailed to Panama and Martinique where he had his first close experience of native life in the French overseas colonies. But his paintings at this time are unremarkable, demonstrably Impressionist in origin, they display the flat perspectives and broad patches of colour of naturalists like Bastien-Lepage and his followers, such as the Glasgow Boys.

Le Pardon de Pont-Aven
by Emile Bernard (1888)
Private Collection

Vision of the Sermon
(Jacob wrestling with the Angel)
By Paul Guguin (1888)
National Gallery of Scotland

It is not until he returns to Brittany in 1888 that his work transforms. He starts to work with Emile Bernard, and his style transforms under his influence. Compare Gauguin's work to the left with Vegetation Tropicale above, carried out the year before, and with Emile Bernard's work opposite. Bernard had been a student of decorative art, and his theories of Cloisonnism (bold shapes divided by dark outlines) were already well develloped when he started to work with Gauguin. As Bernard also experimented with religious symbolism in his works, his influence on Gauguin's mature style seems very apparent to me, and if there is one shortcoming in this exhibition it is that this thread of influence is underrecognised (This idea is developed at length on the Emile Bernard wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Bernard .) It seems to want Gauguin's genius to come wholly from within him which is not the case.

In 1891, Gauguin set sail to Tahiti for the first time, by when he had met Stéphane Malarmé and become heavily imbued with Symbolist ideology. Where this exhibition excels is in its juxtaposition of Gauguin's writings and paintings, which clearly demonstrates the extent to which he viewed his output as a Gesamtkunstwerk. Motifs, such as Ondine the swimming nymph or Oviri the savage, are sketched, printed, sculpted and reproduced in paintings. Typically, Gauguin supplies an allusive or teasing title for his paintings, often in Tahitian, hinting at the meaning of the whole.

To take an example, his painting Te Nave Nave Fanua contains a motif of what appears to be a naked maiden plucking a flower. Closer examination shows a lizard whispering in her ear - the title means "The Delightful Land" and the painting can thus be interpreted as a representation of the Fall of Eve. The exhibition shows how is motif is repeated in prints, watercolours, always with attendant lizard, and finally in his most significant literary work, Noa Noa, his travelogue with etchings which tells of his time in Tahiti combined with folk tales and the work of the Symbolist poet Charles Morice.

Which leads me to a couple of pedantic points. In the otherwise splendid catalogue, Noa Noa is translated as "Fragrant." (Catalogue Pg 37). However, wikipedia lists Noa as meaning "free" in Hawaiian, or "free from tapu or restraint" in Maori. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noa . The translation of Noa Noa as "fragrance" comes from Gauguin himself - but he is both unreliable narrator and translator. It would be in character if his intention was to emphasise the "free" aspect of Noa, but chose to diguise it, to place a poetic slant on it. On another pedantic point, the Norwegian tankard shown is not a "Tine" (catalogue Pg 93), which is a Norwegian carved ornamental box with a handle.

Nevermore O Tahiti
by Paul Gauguin (1897)
The Courtauld Gallery London

However, the great pleasure of this show, and a reason for its success, is that one can examine the main themes in detail, but there are sufficient great works which can be enjoyed simply for themselves. Look into the face of the girl in Nevermore O Tahiti. Is she sad, is she sulking? What are the women saying - is the girl listening? And what is that clunky badly-drawn raven doing with the ominous Poe reference in the title? Add the colours of the girl, the sumtuous curved line of the small of her back and paterns of the pareo - a complex, beguiling, beautiful masterpiece - and there are many more.

You can enjoy his exquisite late works, explore the man, his myth, his art at whatever level you want. And if you want to avoid overcrowding at Art Galleries, then curators will have to strive to ensure that shows aren't as good as this one.

Theatre Review : Small Hours by Lucy Kirkwood and Ed Hime - Hampstead Downstairs (dir Katie Mitchell 17/1/11)

2011-01-18T00:04:00.001Z

The audience is restricted to 25 for this intimate site-specific piece in the Hampstead Theatre's Michael Frayn space. One is asked to take off one's shoes, and sit on the furniture around the edge the living room of an undistinguished IKEA-furnished flat.

A woman stands up, sniffing. One immediately suspects that she may have an issue with 25 newly released pairs of feet, but, no, she sprays some perfume into the centre of the room. One of the benefits of the claustrophobic staging is that one can smell the cheap perfume.

Something is disturbing her. She turns on the radio - Severe weather warning in Scotland. She phones but rings off - after all, it is about 3am in the morning. Someone calls her - father? boyfriend? She says no I don't have a boyfriend. Does he want to go to see The Social Network this weekend? We're only getting half this conversation.

She rings off, disturbed. She slowly and carefully puts her make-up on (at 3am - before going to bed? - no, she's putting her coat on. So is she going for a walk? Is she on the game?) and is about to go out when a baby cries. Is it her baby? She wouldn't go out and leave the baby? Would she? She ignores its cries - but, wait, she's going to it, and returns with a nappy sack. She sniffs again and sprays her perfume - is that baby's nappy I can smell now, or is that autosuggestion?

To say much more would give the game away - suffice to say that the director is Katie Mitchell, so she is a master at using sound to create unsettling tension. Noises we cannot ignore - telephones, babies' cries, Chemical Brothers cranked up at an unfeasible hour in the morning (turn it down think of the neighbours we shout inwardly - no, don't put it on again...).

This is a portrait of isolation - the woman (played by Sandy McDade with proper restraint in her despair) is by herself in the small hours apart from her loved ones, failing to cope. What her backstory is we never know. Fill in the gaps from the hints provided. What has pushed her to the edge? - again we don't know. What is the resolution? It is left ambiguous.

Is this a worthwhile piece of experimental theatre? Undoubtedly yes. The claustrophobic staging is an integral part of the theatrical experience, immersing the audience into the sights, sounds and smells of the woman's flat. But did it work as drama? To a certain extent. For a piece that lasts only an hour it has its longueurs, and its finale is so underplayed that there is a temptation to say is that it? But it is a play that reverberates as one reflects upon it - the unanswered questions, the heightening tension, the soundscape, the ambiguous conclusion - and as I sit here writing this review I realise that Katie Mitchell has got to me once again.

Book Review : Fool's Gold : How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe by Gillian Tett (Abacus 2010) / Whoops! Why everyone owes and no one can pay by John Lanchester (Penguin 2010) / Too Big to Fail : Inside the battle to save Wall Street by Andrew Ross Sorkin (Penguin 2010)

2011-01-16T21:24:00.000Z

Syndicalist philospher Georges Sorel writes about Social Myths which may or may not be true, but act on a class or a group as a spur to action. For early Christians it was the prospect of the imminent return of Christ and for Syndicalists it was the General Strike which would herald a Socialist revolution. He writes in his Letter to Halevy that "People who are living in this world of "myths," are secure from all refutation; this has led many to assert that Socialism is a kind of religion" (www.historyguide.org/europe/sorel.htm)

To this, Sorel could have added the Capitalists have their own myth, their own irrefutable doctrine that acts as a spur to action - that of a belief in the self-regulating nature of the markets in an environment free from regulatory interference. Now this may be true in the austere pages of economic textbooks, but generally such doctrines are underpinned by assumptions such as rational individuals making decisions based on perfect knowledge in a perfect market place. However, in reality, the rational individuals are characterised by greed and stupidity, knowledge is partial and monopolostic / monopsonistic powers hold sway over the marketplaces. The result is that markets in capitalist economies boom and crash as the tides ebb and flo and the Earth circles the sun.

However, in certain quarters there is a collective denial of the need for effective regulatory control of the excesses of the market - a quasi-religious belief in the face of all rational evidence that the markets were not only efficient but self-correcting - a denial, that is, until the Credit Crunch of 2007-9.

Now that the dust is settling on the Crunch, another mini-boom is underway - benign admittedly when compared with the excesses of expansion of Credit which characterised the early years of this century. This boom is in books from economics commentators, journalists and insiders all seeking to explain where it all went so horribly wrong, and point out what must be done to avoid repetition.

John Lanchester is an author who sought to understand for himself what was happening as the background to a novel, and discovered a more interesting story than the one he was writing. He takes a broad view and explains the concepts involved from first principles with wit, clarity and anger. If you don't know your CDSs from your CDOs then this is the place to start.

Lanchester's point is that effective legislation could have prevented the catastrophe, but that this was antithetical to the idealogues in Western governments, and to the major financial institutions themselves who were raking it in. He points out that Canada never had to bail out any banks, but had the tightest regulatory framework, the highest capital requirements, an insistance that those mortgaging over 80% of the value of their homes had insurance - and growth of 11% pa since 2004 compared with 5% in the US of A.

Gillian Tett of the Financial Times has consistently been the most readable and astute of the commentators on the crisis. In Fool's Gold, she looks at the origins of the crisis from the persective of the JPMorgan Investment Bank where Credit derivitives were first devised, but which missed out on the excesses of the boom as it stuck to its principles in risk management. This in turn has enabled it to become the world's leading investment bank as it emerges from the crash much stronger than its competitors.

Tett locates a fundamental problem as being how financial companies dealt with Super-Senior risk left over from the production of synthetic CDOs. Whilst JPMorgan continued to offset the Super-Senior risk, other companies as the Credit frezy set in retained this on their books or passed it on to undercapitalised monoline insurers or AIG. As a result, bankers at JPMorgan couldn't understand how other companies continued to make such strong returns, so they restricted their CDO pipeline thus limiting their exposure to the market.

The basic sound idea behind CDOs was that they allowed the dispersion of risk throughout the banking system. However, all the financial models which measured this dispersion were predicated on limited mortgage defaults in few localities. No-one had predicted systematic mortgage default across the country. But lax regulation - despite the unhappy memories of the Savings and Loans crisis in the 1980s - had allowed greed and stupidity to predominate. Mortgages were being sold to people who hadn't the abilty to repay them, but the sellers didn't care as their risk was being immediately sold on and rebundled by the banks within their mortgage-backed CDOs. However, when default rates started to hit 15%, then the concentration ratios started to change and Super-Senior dept was no longer impregnable. Tett tells the story with verve and clarity

The fall of Lehmans and its aftermath is the subject of Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big To Fail. Ross Sorkin charts the financial world trip to the edge of the abyss with a dizzying array of insider details. It reads like a thriller as it charts minute by minute the efforts firstly of Dick Fuld in trying to shore up Lehmans, and then the Fed and the US Treasury as they try to shore up Western capitalism. It is an astonishing piece of work, setting out in detail why Lehmans was allowed to fail, but AIG had to be saved, and how close to the precipice we had really come.

But whilst starting from different positions and looking from different perspectives, all three authors are agreed on one thing - the banking system has still not taken fully on board the lessons of the crash, and regulators are lagging in ensuring that the next economic cycle does not repeat the whole sorry story over again. We can list the crashes - secondary banking, Russian defaults, Internet bubble, Credit crunch. Yet markets are climbing once again bouyed by rock-bottom interest rates, quantitative easing and a commodities boom led by China. Yet as the Chinese economy starts to overheat and the Chinese government contemplate interest rate rises, and Euro sovereign debt concerns remain, and inflation grows and government cutbacks threaten a double-dip recession, we ask the question - is the self-regulating market mechanism the most efficient way we have to manage the scarce resources at our disposal, or is it a pure leap of blind faith?

Book Review : The Shadow of the Sun by A.S. Byatt (Vintage 1991, first published Chatto & Windus 1964)

2011-01-10T00:16:00.001Z

First novels seem to fall largely into two camps - those which spring fully-formed from their authors heads, usually after a prolonged gestation and which often turn out to be amongst the author's most significant work, and these tentative works of young authors which show glimpses of promise and even of genius but display a gaucheness of youth which disappears in the mature works of the writer. Northanger Abbey, for example, is not much more than a romantic gothic romp by a talented young author. The misanthropic William Crimsworth in The Professor by Charlotte Bronte has an uncertainty of characterisation which is absent from her later work.

Some authors, especially those whose work appeared in episodic form, slowly find their feet over the course of the novel. The first hundred pages of Sir Walter Scott's Waverley are virtually unreadable. Dickens' The Pickwick Papers starts uncertainly and doesn't really take off until Pickwick engages the services of Sam Weller in the third monthly serialised episode.

To various degrees, The Shadow of the Sun falls between the types described above. It had a long gestation. Its first draft had been written between 1954 and 1957 when Antonia Byatt was an undergraduate, but it wasn't published until 1964.

It has a certain gaucheness in characterisation. Henry Severall the self-absorbed author is believable, but his march for days through the wilderness, swimming through lakes and sleeping under the stars, is not - and his eventual reappearance in front of the car driven by Oliver and Anna is not in keeping with the tone of the book. The female characters, as one might expect, are perceptively drawn, even the intense and difficult Anna. Oliver, however, has walked out from that part of central-casting marked small man with massive chip about his working-class background. He is not a likable character, and never really comes to life until the second half of the novel.

To a large extent, the novel reads as if it was written in two parts. The first half is weak, full of coincidence and uncertain characterisation. By the second part, however, Byatt's acute sensibility has kicked in. The disintegration of Margaret is finely drawn, as is Lady Hughes-Winterton, the matriarch who is wise enough not quite to trust Anna for her darling son.

But the biggest gap for fans of A.S. Byatt is the lack of ideas and major themes. This is a sensitive novel of relationships, and whilst there are references to Lawrence and others the big ideas must wait for later. However it is clear that this is a young novelist of considerable power, who can write fine descriptive passages, with a keen and shrewd understanding of human nature, and the ability to unpick emotions. Whilst this is not a great novel, it demonstrates that there is much more to come from A.S. Byatt.

Art Review : Pioneering Painters - The Glasgow Boys (Royal Academy 31/12/10)

2011-01-09T20:09:00.001Z

The Glasgow Boys was not a formal movement like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but a number of loose groups of artists based around Glasgow from around 1880 to 1890, and who exhibited at the Glasgow Institute Annual exhibition in 1885 and in London at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1890 rather than at the Royal Academy of Scotland in Edinburgh. This splendid exhibition, which has transferred from the Kelvingove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow to the Royal Academy in London, tracks their influences and development from 1880 through to their final absorbtion into the artistic establishment at the turn of the century.

Their style was not homogenous - however, there were certain themes which predominated. They were realists, rejecting the classical academic tradition. The earlier Boys were strongly influenced by the Barbizon School, painting poor countryfolk and rural scenes en plein air before finishing their works in the studio. Jules Bastien-Lepage was their exemplar, his naturalism having proved popular and widely exhibited in Scotland. From him, they absorbed the looser brushwork and flat tonalities that are typical of their early work. This is exemplified in James Guthrie's early work "A Funeral Service in the Highlands", where the grey funereal tones remind one of the similarly Barbizon-influenced Hague School.

To Pastures New by James Guthrie
Aberdeen Art Gallery

However the grey tones were not typical. Bastien-Lepage taught that one had to immerse oneself in the communities that you wished to paint, and this proved extremely influential. Guthrie, Walton and Crawhall painted together at Crowland in Lincolnshire where the attraction was the consistency of the light rather than the rapidly changing skyscapes of the West Coast. "To Pastures New" by Guthrie captures the openness of the Lincolnshire sky as the deftly drawn young gooseherd concentrates hard whilst leading her flock across the wide picture frame. But surprisingly, this scene was only sketched in Lincolnshire and worked up during the winter at Guthrie's studio in Helensburgh.

In 1883,Guthrie, Walton and Crawhall went for the summer to Cockurnspath in Berwickshire, which was to be come a regular favorite of the Boys. They would be joined over the next few years by George Henry, EA Walton, Arthur Melville and Alexander Roche amongst others. In this period, Henry and Walton's work - following Bastien-Lepage- becomes flatter, more concerned with composition and the effects of light, whilst Guthrie's "Schoolmates" reminds me of the more traditional compostions of Millet.

Whilst Barbizon was a major influence, several of the Glasgow Boys, including Melville, Roche, Lavery and Dow, spent some summers in nearby Grez-sur-Loing, which had the advantages of being cheaper and easier to get to. A large international artists community was based there, and William Stott of Oldham in particular was an influence on those who painted there. John Lavery spent the summers of 1883 and 1884 there, but when he returned to Glasgow he saw Guthrie's "To Pastures New" which influenced him to remain in Scotland, where he brought his skills increasingly to document the emerging Glaswegian middle classes and in particular the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1888.

The Druids : Bringing in the Mistletoe
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum

Meanwhile, other influences was brought to bear. Japanese woodblock prints were in vogue, popularised by Whistler and familiar in Glasgow through the influential Art dealer Alexander Reid. George Henry and EA Hornel were most deeply influenced by Japanese art, and, from their studio in Kirkudbright in Galloway, their openness to an eclectic range of influences resulted in the most dramatic - though least typical - work of the Glasgow Boys. "The Druids - Bringing in the Mistletoe" combines naturalism in the heads of the Galloway Cows, pictish and celtic iconography in the robes of the druids, and the symbolism of Gustaphe Moreau.

Henry and Hornel travelled to Japan in 1893. By this time the work of the Glasgow Boys had been successfully exhibited in London and then at the Munich Glaspalast. From then on, success came easily for the leading Boys. Guthrie and Lavery became established as society portraitists. Crawhall became the leading exponent of gouache on linen (to my mind "Horse and Cart with Lady" is unequalled). Arthur Melville's watercolours have a richness of colour and fluidity of technique which is breathtaking. But by this time the Boys had progressed beyond their origins. Each had their own individual style which would lead some of them to success in the 20th Century.

Book Review - The Children's Book by A.S Byatt (Chatto & Windus 2009)

2011-01-01T21:39:00.001Z

In 1895, Philip Warren, a young runaway from poverty in the Potteries, is found hiding in the bowels of what would become the Victoria & Albert Museum, sketching the Gloucester Candlestick. Fortunately, when the child is brought to the Special Keeper of Precious Metals, Prosper Cain, he is meeting with esteemed author of children's books, Olive Wellwood, who offers to take the boy to find work for him.

Thus, in an introduction which could have come from any number of turn-of-the-century children's books, is Philip Warren introduced to the Wellwoods and their sprawling family, and through them to the household of the temperamental potter, Benedict Fludd, to whom he is apprenticed. The Wellwoods are Fabians, and their social set includes anarchist emigrees from Eastern Europe, bohemian puppet-makers from Munich, and advocates of women's liberation and free love.

The Children's Book follows the fortunes of the parents and children of these households through the end of the Victorian era to the end of the First World War. To Philip the lives of the Wellwood children seem idealised, part of wealthy and loving family, having freedom to play around Todefright, their large country house in Kent and the extensive woods that surround it. But, needless to say, all is not what it seems.

In such a large, sometimes unwieldy book there are several dynamic themes. Olive Wellwood appears to be the loving, caring mother, who has created a personal story for each of her children. But Olive is withdrawing into her own creative world and leaving the day-to-day caring for her household to her sister, Violet Grimwith. As Olive withdraws, she is less able to cater for her children's emotional needs, with tragic consequences. Olive's withdrawal is partly precipitated by the lack of emotional support from her husband, Humphry. He has left his post with the Bank of England to campaign for Fabian causes, but this is a book in which patriarchal characters are generally portrayed negatively. Humphry has left a string of illegitimate children behind him, and, when he makes a drunken pass at one of Olive's teenage daughters, he is forced to admit that he is not in fact her father.

At nearby Purchase House, Benedict Fludd's terrifying rages appear to have had a cowing effect on his family. There is a general acceptance that since Fludd is a creative genius his moods can be indulged, but, as Philip discovers when he find sexually explicit models of Fludd's daughters, his tyranny has gone much further.

The third serial exploiter of women is Herbert Methley, who we meet whilst sunbathing in the nude in his garden with his wife. Methley is an author who writes and speaks on women's rights, including their sexual rights. But Methley is only intent on seduction - once in bed he treats his women badly.

The book is also concerned with radical politics. Banker Basil Wellwood's son, Charles/Karl, mixes in German anarchist circles, but eventually prefers to study at the LSE to carrying out acts of violence. Ironically, since he has worked out his position on violence clearly in advance, refuses to fight, but becomes a red cross stretcher bearer in the First World War. Olive's daughter Hedda becomes a radical suffragete but, along with Doctor Dorothy and Fludd's abused daughter Pomona also finds a certain peace and self-realisation through her work with wounded soldiers.

Several characters pursue paralleled paths to self-realisation or self-destruction. Olive and her sister Violet have escaped from mining communities in the north to set up a prosperous household with Humphry where Olive can create her books. Philip and his sister Elsie have separately left their starving household in the Potteries to walk to the South, where Philip can create his pots. Dorothy becomes a doctor and Imogen Fludd becomes a craftswoman in spite of their respective parents. On the other hand, neither Tom nor Benedict Fludd can escape their demons.

Tom has parallels with the children of several writers of children's books of the period - the son of Kenneth Grahame (who himself worked for the Bank of England) and J.M Barry's adopted son are both thought to have killed themselves. Benedist Fludd is closely based on sculptor Eric Gill, and aspects of the Wellwood household is based on that of E Nesbitt.

Real characters from radical politics and the artitstic movements of the period take walk-on roles as Byatt builds her picture with excting attention to detail. Her background in the decorative arts is clear as the technicalities of ceramics, of Gien Faiencerie and the influence of Bernard Palissey is described in loving detail, as is the Art Nouveau of the Paris 1900 Exposition.

Byatt delights in instructing the reader, be it the radical beliefs of Munich Anarchists, or the politics of the Victoria and Albert museum, or the Back to Nature of Edward Carpenter. Several critics have complained that this is at the expense of the plot of this novel, but I disagree. When writing with such a cast of characters and on such a broad scale, the discussion of ideas and detailed descriptions of the various creative processes give the reader space both to contextualise and to absorb the reality of the relationships slowly unfolding before you. And they are all interlinked. The creative process builds and destroys the relationships, as do the radical ideas prevelant at the time.

But at heart this is a very conservative book. For all Charles/Karl's youthful flirtation with radical politics, in the end the family unit which retains its integrity to the greatest is the conventional family unit of the banker Basil Wellwood. All the others have been destroyed to a greater or lesser extent by the actions and beliefs of the parents. And when on the penultimate page Dorothy discovers that her father is Jewish, but that "it had not occurred to Dorothy to ask if her father was Jewish, and he had not felt a need to tell her" the scene is set for ideology to drive the next phase of Europe's 20th Century tragedy.

Theatre Review : Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett - Theatre Royal Haymarket (dir Sean Matthias 21/1/10)

2010-01-24T21:37:00.001Z

All these years of theatregoing yet this was my first experience of Godot, indeed of any Beckett, and unlike Godot himself it was worth the wait.

Vivian Mercier's description "a play in which nothing happens, twice" cannot be bettered. Two cantankerous old gentlemen of the road (Ian McKellen as Estragon and Roger Rees as Vladimir) waiting and bickering and contemplating the point of their existence. Their equilibium, such as it is, is disturbed by the arrival of Pozzo (Matthew Kelly) dragging Lucky (Ronald Pickup) on the end of a rope. Then they leave. The next day, Lucky is dragging a blind Pozzo. Godot never arrives.

Reality is fractured, shifting. Vladimir and Estragon don't know what Godot looks like, or why they are waiting for him. Pozzo can't remember meeting them the day before. Estragon can't remember their meeting either, although he bears the marks where Lucky had kicked him. Vladimir thinks that the tree has sprouted leaves overnight, but Estragon cannot remember.

It may be nihilistic, but it's never bleak. "That passed the time" says Vladimir. "It would have passed in any case" retorts Estragon, wanly. The absurdity is well-judged - amusing yet alienating, never overplayed.

The cast is excellent. Roger Rees and Ian McKellen handle the dialogue well with sure timing in this preview production, Rees' Vladimir has energy and traces of optimism but lacked force of delivery. He is upstaged by McKellen who manages to elicit an indefinable sadness from Estragon whose memory is starting to cloud. Ronald Pickup delivers Lucky's speech with speed and aplomb, but Matthew Kelly is once again a scene-stealer, perfect as the big, bombastic, demented Pozzo in Act One. Beckett doesn't leave much scope for stage design, but this was done well, an industrial wasteland, stark and threatening.

Two downsides to mention. £5 for a program which contained a two-page article by Simon Callow, a chronology and a cast-list which is simply not good enough, and a choreographed encore with a dance routine which was cringeworthy. What would have happened if we hadn't applauded? Fortunately for all, not much chance of that in this excellent production.

Theatre Review : The Habit of Art by Alan Bennett (dir Nicholas Hyter 11/1/10)

2010-01-24T18:06:00.000Z

If genius may be defined as someone who somehow manages to both have his cake and eat it, then Alan Bennett certainly comes close in his latest collaboration with Nicholas Hytner at the National.

It's all in the structure. A theatre troup rehearses a play about a fictional meeting between W S Auden and Benjamin Brittain in Auden's rooms in Oxford shortly before their deaths. A simple play about two of Britain's leading artists of the 20th Century had many possibilities: the difference between composing music and poetry; the changing attitude to homosexuality in the 20th Century; the contrast between the buttoned-up Brittain and the uninhibited Auden to name but a few.

But Bennett probably realised that this would provide arid fare. So by not just framing but immersing the inner play ("Caliban's Day") within the rehearsal studio he liberates his material, giving scope for the actors to bicker with the playwright, the Assistant Director and each other and thus provide a wry but very funny commentary on the nature of the theatrical process. In doing so he overcomes some of the portentiousness which is still residual within Caliban's Day, and gives himself scope for a multitude of scatalogical observations which one couldn't realistically envisage when Benjamin Brittain was on stage.

Richard Griffiths and Alex Jennings have no need to break sweat playing Fitz/Auden and Henry/Brittain respectively. Griffiths plays up to the fact that the avuncular Fitz is dissimilar to Auden both in face and form, although Jennings' camped up Henry looks very similar to Brittain. Adrian Scarborough plays their mutual biographer Humphrey Carpenter, sent by BBC Oxford to interview Auden and mistaken by Auden for a rent boy, and Frances de la Tour is excellent as the Assistant Director, ensuring that egos remain massaged, self-esteem boosted and the malign presence of the playwright (Elliot Levey - not a bit like Alan Bennett!) restrained from insisting on the inclusion of some of the worst verse ever to have graced the boards of the Lyttleton.

The structure softens the fact that both the protagonists in Caliban's Day were both pretty unattractive characters. When Brittain cut a friend for slights real or imagined it was for life. Auden's personal hygene (dwelt upon in lurid detail) left everything to be desired. Whilst they had collaborated - notably on Night Mail - in the 1930's, the possibilty of Brittain travelling to meet Auden towards the end of their lives could not realistically be entered into. But in this transparently artificial setting, the rendezvous can take place - although as the focus moves from the production of the play to the inner play itself, the pace drops, the laughs dry up and conversations about the nature of Art, and the relationship between the artists, come to the fore.

It makes a well-balanced whole: funny - both filthy and ludicrous in places - but also addressing some big ideas. It is Bennett's peculiar genius to make the Big Questions about the nature of art, history, sexuality so entertaining and accessible.

Theatre Review : Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams - Novello Theatre (dir Debbie Allen 4/1/10)

2010-01-14T23:39:00.001Z

There's something going on here I don't understand. Why was the theatre half-full for this production? OK, so it was just after New Year and it was cold - but it was before January's snows descended, and further reductions in prices have just been announced. This looked as if it had all the boxes ticked for a sell-out - a transfer of a top Broadway production, a well-loved film star in James Earl Jones, a TV star from a popular series in Adrian Lester, consistently good reviews, good marketing with James Earl Jones doing the TV sofas and the Underground covered in posters.

So why is this not packing them? Is it that Tennessee Williams' reputation is for intense, shouty plays with a lot of angst and not many jokes? If so, that is very unfair, as Cat On a Hot Tin Roof may be intense, but it is also consistently funny as well. Is there some British distaste at the transposition from a Southern white family in the 50s to a black family in the 80s? Once again, that would be very unreasonable, as the transposition is virtually seemless to anyone who is not familiar with the original text. It's certainly not as dramatic as the Moliere being updated to contemporary London, as is happening across the city with The Misanthrope.

It certainly can't be anything to do with the cast or the production - they are all consistently good, while James Earl Jones excels as the odious Big Daddy. He has the presence, the charisma of the patriach, swearing testily at the family sycophants celebrating his birthday. Yet he tries to connect to his ex-sports star son Brick, intent on drinking himself to oblivion. Adrian Lester hits the emotional high notes well, but didn't convince as a seasoned drinker - he always seemed too clean cut and in control. That being said, his relationship with the sinuous, sexy Cat, Sanaa Lathan, was finely drawn.

This didn't draw you into the vortex in the same way that Streetcar at the Donmar did earlier this year - this is as much the theatrical dynamics of the Donmar's claustophobia as it is about Rachel Weisz's multilayered Blanche Dubois - but it certainly packed a hefty punch.

So why the poor turnout? Two reasons, possibly. A first is that there seems to be a lot of quality drama in the West End at the moment, and the regular theatregoers who go to such productions have difficulties stretching to many evenings out at West End prices. The second reason may be more complex. We are now so familiar with black faces on the British stage that it has long since ceased to be a matter worth commenting upon - I've see Adrian Lester himself play both Henry V and Hamlet, excellent in both roles, and the fact that he was black was never an issue. Could there be some sort of a subconcious reaction on this side of the Atlantic to the fact that this is an all-black production, not through any prejudice on the part of your typically white middle-class London theatre audience, but because this is felt to be a bit unnecessary, a bit old-fashioned, and that we have moved beyond the place where we need all-black productions? I don't know. I do know that the transposition is worthwhile because it works and that those who have chosen to give it a miss will be missing out on an excellent evening.

Film Review : A Serious Man (dir Ethan and Joel Coen)

2009-12-06T21:18:00.001Z

Is there something profound out there, or is it just fate? One has to ask oneself if the latest offering from the Coen Brothers is simply telling a story, or getting at something deeper. It is certainly an exploration of Jewishness in modern (1967) America in the sort of Midwestern community in which Joel and Ethan Coen were brought up. In interviews, they spoken about their upbringing, but have refused to speculate on the questions the film might raise. But the movie itself – is it full of clues, or does it simply tease?

Before the opening credits roll, we are in a Polish Shtetl. A man is helped at the roadside by an elderly rabbi, so invites him home. But his wife claims she had heard that the rabbi had died three years ago and the stranger was in fact a dybbuk. Is she correct? We never find out for sure, and neither is this strange tale integrated into the film as a whole. But a doubt remains that, generations on, the descendents of the man are in some way paying for the sins of their fathers.

Larry Gopnik (a magnificent Michael Stuhlbarg) is a Jewish physics professor whose life is starting to fall apart. His wife (Sari Lennick) wants to divorce him for the odious Sy Ablemann (Fred Melamud), his son is into pot, his daughter is into hair, his brother lazing round the house draining his cyst. He is being harassed by his redneck neighbour, bribed by a college student, chased by the record company, and all for no reason – Larry is honest, trusting, decent. It’s as if God is testing him, like he did the honest Job.

Larry turns for support and answers to three rabbis. But the first offers him platitudes, the second a meandering, pointless (and very funny) story about a Jewish dentist who has a goy patient with “Help Me” written in Hebrew characters on the inside of his teeth. The third refuses to see him.

Perhaps the clue lies in Larry’s job – he is teaching about Schrödinger’s Cat, which could exist / not exist in a box simultaneously. A Schrödinger event appears to occur when Larry and another character are both in car crashes at the same time. Larry survives, the other character is killed. Larry’s brother subverts chance by using his numeric skills for card-counting, but fate rounds on him and he is arrested. Towards the end of the film, Larry for the first time when faced with a choice takes the immoral option. As he does, the telephone rings with bad news. Coincidence? Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind which is enveloping the Midwestern community, the storm from which God spoke to Job?

This is a slow-moving, thoughtful film whose humour is whimsical rather than funny, exquisitely constructed and beautifully shot by long-time Coen-collaborator Roger Deakins. It won’t appeal to the multiplex audiences, but will intrigue those who relish intelligent filmmaking that is not afraid to leave all its loose threads hanging.

Film Review : The Men Who Stare at Goats (dir Grant Heslov)

2009-12-06T18:08:00.001Z

On paper, this looked a winner. Jon Ronson’s book, “The Men who Stare at Goats”, had proved a subversive bestseller. The cast was pure Hollywood A-list – George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges. The trailers were very funny. And yet…

When Henry Kissenger won the Nobel Peace prize, Tom Lehrer declared satire redundant. At outset in this film, we are told that some of the events that follow are true. But the story of the First Earth Battalion which is set up to explore opportunities for the use of the paranormal in warfare is so bizarre that it goes well beyond satire, and so the viewer has to decide what is and isn’t true as the film flits between contemporary Iraqi buddy-movie and the story of the setting up of battalion in the 1970s.

The Iraqi framing-device is slight. Journalist Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) has been deserted by his wife for the editor of his small-town American newspaper. He decides to prove his macho credentials by heading for Kuwait at the time of the first Iraq war, where he meets Lyn Cassidy (George Clooney) who is set on heading into Iraq on a secret mission. Desparate to become embedded with the troops to see some action, Wilton joins with him and while they cross Iraq, he learns about Cassidy’s background and the history of the First Earth Battalion, set up by seventies hippy-soldier Bill Django (Jeff Bridges playing his stoner Big Lebowski type).

At this point, the movie dips into the area covered by Ronson’s book, and does contain some very funny moments. The de-bleated goats and the use of the theme music to Barney and Friends to break down prisoners are based on fact. But then all the strands get brought together in a fictional denouement which ties up all loose ends in a manner which may have seemed satisfying to the producers, but came over to me as infantile and embarrassing. Apparently there has already been a documentary made based on this story, and that would seem to be the appropriate way to bring this story to the screen and not this hotch-potch.

Theatre Review : Mother Courage and her Children by Bertold Brecht - Olivier (dir Deborah Warner 30/11/09)

2009-12-05T19:59:00.000Z

Glasgow in the 1980’s was known as the Brecht Capital of Europe. At any time, odds were there would be at least one Brecht play in production. Leading the way was the Citizens Theatre under the directorship of Giles Havergal, Philip Prowse and Robert David McDonald. A Brecht play was guaranteed most seasons, and that is where I first saw Mother Courage and her Children. Sadly, the sands of time have erased my recollection of that production, and Brecht seemed to fall from fashion as Thatcherism made his questioning of power and economic relationships seem old-fashioned.

But in recent years he has come back with a bang in a series of productions (Life of Galileo at the National, Good Woman of Szechuan at the Young Vic) which have revealed not only his intellectual power, but also his humour and daring as a dramatist. Now Mother Courage has dragged her cart across the Olivier Stage in yet another revelatory production.

The Olivier is denuded, all scenery removed, stage hands visible where the wings should be. Gore Vidal intones Brecht’s stage directions, setting the scene amongst the bored troops of Sweden during the Thirty Years War. To a crescendo of music Mother Courage enters on the cart drawn by her sons. Fiona Shaw as Courage takes up a microphone and starts singing, looking for the world like Edward Tudor-Pole on Top of the Pops. Shaw may not be the world’s best singer or dancer, but she radiates charisma and hers is an upbeat indomitable Courage.

This is a long piece, structured around 12 scenes from each of a 12 year period in the midst of the 30 Years War, during which Courage and her family follow first one army then another making a living from trading the contents of their wagon. The futility of war is revealed in the banality of the economic relations which prevail. A deal with a recruiting officer takes her son Eiliff (Clifford Samuel) into the army. Her other son Swiss Cheese (Harry Melling) becomes army paymaster, but is captured. Courage bargains too hard for his life and he is killed. Mute daughter Kattrin (the excellent Sophie Stone) is disfigured in an attack by a soldier, and thus loses her value as a potential wife. The Cook (Martin Marquez) wants Courage to escape with him to an Inn in Utrecht that he has inherited, but refuses to take Kattrin with him as well as she will frighten the customers. Courage decides to stay. Kattrin is finally killed alerting a town to the advancing troops, in the single act of altruism that we see. Mother Courage is left to drag her wagon by herself.

This is a play that was born in a time of war, and there are more parallels with recent events, but there is never the sense that these are being forced on the audience. One is left to make the connection with profiteers such Krupp, IG Farben and Haliburton oneself. Ideologies are cheap - a change of shirt, and the pastor becomes a priest - and life becomes devoid of value. It is a short step to the Blasted of Sarah Kane.

But this is not a bleak play. Brecht is always an amusing writer, and Fiona Shaw extracts every ounce of humour in a sparkling performance, ably supported by all around her. The music, by Irish rocker Duke Special, didn’t always work, but to my surprise I found myself humming the main theme on the way home. The sparse staging with projected directions and Gore Vidal’s intonations not only remained true to Brecht’s Verfremsdungeffekt, but gave a potentially baggy piece a great sense of unity.

This was an adventurous, clever production of one of the great plays of the 20th Century.

Art Review : Turner and the Masters - Tate Britain (September 2009 - January 2010)

2009-11-27T22:56:00.005Z

JMW Turner was a combative character, who frequently set himself up in comparison to both contemporary artists and established Great Masters. He famously demanded in his will that two of his best works were to be given to the new National Gallery, on the proviso that they were permanently hung between two paintings by his great predecessor as an interpreter of landscapes, the Frenchman Claude Lorraine. This splendidly instructive exhibition looks at how Turner learnt from, and attempted to supersede, his illustrious forebears.

The comparisons with Claude are direct, and brilliantly illustrated in the exhibition. Turner knew Claude’s “Landscape with Jacob, Laban and his Daughters” from the collection of his patron, the Earl of Egremont. In protest at the conservative policies of the British Institution who encouraged artists to model themselves directly on the painters of the past, Turner submitted “Appulia in Search of Appulus Learns from the Swain the Cause of his Metamorphosis”, which copied the Claude almost exactly except for the central characters, who point to a shepherd who was turned into a tree for copying the dancing of the nymphs of Pan. Untalented mimicry has its pitfalls.

Turner saw “Seaport at Sunset” (left) by Claude in the Louvre in 1821. In 1828 in Rome, he fashioned his response, “Regulus” (right), which stuck closely to the mirror image of Claude’s composition but which transformed the central narrative. Regulus was a captured Roman General who had his eyelids removed and then pointed at the sun. Turner replaces Claude’s warm glow of sunset with a blaze of brilliant yellow light which dazzles all who gaze at it. The genteel seaport has been transformed into a place of searing drama.

Likewise, Turner engaged directly with Dutch masters of the seascape such as Jacob van Ruisdael and Jan van de Velde. In another brilliant pendant, Turner transforms Van de Velde’s “A Rising Gale”, a clear and precise depiction of a storm-tossed boat, into “Dutch Boats in a Gale: Fishermen Endeavouring to Put their Fish on Board”. The composition is similar, but Turner’s looser brushwork and delicate highlights of the breaking waves give the painting a much greater sense of movement.

However, it is equally illuminating to look at examples where Turner tried and failed to emulate his great predecessors. Titian may be considered a natural point of departure, as his use of colour and his late brushwork have many similarities with Turner. Yet when one looks at Venus and Adonis, whose head is turned away from the viewer and whose shoulder is obscuring the face of Venus, one can only wonder if there is a more poorly composed painting in the canon. Similarly, an attempt to paint the Holy Family offers a vision of an oversized baby somehow suspended in mid-air. In fact, one has to conclude that Turner is a poor figurative painter. For me, his one such success is Jessica, peering out of her Venetian window – a painting which was pilloried for its overuse of yellow when it was first produced.

Turner’s relationship with his contemporary David Wilkie is illustrative. Wilkie’s painting “Village Politicians” had been the success of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1806. This piece was a directly based on genre pieces by Dutch artists of the late 17th Century such as David Teniers the Younger. Turner’s immediate instinct was to try to do better, and in 1807 he presented “A Country Blacksmith disputing upon the Price of Iron, and the Price Charged to the Butcher for shoeing his Poney” at the Summer Exhibition. Yet despite its fine execution, the painting is a failure. The charm of Wilkie - and of Teniers - is in the detail, in the personalities represented and in the incidental vignettes scattered throughout their pieces. Turner’s blacksmith needs the overlong title to explain the topic under discussion, and none of the people are recognisable as characters. Wilkie exhibited “The Blind Fiddler” the same year, where every character from the dull-eyed nursing mother to the expansive man clicking his fingers to amuse the child has a reality to them which Turner lacked. Wilkie won this contest hands down.

This fine exhibition brings its paintings together with intelligence and clarity, setting out a compelling story of how Turner defined himself in relation to others; yet ultimately Turner’s distinct vision is very much his own. By examining the similarities between Turner and other artists, the ultimate revelation is the extent to which Turner’s later vision of light and haze and water was actually a transformation from inside out of the gentle landscapes of Claude. It is to him that he constantly returns, to his classical forms and elegant compositions, even if they are but shadows in a miasma of blinding light. His final exhibited works in 1850 once again echo, however indistinctly, the format of Claude’s seaport works.

Turner wasn’t being arrogant when he wrote his will, he was acknowledging a debt.

Theatre Review : Pains of Youth by Ferdinand Bruckner - Cottesloe (dir Katie Mitchell 23/11/09)

2009-11-25T22:51:00.003Z

Desiree loves Marie, who used to love Petrell, who now loves Irene but is trying to seduce Lucy the maid. Meanwhile, the malevolent Freder, sometime lover of Desiree, is also trying to corrupt Lucy whilst persuading Marie to marry him. Or something like that, as to be honest the love lives of this group of angst-ridden medical students in 1923 Vienna became somewhat bewildering after a while.

Desiree (Lydia Wilson) is impulsive, a slave to her passions, wanting it all – to sleep with Marie, or to try being a prostitute like Lucy, or to indulge herself in the ultimate act of will. Meanwhile Freder (Geoffrey Streatfield) is persuading Lucy first to steal, and ultimately to go on the game, simply because he can. There is no motive, other than to control. “Bourgoise existence or suicide – there is no other choice” intones Alt (Jonah Russell), the intellectual.

Katie Mitchell directs, overlaying the action with menace-laden electronic sounds and flashy scene-changes. But she never manages to fully engage with the nihilism at heart of the play. The characters are not so empty that they become pure ciphers, but neither do they engage so that you care about their fate. Freder is disturbing, but he is not Aaron the Moor or Barabbas, an embodiment of pure evil. Desiree becomes tiresome. Lucy the maid-ingenué is a cliché long predating Moll Hackabout.

Ferdinand Bruckner’s play is an attack on the spiritual vacuum of a generation who have ill-absorbed the intellectual currents of the early 20th Century. Sexuality has been liberated by Freud. Twelve-tone music plays on the gramophone. Freder is a partially-developed Dostoevskian existentialist-nihilist. But this production didn’t leave you feeling sick and empty, or angry, or provoked. It was all too slick and efficient, just too much like a comfortable bourgeois night out with some ideas thrown in, and I really can’t think of anything further from what Bruckner must have intended.

Theatre Review : Roman Tragedies by William Shakespeare - Toneelgroep Amsterdam - Barbican (dir Ivo van Hove 22/11/09)

2009-11-22T16:32:00.009Z

To be perfectly honest, Shakespeare's Roman Tragedies are my least favourite part of his canon. I find Coriolanus's shifts in loyalty difficult to come to terms with and the politics of Julius Caesar leaves me cold. Antony and Cleopatra has some magnificent set pieces, but large parts - unless well-directed - can be quite static. So signing up for 6 hours of Roman Tragedies, in Dutch with no interval, was an explicit act of faith in the Barbican BITE's production team's continuing ability to bring the absolute best in international theatre to London.

My faith was fully justified - this was superb.

In the programme, Ivo van Hove talks about how he wants to focus on the politics and relationships. He cuts the crowd scenes and replaces the battles with tremendous explosions of percussion, composed by Eric Sleichim. The cast wear modern suits, except when in the more intimate surrounds of Cleopatra's court. The set is an expansive arrangement of angular settees, like a conference centre or airport lounge, surmounted by a screen on which real-time video of the actors is projected Katie Mitchell-style (see http://roderick-random.blogspot.com/2007/03/theatre-review-attempts-on-her-life-by.html) along with the surtitles.

I have written elsewhere how performing Shakespeare in a foreign language gives the director a freedom with the text that is usually missing when it is performed in English. To judge by the surtitles, significant liberties had been taken with the text whilst keynote speeches remained unchanged. By necessity, one loses the poetry of Shakespeare's language when performing in translation, but in this case the poetry was replaced by a drive and immediacy appropriate to the modern setting.

Coriolanus was the weakest part of the trilogy, and could have been cut completely and not impacted the whole. There is a major historical discontinuity between this play and Julius Caesar and, whilst interesting in paring down some of the baggage of this messy play, it never scaled the heights emotionally or politically.

Julius Caesar, however, was a different matter. Cutting the crowd scenes gave the political machinations a clarity and immediacy which brought the play to life. Hans Kesting played Marc Antony from a wheelchair, having injured his foot the week before. When asked to reply to Brutus' funeral oration, he wheels himself to the lectern. The camera, shows only the top of his head, making him look faintly ridiculous. He hauls himself to his feet, staring at the audience in a silence which seemed to last for ever. Then he thows his text to the floor, grabs a microphone and wheels to the front of the stage, where a handheld camera zooms in as he splutters "Friends... Romans... countrymen...". Electrifying.

In Antony and Cleopatra, suits are swapped for joggers and pyjamas at Cleopatra's sexually smouldering court. Chris Nietvelt plays Cleopatra as willful and passionate but lacking proper emotional intelligence, screaming when she doesn't get her way. With Marieke Heebink as Charmian barely able to keep her hands off Cleopatra herself, the court is a pressure-cooker of the passions which stifles as the battles plans of Antony and Cleopatra go awry. The long final scene became almost unwatchable as the intensity mounted.

Whilst all this was happening, the audience were invited to mingle with the actors on the settees on the stage. At the side of the stage, in keeping with the conference centre theme, was a bar and food stalls, and a computer where you could type comments which were displayed on the rolling infobar along with news updates, footballs scores and updates on the historical background under the main screen. This sounds gimmicky, and was to a certain extent - but it fitted well with the modern setting of the production.

This was adventurous theatre which took apart Shakespeare and put him together anew for the 21st century, making him modern, accessible and very much relevant. It was quite simply the most eye-opening reimagining of his work that I have seen - fresh, clear, lucid and exciting.

This production ran for only three days at the Barbican, barely time to make the reviews before it finished. Once the word is out, it must return...

Art Review : Turner and Venice - Tate Britain (October 2003 - January 2004)

2009-11-22T15:12:00.005Z

Curators must normally face a difficult task in balancing how they choose to develop the main intellectual themes of an exhibition with the cost and availability of the artefacts that they wish to bring together. However, such is the scale of the Turner bequest, the problem that Ian Warrell faced when setting up the Turner and Venice exhibition at the Tate Britain in 2003 must have been to decide what to omit.

A visit to the recent Turner and the Masters exhibition at Tate Britain (see http://roderick-random.blogspot.com/2009/11/jmw-turner-was-combative-character-who.html ) has sent me back to the Catalogue of Turner and Venice, which had lain unopened on my bookshelves for the past six years. I remember my impressions at the time: a compendious overview of the sketches, watercolours and exhibited works which arose as a result of Turner’s three short visits to Venice. The sketches were of marginal interest, the oil paintings were, of course, superb, but the highlight for me was the revelatory display of exquisite watercolours.

The problem at the gallery though was one of scale. 185 exhibits can challenge the stamina of the most dedicated aficionado, and I do remember flagging towards the end as I fought through the crowds.

No such problem with the catalogue, which examines Turner’s response to Venice in even greater detail – one has the time and space to peruse it at leisure, and it is well worthy of detailed examination. Turner, who lived his life by the Thames, was always drawn to water, so it is natural that Venice was included in his first major tour of Italy in 1819 (he had briefly crossed the Alps in 1802), although he only spent five days in Venice out of a six month trip. The impact was not immediate, as it was not until 1833 that he spent a week there and thereafter until 1846 he sent at least one view of Venice in all but two years to the annual exhibition at the Royal Academy. His third and final visit was in 1840 when he stayed from the 20th August to the 3rd September.

The catalogue is comprehensive. It sets out the historical context – Venice, after years of decline was broken by Napoleon and has now become a client of Austria, the wealth from trade long-since dissipated, and with it the glories of Titian, Tintoretto and Bellini. Canaletto and his followers had painted both Venice and London in precise detail and, by the 1820’s, with Byron’s romanticised vision of the decayed glories of Venice in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage riding high in the public consciousness, British artist such as Clarkson Stanfield, William Etty and Richard Parkes Bonington had started to respond in turn. By 1837, Thackery was able to complain that he was “weary of gondolas, striped shirts…and too many white palaces standing before dark purple skies”. Turner employed a similar viewpoint to that of Stansfield for their respective paintings of the Doge’s Palace both exhibited in 1833. But whereas Stansfield architectural lines echo the precise draughtsmanship of Canaletto, Turner’s smaller painting is focussed on the loose jumble of boats and the hazed reflections of buildings on the water.

However, the main body of the Exhibition focuses on the sketches and watercolours produced during Turner’s visits, and how some of these scenes were turned into full oil-paintings for exhibition. In the case of Turner’s 1840 visit, we are taken down the Grand Canal and across the Giudeca, stopping to look at how Turner responded to each scene in turn. The watercolours are superb, the watery light being subtly conveyed by delicate washes and a few deft flicks of the brush, many having the detail added in pencil or in pen dipped in watercolour.

It gives an insight into Turner’s creative process, obsessively sketching detail and capturing the effects of light in the watercolours for later reworking in oils in the Studio. For example, an 1833 pencil sketch of the Bacino with some hasty blue, brown and white highlights added, is believed to have become “Venice from the Canale della Giudeca, Chiesa di S. Maria della Salute etc”, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1840. Even the great later works where the buildings of Venice barely emerge from a haze of mist and light are firmly rooted in Turner’s sketches and watercolours, and these connections are clearly set out in this illuminating exhibition and its exceptional catalogue.

Theatre Review : Life is a Dream by Pedro Calderon de la Barca - Donmer Warehouse (dir Jonathan Munby 9/11/09)

2009-11-15T13:35:00.006Z

It has been prophesised to Basilio, King of Poland (Malcolm Storry) that his son Segismundo (Dominic West) will be an evil and capricious monarch - as a result, the King imprisons his son and tells his subjects that he has died. However, as the King ages and worries about his succession, he decides to test his son to see his suitability for the crown. So he drugs him and when he comes round he is in his rightful place as the Crown Prince. However, it is not long before the prophesy appears to be correct as Segismundo defenestrates a recalcitrant courtier and forces himself on a lady of the court. Basilio realises he has made an error, drugs Segismundo once again and returns him to his prison, where he is left to reflect if what he had experienced was reality or a dream. But then rebels once again free him from prison -will he have learnt from his experience, or will the prophesy prove to be true once again?

Pedro Calderon de la Barca was one of the great playwrights of the Spanish Golden Age, and this is generally accounted one of his finest works. Its exploration of the nature of dreams and reality is very much attuned to modern sensibility, although Basilio's attempt to thwart fate echos that of Laius, father of Oedipus. However, it is an uneven piece of work. The subplot, where the wronged Rosaura (Kate Fleetwood) dons breeches in order to infiltrate the court and confront Astolfo (Rupert Evans) who has failed to honour his obligations to her, fails to engage at the same level.

Dominic West is magnetic, capturing the despair and elation of Segismundo as his is imprisoned and then freed, and then explores the limits of the power that he wields. As he wakes once again in prison, and tries to understand if he had lived or dreamed his moment of freedom, is the one moment where the play attain a truly Shakespearean level of self-reflectiveness. All other cast members impress, especially Kate Fleetwood as a believably muscular yet vulnerable Rosario.

Yet despite all these positives, and a dark and atmospheric design, somehow, for me, the play never completely came to life. Maybe it was because of too much tedious exposition of the back-story and the weakness of the sub-plot, or maybe a certain amount of intellectual disengagedness which divorced the ideas from the narrative drive and which not even Dominic West could overcome.

Or maybe it was simply that I had an appallingly uncomfortable seat at the end of the back row at the side of the circle, which does divorce one from the action somewhat. The Donmar's great virtue is top quality, challenging productions at affordable prices in a wonderfully intimate theatre. The drawback is that - consequently - tickets are like gold dust and sometimes one has to go with whatever ticket one can get, so perhaps that is why I was never truly able to immerse myself into the drama.

Book Review : The Golden Bough - A study of Magic and Religion by Sir James Frazer (Wordsworth 1993, first published in this edition 1922)

2009-11-14T22:50:00.005Z

In classical times the priest of Diana Nemorensis at Aricia did not enjoy a comfortable tenure. Any challenger who broke a bough from the trees in his grove could challenge the priest in mortal combat, and if the challenger won, he would become the next priest. In “The Golden Bough”, Sir James Frazer studies the origins of this custom. The study runs to ten volumes, and virtually invents the science of comparative anthropology in doing so.

Frazer’s thesis is that this ancient Roman custom displays traits inherent within the beliefs of indigenous communities throughout the world, and that by studying these customs, one can start to explain – despite the lack of written evidence – how such a tradition came into being.

The argument is complex. Essentially, Frazer believed that the custom has arisen from ancient ceremonies of agricultural fertility. Primitive tribes believed in magic which would assist their crops to flourish and their hunting to be successful. As society developed, magical customs became institutionalised as religious ceremony. The priest / king as guarantor of the wellbeing of the tribe was particularly subject to custom, and in some cases answerable with his life for the success of the crops and the wellbeing of his people. However, powerful kings tried to offset this responsibility onto family members, sacrificial substitutes and ultimately to proxy deities. The cycle of death and rebirth was incarnate within the ancient deities such as Attis, Adonis and Dionysus. Within Greek religion, the cycle became refined as the myth of Demeter and Persephone, the mother / daughter relationship reflecting the old woman / maiden of agricultural fertility ceremonies throughout Europe.

There is a radical subtext. Frazer was convinced that the fundamentals of Christian religion were themselves an extension of ceremony and custom to be found in tribes around the Middle East in ancient times. One can see parallels between the death and rebirth of Attis , Adonis or Isis, for example, and the resurrection. Christmas was timed to coincide with ceremonies to celebrate the renewal of the Sun after the Winter Solstice, whilst Easter coincides with spring fertility festivals of death and rebirth.

For each stage in his argument, Frazer brings to bear an astonishing number of examples, ranging from primitive South Sea headhunters to the agricultural traditions of his native Scotland. To take one example, human sacrifices to ensure the success of crops are referenced by the Indians of Guayaquil in Ecuador, Incas, Aztecs, Pawnees, West Africans at Lagos and Benin, the Bagaboos of Mindanau, the Lhota Naga of the valleys of the Brahmapootra, and the Gonds and Khonds of India. And similar examples are given for the killing of the king if the crops fail, or if he shows weakness, or if the term of his office expires and so on.

The scope of the study is awesome, and the breadth of erudition on display is truly breathtaking. One needs a reference source at hand to be able to pinpoint the islands of the Moluccas, the Native Americans of British Columbia, the African tribes or the Carpathian villagers which are constantly referred to in passing, the reader assumed to be familiar with Thompson Indians or Nuba tribesmen. Yet apparently, Frazer travelled little in remote parts. His encyclopaedic knowledge of tribal customs was based on extensive reading and correspondence.

In fact, the detail is exhausting. One could develop the argument more succinctly with reference to fewer examples. It becomes impossible to absorb paragraph upon paragraph of similar customs from around the world (and I have only read the single volume summary at a mere 700 pages of close type), and it is undeniably depressing to witness the universal scope of human barbarity in propitiation of all forms of deities. But this is Frazer’s genius – by universalising the particular, his investigation into the origins of an arcane Roman custom transformed the way we understand human belief systems and how mankind in every obscure part of the Earth has created its gods in its own barbarous image.

Theatre Review : Architecting by The TEAM and National Theatre of Scotland - Barbican Pit (dir Rachel Chakvin 12/11/09)

2009-11-14T20:34:00.003Z

Yankee property developer Carrie Campbell (Libby King) seeks shelter in a run-down bar in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Inside, with bar-owner Oasis Melly (Jill Frutkin) is the historian Henry Adams (Jake Margolin) playing with a paper model of Chartres Cathedral, and Margaret Mitchell (Lana Lesley), who is being sought by TV executives wanting to make a politically-correct TV remake of Gone With the Wind.

Carrie Campbell wants to put in place her father's vision of a vast gated development in this neglected traditional neighbourhood. However, this is her first time south of the Mason-Dixon line and she is out of her cultural mileiu. Meanwhile, Margaret Mitchell is trying to preserve the soul of the South as represented in her novel from the odious producer (Frank Boyd) and his black director who has his own vision of the South, which is skillfully intercut with the primary narrative.

The TEAM (Theatre of the Emerging American Moment) are a New York-based company "dedicated to dissecting and celebrating the experience of living in America today." This they certainly do, as this is thought-provoking, visually arresting theatre, strewn with ideas. The reconstruction of New Orleans is paralleled with that of Mitchell's Atlanta; once again Northerners fail to understand the South. The depiction of black characters in Gone with the Wind is challenged strongly, yet Mammy is played by a white man in a giant black bra. Adams' vision of historical entropy stands bleakly over all.

All this is played with vigour by the admirable company, swapping roles with a speed that is occassionally bewildering, as the Oasis bar becomes the set of the remake of Gone with the Wind or a 24 hour petrol station as themes evolve and merge into one another.

However, it is inevitable that with so much in this heady mix, some ideas work better than others. The story of two unlikely lovers on their way to an audition for the role of Scarlett O'Hara has a charm of its own, but doesn't integrate well into the rest of the play - a more brutal director might have wielded the knife to make a sharper whole. The second half didn't live up to the promise of the first, and ran out of steam in the end. But that does not alter the fact that the TEAM have shown that difficult ideas-based experimental theatre can also be fast-paced and thoroughly entertaining.

Film Review : Katalin Varga (dir Peter Strickland)

2009-10-30T21:04:00.003Z

This is a beautiful, shocking film which will haunt you long after leaving the cinema, for many reasons.

The plot is straightforward, but is revealed slowly: Katalin Varga's husband has discovered that his wife's son was not fathered by him, and he turns her out of their house in rural Rumania. Katalin takes her son and embarks on a journey across the remote Translylvanian countryside, but she isn't intent on visiting her sick mother, as she tells her son, but trying instead to rectify the wrong done to her which has resulted in her life being turned upside down.

The film moves forward slowly through stunningly beautiful but wild and remote countryside, the sense of menace heighened by a hallucinatory electric drone in the background. When she reaches her first destination the film cuts to gypsy violins and wild dancing, it is not clear if we are in real time or flashback - the image becomes grainier, and Katalin has lost her distinctive headscarf. But soon the reasons become more clear.

Hilda Peter as Katalin is extraordinary, her finely wrought face switching easily from concern for her son, to apparent lust, to grim determination. Towards the end of the film, she reveals her story to Antal (Tibor Palffy), one of the men she has been searching for, and his doting wife. She tells her horrific story in a state approaching ecstacy, knowing that the revenge she is extracting is much more subtle than what had been brutally meted out to Antal's colleague.

And yet, Antal is reaching out for redemption himself through the son that is all that is missing in his own marriage, and through his gradual understanding of the past. Is forgiveness possible?
This is subtle, complex film-making, the story being told in a flash of the eyes, a shadow on the wall, yet a storyline that is remorseless in its determinism.

Peter Strickland produced, directed and wrote the screenplay, his first film. Remember the name....

Film Review : Thirst (Bakjwi) (dir Chan-wook Park)

2009-10-30T18:24:00.003Z

- "So here's the deal, it's a remake of Zola's Therese Raquin, wait for it...-it's remade as a modern Korean vampire movie"
- "Nice one, Park" you can see Steve Carroll saying as he raises his eyes to his sidekick, "Look, don't call us on your Orange mobile phone...".

But amazingly, it works. Chan-wook Park's take on vampirism eschews most of the traditional baggage of the genre, adds a moral twist and some very funny bits, but somehow manages to keep the barrage of ideas under control for long enough to fashion a taught, exciting and enjoyable film, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes.

Kang-ho Song is Sang-hyeon, a priest racked with self-doubt who volunteers to test a vaccine for the Emmanuel Virus, a deeply unpleasant Ebola-like haemorragic virus. The vaccine fails, but he discovers that human blood keeps the symptoms at bay. With his recovery, he is ascribed miraculous powers by followers. At this point Zola cuts in. He is asked to cure his sickly friend Kang-woo and proceeds to join his appalling mother and beautiful wife Tae-joo for games of Mah-Jong. Needless to say, Tae-joo is not satisfied by Kang-woo's affactions and soon Sang-hyeon's priestly vows are in jeopardy (although he is unconcerned by syphoning off the blood from hospital patients in comas in order to get his regular fix).

Those familiar with Therese Raquin can see where the plot goes from here, although in Therese Raquin the protagonists don't have superhuman powers, which is just as well for their domino-playing friends. They also don't have the problems of daylight and the need for regular fixes of blood to deal with, which is where the ethical issues of how exactly one sources one's fresh human blood cut in.

Everyone is talking vampires this year. They even did a piece on the genre on Newsnight Review for goodness sake. I don't know if this is some subconscious response to the emasculation of bloodsucking capitalism over the past two years, or just the way these fashions go. From Buffy to Twilight our screens are full of blood-soaked revisionist horrors, turning their backs on Dr Van Helsing and the Hammer films of the past. This doesn't subvert the vampire genre as thoroughly as the magnificent "Let the Right One In" did earlier this year, and as a film it doesn't retain a consistent unity of tone, but it is a very enjoyable, thought-provoking if occasionally bonkers piece of filmmaking.

Film Review : The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (dir Terry Gilliam)

2009-10-22T21:05:00.005+01:00

There is no denying Terry Gilliam's visual brilliance - in all of his films created remarkable images which stay with you long after the film - and this is certainly no exception. From the beatifully realised wagon of Doctor Parnassus, which transforms at the tug of a rope into a fully-functioning stage, to the remarkable pastel dreamscapes of the Doctor's imagination which characters can enter through a mirror on the stage.

But a film needs more than just an ability to look good - a bit of plot, some tension and maybe a couple of ideas wouldn't go amiss. And this is where this film goes sadly wrong. The premise - that characters can enter into the imagination of the immortal doctor and realise their desires - is good, and everyone from Midas onwards knows that one should be careful about what you wish for. But Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) has, for reasons I didn't really follow, made a deal with the Devil (Tom Waits playing Tom Waits) and this is generally not a good thing to do. So innocent souls must be attracted through the mirror, and some seem to succumb within Doctor Parnassus' imagination but others don't. It's all rather confusing.

Now, those of you who have seen some movies in the past may have seen the following plot devices
1. The girl with a choice between the guy who always really loved her and the flashy newcomer
2. A deadline, and a ticking clock
3. A chase (But this time on imaginary stilts!)

By the time all these have been telegraphed your cliche detectors would be on full beam if you weren't trying to wrestle with the detail of the plot, so eventually you give up and let all the beautiful cinematography wash over you. And rightly so, because it all ends exactly as you expected, but since you didn't really care that much for any of the characters in the first place you're not really bothered. You have been entertained for a couple of hours, and you leave the cinema feeling that you have eaten a meringue - it was good whilst it lasted, but hardly satisfying.