Happy Days, Young Vic, 10.2.14



Juliet Stevenson as Winnie in
the Young Vic's 2014 'Happy Days'

Man:  "What's it meant to mean?  Stuck up to her diddies in the bleeding ground?"
His wife:  "And you, what's the idea of you?  What are you meant to mean?"

Peggy Ashcroft (who took the role in 1975) described Winnie, the protagonist of Beckett’s ‘Happy Days’, as 'the summit part’ for any actress, the female equivalent of ‘King Lear’.  


Stevenson in 1991's 'Death and the Maiden'
at the Royal Court

Shamingly, this was Motley's first exposure to the play, although I first saw Juliet Stevenson, the star of the show, as far back as 1991, playing Paulina in Dorfman’s “Death and the Maiden” (with just the right mixture of vulnerability and vengefulness).  Her comic timing as Amanda in the NT’s 1999 production of ‘Private Lives’ was so perfect it demanded a rare repeat ticket purchase.  And she was excellent too as Stephanie, the violinist laid low by MS, in the Almeida’s 2009 revival of Tom Kempinski’s ‘Duet for One’.  Few actresses are so good at conveying spirited suffering. 


Stevenson & Anton Lesser in
the NT's 1999 'Private Lives'

It was, inevitably, a rather different actress on display in Natalie Abrahimi’s Young Vic production of Beckett’s threnody.  



Stevenson & Henry Goodman in the
Almeida's 2009 'Duet for One'

Now 57, Stevenson bravely performed entirely without make-up and opted (unlike Eileen Atkins in 2012’s stand-out production of ‘All That Fall’) to play Winnie sans brogue.  Stevenson played Winnie naturalistically, trying to 'keep on' and 'muddle through' with typical English middle class phlegm (“Another heavenly day. Begin Winnie. Begin your day”).
  

Juliet Stevenson does battle with Winnie's demons

The slapstick humour of Beckett’s early works (‘All That Fall’, ‘Waiting for Godot’) had darkened considerably by the time ‘Happy Days’ was written in 1960, towards the height of the nuclear panic.  It's a kind of distillation of Beckett’s work, a somewhat static meditation on the fear of extinction ("To sing a song too soon is a great mistake, I find"), on ageing (“To have been always what I am – and so very changed from what I was”) and on the inadequacy of language to mitigate those processes (“Words fail. There are times when even they fail.  ...  There is so little one can say, one says it all. All one can. And no truth in it anywhere.”). 

Famously, Winnie is progressively buried alive up to her waist in Act One and up to her neck in Act Two, wreathed in a type of shingle surgical collar, while her grunting husband (“my Willie!”) busies himself inconsequentially to one side, largely failing to engage and mysteriously neglecting to dig her out.  

Winnie startled by an insect

Designer Vicki Mortimer had erected a jagged escarpment as the setting for Winnie's confinement, giving her a bird’s eye view over the stalls but emphasising her vulnerability to rock-slides. Nerve-jangling metallic roars, like tectonic plates
shifting beneath her trapped feet, marked the passage of time:  a device considerably more insistent than Chekhov's 'breaking string' but serving much the same function. 

Predictably, of course, nothing much happened.  The tragicomic Winnie (“if only I could bear to be alone”) prattled away, stream-of-consciousness-style, progressively emptying her handbag, with dogged but transparently artificial optimism, trying to keep her spirits up as the end approached (“ah well – no worse – no better, no worse – no change – no pain – hardly any – a great thing that – nothing like it”). 


"Things have a life.  Take my looking-glass, it doesn't need me"

The challenge for the lead in 'Happy Days', amply fulfilled here by Stevenson, is to act in progressively more 'minimal' fashion, making use of first hand movements and then face movements to compensate for her immobilisation and slow decline.  



Monsieur B lui-meme

Winnie finally makes peace with approaching death by breaking into song (“It is perhaps a little soon – to make ready – for the night – and yet I do – make ready for the night – feeling it at hand – saying to myself Winnie – it will not be long now, Winnie”).  Stevenson powerfully stayed silently buried up to her neck on stage as the lights dimmed and the audience filed out, hushed in the presence of great art. 

Beckett (then 56) never wrote anything as good again.

Kill Your Darlings, 7.12.13

John Krokidas’s sexy and enjoyable movie, the third on the Beats in as many years (and the best), recreated the early student days of the Beats at Columbia in 1944.  While some young men were spilling their guts at Anzio, others were engaged in more ‘normal’ adolescent rites-of-passage: murder, buggery and the like!

The student Beats were shown posing as sexual and literary rebels while disguising their insecurities behind competitive testosterone-driven displays of intellect. 

Moody freeze-framed B&W scenes from Greenwich Village jazz clubs were intercut with lecture hall rebellions against academic orthodoxies (“there is no creativity without imitation”) and symbolic liberations of banned transgressive works (Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” etc). 

Daniel Redcliffe as Allen Ginsberg

Daniel Radcliffe was impressively convincing as the young Allen Ginsberg, whose unrequited puppy love for strutting aesthete Lucien Carr segues into offering himself fearlessly to strangers in Village bars. 

Pouting blue-eyed blond Dane DeHaan (a kind of male Scarlett Johansson) was Lucien Carr, the devil-may-care garçon fatal.  Carr, proclaimer of a so-called “New Vision” for literature (yes, another one) and the original dedicatee of ‘Howl’, provided much of the intellectual (and other) energy to the Beats. 


Jack Huston as Jack Kerouac (L);
Dane DeHaan as Lucien Carr (R)

There was a fun vignette where Carr was shown giving his name as ‘Arthur Rimbaud’ on trying to enlist with the Navy, although funnier still was the scene where Radcliffe/Ginsberg is shown being blown by a horny cantilevered female librarian beneath serried shelves of dusty college tomes, only ‘to get off' himself once DeHaan/Carr eyeballs him back.

On a more elevated note, the flick’s theme was perhaps that the creative impulse (primarily here Ginsberg’s poetry) is escapist, driven by a desire to flee the complicated mess of life into a reality that the protagonist hopes to shape and control more easily.


Radcliffe's Ginsberg tries to go mano-a-mano
with DeHaan's Carr

The film turned darker with the “honor slaying” (according to NY’s antediluvian penal code) of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr (“Another lover hits the universe; the circle is broken”).  

Carr, “the Fourth Beat” (after Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac) was depicted, arguably with some licence, as profiting from a “gay panic defence” to ‘get away with’ a mere eighteen months in jail for the murder of his besotted ex-lover. (He went on to sire three children and to head up UPI’s NY news bureau for decades, only finally shuffling off his mortal coil in 2005 long after the other major Beats were dust.)

Poseurs, nous?
Radcliffe as Ginsberg, DeHaan as Carr,
Huston as Kerouac

Michael C Hall (from ‘Six Feet Under’ and ‘Dexter’) 'played gay' once again as the bearded stalker-cum-murder-victim, while Jennifer Jason Leigh (“Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle”) was Ginsberg’s disturbed Mom, who was carted off to the psychiatric hospital that more than one character from this virtual roll-call of case-studies might well have benefited from! 

Although the disturbing murder scene carried echoes of Tom Kalin’s “Swoon” (1992), the prevailing tone of Krokidas’s movie was more playful and less pretentious.  That said, the parents amongst you probably still won’t want your offspring watching it before they too go up to university!     


































  



Fortune's Fool, 6.12.13

Rare revival of Turgenev's nineteenth-century social satire at the Old Vic.

Written when he was thirty in 1848, at the height of Tsar Nicholas I's autocracy, "Fortune's Fool" (or "The Hanger-On") predates each of "A Month in the Country" (his best-known play), "Fathers and Sons" (his best-known novel) and his internal exile and subsequent emigration to Western Europe.  Its satire of provincial Russian society led to its banning by the censor.  It wasn't until the new reign of Alexander II ('the Liberator') that it was finally published in 1857, four years before the Emancipation of the Serfs. 



Ivan Turgenev (1818-83)

An enthusiast for both Emancipation and for Gogol, Turgenev was less prolific than his contemporary Ostrovsky, scripting nine plays against Ostrovsky’s forty-seven. Better known as a novelist and short-story writer (all the great Nineteenth Century Russians were masters of multiple forms), Turgenev had strained links with Dostoyevsky (three years younger) and Tolstoy (ten years younger).  They caricatured him, unfairly, as only affecting to challenge Tsarist autocracy in order to curry favour with the young.  Whilst the direct political satire in “Fortune’s Fool” is necessarily muted, its social satire is savage, and savagely funny at that. 

First produced in this Mike Poulton version at Chichester in 1996, ‘”Fortune’s Fool” bypassed the West End by going direct to Broadway in 2002, where it garnered Tonies for Alan Bates and Frank Langella.  Consequently, this production at the Old Vic marks the play’s first ever West End appearance.  Director Lucy Bailey (former artistic director at the Print Room) plays it in broadly authentic period style, with a design by William Dudley which ingeniously bisected the stage with multiple door frames. 


Lucy Briggs-Owen, the heiress of'Fortune's Fool'

Young nobles Olga and Yeletsky (tautly played by Lucy Briggs-Owen and Alexander Vlahos) return to their country estate from Petersburg after their marriage.  Estate manager Trembinsky (Daniel Cerqueira), full of empty bluster, doesn’t know how many serfs they own and is constantly under-cut by the pertly capable footman Pyotr (Dyfan Dwyfor).  Plus there’s a sitting tenant in the laundry cupboard, and he's been there thirty years!  And as this squatter, one Kuzovkin, though penniless, is nominally a 'gentleman', he needs must be tolerated at the dinner table.

Richard McCabe (Tropatchov, the pushy neighbour)
and Iain Glen (Kuzovkin, the hanger-on),
co-stars of Fortune's Fool

Worse than the staff and hangers-on are the neighbours. Flamboyant Tropatchov, the sort of egocentric who’ll snatch a mile before the proverbial inch is even offered, attaches himself to the young couple.  A full-figured Regency dandy and “an infamous, fatuous windbag”, Tropatchov loses no opportunity to lord it over Kuzovkin.  A welcome-home supper for the newly-weds goes disastrously wrong when Tropatchov plies the vulnerable Kuzovkin with drink, and unexpected revelations ensue.



Richard McCabe as Wilson in this
summer's West End 'royal' hit 'The Audience'
(the Helen Mirren HMQ play)

Richard McCabe, fresh from his Olivier-winning role as Wilson in “The Audience”, memorably played Tropatchov for laughs.  Iain Glen (ex of 'Game of Thrones') also excelled in the harder task of generating sympathy for the put-upon Kuzovkin.  Remote though Tsarist Russia may be to contemporary London, McCabe and Glen smoothly steered the audience through any temporal and spatial barriers, generating a strong first-night response.  Although we're still waiting for press night, Motley had the distinct sense the Old Vic has a sure-fit hit on its hands.  Recommended!

Ghosts, 24.10.13

Update 18/11/13:  Eyre has just been awarded the 'Best Director' Olivier for "Ghosts".  Good to see the Olivier Panel share my view of this show!

"I'm inclined to think that we are all ghosts, Pastor Manders, every one of us.  It's not just what we inherit from our mothers and fathers that haunts us.  It's all kinds of old defunct theories, all sorts of old defunct beliefs"

Director (Sir) Richard Eyre

I hadn’t expected another Ibsen production to match Michael Grandage’s 2007 ‘Jon Gabriel Borkman’ but Richard Eyre’s production of ‘Ghosts’ for the Almeida was a triumph.  Played straight-through without an interval, in a lucid adaptation by Eyre, this had all the power of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” in only half the playing-time.  

Originally “Gengangere” (‘something that walks again’), ‘Ghosts’ acquired its English title from its translator, to Ibsen's chagrin. Banned by the Lord Chamberlain for its defence of free love and women’s rights, its attack on religion and its mentions of syphilis and euthanasia, ‘Ghosts’' first performance in Britain in 1891 famously generated a firestorm of moral indignation. 

Will Keen as Pastor Manders

The tone of unremitting gloom was set from the start as the sound of pelting rain echoed around Tim Hatley’s Biedermeier set.  I’ve rarely, if ever, seen such a taut duet as between Lesley Manville (who played Cécile Volanges in the original 1985 production of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses”) as Helen Alving and Will Keen as Pastor Manders, the butt of Ibsen’s attacks on conventional morality.  Manders’ desertion of Helen for the priesthood had, in effect, condemned her to a loveless marriage with the philandering Captain Alving. 

Lesley Manville's Mrs Alving

Will Keen’s Manders, swivel-eyed and fingers nervously tapping legs, was as quick to rush to misplaced judgments on others as to cover his own tracks when found wanting.  Dressed in black bustle, Lesley Manville’s Mrs Alving, initially all spirited efficiency, crumpled visibly as events unfolded, her elegant face and resonant voice perfectly pitched to convey suffering.  Twenty-two year-old Jack Lowden was excellent too as her “worm-eaten” but dignified son Oswald, upon whose shoulders the sins of the father were visited.  Charlotte McKenna as the maid Regina and Brian McCardie as her alcoholic but well-intentioned adoptive father played both characters in broad Scots, highlighting the class aspect of Ibsen’s social commentary. 

Jack Lowden as Oswald and Lesley Manville as Mrs Alving

Clouded glass walls conjured up the mists of the fjords and added to the sense the characters were looking at their pasts through a glass darkly.  The sound of the flames noisily consuming the Alvings’ orphanage at the end of Act Two signalled nemesis, rather like the famous ‘breaking string’ in “The Cherry Orchard”, .  

That an 1881 play could pack as much punch in 2013 gave one a sense of the kind of massive impact it must have had on first appearance.

An oddly invigorating experience and a shoe-in for an Olivier!

"The Sound of Things Falling" by Juan Gabriel Vázquez

Up-and-coming Colombian author
Juan Gabriel Vazquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez has a new rival as king of Colombian letters. Juan Gabriel Vázquez (canny self-marketing, the similar name) was born in Bogotá in 1973, has had three novels translated into English to date, and has won acclaim from Marío Vargas Llosa and Colm Toíbin, no less. 

After a law degree in Colombia, Vásquez followed the well-trodden path to Paris (and later Barcelona), where he took a Doctorate in Latin American literature at the Sorbonne, translating Victor Hugo and EM Forster into Spanish.  Nominated as one of the “Bogotá 39” (not a protest group but a selection of South America’s most promising ‘new generation’ of writers), his novels have swiftly picked up gongs and helped earn him a place as a columnist on Colombia’s “El Espectador” paper.

‘Los Informantes’ (published in 2004 and translated as ’The Informers’ in 2009) examined Colombia’s murky role in and after the Second World War, as a destination for both Jews and Nazis, focusing on the tensions and dishonesties arising from two such distinct influxes.  ‘Historia secreta de Costaguana’ (published in 2007 and translated as ‘The Secret History of Costaguana’ in 2011) looked back further still, to the building of the Panama Canal in the late Nineteenth Century, through the eyes of an imaginary assistant to Joseph Conrad. (Conrad's fictional country of Costaguana in “Nostromo” bore more than a passing resemblance to Colombia).  Now, hot off the presses (at least in paperback) in the UK and translated by Anne McLean, who also brought us the previous two, there's moody thriller ‘The Sound of Things Falling’ ('El ruido de las cosas al caer’).

'El Jefe', Senor Coca:  Pablo Escobar

While the Eighties in the UK were a time of bad haircuts, brat-pack movies and the occasional riot, in Colombia they were a rather more violent affair.  The chickens of small-scale marijuana-running to Florida in the Seventies came home to roost in the form of industrial-scale cocaine production, serial assassinations and wholesale subversion by Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel.  Vásquez’s literary noir illuminates this period.  It traces, through the story of a murdered fictional small-time crook, how Colombia descended into ‘narco-statedom’ and how survivors of that period struggle to process their memories:

“Now that so many years have passed, now that I remember with the benefit of an understanding I didn't then have, I think of that conversation and it seems implausible that its importance didn't hit me in the face. (And I tell myself at the same time that we're terrible judges of the present moment, maybe because the present doesn't actually exist: all is memory, this sentence that I just wrote is already a memory, this word is a memory that you, reader, just read).”

Escobar kept hippos in his personal zoo

It's a well-crafted yarn, with each stage of the story cleverly punctuated by a series of aircraft-related incidents, the “things falling” of the title. Aircraft serve as harbingers of misfortune, signs that things are about to go badly awry, in a way that's begun to seem almost familiar since 9/11. (“Bricks can tumble from clear blue skies”, as Sondheim put it in ‘Merrily’.)  Frequent references to Saint-Exupéry’s “Little Prince” maintain the flying theme.  There are key resemblances of mood and in the use of flashbacks with Vargas Llosa's "Conversation in the Cathedral", though this book is mercifully shorter.

Atmospheric and strong on local colour, surprisingly suspenseful given that the main character is killed off at the outset, its melancholia far-removed from the whimsical side of Latin American magic realism, and blessed with an unforgettable opening, this is a thriller I defy you not to polish off in one sitting.

La Grande Bellezza / The Great Beauty, 13.9.13

“History is not a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken, but rather, a glorious tale which I wish to be cast in.”   (Pietros Maneos, The Italian Pleasures of Gabriele Paterkallos)   

At 2h20, Paolo Sorrentino’s lushly visual film was an extended elegy for terminal decadence and a ‘state-of-the nation’ epic. The magnificently expressive Toni Servillo played Jep Gambardello, a wealthy 65yo Roman socialite with a roof-top apartment overlooking the Colosseum (in much the same place as Nero’s ‘Domus Aurea’).  After early literary success and a stillborn youthful love affair, he’s wasted forty years partying.

Toni Servillo as Jap Gambardello, thoroughly at home with the Roman Baroque

 
“Non volevo essere semplicemente un mondano, volevo diventare il re dei mondanito” -

‘I didn’t want to be simply a playboy but to become the king of the playboys’  

Superficially, the film charted Jep's journey towards understanding his own pointlessness, but the character was really a metaphor for Berlusconi’s ‘bunga bunga’ Italy as a whole. 

Sorrentino ticked all the boxes in the course of this giro d’orizzonte of the surface glitter and cynicism of his native land:
botoxed over-sexualised middle-aged élites oblivious to their suicidal youngsters, facially-wasted cardinals interested more in their palates than their souls, impeccably-coutoured Mafiosi, aristocrats-for-hire nostalgic for past glories, blaggard self-deceiving "communists" living in luxury, unhealthy obsessions with angelic children and (probably fraudulent) religiosity, even a passing shot of the stricken ‘Costa Concordia’. 

Caravaggio's Medusa

And all of it unfolding in the carnivalesque context of Caravaggio’s Roma, with the weight of history and art bearing down upon the living in a city which has seen it all and knows there’s nothing new under the sun. 

The weight of Sorrentino’s revulsion bore comparison with Pasolini’s takes on Mussolini’s times.  But the hopelessness was partly offset by visual jokes: the dwarf editor over-shadowed by huge spectacles and a giant Teddy in the corner of her office, the CGI flamingos scattered on the breath of a dying Nun, a giraffe magically disappearing in the Baths of Caracalla:  ‘e solo un truco, amico (it’s just a trick buddy) e solo un truco!  

Fanny Ardant

While hinting that Italy's adoration of surfaces, ‘life as performance’ and the ‘great beauty’ of the title is part of its problem, Sorrentino replicated those same obsessions.  The characters were ‘types’: Carlo Verdone was Romano (Jep’s fatty actor-buddy who leaves the city that’s ‘disappointed him’), Sabrina Ferrilli was the curvaceous Ramona (an ageing tart desperate for a real connection) while Pamela Villoresi and Galatea Ranzi were stunningly cheek-boned matronly ‘mondani’.  Even that most worldly of French stars, Fanny Ardant, made a brief and exquisitely-outfitted appearance.

Bernini's Medusa

Flick benefited from a to-die-for soundtrack which alternated drug-fuelled drumbeats and devotional simplicity (Tavener’s ‘The Lamb’ etc).  This was as far from Merkelian Protestant austerity as you can get, perhaps the closest the cinema has got to incarnating the ‘Baroque’ in all its fatal splendour. 

We’re going to hell in a handcart and we know it was the message, but we’re damned if we're not going to put on a great show as we go down ...