Altman, 16.10.14

Ron Mann’s fond and classy tribute to Hollywood’s rebel-director Robert Altman (1925-2006), showing at the BFI in the London Film Festival, exceeded all expectations.  Made with the support of Altman’s widow Kathryn (his third and longest-lasting wife), it convincingly located him in time and place. 

Originally a hack TV director from Kansas, Altman cut his teeth on advertising promos and series like “Bonanza” in the Sixties. After a long apprenticeship, he got his big break with the original movie version of “M*A*S*H” in 1970 which, though set in the Korean War, was an ironic commentary on the war in Vietnam.  (The studio tried and failed to get him to excise a particularly gorey scene in an operating theatre.) 

Tim Robbins' callow producer receives yet
another death threat in 1992's "The Player"

A virulently anti-Nixon child of the late Sixties (he tore up a signed bio the ex-President later sent him in jest), Altman managed to get himself fired by almost every major Hollywood Studio.  His commitment to film as artistry and his determination to show gritty reality and l'Amerique profonde in the flesh made him the darling of the European festival set, which rewarded him with two BAFTAs (for “The Player” and “Gosford Park”), two Palmes d’Ors (for “MASH” and “The Player) and two Golden Bears.  In contrast Hollywood managed only a belated and merely honorary Oscar. 

Donald Sutherland, Sally Kellerman and Elliott Gould on manoeuvres
in Altman's 1970 breakthrough movie "MASH" 

The early-to-mid-Seventies (“Nashville”, “The Long Goodbye”, “McCabe and Mrs Miller” – alas none of which Motley has actually seen) were his signature period, but he had a late flowering with masterpieces like “The Player” (a 1992 satire on Hollywood, which he described as being “nothing like as bad as reality”, and which included the longest (8 minute +) opening tracking shot in film history), “Short Cuts” (which completely bowled Motley over in 1994), "Kansas City" (a moody 1996 film about jazz's early days), “Gosford Park” (a fresh take on the English country house murder mystery) and “The Prairie Home Companion” (his last film, a collaboration with Garrison Keillor, filled with intimations of mortality, in which Streep and Tomlin excelled). 

The doc didn’t shy away from the fact that Altman’s career included a long fallow period in the Eighties (when he was completely out-of-tune with the zeitgeist) and a fair few turkeys (such as “Popeye” – Robin Williams’ debut feature from 1980, "Pret-a-Porter", a 1994 take on the fashion industry, and “Cookie’s Fortune” – a 1999 Southern yarn with Glenn Close).
 

Lily Tomlin and Tom Waits live it large on the San Andreas Fault
waiting for 'the big one' in Altman's seminal 1994 "Short Cuts",
an adaptation of multiple Raymond Carver short stories

Mann's film pinpointed what was most distinctive about Altman's work (stylised satirical naturalism, overlapping dialogue, blurred sound, masterly choice of music, a willingness to tell the truth about the kind of issues Hollywood normally avoids, a fondness for large baggy ensemble pieces, and recurring actors like Lily Tomlin, Elliott Gould and Shelley Duvall).  It benefitted from the inclusion of family videos which really gave a sense of the man's lumbering paternal good-nature, while gently acknowledging he may have put more effort into film-making than raising his six children. 



Altman and wife Kathryn in the director's last years

A series of Hollywood “A-listers”, filmed in black-and-white close-up profile, offered multiple definitions of what “Altmanesque” meant to them:  "makin' your own rules", "kicking Hollywood's ass", "creating a family" and "expect the unexpected" were some of the snappier offerings from the likes of PT Anderson, Julianne Moore, Lily Tomlin, Bruce Willis and the late Robin Williams.  Altman himself believed it was 'all about the actors'.
 
Altman lived long and drank hard, throwing party after party. After several brushes with near-penury, he ended up in an enormous beach-side condo in Malibu, and survived a heart transplant eleven years.  Mann's film succeeded in placing Altman squarely in that precious counter-cultural generation of Americans which wasn’t prepared to play the now ubiquitous corporate game.  “No hippies were harmed in the making of this film” said the closing credit!

James I (The Key Will Keep The Lock), 8.10.14

The Scots Trilogy (James I, II & III),
currently playing at London's National Theatre

Intriguingly, Hilary Mantel (an unmistakably substantial presence) was in the audience for this NT matinée of the first of Rona Munro’s much-lauded National Theatre of Scotland trilogy on Scots history.  Motley wondered quite what the skilfully nuanced biographer of Thomas Cromwell made of this resolutely demotic foray into the tenebrous gloom and chest-hair of fifteenth century Stirling, a place where even the apples have to be imported from England. 

James McArdle's James I takes on
his uncle Murdac (Gordon Kennedy)

The historical James I (more a “King of Scots” than a “King of Scotland” in Munro’s Nationalist formulation) had come to the throne at the age of twelve in 1406 only to spend eighteen years as a hostage at the English court.  The play covered the 1420-25 period when Henry V of England (Jamie Sives), having publicly humiliated James but realising his own days were numbered, allowed him to return to claim his birthright from the regent, his uncle Murdac Stewart.  Munro’s piece dramatised the thirty year old king’s return, marriage, assumption of powers and humbling of his cousins, the Albany Stewarts.  (For simplicity’s sake, it left out the story of his eventual murder thirteen years later at the hands of yet another of the unruly Stewarts.) 

James McArdle's James I and his bête noire
Blythe Duff's Lady Isabella

With more than a passing nod to Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, but alas with little of the Bard’s lexical sophistication, we witnessed the initially bookish and romantic James (commandingly played by James McArdle) cast aside sensitivity and scruple to assure the safety of his dynasty and that of his new English queen (the endearingly girlish Stephanie Hyam).  Confronted by the greed of the Albany Stewarts (led by Blythe Duff's redoubtable ‘Lady Isabella’, who was clearly channelling Lady Macbeth), the message was that James had no alternative but to “man up”, roger his queen in front of half the Scots nobility and vigorously knock heads together (or off).  This was a bracingly retro message for a female playwright. 

'Uneasy lies the head that wears
the crown' (James McArdle's James I)

Munro had fun depicting the distinctly rambunctious Scottish court, all rough-and-ready snouts to the trough.  Fifteenth-century politics was depicted as being about little more than clashes of uncontrolled appetite between boorish nobles entirely uncivilised by law or culture.  (Lady Isabella, required to vacate the palace upon the king’s return, was only just prevented from carrying off the royal plate, while her unruly sons polished off most of what lunch was available.) 

Jon Bausor’s suitably threadbare two-level set (with a a raised throne above a giant sword, to remind us of the source of all power in this period) was well-done, as were the well-choreographed battle scenes and Paul Leonard-Morgan’s muscular music.  To my mind, though, Munro rather overdid the barely-disguised Nationalist sub-text about the financially-predatory English or the ‘take-me-as-ye-find-me’ Scots being immune to English social deference.

Playwright Rona Munro

Although the relatively obscure historical subject matter was calculated to appeal to Motley, if you’re going to take a period which the Bard so made his own, you really need to clothe your text in something more nourishing than expletives.  While Munro’s timing can’t, in the light of the referendum, be faulted, the exposure to Part One didn’t leave Motley's pulse racing to see Parts Two or Three. 

Pride, 23.9.14

George Mackay's Bromley discovers his inner activist

A bevy of luvvies (Imelda Staunton, Bill Nighy, Dominic West, Andrew Scott, Paddy Considine) starred in this warm crowd-pleaser about a small group of gay activists who fund-raised for the miners during the 1984/5 strike, despite themselves being under attack from homophobes, viruses and the tabloids. 

Heavily-inspired by “Made in Dagenham”, an earlier Brit-flick about marginalised people coming of age during a strike, Matthew Warchus’s feel-good ensemble flick transmuted challenging story-lines into something more uplifting, while occasionally teetering on the verge of corniness.  Much of the story-line was apparently based on fact:  a South Wales colliery band did indeed repay the gay activists' support by leading the 1985 London “Pride” march and NUM block-votes subsequently helped shift Labour party policy on the age of consent. 

Imelda Staunton hits the dance-floor at the Miners' Welfare Club

In the tradition of miners' strike films ("Billy Elliott", "The Full Monty"), Stephen Beresford's script focused squarely on the links between the personal and the political.  Framed as a coming-out tale for 20yo “Bromley” (a gawky catering student well under-played by George Mackay), the film was saturated in Eighties cultural signifiers (à la “Peter’s Friends”, “Starter for Ten”) and looked back nostalgically to the days when playing Bronski Beat, Frankie and Billy Bragg was the standard form of protest. 

A morality tale about the personal confidence to be gained from standing up and reaching across social borders, the film had fun with the classic British trope of introducing urbanites to a traditional provincial setting (cf “Withnail and I”).  Most of the best lines went to the miners' wives, very much the glue holding the pit-village together.  A bulked-up Staunton rather stole the show as a redoubtable Welsh battle-axe you probably wouldn't want to bump into on an unlit street at night. 
 

"LGSM:  Lesbians & Gays Support the Miners"

Ben Schnetzer was the quiffed and gobby activist who led a motley band of naifs to raise funds for a Welsh pit village 'so small there were no vowels in its name' (his character apparently based on real-life activist Mark Watson, who fell victim to AIDS only two years after the strike).  Dominic West had fun playing against standard macho type as a flamboyant Seventies ‘dancing queen’, while Andrew Scott ("Sherlock's" Moriarty) had to be more buttoned-up as West's gay-bashed Welsh lover.  The film played amusingly too with the uneasy gay/lesbian dialectic. 

For those of us who remember these events first-hand, it was striking what a different world 1984 was compared to today, similarly oppressive governments aside.  Motley found himself far more drawn to it as a wised-up forty-something than he probably would have done as a shy provincial teenager at the time.  Better late than never!

My Night With Reg, 28.8.14

Robert Hastie's well-performed twentieth anniversary Donmar production of Kevin Elyot's 1994 landmark gay comedy set in 1985, a 1950s parlour drama with added profanity, was played through without intervals.  The play had created a stir back in 1994 as the first "out" gay drama to hit the West End.  Is it picky to think it might have worked better if it had been a little more "in"?  Comic toasts ("Gross indecency!") exemplified a tendency to banality, while the play helped initiate the tendency of every subsequent 'gay play' to throw in some arbitrary full-frontal nudity to pull in the punters. 


Lewis Reeves' butt enlivened an otherwise
less than enthralling trip down memory lane

Elyot (who died in June, just before this production opened) dallied in the over-familiar territory of the English inability to communicate or engage emotionally.

Most of the characters, with the exception of the youngster, were stereotypes, exiled from youthful dreams of David Bowie by fear of imminent lonely middle-age, or worse.
 

Jonathon Broadbent's apron-clad Guy

Jonathon Broadbent was heavily-bespectacled and repressed Guy, the recipient of multiple well-intentioned cookbooks for one, ever the hostess and never the bride.  Floppy-haired Geoffrey Streatfeild was Daniel, Reg’s dandyish widow, forever running off to hop on planes to the other side of the world.  Old-Etonian Julian Ovenden (better-known from “Downton Abbey” and the son of HMQ’s former chaplain, no less) was public-school drifter John, one of Reg’s many bits-on-the-side, and the object of Guy’s excruciatingly undeclared affections. 
 
Relief from the tiresome Oxbridge-ness of these three came from Matt Bardock as Benny, a priapically blunt Cockney bus driver, and from Richard Cant's Bernie, a classic bore who banged-on about conservatories with an impressively nasal whine.  Twinkly-blue-eyed twenty-five-year-old blond Lewis Reeves was ingénu Brummie painter Eric, the least damaged and most appealing character (as well as the least clothed). 
 

Geoffrey Streatfield's flighty Daniel and
Julian Ovenden's vulnerable John

The central conceit was, of course, that the eponymously absent Reg had slept with them all (bar Eric) and had just been carried off by AIDS.  The unexpected plot twist was that it was the gentlest and least promiscuous character (given to donning Marigolds before any intimate encounter) who was unexpectedly next in line for the Grim Reaper.
 

Lewis Reeves as Eric, the one point of optimism
in a play misleadingly labelled a "comedy" 

Motley's feelings about the play were strangely unchanged from twenty years ago.  It was quite hard to stomach the depressing mixture of unfulfilled men, mundane text (characters constantly being offered refills) and low comedy ("Nuts anyone?", asked the gauchely 'Carry-On' host at his breathtakingly dull soirée), even without the looming threat from an unnamed killer virus.  It was also too well-manneredly English, summoning up little of the rage of Larry Kramer's "The Normal Heart", another early AIDS drama.
 
Elyot’s rancid view of gay men was unsentimental and reductive in more or less equal measure (though not entirely unfair, judging by post-production chat-room comments on the size of Mr Reeves’ equipment).  Improved social and medical conditions have fortunately allowed most gay men to move on from those terrible mid-Thatcher years – and not before time.  

Boyhood, 20.8.14

Mason Jnr (the 6 year old Ellar Coltrane) as we first saw him

Richard Linklater’s Berlin Silver Bear winner was a Bildungsroman examining how “time’s winged-chariot” deals with both children and parents.

Media coverage rightly focused on the extraordinary feat of filming the same fictional family, in cinema verité style, over twelve years. 

We watched Patricia Arquette (Mom) and Ethan Hawke (Dad - Mason Snr), unmarried American parents of modest means, split, move, marry, divorce, remarry and divorce again, while bringing up two children through this maelstrom of changing relationships.  Arquette was particularly impressive at conveying the low-key decency of a Mom who’s serially disappointed by men (“I thought there would be more”, she concludes - about life rather than men).
 

Mason Jnr's Mom (Patricia Arquette), who matures 
as much as either of her children

The eponymous boy Mason Jnr (Ellar Coltrane) went from six to eighteen before our eyes, in tandem with his slightly older sister Sam (played by Linklater’s own daughter Lorelei). 

Yet while we saw Mason Jnr grow up, for him, as for many teenagers, life was always elusively in the present tense (“It’s like it’s always right now”). 

Linklater’s typically Texan-set film was a languorous moody affair, more interested in the mundane realities of relationships and family life than broader social issues.  There were a few topical references to Iraq and the 2008 Obama campaign (Dad swiped some McCain billboards).  Many of the rites of passage were specifically American: baseball and bowling with Dad and a, to European eyes, creepy vignette where Mason Jnr was given a shotgun for his fifteenth birthday by doting bible-bashing hick step-grandparents.  A few more troubling episodes apart (for instance when Mom was beaten up by her alcoholic second partner), the focus of the movie was on showing children's personalities developing - not least in opposition to adults’ frequently cack-handed attempts to guide them.

Finally accepting responsibility:  Dad (Ethan Hawke)
takes his son away for one of many single-parent weekends

Linklater ‘s trademark mood of slightly bemused directionlessness, memorably essayed in “Dazed and Confused” as long ago as 1993, was repeated here at deliberate length.  The pace of the 2 ¾ hour screen time occasionally flagged but the film worked far better than Terrence Mallick’s “Tree of Life”, which tried to cover similar territory more impressionistically.

The universality of the theme, despite the particularities of the American setting, virtually guaranteed a positive audience response, helped by Linklater’s refusal to sensationalise.  Motley had two main cavils. Firstly, with the exception of one Hispanic, there was no attempt to represent America as the melting-pot that it is, with African-Americans in particular conspicuously absent.  Secondly, as many others have commented, flick was mis-titled and should have been called “Family” or “Motherhood”, since it was as much about Mom, Dad and the Sister as about the Boy. 

"The Three Ages of Boy":
Mason Jnr at 6, 14 and 18

That said, compared to the pap that Hollywood generally churns out, kudos is due to the “auteur of Austin” for a sensitive, acute and authentic portrayal, from admirably multiple perspectives, of the transfer of the baton between the generations.
   

Intimate Apparel, 25.7.14

*SPOILER ALERT:  this review contains a plot summary*

Motley's first time at the rather bijou Finsbury Park Theatre for the UK première by Lawrence Boswell's Bath Theatre Royal company of the touching first (2003) work by African-American playwright Lynn Nottage (b1964; Yale & Columbia).  Booked on the strength of seeing Nottage’s Pullitzer-winning ‘Ruined’ at the Almeida in 2010.


Tanya Moodie (Esther) and Ian Goodman (Mr Marks)
share their love of fabrics together

Play centred on the search for love of an “unidentified negro seamstress” Esther (an emotionally transparent Tanya Moodie) in 1905 New York.

 

The eternal feminine: 
Tanya Moodie's Esther

Esther, a plain-but-homely long-term lodger in the “rooming-house” of the redoubtable Mrs Dickson (Dawn Hope) has just turned 35, still a lonely spinster.  She strikes up an unexpected correspondence with George (a dodgily-accented Chu Omambala), a Caribbean labourer on the Panama Canal whom she’s never met.  Illiterate Esther, who’s built up a cottage business supplying ‘intimate apparel’ both to Fifth Avenue white ladies (Sara Topham as the self-absorbed and mildly Sapphic Mrs Van Buren) and Tenderloin tarts (Rochelle Neil as piano-playing sex kitten Mayme) allows her clients to pen the letters on her behalf.  The epistolary romance blossoms into an unlikely marriage. 

Reality though comes home to roost in Act Two as the hapless George, emasculated by racial discrimination, betrays Esther and gambles away her lifetime’s savings.  It emerges that George too had relied on others to pen his letters and, with that shattering disclosure, Esther ends up in Mrs Dickson’s rooming house, poignantly back where she began. 

Whore or dressmaker? 
The choices for black women in early C20 NY
 (Rochelle Neil & Tanya Moodie)

This warmly-feminine well-constructed chamber-piece benefited from deft staging, strong all-round performances and suggestive musical accompaniment (an intriguing mix of klezmer and ragtime). 

What might have been a purely cautionary tale was transmuted into something more hopeful by the sense of solidarity between the women (all variously constrained by white patriarchy) and by a friendship forever teetering on platonic romance which Esther strikes up with the shyly-decent Shtetl haberdasher Mr Marks (a standout performance from Ian Goodman).  

“How we be friends? When I ain't never been through your front door”
Esther confronts wealthy patron Mrs Van Buren (Sara Topham)

Drawing on memories of her own great-grandmother, Nottage gave empathetic but non-preachy voice back to that most forgotten of groups, the black women who helped to power NY’s extraordinary turn-of-the-century growth. 

While lacking the visceral force of ‘Ruined’, it was well worth the effort of getting to the less-than-sylvan Finsbury Park on a sultry summer night.

  

Porgy and Bess, 23.7.14

Timothy Sheader’s new production of the Gershwin opera at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, based on a musical adaptation by Diedre L Murray, condensed the original, successfully bringing it, like the 2006 Trevor Nunn London production, much closer to musical theatre.

Rufus Bonds' crippled Porgy (centre) at the centre of the action

Rufus Bonds Jr and Nicola Hughes (who was Bess in the Nunn production) took the title roles. They were supported by Tony-award winner Phillip Boykin as baddass Crown, the magnificent Sharon D Clarke as matriarch Mariah, Golda Resheuvel as church elder Serena and, resplendent in natty yellow suit, the diminutive Cedric Neal as “happy-dust” dealer Sportin’ Life.  Bonds, Boykin and Neal were all on loan from Broadway. 

Phillip Boykin as Crown,
the alpha male with the voice to match

In an open-air setting, the vocal plaudits went to the powerful Boykin and Clarke and the acting plaudits to Neal and Hughes, who really inhabited their characters.  In contrast, Bonds and the orchestra were a little under-powered. 

Nicola Hughes' Bess samples the goods
(Phillip Boykin as Crown)

The show opened with Nicola Hughes, all taut sexual appetite, coming on silently in a black one-piece and donning a dress as dangerously red as her “loose woman” character.  Wrapped erotically around the big-bellied Crown, Bess is initially treated with disdain by the married women of 'Catfish Row'.  But when Crown kills Serena’s husband Robbins for his winnings from a game of 'craps' and has to go into hiding, Bess has an opportunity to come off the happy dust and “live decent” with crippled beggar Porgy.  Dealer 'Sporting Life' eventually tempts her back onto dope to snatch her away to NY, but the work ends with a hint of optimism as the besotted Porgy sets off in hot pursuit (cleverly staged here by Bonds walking tall over a series of strategically-placed tables). 


Cedric Neal struts his stuff as dealer Sportin' Life

Although Motley, like the rest of the planet, knew the main numbers (“Summertime”, “It ain’t necessarily so”, “I loves you, Porgy”), shamefully he'd never seen the whole work before.  It was fascinating to see how everything fitted together and to discover the lesser-known numbers (“My man’s gone now”, “It take a long pull to get there”, “Oh Doctor Jesus” & “A red-headed woman”).  And all at much less length than the operatic version!

With on-stage racial assaults, two murders, drug use and some fairly explicit crotch-grabbing, it was strong meat, both sexually and politically (which is probably why it took forty years to be accepted into the operatic repertoire).  Aside from baddies Crown and Sporting Life, the black residents of 'Catfish Row' were nonetheless sympathetically depicted as a coherent community, thrown together by poverty and white oppression. 


A set which came alive as the evening darkened

Staged against a cleverly-lit Expressionist luminous metallic backdrop, which changed colour according to the mood, this 1935 Depression-era work came across as more vividly sexual and political than Motley had anticipated: Brechtian in ambition.  (A hurricane, for example, was successfully simulated with only a few stage props.)   

Judging from the standing ovations, if this doesn’t turn into the London hit of the summer, Motley will eat his hat!

[Personal note:  many thanks to DP for the wonderful fourth row stalls seats and catering]