James Martin Charlton

Visiting Bethlehem

2011-10-29T13:18:00.004+01:00

There is some historical evidence (in Josephus and Tacitus) that Yeshua-bar-Yosef ended his life in Jerusalem, given they mention him being sentenced to death by the Roman governor based there, Pontius Pilate. The birth of Yeshua-bar-Yosef at Bethlehem is quite another matter – it is not mentioned outside of the Gospels, except in apocryphal material which looks even more like mythology than they do. There is certainly poetic meaning and no small beauty to be found in the Gospel accounts of the Nativity but as an adult I have never given much credence to them being literal accounts of the birth of a historical man (the same goes for the virgin birth; personally I quite like the Pantera story whilst acknowledging there's no evidence for its historicity). Yet the clearly mythological tone of the Nativity accounts has not prevented Christians, from the earliest times, of mapping out mythic events on the actual land of Palestine and marking places in or near Bethlehem as the site of these events.

A trip from Jerusalem to see these sites in Bethlehem today means a traveller encountering another, far from mythical and all too contemporary story, as Bethlehem lies behind the Separation Wall and visitors must pass through the Gilo checkpoint into the West Bank. We'd booked a half-day coach trip for the visit and our Israeli coach-driver dropped us off at the steel-walled and iron grilled checkpoint which we then passed through to be met by a Palestinian driver on the other side (Israeli citizens are not permitted to travel into the Palestinian territories). The checkpoint is ugly and oppressive but the passage through into the West Bank was quick and simple enough. Driven then towards Jerusalem, we then got a chance to see a the great amount of graffiti which has been done on the Palestinian side, including a dove in a bullet proof vest by Banksy. The Wall on the Israeli side is as your proverbial whitewashed tomb. I will say more about the Wall further down.

We visited three Christian sites in Bethlehem. First, the Milk Grotto purports to be the cave in which the Holy Family rested on the Flight into Egypt. Legend has it that the walls of this cave were once red but a drop of milk from the breast of "the Virgin" spilt onto the floor here and everything was miraculously changed to white. The chalky walls of the cavern are now scraped and the dust sold to women desperate to conceive a child; this small business and the site itself is run by the Franciscans. Our guide was quite serious that this miraculous property of helping conception did indeed exist in the cave's chalk; I remain to be convinced but if it does, I think it's a poor show for the Franciscans to be charging for it. The Grotto itself is a not particularly interesting interior and the modernist chapel constructed alongside it is very featureless; more whitewashed walls…

Nearby another grotto claims to be the cave in which the shepherds were visited by the Angel of the Lord, telling them that the messiah had been born. A small Church has been raised in what is now known as the Shepherd's Fields, The Sanctuary of the Shepherds. This is a small, granite dome the interior of which is decorated by the most tasteless, tacky frescos imaginable – the kinds of things one sees on cheap Christmas cards, with pseudo Pre-Raphaelite angels bearing down on dopey shepherds surrounded by docile sheep; in one of the frescos, an idiot boy shepherd leaps for joy; there's an entirely predictable nativity scene. The Church is in peaceful and well-kept grounds and this is not a bad place to spend some time in quiet contemplation – but how much better would it be if the announcement of the birth of Jesus, who in the gospels comes across as a most unpredictable and positively dangerous character, wasn't being celebrated in such a conventional and anodyne way in the decoration. The grotto itself is a pokey interior decorated by nativity cribs. Inside whilst we were there were a group of South Korean pilgrims being spoken to about the angelic announcement and how it heralds a message about the replacing of the "stony heart" with the fully beating, compassionate human heart which life in Christ can give us. I found this message rather affecting, and was pleased to be reminded of Dylan's lyric Property of Jesus. From the manufactured peace of the Shepherd's field one gets a good view of a nearby Israeli settlement, a kind of monstrously growing, drab Middle Eastern Milton Keynes.

The Church of the Nativity itself is an impressive if ramshackle edifice. One enters, via Manger Square, through a doorway known as the "Gate of Humility" – as only children, dwarfs and midgets wouldn't have to stoop to get through it. Inside one is faced with an impressive if barren Nave, in the floor of which some Byzantine mosaics are exposed, a remnant of the earliest church in this location, built by Constantine's mother Helena. The altar of the church is in stark contract with the nave, a gaudy Greek Orthodox explosion of icons, crosses, cencers and paintings. Beneath this is the Grotto of the Nativity itself, the space claimed to be the stable in which the Christ-child was born.

The Grotto is quite an unpleasant space, in terms of it being thronging with pilgrims and worshippers and therefore cramped and uncomfortable. It has little formal elegance, with the specific locations of various events scattered around and made impossible to see for more than a glimpse as they are covered by the prostrate and praying bodies of the faithful. A silver star marks the spot on which the Virgin supposedly dropped Our Lord, perhaps suggesting that he is a kind of Lone Ranger deputy of the Lord sent to sort, Western style, the bad men out. Given it is such a small and low-ceilinged space and given the throng inside, it is easy to imagine the chaos that must have ensued when the Magi, their servants and the shepherds all barged in to give their praises at the birth; it’s a wonder the baby Jesus didn't suffocate.

Next door to the Basilica is the 19^th century Franciscan Church and Cloister of Saint Catherine, the distinguishing feature of which is a large brass showing the Tree of Jesse near the main door. In the cloister, a statue of Saint Jerome presides; high on the cloister wall, bullet holes from the 2002 siege are still visible. Coming back into Manger Square, I was struck by the pall that hangs about the place – it's a World Heritage Site but there's an unease in the air; I later read that the Basilica is in a parlous state of repair which the custodians, infighting amongst themselves, fail to do anything about. Perhaps in this way it is an apt memorial to the birth of a message of Universal Love – falling to bits as folk argue amongst themselves.

Getting back into Israel from the West Bank is not quite so simple as getting in. One travels back through the Gilo checkpoint and to do so, one must join the queue. Most of the people here are Palestinians, who might well have land, work or family on one side and home on the other; they probably have to do this chore of queuing daily. It took a good 40 minutes to get through the checkpoint, as each of the Palestinians much present their papers (a ragged sheet) and undergo fingerprint recognition before the demonstrably bored young Israeli soldiers let them through. One young woman, in the midst of her family, didn't quite know how to finesse the fingerprint procedure – she kept putting her hand on the reader and something about this was wrong; the Israeli soldier grunted and ordered her to do it again. Again and again. She became exasperated and frustrated, clearly in need of some guidance which was not forthcoming from the checkpoint guard; her family tried to help her but it took her a good few tries before she got it right. This was an unpleasant and humiliating moment for her and for her family and I felt embarrassed to see it, especially given the fact that myself and my partner walked through vaguely flashing our British passports, waved through with disinterest by the guard. We were then waved onto a bus for Jerusalem which was also carrying a large part of the Palestinians who had just travelled through the checkpoint. A young Palestinian guy heard our voices and wanted to talk with us in English, seeming very pleased at this chance encounter but before we could engage with him, a taxi driver got on and dragged those of us on the Bethlehem excursion off and into his cab. I wish I'd have stayed on and done the trip with my fellows in the checkpoint queue.

Travelling through the checkpoint reminded me of the weeks I spent directing a couple of musicals with prisoners in Maidstone prison. Twice a day we'd have to go back and forth through security, as well we might, given we'd chosen to work with convicted criminals, many of whom had committed heinous and violent crimes. No matter the realities on the ground in Israel, who could think it not a shame (I use the word with force) that ordinary Palestinians are forced to go through such a daily palaver with moments of humiliation merely because of acts of terrorism the vast majority of them have nothing to do with? That a country might become a kind of holding camp for swathes of its population has to be unsustainable, whatever the rationales. This walling of the Palestinians casts a vast shadow over Israeli consumer society, darkening all of the shopping malls and the beach parties and the markets and the essentially European infrastructure. Where this leaves the Holy sites is a nagging question – Mere tourist traps? Part of the factional, sectarian problem? Remnants and reminders of another Way in the midst of a fallen world? Or all of these things in a complex mesh?

Jerusalem and its Sites of Mythic Events...

2011-09-14T22:55:00.003+01:00

My partner and I spent 7 days in Israel this in late August/early September, on vacation as the Americans would say or was it on Pilgrimage as a Medievalist might say? One thing is for sure, we weren't on a crusade. It is such a strange, alluring and complex part of the world that I want to write a blog or two on it, and this is the first; fragmented thoughts and scattered insights. Others will follow if I get the time…

We arrived at Tel Aviv Ben Gurion Airport and, after my partner faced some reasonably stringent questioning (they didn't seem that bothered by me), we got a car to Jerusalem. Our first four nights were spent in The Holy City, and our first morning there was spent walking the Via Dolorosa.

The Via Dolorosa is a walk through the winding streets of Old Jerusalem, which is still a walled city, with seven gates; we entered in through Damascus Gate. The Via Dolorosa supposedly traces the journey of Jesus from his condemnation by Pilate to his internment in the tomb. Each of the famous Stations of the Cross are marked on the route, some with a simple round medallion on the wall, some with a chapel or sanctuary. It's a fascinating walk to take, both for the sites - some of the chapels are exquisite (for example the Church of the Flagellation with its beautiful stained glass and Crown of Thorns ceiling, or the Chapel of the Third Station, with its compelling paintings) - and also the characters: the local traders trying every which way to make a dollar from the tourists & pilgrims, the former stopping to take photographs and the latter mostly in groups, singing hymns at each Station. This heady mix of money-making and tourism with sanctity and religiosity is the most palpable and peculiar flavour of Jerusalem, and it would be wrong to wish for it to be any other way. It's kind of a theme park where people go not simply for fun but for ecstasy and grace. I can't say I felt, at the time, any great spiritual affect – but being there is to be swept up into this very real and very present place which is at the same time very unreal and very Eternal. It is a kind of place where time and eternity meet but the effect of that happening is not what you might expect. One thing is for sure, it could only be Jerusalem.

I have a lot of time for the Gospels as Imaginative Art and I've done a fair bit of reading around the historical Yeshua-bar-Yosef, the various theories as to what really happened if any of it did, the "reality" behind the Myth. I suppose my take on this is relatively unusual, because for the Myth to work in me (and at times it does), there doesn't need to have been a literal reality. The Jesus of the Gospels exists in the words on the page and in the Imagination of the reader. Whether a first century Jewish holy man was the reality behind that Myth isn't essential, any more than whether some Theban tyrant really stands somewhere behind Oedipus. Of course, someone came up with the Parables, which seem to me quite extraordinary literary achievements, and someone stands behind the ideas; if Saul/Paul of Tarsus or some other early follower had made it all up, they would surely have credited themselves with the parables and ideas and claimed they were themselves Messiah; so the background figure I suspect strongly was a real person. This ambiguity I have as to the historicity of the figure is an ambiguity which is essentially writerly. As a writer myself, I might base this or that character or situation on a real person or event; I wouldn't want anyone to get too interested in the reality, as the story as I have written it is The Thing. The kick I get from finding out about the life of Yeshua-bar-Yosef is in seeing what the writers of the Gospels – clearly men of literary genius – did with it to turn it into this incredible Myth. That Yeshua-bar-Yosef was something of a literary and philosophical genius himself is an added layer of intrigue…

But how to approach Jerusalem, where real places are presented as mythic ones? The Via Dolorosa ends inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which contains not only the supposed Sepulchre of the Resurrection but also the rock of Calvary and the place on which Jesus was laid to be perfumed and shrouded after death, the Stone of Unction. There are contested theories as to whether these places are the actual places, if the actual events took place (which is, to some more than others, a big if). I am made a little queasy by real land being made mythic in this way; the mapping of Imaginative space onto actual space kind of bothers me. Yet this sceptic wasn't always in place. Underneath an elaborate Greek Orthodox altar and glass case, one is presented by a rock which does indeed look like a skull. One doesn't see the rock until quite late as you approach the altar and, at that moment, I felt a palpable shock. One has to bend down in order to reach through and touch it and there in that moment I wondered "What will happen? Will some vision course through my mind, splitting it open? Will my heart burst with the kind of love St Teresa felt in her ecstasies? Will I be taken on a Trip of mind-altering, cosmic dimensions?" But it was just a cold rock I felt with my sense of touch, as it would be, and those not blessed with a spiritual moment or cursed with a schizophrenic one are left with their imagination to build on this place in that brief moment of touch and after, in contemplation and creativity.

The Holy Sepulchre is more difficult to get one's head around. It is easy to believe that someone was crucified on that rock two millennia ago; it is somewhat harder to swallow that on the nearby site of the now elaborately covered Holy Sepulchre that same man came back to life. It is easy to take this in a myth – Tiresias changed his sex and Leda was raped by a swan, of course I agree with those story elements and can just as soon agree that Jesus came back to life; it is easy to take as a metaphor – after all, you can't kill an idea. But as a historical moment? This is where one needs faith and unless you have this with you already at the Holy Sepulchre, I doubt you'll find it in the Aedicule of the Sepulchre itself. Pilgrims and tourists are harried and herded, about 12 or 13 at a time, into the Aedicule and given a very limited time in the actual space (you pass through one chamber into another). There's little chance here for the trails of mystery and awe to weave themselves around one's mind. Perhaps thinking about the place later? In that case, might you as well not have gone, just Imagined? The literal presence of the places simply leads one back to the Imagination, where such events really take place. William Blake posited that all events take place in the Imagination…

Behind the Sepulchre there is an ante-room with a battered old altar and you can pass through this to the Tomb of Joseph of Arimethea, which unlike the Sepulchre has no ornate or any other decoration and therefore has rather more atmosphere (not many people venture in here, as an added plus). In this barren, unlit cave, crouching down, one can get strange intimations; you could believe that out of sight, out of mind, a wondrously strange thing might happen here… The lack of decoration, the lack of light, the lack of others presents the Imagination with opportunities…

In retrospect, the walk along the Via Dolorosa and around the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was an extraordinarily special thing to have done – whether or not one subscribes any truth to the legends about these places. These are rich sites from which have sprung stories and from which stories can and will continue to spring. The place of the skull though – that is a place in your head, and it is there ultimately that the Saviour will be crucified and might Rise Again; is it there all other mythic events, about Jesus and anything else, will ultimately take place…

The crucifixions and resurrections that go on in your own mind will bleed and come back to life in the reality we share, which is after all the site of the meeting of minds.

Walking around the Stories on The Franks Casket, and Everywhere

2011-08-02T13:14:00.003+01:00

Amongst the many beautiful and extraordinary objects in the British Museum's current exhibition of reliquaries and associated materials, Treasures of Heaven, is an early 8th century box carved from whale's bone, originating inEngland. The Franks Casket, as it has come to be known, is ornately carved withscenes illustrating mythological stories on each side as well as on the lid.Walking round the box, peering at the scenes depicted and reading thetranslations of the inscriptions, I was struck by the idea that here was analmost perfect work of Art, and more than this, a work which could inspire usto create Art which is democratic, provocative, thought-provoking and whichmight intercede in the lives of those who encounter it as a challenge.

The carved scenes are taken from diverse traditions - Roman, Jewish,Christian and Germanic. The front panel shows the Adoration of the Magi, wisemen bringing their gift to the infant Saviour, alongside which is, and hereI'll use the useful description from the exhibition catalogue, "theGermanic tale of the exiled Weland. Imprisoned by King Nithland, Welandextracts a terrible revenge, murdering the king's two sons and raping hisdaughter." Two tales, two kings (the latter of this earth, the other of akingdom "not of this earth"), on showing a horrible revenge for pastdeeds, the other positing forgiveness of sins (which, as William Blakesuggested, is the key message of Jesus - see For Children: The Gates of Paradise).

On the lid of the casket, there is a scene which "depicts a siegefrom an unidentified episode in the life of the Germanic hero Egil, while theback shows the capture of Jerusalem from the Romans in AD 70." The firstscene depicts a situations of entrapment and the second its bloody consequences(the Jews besieged at Masada killed themselves en masse and their compatriotswho survived the 70 AD uprising in Jerusalem were driven from the Holy Land).The casket is sphinx-like as to what we should make of these scenes, but it iscertain that we probably (unless we had a death-wish) wouldn't want to livethem.

On the left panel, the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, are suckledby a wolf, as in their legend, and the catalogue supposes that this is "asymbol of the mother church offering succour". This may be true, as theChurch in that day was the Roman church, but is it really inviting to see thematernal in the shape of a she-wolf? We cannot know how anyone seeing thecasket in the 8th century would have taken this scene, nor can we suppose thateveryone encountering the casket would have taken it in the same way - perhapsthe ideology of Rome was so pervasive as to give everyone mono-vision;certainly with that ideology less gripping now, we can respond to the imagewith the full power of our imaginations (do we really want to suck on a wildand dangerous animals teats and be brought up as pack children?).

The right panel, described in the catalogue as "enigmatic",has a scene which "relates how Hos suffered at the hands of Ertae".The inscription reads "Here Hos sits on a sorrow-mound; she suffersdistress as Ertae had assigned her to a wretched den of sorrows and of tormentsof her heart." This the she-wolf nurtures whilst Ertae rejects creates atension between the left and right panels, but I wonder if this is an either/ortension or a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea.

The stories bounce off each other, comment on each other, offeralternative views and stark choices. Can you believe in the redemption throughChrist, or are the horrors of history inescapable and definitive? I used therethe phrase "the redemption through Christ" but today (and perhapsthis has always been true?) and we might ask ourselves what this could mean.I'll suggest that the words are poetic, and the Christ-child on the casket(like all of the other figures) is a hieroglyph whose meaning is framed in theeye of the beholder. This is why I suggest above that the casket offers thepossibility of a democratic experience of Art - the individual is confronted bya number of stories, and must choose which one to believe is the Truth. Or isthere no Truth, just different perspectives depending on where one stands? TheFranks Casket is both democratic and postmodern.

The inclusion of the Jewish scene makes the casket problematic, but whenhas any Art worth its salt been anything else? If we insist on seeing thecasket purely and simply as an ideological item selling Christianity as the OneTrue Faith, then we might take the Jewish scene as evidence of anti-Semitism,although the casket is no more positive about Germanic/pagan traditions;perhaps what we have here is simply evidence of Christian chauvinism? But thenagain, by positing a saviour who offers redemption through the forgiveness ofsins, a way of breaking free from the past into something new, the casket asksa very striking question - is this what you want? Do you want to break free?Because if we strip Christianity of all of its mystical obfuscation, all of itsmoralising cant and all of its kidnapping into Imperialist propagandas, we areconfronted with a core message which is still capable of shaking the innerbeing of anyone who opens themselves up to the possibility that life could besomething other than merely wars and rumours of wars.

To walk around the Franks Casket and looks at its various stories is todo what all of us always do - walk around looking at various stories. Thesestories are often both contradictory, complementary, frightening and inspiring.The Franks Casket does not tell us what to think about them, and nor must acontemporary democratic Art. It simply leaves the reaction up to you.

All catalogue quotes from:

Bagnoli, Martina, Klein, Holger A., Mann, C Griffin, Robinson, James(Eds.) Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe(London: The British Museum Press, 2011), p. 120.

SONNTAG aus LICHT Teil 2, Oper Köln

2011-04-27T17:47:00.003+01:00

[SONNTAG aus LICHT Teil 1, see here]

The second part of SONNTAG aus LICHT began in Auditorium B,where the raked seating faced the now unscreened expanse of the deep stage withits black pool of water. In this pool, the 4^th scene, SCENTS – SIGNS– took place. Yet the scene spilled out beyond the parameters of theperformance space, as a major factor of the scene is the burning of 7 differentkinds of Incense, each scent assigned to a day of the week; as the incense isburned as part of the performance on stage, dark figures walk the stairs by theside of the seats with incense burners, to ensure the audience get a propernose-full of each perfume. Although theatre is a sensual art form, it isunusual for the sense of smell to be engaged in a performance (an exception wasRufus Norris' production of Afore Night Come at the Young Vic in 2001, wherethe pungent smell of pears viscerally brought one into the pear-orchardsetting). Of course, incense as an element of religious ritual has a longhistory and it is this tradition which SCENTS – SIGNS plays into. As theincense is burned, the singers (again done up as space-age medievalists) and dancers conduct obscure rituals inthe pool. Large metallic frames are lit and burn with flame; a circle of fireis built around Lucifer, making his only appearance in this LICHT opera (andsurely giving a nod towards the circle of fire placed around Brünnhilde by Loge in Die Walküre) and providing some deeply compelling baritone singingas he is immured. I got the impression watching this scene that we were very muchback in the world of a pre-Reformation Europe, where initiates performedobscure ceremonies for a captured audience who dimly realize that some rite is beingperformed but we're not sure what (perhaps some Stockhausen adepts in theaudience – dressed resplendently for the occasion in white - understood all the minutiae of the workmore than I did). Yet despite not knowing quite what was happening, I wasoverwhelmed and seduced by the spectacle – glad to be a passive recipient ofthe ministrations of these priests and witch doctors of LICHT.

Again, I feltlike something was unfolding in the time the scene takes – on this occasion,the scene comes to a climax of extraordinary beauty. The boy Michael issummoned to the stage area and, after singing a beautiful duet with Eva, a(puppet) white horse glowing with light appears, cantering on the water towardsthem Michael is placed on the horse which flies off. This is a moment ofmonumental, heart-stopping gorgeousness in which the heavens open and we are ina world of magic and beauty (I couldn't help reflect how much more meaningfuland heart-stopping this moment was compared to anything in the drab and drearyWar Horse, which many English audiences have somehow taken for an evening oftheatrical magic and emotional affect; how much more does SONNTAG aus LICHTbring the idea of peace into the audience's heart…). The music and ritual SCENTS– SIGNS had taken me, through the seven days of the week (each with its ownsign and scent) from turbulence to union and ascension.

By now, the audience were accustomed to being summoned toeach new scene by a short musical phrase and, on hearing this, we rose from ourchairs and departed our standing points in the makeshift bar and lobby andwalked, as one, towards the auditorium of the next scene. There was somethingreminiscent of the notes which summon the connected humans in Close Encounters of the Third Kind to the Mothership or, indeed, the bells or muezzins which call traditional devotees toservices or prayers. It could be said that the event had trained and pacifiedus to have an almost Pavlovian reaction to this musical phrase, yet such wasthe beauty of SCENTS – SMELLS that I was in no mood to critique the situationfrom a rationalist or cynical standpoint; truly, Lucifer had been restrained.

The beautyof SCENTS – SMELLS had raised my expectations of the rest of the opera, yetlittle prepared me for the overwhelming affects of the 5^th scene,HIGH TIMES. HIGH TIMES is, even for this opera, an unusual challenge to theproducer. The music is arranged for both choir and orchestra. In Auditorium 1,the choir music is performed whilst simultaneously, in Auditorium 2, theorchestral version is played. On top of this, on 7 occasions, the two differentperformances blend with each other – here with the help of live visual/sound relay. The audience is divided into two (we were given gold cardsinstructing us) and one half goes into Auditorium 1 for the choir whilst theother half goes into Auditorium 2 for the orchestra. I was sent to Auditorium 1for my encounter with what turned out to be one of the most awe-inspiringtheatrical events I have ever witnessed.

InAuditorium 1, the HIGH TIMES choir is unseen. The audience walks into apromenade space (the deckchairs have gone) and sees a number of dance troupesaround the room. The audience tentatively realizes that we are free to walkamongst these. The dance troupes each represent ecstatics from differentcultures; there are Sufi dervishes, Hindu Brahmins, Buddhist monks, Africanshamen and, representing Europe I suppose, 4 club dancers – 2 go-go boys ingold Speedos and 2 women in lesbian chic suits (they will get into both heteroand homosexual couplings as the scene progresses). As the divided choir sings in variouslanguages – as an audience we come into the orbit of one or other as we walkaround the space – the impossibly agile and beautiful dancers perform routinesof mystery and wonder, generally mystical marriages/unions. As this goes on,the choirs and the dance troupes begin to mash up; the sections where theorchestra from Auditorium 1 is heard and appears on giant screens are mostintense. This, the revelation seems to say, is the world we walk through whenwe see it right – a world where ecstatic mystics praise God in their many ways.

As an adjunct to the dancing, individual dancers get into a plastic suit-cover which acts as a cross between a gimp-suit and a Matrix-pod, and breaththrough tubes until being released; a kind of odd enacted image of immersion inand rebirth from consumerism. The light horse then appears, with a Sufi mysticon its back; the sense of wonder and the insistent power of the music at thispoint were combining to give me rushes of joy. Whilst the horse flies aroundus, bucking and turning like a bronco, the troupes disappear then reappear onstilts. They gently – oh-so-kindly and patiently, sometimes with a light andloving touch – shepherd us into the centre of the space; we find ourselvescorralled there, surrounded by the stilt-giant dancers and a wall of largeround white shapes. The dancers put airplane-like wings on and, at the momentof climax, raise them. We are encircled by these beings, lights shine and westand in the silence, the music having come to an end. The moment here, with usheld in the circle, was an extraordinary hiatus. We didn't know what to do. Weall knew, in our heart of hearts, that this was the end of the scene but no onedared move, as if we didn't want to break some spell. Then the dancers loweredtheir wings and, of course, we clapped. I came out of this scene buzzing withexcitement.

Back inAuditorium 2, the orchestra play HIGH TIMES for the second time that evening(the dancers and choir, extraordinarily given the energy and precision demandedfrom the piece, are at it all again in Auditorium 1). As a number of smallensembles play in the pool, pairs of instrumentalists come out of their bandsand play together, enacting as they do odd abstract scenes. Images areprojected on a screen behind the orchestra and on a transparency across thefront of the performance space (at the 7 times, we are shown what is happeningin Auditorium 1). One odd anomaly is that we see a projection of an audience inthe circle we found ourselves in at the end of the choir version – but thesepeople take their clothes off, dance and pray (should we have done this, if wewere truly in tune with God?). Slogans are projected, which are not in thelibretto but which may be quotes from Stockhausen (although they were a bitgeneralist) – "Mankind must listen to its Visionaries", "Mankindmust abandon political and religious parties" or "Mankind must liveits life in the face of the Life After Death"; not messages to appeal to arationalist or Mr. Worldly Wiseman. HIGH TIMES for Orchestra is somewhat less overwhelmingan experience than the version for Choir but that kind of suited me; it boughtme gently down from the adrenalin rush of the previous scene and sent me out ofthe event in a thoughtful and becalmed frame of mind.

We left thevenue to the strains of a pre-recorded Stockhausen piece – SUNDAY FAREWELL –the miraculous, other-worldly sound of which is was hard to tear oneself awayfrom (many of us lingered to hear more, that the spell not be broken). Finallyleaving, I walked along the bank of the Rhine, the sound of SUNDAY FAREWELLgrowing distant. Across the river, the Cathedral glowed in its strikingly lit night time presence, truly the vision of the Kingdom of God which its medieval originatorswished pilgrims to see, rising out of the earth and pointing towards anotherworld.

Against allodds, SONNTAG aus LICHT was a constantly compelling and life-affirmingexperience. As a theatre event, it is memorable and unique. How rare it is tosee a contemporary work of Art which affirms Light, Love and Union and how much againstthe prevailing trends of rationalist doubt Stockhausen was pushing his work and audience. It raised many questionsin my mind – Do we need, regularly, a time spend imagining another, brighterworld? Have we lost something now most of us have abandoned religious rituals? Dowe need to turn off the inner and outer voices of cynicism and doubt, criticismand objection now and again in order to access something else? Do we spend fartoo much time mired, as William Blake would certainly suggest, in therationalist world of Newton, Bacon and Locke (or, today, perhaps Hawking, Dawkins and Hitchens)and deny ourselves time spent bathing in the Light? Denying ourselves Sunday,our day of Rest…

SONNTAG aus LICHT Teil 1, Oper Köln

2011-04-23T12:47:00.005+01:00

When I read that Oper Köln were producing the world premierproduction of Karlheinz Stockhausen's SONNTAG aus LICHT, the temptation to spotsuch a rare bird (alongside the opportunity to visit for the firsttime the city of Köln itself) proved too much. Nevertheless, I was in two mindsabout seeing the opera – the piece was being produced over two nights and isthe culminating part of the composer's seven part LICHT cycle of operas, onecomposed for every day of the week. The LICHT cycle is based around the ratherobscure cosmic interplay between three characters - Michael, Eva and Lucifer -each of whom is represented musically by a formula which is then experimentedwith over the many hours of the seven operas. I'd heard a recording of SAMSTAGaus LICHT and, although I liked the music, the libretto as printed in the boxset is almost impenetrable and very difficult to visualize as a piece oftheatre. But on the basis that the opportunity to see one of the LICHT operas is something unlikely to comearound too often - only one, DONNERSTAG aus LICHT, has ever been staged inLondon (at Covent Garden) and I get the impression that the British criticsgave it the kind of welcome that isn't likely to encourage our main houses totry that kind of thing again - I booked tickets, a hotel and flights...

I was delighted to read, just before going, that the stagingof the opera had been placed in the brilliant hands of the Catalan theatretroup La Fura del Baus, whose production of Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre was atriumph at the ENO and whose Valencia Ring cycle, available on Blu-ray, is asuccessful attempt at placing Wagner's masterpieces in the context of virtualreality. If anyone could make SONNTAG aus LICHT work, it was them.

Yet SONNTAG looks, on paper, impossible. Not merely thelength, not merely the acquired taste that is Stockhausen's music but theconcept of a near-on eight hour opera in which there is not only minimal storybut also absolutely no drama whatsoever doesn't promise to be a theatricallyexciting event. Lucifer, the cycle's antagonist described by the composer as"this very sceptical and often negative spirit" (Ermen & Stockhausen, 2011, p. 190),scarcely appears in SONNTAG and when he does he is easily subdued. The work isabout the "mystical union of Eve and Michael" (Ibid.) and they spend the entire opera working together in orderto, wait for it, praise God. Stockhausen said "All of this worships Godthrough my music, because from the very beginning I have composed my oeuvre toworship God. Now it has been said. And the music sounds like that, Ithink." (Ibid., p. 193) Not anevent, therefore, which is likely to go down a storm in European intellectualcircles, sceptical and negative as they tend towards being. But also, it didn't sound somethingthat would possess the energetic drive which I, for one, hope for from anevening (or two) of live performance.

The opera is made up of five scenes and a"farewell". Oper Köln have staged the piece as an enormoussite-specific project in the Staatenhaus am Rheinpark, a large 1920s buildinglargely used for conferences and "events" on the right bank of theRhine. The opera is staged in two auditoriums – A, a circular, white space andB, a very long, rectangular space with raked seating facing an impossibly deep"stage". The first two scenes are staged in A, where the audience siton (unreserved) low-lying deckchairs with the performance going on around them.

Immediately, the first scene LIGHTS – WATERS (SUNDAYGREETING) is like very little I've ever seen and heard before. Lying in theirdeckchair, the audience listens to a long, sonorous, inter-weaving duet betweenMichael and Eva; the musicians are instructed by the pair to move around theauditorium and play from specific points (all of this, as well as the lay-outof the auditorium, is specified in detail in the libretto). Both white- clad,Michael in a spacesuit sings from a sideways-rotating podium whilst Eva wandersaround mostly encased in a rubber suit in which a number of voiceless,white-faced women writhe (reminiscent of the Borg). Through the scene, someobscure slow process seems to be taking place – giant fan-wings rotate above usand projections of space, planets and radar-screens travel around the walls andceilings. This all reminded me, in terms of imagery and pace, of thespacecraft docking scenes in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. By the end of thescene, Michael and Eva have achieved something, although it is hard to putone's finger on exactly what. They have, along the way, sung the praises ofLight and the Solar System. I got the feeling that, by the end, a union hasbeen completed…

Scene two, ANGEL PROCESSIONS, is also in auditorium A; wereturned but took different deckchairs – some of the audience were freaked outby this randomness and the idea that the place they say in scene 1 isn't still"their" place. In this scene, seven angelic choirs, each dressed in a differentcolour of rubber suit, move down the aisles of the auditorium, each singingin a different language (Hindi, Chinese, Spanish, English, Arabic, African [Kiswahili], German), finallyplacing flowers on a central pillar. The choirs create a polyphonic and rathermesmerising sound; again, things are sonorous but by the close of the scene,something seems to have been achieved. For me, the scene offered a vision ofseveral "missions" of light-bearers/message-bearers bringing their"flowers" (I take these metaphorically) to the earth.

In scene 3, LIGHT PICTURES, we meet Michael (sung superblyby the Tenor Hubert Mayer) again but this time in Auditorium B. We are given 3Dspectacles on the way in. Michael and three musicians – trumpet, flute andbasset horn – stand at the front of a shallow pool of water before a giantscreen. The musicians play (from memory) and the tenor sings praise to theseven days of creation (these don't correspond to the Biblical account),culminating in the praise of God and his church. As this happens,computer-generated 3D images are projected and it is as if each figure –whether it be an abstract amoeba or an imagined landscape or a recognisableanimal – is travelling through a cosmic mind, which of course is the mind ofthe individual audience member at the time of performance. Amongst the finalimages we see are the twin towers of Köln's famous Cathedral. Occasionally, thescreen is pulled back and an impossibly deep expanse of stage is revealed, therest of the pool then a concrete surface; on this, dancers perform abstractmoves. It is as if the surface of reality is occasionally pulled back to revealthe cosmic dance of creation behind it. This scene is spellbinding. Again (asin all the scenes), the music – which seems at first shapeless – has aculminating effect and I felt as if I'd been witness to some mysteriousprocess; perhaps not merely witness but party also, as the audience at aceremony or ritual are not merely passive spectators but partakers in theritual event. Intriguingly, Michael and the musician are dressed here in a mix between futuristic and medieval costumes, as if the future Stockhausen envisages is a return to a world pre-Reformation.

The first evening of SONNTAG aus LICHT was a fascinatingexperience. I was mostly spellbound by the music, yet not moved. Some (Luciferian?) doubts persisted in mymind as to the mysticism of the piece – was it just all just a load of intriguing-sounding New Age cobblers?Yes, the staging and projections were overwhelming in their beauty but does theevent have any intellectual substance? Nevertheless, I looked forwards to thesecond evening without any feelings of weariness or wariness.

(Continued in next blog)

Works Cited

Ermen, R., & Stockhausen, K.(2011). Karlheinz Stockhausen talks to Reinhard Ermen about SUNDAY from LIGHT.In K. Stockhausen, SONNTAG aus LICHT:(pp. 189-210). Kürten: Stockhausen - Stiftung für Musik.

Judith: A Parting From The Body

2011-02-12T15:35:00.006Z

With respect to Field Marshal Paulus, who had done the"wrong" thing and surrendered to the Red Army at the close of thesiege of Stalingrad, Adolf Hitler stated "What is life? Life is theNation. The individual must die anyway. Beyond the life of the individual isthe Nation." (Hitler, 2007)The question of whether an individual owes allegiance to something beyondthemselves – their country or class or family or peer or political group – is acentral question in ethics. It is also at the centre of Howard Barker's playJudith: A Parting From The Body, which is currently getting a welcome revival at the Cock Theatre. Judith posits that there is another force pulling at theindividual, a force which may wrench them away from their allegiance toideological forces and compel them to rebel; that force is desire.

Barker's subject is the assassination of the Babyloniangeneral Holofernes by the Israelite widow Judith in his tent just before abattle which would have seen the nation of Israel massacred or enslaved. Thisis an Apocryphal subject, told in the Book of Judith, yet one which has been atthe centre of European art andculture for centuries: Chaucer and Dante wrote of it, Caravaggio, Artemisia and Cranach painted it; Vivaldi composedan opera on the subject. In Barker's short play, Judith (accompanied by aservant) arrives at the tent of the general planning to kill him, only to haveher plans thrown into doubt by a mutual desire which develops between the widowand the general. What does a person do when one's ideological commitments areat odds with one's desiring subjectivity?

Barker does not change the tale's end. Judith beheadsHolofernes and so saves Israel. But there it also appears that in betraying herpersonal bodily desires for the body politic in this way, Judith has killedherself. She is paralysed after the act and only rises as a new being, one whoannounces that "Israel Is My Body!" (Barker, 1990) She stompsaround declaring herself a god and wishing to massacre innocents. She is awalking talking price that has been paid for committing oneself ideologicallyagainst all personal considerations.

Barker does not indicate whether he thinks she has done theright or wrong thing. It is made clear, as in the original, that Holofernesdeath was absolutely necessary for the survival of Israel. Yet who could thinkthat the being Judith becomes is admirable? Perhaps the choice is impossibleand, one way or another, the only choice is between deaths.

The strength of Judith as a theatre event is that it shows,in one intense act and through the interaction of just three characters, theimpossibility of the human situation at this extreme. Given the infinite callsof ideological commitment that pull at us all and the many times when we areexpected to act against our own desiring agency's interest, Judith offers amicrocosmic vision of a terrible, insurmountable moment in which we could all find (and lose) ourselves any time now.

Bibliography

Barker, H. (2011, 02 08). Judith: A Parting From The Body. (R. Winfield-Smith, Director, C. Cusack, E. Prior, & L. Smith, Performers) Cock Tavern Theatre, London, England, United Kingdom.

Barker, H. (1990). The Europeans / Judith. London: John Calder (Publishers) Ltd.

Hitler, A. (quoted at) (2007, 05 18). General Paulus Nazi Germany. Retrieved 02 12, 2011, from Sparticus International : http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERpaulus.htm

Further comments to the BBC re Jody McIntyre

2010-12-14T20:25:00.000Z

I have responded to Kevin Bakhurst's editor's blog on the BBC and my comment "awaits moderation." I publish it here just in case it never sees the light of day there.

Dear Mr Bakhurst

It is quite immoral of you to insinuate that the strength of feeling generated by Ben Brown's interrogation (it was not an interview) with Jody McIntyre is some kind of shadowy "internet campaign". I watched the interview yesterday and was appalled by what I saw. I immediately wrote the following complaint to the BBC:

[Here I post my original complaint]

Feeling strongly about it, I then posted the content of the complaint to my blog and tweeted, as I always do with newly published blogs, the fact of its publication. Soon, my tweet had been re-tweeted a number of times and I had been contacted by a number of people who shared my dismay - all of us spontaneously coming to the same conclusions about the interview. We are all individuals but we share a sense of outrage here. Your dismissal of that as an "internet campaign" is insidious, the same insidiousness shown by Ben Brown when insinuating that Mr McIntyre has somehow earned his treatment at the hands of the police.

As for Mr McIntyre being "treated the same" as anyone else, the meanest glance at disability legislation will tell you that provisions must be made for some disabled people so that their treatment can be consistent with the treatment given to others; Ben Brown not allowing a man with cerebral palsy more time to get his answers out, cutting him off and barking at him in the way he might bark at a convicted criminal, is in direct contravention of the act. And as others have said, the suggestion in any case that you would treat Superintendent Julia Pendry or HRH The Prince of Wales in this manner is risible, simply risible.

I am going to take my complaint to Ofcom, as it is clear to me that the BBC is not capable of listening with sensitivity to this complaint.

You can complain to Ofcom here.

The BBC and Jody McIntyre

2010-12-13T21:01:00.003Z

The following is the text of an email I have written to the BBC news with regard to their appalling interview with Jody McIntyre, a young man of whom footage has come to light of police dragging him from his wheelchair at the student protest in Parliament Square last week.

Dear BBC News

I am writing to express, in the strongest terms, my dismay at your broadcast interview on News24 with Jody McIntyre, a disabled young man who was talking about his experiences with the police at the demonstration in Parliament Square on 9 December 2010. The attitude taken by your interviewer was condescending and accusatory. He even stooped to imply that Mr McIntyre shouting was in some way justification for the police pulling him out of his wheelchair. The interviewee was rightly taken aback by the suggestion and stood up for himself admirably. But the point is that you were not dealing with a convicted criminal nor a career politician and such a bellicose interview technique on a young man who has clearly been the recipient of violence (we have evidence on film of this) is quite beyond the pale.

What I will finally ask you is, if you had interviewed the Prince of Wales or his wife about their experiences that night, would you have taken such a confrontational stance in questioning them? I think that we all know the answer and so we are faced with the truth, that the BBC are taking the side of power and privilege in the reporting of this story - and how many other stories might we say that about? Mr McIntyre was correct to draw a comparison with your reporting of the Palestinian conflict.

I work at a University where we all work very hard at ensuring that especially vulnerable students and staff, for example those with disabilities, are treated with respect and allowed to recount their experience with dignity. No doubt the BBC believes that it practises to the same standard. On the evidence of this interview, in which your journalist showed his opinions and colours only too clearly, you have failed to live up to any kind of civilised standards. If your interviewer were a member of staff here and had spoken to a disabled student in that fashion when listening to a complaint, he would be on disciplinary as a result.

You can follow Jody Mcintyre, and offer your support, on twitter. Details of how you complain about BBC news are here.

UPDATE: The interview is on YouTube now. Every one can see and hopefully many will complain about Ben Brown's appalling behaviour.

Red, Black and Ignorant and There Will Be More, Cock Tavern Theatre

2010-11-08T20:03:00.003Z

The final two plays of the Cock Tavern's Edward Bond season are examples of the kinds of plays which either draw the audience member further into an engagement with the writer's extraordinary vision of the world or repel the audience member so much that they react with outrage or attack. Both are pieces for which the word uncompromising might have been invented, although both deserve respect for taking theatre and thought to places which stretch the art and the mind.

Red, Black and Ignorant is the first play of Bond's enormous War Plays trilogy, first produced by the RSC in 1985 to critical displeasure but rather more successful in Alain Françon's Avignon Festival production of 1995. RB&I presents us with a charred male protagonist, named simply as Monster, who presents scenes of the life he didn't get to live (because of a nuclear war). A series of sketches illustrate the ways in which institutions – school, marriage, capitalism, the army – install an ideology into those within them which erodes and degrades their humanity. The final irony of the piece is that, even without the nuclear war, the Monster finds himself killed by a force within his own nuclear family.

Red, Black and Ignorant, with its short playlet-like scenes, reminds me of both Brecht (notably Fear and Misery in the Third Reich), the agit-prop drama of the 1970s (an era recounted brilliantly in Catherine Itzen's indispensable book Stages in the Revolution) and, at times, the absurdity of Monty Python's Flying Circus. Bond isn’t coy about the idea that the society he portrays ideologically brutalizes its inhabitants and forces them into situations in which the only choice is Hobson's. The play feels to me quite bitty and not altogether achieved but that doesn't strike me as a reason not to perform or see it – it looks forwards, as a set of notes and ideas for development, to both the second and third of the War Plays trilogy and, beyond that, to themes that haunt the last quarter century of his work. A production of it is the theatrical equivalent to those exhibitions which show the sketches and drawings of a major artist which went towards the development of more complete and achieved masterpieces; I was at times reminded of Goya's Distasters of War. That said, the final scene of Red, Black and Ignorant – in which a boy soldier (Bond was writing about this phenomena long before the children dragged into wars in such countries as Sierra Leone and Uganda became a fashionable subject for bleeding heart liberals to kvetch about) faces with an appalling decision as to whether to kill a member of his own family or a neighbour - is one of the greatest scenes of Bond's career. The place of decision is a crossroads (the same ones at which Laius was murdered by Oedipus, no doubt) and here the play stakes its claim to a dramatic lineage old as theatre itself.

Red, Black and Ignorant is also an essential document of its 1980s time, when the Greenham common anti-nuclear protests were at their height, the miners were being brutalized and Thatcherism was setting in motion a new kind of society in the UK, in which market values mattered more than people and sub-classes were deliberately created in order that those out of work were made to feel their own situation as a social crime against order (the Coalition's policies since election have simply been a reiteration of what was hammered into being then). I was involved in the anti-nuclear and Stop the City protests at the time, along with many others on what might loosely be called the anarcho-punk scene. Watching Red, Black and Ignorant, I was struck by how close Bond's worldview was to his contemporaries in such bands as Crass and Conflict; the lyrics to the song Bond's soldier sings as he is being dressed for war might have sat comfortably on the seminal Let the Tribe Increase album by The Mob.

A even less obvious comparison with Bond might be between the poetic language and striking, apocalyptic imagery which he puts in the mouths of his actors and the flashing images of the 19th century poet savant Rimbaud and his 20th century follower Bob Dylan – at times, Bond's words would fit happily in a song like A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall or an album like Highway 61 Revisited. I make this comparison to emphasise that Bond is not some lone voice at odds with the culture of his time but very much a part of a movement in literature, music and other arts which flourished in the 1960s and developed into the scenes of the early 80s and beyond.

As a gesture of solidarity with the season, Bond contributes a new play, There Will be More, produced in repertory with RB&I but with different actors and director. Anyone who expected Bond to have matured and calmed down by his mid-70s (anyone who doesn’t know his work very well, that is) would surely be appalled by the feast of horror that is There Will Be More and boy were some of the knee-jerkers who review for the broadsheets bemused, angry and dismissive by turn of the new play.

It is easy to spot the Greek lineage of There Will Be More. In the first scene, an army officer's wife murders his twin sons (one is so flinch-conditioned by Bond's reputation that the sight of a baby on stage immediately makes on fear for the worst) and is raped in return by her raging husband; we are in Medea territory, clearly. This first scene – 20 minutes of odd social comedy mixed (like blood and tonic) with extreme violence – seems to be an odd take on the upper class social comedies of Rattigan or Coward (Hands Around the Throat rather than Hands Across the Sea). After this (and a provocatively placed interval), we shudder forwards 18 years to when the wife escapes from the lunatic asylum she has been banished to in order to confront both her husband (whose careerism was somewhat hampered by her act) and one of the twin sons born of the rape (the other is fighting in an Orwellian constant war somewhere). The three characters then set about recriminating and destroying one another in scenes which reminded me of Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home sleeve note – "…divided by pierced ears. false eyelashes/subtracted by people constantly torturing each other…"

I've made the Dylan comparison twice now in this blog as I believe that we might gain something from comparing what both artists have been doing in the last few decades of their careers. Both have taken stock of a rather frustrated 1980s and then re-consolidated their voices by going back to the roots of what they are doing – Dylan in old blues and folk songs, Bond in the plays of the Greeks and Shakespeare.

There Will Be More re-imagines elements of Euripides (and Sophocles) into a vision of a contemporary family destroying itself from within. Johnson, Bond's Jason in There Will Be More, is so fixated on his own career in the services and desire for his wife as sexual object that he has no tools with which to understand their situation, resorting to the only tool he knows how to use and wielding it in what used to be sickly and euphemistically referred to as "assault with a friendly weapon" (we might compare the militaristic term "friendly fire"). His mad wife Dea, Bond's Medea, has no insight into why she committed her double filicide and simply blames it on her husband ("you wanted me to" she accuses). If any people ever were lost in a cloud of unknowing, it is this pair.

At the beginning of scene two, she has returned to the family home (rather like zombies or unquiet ghosts in the horror genre return to the places they once inhabited after their deaths), seemingly hoping to settle into the old routine; astonishingly, Johnson is willing to let her as long as his conjugal rights are upheld. Johnson seems to have an absolutely authentic though blind and desperate desire for his wife, a desire which she sets her will against him achieving. Their marriage is like that of two people butting heads, neither of whom ever gets any sense knocked into them. Pity their son Oliver, confined to the house and judged wanting next to his absent, warrior twin: his father wishes to withhold the truth of his mother's identity in order to protect him, his mother wishes to rip his illusions rudely away. More violence follows as well as a strange, appalling, moving and very murky seduction of the son by the mother in which the sleepwalking off-spring is fellated by his Mum in a strange, Oedipal twist. It is notable here that it is the mother that kills the father, as if the Oedipus complex was a set-up designed to indoctrinate the child with guilt. The mother is devouring and the father is controlling – the terrible parents of primal myth lour over the household; it is no wonder that the child, like so many of our youth, clings steadfastly onto a blade he carries with him. In one way, the play can be seen as a reflection on the problem of youth knife crime; it is this but also so much more – no more rational a work than Goya's mighty painting Saturn Devours his Children, which looking back was an entirely justified response to the violence the artist saw around him but which also has a timeless quality.

Euripides, Goya, Shakespeare, Dylan – these are some of the names that flash through my mind when encountering a Bond play; There Will Be More is no less complex and knotty a work of art than any of these at their best. This is not to say that the work is meaningless or merely surreal – but the discomforting and destabilising affect of the play is more to the point than any moral lesson we might attempt to garner from it. One could say that it would be a tiresome fool who came to us suggesting that it might be a better world if it did not involve adults destroying each other and their children for their own psycho-sexual power-game gratifications. Yes, surely we all believe that it would be. "Why then," Bond's plays with a child-like impertinence ask, "is it not that better place?" Unless we confront the most terrible mirrors showing us of the times we live in and how things all too often are, only one thing is certain: there will indeed be more.

The Under Room and The Fool, Cock Tavern Theatre

2010-11-01T19:55:00.003Z

The middle pair of plays in the Cock Tavern's Edward Bond season are very different pieces, one a chamber piece written in 2005 (and now receiving its London premier), the other an epic play first performed by at the Royal Court in 1975. Seeing them close together allows one to focus on how Bond's writing had developed in the intervening period and how he had, by the time of the chronologically latter play incorporated within his dramaturgy what I can only describe as a performed self-consciousness as to what the drama is (what Drama itself is, Bond would say).

The smaller play is The Under Room, and was performed in the cellar of the pub theatre, a location reached by going upstairs, through the regular theatre space and down again into an under room throbbing with the sound of a generator, a rectangular space with low ceilings. On the night I saw the play (the first performance of this production) the cast of The Fool with Bond himself sat directing them were rehearsing as we passed, a weirdly ghostly and haunting scene in an of itself. A complete naïf might have asked "what are they doing?" and then might, with some thought, have found the answer to that downstairs in The Under Room.

The Under Room, like most late Bond plays, is set in a dystopia which is easily believable and which would be arrived at quite quickly should a further financial collapse hit the West's economy. A police state runs Britain and, in an Orwellian act terrifying in its simplicity, allows itself to summarily shoot anyone shoplifting as the crime has been renamed "shop-looting". The story concerns one shop-looter who hides in the basement of a single woman's home and is discovered by her. The singleton, Joan, is extremely leery of the stranger at first but gradually gets drawn into his story. His is a non-European whose past has involved being a boy-soldier, whose first killing for the army who kidnapped him was one of his own parents. The stranger embroils Joan in his situation, involving her in the shady deal his is trying to pull of with a treacherous black-marketer named Jack. Jack is supposed to get the stranger a passport and a way out of the UK but instead rips off his money and blackmails Joan to find more. The stranger's presence in both Jack and Joan's life reveals them.

I structure this last sentence in the way I have so that I can get into talking about the play's central innovation – the stranger is represented by a dummy, his lines being spoken by an actor who stands to the side of the action. This simple device makes what could have been simply a representation of a dramatic situation into a way of thinking about what we do when we represent dramatic situations. Joan and Jack are revealed, they and we find out who they are by their interaction with this effigy. Of course, all dramatic characters are effigies or dummies and the dramas we watch them perform reveal the character of the other figures in the drama. There is something else though – the audience as well is pretending that these characters are real in order to find out something about themselves through the drama: Bond is conscious of the Greek beginnings of dramatic theatre, its coincidence with the beginnings of democratic society and citizenship and the imperative to "Know Thyself". The dramatic process towards the somewhat ironic ending of The Under Room allows Joan and Jack to find out that she is a person that wanted to help the stranger for rather selfish reasons - as an end to her singleton existence becoming a couple running away together – whereas Jack is someone who, when called to quit his low down ways and attempt make a positive contribution world with the stranger, finds himself drawn to the stranger's violently unexpected offer. Yet Jack doesn't get the chance to do this, as Joan has ripped the dummy to pieces once she finds herself rejected.

There seems to me to be a mordant critique of contemporary drama built into this. Joan's liberal selfishness, in which motives are more to do with personal wishes and ownership of the other, destroys the opportunity for Jack to change. One of the things this suggests to me is that contemporary drama, in concentrating on a liberal sentiment which demands that the "victims" of the present system be given to them as personal projects, decimates a more immediate drama which might affect a change in the aggressors and the victims themselves. It is certainly true that much of the liberal, soul-searching drama we see points towards liberal consciousness raising amongst the already-liberal middle-classes. Bond's rather caustic suggestion is that these liberals will, rather than give up their hold on the puppet strings of the victimized classes, align themselves with the extreme right and become victimizers themselves.

This could be seen as a rather despairing vision. In his programme note on Hope, Bond writes "The hope is in the audience." The very process of watching The Under Room might change an individual, or at least get them to take a good, hard look at themselves. Maybe that's hoping too much, although I can affirm that it got me feeling and thinking…

The Fool is as epic as The Under Room is condensed; it's concern is with the producer of art in society whereas, for me, The Under Room is concerned with the audience. The play tells, in eight scenes, the story of the 19th century peasant poet John Clare, staging his fringe involvement with the rural protest movement against land enclosures. The land enclosure theme, the central role given to a "great British writer" and the subtitle, Scenes of Bread and Love, show The Fool to be somewhat of a companion piece to Bond's Shakespeare play Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death; Clare's own position as a "nobody" elevated by his talent into the world of the gentry and ruling class make his position somewhat analogous to a Shakespearean fool. Bond directed the Cock Tavern production himself (replacing the advertised director) and did a brilliant job of making this huge play work in the small, pub theatre space; it is an irony that his programme note also includes a satirical pop at the National Theatre, who wanted to do The Fool in the Olivier Theatre but were refused by Bond with a curt

‘You cannot do My Fair Lady one day and Macbeth the next: you cannot be Van Gogh one day and paint green-faced oriental ladies the next. You have to choose, and if you don’t what you do chooses you’. (Saunders, 2004)

The Fool is a intricately patterned play. Clare is shown as a player in a class struggle, contrasted and compared with other players (notably the agitator Darkie) and shown in antagonism with his class enemies, who are ironically also his patrons and benefactors. It is significant, for Bond as a stage writer himself and for a comparison with Bingo, that the first time we see Clare he is taking part in a Mummers play performed for the local Lord of the Manor and his preening houseguests (perhaps this is analogous to Bond's early involvement with productions of his plays at the Royal Court, National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare company). There is a sense within the play that people are locked into their class positions, that they cannot leave them behind nor see beyond them – it is perhaps the most self-consciously Marxist of Bond's plays in terms of how its structure stages the class struggle. This might be problematic in that the play may box in its audience – yet the play is part of not the completion of a process. It is right that Bond on occasion provokes us into thinking about how at liberty a person can be in a class society. He offers a powerful rebuttal of the idea that a person can, in such an environment, be in charge of their own destiny.

The play includes two of Bond's most powerful scenes. In one, the rioting rural workers come across a country parson – an apologist for the ruling class – and proceed to strip him of his finery; when he is naked, they weep as they pluck at his well-fed flesh, mourning that its plenty has been at the expense of them and their children. The scene is striking and unforgettable – the parson (not a sympathetic character) is vulnerable and almost Christ-like in his suffering but his attackers maintain an innocence and child-like quality, as if the Church's Jesus-surrogate were being suffered to come unto the children. There's also a sense in which the scene links to those zombie films, for example Andrea Bianchi's Burial Ground or Romero's Land of the Dead, in which the zombies are used to symbolize the exploitation and revolt of the proletariat against their class oppressors, as Bond's worker's come close to wrenching the parson's flesh from his bones.

The other great scene – as great a scene as has ever been written for the theatre – has Clare taking the air with his upper class patrons in Hyde Park where a vicious boxing match happens to be taking place. The boxers are two prime examples of the victims of English Imperialism – an African and an Irishman – and the alternation of focus between Clare and his literary friends and the participants in the boxing match creates a split of focus which (via their on-stage proximity) encourages an audience to see the connection between the two groups and their ostensibly dissimilar activities.

Bond's large scale dramas often deal in the on-stage relationships between groups, relationships which stage the economic and social relationships within the societies he is writing about. The Cock Tavern production shows that Bond, even in such a tiny performing space, is adept at grouping his actors in meaningful constellations. The production gives the lie to the idea that Bond is not a good director for his work; here, he shows that he has reached a level of impressive understanding of the stage space and its dynamics, where space and communication consummate a meaningful relationship. That we are unlikely to see him showing us what space we can do on a large scale is a terrible loss for anyone interested in theatre in the UK.

Bibliography
Saunders, G. (2004). 'Edward Bond and the Celebrity of Exile'. Theatre Research International , 29, pp. 256–266.

The Pope's Wedding and Olly's Prison, Cock Tavern Theatre

2010-10-01T19:36:00.002+01:00

The Cock Tavern Theatre in Kilburn is currently producing a season of the plays of Edward Bond, one play representing each of the decades in which he has been writing since the 1960s. It offers a marvellous opportunity to see plays that are all too rarely performed on English stages, an opportunity made more vital by the fact that the first two plays, Olly's Prison and The Pope's Wedding, have been produced to the very highest standards.

These two plays share some important similarities (both, for example, deal with working class lives contemporary to their composition) as well as showing that Bond can write in very different registers. The Pope's Wedding, Bond's first professionally produced play (1962) is a brooding, minutely detailed and ostensibly naturalistic account of the doomed relationship between a young rural worker, Scopey, and an old outcast, Allen, who live in the same Essex town; it's affect on me was to sadden, producing an air of contemplative melancholia. Olly's Prison, originally a TV play (1992), tells an epic story of a man, Mike, who commits an appalling crime and then spends the next decade or so, in prison and out, coming to terms with what he has done; it's affect on me was both anxiety-inducing, adrenalin-producing and I emerged rather awe-struck and inspired by its reach. What the two plays in performance here have most strongly in common is that they take the audience into the heart of mysteries which are not solved within the play (Bond is never a glib writer) but that they have a solution feels important for myself as viewer, a feeling which has stayed with me long since seeing the plays. A number of (excellent) books have been written about the meaning of Bond's drama but I am not sure that its ability to affect the audience has been sufficiently emphasised. Bond's dramas, I would suggest, are not primarily a series of meaningful, enacted images to be "read" (although you can approach it like that) but rather living theatre experiences (Theatre Events, he calls them) to be involved in; processes undergone rather than processions gazed upon.

The Pope's Wedding is a measured play pace-wise, although never boring. It is also a structurally fragmented piece, being for most of the first half an immersion into the world of a group of working class lads (and a couple of lasses), casual labourers in rural Essex who spend their time moaning about being broke, getting drunk and smoking when they are not, engaging in mild yobbishness and play-acting antagonisms. Occasionally, punctuating the lads' scenes peripheral to this group, we get to meet, an old man, Allen, who lives alone in a ramshackle hut and whose only connection to the "main" story is that one of the girls who hangs out with the gang, Pat, does cleaning for him due to a promise made to her dead mother.

The main story focuses, after some time, on the individuation of one of the gang members, Scopey, who becomes a local sports-hero and wins Pat's hand in marriage. Throughout this first half, an audience could feel somewhat starved of a strong plot-line, although the antics of the lads are engaging enough and Allen offers the promise of mystery and development; we know the two "strands" must come together and both desire it (we want "something" to happen) and fear it (the lads might hurt Allen). This desire of the audience is answered in the second act but in a roundabout way. Scopey's relationship with Pat almost immediately collapses into domestic bickering; Scopey gradually takes over Pat's role of cleaner and cook to Allen and the old seems to fascinate the younger. The air of mystery about the old man is palpable – is he really Pat's father? what is the "work" he is doing with his piles of old newspapers? what does his part experience have to teach the younger man? Scopey pursues, in such a single-minded and dogged fashion that it becomes a monomania, the answers to these questions only to find out something terrible – the old man holds no secrets or knowledge at all, he's "just" a batty old man. By this point, Scopey has ruined his marriage and his position in his peer group, so he takes the only route which he now feels is available to him – he murders the old man and takes his place in the hut…

The sense of Scopey's disappointment is heartbreaking in performance. The audience has seen and, importantly, shared his frustration as part of a world which is going nowhere (that sense of the story not developing in Act One is a dramatic strategy) and ache for his relationship with the old man to be meaningful and enlightening. But it can't be – the old man is too far gone and Scopey hasn't the social skills to bring him back again. The sense of waste becomes palpable – you could say that the play conjures it up – and the final transformation of Scopey into Allen (a metamorphosis worthy of Ovid) is designed to leave the viewer with a palpable sense of frustration and sadness. What the play means is less important than that it does this, creates this feeling of dissatisfaction. It opens a void which the audience member then has to fill. This all suggests to me that the play-event we are dealing with here is a kind of ceremony – the impossible ceremony of the title, The Pope's Wedding.

The Pope's Wedding is a social event to which we are invited in order to witness no one affirming a commitment to another, perhaps the impossibility of such a commitment; Olly's Prison is another kind of social ritual, a prison visit during which one watches the inmates realise that when they get out, they'll still be incarcerated. This has its own knock-on effect to the audience, as the implication is that we don't leave this play when we leave the theatre, the last line being

"Olly's prison. 'E'll never get out. We're all in it till we understand."

This kind of metatheatricality is apparent in the opening scene. The audience sits in silence whilst we watch the protagonist, Mike, trying to get some words out of a character (his daughter, Sheila) on stage who sits there in silence. The scene is long and testing but by the end of it, the play grips, which mirrors the protagonist's gripping hands on his daughter's throat. He murders her and both he and we spend the rest of the play trying to understand why this happened, what the implications are, what is going on after. Mike is sent to prison for a decade and spends a number of years in despair, before another horrific act propels him into attempting consciousness: a young prisoner hangs himself days before his release. By the end of the play, Mike has grasped that release from an actual prison is not an actual release from imprisonment, to which I'd add that coming out of a piece of theatre isn't actually emerging from the theatre; the play goes on all around us and we remain in it.

Near the end of Olly's Prison, a policeman named Frank, the former boyfriend of Mike's daughter, violently beats up the title character in order to frame Mike for the crime. It is worth emphasising that Frank does not do this because he is himself bad or corrupt; he does it because he is personally convinced that Mike is bad and corrupt. Here we see how a human being, one invested with social authority, can justify using violence against the innocent in order to protect the innocent. But Frank, ready to condemn another man, is not willing to face himself. Earlier in the play, when Frank comes in and sees that Mike has murdered Sheila, he's begins the process of telephoning the authorities when Mike offers him the flat. Frank stops dialling, takes Mike up on his offer and so does well, property-wise, out of the crime. Frank has himself become authority in the final scene, unable to face his own reality and so blaming Mike for everything. This is what Mike, and perhaps the audience, comes to "understand" at the end of the play: criminals are no worse than each of us, we all partake of the same daily bread, and any personal attempt to put oneself "above" criminals as an embodiment of the law makes one worse than them, not better.

About a week after seeing the play, I was watching an afternoon chat show which featured the policeman, PC David Rathband, who was blinded by Raoul Moat. In an odd and convoluted exchange with the host, the blind policeman said it takes a great effort for a human being to remain "good" but that Raoul Moat had been "born evil." It is almost as if PC Rathband is embodying Olly's Prison in his own being. I know of few other living dramatists who can so make one see the world through the prism of the theatre events they create. Then again, it wasn't contemporary dramatists that came to mind when I was watching it: it was Shakespeare, it was the Greek tragedians.

There are four more Bond plays in the coming season, and I will try to write down some thoughts on each – they'll probably be as disorganised and partially formed as the ones above but its important that the season doesn't go by without record, given that so few of the mainstream critics (or, for that matter, non-mainstream reviewers or theatre bloggers) have got themselves down to & written about these first two plays in the season. I'll leave you with the words of a critic who has, Simon Thomas (of MusicOMH):

Anyone serious about English Theatre of the last half century should think twice about missing these and the remaining productions.

Veronika Voss and fascination

2010-09-04T19:37:00.003+01:00

Veronika Voss is the last film in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's BRD trilogy, following The Marriage of Maria Braun and Lola. All of the films are set in West German in the 1950s and each features a central female protagonist at the centre of a nexus of economics, history, survival and desire. Yet Veronika Voss, Fassbinder's penultimate film before his death in 1982 feels somewhat different to the other two BRD films. The titular protagonist does not find and make herself during the economic miracle - as do Maria and Lola - but has already spent the best part of herself during the war years. Voss is based on the last years of UFA star Sybille Schmitz, a hugely popular actress and favourite of Goebbels whose career never recovered once WW2 was over; she committed suicide in 1955. Using her life as a springboard, Fassbinder creates a glorious black and white noir in which a soccer journalist is drawn into a web by a faded actress, a web which leads to death and despair; it bears some similarities to Sunset Boulevard in the same way that Braun does Mildred Pierce or Lola does The Blue Angel.

The received wisdom about Fassbinder's BRD trilogy is that they are in some ways allegorical portraits of the West German economic miracle (Thomas Elsaesser deals with this critically in his excellent book Fassbinder's Germany: History Identity Subject). Voss feels different because, although it is grounded in a particular time and its lead character has been shaped by a particular historical period, the subject matter of the film leaps beyond history into something more dazzling and dangerous. Veronika Voss is a film about desire and fascination, subject matter which is far more compelling (to my current eyes) than allegorizing history for socio-critical purposes. Voss seems like the last station for Fassbinder before his extraordinary final film Querelle, whereby he jettisons Germany history and all pretence at social realism to give a deeper, wider-ranging vision into fascination, disavowal and the forming of the socially gendered self (see Steven Shaviro's chapter on Querelle in his The Cinematic Body).

The journalist in Veronika Voss becomes fascinated by VV after meeting her after a screening of one of her Nazi era films. He becomes embroiled in her life as she tries to make a comeback, tries to deal with the past and maintains her present morphine addiction. The journalist's girlfriend also gets involved with Voss, leading directly to the girlfriend's death. This fascination of the couple with Voss can be taken as an emblem of audience fascination with stars and celebrities. Whether it is Voss on the silver screen, Voss as public celebrity or Voss as lost cause, at all times the woman is completely compelling and the couple are driven, we and they are never sure why, to involve themselves with her. From whence does Voss's fascination derive? Fassbinder answers this question partially in the film's mise-en-scene, where she is made available to us through a highly stylized use of black and white cinematography – a film star's appeal is provoked in us partially by their manufactured cinematic presence. Yet this only goes some way to explaining why a star becomes fascinating and continues to be fascinating even when they are no longer doing the things which made them a star. There seems to be a deep need within the central couple, it almost might be deemed a void, which Voss feeds and fills. Yet even as I type this, I am advised by a voice to clarify – Veronika Voss does not criticise the fascination that its protagonist holds; it wallows in it. To merely criticise would be a puritan's pose; Fassbinder was better than a puritan. There is a scene, near the end, where Voss stands at a piano and sings Memories Are Made of This; other characters watch her as the audience do, fascinated even as the performance falters, each experiencing it in a peculiar, personal way. Rosel Zech brings a quality of watchability to this moment which is extraordinary, convincingly conveying that this person is the only person who can perform the song in this way, that we are experiencing the presence of a daring singularity. The idea that an individual can be a singularity, perfectly unlike anything else, is dangerous to the Democratic ideal. This makes fascination a subject which an artist explores at his or her peril, especially in ages such as ours, in which art is supposed to have a socially valuable qualities. Fascination has little to no positive, progressive social value, yet it is difficult to imagine life being as intriguing without it.

Fascination is a quality we most associate with film, music and sports stars; politicians might also fascinate and this is where the subject causes most unease. Yet fascination is not solely the preserve of the (in)famous. How many people owe their relationships and their careers to the fascination they exert over others? Only this week, the Tory politician William Hague has been unable to quite explain why he gave one Christopher Myers a job as his Special Advisor; it could be that Myers fascinated him in the way that, for example, George Villiers the first Duke of Buckingham fascinated James I and his son, Charles I. There is not necessarily an active sexual component to fascination – having sex with the fascinator might be a part of the deal or not – but what is central is that fascination brings a kind of mystery into our lives, the kind of mystery the Saints felt when they pursued their God, even unto their annihilation. Fascination and annihilation go together, the one leading inexorably to the other – perhaps we are fascinated because we wish to lose ourselves, or because we believe that we are lost and wish to find ourselves; in either case, the fascinator is believed to be the one in which we can be lost or found.

To be a fascinating person is a lifelong occupation. Those who fascinate are as addicted to being fascinating as those fascinated by them are addicted to the fascination. Fascinators often come to bad ends – Voss commits suicide, a death arranged by the morphine-dealing health "carers" who are picking over the last remnants of her wealth in the film; in the age of Kings, favourites like Gaveston, Hugh Despenser or Villiers were killed by political rivals. It is doubtful whether a fascinator can ever stop casting the spell of fascination; the best they can do is become a recluse, like Garbo. One might break the fascinator's spell on oneself, although my suspicion is that life would be then given a fine coating of grey (unless one found another fascinator).

Fassbinder's Veronika Voss is one of the few contemporary, "respectable" works which deal with fascination. It is a lucky coincidence that I watched it in the same week as I re-read Howard Barker's small book Death, the One and the Art of Theatre. Barker is one of the few contemporary theatre artist who takes fascination as a subject. Odd, given that fascination is all around us but then, fascination is, as I suggest, an invitation to death. I write this blog not as a definitive statement but rather as a declaration of interest in fascination as a field of meditation, as a subject area (I am researching the life of the above mentioned Villiers for a film script). I inch forwards a case that we consider fascination…

Tannhäuser at Bayerische Staastoper

2010-08-12T16:29:00.003+01:00

I attended two operas whilst in Munich, both performed by Bayerische Staatsoper as part of their annual opera festival at the Bavarian National Theatre. The theatre is a beautiful if rather imposing neoclassical edifice, much more welcoming inside, where rococo predominates in the foyers and the auditorium is almost circular, with a very deep stage and five small tier circles; in the centre of the second and third of these is an enormous Royal Box. Above all looms an enormous chandelier. The theatre seats over 2000. Both of the operas I saw were by Richard Wagner, which is appropriate as it was in this theatre (extensively reconstructed to the original pattern after WW2) that the world premiers of Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre took place, albeit that it wasn't any of these I saw.

I don't want to dwell too much on the first production, Richard Jones' 2009 Lohengrin. Whilst I was watching this, I found it irritating when not annoying and mostly unbothered by bringing across the story that Wagner is telling, although a skeleton of it remained. Since the performance, a number of the images have stayed with me and been food for thought, so perhaps this is an experience better recalled in memories that judiciously edit out the more irksome details. Watching Wagner is Germany is always, for good or ill, a testing experience, as directors feel (probably rightly) that they have to deal with those elements of the operas which might tend, in a warped reading, toward reaction and which therefore might perhaps prefigure National Socialism. I could probably eek out some kind of meaning from Jones' mish-mash of Metropolis, Bavarian kitsch, 1984 and Stasiland but the evening was so uniformly ugly (thank to designer Ultz) that it didn't encourage me to want to bother. I have seen far better Jones productions, of operas by other composers and by Wagner (including his recent, very fine Meistersinger for WNO).

Far better I write about David Alden's 1994 version of Tannhäuser, which I saw two days later. I’d seen and enjoyed a DVD of the original cast of this production but seeing it in situ is far more rewarding, especially as the cast on this occasion was so fine (the DVD features a very tired-looking René Kollo past his prime in the title role). Alden's take on the opera elucidates the work's meaning rather than building something other than Wagner on the top, as well as featuring the kind of being in music that I have always seen achieved by performers in Alden's opera productions.

Being in Bavaria and looking around various churches, galleries and palaces, I experienced the intense atmosphere of Catholic religiosity which runs through the region, a religiosity as per usual with Catholicism marked and marred by the veneration of the Virgin; the city's main cathedral is the Frauenkirche (Cathedral of Our Dear Lady) and the main square is centred around a Marian column. This is highly relevant to Tannhäuser, which tells the story of a historical Meistersinger who became the subject of a legend: he spent time at the Venusberg, repented of his "sin" then went on a pilgrimage to Rome, seeking forgiveness. The Pope, reckoning then as now that sexual "immorality" was the worst form of godlessness, refuses Tannhäuser absolution, saying that it was more likely that his staff will flower. Tannhäuser returns to the Venusberg in a huff, not knowing that in Rome the nasty old Pontiff's staff has indeed miraculously bloomed. Wagner adds a fair deal of his own into the story, most notably giving Venus a foil in the figure of Saint Elizabeth, portrayed as in love with and venerated by Tannhäuser, her finally dying after years of praying for his soul. It is implicit that it is her sacrificial love that causes the staff to bloom. One of the most problematic tendencies in Wagner is his penchant for elevating "purity" as a virtue, a tendency definitely implanted in him by the culture in which he lived.

Alden's portrait of the Venusberg in the ballet at the work's beginning is exemplary and ambiguous; muscle-queens, gimps, nymphs, crocodiles, well-hung sex-slaves and done-up whorish Madames stalk the stage as if in a world created by Clive Barker, creating a kaleidoscope of wearying pleasure for the poor old minstrel who is understandably both attracted to this world and keen to get out of it and breath some fresh air (anyone who has spent an entire night in a Vauxhall club will know how he feels). The relationship of Tannhäuser with Venus herself is complex and stricken; she is cast in standard readings as the villain of the piece but she does have a right to be a more than a little ticked off when the man to whom she's given the utmost pleasure for many moons turns around and, in the midst of telling her how wonderful she is, says that nevertheless "I must go." Go he does. The scene changes to a pastoral clime peopled by a youthful swain , repentant pilgrims carrying stone burdens heading for Rome (reminiscent of Blake's illustrations to Bunyan) and Tannhäuser's fellow minstrels paying court to the imposing Landgrave of Thuringia. The other minstrels here are a right bunch of nobs, ranging from flower-carrying fop Walter to Herr Flick-like leather-coated Biteroff. Only the sensitive Wolfram possesses any humanity but even he is infected by the overarching ideology of the court.

It is in the portrayal of the Landgrave's court and the ensuing song contest that Alden's vision really makes its impact. These are not attractive people but nationalists and idealist poseurs whose world could only be wearisome to bear, tending towards authoritarianism. Their attitude to the Landgrave's niece Elizabeth is rather nauseating, encouraging her holier than thou self-image and worshipping her as the living embodiment of Virginity. It is clear from Alden's direction that she feels trapped by this role; Tannhäuser is also entrapped by her public image of sanctity and foolishly looks to it as a means of rescuing him from the lures of Venus. Yet when the contest begins and the Mastersingers sing their songs, Tannhäuser can no longer keep his cool and he spoils their mutual back-slapping session of bigging up Pure Love with a rousing song in praise of his old mistress, Venus. Elizabeth gets the vapours, the minstrel crew are shocked and only Elizabeth reminding them of Christ's call to forgive sinners saves Tannhäuser from being murdered by his furious old comrades. Tannhäuser is packed off to Rome to beg forgiveness. The genius decision in Alden's version is to have Tannhäuser's hackles begin to rise at the Landgrave's introduction to the contest, where he sings the praises of a Mastersingers' art in which

"…You have enriched our quality of life.
What if our swords were drawn in righteous anger
called to defend the safety of the state,

both to repel invaders from our borders,
and crush dissent with in our nation's confines?
The art of song has played its part in battle,
For virtue and our ancient customs,
for chastity and true religion
you fought beside us with your art.
and won a victory no less great."
(Wagner, 1988, p. 76)

The Landgrave's nationalistic regime has used Art for its own sinister purposes. Roni Toren's set for Act II gives us Speer-like architecture over which the giant words Germania Nostra tower. Some might find this a little too much an underlining of the point but the history of Tannhäuser criticism has seen Venus as the problem, when all the while the Landgrave and his lickspittle Artist lackeys have been far more dangerous; the production gives much a needed re-emphasis.

In this reading, Tannhäuser and Elizabeth suffer under a regime of repressive sexual morality which is imposed by a dangerous, nationalist ideology. At the close of the opera, as Venus fails to win her lover back and he dies alongside Elizabeth, worn out by the wrenching contradictions of his life, the Pope's blossoming staff is brought on as a holy relic and the forgiven pilgrims follow worshipping it, swarming over the stage like so many George Romero zombies. The miracle hasn't helped the human beings Tannhäuser and Elizabeth one jot; their dead bodies speak eloquently of a waste of life. Their memory will be appropriated by a bunch of hysterical zealots whose religion misses all of the salient points in the tale.

In giving us such a Tannhäuser, Alden doesn't damage or underestimate or rewrite Wagner, although he does see the work through the prism of a history which has happened since the its composition; how could he not? All of the ingredients for this evening were provided in the text and music of Wagner himself. Alden has teased meaning out in a way which makes them vital, visionary and for us in our time. He takes it as read that Wagner was an astonishing genius who, like Blake's fool who persisted in his folly and became wise, is a visionary because he persisted in telling the truth about his own and his contemporaries' inner lives and the ways in which these were intensely affected by the ideologies of their day; ideologies which still survive today.

The cast were astonishing, with a be-quiffed and looming Peter Seiffert as charming, riven and sensual a Tannhäuser as one could wish for. Kent Nagano encouraged really sensitive and detailed playing from an orchestra which must be surely one of the best in the world, at least in terms of this composer.

Works cited
Wagner, R. (1988). Tannhäuser. (R. Blumer, Trans.) London: John Calder.

The Path to Dachau

2010-08-08T17:18:00.001+01:00

Whilst in Munich, I paid a visit to the Dachau Memorial Site, which preserves the grounds and some of the buildings of the former Concentration Camp and houses an exhibition, Art works and religious memorials. I went with on a a guided trip with a Munich-based tour company. I was rather nervous as to what this would be like, because the same company sold trips to destinations such as Neuschwanstein Castle and Salzburg; would the site of such horror be reduced to a mere tourist attraction? I was particularly leery of this as, when I visited the House of the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, there were people having their photographs taken smiling with the house in the background (although everyone behaved impeccably in the house).

My fears were not realised as not only was our guide excellent at conveying the horror and the history of the place but for the most part people were very respectful at the site. I've read a fair amount about the Nazis in power and the Holocaust but seeing the actual location of one of the notorious camps is something else. Not, I have to say, because the camp has any residual atmosphere - it was a sunny day when I visited, everything is clean and people were making their way around the site in a relaxed fashion, which mitigated against atmosphere. What struck me at the site itself was the scale of the place and the proximity to the town of Dachau. It has only been since the visit, in digesting the worlds of the guide and the meaning of this particular piece of recent history, that I've felt Dachau's deep impact.

Dachau was the first of the Camps, the one which set the principle for all of the others. The tour guide took us on a route which mirrored the prisoners' induction into the camp. They were marched through the town (the camp at Dachau was public knowledge), then passed through the gate with its infamous "Arbeit macht frei" sign. It is in this sign that the Protestant Work Ethic reaches its ultimate conclusion - a world where work kills and where the only freedom is in that death. As prisoners entered, the rest of the inmates would be gathered in the yard. The new arrivals would be brutally beaten before the other prisoners; it was clear that they were entering a world where your fellows will watch you being brutalised and do nothing about it. Then, with broken noses and aching guts from the smashes and jabs of the SS men's fists and elbows, the new prisoners would be taken into the reception area. Here they would be forced to strip naked and hand over all their belongings. Their possessions would be carefully bagged and labelled, creating an idea in the prisoner's mind ("arbeit macht frei") that they might one day get their stuff back on release. A prisoner would be given a number, which would henceforth be their only name. They would have the hair from their entire body removed; the clippers are on display, and they are more designed to rip than shave the hair. Having had their hair ripped out, they would be dipped in a chemical bath (inflaming their wounds) and then given uniforms, which most likely did not fit. As it says in the printed Guide to the Camp:

"By this stage in the admission process, the prisoners had lost their liberty, dignity, property, clothing, bodily hair and their names (...) They had also lost their independence and autonomy; the only thing they had not lost in the maelstrom was the freedom to die." (Mitchell, 2009, p. 19)

Death now lay in wait at every moment. Guards, or the Capos who effectively policed the camp for the SS guards, might arbitrarily pick a prisoner to humiliate unto death. Uniform must be worn at all times, as the lack of it means an attempt to escape. Even the lack of the cap means you are not in uniform. So a guard might take your cap and throw it on the camp perimeter, where snipers will shoot to kill anyone trespassing. So, a choice - either get instantly shot dead fetching the cap or slowly beaten to death for not wearing it. The labouring work prisoners did in the camp and in the local area was itself so burdensome it could be fatal; work made you free to die.

The guide emphasised two things: the process through which the Nazis gained political power (the post WW1 depression which gripped the country, where people watched their children starve to death, was made vivid; no one in Germany wanted to go back to that in the late 20s/early 30s and would look to anything that would prevent this); and the lack of solidarity between the prisoners in the camp: the Capos (Socialists in this camp) would be as cruel as the guards; some groups of prisoners would be better treated than others, breeding intense resentments; snitching on and stealing from fellow prisoners was rife. The stakes if another prisoner escaped could be your own death. Yet there were appalling acts of kindness, courage and mercy by prisoners for their fellows.

The camp began by imprisoning political opponents of the Nazis: "Communists, Social Democrats, journalists, royalists, trade unionists, Jewish Lawyers and others" (Mitchell, 2009, p. 12) but soon encompassed all kinds of "undesirables" including violent and career criminals (who found themselves in Dachau after serving their sentences in regular prison), homosexuals, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses and, of course, Jews. When the war begun, enemy combatants from the USSR and other countries crowded the camp. Each types of prisoner was identified by a patch, sown into their uniform; the system of categorisation was very sophisticated, so for example if you were a Jewish homosexual you'd get a Star of David made up of interlinking Yellow and Pink Triangles. As a racially Jewish homosexual with anarchist leanings, there would have been at least three reasons why I would have been sent to the camps; constitutionally, I don't think I would have survived for long. Perhaps it is morbid to think this way. I was very saddened to see that the 1960s memorial sculpture In the Machine by Nandor Glid - part of which is made up of triangles which "symbolise the prisoner patches" - omits the pink as well as the black (asocial) and green (criminal) triangles, as at that time there was still a feeling that some people perhaps deserved to be in Dachau. There is now a large Pink Triangle memorial on site, although hidden away in a room whereas Glid's sculpture has a significant place in the parade ground. Our guide told us that there has been talk of adding the other triangles to the sculpture but this was rejected as the work offers a snapshot of attitudes when it was designed. This is probably right but those 1960s attitude were shameful. The sign in five languages nearby says "Never Again" and never again should this happen to any of the groups categorised, even the worst of criminals does not deserve anything like this kind of treatment and no society which treated a single one of its citizens thus would be properly human. Someone said that you can measure a society's values by how it treats its criminals...

There is a display about the euthanasia programme, whereby the mentally and physically disabled were murdered by the state, and the medical experiments which doctors carried out on inmates at the Camp. I won't describe these here. The picture of the young man frozen to death in an ice bath will stay with me forever. More chilling even than this is the "commemorative photograph" which the doctors in charge of the euthanasia programme had taken on their appointment to their job, after they'd chosen the first batch of people to be murdered. They look relaxed, happy and proud of themselves. Our guide was very firm in maintaining that these men were not mad - the Nazis made a point of weeding out psychopaths and sociopaths from such position. There were "normal" men who were convinced that murdering other human beings was the best thing for their country.

There is a crematorium at Dachau; in fact, there are two, as an earlier pair of ovens did not suffice to dispose of the many dead the system produced. The newer building, built by prisoner labour, includes gas chambers for delousing clothes, a gas chamber for murdering human beings, a mortuary room and a number of large ovens. There is some doubt that the gas chamber was ever used for mass exterminations - Dachau was a prison camp not a death camp (those were further afield). Despite knowing this, there is no coming to terms with the experience of walking through the second building, a man-made conveyer belt designed to turn living human beings to ash.

There are religious monuments on the site - Catholic, Protestant and Russian Orthodox Churches, a Carmelite monastery and a Jewish memorial. The first four are concentrated places of worship and services go on most Sundays. They appeared to me to be rather melancholy and inadequate responses to the horror of what went on here, although the architects have striven to find imaginative ways of responding to the needs of the place; the crown of thorns in the Catholic Church of Christ's Mortal Agony has barbed wire making its crown of thorns, the Protestant Church of Reconciliation has no right angles (Nazi architecture being obsessed with them) and the Jewish Memorial poetical surveys the suffering of the Jewish people in the Holocaust, a granite tunnel leading down to nowhere. The Carmelite nuns, our guide told us, think it is their duty to pray the pain in the place away but this just seemed to me to be hyperbolic superstitious grandstanding of a dubious nature.

It is a week since I went to Dachau. What keeps me going through my mind as I think about the place is not a sense of the absolute apartness of what went on when compared to what happens in our society but rather the sense of the similarities. At the end of Trevor Griffiths' Comedians, the old comic speaks about his experience of visiting a camp shorty after the end of the war and he says "It was the logic of our world... extended" (Griffiths, 1979, p. 64). A word where some people are judged fit to be able to be productive members of society, some people can't or won't produce and some people are distrusted as culturally or politically alien. The whole point of the Camp system was to dehumanise those reckoned to be unfit for society. This came after years of propaganda in which non-productive or alien people were dehumanised through language in newspapers and general conversation. You read a copy of The Sun or Daily Mail or go onto the comment threads at The Guardian even and you can see the dehumanising language that people who have enough wealth to gain access to a computer are using about their fellow human beings.

Something in some ways very predictable but nevertheless very strong is said by the guide at the end of the tour: now that we've have been here, and seen and heard this, We become the custodians of "Never Again." The people of the tour were "ordinary" people, from the UK, the US, Austria, South Africa. It is my faith that all of them came away with as strong a feeling as I did of the need for watchfulness of the language and behaviour we use when referring to or interacting with our fellow human beings, even our political opponents or those whose behaviour or culture scandalises us. May we all also find the courage to point out when we see others dehumanising our fellows that that this is the path to Dachau.

Works Cited
Griffiths, T. (1979). Comedians. London: Faber and Faber.
Mitchell, N. S. (2009). Dachau Concentration Camp: A Guide to the former Concentration Camp and the Memorial Site. Sheffield: Minerva Research.

The Direct Gothic Encounter and its Loss

2010-08-05T15:24:00.000+01:00

Certain thoughts and feelings have occurred to me on occasions of exploring the major collections housed in European art galleries. The most recent incident was last week, as I ruminated around the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum and the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. The thoughts and feelings are based around the viewing of any significant gathering of Medieval Art and can be summed up as a kind of inspired melancholy that something was lost in Art after that period, albeit a loss which was for many more than partially compensated for in gains. Yet a part of me loves that which was lost over anything which replaced it.

The Nationalmuseum's Medieval galleries are the finest I've yet encountered. It holds room after room of paintings, wood sculpture, ivory carvings, bronzes and tapestries from the Middle Ages, stretching from the 9th to 14th centuries. The vast majority of this work is Christian and represents stories and characters from the Bible or the lives of Saints. The bulk of the collection is German in origin and Gothic in style, concentrating on the years 1250 to 1530. As I explored the many rooms, I was moved (as I have always and many times been, when I've encountered Art from this period) by the directness of communication that the artists achieve.

One of the pieces which caught my attention here was a painting on wood, dated approx. 1335, from a Viennese Altarpiece, showing Christ Before Pilate. The figures are arranged in a line; beginning (from left to right) with two soldiers, then Christ, then a bearded accuser, the two young noblemen and finally, at the far right, Pilate himself sitting on a canopied wooden throne. Each of the figures has his own specific character – one of the soldiers hangs back, knock-kneed, trying not to be too involved whilst the other shoves his arm up in the air for attention; the bearded accuser points at Christ whilst talking straight at Pilate; one of the young men points out his tongue whilst the other looks stern and serious. Christ himself, taller than the rest, stands calmly and passively with his head bowed but his gaze very much on Pilate; Pilate sits with a finger in the air and the most curious, vacillating, weak and confused expression on his face. The power in the scene is Christ's. With a small bow of the head, he accepts his fate yet his gaze is full of sorrow for the man of supposed power it looks at; it is clear that Pilate is quite befuddled by the whole scene and the man before him.

The impact of the painting has everything to do with its concentration on character within drama. Each of the figures is playing a particular role in the scene and the viewer can immediately identify these roles. The artist shows one man of strength in submission – Christ – and another of power and weakness – Pilate. The viewer is encouraged to put all of their meditations into the implications of this scene; what do we make of Christ, Pilate and the rest here? What is the import of this scene? Who does one admire? Who does one wish to emulate? Who does one really pity? Who would one prefer to be? What is human nobility?

Of course, for a fourteenth century viewer all of these questions would be mediated by their cultural relationship with Christianity and the Church. But surely they would also be affected by one's actual life experience? There is a subversive element to the work, to do with the weakness of the man on the throne and the inner strength Christ's portrayal might potentially inspire in anyone brought before such a power. Yes, these images were used ideologically by the Church to corral and control their congregations but there is something about the drama and characterisations in the scene which transcend ideology and bring us to the realm of story and myth, a realm which encourages each individual to consider his or her place within the relationships portrayed. Although I have no evidence for believing this (other than the paintings themselves), I speculate that the greatest artists of the Gothic period (and the architects) plied their trade in tension with the churchmen who commissioned them, not merely in thrall to them. Truly visionary artists have always had a conflicted relationship between those with the power to pay them and the best have created potent work which transcends the requirements of the commissioner and speaks frankly to the individual in the audience. This is as true of the Art commissioned by commissioned or supported by the contemporary UK Arts Council or Hollywood as it is of the Art of Medieval times. My suspicion is that there are less artists willing to rise above the demands of their commissioners these days than there were in Europe in the Middle Ages.

The walk through these galleries and through the less extensive Medieval ones at the Alte Pinakothek were thrilling experiences. I was again and again arrested by an image and plunged by the artist into dramatic, ethical and spiritual situations which, despite the intervening centuries, were immediately relevant to aspects of my life. The reason for this long-lasting immediacy is the lack in the Art of those times of the very things people usually criticize it for lacking – perspective, ornamentation, historical realism or indeed realism of any other kind, except what I can only describe as a realism of character and dramatic encounter, which are intensely real. In both collections I wandered through the paintings chronologically and was struck, on entering the Renaissance rooms, not on the gains made by the introduction of those lacking things but rather on the loss of dramatic immediacy. Suddenly bodies bulk out, clothing becomes ornately and extravagantly realised, aestheticized beauty replaces sublime simplicity, perspective becomes something to be striven for; these effects later reach their zenith in the Baroque Art of Rubens, whose pictures are all about flesh and its ornamentation and which rarely communicate much drama to this viewer (except a kind of self-dramatizing need to impress).

It is no coincidence that the rise of the Renaissance saw both an opening up of subject matter to include both Greek and Roman mythology and the portraits of nobles and notables. Greek and Roman society was based around a very intense ideological definition of class nobility and the Emperors, Kings, Princes (sacred and profane) and Electors of the Renaissance saw these tales as much more capable of emphasizing and aggrandizing themselves and their power than Biblical stories. These latter remained in Art but in a less forceful form, sometimes with the profanity of the commissioner's face replacing that of the Saint on the Canvas. More important than the art of direct communication of the story to the viewer had develop into the Art of flattering the wealthy and powerful; the beginnings of a bourgeois Art. Art became (as Blake accused Milton and Shakespeare of being) "curb'd by the general malady and infection from the silly Greek and Latin slaves of the sword." No coincidence again that colonization and the beginning of Empire rear their ugly heads at this juncture of European history. Go into a major collection like this and you can see it all happening up there on the walls.

I don't mean to be Philistine and reject everything from the Renaissance onwards as a loss. But "Everybody must give something back / For something they get" and European Art gave up something very precious at this time. The best Art of the Renaissance (Caravaggio) combines the new techniques with the old directness of drama; artists and movements since – the counter-reformation works of El Greco, Blake, the Pre-Raphaelites – have made extraordinary attempts at regaining the dramatic impact of Gothic Art.

The most important thing is that large collections of early European Art do exist and we can experience it anew, not as mere historical oddity but as it always was, as direct communication of stories that are of vital importance to the whole being of the person who encounters it. Any of us working in the Arts today can glean something very valuable from it.

Getting into Into the Little Hill

2010-07-24T13:22:00.000+01:00

Went to the Linbury Studio last night to see a double bill of short operas, Berio's Recital 1 and George Benjamin's Into the Little Hill. The staging of the latter struck me as a good illustration of how a fairly "open" text - one which is not rooted in entirely specific historical or social circumstances - can allow the production team to built another layer on top in the production, a layer which is absolutely detachable from the piece in that it could be produced in quite another way but yet which gives insights which open up the piece for the audience.

Into the Little Hill is a retelling of the 'Ratcatcher of Hamelin' myth, with a libretto by Martin Crimp. In the programme Benjamin says that

Martin and I wanted to tell our lyric tale in the most direct and authentic way possible - not an easy task in the age of television and cinema. Our solution, where the story-telling as well as the multiple roles are shared between just two singers, acknowledges at all times the artificial nature of sung drama, while still permitting dialogue and characterization. Occasionally, particularly in heated moments, it approaches the naturalistic.

Benjamin's phraseology here is a little problematic - "authentic" and "naturalistic" are particularly fraught. The idea that admitting that here are two singers on stage makes something more "authentic" than something which doesn't admit such a thing up front is frankly a little silly - because I should think that nobody ever sat in an audience at an opera and imagined that they were not watching two singers engaged in something entirely artificial (one of the most attractive things about opera is its blatant artifice). This slightly fuzzy thinking results in a Crimp libretto which involves two voices - a soprano and mezzo - who tell the story to the audience and enact some bits of it in dramatised scenes. I suppose Benjamin is using "naturalistic" to mean that, at some moments, the storytellers seem to "disappear" and we are left watching the characters in dramatic conflict.

John Fulljames' production takes Benjamin and Crimp at their words and presents us with an orchestra on stage, three rather abstract hoops of varying sizes and the two singer/performers - Claire Booth and Susan Bickley - in contemporary dress. They sing the narration out front to the audience and interact with each other in the scenes between the characters (they never interact with the orchestra, which is in itself a choice which leads to results). Because the contemporary dress used is exactly what one would expect conservatively stylish middle-class women of Booth and Bickley's status to wear, we are shown a traditional story told to us by two middle-class women. Now, these ARE these two middle-class women - but the mis-en-scene also encourages one to mull over the idea that two relatively well-heeled fictional British women are telling an audience - which may be us or may be some fictive but unspecified audience - the tale. They do so with great thought and concentration - and at times (especially during the later parts of the narration) they seem to be personally considering the events of the tale and disturbed by their considerations...

Crimp has, by a few subtle strokes, make the tale suggestive of not merely ridding a town of vermin as a literal event but also of more sinister and historically recent purges of undesirable elements. At one point, a child insists that the rats look like humans, in coats and with suitcases. Crimp's tale is set in a more modern environment than the medieval version we are traditionally used to. The Mayor is up for democratic election, the rats are accused of stealing not only bread and property but electricity. The Stranger - as the Piper is called in Crimp's version - becomes a sinister figure indeed. All the while in Fulljames' production, even though at times one is drawn into the events of the tale and the fates of its characters, one is conscious of these two middle-class women telling, feeling, considering, being made sad and thoughtful by it.

The piece need not be performed like this. More abstract or mythic consumes could be used; dumb shows could work with the storytelling to enact the events; the storytellers could be a lot more neutralised or removed from the performers. By making them very clearly two well-dressed, contemporary women, the production encouraged me to think about why two bourgeois women might want to tell and consider the Ratcatcher of Hamelin tale. That the women are of different ages - Booth is young enough to be Bickley's daughter - suggests a familiar relationship between the two; that Booth is also visibly pregnant suggests that they have occasion to think about a tale in which society plunges into mass murder and terrible consequences; it certainly makes the moment where Booth plays the child witnessing a rat drop its baby very poignant indeed. A whole imagined situation in which two seemingly comfortable women are nagged at and moved by a strange children's story opens up.

All the while during this, Benjamin's haunting, nagging, insinuating music accompanies the proceedings with its seductive but sinister sheen. That The Stranger uses music in his extermination of the rats makes the story eminently suitable for operatic treatment; that certain regimes have used music as part of their death culture should gives an opera-going audience as well as the makers of opera some pause for thought. Fulljames's production of Benjamin's short opera IS that pause.

'The Ratcatcher of Hamelin' is a discomforting tale. In the end, the town's children disappear because the politicians will not pay the Stranger. The children disappear into the little hill nearby and can be heard following the Stranger further and further down to something which, in Crimp's version, sounds very much like hell. Having gone down into the Linbury Studio and experienced the piece, having seen the two worried women telling and being disturbed by the tale, I came out disturbed by their disturbance, making this a very successful evening of art indeed.

What changes? What doesn't?

2010-07-07T20:39:00.000+01:00

I am currently vexed by questions of change and the unchanging. Last week I attended Middlesex University's annual Learning and Teaching Conference, the title of which was Engaging the Digital Generation in Academic Literacy. Much of the conference was spent on the challenges and opportunities offered by new technologies - Web2.0, social networking sites, new hardware and software – and whether contemporary students really are a new animal, Frankenstein creatures with short attention spans, addicted to being always plugged into the Matrix of iPods and mobile phones. Briefly, my own view is that some of them are a lot, some of them aren't at all and some of them are a bit like this (and this isn't simply true of the younger generation). Figures quoted by one of the keynote speakers, William Wong, bear this out, with something like 27% being native children of the Matrix, 57% using low levels of technology to support their learning and 20% being complete technophobes (Wong, 2010, slide 9), which bears out my own experience in teaching.

One of the moments which struck me at the conference was during another of the keynote sessions, when Steve Wheeler quotes Heraclitus' "The only constant is change." He followed this with a presentation (Wheeler, 2010) taking us through various theories about the ways in which younger people (I should add "in the West") interact with new technologies and how we are living in a world which has changed massively in the last two decades, with the velocity of change ever-increasing, which has been a theory ever since someone came up with the phrase "future shock". At one point, Wheeler mentioned Smart Mobs and quoted one Howard Rheingold saying "Smart Mobs consist of people who are able to act in concert when they don't know each other. [They can] cooperate in ways never before possible." (Rheingold, 2002) This sent me into a bit of a reverie in which I came over a little like the author of Ecclesiastes, wondering whether there was anything new under the sun. Mobs have always existed; certainly the mob that Shakespeare portrays in Julius Caesar act in concert when they riot and kill the poet Cinna simply because he has the same name as one of the conspirators. Perhaps the ways in which the members of a mob can communicate their mass concerns has developed, certainly it might have increased in reach and velocity. But is this a fundamental change in human behaviour rather than a new way of facilitating behaviour as old as time? Are we in danger of losing site of the wood for the trees? As befits a wanderer in a wood, I was visited by the voice of various bards, ancient and modern. One of them was Dylan, who in his 1985 Biograph booklet interview with Cameron Crowe says

"…I like to stay a part of that stuff that don't change. Actually, it's not that difficult – people still love and they hate, they marry and they have children, still slaves in their minds to their desires, still slap each other in the face, and say 'honey can you turn off the light' just like in ancient Greece. What's changed? When did Abraham break his father's idols? I think it was last Tuesday." (Crowe, 1985)

I also mulled on William Blake's Note in his Descriptive Catalogue with reference to his Canterbury Pilgrims painting, where he writes

"The characters of Chaucer's pilgrims are the characters which compose all ages and nations; as one age falls, another rises, different to mortal sight, but to immortals only the same; for we see the same characters repeated again and again, in animals, vegetables, minerals, and in men; nothing new occurs in identical existence; Accident ever varies, Substance can never change nor decay." (Blake, 2009, p. 49)

Blake's point is nuanced and Zen-like here, and he is certainly having his cake and eating it. Nothing occurs in exactly the same way twice but the same things occur again and again in different guises.

This isn't a fashionable view, and can all too easily fall into a bourgeois inability to comprehend that others are not the same as him. As Barthes writes, "The petit bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other." (Barthes, 1993, p. 151). I was reminded of this only yesterday when I came across some sloppy thinking in the programme note to The Prisoner of Second Avenue, a Neil Simon play revived in London as a vehicle for the excellent (though wasted in this) Jeff Goldblum. Kevin Spacey writes that Simon is "a brilliant writer (…) with a deep sensitivity for the truths we all share" (Spacey, 2010), a theme which Matt Wolf continues in an article on Simon, writing

"The resonances of The Prisoner of Second Avenue, nearly 40 years on, are due to a playwright grounding his concerns fully in the specifics of the era, only to discover that the uncertainty and fears to which humankind is subject never dates." (Wolf, 2010)

Does this mean anything? Simon's play is about a New York businessman who has a nervous breakdown after he loses his job, his problems compounded by the pressures of city life; the piece also concentrates on his relationship with his wife. Certainly there are themes which link this 1971 play's content to more recent concerns – the crisis in masculinity which everyone was talking about in the 80s and 90s, and the current climate of economic concern and impending job-losses in the public sector. Yet it is hardly surprising that we recognise these factors in Simon's play, as we live under the same economic system as his characters! Would the play's story and characters be able to be translated into Other, more profoundly different times and places? Would the play be able to be re-set in a feudal society, long before the changes wrought by Reformation, Enclosure and Industrialisation? Blake and Dylan suggest that there are works of art and culture which can weather such changes in time; I am not convinced that Neil Simon's play is one of them…

A more convincing claim to long-lasting relevance is made in the programme for the Henry IV plays, currently on at Shakespeare's Globe (I caught Part 2 on Sunday). Peter Staccio analyses the central dynamic in the relationship between Hal and Falstaff and posits that

"Shakespeare has created one of the governing myths of Western culture. Hal heeds the Protestant ethic: duty, hard work, devotion to public welfare. Falstaff belongs to the counter culture: the ethic of personal warmth, loyalty in friendship, and scepticism about the claims of the establishment." (Staccio, 2010)

Although I am not sure that "devotion to public welfare" is one of Hal's aims (more like devotion to the continuance of the bloodline power he inherited from his father), certainly Hal caught between the twin pull of blood family and duty (his father, Henry IV) and chosen friendship and irresponsibility (Falstaff) does present us with a choice that most free human beings since civilisation began have faced (even in feudal societies, one could presumably join bands of robbers, prostitutes and ne'er-do-wells). I am tempted to say that it is in the dynamics of the ethical choice(s) portrayed that a work's "universality" is contained, and in the characteristics of those involved in the choice (the suggestion being that not only will Hal's choice be between duty and licence but also that those pulling him in either direction will always share the character of Henry IV or Falstaff).

To come back to the subject of the conference, does my reverie have any bearing on the education of the young? Perhaps not, if what they are learning is a purely technological subject, although surely ethics, which involves thinking about the stuff that never changes as well as the stuff that does, will be involved when developing new forms of technology. But teaching (and writing) as I do working in the imagination, then encouraging the students to see why some stories and characters have more lasting appeal than others must be central to my work.

Returning again to Dylan's statement, I can read about Abraham breaking his father's idols in a print edition of the Bible or on the Bible app I have on my iPhone (along with the Shakespeare and Great Philosophers apps) or in a podcast or a film of the story but the essence of the story remains the same, no matter the medium through which I receive it.

Works Cited
Barthes, R. (1993). Mythologies. London: Vintage.
Blake, W. (2009). Seen in my Visions: A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures. London: Tate Publishing.
Crowe, C. (1985). Biograph Liner Notes. Sony.
Rheingold, H. (2002). Revolution, Smart Mobs: The Next Social. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books.
Spacey, K. (2010, June 30). Hello. The Prisoner of Second Avenue Vaudeville Theatre Programme.
Staccio, P. (2010, June). Prodigal's Progress. Henry IV Part One & Part Two programme , pp. 7-11.
Wheeler, S. (2010, June 29). Digital Tribes and the Social Web. Retrieved July 7, 2010, from MDX Annual Learning & Teaching Conference 2010 Engaging the Digital Generation in Academic Literacy: http://altcmu.blogspot.com/2010/06/steeve-wheelers-keynote-slides.html
Wolf, M. (2010, June 30). New York in the 1970s. The Prisoner of Second Avenue Vaudeville Theatre programme.
Wong, W. (2010, July 2). What Matters? Retrieved July 7, 2010, from MDX Annual Learning & Teaching Conference 2010: Engaging the Digital Generation in Academic Literacy: http://altcmu.blogspot.com/

Some thoughts on the original Morrissey

2010-06-27T18:13:00.002+01:00

There's nothing I like better than working my way through the wilder reaches of a filmmaker's oeuvre, especially if their work gets more obscure and more unpopular as their career - well, you can't say progresses, I suppose carries on regardless is the best option. I've an idea that an artist produces their best work when they fall out of public favour, or at least their most uncompromising and honest (which, for me, are synonyms of 'best'). In the past few weeks, I've been looking at some of the later films of Paul Morrissey. Morrissey rose to prominence as the filmmaking crony of Andy Warhol, and it is generally considered that the majority if not all of the filmmaking on such groundbreaking classics as Chelsea Girls and Lonesome Cowboys is Morrissey's. His best known films as credited director are the late 60s/early 70s trilogy Flesh, Trash, Heat, which all feature the awesome Joe Dallasandro (a hustler and porn performer elevated by Morrissey's camera and his own extraordinary cinematic presence to international stardom). These films remain a high-benchmark of American independent cinema, of gay cinema and of cinema realism – but this latter is highly deceptive, as although the films appear on the surface as rather haphazard and improvised things, they are meticulously constructed and artificial works (Flesh, for example, is a series of variations on the theme of human flesh as a commodity).

Morrissey is a strange bird, as although his whole career has been devoted to the "alternative" and the "underground", he himself is a political conservative. Here he is talking about Flesh on the DVD commentary:

“A day in the life of somebody living a silly, absurd life. The simple story is of someone who is living some sort of family life in an age where they are no more rules which apply to anything at all, let alone family life. At the time, it was a story which seemed unusual but that kind of story has become the only kind of story left for filmmakers to tell. I can understand why so many of them want to avoid it. Life today is pretty pointless and has little if any meaning. Unless someone sees the humour and comedy in it, it's better to avoid the subject altogether and go into violence or special effects or gangsters screaming and making faces at one another. But modern life is a little too depressing and can only be treated well with humour."

Morrissey is an avowed authoritarian Republican and, although no longer a practising Catholic, the religion of his childhood seems to haunt him. He's a contrary figure, because although in his interviews and DVD commentaries he affects to despise his characters and their lifestyles, his films have a celebratory mood and certainly his camera adores to the point of sacred love his performers, so despite the scabrous and critical stance he ostensibly takes, one comes away from most of his films feeling that life has been affirmed. He is a peculiarly American filmmaker and it is hard to imagine anyone in Europe matching his style; in Europe, we've a tendency to become unloving when our critical hat is on.

That said, the film Morrissey made around the same time as the Flesh trilogy is perhaps his least likeable – Women in Revolt is a mean-spirited and scabrous piss-take of the women's liberation movement, acted by a lead trio of transvestites – Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn. Each of them try to break free from the patriarchal chains that bind only to find themselves worse of as a result; as the DVD jacket says, they end up "exploited, derelict or abandoned." There's an extraordinary scene where Darling goes to audition for an agent with whom she impersonates Hollywood starlets, gets on the casting couch and gets cast in cheap pornography – Morrissey's wry comment on career advancement for women in the entertainment industry at the time. Structurally, the film has something in common with the multi-strand women's pictures of the 1930s, most obviously George Cukor's The Women. Cukor became quite a fan of Morrissey's films, campaigning to get Woodlawn an Oscar nomination for Trash and inviting Morrissey himself to appear in the final Cukor film, Rich and Famous. It is in the way in which the two directors film their performers that the link between the two is most obvious, the performers are caressed and adored in such a way that when the films are projected, they become icons. However, Woodlawn's contribution to Women in Revolt is really repellent, playing a nymphomaniac whose violent and humiliating sexual encounters threaten to burst a number of scenes into anarchy and who ends up a homeless alcoholic urinating in doorways. The sheer virulence of the film's attack on contemporary feminism probably has much to do with Valerie Solanas' shooting of Andy Warhol after the publication of her SCUM manifesto. The attempted assassination (which probably did contribute to Warhol's eventual, relatively early, demise) had a traumatic effect on the Factory crowd, and Women in Revolt as well as Lou Reed's much later Songs for Drella number I Believe are a testament to this unhappy event and the rancour it caused; the whole thing feels rather sad and tawdry to me, at this remove.

Morrissey's later films split into two types: historical/literary aberrations (Flesh for Frankenstein, Blood for Dracula, an unusual and much derided collaboration with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore on The Hound of the Baskervilles, a piece of eurotrash depicting Beethoven's Nephew) and contemporary satirical melodramas which continue the themes and feel of the Flesh trilogy but with somewhat better production values.

There has been a noticeable cross-fertilisation between Morrissey and another of my other favourite film-makers, John Waters, who surely wouldn't have made his films with Divine without the influence of Morrissey's earlier transvestite romps; but Waters' influence on Morrissey is evident in 1981's Madame Wang's. In this rather prophetic work, an east German spy attempts to infiltrate Californian culture and inspire a revolution in the USA. He decamps with a group of talentless, fat transvestites living in a pretend family relationship in an abandoned Masonic Temple in LA, a metaphorical image of America if there ever was one. The transvestites dream of stardom at the title character's punk rock club but their hippy/showtune/disco hybrid act is behind the times; the spy himself has more of an opportunity for success when his penchant for masochistic self-harm goes down a treat with the denizens of Madame Wang's, yet our 'spy who stayed in the cold' Soviet is having none of the lures of the American dream; he retreats back to the GDR despondent of America ever becoming a communist state. I've read that Morrissey admires the Soviet bloc "for suppressing liberalism, rock and roll and other modish fatuousness" [1] making it is possible to read the German hero of this film as Morrissey's self-portrait; certainly the scenes of Patrick Schoene's Lutz looking around Wang's club appalled and bored at the antics of the punk crowd are staged to encourage the viewer to be equally judgemental at the silliness and human waste of what is going on, yet the film also allows the girl who lives with the transvestites to counter-accuse Lutz of not being able to let his hair down and enjoy himself. Morrissey is a sophisticated enough artist to allow the viewer to mull over both points of view. Madame Wang's is often very funny; its portrait of absolute no-talents insisting on their chance at stardom looks forward to the American Idol/Big Brother society of our own time; that they are mostly morbidly obese makes the film even more prescient. One scene, in which the German drives a fat tranny to MacDonald's as she eulogizes Hamburgers is as funny and grotesque as anything in Waters' oeuvre, if less inclined than the Baltimore genius to admire the dysfunctional lifestyle of the character.

1984's Mixed Blood is probably Morrissey's finest post-Warhol achievement. I can remember its release being greeted by a bemused review on the BBC by Michael Parkinson, whose bovine reactionary brainlessness was filling in for Barry Norman's affable banality on Film '84. Parkinson was particularly appalled by lead actor Richard Ulacia's line delivery, which on viewing the film all these years later certainly is unusual. Ulacia honks out every line like a vicious goose, without a single variation of intonation or level; in his defence, he is playing a character who is clearly remedial but I can see why connoisseurs of fine acting might be offended. Yet Parkinson's aggressively performed heterosexuality prevented him from seeing the main merit of Ulacia's screen presence – he is probably the best-looking man to ever grace a cinema screen, with a raw sexual energy to go with the looks. Morrissey's camera stares at Ulacia as if it were caught in the headlights, amazed, appalled and intolerably attracted to what it sees. Perhaps Morrissey's cinema is really only appreciable by women and gay men? Most of his films are transfixed by the beauty of their male protagonists and, loathe their actions as Morrissey and his target audience might, neither he nor they can help but be seduced by their physical perfection. This is certainly challenging and does something intriguing to Morrissey's moralistic stance, making it amoral despite itself.

Mixed Blood is another film highly relevant to contemporary viewers: in it, gangs of ethnically-defined teenage drug dealers shoot and kill each other as the stooges of adults who make a profit from their trade; the kids are quite without moral compasses and their cold-bloodedness is chilling. The film is set in Alphabet City before its regeneration and the gangs live and deal in a maze of derelict buildings. In the DVD commentary, Morrissey reads from contemporary newspaper reports of the drug dealing and crime in that neighbourhood; he took most of his incidents from journalistic reports (kids throwing each other from buildings, too young to be tried for murder, drugs dealt as if they were candy). Morrissey gives a valuable insight into his creative process and aesthetic tastes, saying that journalism translated directly onto film would be boring, so he combined it with classic Hollywood storytelling, the plot of Mixed Blood being somewhat derived from the Pepe Le Moko film Algiers. There's also elements of White Heat about Mixed Blood, as Ulacia's gang leader is under the thumb of his possessive mother, played for all she is worth by the legendary Marília Pêra from Pixote. Morrissey emphasises why he tells his shocking tale with a comic tone – "no modern story is worth taking seriously" – and then elucidates why: America is a wealthy and developed country, and if it wanted to do something about a social situation like Alphabet City, it could; it doesn't, so it becomes funny. This rather reminds me of Orton stating that "I developed a mocking, cynical way of treating events because it prevented them from being too painful…" [2] This seems to be a prevalent tactic for a number of intelligent gay 20th century artists and the really telling thing is that, as opposed to sentimental mainstream artists who might pretend to "care" whilst never really mentioning the horrible truths about society, the likes of Morrissey, Orton or Albee (another similar case) pretend not to care whilst never failing to mention the terrible truths…

Mixed Blood, like most of Morrissey's films, is acted by a cast mixing amateur with professional performers. In the case of Mixed Blood, the non-acting of many of the youths playing the gangsters becomes a statement in itself, as in reality on the streets of the world's cities, children and youths play out versions of gangster films, so the ostensible amateurishness of the acting in the film is actually closer to realism than many mainstream films with professional actors on the same subject. It is again intriguing how many gay filmmakers – Pasolini, Waters, Jarman as well as Morrissey – use non-actors in their works, as if to emphasise the very queer idea that everything in reality is a series of acts, and poorly performed acts at that…

Lastly, I watched Morrissey's most recent fiction film, Spike of Bensonhurst, released in 1988. This has the feel of the same period Waters films, with the filmmakers working on a higher budget with more professional actors in the cast, some of them well-known names. The eye-candy at the centre of Spike of Bensonhurst is Sasha Mitchell, ex-Dallas regular who went on to star in the Kickboxer sequels, and he is supported by Ernest Borgnine as a mafia kingpin. The plot is a kind of amoral Rocky combined with Married to the Mob. Spike is a gorgeous, affable idiot who wants to be a boxing champ but doesn't want to get his face damaged, so he hopes that a local mobster will take him under his wings and fix fights for him; things becomes complicated when Spike falls in love with the mobster's (Borgnine's) daughter. This mobster is a morally confused gentleman who gives money to (corrupt) liberal politicians but savours the idea that the local ethnic populations spend all their welfare on the drugs his minions deal; he wants his daughter to marry a WASP lawyer but likes Spike's threats to beat her up if she gets out of line. The film revels in the moral idiocy of its characters; Spike encourages the local Puerto Rican community to clear out the drug dealers but doesn't understand that these dealers are working for the mob he valorises. Morrissey's film understands only too well the way in which legitimate politicians, drug dealing gangsters, very poor ethnic communities and the fools of faux-individualist ideologies are meshed together in contemporary Capitalist societies; he may be a Republican but his films are socially cannier than all of the liberal Hollywood social-conscience filmmakers put together, as well as being a thousand times more entertaining. Spike of Bensonhurst is, despite its perhaps unpromising subject matter, a gloriously feel-good film, almost as joyous an experience as Waters' contemporaneous Hairspray. Spike's fabulous Coati Mundi soundtrack helps keep things buoyant. A shrewd Broadway team might manage to make as successful a musical from Spike as Shaiman et al did from Hairspray (although perhaps they'd have to fillet the film of its soul, as happened with Waters' paean to miscegenation and dance crazes).

Some of Morrissey's films are still not available on DVD, which is particularly saddening for me in the case of Forty Deuce, which imdb gives perhaps the most promising plotline I've ever seen for a film – " A young hustler tries to get drug money by selling a boy to a middle-aged man; his plans are disrupted when the kid dies." No doubt Morrissey and his star, Kevin Bacon, make this as rib-tickling as it sounds…

Since Spike, Morrissey has only co-directed one documentary, released in 2005. A sad note at the end of his imdb biography reads

"He was always responsible for his films in their entirety, working consistently with mostly young unknown actors, writing and directing with no outside interference of any kind. Once financing from "independent" sources no longer allowed him the freedom from interference that he previously enjoyed, he stopped making films."

I fear that we're unlikely to see many films of the likes of Morrissey's again, as although the ready availability of digital technology makes possible, the difficulties of distribution make it extremely difficult for completely independent filmmakers to get their films shown to wide audiences. Thus are genuine, unmediated voices of truth denied a place in the mainstream in advanced Capitalism; at least, if we search them out, the films of Morrissey and those like him can show us that once such truths were possible to be told.

[1] Yacowar, Maurice The Films of Paul Morrissey (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 14

[2] Orton, Joe quoted in Lahr, John Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton (Allen Lane, 1978), p. 153

Something's Rotten to Motton in the state of UK Arts

2010-06-21T17:31:00.004+01:00

The playwright Gregory Motton has written a scathing polemic against the UK theatre and arts establishment, entitled Helping Themselves: The Left-Wing Middle-Classes in Theatre and the Arts. Needless to say, the book has had precious little publicity (I haven't been able to find a single review online) and I only heard of it on the recommendation of a friend who mentioned it in his facebook status. I grabbed a copy from the National Theatre bookshop and read it quickly – it is, like most polemics, a speedy read. It is a frustrating, inspiring, annoying and important book, the which central argument of which does nail a certain awkward truth about our artistic elite; I say this despite finding much to disagree with in Motton's screed.

Motton's central point is that the last half century has seen a consolidation of middle-class power in the UK (and elsewhere) and that this has been achieved partially by the middle-classes defining themselves as left-wingers at the same time as taking the substance of left-wing argument away from an economic critique of Capitalism, away from advocating the advancement of the working classes, concentrating instead on identity politics and pseudo-liberal nods towards "progressiveness." In Motton's reckoning, Britain has gone to hell in a handbasket since the 1960s and the blame for this lies squarely on the permissive society ushered in at that time and valorised ever since; the main beneficiaries of the eroding of previous hierarchies and deference have been the said middle-classes and the main mugs in the game have been those less privileged. This Motton links with the rise in neoliberal economics:

"The urban middle classes' identification with left-wing ideas ought to be seen, then, in the context of the middle-class revolution which has taken place. For it is notable that many of the aspects of this new leftwingism coincide with another sort of liberalisation – the kind required by consumer capitalism." [1]

Motton goes on to identify the faux-individualism encouraged by consumer capitalism with a popular idea that the arts are a form of self-expression, a development of the Romantic ideal. I say "faux-individualism" but Motton just uses the idea of the individual as a negative, which is all very well when complaining (as complaints have to be made) about the individualistic, selfish society that advanced Capital encourages but dangerous if not nuanced as the polar alternative – collectivism – is full of many of its own dangers, as evidenced by the failures of Soviet and Maoist communism.
After identifying the root of modern artistic ideology in the near-forgotten writings of Herbert Read, Motton goes onto the main body of his attack, on that central institution of new theatre writing the Royal Court. Motton gives a potted history of the English Stage Company, full of satirical digs, with the only artistic director having he good word said about being Oscar Lewenstein; Motton is particularly scathing about the reign of Max Stafford-Clark:

"…the stylish head-prefect who drove a Jensen Interceptor, introducing the dead hand of 'play-development into the Royal Court, and it might be fair to say that his tenure marks a low-point in the status of the writer at 'the writers' theatre'." [2]

Motton is pretty much appalled by the majority of the work produced by the Royal Court over the years; god knows I'm not an uncritical fan-boy of much of it myself, but in developing his argument that this is a middle-class hive of public school educated liberal bullies poisoning the nation with half-silly, half-sordid repertoire of rubbish feels a bit like Motton throwing the baby out with the bathwater (it is worth adding here that a number of Motton's plays were produced at the court during Stafford-Clark's fiefdom, one of which – The Terrible Voice of Satan, I saw; it was quite enough to make me vow never to see a Motton play again…). Of John Arden's Live Like Pigs - the author of which is introduced as "an architect educated in an all-boys boarding school called Sedberg…" - Motton writes

"A pretty good play this one, which exhibits the middle-class writer's contempt for any feeble working class pretentions to bourgeois comfort and sophistication, and makes a big noise of supporting the neighbours from hell. I loved this when I was thirteen. We can see now what has happened on the housing estates, where one family can easily terrorise a whole neighbourhood' where, just for an example, a family with 80 criminal convictions can pursue a campaign of terror against a whole community, and end up slaughtering and torturing to death two hapless students. (Not quite so fucking funny now is it, Mr Architect?). The Royal Court has to accept its share of blame for its role of architect of our modern society…" [3]

Now I don't know how most other people have taken Live Like Pigs but it seems to me that Motton here is reading the play as if he were still thirteen. The point of the play surely is not that the pikey Sawney family should be allowed to terrorise their neighbours with official sanction but that the town planners who moved the working classes as a mass onto poorly designed housing estates were creating this kind of problem of mismatched pseudo-communities in doing so. Arden himself wrote of the play

"I approve outright of neither the Sawneys or the Jacksons. Both groups uphold standards of conduct which are incompatible…" [4]

Soon after, Motton attacks Edward Bond's Saved as "a play whose only achievement is to show how vile and horrid the working class has become" and which casts a "strange spell (…) by its inertia." [5] There certainly are criticisms to be laid at the door of Saved, most of which are encapsulated in Howard Barker's statement

"I'd gone to see Saved on the strength of a review we'd read saying that this was life in South London epitomized. We just didn't think that this was so – we didn't understand much about what Bond was trying to do with the language of the play." [6]

Many working class people were and are much more vocally and intellectually florid, as well as more ethically grounded, than Bond's characters are in Saved. But to attack the play solely on these grounds seems to me to be ignoring its strengths (it is an almighty structural achievement and is surprisingly very funny when performed well) as well as mistaking its actuality as a theatrical statement in and of itself for a realistic, generalised portrait of how the working classes are. Bond is not a realist writer but rather the creator of theatrical experiences/events. It could also be facetiously added that many of those events have since referred to how horrid the ruling classes are. Any individual play of his should be seen as being a part of a body of work by a major artist (for whom self-expression is not the modus operandi) as well as being works in dialogue with the other theatre of his time and, of course, his society.

The reason I take these two examples is because this seems to me to be a major fault in Motton's book; he lumps a lot of individual playwrights together as a mass of Royal Court writers and then beats them all with the same stick. I can say that for me, as a working class teen coming from a Romford council estate and "educated" (if you can call it that) in a local comprehensive school, Bond's plays (along with Orton's and Barker's) were inspirational. Attending the Royal Court during the late 1980s through to the 2000s, I did get the feeling of a lot of not very individual writers putting out plays which were the result of a hive consciousness, offering me some of the most boring evenings I've ever spent in the theatre; lately things seem to have got somewhat better. Ultimately, whilst I agree with the gist of Motton's nailing of the theatre establishment, I find his approach rather scattershot. Motton at least has the grace to concede that by the early 80s Bond (who is himself of working class origin) had left the Court, having

"gone too far and become a Marxist. Not only did this make Bond an embarrassment to their new ideology, it also meant that he rejected the middle-class grip on power IN THE THEATRE, and God forbid, wanted to control things himself when it came to the production of his plays!" [7]

After publicly dissing his old stamping ground so conclusively, Motton then goes on to blame the OZ trial for the rise in pornography and sexual violence, aligning himself with the moralistic/Christian right and certain feminists in the process – there isn't enough space here to go into what I think about this but suffice to say for me both anti and pro pornography arguments are usually too simplistic to deserve the final say on what is certainly a vexed area of human expression.
Motton is at his worst when writing about academia and what he sees as the rise of postmodern philosophies and thinking in the universities. For one, he massively over-exaggerates the pervasiveness of postmodernism in our universities (one of the main points of the Save Middlesex Philosophy campaign was that the axed department at Middlesex was about the only centre in the UK at which contemporary European thought is focussed upon, which gives a lie to Motton's paranoia that it, like reds under the bed in 50s America, is everywhere). Even more irritatingly, Motton doesn't actually seem to know what he's talking about when dealing with postmodern thought – he has a de rigueur pop at Derrida but then goes on to give an account of a rather lame argument he had with a university lecturer friend, over whether Bram Stoker's Dracula should be taught as "late nineteenth century anxiety over the end of Empire and racial mixing" which Motton dismisses as "a load of bollocks" [8]. Now, whatever the merits of discussing Stoker's novel in these historical/cultural terms is (and I have to admit that it wouldn't interest me very much to think of the novel entirely in such a way), this has absolutely nothing to do with Derrida and deconstruction. Derrida's interest is in reading a cultural product in a complex way so that it is never reduced to less than the sum of its parts. Motton also mentions Foucault in passing; again, if he knew anything about Foucault's writings on power, he might find an ally in his own analysis that "For while certain older forms of hierarchy have certainly been removed, these have simply been replaced by similar new ones" [9]. But I don't suppose that Motton has actually read enough of Foucault to know anything other than he's a johnny foreigner whose crazy ideas have contributed towards the corruption of our youth…

More seriously, Motton says that "Access to culture and knowledge is snatched away" [10] by contemporary university education. I have no idea how he "knows" this (the book is entirely unbothered by the dreary business of citing sources - probably too close to the sort of wicked things universities encourage working class yoof to do) but I do know that everyone I know who works in academia is striving very hard indeed to provide students with growth, skills, knowledge and access to culture in very trying circumstances, especially given how poorly equipped by their schools and colleges many students who come to us are. In the education section, Motton comes across as a mouthing-off down-the-pub silly bollocks, raving in an even more generalised fashion than in the rest of the book and thus proving Blake's adage that "To generalize is to be an idiot." [11] For most of this section, Motton prattles on about something he calls "common sense" – common sense might have advised him to know something about a subject before railing against it.

This tendency to uninformed opinion-making hazards condemning Motton's book to that bonfire of vanities preserved for the likes of Nick Cohen's What's Left? and Peter Hitchens' The Abolition of Britain, works which were clearly written in a fever of excitement encouraged by an over-wheening belief that something must be worth typing and having published merely because the author believes it. But, its many and manifest faults aside, it would be a shame if Motton's mistakes blinded us to the importance of his better observations. His is a contribution best taken in the spirit of a democratic debate which is prevented from existing by the non-democratic nature of arts leadership in this country, a leadership whose rudder-work prevents a plurality of voices, methods, schools, ways of seeing and doing. Motton is right when he talks of an establishment which tends to marginalize and ignore anyone who disagrees with its avowed ideological or/and artistic stance, condemning any dissident as

"a sinister villian with an obscene agenda, a real enemy of good society, an enemy of the people, a failure seeking to aggrandise himself, a reject with personal problems, deluded, megalomaniac." [12]

I've mostly concentrated here on what irks me about it but I'd heartily recommend Motton's book is to anyone with a passionate interest in the Arts in the UK. It has the sense of being a cultural grenade lobbed through the glass window of that invitation-only coffee shop which the chattering classes have turned the Arts into in this country; like any grenade, its effects are scattershot and for ever palpable hit there's half a dozen undeserving collateral damages. But cultural grenades are easier to get over that actual ones; only wusses should be afraid of catching this one for fear of it going off and losing them face.

[1] Motton, Gregory Helping Themselves: The Left-Wing Middle-Classes in Theatre and the Arts (Leveller's Press, 2009), p.18
[2] Ibid., p. 122
[3] Ibid, p. 108
[4] Arden, John Three Plays (Penguin, 1964), p. 101
[5] Motton, p. 113-114
[6] Barker, Howard in Trussler, Simon (ed.), New Theatre Voices of the Seventies (Methuen, 1981), p. 186, cited in Rabey, David Ian Howard Barker: Politics and Desire - An Expository Study of his Drama and Poetry, 1969-97 (Macmillan Press, 1989), p. 20
[7] Motton, p. 105
[8] Motton, p. 191
[9] Motton, p. 19
[10] Motton, p. 188
[11] Blake, William Annotations to Reynolds in Keynes, Geoffrey (Ed.) Blake Complete Poems (Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 451
[12] Motton, p. 136

Defending the indefensible? Paradise Found at the Menier

2010-06-06T17:28:00.006+01:00

By coincidence, a week after I saw the opera Paradise Lost in Wrocław I saw a new musical called Paradise Found at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London. The musical has a book adapted from Joseph Roth's novel The Tale of the Thousand and Second Night by playwright Richard Nelson, and songs adapted from the waltzes of Johann Strauss II which have been festooned with lyrics by Ellen Fitzhugh. The musical has been more or less universally abused by critics and bloggers; I went to the theatre with a fair amount of trepidation, thinking that I was going to see something in the same league as the much (and deservingly) maligned Ernest Hemingway musical Too Close to the Sun. It surprised me that I came out at the end having actually liked some of Paradise Found.

I have ambivalent feelings about musicals and only booked for this as it has been co-directed by Harold Prince, whose 1980 Drury Lane production of Sweeney Todd was one of my formative theatre experiences, and the other shows I've seen of his have also been staging miracles – hell, he even managed to make Phantom of the Opera into a show I enjoyed, and I usually hate the work of Andrew Lloyd Webber. During the first 20 or so minutes of Prince's new production, I felt that I was going to be in agreement with those that have derided it – it seemed a sloppy, leering and rather absurd musical about the Shah of Persia coming to Vienna in the late 19th century in order to cure his "ache" at not being able to raise an erection with any of his many wives or indeed with anyone in his homeland. The story is set up with such vulgarity that it's like being stuck in a confined space with a third-rate Zero Mostel impersonator who insists on telling you about his love-life, gestures and all. The Shah brings with him his head Eunuch (played by Mandy Patinkin in a performance of such counter-intuitive strangeness that I couldn't help but be spellbound by it) and this Eunuch is taken out on the town by a Viennese Baron whilst the Shah lies in bed nursing his lack of a hard-on. The poor old Eunuch is dragged from brothel to boudoir to what seems to be a 19th century heterosexual sex club complete with maze, as all the time with the cast sing with oomph these Strauss knock-off songs.

It was around 35 minutes into the show that I realised that I was actually, despite myself, rather enjoying it. By the time the Shah had raised himself from his bed, dragged himself to a Ball in his honour and got a stonking hard-on for the Empress, in response to which the Baron and the Eunuch conspire to dress a prostitute up as Her Majesty, disguise the brothel as a palace and satisfy the Shah by pretence I was veritably intrigued. The show seemed to be a rather extraordinary way of talking about the idea that desire can be fulfilled through illusion; I could see what had attracted intelligent theatre makers like Prince, his co-director Susan Stroman and others Broadway royalty to the piece, which far from being the old-fashioned froth which most people have dismissed it as seemed to me to be very much tuned into our age of promiscuity and readily available pornography, Vienna standing in as a bourgeois world par excellence in which anyone with the cash or a credit card can get themselves off to an illusion that they are shagging the object of their desire but where it is all being done by proxy. In this sense, Paradise Found seems to me to a remarkably postmodern work, dealing not only with the sense that reality and illusion are to Westerners now just as good as each other, but also postmodern in the sense that the songs were not so much adaptations by deconstructions of Strauss' music, making them sing about what their lavishness excludes – the dirty truth about the sex-industry economy which was the Vienna they were written for.

The second act of Paradise Found becomes stranger still, as the characters who have just been behaving like frantic cartoons in an end-of-pier sex farce reveal that there have real emotions and suffer real consequences for their behaviour. The tone of the show now veers wildly from the lubricious and vulgar to the heartfelt and stricken and it can't be said that the change of gear is a success aesthetically, except that such an awkward gear-change does make the proceedings much more like life. In refusing consistency of tone, the piece attains a kind of crazy realism (audiences and critics hate this kind of thing, which is an interesting phenomena worth thinking about in and of itself). The final quarter of the show is over-ambitious, to say the least, in trying to hang a late-Shakespearean All Is Forgiven and Redeemed ending on the piece, a la Pericles (which is also set partly in a brothel). The ending is mostly unsuccessful because the actor playing the Baron, Shuler Hensley, is so convincing at showing us a man whom circumstance, society, drink and lack of character have brought to a bad place, a place which there's no getting up from; the Broadway musical's traditional requirement for a happy resolution is shown to be in an irresolvable tension with what actually happens to people in society – which again is interesting in itself but kind of makes the show commit hari-kari before the audience's appalled eyes.

Paradise Found was, for me then, a mind-boggling experience and all the more fascinating for it; I found it more intriguing than many musicals that get audiences or critics or both salivating with raptures. Somewhere in his diaries, Joe Orton pours scorn on the idea that there can be such a thing as "an interesting failure" – yet with the right amount of mulling, some failures do give the mind much to be interested in.

Penderecki's Paradise Lost in Wrocław

2010-05-30T21:52:00.005+01:00

My initial impetus for going to Wrocław was the coincidence that of finding that a Polish friend I'd lost and regained touch with was now living back there (I knew him previously in London) only a day or two of noticing that there was a rare performance of Penderecki's Paradise Lost at the opera house there. A trip to see my friend and this rarity proved irresistible.

The Wrocław opera are based in a good old traditional 19th century opera house with a prettily (some might think too prettily) decorated interior. The repertoire is mostly the staples (Puccini, Mozart, Verdi, Carmen) mixed with some more local favourites, for example The Haunted Manor and Król Roger; Penderecki is a Polish composer – perhaps the best known living one – but the inclusion of his relatively obscure 1978 setting of Milton's epic poem is an act of some bravery on their part. The Sunday afternoon performance I attended was about two thirds full, and the audience didn't feel particularly enthusiastic. Like a lot of people (I suppose), I was made aware of Penderecki's music by its inclusion on the soundtrack to The Shining; he had a fierce avant-garde reputation in the 1950s and 60s but since the 1980s he has taken a more conservative route which he refers to as him having "come to a point where it appears most creative to turn back and open the door we have shut behind us". Paradise Lost is mid-period Penderecki and its sonorous, deep and gloomy music is well fitted to setting a text based on a work by the author of At a Solemn Music.

This is the second theatrical adaptation of Paradise Lost I have seen, after Rupert Gould's production of Ben Power's version for Headlong. Despite having being a relatively dialogic epic poem, whose writer made his own contribution to the Jacobean theatre scene with the masque Comus, Paradise Lost usually proves tricky to make dramatic. Its scope is enormous, and its structure – whizzing from the fallen angels in hell through flashbacks to their rebellion in heaven onwards to the temptation of Adam and Eve and then flash-forwards to later events in Biblical history, there's too much there for a single play. Christopher Fry wrote the libretto for Penderecki and does a decent job of getting it down to a manageable two and a half hours but loses the battle in Heaven, which is one of the most dramatic sections of the poem. He brings Milton on stage at the beginning and at intervals throughout, to introduce and narrate the action; this is strong, as it suggests that what we are seeing are the visions of a bard, the performance our visionary experience. The Wrocław production began well, with Penderecki's music brooding over a dark stage, with the figure of blind Milton being led by a dogged boy gradually becoming clear as the lights rose – us being introduced to our own temporary form. Milton's part is spoken and has the great effect of an incantation.

In Fry's rearrangement of the material, Milton/we first see a moping Adam and Eve in postlapsarian guilt and despair over the loss of Eden. We then meet the hordes of hell, and witness the council at which the devils discuss how to deal with their fall. This structure works well and preserves a strength of the poem, wherein one gets the feeling of having backdrops lifted to show what lies behind each thing we encounter. The devils at Wrocław were dressed as a cross between Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings orcs and Clive Barker's Hellraiser team of Cenobites. This was a fairly straightforward visual imagining of the poem with devils looking ugly and devlish and angels looking pure and angelic. As these are poetic figurations, this didn't prevent me as an audience member reading them as signs but sometimes it did seem a bit obvious as a choice, even a little ludicrous at times – when the devils did a demon dance near the beginning, it looked a little like a geriatric version of the zombie routine from the Thriller video.

Satan is always going to be the focus of interest in Paradise Lost, as despite being the theologically the antagonist, dramatically he is the protagonist – goal orientated and driven in a way that none of the other characters are. In Wrocław he is dressed in leather trousers and cuts a half-attractive, half-campy figure. Piotr Nowacki sung him with an impressive authority but did a little too much swishing of his long leather coat, suggesting that this when he states it is "Better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven" I got the feeling he was going to be the Queen rather than the King. He had great moments though, best of all when he lurks and lingers voyeuristically observing the happy couple in Eden, a malcontent singleton who disses partnership whilst burning in the hell of lacking one. Whatever my qualms about the design and performance, Satan is the most energetic and compelling presence on stage; Adam and Eve begin as whiners and for most of the time either stay doing that or stay dull under God's law. Eve's giving in to temptation feels like the best decision she ever made, and Adam's best moment is when he takes the plunge himself, more committed to a life with the wife he loves that obedience to the laws of the God who made him.

Fry's best decision in the libretto is having two sets of performers as Adam and Eve – two singers, for the disquisitive sections and two dancers for the action. The Adam dancer – sturdy Sergei Oberemok (who really does look the part of the Human Form Divine) – brilliantly expressed Adam's birth pangs in a coming to being more reminiscent of a Frankenstein movie than a Bible tale. Later, the two dancers perform a fairly raunchy consummation of their marriage – Milton was certainly the greatest poet of married love the world has known and here his words take a physical form which manages that most difficult of tasks for contemporary artists, to make marriage an erotic activity. A dance with anthropomorphic animals as Adam names them (as in one of Dylan's quirkiest Christian-period numbers) was less successful, being somewhat reminiscent of that long and best forgotten West End musical flop Children of Eden.

Eden in the Wrocław PL is a dubious place. The walls are plain and the angels walk around entirely dressed in white, as if this were some sinister private mental institution or science lab with Adam and Eve the inmates/subjects of experiment. God is never seen but spoken in an amplified voice; as his speeches are accompanied by a large ball hanging over Adam's head, there's something of The Prisoner about Adam's predicament. William Empson argued that Milton's God was a prediction of Stalin and this makes the production and story very relevant indeed for post-socialist Poland; the population has been tempted to escape from the prison-Eden of the Soviet era but the world waiting for them is one of toil and blood. It is ironic, given how antithetical to communism the Catholic church is, how close the God of creation in Milton (and, indeed, Genesis) is to a Stalinist authoritarian. In this reading, Satan would be the temptations of neoliberalism, promising freedom but providing struggle, wars, pestilence and pain.

Later in the libretto, as Michael shows Adam mankind's future, Fry calls for "A series of static and moving images from the beginning of time to the present, of man's physical and mental affliction." The projections were dispensed with by director Waldemar Zawodziński; a mime/dance in which nearly-naked extras stepped out of a pen with an iron-door to drop dead one by one was substituted; this had chilling resonances with the death camps, the most notorious and murderous of which are of course in Poland. What Michael presents to Adam as humanity's future is our terrifying recent past and potential present.

The final section of the opera is dramatically under-played and the performance ends on a tentative note. This is a little underwhelming but I can't quite make out whether it is a failing or a deliberate subversion of our expectations for climax and resolution. Penderecki didn't quite describe Paradise Lost as an opera, rather as sacra rappresentazione, a cross between opera and oratorio. At Wrocław, the chorus are offstage, on either side of the auditorium on the edges of the first circle, reminiscent of a church choir. Thus this performance of Penderecki's work attempts to abolish the differentiation between church-going and theatre-going, which is promising in the light of Blake's "What is a Church & What Is a Theatre? are they Two & not One? can they Exist Separate?" If theatres becoming churches meant the performance of ideologically leading works which disallow mental fight then this would be a bad thing but given that Penderecki's Paradise Lost points the way towards a deeply questioning and ambiguous spiritual tale, I found something in the performance deeply inspiring. The opera has all the virtues of Milton and all of his problematics (not least Messias, who in Zawodziński's mise-en-scene is a static marble-like figure in white, eerily reminding me of Syberberg's conception of Amfortas in his Parsifal film). The congregation/audience are presented with such thorny imagery and such a difficult and unfinished story and this makes Paradise Lost, for all the classical, Christian and conservative associations that Milton/Penderecki/Fry might suggest as a trio, a radical experience and not at all mere preaching or cant.

It hope that the opera becomes better known, as it does present us with what is still one of the fundamental stories of our civilisation in a way which expresses all its inspiring difficulties and sets them to music which is deep, dark, expressive and, whilst overly homogeneous for some tastes in the orchestrations, varied and fluent in its use of many voices, from speaking roles to counter-tenors and boy choirs.

Wrocław, part two: Baroque Panoramic History

2010-05-28T00:13:00.009+01:00

The people of Wrocław were worried about floods this weekend. There had been heavy rainfall for many days preceding my arrival and the banks of the Oder river were almost overflowing, with the river running far faster than its normal speed. There was serious flooding in the area in 1999 and seeing as little work has been done on flood defences since then, the population were worried that a repeat was going to come. They, and I with them, were lucky – there was little rainfall over the weekend (it was very sunny at some times) and so - apart from a few unfortunate incidents where the river flooded housing which had, in three little piggies style, been built on inappropriate low-level land - we were spared a thoroughgoing emergency. On one occasion, just after a visit to the University, my friend and I were in a cafe when the electricity supply was cut off, but this did not last for too long. It was lucky for us that this hadn't happened an hour earlier, as we soon discovered that the University we'd just enjoyed was now shut due to the power failure.

The University of Wrocław is one of the major attractions of the city. Its main hall, the Aula Leopoldina, is a Baroque monstrosity, one of the most consistent and gaudy examples of that period in the area. The platform is capped with a faux-marble statue of the Emperor Leopold I, the stony monarch flanked by his "friends" Prudence and Providence and spurning his enemies Discord and Stupidity at his feet; students nowadays might take a warning from the personification of these fiends, a wild young woman with tousled hair and a youth with donkey's ears. Above Leopold a painting continues the scene, showing The Mother of God with Child sending Wisdom, in the care of various Saints, down to the Emperor, who has supported this University so that this wisdom gets taught to men. An equally explicit allegorical painting decorates the choir balcony at the back of the room. Allegory is an inferior art, forcing metaphor into ideological shape and indoctrinating the mind to accept the identification of abstract ideals with temporal forms of state power. Despite my distaste for this galumphing form, the Aula Leopoldina is well worth the visit, for its ornate decoration is admittedly impressive and seeing the folly of allegory encourages the viewer to identify its ideological sins.

Next to the University and attached to it is another Baroque masterpiece, the Church of the Holy Name of Jesus. Here the decorations positively clamour for your attention, each battling for your eye against the other and so making focus difficult. The (rather good) audio guide suggests that the church is so ornate in order to show off and attract believers in what was, at the time of its building (by the Jesuits) a Reformed City. Although there is an aesthetic appreciation I can have for Baroque decoration – it is lively and lavish if you're in the mood – I can never identify it with spiritual thought; if you think of the religious epics of Cecil B DeMille (perhaps cinema's greatest Baroque genius), the last thing that comes to mind on viewing them is serious thoughts of God. Perhaps it's just a matter of taste. I got to like the tall, Romanesque interiors of the many other churches in the city, which were fairly uncrowded and which direct the mind to contemplations of airy expansiveness. Unfortunately the worshippers in these tall churches were, as is the religious Christian wont, bent downwards in prayer rather than looking upwards for inspiration; I read somewhere that Jean Genet despised the supplicant physical attitude of Christians in prayer and I share his distaste. I couldn't love a God who wished for bowing and scraping; as Blake has it, such a God "is only an Allegory of Kings & nothing Else." In St Barbara's Church there is a set of statues involving a preaching form (perhaps an Apostle) done up like a Grecian noble, flanked by other aristocrats; holding him aloft are two solid soldierly types; holding them up and groaning under the weight is a Polish peasant – if the worshippers were to think about the meaning of this display rather than pray to Nobodaddy, they'd be closer to the Truth than prayer can bring them.

A strange mystery in University Musiquarium and church involves the organs in each; both are decorated by an enormous Pyramid with Eye, suggesting that the University has at some point been an Illuminati or Masonic hive. No explanation is given for these is any of the books or audio guides I saw or heard, but never have I seen Masonic symbolism so audaciously displayed...

Two sites visited on my final day in Wrocław are worth mentioning. The Racławice Panorama is an enormous painting, housed in a specially built rotunda, which celebrates the battle in 1794 in which Polish "insurgents" (that word makes a positive here) beat the Russian forces. The painting is impressive and the perspective and extra-mural effects really do place you in the midst of things. The audio guide is intensely Nationalistic, and even when the narrator is forced to admit that the battle was won but the revolt against Russian rule was a failure, we are told that the victory and this painted scene inspire those who came and come after in the fight for Polish independence. Wide-eyed children were being shipped in groups to see the Panorama whilst I was there, another generation of Poles egged-on to Nationalistic pride; it certainly was the kind of scene you wouldn't see in England (thank Heavens).

The second site was the 19th century White Stork synagogue, which somehow managed to survive Kristallnacht and which has now been restored to its former glory. The interior is impressive and spacious; the upper floors are dedicated to an exhibition telling the history of the Jews of Wrocław and Lower Silesia. On occasions they thrived in the city, although persecutions were numerous; our old friend Bishop Nanker (see previous blog) presided over an expulsion, and of the 22,000 Jews in the city at the beginning of the Reich, only 30 survived the Holocaust. The communist era was not free of persecutions either, and most of the Silesian Jews who survived the war found themselves driven out of Poland into Israel. The lack of divergent ethnicities was perhaps the strangest thing for me, a Londoner through and through who is so used to many colours and creeds around him that the lack of them seems somehow wrong.

I very much enjoyed my time in Wrocław. I was blessed with an excellent host and guide who taught me much about the city. It is small enough to walk around without having to use public transport (although whenever a city is small like this, the city makes demands on the feet!). There's nothing like immersing oneself in a centuries-old city for broadening one's knowledge of the distant and near past. Even better was the chance to see Poles in their native clime, having previously only met them in mine. The contradictions, blessings and conflicts of European union now feel clearer to me than they were before the visit. If you get a chance to go to Wrocław, take it. An excellent book on the city is available in paperback from The Meeting Point, the tourist information centre in the town square, which itself preserves a medieval town hall and pillory.

Wrocław, part one: Infested churches

2010-05-23T13:05:00.011+01:00

I’ve been spending a few days in the Polish city of Wrocław, visiting a friend and cramming in some sightseeing and opera-going. I say Polish city, but in reality the city is a challenge to the idea of National identity. As a major city in Silesia, it was a German city (Breslau) until the late 1940s, when the Potsdam conference gave the region to the Poles. The Germans were ethnically cleansed from the area and a Polish population replaced them; the vast majority of the people who live in the city now only have roots in the region going back a generation or two. What this does to the idea of National identity, of being Polish because one comes from Poland for example, is quite surreal and shows that identity is certainly more about language and culture than place.

The Polish presence in Wrocław is the latest in a changing line of occupancy of the city, which as well as German has also involved Bohemian, Austrian and Prussian rule. This has had great visual impact on the city, leaving it an intriguing mix of architectural styles, from the Gothic to the Baroque, the modernist to a low of sour Soviet-era tower blocks and apartments; there is even a German Nazi-era building, a long and imposing neo-classical edifice now used as the local Parliament.

The main thing is Churches – there are dozens of them, many of enormous and imposing size. The city’s centrepiece is the so-called Cathedral island, on which is a convocation of the twin-towered Cathedral of St John the Baptist and a number of other churches, from the small Romanesque St Giles’ to the blackened Gothic edifice Church of the Holy Cross. The Cathedral is also Gothic, with some unhappily stuck-on Baroque additions, which look like such poor grafting that they reminded me more of parasites clinging to a host than careful cosmetic alterations. One of them, the large St Elizabeth’s chapel, houses the tomb of a wealthy landowner and is one of the least happy (at least architecturally, from the outside) Cathedral tributes to a patron I have seen (the Chapel itself is not open to the public, being cordoned off with at least half of the rest of the building). There is some beautifully restored stained glass but as this covers all of the windows, the light is restricted and the Cathedral is a gloomy, oppressive interior. A stone carving on a column to the right as one enters the door shows a certain Bishop Nanker, who was responsible for building the Cathedral, anathemizing King John of Luxembourg; it is no surprise to see this assertion of church power in so prominent a place in Wrocław cathedral, as the city and its Churches affirmed to me that the church remains a politically active force in the life of the nation, not it has to be said a force for very much good.

The Catholic church in Poland is a politically conservative and reactionary force; Poland remains (alongside Ireland) one of the two European nations that forbid abortion (except in extreme circumstances, and even then doctors demur) and, although homosexuality is ostensibly legal (due to European regulations), the gay population of Poland live lives as secret as their British counterparts from the 1950s. The Churches of the city are an incredible historical, artistic and architectural resource but the visitor has to avoid the masses still practised in every one, and one’s contemplation of the artistic achievements of the builders and decorators is distracted by worried-looking people coming in to use the churches to pray or give confession. This infestation of active religion does little for the glory of the buildings – it limits access and (like official Christianity has always done) overshadows the marvellous imaginative achievement of Christian stories and artists with the dogma and rule of priests who know nothing of light and life. Christianity should and once was a source of liberation for humankind, dragged down through centuries of its involvement with the state and the wealthy elites, it is now mostly an encumbrance to human social and spiritual evolution. Which is not to say that there is nothing good done in the name of religion – Jesus’ message of helping the poor and vulnerable means that decent people within the church do much to assist the socially excluded (who are many in a country like Poland which has been neo-liberalised to the point of crime) but this activity would be better practised without the attached Patriarchal, anti-feminist and homophobic bent, made all the more unpalatable in Poland by being attached to an unattractive Nationalism smearing itself in a martyrdom complex.

The unfriendliness of the guardians of Wrocław’s Christian sites has struck me as peculiarly unchristian. The emblematic moment was, on entering a side-chapel of the Church of the Holy Name, being confronted with a collection of mechanical Children’s toys laid out where the alter previously was. A sour-faced female warden glared at me, made a show of how having to get up was exactly not what she wished to be doing and then switched the toys on. To a soundtrack of what sounded like Polish carols, the disparate and many toys danced, banged drums, nodded their heads and walked in circles; all this I watched, glad I wasn’t tripping, under the constant surveillance of the warden. As soon as I stepped in the direction of the exit, the warden leapt to turn the toys off with the concern of a poor pensioner watching their electricity bill, yet I suspect that dislike of the toys’ joy rather than home economics was the impetus behind the warden’s rush to switch them off.

The presence of the late Karol Wojtyła spreads everywhere in the city like a rash, including a renamed Square and frosted glass with a shrine dedicated to him in St Elizabeth’s Church, which he made a minor Basilica. My friend tells me that the so-called John Paul generation of Poles are in many ways more conservative and religious than their parents; when they come to the UK in search of work and encounter multiculturalism (Poland is almost entirely ethnically white) and open displays of female or gay sexuality, they are morally appalled. This doesn’t reflect well on the Polish pope and whilst I can see that there must be a lot of National pride in having an important world-figure hail from your homeland, his legacy is hardly something to be uncritically proud of. Poland gets a lot of money to invest in infrastructure and renovation from Europe, and the many roadworks (which apparently take an unnaturally long time to complete) and restored buildings (the painted fronts of the Baroque houses around the city are very attractive) tell that the money is much-required. It is a shame that more central European attitudes don’t bleed into the culture alongside the money. I fear that as long as Poles define themselves as John Paul II’s children and the martyrs of Katyn, the country cannot become a progressive society, by which I mean a society in which some people aren’t treated as second class citizens and the politics that govern things are not simply the politics of self-involvement, conspiracy and fear.

Opera, Ethics and La Trivialising of Culture

2010-05-16T22:05:00.010+01:00

I've been reading a collection of essays on Film and Ethics and am highly taken by the authors' suggestion that "Critical work in the arts and the humanities influenced by those branches of thought known as poststructuralism, have been characterized in recent years by what has been termed as a 'turn to ethics.'" [1] The book concentrates on encounters with films as ethical events but we can clearly apply an ethical line of interrogation to other cultural products. Ethics were certainly at the forefront of my mind as I was confronted by the spectacle of Richard Eyre's production of La Traviata at the Royal Opera House on Friday. I found the production unethical.

Why, and what might be an ethical production of an opera? Some might argue that the form itself is unethical in terms of the structure of its funding in Western Europe these days – an elitist and perhaps non-populist cultural product which though it appeals to wealthy patrons has to be kept alive with subsidies from the public purse. This objection can be easily dealt with by affirming that opera would survive, as it does in America, without public monies but that the ticket prices really would then mean that it is available only to wealthy audiences. It could keep itself going like sport from sponsorship deals with corporate companies, but how might their heavier involvement affect the artistic output of a company? I have not followed US opera houses closely enough to know if or how they are compromised by their absolute reliance on private sponsorship.

Back to La Traviata, Eyre's production might be described in terms of it being solid, handsome, traditional and completely competent as a piece of staging. Its main strength is that it foregrounds its singers in such a way that during their major arias, they are the focus of attention on stage. But notice how I use singers here to describe the performers – the singing has been foregrounded here to the detriment of the dramatic content. It is not that I am calling for opera in which the singing is not important – that would be absurd (and the singing of Ermonela Jaho as Violetta and, supremely, Dmitri Hvorostovsky as Germont is superb here). But opera is not only about the enjoyment of the music and singing (otherwise concert versions would be the preferred production model); we are in the theatre to witness a music drama (to borrow Wagner's phrase). Eyre's production fails to lead us into the drama at all; it gives its audience a pleasant experience, and given that the work is about a woman who dies after having her one chance of happiness taken away from her by hypocritical and moralistic social forces, is a merely pleasant and enjoyable experience the ethical one? I would doubt that many in the audience came away from the production with a strong feeling of injustice.

The real work in opera production, since David Alden and others revolutionised it in from the early 1990s onwards, has been to force audiences to look at the content of the work they are seeing and understand that they are witnessing the work of artists who are dealing with the salient problems of human life, in a way which is still vitally relevant to a contemporary audience member. The simplest way of doing this is to update the setting – imagine a Violetta who is a transsexual porn star or a gay man in the 1980s stricken with AIDS. The fact that some relationships would still be socially unacceptable recently or now has to be apparent for any audience to understand the need Verdi had to compose the work; the programme makes much of how the writing was inspired by the composer's own socially unacceptable relationship with Giuseppina Strepponi. When we are confronted, in the final scene, by a woman on her death bed who has been robbed of what the Americans feel is her universal human right to the pursuit of happiness, we need to see the truth of death, beds and human lives. Someone dying doesn't languish on pristine white sheets, as in Bob Crowley's design for Eyre, but on sheets soiled with bodily secretions. The final scene should be horrific and not merely an exercise in pretty aesthetics; at the outset of Act 2 Scene 2 the audience actually applauded the set, a thing I always find distressing in a theatre. The production is very disappointing coming from Eyre, who when he ran the Nottingham Playhouse in the 70s was at the forefront of radical dramatic theatre, directing Griffiths' Comedians and Brenton & Hare's Brassneck. Whatever has happened to him – including the prestigious Artistic Directorship of the RNT, a knighthood and hit Broadway musical productions – in the interim has clearly been artistically deleterious if it has lead him to produce La Traviata as if it were a waxwork display sitting on top of a chocolate box.

I have seen a couple of recent German productions of Wagner - Stefan Herheim's Lohengrin and Philipp Stölzl's Rienzi – both of which really interrogated the works and gave the audience no choice other than to think about what they are seeing. Some audiences may not wish to think so hard but I would say that these are non-ethical audiences and the ethical artist cannot be beholden to them. There is the argument that Roger Scruton makes that beauty in itself is ethical, and he objected strongly to Calixto Bieito's production of Mozart's The Abduction from the Seraglio on the grounds that it did nothing but destroy the beauty of Mozart's music. I didn't see that production but I did see Bieito's Don Giovanni at the ENO – the music of Mozart was still there in all its grandeur and beauty but Bieito certainly did thrust the ugliness of Da Ponte's characters and their behaviours in our face in such a way that we were encouraged to intimately connect this with our society. That must be the ethical way to produce an opera, and we do an injustice to Verdi, Wagner, Mozart et al if we fail to think of them as ethical human beings engaged in encouraging their audience to think and feel about human problems in a very immediate way.

Some of the problem, it could be said, is in Verdi's music for La Traviata – and we can turn to Adorno as a voice of encouragement to think about serious music and culture in post-1945 European context. Adorno would surely say that La Traviata should never be, as it certainly is in Eyre's production, mere trivia, escapism and aesthetic over-indulgence.

[1] Dowling, Lisa & Saxton, Libby Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters (Routledge, 2010), p.1

Bond asks the nagging questions

2010-05-09T22:30:00.017+01:00

Another encounter with a play about an artist, as I took a pilgrimage to Chichester to see the production of Edward Bond's 1973 play Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death. On the surface, this is a speculative bio-play concerning the last years of William Shakespeare, our National poet and generally considered to be, as Nick Hutchison writes in the programme,

"…the greatest playwright of all time, the greatest love poet, whose plays have come to represent all that is best in human artistic endeavour…" [1]

Bond's play begins with Shakespeare sitting in a garden contemplating a sheet of paper but it is neither a page from a script nor a poem but rather a reckoning of the amount he makes from the rents he makes from some sitting tenants on some local common fields. We soon learn that a local businessman, William Combe, is set on enclosing the land and Shakespeare wants assurances that his income will be maintained. Combe offers to compensate Shakespeare for any losses as long as Shakespeare agrees not to oppose the enclosures. In the first half of the play, alongside this business story, there is a subplot involving a young homeless woman who is at first whipped for disobeying the laws on vagrancy and then hung for setting some fires in Stratford-upon-Avon. By the end of the first part, we understand that Shakespeare retired to Stratford for rest and contemplation (buying New Place for this purpose) but is unable to stop thinking about the suffering he has seen in London and now continues to see in his Warwickshire hide-out. For most of the three scenes of Part One Shakespeare is reticent in his speech, but at the end of the Act he busts forth with an elongated speech envisioning a London awash with cruelty and crime.

The involvement of Shakespeare in the enclosures at the nearby village of Welcombe are a historical fact; Bond (in a 1973 note to the play [2]) references E K Chambers' 2 Volume William Shakespeare as a source for documentation and commentary. Despite this (and other assertions of this truth in the programme), some critics write as if this episode in Shakespeare's life is Bond's suggestion. Bond's play can cause extreme reactions from critics, but given that the play on the whole presents the bard as a humane and very deep thinker troubled by his own social situation, I am at a bit of a loss to understand why anyone should be offended by the portrait.

Of course, by the end of the play we have seen Shakespeare question his legacy as an artist (he continually asks himself "Was anything done?") and ends up taking poison and committing suicide, unable to find a way out of his despair at the world and some of his involvements in it (not only has his behaviour as a landlord been questionable, but he has neglected and alienated his wife and his younger daughter, Judith). Bond rather provocative wrote in 1973

'My account rather flatters Shakespeare. If he didn't end up the way shown in the play, then he was a reactionary blimp or some other fool. The only more charitable account is that he was unaware or senile.' [3]

Bond's view of Shakespeare as a man passionately concerned with social issues is borne out by any overview of the bard's work. In watching the play's scenes of a despairing Shakespeare wandering through a world in which judges condemn and hang homeless beggars, I couldn't help but think of Lear at the height of his "madness" – concerned in the storm for the "poor, naked wretches" and condemning judges as thieves (in Bingo, Combe is a magistrate). The play is asking important questions about a person's political and social role in the world, not merely an artist's role but every human's. In Tony Coult's useful short book The Plays of Edward Bond, he quotes Albert Hunt (in a piece for New Society) accusing Bond of being someone who is

'…trapped by his own literary aspirations and has lost touch with the society he was trying to explain… it's not so much a question any longer of a "writer's theatre", as a theatre about writers.' [4]

Coult challenges this on the grounds that plays about artists are as valuable as plays about any other kind of worker (artists face the same social circumstances as anyone else) and also in that it is erroneous to assume that only artists enjoy plays about artists. I would agree with Coult here (I suppose I would say that, having written a number of plays about both fictional and historical artists in my time) but also add more about Bingo's positioning and impact as a theatre event.

Bingo came at a time when Bond was making inroads into the higher echelons of UK cultural life. After its premier at the Northcott in Exeter, it was performed at the Royal Court with John Gielgud as Shakespeare; soon after, Bond had work performed at the National Theatre, the RSC and the Royal Opera. Bingo was part of an ongoing project on his part to ask the most important questions about his society in those cultural institutions that were held to be the most prestigious. I had thought about using the word "infiltrate" in the previous but I realise that this would sound as if Bond was somehow coming from somewhere else and attacking a tradition; this is wrong, as Bond is very much the inheritor of the tradition of English drama and literature which through the past 500+ years has asked the pertinent questions. In a way, Bingo is analogous to Blake's epic poem Milton, in which the bard of the civil war returns to earth to separate what was visionary in his life and work from what was error. Bond is correcting, building on and continuing Shakespeare's work.

Some critics dismiss Bond as a doctrinaire Marxist whose plays are mere propaganda for the cause. This does him an injustice, as it should be quite clear to any intelligent and sensitive audience member at Bingo that this is the work of a man who is struggling, like the play's protagonist, to understand his social situation. Bond shows Combe as a thief of land and shows the rebellion of a group of locals who dig up the enclosures, hoping to reverse the process; theirs is a revolt which has a vision of a better world at its centre (Christian in its symbolism, reminiscent of the writings of Winstanley) but which uses violence in achieving its aims, a violence which has unfortunate effects on innocent bystanders. Bond shows this struggle in all its complexity, portraying the leader of the rebels as a preaching, humourless puritan and giving Combe a speech which any revolutionary must struggle to answer:

'I live in the real world and try to make it work. There's nothing more moral than that. But you live in a world of dreams! What happens when you wake up? You find that real people can't live in your dreams. They don't fit, they're not good or sane or noble enough. So you turn to common violence and begin to destroy them.' [5]

In the last scene of the play, Combe and the leader of the protest are still arguing, in Shakespeare's bedroom. Shakespeare sits between them as they accuse and counter-accuse, and as he does so he takes some poison. This is an extraordinary moment, capable of being taken in multi-dimensional ways. In one way, Bond is killing off Shakespeare here, asserting that a man who lived 400+ years ago isn't going to be able to help us sort out the social difficulties that face us. The character is expressing a need which many of us might feel, a need to hide in death rather than face historical or class problems. Or perhaps the sugar-coated poison is (as my companion on my trip to Chichester – Ben Francis – suggested to me after the performance) the false culture which takes us away from the real arguments of our lives. It was at this moment in Bingo I realised what a remarkable achievement the play is, one which hands to me as an audience member the question "Was anything done?", to ask myself about my life in a world which isn't very much different, in its injustices, brutality and social structure, to the one portrayed in the play. Was the Iraq invasion anything more than Western interests enclosing land in the middle east?

At the centre of the play's questioning is a problem of property which we must all face. Our main political parties encourage owner-occupation as the preferred living arrangement, and I couldn't help wondering as I was watching the play how many of our wealthy liberal writers have second properties on which they collect rent? I remember a few years ago, when I got a small inheritance, someone advising me that the best investment would be to buy to let (I did not follow this advice); friends of mine have been forced to move when their landlord needed to sell the home they were living in. The Shakespeare of Bingo faces a very current problem.

Bond's attempt to do ask the questions of our age our big arts institutions came to a bad end in the mid-80s, and his plays since then have been premiered either in a Theatre-in-Education environment in the UK or in Paris at the Théâtre National de Colline. Bond has a famous, ongoing feud with our National Theatre but the performance of Bingo at Chichester made it clear to me how important his voice is to the life of our mainstream drama; his plays ask the challenging questions and we do something when we confront them which is valuable to us.

The production at Chichester, by Angus Jackson, is superb. Patrick Stewart (whose desire to play the role again instigated the production) is an intelligent, passionate and compelling Shakespeare, Ellie Haddington is beyond moving as the Old Woman who serves as his housekeeper and confidante and the rest of the cast give outstanding performances. Bond's plays are tricky to get right (I didn't much like the recent revival of The Sea in the West End) but here the full effect of his writing plays out. The whole experience is one I won't be forgetting in a hurry, and the central question will continue to nag.

[1] Hutchison, Nick 'Scenes of Money and Death' in Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death (Chichester Festival Theatre programme, 2010)
[2] Bond, Edward Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death (Methuen, 1974), p.xv
[3] Ibid., p.vii
[4] Coult, Tony The Plays of Edward Bond (Methuen, 1977), p.19
[5] Bond, p.36

The Artist as Monster Times Two

2010-05-03T22:49:00.003+01:00

Twice in the space of seven days I've encountered dramas revolving around the idea of the artist as monster. As an artist, this is bound to be of interest to me (I hope I am not too much of a monster); I do wonder whether this is a subject which is that close to the concerns of many people, except that it does raise questions about the way that any self relates to others in order to get things done, and getting things done is the primary concern of Protestant Man. The artists – both poets - in both Elegy for Young Lovers (an opera by Hans Werner Henze with libretto by WH Auden and Chester Kallman, performed by ENO at the Young Vic) and Hurts Given and Received (a play by Howard Barker, performed by The Wrestling School at Riverside Studios) play merry hell with the lives of those they come into contact with, but the pieces have divergent attitudes towards this wreaking of havoc.

Elegy for Young Lovers concerns a middle-aged and highly respected poet named Mittenhofer, who spends months of each year at a hotel in the Austrian Alps in order to take inspiration from the ravings of a demented woman, Hilda Mack, who has been living in the hotel for forty years since the disappearance of her husband whilst he was climbing a local peak. Mittenhofer is waited on hand and foot by his patroness/private secretary the Countess Carolina and his personal physician, Dr Reischmann, fawners both. Mittenhofer has a young mistress, Elizabeth, and the crux of the story is that she falls in love with the doctor's son, Toni, much to Mittenhofer's chagrin. We witness Mittenhofer's infantile demands and ritualistically adhered to obsessive compulsive routine and soon get the idea that this is not a very pleasant human being to be around at all; yet Mittenhofer is worse than a pain – he is actively evil, as he compels the young lovers to gather him edelweiss on the mountainside and, when a blizzard hits, tells the local guide that there is no one from the hotel out in the storm; the lovers die. The drama ends with Mittenhofer reading his new poem – 'Elegy for Young Lovers' – to an appreciative audience in a packed Vienna hall, dedicating his new work to the lovers whose death he arranged.

Much is made in the programme of the possibility that Mittenhofer is based on W B Yeats, although others have suggested that Hugo von Hofmannsthal and even Benjamin Britten are possible originals for the character. This scrabbling around for originals doesn't really interest me; why the trio of Henze, Auden and Kallman should think that Mittenhofer's story is an important one to tell does. There is an oddness in these three homosexual artists telling this tale, as the lovers are presented as an "approved" heterosexual pairing (unlike the age-gap mistake which is the Mittenhofer/Elizabeth affair) and as they lie waiting for death on the mountain, they imagine the life they might have lived, which is a pretty ordinary example of normative petit-bourgeois living from the mid-20th century; Mittenhofer's great sin is that he prevented their living out this existence. I can't help suspecting that there's a certain self-laceration in the trio's choice of material here; all three of them being avowedly left-wing, this feels like a public performance of self-criticism, a rejection of their own potential to use and abuse "ordinary" folk by asserting their Great White Artist egos.

The setting of the tale is a very Nietzschean one, and there is a satire here against the idea of the Great Nietzschean/Romantic artist who uses those around him for the glorification of his Important Works. The joke appears to be that Mittenhofer is actually not a very good artist (the programme notes that Auden's real criticism of Yeats wasn't that he was a git but that his work wasn't any good in the later years). In some ways, the opera offers a rebuke to the idea of the individual genius who can get away with anything in pursuit of his self-aggrandizing artworks. In this, it seems to me to be an important work – a rejection on the part of three mid-twentieth century artists of the assumptions about artists which had by the time of their writing it become rather clichéd. I have some sympathy for this, as those writers I've known who have paraded themselves in Mittenhofer-like ways have had an element of the faux-artist about them, dressing themselves in some rags of an outdated Romantic idea and finally not really coming through with the art which such a performance might be the only excuse for. I have my suspicions about the very idea of the writer who waits listening for the extraordinary things that those around them come out with and then churns out writing which is little more than compendiums of overheard bits and bobs. In Elegy, when Hilda Mack finally is faced with the truth of her husband's death, her madness is cured and she comes to possess herself again; in her new-found clarity, she scolds Mittenhofer for stealing her visions for his own work and reckons that she should have got some credit and a cut of the royalties.

In a note for Hurts Given and Received, Barker writes

The sacred character of the individual in secular democracies obliterates any possibility the sacred might be located in any other sphere, and the consequence is a war of competing egos, thinly concealed beneath sentimental and threadbare platitudes of conscience and pity. These rags of faith and reason, strung together by some dimly-remembered concept of progress, flutter over a culture which seethes with cruelty and manipulation, rendered more odious by the cult of transparency, a transparency that elicits no shame. The poet has perhaps, the obligation to own up to his wilfulness, if only to assist others to own up to theirs…

Barker's protagonist, the poet Bach, also arranges the death and distress of his friends and helpers which in turn feeds his work. The work has a great effect on those that read it – its quality even encourages a policewoman to hide Bach's sex-murder of his nymphet mistress – but Bach is in turn punished and exploited by those that come after him, taking inspiration from his work whilst standing around as he is kind-of crucified. Barker is certainly approaching some difficult questions about individuals' and societies' relationship to those we consider Great Artists; he is a lot less satirical than the Elegy trio, but as piece of work, Hurts Given and Received seemed less successful than Elegy, which feels in Fiona Shaw's production like a major work.

Some of the blame for the Barker piece might be laid at the foot of the Gerrard Mcarthur's production, which is an impressive piece of staging but I was never convinced by either the relationships nor by the claims made in the text as to Bach being who the play claims he is. I am not sure whether Barker means us to agree with the character and his admirers that Bach is a genius, but I never for a moment believed that this was a man who was capable of creating anything. Tom Riley's performance in the central role is an impressive vocal and physical display of technique - at his best, as he lowered down from his high chair, he reminded me of Jeff Goldblum's Brundlefly spouting his insect-like brand of Nietzschean craziness; but Riley's (and other important performances in the production) are one-note affairs, him beginning as a show-off and brat and staying mostly in the same place. Barker is a difficult writer for actors to pitch right, but it can be done, as Hanna Berrigan's perfect gem of a production of a smaller Barker piece Slowly (which is playing alongside Hurts…) proves.

Yet there is something worth thinking about in Barker's characterization, and maybe a future production (or even future performances of this production) will make the play live on stage. The monstrousness of the artist – an overgrown and demanding child – is the monstrousness of the contemporary Western man, demanding and going through people (consuming them) in pursuit of some expression of the self. There is more to Hurts... than just this suggestion, but this strikes me as something which connects Barker's play with Henze's opera, the attempt to deal with the monstrousness of the self in the post-1945 world. At one point, a character compares Bach to "a war" with its "brief intoxications" when "men do vile things / men not themselves vile necessarily / its like a dream from which they wake saying / did I do that / was that me?" [Howard Barker, Hurts Given and Received/ Slowly (London: Oberon Books Ltd., 2010), p.70]

Both works encourage us to look at these monstrous artists and think about their behaviours; perhaps my qualm at the beginning - " whether this is a subject which is that close to the concerns of many people" – is unnecessary. I've always believed that we create our lives (but, to paraphrase Marx, "not in circumstances of [our] own choosing") and so we're all creative artists, all little Mittenhofers and Bachs…

Let's blog again!

2010-05-02T10:21:00.000+01:00

I kept a blog for a number of years - approximately between 2005 and 2008 – before ending it and deleting all of the content from public view. My rationale for ending things was that the blog was taking a lot of my writing time (I was blogging a few times a week) and I also that I was unsure about the focus of that blog – it was an impressionistic and often quite ranty view of the culture I encountered; it had no proper focus, to an extent. Nevertheless, it was a worthwhile experience and I made a number of contacts and even friends in the process, which was an unexpected boon (I may also have made enemies, but they didn't contact me so I am blissfully unaware of them…).

Since ending the blog – selections from which I am gradually putting up on my website here – I have missed keeping an online notebook. A better grasp of time management and an environment (I have recently moved home) far more conducive to writing has led me to desire to resume blogging. I want to just lay down the focus of the blog, so you can decide whether it is going to be something for you to come back to, and so I can be clear in my mind as to what it is.

Although I will often be writing about the performances and other cultural events & places I visit, this is not a reviewing blog. I am not a critic but a practitioner. When I engage my mind with something I've seen or heard or read, it is for matters of inspiration – either positively or negatively. William Blake wrote that "That to Labour in Knowledge. is to Build up Jerusalem" and my attempts to know culture are inspirations within that process. I will be attempting here to write what I see, and to think through the issues which the works of other human beings throw up for me as an artist. I shall be sometimes referencing critical and cultural theory as I go along and could get dense at times. If that is not your bag, this blog might not always be for you. There might sometimes be a gap of weeks between entries, as other work takes precedence.

My major interest is drama (for both stage and screen) and most of what I write about here shall be plays and films - but this will not preclude encounters with art works, books, buildings and music. Every coincidence between the product of a human mind and the mind of another is a kind of close encounter with something alien and this is a journal examining those extraordinary events. Most of our lives are full of such events and as the Socratic proverb goes, the unexamined life is not worth living.

I will be keeping the comments box open for reader's insights and engagements and in doing so I welcome debate. I will moderate anything I find abusive or unnecessarily ignorant. But let's hope that it doesn't come to that. I will admit that, as I have evolved in my own internet usage, I have come to prefer engagements from myself and others which are not made under a cloak of anonymity.

I am currently engaged in writing a couple of plays and developing some screenplays, one of my short plays (Fellow Creature) is being performed at the Lost One Act Festival this coming Tuesday and I am researching an ongoing Ph.D. which involves the writing of and theorizing about a screenplay concerning George Villiers, the First Duke of Buckingham. Most of the things I choose to write about on the blog will have some connection with my life as a Imaginator of Dramas.