Flemish Primitives Part 1, Hieronymus Bosch

 

I spent a week’s holiday in Belgium, which afforded me the opportunity to visit a number of important galleries and soak myself in the work of the so-called Flemish Primitives, the early Netherlandish painters who flourished between the 15^th and 16^th centuries. I say “so-called” primitives, as their work is anything but primitive, rather being a school of sophisticated masterpieces by supremely talented individuals on mostly Christian but sometimes classical themes.

Thinking back, the work of perhaps the best known of these painters, Hieronymus Bosch, was one of my ways into classical Art when I was in my teens. I haven’t had much opportunity to see his work in the originals, there being one solitary, albeit astonishing, Bosch in the National Gallery; I did see a number in the Prado in Spain a few years ago, including the surprisingly small Garden of Earthly Delights triptych. Virtually the first painting I encountered in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels was the Temptation of St Anthony triptych, a much bigger series. I’d known this painting from book reproductions for half my life (we even used the figure of the bird with the letter as part of the publicity for my play Groping in the Dark) but seeing it up close and personal like this was thrilling. The work teams with vibrant detail and writhes with a terrible life. All three panels show scenes from the life of the early Church desert father St Anthony, who was assailed by the world, the flesh and the devil as he attempted to put his mind solely to Godly thoughts in his wilderness retreat. Bosch is a mysterious figure about whom little is known; one theory has it that he leaned towards a Cathar outlook and saw the material world as a stenching (all those decaying fish creatures!) thing of evil. Certainly in Bosch nature is prodigious in its production of horrors; figures mutate between the human, the demonic and the bestial, as if the world were merely a breeding ground for freaks, each one of which has its own peculiarities and quirks. The freaks torment, torture and prey on each other; there’s a curious attitude towards generation which suggests that the act of sexual congress produces this carnival of horrors in which the revellers get off on their terrible antics. The Saint must resist the blandishments of this world, which despite being horrific hold intense fascination. Only contemplation of the person of Christ and His sacrifice can take the Saint away from the demonic world and it takes an enervating effort to achieve communion with Christ (one of my favourite images in the painting, on the left panel, has Anthony being carried away by his companions, utterly exhausted). Even when the Saint appears in meditation in the right panel, his gaze is fixed on a table under which naked sinners are lost in violent, somnambulant revels – but here he has learned some distance, perhaps linking the Saint’s gaze with that of the ideal Artist, who can look at these things as mere vision; for whom the earth itself is a passing vision…

In Ghent, Bosch’s third and last and greatest version of Christ Carrying the Cross assaults the viewer with a vision of intense violence and hatred carrying on around a Jesus who, His mind entirely elsewhere, has transcended it despite still being physically a part of it. It is telling that all but one of the figures around Christ are male, testosterone-fuelled products of a brutal patriarchy against which only withdrawal to an inner world and passivity towards the outer aggression are the only answers. The one female figure is Veronica, who holds her veil on which Christ’s face has been miraculously implanted; she holds this out to the viewer and so Christ looks at us. This has a curious effect, as if I think of the veil with Christ’s face as a mirror, I also must widen my view and take the entire painting as a reflection; I wonder how much I contribute to this hell of aggression portrayed and how I can free myself from it. The aggressive world is timeless and ever-present, no matter what temporal ephemera happen to be around at any given moment; whether Christ (whatever He signifies) is the answer is another issue – the painting certainly posits the question of aggression with unwavering force. It is blindingly obvious that Bosch, in this painting and others, does not see the Church as a means to Christ, as the representatives of religion are themselves a part of the aggressive world and offer no solace; the good thief in the upper right corner swoons in terror at the words of his grisly confessor, who couldn’t be less Christ-like if he tried. The painting is a formal triumph, with Christ at the centre of a cross and the two thieves, Veronica and the hands of Simon of Cyrene at its four corners. I rather admire the gumption and resistance of the bad thief at the right lower corner but clearly it gets him nowhere and only adds to the ugliness of the scene.

Also in Ghent, Bosch’s St Jerome at Prayer echoes the theme of the St Anthony triptych but in a calmer key. St Jerome has abandoned the things of this world – his fine cloak, his book, his hat; he lies abject at the feet of his object of contemplation, Christ on the cross. The world around him is a complete wasteland, an emotional and physical dead end. Yet this desperate natural world cannot harm the Saint, as evidenced by the lion who has been turned here into little more than a gentle lamb.

In Bruges, Bosch’s Last Judgement triptych shows the world’s end. The last days are a war zone, with cities on fire and rats the size of cows in the streets. As ever, the prodigious demons torture the damned. Most medieval Last Judgements confine hell to the right hand corner  and give most space to the righteous and the Heavens above. Not so Bosch, for whom hell is almost the whole scene; his left hand panel is a calm scene where a few naked innocents are taught by angels or frolic in serenity and a single Gothic structure stands (in contrast to the many destroyed buildings in hell); there is also a hint here that a more positive vision of sexuality might be possible. According to Bosch, few will find a way out of hell, punishment, retribution which – if I for a moment apply a Blakean reading – can be seen a mindset rather than a physical place (although of course the mindset creates the physical into the embodiment of hell). For me, Bosch’s work is a vision of the mind in action, for the most part a terrible, tormented mind full of violence, enmity, sometimes strange pleasure but finally disease and death; yet there is an alternative mind of calm, knowledge, contemplation. Yet it takes tremendous efforts of concentration to take oneself from one to the other, and that other is always waiting with its pinchers to pinch and pull.

Bosch is the most extreme of the Flemish Primitives and whilst he sums up their vision is also anomalous in the fever pitch of his imagination. Like most of them he was a master craftsman with an enviable sense of composition and a mean ability to colour his scenes in vivid, striking tones. He’s a great place to start as his figures are so utterly indelible that once seen they are never to be forgotten. In my next blog, I’ll talk about some of his fellow Flemish Primitives, who give him some context and not a few of whom are geniuses in themselves. Yet I suspect he’ll always be my first love, who torments me with the most terrible and profound of loves.

The Direct Gothic Encounter and its Loss

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.

Bond asks the nagging questions

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

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…