God's property

I went to the Soho Theatre last night to see a new play – God's Property, by Arinze Kene. Nigel, who's one of my regular culture companions, and I had realised we were seeing a lot of Shakespeare and opera, but nothing much that was new, so our visit was the result of that. (In fact, it all started when I read Peter Hall's autobiography a couple of weeks ago. Really interesting, and he was somehow breathtakingly ambitious but low on ego. A local boy, too – when Hall was at Cambridge, his father was station master at Whittlesford, the nearest rail station to here. Anyway, there's a great moment when he's about six weeks into his first job as a director of a London theatre, and the script of Waiting For Godot lands on his desk. His experience with that, and his willingness to innovate, made me realise that my theatre experience had got rather fossilised.)

Last night was remarkable. The theatre is a great space, very like the Young Vic and the Donmar, with long benches and no prescenium arch. Below us was an eighties kitchen, and the first thing that happens is that a black guy comes through the door carrying a bag and some groceries. He goes upstairs to see if his Mum is at home. The door opens again for a younger guy with a guitar, and when he sees the first he pulls out a knife. From that moment, the drama never lets up.

There are some lovely moments of humour, but where the play really works well is in ratcheting up the tension. What struck me most is how beautifully it's constructed; the entry of new characters and the revelations of the plot are perfectly paced. There are no lulls, and no false steps. The dialogue is batted to and fro like a ping-pong ball, and the humour feeds into the drama. We were on the edge of our seats for most of the ninety minutes, and I spent the last ten minutes at least in tears.

None of the actors seemed to miss a beat at any point – all four were utterly believable. The lighter scenes also had me almost in tears, remembering what it was like to be sixteen and in love. Ach.

I'm going to be a regular customer of this place, I think. In the bar afterwards, I heard about at least two other plays and one cabaret act that I've just got to see!

More info at the Soho Theatre site.

Also this week.... I read J K Rowling's The Casual Vacancy, and enjoyed it more than I expected to. I don't get on with Harry Potter: Rowling's world never strikes me as fully realised, and the way some characters are realistic and some farcical, so you can't tell who you're meant to take seriously, makes me uncomfortable. This novel avoided those pitfalls, and made the most of her ability to wind a lot of plot strands together. I thought her range was impressive, too: it's the characters at the bottom of the hierarchy who have stayed with me, and they're the ones who don't get to be in many novels.

Oh, and lastly: go and see Medea at English National Opera: it is bloody amazing. 

A moderate feast, and a silent opera

To the Young Vic last night, to see Feast - reflecting a resolution I made after seeing A Doll's House and Three Sisters there, to go more often. They seem to be doing some great work at the moment.

Feast was a slight disappointment, partly because it seemed a little over-hyped in the reviews. I went expecting to be exhilarated and was only really charmed.

The reviews had somehow led me to expect swirling costumes and beating drums, a whirl of colour - African cliches, perhaps? What was on offer was more thoughtful and measured, but sometimes lost its momentum. Ideas floated - the first actor on stage encouraged audience participation, but this didn't happen again - but then sank.

The evening was a sequence of playlets moving through history. The stage effects were great, the acting convincing, and the dancing excellent, and there were a couple of charismatic narrators, but what it lacked, for me, was a really strong narrative or any really dramatic moments. There was a little bit of everything, but not quite enough to bowl you over. Would I have minded, if I hadn't expected to be overwhelmed? I'm not sure....

Feast reviewed in the Telegraph.

Feast reviewed in the Independent.

And even Michael Billington in the Guardian liked it - which should perhaps have worried me, as he doesn't generally share my taste (he seems to loathe the Globe, for instance).

The friend I went with agreed with all this - but, as he pointed out afterwards, we haven't actually seen anything we disagreed about yet.

Last week I went to see the Silent Opera doing Monteverdi's Orfeo. That was fun as I went along with an acquaintance who's an opera director, so applied a critical, professional eye to the production. He was less than impressed, I'm afraid. For me, it was interesting to see how the gimmick had run away with things. In this case, they had continuo instruments - harpsichord, theorbos, harp - but no strings, brass or wind. The audience were all issued with wireless headphones, and the singers and instruments were miked up, but you only got the effect of the full orchestra if you wore the phones.

But there's something about having headphones clamped on that really distances you from the action - my friend and I spent the production taking them off at every opportunity. Suspicious minds might have seen it as a ruse to save money, since all those sackbuts didn't have to be paid to be there. But the other snag was that if you'd have taken out that element, what was left wasn't quite good enough. The staging was okay but could have done so much more: we'd expected to crawl through tunnels and get trapped in Hades; in the event we simply shuffled into the next room and went up some stairs and then down again – more like being on the tube than anything else. Not knowing the plot, I had no idea at what point we – or Orfeo – were crossing the Styx, and so a lot of the drama passed me by. This seemed a rather basic point not to have made.

It also meant that the chap I thought was Pluto was really Charon, though he did get the lion's share of the music - which was a shame as the singer wasn't up to it, simply ghosting the low notes. I happened to know the bass who sang Pluto, but my friend (who didn't) agreed that he'd have swapped the two singers. Pluto had a lot of groping, snogging and fumbling to do; there was rather a lot of That Kind of Thing, in fact, with a whole lot of dancers whose only function was to writhe on scaffolding. Which is fine if you want set-dressing, but you could have paid to have the sackbuts there instead. Not just for the ethics of it – having recorded musicians when you could have live isn't polite - but for the energy they bring: I really missed the visual aspect you get from string playing: the energy and rhythm of all those bowing arms, and the visual drama of sackbuts, which are beautiful things.

What I assumed should have been the pivotal moment – when Orfeo loses everything in a moment by looking back at Eurydice – was also oddly fudged. I thought I'd missed it: then Eurydice didn't seem terribly keen to stay anyway. It was all a little odd - whether it didn't go as planned or the effects were misjudged, I wasn't quite sure. The moments of really effective drama were mostly driven, come to think of it, by the quality of the music and the singing. The messenger who brings news of Eurydice's death to the wedding party sang her part beautifully: that was the one moment that brought tears to my eyes. And Orfeo's final raging, right across the audience, was very effective. A word for Musica, too, who had a lovely voice that rang out in her solos and also shone through the choruses.

On reflection, losing the mikes, the headphones and the ranks of mixing desks, and focusing on using the space effectively (considering what a schlep it was to find the place, we'd expected something more unusual), might have paid off better. I wondered if the problem with this kind of endeavour is that it's easy, once they're completed, to watch the finished product and point out exactly how they could have been improved. But there were a few terribly trendy elements to the  production which seemed to demonstrate that the gimmick was rather the point, and that the desire to be fashionable might have taken precedence anyway.

What happened to feminism?

We had a very interesting week a month or two ago: in the same week we went to see 'The Taming of the Shrew' at the Globe, and 'A Doll's House' at the Young Vic. 

They were both terrific productions, I thought. I've always liked the idea of playing Petruchio as a clown, someone who's unconventional but has worked out how to do it within the boudaries of society, and wants to teach Katherina how to do the same. The BBC production years ago cast John Cleese in the part, and it worked very well. The Globe's actor went rather further, and the shock value was great. Their Katherina was what's always called 'feisty' so it was interesting to see what they'd do about her final speech. You can play it as Kate taking the piss rather to win the bet, but that's a bit of a cop-out; instead they played it pretty much straight.

What was interesting, at the Globe, was to feel - physically feel - how uncomfortable this made the audience. At first it felt like disbelief - was Kate really saying this stuff? How could she possibly mean it? Wasn't anyone going to stop her? And then it slowly turned into shock - she really was going to say it, and apparently without irony, and actually all the people on stage were in agreement with her. The sense I got from the audience was that, despite everything that they'd seen in the play, they hadn't really realised that this was, once, how some people thought. It made me want to look really closely at the text to decide whether it's possible to deduce if Shakespeare is actually over-egging it at this point, or whether you can read it as a statement of his values.

What clinched it was that we had much the same experience watching Ibsen's 'A Doll's House' at the Young Vic.At the point where Torvald, the husband, talks about how he's always seen Nora as the child that he took over protection of from her father, there were gasps from the audience. How sexist! How could he say that! What was Ibsen thinking of.... I wanted to stand up and shout - "This is how it was! This is what decent people thought in 1879! THIS IS WHY WE HAD FEMINISM!"

Both were very strange experiences. Have people somehow forgotten that things were once different? Do play audiences not know that the position of women in society has changed dramatically in the last hundred years?

I suppose there's a side point too, that it's crazy to expect the work of the past to conform to the orthodoxies of the present. I've always strongly disliked the tendency of feminist criticism to accuse the works of the past of not being feminist enough – how could they have been? And you can't demand of all writers that they be politically aware. Gah!

Henry V at the Globe

Saw a terrific production of Henry V at the Globe on Wednesday. Unusual - but really no reason - to have a female chorus. And when she said 'this wooden O' (about thirty seconds in) my eyes filled with tears to think that once again it was literally true.

I didn't know the actor - we don't really watch television apart from the odd thing on iPlayer - but Henry himself was terrific. He was very good at conveying the physical effort: lots of wiping of brow, wincing at bruised hands, and so on. And good at doing the thinking between scenes, so they developed without words. And those tricks like coming in before the other person has stopped - because you're not meant to know exactly how much the other person is going to say. But more importantly, he brought the words to life and said them as though he understood them, and they were relevant, without losing the poetry. The set pieces were truly inspiring - I felt moved to cheer louder than I ever have at the Globe, and standing in the yard is a great inducement to cheering. I wanted to boo the French, too, but nobody else did. (I also laughed at a few jokes that nobody else did - not use whether that betokens great subtelty in my understanding of Shakespeare's lanugage, or simply reflects how many of the audience don't have English as a first language.)

The actor playing Katherine was lovely in her first scene, but almost the only quibble I had with the production was that she didn't yield enough to Henry's courting. I'm sure you could make a strong case that the character wouldn't; but dramatically, I felt it needed her surrender as a princess to reflect the surrender of the country. But I like the way that the concluding dance often supplies a consummation that hasn't had quite enough time to play out in the drama. That's one of the many things I like about the Globe.

Another is the interval treats. They've always done nice nibbles and things. This time there were very classy burgers, and some good-looking frankfurters. Cider at £5.90 a bottle seemed a bit much, though.

What I don't like is the website, which in the many years I've been using it has never had some fundamental usability flaws fixed. Find the play you want to see, find the date you can go, click Book tickets.... and start again from scratch. Do you want the Theatre, Education, Globe on tour? Oh, come *on*! It's as rubbish a user journey as you could hope for.. What could be worse than taking a user who's made a decision to buy, and forcing them two steps back in the process?

Get over that hump and you face a larger one. Your £5 ticket has a £2.50 transaction fee. Splutter! Some theatres - such as Cambridge Arts Theatre - host outside productions, and the booking fee is the only way to get their percentage - apparently, though it's another one of those things that you'd have thought they could equally just bloody well sort out among themselves, frankly. But the Globe has its own company and does its own productions. It has the same layout and ticket prices for every single play, so far as I know, so there's no reason why the ticketing process should be so frightfully complicated that it has to be subcontracted to an outside agency who'd have to take their rake-off. So why the fifty percent surcharge?

I asked at the box office when I collected my ticket, and the person there said "It's a transaction fee." For what transaction, I asked - using a credit card? That's only ten percent. "It's a transaction fee."But you don't have a ticket agency - "It's a transaction fee." (At this point the person next to me said "It's not worth it, they're just robots.") The staff member said "You don't pay it if you book by phone." And I said "WHAT??? I phone you up and use up your time and I don't pay, or I do it all by myself and you charge me a whacking great fee? What the hell are you doing?" "It's a transaction fee."

So there you are. Don't use their website: it costs fifty percent more than talking to a human being. Insane. And how stupid, that such a great institution should have one big fat lump of idiocy that sours the whole experience - which, apart from that, is stupendous.

Oh yes we have

To the pantomime on Saturday: a family outing thanks to Grandma Pam (thank you, Grandma Pam!). We were surprised to see the place not at all packed (it was Jack and the Beanstalk at the Arts Theatre): it was a bit lame in places, but really not bad at all. Their only mistake, I thought, was always to aim for comedy and forget that a story needs drama. The scene in the ogre's castle went for nothing, because it just wasn't scary.

Anyway, we had ice-creams in the interval and everything. When we were packing up to leave, Sasha started crawling around, collecting the empty tubs together and picking up the spoons. When I picked up the child to go, there was a bit of scene that ended with a huge wail of "But Mummy, I want to TIDY UP!"

Truly, we have created a monster.

Life in pink

I went to see Piaf at the Vaudeville Theatre (transferred from the Donmar (btw did you know that the 'Mar' bit is from Margot Fonteyn, who started the place with someone whose name I can't remember (but they contributed the 'Don')?)) last night. Just as all the reviews had said, the play itself was a bit flaky but Elena Rogers was amazing - and in what seemed rather a Piaf-like way, too: that tiny, fragile frame, emitting a HUGE noise. But I wonder why writers find it so hard to tell Paif's story? Perhaps there's just too much to tell? The film - La Vie En Rose - was really incoherent: I do hate narratives that mess with the chronology purely for the sake of novelty.

I'm thinking a lot about story-telling as I've a third of the way through Russell T Davies' The Writer's Tale - a splendid book. I've been thinking about how gut-wrenching the end of series four was, with Donna Noble saving the world then having to have her memory wiped. I love the way Davies portrayed that as what it really was: a kind of death, real and tragic. One of the mailing lists I'm on had a discussion a while back about what a swizz the '... and it was all a dream' ending is, or even worse the 'and they forgot everything that had happened'. There's a John Masefield that does it, and I know it made my heart sink when I read it. We couldn't remember whether Dan and Una forget everything at the end of Rewards and Fairies. But what's the point of those two whole books, if they do? Oh, and the chap at the end of Silver on the Tree who asks someone else to decide whether he'll remember that his wife was on the dark side, and the supposedly wise old person decides to wipe his mind. Gah!

It made me think: is there anything in my past that's so awful that I'd want to erase it? (Now we've moved on to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - and wasn't that just absolutely the greatest movie title ever? And I love the sci-fi fan who commented that it could well have been called We can forget it for you retail (you'd have to be reasonably geeky to get the reference, I think - can I do a quick straw poll of all the, er, two or three people reading this (hello Mum!) and ask if you do?)) Anyway, I digress. I couldn't think of anything. The events that haunt me aren't the big emotional moments - I wouldn't lose a second of those, however much they hurt at the time - but the small snarly moments of acute social embarrassment, when I said something really tactless. Embarrassment is such a strong emotion, I think - you really feel it physically, in the pit of your stomach. The memories are so tangible: they take decades to fade. But even so, I'd keep them. I want to be reminded not to say something quite that stupid ever again.

(Anyone spot a running theme of nested parentheses in this posting? What's that all about? (Just my butterfly mind, I suppose))

Total miscellanea

Lawks, I feel as though I haven't stopped scudding around for a fortnight. I really, really have to write about our fabulous musical week at La Maison Verte, but I've got behind myself. To the Globe last night for A Midsummer Night's Dream - I was sorry to miss Timon of Athens, but we couldn't find a babysitter so A went alone - and found it surprisingly pertinent. Dream was great fun, though boy it's long - a solid three hours. As ever with Shakespeare, packed with quotations. "In maiden meditation, fancy-free" I'm sure is quoted in Alcott somewhere. Now I'll have to reread everything. Oooh.

I've been reading a shortened version of Pepys's Diary, and loving it. He's only 28 at the point I've got to, but so thoughtful and entertaining. I really need the unabridged version, with footnotes, though - the editor of this one rather charmingly says that they decided to have fewer notes so as to have 'more Pepys'. The mixture of history - at the pace it actually happens, not the speeded-up version of history books - and domesticity and trivia is uttterly beguiling. And everyone is so cultured: always popping down to the pub to sing part-songs, or staying up late playing the lute. I suppose that's because nobody below a certain level of income is involved. It's obvious what a tough time the servants have: the amount of physical punishment they get is notable.

I'm pleased I read Tomalin's wonderful biography first, to get an overview. I'll have the fun of reading it again afterwards, too!

I also read a biography of Jaqueline Kennedy, as fallout from a brief obsession with the JFK assasination: I remembered one evening that I'd meant to look up the Zapruder video on YouTube as I hadn't ever seen it. About five hours later I looked emerged from the internet, pallid and slightly paranoid. Actually, Wikipedia, the wonderful thing, had a perfectly cogent analysis of the best current thinking. Anyway, Jackie. Gosh, she was a boring woman. There's a photo of her as a stunningly arrogant six-year-old, then as an airily arrogant teenager. Then she marries JFK - for the money and prestige, it seems (they didn't seem to talk to each other much) - finds her vocation and becomes a calmly arrogant clothes horse. Then she marries Onassis for money. What's to like? The biographer obviously loved her, but even so couldn't come up with any reason anyone else should. I dipped in and out and then put it on the Oxfam pile.

I was going to say something about Berty, so I could put in a link to his site, which I built recently using iWeb (free Mac software, pretty results but I suspect rubbish with screen readers as the code must be a dog's breakfast, and you can't reliably increase the font size, which is pants). If anyone knows of something better - maybe a simple CMS system - do let me know: the Fagiolini site is in desperate need of an overhaul, but neither A nor I is any good at building websites, dammit. Have a look at Berty's site and tell me what you think - it needs more visitors as it's not showing up on Google yet.

I should be so lucky

I had an unexpected Sash-free evening in London last week, and discovered that 'Merry Wives' was on at the Globe, and had got a rave review in the Guardian. I checked the Globe's website the evening before, and there were at least seven tickets left for the yard (that's where you stand, in the middle: it only costs a fiver and gives a real taste of what it would have been like to be a groundling, I think - it's certainly a unique experience). Next morning I was at work and forgot to phone the damn box office until 1130. They had no tickets left except five for the Yard, which someone on the website was dithering over - call back in 20 minutes, they said. I thought it couldn't take that long, so I called back in five. Sorry, sold out, they said. What about the website, I said - any that anyone's dithering over? Ooh yes, they said. Two left. So I got the last-but-one ticket in the whole theatre. Remarkable luck.

Later that day, a old work colleague of mine came into the office. She had a baby about a year after I did. She had a tough pregnancy: swollen ankles from month one, that kind of thing. And she had terrible problems with her hips - has been in and out of hospital ever since. The kind of thing that's so gruesome you forget the details, deliberately. She was still limping six months later. And she must be at least ten years younger than I am. How on earth did I get off so easily?

So I'm lucky in the big things, and lucky in the small things. It freaks me out rather, if I think about it at all.

'The Merry Wives of Windsor' was really good, too. Aaaargh.

It was quite broad, but never descended into caricature, so when Ford found redemption, it was not only believable but very affecting. Well, I cried, anyway - as usual. One of the things I like most about A, you know - I do call him A, don't I? - is that he cries as often as I do. The scene in the Archers between Ed and Emma had us both wiping tears away afterwards. I don't really feel apologetic about it as I can't see any way in which it's a bad thing - it would be more worrying not to be affected by art, if I may call it that. The Archers is very well written these days.

I've just spent a lovely day with a woman who would be my sister-in-law, if I was married to A and she was married to his brother, and neither of us is. Should I eschew the labels that reflect such tired conventions, or adopt them, as another kind of rebellion? Answers on a postcard would only work if you had very small handwriting.

Nine months in, nine months out

Oh dear, it's been ages. Ah well. Sasha is now nine months old, which is nicely symmetrical. Our little prodigy has now been introduced to Shakespeare: we went to see Othello at the Globe last week. Slightly fraught, as you really can't prevent the occasional squawk and it's really quite a quiet, domestic play: lots of scenes with only two or three people in. [Info added much later - you can take babes in arms to the Globe, which is brill and authentic of them, so I took Sash in a sling. Which did, after a bit, hurt. Quite a lot. But it was worth it.]

Very good, I thought: I was interested in seeing Tim McInnerny as Iago as I only know him from Blackadder. He was certainly a change from the simmeringly evil Iagos you sometimes see: very obviously making it up as he went along rather than having some fiendish masterplan, which makes perfect sense when it's pure luck that he gets his hands on the handkerchief. As ever, the strangulation scene was absolutely vile, though not quite as awful as a Cheek by Jowl production I saw years ago in Cambridge, where Othello was really huge and Desdemona tiny, and he lifted her right off her feet. Urgh. I don't think I'd quite clocked before just how far Othello falls: he actually tries to protest his innocence to Aemilia after she's found him with Desdemona's corpse. At that point he really has lost every ounce of his integrity. A nasty, nasty play: A and I were both in tears afterwards.

I really must try to write about things while there's still time to encourage you to go and see them, though.

A few bits and pieces I've been meaning to post... If you're interested in creative writing, and particularly if you're writing spec scripts for TV (no, I've never met anyone who is, either), check out Jane Espenson's blog. She's a writer for Buffy (yes, and I found the link to her site reading footnote number 62 of the Wikipedia article on Buffy, so how sad am I? (Very, very sad, I know, what the hey.) She's very sweet and very funny, and a lot of what she says is interesting even if you're not writing spec scripts.

Also an article in The Onion which I think may be my second favourite of all time. Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does. It's so bloody true. "Shopping for shoes has emerged as a powerful means by which women assert their autonomy," says an expert... If you've never come across the Onion, do give it a try: It's very American, and very funny: really cynical, and very well written. Oooh, look! They still have my favourite article of all time. Isn't the internet jolly? This one is possibly the most over-the-top bit of prose I've ever encountered. Love it to bits. It's called This New Toilet Paper Is So Soft And Absorbent! Don't read it if you have an aversion to toilet humour is all I can say. Sample line: errr, actually, it's just too disgusting to quote, and the cumulative effect is a large part of it. Still I can assume you're not easily offended if you've read my birth story, right?