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Now I'll always be able to say that I saw Darth Vader in the flesh. James Earl Jones, 78 years old but looking at least 15 years younger and with charm and energy to spare, owned the stage last night at the Novello. He WAS Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Tennessee Williams's otherwise complicated family saga of the South. It was a privilege to see one of the true greats of American theatre in action - and it's not something we'll get to see for very much longer.
Oh and tonight, I'm off to see McNulty from The Wire playing Calderon at the Donmar! Only in London.
JEJ interview in the Guardian, review of the Broadway production in the New Yorker.
P.S. More Belle de Jour!
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So yeah, The English Game out in Kingston which I saw just a few days ago turns out to have been the 200th play I've seen in this here town. Doesn't feel as much of a big deal as the 100th. Probably cos it isn't. Anyway, I've been cutting down quite decisively on my theatrical intake of late - there's an amazing amount of dross out there and my appetite for sitting through 2 hours of pure meh and then crawling home at 11.30 pm has definitely diminished. So unless something is raved about to the skies, these days I don't much care to check stuff out. Let's say that the spirit of reckless (and expensive) experimentation is not as strong as it used to be.
The History Cycle at the Roundhouse marked a turning point in this respect; after that dramatic crescendo, I knew that things would have to come down and settle at a lower pitch. As it is, I'm happy with what I've seen so far of the canon. I love Shakespeare. I like Ibsen a lot, and have seen a lot of his work, as I have of Pinter who continues to baffle me - enjoyment would be too strong a word for him. I'm bored stiff by Shaw's preachiness and as for Chekhov, he left me cold with The Seagull and I have not bothered with him since. Maybe I'll get back to him at some point, if they can put up a more interesting piece than that Kristin Scott Thomas snoozefest. As for the moderns, Hare and Stoppard and all that, when they show up, I'll certainly check them out.
Either way, theatre is still the best thing about London, which is otherwise an ill-governed, crime-ridden, recession-hit snakepit just now. The latest French brutalities only serve to strengthen London's new status as the murder capital of Europe. Almost 20 kids stabbed to death this year, and it's only July. And the authorities don't have the faintest clue as to what to do about it.
Rod Liddle puts his finger on the pulse of Stabbing Britain in his Speccie column and finds out what ails the nation -
Please forgive the flippant tone; but these gruesome, foul and pointless deaths follow one after the other in our newspapers and on our television screens and we do not seem to be much closer to discovering how to stop them... Stabbings have become the urban, modern equivalent of the pub fight; our young people are even more hair-trigger sensitive than once was the case, more prone to acts of incandescent rage fuelled by alcohol, more likely to tip over the edge into lethal acts of violence. The sociological causes for this are now deep-seated — count them off: a lack of any concept of deferred gratification; bad parenting; cheap alcohol; a total and utter lack of either discipline or deterrent from those who are supposed to have domain over them, be it the law courts or their teachers or their parents; a familiarity through films, TV and games with casually excessive violence; an attitude which insists that the individual must not be gainsaid in anything he or she does; lack of moral guidance; a surfeit of materialism; base human wickedness. We can make a start addressing those issues, but it will be a generation or two before we make any headway — and there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of willpower to do so, in any case.
Liddle is bang-on brilliant but who the fuck is listening to him anyway. Also it's quite cute how he completely evades any mention of the woman who, more than any other single person, is responsible for what Britain has become today. Margaret Thatcher, Tory talisman, the goddess in the Spectator's pantheon. Thanks a lot, you bitch, you saviour.
*
But I digress. Coming back to the 200, it was an interesting exercise to check up on the Top 10 venues as they stand now, and this is the list -
| Venue | Plays | National (1)
| 22 | Royal Court (2)
| 13 | | Arcola (5) | 12 | | Trafalgar (3) | 11 | Donmar (4)
| 10 | Hampstead (7)
| 10 | Tricycle (6)
| 8 | | Almeida | 7 | Lyric Hammersmith (9)
| 7 | Soho (8)
| 7
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Quite interesting as far as I am concerned. Both the National and the Court stand at the peak of their respective theatrical domains, the former for the canon, the latter for cutting-edge new work. Together these 10 venues account for more than half of what I've seen so far. Brackets indicate positions after the last count in February, when I hit 150 - the Finborough has dropped out of the top 10 and the Almeida has come up in its place.
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Last year I went to see a play at the Hampstead called "In the Club". At its core, it was a hate-filled tirade against the accession of Turkey into the European Union. The idea was that the bloodthirsty Moslems of the decaying Orient would enter the EU and proceed to overrun the continent, holding swords to the throats of the domestic infidel population until all the men sprouted beards on their chins and all the women abandoned their halter-tops for black tents with eye-slits. Engrossing stuff, as you can tell.
I'd forgotten who wrote it. Yesterday, while watching "The English Game", a play about cricket at the otherwise quite pleasant Rose of Kingston in south London, the memory of "In the Club" came back to me with a hot blast. Mainly because a lot of the characters on stage - amateur Sunday cricketers on a patch of green - were spouting off about immigrants and Moslems and Mohammed jokes and Islam jokes and what not. I realized then that it was the same person who'd written the two plays.
The name of this middle-aged mean spirit being Richard Bean. A worse example of the bigoted little Englander you'd be hard-pressed to find.
Even his jokes were old and cliched. While Mohammed jokes killed (pun intended) in 2005, they are just plain dull today. The conversation has moved on several paces in the years since 7/7, yet this Beano was clinging on to that grim day for dear life as proof positive of all that is unholy about the Moslems of the world. Essentially his reaction is the same reaction that the right-wing bloggers in the US had in the years following 9-11, people like Tacitus and Dymphna and Wretchard and Instapundit and the pale-faced ringworms on Redstate. They couldn't think any other way, they lacked the imagination or the mental suppleness to figure out that a billion Muslims didn't necessarily form a homogeneous monolith.
Beano seemed to me to be stuck in that same rut, spouting anti-Muslim chestnuts and lazy cliches. Well, as luck would have it, there was a discussion with the author last night and I got to see this chinless wonder in the flesh. It was dreadful. Naturally, in well-heeled Kingston, where the profile of the average theatre-goer is a 65-year-old white Englishwoman with a Home Counties accent, this kind of bollocks plays very well. "Will it play in Peoria?" used to be the million-dollar question in US advertising. Well, the kind of fucking shit that Richard Bean cooks up plays very well indeed in Kingston.
However, all that didn't prevent me from jumping in with both feet and asking him why he was going on in this one-dimensional monotone about the evil Mohammedans, and whether he thought he could ever bring some fucking nuance into his work.
Methinks I lost him. He was much safer with his fucking pigeon-holes. Interesting night out, but I know what crap you write now, Beano. It's what you ruled so imperiously for 200 years and what you brought in so carelessly for the last 50 what's caused you all the problems, and don't you ever forget it. Crying boo-fucking-hoo won't help ya now.
9/11, immigrant, osama bin laden, little england, racist, muslim, richard bean, bigot, playwright, racism, national theatre., moslem, tolerance, european union, theatre, cricket, white flight, resentment, multiculturalism, bnp, turkey, bigotry, 7/7, islam, terrorism, immigration
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As of this week, I am an official bona fide "volunteer steward" at Shakespeare's Globe theatre. It may be recalled that the Globe was where I saw In Extremis last year. That red-hot piece remains the very best of all the 160+ plays I've seen in this town.
So yeah, ever since then, I've wanted to volunteer there, and now I'm in. I'm signed up for 13 Sundays this summer, and maybe extra shifts here and there.
I cannot wait.
P.S. I'm of the firm belief that the best fiver you can spend in London is in the pit of the Globe. (The best sixer is in the stalls of the Almeida.)
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Even by the wacky standards of London, the last 24 hours have been crazy as hell! In short, I spent last night sleeping rough on the pavements of Covent Garden, braving the cold and the damp. It's been insane. But it was well worth it. Met some terrific people into the bargain. Seriously, I've never loved a place as much as I love this city right now. It throws up so many things every single day that I spend here - Dr Johnson was never more right.
Around this time yesterday then, I was sweating bullets about sending out the Asia Pacific reports to the Singapore office. A good deal of scrambling by the three economists - GK, BB and moi - saw me finally getting things out the door a little before 7 pm.
From then on, it was all helter-skelter. I ran out and jumped on the tube to Holborn, then jumped on a bus to Aldwych to catch Shadowlands at the Novello. It was the second-last night of its hit run - and I'd wanted to see it as I remembered the praise that Hopkins and Winger's film had received back in the early 1990s - the story of CS Lewis and his American girl Joy Gresham.
Charles Dance and Janie Dee rocked the house in their two roles, the whole play was sound, solid and powerful in a staid, restrained, English sort of way. There were a few tears among the audience in the end as Gresham kicks it early from bone cancer - but Lewis and Gresham's words spiked me to my core more than once. Deathless words, deathless emotions.
*
From there, I had to make a decision. 10 pm. Do I go back home to east London, change and then come back to city centre and the Donmar? That will essentially take me 2-3 hours, round trip. And by then, I may fall way back in the queue.
On the other hand, I can just walk over from the Novello to the Donmar, they are just 15 mins apart. I didn't have any warm clothing on beyond a thick jacket and a woollen hat. No warm trousers or leggings, no blanket, not even so much as a pillow for my head or a newspaper for my ass. And February nights in London can get cold. But I thought fuck it - details, details!
What was all this in aid of? What was the prize? Othello, starring Chiwetel and Ewen McGregor, last day today Saturday. Hottest hit in town, this show sold out in 2 hours flat when tickets were first released many months ago. On eBay, tickets have changed hands for over a thousand pounds. The only way to get tickets was to get day seats which are released on the day - just 30 of them - at 10.30 am. You queue up, you take your tickets - 2 each maximum - you get lost.
Only snag? The queues for this one apparently were starting OVERNIGHT. I'd queued at the Donmar before a couple of times. But never before 8 am. I'd queued for War Horse, but even that was after a quick night's sleep, at 6.30. What I was proposing to do here was spend the whole night in the open, parked outside the Donmar with nothing to sustain me through the cold.
The decision was an easy one. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
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When I got there through the Friday night press, there was one single solitary person there -a German girl from Frankfurt who confessed that she'd seen it half a dozen times already but was desperately in love with Ewen so she was seeing it one final time. I was second in line. It was cold, but tolerable. Another guy joined us - an actor from Milan, Simone his name. He had just come out from the show, we started up a chat. A crowd now started to form - as with Orlando Bloom a few months ago, most of them were Japanese women of various ages.
People waited. Cameras, mobile, theatre programmes at the ready for the autograph. Suddenly with bewildering speed, a man came down with a little boy and rushed out into the night. That was Jude Law. No one was expecting to see him, so he made his exit quick before anyone had a chance to react. It was only seconds later that people started saying - hey wasn't that Alfie? It sure as fuck was.
And then Desdemona came down. And then finally Ewen McG, also known as Anakin Skywalker of Star Wars, star who started with that super Danny Boyle flick Shallow Grave. Even Jude Law's done one of my fave movies, Gattaca.
So people took autographs, pictures. I sat back. The Jap women gave hugs, took pictures with their heads resting on Ewen's un-broad chest. He had a bit of a rough time, but he kept his temper even all the way, was as nice as was possible under the circumstances and after 10-15 mins, pushed on by his handler, made his exit.
Some of the Japanese women then started crying like teenage girls. Weirdoes and freaks. An infantile race, the Japanese.
*
Ellen and I waited. A woman joined us, armed with sleeping bag and blanket and book, just like Ellen. Was I the only one who didn't know the rules of this camping game? Evidently. It was getting up to midnight. No book. No book!!! All I had was the Bubble Breaker game on my Vario.
I needed to go to a bar or a pub that was open late. I walked off looking for one. A rickshaw puller mentioned The End bar nearabouts. Walking around in the Charing Cross/Covent Garden area, footpaths emptying out, I came across a Subway that was open till 3 am. Bingo! Order a Subway and a Coke, hang around till 3! That takes care of the warmth problem for the next 3 hours.
I went in. Queueing for my sub, I realized that one of the two guys behind the counter was Bengali. Naturellement we started chatting as soon as the crowd subsided a bit. He was a long-haired law student, formerly of DU English dept. But like most DU English students, his English too was pretty basic. His sidekick was another student, a little kid from Samarkand, Uzbekistan. We kept up a stop-start convo as they served customers. Drunken fuckwits, a lot of them. Saturday night after all. English. Irish. American. Greek. Indian. Pakistani. They all poured in through the night. I played my Bubble Breaker.
And I played my Bubble Breaker some more. Average score is >600. Good no?
*
Then at about 2.45 am, I went back to the Donmar. NOW there was a line. A real one. About 7-8 people ahead of me. And again, everyone had come prepared! At minimum, sleeping bag and blanket! Right ahead of me, there was a black couple. The boy Osi a budding actor, the girl Vanessa a budding soul singer just back from 2 yrs in LA. We started chatting. Amazing how friendly these queues always seem to be. Pretty soon, we were joined by a black American guy, an assistant director in small film projects in Hollywood. Darrell had flown out all the way from LA to London just to see this show!
The next few hours was all conversation. Obama. US politics. Economics. The boy Osi had a rather weak grasp of "the Fed bank, like, the Federal Reserve" and a very HUGE emotional involvement in all sorts of hair-brained conspiracy theories. We let him yammer on. The girl Vanessa, the American Darrell and moi - all big-time Obama fans. And so it went.
5 am. Air getting colder. Much colder. Me feeling sleepier. I sat on a foldable chair and dozed. They offered me half-share of their mattress and they had a spare blanket. My legs cold. Sheathed only in thin trousers. I sat against the wall and dozed. My ears wrapped in wool, my torso cased in suede and cotton, my legs exposed. Cold cold. I covered them with the blanket. I fell asleep.
The cold cut through me. I woke up, went to sleep. Woke up from the wind, went to sleep again. Curled up in a ball. Like a fetus. Or a cat. Curled up for heat. Osi and Darrell, standing, talking still. Talking through the night, through the dawn.
*
I woke up. 8 am. Morning! I made it!
Bleary-eyed. Osi was off to get some coffee and muffins. I went with him. A 10-min walk thru the mean streets of Soho brought us right up to the Whole Foods supermarket. All organic, floor after floor, section after section, shelf after shelf. Expensive. Fancy. Exotic. Never been inside an organic store. Eye-opener.
I got a 2-pound soup. Osi the same. We left.
From then on, time moved on quickly. The queue by now was massive. 40-50 people snaking round the block. Came 10 am. Doors open, inside into the warmth. I'm 9th in the new queue. 10.30 am. Box office opens. I go up after Vanessa and Osi. I get two tickets, one for me, one for touting?
They drop me off at Picc Circus. Still haven't gone home. In the office now, deserted on a Saturday afternoon. Going to take a shower, going to change my clothes. And then it's off to Othello!
It's been extreme, and I feel as pleased as Punch :-)
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Equus
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Jun. 10th, 2007 @ 02:51 pm
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Astonishing drama at the Gielgud last night, Peter Shaffer's 1973 horse-play 'Equus' revived in London for the very first time since its original production at the National Theatre 34 years ago. Last night was the final performance, and after copious amounts of indefensible procrastinating over the last three months, I finally hauled my ass to the Gielgud two days before and got the tickets. They were nosebleed seats and having had forgettable encounters with West End nosebleeds in the past, I was naturally somewhat apprehensive. But I needn't have worried. The power and passion of Shaffer's play climbed right up to the rafters and grabbed everyone by the throat. I have to say that my earlier opinion of Shaffer had been coloured somewhat by my experience with The Royal Hunt of the Sun at the NT last year, but Equus is by any measure a far more interesting play, on a different plane of theatrical achievement entirely. (Although RHOS is still the one that contains Shaffer's legendary stage direction: "They cross the Andes.")
Okay, about the play, first of all can I just say that Thea Sharrock is an insanely talented director and if she's not careful, she's going to end up being mentioned in the same breath as Richard Eyre and Trevor Nunn some day. Beautifully simple production yesterday, although I guess the credit for that must equally lie with John Napier who apparently designed the original 1973 version as well. I just loved their whole minimalistic approach to stage design - Richard Eyre did it for James Mossman in The Reporter, and last night Sharrock/Napier did it for Equus - how to evoke a seashore, or a stable, or a meadow at night without the help of a single prop - just light and sound and magic - and how to make it utterly believable and convincing and persuasive at the same time. Apart from the actors, there were just four rectangular black blocks on the stage for furniture last night and they became as integral a part of the play as Griffiths or Radcliffe or the horses themselves.
What to say about Richard Griffiths. The man is a complete natural, a giant of the stage, both literally and metaphorically. He carried The History Boys on his back to its current status as 21st-century instant classic, and this is how he must have done it. When he talks, his audience listens. It's as simple as that. He possesses that stage like he was born to it, born to stand there and speak to us, to hold us in the cup of his hand. I for one can never get over the miracle that is voice projection, and these English actors do it so magnificently well, even their whispers become audible to those of us in the furthest row of the topmost circle. As for Daniel Radcliffe, he gave a coiled spring of a performance, brilliant as Alan Strang, the tortured teenager with a bizarre penchant for horses. Goodbye Harry Fucking Potter, say hello to a true actor. The horses were terrific too. For me, the scene of the night came right before the interval when Alan takes Nugget out of the stable late one night. A walk becomes a trot becomes a canter becomes a gallop - and yet, and yet neither Radcliffe nor his mount had moved from the centre of the stage! It was amazing. You had to be there.
The story itself is a pretty messed up one. What is the price of growing up? What happens to our youthful passions, our instincts? Do we all become dead inside as adults? Repressed, unhappy, dysfunctional? Living from one day to the next, 'hanging on in quiet desperation'? Is it compromise or compromised? Equus hasn't dated at all in thirty years, and it is unlikely that it will date in thirty more.
P.S. And yes there is a nude scene, Harry Potter does prance about stark naked with a girl, but really it was nothing to write home about. (Or maybe I was sitting too far from the action? ;-)
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I came out of this play, shaken by the magnificent acting on display, stirred by the beauty of Conor McPherson’s prose and the elemental melancholy of his Irish vision. The first hour of the play, snappy and funny and fast, was as good as anything I’ve ever seen on the stage. The acting was outstanding from top to bottom, but I have to mention the two masterpieces: Conleth Hill’s stunning portrayal of Ivan the drunken friend, chubby and good-natured and in a permanent state of befuddlement, Ivan who can’t find his glasses and is locked out of his home; and also Jim Norton’s towering performance as the blind brother Richard, pushy and irascible, drunk like a skunk and ordering the sullen, long-suffering Sharky all over the place. As with Kevin Spacey in Misbegotten, these were superbly convincing portrayals of the demon drink.
The second half of the play contained that deux ex machina that resolves the plot, the twist in the tail that gets Sharky off the hook and sends Mr Lockhart (or the Devil) scurrying for other prey. Faust with a happy ending! I did find the trick rather contrived – Conleth/Ivan finds his glasses in the toilet and the 4’s then turn out to be winning aces and Mr Lockhart loses his bet. But the rest of the play worked just fine, the applause at the end was loud and furious and from me personally, it was a dead cert standing ovation. I caught it on the last night at the Cottesloe for just a fiver, the best fiver I’ll spend this year. A fiver at the Cottesloe gets you just standing room along the sides of that cute little box (I’d never been before), but for the second half I did manage to get a seat which was good.
Out into the night then, shaken and very happy in spite of my CEE forecasts presentation 36 hours later, moved by the powerful thing I’d been witness to. This was the night I stiffed the BBCC dinner at the Troxy but I have absolutely no regrets!
Seafarer Linkathon
Conor McPherson:
Guardian profile
Telegraph profile
The Seafarer:
Guardian review by Michael Billington
Times review by Benedict Nightingale
Evening Standard review by Nic de Jongh
Independent review by Paul Taylor
Another Indie review by Kate Bassett
FT review by Alastair Maculay
Toby Young review
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Holy shyt. I just got back from Frost/Nixon.
I'll start at the end. When it was over, I sat there with my jaw somewhere around my knees. Then I started clapping - and I slammed my palms into each other with such violent force that they were stinging before long. I was clapping like a man possessed - mainly because I had no other way of expressing my feelings about what I had seen over the last two hours. A few more minutes of that, and I would probably have drawn blood. I walked out of the theatre and I was still shivering with the electricity, shaking from the sheer motherfucking excitement of it, muttering to myself. And then because I had to tell someone, ANYONE about what I had just seen, I called up Asif and bawled into his ears for fifteen minutes.
It was stupendous. It was staggering. It was nothing but the story of a political scandal in 1973 and the interview that followed four years later - and yet the script was as tight and tense as a classic thriller. The audience sucked it up, rapt for two hours without so much as an interval. The performances were towering. The guy who played Richard Nixon.. Jesus what a performance. I found out later that he was in Good Night and Good Luck. But up there, he was Nixon. David Frost was only paces behind.
And the beauty, the intimacy of the Donmar - it added to the effect. The two best plays I've seen in London - Tartuffe and Fabulation - were both staged in small theatres, in cosy, drawing-room surroundings. Frost/Nixon belongs up there. There's something about venues like the Greenwich or the Tricycle that enhances the play. It dials down the theatricality and heightens the realism of the story. That's what happened today as well.
So yes. 5 bright shiny stars to Peter Morgan's Frost/Nixon at the Donmar Warehouse. If this bitch don't win a stack of prizes at the end of the season, I'll eat my prayer cap.
P.S. AJ and AA, this one is most highly recommended. Shaffer and Stoppard, suck on this ;-)
P.P.S. This time I was the only brown face in a sea of white. It was a bit weird.
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Yesterday was the hottest day of the year. ~36 degrees Celsius in London. And I quit Dallas for this?!
*
Went to see Juliette Lewis on stage last night, at the Apollo off Piccadilly Circus. She and Martin Henderson (Darcy to Aishwarya's Elizabeth) were in Fool For Love, Sam Shepard's play about drifters in the American West.
I hadn't planned on seeing it originally, but Rubes said she wanted to see it so I went along. This is the second time I've gone to the West End with her, both times to see an American play, both times to see a Hollywood star. And I just realized that Juliette Lewis AND Woody Harrelson were the two stars in Natural Born Killers! Fucking coincidence!
Anyhoo, it was a terrific show, just 80 mins long, like a short, sharp shock, set entirely in a low rent motel room on the edge of the Mojave desert. Ferocious acting from both stars. I loved the whole show.. but then I have a kind of a connection back to that place. My mind kept running back to that dreamy subtitle of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian - The Evening Redness in the West. That's what last night felt like.
Afterwards we bummed around Waterloo till minuit and then hopped off homewards. I'm taking the day off today, "working from home" in theory ;-)
*
Profile of Gnarls Barkley, which is getting lots of airtime in the UK.
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And funny story from the BBC about TV journalists in India.
Mr Verma has one ambition in life - "to touch the sky keeping my (sic) firmly on earth, as well as to bear out and excel".
I am still not sure what he means but he is quite serious about it, because that is what it says in the first line of his CV.
A decade ago young Indians aspired to be doctors, engineers or business executives. Now they want to be in TV news.
..
Everyday I get their CVs, often along with photographs of them pouting provocatively over a computer with brow slightly furrowed to show that they have beauty and brains. And that is just the men.
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Saw Tartuffe over the weekend at the Greenwich Theatre.. had never been to that part of town before (well I’d been to Woolwich one time).. extremely, extremely funky, it’s the kinda place you’d want to stay long-term if you absolutely had to stay here for good.. this huge clipper Cutty Sark sitting there on the Thames.. lovely views across the river to the towers of the financial district.. very village-y atmosphere, with pubs, shops, narrow roads, all kindsa people, busy traffic..
As for the play itself, it was the best night out at the theatre I’ve had since I saw Fabulation in Kilburn. Riotously funny.. the translation was an incredible piece of work, done by a chap called Ranjit Bolt.. turning the whole thing from the original French into two and a half hours of rhyming verse, spoken by the cast.. he’d made it sharp and bawdy, and for all its antique inflections, it was alive and vivid and witty. The audience laughed and hollered the whole way through.. and boy, the applause at the end, it made my palms burn.
It never ceases to astonish me how these actors can memorize pages and pages of dialogue, sometimes very difficult dialogue, and spout it out verbatim for minutes and hours on end without skipping a beat, remembering every word they’re supposed to remember, and even managing to act and emote through it all properly! It’s a real craft, this acting on the stage business…
So yes, five easy stars for Moliere’s Tartuffe, in Ranjit-ji’s production for the Windmill. Asif, I strongly recommend you catch this one.. they're touring Oxford in late May.
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