Progress Industry Humanity

The town in which I live is part of Leeds and for the most part that's where I go for entertainment and intellectual stimulation. However, I live on the border with Bradford and this weekend has seen me attend events celebrating two of its most distinguished sons.

On Saturday I made one of my infrequent returns to the University of Bradford, the place where I took my first degree, on this occasion for a talk on the time theories of J.B. Priestley. I won't attempt to reproduce what was discussed, which you would be correct in interpreting to mean that I didn't fully understand it. There were names bandied about that I'd never heard of (J.W. Dunne, Ouspensky), haven't read (Proust - shameful but true) or regard as complete charlatans (Myers and Briggs). Still, the main point at issue was that Priestley was a first rate writer, is unjustly overlooked and was ahead of his time. His influence can clearly be seen on novelists such as Borges and Burgess and on playwrights like Stoppard and Ayckbourn, and he was an early explorer of concepts later seen in works as diverse as E.T., Catch-22, Groundhog Day, Sliding Doors and The Purple Rose of Cairo to name just a few. The speakers recommended a range of works which apparently illustrate his interest in the possible circularity of time, but I have chosen to buy 'The 31st of June' on the basis that the panel said it was very funny. I shall report back. I also have to mention that I rather regret not having also been to the session before ours, which featured lots of brightly clothed Nigerians playing drums.

Today saw celebrations to mark the 80th birthday of David Hockney. The weather was nice, a big crowd turned up, there was a wide choice of food (I went for Tilapia and Jollof rice, perhaps still regretting missing out on the Nigerian drumming) and loud music; judging by the playlist DH is a fervent disco fan. There was even a large birthday cake representing his large work Le Plongeur, which is the cornerstone of the excellent new Hockney Gallery at Bradford's Cartwright Hall.

The other notable feature was a Hockneyfication Station where those with a more frivolous nature than your bloggist could be transformed into lookalikes of the great man.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves

"The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means." - Tom Stoppard

It's time to leave behind British politics - with its stories of powerful though flawed individuals brought low by hubris and vanity; characters stopping at nothing and abandoning all principle as their ambition and selfishness causes careers and lives to end in undignified catastrophe; narratives that inevitably end with everyone involved, both the innocent and the guilty, lying prostrate as a result of revenge and ill will; all interspersed with cruel humour as the common people gather to mock those who presume to rule over them - and turn to the kinder, gentler world of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.

I have been to see 'Romeo and Juliet' - again. Even I now accept that this has shifted from the harmless cultural pseudery that has been a lifelong diversion and instead become a disturbing monomania. However, fate has punished me in the manner of, well, of one of Shakespeare's tragedies, and this was by some way the worst of the four (count 'em, Jim, four!) productions that I have seen this year so far. This was especially disappointing as it was at the Globe, a theatre where I have never before seen a production that I didn't like. It was a raucous mess, played in whiteface for no discernible reason, and with the poetry overwhelmed by shrieking delivery and inappropriate banging music. Tybalt was the best thing about it, played as a cross between malchick and butcher and, in fairness, Juliet had a good crack at a few teenage tantrums despite being rather long in the tooth for the role. The various methods of death - rapiers, poison etc - were all replaced by handguns. That might have worked, but instead of firing blanks the actors all shouted "bang"; it was risible. As was the climax in which Romeo appeared to kill both his own parents and Juliet's in a mass US style shooting rampage before he visited Juliet's tomb. It was all truly terrible.

Much better was their production of 'Twelfth Night'. Reviews were mixed (which they certainly weren't for Romeo & Juliet), but I loved it. It appeared to be set on a remote Hebridean island, although apart from kilts and some generic Scottish dancing the location didn't intrude too much. The text was heavily chopped up and new bits added, but there was much to enjoy. Malvolio was played by a woman (I should have mentioned above that so was Mercutio), but it was somewhat more complicated. Katy Owen played the part as a man - a Welshman inexplicably living in Illyria/Brigadoon - but also had clearly based her performance on Ruth Madoc's Gladys Pugh. Anyway, whatever the gender bending ramifications it worked a treat, as did the appearance of Le Gateau Chocolat (as seen in the National Theatre's 'Threepenny opera') as Feste. However, the show was stolen for me by Carly Bawden's sexy, sassy and funny Maria. As one reviewer pointed out, it may not be great art, but it's undoubtedly great fun.

Plastics

 “What a fine persecution - to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.” 

- Tom Stoppard

And so to the theatre. The stage version of  'The Graduate' is best known for providing famous, middle-aged actresses with a chance to show that they're still worth looking at, but it also captured the interest in a number of other ways. It featured the second actor in a wetsuit in a fortnight, this time somewhat more relevantly; Benjamin's mental floundering is being underlined by a visual 'out of his depth' metaphor. There was also what I'm pretty sure was the first time I've ever seen a door being smashed down with an axe live on stage, and very enjoyable it was too. Last, but by no means least, was the vigorous tassle twirling of professional burlesque artiste Elsie Diamond; I think one knows where one is with someone who chooses the stage name 'Elsie'. In any event the programme observed that if one didn't like the character of Benjamin then one wouldn't 'get on' with the Graduate; I didn't and , by and large, I didn't. Elaine - who gets more of the story on stage compared to the film - did make one philosophical statement that appealed to me as a Stoic: "If you allow yourself to have dessert every time you see a little pig," she said "then you will see a lot more little pigs and eat a lot more dessert". Wise words.

I'm always happy to see any play by Alan Ayckbourn because one is guaranteed at least half a dozen good laughs and  'Sisterly Feelings' was no exception. I have long held the theory that a successful farce will involve sardines, and sure enough they pop up here, as does the slightly creepy concept of stalking someone leading to a positive 'happy ever after' result, a trope it shares with 'The Graduate'. As this happened in the second half its occurrence was apparently determined by an on-stage coin toss in the first half, Ayckbourn having written two alternate conclusions to the piece. Whilst this is an intriguing idea, it strikes me as essentially pointless because most people are only going to see it once. It would be particularly galling to choose to see it a second time to catch the alternate ending (which hopefully shows stalking to result in imprisonment) only to find that the coin landed heads twice in a row and one had to sit through the same thing again.

Of course dozens of heads in row are the result of a coin being repeatedly tossed in the opening scene of 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead', Tom Stoppard's youthful masterpiece. I have been to see the live streaming of the Old Vic production starring Daniel Radcliffe and Joshua McGuire. It is possible that many of those in the screening that I went to came along attracted by the former's previous role as a boy wizard rather than by Stoppard's absurdist wordplay or his existential examination of the limitations of man's real freedom of action in the light of his inevitable demise, and nor perhaps were they aware of the need to have some familiarity with 'Hamlet' in order to make head or tail of it all. For whatever reason there were many fewer of them after the interval. It rather put me in mind of when I saw Ross Kemp give his Petruchio, although on that occasion Dutch courage allowed most of the soap fans to stick with the blank verse all the way through. In this case the show was rather stolen by David Haig as the Player, but it was all, as one would expect, excellent.

We feed the baby

And so to the theatre. The Royal Exchange in Manchester and the West Yorkshire Playhouse have co-produced a dramatisation of Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina. As with the Keira Knightley film of 2012 - which I liked; it had a Tom Stoppard screenplay after all - it is a stylised rather than naturalistic staging. In the case of the climax (although I'm assuming everyone knows how it ends, I won't spell it out) not reproducing the written word is of course inevitable given the physical limitations of a theatre, but it seemed to me that the director's choice would have left anyone coming to the story cold completely mystified as to what was supposed to have happened.

Anyway, whilst the book has a very famous opening sentence (not present here) and a well-known ending, the meat of the sandwich is, er, well sort of in the middle. Anna trades safety for passion, her husband becomes a Christian and thereby loses the ability to forgive, Vronsky finds that one should be careful what one wishes for, Oblonsky - representing his entire class - sleepwalks towards his doom, and Levin and Kitty learn that true heroism is in the banal daily struggle rather than the grand gesture. All of these themes were sketched out here rather than covered in depth and therein lies the paradox of condensing such a complex novel into a two hour play. In order to understand it one must have some familiarity with the source, but if one does then the precis version can easily disappoint.

If it be not now

And so to the theatre. To the City Varieties to be precise for The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) by the Reduced Shakespeare Company. It's one of those shows about which everyone, including me, says "I've heard that's funny". As indeed it is.

My own favourite was the hip-hop Othello, but the backwards Hamlet ran it close. It was pretty much all good; another special mention must go to the history plays as an American Football game with the crown being passed from one player to another with a foul called against King Lear because of a fictional character on the pitch. Ironically - fitting that there was irony given that the man invented it, or at least stole it from the Greeks - the least funny part was the quick run through of the comedies. The joke was supposedly that they are all the same: cross-dressing, twins, shipwrecks and so on. True enough, but we all knew that anyway.

 

They spent the entire second half on Hamlet, performing it four times in all. Whereas Tom Stoppard made a play out of thrusting minor characters to the fore, this bunch do away with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern completely (do you see what I did there?) and reduce the play within a play to a puppet show. But I think both recognise the essential duality of Hamlet; one the one hand possibly the greatest play ever written in English and on the other hand an inherently absurd melodrama. As Stoppard himself said "The bad end unhappily; the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.".

Anyway, I laughed and that's enough for me.