The Spire at Salisbury Playhouse

Saturday 17th November

In the programme, Roger Spottiswoode is described as having ‘been interested in William Golding’s novel The Spire for many years’.   It’s an interest I’ve shared since studying it as a set-text for A’level in 1979.  Then, as a seventeen year old, the most vivid parts were the love affair between Goody and Roger Mason, obvious to Dean Jocelin as he sees a net holding them together, and the brutal murder of her disabled husband, Pangall, hunted down and sacrificed by the superstitious builders.

I re-read it in 2006, when I was working as writer-in-residence at Truro Cathedral – which incidentally has three spires.  Then I was struck less by the plot, than the extraordinary writing, especially the descriptions of light and sound and how they relate to the inner workings of Jocelin’s mind, whether in his dreams and visions or as he perceives 'reality'.

‘He blinked for a moment.  There had been sun before, but not like this.  The seeming most solid thing in the nave, was not the barricade of wood and canvas that cut the cathedral in two, at the choir steps, was not the two arcades of the nave, nor the chantries and painted tomb slabs between them. The most solid thing was the light.  It smashed through the rows of windows in the south aisle so that they exploded with colour, it slanted before him from right to left in an exact formation ....  the grains of dust … drifted cloudily, coiled or hung in a moment of pause, becoming in the most distant rods and trunks, nothing but colour, honey-colour slashed across the body of the cathedral … the honey thickened into a pillar that lifted straight as Abel’s from the men working with crows at the pavement .’ (pp.9-10)

So much of the book works symbolically, sometimes farcically with the phallic spire standing for Jocelin’s repressed sexuality that it would seem a difficult book to dramatise.  Much of the action is internal, such as Jocelin perceiving the pain of his diseased back as the prescence of an angel and his own self-deception about his feelings towards Goody, Mason and God.

Another difficulty dramatically is that we know from the outset that the spire was built and still stands, so the scenes where Roger, the Master Builder and Father Anselm express objections, have little dramatic tension.

But  Gareth Machin’s production in Salisbury was a brilliant theatrical experience.  The set was on a grand scale with a replica of the tower, its crows nest and the gigantic capstone all suitably precarious, some great lighting and the monkish chanting automatically atmospheric.  The scene where the wedges were hammered out to allow the risky dropping of the capstone’s weight (which in spite of an explanation with a censer I didn’t quite understand in engineering terms) was genuinely thrilling.

There were lots of short scenes, perhaps reflecting Roger Spottiswode’s earlier screenplay, which didn’t always give the actors much scope.  The two women were strongest, perhaps because the three characters they played genuinely influence the action.  Vincenzo Pellegrino as Roger Mason had a powerful manly prescence, and Mark Meadows as Dean Jocelin moved from a rather New Labour reasonableness to genuine feeling.

The two intervals worked well with each of the first two acts ending with a death – the murder of Pangall, and Goody’s tragic miscarriage, both happening off-stage (and it wasn’t clear to my companion, who hadn’t read the book, that Pangall had died).  There was something overly-restrained about the beginning of the play, perhaps intended to highlight the crazier action later as men worked towards achieving the impossible.

One of the strongest scenes dramatically came near the end where Dean Jocelin and Father Adam confront the changes in their relationship as a result of Jocelin’s obsession in an exchange that was sad, touching and timeless.

Some of the reviewers talk about the play’s theme as being religious faith – I think that’s beside the point here.  In medieval times, God was just background, like air is now, and people’s experience of the machinations of the Church would be more akin to how we perceive local government rather than a question of faith and belief.  

The main themes to me seems to be vision and persistence and how one man explains himself to himself, and particularly the role of pride, both in Jocelin who thinks he’s chosen for this work and Roger Mason who has the skills to make bricks and mortar happen.

Well worth the trek from Canterbury to Salisbury.

Who's to blame?

Last of the Haussmans

11^th October 2012

I saw this play as a live broadcast from the Lyttleton to the Gulbenkein cinema on the last night of the run and wished I could have seen it again.

I agree with the reviews about its strengths and weaknesses, its Chekhovian atmosphere, Julie Walters’ and the others’ brilliant acting and the way it struggled to bring together the threads at the end.  I thought the set was overdone and dominated too much, but enjoyed the local references having lived briefly in the South Hams, among the millionaires, across the water from a Dimbleby, and down the road from relentlessly New-Age Totnes.

The family dynamics were fascinating.  Something not mentioned in any of the reviews is the influence of absent fathers.  I think the play is less about the legacy of the 1960s and more about parenting in general.  We learn that Libby and Nick were brought up by their grandparents whilst Judy carried on travelling, but nothing about their father, not even whether they had the same one.  Libby’s daughter, Summer, visits hers and falls in love with his orderly life – but that’s all off-stage.  Peter, the cringe-making trendy doctor, has a jealous wife but there is no mention of children.  Daniel, the sexy pool-boy has an invalid mother, but no father. 

Judy, the ‘unreconstructed hippy’, has a very clear morality and no regrets about her life.  She knows what’s important and her opinions are coherent. By contrast, her adult children are lost – Nick to addiction and Libby to unsatisfactory relationships.  Their desire to make it right with their mother struck me as slightly pathetic - perhaps there's a point here about my current generation who have largely replaced idealism with anxiety, to grow up and stop blaming what's gone before. Judy is still fully engaged with life in a way they can't be.

There appears to be hope for Summer who is weighing the different life options open to her and for Daniel, who as a kind of angelic observer, is able to make his own life.  The doctor, Judy’s generation, is hedging his bets – able to be a dope-smoking advocate of free-love  as long as his wife doesn’t find out but deep-down driven by a bourgeois interest in property and reverting to suit and tie when his life-style is threatened.  The ambiguity of his affections is complex and rings true.

The house as a plot device harks back to Chekhov – as a symbol of changing societies, the loss of wealth (of all kinds), and also as something that touched him personally when his childhood home was bought and demolished by a family friend.  The title of Stephen Beresford’s play with its pun, makes the house allusion key.  Houses, and their value, are one of the most divisive social issues in the West Country, writ especially large in the South Hams where no ordinary local person could ever hope to own property without inheriting it.

Judy may have been an ineffective mother to her children and the star of the show, but for me it is characters like Peter, moving into households where fathers, and all they represent, are absent, who are the more destructive, reminiscent of our current culture of late capitalism where the greedy can exploit the idealistic and damaged, under the guise of a dodgy paternalism.

Smile, not

Will Self makes jokes but doesn’t smile. We didn’t see his teeth even once, during a talk he gave last night at the University of Kent.  Darwin College Senior Common Room was full.  Students and one or two professors were sitting on the floor and there was a buzz of expectation that fell silent when Will entered, accompanied by Dave.  Dave seemed around the same age as Will, with black hair and black clothes, an aging rock star look. He was too relaxed to be the unhappy Dave of The Book  of Dave, but whether he was a mate, someone from the university or a minder, we were never told.  He sat in the easy chair looking at Will’s back, while the author sat on a hard upright chair, swinging and cantilevering his long, thin denim clad legs in the gap between him and the audience, seeming uncertain of the form of the event.

He began by reading us a short story called The Minor Character.  He stood up to read and, like an actor, switched on his charisma, his unmistakable voice taking on authority, conviction and polish.  

The piece is a witty and scathing portrait of wealthy, fifty-ish Londoners.  It introduces many minor characters who variously have dinner together, go away for the weekend to the country, have affairs and break-ups, come out as gay, develop cancer and finally, in the case of the most minor of minor characters, die alone at home.  The narrator of the story, a character called Will, of whom we learn hardly anything, decides to have nothing further to do with this circle and disappears himself, getting rid of mirrors to avoid looking into a void. Will challenged us to decide what the story was about no one ‘gets’ it. 

He then read a short extract from Walking to Hollywood with a more fantastical content,in which the ‘Self’ character, mildly insulted by someone in a shop, develops movie-like superhuman powers which enable him, literally, to stick all the sweets in the shop up the man’s arse, described in a wonderfully extravagant and surreal prose. 

There was Q&A and a couple of themes emerged.  One was aging and the body.  Will referred many times, both directly and indirectly, to the age of the audience compared to his own.  Walking to Hollywood in part, is about the loss of the shared culture of film that was part of Self’s youth, compared to today's‘Balkanised’ age of screen watching.  He mentioned how the death of his mother and birth of his first child in his late twenties helped him find his authentic writing voice. That was when he realised that he could no longer reinvent himself.  Excretion came up many times.  Will told us the ‘key’ to the first story was the narrator likening the back of a dustbin lorry to a filthy anus.  In Walking to Hollywood , he describes three bowel movements and then defends including them by saying, he had many more.  He became animated when complaining about how most characters in literature are disembodied, that the taboos on writing about bodily functions are still strong.  He described how, in his current writing, he reminds himself to include ‘minor ailments’ on every page. 

At this point, he suggested that obsessing about minor ailments are common to everyone of any age but, looking around the room, and including myself, only a couple of years younger than Will, I’d say, only up to a point.  There’s much material here that could be approached psychoanalytically, not least the way in which Will’s own relationship to his, incidentally attractive, body, has been destructive, suggesting what Freud might call an anally expulsive personality that has fed into his prodigous creativity.  But perhaps that’s better explored in a PhD thesis …

The other theme, of course, was writing.  One former student, hit the jackpot, correctly identifying that The Minor Character is about the writing of stories and the impossibility of capturing ‘character’.She came to this conclusion as there were ‘too many characters’ in the story.  He gave good advice to a stuck novelist to plough on through a first draft before thinking of editing.  He ranted about the eulogisation of Dickens as a way of preserving a certain picture of what literature is.  My own take on Dickens is that he is so highly rated because he’s televisual and we live in a televisual age.  Will has just written the screenplay for a TV version of The Minor Character which seems paradoxical as it’s a story about writing a story and we were told several times how the director and the ‘accountants’ who make up a TV production team, didn’t get it.

And so much more … This was an entertaining evening, hearing exciting prose in a beautiful voice.  I came away stimulated, with a variety of takes on the world, some insightful, others silly.  I wish he’d let himself smile, especially at his own good jokes.  And who on earth was Dave?

    

Some Like Midnight in Paris Hotter

Usually I have a row, at least, of seats to myself at the Gulbenkein Cinema, being an eccentric lone film goer among a handful of other odd-bods who want to watch, for example, a Greek-language coming-of-age film where the lead character is obsessed with David Attenberg (sic).  I suppose Woody Allen is deeply mainstream, but I was still surprised last Friday, to see the auditorium full, and of people mostly twenty years older than me. Midnight in Paris was fluffy and light, its chief pleasure lay in the spotting of look-alikes of famous artists and literary figures 1920s Paris and seeing them live up to their larger-than-life personae. Nothing nasty happens, in fact nothing much at all happens, Paris looks pretty, the costumes are gorgeous, the shallow capitalists return to the US after lots of shopping, and the sensitive hero finds romance with a sensitive girl, all predictable and pleasurable but ultimately as unsatisfying as candy floss.

The same running gag of the past being better was developed in a much more nuanced way in Richard Hurford’s quirky play Some Like It Hotter which I saw at the Theatre Royal in Margate on Saturday, a touring production by the Watermill Theatre. The auditorium was chilly and a bit musty-smelling (not surprising for a building dating back to the late 18^th century), it was a smallish house but I was recognisably among odd-bods, including what seemed to be a hen party and a tall colonel-like figure who immediately went to sleep in the front row. But the show warmed us all up, with its spirited performances and its mixture of hilarity and genuine poignancy, the latter being what was missing from the formulaic Woody Allen.

Some Like It Hotter also takes us back to a golden age, this time epitomised by the movie and the three iconic performers, Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon.  The three immensely talented performers on stage in 2011 seemed to channel these stars of the past in an uncanny way, so not only were we watching this performance, but also what might be the sequel to the 1959 film.  I have seen the virtuoso T.J.Holmes perform in many places, whether straight acting, on stage or outdoors, playing solo cello in Truro Cathedral or crooning in a Cornwall pub, so it was a real pleasure to see him in a role that gave him a chance to do all these things whilst cleverly keeping his performance as Jack Lemmon / Daphne funny but never farcical.  Sarah Applewood as Marilyn was gorgeous and also complex and Paul Matania was uncannily like Tony Curtis, both immensely watchable.  All of this would have been enough but what took the show to a pitch way more interesting than Midnight in Paris was the time-travelling character, Charlie, masterfully realised by Patrick Bridgman.  Gil, played by Owen Wilson in the film, is similarly socially awkward and one-dimensional.  All we know is that he is a successful screen-writer who wants to be a novelist and especially admires 1920s Paris and we never find out why, nor how he came to be with his deeply incompatible fiance in the first place.  In contrast, Charlie, who after dying arrives in a version of heaven that is the film, Some Like It Hot, reveals layer after layer of complexity, so that by the end, we have a very Freudian view of why he likes that film and what love is all about. 

Seeing the two pieces back to back was fascinating.  Both writers are cleverly examining nostalgia, fame, glamour, beauty, yearning and the past.  Both pieces have wonderful performances and are a visual pleasure.  The live music and singing was a treat in Some Like It Hotter but it was something else that lifted it for me.  The main thing about the past, as in both shows, is that the people there are often, or if the past is long enough past, always, dead.  The Woody Allen film, perpetuates the idea of eternal youth – everyone in it is in their prime, at the top of their game.  In Some Like It Hotter, Richard Hurford depicts Marilyn and co in their prime, but isn’t afraid to go straight to the heart of our yearning by putting ‘heaven’ in its proper place of being where we go when we die.  The sudden dark shadow of the story of Charlie with its very real pain and sorrow, makes the show so much more than a romp, something satisfying and multi-layered – not candyfloss but food fit for adults.

Victoria Field

A Cheerful Film About Depression

Melancholia – A Cheerful Film About Depression

This post is nothing to do with Georgia, but is written as a distraction from editing our new translation of The Counting Out Game by Tamta Melashvili ...

Lars von Trier’s new film reminds me of Gwyneth Lewis’ Sunbathing in the Rain – A Cheerful Book About Depression.  The use of the word ‘melancholia’ to denote depression dates back to the 4^th century and the first modern account comes from Robert Burton’s 1621 book, The Anatomy of Melancholy, which looks at the subject both as a medical and cultural phenomenon. The film Melancholia is a similarly brilliant study of depression, the epidemic of our times, and is both emotionally challenging and exasperating – just as being with a depressive person is – and yet, perhaps perversely, when the blue planet, called Melancholia, finally crashes into the earth, I couldn’t help but burst out laughing and felt immensely cheered up by the end of the world.

Lars von Trier is a self-confessed melancholic and has suffered severe depression, even having to cut short a casting session when he couldn’t stop crying.  The tears of Justine in the film are beautifully observed.  And yet, he continues to make absurd, challenging and, in this case, beautiful and funny, films about profound personal pain.  Here there’s an echo of Robert Burton’s seventeenth century take on the condition where his persona Democritus Junior explains, ‘I write of melancholy by being busy to avoid melancholy.’ I suspect Lars von Trier is similar.

For me, the best films about depression have humour, and not necessarily black. As well as the ultimately bleak One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, other funny films about depression are the more nuanced American Beauty, About Schmidt and A Serious Man.  Melancholia is less conventional in style, plot and structure and as well as finding the humour in its subject matter, it is also a film that focuses on beauty and eternity.  Melancholy in ancient Greece was attributed to a preponderance of black bile, one of the four ‘humours’ responsible for personality.  In Melancholia, the only character to manifest bile, is Justine’s mother, the profoundly bitter Gaby.  She is dressed drably and is out of kilter with the lush beauty of the rest of the film.

The two sisters, whose names are the titles of the two main sections, are like the sun and moon of melancholy, both beautiful, one blonde, one dark.  One behaves badly, refusing to conform with social norms at her own wedding, unwilling to have sex with her husband, but seducing a young man on the golf course, but finding herself calm and at ease once she is taken in by her sister’s family, away from any social pressue. Like sun and moon, Claire’s and Justine’s trajectories are complementary.  Claire is ‘good’, dutifully married, a caring mother, wanting everything to go right and to make her sister ‘happy’, a word used several times.  But as things unravel, both socially and globally, Claire’s realisation that she can’t control the world, leaves her anxious and terrified. 


These two women are portrayed against a background of serene beauty which gradually becomes less and less populated – we see the wedding guests leaving in a series of different states – the insulted boss, the philandering father, the puzzled husband – in part one.  In part two, first the butler fails to turn up for work, then John, with his reassurance of that the end of the world is not nigh, dies, leaving Justine and Claire alone with Leo, the young boy.  The castle is timeless, seeming sometimes to have the anonymity of a hotel, ambiguously situated – America, Scandinavia – an unreal place.  Its golf course seems to stand for the futility of human existence and culture and the grounds through which the women ride their beautiful horses, shot from above, seem to go on forever.  Getting in and out is difficult, from the stuck limousine, also shot from above, at the beginning, to the flat battery of the golf cart at the end when Claire tries to leave.  The horses won’t cross a certain bridge, whether it’s over the Lethe or some other divide, is unclear. 

The references to beauty are made explicit in the tableaux at the beginning and the way in which the women arrange art books in the living room.  There are echoes of the erotic potential of death in the scene of Justine bathing naked in the blue light of melancholia that made me think of Anne Sexton’s poems – in contrast to the more prosaic hoarding of suicide pills by Justine…. 

And so much more – the men in the film disappear, all of them become inadequate in different ways … there seems to be a subtext of how we react to climate change in the way the characters react to the impending disaster … the conscious referencing of famous paintings, famous films, the use of Wagner’s music, the echoes of literary references … the moral questions … the role of the domestic rounds of food and bed time … wealth and poverty … temporal and eternal priorities …

So ultimately, it’s a serious and beautiful film, but still, thinking about that blue planet crashing into the wigwam at hole number 19 on the golf course, makes me laugh.

Victoria Field 28^th October 2011   

Polyphonic Songs from the Christian East

Walking through Canterbury, I saw a small flier stuck on a gate in the High Street, advertising a concert, to be held in the Eastbridge Hospital – a hospital in the sense of a place offering hospitality since the twelfth century and still active as a place of worship and Christian mission in the city centre.  I called and booked a ticket and last night, enjoyed one of the most profound evening of music and thought-provoking commentary I have ever experienced.

Arriving 10 minutes before the start of the concert, I was surprised to see a crowd outside the Hospital.  I thought perhaps it was overbooked, but no, we were asked to wait outside until the start time, when we were invited into the undercroft.  Apart from a few benches against the walls, it was standing room only and hot and crowded, when a young blonde woman to my left, thin, wearing thick tights and pretty lace-up shoes, stretched long fingers in front of her, as if weaving or touching air as some do when they are dying, opened her mouth wide like a gargoyle’s and released a sound that was heavenly and human simultaneously and which, like a wave on the sea, merged with the voices coming from people I couldn’t see dotted through the crowd in the dim cellar.  It was like swimming, or almost drowning, the way the sound dissolved barriers and created a medium in which I was sinking and floating, being held and released all in one rich moment of song.

We heard three songs, without commentary, people leaned uncomfortably against pillars, each other or on sticks.  The blond woman’s eyes focused on something beyond us and her hands pushed and pulled, as if skeining wool, stroking an animal, or making love as the sounds wove through the crowd.  A member of the audience, dreadlocked and pale, fainted and was carried to the steps near the entrance. We were ushered out of the undercroft and upstairs, past the pilgrim’s refectory and into the chapel.

I was one of the last to come in and the space was full but then someone told me to sit at the front, which I did, just squeezing onto the pew next to two women and a man holding a large hardback book, which I think was by Peter Matthiessen, but I couldn’t see the title. I am reading, now and slowly, PM’s classic, The Snow Leopard, in paperback with a cover that shows just snow, as the leopard of the title is never seen.  Those stories of journeys and Matthiessen’s buddhism seemed appropriate to this setting, this music, these performers. A contemporary icon of St Thomas looked down on us and a huge tapestry of Christ as salvator mundi surrounded by the gospel symbols was the backdrop to the group of nine singers.

Their songs and fragments of songs were mostly liturgical, mostly from Svaneti.  Some had recognisable words, Christ is risen, kyrie eleison … others were so ancient, that they were now just ‘sound’, the ancient Svanetian language being lost.  There was a magnificent meeting of cultures in a piece from the Sioni Cathedral in Georgia, merging the Russian and Orthodox traditions, something that’s now disappeared with the rise of Georgian nationalism.  Some of the songs, we were told, go back directly to Byzantium, I assume when it moved East from Istanbul to Trabzon.

Dotted in between were pieces from Sardinia, Corsica and Bulgaria, marginalised places, ancient places, where the harmonies and polyphonic angelic blending, mixed with the sharp and rocky landscapes of peasant farmers, the scent of rosemary and oregano on hot hillsides, the stench of goat.  In one piece, the five women took centre stage, the four men standing behind in the manner of a motown backing group, and the women each in turn seemed to riff in the jazz manner where pain and pleasure merge in a way that’s spiritual and sexual, each of them becoming herself, whether soft faced or strong, stocky or wiry, dark or fair, those hand, always those hands, reaching, yearning, touching the air that all of us breathe.

Then back to Svaneti and ‘Zar’, the name for the funeral songs that are said to create a ‘column of sound’, presumably to connect heaven and earth in the way that the death of those we know and love connects us to eternity and our own mortality.  These are sung by woodsmen and were flinty like axes, rooted like mountains, strong, convinced and powerful, as songs should be at funerals,  an antidote to the banality of our modern way of denying tradition and the deep knowledge of people still singing with the whole of their body and souls.

Into the refectory, and a toasting song from Georgia, joy and abundance, pain forgotten around a table laden with broken bread and the velvet tastes of red wine, an encore, and they file out, nine young performers, their voices, talents, bodies, discipline, huge eyes and those hands, reaching, searching, touching.

The warmth of the heart

We were in Tbilisi over Easter, the main festival in Georgia.  Like Christmas at home, it's a time for visiting, feasting, opening the home to friends and relatives.  It struck me that in every home we visited, there was an elderly mother, living with her children and grandchildren.  Sometimes she was helping, bringing dishes and glasses to the table, sometimes she was barely seen, slipping from bedroom to kitchen or bathroom, then disappearing like a shadow back into her own room. 

We heard many conflicting stories about this living arrangement.  Sometimes the mother, or more commonly the mother-in-law, was a nuisance, vetoing home improvements or complaining about the absence abroad of a son or daughter.  Usually she was a much-loved and natural baby-sitting, looking after her grandchildren so that daughters and daughter-in-laws could work.  When people talked about these women, there was a mix of love and exasperation but never a question of changing the status quo.

When I came home, I read, after hearing some of it on R4's Book of the Week, Marie de Hennezel's The Warmth of the Heart Stops the Body from Rusting - a polemic about aging and how it is dreaded in our culture.  Without wanting to romanticise the Georgian approach, it seems to me that living with the extended family, joining in the singing at an Easter feast, then slipping away into one's own room when one wants, wouldn't be an unpleasant way of getting old.