Comedy and drama

There is a TV series running at the moment called Death in Paradise. It is described as a comedy drama but is in fact not in the least funny or dramatic. It has reminded me of something I once saw many years ago in Pyongyang, also with Paradise in its title; this was tremendously dramatic as well as funny, though the comedy was unintentional.

It was a sort of musical, though in The Democratic People's Republic of Korea they call them revolutionary operas. As I have noted before, the musical theatre thrives in Pyongyang as nowhere else; this production was in 1976, but there is no reason to suppose that this and similar productions are not still going on and on like a lot of mousetraps.

It was, and probably still is, called Song of Paradise, a "heightened paean for the advantages and great vitality of our socialist system... another monumental masterpiece adding radiance to the great flourishing Juche art... a high tribute to the illustrious line on literature and art enunciated by the respected and beloved leader".

The number being sung here is the first act closer, called A Love Much Deeper Than the Deepest Sea, and they sing:
Our fatherly leader's love that is warm and unlimited...
Our hearts throbbed with emotion profound
When he hugged us still damp from the sea-wind.
... though no doubt it has lost something in translation. The scene comes at the moment when "Deep-sea fishermen are moved to tears to hear the glad news that they will enjoy one-month holidays with their families in Mt Kumgang-san thanks to the Great and Respected Leader's loving care and attention."

It looks to me as if two quite separate announcements are being made simultaneously, one stage left and one stage right, and I cannot remember why this was, but anyway it was a splendid ensemble number. They all seemed very happy in their stylish deep-sea fishing uniforms.

The G and R Leader referred to here is, of course, the late Kim Il Sung whom we called Chubby-Chops when none of his subjects were listening, and it may be that by now the lyrics have been amended to transfer the credit to his son Kim Jong Il, the Dear Leader.

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The skull on the mantelpiece

N.F. Simpson, who recently died aged 92, wrote a play called The One Way Pendulum; I have treasured lines from it for years, including these:

"What's it for?"

"Oh, it's a memento mori. Supposed to remind you of death."

"And does it?"

"No, damn thing hasn't worked since we got it."

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Jackson's crazy ideas

No, not that Jackson.

When stupid, ignorant people tell you that they believe in something very silly there's no point in arguing with them; that's what stupid, ignorant people do, they believe in very silly things. What is really depressing is to discover that a person for whom one had respect or even admiration has inexplicably picked up some crackpot notion and is enthusiastically promoting it.

I sent this email about three weeks ago to the star of Women in Love, Elizabeth R, A Touch of Class and many other acclaimed films and plays:

(An open letter: to be posted on the internet early in April)

Dear Glenda Jackson

I was surprised and disappointed to find that your name appears on the list of MPs supporting David Tredinnick's Early Day Motion dissenting from to the recent Science and Technology Select Committee’s report on homeopathy. The motion calls for this quackery to be encouraged and funded by the government and the NHS.

Looking at the record of your distinguished career in Parliament I do not see that you have ever before espoused so disreputable a cause, and it is very hard to believe that you have thought seriously about what exactly it is that you are supporting, and just who it is whose ridiculous views you appear to share.

A glance at any of these webpages will perhaps give you some reasons why you should think again:
http://www.dcscience.net/?p=2829
http://www.quackometer.net/blog/2010/03/mp-david-tredinnick-is-wrong-about-the-homeopathy-report.html
http://layscience.net/node/943
http://omf.blogspot.com/2010/02/sugar-pills-and-water-on-nhs.html

I understand that you will be seeking election in the revised Hampstead constituency. I am not now a resident but I do have family, friends, and acquaintances who live there. Many of them might well be voting for you, and I will be writing to all of them before polling day making them aware of your views on this matter. However much they admire your stance on other past and current issues, it may be that they will not be at all keen to return to Westminster an MP who subscribes to these absurd and harmful superstitions.

Yours, etc.


[I don't really expect to get an any response to this. Most MPs, particularly those who are celebrities outside parliament, have no time to engage in correspondence with non-constituents, though I suppose conscientious ones might get someone to glance at their messages in case any are of interest.]

Back again

After leaving home briefly to take a satisfactory if not particularly enjoyable break in the Arctic wastes of Sussex, I have returned to a changed world:

Eighty-nine-years-old Mickey Rooney has finished his stint in Milton Keynes as Baron Hardup in Cinderella, a role which he had already played in Sunderland a couple of years ago. I am sorry I missed his performance.

Common themes

Playwright David Edgar, in a fascinating piece in the Guardian, notes that the same summary can describe more than one play, film or story, thus:

A town is threatened by a malevolent force of nature. A leading citizen seeks to take the necessary action to protect the community from this danger, but finds that the economic interests of the town are ranged against him and he ends up in battle alone (Jaws, Ibsen's An Enemy of the People).

Two sisters are unjustly preferred over a third sister. Despite their efforts, the youngest sister marries into royalty and her wicked siblings are confounded. (The situation at the beginning of both King Lear and Cinderella.)

A husband and wife are at war. A younger influence enters their lives, providing a sexual temptation which threatens the marriage. But ultimately, they discover that, although they find it hard to live together, they cannot live apart. (A host of 19th- and 20th-century marriage plays, including Strindberg's The Dance of Death, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Noël Coward's Private Lives and John Osborne's Look Back in Anger.)

And, Edgar says, he's not the first one to spot the parallels between the tragedy of Hamlet and that of Diana, Princess of Wales:
With her father's encouragement, a young woman allows herself to be wooed and wed by a prince. Her brother moves a long way away. The prince behaves increasingly peculiarly, and, shortly after the death of the woman's father, leaves on board ship. The woman goes mad, alarms the royal family, gives everybody flowers, escapes from her minders, and dies in a suspicious accident. The brother returns, angry, at the head of a popular army. There is a contest over the funeral arrangements between family, church and state. The prince returns and he and the woman's brother end up fighting over the coffin.

Two films

Last week I went to see the touring production of Emma Rice's ingenious multimedia take on David Lean's film Brief Encounter. Afterwards I remembered that some years ago I had a stimulating argument with my friend Pavlovsky who, like me, had seen both the 1945 film and also a 1956 film called The Bespoke Overcoat.

We differed strongly about the relative virtues of the two, not so much in terms of their artistic merit—we found both of them satisfying—but as serious studies of aspects of the human condition.

Pavlovsky maintained that The Bespoke Overcoat dealt with the eternal verities of life, death and poverty, while Brief Encounter merely depicted hypocrisy and repression among the suburban middle classes and their obsession with respectability.

Nonsense, I said, Brief Encounter tackled profoundly the great themes of love and renunciation, and The Bespoke Overcoat was just an amusing bit of Jewish whimsy.

Looking back on the discussion, we were probably both right.

Back from the Orient

Welcome home, Beatrice and Grumio. Fitzrovia was not the same without its Golden Couple.

Funny how things work out

As I mentioned the other day, I used to review West End plays from time to time for a chain of provincial weekly newspapers, and once I was sent to Les Trois Mousquetaires at the Piccadilly Theatre. This was a burlesque of 17th century swashbucklers devised by Roger Planchon's company, which had transferred from the Edinburgh Festival for a brief season in London.

[By coincidence, just after I had written the above but before I had posted it, I read that Roger Planchon has died aged 77.]

It was based on Dumas' play and had much of his plot going at a terrific clip, with the Cardinal Duc de Richelieu concocting villainy and an omelette simultaneously, Sa Grace le Duc de Buckingham bathing and being murdered in a barrel and of course the Musketeers, killing the wrong people and generally making pests of themselves. Around these, and a fatuous Louis Treize and his Queen with assorted hangers-on, revolved an engaging farce; for good measure, parodies of Brecht and Claudel were thrown in.

At one point Buckingham shouts, pointlessly, "My kingdom for a horse!", but apart from that it was all in French. I had been taught the language at school for eight years, but when I went to France for the first time I had found that I didn't know enough of it to buy a pack of cigarettes, let alone follow a play, so I thought I'd better get someone to come with me to help.

A French friend of mine was living in England at the time and introduced me to his sister, who had come over to stay with him for a while. She had previously lived over here as a child and gone to the Lycée Française in London, so I knew that she would be able to translate into English for me when necessary and I asked her to come to the play with me. She accepted the invitation, the evening passed off very agreeably and it was a long time before she returned to France.

Reader, I married her.

Part-time hack

Back in the sixties I wrote a letter to a local paper (I had a lot of time on my hands) expressing some trenchant views about a concert hall complex that had just been built in the town, and the Arts Editor rang me up and asked if I would like to be Architectural Correspondent. I was greatly flattered but confessed that I didn't know anything about architecture, and he asked hopefully if there was anything at all I did know anything about. I told him that I went to the pictures once or twice a week and he told me that they already had a film critic but they were always looking for people to join their panel of theatre critics. I said OK and thus began ten happy years of part-time employment.

The paper was part of a large group with half a dozen weekly titles circulating in an area with a population of 350,000, so they had a lively Arts Section and published critical reviews, not just puffs written by cub reporters, of nearly every theatrical production, amateur and professional, in the area. They also covered London theatres, so although I had to spend many hours attending school plays and such delights as the St Barnabus Players doing Quiet Wedding for the fourth time, and trying to think of something constructive and fair to say about them, I had my reward once a month or so when it became my turn to be sent two tickets for the third (provincial press) night of a new play in the West End.

Thus it was that for a few years I had some memorable evenings at the theatre, free, with my fares paid and a small fee. These included, for example, a new play by Harold Pinter, and here is my somewhat jejune review of it written forty-nine years ago:

I was paid a total of one pound four shillings and fourpence: one (old) penny a line, five and sixpence for fares and sixpence for a programme. This seemed quite a lot at the time and actually it was: today, the programme alone would cost several pounds, and with train fares from the suburbs an evening for two in a West End theatre would cost you at least sixty times as much as I got for writing this piece. Also, by contributing a weekly 500-word piece of whimsy for the same papers I brought my total earnings from journalism up to £5 a week, which in the early sixties represented a 40% bonus to my salary as an Export Manager.

Reviews often appeared in the national dailies before I saw new plays, and I never allowed myself to look at them before writing at least a draft of my own; not only would I have been influenced by the views of my professional betters, but I would probably have been tempted to lift some of their witticisms and pass them off as my own.

[By the way, none of the original cast of The Caretaker are still with us. Peter Woodthorpe was the last to go, in 2004; he had a brilliant career in Beckett and Shakespeare but did not often achieve the heights later and is remembered today chiefly as the gravel-voiced pathologist Max in many episodes of the TV Inspector Morse.]
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And practically no blood

Just lately both large and small screens seem to have been offering me a diet very heavy on gritty realism, horror and steamy sex. But not everyone wants to be depressed, frightened or titillated all the time, with only turgid slabs of overdressed historic royalty or bonnet-wearers for relief. The other evening I found a corrective in a splendid bit of good-natured tosh from more than half a century ago: Call Me Madam.

The topical jokes mean nothing now (who remembers that Harry S Truman's daughter Margaret had a singing career?), but this was the second most successful of Irving Berlin's Broadway musical scores and the film is still a treasure: it's got Ethel Merman belting it out with much more style than Streisand, and, above all, it's got Donald O'Connor. Never mind about his cheeky, wholesome image, when he was not fooling about he had Astaire's kind of ineffable grace as a dancer: like Mozart and Gielgud, he was the type of artist which Nietsche called the Appollonian*: "the classic whose deepest and saddest utterances can never take a form that is not shapely and rounded".

*As opposed to the Dionysiac, "the blows of whose gigantic hammer and chisel are still visible on the marble of his noblest masterpieces" (Beethoven, Olivier).

Bunbury in London

On January 31st 1939 there was a revival of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Globe Theatre. The doyen of English theatre critics at the time had this to say about the cast:

Mr Gielgud, rightly aiming at the humourlessness of John Worthing, conveys a sense of dudgeon... probably the part is unplayable, for how to reconcile humourlessness with the invention of that brother?... Miss Joyce Carey's Gwendolen and Miss Angela Baddeley's Cecily... are not more consciously inane or unconsciously dewy than any other ingenues in any other comedy... And now let me say that the farce comes to full flowering in the persons of Miss Margaret Rutherford's Prism and Miss Evans's Lady Bracknell. Of Miss Rutherford I must be content to say that she could not miss perfection if she aimed wide of it, while to do Miss Evans anything approaching justice would require a whole essay... As long as she is on stage one has no doubt about anything except the relative grandeur of Lady Bracknell's upholstery, and those two hats in one of which swans nest while in the other all the fowls of Rostand's Chantecler come to roost.

In Anthony Asquith's film made thirteen years later the performances of Margaret Rutherford and Edith Evans were, happily, preserved for all time, but the ingenues had to be replaced, for they were hardly dewy, even in 1939: Angela Baddeley was 35 then (and in 1971-75 became Mrs Bridges in all five TV series of Upstairs, Downstairs), while Joyce Carey was 41: in 1945 she was the station buffet attendant Myrtle Bagot in Brief Encounter who flirted decorously with Stanley Holloway ("I'm sure I don't know to what you're referrin'... ").

Isn't it a nobby one?

Where did you get that hat?
Where did you get that tile?
Isn't it a nobby one
And just the proper style?
I should like to have one
Just the same as that

Wherever I go they'd shout "Hello!

Where did you get that hat?"

Joseph J Sullivan had been a blackface comedian and acrobatic singer (?) who introduced this song at Miners Eighth Avenue Theatre in New York in 1888. It became an immediate hit and the title became a slang catch phrase; the song then crossed the Atlantic to make its mark on the British music hall. The words above are the amended ones written later by James Rolmaz and sung by J G Heffron.

You can get the tune as a ringtone, but never let it ring in Saint Peter's.

The curtain will rise...

One of the best examples of man's tendency to hold on to an ideal long after experience has rudely shattered it may be seen in our attitude to the theatre bar in the interval. In the practical daytime, when the anticipation of a night at the theatre flits into our minds, we see ourselves, like people in an advertisement, in some elegant foyer with palms and flowers and flunkeys; men are clean-cut, in beautifully tailored clothes, with that standard, young lieutenant-colonel kind of face, one hand in trousers-pocket. Girls are in ballet-length dresses, smiling up at escorts.

In this mental picture we have, there seem to be about twenty-five minutes for relaxed, sophisticated talk about the play. No rude bells sound in this dream, no-one ever has just beer, or coffee. And, most of all, there is no hint of the sordid struggle by which drinks are actually obtained in real life. The mind closes over this aspect of it like a self-sealing petrol tank.

Now I come to think about it, though, nobody else does seem to have this struggle except me, because all the other people in the bar are terrific personalities. It is only I who seem to be a normal, humdrum man, unable to attract the servers. Every time I try to get a drink in a theatre bar I make a resolution to come next time on stilts, making myself nine feet high, to wear a red beard, and to demand drink with Latvian oaths. I stand sideways on to the bar and gradually work forward until I have one elbow on it, and finally two. But before I can do this the man in front, holding two glasses, steps back from the counter. I politely make way for him and somebody on the other side of him immediately steps into his place.

When I do get to the front, I am always faced either by a large bowl of flowers or I am in a kind of no man's land between two servers who, if they ever hear my despairing cry, "two gin and—", hiss "Just a minute" crossly at me through teeth which are holding a twenty-pound note. Normally they don't say anything at all; they are too busy flying up and down whisking bottles open for people who seem to be ordering enough refreshment for a Watteau country picnic.

Yet the other people have such personality that they can get served simply by speaking in cool, authoritative voices from wherever they happen to be. "Six champagnes, please," says a plummy-voiced well-bathed man in a velvet jacket who is standing directly behind me. I have a strange feeling that I am getting smaller and smaller.

Sometimes, when I get a seat at the end of a row, the moment the curtain has come down on the first act I rush to what is sometimes called the saloon, which usually turns out to be on the other side of the theatre. Then after I have rushed up and down flights of stone steps so long and untheatrical that I am surprised not to find myself coming out under Blackfriars Bridge, the place is already full when I get there.

Acknowledgements to Paul Jennings

Higgins and Eliza

Last week I saw Peter Hall’s production of Pygmalion at the Old Vic and realised that I had never seen the play on the stage before, though I had always vaguely imagined that I had, having read it at school and seen the 1938 Asquith/Howard film and, of course, My Fair Lady.

One line struck me as odd, and with the help of the invaluable Gutenberg Project I was able to check that I had not misheard it (and at the same time read Shaw’s preface and appendix). It came towards the end of the scene after the ball, when Eliza says she is leaving:

…ELIZA. All I want to know is whether anything belongs to me. My own clothes were burnt.
HIGGINS. But what does it matter? Why need you start bothering about that in the middle of the night?
LIZA. I want to know what I may take away with me. I don't want to be accused of stealing.
HIGGINS [now deeply wounded] Stealing! You shouldn't have said that, Eliza. That shows a want of feeling.
LIZA. I'm sorry. I'm only a common ignorant girl; and in my station I have to be careful. There can't be any feelings between the like of you and the like of me. Please will you tell me what belongs to me and what doesn't?
HIGGINS [very sulky] You may take the whole damned houseful if you like. Except the jewels. They're hired. Will that satisfy you? [He turns on his heel and is about to go in extreme dudgeon.]
LIZA [drinking in his emotion like nectar, and nagging him to provoke a further supply] Stop, please. [She takes off her jewels.] Will you take these to your room and keep them safe? I don't want to run the risk of their being missing.
HIGGINS [furious] Hand them over. [She puts them into his hands.] If these belonged to me instead of to the jeweller, I'd ram them down your ungrateful throat. [He perfunctorily thrusts them into his pockets, unconsciously decorating himself with the protruding ends of the chains.]
LIZA [taking a ring off] This ring isn't the jeweller's: it's the one you bought me in Brighton. I don't want it now.

Brighton? BRIGHTON? Taking a girl to Brighton or to its neighbouring resort (...people will say we’re in Hove...), and buying her a ring there, has an implication quite foreign to everything that is clear about the relationship between Higgins and Eliza; there is no reference anywhere in the play to them going there with Colonel Pickering for a jolly day at the races. Was this carelessness on Shaw’s part, or was the old devil just dropping a mischievous hint to confuse us?

[Oh, another line in that scene has Eliza saying “..the like of you and the like of me…”. The likes, surely?]

If the stage directions are clear and comprehensive—as Shaw’s usually are—reading the text of a play can tell you just how closely a production is following the playwright’s intentions. The very last scene in Pygmalion goes like this:

LIZA. Then I shall not see you again, Professor. Good bye. [She goes to the door.]
MRS. HIGGINS [coming to Higgins] Good-bye, dear.
HIGGINS. Good-bye, mother. [He is about to kiss her, when he recollects something.] Oh, by the way, Eliza, order a ham and a Stilton cheese, will you? And buy me a pair of reindeer gloves, number eights, and a tie to match that new suit of mine, at Eale & Binman's. You can choose the colour. [His cheerful, careless, vigorous voice shows that he is incorrigible.]
LIZA [disdainfully] Buy them yourself. [She sweeps out.]
MRS. HIGGINS. I'm afraid you've spoiled that girl, Henry. But never mind, dear: I'll buy you the tie and gloves.
HIGGINS [sunnily] Oh, don't bother. She'll buy ‘em all right enough. Good-bye.
[They kiss. Mrs. Higgins runs out. Higgins, left alone, rattles his cash in his pocket; chuckles; and disports himself in a highly self-satisfied manner.]

As the curtain falls on the Peter Hall production, Higgins (the excellent Tim Pigott-Smith), alone on the stage, allows the self-satisfaction to drain from his face, and at the last second his expression suggests that he has realised that Eliza is lost to him. Although Shaw didn’t call for this, it is a fair interpretation, for in the appendix he explains exactly why Eliza will marry Freddy (and tells us what their future life will be like), and it is not unlikely that Higgins  finally worked this out.

Danse Macabre

I really cannot say why I find this picture of the Rambert Dance Company hugely funny, but I do, I do. Is it the sheer panache, or is it just the feet?

National Ballet

I have absolutely no comment to make on this picture

Business worries

Before Michael Frayn became a novelist and playwright he had regular columns in the Guardian and the Observer. Many of these pieces were later published as collections, and those lucky enough to have copies can happily revisit them. Here he is, forty years ago, describing the agony of the actors—and the audience—when there is a mishap on stage:

...I have a haunting fear that one night when I'm present some piece of business is going to go so completely wrong that the play as written cannot proceed at all, and the actors will be reduced to improvising some new line of development entirely. Take the famous Locket scene at the end of Error for Error, when young Ferdinand shows Duke Oregano and the assembled court the locket which proves he is the Duke's son, carried off at birth by a waterspout. Suppose that after the lines -
A locket sav'd I from that spoutsome day,
Most curiously incrib'd. I have it here.
Ferdinand tosses the vital instrument to the Duke, and the Duke fumbles it and drops it out of sight. What can they do, except make the rest of the scene up as they go along?

DUKE: Alas! Methinks I have misfinger'd it!

FERDINAND: Sire, bend thou down thine aged frame
And do thou smartly pluck it up again.

DUKE: Bend as I might, I cannot see the thing.
My lords, do you explore your cloggy beards.
No sign? Ah me, I fear it must have roll'd
Amid this mazy grove of cardboard trees.

FERDINAND: Was not one glance as it came winging by
Enough to grasp the general sense of it?
- That here before thee stands thy long-lost son?

DUKE: A fig for your problems - what worrieth me
Is how I speak my major speech, which starts;
'Come, locket, let me kiss thee for thy pains,
And taste the savour of fidelity,'
Without the bloody locket. Come, let's shift
This forest. Take the yonder end and heave.

FERDINAND: Is this meet welcome for a long-lost son?

DUKE: Meet welcome for a long-lost son, forsooth!
What kind of long-lost son is this, that chucks
Essential props outside my senile reach,
And cuts his long-lost father's longest speech?
Lose thee again, son, till thou learnst at last
The art of throwing props and not the cast.

Sagesse Normande

Here’s the little fellow at the Empress Hall, London, in 1951 (the music stand was set too high for him).
It looks as if he was a fair athlete, but he was never very funny, his comedy act consisting mainly of using a silly voice, putting his cap on crooked, doing up his jacket on the wrong button and falling over. But perhaps we missed something: Charlie Chaplin called Wisdom his "favourite clown”, and his films outsold Sean Connery's James Bond features from 1955 till 1966; they were said to be the direct descendants of the films made a generation earlier by George Formby, who was not in the least funny.

He was nominated for a Tony Award in 1966 and was a success in America, though only moderately and briefly (unlike Benny Hill— also admired by Chaplin—who was inexplicably popular over there).

Wisdom is a well-known and loved cult film icon in Albania and was the only Western actor whose films were allowed in the country during the Communist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. The archetypal Wisdom plot where the common working man gets the better of his bosses was considered ideologically sound by Hoxha. In 1995, he visited the post-Stalinist country, where to his surprise he was greeted by many appreciative fans including the then-president of Albania, Sali Berisha.

Sir Norman is 92, bless him.

Serendipity

Forgetting it was Sunday when the TV schedules are all over the place, I switched on for the lunchtime news and found myself in the middle of Eastenders, which I hadn’t seen for many years; by an extraordinary piece of luck I had tuned in just in time to catch a line of dialogue which must be one of the finest in the soap’s twenty-two year history.

I never latched on to the background of the episode, but playing a major part in it was a sad, lonely, fat, unattractive woman who I gathered had, apart from all her other problems, lost her job. She gave out a wail of anguish comparable to Ian McKellen’s in his 1969 Richard II: “I live with bread like you, feel want, taste grief, need friends", when he made the last two words a cry full of pain and desolation. The memory of the line from Eastenders will stay with me for a very long time:

“I’m not even good enough to sell cheese!”

Joining in

Who has not wanted to join in when people are dancing?



In the wings of a theatre in 1956, a charlady joins in a group dancing audition.