Edward Bennett as Hamlet
In Hamlet, the RSC have, by far, their best production of the year. Last night at the Novello Theatre, an enthusiastic audience rose to their feet in standing ovation to reward the actors on the conclusion of an oustanding performance.
On Friday, I was in Stratford-Upon-Avon, once more, for the Royal Shakespeare company’s latest production of Romeo and Juliet. It has been an interesting year for the RSC with receipts up because of David Tennant’s involvement in Hamlet and Love’s Labour’s lost but some mixed reviews and varying quality and conceptualisation of productions.
Harold Pinter does strange things with words.
It’s not just the obligatory Pinteresque pause that everyone mentions. He takes them from their normal surroundings and imbues them with a sense of tension which, in his best work, is never resolved. It simply hangs.
A few days ago, I caught the production of his “The Birthday Party” at the Lyric theatre, Hammersmith, London (just down the road from the place I live, which is handy).
I first read the The Birthday Party a long time ago. This was in the early 1980s. I’d started reading Beckett and Brecht and then I stumbled on Pinter. In the town I grew up in, you didn’t get productions of Pinter, Beckett or ANYTHING. It was like living in a cultural vacuum. So if you were young and precocious, you read play scripts and tried to visualise what it would be like. I visualise better than most. I learned earlier. It was about putting a little colour into life – you get so sick of black and white.
So I read everything that Pinter had written that I could lay my hands on. The Homecoming, The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Dumb Waiter, Betrayal, A Kind of Alaska (maybe that was later, it seems that way), Old Times, No Man’s Land were some of the plays I remember reading back then and always in his best plays it was the tension and the transitions that he captured that got me and kept me reading. There was also a screenplay for “A la recherche du temps perdu” by Proust which I loved and admired greatly.
There are many writers whose best work is in the past and, for myself, I regard Pinter in that way. I can’t admire his politics and his recent public pronouncements just simply needed a certain degree of proportion and that is what a writer should have. I think Pinter has lost some of that measure that he had when he was a younger man.
So it was good to see one of his old plays. “The Birthday Party” is, if anything, perhaps a little too early. He is still learning the craft that fired that tension that interested me, at this point. The third act largely exorcises that malevolence that he has spent two acts creating. It resolves some of the issues and if Pinter has a strength it is that he taught the theatre that things don’t have to be resolved.
In The Birthday Party, Meg and Petey, a married couple, live with their guest, Stanley Webber. Nothing much changes in their lives. Lulu, apparently a neighbour, flirts with Stanley but nothing much goes on beyond the routine of daily meals, newspapers, a time for bed and a time to rise. All this changes when Meg is told that two visitors are coming. It is then that all of life’s possibilities break out and things begin to fall apart.
The words are clever and even some times funny. It is the characters’ response to simple words and simple encounters that places them on the rack and stretches them and allows their potentialities to burst open.
Stanley (advancing): They are coming today.
Meg: Who?
Stanley: They are coming in a van.
Meg: Who?
Stanley: And do you know what they’ve got in that van?
Meg: What?
Stanley: They’ve got a wheelbarrow in that van.
Meg (breathlessly): They haven’t.
Stanley: Oh yes, they have.
Meg: You’re a liar
“The Birthday Party” teaches us that those who are fully awake are changed by encounters. Those who prefer not to change (like Petey in the play) can remain that way but only by sleepwalking through life’s experiences.
The play is loaded with possibilities. The fact that McCann and Goldberg (two visitors at what is apparently <perhaps> a coastal boarding house are Irish and Jewish respectively loads their mission <should it exist> with all manner of possibilities – religious, political, cultural. All we know is that this is the twentieth century and their purpose, should they have one, could be sinister. We’re not sure how much of what happens is real or if any of it is dream. The import is not in the action but in the words – what is said and what is not said and how the characters and the audience react to what they hear and what they are not told.
The current production is at a close now. For the record, Nicholas Woodeson and Lloyd Hutchinson as McCann and Goldberg were excellent with the right air of purpose but with so much hidden. Sian Brooke as Lulu had just a little too much class and was a little too pretty (if you’re going to come up short, it’s not a bad way to do it). Sheila Hancock as Meg was a little too aware of herself and the play and her costume in the first act was just a little too stereotyped. She played for laughs sometimes that the play did not need.
Meg’s character is potentially the most mysterious of all in a strange way, if handled well. On the face of it she is almost moronic and easily satisfied. Simple. But she has many layers. She wants to be sexually alluring to the guests (even Stanley). She wants social standing – her dwelling is “on the list” she insists, her guests found her to be the belle of the ball. She wants to mother Stanley. His birthday present from her is a child’s drum. She is made more distraught by its brokenness than by anything else. Petey assures it that it can be easily replaced but then he also assures her that Stanley is still upstairs at the conclusion of the play. Is he or is Stanley broken too? She wants the danger but not the threat of change but most of all she wants things just to stay the same.
It is a thought-provoking play. I’m glad to be still thinking about it.
The new John Foxx album arrived today. It’s a live album recorded on his “Metamatic” tour last Autumn. Entitled “A New Kind of Man”, it can only be obtained direct from Townsend Records ( www.townsend-records.co.uk ) under an exclusive deal that Foxx has with this outlet. As I understand it the release is limited to 1000 copies at the present time so will probably prove difficult to find in the long term.
The album carries 17 tracks which were recorded across the tour and selected by John and his musical partner Louis Gordon. Consequently, it has performances of the 10 tracks which originally made up the “Metamatic” album in 1980 and 7 recordings of additional tracks which were from the same era. These are the instrumentals: “Film One” (B-side of Underpass); “Glimmer” (which was covered by cult electronic band, Sonic Dude for a single release in 1982); “Mr. No” (also covered by Sonic Dude and then the Foxx version was remixed for a DJ single a couple of years ago); and the vocal tracks: “This City” (part of the No-One Driving single package originally); “Burning Car” (a hit, of sorts, in its own right); “21st Century” (b-side of that hit then called “Twentieth Century”) and, finally, “My Face” which those of us of a certain age will remember was originally released on a yellow flexi-disc attached to the cover of Smash Hits.
Anyway, the tour was essential viewing and listening for those who like the in-vogue tours which revive a classic album in its entirety and the album is a great reminder of that and should be picked up by those who were there and those who were not.
(This was the original title. When it was published elsewhere, my editor chose to retitle the piece “Bob Dylan: The Spiritual Journey of a 20th Century Icon” which was not what I wanted AND rather seemed to miss my point)
When Leon Patillo was converted in the late seventies, the Christian music industry and its press was full of the news of the conversion of “Santana’s lead singer”. Those who are familiar with the music of Santana will know that the band revolves around and is named for its guitarist and has used a mammoth amount of vocalists over the last 30 years. But the facts don’t always get in the way of Christian reporting and a good story when it sees one.
Patillo may now only merit a footnote in the history of Contemporary Christian music but his launch into the Christian marketplace and its subculture was indicative of something that was going to happen time and time again in the late 70s and early 80s. The church had come to believe that celebrity converts in some ways added to the validity of the gospel. Perhaps if it waved the flag hard enough and high enough and showed that someone famous believed then those who didn’t would be persuaded by celebrity testimony.
Perhaps it was symptomatic of the times. It was the opening of an era in church life which was heavily influenced by the Vineyard fellowship, John Wimber and his teachings. The argument went something like this – if people see marvellous works of God then they would be persuaded of the validity of the gospel and accept Christ. Leaving aside troubling comments of Christ that suggested it was an adulterous generation that looked for a sign and that people would not be persuaded even if someone was raised from the dead, whatever the weaknesses of the theology and the theory of the church, the Vineyard movement would make a lasting impression on the church for the next two decades, until the passing of Wimber, its most persuasive advocate.
Which brings us to Bob Dylan. Not only was Dylan the height of the cult of the celebrity convert, his conversion occurred whilst he was under the auspices of the Vineyard movement. After his conversion, Dylan immediately began to record exclusively gospel songs and began to perform in concert in a way that was out of keeping with the first twenty years of his career. Someone who previously had needed to be encouraged to say “Thank You” between songs and who evaded questions presented by the press, now began to preach sermons about Armageddon and give interviews about his new found faith. Sometimes he was booed and heckled whilst on stage whilst others talked about it all being “a phase”. In 1982, he reverted to type refusing to talk about much of anything once more. He left Vineyard, began to study Scripture, occasionally with the Jewish Lubavitch sect, and declined to host a gospel music awards show. The church that had a use for Dylan’s celebrity now had no use for him. His 1983 album “Infidels” was searched by the Christian press for the expected disowning of the Christian faith and when none came the religious press paid less and less attention to each subsequent Dylan album. The Dylan Christian era was over, it seemed.
twilightdawning 