PRIVATE EYE – STILL GOING AFTER 50 YEARS. NO POSSIBLE SEGUE: THE NATIONAL THEATRE’S CURRENT OFFERINGS AND DAVID HOCKNEY AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY
The other day I picked up a copy of Private Eye – and it remains remarkable to me how incisive and well informed it is after 50 years. As they say on their subscription page however, things don’t change too much. The 50th Anniversary issue cover shows two pictures, 1961 – Harold Macmillan; 2011 – David Cameron. Underneath the Macmillan picture it says: ‘Magazine pokes fun at Old Etonian Prime Minister surrounded by cronies making a hash of running the country.’ Underneath the Cameron picture it says: ‘Er...’.
There is so much to enjoy in the Eye. One of their very clever and newer features is called Pseudo Names: here are some of this week’s entries:
...After all the rich Christmas fare, it is a relief to get back to plain, simple food.
BRENDAN BUTTER
...To cap a bothersome year, Miriam and I look unlikely to be invited to Heather Mills’ again next Christmas. This year’s festive prank went down VERY badly.
NICK CLEGG
Here in Venezuela, seasonal festivities certainly went with a bang!
CHRIS MASS (CARACAS)
I was wondering if you could help. What language do Merkel and Sarkozy speak when they hug?
LYN GWISTIX
How dare the Bishop of Nottingham say that my 3-wheeler taxi isn’t suitable for Sherwood Forest?
FRIAR TUK-TUK
I keep sending you examples of witty names that I keep making up, but you never print them. Am I wasting my time?
NOAH VALE
The problem with Pseudo Names is that they are not witty enough. Now if you had only asked me to...(cont. p. 94)
HUGH JEEGO
You see what I mean?
Moving on from Private Eye it is now time to report to you on my latest 24 hours in the smoke. The closing words of my friend Philippa Dickins’ report on Mike Leigh’s new play at the National, ‘Grief’, were ‘I don’t know why he wrote it really.’ Having now seen the play, I have to concur. If you wish to study the double bind effect in the family, then Ken Loach’s 1971 film, ‘Family Life’, about the descent into madness of a young girl, scores 10/10 compared with this Leigh vehicle which perhaps merits 3/10. The Loach film was heavily influenced by that Guru of the 1960’s, Ronald D Laing, the trendy psychiatrist, whose thesis was that the ultimate expression of the mad individual was a response to the external influences and pressures of the family. In the film, one unconsciously recalls the most famous of Larkin’s poems and the line: ‘They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad. They do not mean to...’ The brilliance of the film is that one first of all discovers a pleasant normal girl, and then follows her deterioration, bit by bit. In the Leigh play, this deterioration has already mostly taken place, and there is no opportunity to sympathise with the unfortunate girl before her downward progress. It’s told in irritating little vignettes. The acting by the entire cast is brilliant, and will I am sure be seen in Leigh circles as vindicating the quality of the play. Looking at the sitting room however, where all of the action takes place, and remembering my Grandparents’ sitting room, and indeed our own for a time, there is one important thing missing: a radio or a radiogram. In the 1950s, the only entertainment was the radio. People talked about it all the time. ‘Did you hear Hancock’s Half Hour?’ ‘Wasn’t The Clitheroe Kid funny?’ ‘What about Arthur Askey?’ One reviewer perceptively stated that he had the answer to all Mike Leigh’s characters’ problems: a television set. Michael Billington pointed out that in this late period of the 1950s, more than half of the population had a television set. My own family did not, but it was quite normal in those days to be invited round to friends to watch programmes, but Mr Leigh had evidently decided that this was not going to help his characters out. Enough. Mike Leigh – one reviewer called him the inheritor of Rattigan’s tradition. What balls. Leigh doesn’t draft out a proper plot as Rattigan or Priestley or any other dramatists do – he starts with the actors, no plot, and it shows.
I won’t spend too much time on Travelling Light either – also at the National, just opened. The play was by Nigel Wright, the adaptor of ‘His Dark Materials’. It seems to be a vehicle for Anthony Sher to get into Topol costume in a Shtetl in Eastern Europe, but not to do any singing. There is some soulful Yiddish background music and a short piece by a young violinist, but that is it. One reviewer wrote about the excitement of the characters discovering techniques for splicing film together to create a story, but I have to say, it was terribly contrived. The early Jewish pioneers of cinema also don’t emerge well from an autobiography published by the last survivor of silent cinema, Frederica Sagor Maas who died this week aged 111 years. She wrote screenplays, and saw most of her work appropriated by others, reworked with no attribution, and diddled out of what was her due. The book was called ‘The Shocking Miss Pilgrim’ and may perhaps now be reissued due to the interest in silent film that the new movie ‘The Artist’ has engendered. In ‘Travelling Light’ I had hoped that when the action moved to Hollywood in the second act that it might improve, but no, pretty soon we were back in the Shtetl in Fiddler on the Roof land. The gentleman sitting next to me didn’t applaud at all. I think he was Jewish (quite a lot of the audience were). He observed that he couldn’t understand why Jakob (Anthony Sher) had a Russian instead of a Yiddish accent. We agreed that the characters were cartoon characters, and not real people at all. Another gentleman with a Yarmulka and a Glaswegian accent observed that it was a Polish accent. Oy veh, does it matter? No, I think is the answer.
Our brief stay was redeemed by a visit on Sunday morning to the David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy. This uplifting exhibit of a huge number of Hockney works will do wonders for tourism in East Yorkshire, and particularly the Yorkshire Wolds. Most of the work is landscape of one sort or another. Many in oil, some in watercolour, and most of the recent works done on an i pad. These i pad paintings are wonderful. With many of his studio works done from drawings and from the use of imagination, the vibrant colours suggest a modern day Van Gogh at work. A review suggests that what Constable has done for Suffolk and Turner for the East Kent coast, Hockney has now done for Yorkshire.
That’s enough for now, folks. ‘Got no bags and baggage to slow me down; I’m a-travellin’ so fast my feet aint touching the ground; Travellin’ Light; woh woh woh... woe is me. Oy veh.
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