The James plays

The James Plays

The earliest written use of the word ‘fuck’ probably appears in the play ‘Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis’ by Sir David Lindsay, first performed in full in 1552.  Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that Lindsay was Scottish.  Rona Munro, in her new plays about the first three James, Monarchs of Scotland, obviously assumed that it was in common currency in the 1400s too, so that at times the dialogue on stage in these plays reminds one of the standoffs that occur between rival Celtic and Rangers fans at an Old Firm game.

One of the lines which has become famous is uttered by Margaret, Princess of Denmark, in trying to hold things together at the end of James III.  ‘The trouble with you Scots is that you’ve got fuck all except attitude.’  And there is certainly plenty of attitude on stage, in fistfuls and often fisticuffs.  But at the end of all this, are the plays any good?

We saw James III first, were unable to see James II (which most critics, and certainly friends in Edinburgh thought was the weakest), and finished off with James I.  In James III, the King, tautly and edgily played by Jamie Sives was an excellent foil for the undoubted star of the show, Sofie Grȧbøl, the Danish actress with an impressive curriculum vitae.  Sofie is best known to English audiences as Detective Sarah Lund from ‘The Killing’, where she usually ventures into dark buildings armed only with a Faroe Island sweater and jeans.  In James III however she is exquisitely dressed, and both her appearance and acting are regal and dominating.  In fact her diction and her English is so perfect that I found myself wanting to hear her to speak with more of a Danish accent!  Halfway through the first act of James III (subtitled The True Mirror) I was unsure how it was that the Scottish nobles hadn’t managed to get rid of James already, with his unsufferable and unrealistic ideas, together with a complete absence of funds in the privy purse to achieve them.  But as in Hamlet, one can’t end the play too early.  When Hamlet catches Claudius at prayer, he is able to kill him easily, but fails to do so for another two hours; and so we have to plod on until eventually James exits stage front right with his paramour and a bit of gratuitous male nudity.  Hamlet is a good play to keep in mind.  The machinations of Claudius have nothing on some of the Scots kings and nobles...

James III is also, probably intentionally, the funnier play.  Because of his apparent devotion to the arts, there is much more music, expertly provided by a band on stage (Red Hot Chilli Pipers take a bow), and a remarkably apposite and enjoyable version of ‘Don’t you want me baby’ by the Human League is a highlight, together with well-executed dancing from the ensemble.  Much fun can be had with James’ lamentations that all Margaret has brought with her as a dowry from Denmark is the Orkney and Shetland Isles.  ‘They’re very beautiful’ says Margaret, ‘You should get your Navy to take you there sometime.’  ‘When I want to see a bunch of Danish castoffs shagging their livestock and making bootees out of herring skins I’ll be straight up there’ retorts James.

James I (subtitled The Key Will Keep the Lock) is darker, and I missed the band, though there is some music.  There is an overlong scene in the King’s bed in Act II, which would have benefited from some editorial cutting, or at least honing.  The cast does not seem to be as strong either.  James McArdle, as James I, has a disconcerting habit of pausing for dramatic effect, but in a way which makes one feel that unfortunately he has forgotten his lines.  But he does at least make a transition from timid prisoner of the English to regal status.  Stephanie Hyam, Queen Joan, is undoubtedly pretty, but her voice does not carry further than the first ten rows.  Do Directors sit at the back in rehearsals to assess diction and enunciation these days?  One wonders.

There is an enormous dramatic opportunity which Rona Munro has not missed for James I to make a statement about Scotland and the quintessence of being Scottish.  He has emerged from the chrysalis of long term internment in England, seemingly at the wish of Henry V, to unite the Scots and to become a friend to England (a little known fact of English history is that Agincourt was not the be all and end all of skirmishes between France and England in the early fifteenth century, and the Scots were quite capable of joining with the French to fight their traditional enemy of England).  Plus cą change.  So James returns to Scotland, and bearing in mind that these plays were performed in Edinburgh, shortly before the vote on Independence, he delivers a stirring speech which must have had them cheering to the rafters in Scotland.  At the National Theatre in London it seemed to be absorbed, just like Queen Joan’s diction, about halfway back in the Olivier Theatre’s comfortable padded seats.

There is much more than narrow Nationalism in the plays however.  The central theme is Kingship, and its use and abuse.  How to be a King is a recurring theme from Sophocles to Shakespeare.  The Key Will Keep the Lock refers to security and the rule of law which James is keen to implement.  James I gets it mostly right, but makes fatal errors.  James III never gets it right, but fortunately has Margaret to pick up the pieces.  There is something to enjoy in all this, especially James III, but Scottish ‘attitude’, especially in James I seems to be portrayed in a torrent of ‘fucking’.  Restraint is an excellent and too little used strategy.  In John Cleese’s famous sketch, where as Pope he is interviewing Michelangelo, he eventually comes out in exasperation with ‘I ought to know: I am the head of the fucking Catholic church’.  And the effect is uproarious.

‘You praise the verve with which they write,

I’m with you there of course.

They use the snaffle and the curb all right

But where’s the bloody horse?’

RIP (Restitutum In Patria – Gie us back wir Country) Alex Salmond.

A review by Andrew McLeod (Scottish but wasn't entitled to vote)

The Drowned Man: a Hollywood Fable

The Drowned Man

By: a Browned Off Man

Please, please, please don’t waste your time and money on this dreadful ‘con’.  If you’re interested in dance then it might have something for you – stay in the Tavern on the top floor and watch the show repeat at least a couple of times.  Then just before the end make your way to ‘Studio 2’ for the dance finale.

This show is put on by ‘Punchdrunk’ productions in association with the National Theatre.  By the end of the show you may be punchdrunk too.  They have hired out an ex-post office sorting warehouse just round the corner from St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington.  There is a portentous story line that there are two different versions of the Woyzeck (Georg Buchner) story going on.  As one enters it feels a little bit like the Tower of Terror in Disney World, but unfortunately the excitement pretty well ends there in the lift (elevator).  The story is happening in simultaneous vignettes in a number of rooms in this four storey warehouse.  It’s mostly rather dark and one is compelled to wear a mask.  Hints are to follow a cast member from scene to scene, but since there seem to be about 15 principal cast members and at a rough guess some 600 to 900 admittees, you can immediately work out that there is likely to be a minimum of 40 people trying to rush along behind the actor up the narrow stairs and along the passages in the dark to the next scenario.  We paid extra to be ‘premium’ guests which gained us entry to a control room which was supposed to add light to the proceedings but didn’t.  A pretty girl in the control room thrust a note into my hand which suggested I make my way two floors up to the tavern, and that I ‘come back and see me very soon’.  The tavern is the scene of the best set-piece dance in the show, and fortunately we saw it twice.

Don’t expect any dialogue – there isn’t any.  Another reviewer has questioned why this wasn’t billed as a dance event.

In fairness, there have been a number of reviews posted on sites such as Trip Advisor, and writers seem to be polarized one way or another, but my view concurs with several others which use the phrase ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ to describe this event.  If this is Immersive Theatre, I’ve been fully immersed and I’ve had it up to here.

Chiefly London - The Beauty Queen of Leenane - The Royal Academy - London Road

August 27^th to 29^th 2011

It started with the Cambridge Folk Festival, and that was how I came to catch a glimpse of Pete Chiodini after a gap of perhaps 35 years.  It finished with London Road, the play at the National (Cottesloe Theatre).  An interesting few days.

Earlier in the week I noticed that Sky Arts was carrying some of the highlight acts from the Cambridge Folk Festival, including Richard Thompson.  By the time I switched on one evening, it was bedtime, so I watched from the bed.  It seemed that I had missed Richard, so I watched what was on offer.  First up was the Webb sisters, one with harp the other on guitar.  Plangent harmonies as their Webb (sorry) site has it, they had rather ethereal voices and pleasant if mostly standard folk style tunes.  Then a very good US black blues oriented guitarist called Robert Cray.  After the show I drifted off slightly and Lindsay started channel hopping.  Lo and behold she came across a programme called ‘Help! I caught it abroad’.  Suddenly I sat up!  ‘That’s Pete Chiodini!’ I shouted.  Peter was my house physician when I was doing cardiology at King’s.  He was a brilliant young man, with a rather comic Chaplinesque moustache, which he obviously retains to this day.  He comes over as slightly geeky but brilliant, a veritable anorak of Tropical Disease.  Peter had early on decided that he wanted to do Tropical Medicine and, being very good, he obviously had little trouble in working his way to the navel of British tropical medicine, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, subsequently being honoured with a Professorship.  In the programme he was a fine advocate for all of the qualities that a good doctor should have – calm but enthusiastic, good with patients, and a good teacher.

Friday 26^th was the start of one of our cultural dashes to London.  Lindsay had read an account of a play performed at the Young Vic, called ‘The Beauty Queen of Leenane’ which had received the most fantastic reviews.  So – bookings made, and off we went.  Checked in at the RAF Club, parked in the Vinci car park at the bottom of Park Lane, and off we walked.  I went to the exhibition at the Royal Academy, Hungarian photography in the 20^th Century.  Lindsay went off to the Mephisto shop to try and find some new shoes.  The photographs feature some remarkable images, many of which are frequently reproduced.  The early ones by Rudolf Balogh show life of the peasants in rural Hungary.  Then there are the later ones including fashion photos by Kertesz and Munkacsi.  There is a whole section devoted to the war photography of Robert Capa.  Exhibitions at the RA, no matter how small, are always worth visiting.  We had tea and a muffin in the Friends Room at the RA – it’s not exactly cheap there.  Usually seems to be fairly full to me – not quite as relaxing as it would ideally be.

Walking on.  Caught in the occasional heavy showers just going over the Hungerford bridge.  Dashed for shelter under a plane tree by the King’s College building opposite Waterloo Station.  Eventually reached the Waterloo Bar and Grill at 119 Waterloo Bridge Road – the first on our list of possible places to eat, but in the circumstances the one that was the obvious choice.  Anna joined us later for a quick supper before we headed off to the Young Vic.

The play is by Martin McDonagh, and it is a revival – first done in 1996.  All Irish cast – essential really.  How would I describe it?  Well it’s like a modern version of ‘The Playboy of the Western World’.  Has the same rural and simple characters and a rather tragicomic feel.  I haven’t seen the Synge for many years so perhaps that’s as far as I can go in comparison.  It is certainly funny, sometimes laugh out loud funny, but there is a desperate, sad, and bleak feel to it.  All of the characters are unhappy in Connemara, but it does seem as though this is primarily for economic reasons – none of them have any money.  Even Pato Dooley, who is earning some money in England, is trying to get away, and eventually leaves for Boston, USA.

The play centres around Maureen Folan, who has to look after her miserable and manipulative old mother, Mag, who treats her like a skivvy.  I won’t spoil the plot in case you manage to see it (the current run is almost over), but don’t expect a Happy Ending...

I should say something about the set and a rather curious and creepy coincidence in the play.  All of the action takes place in the single living room of the Folan’s cottage in Connemara.  The old cast iron range has a pile of peat or turf beside it.  There is a newer gas stove and peeling Formica units.  On the wall is a framed photograph of Jack and Bobby Kennedy.  On another wall is a tea towel with the inscription ‘May you be half an hour in heaven before the Devil knows you’re dead.’  During the action of the play, a tatty old radio is sometimes switched on to hear the music and whether there have been any dedications (it turns out that Mag is hoping for a dedication from her other two daughters).  During the programme, a song starts playing.  It is ‘The Spinning Wheel’, a 1939 recording of a Victorian Irish song by Delia Murphy.  The song is brilliantly chosen for the action because it deals with a beautiful girl trying to escape her task of spinning to be with her lover while her drowsy old grandmother knits by the fireside.  This is a predicament mirrored in the play.  But what made the hairs on my neck stand up was the fact that my parents had this recording on an EP record, which was one of our very first purchases when we acquired a 33/45 rpm record player on moving to Fishguard in 1958.  I couldn’t say how many times I’ve listened to its gentle waltz theme – but I would say that although we played it to death after it was first purchased – it had probably not been played since about 1961 or 1962, and no doubt found its way into the skip when my parents died.  Although she had a beautiful voice, with accurate pitch, I always had the impression that the somewhat burbling sound that comes through in the record made it seem as though Delia was drunk.  Later in the play, when Maureen puts the song back on the radio, Pato describes it as ‘a creepy oul song’, and indeed, for me especially, it was.

I can write at more length about the play at the National.  It was headed for its last performance on the day we saw it.

We had a leisurely start on Saturday, and Lindsay was able to get to see the RA exhibition, and I bought a new lightweight Sprayway jacket at Cotswold, before we headed off to a pleasant and leisurely lunch at the Mezzanine Restaurant at the National.  Then into the Cottesloe!

Now Lindsay had checked this play out and decided that it sounded interesting, and was a sellout.  She managed to get tickets at short notice.  The subject matter, dealing with the serial killing of 5 prostitutes in Ipswich, reminded me of the time that I came back from the States and hit London for the first time in 20 months.  I asked Mike Weaver to get us tickets for ‘Another Country’, a new play, in late 1982.  His comment afterwards was ‘Fantastic, but I did ask myself beforehand, do I really want to spend an evening watching a play about homosexuality in a public school?  Didn’t really sound like my bag.’  You may recall that this was the play that first introduced us to the talents of Kenneth Branagh and Rupert Everett.  My feelings in 2011 were somewhat similar.  ‘London Road’ is named after the road which the newspapers in 2006-7 referred to as Ipswich’s Red Light District, after the murder of 5 prostitutes and the arrest of a fork lift truck driver called Steve Wright who lived in the road.  So once again I did ask myself, ‘A play about prostitutes in Ipswich, a happy way to spend Saturday afternoon; is this my bag?’    In addition, when I picked up the programme and it said, ‘Book and Lyrics by...’, I had another major sense of misgiving.  Oh no!  Not another bad musical.  However...

If this is ever produced again, and I expect it will be, I would urge you to go and see it.  Especially if you are interested in the process of theatre, the evolution of theatre, and novel ideas.  Every time I go to the National Theatre however I wonder if other companies could put such a production on.  In addition to about five musicians, there are 11 members of the cast.  So it’s not exactly cheap to put on, and isn’t Am-Dram material.  All the cast members are equal – there is no standout or main character, and in addition between them they play about 50 other characters, ranging from TV reporters to the prostitutes themselves.  The basic idea and technique is open to criticism.  It consists of verbatim interviews with the residents of London Road and other people in Ipswich, translated into a play which focuses on the lives of the people in the road, and their reaction to the events as they unfolded from December 2006.  In many ways this made for a better play than a play about Steve Wright himself, which could have been rather boring, and of course there had already been a play about the lives of several of the girls themselves produced for TV (heavily criticized by the girls’ families).  But to me the verbatim technique is really a rather easy way of going about one’s work.  It is surely more of a challenge to use the actual words that people say, but to blend them into original material to create one’s own play.  This remarkable ability is the reason why many critics consider Harold Pinter to be such a fine playwright – the observation of the way people talk and then its use in original dialogue.  Nonetheless, selecting some of the remarkable things that people say, and then setting them to music, the music following the rhythm and cadence of the words, is quite a remarkable feat.  Rather than an opera, the piece comes across as a prolonged piece of recitative, but it’s never dull.  The music is somewhat jazz influenced.  From time to time there is a more choric piece, with multiple repetitions of certain phrases: ‘I have nearly seventeen hanging baskets in my garden...’  I was left wondering however whether it would have been even better with a score by Andrew Lloyd Webber, though the authors say that they definitely didn’t want to create an opera.  Lindsay thought it was one of the best things she had ever seen.  I thought it was very good indeed.  As a piece of contemporary theatre it was excellent.  Especially for the theatrical equivalent of a book club.  There are many sections which could be worthy of discussion.  In the only scene in which we see the prostitutes, three members of the cast, in cheap thin clothing, huddle in the darkness, and then quote statements from the girls, about their lives after the murders.  Then they stop talking.  They look at us.  There is silence.  The silence goes on, and on, and on.  Why?  It’s obviously a theatrical device.  Some of the audience have a hard time coping with it.  There are one or two nervous coughs.  Why the silence?  Now Lindsay and I had completely different ideas about this.  Lindsay felt that this was a two minutes’ silence for the dead girls.  I didn’t feel this at all.  To me it was a challenge.  A challenge to the audience.  ‘What do you think of me?  Would you like to have me?  Are you as guilty as Steve Wright?’  Maybe I haven’t got the whole story, but I also felt that I was being targeted by the cast – this is a valid strategy in street theatre – interactive theatre if you like.  Dumb insolence.  The silence may have lasted for three minutes.  Then it was broken by musical accompaniment.

The other part that was worth discussing was the ending.  The authoress, who collected the reportage, said that when she went back to London Road in 2009 she was amazed and impressed to find a ‘London Road in Bloom’ festival going on, a kind of healing and rebirth of the road.  In the programme she states that she felt it was the residents’ way of dealing with what had gone on, of coming together and creating neighbourliness.  So the ending amid all the flower arrangements was in one sense redemptive, but to me the phrase that came to mind was ‘Everything in the garden is lovely’, when of course it isn’t...  Whether that was intended or just something I alone thought of I have no idea...  One of the most true to life parts of the play was the character played by Kate Fleetwood, who near the end, is sitting on a sofa, musing.  ‘Of course,’ she says.  ‘I personally feel grateful to Steve Wright.  He got the girls off the street after all.’  In another scene, where the whole stage is covered in a maze of police tape, one character says, ‘There were police everywhere.  Of course, it would be nice if it could be like this every day.  Then we’d feel safe!’

Enough of London Road!

Yesterday, Sunday, was a lazy day, and we, or at least I, was transfixed by the football for quite a lot of the day.  Spurs 1 – Man City 5; Man Utd 8 – Arsenal 2.  So as one wag put it – Manchester 13 – London 3.  It was also remarkable for the operation of this new Athletics rule disqualifying any athlete for a false start – and the chief dismissee was Usain Bolt, the fastest man in the world.  Although he is rather a cocky individual, it is rather a shame to think that the 100m was then won by the second fastest man in the world.  I was rather hoping that The Sun would come up with one of its witty headlines like ‘Usain shoots his Bolt’ but all they can manage is ‘Usain’s Pain’.  A trawl of the newspapers reveals only that Bolt has been shooting in other respects, with a barmaid from London and a care home worker from Swindon.  The interview with Gemma, of Swindon, is hilarious, and I quote verbatim from the Sun:

“Afterwards they showered together.  Gemma said: ‘He told me all about Jamaica and I told him about Swindon.  He asked me if the shopping was good in Swindon and I told him it wasn’t great.  Once he heard that he seemed to lose interest in Swindon.’”

You can’t make it up, can you?  So maybe this verbatim technique for the theatre has got something going for it after all.

Finally, Lindsay and I went for a bike ride today.  One of our favourite rides, starting in Wimborne and taking in Shapwick, Blandford, the Melbury Abbas road, then the Tarrant valley, up Windy Hill and across to Witchampton, and back via Furzehill.  Lovely drink in the Langton Arms at Tarrant Monkton (plenty of choice; Butcombe bitter, Ringwood best, Purbec, etc)  Stopped at the Spar in Blandford.  Something of a tradition.  Two frozen OJ lollipops please.  As I finished mine I said to Lindsay ‘I’ll buy you one more frozen orange juice....’.  A fat man wearing a Ferrari T shirt limped by with a stick.  ‘Do you think he owns a Ferrari?’ said Lindsay.

Don’t bother looking for other headlines about Usain.  The Daily Star had ‘Usain Bolt’s Jolt’.  Pathetic.  Have you noticed how similar the names Usain and Arsene are?  Now Usain Wenger and Arsene Bolt are almost interchangeable, and the result either way you look at it is just as bad.

Until the next time.