Theatre Review: Doctor Faustus at The Globe

I recently managed to see the Globe’s production of Doctor Faustus at a local cinema (Globe Onscreen is this brilliant initiative that allows you to view a stage production in the comfort of an Odeon or Vue, complete with popcorn).

All I can say is: WOW.  Seriously.  Doctor Faustus is perhaps one of my favourite early modern plays.  It’s a weird mix of medieval morality and burgeoning renaissance interiority, plus it has demons, devils and necromancy.  Christopher Marlowe’s play follows the story of an arrogant and clever scholar who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for power, wealth and most importantly knowledge.  But after his twenty-four years are up the prospect of spending an eternity in hell doesn’t seem quite so attractive.

Matthew Dunster’s production is a complete baroque spectacle.  The comic scenes are pushed right to the forefront in all their ribald and Bakhtinian excesses, while the scenes between Faustus and Mephastophilis alternate between a kind of budding bromance and chilling master/slave relationship.  Arthur Darvill plays Mephastophilis, thrown out of heaven for conspiring with Lucifer against God.  He’s deceptively gentle, waiting till the end to show his true metal.  Paul Hilton is a kind of world-weary, down-to-earth Faustus.  He rolls out Marlowe’s mighty lines like he’s reciting it to some mates down the pub, but I kinda like it - Faustus as one of us.  This pair is a kind of odd couple, bounding around the stage doing all sorts of hi-jinks.  They even wear matching skull caps and red capes at one point – uncanny doubles of each other.  Their buddy relationship is so disarming that it genuinely shocks when you realise Mephisto still is very much Satan’s minion. It’s a really visual and mesmerising production all round. The good angel and evil angel are dramatised almost like anime characters; they run onto the stage, performing high kicks and screams that wouldn’t look out of place in Mortal Kombat, and we get an actual dragon.  Yes, a dragon.

And Lucifer – words cannot describe how AMAZING he is.  He’s actually a satyr, a dirty old man-goat lurching and leering around the stage, rubbing his grubby paws up and down his legs at the thought of Faustus’ lovely soul (all swollen with pride - extra yummy). Watching the final horrifying scene as Faustus realises his time is up and he panics, while Lucifer gloats at the side of the stage is totally disturbing and aided by increasingly increasingly chaotic music (Dunster’s production follows Text B rather than the shorter Text A. In Text A Faustus is alone for most of the final scene).  And finally, Faustus is dragged to hell.  Well, he kind of crowd surfs actually, physically hoisted up and carried in through those gates by all of Lucifer’s cronies (they carry freaky puppets that they stretch and torture).

Being a Globe production we get a little dance at the end too; Faustus and Mephisto jam together on guitar. I like to imagine them together, down in hell talking over old times.  What more could you want?

The Horror...The Horror... Best Halloween Movies

There's not much I like more than a good horror film.  Well, actually, there's a lot I like more, now I come to think of it.  But I do like horror an awful lot.  For the month of October The Hollywood News did a run-down of top terrors, and I wrote about five of my favourites.

The list goes as follows:

Halloween
Suspiria
The Exorcist
Candyman
Trick 'R Treat
The Haunting
Kwaidan
Scream
Carrie
Don't Look Now
An American Werewolf in London
The Descent
[REC]
Let the Right One In
The Innocents
The Devils
The Woman
House of 1000 Corpses
Friday the 13th
The Wicker Man
Antichrist
The Blair Witch Project
Misery
Audition
Evil Dead II
The Omen
Eden Lake
Magic
The Thing
The Shining
Psycho

You can read the complete run-down here.

Incidentally my choices were Antichrist, Suspiria, Eden Lake, The Devils and Don't Look Now.

Book Review: Firefly: A Celebration

Firefly. Sigh. Don't we all miss it? It seems so ridiculous Fox network axed it, especially when you compare the quality of S1 of Buffy and Angel.

S1 of Buffy was good, don't get me wrong, but it certainly wasn't a series at its prime and it showed. And S1 of Angel is the one you need to get through to get onto the good stuff. It's the identity crisis season - the season of dead end plots (and that annoying detective, Kate). But Firefly S1 was just ... pure brilliance. It makes me wonder, on some long and lonely nights, about what might have been.

Anyway. Enough of this lamentation and misery. It's gone. And it's been gone 10 years!! So to celebrate the momentous anniversary of Firefly's birth, there's a new book out called Firefly: A Celebration. And if you follow this link you can see what I thought of it in a review I wrote for The Hollywood News.

Theatre Review: Troilus and Cressida at The Swan 2012 (RSC & Wooster Group)

Stratford Upon Avon always looks amazing in the sun

What could be more tempting than watching a play that’s rarely performed?  And about the classical world?  I’m a complete sucker for anything vaguely to do with togas.  So when I saw that Shakespeare’s little staged Troilus and Cressida was coming to the Swan this year I had to get tickets.

This was my mum’s first introduction to live action Bard.  Should we go to Much Ado? I pondered.  It did seem a safer bet. 

‘Mother,’ I said, ‘would you like to go and see a romantic screwball comedy with lots of witty wordplay and an almost tragic plot but not quite?’

‘Hmmm,’ she said.  ‘I think I’d prefer something a bit more, well, sad.’

So, Troilus it was.

A quick character map of Troilus and Cressida - yes I know,
I always forget Shakespeare calls Odysseus 'Ulysses'

Troilus and Cressida is about the two eponymous lovers and the breakup of their relationship, set against the backdrop of the Trojan war.  They’re both Trojans, but Cressida’s father is a turncoat and in the Greek camp.  When he asks that his daughter joins him she can’t say no.  Sounds familiar?  Well, this is where it all ends.  The rest of the play is a strange mish-mash of manly virtue and anger, fight scenes and anti-climax.  It’s a strange beast and has won the dubious honour of being called “problem play”.

The 2012 production is an ensemble cast featuring both the RSC (the Greeks) and the American Wooster Group (the Trojans).  It’s part of the World Shakespeare Festival, but did this collaboration work?

Right.  First things first, I’d like to say I have mixed feelings about this performance.  Let me start with what worked.

Stratford upon Avon. Can I move here right now?

The Greek Camp: The audience feels pretty safe in these guys’ hands.  Scott Handy in particular is effortless as Ulysses.  Joe Dixon’s Achilles is all shades of manly.  He’s kind of mesmerising actually – the stage works by rotating and the sight of Achilles slowly inching into view leaping around on an army bed to loud music, towel about to fall off is er, memorable!  He comes across as a petulant boy, refusing to fight for whatever sulky reason his teenage brain can devise.

I like the concept of the set and staging too.  The Greeks are the British army while the Trojans, Native Americans.  But more of this later.

Some of the Trojans are strong – Hector in particular.  And I did like Pandarus’ body language and way with words. There are some genuine laughs too.  The excellent Scott Handy plays Helen in super-camp mode.  And what better way to undercut the weight placed on the ‘face that launched a thousand ships’ than by turning her into a joke?  Paris started a war – for this?  The Trojans have no choice but to step in line, support their prince and fight.

So let’s move onto those parts that were a bit more questionable.

If you’re a theatre follower you may know this production got a bit of a roasting.  And it’s true, I did notice a fair number of empty seats after the interval.  What wasn’t working so well then?

I have to say it but I found (on the whole) the Wooster Group’s performance weaker than the RSC’s.  That’s not saying there weren’t some great moments there, but I’m not sure I really “got” everything that was going on.

Firstly this interpretation as I’ve said had the Trojans as Native Americans.  I did love their wardrobe – a mixture of traditional costumes and skins married with broken Greek statues (as kind of capes) and the detritus of western society.  I like the fact that these guys carry basketballs around and use them as temporary seats – it’s like they were living in a bubble for years and then, wham! their culture’s been surrounded by this new one and they’re going to take aspects from it.

I can even go with the TV screens.  Onstage large screens are positioned high in a few prominent positions and we get to see clips of documentaries and old movies.  When the Trojans have important scenes the actors kind of copy or mirror the actions on the TVs.  This makes for quite disconcerting viewing.  So in Troilus and Cressida’s love scene instead of close actor interaction we get this kind of distancing performance where both actors are looking over each other’s shoulder and mimicking the screen.  What does it all mean?  I was thinking about this and for me I see it as a comment on the outside influence of the media on a more primitive society; they’re starting to look to filmic representation to work out how they should act in their own world.  This distancing is amplified by the Wooster Group’s use of microphones and occasionally a distortion effect.  It’s quite ghostly actually – trying to work out where the voice is coming from.  But herein lies most of the problems with the Trojans – voice, intonation and projection.  Not only is it hard to work out where or who each voice is coming from, but the actors’ unemotional, deliberately stilted and Dalek-esque intonation made it really hard to follow the metre, rhythm or meaning.  Some parts I just couldn’t make out – lack of projection meant I didn’t have a clue what they were saying.  And if you take away Shakespeare’s language, what have you got?

So I really came away from this production a little confused.  Some parts I loved: Scott Handy, Achilles’ well-documented penchant for cross-dressing, Zubin Varla’s bitter Phoenix Nights delivery as Thersites, complete with wheelchair, wig, drag and spotlight.  I was left with some really vivid and often amusing images here, although you could say no revolutionary new ground was covered.  But for some bits in the Trojan camp I felt oddly disengaged.

And my mum’s opinion? 

She says she’d quite like to go and see another play, but maybe not for a while, and maybe not Shakespeare.  

W-s-M Fringe Festival 2012: Waiting for the Wave

This is happening on Wednesday 5th September at Weston Arts Gallery W-s-M. It's to launch Bob Walton's poetry pamphlet Waiting for the Wave, published by Pighog Press.

Is Hitchcock's Vertigo the Greatest Film of All Time?

Unless you've been living under a stone for the past few weeks you should have heard about this new development.  Citizen Kane is gone!

I've got an article up at The Hollywood News (here) about why Vertigo deserves its place at the top.

So movie goers ... do you agree?

Book Review: Family Album by Penelope Lively

‘Read some Penelope Lively!’ my friend insisted time and time again.  I must admit I did resist.  I’d recently decided I couldn’t stand Ian McEwan anymore and I was worried that another decidedly white middle class read might send me over the edge.  But when I found a copy of Family Album (Moon Tiger is my friend’s recommendation) in a charity shop in Wells it was clearly a message from the great bookseller in the cosmos.

Family Album (2009) charts the story of a Victorian (or Edwardian – it seems to vary) house; it’s a gargantuan structure with a myriad of floors and rooms (it actually has parlours!) and is called Allersmead (surely a better title?).  And in this house live the Harper family: mum Alison, dad Charles, kids Paul, Gina, Sandra, Katie, Roger and Clare, plus the au pair Ingrid.  Alison’s a real ‘70s homemaker – all shapeless smocks and hair buns, cooking like there’s no tomorrow, insistent on the importance of a happy family life.  The book starts with one of the older girls (Gina) and her trip back home with the new boyfriend who’s enchanted by this retro childhood home and Alison’s ideals.  But it soon becomes clear that Alison’s view of their Waltons-like existence doesn’t quite marry up with everyone else’s.

Coming from a single child family myself, some parts of their life did read a bit like a horror story to me.  The named mugs, the hordes of children on a treasure hunt, the enforced family picnics, the lack of privacy.  I started empathising with poor dad Charles, hiding in his study and keeping out of everyone’s way.  And then there’s the strange live-in au pair Ingrid who came over from Scandinavia in the sepia toned ‘70s, never to return.  Instead way past the time the kids have left (well most of them – the one failure, Paul, keeps on coming back) she’s still there, saying things like ‘I am thinking you would like a nice cup of tea now’.  Of course, there’s a mystery here.  We know this from the blurb on the back (‘and one particular devastating secret of which no one speaks…”) however you’ll guess it by page 30.  But here’s what Lively does so well – she reveals it early on too!  Phew.  I thought I was going to have to read the whole thing and act surprised at the end.  So this got me thinking – maybe it’s another secret – and there is one surrounding Charles…

Some parts of this read are a little clichéd.  I mean, the statuesque Scandinavian au pair with the long blonde hair, the protective earth mother and the distant father all seem familiar.  And despite the back cover’s tempting whiff of a hidden scandal there is no shocking revelation.  But what’s really compelling here is Lively’s style; she effortlessly segues between past and present, action and memory, and between characters.  One minute we’re listening to an omniscient narrator charting the history of the house before 1914, the next we’re in Alison, or Paul, or Gina’s psyche – sometimes in first, sometimes in third person.  But it never jars.  Instead we’re given a fluid exploration of family, memory and perception that’s always immensely readable.