Opera della Luna’s Don Giovanni

Don Giovanni

Music by Mozart

Opera della Luna

The Lowry, 27 April 2012

For verve and vitality, this freshly minted production of what is possibly Mozart’s finest opera scores in the high nineties.

Highly, yes, yet not as frequently as its eponymous hero: the Don in question being a hedonist with an eye for the ladies.  But fair dos to him, for when the gates of hell open up, he goes to his fate with nary a whisper of repentance.  He is a stand-up guy in more ways than one.

What is special about this company – and Opera della Luna are one of the precious jewels of British theatre – is that they’ll revamp a classic work, including perhaps some topical jokes/references and a smidgeon of naughtiness, while keeping production values high and leaving the spirit of the piece intact, its stature undiminished.  It’s that classic strategy of presenting vintage wine in shiny new bottles.

And so it proved here with Don Giovanni: terrific singing, an orchestra live on stage, a slue of sublime arias and dramatic scenes, a story that shifted from tragedy to comedy and back again.  It was pure and dark, murky and light, quintessentially baroque.  There was also  Elvis and Marilyn and Dolly, and a young woman, name of Zerlina (the wonderful Rhona McKail), pleading to be spanked.

It was a mint production.

Opera della Luna is touring Don Giovanni (and The Parson’s Pirates too) throughout the UK, further details are here.

Ballet Central 2012

Ballet Central 2012

Central School of Ballet

The Lowry, 25 April 2012

There are several stars of the future here, but it wouldn’t be to their benefit to name them.

The show featured seven short works, each being performed by the final year students of the Central School of Ballet.  Some could be called modern dance (such as Code, characterised by abrupt gestures and hard-edged movements) though most were ballets, for example the traditional and technically challenging Pas de Trois.  Period, picturesque and quite a puzzle is how I would describe the final work, Whodunnit?, conceived and choreographed by Matthew Hart.  The conceit was that an Agatha Christie novel or the Cluedo board game had been brought to life, recast as a narrative ballet.  It was charming and ultimately compelling.

The programme was varied and fresh, the dancers were of professional calibre and not a few are principal dancers of the future.  Adventures rarely promise and deliver as much.

Ballet Central 2012 is touring the UK until July, details here.

Elles

Elles

Directed by Małgorzata Szumowska

France, 2011

Cornerhouse, 21 April 2012

Open the weekend supplement of your favourite newspaper and you’re likely to read yet another story about University students, nice girls all, selling their bodies for sex: easy money, pleasant work, no cost or personal injury incurred.

In this film we follow a day in the life of a journalist – name of Anne, played by Juliette Binoche – as she puts together just such a story, racing to meet a deadline.  Her encounters with two interviewees, both nice girls, are recounted.  Their experiences make up most of the film, and are responsible for its 18 certificate.

It is a subtle film, not simply a quasi-documentary or social commentary.  At its root is the thesis that fantasy (specifically, transgressive sexual fantasy) is necessary to regulate and keep in good shape the bourgeois family, and therefore the social order in general.  For the most part, these young women serve married men’s sexual needs and desires, offering them those things that they cannot get, or choose not to get, from their wives.  To this one can add that, during her day, Anne discovers porn on both her husband’s and her eldest son’s computer – so matters skirt close to home.  While her younger son plays war games on his Playstation, perhaps a not dissimilar mode of escape.  And she herself is seen to masturbate and float away.

The final scene, with the nuclear family sat around the breakfast table on the following day, is hardly a copout – it possesses an inevitable logic.

Binoche is excellent here and Joanna Kulig notches up another fine performance, following on from her appearance in The Woman in the Fifth.  There’s golden music from the likes of Beethoven, inventively deployed.  Despite the explicit sexual scenes, Saints couldn’t fault this film.

The Birthplace

The Birthplace

By Henry James 

Foreword by Mark Rylance

Hesperus Press, February 2012

ISBN 13: 9781843912071

It is always an exhilarating moment when you finish a piece of prose by Henry James and find that you have followed it right to the end.

Man, what Louis Auchincloss wrote in Reflections of a Jacobite is true, you think.  When he chooses to be, this Henry James guy can be understandable and accessible and even entertaining.  Rather fine, actually, his way of going about things: the rambling prose veering always it seems towards incoherence, though never quite losing the thread completely, has an incisive bite.  He is a labyrinthine teller of tales.

This volume collects together two short works: The Birthplace (1903) and The Private Life (1892), each touching on the theme of the presentation of the self in everyday life.

An early and excoriating take on the heritage industry, the title tale is about a couple, the Gedges, who are employed to take care of a house where a great poet (Mark Rylance alludes to Shakespeare in the foreword) was born and grew up.  Their position requires that they show literary pilgrims around, spouting a potted spiel and parroting ‘false facts’ (or at any rate things they don’t believe).  There’s no way that they – and the male Gedge especially – can honestly speak their mind and keep the job.  Political machinations whirr and buzz.  Ultimately, it’s about power and manipulation.

Let the following sentence act as a coda for The Private Life, which is set at a social gathering in Switzerland:

The world was vulgar and stupid, and the real man would have been a fool to come out for it when he could gossip and dine by deputy.  (117)

Never expose yourself completely to others, that way lies confusion and folly, instead see social life as akin to acting on stage – artifice not authenticity is the order of the day.  Maybe it’s intelligent advice, maybe not.  The doppelganger scene, calling to mind the denouement of  The Jolly Corner, gives the tale a weird, uncanny aspect; but the main register is one of playful intrigue and pleasant dalliance.  Violence and melodramatic gesture are absent but the sense of life present and time passing (a low-key, under-emphasised melancholy) is palpable.  Nothing much happens here yet one is moved at the close.

The publisher’s description of the book can be read here.

Marley

Marley

Directed by Kevin Macdonald

USA, 2012

Cornerhouse, 20 April 2012

This documentary delivers a fully-rounded portrait of the man who brought reggae to the world.

Like Malcolm X and Barack Obama, Bob Marley was of mixed race and had difficulty fitting in as a child.  He didn’t belong, grew up hungry-poor, encountered many rejections.  Yet he came, through his exhilarating eternal music, to preach a message of brotherly harmony: black and white, unite.

There’s a lot of substance to this film and Marley’s human weaknesses are not glossed over.  The best bit for me being an interview with a pink-bearded Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry.  The man is one of a kind, a genius.  His movements here still sprightly, fluid and dynamic, despite his age.  And his face alight with impishness or intelligence or an incandescent holy delight.  Take your pick.

If you’re looking for a comprehensive yet critical overview of Bob Marley’s life and achievements, Kevin Macdonald’s film is it.

Miss Julie

Miss Julie

By August Strindberg

Royal Exchange Theatre, 16 April 2012

Maxine Peake as Miss Julie in MISS JULIE (Royal Exchange Theatre until 12 May). Photo - Jonathan Keenan.

It is a masterly play and the marvellous Maxine Peake is its equal.

What’s copacetic about it is that nothing happens yet everything changes.  Jean (Joe Armstrong) remains a servant while Miss Julie (Maxine Peake) will likely flit from day to day, just as before.  She doesn’t have the courage to carry out that one resolute act, whatever it may be.

But – and this is what makes the play great - the clockwork machinery that operates these creatures, their motivations and dreams, has been exposed, along with the power relations that constitute their world.  They oppress each other, that is the truth of it: the mistress lords it over the servant, the man over the woman.  There is arrogance, agony and abjection on both sides.

It’s a fine production of an incredibly intense play –  just the one act, the tension building as the whole landscape of this domestic world becomes illuminated – and Maxine Peake’s performance is simply stunning.  It is a naturalistic tragedy indeed.

Miss Julie is at the Royal Exchange Theatre until 12 May, further details can be found here.

Love’s Labour’s Lost

Love’s Labour’s Lost

By William Shakespeare

Northern Broadsides

The Lowry, 17 April 2012

The ladies looking none too impressed. Photo by Nobby Clark.

One apostrophe denotes possession, the other contraction: so much for the grammatical intricacies of the title of the play.

It’s a comedy containing a cornucopia of courtships (well, four or five) and was also, incidentally, Harold Bloom’s favourite play.  In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human he praises the play in particular for its language – its poetry, wordplay and rhetoric (all those ‘figures pedantical’ that Shakespeare most likely culled from Puttenham) – and here it is placed at the service of love.  His suitors, and especially Berowne (an excellent performance by Matt Connor in this production) are sophists, though the game is to win a lady not an argument.  And just as the sophists in olden days were  not too concerned with truth, nor do they – the suitors – make a big song and dance about fidelity.  There’s little wonder then that the gentler gender seek a deferment, to test their suitors’ affection.

This is a vibrant production of the play that would satisfy even Bloom himself.  There is the comedy, and here I would pick out the performances of Andrew Vincent (as Armado) and Adam Fogarty (Costard) in particular and the moment when Longaville’s (in person, Jos Vantyler’s) pockets seem to teem with manuscripts, a slue of scrawled sonnets.  This last was one of several comic details that enhanced the text no end.  The music and songs were spot-on an’ all.

And the sets and costumes were wonderful to look at, a colourful extravaganza you couldn’t peel your eyes away from.  It was a joyful experience withal and you went away with a better understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare’s great talent.

 Love’s Labour’s Lost is at The Lowry until Saturday 21 April, details here.

This Must Be the Place

This Must Be the Place

Directed by Paulo Sorrentino

Italy, 2011

Cornerhouse, 14 April 2012

Sean Penn is a sad clown.

When a pop star, these teenagers killed themselves on listening to a depressive song he wrote – that made his cheery visage go walkabout.  He blames himself for their deaths.  And there’s more.  His estranged father, a holocaust survivor, dies and though Cheyenne (Penn’s character) never knew him, not really, on his death he goes in search of a Nazi war criminal.  By playing PI, Cheyenne becomes happy once more.  That’s job done, by any reckoning, though it doesn’t make an awful lot of psychological sense.

All this detail is by way of warning: expect teary-eyed acting, heavy unearned emoting.  Well, what else would you get from a Hollywood star in a Holocaust movie?

It’s not a good film: too many unwarranted tears, too much faux-surreal quirkiness, probably also too much Sean Penn.  In the end, you feel that it’s been more about adding a Holocaust film to Penn’s CV than engaging or involving the viewer.  Disappointing.

Martin Carthy

Martin Carthy
The Lowry, 15 April 2012

Not just a national treasure, Martin Carthy is also very much a treasury of songs and tunes, all ancient, wondrous and fine.

They retain a mystery, these folk songs and ballads: the detritus of history and human experience clings to them still.  Martin Carthy didn’t so much share or perform the songs as bring them to life, showing us in doing so the faces and the hearts of our ancestors, our forefathers and mothers.  He acted as a vital connection to the past, to a community of people not unlike ourselves.

Nor should I neglect to mention what a fine musician Martin Carthy is.  And his guitar-less performance of Adam McNaughton’s Hamlet song was exhilarating!  There’s a link that song here.

Martin Carthy’s UK tour continues apace, details here.

L’Atalante

L’Atalante
Directed by Jean Vigo
France, 1934
Cornerhouse, 15 April 2012

The story is quite banal – all about the ups and downs of a young couple’s marriage, the wife’s odyssey and return – but Jean Vigo’s film makes of it something strange and wonderful.

That wedding procession at the start, the way it meanders wildly and eventually segues into a funeral march (signified by the tolling of the bells, the chatter about how the bride is being lost to the village, the coffin-shaped barge that’s to be her home), inaugurates the weirdness and sets you up for what’s to come.  There are the curious objects to be found in the first mate Jules’ cabin, a character who has a kind of Mr. Hyde relationship with Jean, the young husband who’s also skipper.  Such as the hands of Jules’ dead friend or lover, which are kept pickled in a jar.  Jean will later writhe in a bed separate from Juliette, as  too will she (wearying from a day spent plumbing Paris’ sterile depths) and this, the most celebrated montage in the film, retains its sensual power.

By any normal measure, life dealt Vigo a rotten hand.  Orphaned at twelve, he grew up in care, an experience which formed the basis of his first film, Zero for Conduct.  His health had been seriously bad since he got tuberculosis in his early ‘20s and he died just a few day after L’Atalante was released.  It is a wonderful film, full of the mysteries of the quotidian.  An authentically surrealist film – Vigo had it in his blood – not showily, cartoonish or quirkily surrealist.

Showing as part of the Matinee Classics series, L’Atalante can be seen again on Wednesday, details here.