Akram Khan’s Giselle

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Adolphe Adam, Akram Khan, Alina Cojocaru, Giselle, Isaac Hernandez, Livy, Polybius, Tim Yip, Vincenzo Lamagna

Akram Khan’s Giselle

Music by Vincenzo Lamagna after Adolphe Adam

English National Ballet

Palace Theatre, Manchester

27 September 2016

Although the choreographer gets the possessive credit, just as the director owns a film, this production was a perfect storm of talents.

Alina Cojocaru in the eponymous role was the ornament of the stage, Isaac Hernandez as her lover Albrecht was the model of chivalry. There was a dark fairy-tale ambience to Tim Yip’s costumes; they moulded sinister personages who you could come across only on a hell-infested night. In the clinky-clanky synchronicity of Vincenzo Lamagna’s score you saw the mechanical monstrosity of the factory floor and heard the taut chains of slave labourers.

As for Akram Khan’s choreography, you immediately notice that he likes a busy stage – English National Ballet have an illustrious corps, so why not make use of them? – for Giselle and Albrecht are never together alone (remember that old Paul Weller line about two lovers missing the tranquility of solitude?). Colour and clutter is a constant. Khan is best at processional visions where ranks of dancers plaid into one another. These scenes are like watching an abstract painting in motion, something by Malevich, say.

This is a munificent production whose great virtues and qualities do full justice to the ballet that is the dark jewel in the crown of the classical repertoire. If you have an evening when you can get off from collating Polybius with Livy, I’d say go see it, give it a whirl.

Giselle is at the Palace Theatre in Manchester until 1 October then it tours the UK, ending up at Sadler’s Wells in London on 19 November. Details here.

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El Sur

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El Sur, Goytisolo, HOME, Shadow of a Doubt, Victor Erice

El Sur

Directed by Victor Erice

Spain, 1983

HOME, 21 September 2016

A young woman, overcome with love and dread for her father’s fate, decides to journey to the South, seeking the key to his existence.

It ends right then, this precious and elliptical film, after presenting an array of strangely beautiful fragments.

One learns that the father is a Republican in Fascist Spain, living in a sort of exile in a small provincial town.  In time even his marriage, a dowdy confection, feels like a sort of exile.  He is unhappy, pining for a film actress he had known in the days of his youth. A woman changed, as he has changed. It is all hopeless. His life, or at any rate another, perhaps an authentic life, lies elsewhere.

It is a lovely film, which put me in mind at times of Shadow of a Doubt  – though as filtered through, let’s say, Goytisolo’s delicate sensibility.

Andrew Wilde, Celebrity Piano Recital

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Andrew Wilde, Beethoven, Celebrity Piano Recital, Chopin, Moonlight Sonata, Pathetique, RNCM, Scherzo in B minor

Andrew Wilde, Celebrity Piano Recital

RNCM Concert Hall, 18 September 2016

In one sense the programme of Andrew Wilde’s recital was quite simple: Beethoven in the first half, Chopin in the second.

We heard three sonatas by Beethoven, the last of them being the ‘Pathetique’, and they were followed by a selection of works by Chopin, including nocturnes, mazurkas, waltzes and the Scherzo in B minor. After hearing Chopin’s nocturnes, the Moonlight Sonata made for a perfect encore and alongside this came the realisation – for in truth, the penny took a long time to drop – that the programme, rather than being simple and straightforward, had an underlying thesis.

Wilde’s scintillating performances of these works – each one deeply and complexly pleasurable in and of itself – brought out the affinities between these two great composers in a rare, demonstrable way. How many others, I wonder, among those who gave Wilde such a rapturous welcome on his return to his old college – and, at the end, a warm fare-thee-well – how many when they now listen to Chopin will hear echoes, small fragments, of Beethoven too, like pebbles embedded in glass? It was brave as well for this artist to choose for recital such familiar works.

This fine concert was heard on a warm September afternoon and early evening in Manchester.

Captain Fantastic

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Captain Fantastic, Chomsky, HOME, Matt Ross, Sweet Child of Mine, Viggo Mortensen

Captain Fantastic

Directed by Matt Ross

USA, 2016

HOME, 17 September 2016

Apropos Chomsky: a good title for a book, an efficacious way to open a conversation.

And an apt title for this film as well.

It is about a father (Viggo Mortensen, attractive and abrasive) who raises his children in a forest. They are survivalist folk, anti-establishment, hyper-intelligent and (incidentally) they revere Noam Chomsky, even going so far as to celebrate his birthday. Yet these children are not prepared for the real world, such as it is, a world of fat people (this is America) and phone zombies and quaint, social conventions.

Family values are questioned and in the end reaffirmed – as in all American films. There is a fine performance of ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’ – not the best song in the world, but OK. I enjoyed the film despite its incoherence, maybe because of it. Good.

A Streetcar Named Desire @ the Royal Exchange Theatre

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A Streetcar Named Desire, EU, Maxine Peake, Royal Exchange Theatre, Tennessee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire

By Tennessee Williams

Royal Exchange Theatre, 13 September 2016

Maxine Peake as Blanche DuBois in the Royal Exchange Theatre production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Photo by ?

The driving rain, the rollicking thunder, the flashing lightening, the dark Autumnal Manchester skyline, the pooled pavements where (no choice) you had to wade forward ankle-deep: all that was outside, a preamble (or so it seemed) to the main event.

Inside there was an emotional storm just as fierce, with this welcome production of Williams’ well known play, and Maxine Peake being Blanche DuBois.

There were a few additions and deletions, some meaningful (the presence of ghostly black women alongside the suggestion that Belle Reve had been a plantation – there is no evidence for this in the text, mind), others perplexing (The Pina Colada Song made an appearance: say what?). It ended with Blanche’s hackneyed line, ‘I have always depended on the kindness of strangers’, so the text had been truncated a little.

The dramatic structure of the play, what makes it work so well, was however intact. We see Blanche achieve happiness, or at any rate safety, with Mitch’s declaration of something like love: ‘You need somebody. And I need somebody, too. Could it be – you and me, Blanche?’ And then we see it taken away from her, a slow unravelling as her facade of lies – that anxious, fragile pose – crumbles into dust.

Peake’s performance is a play of smoke and mirrors, trickery and illusion. She shows us a Blanche who is never quite open and true; there is a pretension right up until the end (like the EU, kinda). At the end we realise that Blanche will never escape her loneliness; she is so lost that she has no heart, no centre, no values, and will never deliver on her promises (again, like the EU, kinda).

A Streetcar Named Desire is a cruel play, at root a Grand Guignol piece, and in my opinion Williams’ later, more experimental plays are his best or certainly his most interesting. It is anyway showing at the Royal Exchange until 15 October, further details can be found here.

 

 

 

 

The Blue Room

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HOME, Mathieu Amalric, Simenon, The Blue Room

The Blue Room

Directed by Mathieu Amalric

France, 2014

HOME, 10 September 2016

You are confused yet compelled to watch.

There is too little information to make sense of the events that flicker by on screen, everything happens hyper-fast. With time, however, a pattern emerges; the fragments form a portrait. We see a weak man and a powerful, possessive (if perhaps not quite sane) woman: Julien (Mathieu Amalric: yes, he stars and directs) and his mistress. Before the heady poison of her forceful sexual passion he is a helpless pawn.

Simenon wrote the source story and while the film has been updated and looks wholly contemporary, still it bears his birthmark: the indelible stain of human sin. First principle: there is no escape and no mercy for anyone. You can see that everyone here is hunted or captive, caught in a trap. At the end it is Julien’s weakness, his malleable impressionability and lack of a strong moral centre that damns him.

Is weakness then a vice?

Hell or High Water

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a battle lost, Ben Foster, Chris Pine, David MacKenzie, Hell or High Water, HOME, Jeff Bridges, war, Wellington

Hell or High Water

Directed by David MacKenzie

USA, 2016

HOME, 11 September 2016

This one is a crime drama set in the contemporary West, with Jeff Bridges a Texas Ranger on the trail of two brothers (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) who rob banks.

It has a powerful narrative pull and it provides as well a stringent critique of those banks that prey on the poor and the down-at-heel. Some activities that rake in the cash are legitimate (loans with extortionate interest rates, say), while others are against the law. If you are poor you are powerless, that’s the bottom line – and in America that is the worst thing to be.

The presence of Jeff Bridges gives what is a good film that added, extra ounce of class. What more is there to say about this fine actor? He is brilliant, once again, his nuanced performance another arrow in the quiver. That response of his when he kills the man who killed his partner is cinematic poetry: a boyish delight followed by sudden anguish. It put me in mind of what Wellington said of war, that the only thing worse than a battle lost is a battle won. War, violence, is the vocation of men yet is a terrible thing always.

Hell or High Water is well crafted and intelligent, effortless – not laboured – in the points it makes about contemporary America. But… Trump or Clinton, how did the choice ever get to be so dire? That question is not answered.

The Abecedarium of the Artist’s Death

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Alexander Theroux, Edward Gorey, Moussa Kone, The Abecedarium of the Artist’s Death, The Gashlycrum Tinies, The Loathsome Couple, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey, Verlag für moderne Kunst

The Abecedarium of the Artist’s Death

By Moussa Kone

Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2014

ISBN: 9783869845272

Yes, I know what you are wondering.

My best guess is that the word is pronounced ‘ABC-darium’, with the book – which is nicely designed, by the way, kind of like an index file – consisting of drawings of 26 artists and a summary of the various fates, deaths real and metaphorical, that befall them. In our opening drawing, we make the acquaintance of Anna (‘A is for Anna who was struck by her work…’) and we close by saying farewell to Zacharias. You get the picture: the alphabet acts as an organising principle.

At the end Moussa Kone describes her book as a homage to Edward Gorey and it owes most perhaps to The Gashlycrum Tinies (tales of 26 tiny tots’ tragic terminations). Kone’s drawings are beautifully composed and are not without a healthy dollop of black humour (e.g. ‘I is for Ingrid who trusted her friends…’) but for the most part they are quirky and amusing rather than disquieting, as is almost always the case with Gorey. They will raise a wry smile, certainly, but they won’t put you on edge as Gorey’s drawings are wont to do.

As a small aside, let me correct a statement made by Alexander Theroux in his otherwise excellent monograph, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey. In his discussion of The Loathsome Couple, a book inspired by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley’s depraved crimes, Theroux states that the Moors Murders occurred in Yorkshire. Not so, I am afraid, as those of us who live in this part of the world know only too well. The bodies of the children killed by Brady and Hindley were buried on Saddleworth Moor, not the Yorkshire Moors. And The Moors Murderers, rotten as they were, were Manchester-made.

Moussa Kone’s website is here.

The publisher’s description of The Abecedarium of the Artist’s Death can be read here.