REVIEW: Father John Misty at the Hammersmith Apollo

Tuesday 7 November 2017

I’d listened to Father John Misty a little and dismissed him as “not really for me” (I reasoned that I didn't have room for a whiny, self-obsessed white man in my life aside from myself), but my brother and my friend Katie wanted to go, so I took the plunge. In revising for the gig, my Last FM (helloooo, 2003) tells me that I’ve listened to his songs 151 times in the past week, and by the end I was brainwashed. Sorry, ‘a fan’. And even his proselytising about the evils of religion, which seemed to be operating at the level of a GCSE textbook, began to make sense to me (a Catholic) when I read about his background, and understood the writing to be more about white-hot anger, lived experience, existential desperation and the repugnant hypocrisy of evangelist America than in-depth theological debate.

From interviews – and reputation – though, I was still expecting the morose, meandering, confessional Misty who turned up to a gig the day after Trump’s inauguration, did a rambling 15-minute speech, played a 13-minute song and then went home. Instead, we got a proper pop show: a sensational pop show – 24 songs across two hours, with confetti cannons, a band and a string and brass ensemble, a dazzling light display and Tillman’s full repertoire of struts, poses and guitar moves (and when I say ‘guitar moves’, I don’t mean his guitar-playing, I mean him taking his guitar off and flinging it halfway across the stage to a roadie, mid-song), but with enough room for the sincerity, the lamentations, the howls of protest and shards of bitter wit that make him one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary music.

There's almost no between-songs chat (a few 'thank you's and 'good to see yer's), it's just the music: the bearded Tillman, his hair slicked back, in a flowery shirt and black suit, his drainpipe trousers accentuating his slender legs, and the heeled boots just right for cutting a dashing silhouette as he's frequently backlit in a mist of pink or codeine white.

We kick off with 'Pure Comedy', climaxing with that explosive realisation that religion is "the kind of thing a madman would conceive!”, complete with panto-esque ‘loony’ gesture, 'Total Entertainment Forever' – an irresistible, rockabilly paean to just how fucked we are – and 'Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution', most people’s favourite on the album. I’m still wrestling with the song’s philosophy (is he foggily denouncing leftism or acerbically critiquing the comfort of capitalist conformity?), but it’s a definite Tune, and when the confetti cannon explodes on “Industry and commerce: toppled to their knees”, creating a red, mirrored supernova, everybody loses their shit. After a somewhat muted 'Ballad of the Dying Man' (and so the first four songs from the current record), we dip into the old stuff, including a plaintive, insistent, seductively reimagined 'Nancy From Now On', a lovestruck, crowdpleasing 'Chateau Lobby #4' (“You left a note in your perfect script/’Stay as long as you want’/And I haven’t left your bed since”) with Tillman striding around the stage like a Butlins redcoat, and a conversational 'When the God of Love Returns There’ll Be Hell to Pay', as he has a few choice words with his maker. The pay off, “Oh, my Lord/We just want light in the dark/Some warmth in the cold/And to make something out of nothing sounds like someone else I know” sounds like vintage Vonnegut in the land of Steinbeck, and I don’t have higher praise than that.


I didn't spend much of the gig taking pictures. Will this do?

There are Misty songs I don’t like much, and if a couple of them are banal live – ‘A Bigger Paper Bag’ and the interminable ‘So I’m Growing Old on Magic Mountain’ – others are given an individuality missing on record, and extraordinary life. ‘Only Son of the Ladiesman’ is chokingly broken amidst the country-rock sound, ‘This Is Sally Hatchet’ becomes a great lost Beatles song, ‘When You’re Smiling and Astride Me’ so fragilely self-mocking, and ‘Strange Encounter’ sensitive and vulnerable as it moves from Misty’s familiar boasting that he has sex with a lot of women to something like tentatively self-justifying self-realisation ("Yeah, I'm a decent person/Little aimless"), the perfect counterpoint to the disposable fun of, say, ‘I’m Writing a Novel’. 'Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Goddamn Thirsty Crow', by contrast, is an absolute bastard live: a sleazy love poem that turns increasingly belligerent and violent, with Tillman spitting its bitter denouement, "Why the long face, jerkoff? Your chance has been taken," into the crowd.

And then there are the songs I can never get enough of, like ‘The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apt’ – basically his ‘Idiot Wind’, a character assassination of a woman he’s just slept with, which would be completely indefensible if it wasn’t so beautifully, rhythmically sung, and so incredibly funny:

She says, like literally
Music is the air she breathes
And the malaprops make me want to fucking scream
I wonder if she even knows what that word means
Well, it's literally not that

And ‘Bored in the USA’, a chronicle of depression, a portrait of a wasteland of a homeland: America’s culture reimagined alternately as The Road, or as a tacky, narcotised, identikit, subprime, debt-ridden monument to nothing, guarded over by white president Jesus – the whole song springing from a profound pun for the ages. Tonight, though, the “white Jesus” that he pleads to becomes “honky-tonk Jesus’”, and the President Jesus just “President Anyone”. ‘The Memo’, one of the best songs on his current record, Pure Comedy, is mostly more pointed than despairing, and its targets are more specific and less existential, though its conclusion is similarly bleak, depicting a world in which people “won't just sell themselves into slavery/They'll get on their knees and pay you to believe”. Live, it comes with its wild card intact: a voice generator increasingly barking out mundanities and platitutdes: “This is totally the song of my summer,” “This guy just gets me” and “Music is my life”, as Tillman himself asks: “Just quickly, how would you rate yourself in terms of sex appeal and cultural significance?” “Do you usually listen to music like this?” and finally “Can we recommend some similar artists?” All three songs are just wonderful live – faithful but raw and immediate – though screening the video for ‘The Night…’ was kind of pointlessly distracting.

The main set ends with ‘Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings’ and then a climactic ‘I Love You, Honeybear’, a rousing, glorious version that catapults it high into my favourite Misty songs, with Tillman making his second foray into the crowd, playing both the woodland indie messiah and the pop god, as the confetti flies and the singer performs the laying on of hands, as he pleads: “Don’t give into despair/Cause I love you, honeybear.”

What I loved – and what most surprised me – about the show was how much thought, effort and enthusiasm had clearly gone into it: into the choreographed stage moves (though never so choreographed that there's no room for him to extemporise as he's swept away by emotion), the lighting that creates an icon out of his silhouette, the reshapings of older songs. Tillman’s distaste for the entertainment industry doesn’t translate into a contempt for his fans, as it does with so many artists. As a mentally ill bloke myself, I can understand that sometimes his interviews are car-crashes, and that he has good gigs and bad gigs. I know too, of course, that it need not necessarily constitute an enormous challenge for a man to behave nicely towards a roomful of people who adore him and his art. But I’d thought of him as probably being a bit of a dick, and that didn’t come across at all. He even did an extended encore: ‘Real Love Baby’ – which is pleasant, but could have been written by anybody – and the tedious ‘Magic Mountain’ followed by something extraordinary: his shopping list of contemporary ills (some real, some imagined), ‘Holy Shit' incorporating a mid-song freak-out and seguing straight into an explosive, furious grunge version of the waspish, self-annihilating character study, ‘The Ideal Husband’, which ends with him lying on his back on the stage, writhing around on the floor as he screams: “Wouldn’t I make the ideal husband?” Yes, Josh, you probably would.

One of the gigs of the year. I’m a fan now. A convert. I left the Apollo moved and exhilarated. Speechless. I’m glad I took up that ticket offer.

SETLIST:

Pure Comedy
Total Entertainment Forever
Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution
Ballad of the Dying Man
Nancy From Now On
Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins)
Strange Encounter
Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Goddamn Thirsty Crow
Only Son of the Ladiesman
When the God of Love Returns There'll Be Hell to Pay
A Bigger Paper Bag
When You're Smiling and Astride Me
True Affection
This is Sally Hatchet
The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apt.
Bored in the USA
The Memo
I'm Writing a Novel
Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings
I Love You, Honeybear

Encore:
Real Love Baby
So I'm Growing Old on Magic Mountain
Holy Shit
The Ideal Husband

(Source, as ever, setlist.fm)

***

I'm only really reviewing movies now (and only here), but last night had such an impact on me that I thought I'd write a little about it. Thanks for reading.

Warren William, The Girl From the North Country, and peaceful protest – Reviews #271

It's not all profiles of people from the 1930s, occasionally I review things that have just happened. But only if they're set in the 1930s.

THEATRE



Girl From the North Country (The Old Vic)
Saturday 22 July 2017 (matinee, final preview)

This new Old Vic production is a jukebox musical of Bob Dylan album tracks, allied to a Depression-era melodrama, and nearly as good as that sounds. Written by Conor McPherson, it takes place in a guest house in Dylan's home town of Duluth, Minnesota in 1934, where owner Nick Laine (Ciarán Hinds) cares for his wife Elizabeth (Shirley Henderson), who's animated by dementia, while trying to pair off their pregnant daughter (Sheila Atim), navigate an affair with a long-term tenant (Debbie Kurup) and cater for two strange man who arrive in the dead of night: bible salesman Michael Shaeffer and ex-boxing champ Arinzé Kene. All of them are waiting for their ship to come in.

The numbers are brilliantly chosen, adapted, staged and sung, ranging from a yearning duet on 'I Want You' (slowed down as it always should have been, and performed by parting couple Sam Reid and Claudia Jolly) to a dynamic, ensemble 'Slow Train Coming' and a climactic medley of 'Duquesne Whistle', 'Make You Feel My Love' and 'Is Your Love in Vain?', all accompanied by a period-appropriate Bluegrass ensemble. Even some of the more peculiar ideas, like commandeering that ode to gloriously malignant petulance, 'Idiot Wind', as a Dustbowl lament, leaning on 'Seňor' or making 'Like a Rolling Stone' a ballad, come off really nicely, with 'Jokerman' effectively reprised and 'Forever Young' finally where it belongs: as a West End weepie. (Other songs utilised include 'True Love Tends to Forget', 'Tight Connection to the Heart' and 'You Ain't Goin' Nowhere', not perhaps the most obvious Dylan tracks, but more the welcome for it; the eponymous track, from The Freewheelin' doesn't get an airing.)

At times the scenes around the music can be too vague or muted, but there are moments of resonance − and bits of tension created from thin air − before the narratives coalesce satisfyingly (but not too conveniently) in two moving final scenes. There perhaps isn't enough at stake, or at least enough that's truly tangible in the script, but perhaps future viewings would reveal hidden depths or further truths. I enjoyed Kene's performance, and the voices of Atim, Reid and Kurup (whose stately grace and absence of self-pity still lingers), though I struggled to take my eyes off Henderson whenever she was on stage.

I've never been that taken with her, seeing her in films, but she has such a presence and physicality, flitting between pitiful and sensual, rabid and comatose, that I was transfixed. Though I tend to have a problem with portraits of mental disintegration which are big and tic-laden (as the journalist Tim Lott once wrote, a realistic piece of fiction about mental illness would just be very boring), this one managed to be funny, intelligently allegorical, moving and somewhat unpleasant, without traversing into unbelievability or hysteria, while her moments of lucidity unveiled an unexpectedly beautiful voice, shot through a Scandi-Minnesotan lilt. It's her, the songs and the atmosphere of quiet desperation which I think will stay with me. (3.5)

See also: I've written about a few other Old Vic plays, including Clarence Darrow, The Master Builder, The Caretaker (which I didn't care for), Groundhog Day (my favourite theatrical experience of last year), and King Lear.

***

EXHIBITION



People Power: Fighting for Peace (Imperial War Museum) is impressive, multi-faceted and a little unfortunate in having to follow the V&A's Disobedient Objects, which is one of the best exhibitions I've seen since moving to London, and dealt with a similar theme: public protest. Here that's scaled down to protests for peace, and zones in on four big British protest movements, those of conscientious objectors in World Wars One and Two, the CND campaign that ran throughout the Cold War (with a little on Vietnam), and the Stop the War coalition which protested Tony Blair's invasion of Iraq.

That's both its strength and its weakness: it has a formidable mixture of exhibits: striking banners, poignant paintings, and arresting posters, trinkets and oddities (from CND pin badges reading 'Guardian Readers Concerned About the Bomb' and 'Clouseau Fans Against the Beumb' to a protestor's accordion), alongside audio snippets also transcribed on a display screen, and fascinating archive videos: one shown via a dozen faux-placards forming an irregular whole, others sharing snippets of news reels, news reports and public information films.



One of those, offering advice on how to survive a nuclear blast, is comically, depressingly and appositely juxtaposed with Peter Watkins' chilling film, The War Game, which showed British unpreparedness and was subsequently banned by the BBC, which had commissioned it. The flip-side is that the exhibition doesn't necessarily have a sufficient through-line explaining or investigating the continuity of pacifism, while its personal case studies − including one of Paul Eddington, a CO during WWII because of his Quakerism − are sometimes too brief and slight to really hit home. Having said that, one inspired inclusion is that of hate mail sent to successive generations of those who excused themselves from war, written by ordinary men and women whipped into a patriotic, judgemental fever by politicians and press.

In that way, People Power allows us to appreciate that where British current affairs are concerned, there is nothing new under the sun. It also offers a huge amount to see, and has plenty to say on the iconography, idealism and discomfort of pacifism, though I found Disobedient Objects somehow more inspiring, perhaps because of its internationalism and diversity of activist art, or perhaps simply because it celebrated causes that are simply more easy to embrace, several of which actually won. The final room here tries to send out on an upbeat note, saying that another British war was less likely after Iraq, but all I could think was that Corbyn only stood a chance in the election because he vowed to keep Trident, and that I don't necessarily disagree with that. (3.5)


I liked this poster, which highlighted the hypocrisy of America at a time when anti-war posters (like the 'Fuck the draft' one above) were being seized under obscenity laws. Not much has changed.

See also: I wrote about the IWM's 'Real to Reel' exhibition last year. ***

GIG



Robin and Bina Williamson (The Half Moon, Putney) – An evening with 'the mystical one' from '60s psychedelic folk heroes The Incredible String Band, Robin Williamson, who's long since stopped singing his old stuff, and now sings much older stuff: Celtic and pioneer songs, accompanying them on the harp and guitar. He's joined by his wife Bina, who seems lovely, but is a bit of a Yoko: while her voice works OK in harmony, it can't sustain songs by itself, and her psaltery-playing seems to require such concentration that there's no room for expression or timing.



Williamson still has it, though: that distinctive voice, topped by a slight clicking lisp, and the same mesmerising gift for fretwork and fingerpicking, poured into a dozen songs, each either contextualised or prefaced by a story or gag. Who knew that the mystical one would have such a weakness for delightfully terrible puns. Seeing a musical visionary, still performing a half-century on, was a rarefied and special experience, especially doing so in the back of a London pub along with just 30 other people. It might have been even better if he'd had the spotlight all to himself, but they're clearly in love and he's clearly in thrall to her talents, so good luck to them. (3)

***

FILMS



CINEMA: Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001) – This film is so personal to me that writing about it honestly would be like posting my diary, so I'll just say that while one could harp on endlessly about its shots, its structure, its score and Tautou's mesmeric central performance – and although those elements are almost without equal – it's the film's intensely beautiful heart that takes my breath away every time. I can't believe I just got to see it on the big screen. (4)

***



The Match King (Howard Bretherton and William Keighley, 1932) – I bow to no-one in my appreciation of pre-Code Warren William vehicles, but this one's a bit of a mess. It's quite fun, though. The film kicks off with a pre-credit sequence (surprising, since the earliest pre-credit scene is generally cited to be Crime Without Passion, which came out two years later), showing how important and ubiquitous matches are. Then we're into the story proper: a thinly-veiled biopic of Ivar Kreuger ('Paul Kroll', as he is here), the Swedish-born conman who had died earlier that year (and was immediately immortalised in a novel), having cornered the world market in matches.

It begins uproariously in the amoral Warren William tradition, the star selling out friends, pimping out girlfriends and swindling bankers on his way up the ladder. But then it turns into a romance featuring Lili Damita, a business drama full of laughably bad expository dialogue, and finally a morality tale that exposes the star's limitations. He was always a dynamic scoundrel, but just opening your eyes very wide isn't enough for the serious bits. If you like pre-Code cinema, it's worth a look, with some scurrilous plotting, saucily suggestive near-nudity, and bits for Glenda Farrell and Claire Dodd, while its neat final line anticipates the capper to The Roaring Twenties' rise-and-fall narrative, but it seems to have been written, shot and put out in a tearing hurry, with flubs left in the finished film, haphazard editing and an increasingly crap screenplay. Plus Harold Huber pretending to be Portuguese. (2)

See also: I wrote about The Mouthpiece, a better Warren William film, also found on the Forbidden Hollywood, Vol. 10 box-set here. His two defining films, Skyscraper Souls and Employees' Entrance are on Vol. 7, which I wrote about at length here.

***

DVD



Stewart Lee: If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One (2010) – I'll give it to you straight, like a cider that's made from 100% pear.

This is perhaps Lee's best show, with a pair of inspired, extended set-pieces about Top Gear and Magners Cider that take unnerring aim at casual racism, manufactured outrage, and the corporate co-opting of the art, history and communal experiences that we treasure. The interview with Kevin Eldon on the DVD is a real bonus too, a fascinating insight into Lee's psyche, character and work, which reached some kind of apogee with this daring, thematically and formally original, consistently hilarious act: part deconstruction, part tightrope-walk, part epic fantasy about Richard Hammond being decapitated. (4)

***

Thanks for reading.

REVIEW: Angels in America − Part One: Millennium Approaches at the National Theatre

Wednesday 12 July, 2017
*A FEW SPOILERS*

You can see the play at the National Theatre (a limited number of day tickets are available for every performance, on sale at 9:30am beforehand), or via NT Live.



I only knew this play from one scene, the highlight of NT50, a decidedly patchy nationally-broadcast celebration of half a century of the National Theatre, which proceeded to confirm to half the country that they really don't care for theatre. In it, Andrew Scott's fey, muscular, aloof Prior teases his lover Louis (Dominic Cooper) about becoming the butch "Lou" when he's around his own family, before revealing that he's dying, via the sudden exposure of the lesion on his arm. The way the scene shifts from catty camp to stoical sincerity, via linguistics, Judaism, death, seeming to cast its net so wide across the gay experience, marked it as a piece of urgent, intelligent, human writing, and confirmed what has been readily apparently to those more knowledgeable than me for years: Andrew Scott is quite something.

Now Tony Kushner's play is back at the National Theatre, where it premiered to UK audiences in 1992 a year after its American debut, with Andrew Garfield in the Scott role and James McArdle in Cooper's, as part of an ensemble featuring Russell Tovey, Denise Gough, Nathan Lane and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett.

It's billed as 'A Gay Fantasia on National Themes', and that's about the size of it: a waspish, tender and abstract state-of-the-union address, full of hallucinations, flights of philosophy, self-reproach and humour − it's far funnier than I expected − but completely sure-footed, never spinning into self-indulgence or triviality, and with such a variety of ideas, jokes and language that it reminded me of Truman Capote at his best. Set beneath the neon striplights of an unforgiving New York, a sort of Hell, haunted by the spectre of the AIDS pandemic as the Millennium Approaches, it follows a vivid assemblage of damaged souls, from Gough's valium-addicted housewife, hiding from an abusive childhood, to her closeted, straight-backed husband (Tovey) and his father figure, Roy Cohn (Nathan Lane), a genuine figure in 20th century American politics, who trained under Joseph McCarthy and mentored one Donald J. Trump.



Cohn, as envisaged by Kushner, is a brilliant character, and this is a simply brilliant characterisation. On one level he is so clear and commanding, so assured, so rendered in coal-black and Vanish-white, an unshakable monolith rooted in an immovable Americanism, and yet there are layers within layers, so many of them grey, and each lit up by the scene, and by what Lane seems to play between the lines. We see him first as a sort of barking barrel on little legs, roaring into his phone like a wackily irascible '30s screwball character. That blustering fury is part of his persona, but the blistering, hollering rage that comes later is part of his personality. Cohn seems at first full of contradictions, but they're not contradictions, they're contentions as firmly held as his believe in robust, right-wing America. He loathes traitors, but sees his disavowal of his orientation not as a betrayal of a community to which he doesn't believe he belongs; for him, betrayal would be accepting the lowly, put-upon place of the 'homo' in American life. And so, as he explains to his doctor (Susan Brown): "Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man, Henry, who fucks around with guys." The awesome power and nimble timing that Lane brings to this role is extraordinary but, like every element of this production, it's regimented and restrained, part of a whole that moves sleekly and sublimely.

McArdle is excellent too as Louis, a verbose, liberal Jew whose idealism is tempered by a pragmatic discovery of his own limitations that saturates him with self-loathing, and unbearable guilt. His chemistry with Garfield is tender, his deftness with quickening streams of political consciousness is a feat of admirable, involving plate-spinning, and his emotional connection with the audience allows us into a character conspicuously lacking in heroism.



Garfield's role is more obviously showy, and his performance attracts superlatives, but he refuses to play Prior as a straightforward martyr. His Prior is effete, sensitive and even profound, with a natural grace and an affected gentility. He's also this first half's great victim, transfigured but more often disfigured by his disease, by mental torment and physical degradation; a character defined by his beauty, with an illness that's ugly and unforgiving. Stricken, with lesions on his skin; pouting, dressed as Norma Desmond; barking wordplay on a bench; reclining like a dying Greek God on a hospital bed, his homosexuality or his illness make him irresistibly otherworldly, touched as if by some secret spell. But in this first half, Prior is also slightly silly: a shrieking, bitchy, tart, vain queen (played without an ounce of vanity), and Garfield never loses sight of that dichotomy.

By contrast, Tovey's Joe is a model of Reagan-era repression, a clean-cut, ambitious forceful 'nice' guy struggling to reconcile his sexuality, his morality and the sphere in which he operates. I was a bit of a Tovey agnostic before this (I believe he exists, I just wasn't sure if I was a fan), but he struck just the right tone, and continued striking it with just the right variations. As his tortured wife, Harper, slipping from her pained existence into the welcoming embrace of fantasy, Denise Gough matches him: we want to protect her character from this self-destructiveness, we want her to be happy, or content, or free, but we also want her to stop lying.

But while Louis spouts democratic rhetoric, Joe voted Republican and Belize (Stewart-Jarrett) listens − boiling − to Louis' description of a post-race America, these characters are not conduits or manifestations of political positions. They're people who have ideas, not people who represent ideas. That's why they feel real. I also loved the way that Kushner's language is attuned to his themes, and that those themes are so wide-ranging and yet so specific. Millennium Approaches cast its view across a broad scope of American history, takes in all areas of American society, and then goes broader still. Without labouring his points, the playwright can evoke the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, the rooting out of communism, the endemic racism against African-Americans, the self-satisfied, unthinking, privileged, hostile 'niceness' of Reaganite Washington, and the hole in the Ozone layer that no-one but the emotionally damaged gives a shit about, without having to ever compare any of these, explicitly, to the plight of gay men during the AIDS pandemic.


Cohn and Trump

This revival is valuable too in reading present-day America. The people Cohn worked for (and namechecks) characters were − like Reagan −both political and pop cultural, celebrities who became celebrities because of their political power, and whose celebrity caused that power to increase exponentially: gossip columnist and commentator Walter Winchell, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, and red-blooded, red-hunting senator, Joseph McCarthy. All fine Americans, celebrated in their time for their strength, their weeding out of hypocrisy, and their obsession with the morality of private lives or of private political beliefs. Trump, though he's thick as shit, is a tub-thumping populist whose Americanism is similarly uncomplicated, and whose major calling card has been a ubiquitous celebrity, though he doesn't have the same concerns Cohn does about state officials being under Russian control. Nor is Trump's malevolence coated in the unwavering 'niceness' of Reaganism − who made people feel good about themselves, then looked the other way − it is sheer, toxic nationalism, which makes him more the heir to McCarthy and Cohn than Ronnie ever was. As much as anything, this is a play about both the ruinous effects of privilege − in which even a gay Jewish man whose lover is dying of AIDS cannot attempt to comprehend the African-American experience − and the blinkered guilt-saturated selfishness of '80s America ("All of us... falling through the cracks that separate what we owe to ourselves and... and what we owe to love," as Louis puts it). President Trump is both the scion and the defender of unthinking, uninvestigating privilege, while Reagan's America was the self-serving economic playground in which he began to pave his path to the White House.

As it contemplates these characters and draws those from history into its realm, its sprawling tentacles make the play feel like something in a hidden American tradition, the way Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven reinserted the nation's censored stories into '50s melodrama. It looks forward, back and around: absorbing the past (Jewish mothers carrying their world on their backs to the New World), staring dumbstruck at the present, and forecasting − via Cohn −a dominant Republican future, anticipating today's horror show, but little-knowing that the play's pop-culture savvy (with nods to Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist) is probably going to be more valuable in understanding it than any knowledge of Washington history.



The play's stagecraft impeccably mirrors its subject matter. At first it's compartmentalised in three small sets (left, right and centre), its characters boxed off from one another, trapped in lives that are about to upended. Later the characters shout across one another: as they open up, so does the set, setting into motion the "connectedness" of which Louis speaks. Finally, the scenery moves back to make the most of a vast stage, as Garfield's descendants (a hilarious, Very Yorkshire Tovey, offset by Lane as a preening, powdered fusspot) pay him an unwelcome, hallucinatory visit, Gough retreats from her kitchen floor to see the Ozone layer up close, and Moon River pipes up from somewhere giving us a hint of a Hollywood ending as false as those always are.

I can gaze perplexed at some gay culture − when it's gaudily sleazy, I tend to feel either disinterested or uncomfortable; at others times I find its reductionism baffling, seeming to define gay people only by their gayness − but I suppose this is like how those who are LGBT might enjoy the album Liege and Lief but hate Transformers, the defining criteria of the art isn't the sexuality underpinning it, but whether it's really good or rubbish. You'd have thought a Corbyn voter would have known that.

One line in particular ("You're old enough to understand that your father didn't love you without being ridiculous about it") makes a dizzying comic leap that brings understanding and recognition in lapping waves of laughter, having audaciously vaulted over the expected exposition or consolation to land effortlessly on its feet.

I was blown away by Angels in America: this clear-headed, literate and ambitious piece of art; by the precision and variety of its ideas, the breadth of its imagination, the variety of its expression (in language alone, it moves from absurdity to knowingly long-winded verbosity, to wit, to caustic one-liners, to an unexpected bluntness that really works in such small doses), and by how unexpectedly enjoyable and funny and entertaining it was. Only a month to wait till Part Two. (4)

***

Thanks for reading.

REVIEW: An evening down the culture wars

The Girls (Phoenix Theatre)
Thursday 18 May, 2017



This is so, so Brexit. Gary Barlow’s musical version of Calendar Girls is fine-tuned to within an inch of its life, evoking a world and espousing a worldview that’s both seductive and abhorrent. It’s a hymn to a vanishing Britain – rural and nostalgic, where everyone knows everyone, and everyone is white – but it lacks the poetry or radicalism of the pastoral: it’s cloying and self-involved and almost context-free, lacking in proper principles beyond the ones you might find in the Conservative Party manifesto, and with a sense of community where there used to be a sense of society (cast member James Gaddas was a Tory PPC in 2005, so he should know all about it). The Girls is like Brassed Off for Leave voters: a safe, convivial, reassuring evening’s entertainment for people who look like the characters and think alcoholism is funny, and an ode to the crushing mediocrity rapidly consuming British culture, in both its music and its broad, blunt, saucy-seaside-postcard sense of humour. These characters aren’t really interested in politics, but they’ll vote Tory because they always have, and because you know where you stand with the Tories, and they’ve always done alright by us, and didn’t Corbyn say something about the IRA and wasn't that was dreadful, because I was around then and I remember what it was like. It’s a show of girl jobs and boy jobs, where hospitals should be paid for by charity, and the score is written by a tax avoider.

And yet, after 20 minutes of hating it, I began to come around, at least a little. From the moment that Claire Machin disappeared into her skirt for an exceptional piece of clowning on the knockout number ‘Who Wants a Silent Night?’, I started to forget that we’re in the middle of a culture war, and remembered that I was allowed to have a nice time, and a break from a hectic week at work. Having said that, the part of the show that really works is the hard part. The heartbreaking part. Torn from real life. Annie (Joanna Riding) loses her husband, Clarkey (Steve Giles) to cancer, and the play makes you feel the weight and the sorrow and the injustice of it. The way it's realised is very middle England, the lyrics evoking a world of duvets, margarine and Tesco trips that’s more Daily Mail than Ray Davies, but it's also moving and genuine and wonderfully played, with the two actors effortlessly stealing the show. That sincerity and emotion should, in principle, juxtapose perfectly with the humorous sequences that rub up alongside it. But they don’t. There are a handful of very funny moments, largely from Machin and young cast members Ben Hunter and Josh Benson, but most of the humour is really loud: inane, broad-brush joshing – the kind of thing you see on Loose Women or in an above-par Carry On… film, or when a hen party is on your train.


Chloe May Jackson, Ben Hunter and Josh Benson, the latter two providing many of the funny bits.

As you may know, Annie – encouraged by her free-spirited friend Chris (Claire Moore) – decides to make a nude calendar with her friends in the Women’s Institute, to raise money for a new sofa at the hospital where her husband died (I presume it hadn’t been replaced for several years due to 18 years of chronic underfunding of the health service by successive Tory governments). Along the way, they fight, squabble, banter and heal, while facing a cartoon baddie (Marion McLaughlin), assorted familial troubles and the personal demons of their WI friends. And we get a succession of Gary Barlow tunes – with pleasant if uninspired melodies, and wildly variable Tim Firth lyrics – before plot threads are tied and the cast take their clothes off behind pianos, flowers and currant buns, and the audience whoops and hollers, and a standing ovation breaks out. And in the end I kind of enjoyed it, because I like the theatre, and there were just about enough hummable songs and incidental funny bits, and Riding was very good, and her scenes with Clarkey stick in my mind because they brought a lump to my throat, and the second half was much more entertaining than the last act of King Lear at The Old Vic last year, which troubles me immensely. And though it’s set in a Paul Dacre wet dream of a small-town idyll, and the characters are cartoon Yorkshire people, and they’re the kind of cartoon Yorkshire people who actually exist, because they find the stereotype so alluring, and I’m going to have the burn the book to this show once the culture war hots up, it was a hell of a lot more enjoyable than I expected after those first, joyless 20 minutes, when I’d begun to question many of the life choices that had brought me to this point.

Having said all that, think how many hospital wings we could build if Gary Barlow just paid his taxes. (2.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

REVIEW: An American in Paris at the Dominion Theatre

Wednesday 15 March, 2017



This explosive, intelligent stage version of MGM’s 1951 masterpiece, direct from Broadway, sags now and then in its book, but offers unmissable entertainment of a type rarely seen in the West End.

We began in the tumult of postwar Paris, less the escapist playground of the film and more a ravaged battleground where demobbed soldiers try to forget the war, women feel in perpetual danger and collaborators are being beaten and getting their heads shaved. Craig Lucas’s script offers a rejigged, re-ordered narrative that adds extra Gershwin songs (the film doesn’t have nearly enough), underscores the action with a battle fatigue that accentuates its more carefree moments, and leads to a putting-on-a-ballet climax that’s imaginatively conceived in narrative and artistic terms.



Its great masterstroke is turning the sardonic narrator from the grouchy, alienated middle-aged Adam played by Oscar Levant into David Seadon-Young’s war vet (above, left), an inspired innovation that lends a far greater heft to his sequences, if rather undermining the appeal of Jerry Mulligan (Robert Fairchild), one of three protagonists now in love with the same woman, the gamine ballerina, Lise (Leanne Cope, a worthy successor to Leslie Caron). Jerry is a painter who truly cares for Lise, but when you put this character into a more realistic, grounded world of Nazis, collaborators and the battle between duty and romance, his charming rom-com stalking comes off as a little thin, selfish and, y’know, sexist. The other romantic possibility for Lise is her fiancée, Henri Baurel (Hayden Oakley), a French aristocrat who dreams of being a musical-theatre star, and who here is a nervous, cautious man with a rather abrupt back story.



Fairchild and Cope (above) both originated their roles on Broadway, and they’re superb dancers, while transmitting the basic traits that make their characters appealing: Jerry’s ease in his skin, his irreverence and athleticism, Lise’s combination of the elfin and the erotic, a latent fire burning beneath an ethereality that – like Audrey Hepburn’s – seems dictated by the privations of war. Their characterisations can’t quite bridge the shortcomings of the script (Jerry’s quite selfish, Lise is something of a cipher), but their song-and-dance talents are unimpeachable. The moment that the climactic ballet explodes into sensual life is pure exhilaration, with shades of Bob Fosse’s revolutionary, finger-clicking goodness in Kiss Me Kate. In support, Zoe Rainey makes for a sparky, hugely appealing Milo (younger, and funnier, than Nina Foch), Oakley is pretty good balancing the inconsistencies of his character, and Seadon-Young is simply terrific as the lovelorn, limping war vet who channels his unhappiness and romantic impotence into his art.

The staging is similarly superb, making the most of the stage’s depth through some striking compositions, and mixing the irregular patterns and primary colours of ‘50s art with the more impressionistic style of the MGM film, and many of its most enchanting, striking and transportative effects achieved through brilliant projections and lighting. That sense of intelligent, contextualised innovation extends to the musical numbers, which are an absolute knockout. Beginner’s Luck is the epitome of vibrant, perfectly choreographed, 1950s-style showstopping magic, as Jerry crashes Lise’s workplace at the Galleries Lafayette perfume counter, turning the room into a riot of colour, extravagant hoofing and umbrellas.



When Henri makes his live debut, we get all the art deco razzmattaz of a ‘30s Warner musical, but framed in the realism of an awkward, halting first show that explodes into fantasy. It’s lovely too that its post-modern but idealistic escapism extends to Adam losing his limp and getting to share the spotlight (though it loses a fraction of a point for Oakley being unable to hit that climactic top note, instead going down an octave). I Got Rhythm too tinkers with the film’s formula, bringing all three love rivals together for the first time and incorporating an inspired, hushed, candlelit middle-eight with diegetic sound. Character-led, grounded numbers that still thump it out of the park are about the best thing that musicals can offer, and there are several here. And though we don’t get the breathtaking Seine-side dance to Our Love Is Here to Stay that’s one of the MGM movie’s great virtues, this stage version does incorporate several Gershwin songs from other shows, including his fondest, saddest, most romantic creation – Our Love Is Here to Stay – as well as The Man I Love and, erm, Fidgety Feet. The vocals are strong while retaining a fair amount of the subtlety and personality that can be lost in musical theatre, and the orchestra is fantastic: punchy and precise, like John Wilson at his considerable best.



The show climaxes with a ballet that’s still a hypnotic fantasy of love, but now coupled with a putting-on-a-ballet climax, as Lise makes her first public performance, but can only acquire the requisite passion by calling Jerry to mind. For a little while you wonder if they’ve botched it by junking the movie’s journey through different artistic styles – though Singin’ in the Rain is now the best-loved and most-respected of all MGM musicals, in the ‘50s it was An American in Paris, and particularly this sequence, that was regarded as the studio’s supreme achievement – but with Jerry’s entrance it becomes a powerful, extremely sexy and all together beguiling proposition: the bob-haired Cope draped across Fairchild, or swaggering, shoulders-back, towards us, as he pirouettes furiously, exuberantly around the perimeter of the stage.

It’s a stunning highlight of a show that’s less slick, seamless and smooth in the book than it needs to be – the jokes are patchy, and a laboured subplot about Henri’s parents isn’t helped by shallow sentimentality and broad playing – but knows its strengths, with some intelligent weighting towards the political context, fine acting, and musical moments that are everything they should be and more. And since I was lucky enough to land a ticket for the first night, I also got to see Leslie Caron come and take a bow. (3.5)


(Pic credit: Heidi Bohnenkamp)

***

Thanks for reading.

REVIEW: Exhibitionism at the Saatchi Gallery

Exhibitionism (Saatchi Gallery) – This huge Rolling Stones exhibition is invigorating and infuriating in equal measure, much like the band themselves. There were things I loved: like the ‘60s jackets that defined their changing modes and moods, and reflected the way that they were fed – and later led – the culture that surrounded them. I’ve been weirdly fascinated (and revolted) by the filthy bedsit that they shared in the early days, since I read about it in a tawdry Jagger biog as a 10-year-old, so walking through a slightly sanitised but very authentic seeming replica in order to get from a multi-screen, 50-year history to a room of sixties’ memorabilia was a treat that immersed me in that world. Those sorts of experiences – low-rent time travel by any other name – are what make this sort of exhibition so worthwhile and special, and another room (prior to a climactic 3D extravaganza) did a similar thing, putting us backstage at a mammoth Stones show, amidst the paraphernalia of the band’s everyday life on the road.

Where Exhibitionism falls down, though, is in its failure to articulate why the band matter, other than as a pop cultural phenomenon, and perhaps that’s because a) Saatchi has no interest in depicting the socio-political importance of a band initially bound so tightly to the counterculture and, b) they don’t stand for anything, apart from making money. They’re defined by their popularisation of the blues and their contribution to the permissive society, but taken as a whole, their career is a microcosm of the promise of the ‘60s and where that promise ultimately took us. Perhaps they were just a part-painted canvas on which you could project your own desires, and certainly they lacked the overt political radicalism that marks (if dates) so many of their contemporaries, but more than any other band they represent the way that the counterculture was, and is, subsumed by the Establishment, and the greed that replaces genuine artistic endeavour.

Anyone who saw the Stones as a beacon of light in a world of drab conformity is justified in feeling a bit betrayed by the cash cow that they have become (a pack of tour posters – sorry, “limited edition lithographs” in the gift shop is £225, there are silk Rolling Stones pyjamas for almost twice that). You might ask how a young rebel grows old, something I’m defensive about whenever John Lydon gets a bad press, but there are other ways than espousing Tory politics while creaming money off the people who put you where you are (still, that generation voted Brexit and got a serious hard-on for wars abroad, so...). For all that, Jagger remains a completely fascinating figure to me: such a baffling combination of a vital, borderline genius and a preening, out-of-touch embarrassment. Like Cristiano Ronaldo.



Another odd thing about the exhibition is how little emphasis it places on the music. I heard perhaps seven Stones songs during the two hours I was there, and most of those were just fragments. One could argue that you would have to already be well-versed in their music in order to make the trip, but it keeps you oddly alienated from the band you’re celebrating and their supposed raison d’etre; a handful of rare or unreleased tracks or takes piped into rooms showcasing graphic design and stage sets would have given you a conspiratorial connection to the group. One of the most enjoyable elements is one of the few exhibits actually about music: a box with faders that allows you to re-tool 90-second clips of Stones classics like Angie and Sympathy for the Devil (live), by tinkering with the lead vocal, back-up vocal, lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass, drum and brass levels. It’s such a simple idea and such a great marriage of innovation, education and make-believe.

There are some other lovely flourishes too: a room that’s a treasure trove of miscellany, from props used in the Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out shoot to the toy drum and cheapo cassette recorder used to record Street Fighting Man, complete with a cracking explanation of the process and a listening post where you can hear the original basic track in all its make-do-and-mend lo-fi majesty. There’s the chance to read the Stones’ Q&As for a fanclub mag – Brian Jones likes “boating”, Jagger lists his interests as “girls, eating, clothes” and has his answers to eye colour (“blue”, with "brown” crossed out) and instrument (“maracas” replaced by “harmonica”, which he then started learning) edited, presumably by a press agent – and at one point Mick and Keith’s versions of how they met are laid out side by side, painted on slats coming down from the ceiling. But while the determination of the rooms is deftly done – one room on film, another on style, a third on instruments, a fourth on their studio work – there’s no real hierarchy relating to the quality of their output. You’d be hard pushed to find anyone who doesn’t think they did their best work between 1968 and ’72, and yet there’s as much prominence given to the Steel Wheels tour in 1989 than there is to a seminal record like Sticky Fingers. At one point the decision to position and sell phenomenal numbers of extra seats behind the stage is framed not as a money-making venture but as Jagger’s tribute to the design of Shakespeare’s Globe.

I suppose really it’s fitting: an exhibition that treats the Stones not as a band but a brand, where the stage design, the ticket sales and the profit-margin are more important than the music. And the message? Well that doesn’t exist, if it ever did. As a multi-faceted, multimedia extravaganza, stuffed with multiple rare artefacts, it’s in many ways a treat, but for anyone still clinging vainly to the promise of the ‘60s, it’s also a lesson in where the counterculture ends up: flogging you branded silk pyjamas for £400 a pop. (3/4)



Tickets are £25. It runs until 4 September.

A love letter to My Own Private Idaho (and some other bits and pieces) – Reviews #238

FILMS



My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991) – I’ve only had three different favourite films since I was 19: Remember the Night, before that The Searchers, and before that: this. I’ve seen My Own Private Idaho well over a hundred times, but this was my first on the big screen.

It’s Gus Van Sant’s dazzling, gutting, phantasmagorical Rent Boy Henry IV, as narcoleptic hustler River Phoenix searches for his mother across Idaho, Oregon and Rome, in the company of his best friend – and love of his life – Keanu Reeves, the sire of a wealthy family, trapped between his domineering dad and a Falstaffian father figure (William Richert).

Its iconography, its laidback feel, its use of fantasy, of Eddy Arnold, Rudy Vallee and Pogues recordings, of real-life confessionals from genuine prostitutes, is like nothing else I’ve ever seen: beautiful, haunting, horrifying and seductive. And though it’s not without false notes now and then, its lax approach to scene length and oddball characterisation is part of its charm, forming a perfect whole not comprised of perfect pieces.

Its great virtue is Phoenix’s storyline, a tale of abandonment powered by his astonishing performance, which crystallises everything that made him the most important, interesting and artistically successful actor of his generation: the sensitivity, depth of inner life and impeccable, unsung comic timing he exhibited in an eight-year career that ended so abruptly and tragically in October 1993. His monologues which open and close the film are something like the apogee of slacker cinema – with a poetry and lack of pretension so rarely present in the oeuvre – while the scene between him and Keanu by the campfire (almost completely improvised by Phoenix) is simply one of the most genuine articulations of unrequited love that I have ever experienced.

Throughout, his character speaks to me profoundly and personally, a connection that has not lessened or abated over a centenary of viewings. (4)

***



Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1968) – This revolutionary lovers-on-the-lam flick changed the face of Hollywood, ushering in a decade of innovation through its offbeat approach, rich and distinctive characterisation, and spasms of extreme violence.

Warren Beatty is the charming ex-con who has a zeal for bank-robbing where his sex life should be, Faye Dunaway the bored waitress he hooks up with, while his brother (Gene Hackman), his brother’s neurotic wife (Estelle Parsons) and a shy, baby-faced misfit by the name of C. W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard) round out the rest of the notorious Barrow Gang.

Despite decades of rip-offs – and its influence on movies as diverse and wonderful as Thieves Like Us, Bound for Glory and screenwriters Newman and Benton's own Bad Company – Arthur Penn’s film retains its visceral impact, while its overarching fatalism, tied to an unpredictability in the moment and the understated, fleeting nature of its peculiarities, keep both your head and your heart enthralled, as it starts off light, turns goofy, then becomes deadly serious. A special mention too for Pollard’s intriguing, naturalistic performance (Michael Andrew Fox was so impressed that he borrowed the actor’s ‘J’), and Dede Allen’s mesmerising editing, particularly during that unforgettable finale.

Studio head Jack Warner, who rated films based on the reaction of his bladder, memorably dismissed Bonnie and Clyde as “a three-piss picture”, while heavyweight American critics saw their reputations made or destroyed by their reaction to the film. It turns 50 next year and is still as bloody, and as bloody brilliant, as ever. (4)

***



The Fall of the House of Usher (Roger Corman, 1960) – Inoffensive Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon) turns up at a crumbling Gothic mansion, hoping to carry off the woman of his dreams (Myrna Fahey), only to meet her rather difficult brother (Vincent Price). Corman’s first Poe adaptation doesn’t make a lot of sense in either story or execution, but it’s pretty creepy, with some effective suspense sequences and a good performance from a peroxide Price. (2.5)

***



A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Tay Garnett, 1949) – This second version of Mark Twain’s classic story is far better than the 1931 adaptation (which starred Will Rogers), with an effective framing device, a nice feel to its romantic scenes – featuring the not unattractive, flame-haired Rhonda Fleming – and one classic song, Once and For Always, but I’ve begun to find Bing Crosby’s screen persona really irritating: the embarrassing jivetalk, the smug intonation that masks a deficiency of sincerity, and that walky sort of dance he does in lieu of any terpsichorean ability. His singing’s great and the film is diverting enough overall, but it simply grates and stutters too often. (2)

***

TV



The Best of What's Left of 'Not Only... But Also' – Peter Cook is perhaps the funniest person who has ever lived, so it's odd that this landmark series − his most popular and sustained creative effort − is so incredibly underwhelming. Working in tandem with regular foil Dudley Moore, Cook made a sustained effort to move away from the satire of Beyond The Fringe, only to waste much of his energy on lousy spoofs − which ironically age a lot more quickly than topical political gags. Still, he wanted superstardom, not a legacy.

Only about three hours of the three Not Only... But Also series that they made for the BBC still exist, the rest having been wiped to save expensive tapes, and I was shocked by how little of it is actually, well, funny. There are a handful of truly great sketches − mostly the 'Pete and Dud' routines, including an unassailable classic in the National Gallery complete with Cook ad-libbing to make Moore corpse, and an embryonic Arthur Streeb Greebling effort − and a few other good ones (the goblin cobbler, Alan A-Dale, Bo Dudley), but the rest is a mixture of pastiches that go on forever (the Thunderbirds one is fucking terrible), silly voices, pointless big-money stunts, Cook repeatedly using the word 'substances', and Moore doing the same unfunny faces and breaking off for regular musical interludes. Oof. (2.5)

***



Cunk on Shakespeare (2016) – Fine, but not really sustained, with too many of those awkward Ali G-style segments in which Philomena meets real-life experts. There's nothing in it as funny as this gag:



Oddly, the Guardian article that Morgan wrote to plug the show is better than the programme itself. (2.5)

***

BOOK



One Summer by Bill Bryson (2013) – An interminable summary of second hand sources (and a few New York papers) that deals with the incredible summer of 1927, in which America saw the first Atlantic crossing, the birth of sound cinema, the invention of the TV, Babe Ruth’s record home run chase, and a whole lot more besides. There are some interesting details and funny stories, but it frequently drags and rarely gives you a sense of what it must have been like to actually be there. The Ruth sections promise much and deliver almost nothing. The book is also so mistaken on the bits I already knew about – attributing silent star Clara Bow’s decision to quit cinema to her voice rather than her mental health, mistaking the technical significance of 1926’s Don Juan – that it made me doubt the rest. Really disappointing. (Lovely front cover, though.) (2)

See also: David Stenn's Clara Bow biography is a gem. As it's in Bryson's bibliography, you might have thought he would have read it.

***

Thanks for reading.

Secret Cinema, Adam Curtis and gut punches - Reviews #209

I'm planning something separate about my overriding preoccupations - D. W. Griffith and Lillian Gish - but here's everything else I've been enjoying/not really enjoying of late...

FILMS



Bitter Lake (Adam Curtis, 2015) - The latest film from Power of Nightmares director Adam Curtis, available solely on iPlayer, is an astounding piece of work.

His thesis is that we are unable to truly engage with or understand contemporary affairs because of the simplistic stories to which we have become addicted. To make this point, he considers the case of Afghanistan, creating a sprawling mosaic that alternates utterly fascinating, eye-opening polemicising with thousands of feet of extraordinary, raw, unbroadcast footage − poetic, surreal, chilling, heartbreaking and enraging − shot by BBC News crews over the past 15 years.

Oddly, Curtis doesn't actually succeed in constructing a convincing case around what turns out to be a rather nebulous, ironically simplistic theory, while the idea that most of us stand for nothing, compared to the Mujahedeen, is frankly madness. But the story he weaves, of the seeds for our economic and ultimately ideological destruction being unwittingly sown by Roosevelt (hands down my favourite president) when he met Saudi Arabia's Kind Saud on Seattle's Bitter Lake in February 1945, is quite, quite brilliant. And while at first many of the clips seem to be going on a bit, Curtis's unique approach ultimately gives the movie a haunting, cumulative power that lingers on long after the credits have rolled.

It's an imperfect but essential film. (3.5)

***



An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, 2006) - Despite being a slightly annoying, militant eco type (I didn't fly between 2005 and 2013, I don’t drive for the same reason), I'd never gotten around to Al Gore's Morally Righteous PowerPoint Presentation, as this film should obviously be called.

His sincere, twinkly-eyed hectoring, which includes wiping his mouth whenever he makes a joke, is mostly extremely effective and informative, ticking all the boxes from the Confident Presenter course I once went on with work, and making a passionate, inspiring case for saving the planet. Though admittedly, putting axes on several of these graphs might be helpful if we're going to finally see off all the selfish, blinkered wankers, sorry, 'climate change sceptics'.

The problem with An Inconvenient Truth, and there really is a true, inconvenient problem, is that it breaks off regularly for folksy, glossily-shot segments about Al Gore's life, which are occasionally illuminating (his college professor was the first person to measure the amount of CO2 in the air, for instance) but mostly self-aggrandising and completely irrelevant. There is also a quite staggering amount of PowerPointPorn, as Al smoulders in close-up, dragging pictures from one window to another, as if the other main crisis threatening to engulf us is shoddily assembled slideshows.

The rest of it's good, though, and I was glad to see in the credits that it's a carbon neutral production, as Al seemed to be flying around the world telling people to stop flying around the world. Next I expected him to start stoking a bonfire while shouting: "This is really irresponsible!" (3)

***



Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006) - An above-average dystopian flick set in an apocalyptic England, the last outpost on an Earth battered by untold calamity, including an infertility epidemic. Clive Owen is the bereaved activist who’s dragged into radical politics again by his ex-wife (Julianne Moore) and ends up as the protector of a mysterious young woman on the run (Claire-Hope Ashitey).

The frequently redrafted script has too many annoying tics and speeches of weak, mannered dialogue – the sort of thing you’d write if you had writer’s block – but the one-take action scenes are dizzying and dazzling, and the story is hearteningly unpredictable, incorporating not only unexpected deaths and shifting sympathies, but Biblical allegory, Pam Ferris with dreads and a man being shot for farting.

The cast is alright too: though Owen isn’t much of an actor, he’s a decent star, and the supporting ensemble is unpolished but interesting, featuring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Peter Mullan and a weed-smoking Michael Caine, playing a kind of slightly damaged Bob Harris. Ashitey is also quite good as the key central figure, her unorthodox performance – sincere, twinkling yet fearful – adding another layer to this flawed but impressive vision of the future. (3)

***



Sunshine (Danny Boyle, 2007) - I don't know what to think about this one, exactly, which is probably a good thing.

Danny Boyle’s visceral film about sticking an atom bomb in the sun throbs with the director’s typical restlessness: has he ever ended a film in the same genre that he began it? It starts as a men-(and-women-)on-a-mission movie, full of suspicion and setbacks, then becomes a psychological thriller and ultimately an explosive, screeching fusion of horror and action.

There’s some Alien in there, a bit of 2001, Silent Running and Cube, but plenty that’s new too, particularly in its theme of sun worship, which hangs over the story and overpowers its visual sense, resulting in scenes of increasingly exhilarating screen saturation.

The dialogue can be perfunctory and the story extremely difficult to follow, but the ensemble cast is interesting – including future stars Chris Evans and Rose Byrne (who I finally fancy, now she’s an intense tomboy rather than a vacuous neurotic) – there’s fascination to spare, and the imagery is immense. (3)

***



SECRET CINEMA: Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980) - I reviewed this movie very recently, so no need for a big write-up.

What I did notice this time were a couple of things half-inched from Tarzan movies, which provided serial-like thrills of their own in the 1930s. Firstly and most obviously, Luke swinging on the vines at Degobah, but then also the Mynocks attacking the Falcon - this far, far away galaxy's answer to the "vampire bats" so cruelly cut from Tarzan Escapes.

I was watching the movie again due to Secret Cinema. Though I found everything surrounding it rather underwhelming and amateurish, the film itself did manage to transport me, in a way that it always does, and in a way the rest of the experience didn't. (4 for the film, 2 for the overall experience)

***

THEATRE



Gypsy (Savoy Theatre) – This is a fun, funny, intensely sad translation of Sondheim’s 1959 musical about the creation of striptease sensation Gypsy Rose Lee (Lara Pulver), focusing on her manager, Rose (Imelda Staunton), the ultimate stage mother. A work of real emotional heft, it starts off light and sweet and frothy, then takes us deep into the souls and psyches of its characters, peddling a little of Sondheim’s broad sordidness (which isn’t really my sort of thing but works alright), before flooring us with a succession of gut punches. Completely compelling even at two-and-a-half-hours, it’s a show shot through with wit, ugliness, angst, desperation, panache and pizzazz, from the stylised, skewed-perspective sets to a slew of stellar songs and Staunton’s sensational central performance, the best I've ever seen her give. (4)

See also: I reviewed another favourite Staunton performance here.

The Elephant Man at Theatre Royal Haymarket

Wednesday 27 May



The Elephant Man (Theatre Royal Haymarket) - This adaptation of Bernard Pomerance's play (also the basis for the exceptional 1980 film) is fantastic as far as it goes, but it doesn't go quite far enough.

The production feels too short by a good 20 minutes and has no real dramatic climax, though it's illuminated by a superlative, all-American cast, particularly screen star Bradley Cooper, who made it big in that abhorrent, detestable slice of Fratwank, The Hangover, before revealing he could actually act the pants of most people in Hollywood, and makes for a simply sublime John Merrick. Eschewing prosthetics, he instead walks on stage as the pin-up he is, before responding to a doctor's coldly clinical analysis of his character's physique by contorting his award-winning body (People Magazine's Sexiest Man of 2011) into the curious curves of the Elephant Man, just as his voice then leans on gasps and gulps, and his personality bends to draw out Merrick's good humour, irony and inherent tortured melancholia.

In what is more of an ensemble piece than you may expect, veteran indie darling Patricia Clarkson goes for some big American moments, angling for the loudest kind of quiet pathos imaginable, as she wields the silence between words like a sledgehammer, but she's certainly commanding playing a world-weary diva shaken to sentiment by her encounter with true goodness. The other really notable performance here, though - indeed, the only person on the Theatre Royal stage who can live with Cooper in this kind of form, in this kind of scene-nabbing role - is Alessandro Nivola, absolutely excellent as doctor Frederick Treves, a character whose descent from arrogant, ambitious physician to largely broken man wielding a few choice observations about the human race is chilling, if not dramatically complete.

The acting is complemented by inventive though not groundbreaking stagecraft, into which so much thought has clearly gone that at times the production slightly undermines itself (the odd if arresting scene in which Cooper contrasts the standard human form with Merrick's distorted body requires that he act from behind a curtain prior to that). It's a hot ticket, though, and it deserves to be, not just for the big names from the big screen - which have brought a crackling excitement to Haymarket - but for the quality of the acting, Pomerance's familiar, erratic but sometimes beautifully modulated observations, and a basic story that retains its ability to appal, amuse, confound and move.

If it has a problem, it's that it never quite comes to the boil. The problem, perhaps is that Pomerance's thesis - that Merrick was as damaged by his embedment in high society as by his experiences as a ritually abused freakshow attraction - doesn't really seem to ring true, at least not in this version of the story.

There's a huge amount to be drawn from it, though, and even a bit of gratuitous nudity for us all to enjoy. No, not Patricia Clarkson's waps (though those are also on show), I'm talking about that glimpse we get of the real John Merrick's penis, which is perfectly in proportion. Cool. (3.5)

The Big Sleep as you've never seen it

*A FEW SPOILERS*
The Big Sleep: the pre-release version (Howard Hawks, 1945)



The Big Sleep is one of the most purely entertaining films of the 1940s, a zingy, slangy, sexy slice of film noir that takes full advantage of a classic Raymond Chandler story, a script by three of the best writers in Hollywood (including Leigh Brackett, who co-wrote Rio Bravo and The Empire Strikes Back), and Bogie and Bacall's sizzling chemistry.

Shabby detective Philip Marlowe (Bogart) is hired by the ailing General Sternwood (Charles Waldron) to foil a blackmailing racket, and finds himself up to his neck in corpses and amorous dames, including the general's smoking-hot daughter, Mrs Rutledge (Lauren Bacall).

So far, so legendary.

The movie has a peculiar history, though. Originally wrapping in January 1945, just as Bacall's debut - To Have and Have Not - hit cinema screens and made her an instant sensation, The Big Sleep was ready for release by March of that year. But with World War Two nearing a close, Warner shelved the film as they rushed to release any and all propagandist flicks that would soon be rendered redundant. By the time The Big Sleep was reinstated for release in November, Bacall's second film - Confidential Agent - had come out, receiving savage reviews that suggested her career might be over as soon as it had started.



At that point, Bacall's agent, Charles K. Feldman, wrote to the head of the studio, Jack Warner, and urged him to take action: to add more scenes of Bacall, to scrap a scene in which she wore a veil (apparently because he didn't think she looked attractive in it, the mad bastard) and to chop various exposition in order to make way for the new material. Warner wrote back to him almost at once, saying that he'd been thinking exactly the same thing (Warner always said that), and Bogie and Bacall agreed to shoot the additional material if Howard Hawks would return to direct it.

The pre-release version (the one from March 1945, which actually played to US soldiers overseas) is available on the flipside of the Region 1 DVD, and is one of the most fascinating cinematic artefacts currently in popular circulation, the sort of bonus feature you dream about, if you're a massive nerd like me. It runs three minutes longer than the finished cut and has over 18 minutes of alternate material, including:

Reel 3



More footage of Marlowe searching Geiger's house. (This is a bit long-winded and was rightly cut for pacing reasons.) Alternate scenes with Marlowe and Carmen in the car, and a different conversation between the detective and his employer's butler. This was ultimately replaced with a superb, daring new scene in Bacall's bedroom that exploits the actress's feline sensuality and her leading man's sardonism (above), and gives the film a welcome injection of eroticism ("You go too far, Marlowe", "Harsh words to throw at a man - especially when he's walking out of your bedroom"). Some dialogue was overdubbed in Reel 4 to cover for the plot changes.

Reel 7



There's a full nine minutes of exposition, explanation and macho sparring in the 1945 version that was ultimately chucked out, with Thomas E. Jackson as a compromised D.A. and James Flavin playing a vaguely incompetent, Marlowe-hating police captain. In this cut sequence, Regis Toomey really comes through for Bogie, as Chief Inspector Bernie Ohls, getting him off the hook when it matters most. Toomey is excellent in the finished film too, but their bromance has much less to it without this chunk of story. Also, if you're someone who finds the finished film hard to follow (i.e. a member of the human race), then this passage should clear things up a bit. Having said that, you can see why it was snipped: whilst it's entertaining (and completely fascinating from a historical perspective), it's also a little slow and turns the movie into more of a procedural than you might expect. This sequence is followed by the notorious 'veil' scene, a piece of exposition in Marlowe's office that simply isn't very interesting, especially when compared to the scorching 'racehorses' passage that replaced it, taking place in the bar at Eddie Mars' casino and graduating from plot-point ticking to an awful lot of innuendo.

Reel 8

The scene where Mrs Rutledge is threatened by one of Eddie Mars' henchman was later redubbed to make her and Marlowe seem more familiar with one another, fitting with the more laid-back, sensual quality of the finished film.

Reel 9



The sequence in which Carmen is waiting in Marlowe's room was added for the theatrical release (she's sitting in his chair, fully-clothed (above), rather than naked in his bed, as she was in Chandler's novel and would be in the '78 version). There's also more information in the final film than in the '45 one regarding Mrs Rutledge getting the DA to drop the case. Here it's just a few lines. In the final film, Marlowe's feelings for her are given greater context, and he ultimately seems like a nicer guy. The '45 version does include a cool bit where Marlowe flicks his guns out of the hidden compartment on the dashboard, though.

Reel 11



Pat Clark, a bottle blonde with intimidating eyebrows and a rather artificial manner, plays Mrs Eddie Mars in the '45 version. She was unavailable for retakes and replaced by Peggy Knudsen, who's more sparky, energetic and believable (and attractive). Bacall gets fewer close-ups in the original, and they're shot from a less adulatory angle.

So there you have it. The 1945 version has a clearer plot, a couple of interesting additional characters, an alternate Mrs Eddie Mars and a stronger through-line for Bogie and Regis Toomey. For once, though, a messy production history and the interference of a powerful, nosey agent made a movie an awful lot better. The original cut is a very good film, but the final product is a classic, and a seamless-seeming one at that, flowing far more freely, easily and quickly than its earlier incarnation, and possessing an irresistible erotic charge that comes largely from those three extra scenes: two spotlighting Bogie and Bacall's badinage, and one casting further light on Carmen's character.

Still, many of the film's familiar virtues are already in place - like Max Steiner's stunning symphonic score (the way he underlines Elisha Cook's closing moments!) and that perfect closing shot, and it remains an extremely illuminating and valuable piece of film history: essential viewing for anyone with an interest in the Hollywood studio era.



See also: I did a similar piece on My Darling Clementine a few years back now.

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Thanks for reading.