Storm in a bath-tub

In memory of  Kate Waring, a short review of her chamber opera Porcelain and Pink

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17 September

Posted in memory of composer Kate Waring, this is a short-form review of her setting of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sketch / play Porcelain and Pink as a one-act chamber opera

Just as Cole Porter does (in Kiss Me, Kate, say), carefully using the device of the curtain-raiser to introduce us beforehand to (or remind us of) the themes of songs that follow in each half, so this Kate, Kate Waring, deliberately sets the musical scene with her overture to Porcelain and Pink, as well as giving us the scope of what is to follow :

In Kate Waring's @PinkNPorcelain, clarinet, cello and piano set out, in an overture, the thematic mood / material for the later three voices
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 28, 2015

Cellist Jon Fistein, clarinettist Sarah Bowden, and pianist Alex Reid are the same instrumental forces as a year ago, when they gave us Kate’s companion-piece, Are Women People ?. Together, they herald, and then accompany, returning vocalists Hazel Neighbour (soprano) and Jessica Lawrence-Hares (mezzo-soprano), with the only change from before being that James Proctor (bass-baritone) replaces having a role for a tenor.

As we already know, the timbre of the two female voices is nicely complementary, and we find the same to be true of those of Hazel and James (the latter is familiar, at and after his time at Clare, for skill in the art of the blended voice). And, as the overture hints at (even if the framing is, of course, essentially comic), there are a few darker strands : lyre-like, the strings of the piano are directly swept three times, maybe four, as if as a portent. Yet the manner of doing so in no way invokes John Cage’s work, but the approach of Orpheus – perhaps playing a song about eternal nature and destiny, because of, and through the operation of, The Fates ? Thus the repeated gesture can be heard as embodying the primaeval tensions that are casually evoked by Fitzgerald’s text : the ancient impulses to be naked, to sing, to dance !

Whereas, putting bathing in its historical context, the early twentieth century had safely established it, at least for public consumption (and whatever the truth behind the glitz of Gatsby’s functions, or that of The Diamond as Big as The Ritz), as a private, sacred, even penitential time, or practice – not, on any account, to be seen as a pursuit, pastime or pleasure (or not, at any rate, to be seen in that way by the masses ?)…

A state of moralistic affairs that may not seem not so distant from when Thoreau, living in – and off – Emerson’s woodland near Concord, gave an account of his way of life in Walden ? (Even if Hawthorne, as we would expect and even require of him, can be found playing some deliciously ironic chords, in The Blithedale Romance, about his own experience of that period…)

At root, though, Fitzgerald also wants us to show a young woman who is making, and then wholly enjoying, the chance to flirt quite inappropriately, play a part, and, needless to say, tease us, too, with her bath-time antics : Kate Waring clearly relishes what can be found in these scenes to ground a libretto, and so, having revisited them (as she did the perhaps overlooked writings of Alice Duer Miller, with Are Women People ?), bringing them to the musical stage.

From what might otherwise have seemed an inconsequential work by Fitzgerald (even though it did cause him notoriety), she has made a finer piece and brought out both its comic and deeper potential through her setting and her care.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

The Izzie Poems (Part V*)

This is : A Poem for Izzie and Iggy

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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4 May (Postlude added, 4 October ; plus, from a Tweet, two haikus, 13 October)

A Poem for Izzie and Iggy

What you devoutly shared,
You might still have shared –
Not as lovers’ secrets,
But as thoughts, open
And showing your care


A clear communion,
As between one speck –
From another world – and
One more, made kindred
By shared origin ?


Or do ‘the poets pipe
Of love’ childishly ? :
Gawain, elevating
His slight dalliance,
Because he is famed… ?



© Belston Night Works 2015


Postlude :

To the tune of : My Lady Isabella's Jig so obsessed was she, with herself, that she overlooked how she turned him off

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 3, 2015

Twinned traitors

He enjoys stories
Of her dark, sexy exploits
With the other men

It makes the sex sharp,
And fine, that he might hit her –
For what he'd allowed


Succubus

Sucking your nipples
Till you came (or seemed to come... ?)
Accorded prowess :

Flattery's efforts
Let you worm in warming hope –
Which you could then crush


End-notes

* These are the other Parts : Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Are Virginia and Sergei an unusual couple - kept apart from birth ?

This is a review, after a special screening, of What is This Film Called Love ? (2012)

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5 December

This is a review, after a special screening, of What is This Film Called Love ? (2012)

* Contains spoilers *

Even the presentation of the title What is This Film Called Love ? (2012) in the opening credits, contains a suitable ambiguity, because the last word (maybe even without a question-mark – I am unsure now) appears on a separate slide.

What I think that that subtlety does for me - of implying that there could be a comma before the word ‘love’- is to remind me to watch this as a film, not as an artifact. Its director, Mark Cousins, had just been telling the audience in Screen 2 at Festival Central on Sunday afternoon how he came to be in Mexico City with three days on his hands before a flight* : a situation to which he responded by deciding to film the basis of the film, and with the only outlay being laminating a photograph of Sergei Eisenstein (which made Eisenstein resemble, a little, both Harpo Marx and Dylan Thomas).

As a film, it is almost pointless (whatever the title may suggest**) to consider the precise genre, because, although we might later know that Cousins, filming both himself and the city, kept a notebook of his thoughts (as he told us), I think that he was asserting neither that the dreams represented were ones that he recalled having then (or ever), nor that this was a documentary in fictionalized form, and the film – as it should – speaks for itself.

Yes, we see clips from other journeys, travels, that Cousins had made, but there is using footage – itself almost necessarily what one selects to record (or have another record) – and there is editing it together with other material in a dream-sequence. When Cousins talked about Virginia Woolf in the Q&A, it was clear that he had been spending time with her writings, in particular her diaries***. Good lad! (My impression is that pitifully few people give Woolf any time, attention which did not seem to materialize with Cunningham’s The Hours and the 2002 film (or even with Orlando (1992), taken from a wonderfully anarchic novel), but might now that some pointless anniversary is slapping us in the face and telling us that she exists, a lively, passionate woman who wrote amazingly and was not just - as I have heard her dismissed - a depressive).

I had been wondering about the female narrator****, and now I realize that, modernity apart, it has a Woolfian quality to it, if not necessarily of Orlando itself, then of other significant works. And there were, with it, other qualities (even a probably quite deliberate echo of the sing-song woman vocalist / male narrator in that once deeply popular song ‘Tubthumping’ by Chumbawamba), amounting to a sense of familiarity with the delivery, the type of content, the message behind the voice being there.

The apparent purpose of the film is to show how the days available were spent (although the introduction gave the impression that, say, they fell between arrival on Wednesday and departing on Sunday, whereas the narration suggested a different placement within the week, which could just be because, off the cuff, Cousins forgot how the days fell). However, a degree of licence is implied, because there is a coherence to the narrative and its direction that might have been purely fortuitous if one had had, with no starting-point, to root around for what to do with a camera for 72 hours.

In the case of Belgian-born artist Francis Alÿs, of whom I was reminded early on by being shown a block of ice (against which Eisenstein’s laminated image was duly rested) and who, unknown to Cousins, works in the city, the starting-point for one happening-like work is such a block : I am not sure whether Alÿs has done so more than once, but there is footage of him pushing and pulling it around all day until there is nothing of it left, which was sub-titled Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing. My point being that it is a rare thing, on demand, to be able to hit upon where to start - which is what Cousins chose to do - and not to make a false start.

As it unfolds, the film is not primarily about what Eisenstein did or saw when he was in the city, but partly, in conversation with him, it suggests insights to him into what he would not have known or witnessed then (though he may have had other ideas), all of which is in an endeavour to come closer to what he documented as having thought and felt. That Cousins, in trying to relate to Eisenstein’s word ‘ecstasy’, only came to a thought on his film’s day two that was with me on day one (from knowing the literal meaning), is neither here nor there, but it did give that element of dramatic irony, of seeing, as the viewer, a course of action not known to the protagonist (why ever we used that word deserves a blog posting in its own right, some day...).

What we were being shown did not feel self-revelatory, although it may well have been highly so (and I do not just mean the Billy-Connolly-style desert streak), because it had the forward momentum that I have mentioned above (which was only slightly lost in one dream, and in one long musing in bed before getting up, where it did feel that it could have been a fraction tighter). Cousins himself would have known precisely what each thing presented signified, whereas we could only guess at it through the narrative voices: as an outsider, I had been quite content that, rather than telling his own story of those days, he could have been acting in what he had fabricated. For, to me, it made no difference, although it is clear enough, at the same time, that he positioned the camera to do some press-ups, and must equally have feigned views of falling asleep or waking up.

As I say, none of this really matters, because it was, complete with the Woolfian twists right at the end (courtesy of, again, Orlando, and also of her short book Flush), not even where we ended up with the city and with leaving it, but of the triangular relationship over time between Eisenstein, Cousins and the camera, as commented on - as if from above - by the female voice.

To this already complex mix, P. J. Harvey (or Polly, as she is known to Cousins) brought two songs (I think that it was just two) that I found the most significant part of the audio, and I brought my own little feeling that I was part of it, having Tweeted Cousins when he was in Moscow that maybe he would find cherry-blossom at Eisenstein’s place of rest, since he had left a stone from a cherry there on a previous visit…


End-notes

* Probably fortunately, no one asked, and Cousins did not say, either how this had arisen, or why he did not strive to change the flight to an earlier one.

** And hearing a recording of Ella Fitzgerald sing the Cole Porter number from her version of The Cole Porter Songbook made me value her all over again.

*** Widower Leonard Woolf edited them to one length for A Writer’s Diary, as a full set, and as an intermediate length.

**** (Cousins is also a narrator, but a more interior one, of what he said and thought, although my impression, in recollection, is that one could not make an exact separation – it may be that he strays into ‘her’ territory, and vice versa.) A question was asked about why a woman narrating, with a suggestion as to why (other than something that is narrated near the end), but, sadly, I cannot recollect the idea clearly enough to document it.


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Notes on a performance: Grief, 'a new play by mike leigh'

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5 November

Mike Leigh explicitly works on plays and films by freely involving the cast in improvisation, role-play, etc. – does this make for a less tenable notion of a play being 'by him' than with a film? (The short answer: probably not, but it feels as though it should, feels as though someone who sat in on a development session and contributed a line 23 minutes in, when everyone was stuck, might have something to say…)

Although the script of a play may, after experimentation, become fixed (as I understand Leigh’s does), with a film there is a set of performances whose nuances are captured (i.e. more than one take might be made, and then there would be a choice, but the choice, once made, would be in the cut).

With plays in general, how the words are delivered, or the stage-directions observed, can vary immensely from one show to the next, let alone one theatre – or one production - to the next. Admittedly, less likely to be so, if the actors are good ones, and the writer/director keeps an eye on things.

If the film credit says 'BUBBLEPOP - A Mike Leigh film', we know that, in studio speak, that may mean more than 'Presented by Dead Parrots Pty' or 'A Clint Eastwood production', but, perhaps crucially, who claims ownership or authorship of the script in the credits? The massed dancing bands of the city of Brno?

At any rate, the programme tells me - in a note on Leigh by Michael Coveney - that the gesture used to be 'devised and directed by', and maybe I'm happier with that.



Anyway, as to Grief, it needs to be judged whether it really works, but it is not, I believe, a great piece of theatre.

It all happens on one set, changing only as to time of day, which is shown largely through the large bay-window, stage right (but also through the light entering into the hallway, which is also stage right, through the room’s entrance in the long downstage flat). Light within the room, when it needs to be turned on during a scene, is always done by Dorothy (Lesley Manville), otherwise by the stage crew between scenes.

That said, there are various curiosities of this household, as we see it move from late 1957 into mid-1958, and which crucially relate to the staging (and what is staged):

* The only bell that we hear is the doorbell - the telephone (if there is one) never rings, is never referred to (or used), and visitors just turn up unannounced, starting with Edwin’s GP friend, Hugh (David Horovitch).

Yet this is not the provinces, but suburbia: which means not only that people may have come from a distance to happen by, but also that, though it is still early days for television, it is not for a telephone. As we know how the play has developed, this approach to people calling will be a given, but how true is it to its period?


* For the simple reason that, if visitors did turn up unexpectedly, there would be somewhere to receive them, houses of the time had two reception rooms: what we are shown here would have been the front room, almost exclusively used to keep neat and show guests into (whereas another might have doubled up as a dining-room, which Dorothy’s household has).

Guests simply would not have seen the living room in the way that is shown here, and those social niceties were alive well into the 60s and 70s (and beyond). We are, unrealistically (because anachronistically), presented with one room with the shared function of those in the household coming together and of receiving guests, i.e. what is now a lounge.


* Dorothy would have been viewed very strangely by her other well-heeled ex-telephonist friends from wartime, let alone the cleaner, if she had really had a home on the principles shown§. As to the telephone, I do not know, but it seems surprising, as does the absence of radio.

For radio would have been a large part of people’s lives at the time, but there is no evidence of one, or of anyone listening - only a reference by Gertrude (Marion Bailey) to a song that she asks Victoria (Ruby Bentall – more of an exciting name than her stage character’s) whether she has heard. (She has, much to the glee of 'Garrulous Gertie', who herself wants to seem young.)


Fine, with the second point, a number of those in the audience would have known that there was a conflation of function being shown, but younger viewers would not, and then one asks how much, if it is meant to be one, this is 'a slice of life'. It is a compromise, and one that, I imagine, one would not make in a version of the script for film - but I may imagine wrongly...

Of course, it is done just because it is a convenient way of having one large area on the stage, not the separate rooms often depicted in a set in a search for naturalism, but does that fatally flaw the integrity of trying to show a household in Britain where there is so much emphasis on a war that is not much more than a decade over, and of trying to (regain or) maintain reality? (Victoria is even told by her mother how good she was during the war.)

However, on another level, the five songs (including 'Goodnight, sweetheart' and 'Night and Day') that are burst into would not have had such a place with the presence of radio, the central one being Gertrude, Muriel and Dorothy singing 'Black Bottom' together. Otherwise, the songs are started in equal measure by Edwin or Dorothy, with the other joining in, complete with harmony at the end of some of them.

Edwin abruptly breaks off 'Night and Day', seemingly either through his own, or his sister's imagined, awkwardness: perhaps at the sentiments, although they do not differ vastly from other songs, perhaps from some connection to his bachelorhood. I was reminded not so much, as some might have been, of Dennis Potter, as of Pinter’s play Old Times, which Leigh surely knows, with its snatches of song shared in the same way.

Poor Edwin, unlike the eccentric - and, the more that we hear of him, rather irritating* – Dr Hugh, is doomed to exist more in his memories: both Dorothy and he are, and they take comfort in a familiar pattern of songs when holding their sherry, finishing with the usual ‘chin chin’, led by Edwin.

Before the final scene, with retired Edwin at home from May onwards, Dorothy and he seem like Winnie and Willie from Beckettt's Happy Days, presumably a deliberate reference by Leigh: Edwin calling out snippets from the newspaper, which make less sense to the person who cannot see it, whilst Dorothy tries to make conversation with him, but he is then immersed in this, or whatever else, he is reading. He has been warned about just slowing down rather pointedly by Dr Hugh, and the play is called Grief.

All of the cast were excellent, so I do not see the need to single any one out for praise, although, since they were necessarily on the stage for much of the two hours' duration, one's admiration for the leading players is greater.


As, though, to whether what they performed really amounted to much:

1. Grief had an end that always seemed likely (though it was unclear what we were to infer had happened to Edwin - a stroke?). Was the pain in his knee an aneurysm?

2. For the reasons stated, it was not true to its time (there were also momentary snatches of dialogue that seemed too modern for their time, e.g. Victoria saying ‘I hate you!’ to Dorothy, and largely getting away with it); and

3. Both in the 'steals' from other playwights, and the kind of life, rather empty except for remembering other times, and talk (or cross-talk) listened to by other characters with a sense of frustrated toleration, it lacked originality. Not that everything has to be new, and there were some amusing moments, but so what?

Unless it was deliberately anachronistic, and was trying to show us, by mixing times, that the 60s and 70s, and their attitudes, had their roots in the behaviour of the post-war period, which would, with war-time, have been all that Victoria knew.


* ’All's well that ends’ was fun as a quip the first time, but not by the second repetition: David Horovitch appeared in the Shakespeare, and he may have brought it to the party as a cast-joke. He seemed like a witty doctor, in a Chekhovian British vein, with his ‘Where there's death, there's hope’.


§ Not that the modern style of living with which we are all too familiar, with the emergence of the lounge-diner (or even the studio flat), had not begun in the 50s, but the window in the set showed that the house of which we saw part was not a new build of that type at all - if it had been, all well and good, and people getting used to others living that way would have been got out of the way well before the scenes that we witness, but what we were clearly shown was from an earlier property, not this.


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