Punchdrunk - The Drowned Man

I went recently to the latest production by the Punchdrunk theatre company, an ambitious epic entitled The Drowned Man.

The venue was an abandoned building next to Paddington station - a colossal Edwardian pile empty for the past half century and presumably a warehouse of sorts built for the Great Western Railway. It has been taken over by Punchdrunk and four vast floors cunningly remodelled by stage designers to resemble a run-down 1940s film studio (complete in every detail with dozens of rooms for wigs and  costumes and editing suites and make-up and a producers' boardroom and commissary. That's not all - on one floor was an acreage of scrubland desert; on another street of stores and a movie theatre; in the basement a stagnant lagoon. There were also clusters of run-down slum caravans housing starstruck newcomers and those who never made it. All lit in dim Edward Hopper tones, the entire building dingy and hazily atmospheric.

On arrival we had been issued with a sinister beaked mask, given a short introduction by a camp lift attendant (and the warning not to speak during our visit) and then let loose to roam freely around the site for three hours in what's known as an "immersive theatre experience". After two hours I'd seen about half of the installation (including some spectacular dancing and some very surprising and satisfying moments watching actors in close up in remote parts of the building) and was completely exhausted, so found the very congenial bar (complete with torch singer but, alas, unstylish cans of warm Budweiser) and waited for my companion to join me (the point being that one had no choice but to navigate the building alone, like a ghost revisiting the past).

Well it was alright. I'd prefer an evening re-reading Nathanael West because three hours of crepuscular mystery, athletic dancing, ambiguous encounters and overwhelming portentousness soon begins to pall, no matter how awe-inspiring the treatment. The lighting and sound were superb, and the choreography (which involved moving a company of over thirty performers seamlessly around the site from one episode to another) was astonishingly good. But (to use an old cliche) it all amounted to less than the sum of its parts.

It struck me that the reason for this was that the whole conception of A Drowned Man was based around an essentially Protestant sensibility. There were thousands - thousands - of "clues" scattered around the building - photos and letters and typescripts and postcards and memos and love notes and so on, and one was expected to read them (in the dim light) and piece together a (quite banal) narrative  -seemingly lifted from The Day of the Locust. 

By Protestant I mean the belief that "the World is God's second book" as John Calvin said, an elaborate code to be broken, an accumulation of symbols the meaning of which we are placed here on earth to decipher. The makers of the show have decided to create an environment absolutely saturated with detail, but detail that adds up to nothing much. Worth seeing though, and even worth going to see, if only to confirm that God is not in the details. And we may be reminded of that distinctly modernist principle - that a work of art should not be about something, but should be that thing itself.

Images © Punchdrunk Theatre Company 2013

Follow the Money!

Here's a chance to get involved in a terrific film project and brag about it to your friends.

My friend John Hardwick is a wildly talented and ferociously hard-working film-maker. He's close to completing a brilliantly original documentary film which follows a $10 bill on a 30-day, 6,000 mile journey around the United States. Please read John's pitch below click on the link to see some of the film (which is almost ready to screen). He'll explain why he has to get the full sum by the end of October - and after three days is already half way there! If you don't want to support this very worthwhile project (and get a credit) please circulate the link to everyone you know.

Over to you, John:

John Hardwick

Hello friends and colleagues,

Most of you know that I'm making a new film called Follow the Money. It's a feature length documentary about a month in the life of a ten dollar bill. For thirty days and thirty nights myself and two colleagues followed a ten dollar bill as it criss-crossed the United States of America. The bill travelled 6,000 miles and through 13 different states. And it passed through the hands of countless incredible characters, building a unique and collective portrait of American life.

So far, me and my colleagues Ben and Steve, have financed the film ourselves but we're now at a stage where we need to pay to edit, score and finish the film. This is why we're launching an appeal for funding via Kickstarter.com - a website that helps artists, film-makers and authors to complete their projects. 

Our appeal will run from October 1st to October 31st and in that period it is vital that we get as many people as possible to see the project. Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing platform - if you reach your target you get the funding, if you don't, you get nothing. Here's a preview link to our Kickstarter appeal. It includes a trailer to the film.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1460639069/1824982202?token=2acb2df3

 If you like what you see, please keep the project in mind, and I'll mail you again next Tuesday (October 1st) with a live link. When you get it, please pass on the live link to anyone who might be interested. 

Obviously feel free to lash in a few quid to the project yourself if you wish! But even more crucial than that, please pass the link on. I'm hoping you'll ask your colleagues, friends and any billionaires you know to take a look at it. The more buzz we get via Facebook, tweets and emails, the more chance we have of funding the film.

And in return for your generous endeavours I will obviously love you forever - at least until we narrowly loose out on a Bafta - at which point I will become too bitter to love.

Thank you,

John

Don't let John become too bitter to love - he has so much to give! Here's the link again: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1460639069/1824982202?token=2acb2df3

  

  

The Goldsmiths Prize

The shortlist was announced yesterday for a new literary prize - the Goldsmiths (as in the college). According to the press release "it will be awarded to fiction that breaks the mould and opens up new possibilities for the novel form. The annual prize of £10,000 will go to a book that is genuinely novel, and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterises the genre at its best."

That sounds promising, and the winner will be confirmed on November 13th. Let me blow my own trumpet because the shortlist includes Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. I happened to be the first person to review this brilliant novel (for the TLS, here). The author and her book are the subject of previous blogs - most recently here. I am, you'll gather, a fan.

The other titles on the Goldsmiths shortlist are:

Harvest by Jim Crace (also favourite to win the 2013 Booker) Very good this.

Red or Dead by David Peace (it's about football, and very long, so one to avoid. I don't get Peace)

Artful by Ali Smith (haven't read this but Ali Smith has never made much of an impression on me)

Exodus by Lars Iyer (have just ordered this and it comes highly recommended.)

Tapestry by Philip Terry (a period novel, telling the story of the Battle of Hastings from the perspective of a Bayeux Tapestry weaver. I'll reserve judgement - but if it's written even partially in the present historic sense I'll be the first to denounce it)

My money's on Eimear McBride because her's really is the most impressive first novel I've read in thirty years and deserves the widest possible audience.

Here's what one of the four judges, the novelist Nicola Barker, has to say about McBride's novel. No prizes for guessing where she'll cast her vote. although she seems to be influenced by Fifty Shades of Grey:

Imagine being repeatedly slapped in the face, only quite lightly to begin with, by a delicate little hand wearing a large and ornate signet ring. You want to turn away, to lash out, to resist, but the little hand is so dogged, so persistent, and the ring has caught your eye, somehow, and you just want to study it, to focus in on it, because you know that it is strange and special and very beautiful. But as the little hand continues to slap it becomes more painful and your cheeks gradually start to sting and to redden. Is it a pleasurable feeling? No. Well, yes. Is it startling? Certainly. And afterwards? When it’s all finally over? The devastating bruises, spreading and flowering across your flesh in their terrible palate of blue, green, black, purple...

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is at once the slap and the gasp after the slap. It is, in a single word, breathtaking.

Read more about McBride's spectacular arrival on the literary scene here.

Some dare not by fear

From my son's (French) school, an emailed note about late arrivals:

Subject: Delay college students

Colleagues,

We noticed that some college students (especially 6) do not dare knock on the grid when they are late in the morning. Therefore, they remain outside / roundabout or return home until the next hour. Some dare not by fear, others by shyness.

This is not safe for our students. I would appreciate to encourage them to enter the gate / lodge and the service person will leave school to enter. They will then be directed to their school lives.

Note: This note does not apply to delays students.

Thank you for your cooperate

W. H. Auden - forty years on

W. H. Auden died in his sleep last night, forty years ago.

Earlier in the evening he had given a poetry reading to the Austrian Society of Literature in Vienna and then returned to the Hotel Altenburgerhof, in the Walfischgasse. He was 66 years old and was, indisputably, the greatest Man of Letters of the 20th century.

'Man of Letters' isn't a phrase one hears much any more, as such tweedy exotics no longer exist and Auden was among the last. He published around four hundred poems but was also a playwright, critic, librettist, theologian, travel writer, essayist, journalist, translator, reviewer, lecturer and film-maker. 

He was by far the most accomplished of poetic virtuosi -  he could turn his hand to the most rigorous syllabic verse and to traditional forms (sestinas, sonnets, villanelles); he could grind out Anglo-Saxon metrics, ballads, limericks, clerihews, light verse, song lyrics and much more besides. There was nothing he couldn't do, and do supremely well, in verse.

The best piece I've ever read about Auden originally appeared in the TLS in January 1973. It's by Clive James, and was prompted by the publication of Epistle to a Godson the previous year. You can, and should, read it here. It's a brilliant introduction to both the life and the work.

Auden's first collection was the tiny 1928 booklet Poems (see below), hand printed by his friend Stephen Spender in an edition of 'about 45'. All known copies are now accounted for, and priceless. Auden would not republish most of the poems in this collection, and James in his review suggests, intriguingly, that the poet spent the rest of his career in flight from his own virtuosity, his huge Shakespearean gift. It's a theory.  

Poems (1928)

The first poem in that first little book is entitled (with admirable modernist anonymity) 1(a). Here it is in full:

The sprinkler on the lawn

Weaves a cool vertigo, and stumps are drawn;

The last boy vanishes,

A blazer half-on, through the rigid trees.



The rest are just as good - but isn't that great?


©  The Estate of W. H. Auden

Celebrity

Frankie Howerd!

We share a birthday (March 6th) and, to a degree, a sensibility - or at least a weakness for innuendo. It was Howerd as the gossipy slave Lurkio in the 1970s BBC television comedy Up Pompeii! who delivered the ripest of all doubles entendres when, faced by a giggling cluster of sexy Vestal Virgins said, by way of salutation: "It is a great honour that you do me", before turning to the audience, aghast at their laughter, scandalised by their lewdness. It was, I think, Talbot Rothwell who wrote the show, the man behind so many lamentable 'Carry On' scripts.

One remembers Frankie Howerd fondly as a filthy performer, but he was really nothing of the kind - the audience provided the filth, he the pretext. He was, if anything, rather prim. I saw him only once on stage, at the Southend Cliffs Pavilion in the early 1980s. It was a matinee, and the house more than half-empty (not quite the same thing as less than half full). He wore a terrible tan suit, a wig like Weetabix and his yellowish camel-face had sagged into a permanent bilious glare. He shuffled on stiffly, looked into the audience with distaste, licked his chops, adopted a characteristic posture (left hand on hip as if massaging a bad back, right hand raised, elbow pressed to the other hip, hand splayed in a camply emphatic rhetorical gesture) and he was off. The whole first half of the show consisted of a rambling explanation of how he came to be here "in this posh garage", as well as several unsuccessful attempts to sing "Three Coins in a Fountain" accompanied by an elderly pianist ("She's deaf, poor thing, stone deaf"). We all laughed helplessly, and constantly. "Give us a smile missus. Show us your teeth. No - don't hand 'em round!". All the trademark oohs and aahs were delivered in a kind of ripely eldritch shriek while the Brezhnev eyebrows did their thing; he made us imagine we were capable of any manner of wickedness. Excellent. When he said, as I expect he was contractually obliged to: "I was flabbergasted. My gast has never been so flabbered!" we all howled and clapped and even whistled. He  pursed his lips and looked dismayed.

Jeanne Moreau sings!

Jeanne Moreau sings Le tourbillon de la vie in Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1962).

How lovely to hear an untrained voice sing a beautiful song. Here's another - Anna Karina  in Godard's Pierrot le Fou sings Ma ligne de chance, attended by Jean-Paul Belmondo.

This is one of the early films Godard would later disown. He's nuts. I'd trade all the lacklustre doctrinaire Maoist videos he went on to make in the 1970s for this three-minute clip. Life is here, and love. I hope our children will one day get to see such films as they should be seen, on a big screen - but it seems unlikely. Pierrot le Fou (1965) is an absolutely immersive movie (as they say nowadays) - in Cinemascope and saturated Eastmancolor (which has to be seen to be believed). A wonderful film.