Saturday, 29 August 2009
Tuesday, 11 August 2009
Tuesday, 16 June 2009
When The rain Stops Falling
Latest trip to the Almeida clever, clever play beautifully acted. Michel Billington puts it much more eloquently below.
It is good to be reminded that there is more to Australian theatre than Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. This superb play by Andrew Bovell has the same fiendishly ingenious cats cradle structure as his Speaking in Tongues, which was filmed as Lantana. And it tackles even richer themes: father-son relationships, the past's ability to devour the future, the cataclysmic nature of the environment.
The action switches geographically between London and Australia and, temporally, between 1959 and 2039; and the connections it weaves are so subtle as to make the story murder to describe.
The pivotal scenes take place in London in 1988, where the 28-year-old Gabriel Law confronts his reticent, alcoholic mother. We learn that Gabriel's father mysteriously decamped to Australia when the boy was seven, sent his son seven cryptic postcards from the outback and disappeared on Ayers Rock. Going back in time, we discover the reasons for the father's exile; and, as Gabriel heads down under to retrace his father's footsteps, we move forwards to see how the past shapes the future.
Henry James talked of discovering "the figure in the carpet", and the crucial figure here is the deterministic nature of time.
Across four generations of a family, people constantly console themselves about the weather by saying "still, there are people drowning in Bangladesh". Saturn is repeatedly invoked in the form of both the planet and the Roman god who consumed his own son. But, for all the play's intellectual ingenuity, what emerges is a pervasive sense of loss and loneliness as fathers disappear and mothers retreat into their own world.
The one false note comes when a character offers an erudite summary of Diderot's Enlightenment philosophy, but even this bears fruit in that Diderot's observation about man's urge to consume more than he needs relates to Bovell's vision.
This is a play for those who enjoy tightly wrought drama. Michael Attenborough's production is also the finest he has done in his Almeida tenure: the combination of Miriam Buether's design and Stephen Warbeck's elliptical piano music perfectly expresses the play's mood. There are glowing performances from Tom Mison as Gabriel, Phoebe Nicholls and Lisa Dillon as his mother's older and younger selves and Jonathan Cullen as the disappearing father.
But all nine actors are equally good and the image of them seated around a table carries an almost Biblical weight. In fact, one of the strangest features of this utterly compelling play is that, for all its rationalist instincts, it suggests that the sins of the father are always visited upon the children.
The action switches geographically between London and Australia and, temporally, between 1959 and 2039; and the connections it weaves are so subtle as to make the story murder to describe.
The pivotal scenes take place in London in 1988, where the 28-year-old Gabriel Law confronts his reticent, alcoholic mother. We learn that Gabriel's father mysteriously decamped to Australia when the boy was seven, sent his son seven cryptic postcards from the outback and disappeared on Ayers Rock. Going back in time, we discover the reasons for the father's exile; and, as Gabriel heads down under to retrace his father's footsteps, we move forwards to see how the past shapes the future.
Henry James talked of discovering "the figure in the carpet", and the crucial figure here is the deterministic nature of time.
Across four generations of a family, people constantly console themselves about the weather by saying "still, there are people drowning in Bangladesh". Saturn is repeatedly invoked in the form of both the planet and the Roman god who consumed his own son. But, for all the play's intellectual ingenuity, what emerges is a pervasive sense of loss and loneliness as fathers disappear and mothers retreat into their own world.
The one false note comes when a character offers an erudite summary of Diderot's Enlightenment philosophy, but even this bears fruit in that Diderot's observation about man's urge to consume more than he needs relates to Bovell's vision.
This is a play for those who enjoy tightly wrought drama. Michael Attenborough's production is also the finest he has done in his Almeida tenure: the combination of Miriam Buether's design and Stephen Warbeck's elliptical piano music perfectly expresses the play's mood. There are glowing performances from Tom Mison as Gabriel, Phoebe Nicholls and Lisa Dillon as his mother's older and younger selves and Jonathan Cullen as the disappearing father.
But all nine actors are equally good and the image of them seated around a table carries an almost Biblical weight. In fact, one of the strangest features of this utterly compelling play is that, for all its rationalist instincts, it suggests that the sins of the father are always visited upon the children.
House Bound by Winifred Peck
House Bound was interesting in showing just how tough a middle class woman used to help found manging without servants. This was the better bit other than that there was a bit too much cod psychology about mothers and daughters.
Still as with all Persephone books well worth a go.
We first read House-Bound by Winifred Peck in 1985 when, in a feature in the Times Literary Supplement, the novelist and critic Penelope Fitzgerald, Winifred Peck’s niece, chose it as one of the books she would like to see reprinted. This was a repeat of the 1977 feature in which Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin both chose Barbara Pym as the novelist they thought most unjustly neglected.
Penelope Fitzgerald wrote: ‘If I could have back one of the many Winifred Peck titles I once possessed I would choose House-Bound. The story never moves out of middle-class Edinburgh; the satire on genteel living, though, is always kept in relation to the vast severance and waste of the war beyond. The book opens with a grand comic sweep as the ladies come empty-handed away from the registry office where they have learned that they can no longer be “suited” and in future will have to manage their own unmanageable homes. There are coal fires, kitchen ranges and intractable husbands; Rose is not quite sure whether you need soap to wash potatoes. Her struggle continues on several fronts, but not always in terms of comedy. To be house-bound is to be “tethered to a collection of all the extinct memories... with which they had grown up... how are we all to get out?” I remember it as a novel by a romantic who was as sharp as a needle, too sharp to deceive herself.’
Penelope Fitzgerald, who died in 2000, agreed in 1998 to write about House-Bound;however, we waited to publish the book, and her Preface, because we wanted a good length of time to elapse between its publication and that of the rather similarly titledThe Home-Maker, Persephone Book No.7. So the publication of House-Bound is acelebration not only of Winifred Peck but of Penelope Fitzgerald.
Winifred (nee Knox) was sister to The Knox Brothers, the title of a 1977 book Penelopewrote about her father Evoe Knox and her uncles Dillwyn, Wilfred and Ronald. It is a pity that Winifred hardly appears in that book and in fact it has been difficult to find out anything about her, bar the fact that she was brillliant, like her brothers, was one of the first forty pupils at the pioneering (and still outstanding) Wycombe Abbey School and went to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford to read History. She married when she was 29 and over the next forty years, as well as having three brilliant sons, wrote twenty-five books, mostly novels.
House-Bound was written during the war and the war is both in the background andforeground: one of the questions that the reader is asked throughout the book is – what is courage? This is another book, like Few Eggs and No Oranges, Persephone Book No.9 and A House in the Country, Persephone Book No.31, which gives an incredible picture of life during the war as it actually was rather than viewed with hindsight.
House-Bound also contains a more unusual theme: Rose’s daughter Flora is difficult, petulant and horrible to her mother, which is not something often written about in fiction (for obvious reasons, but perhaps Winifred Peck felt able to write about Flora because she had no daughters). Flora finally turns a corner; but it is painful to read about her until that happens.
Winifred Peck is also funny and perceptive about Rose Fairlaw’s decision to manage her house on her own. For years her family ‘had been free of nine or ten rooms in the upper earth, while three women shared the exiguous darkness of the basement.’ But, like Mollie Panter-Downes or Lettice Cooper, Winifred Peck could foresee the future and wrote informatively and amusingly, not complainingly, about the need for middleclass women to run their home without help, the title of one of our books and a key theme of many of them.
Penelope Fitzgerald wrote: ‘If I could have back one of the many Winifred Peck titles I once possessed I would choose House-Bound. The story never moves out of middle-class Edinburgh; the satire on genteel living, though, is always kept in relation to the vast severance and waste of the war beyond. The book opens with a grand comic sweep as the ladies come empty-handed away from the registry office where they have learned that they can no longer be “suited” and in future will have to manage their own unmanageable homes. There are coal fires, kitchen ranges and intractable husbands; Rose is not quite sure whether you need soap to wash potatoes. Her struggle continues on several fronts, but not always in terms of comedy. To be house-bound is to be “tethered to a collection of all the extinct memories... with which they had grown up... how are we all to get out?” I remember it as a novel by a romantic who was as sharp as a needle, too sharp to deceive herself.’
Penelope Fitzgerald, who died in 2000, agreed in 1998 to write about House-Bound;however, we waited to publish the book, and her Preface, because we wanted a good length of time to elapse between its publication and that of the rather similarly titledThe Home-Maker, Persephone Book No.7. So the publication of House-Bound is acelebration not only of Winifred Peck but of Penelope Fitzgerald.
Winifred (nee Knox) was sister to The Knox Brothers, the title of a 1977 book Penelopewrote about her father Evoe Knox and her uncles Dillwyn, Wilfred and Ronald. It is a pity that Winifred hardly appears in that book and in fact it has been difficult to find out anything about her, bar the fact that she was brillliant, like her brothers, was one of the first forty pupils at the pioneering (and still outstanding) Wycombe Abbey School and went to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford to read History. She married when she was 29 and over the next forty years, as well as having three brilliant sons, wrote twenty-five books, mostly novels.
House-Bound was written during the war and the war is both in the background andforeground: one of the questions that the reader is asked throughout the book is – what is courage? This is another book, like Few Eggs and No Oranges, Persephone Book No.9 and A House in the Country, Persephone Book No.31, which gives an incredible picture of life during the war as it actually was rather than viewed with hindsight.
House-Bound also contains a more unusual theme: Rose’s daughter Flora is difficult, petulant and horrible to her mother, which is not something often written about in fiction (for obvious reasons, but perhaps Winifred Peck felt able to write about Flora because she had no daughters). Flora finally turns a corner; but it is painful to read about her until that happens.
Winifred Peck is also funny and perceptive about Rose Fairlaw’s decision to manage her house on her own. For years her family ‘had been free of nine or ten rooms in the upper earth, while three women shared the exiguous darkness of the basement.’ But, like Mollie Panter-Downes or Lettice Cooper, Winifred Peck could foresee the future and wrote informatively and amusingly, not complainingly, about the need for middleclass women to run their home without help, the title of one of our books and a key theme of many of them.
The Horrors
Electric Ballroom 5th June. Brilliant brilliant gig played the whole of Primary Colours sent shivers down the spine but grin inducing happiness as well. One of the best things I have seen for ages. Loved it loved it - listen to the album if you have not already.
A House in the Country
Another Persephone book. Not one of the best but it really did show that very little has changed within England in terms of what people have to give up. I drew the comparison between the second WW and climate change.
The Daily Mail called this 1944 novel 'an elegiac romance that describes social niceties, petty squabbles, self-restraint, all played out in a rural idyll, while abroad thousands die defending that very way of life.' The great interest of Jocelyn Playfair's book for modern readers is its complete authenticity. Set sixty years ago at the time of the fall of Tobruk in 1942, one of the low points of the war, and written only a year later when we still had no idea which way the war was going, A House in the Country has a verisimilitude denied to modern writers. Sebastian Faulks in Charlotte Gray or Ian McEwan in Atonement do their research and evoke a particular period, but ultimately are dependent on their own and historians' interpretation of events; whereas a novel like this one is an exact, unaffected portrayal of things as they were at the time. The TLS praised 'its evocation of the preoccupations of wartime England, and its mood of battered but sincere optimism'; and The Tablet remarked on its 'comic energy, compelling atmosphere and richly apt vocabulary.'
Monday, 18 May 2009
The View Forum 16th May
Fantastic gig at the forum Saturday night. Saw the View just over a year ago at The Astoria. They have come a long way since then a well received second album and a fancy and complex light show. Still the same scamps though and I had forgotten how god their songs were and how good their lyrics are.
Thoroughly good time
PS Sun night there was a Libs reunion just to think one day I might be posting here about seeing them live
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