Theatre

Tuesday

Fleur Macdonald

Gray’s anatomy

Reading a new John Banville novel is like walking into a house you know but finding the dirty old armchair has moved. The shelf, still stacked with the same books, is now bathed in dusty light. The rug has shifted from right under your feet. Time and memory, ‘a fussy firm of interior decorators’, have rearranged the furniture. Whenever a Banville character peers into the recesses of their mind — and introspection is the norm — they experience a similar feeling of disorientation. We last met Alexander Cleave in Eclipse when the former thespian had retreated to wandering around his late mother’s house in an attempt to gather his wits

Saturday

Alex Massie

Waiting for Growth

With apologies to the Beckett Estate… Two tramps appear on stage. They are dressed in white tie and tails and wearing top hats. Their clothes are dirty and shabby; their hats gleam. The stage is bare, apart from a mound of earth and a tree. Which appears to be dead. ACT ONE: David: [gloomy] It’s too much for one man. On the other hand what’s the good of losing heart now, that’s what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago, in the nineties. George: What do you expect, you always wait till the last moment. David: [Ponders this] The last moment… Hope deferred maketh the

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Reasons to Like Nick Clegg

As a person rather than as a politician, I mean. David has already mentioned Clegg’s taste for Germanic* classical music and now there’s another reason to approve of him. He’s a Beckett fan. If he comes out for cricket and Wodehouse, his party can have my vote… Here he is on Sam: Every time I go back to Beckett he seems more subversive, not less; his works make me feel more uncomfortable than they did before. The unsettling idea, most explicit in Godot, that life is habit – that it is all just a series of motions devoid of meaning – never gets any easier. It’s that willingness to question

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Annals of Pointless security Theatre

There’s really no need to switch off your phones and iPods and iPads next time you are on a plane. Over to James Fallows: – 100% of the pilots making those landings and approaches have GPS receivers right there next to them in the cockpits, of the kind you would have to turn off if you had one in your lap in seat 38F; […]- More and more pilots have iPads turned on through the entire flight, including United pilots who are being switched en masse from paper to iPad navigational charts. I now use an iPad extensively when flying, because the program I use, Foreflight, is so much more

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Theatre to mark Western decline

USO is not what it once was. The days of Bob Hope’s wisecracking have receded into the past, and ogled Playmates no longer sex their way across stages. The Pentagon has commissioned British theatrical talent to educate its troops about Afghanistan’s political culture and history. Performed by the Kilburn Tricycle Theatre, The Great Game is a 7 hour show about Afghanistan’s cycles of invasion, struggle and victory. Presumably if the grunts can withstand that, they can withstand anything. As Ben Macintyre notes in the Times (£), there is neither greatness nor beauty in the games that Western powers have played in Afghanistan. But, unencumbered by imperial guilt and hubristic in

Saturday

Andrew McKie

A right song and dance

The first Broadway musical that I saw, a quarter of a century ago, actually on Broadway, wasn’t, of course, actually on Broadway; it was on West 44th Street. The first Broadway musical that I saw, a quarter of a century ago, actually on Broadway, wasn’t, of course, actually on Broadway; it was on West 44th Street. It was 42nd Street. The geography is confusing, but so is the history, and indeed the nomenclature. For 42nd Street was not, of course, a Broadway musical, but a musical film made in 1933, based on a novel about life backstage at a Broadway theatre, with staged setpieces — notably the title song —

Thursday

Alex Massie

Oh Caledonia!

Paul Higgins as William Paterson in Alistair Beaton’s Caledonia. To Edinburgh yesterday to see the flagship indigenous production at this year’s Festival: Alistair Beaton’s play about the Darien misadventure in the late 17th century. For a dramatist this should be much more fertile ground than were the mangrove swamps of Panama for the poor would-be colonists. It was a national adventure swallowing up, by some estimates, as much as half the national wealth which makes it all the more infuriating that Caledonia is both so glib and so very heavy-handed. Leaving the theatre my immediate sensation was one of a great opportunity badly, foolishly missed. Half-way through proceedings it occurred

Tuesday

Alex Massie

The Gospel at Colonus

Taking Sophocles’ least-known play and reinterpreting via the hymns and songs of gospel music is, damn it, just the sort of thing that you expect from Edinburgh* in August. Thankfully, Lee Breuer’s plundering – adaptation is too limited a term – of Oedipus at Colonus is a monumental success. If you ever get the chance to see it in London, New York, DC, Chicago or wherever then for god’s sake get yourself a ticket. Most of the reviews of the Gospel at Colonus have focused, understandably, on the music and, unavoidably, on the tensions between Christian and classical Greek theology and you can certainly argue that the production loses some

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Bush, Cheney, Blair, Brown: Four Characters in Search of a Tragedian?

I enjoyed Ross Douthat’s column this week in which he contemplates the inadequacies of Hollywood’s response to the Iraq war. (Hey – at least Hollywood has responded: has the British film industry? There haven’t been too many British stories told, as opposed to Britishers telling American stories. Which is a little different.) The narrative of the Iraq invasion, properly told, resembles a story out of Shakespeare. You had a nation reeling from a terrorist attack and hungry for a response that would be righteous, bold and comprehensive. You had an inexperienced president trying to tackle a problem that his predecessors (one of them his own father) had left to fester

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Krapp’s Last Sale

From John Banville’s TNR review of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-40: In London, Beckett considered a number of possible day jobs, toying with the notion of becoming an airline pilot or–wait for it–an advertising copy writer. (There is food for a dinner-party game, devising the jingles that Beckett might have thought up for washing powder or diapers.) Quite so! Readers are therefore invited to suggest advertising copy that could have been written by Mr Beckett…

Thursday

Alex Massie

Death of a Gadfly Playwright

Hugh Leonard has died. His Telegraph obituary reeks of boozy afternoons in Dublin’s finest hostelries: Indeed, Leonard relished quarrels. “An Irish literary movement,” he used to say, “is when two playwrights are on speaking terms”… Leonard resented what he saw as his exclusion from the Irish arts world, and poured vitriol on lesser performers. The trouble with Ireland, he said, was that it was “a country full of genius, but with absolutely no talent”. His critics were equally forthright about the Leonard ego. He was, said one, not an original playwright, merely “an adapter always in search of a plug”. Leonard retorted in kind. He eagerly debunked other famous names,

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Lessons on Taking a Compliment

Yeah, even by writers’ standards, John O’Hara could be touchy. Here’s Alan Jacobs: Anyway, when Pal Joey was a big hit on Broadway in 1940 a couple of friends ran into O’Hara at a restaurant and told him, “John, we just saw Pal Joey again and it was even better than the first time!” O’Hara replied, “What the hell was wrong with it the first time?” Splendid stuff, you’ll agree.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Department of Calumny

Patrick Appel, standing in for Andrew while the Boss Man takes a break, has the audacity to nominate Terry Teachout for one of Mr Sullivan’s “Poseur Alert Nominee” awards. Yikes! What has the urbane Mr Teachout written to deserve such teasing? Why only this: “I know how it feels to see the design for the dust jacket of a book that I’ve written, but that’s different: the cover is not the book. An opera, on the other hand, truly exists only in performance, and must be created anew each time it is produced: the score is not the show. As I saw how Hildegard had transformed my libretto into a

Tuesday

Sunday

Alex Massie

The Verona Daily Mail

Condensed Shakespeare: nation’s tabloids report modern repeat of story of Romeo & Juliet under headline: KNIFE CRIME TOFF IN PAEDO SUICIDE PACT

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Hamlet: the Facebook Folio

Courtesy of Sarah Schmelling at McSweeney’s: Horatio thinks he saw a ghost. Hamlet thinks it’s annoying when your uncle marries your mother right after your dad dies. The king thinks Hamlet’s annoying. Laertes thinks Ophelia can do better. Hamlet’s father is now a zombie. – – – – The king poked the queen. The queen poked the king back. Hamlet and the queen are no longer friends. Marcellus is pretty sure something’s rotten around here. Hamlet became a fan of daggers. V droll. [Hat-tip: Ezra Klein]

Monday

Alex Massie

Prime Hutton

Lovely story told by Simon Hoggart in his Guardian column at the weekend: The death of Simon Gray lets me reprise a favourite story. He was a close friend of Harold Pinter, a great cricket lover. Once Pinter wrote a poem about his hero Len Hutton. It read, in its entirety “I saw Hutton in his prime / Another time, another time.” He sent it to several of his friends. Soon afterwards Pinter and Gray were at the same dinner party and Pinter asked what he thought of the poem. “I don’t know, Harold,” said Gray. “I’m afraid I haven’t finished it yet.” [Hat-tip: Stephen Pollard]

Thursday

Alex Massie

Simon Gray, RIP

Sad news. Simon Gray, the playwright and memoirist, has died. Just last month I read the latest, and, I suppose, final installment of The Smoking Diaries, a wonderful, funny, poignant set of memoirs that I recommend without the slightest reservation. More importantly, sad because he was one of my father’s oldest friends from Cambridge days way back when. Not many of them left. Booze and tobacco and all that. Telegraph obituary here. The Guardian’s Michael Billington here. And a characteristically good Simon Hattenstone interview here. Understandably Gray rather disapproved of the notion that his memoirs may outlive his plays, but that’s the nature of the respective genres. But I can’t

Sunday

Alex Massie

Blogging Beckett

Noah Millman, one of my favourite bloggers, on Brian Dennehy appearing in Krapp’s Last Tape: It’s a marvelously devastating bit of theater, as Beckett should be.Krapp’s Last Tape is – and should be – a particularly uncomfortable play for a blogger. Here sits a man, a writer, having reached his grand climacteric, looking back on a life devoted to a project of self-creation through self-revelation (and using new technology – the reel-to-reel tape recorder), and consumed with self-disgust at the utter waste of such an effort. The fact that I’m continuing to blog after having seen this play is only more evidence that theater lacks any real power to change

Monday