Then NOAH shall go into the Ark with all his family, his wife except, and the Ark must be boarded round about, and on the boards all the beasts and fowls hereafter rehearsed must be painted, that these words may agree with the pictures.
SHEM Sir, here are lions, leopards in,
Horses, mares, oxen, and swine, Goats, calves, sheep, and kine
Here sitten thou may see.
HAM Camels, asses men may find,
Buck and doe, hart and hind;
All beasts of all manner kind
Here be, as thinketh me.
NOAH’S WIFE And here are bears, wolves set,
Apes, owls, marmoset,
Weasels, squirrels, and ferret;
Here they eat their meat.
SHEM’S WIFE Yet more beasts are in this house;
Here cats maken it full crouse;
Here a ratton, here a mouse,
They stand nigh together.
HAM’S WIFE And here are fowls, less and more: Herons, cranes, and bittor,
Swans, peacocks; and them before
Meat for this winter.
JAPHETH’S WIFE Here are cocks, kites, crowes,
Rooks, ravens, many rows,
Ducks, curlews, whoever knowes
Each one in this kind;
And here are doves, digs, drakes;
Redshanks running through the lakes;
And each fowl that leden makes
In this ship man may find.
from the Chester Mystery Play of Noah’s Flood (15th century)
There’s no such thing as heaven. I think we can all agree on that one. But obliterate all rationality from your mind for a moment, and ask yourself what your personal heaven would be like.
Armando Iannucci dreams of a heaven where he finally gets to watch all of the television programmes he was deprived of in his youth because of being a Viewer In Scotland. I think I’d settle for being able to rewatch those programmes I did see in my youth but which have been forgotten by history. I know some people still remember Simon and the Witch with fondness, but if I walked the length and breadth of Cambridgeshire I wouldn’t find more than a handful of people who would smile with nostalgia at the mention of Gruey or Marlene Marlowe Investigates.
But these programmes presumably still exist somewhere, if only on old VHS cassettes in the dingier cupboards of Broadcasting House. Maybe the dream of a digital archive is not so distant as all that. The BBC at any rate ought to have learned the lesson that all of its creative output should be preserved indefinitely. The odd missing episode of Hancock or Steptoe and Son resurfaces every so often, but the hope of seeing things such as John Fortune and Eleanor Bron’s sketch show Where Was Spring? ever again are very faint.
Alan Bennett, with Virginia Stride and John Sergeant
Perhaps one should be grateful for small mercies, such as the audio release of a compilation of salvaged sketches from On the Margin, which I have been listening to regularly over the past few months. This was a 1966 sketch show written by Alan Bennett, the original tapes of which were wiped long ago. The soundtrack, by happy chance, has survived. It’s of interest not merely for curiosity’s sake, being Bennett’s only TV sketch show, but because, 45 years on, it’s still extremely funny. It opens with what I presume (and I may be wrong) to be the first version of Bennett’s sketch, ‘The Telegram’.
On the Margin is inevitably indebted to Beyond the Fringe, and includes a version of the ‘In Memoriam’ sketch (also known as ‘The English Way of Death’) that appeared in some incarnations of the revue, but it’s nice to see Bennett breaking away from the other three and settling into his own voice. The Betjeman pastiche, ‘Going to the Excuse Me’, is a prime example, and ‘Camden Passage’, a two-hander with John Sergeant where Bennett plays an effeminate antiques dealer (‘You must excuse my hands, but I’ve just been stripping a tallboy’), contains echoes of the ‘Bollard’ sketch from Beyond the Fringe, but is more sophisticated. ‘Bollard’ shows three queeny actors (Bennett not among them) preparing to record a commercial, the punchline being that when eventually they attempt a take their voices are immediately transformed into the deepest basso profundo (‘SMOKE BOLLARD – A MAN’S CIGARETTE!’ [falsetto whoop]). ‘Camden Passage’ moves beyond the intrinsic funniness of a man talking in a high voice to exploit a richer vein of camp humour, a humour derived, as so much of Bennett’s humour is, from northern dialogue.
But I think the highlight for me is possibly ‘The Lonely Pursuit: A Writer’s World’, in which Bennett portrays a Yorkshire writer who has enjoyed a modicum of success.
I don’t know whether you’ve ever looked into a miner’s eyes for any length of time, because it is the loveliest blue you’ve ever seen. I think that perhaps that’s why I live in Ibiza. The blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the eyes of these Doncaster miners.
Or try this bit.
At the moment I’m working on a novel set entirely in the mind of an ageing cinema usherette during a festival of Anna Neagle films. She’s at the crossroads, really, desperately trying to come to terms with herself and the demands of her career. We explore her reverie, which is broken in on occasionally by the film or by the patrons wanting to be shown to their seats. We see how deeply, how tragically she’s identified herself with the personality of Anna Neagle, and how tragic the inevitable outcome. It takes in, en passant, the eternal themes – love, death, birth – some of the less eternal ones – her love-hate relationship with the ice cream girl. If I can sum up, it’s everything that Virginia Woolf failed to do, plus the best of Stan Barstow.
That brilliant juxtaposition of names is typical of Bennett, isn’t it, and is funny twice over, firstly for its betrayal of the writer’s pretensions and secondly for the sheer absurdity of the combination. His inspired use of brand names is also in evidence here. Anyway, just a recommendation. I must get Bank Holidaying. Here’s to a nice long weekend.
I’m just back from seeing Marc-André Hamelin in recital, and a little write-up feels necessary.
The last time I saw him was, if not a damp squib exactly, then not the rollercoaster ride I’d been expecting. I’m amazed to find it was more than four years ago, in February 2007, also at the QEH. He played three late sonatas by Beethoven and Schubert. Incontrovertibly some of the greatest music ever written, but just too earnest a programme for my taste, it turned out. Tonight promised to be more my kind of thing, and looked more like a typical Hamelin programme – Haydn, Schumann, Wolpe, Debussy and Liszt.
Robert Schumann
It was Carnaval that was the catalyst for my buying the ticket, as if I needed any persuading to see this mercurial man in concert once more. I’d heard it live once before, at the Bath Festival about 10 years ago, and against my expectations at that. Richard Goode had been taken ill, and so John Lill stepped heroically into his shoes with a programme of Schumann and Chopin. I didn’t know the piece, and didn’t greatly enjoy it, which probably wasn’t helped by my sitting at the back of a long room with no tiered seating, meaning I could see nothing whatsoever.
I’m not surprised I didn’t get it when I was a teenager. I think Carnaval is a piece that rewards close analytical study exponentially. The more one comes to understand its ingenious construction, particularly in terms of melody, the more one comes to appreciate and love it. In the years since that first recital, I have studied it fairly meticulously and written dodgy university essays on it, and I continue to learn new things about it. I hadn’t quite realised until tonight, though, what a feat of endurance a performance of it must be. Any pianist is likely to require time to recover after playing it through, which may account for its position immediately before the interval in Hamelin’s programme.
Alfred Cortot
At times in the Schumann and the Haydn that preceded it, I felt some slight concerns about tempi, specifically to do with undue acceleration within fast passages. Carnaval in particular almost goads the performer into playing as fast as possible, and the failure of any pianist to keep this temptation in check can make all the difference between a phrase being dashed off with élan and thrown in the dustbin. Hamelin sailed close to the wind here, but by and large got away with it. He gave the most delightful performance of ‘A.S.C.H-S.C.H.A (Lettres dansantes)’ I can imagine, and his way of coaxing out the melody at the start of ‘Réplique’ made me think of Cortot, though with more right notes.
(Incidentally, this expectation of note-perfection from professional classical musicians in live performance is quite a recent development, and not one I am entirely in sympathy with. One risks losing sight of the wood for the trees if one focuses solely on the notes. Hamelin hit a few bum notes tonight, but they didn’t affect the overall impression his performance made. Listen to Cortot and Thibaud’s 80-year-old recording of the Franck violin sonata. No musician today would dream of releasing a record of such a performance. There are splashes all over the place, but their sheer musicianship astonishes, and there is no recording of the piece I think more highly of. Read Robert Philip’s book Performing Music in the Age of Recording – it’s fascinating on how the growth of recorded sound has altered the listener’s expectations over the past century.)
Marc-André Hamelin
If I had reservations about the first half, the second was quite staggering. I love that Hamelin persists in programming music by composers who are not simply difficult but also obscure alongside the mainstream canon. The Passacaglia from Stefan Wolpe’s op. 23 set of serialist pieces is something I am delighted to have been introduced to. It recalls the people you would expect it to – Schoenberg above all, perhaps, though Wolpe’s textures are fuller than those in Schoenberg’s piano music, and if there was one single piece it brought to mind it was Poulenc’s delicious Thème Varié, itself a theme and variations rather than a passacaglia, but sharing with the Wolpe certain structural similarities in its juxtaposition of different dance-like movements, and a sudden disarming tenderness that one expects from Poulenc but maybe doesn’t from Wolpe.
Three Debussy preludes followed in dazzling performances – ‘La Puerta del Vino’, ‘Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses’ and ‘Feux d’artifice’. I know the first book of preludes well, but not the second, which is quite inexcusable. Time to get properly acquainted with my copy of the Steven Osborne recording, I think.
And then it was Liszt time. Every pianist feels compelled to play Liszt this year, but Hamelin plays it constantly anyway. If you have a spare 12 minutes, have a look at this (wow). Tonight, however, it was the Reminiscences de Norma. Of Liszt’s many suits, one of my favourites is as a transcriber and paraphraser, and this is the ideal source material for the Liszt treatment. No offence to Bellini fans, but Liszt can only make it better – and does. Though I was taken aback to hear a primitive version of the Last of the Summer Wine theme tune early on. Maybe Hazlehurst wasn’t the visionary genius we all thought he was. This was the sort of performance that makes one realise why Hamelin is described so often not as a virtuoso but as a super-virtuoso, though I’m sure it’s an appellation he shuns. My pulse quickened, and I found myself gasping involuntarily, not quite able to believe what was going on before my eyes.
After a piece like that, what could anyone play for an encore? His choice could not have been more perfect. I heard the first couple of notes and sank with joy deep into my seat. It was this.
Anyway, not a bad night, all in all. And so to bed.
I was one of many people saddened by the news over the weekend of the death of Sidney Lumet, a favourite film director of mine. The observable lack of meretricious flashiness in his films betokens the filmmaker of great sensitivity and intelligence that he was. On Sunday I watched his harrowing drama The Pawnbroker, notable for a riveting central performance by Rod Steiger as a repressed concentration camp survivor and an excellent Quincy Jones score (his first). I followed it up, foolishly, with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film which seems to embody everything Lumet was not about: spectacle, noise, and vacuity.
The obituaries list the same celebrated films over and over – 12 Angry Men, Network, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon – but a particularly fine example of Lumet’s craft has been omitted from all those I have read, even Roger Ebert’s reminiscence, though Ebert gave it the highest rating of four stars in his original review when it came out. The film is Running on Empty.
River Phoenix, c. 1988
Released in 1988, it’s now most often thought of as one of the small legacy of films left behind by River Phoenix, and watching it one feels a sense of tragedy at the premature death of this man who was not merely beautiful but also talented in multiple directions. His performance was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, though he is very much at the film’s centre. He plays Danny, the elder son of Arthur and Annie Pope (Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti). As young radicals the Popes were involved in the bombing of a napalm laboratory in an anti-Vietnam protest, and nearly 20 years later they are still on the run from the police. They love their sons dearly, but are compelled to give them an unstable upbringing, moving on every few months or years as their past catches up with them, and creating new identities and appearances for themselves.
This fugitive life is all that Danny and his little brother Harry have ever known, but now Danny is growing up, and two complications have arisen: firstly, he is a talented pianist who wishes to audition for the Juilliard School, which, if successful, would mean a break with his family, perhaps permanently (one has to suspend one’s critical faculties here – Danny is a good pianist, and so was Phoenix judging by the evidence, but none of the pieces he plays is sufficiently demanding to demonstrate whether or not he is Juilliard material – and who ever became a virtuoso with only a dummy keyboard for practice, apart perhaps from Joe Cooper?); secondly, he has fallen in love, with Lorna (Martha Plimpton), the daughter of his school music teacher.
One of many touching scenes is that of Lorna’s visit to Danny’s house for a meal. His father is suspicious of her at first, as he is of everyone outside the family. They turn on the radio while they do the washing up, and James Taylor’s ‘Fire and Rain’ comes on. Arthur begins to sing along, and Lorna joins in. The two of them begin to dance together, and soon the whole family follows suit. Danny’s parents see in Lorna the free, rebellious spirit of their own youth, and, for all the eccentricities of Danny’s home life, Lorna finds something in his family that she does not have in her own, which is austere, though not devoid of love.
It’s a well judged and tenderly handled scene, but there is also a simple joy in seeing these people singing spontaneously. In musicals, impromptu bursting into song doesn’t mean anything, but in the context of an otherwise non-musical film, whether it makes contextual sense (as it does here), or doesn’t (as in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, where the central characters sing along with Aimee Mann’s song ‘Wise Up’), I can rarely forbear to smile when watching. Perhaps the success of such musical interludes depends on their unpredictability. The sense of spontaneity in the Running on Empty scene is reinforced by the song appearing unbidden, coming by chance from the radio rather than from an expressly selected record.
It’s easy to see why the two scenes I mention above are a rarity in films, at least in films operating at the level of reality that Running on Empty occupies: a communal singing scene can come across as unwelcomely gratuitous (as some would argue the Magnolia scene does) or as a distraction from the thrust of the film. Shakespeare didn’t have these reservations, I find myself thinking. A well placed song can be a very effective punctuation mark in the scheme of a drama, equivalent to an aria in opera (which is how the Magnolia scene functions, as an ensemble piece uniting several characters at individual crisis points, in a moment of reflection while the action pauses). The song scene in Running on Empty, by contrast, is more like recitative – it’s not merely a song for its own sake, but also a plot device to show the Pope family’s acceptance of Lorna into their life and her acceptance of them.
While Running on Empty was broadly acclaimed on its release, there were dissenting views (see Hal Hinson’s mean-spirited review from the Washington Post for a taster). As far as I’m concerned, it’s a most sensitively judged drama, with the dynamics of the family as a single unit and as constituent elements beautifully played. Hirsch, an actor with more versatility than he is often given credit for, and Lahti, whose meeting with her estranged father, played by Steven Hill, provides the most moving scene in the film, are both superb, and those viewers not nauseated by adolescent romance will find the scenes between Phoenix and Plimpton touching.
Lumet, unlike Spielberg, generally succeeds admirably in keeping sentimentality in check. This is a film where his hand wavers slightly, but I think the viewer would have to have a hard heart indeed not to feel both moved and exhilarated by the climax. If it’s not his absolute finest work, then it’s a typical example of what he was capable of – an involving, considered and poignant drama. I still rate 12 Angry Men as his greatest achievement, if not his most ambitious, but in addition to the titles already mentioned above I would put in a good word for his film of Eugene O’Neill’s stark Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which is quite mesmerising.
