2022 threesomes

2022, we hardly knew ye. Don’t know what I mean by that. Anyway, let’s get this done.

Top 3 theatre
It’s not been what I’d call a vintage year for student theatre in Cambridge, not that I’ve gone to a huge amount of it. I loathed one production so intensely that I left at the interval, which I don’t think I’ve ever done before. But the Marlowe Society’s BME Much Ado about Nothing in March had a lot to recommend it: colour, pace, and some beautiful speaking from among others Naphysa Awuah (Beatrice), Louella Lucas (Hero), Joy Adeogun (Don Pedro), and particularly Marie-Ange Camara (Leonato). Company in June was very good, with a large and polished band playing the original Jonathan Tunick orchestrations (even ‘Tick Tock’, too often omitted). Maddie Smith, veteran of a few ADC musicals, stole the show as Amy, and I lament that her Cambridge theatre career was so Covid-affected. I’d have liked to see her in other things. Ashley Cooper’s Joanne and Emilia Grace’s Marta were also excellent, especially vocally. Best of all was Our Generation (NT Dorfman), Alecky Blythe’s sprawling verbatim play about a bunch of diverse teenagers. Puppy-doggish Conor Gormally as Belfast Thatcherite Callum, sweet Joe Bolland as public schoolboy Lucas, Rachelle Diedericks (also a fine Mary Warren in The Crucible later in the year) as studious Ierum … but it’s invidious to single out individuals from an impeccable ensemble cast. It was just lovely to watch young people being brilliant. Here’s to more of that in 2023.

Top 3 new films
On the subject of young people being brilliant… Try Harder! is everything you’d want from a documentary, a portrait of five San Francisco high school pupils applying to college, initially unassuming, presently gripping. By the end I was punching the air. And if you’re in the UK you can watch it on iPlayer! Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir: Part II is one of the best films about filmmaking I’ve seen, and will surely grow in impressiveness with future viewings. Best till last: Charlotte Wells’ debut feature Aftersun, with Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio giving stunning performances as a young father and his daughter on holiday in Turkey in the late 1990s. A true cinematic love story. I see I’ve chosen three female-directed films in a year whose Sight and Sound poll saw a sea change in terms of diversity. When I next revise my own top films list, I’ll be surprised if Aftersun isn’t on it.

Top 3 old films
My knowledge of Italian Neorealism is sketchy, I watch a new one every few years and then forget about it, but Fellini’s I Vitelloni, a story of five friends and their preoccupations, is one I may remember, really beautiful and beautifully real. Elsewhere in the world, Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker Trilogy, consisting of Where Is the Friend’s House?, And Life Goes On, and Through the Olive Trees, and becoming more self-referential and kaleidoscopic with each film, was a delight, full of the quietly pulsating human feeling that, who knows why, seems so often to be the natural province of Iranian filmmakers. The film that made the greatest impression on me all year was perhaps Streetwise, Martin Bell’s 1984 documentary about street kids in Seattle. As with Try Harder! you find yourself caring very deeply about its subjects, falling in love almost. Parts of it are unbearably, overwhelmingly sad. It’s a hard world for little things, but attention must be paid.

Top 3 live music
Anyone who saw or (raises hand) was in the 2004 student production of Britten’s Peter Grimes in St Giles’s Church, Cambridge, starring tiny Allan Clayton as Grimes, will have had no doubt that he’d sing the role at the Royal Opera House eventually. This March he finally did, and I went twice. He’s the embodiment of Grimes, of course, but Bryn Terfel made Balstrode coherent in a way I hadn’t seen before, and Jacques Imbrailo and Catherine Wyn-Rogers among others were class. The aerialist too was a lovely touch. It was great to see Simon Rattle and the LSO doing Weill at the Barbican in April. My beloved Sieben Todsünden with Magdalena Kožená was beautifully done, but so were the smaller items. Andrew Staples singing ‘Lonely House’, just sumptuous. And I was moved to see the Emerson Quartet make a belated Cambridge debut on their farewell tour, playing Beethoven and Shostakovich. They played as a single organism, it felt superhuman. Honourable mentions: Imogen Cooper, Artur Pizarro playing Albéniz’s Iberia, Stephen Hough, Salome (ROH), and a super Dizzy Gillespie gig earlier this month at the Marylebone Theatre by a NYJO sextet led by Mark Armstrong.

Top 3 books
Sometimes I struggle to find three titles worthy of inclusion here; this year it’s been a struggle to get it down to three. So, to pick three titles arbitrarily from a longlist of about twenty: Evan S. Connell’s novel of early 20th-century housewifery Mrs Bridge, which should be much more widely known in the UK (its sequel Mr Bridge is scarcely less good); Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s trilogy A Scots Quair, set at the same time as Mrs Bridge but a world away, though it’s also full of life and pity; and My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley, which I enjoyed so much that I read it again a few months later, a recovery rate unprecedented in my adult life. Honourable mentions to Some Tame Gazelle and Jane and Prudence (Barbara Pym), The Nickel Boys (Colson Whitehead), Earthlings (Sayaka Murata), Tampa (Alissa Nutting), Columbine (Dave Cullen), Lonesome Dove (Larry McMurtry), The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas), The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case (David James Smith), The Death of the Heart (Elizabeth Bowen), Election (Tom Perrotta), Genie: A Scientific Tragedy (Russ Rymer), Riceyman Steps (Arnold Bennett), A God and His Gifts (Ivy Compton-Burnett), Mr. Ives’ Christmas (Oscar Hijuelos), and Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, all of which I loved. More on all this presently.

Top 3 comedy
It was great to see Tim Key live for the first time in a few years, with his show Mulberry at the Soho Theatre. No one else has his dangerous magnetism. Peter Fleming’s Woefully Inaccurate History of the BBC at the Museum of Comedy was a characteristically funny and poignant tribute to the national broadcaster in her centenary year. A Christmas Carol-ish, also at Soho, was your standard Mr Swallow Christmas show, only with the added bonus of Sarah Hadland singing a manic song about her relationship with her turkey. A good way to end the year.

Top 3 sport
My own Englishness is always a bit half-hearted, but even I was surprised by my underwhelmment at the Lionesses’ triumph in Euro 2022. I think it was because they’d been so impressive, both on and off the pitch, that I ended up feeling it couldn’t have mattered less whether they won the trophy or not. What they achieved was bigger than football, as future years will surely show. So to pick three other highlights: Bazball, Andrea Spendolini-Sirieix, and Chelsea Women winning a very hard-fought WSL on the last day of the season. I do love this Chelsea side. With the men’s team at its lowest ebb in years, the women are providing more than consolation. Not since the days of Ed de Goey have I loved a Chelsea keeper as much as I do Ann-Katrin Berger. Jess Carter, Jessie Fleming, Erin Cuthbert, Pernille Harder, these are my sporting heroes now. And I’ll never get tired of watching Sam Kerr’s second in the final match, controlling the ball on her chest and lobbing Mary Earps (at 2:13 here).

Top 3 TV
I watched all of The Yogi Bear Show. The cartoons I most loved in childhood, until The Simpsons came along, were the Pink Panther ones, but revisiting Yogi Bear as an adult has been a great pleasure. Yogi, Boo-Boo and Ranger Smith are all lovable characters, and pleasingly animated. As for Snagglepuss, he’s the apotheosis of style over substance. The cartoons themselves are pretty drab, but Snagglepuss himself is adorable. A-window-able, even! Heavens to Murgatroyd. Frankly the best thing I saw on telly all year, better even than Tom Stevenson winning Countdown and Paul Hollywood entering the Junior Bake Off tent as an emergency judge and causing a bunch of children to shit themselves spontaneously, was Liza Tarbuck’s magnificent goatee on Taskmaster Champion of Champions 2. A legend in her own lifetime. But the one thing that has given me the most sustained joy is Howard and Hilda’s simpering on repeats of Ever Decreasing Circles. A still underrated sitcom that will one day be acknowledged as one of the greats.

Top 3 albums
An eclectic bunch, as usual. I’ve been cataloguing a lot of music in the second half of the year, and listening along with much of it (who knows Stravinsky’s Four Norwegian Moods? delightful), and that’s how I came across the various iterations of Tōru Takemitsu’s Toward the Sea, included on this beautiful album. I’ve only known it for a couple of weeks, but John Wilson and the Sinfonia of London’s Hollywood Soundstage is an album as beautifully conceived as it is performed. Max Steiner’s Now, Voyager, Korngold’s Elizabeth and Essex, David Raksin’s Laura … a treasure trove. As last year, perhaps tragically, the one thing I’ve listened to most often is an EMI comedy compilation from the early 1990s, Comical Cuts 3. Even by the standards of their own days, Vic Oliver, Ronald Frankau, Arthur Marshall and Douglas Byng were probably never the height of hilarity, but there’s something deeply comforting about their cheeky songs and routines that I can’t quite explain. Marshall’s cod-Angela Brazil schoolmistress monologues contain some minor masterpieces. ‘Miss Baines had kept wicket for Lundy Island, but she could make nothing of Mary’s hot deliveries. The plucky little girl put all she knew into her lobs, and her balls were like greased lightning.’

I hope you’ve had a happy 2022, and have a happier 2023.

2012 threesomes

Before we settle too cosily into 2013 I am going to recycle the format I stole from Becca’s Blog last year and look back at my cultural year.

Top 3 books
My greatest joy has been in reading P.G. Wodehouse, with three Jeeves and Wooster books late in the year reminding me what an unutterably funny writer he is. Sadly I only have about 90 of his books left to read. But if I’m going to choose individual titles, I shall go for Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, the wit and imagination of which was an unexpected delight, Winifred Watson’s Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, a sparkling and cheeky variation on the Cinderella story, and Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens. Completed in 1848, it’s not Dickens’ greatest novel, but it shows the stirrings of a greater ambition that would be realised in the masterpieces he wrote in the following twenty years, and in the likes of Captain Cuttle, Solomon Gills, Walter Gay, Toots and Florence Dombey it contains some of his sweetest and most lovable characters.

Top 3 CDs (classical)
Late in 2011 I heard this Radio 4 documentary which contained some beautiful guitar arrangements of French piano music. I contacted the producer, who kindly informed me that the CD used was Rêverie by the Groningen Guitar Duo. I have enjoyed getting acquainted with it this year. An article in Gramophone alerted me to a 1999 disc of French Airs de Cour performed by Catherine King, Charles Daniels and Jacob Heringman, which is superb and contains much unfamiliar and charming repertoire. I haven’t bought a great many CDs released this year, but the disc of choral music by Howells sung by the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge under Stephen Layton is one that stands out. The programme is inspired, beginning with the Hymn for St Cecilia and ending with ‘All my hope on God is founded’. The recent discs of Howells from Hereford and St John’s, Cambridge have missed a trick in not including any of Howells’ hymn tunes. I could have done with one or two more on the Trinity CD.

Top 3 CDs (other)
I have been recommending Todd Rundgren’s 1972 double album Something/Anything? to all and sundry this year, and have given it to people as presents. It’s enormously sugary and 90% of it is seventh chords, but I love it. I have also been spending a lot of time with Para One’s soundtrack to Céline Sciamma’s film Naissance des Pieuvres. I saw the film two or three years ago. It’s a coming-of-age drama centred around a swimming pool, a fine piece of work, but I think the music stands on its own. It’s sumptuously atmospheric, and very watery. And I was lucky to find a cheap copy of this William Sheller anthology. It’s been lovely discovering songs of his I didn’t know before.

Top 3 films
I’ve already written about my favourite new films of last year, but what of those I came across on the TV? I watched quite a lot of them. Omitting those I’d seen before (though I would like to give an honourable mention to Basil Dearden’s Victim, which came across as a bold minor masterpiece that I hadn’t acknowledged before), I have narrowed the list down to three, two of which are very recent films anyway. Firstly The Arbor, Clio Barnard’s audacious drama-documentary about the life of Andrea Dunbar, which marries documentary footage with new interviews lip-synched by actors. At times it takes the breath away. Then Hirokazu Koreeda’s Still Walking (Aruitemo Aruitemo), a gentle, illuminating drama about a family convening to mark the anniversary of a son’s death. It has been compared by some to the films of Ozu, which is not unwarranted praise. And thirdly, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s remarkable religious melodrama Ordet, which packs an astonishing emotional punch at its climax.

Top 3 live music
I love instrumental and chamber music, but my favourite concerts in 2012 were on a larger scale. I don’t always like the Royal Albert Hall as a venue, but I find it’s better if a) there are a lot of performers to fill the space; and b) you’re not too far away from them. I was lucky to be in the side stalls for two excellent Proms – Les Troyens in July, and Bernstein’s Mass in August. Both were thrilling. Smaller but no less exhilarating was English Touring Opera’s production of Britten’s Albert Herring at West Road Concert Hall in Cambridge. I hadn’t realised how fun and how funny it is; I’d certainly never laughed at an opera before. I hope to see plenty more Britten on stage in his centenary year.

Top 3 theatre
I’m including musicals again. One of my choices last year was the Chichester production of Sweeney Todd, then about to transfer to London. I went to see it three more times after the transfer, and I’m choosing it again. I suppose this is about as close as I get to being a fanboy. I marvel at Sondheim’s genius, and vow to get to know more of his work this year. Company is on at the ADC in a month, so that can be the first step. Then, the revival of Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork’s London Road at the National Theatre, a haunting and upsetting musical based on verbatim transcripts of interviews with the residents of London Road in Ipswich, in the aftermath of the 2006 prostitute murders. It sounds unpleasantly sensationalist; in fact it’s just sensational, and grows in stature with the passage of time. And lastly, the all-male Shakespeare’s Globe production of Twelfth Night, which I went to twice, firstly at the Globe and then at the Apollo Theatre. The play’s a masterpiece, of course, but this production is a dream. The grace and sweep and composure of Mark Rylance’s performance as Olivia defy description. He is the finest actor I have ever had the privilege to watch, and I am going to see his Richard III soon. You still have time to catch them before they close next month.

On the subject of theatre, I feel bound also to credit Gatz, the unabridged theatrical adaptation of The Great Gatsby staged by Elevator Repair Service at the Noel Coward Theatre, Helen Edmundson and Neil Hannon’s captivating musical of Swallows and Amazons that I caught at Cambridge’s Arts Theatre, and a number of comedy gigs (Sheeps, Jonny Sweet, Tom Basden, Tim Key, the excellent Staple/face). There is one more event I would like to mention that doesn’t quite fit into any of the categories above: Alex Preston’s discussion with Richard Holloway at the Cambridge Union as part of Cambridge Wordfest in April. It felt a great privilege to see Holloway in person, a wry, humane, sympathetic and wise man. I’m sure I will read his acclaimed memoir, Leaving Alexandria, this year. Let’s all of us have a good one!

Short films

I only tend to go to the cinema when I feel fairly assured already of liking the film in question, but if one day I should happen to pick a dodgy one by mistake I hope I will find some consolation in the extras. I used to be bored by adverts and trailers as a child, but I don’t mind them now. I can always snooze through the preliminaries if I’m feeling tired.

Recently, though, the advent of Virgin Media Shorts has added a new layer of enjoyment to moviegoing. I imagine this is what it was like in the war, where you would have a Mickey Mouse or a Donald Duck before you made it to Robert Donat and Greer Garson. Virgin Media Shorts is a competition open to (predominantly young, I suspect) UK-based filmmakers, with the reward of funding and door-opening. Before the feature, then, one now sees one of several entries to the competition. Most recently I saw Luke Snellin’s lovely Mixtape, a film of almost but not quite excessive charm starring Bill Milner of Son of Rambow fame, which won the 2009 competition.

The quality of the films submitted for the competition varies, but I can have nothing but praise for the initiative, which must give great inspiration and encouragement to people with dreams of seeing their work on the big screen. It’s a celebration of the smart, the absurd and the offbeat, and it’s nice to be reminded what can be achieved in a couple of minutes. I’d certainly endorse browsing the site and trying out the goods. I remember laughing at Serdar Ferit’s Elevator Music several months ago, and the combination of comic/tragic narrative, melancholy soundtrack and deliberate borderline pretentiousness of Tim Key’s The Transaction I find quite moving. It can’t be easy to achieve such apparent artlessness.

Party

Last night I went to see Party, Tom Basden’s play which won a Fringe First Award last year in Edinburgh, which is currently running for a brief period at the Arts Theatre in London to coincide with its reinvention as a four-part series on Radio 4, beginning on Wednesday at 6.30pm.

The setup – five clueless studenty types meet in a garden shed to found a political party – has the sound of a potentially short skit in a larger show. That it works over such a length (75 minutes) and that I would gladly have sat through it if it had been twice as long is surely a testament to Basden’s writing.

The play opens with the characters attempting to draft a foreign policy by means of taking an exhaustive series of votes on whether they are in favour of or against, for instance, Armenia. They seem well-intentioned but hopelessly uninformed. Leading – and dominating – discussion is the self-important and increasingly tactile Jared (Jonny Sweet), a pedant who insists on the pronunciation of ‘abstention’ as ‘abstaintion’, believes Burma is “pronounced ‘Myanmar'”, and favours the party name “Gladios”. Forming the rest of the group are the perpetually warring Mel (Anna Crilly) and Jones (Basden), who is elected Foreign Secretary on account of his mother’s Welshness, idealistic secretary Phoebe (Katy Wix) and out-of-place Duncan (Tim Key).

The character of Duncan holds the key to the play. After fifteen minutes it becomes apparent that he has come to the meeting in the belief that it is in fact a party with cake (lemon drizzle) rather than a political party. A further revelation later on is unexpectedly heartbreaking in the context of a play that is heavy on laughs. In spite of his evident naïveté, Duncan is perhaps the least blinkered of the central characters. He’s certainly the least interested in getting involved in politics, which makes his eventual election as leader almost inevitable. Tim Key’s performance is quite remarkable. For the first few minutes of discussion he sits in the middle silently, resembling a benevolent if befuddled owl. The sheer range of his facial expressions is a thing of beauty, his presence on stage curiously magnetic. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has witnessed him as the capricious and suggestive questionmaster on BBC4’s We Need Answers. Any burgeoning filmmaker could do much worse than to train a camera on his face for the duration of the play, Zidane-style. It would produce a document of endless wonder. Duncan gets many of the best jokes too. He is in favour of designating white as the party colour purely on the basis that it will save money when it comes to producing promotional materials at his father’s printing shop.

Tim Key

The play makes some serious points about the state of politics today, if not in quite as incisive a manner as The Thick of It – about the disenfranchisement of the young, the bureaucracy that prevents the simplest of decisions from being made, the ultimate failure of democracy as exemplified by the election of the one person who is not politically engaged – but it would be a mistake to think that it places satire on a higher pedestal than comedy. Ultimately it’s about the jokes. Alistair McGowan, sitting in front of me, certainly seemed to enjoy it. The cast is uniformly excellent, though I’d love to have seen more of Nick Mohammed, a performer who merits more than the brief cameo he has as the only character who does understand a little about politics, something which, when it becomes apparent, leads to his immediate ostracism by the rest of the group.

The radio version promises much, though it’s a minor tragedy that many of the funniest elements will be lost in translation. I’m thinking of Sweet’s posturing and swaggering, the interlude where Key pours glasses of water for everyone, or the bit that made me laugh most of all, where Sweet, turning sheets on a flipchart, momentarily reveals the legend: “CELEBS WE KNOW: CHRIS BARRIE”. There’s still time to catch it in London if you’re in the area. Otherwise, keep your ears open.

Pictures from theinvisibledot.com and timkey.co.uk. Please contact me if you think images have been used unfairly.