The question every actor or director has to ask when staging Hamlet is: why? This is the most famous play ever written, not to mention the most quoted: the text is so plump with familiar phrases that it’s hard to restore them to their context, to make them newly-minted once again. As a result each new production , and each actor, needs a clear sense of conviction of what he can bring uniquely to the role:
Sadly the only answer to the question, to judge by this production, is “so that Jude Law can play Hamlet”, and that doesn’t prove to be enough. Kenneth Branagh was originally due to direct it, and it may be that he and Law had a clearer vision for the play. Branagh, after all, has devoted much of his career to Hamlet, both on stage and, magnificently, film. His own Hamlet was one of great intellectual dash and swagger, a quicksilver wit who dazzled on the outside while crumbling within. But Branagh had to pull out for development on Thor (Brian Blessed as Odin! Surely the perfect match of character and actor) so Michael Grandage stepped in.
And what we get is a bit of a muddle. It’s crisp and efficient, rattling through the play in just three hours, but there’s no real sense of purpose, or of the world of the play. Hamlet is, at heart, a classic Agatha Christie set-up: an isolated setting, a brutal murder and a range of suspects, each with different motivations of their own. But for the story to work properly, you have to understand the world outside. In the case of Hamlet, whatever the period of the production (this one’s an uneasy combination of medieval walls and modern costume, like an All Saints catalogue shoot) we need to understand from the beginning that this is a country under genuine military threat, and that violence lurks everywhere beneath the surface. Otherwise — as happens here — Hamlet’s murder of Polonius feels absurd and almost farcical, and the accumulating corpses of the final act lose any real tragedy. It’s fine for Claudius to be a weak, uncertain leader (Kevin R McNally seems like Gordon Brown to Old Hamlet’s Tony Blair) but we still need to feel his hunger for power. And a contemporary audience needs a solid understanding that this is a world where God — and Hell — feel very palpable, and that damnation is never far away.
None of these elements really come across, and as a result Jude Law’s Hamlet feels oddly unmoored: with no clear sense of context it’s hard to feel what he’s fighting, or what he stands to lose. He’s clear-spoken, wiry and athletic, a pouncing, prowling bi-polar Tigger who’s smoothly menacing one moment, tightly wound the next: his interrogation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is particularly good. And he’s terrific in his banter with Polonius, played by Ron Cook in the best performance of the night. But while Hamlet has all the best lines, it’s hard to make them sing without a strong cast to react to, and it’s here that Law has been really let down. Matt Ryan is a dreary, pleading Horatio whose puppy-dog eyes made me long for a gun, Peter Eyre gabbled the Ghost as if speaking underwater and running out of breath, and even Penelope Wilton seemed a little lost as Gertrude: after playing Doctor Who’s Prime Minister I longed for her to take control.
The one thing that really struck me in this Hamlet was how much he is lied to. In almost every conversation someone is attempting to deceive him, to spy on him or to betray him. Even those who love him plot against him, or if not against him then around him, trying to convert him to their cause. He can’t trust anyone around him, so he responds in kind. The disappointment of the production is that you feel that Law is in a similar position: giving it his best, while those around him duck away.
Hope Davis has replaced Julianne Moore as Hillary Clinton in The Special Relationship, Peter Morgan’s third Tony Blair movie, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Which, judging by this picture, is pretty spot-on casting. Morgan has also pulled out of directing the film, which was due to be his debut, with Richard Loncraine (Richard III, Wimbledon) taking over. Shooting starts next week.
I’ve never much wanted to live on an old cherry-farm in the mountains of Northern Taiwan. Right now though, I really do.
This was another exciting selection of student work, from delicate drawings to full-scale installations. I loved Anne Marie Taberdo’s utterly immersive installation: an ice chamber built from polystyrene that was enchanting and unnerving all at once:
But my favourite was Jemma Appleby’s enormous drawings, setting real modernist buildings into deep, dark fairytale forests. Glowing from the shadows, they could be peaceful retreats from city life, or something far more sinister: what’s going on inside them that has to be so hidden from the world? Beautiful, impassive, they give away no secrets, every one a mystery that lingers in your mind. I was reminded of Peter Doig; Appleby also cites Andrew Wyeth and James Turrell, whose latest extraordinary project was recently unveiled in Cadiz.
Mark Rowlands‘ The Philosopher and the Wolf promises “Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death and Happiness”, which was almost enough to make me put the book down before I started: was this going to be some tree-hugging, crystal-sucking sentimental self-help manual?
Fortunately not. Indeed, if it’s consolation you’re after, I suggest that you look away now:
That is how it is with us humans. We think of the time of our lives as a line; and we have a very ambivalent attitude towards that line. The arrows of our desires, and our goals and our projects, bind us to this line, and therein do we find the possibility of our lives having meaning. But the line also points to the death that will take this meaning away. And so we are simultaneously attracted to and disgusted by this line, both drawn to it and terrified by it. It is our fear of the line that makes us always want what is different … For us, no moment is ever complete in itself. Every moment is adulterated, tainted by what we remember has been and what we anticipate will be. In each moment of our lives, the arrow of time holds us green and dying. And that is why we think we are superior to all other animals.
Ouch. This is White Fang as directed by Ingmar Bergman: the story of Rowlands’ eleven-year life with Brenin, a wolf who lived and travelled with him through Britain, Ireland, France and the US, interspersed with his philosophical analysis of the difference between wolf and man. And it doesn’t make for comfortable reading. While there’s enormous warmth and humour in his loving portrayal of Brenin, his analysis of humans is pitiless. In Rowlands’ eyes, the difference between the wolf and the ape — the original, evolutionary split between larger-brained apes and all other animals — is calculation: the endless, unstoppable force of “what’s in it for me?” This sense of choice, of planning, of ambition leads us to feel superior over every other living thing — indeed, it’s enshrined in many creation myths. But in what ways are we superior? How far does it make us happy? And how has it polluted our relationship with our surroundings? Rowlands cautions us to look again, to think again, and to see our fellow animals through different, more respectful eyes. What have we lost for all our achievements? And at what cost to ourselves? Rowlands argues this particularly powerfully in his analysis of evil:
The malice of apes — and human apes in particular — is to be found in their manufacture of helplessness. In this, human apes engineer the potential of their own evil … Just as true human goodness can manifest itself only in relation to those who have no power, so too is weakness — at least relative weakness — a necessary condition of human evil … Humans are the animals that manufacture weakness. We take wolves and we make them into dogs. We take buffalo and we make them into cows. We take stallions and we make them into geldings. We make things weak so that we may use them.
This is fierce stuff. Humans, as we know, cannot bear too much reality. We prefer reality TV. We like clear morals, goodies and baddies and satisfying happy endings. We like things that make us feel good (”Unlike humans, wolves don’t chase feelings. They chase rabbits.”). But like Bergman’s films, Rowlands’ book isn’t depressing: it’s exhilarating, a cold walk on a winter beach. In its willingness to confront the uncomfortable — a staring match with cold hard truth — this is one of the most exciting books of the year. Just not, perhaps, one for the beach. That cold dark sea might seem just a little bit tempting.
In the end the ape’s schemes will come to nothing: its cleverness will betray you and its simian luck will run out. Then you will find out what is most important in life. And this is not what your schemes and cleverness and luck have brought you; it is what remains when they have deserted you … In the end the ape will always fail you. The most important question you can ask yourself is: when this happens, who is it that will be left behind.
Kusama is one of the most ambitious artists of her generation (she’s now eighty), working on a huge scale both as a painter and, more recently, on installations, such as this year’s extraordinary Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity, now at the Gagosian in New York:
You’ll also have seen her work this summer f you’ve wandered down the South Bank, where her Ascension of Polkadots on the Trees is part of the Hayward’s summer exhibition, Walking In My Mind:
The overall effect is striking: beautiful but slightly sinister, as if London has been colonised by clowns. Close up, what’s striking is the way in which people have co-opted the artwork with their own private proclamations, filling in the polka dots with a gleeful mixture of the romantic, the poignant, the mysterious and — inevitably — the erotic. Here’s just a small selection …
In 1942 a young girl is raped and murdered by a Japanese soldier in Hong Kong. Torn too soon from life, her spirit haunts a military hospital which, forty years later becomes a posh private school. There the ghost finds a lonely little girl called Alice — and slips inside her. Now they are one, and the little ghost has found a home.
This is just the beginning of The Hungry Ghosts, a first novel from Anne Berry that’s actually more of a family saga than a ghost story, albeit one inhabited not just by the spectral Lin Shui, but by a ghostly canary, dog and baby, all of whom eventually compete for space in Alice’s soul. Alice is the youngest daughter of Ralph Safford, a senior British diplomat, and his nightmarish wife Myrtle, whose first response to Alice, the moment she is born, pretty much sums up their relationship thereafter:
I took it awkwardly, as though it might bite me at any moment … what I felt was not a trickle of love, but a wave of cold dislike.
The household is one of enormous privilege and deep unhappiness, as Ralph clings to a vanishing imperial past, the four children cling variously to food, sex and the family dog, and Mrytle clings increasingly to the whisky bottle, each lost in their own search for happiness and purpose. Narrated by its different characters in turn — all except Alice — it’s not a happy read, but sentence for sentence it’s one of the year’s best so far. Berry has a great gift for the perfectly chosen word:
Jillian slid malevolent eyes towards her sister, but her head remained motionless.
Spirals of cigarette smoke are ambushed by the breeze and stretched to translucence.
Day-trippers still freckle the beaches.
There’s also a deliciously dark streak of social comedy, particularly in the passages narrated by Myrtle, and by their lecherous neighbour Nigel, who is endlessly unsettled by Nicola, the family’s eldest daughter:
Nicola, whose eyes I now become aware have never left me, lets a hand move against her thigh, easing her already indecently short skirt up a few inches. Someone should take that girl over their knee and give her a good spanking, I decide. The erotic potential of this image rather negates its original conception.
The descriptions of Hong Kong — the bright lights of the harbour, the clammy fog that wreaths the hills — are terrific, as is the sense of a community in crisis as the Chinese handover looms. The British, so long used to being overlords, suddenly find themselves irrelevant, ignored, as if they themselves are becoming ghosts. Where the book falls down is its move to England, as Alice tries to start a new life, far from her family; the second half of the novel is looser, less precise and less engaged. There’s a terrifying portrayal of dementia, as Ralph struggles to narrate his life in Britain, but as the Safford children grow up the sparkle of the book begins to fade. Nonetheless, this is a hugely ambitious, richly imaginative novel that leaves a distinctive shiver in its wake.
Last week there was a terse announcement by Sony that they had stopped production on a film called Moneyball, just days before it was due to start shooting. This was not an easy decision: the film, from Michael Lewis’s bestseller, was to be directed by Steven Soderbergh, and starred Brad Pitt in the lead role of legendary baseball manager Billy Beane. And in a very unusual move, Sony boss Amy Pascal spoke out to explain her decision:
I’ve wanted to work with Steven forever, because he’s simply a great filmmaker … But the draft he turned in wasn’t at all what we’d signed up for. He wanted to make a dramatic reenactment of events with real people playing themselves. I’d still work with Steven in a minute, but in terms of this project, he wanted to do the film in a different way than we did.
You can see why this might make a studio boss nervous. Rather than what is, by all accounts, a tense, witty script by Schindler’s List writer Steve Zaillian, Soderbergh wanted to make something closer to a reconstruction: if it didn’t happen in reality, it wouldn’t happen in the movie. And this, I think we can assume, had serious implications for the commercial potential of the film.
Why? Because Steve Zaillian writes better than most people talk. Because real life doesn’t always fit a perfect three act structure. And because real people don’t always learn from their mistakes. The truth is, most audiences like fiction. We like simple heroes and villains, we like characters who change, and we want to emerge from the cinema feeling that that story has come to a satisfying conclusion. None of which is true of real life. but that’s why we go to the movies.
And that’s what makes this story interesting. The simplistic response paints Soderbergh as the hero, Pascal as the villain: the artist vs. the money. But it’s fair to say that Pascal has a point. There’s certainly an audience for films that tell the truth. But let’s look at the numbers. The last few years have seen a resurgence of documentary feature films, acclaimed by critics and audiences worldwide. Here, according to Box Office Mojo, are their worldwide grosses to date:
Grizzly Man: $4,061,305
Man On Wire: $5,180,066
Waltz With Bashir: $10, 956,861
Persepolis: $22,752,488
These are pretty good numbers: all of them will have made a profit, as well as being some of the most exciting and innovative movies of the past decade. But the projected budget for Moneyball was $58 million. Even with Brad Pitt to pull in the audience, this was a commercially ambitious film. And Soderbergh’s commercial record is patchy: for every Ocean’s Eleven (production budget $85m: worldwide gross $450m) there’s a Solaris ($47m: £30m), Che ($58m: $30m) or The Good German ($32m: $6m).
I’m a huge fan of Soderbergh. He’s a hugely talented, innovative film-maker. But right now every director, however renowned, is having to work movie to movie: however successful you’ve been in the past, and however much money you may have made in total, every project has to punch its weight. I suspect there’ll be more stories like this over the coming months: for now you can read the full story of Moneyball here. In the meantime, I’m hugely looking forward to Soderbergh’s next film, The Informant! — here’s the trailer:
I’ve always loved Tintin, and the brilliant, cinematic art of Georges Remi — Herge. And now, to fill in the year or so before the movie, there’s a new museum dedicated to his life and work: the Musee Herge in the new university town of Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium. Dezeen and Archicentral have first looks at the project, whose address, in case you’re interested, is 26 Labrador Road …
I have very few memories of Michael Jackson, other than watching the famous Oprah interview, in which Elizabeth Taylor appeared alongside the star, saying that, “he’s the most normal man I know”. Which, coming from Elizabeth Taylor, might actually be true. Here’s a fascinating article by Paul Theroux about his trip to meet Taylor at Neverland, and a late night phone call with Jackson himself.
Check out the others right here and see if you agree.
Exit, pursued by a bear is the best-known stage direction in history. It’s a combination of absurdity and horror that’s entirely appropriate to the play that it appears in: The Winter’s Tale, now showing at The Old Vic as one half of The Bridge Project, directed by Sam Mendes.
Like that other late (and wintry) masterpiece, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, Shakespeare’s penultimate play is a story of obsessive sexual jealousy, played out in a world that is familiar, but not quite ours: there’s a shipwreck on the (nonexistent) coast of Bohemia, predictions from the Oracle at Delphi, and a statue that comes mysteriously alive. Its psychology — jealousy, fraudulence, romance — is accurate but magnified into obsession. And, like Eyes Wide Shut, its happy ending offers little sense of closure: the dead are still dead, and the emotions of the story dormant not extinct.
The heart of the play is Leontes, King of Sicilia (Simon Russell Beale). Leontes becomes convinced that Queen Hermione (a fragile, deeply touching Rebecca Hall) is sleeping with his boyhood friend, Polixenes, the King of Bohemia. Once the idea is fixed in his mind he’s impossible to dissuade, seeing everything that happens through the lens of betrayal:
There have been,
Or I am much deceived, cuckolds ere now;
And many a man there is, even at this present,
Now while I speak this, holds his wife by the arm,
That little thinks she has been sluiced in’s absence
And his pond fish’d by his next neighbour
And this:
I have said
She’s an adulteress; I have said with whom:
More, she’s a traitor and Camillo is
A federary with her, and one that knows
What she should shame to know herself
But with her most vile principal, that she’s
A bed-swerver
Sluiced? Bed-swerver? This is full-blooded tabloid language, and still shocks a contemporary audience. Despite Hermione’s pleas, Leontes cannot be dissuaded, and has her imprisoned, even when the Oracle proclaims her innocence. Worse, when she is discovered to be pregnant, he disowns the baby, and orders the child to be flung on a fire. By the end of the play’s first section, both Hermione and the Leontes’ son are dead, and the baby has been left to die, abandoned on the shoreline of Bohemia —
— only to be found by a passing shepherd. And here the play shifts gear entirely, into pastoral romantic comedy, full of mistaken identities and disguises, all ruled over by Autolycus (Ethan Hawke), a travelling con man. Mendes plays this as a kind of bluegrass festival — in this production the Sicilians are played by the English, the Bohemians by Americans — and for a while, as the characters sing and dance together, the production feels more enjoyable for the cast than it does for the audience. It’s a disconcerting shift in tone, one of the reasons why The Winter’s Tale is often seen as one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays”. So what is Shakespeare up to here? He’s questioning the very nature of narrative, and displaying his mastery of the craft, pushing drama to its limits. He’s showing us our greed for story, and how, even when it’s gossamer-thin, our ability to empathise can make it real. Yes it’s artificial; yes it’s psychologically extreme, but the collaboration between author, actors and audience ensures that, even at its limits, drama works its magic on us.
In the final act of the play this is made literal, as Hermione, commemorated as a statue, comes to life again. Mendes, far from concealing the artifice of this, emphasises it: we see Hermione take up her position on the plinth during the scene change, and there’s no attempt to disguise her as a statue. Yet the moment of her animation is extraordinary, and her reconciliation with Leontes touching. Do we forgive Leontes? No. But do we want him to be happy? Oddly, even now, we do. Despite his shocking cruelty, despite their son’s death, despite the wasted years of both their lives, our human yearning for a happy ending transcends absurdity and horror. And maybe, looking at the world around us, that’s a start.
Well, we knew it would be spooky but this looks downright terrifying. Disney has just released the first official character shots from Tim Burton’s Alice, adapted by Linda Woolverton, which arrives in cinemas next spring. Here are Burton regulars Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter as the Mad Hatter and the Red Queen:
Richard Kelly, the writer-director behind Donnie Darko and Southland Tales, is back to mess with our heads once more with The Box, based on a Richard Matheson short story. It’s the tale of a couple (James Marsden and Cameron Diaz) visited by a mysterious stranger (Frank Langella) who presents them with a box. On the box is a button. And every time they press the button they get a million dollars. The downside? Somewhere in the world, someone dies.
If that sounds like an episode of The Twilight Zone — well, it was one. But Kelly, characteristically, has greater ambitions, and has expanded the story, telling us more about the couple (and keeping the original Seventies setting) as well as their investigation of the dangerous, deformed Langella. It’s also Kelly’s first feature shot on digital, using Panavision’s Genesis camera, which brought a new freedom and flexibility to his work, as he recently explained to AICN:
There are two shots in the film that were shot with film cameras because we had to go up to maybe 120 frames-per-second, really slo-mo stuff that we couldn’t do with the Genesis. But it’s completely digital other than that. It was a huge asset, too, in terms of the performances. Jimmy and Cameron would love to do serious takes, where, for instance, in the Corvette on the way to the rehearsal dinner – and, actually, that got cut out of the film – or sitting across from each other at the kitchen table having a discussion about the button unit or lying in bed having a discussion as they’re watching Johnny Carson… they would just love to run the scene as many as like six or seven times without me saying cut. So they’d run it, start over, run it again, and we’d just run the tape out. I ended up getting more takes on this film – and I had more days and a bigger budget than I’ve ever had to work with, which helped, too. But I ended up getting more takes on this film than I ever have because you don’t have to reload.
It was also because of Langella’s face and the digital f/x work. Eliminating scanning from the process helped a great deal. We had to send all of his face shots to multiple f/x houses, like to India to have the clean dots removed from the clean part of [the face], and out to Venice Beach for a gradient. There are only 300 visual f/x shots in the movie. It’s not like a visual f/x movie. I mean, there is a science-fiction element to the film, and there is some stuff that is clearly CGI in the story sense that you know you’re looking at something otherworldly. But there’s also Langella’s face and a lot of wide shots of Richmond, Virginia where we very meticulously transformed all of the buildings and all the architecture back to the way it was in 1976. And we added 1970s digital cars. And snow. A lot of digital snow we had to add in places. There are a lot of invisible CGI shots all throughout the movie. There’a a shot we did in the mirror of Arthur’s Corvette; he’s pulling away, and you see a kid at the valet [making a peace sign] in the rearview mirror. It’s an impossible shot to get that we had to digitally sandwich in.
It’s a fascinating, wide-ranging interview and really worth a read.
What happens after the Disney ending. From a series by Dina Goldstein, to be exhibited in the autumn.
It’s one of my favourite times of year: the summer degree shows. First up this year is the University of Brighton’s Graphic Design and Illustration show, featuring some lovely work, including Kyle Bean’s shadow play Donna Tartt cover:
And Joe Porter’s Nijinsky-like cat:
Here’s an amazing promo for We Have Band’s single You Came Out, directed by David Wilson. According to the creative team:
The face paint animation film is made up of 4,816 separate stills. Each and every frame was hand-painted, shot, wiped off and redrawn, slightly differently for the next frame in order to create a seamless sequence. This time-consuming process involved the band members lying still for two consecutive days in a studio. In order to animate the singing bit, lip movement was created by animating a painted mouth on the singer Dede. This involved breaking the lyrics into phonetics and giving each sound a specific mouth shape. To make this as realistic as possible all the mouth shapes were painted on Dede’s face individually and then shot.
You can see all the individual frames here. Thanks to our friends at BoingBoing.
Dance is the closest I get to religion. The comparison felt particularly apt at Sadlers Wells on Thursday, where Russell Maliphant and Sylvie Guillem returned for two nights with Push, their half hour duet, accompanied by three solo performances, Solo, Shift and Two.
So why the comparison with religion? Because this is an oddly devotional experience: closest, perhaps, to Rothko, or a Robert Bresson film. This is dance at its most stripped down: no set, no narrative, just bodies, light and music. Shorn of theatrical distractions, it demands your absolute attention, tiny shifts of light and muscle detonating through the room.
The effect is enhanced by Maliphant’s choroeography, which is extraordinarily demanding, but refuses ever to show off. There’s no extravagance, no showiness, just absolute physical grace: Guillem is performing miracles, but they’re the miracles of a surgeon, not a conjuror.
Push, of all the pieces here, is warmer, lusher, at times even romantic, beginning with the two performers locked together, a single shadowed animal on stage. Then they split, circling, hungry, mirroring each other, before coming together once again. It’s a riveting performance, and I’ve rarely felt an audience more focused, fifteen hundred people concentrated on one spot.
And that’s the power of Maliphant’s work: the choroeography is intellectual, but its effect is emotional, exhilarating. At the end of the performance we came out gorging on endorphins, physically excited by the mental work-out of the show. It’s a brilliant demonstration of the power of withheld emotion: we’ve become so used to easy triggers — familiar songs and CGI — that the real, rigorous thrill of art was overwhelming, as we spilled out, chattering and laughing, into the summer evening air.
