My twin highlights of the London Film Festival, Cracks and An Education, are both coming-of-age tales in which young women have their conception of the world upended when a brutal reality intrudes. They are also both directed by women, both set in Britain at periods of momentous change, and both offer some of the best screen acting of the year.
Cracks, which had its UK premiere last week and opens in December, is a lush, dreamy, fantastically confident debut feature from Jordan Scott, based on the novel by Sheila Kohler. Set in a remote English all-girls boarding school in 1934, it’s somewhere between The Virgin Suicides and Picnic at Hanging Rock, as the cheerful monotony of life is disturbed, then shattered by the arrival of a new girl, rumoured to be a Spanish princess.
The trio at the heart of the film are the glamorous, seemingly worldly Miss G (Eva Green), whose stories of her adventurous early life captivate her pupils; Di Radfield (Juno Temple), the captain of Miss G’s diving team; and Fiamma (Maria Valverde), the Spanish newcomer, in whom Di immediately recognises a competitor. Because Di is Miss G’s favourite: she’s the best diver, the closest confidante and most avid listener to Miss G’s exotic tales. Fiamma threatens all of these, as well as Di’s position as unquestioned top dog of the group.
Juno Temple, as Di Radfield, gives a star-making performance here: heartfelt, vulnerable and dangerous, part Marmalade Atkins part Catherine Tramell. She plays Radfield with just the right degree of self-awareness, balancing wide-eyed curiosity with the assumed ironic poise of a girl who’s read just a bit too much Dorothy Parker. Eva Green, of course, is splendid as Miss G at the beginning of the film, as she sashays into chapel to admiring glances from the girls; but she struggles with the character as we discover more about her, and the cracks start to appear. Green is better at cool irony than passion, and is most confident as characters — as in her sensational debut, The Dreamers — who are aware they’re being watched. Alone in a room she seems to falter, her grip on the character fading. Nonetheless, as the screws of the story start to tighten, and tragedy becomes inevitable, Cracks is absolutely gripping, and I’m already looking forward to whatever Scott does next.
An Education is of course, already famous as the film that made Carey Mulligan a star, although I think that’s been apparent since she appeared in Doctor Who; she also brought her beguiling blend of innocence and steel to The Seagull at the Royal Court and on Broadway last year. But hers is not the only extraordinary performance in the movie: Olivia Williams provides a sequel of sorts to Rushmore as another fragile but life-changing teacher, and Rosamund Pike reinvents herself triumphantly as the dim but compassionate Helen. She does something absolutely extraordinary here, playing a woman with great emotional intelligence but absolutely none of the traditional kind, and her performance is hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure.
Now. Spoilers. Don’t keep reading if you haven’t seen the film — but if you have, were you disappointed by the ending? It’s true to life, I imagine (I haven’t read Lynn Barber’s memoir) but on film it feels as if Nick Hornby ran out of time and farmed out the last act to the writers of Eastenders. A film that’s been all about nuance, huge emotions signalled in a single dipped eyelash, tips into lurid melodrama, and the most contrived discovery of letters since National Treasure Part 2. More importantly, it’s a betrayal of the character: the film may be called An Education, but the ending makes Jenny merely passive, a victim of circumstance, rather than a woman who has learned, changed and decided to act. It doesn’t diminish the rest of the movie, but it’s a dull, unworthy finish to such a subtle piece of work.
The announcement — followed by immediate ticket sales — of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sequel to Phantom of the Opera, Love Never Dies, was a reminder of the Eighties and Nineties, when a new West End musical was a genuine theatrical event, rather than a transparent attempt to cash-in on an already well-known franchise, like Dirty Dancing, Sister Act or — er — Love Never Dies. It was also a reminder of a period when the talk after the show was as much — sometimes more — about the set than the songs, perhaps most famously Miss Saigon, where a full-sized helicopter landed on stage.
This year I’ve seen much more dance and experimental theatre than traditional shows, and have been consistently dazzled by the simple spectacle of bare stages, tight performances and creative lighting. Whether at the Edinburgh Fringe, Sadlers Wells or converted warehouses in London, the year’s most memorable moments have not been those that attempt to replicate reality, but those that create their own consistent worlds, conceptual rather than concrete. And the man behind many of them, including last week’s beautiful, simple Afterlight at Sadlers Wells, was lighting designer Michael Hulls, best known for his work with Russell Maliphant. Here’s a demonstration of his work in Maliphant’s recent collaboration with Robert Lepage and Sylvie Guillem, Eonnagata, which I wrote about earlier this year.
Dance theatre is the perfect playground for lighting designers, because you can’t clutter up the stage with props. Consequently, dance designers work with suggestion and projection, rather than with complex sets. Here’s a look at Wayne McGregor’s Entity, which I wrote about last year:
Entity creates an entire, vivid, complete world of its own on stage, a sci-fi adventure in dance. So does this mean that there’s no place for funfairs, sewers and helicopters? Not necessarily. But before they set about recreating reality, particularly at West End budgets — the Broadway production of Spider-Man is rumoured to cost more than $40 million — producers should perhaps be calling Michael Hulls, or Wayne McGregor’s designer Lucy Carter, before applying for that loan.
The performance collective Sweatshoppe have developed a new interactive technology that allows them to “paint” video onto any surface. This is their first video of the technique — can’t wait to see what they do next with it … Thanks to Rubbish.
A few weeks ago, celebrating stop motion animation, I mentioned Romela Crnogorac as a new talent to watch out for, and lamented that I couldn’t show you her extraordinary MA film. Well, now it’s here: I don’t know if it will make you hungry, horny or horrified, but if you thought that food porn meant Nigella Lawson I suggest you turn up the sound, go full-screen, and enjoy the (perhaps thankfully) unique experience that is Carnal …
Two plays, two authors, two theatres, each trying to explain the complex mess we’re in. At the established National Theatre, veteran playwright David Hare with The Power of Yes; at the rebellious Royal Court, young star Lucy Prebble with Enron, directed by theatre’s man of the moment, Rupert Goold. So which best illuminates the crisis, and how?
Enron is certainly the most talked-about of the two, already booked into the West End following its Royal Court run. It has big musical numbers, flashy electronics and a a pack of angry raptors on the prowl. But does this extravagant theatricality disguise a hollow heart? Is the flim-flam there to hide a lack of substance?
Absolutely not. This is thoughtful, and thought-provoking, drama, combining a forensic level of analysis — what went wrong, why did it happen, and what were the character flaws that made it possible — with a rich theatrical imagination. Whether you’re familiar with the Enron story (over-familiar, in my case) or new to the culture and characters involved, Prebble delivers an awesome amount of information without ever giving the impression that she’s showing off her research. All the lead players are here — Ken Lay, Andrew Fastow and, in a quietly terrifying performance, Sam West as Jeffrey Skilling, the nerd who became a bully, and set out to change the world. But as well as dramatising the characters, Prebble dramatises the ideas: the raptors in the basement, seen here as literal dinosaurs, are Fastow’s own term for the complex financial constructs used to hide the company’s losses: constructs that outlived their usefulness, and started to bite back.
For much of its length Enron plays as comedy, albeit of the blackest kind. But there’s no doubt of the tragedy at its core. Most treatments of the story have been one-sided, quick to damn: this is perhaps the first real attempt to dramatise both the brilliance of the company and the exhilaration of its initial success. This was a company rooted in the Texan oil tradition, infused by the spirit of the Western pioneers. Every day brought new invention, breaking ground that regulators couldn’t comprehend; it was not, at the beginning, that Enron was breaking the law, more that it was ahead of it. But success — and the praise that went with it — led to hubris, a fatal sense that everyone else was just too stupid to keep up. And this is where, with real feeling, Prebble explores the personal tragedies of the characters involved: what it was about them that created the company’s triumph, but that also led to its doom. As with any financial disaster, those at the helm blamed “the market” and “events beyond our control”. This play suggests the opposite: that the tragedy of Enron lay not at its edges but its centre, at its flawed, self-dramatising heart.
Also self-dramatising — literally, this time — is David Hare, who puts himself at the centre of his new play at the National, The Power of Yes, which is subtitled A dramatist seeks to understand the financial crisis. And which is pretty much what we get: a series of reconstructed interviews between Hare himself (played with eerie accuracy by Anthony Calf) and a series of participants and experts (bankers, analysts, journalists) as Hare tries to figure out just what went wrong.
If that sounds a bit dry — well, it is. I’m a huge fan of David Hare. I loved his painful, funny monologue Berlin earlier this year, and I admire his commitment to putting the contemporary world on stage. And there’s a lot that’s good about The Power of Yes, including a spiky, funny performance from Claire Price as a bitchy Financial Times journalist and a chilling final meeting with George Soros, the man — let’s not forget – who almost brought down Britain in 1992. But overall it’s a missed opportunity. This is partly because, unlike Berlin, The Power of Yes reveals very little about Hare himself: his character here is a dogged, witty reporter but little more than that. This is disingenuous: Hare is a well-known public figure, married to an internationally-known designer. What did the crash mean to him, how did it affect his psyche? If you’re going to put yourself at the centre, you have to fill the centre in.
But even more frustrating are the ghosts of Hare plays we might want to see, just poking through. There’s the play about Fred Goodwin — the best segment of the show — or the bonkers Adam Applegarth, former chief of Northern Rock. Or there’s the play about the Queen’s controversial visit to the stock exchange earlier this year, mentioned here almost in passing in a section called The Queen’s Question: “why did no-one see it coming?”, she asked, and no-one was able to offer an answer. Or, indeed, the play about George Soros, global super-villain turned philanthropist and sage. All of these feel like start-points for a classic Hare drama, but none of them is quite delivered in this investigative, intelligent but, in the end, infuriating play.
Thank you to everyone who came along to the Alexander Mackendrick interview at Raindance last week. It was a great evening and Terence Davies was, as ever, inspiring, charming, witty and waspish in equal measure. For anyone who didn’t get to the event, Fred has posted the complete transcript here.
Well — it’s happened. To no-one’s great surprise Marc Shmuger and David Linde have been booted out of Universal following a dismal year. In the same week, Dick Cook was replaced at Disney Studios by former Disney Channel chief Rich Ross. So with more heads rolling than Sleepy Hollow, what kind of talents are studios looking for? Here’s The Big Picture’s analysis:
Until a decade or so ago, it was pretty easy to identify what it took to run a movie studio. The best executives had the same kinds of skills — they were movie pickers. They could identify a good script, figure out the kind of talent who should star in it and hire the right filmmaker to make it, all the while having a relatively good grasp of its commercial potential. But studios aren’t movie-idea incubators anymore. They’re brand businesses, always on the lookout for a project that can be transformed into a franchise that not only has worldwide appeal but — even more crucially — can be duplicated over and over in sequel form.
Now that they are so dependent on the franchise business, studios need leaders with a skill set that is something closer to an advertising brand manager. It’s hardly a surprise that Disney, which is now largely a collection of identifiable brands (Pixar, Bruckheimer, DreamWorks and Marvel) has replaced Cook with Disney Channels chief Rich Ross, who has overseen the creation of such successful young teen brands as ”High School Musical” and ”Hannah Montana.”
With rare exceptions (meaning Johnny Depp in “Pirates of the Caribbean”) the movies that have been the biggest profit centers for studios in recent years, such as “Harry Potter,” “Transformers,” “Batman,” “Spider-Man” and “X-Men,” are films that rely more on our collective pop-culture subconscious than any individual movie star or creative talent. Even as recently as four or five years ago, you’d measure the value of a studio chief by his or her relationships, either with A-list stars or the top writer-directors in town who could supply ready-to-shoot, talent-friendly scripts. But at today’s studios, the real payoff comes from acquiring a new, well-known pop-culture brand, a brand with the kind of kinetic energy that appeals to moviegoers who speak different languages and live in all sorts of different cultures.
The big movie brands no longer depend on top talent. It hardly mattered who was cast in “Harry Potter” or “Transformers” or ”Spider-Man.” The character, already clearly a part of the pop-culture firmament, was the star, not the actor. The same goes for the filmmaker, as the evolution of “Harry Potter” has proved, with the various installments all padding Warners’ deep pockets, regardless of whether a real auteur — like Alfonso Cuarón — or a journeyman director was at the helm.
You can find the rest of the article here.
Since picking up the Bond rights for last year’s Fleming anniversary, Penguin has treated the series with real ambition and class. True, Sebastian Faulks’ anniversary novel, Devil May Care, was better at aping Fleming’s style than his substance — James Bond playing tennis? — and failed to provide 007 with a worthy adversary; but there are always the originals, and they have rarely been so beautifully produced. Designing a Bond novel has never been an easy task. There are Richard Chopping’s classic originals, for a start; then the sensationalist Pan covers by Sam Peffer; and, less an inspiration than a warning, the actively embarassing “girl on gun” covers of the Eighties. But following last year’s beautiful hardback Collected Stories to tie in with Quantum of Solace, Penguin has now released The Blofeld Trilogy, bringing together Thunderball, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and the truly deranged You Only Live Twice, in which a heartbroken Bond hunts down his nemesis in a Japanese torture garden. Simple, elegant and evocative, it’s a terrific piece of cover design, with a new introduction by Nick Lezard.
My Name Is Charles Saatchi And I Am An Artoholic is a new book published by Phaidon to co-incide with the BBC’s forthcoming search for a new British art star, co-created with Charles Saatchi. Saatchi is famously shy — he doesn’t even attend his own exhibition openings: “I don’t go to other people’s openings, so I extend the same courtesy to my own” — and generally shuns interviews, so it’s a rare chance to hear his opinions on art, life and his own talents.
The book is a series of answers to questions submitted by critics, journalists and members of the public. It’s funny, forthright and thought-provoking, but its real appeal is not its revelations — don’t ever expect Saatchi to let down his guard — but Saatchi’s own, dry, very distinctive voice. So here are a few highlights from the collection:
Perhaps your greatest legacy will be that you, more than any other, have been responsible for pitching modern and contemporary art into the UK’s cultural mainstream. Contemporary art is now discussed in taxis and government think tanks. Did you set out to achieve this from the start?
Yes.
Looking ahead; in 100 years time, how do you think British art of the early 21st century will be regarded? Who are the great artists who will pass the test of time?
General art books dated 2105 will be as brutal about editing the late 20th century as they are about almost all other centuries. Every artist other than Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd and Damien Hirst will be a footnote.
Why has Damien Hirst lost his inspiration?
He is a deeply gifted artist, a genius among us, but he’s had a bad run of shows over the past few years. All great artists have an off patch, and he’s having his. Usually when that happens, artists try too hard and the results look effortful and overblown. But I’m sure his next show will be a winner.
Does refurbishing Damien Hirst’s rotting shark rob it of its meaning as art?
Completely.
You’ve been successful at discovering new artistic talent. But are there not always great artists who go undiscovered?
By and large talent is in such short supply, mediocrity can be taken for genius rather more than genius can go undiscovered.
You famously created the slogan ‘Labour Isn’t Working’. Were you a Tory? Are you a Tory?
I once also threw myself into the Health Department’s Anti-Smoking campaign, visited emphysema wards, studied pictures of cancerous lungs and came up with the grisliest copy I could — puffing away happily as I wrote. How sweet of you to think that advertising copy is written from the heart.
With your former adman’s hat on for a moment, would you say that David Cameron has the X factor?
I’d rather have Simon Cowell.
Can you tell me anything about yourself that might make me like you?
But why would I care whether you like me?
One of the great innovations at the Raindance Festival while my colleague Fred Hogge was working there was the Alexander Mackendrick Lecture. Mackendrick was one of Britain’s greatest directors, whose work includes The Man in the White Suit, The Sweet Smell of Success and A High Wind in Jamaica. His films are beautiful, pointed and pitiless, and he went on to be a great teacher of film, whose book On Film-Making should be required reading for everyone. This year’s Mackendrick subject is Terence Davies, director of Distant Voices, Still Lives and Of Time And The City. Davies is not just a terrific film-maker; he’s also a very funny, passionate interviewee. Fred will be interviewing him on 6th October, and tickets are available here. And here, to whet your appetite, is an introduction that I wrote for Raindance, setting out why Davies is such a worthy choice for the Mackendrick:
Terence Davies has been called many things. Eric Stoltz called him “a Tasmanian devil crossed with Doris Day”. He’s described himself as looking “like an avocado”. But he’s perhaps best known, in Mark Kermode’s words, as “Britain’s greatest living film director”. He is also the first Mackendrick subject to have been taught by Mackendrick himself, as he recalled in 2005: “It was quite wonderful: you could actually learn about rhythm and timing and where a shot dies.” Mackendrick was obsessed with craft — “process, not product” was his mantra — and Davies is one of the most rigorous directors working today. As he told Harlan Ellison in 1998, “I write down everything as I hear and see it in my mind — every track, pan, dissolve, crane, piece of music. So the script becomes an aide-memoire, which is why I never do a storyboard”.
Mackendrick also wrote that “Cinema deals with feelings, sensations, intuitions and movement, things that communicate to audiences at a level not necessarily subject to conscious, rational comprehension”, and Davies’ work is a prime example of this. Most British directors photograph dialogue. Davies photographs emotion. His rapturous tracking shots, long-held close-ups and precisely chosen music can move you to tears, even as you’re wondering quite how: if you’ve ever cried while watching carpet, you’ve seen a Terence Davies film.
And Mackendrick was devoted to emotional truth, the absolute heart of Davies’ work. As he explained in 2008, “If you’re true to your subject, people recognise that. You don’t have to be Austrian to love Schubert, or Russian to love Chekhov — they’re true to what they felt and what they experienced.” Davies’ great understanding is that, to be universal, you must be specific: audiences worldwide respond to his movies not because they’re gay, raised Catholic, or Liverpudlian, but because they’ve felt desire, shame or a longing for home.
Davies’ films are unique in British cinema: deeply personal, beautifully made. So what next? His work isn’t famous for its humour — when Mackendrick, after seeing Madonna and Child, was asked, “It’s a gay movie, isn’t it?” he replied “Not at the moment” — but Davies has a spiky wit that makes you long to see his planned romantic comedy, Mad About The Boy. There’s also a movie of Sunset Song, or his adaptation of Ed McBain. But whatever his next project, Davies’ movies don’t belong in an art house. They belong in everyone’s house, and it’s a great honour to Raindance that, on October 6th, he’s coming to ours.
And so it begins. This picture gives nothing away about Dennis Kelly’s Orphans, which stormed the Edinburgh Fringe and now comes to Soho, because it’s the very first moment of the play. Helen (a terrific performance from Claire-Louise Cordwell, half WAG half sniper) and Danny are an apparently respectable couple, sitting down to dinner in their well-upholstered home, when a man comes through the doorway, drenched in someone else’s blood. It soon becomes clear that he is Helen’s brother; that he has a knack for trouble; and that his first account of what has happened isn’t the whole truth.
Orphans is, in some ways, a very traditional play. It runs in close to real time (with one lapse in the middle, which will have terrible repercussions later), it’s all set in one place, and it’s set in Britain in the present day. What, no promenade? No audience participation? No puppets, no dancing, no mime? Absolutely not, but by sticking close to the conventions, Kelly frees himself to tell his story, and to keep his audience bewitched. We’ve become so used to theatrical distraction that the simple thrill of narrative — of being desperate to know what happens next — feels almost radical in Orphans, as Kelly keeps twisting the action, upsetting all that’s gone before.
This is a play that’s stuffed with ideas: about Britain, about violence, about terror. It’s a play about not looking, and what we all choose not to see. And at its heart is a simple dilemma: how far would you go to protect your own family, whatever they were responsible for? I spent a couple of weeks this summer travelling around Britain, interviewing couples about their daily lives. Many of them had been terribly affected by recession: lost jobs, squeezed incomes, their communities closing down around them. When pubs and local shops shut down, what’s lost isn’t business but cohesion; when society unglues there’s little cause to stick together. And the one over-riding faith was family. stick with them, look after them, support them. Orphans pushes family to its limits. What happens when family and justice collide? And when does protection become cover-up, or worse?
Director Roxana Silbert gives the play a slowly tightening tension that creates a real sense of dread. And, although at its heart this is a dark and bitter play, it’s full of good jokes to sweeten the pill: there are echoes here of Jez Butterworth, and a clear link back to Pinter in its claustrophobia, its sweatiness, and its protagonists’ inability to communicate. Like a lot of current drama, there are perhaps too many themes here, fighting for attention, but it’s exciting and refreshing to see a play so confident, so heartfelt, so completely engaged with the world.
I admit it. I’d never seen the movie. Or the play. And I’d carefully steered away from the other reviews. So, perhaps alone amongst the audience, I arrived at the Donmar on an appropriately sultry summer night with no real knowledge of Streetcar other than that Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh had played two people called Stanley and Blanche, and that it was set somewhere deep in the South.
And I loved it. It’s sweaty and sexy and breathlessly tense, sparkled with humour and drenched in desire. It has the lightness of good tragedy — when you know things will go badly, you don’t need to labour the point — and the darkness of all great romance. And while Tennessee Williams is most famous for his lush, poetic language, there are also spikes of blunt directness that still take your breath away, as when Stella tries to justify to her sister Blanche why she stays with the brutish Stanley:
But there are things that happen, between a man and a woman, in the dark, that sorta make everything else seem unimportant.
And that, at least in this production, is the real heart of the play. Directed by Rob Ashford, this is not the Blanche and Stanley show: Stella is as least as central to the action, and, as played here by Ruth Wilson, is arguably its heart. Blanche, of course, is a performer, and a conscious one: as she says herself, “a woman’s charm is fifty per cent illusion”. But so is Stanley: an immigrant worker searching for a clear identity as a husband, potential father and American. Only Stella is entirely herself, and Ruth Wilson gives one of the most complete performances of the year. Fiercely proud, fiercely intelligent but desperately struggling, as her family crumbles, to create a home she can believe in, her Stella is a woman you can feel sorrow for, but never pity. She’s far too self-aware for that; and her clear-eyed understanding of her situation stands in fierce hard contrast to Blanche’s desperate ducking of the truth.
Stella: He smashed all the lightbulbs with the heel of my slipper.
Blanche: And you let him? Didn’t run, didn’t scream?
Stella: Actually, I was sorta thrilled by it.
Rachel Weisz is a bewitching Blanche, all arching brows and throaty wit. This is not some crumbling vampire but a lush, just faintly over-ripened beauty, her decay more in her own eyes than in others’, trapped in the beam of her own reflected gaze. She has the neediness of stand-up, her life a desperate improvisation, endlessly seeking applause.
The tragedy of Streetcar is not its inevitability, but its avoidability: Blanche has looks and smarts and family, but is so wrapped up in disaster that she fails to see her luck. By the end of the play, and Blanche’s great cry of despair —
I don’t want realism. I want magic!
— we can see that Stella’s painful clarity has brought, for all its shudders, a better life than Blanche’s lies.
Like all of Williams’ work, Streetcar is absolutely specific in its time and place. But it was not written as a period piece; nor, in this production, does it feel like one. The language and the costumes are those of another era; so is the technology, and manners. But the play feels as contemporary as anything on the London stage. Just as The Cherry Orchard, over at the Old Vic, is the best analysis of the recession, and the global swing from West to East, so Streetcar, with its stew of self-deception, sexuality and violence, feels as fiercely topical as ever: Magic ÷ Realism = Celebrity.
Stop motion animation is the absolute essence of cinema: creating life at 24 frames a second. And right now it’s on a high. While the box office might be dominated by glossy, 3D CG movies from Pixar, Dreamworks and Fox, the last few years have also brought us some of the most beautiful hand-made movies ever filmed. Here’s a clip from Suzie Templeton’s wonderful, Oscar-winning Peter and the Wolf (now available on iTunes):
Henry Selick, the director of Nightmare Before Christmas, also returned this year with Coraline, which I loved. Here’s an inspiring, faintly unsettling interview with Selick as he discusses the world from a puppet’s point of view:
At the more experimental end of stop motion, keep a look out for Romela Crnogorac, whose MA degree show at Chelsea last week was extraordinary. I’d love to show you her cooked Chinese duck sex video (honestly), but it hasn’t yet made it onto YouTube, so here’s a taster from her earlier work, which should at least win her the next Bjork promo:
Finally, here’s a very touching new behind the scenes film from Wes Andersons’s Fantastic Mr Fox, which is playing a next month’s London Film Festival. Turns out that Anderson actually lived in Roald Dahl’s house while writing the script, and based much of Mr Fox’s character on Dahl. Keen Dahl fans will also recognise Mr Fox’s chair.
The top 10 grossing films at the box office since January 2007 have all been sequels, reboots of franchises or action movies based on pre-existing comic book characters. Which is a pretty depressing state of affairs. So why is Hollywood so addicted to reboots and remakes [clue: money]? Check out this piece from The Big Picture for the gory truth.
Edinburgh’s Mercure Hotel is sleek, anonymous and impersonal, about as erotic as a Boots sandwich. So why, as the five of us assembled in the lobby, was there a palpable sexual tension, an edgy, slightly nervous frisson as our eyes flicked from one to the other, never holding gaze? We were here, five strangers, as the audience — participants? performers? victims? — for Internal, the latest show from Belgian theatre company Ontroerend Goed, and it was clear from our reactions to each other that the show’s reputation had preceded it. Internal was one of the most talked-about shows in Edinburgh this summer, stirring up debates about the craft, limits and even ethics of theatre. It had also, it was rumoured, broken up a marriage. As a polite but stern assistant, clip-board in hand, led us from the lobby to a darkened, black-cloaked corridor, I heard a nervous giggle to one side of me and an apprehensive intake of breath from the another.
We were lined up in a row, shoulder to shoulder, facing a black curtain, which rose to reveal the five cast members . Young, clean-cut, attractive, they surveyed us, not unpleasantly, before taking our hands and leading us individually to five small booths, each with a table, a bottle — mine was Cointreau — with two glasses and a gentle, warmly glowing lamp. We couldn’t see into any booth except our own, or hear the other conversations in any detail, partly because of the music.
Ah yes, the music: soaring, epic string arrangements of romantic classic songs. If you ever wondered just how potent cheap music can be, this would be the moment to find out. With the low lighting, alcohol and orchestra, it was like a parody of dating. But what was being parodied, and how was the parody different to the real thing? As I poured a drink for my partner, Aurelie, who had a direct gaze, a throaty giggle and the dangerous smile of a femme fatale, the traditional definitions of performance, theatre and spectator dissolved into something far more intimate, intense — and disconcerting.
By the time that we were gathered in a circle, and the performers analysed their ‘dates’, it was clear that, however much Internal is artifice, it generates a real charge. One woman was visibly tense, even angry with her ‘partner’, while another couple were shyly affectionate, softly touching hands. There’s no doubt that the experience is emotional; the question is what is a ‘real’ emotion, and whether even unreal is quite the same as false.
Our lives are saturated with systems that play on our emotions. News reports, charities and advertising all try to win us over, using music, words and light. Our environments are mediated, designed to create an emotional charge. We’re alert to this, but still seduced by it, suspicious but complicit every step of the way. Internal plays with this and questions it, creating a startlingly intimate moment in the sterile world of the Mercure. As Internal ended and we kissed our ‘dates’ goodbye, we grinned conspiratorially at one another other as we slipped, seduced and startled, into the hop-scented rain.
In 1308 Geoffrey d’Ablis, the Inquisitor of Carcasonne, arrested the entire adult population of Montaillou. This village in the Languedoc was one of the few remaining outposts of Catharism, a Christian heresy that saw the universe as Manichaean: that God and Satan were equal powers, respectively ruling the spiritual and terrestrial worlds. Cathars believed that the terrestrial world was inherently corrupt, something to be battled in pursuit of the spiritual life. They rejected the worldly wealth and ceremony of the established Catholic church, and in doing so, came directly into conflict with it — a conflict that they couldn’t hope to win.
Not every Catholic bishop approved of the Inquisition. Many turned a blind eye to their local heretics, believing that faith was better than no faith and that so long as they paid their church taxes there was no great cause for alarm. But when Jacques Fournier was made Bishop of Pamiers in 1317 he determined to stamp out the Cathars, and set up an Inquisitorial Office to track down, interrogate and punish every potential heretic close by. Between 1318 and 1325 the Office carried out 578 interrogations, covering 98 cases of heresy, twenty-five of whom came from Montaillou. These interrogations were painstakingly recorded, and the texts they left behind give us the most detailed, lively and intimate portrayal of everyday Medieval life that we have.
Montaillou, by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, was first published in 1978. Divided into themed sections — The Shepherds, Marriage and Love, Death in Montaillou etc. — it’s a painstaking distillation of the hundreds of pages of Fournier’s investigation, piecing together the details of everyday life in the village. There’s a wealth of fascinating detail about food and clothes and sleeping arrangements; but more than that there are the people. Fournier’s great bequest to us — which is ironic given his mission to erase them — is the characters of Montaillou, both heretic and loyal. There’s the charming, dangerous Belibaste; the sweet-natured shepherd Pierre Maury; the sly, seductive Beatrice de Planissoles; and above all the treacherous, lecherous parish priest, Pierre Clergue, who romps through the book, engorged and monstrous, playing love, religion and politics with equal skill:
Pierre was a swashbuckler. Cathar, spy and rake — he was everywhere … He scattered his desire among his flock as impartially as he gave his benediction, and in return won the favours of many of his female parishioners. He was helped by the general tolerance with which concubinage among ecclesiastics was regarded in the Pyrenees. At an altitude of 1,300 metres the rules of priestly celibacy ceased to apply ... When Fabrisse Rives, another man in the village, challenged Clergue over one affair, telling him “You are committing an enormous sin by sleeping with a married woman,” Clergue replied, “Not at all. One woman’s just like another. The sin is the same, whether she’s married or not. Which is as much as to say that there is no sin about it at all”.
Montaillou was a key source for fiction bestsellers like Labyrinth and The Name of the Rose. It’s not all easy reading — it feels quite academic next to contemporary historical blockbusters from Andrew Roberts or Antony Beevor — but it’s fantastically vivid, packed with quotes from the Fournier text. And however distant the period feels, the characters feel instantly familiar: technology may change, but envy, lust and politics remain the same.
Disney has just announced that it’s bought Marvel, whose characters include Spider-Man, X-Men and Iron Man. Marvel has, of course, had huge success with many of its recent movie adaptations, and the deal will no doubt lift the spirits of the comic-book industry. But doesn’t your heart sink just a little bit at the thought of yet more Spandexed super-sequels? On the other hand, as two comic powerhouses, home to some of America’s most innovative artists, come together, perhaps it’s the opportunity for some exciting creative collaborations? Inspired by the magic of Disney and the fearless heroism of Marvel, here’s how the companies’ bosses, Ike Perlmutter and Bob Iger, welcomed the news:
“We believe that adding Marvel to Disney’s unique portfolio of brands provides significant opportunities for long-term growth and value creation,” Iger said. “Disney is the perfect home for Marvel’s fantastic library of characters given its proven ability to expand content creation and licensing businesses,” said Ike Perlmutter, Marvel’s Chief Executive Officer. “This is an unparalleled opportunity for Marvel to build upon its vibrant brand and character properties by accessing Disney’s tremendous global organization and infrastructure around the world.”
Oh.
