Jamie Lloyd's production was thrilling, disturbing and, finally, deeply moving, with Zawe Ashton, Uzo Aduba and Laura Carmichael giving galvanising, fearless, exposing performances that hot-wired us to the still-potent weirdness and radicalism of Genet's vision.
With its Brechtian approach (inspired by Trevor Nunn's Nicholas Nickleby, no less) Lars von Trier’s film seems a
(too?) obvious candidate for a stage adaptation. But, faithful to the plot yet theatrical in its own highly expressionistic way, Marcin Liber's production of Christian Lollike's text proved equally compelling. The
moment when Monika Buchowiec's Grace pulled back the canopy covering the rear of the stage to reveal a huge wall of tangled chairs was
especially sensational: the knotty nastiness of the town exposed.
Photo: Mitzi de Margary
After October (Finborough)
Waspish but humane, populated by vividly drawn, relatable characters, Rodney Ackland's funny, poignant plays are revived all too rarely on UK stages. This makes Oscar Toeman's perfectly pitched revival of After October all the more special. The production is especially notable for its glorious performances from Sasha Waddell and Adam Buchanan as the ex-actress mother and writer son struggling to survive in '30s London, supported by a great ensemble including Beverley Klein, Josie Kidd, Andrew Cazanave Pin and Jasmine Blackborow.
2016 was a
year that frayed and frazzled our collective nerves in many ways,
leading some of us to seek out films that restored a sense of
goodness, balance and belief. One such was Jarmusch’s
lovely latest, a movie that makes an unremarkable week in the life of
a bus driver/poet (Adam Driver) absorbing and transcendent.
Structured through patterns of repetition and variation, as
unassuming yet as indelible as its protagonist, Paterson
is a wry, observant ode to the poetry of everyday experience, that
ranks as one of the director’s
best, and certainly warmest and most loving, works. John Bleasdale’s
great review of the film, at CineVue, is one of my favourite pieces
of film writing this year. Read it here.
The Last
Family (Ostatnia
Rodzina) (dir.
Jan P. Matuszyński)
Jan P.
Matuszyński made
his drama about the Beksińskis - an artistic Polish clan
beset by a number of tragedies - into a funny, intimate and finally
devastating family portrait.
In its mordant humour and its beautiful attention to the texture of
the quotidian, the haunting The Last Family
recalls the very best of Mike Leigh’s
work, while feeling totally fresh and distinctive in its own right.
The movie announces Matuszyński as a major talent to watch. Full review here.
Things to Come (dir. Mia Hansen-Love)
Hansen-Lovefollowed up the draggy, slightly irritating Eden
with a finely honed, surprisingly funny drama about a philosophy
teacher (Isabelle Huppert) undergoing a series of personal and
professional shake-ups. Warm, wry, wise, and boasting one of
Huppert’s
most spontaneous, likeable performances, Things to Come is a
strangely soothing experience. Full review here.
Lemonade
(dir. Beyoncéand others)
So…
you pretty much give up on the American mainstream and then
this happens. Made by one the biggest stars in the
world it might have been, but the thing about Lemonade
is that it doesn’t
feel mainstream. On the contrary, its
powerful, haunting images - encompassing urban car park and rural
idyll, grainy documentary and luscious stylisation - are as
enigmatic as they are iconic, a perfect complement to the dynamic
stylistic diversity of a song sequence that boasted Beyoncé's best singing and song-writing to date. Some critics got hung up on
the tabloidy Bey and Jay bust-up element of the endeavour, but dig
deeper and something far richer and more subversive is revealed.
With its Katrina and Black Lives Matter references, Lemonade
certainly hit the zeitgeist yet its nods to the history of Black
expression created something both cutting-edge yet timeless in
feeling. With Beyoncé using her talents and persona to channel vulnerability,
rage, resistance and transcendence, Lemonade added
up to a genuinely empowering and totally engrossing experience,
accomplishing more in under an hour than several slack, shapeless features managed in nearly three. (Lookin’
at you, American Honey and Toni Erdmann.)
Theo and Hugo (dir.
Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau)
Summertime
(dir.
Catherine Corsini)
These beautiful films are very different: the former a taut yet dreamy
night-in-the-city involving two guys whose sex-club hook-up takes a
dramatic turn, the latter a years-spanning love story between two
women of different backgrounds and temperaments, presented in the
context of second-wave feminism. Yet I persist in thinking of the
films as companion pieces, not least because they prove, once again,
that when it comes to crafting intense, serious-minded movies that
really do justice to the soul-shaking experience of falling in love,
no one does it like filmmakers working in France do it, these days. Summertime review here.
Hissein
Habre: A Chadian Tragedy (dir.
Mahamet-Saleh Haroun)
Haroun made
his first foray into documentary with this quietly searing work, in
which interviews with victims of the Habre regime and those who fought
a long struggle to bring the dictator to justice, are the focus. Few
shots in 2016 cinema were more potent than the closing images here,
which show the dictator, struggling and unrepentant, being dragged
from the courtroom. Full review here.
Aquarius
(dir.
Kleber Mendonça Filho)
Like
Things To Come, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s
follow-up to the much-admired Neighbouring Sounds
is also about an older female protagonist confronting new challenges.
More openly transgressive than Hansen-Love’s
film, Aquarius sometimes dotes on its heroine a
little bit too much for comfort. Still, the movie remains wonderfully
fresh and subversive, crowned by a great performance from Sonia
Braga as the radical, resistant widow. The moment in which Braga’s
Clara blasts Queen’s
“Fat-Bottomed
Girls”
back at her noisy neighbours might be my favourite scene of the year.
The BFG
(dir.
Steven Spielberg)
A lot of
people seemed decidedly lukewarm about Spielberg’s
latest, but I found The BFG to be everything you’d
hope for: funny, touching, supremely loveable, and, in its exuberant
delight in Gobblefunk, as rich to listen to as it is to look at. Full review here.
Staying
Vertical (dir.
Alain Guiraudie)
Guiraudie
followed up his phenomenally successful art-porn thriller Stranger
By The Lake with an even odder and more transgressive
work: a consistently confounding, somewhat Ozonian meditation on
creativity and parenthood that moved from hilarity to deep unease in
the blink of an eye. Very weird and totally unforgettable. Note: the Cannes audience squirmed more at one
(already notorious) sequence than the Wroclaw audience did. Full review here.
When the news came that Glenda Jackson
would be returning to the London stage after an absence of 25 years
to play King Lear in a new production directed by Deborah Warner,
my first reaction (like most people's) was
“Wow”!
That response was followed quite swiftly by another thought: “I
wish Pauline Kael was around to write about this!”
Sometimes positive but generally not,
Kael’s
appraisals of Jackson’s
distinctively brittle screen performances have given me as much
pleasure as her writing on any actress. Full of acclaim for
Jackson’s
TV work in Elizabeth R, Kael came to find
Jackson’s
“clenched,
hard”
film performances much more problematic, and expressed her
displeasure in some memorably cutting remarks.
“Miscast, Jackson
can scratch on one’s
nerves; she can even seem to be scratching on her own nerves,”
Kael wrote in her (actually favourable) review of The Return
of the Soldier (1983). For Kael, Jackson - “spiky-thin,”
with “slitted
eyes showing malice”
- was “the
least lyrical major actress of her day,” her performances
“familiarly
grating.”
“[Jackson has] been
in movies only since 1967,”
Kael complained in her piece on Michael Apted’s
Triple Echo (1972), “it’s
too soon for us to know her every trick, yet she’s
as easy to imitate as Bette Davis.”
For Kael, Jackson was “a
coiled-tight actress who articulates each shade of emotion with such
exactness that she has no fluidity and no ease. She carries
no-nonsense precision to the point of brutality; she doesn’t
just speak her lines –
she flicks them out disgustedly.” Kael diagnosed an “unnecessary
tension in [Jackson’s] voice and body,” and seemed to put her
finger on the issue when she observed: “it could be that she’s
so determined not to be smiley-sweet that she looks daggers.”
The qualities of androgyny and
abrasiveness that irked Kael about Jackson on screen are part of what
make the actress a formidably great stage Lear. From the moment she
appears - still “spiky-thin” and defiantly “no-nonsense” -
Jackson commands the stage with an apparent effortlessness that’s
all the more staggering following her long absence from theatre. If
the performance takes a little while to really warm up that may be
due to some of the production’s more questionable decisions (after all, a
cardie and slacks ensemble doesn’t do a whole lot to suggest
regality).
But by the time Jackson’s Lear is
spewing curses or, later, fiercely berating himself for his neglect
of his kingdom, the actress’s control and mastery are quite
breathtaking. Jackson does what any great Shakespearean does: she
makes us hear familiar speeches totally afresh. The descent into
madness is charted with rasping poignancy but without special
pleading. Awakening, shocked, to find herself reunited with Cordelia (Morfydd Clark), the lightness of touch that Jackson
gives to lines like “I am a very foolish fond old man” is
superbly judged. In not begging for pathos, the actress achieves true
pathos. (And, even, though Kael might doubt it, true lyricism.)
King Lear(Credit:
Alastair Muir)
The rest of the production is more mixed. I’m a huge fan of Deborah Warner’s
productionsgenerally (even her much-derided School for Scandal
made my Top 10 of 2011), which have a messy, uncontrolled atmosphere
that can be very exciting. Here, though, some of Warner's ideas feel
shopworn. This isn’t the first time that Warner has
directed Lear (her 1990 NT production with Brian Cox in the title
role was widely praised) and maybe she takes too much for granted:
the bits of Brechtian business (the spare, white box set; the
rehearsal room ambience of the opening; the casual, contemporary
costumes; captions announcing Act and Scene, and so on) don’t add
up to much.
Yet the affected staging is fitfully
powerful: the storm scene, in particular, is simply great, with
Jackson and Rhys Ifans’s Fool making their way towards us across
billows of black plastic sheets, while a wind effect ensures that we
too feel the chill. And I admire Warner for not doing the obvious,
such as setting the play in some overt post-Brexit Britain facsimile
that would have probably got a lot of people very excited.
King Lear(Credit:
Alastair Muir
The performances surrounding Jackson are
fitful, too. Both Celia Imrie, as a matronly Goneril, and Jane
Horrocks, as a whorish Regan, feel miscast. Imrie’s indignant line
readings sometimes suggest Miss Babs at her most self-righteous, and
when she reaches for a pair of marigold gloves to clean up some sick
in a late scene, an Acorn Antiques homage actually
seems intended. Yet the ferocity Imrie gives to her reading of
Goneril’s last line almost redeems the whole performance. Teetering
on spiky heels, Horrocks overdoes it quite a bit throughout. Yet,
cackling as she clings to Cornwall (Danny
Webb), something memorable is
achieved: an archetype of coupledom at its most grotesque.
Karl Johnson is a solid, if not
exceptional, Gloucester and the always-interesting Warner-fave Harry Melling succeeds in
showing Edgar finding himself within Poor Tom’s disinhibition, while
Simon Manyonda’s strong Edmund limbers up for malice with press-ups
and a skipping rope. (Any production that doesn’t cut Edmund’s
final attempted moment of repentance - as this one doesn’t - also
wins points from me.)
As with Hamlet, the
greatness and depth of King Lear is such that no
single production can really encompass it, and, while Jackson’s
greatness in the role seems to have been acclaimed by all, Warner’s
staging has proved as divisive as expected. It's an erratic
Lear, to be sure. Yet, writing about this by turns annoying and exhilarating, obtuse and illuminating production a few weeks after seeing it makes me feel very
eager to see it again.
King Lear is booking at the Old Vic until
3 December.
As
anyone with even a passing interest in pop culture won’t
have failed to notice, acres of media coverage, some of it sceptical
but most of it rapturous, greeted the release of Beyoncé’s
stunning visual album Lemonade back in May. The
cultural conversation raised by that record rightly continues, yet,
amid the articles and think-pieces examining the album’s
inspirations and intertexts, one connection failed to be made by major commentators:
namely, Lemonade’s
links to Tori Amos’s Boys of
Pele (1996), which was released exactly 20 years before.
From
the fierce, feminist play with Deep South iconography, to details such
as Beyoncé’s Amos-echoing
left-leg-slung-across-the-chair-arm posture in the “Sorry”
video, from the shared musical quoting of Led Zep’s
“When the Levee Breaks”
(in Pele’s notorious
“Professional Widow”
and Lemonade’s
equally blistering “Don’t
Hurt Yourself”), to both albums’
detection of wider historical, mythic and cultural patterns in the
intimate sphere of male/female relationship conflict, the connections
between the two records are numerous. Aside from short memories,
maybe critics’ ignoring of the parallels
is down, in part, to the current polarisations of US culture and its
worrying segregation of “Black”
and “White”
artists, even as Lemonade itself subverts that
tendency through Beyoncé's fruitful
collaborations with Jack White, Ezra Koenig, and others. (Amos, for
her part, performed two Beyoncé songs, “Crazy in Love” and “Halo,”
on her last tour.)
For
many listeners, Boys For Pele remains as
significant and indelible a cultural touchstone as Lemonade
will doubtless prove, and, 20 years on, the album gets the
recognition it deserves thanks to a two-disc reissue from Rhino, who
put out deluxe editions of Amos’s first
two albums, Little Earthquakes (1992) andUnder the Pink (1994), just last year. (You can
read my review of those reissues here.)
The
format is very much the same for the Pele release:
once again, a re-mastered version of the record is supplemented by a
second disc that contains B-Sides, live versions and rarities. But
where the Earthquakes and Pink
reissues featured no material that hadn’t
already been released elsewhere, the new Pele goes
one better, with a second disc that includes some previously
unavailable tracks, most notably the near-mythic “To
the Fair Motormaids of Japan,” a song
that Amos devotees have been hankering to hear for many years. The
inclusion of that track alone pretty much renders this an essential
purchase.
When
it came out in 1996, Boys for Pele sounded like
nothing else out there, and, 20 years on, the album’s
freshness, strangeness and idiosyncrasy haven’t
dimmed. The record’s
heady mix of styles - with classical flourishes (has the harpsichord
ever sounded this demonic…?) merging with
post-punk fury and ghostly gospel interludes segueing into surreal
show-tune strut or achingly beautiful torch songs - remains as
confounding as it is cohesive.
What
links the diverse parts is the consistency of Amos’s
vision (this was her first solo production job) and her skill at
constructing an album as a compelling narrative in which sequencing
and transitions are crucial. A brutal and beautiful fever dream of a
record that boldly confronts violent impulses (while making space for
lyricism, tenderness, humour and hope), Pele takes
the break-up album into previously uncharted areas of myth, madness
and magnificence. It still stands out as the weirdest, wildest item
in the Amos canon, its musical ingenuity matched by brilliantly
bizarre, allusive free-association lyrics and seriously strung-out
vocals. (The album’s infamous, The Night of the Hunter-referencing liner art,
meanwhile, involving dirty mattresses, pig-suckling, and
pianos aflame, proved the perfect visual complement to the musical
and lyrical subversiveness.)
Amos’s
bravery in going to emotional extremes had already been signalled on
Earthquakes and Pink, of
course. But Pele, recorded in Ireland and the
American South and named for the Hawaiian volcano goddess who
demanded the ritual sacrifice of young males, represented a whole new
kind of exorcism in its confrontation with patriarchal power. “She’s
crawling on her knees towards a telephone that isn’t
ringing,” Amos said, at the time, of the
album’s protagonist. “To
go there, you have to remember when you did that.”
As
it turned out, a lot of folks were willing “to
go there,” and Boys for Pele
remains the album that certain fans would have liked Amos to have
carried on remaking - a stance which may say less about her own
evolution than about their inability to move on. Rich and daring,
expansive and intimate, Pele still rewards,
unnerves and challenges. And this reissue does what a good reissue
should do: it succeeds in deepening a masterpiece. The second disc is
the place where fans will head first and while some will probably
find something to whine about there (the complaint “Where
is ‘Samurai’”?
has, inevitably, already been made) it’s
likely that most will be sated by the abundance of riches on offer
and the attention paid to the material’s
sequencing and presentation.
The second disc
actually opens with a familiar item: the so-called “Dakota Version”
of “Hey Jupiter” which was released as a single and which Amos
still performs in concert. B-Side fan favourites featured include the
Chas and Dave covers “That’s What I Like Mick (The Sandwich
Song)” and “London Girls,” which retain their quirky charm,
thanks to the supple arrangements and the incongruity of Amos
gleefully scatting out ineffably British lyrical references to
“kippers,” “pie and mash,” “Derby chinaware,” and “Glenn
Hoddle scoring a goal.” The deceptively playful childhood
reminiscences “Toodles Mr. Jim” and “Frog on my Toe” are also
highlights, as is the subversively mournful, resigned reading of
“This Old Man” and the brisk, tremulous “Alamo.”
Some of the tracks
here first featured on the mammoth A Piano collection that
Rhino released ten years ago: these include “Fire-eater’s
Wife/Beauty Queen,” a delicious prelude to Pele’s oblique
opener, and “Walk to Dublin (Sucker Reprise),” a sublimely
unhinged piece that finds double-tracked Amoses wailing “Do a jig!”
against chunky piano and brusque harpsichord. Both songs gain from
this new context, and the latter track now gets supplemented by its
previously unreleased sister, “Sucker,” a wonderfully mean
classical/grunge hybrid that starts out echoing “Jingle Bells”
before morphing into something that Wanda Lewandowska and Kurt Cobain
might have cooked up in collaboration.
Easily the most
highly anticipated track here, “To the Fair Motormaids of Japan”
does not disappoint, either: from its tumbling piano introduction,
it’s an exquisitely evocative and enigmatic piece that could have
fitted snugly into Pele’s arc, as it finds its narrator
contemplating all manner of feats and humiliations in order to
recapture something lost. “The things that I would go through/To
turn you back around/The laces I would trip on/To bring on the
circus crowds” Amos seethes, the song debating whether
transformation (“the things that I turn into”) might be an
expansion or a betrayal of the self, and ending in fittingly
unresolved suspension.
Emotional
complexity and ambiguity has also been a large part of Amos’s
appeal, and songs like the brief and beautiful elegy “Graveyard”
showcase her peerless combination of the sexual and the spiritual
(“I’m coming
in the graveyard/To sing you to sleep now”).
Southern influences also continue to surface on a number of the
tracks, including the demanding piano dirge “Sister
Named Desire” (which might be Blanche du
Bois’s post-incarceration fever dream)
and “Amazing Grace/Til the Chicken”,
a lovely piece of improvisation that showcases Amos’s
warm rapport with bassist George Porter Jr. “This
is our church, George,” Amos quips in the
segue between the two songs.
Such
exposing, loose and jazzy jams demonstrate the kind of spontaneity
that Amos prefers to leave off of her studio work and save for live
performance these days. The fine concert versions of “Honey”
and “Sugar”
included here find the songs starting to take shape in front of an
audience in a way that their recorded versions can’t
match, while the ironically subtitled, and frankly terrifying,
“Professional Widow (Merry Widow
Version)” remains one of Amos’s
most uninhibited and startling vocal performances ever. The album
signs off - succinctly and elegantly - with “In
the Springtime of His Voodoo (Rookery Ending),”
a spare and emotive extension of part of that song, as, against
delicate piano, Amos breathes out: “Right
there for a minute, you were my enemy…/Right
there for a minute, I was over it.”
For
many listeners, Boys
for Pele
has, over the years, served as its own church of sorts: a place of
enlightenment, succour and empowerment in the midst of pain and
confusion. Amos has produced much fantastic work of comparable
ambition and immersive impact since: whether its 2002’s Scarlet’s
Walk,
2007’s American
Doll Posse
(a record whose relevance seems only to have multiplied in the last
week), 2011’s Night
of Hunters
or her sublime foray into musical theatre, The
Light Princess
(2013). Pele,
though, finds Amos at her most overtly radical and risk-taking:
boldly challenging the oppressions of culture and history, pushing
the album form in fresh directions, discovering a productive way to
burn. In its expanded form, the brilliant Boys
for Pele
thrills, moves and inspires anew.
Boys
For Pele: 20th
Anniversary Reissue is out on Rhino on 18th
November.
