Concert Review: Joan Baez, Fare Thee Well Tour, Royal Albert Hall, London (28th May 2018)

Joan Baez at the Royal Albert Hall (Photo credit: Martin Harris)

The last time Joan Baez took to the stage of the Royal Albert Hall was 10 years ago, during a tour celebrating the fifth decade of her storied career. Baez’s return to the venue on Monday night also marked a significant, though rather more bittersweet, occasion: the London stop on what she’s announced will be her final world tour, one which will continue in Europe throughout the summer  and then head to the US in the Autumn. The tour accompanies the release of Baez’s fine new studio album, Whistle Down the Wind [review], a modest, beguilingly humble work that lightly touches some of the abiding concerns of her career, one in which activism and artistry have, of course, always been intimately interconnected. Taking its cue from the album, the concert itself also avoided any sense of grandstanding or any big, forced statements. Instead, Baez placed the focus firmly on the music, letting the songs – old or new, political or deeply personal – speak for themselves. 

Baez is an artist who invariably creates an exceptionally warm and inclusive atmosphere for her audience, and she did so here from the moment she arrived on stage, apologising for her “lateness” (about five minutes or so!) with the confession “I forgot my lipstick.” She opened the show solo, performing  Phil Ochs’ "There But for Fortune”, Steve Earle’s “God is God” and Dylan’s “Farewell Angelina” as a trio that harked back to the stark power of her first performances - a girl, a guitar, a commanding voice singing potent words - before being joined by what she jokingly referred to as her “big band,” an outfit comprising only her son, percussionist Gabriel Harris, and multi-instrumentalist Dirk Powell. The all-acoustic set-up brought the Whistle Down the Wind songs to vivid life, with a spellbinding take on Josh Ritter’s neo-folk ballad “Silver Blade” and a stately, deeply moving performance of Mary Chapin Carpenter’s ode to memory and mindfulness, “The Things That We Are Made Of," among the stand-outs.   

Fresh, supple textures were also added to standards such as a newly-relevant “Deportees (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” a stunning, dramatic “The House of the Rising Sun” and an intense “Seven Curses,” Baez’s lower, weathered tones, with occasional rationed jumps to her higher register, finding new depths in the familiar material. Perhaps the only disappointment was “Silver Dagger,” drained of some its tension here in a more meandering arrangement that showcased Powell’s fiddle-playing. On the other hand, the contributions of the young singer Grace Sturmberg, who added ghostly harmonies to a haunting “Diamonds and Rust” and youthful zest to a rollicking “Darlin' Cory," were terrific.

Throughout, Baez seemed touchingly awed at the audience response, and her affection for the “beautiful, gorgeous” venue was palpable, especially  as she recalled her first time performing there in the early ‘60s and her inclusion of the English music hall song “Isn’t it Grand, Boys?” in her set. “I got told off for singing ‘bloody’. Well, times have changed.”

Times have changed – are changing – but the greatness of Baez’s shows is that they offer us links to the past without ever feeling like mere nostalgia-fests. Nowhere was that clearer than in a section that began with, yes, “The Times They Are A-Changin’” – which Baez dedicated to the Florida students currently challenging the NRA – before  progressing though Zoe Mulford’s hymnal “The President Sang Amazing Grace” and ending with a rousing “Joe Hill.”

Audience singalongs were encouraged from “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue” onwards, and by the time the show reached its climax, which included a joyous, cathartic “Gracias A La Vida,” a tender “Imagine” and a stirring “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” these singalongs could be guaranteed without any prompting. Interestingly, no direct reference was made to the tour’s status as Baez’s last, and the addition of some new UK dates in 2019 suggests – happily – that this farewell tour may in fact turn out to be “a long goodbye”. Perhaps the closest that Baez came to acknowledging the significance of the tour was her repetition of a lyric in the final song that she performed, words from “The Boxer” that resonated as a statement of her shining legacy of activism and endurance: “I am leaving, I am leaving/But the fighter still remains.”   

Set List

There But for Fortune

God is God

Farewell Angelina

Whistle Down the Wind

Silver Blade

It’s All Over Now Baby Blue

Deportees (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)

The Things That We Are Made Of

Diamonds and Rust

Me and Bobby McGee

Another World

The Times They Are A-Changin’

The President Sang Amazing Grace

Joe Hill

Seven Curses

Silver Dagger

Darlin’ Cory

Gracias a la Vida

Imagine

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

The Boxer

Theatre Review: Otchłań (The Nether) (Teatr Jaracza, Łódź)

Generally speaking, British perceptions of "European theatre" these days don't extend too far beyond whatever Ivo van Hove happens to be up to. Yet much more vibrant, interesting work is being done elsewhere, mostly without getting the wider exposure it deserves. (David Hare was pilloried by the Twitter mob last year for his remarks about "an over-aestheticised European theatre" style "infecting" UK stages - and it was surely van Hove that he had in his sights when he made the statement - yet the story was a more complex one: just a few years previously, Hare was to be found criticising Nicholas Hytner for not inviting international companies to the National Theatre during his tenure.)

I've been seeing theatre in Poland fairly regularly since moving to Łódź in 2016, and several of those productions - including Marcin Liber's Dogville at Nowy Teatr and Michał Zadara's Mother Courage at Warsaw's Teatr Narodowy - have ended up on my Top 10 lists of shows of the year. The Polish capital may remain the country's theatrical centre but the riches offered stretch far wider. And, though known mostly as Poland's principal cinema city - HollyŁódź, if you will - Łódź also boasts a lively theatre scene, one which often avails itself of the talent nurtured at the city's famed Film School. 

One such production is Mariusz Grzegorzek's new staging of Jennifer Haley's play The Nether, which premiered last month at Teatr Jaracza, where Grzegorzek's productions of Sarah Ruhl's The Clean House (Posprzątane) and Arthur Miller's The Crucible (Czarownice z Salem) continue to be huge hits. (A director of cinema as well as theatre, Grzegorzek has been Rector of the Film School since 2012.) Haley's play opened at California's Kirk Douglas Theatre in 2013 and was staged at London's Royal Court by Jeremy Herrin later that year, where it became the (somewhat surprising) recipient of a West End transfer. I didn't see Herrin's production so was particularly grateful to catch Grzegorzek's, which gives the play a bold, haunting and hallucinatory treatment that it's hard to imagine being matched. 

The text, presented here under the title Otchłań (which translates as "The Abyss"), might be described as a digital dystopia, and Grzegorzek's statement that the play confronts "the spiritual desolation that modern technology breeds in us" suggests his perspective on the issues at hand. Haley imagines a not-too-distant future in which the Internet has evolved into "the Nether," a network of virtual reality worlds which allows users to act out their desires via online avatars. One such realm, the Hideaway, provides a space for paedophiles, and the play's action flits between scenes in that realm - where the "shining little girl" Iris meets an enigmatic newcomer, Mr. Woodnut - and sequences set in an interrogation room where a detective, Morris, faces off with one of the Hideaway's regulars, Doyle, and with its creator, the aptly monikered Mr. Sims. The question emerges: Does a space such as the Hideaway provide an incitement to deviance or an outlet that stops its users from committing crimes in the real world? 

Such debates may not be novel, but, for those of us who count ourselves deeply concerned about the Internet's impact on our minds and souls, they remain urgent nonetheless. And Grzegorzek's highly stylised, expressionistic and often eccentric approach proves a compelling fit for Haley's spare but twisty text, which conceals and discloses as its characters' identities and personas shift and blend. The play's two worlds are brilliantly rendered here, with the director's design - complemented by Magdalena Moskwa's superb costumes - setting the clinical, spacy ambience of the interrogation room against the suspiciously lush Victoriana (with inevitable Lewis Carroll associations...) of the Hideaway. The contrast is conveyed aurally as well as visually, with the decorous classical textures of the virtual realm rubbing up against the twitchy, rumbling soundscape provided by DJ Alex. And, as in Grzegorzek's take on The Crucible, projections are adroitly employed throughout, the images blossoming and blooming, flickering and fragmenting, and creating eerie, distorted landscapes over the bodies of the performers.

The acting is highly physical in the manner that Grzegorzek seems to favour, and the cast works together wonderfully well. As Morris and Sims, Agnieszka Skrzypczak and Andrzej Wichrowski bring wit and heat to debates that might look dry on the page. Hunched and huddled, Krzysztof Zawadzki makes Doyle a singularly disturbing study in depletion. As the watchful Woodnut, Marek Nędza is a dandy with a touch of Dali. Most arresting of all is Paulina Walendziak as Iris, all poses, Pre-Raphaelite tresses and porcelain-doll skin. (The actress also plays Betty Parris in Grzegorzek's Crucible.) Vocally, Walendziak is probably doing too much here: an extraordinary array of squeals and shrieks issues from her. But, given what she's playing, her heightened approach may be justified, and her reactions make her a captivating presence, as the entirety of the drama seems at moments to play out across her amazingly expressive face. It's a startling performance from an actress whom we're sure to see a great deal more of on Polish stage and screen.

There are times, it must be said, when Grzegorzek seems to be working against the grain of the text: Iris lip-synching to "O Mio Babbino Caro" is emblematic of an attempt to turn the piece into an operatic tragedy that the material itself resists. The stark, low-key ending, in contrast, is perfectly judged, stripping away every ounce of stylisation to implicate characters, performers and audience alike in a potent, poignant reminder of the reality beyond the seductions of the screen. 

Otchłań plays in repertory at Teatr Jaracza, Łódź. For dates and booking details see here. 

[Poster design and production photos credit: Mariusz Grzegorzek]