Category: Aberystwyth

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Chalk Circuits: Brecht, the Stage, and the Radio

Well, it rolled into town last night . . . and carted me right back to high school (in Germany, anno never-mind), where I was exposed to it first. The National Theatre’s “education mobile,” I mean, whose production of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle I went to see at the local Arts Centre. Despite the publicly staged custody battle at the Circle‘s center, I did not once think of the circus that has become the life and legacy of Anna Nicole Smith. Brecht’s parables of the filthy rich and dirt poor are hardly without tabloid appeal; but instead of drawing parallels between this story and history, I felt encouraged by the production’s interpretation of Brecht’s theory of Epic Theater to contrast the techniques of the theatrical stage with the potentialities of the sound stage, radio being a medium of which Brecht was suspicious at first (given its exploitation in Fascist Germany), but for which he was to write a number of plays.

Communism has always been big business in capitalist societies, both as fuel for wars, cold or otherwise, and as an artistic construct. A carnivalesque appreciation of his anti-capitalist allegories from the comfort of a loge might run counter to anything Brecht envisioned in his organon, but I suspect that such is the spirit in which most audiences take in his works for the stage. They are didactic, all right, but that does not mean theatergoers are ready, willing, or able to be instructed.

Instead, audiences might take in, take on or leave Brecht’s Epic theatricals, only to return to their shopping, to the latest installment of an American television serial featuring the works of Hollywood’s highest-paid plastic surgeons, or to their various modes of right-winging it in style. Episches Theater struggles against the complacency induced by the convenience and relative comforts of a reserved seat in a handsome theater. Theatergoing, after all, is little more than a costly interlude these days, a getting-away-from the everyday rather than a forum in which to face it.

Besides, Brecht’s apparatus seems by now more creaky than a well-oiled Victorian spectacle. Its stage was not the proscenium arch of melodrama, plays of sentiment and sensation that draw you in and, once the curtain is drawn, absolve you from any responsibility to engage further with whatever you had the privilege of witnessing. Never mind that The Caucasian Chalk Circle draws to a close with the potentially high-tension climax of two women called upon to tear at a child rightfully belonging to one of them (the verdict depending on the judge’s—and our—definition of “rightful”). Much lies outside this circle that invites onlookers to stray from the center.

The main principle of Epic Theater is not to let anyone watching get emotionally absorbed in the action. Brechtian drama challenges audiences to observe behavior, action and circumstance, however stylized, in order to assess and draw conclusions from it. Conceived as a theater of estrangement (or Verfremdung), it is meant to provoke thought rather than pity. The play (and the play within) remain an artifice rather than becoming—or assuming the guise of—reality.

In order to create this sense of estrangement, the National Theatre production lets the audience in on the stagecraft involved in the manufacture of realist theater, especially the motion picture variety whose special effects trickery has long surpassed traditional stagecraft. The stage was both scene and soundstage, a set peopled with foley (or sound effects) artists at work in the background and, to highten the effect of alienation, interacting with the performers or taking part in the drama they help to mount. Not since I last attended a production of a radio drama have I seen so many tricks of the trade displayed, from the production of a crackling fire to the imitation of a bawling infant.

I’m not sure whether Brecht would have approved of this interpretation of his theory, which results in a spectacle that was amusing rather than authoritative, a Marx Brother’s production during Karl’s night off, a staging that turned Verfremdungseffekt into an elaborate running joke. This Chalk Circle, replete with a narrator addressing the audience with a microphone in his hand, was a radio melodrama turned “epic” by virtue of being both played and displayed.

On the air, with its techniques obscured from view, it would have come across like the very stuff against which Brecht rebelled with his theory. The eye and the ear were pitted against each other, an “epic” battle of the senses whose enemy is realism but whose victim is engagement. For once, my ears were the channels of realism, while my eyes were instructed to see and disbelieve. Sure, I learned how to set a palace on fire; but Revolution had nothing to do with it.

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A Moody Christmas: There’s Life Yet in the Old Scrooge

Eighty-what? Bah, humbug! Age does not deter film, stage, and television actor Ron Moody from going on tour in yet another dramatization of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the Wales Theatre Company production of which I caught at the Aberystwyth Arts Center. In fact, Moody adapted the story as well, in collaboration with director Michael Bogdanov (whose productions of Fiddler on the Roof and Amazing Grace I have reviewed on previous occasions).

What’s more, Moody not only took on the play’s largest role but enlarged it still by taking over as Dickens’s narrator as well.  He resurrected the old miser with wit, humor, and feeling, even though his voice came across rather faintly and his lines were at times mumbled or muddled to an extent that the character’s age and grumpiness could not entire disguise or explain. When Scrooge reminds one of his ghostly guides of being “mortal” and “liable to fall,” Moody’s frame made the line utterly convincing; yet he stepped surprisingly lively after his reformation, cheerfully urging the audience to rise for a standing ovation.

The production was a busy one, meticulously recreating the story’s memorable scenes and characters with numerous set changes performed by stagehands shifting the makeshift props, activities that distracted from the endearing fairytale simplicity of the narrative and very nearly defeated the object of creating a sense of proscenium arch realism. It was all too much for poor Mrs. Fezziwig, who slipped upon entering the scene in which she was introduced to Scrooge by the Ghost of Christmas Past.

All this stagecraft brought to mind the superiority of non-visual storytelling on radio and in public readings. It is in the spoken word, aided at most by music and sound effects, that a ghost story like A Christmas Carol is most likely to thrill and enchant, as it certainly did in many of the productions heard during the 1930s and ‘40s on US radio, including this Campbell Playhouse adaptation broadcast on Christmas Eve, 1939.

There is no use trying to keep the eyes dry; their services are not required for the enjoyment of plays by radio. If tears happen to blur your vision, let them run freely.  They are testimony to the vision and insight of your mind’s eye.

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Bloodshed: Did Freddy Kruger Slay Cocteau?

It can do serious damage to one’s sensibilities. Popular culture, I mean. I sensed its deadening force tonight when I attended a screening of Jean Cocteau’s first film, Le sang d’un poète (1930). It was shown, together with the Rene Clair short Entr’acte (1924), at the National Library of Wales here in Aberystwyth, where it was presented with live musical accompaniment by composer Charlie Barber, who also conducted. However animated the score, the images left me almost entirely cold. Why? I wondered.

There was a time when I was thrilled—or at least tickled—by surrealism. Reproductions of Magritte’s paintings lined the walls of my room. In my drawings and watercolors, I ransacked the surrealist inventory, ripping off Dali’s shadows and reshaping the landscapes of Tanguy and de Chirico. Getting experimental with the camera, I posed in front of designer-cracked mirrors, something standing in for blood oozing from my cheek or brow. That was just about the time when early 20th-century art was being reprocessed on MTV, in music videos and horror film franchises like Phantasm, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Evil Dead. This New Wave swept over and wiped out what was once avantgarde but nowadays generate about as much excitement as a can of Campbell’s soup.

Our jaundiced eyes have stared down a multitude of visual assailants. How many times can you be surprised by a mirror turning into a pool of water, startled by violent juxtapositions, or amazed at facile paradoxes? How long does it take to turn an outrage of images into an outage of imagination? Video, it seems, killed something other than the radio star.

Popular culture can make Cocteau’s Poet look like Mr. Potato Head. It exterminates the life of art in the very process of reproduction. Was it this frustration with the fading power of pictures that made me turn to the non-visual arts, to broadcasting in the pre-television age? If so, video did not kill the radio star after all. When you run those digital pictures until the recycled blood on the screen runs dry, you might begin to hunger for a blank slate on which to give new expression to your personal terrors and intimate desires.

Give the poet in you a blood transfusion by taking your eyes from the plasma screen. Close them a while . . . if you have the sang-froid to open your mind’s eye to such a world of possibilities.

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Delayed Exposure: A Man, a Monument, and a Musical

Well, I don’t know why I took it. This picture, I mean. Over the years, I must have walked past that plaque hundreds of times without paying attention to it. A few months ago, returning for a visit to my old neighborhood in Manhattan, it insisted I take notice at last. I went to an exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 91st Street. Erected in memory of the journalist W. T. Stead, this modest cenotaph stands opposite the museum, on the Central Park side of the avenue. I had no knowledge and little interest in the life of Mr. Stead, which (the plaque tells you as much) ended spectacularly aboard the Titanic. Last weekend, some three months after my return from New York, the man insinuated himself into my life once again, this time in the guise of a character in a Welsh musical.

Amazing Grace, staged at the local Arts Centre, tells the story of Evan Roberts, a Welsh miner turned preacher who, in the words of Mr. Stead, became the “central figure” of the early 20th-century “religious awakening in Wales.” Stead followed the movement, interviewed Roberts, and reported about this so-called Welsh Revival. In Mal Pope’s play, he appropriately serves as narrator and commentator on Roberts’s fabulous rise and his equally sudden disappearance from public view.

Unfortunately, Stead doesn’t get all that much to say or sing about Roberts, and the musical, which, in this particular production, featured the aforementioned Peter Karrie as a fierce reverend envious of the enigmatic upstart, suffers from a serious case of anticlimax: whether daunted by his fame or no longer driven to preach, Roberts simply shuts up—a silencing that doesn’t make for a rousing finale.

Unimpressed by Pope’s 1980s-styled power ballads and his by-the-numbers approach to biography, I was easily and gratefully distracted when I saw Mr. Stead walking across the stage and back into my conscious, as if to demand the leading role denied to him in this production. Now I find myself compelled to follow up on Stead’s life and writings.

As it turns out, Stead was fascinated by the spiritual, by premonition and second sight, by ghostly doubles and “long-distance telepathy.” For instance, he wrote about a case in which a telegram, then presumably the fastest means of telecommunication, was several hours slower in conveying a story than a message alleged to have been transmitted by a “disembodied spirit.” It is the extra-scientific (rather than the supernatural) speculated about by those growing up in the age of Darwin, an age of industrialism and shattered systems of belief.

Researching Etherized Victorians, my study on old-time radio, I came across one such comment on modernity by one of Stead’s contemporaries, Rudyard Kipling, whose 1902 short story “Wireless” marvels at psychic phenomena while questioning scientific progress: telepathy as the ultimate wireless connection.

It seems Mr. Stead is anxious to continue the debate from the beyond. I have unwittingly become a ghost writer for the late journalist; recalling him to life in word and image, I am merely his chosen amanuensis.

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Fiddle/Sticks; or, When Broadway Comes to Town

Well, there’s milk in the old cow yet. The cash cow that is Fiddler on the Roof, I mean, which started giving in 1964 and ran for a record-breaking 3,242 performances. Forced to abandon the town of Anatevka, Tevye and his neighbors have travelled the world to inhabit the small but rich territory that is the theatrical stage. One of those theaters giving a temporary home to the Fiddler is the Arts Center in Aberystwyth, Wales, where the plight of the Russian Jews and their threatened “Tradition” are now being re-enacted by a mostly Welsh cast, headed by Welsh-born Peter Karrie in the role of Tevye.

Karrie (“The World’s Most Popular Phantom”) performed in the same venue last summer, when he impressed me with his sensitive portrayal of Fagin in Lionel Bart’s Oliver! (as discussed here). This time around, the show truly revolves around him, which is somewhat of a problem for his fellow actors, who can’t hold a candlestick to him. Karrie is a musical actor; he does not merely saunter or dance across the stage to belt out tunes like the familiar “If I Were a Rich Man.” Even with a microphone coming unglued and protruding from his cheek like a handle on a paper bag, he is thoroughly convincing and engrossing.

Holding up well enough opposite him as his wife is Andrea Miller, who takes on Golde with a long-faced, comical severity that reminds me of Edna May Oliver. Her sentimental duet with Tevye, “Do You Love Me?” is one of the highlights of a show whose greatest shortcoming is that it is rather devoid of darkness. After all, the pogroms, the razing of entire villages and the exodus of the Jews from their Russian homes, are not to be treated like an occasion for so many routinely staged showstoppers. This Fiddler came across like a Jewish version of Pride and Prejudice, with hard-up Golde, like Jane Austen’s Mrs. Bennett, trying to get her five daughters married to well-to-do suitors while her permissive husband caves in to the youngsters’ concept of matrimony as a union of loving partners.

Central to this plot is the matchmaker Yente, a role originated by Golden Girl Bea Arthur (whom I last spotted autographing DVDs at a Manhattan bookstore). In this production, a shtick-figure of a Yente slips in and out of her Yiddish accent. Less fitting still were most of the wigs and beards, rendering the Rabbi, as performed by a juvenile, so laughable as to compromise the sincerity of the entire production. Now, Aberystwyth is a summer resort for Hassidic Jews, who take over one of its beaches during the month of August. Should any of them venture out to see this production, as directed by BAFTA-award winning Michael Bogdanov, they might very well hiss this unfortunate miscast off the stage.

Studying the playbill, I came across one intriguing radio dramatic connection–a wireless connection I invariably seek and find without fail. Apart from Andrea Martin, who is an award-winning writer of radio plays, the playbill names Arnold Perl as the man by whose “special permission” the Tevye stories of Sholem Aleichem were adapted for Fiddler.

I am not sure how Perl got to acquire the rights to these late 19th/eary 20th-century tales; but, as a writer whose old-time radio play “The Empty Noose” commented on the inconclusiveness of the Nuremberg Trials (as mentioned here), he was undoubtedly drawn to them due to their special cultural and political significance, a heritage of horrors now playing itself out in the uneasy compromise that is Israel, a heritage that Bogdanov, himself a descendant of Ukranian Jews, merely fiddles with his amiable roof hoofers for the sticks.

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Carrion Antigone: The Island Beyond Guantanamo Bay

Chicken pox. That’s what had kept the Johannesburg Market Theatre players from coming down to Cardigan Bay to perform in Athol Fugard’s The Island. Last night, the two (Mpho Osei-Tutu as Winston and Thami Mngqolo as John) made up for it, even though their audience (students at the local university) had taken off by then for some holiday destination. It was worthwhile hanging on to the ticket, though. And since I enjoy debating myself, I dug up an old college paper I had written on The Island for a graduate course in drama back in the mid-1990s. Aside from its title “Carrion Antigone,” that essay, while not outright dismissed by its academic audience, is rather too slight a performance to warrant reproduction here. It told me more about myself than the play, which I argued to be less concerned with historical facts than with cultural universals.

That statement is in serious need of revision. In its stead, I will only raise the questions that came to mind when I watched the play last night. While staging Sophocles’s Antigone—or re-staging the famous staging of it—on Robben Island, the notorious prison where Nelson Mandela once took on the role of Creon, Fugard does not so much follow than confront the Aristotelean maxim that poetry is a “more philosophical and higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.”

Winston and John, like Mandela, are the prisoners of an oppressive state. They are doing time as a direct consequence of the times in which they live. Indeed, Winston is doing more than time—he is in it for life. Yet even though he, like the defiant Antigone, has been robbed of a chance to count his days—to plan for and look forward to a tomorrow of his own shaping), he resents being asked to play the title role in Sophocles’s drama, which John wants to perform for fellow inmates and prison staff.

Aside from being uncomfortable playing a female character inside the homosocial confines of a prison, Winston dismisses the very idea of staging Sophocles as “child’s play.” Make-believe like Antigone seems remote and irrelevant to him: “I live my life. I’m here, and it’s history, not legends.” John tries to remind him that “child’s play” is what their warden calls their “convictions” and “ideals”—the beliefs for which they, like Antigone, were condemned.

Ideals are not removed from history—they are born of and beget it. To think of “history” and “ideals,” of “reality” and “play” as opposites may mean surrendering life to the system of binaries according to which Winston and John were cast as criminals.

When Winston learns that John’s sentence has been shortened and that his cellmate is to be released in a few months, his attitude toward performing changes. He is, after all, living quite outside what he thought of as history, on Robben Island, where even time in its relativity has lost its meaning: “My life? How do I count it, John? One . . . one . . . another day comes . . . one.”

Now “lost between life and death,” he has to meet the challenge of making his days matter. Playing Antigone—and playing it for those like him, right before the guards—may be just the thing. The latter may shrug off the trial and death sentence of Antigone as harmless “legend”; but to the former it will be the living history of their convictions.

The Island confronted me with my own remoteness from what I often thought of as the world before I entered the blogosphere—a world of ideas presented on the stage that is a journal such as this. Is this stage as much a new world as it is an old prison? Is that sphere a Robben Island on which inmates circulate, exchange, and recycle thought, as the guards watch on and let it pass, for now? How do you meet the challenge of making life matter when it does not seem to count or add up to much?

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Gormenghast (Dis)played; or, How to Mount a Frame of Mind

The beleaguered sun appeared to have triumphed at last in a narrow victory over the long-reigning clouds, and I, a much deprived heliolater, ventured out with laptop and deckchair to luxuriate in the vernal cool of a brightly colored afternoon, absorbed in thoughts of . . . death, dread, and desolation. It was not the long shadows cast upon the weeds-corrupted lawn, nor the shrieking of the crows nesting in our chimney that evoked such gloomy visions; nor was it the realization that the skies were darkening once more as another curtain of mist was lowering itself upon the formerly glorious outdoors.

No, my mood was not brought on by any one thing I happened to be perceiving at that moment; it was something instead that I took away with me last night as the crowds poured out of the theater on the hill, sending them into the inky, rain-swept night with images of Gormenghast.

Appearing before me, on the stage of my mind, are scenes of last night’s production of Mervyn Peake’s Titus trilogy, a dark evocation of a world more forbidding, more rotten and miasmic than Hamlet’s Elsinore—a world of stifling traditions, soul-crushing dread, and futile ambitions. To say that John Constable’s adaptation of this world was a recreation in sound and images would be an injustice to this thoroughly engrossing spectacle—a theatrical event that struck me at times as a staging of Jacobean revenge tragedies by Cirque du Soleil.

Matthew Bourne, who whipped Edward Scissorhands into such a frothy confection of over-hyped ballet-hoo should take note; as should anyone endeavouring to bring a fantasy like Tolkien’s alive in the “wooden O” of the theater. Under the direction of David Glass, Gormenghast is conceived as an imaginatively choreographed piece of melodramatic shadowcasting, a labyrinthine dreamscape whose grotesque denizens scurry about like frustrated rodents.

As Quentin Crisp suggests in an essay on Peake as author and artist, visualizations often fail in the attempt to capture the imagined. When illustrating or showing, when portraying and rendering concrete the world an imaginative storyteller creates in words, “a certain ludicrous quality is always liable to creep in; the eye begins to vomit sooner than the ear—far sooner than the mind.”

So, the prospect of ghastly gormandizing, on seeing novelistic food for fancy being processed into rancid eye candy was not something I looked forward to without serious misgivings. I had not expected anything quite as bold as this inspired translation, which relied neither on the spoken word nor elaborate props to assist the audience in seeing the castle of Gormenghast rise not so much before their eyes as before their mind’s eye.

There was silent screen horror in the movement of Phillip Pellew (above, as Flay) and in the long corridors suggested by panels and shafts of light; in fact, the production seemed to owe more to silent movies than to western stage melodrama; this Grand Guignol was at times Kafkaesque, at others reminiscent of Brecht’s epic theater, as meek and inconsequential Steerpike (played by Adam Sunderland) attempts to lift himself from squalor to political prominence—a ruthless revolutionary in a stagnant, corroding society insisting on “no change.”

David Glass’s Gormenghast is too bleak to be called brilliant; but it certainly is a memorable achievement in translation, which is the realization that being faithful is not being literal, the radical art of doing away with “no change.”

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“Reviewing the Situation”: Catching Up with Fagin in the Way West End

Moving from Manhattan to Mid-Wales was bound to lower my chances of taking in some live theater now and then (not that Broadway ticket prices had allowed me to keep the intervals between “now” and “then” quite as short as I’d like them to be). I expected there’d be the odd staging of Hamlet with an all-chicken cast or a revival of “Hey, That’s My Tractor” (to borrow some St. Olaf stories from The Golden Girls). Luckily, I’m not one to embrace the newfangled and my tastes in theatrical entertainments are, well, conservative. I say luckily because even if you’’re living west of England rather than the West End of its capital, chances are that there’s a touring company coming your way, eventually.

What came my way last night was a well-oiled production of Oliver!, with Peter Karrie in the role of Fagin. It was my second reunion with Oliver Twist this year, having watched playwright/composer Neil Brand at work on a new score for the 1922 silent screen version in his London studio last June. Apparently, the age of political correctness has not yet torn down or effaced all the melodramatic caricatures in the western portrait gallery of villains and scoundrels.

Never mind the play’s eponymous tyke, who wriggled through the miseries of his youth predictably well, in keeping with the plans laid out for him by “Mr. Popular Sentiment” (as Dickens was mockingly called by fellow novelist Anthony Trollope). Aside from Lionel Bart’s eminently hummable tunes, it was Karrie’s con brio portrayal of Fagin that kept this superannuated warhorse of a melodrama from coming across as lame and lumbering.

While often considered sure-fire, revivals are not quite so easy to pull off; too often they are self-conscious about the dateness of the material. Apart from the half-heartedness of uneasy reverence (as achieved by the Old Vic production of The Philadelphia Story I saw earlier this summer), there’s nothing worse than camp, the postmodernist disease of arrogant, willful misreading and flaunted emotional impoverishment. Oliver! was refreshingly, that is unabashedly, old-fashioned, brought to life by force of Karrie’s sense of bathos, at full throttle in the musical number “Reviewing the Situation.”

Well, it was not difficult for me to identify with the situation under review, that is, with Fagin’s assessment of his outsider status and his pondering of the pressure to adjust: “I’m finding it hard to be really as black as they paint,” he sighs, addressing the audience. Twice authored—by the creators of the play and the society they depict—Fagin conforms both to melodramatic conventions and societal expectations (he’s a “bad ‘un” who cannot change) while all along defying such standards (aware of his “situation,” he grapples with it and implicates the class system that stamped him an outcast):

Left without anyone in the world,
And I’m starting from now,
So how to win friends and to influence people?
So how?
I’m reviewing the situation:
I must quickly look up ev’ryone I know [. . .].

So where shall I go—somebody?
Who do I know? Nobody!
All my dearest companions
Have always been villains and thieves.
So at my time of life I should start
Turning over new leaves?

There simply aren’t enough leaves in the book for old Fagin. So, having reviewed the situation, he is very nearly resigned to a condition that a less reflective person would call fated:

I’m a bad ‘un and a bad ‘un I shall stay!
You’ll be seeing no transformation,
But it’s wrong to be a rogue in ev’ry way. 

I don’t want nobody hurt for me,
Or made to do the dirt for me.
This rotten life is not for me.
It’s getting far too hot for me.
Don’t want no one to rob for me.
But who will find a job for me?
There is no in between for me,
But who will change the scene for me?
I think I’d better think it out again!

Between a rock and a hard place, between Scylla and Charybdis, Fagin is forever reviewing a situation he is at a loss to improve; for him, there’s no silver lining (like the one above, which I spotted in the sky this morning). Taking advantage of the anonymity and visibility technology can offer the latter-day rogue with a touch of Hamlet and Werther, he would probably be blogging about it today.