‘Man with a Love Song’ by James Hill
25 January 2012
The humble ukulele has undergone a renaissance in recent
years, with its notable appearances including ‘Bang Goes the Knighthood’ by The
Divine Comedy (reviewed here in June 2010), the eclectic music of Beirut (reviewed
here in November 2006 and October 2007), the phenomenal posthumous success of
the late Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiwo’ole and the ubiquitous Ukulele
Orchestra of Great Britain (reviewed here in July 2010). James Hill is a
Canadian singer, songwriter and ukulele player and his latest album ‘Man with a
Love Song’ is a lovely, varied set of songs – laid-back, gentle and playful tunes.
James Hill also plays banjo and piano and is joined by the cellist Anne
Davison. He uses the ukulele thoughtfully and sparingly: there is little of the
clichéd frantic strumming here. And the pick of the tracks, for me, is the
haunting, moving ballad ‘High Demand’ – a beautiful song.
Labels: Albums, Music
'The Awakening'
20 January 2012
We made a rare trip to The Castle in Wellingborough last
Saturday to see ‘The Awakening’, a British film that came out last November but
had passed me by. It’s a ghost story, set just after the First World War at a
boarding school in Cumbria where professional hoax exposer Florence Cathcart is
called in to investigate the death of a boy who has apparently been scared to
death. It’s a spooky tale, atmospherically filmed in a constantly gloomy light with
muted colours, allowing half-seen images to lurk in the shadows. The most scary
ghost films are those that don’t show too much but play upon the audience’s
imagination. ‘The Awakening’ pulls off that classic trick of showing you a
scene in which the heroine walks through a room without noticing anything
unusual, while a ghostly figure appears very briefly in the background in a way
that ensures all the audience see something but no-one is quite sure whether
they really did. Rebecca Hall is great as Florence Cathcart, her rational
determination gradually unwinding in the face of increasingly unexplainable
happenings. And there is good support from Dominic West and Imelda Staunton. It’s
a nicely made film that doesn’t outstay its welcome and confirms that there is
nothing so scary as children!
Labels: Film
‘The House of Silk’ by Anthony Horowitz
13 January 2012
It’s been confusing, over the past couple of weeks, to be watching
the excellent new series of ‘Sherlock’ by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss whilst
I have also been reading ‘The House of Silk’ by Anthony Horowitz – the first
new Sherlock Holmes novel to be officially approved by the Conan Doyle estate.
Both are lovingly reverential to the original Sherlock Holmes stories and knowingly
playful with the genre. In ‘The House of Silk’ (I read the unabridged audio
version, read by Derek Jacobi) an elderly Dr Watson, living in a nursing home
many years after Holmes himself has passed away, recounts one last case which he
was unable to tell at the time it happened – and will be consigned to his
solicitors' vaults for 100 years. All the familiar Holmesian elements are
present – 221B Baker Street, Mrs Hudson, Inspector Lestrade, the pipe, the
violin, the Baker Street Irregulars etc. There’s a wonderful laugh-out-loud
encounter between Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes where they exchange a rapid series
of elementary deductions about what they have each been up to since they last
met – like an intellectual tennis match. The narrative style is faithful to
Conan Doyle and Watson’s voice is completely recognisable. Watson himself
comments on his tendency to preoccupy himself with plot and laments his
inability to comment on the social conditions of Victorian London in the way
Gissing or Dickens had. He then attempts the occasional foray into Dickensian
description but Horowitz’s main focus is also on the puzzle of the case (or
cases). It’s hard to know whether to criticise the occasional clumsiness of the
writing or to attribute this to an accurate reproduction of Conan Doyle’s
narrator but ‘The House of Silk’ works better as a thriller than a literary
period piece. It’s a marvellously complex mystery: being much longer than Conan
Doyle’s original stories allows the novel to weave an extensive web of
plotlines, while the relentless pace of the adventure drives the confused reader
continually onward. The trick of a Sherlock Holmes story is to leave the reader
always slightly ahead of Watson but slightly behind Holmes – and Horowitz
achieved this admirably as far as this reader was concerned. The novel builds
to a truly thrilling conclusion – I was completely hooked.
Labels: Books
‘You Can’t Take It With You’ by George S Kaufman and Moss Hart
5 January 2012
Last Friday we were at the Royal Exchange Theatre in
Manchester to see ‘You Can’t Take It With You’ by George S Kaufman and Moss
Hart. This production by the Royal Exchange Theatre and Told By An Idiot of the
1936 Broadway comedy, was extremely silly, incredibly funny and joyously life-affirming:
I loved it! Kaufman wrote for the Marx Brothers (including the screenplays for ‘A
Night at the Opera’ and ‘A Day at the Races’) and ‘You Can’t Take It With You’
displays a similar zany humour. Set in New York in the 1930s, Alice Sycamore
(played here by Sarah Ridgeway) brings her new boyfriend home to meet her
eccentric family. Here the two lovers are the only ‘normal’ characters with
everyone else slightly larger than life – the mother (played by Joanne Howarth)
who has spent eight years trying to write a play, purely because eight years
ago someone mistakenly delivered her a typewriter, the father (Sam Parks) who
spends his days in the attics inventing fireworks, the sister (Sophie Russell) who
wants to be a dancer and dances almost continuously around the house, the house
guest (Martin Hyder) who arrived six years ago to deliver ice and never left
and the grandfather (Christopher Benjamin) who decided that spending six hours
a day doing something he didn’t enjoy in order to spend one hour doing the
things he liked made no sense and so he stopped going to work or paying income
tax. It was a wonderfully silly show, directed by Paul Hunter and making good
use of the theatre-in-the-round setting. Everyone left with a smile on their
faces.
Labels: Drama, Theatre
'The Ladykillers' by Graham Linehan
5 January 2012
Between Christmas and New Year we were at the Gielgud
Theatre in London’s West End to see ‘The Ladykillers’ – a new stage version of
the classic Ealing comedy, written by Graham Linehan and directed by Sean
Foley. It was an all-star cast with Peter Capaldi, James Fleet, Ben Miller,
Clive Rowe, Stephen Wight and the wonderful Marcia Warren as Mrs Wilberforce.
But the clear star of the show was the amazing set by Michael Taylor. The whole
inside of the house is laid out in exaggerated and eccentric angles and
perspective – which reminded me of the Stephen Daldry version of ‘An Inspector
Calls’ – and this is combined with a revolving stage to take us outside and
show us the heist with a series of toy cars and a toy train. Graham Linehan
says in the programme that he was influenced by Patrick Barlow’s stage adaptation
of ‘The Thirty Nine Steps’ and this was certainly in a very similar style.
There were some very funny moments – I loved the tableau of the six faces of
the criminal gang crammed into a tiny cupboard – and it was a very enjoyable
evening in the theatre but the performances were good rather than outstanding.
Labels: Drama, Theatre
'Measure for Measure' by William Shakespeare
5 January 2012
On Boxing Say we were at The Swan Theatre in
Stratford-upon-Avon to see the Royal Shakespeare Company production of ‘Measure
for Measure’, directed by Roxana Silbert. I’ve seen the play before but this
production held my attention better and I felt I properly appreciated it for
the first time. Although technically one of Shakespeare’s ‘comedies’, ‘Measure
for Measure’ is a dark play. It was good to see the comic moments brought out,
without losing the seriousness of its themes. Raymond Coulthard was a mercurial
Duke, with a twinkle in his eye, a tendency to break down the fourth wall and a
fine line in conjuring tricks. Now that the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre
echoes its thrust stage, the Swan, next door, feels very small. We were in the
top gallery and could only see the stage by leaning uncomfortably forward. But the
quality of the acting overcame these practical annoyances and it was an
impressive production.
Labels: Drama, Theatre
‘The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha’ by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
5 January 2012
I’ve just finished reading ‘The Ingenious Gentleman Don
Quixote of La Mancha’ by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, as an unabridged audio
book translated by John Ormsby, revised, updated and read by Roy McMillan. It’s
a massive book – the audio version lasts 36 hours – and I’m afraid it did feel
very long. Everyone knows about ‘Don Quixote’ but it was an interesting
experience actually reading it. At first it is hard to know how to take it: on
the surface Cervantes is clearly parodying a particular style of chivalrous
tale of knights of old, but the stories being parodied are now unfamiliar, so
the tales of Don Quixote’s mistaken skirmishes with windmills and the like
appear to us a simple child-like slapstick. This cartoon narrative is funny but
doesn’t seem sophisticated enough to hold your attention over such a long
novel. But then you gradually begin to see something cleverer going on in the
way the story is told and, in particular, the question of who is telling the
story. We appear to be in the hands of an omniscient narrator who knows all
that befell Don Quixote and his trusty squire Sancho Panza, even when there was
clearly no-one else present. But then there are references to the different
versions of Don Quixote’s story, suggesting that he has been written about by
many authors and his exploits have become the stuff of legend. ‘Don Quixote’
was published by Cervantes in two volumes, in 1605 and 1615, and in the second
part the knight and his squire frequently encounter people who have read the
earlier volume and are familiar with their history. This must be one of the
earliest examples of meta-fiction and Cervantes proceeds to have lots of fun
with the premise: the author himself points out inconsistencies in earlier
chapters where, for example, Sancho Panza’s ass is stolen in one scene but he
is then described as riding it again in the next. We are told that the author
of this account of the Don’s life wrote it in Arabic and that it was then
translated into Spanish. The narrator then interjects with comments about the
original Arabic author and also about the translator – so who is making these
comments? This becomes a very clever, entertaining and rewarding exercise in
narrative style. The other thing that Cervantes does very impressively is to
construct two classic comic characters, whose influence can be seen to the
present day. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are both deluded simpletons but with
their own serious and consistent logic. I worried at first that we were simply
being invited to laugh at Don Quixote’s mental illness as he mistakes an inn
for a castle or windmills for giants, and even when these obvious mistakes are
pointed out to him he excuses them by claiming he has been enchanted by evil
forces. But there is much emphasis on the way in which Don Quixote is actually
very sensible and logical on every topic except that of knights errant as he
has been corrupted by reading too many chivalrous tales. And gradually you
realise that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are wonderfully drawn characters with
their own internal logic – exaggerated cartoon creations placed in an otherwise
real-world setting. Though set in a different continent at a different time, their
picaresque adventures reminded me of the Coen Brothers film ‘O Brother, Where
Art Thou’ – itself a loose version of Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’. Cleverly, Don
Quixote and Sancho Panza can both see through many of each other’s delusions,
while remaining blissfully unaware of their own shortcomings. These are comic
simpletons with a serious approach to life – like Laurel and Hardy, Morecambe
and Wise or Alan Partridge. I enjoyed reading ‘Don Quixote’: it is too long but
you can see why it became so revered and how influential it has been and I will
miss The Knight of the Rueful Countenance and his loyal companion with whom I
have travelled so far.
Labels: Books
Lea Singers Concert
5 January 2012
I can think of few better ways to start the Christmas break
than by attending the Lea Singers Charity Christmas Concert, ‘MerryLea’. On 22
December we were back at the Harpenden Public Halls to see this excellent
chamber choir entertain us with a festive programme ranging from medieval to
modern. Each of Poulenc’s beautiful ‘Four Christmas Motets’ were paired with settings
of the same words some 400 years earlier by Palestrina, Orlando Lassus and
William Byrd. I also very much enjoyed a modern South African Christmas Anthem by
Grant McLachlan, ‘Come Colours Rise’. It was great to see a packed audience helping
to raise funds for the Grove House hospice charity and singing the carols enthusiastically
and impressively.
Labels: Concerts, Music
