'Macbeth' by William Shakespeare
25 July 2013
Having
heard nothing but good reports about the National Theatre's NT Live
screenings of stage shows in cinemas, I thought it was about time I
tried the experience myself. The Manchester International Festival
production of Macbeth, starring and co-directed by Kenneth Branagh
(with Rob Ashford) was such a hot ticket the entire run sold out
within nine minutes of going on sale. So the only way I was going to
see it was via the NT Live screening last Saturday, when the final
performance in Manchester was broadcast to cinemas across the
country. It was magnificent – both the production and the
experience of watching it live on the big screen. The show was
expertly captured with multiple camera angles (including Busby
Berkley overhead shots) making it feel almost like being there, but
with a much better view and excellent sound that meant you didn't
miss a syllable of the text. It was irritating that there were some
problems with the synchronisation of the sound and pictures (at least
where we saw it at Cineworld in Milton Keynes) but otherwise the
screening was technically excellent. Macbeth was performed in a
deconsecrated church in Ancoats - a customised theatre space with a
long, thin central performance area running the length of the church
and faced on both sides by an audience boxed in raked pews enclosed
by wooden boards which made them look more like the spectators at a
Quidditch match! The floor was rough and muddy, particularly after
the opening battle scene had taken place in driving rain – the
increasingly dirty hem of Lady Macbeth’s long dress emphasising the
gritty reality of the play. This was a brutal, visceral Macbeth –
with believably violent swordfights and plenty of Kensington Gore.
Kenneth Branagh managed to make Macbeth a real and sympathetic
character, while demonstrating a delicacy and precision in the
language of the play. Alex Kingston was a powerful Lady Macbeth and
the scene in which Ray Fearon’s Macduff learned of the slaughter of
his wife and children was achingly poignant. The whole cast were very
strong – with Alexander Vlahos particularly standing out as
Malcolm.Labels: Drama, Film, Theatre
'The Teleportation Accident' by Ned Beauman
17 July 2013
I was drawn to Ned Beauman's novel 'The Teleportation Accident' by glowing reviews and by the intriguing premise of a theatre set designer in Berlin in the 1930s working to recreate the famous Teleportation Device ("An Extraordinary Mechanism for the Almost Instantaneous Transport of Persons from Place to Place") devised for a Paris theatre in 1679 by the great Renaissance stage designer Adriano Lavicini. The opening chapters made me think I had made a mistake - almost every character we were introduced to seemed unlikeable and the main protagonist, set designer Egon Loeser, is a very unsympathetic anti-hero - cynical, contemptuous and selfish. Also the thrilling notion of the Teleportation Device - where art meets science to create magic - seems quickly forgotten as the story becomes obsessed with parties, sex and drugs. I persevered with the novel (which I read as an unabridged audio book, narrated by Dudley Hinton) and began to appreciate the writing - Loseser's cynical railings against the harsh hand that life keeps dealing him are very funny and there are some beautifully witty metaphors with a Raymond Chandleresque swagger which made me laugh out loud. (He had "the sort of moustache that could beat you in an arm-wrestling contest". "The lenses of his glasses were so thick that, like an astronomer observing Neptune, he was probably seeing several minutes into the past".) Also the plot built towards some wonderful set-piece farcical scenes that could have come from Tom Sharpe (the monkey gland episode for example). And as the story moved to Paris and then to Los Angeles, I realised how clever and intricate the plotting was. Like Loeser I had missed or dismissed many references, characters and clues that were to return as elegant explanations for seemingly supernatural puzzles much later in the book. As 'The Teleportation Accident' grew and grew on me I came to appreciate that it is a rather brilliant novel - a very dark comedy spanning centuries with a complex web of themes. It's an entertainingly innovative novel to rank alongside 'A Visit from the Goon Squad' by Jennifer Egan (reviewed here in July 2011). Egon Loeser hates politics, physics and historical literature so it is his supreme misfortune to find himself the main character in a novel about politics, physics and historical literature (though his obsession with public transport does provide him with an interest in another of the book's recurring themes). He thinks himself an intellectual who is having a particularly unfair run of bad luck - but he comes across as a surprisingly naive loser, blundering through major events without appreciating their significance. The Teleportation Device itself has echoes of Christopher Nolan's 2006 film 'The Prestige' in which two rival magicians battle each other to achieve the ultimate illusion, drawing on the seemingly magical physics of Nikola Tesla (himself the subject of Samantha Hunt's wonderful novel ‘The Invention of Everything Else’, reviewed here in September 2008). But above all 'The Teleportation Accident' is an incredibly funny, terribly clever and extremely enjoyable novel that I look forward to reading again and again - just make sure you pay attention to those opening chapters!
Labels: Books
