'Good' by CP Taylor
27 April 2023
CP Taylor was a Glasgow-born writer who wrote 80 plays in 16 prolific years - many of them for the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh and Live Theatre in Newcastle. Sadly, he died shortly after the premiere of his most successful play, 'Good' in 1981. On Saturday we were at the Curzon Cinema at Milton Keynes Gallery to see a screening of Dominic Cooke's current West End revival of 'Good', from the Harold Pinter Theatre in London. Set in Germany in the 1930s, 'Good' demonstrates how the incremental effect of a series of seemingly small decisions to go along with the prevailing political flow adds up to a journey from good to evil. Professor Halder, played here by David Tennant, appears naive, cowardly and blindly optimistic rather than evil - but his acquiescence with the Nazi regime acts as an allegory for Germany as a whole. His story is inventively told in a non-linear narrative which flits back and forward in Halder's life, often turning on a sixpence from past to present within the same scene. The rapid switching between different places, times and characters is brilliantly done here by a cast of three actors - with Sharon Small and Elliot Levey each playing multiple parts. It's a very clever script with echoes of Tom Stoppard, and a very dark play which looks at good and evil as things we choose to do rather than inherent traits we cannot help - "subjective thinking masquerading as objective truth".
Labels: Drama, Film, Theatre
'Drive Your Plow Over the Complicité from the novel by Olga Tokarczuk
21 April 2023
On Thursday night we were at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry to see the Complicité production 'Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead' directed by Simon McBurney. The play is based on a novel by Olga Tokarczuk about a 65-year old woman in a rural community in Poland, close to the Czech border, who is appalled by the human disregard for animal life. She wages a personal campaign against the local hunting club and others who have abused and killed animals, many of whom start to meet their own gruesome deaths. But, this being Complicité, her story is told with wry humour and ambiguity through physical theatre performed by an incredible ensemble cast. It was worth the price of admission just to see the amazing Kathryn Hunter, who narrates the tale, leaning on a microphone stand like a stand-up comedian and is ever-present through this nearly three-hour production. Hunter is the most fascinating physical actor and her performance is a magnificent tour-de-force. She is assisted by a brilliant multinational cast, including the always compelling Tim McMullan, and César Sarachu as the slightly dopey neighbour Oddball. 'Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead' is a dark comic exploration of issues of animal rights, ecology and climate change, and it's great fun. With hardly any set, this is a narrative conjured up by human bodies, inventive lighting and projection and sumptuous sound design (by Christopher Shutt). It's a little too long and felt a bit repetitive at times but fans of Complicité will love this like an indulgent box of chocolates.
Labels: Drama, Theatre
Leighton House and Sambourne House
14 April 2023
On Saturday we were in London to visit Leighton House in Kensington, London, the home of the late Victorian artist Lord Frederic Leighton. One of a series of houses and studios designed and built by artists in the streets around Holland Park in the 18060s, Leighton House has recently reopened to the public after a major refurbishment. It’s an amazing building, packed with textiles, pottery and other objects collected by Leighton on trips to Turkey, Egypt, Syria as well as his own works of art. The building is part showpiece, part home and part studio and the exhibitions about Leighton and his contemporaries are fascinating to see within the house where he lived. We also visited the nearby partner property Sambourne House, which was the home of the illustrator and Punch cartoonist Linley Sambourne - a contemporary of Leighton’s. This is a more conventional Victorian town house, but the lavish decoration and furnishings are a celebration of late Victorian society. And every room is crammed with Sambourne’s drawings. Both museums are well worth a visit.
Labels: Heritage, VisualArt
‘The Island of Missing Trees’ by Elif Shafak
14 April 2023
I’ve never been to Cyprus, and my understanding of the history of the division of Cyprus could best be described as hazy. Reading Elif Shafak’s 2021 novel ‘The Island of Missing Trees’ has filled in a lot of gaps for me. It’s a beautifully written family saga, told mostly in flashback with the constant presence of a fig tree that spans the generations (and takes its turn as the narrator). When two teenagers - one Greek, one Turkish - fall for each other in Cyprus in 1974 they may have chosen the worst possible time to be star-crossed lovers. Seeing their story through the vantage point of modern-day London makes us assume we know what must have happened but Elif Shafak cleverly teases us with unexpected twists along the way. Though it has its own individual style, ‘The Island of Missing Trees’ felt a little like a mixture of ‘Captain Corelli's Mandolin’ by Louis de Bernières and ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ by Amor Towles (reviewed here in September 2021) - showing us the passage of a tumultuous period of history through the personal tales of people caught up in it.
Labels: Books
