Elephant and Castle & Hinduism

This morning I went down to the Heygate estate next to Elephant and Castle. The whole thing is scheduled for demolition at some point next year, as part of a huge redevelopment that will see whole estates, the shopping centre, and the underground station knocked down and built up in a more pleasing style. It seems that since I started working for local papers, all I have really done is speak to people in the path of bulldozers (see the front page of the Paddington and Westminster Times last week for the results of similar enquiries at Tottenham Court Road).

Southwark Council is trying to achieve the impossible: rehouse the thousands of people who are on the estate without having built any new housing stock. Apparently, according to Ernie, the process was going well until the first 600 moved out, then saturation point was reached, and the council are trying to cram the remaining residents into more and more unlikely places.

There may seem little to love about the huge concrete buildings. Modernist buildings do not age well: the whole baroque apparatus of ornamentation, cornices, friezes, architraves and so on had been dismissed as the unnecessary junk of history. It was only after the buildings of Le Corbusier et al had aged enough that it was discovered that the old ornamental features did well in channelling rainwater, protecting walls, and otherwise baffling the processes of age and decay. Consider the caryatids of almost any North London building, which are at once structural - supporting elements of buildings - and also the most fortunate of sculptures, which always have a roof over their heads to cover them from the rain.

There is no ornamentation on the Heygate estate, apart from if you count the satellite dishes that so cover the sheer walls that the buildings look colonised by a riot of black metallic flowers.

All six of the residents I spoke to today had moved into the estate when it had first been built in 1974. They moved out of ancient landlord-held tenements, built pre-war, that stood in locations like Manor Place in South London. The scraps of culture that have come down to me from these places don't seem salutory. Horrible references from Dickens and Eliot, knowledge of a particularly unglamorous set of murders in a now demolished street called Rillington Place.

Dennis, a current Heygate resident, told me: "When we first moved here, they came to our tenements and told us - 'the new estate is ready, would you like to go and have a look?' We did, and we liked it."

It must have seemed an incredible gift from the state to the poorer people in society. The prime gripe of the residents now is that they aren't being offered anything half as nice in return for where they are living. Meanwhile, instead of solving the problem by building decent housing for the residents who are there, they offer deals and trinkets. The most absurd endeavour was to hire, at the cost of £2000, stress counsellors to come in and set up shop in one of the abandoned flats, and invited the local residents in. The council counsellors were faced with a lot of angry people shouting 'where am I going to live? Why have I been served an eviction notice?' and predictably, did nothing to destress the residents. (Luckily, ITV were on hand to capture these classic moments.) Otherwise, the tenants are rushed out to a showflat somewhere further south, and offered cash to sign on another related flat that they haven't seen.

Throughout the debacle, the local council acts in various different guises, like aspects of the divine. Brahma, the creator, who built all of these houses, is dead. (Building houses is now looked after by smaller deities or demons called housing associations, who are very susceptible to financial offerings.) The local residents are left with Shiva who captivates - the various false literature the council posts, the stress counsellors, the lovely pictures of new housing that have yet to materialise; Shiva the Terrible, who frightens with eviction notices, Shiva the second hand car dealer, who conjures up crackpot deals to palm off other flats on the residents, and Shiva the Destroyer, who is due to arrive at some point next year. None of the aspects of the council seem to work together: as Terry, the most disenchanted of the residents I met, put it: 'The right hand don't know what the left is doing'. He is right, apart from the fact there are more than just two hands - there are dozens.

The residents themselves didn't want the place saved, although it was lovely. Dennis cracked me up with tales of how a group of 'lefty nutters' as he termed them, had jumped on the bandwagon with a campaign to 'Save the Heygate'. There was no question of saving it for them, it was just a question of being rehoused in places as good as they were - and these flats were absolutely lovely, nicer than my current house even - in such a way that their community, made almost exclusively of people who had moved there originally in 1974, stayed together.

I jump at the chance to make this point outside the febrile atmosphere of the newsroom, because papers will often slam councils and planners as a kind of reflex action. The tenants, on the face of it, were not asking for much. Presumably, somewhere near the top of the various council cabinets and panels and commissioning bodies, everything seemed to be making sense. But the reality on the ground was that the various processes of the council were completely opaque and Byzantine. The less the tenants knew, the more they were worried, and they ranged from Ernie, who was fairly clued up, knew his rights, and wasn't too bothered, to an unnamed 80 year old man who was almost the sole survivor in one of the bigger blocks, stranded right up at the top who understood nothing apart from the eviction notice and maybe not even that, and had nobody to talk to about it.

Perhaps the tutelary deity of Elephant and Castle is the eponymous elephant himself, plinthed at the front of the shopping centre. Anyone who travels to South London will have seen him. Ganesha, the elephant god of Hinduism, has two aspects: Lord of Beginnings and Lord of Obstacles: proof that, in addition to his other aspects, he is most definitely the patron saint of development projects. At the Elephant and Castle, he has reached a furious state: he gazes in myopic plastic fury at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, and its classical entablature across the road. He is as angry and single minded as some high-up development mandarin, with his pet project, the castle, carried on his back: a huge chip on his shoulder.

Battersea

Coming across the Grosvenor Bridge yesterday, I saw two men in a gantry on the flanks of the luckless Battersea Power Station. The promised investment projects in the area show the body of the building restored, hooked up to a glittering retail centre like a patient on a life support machine. As it is, however, the building still remains, with a wall and roof missing, and the rest in a poor state of disrepair. It sits on the south bank of the river like a the remains of the turkey on Boxing Day.
The rest of Battersea visible from the train station is in harmony with the general air of having been forgotten. A huge factory building on Lombard Road has been converted to a branch of 'safestore - self storage', with large signs explaining to businesses and individuals how easy and convenient it is to bring their possessions to Battersea, lock them up in a dry, safe space, and then forget them.
Another warehouse of the forgotten, Battersea Cats and Dogs Home, spreads out its neat concrete pens under the eyes of the commuters - empty when I passed, jammed in under two diverging sets of railway tracks.
The tracks are a defining feature of Battersea: tributaries from all of South London and beyond into Victoria. The station itself, Battersea Park, is a Victorian infant of a railway station, jammed in between such a weight of lines, and neglected by the majority of trains that pass through, it wanted to grow up as grand and well turned-out as other railway stations, but it is thin and sickly and in need of investment: a few thin platforms and rickety staircases barely large enough for two people abreast.
Knots and tangles of railway lines around South London are the more or less direct result of the report of the Royal Commission on Metropolis Railway Termini, which in its 1846 report laid down a golden line surrounding London beyond which no overland railways should penetrate. Hence our current pattern of major termini surrounding the whole city, and only underground railways in the centre. The logical pay-off of preserving the centre as railway free is the creation of areas such as Battersea, where huge amounts of the business of rails and signals and steelwork and sidings need to congregate: the landscape of 'utility', of which the power station itself is a part.
I have been quizzing my architecturally clued-up friends as to whether any other power stations in the world were built, as Battersea was, by one of the leading architects of the day. Preliminary results seem to suggest that there were not many: In the UK they are put out of sight, and so design by Foster and associates would be wasted on an audience of sheep and/or seabirds. The remaining nuclear power stations in the UK are Dungeness A and B, Hartlepool, Heysham, Hinkley Point, Hunterston, Oldbury, Sizewell, Torness, and Wylfa. How many of these places had you heard of? Battersea Power Station is a relic of a time before the need to forget where our energy came from overwhelmed us.

Travelling South on the 68 no. 1 - signs to be read

And Buffet Restaurant, Eat as Much as
You Like Take Away Available from £5
Start Your Graduate Be Seen With A
Mule This Summer Unfortunately My
Younger Brother Playing for England is
ultimate honour Julian Markham
House Except Buses Heygate 20 Zone
Telephone Camberwell Grove Ferrari
Fuel For the Road In Memory of
925 Southwark Inhabitants Who
Gave Their Injured? At Work,
Road, Traff you may be entitled to
Property Managers Risky Sportec
KFC Ridgway Lynnes Electrical
Better Than Sales Prices Freshly
Baked The Beaten Path Pasties Beefy Boys
Boots Bust Stop Blue Inc Buy Tickets
Mk D&A Free House Filled Bagels
Health Foods Marks Pound -hoice £
Sense Deafblind Cheques Cashed
Fast Friendly Belief Betfred the Bonus
King Superdrug Exclusive Footwear
Cash Lent on Geranium Shop for
The Blind Hair Nail Was etc
London & Trumans Coral Save 40
LEMIS Groceries 3 Piece Suit Third
Dimension in Furniture A Church for
All Nations Controlled Zone
Mon-Fri Suzuki Back To School
2008 It's Started! OrderYour
Child's Uniform Now! Open
Weave On Braids Afro
Kinky Twist
Bonding Curly
Perm Straight
Relaxer Controlled Zone
Traffic Enforcement Cameras No Loading
at any Liverpool 2 Courses Street
Boris's Walks out of City Hall
Request Stop JB Wheatley & Co Solicitors
Play Here Arsenal Food Cheques Store
Cashed Addington Food Cheques Store
Cashed Addington Square Any 1 Only £1 oNLY
£1 Iceland Canaan Restaurant
Open Bureau de Hot Meals No paper.
No post. Dry Cleaners The Corrib Bar
This Pub is Now Open from 10am
Kenyon House. This Pub is Now Open from
10am EVERY DAY Snacks Patisserie
Oxford Circus Castlemead Smartwater
Moey Transfer £2 Freetown Guinea
Gambia Makeni Sierra Leone British Born
Kono Kenema I'm in shock, admits
Specialised Scene Barbers Twice Distractions Paradise
Chinese Medecine and Magistrates Court
Fax Services Photo Copies Sunrise Cafe
Mozarella Keep Out of Bus Lane
Fragrance Sale McDonalds 01281
Bus passes Bus Stopping Altered Image
Split Red Route Deli of the Day Butterfly
Pharmacy Accidents and HSBC 20 Zone
Post Telephone Camberwell Flowers Office
Cheques cashed from 2% FM Food
Off Store Licence Michaels La Moon
Under Offe Kings selborne Indiaah
Computer Faxes Camberwell Printers
Sexual Tasty Kings Health P First Left
Ice Mageners Breaker Magners Towards
Tulse Hill
Great Day Emergency Out
Administrator 9.30pm, 10pm, Duty
On Call Doctor House of The Dead
No Loading At Any Time, No stopping
No parking in this big is better for slow
Tomorrow Area Parkside Nursery
Aerons South Africa wanted, £200
each, Bought in Any Sunny Condition
Diet workout to Tube Union Denmark
Hill Brown's poll last-minute talks
What Who Then & Now Let By
Coming Soon Coming Soon, Mon-
Sun Families Welcome Bus Stop
Arsenal V 251 treatment on NHS
Woman must pay £16000 for
sell taxi tame Wiggins sharing
Taxi 42 68

It was not the fall of the Empire, but it felt like it might be the shadows of it.

Declan Donnelan bestrides the theatrical world like a Colossus. His company, Cheek by Jowl, has grown from ground-breaking fringe productions in the eighties, to being a huge theatrical enterprise, perhaps the nearest thing the theatre world has to a Hollywood studio. They run three or four internationally touring shows in tandem, playing in top venues wherever they go, with workshops, academic tie-ins, and of course the book of the man himself (The Actor and The Target) touted along the way.

I read the book. It seemed like common sense, which is a scarce enough quantity in theatreland, so I could see how it was useful.

Then I saw the Cheek by Jowl Russian-language version of Chekhov's Three Sisters in Cambridge last year, and it was brilliant, heartbreaking, fantastic. The Russian subtitles were gloriously crude (The ready-made translations by Frayn et al seem to aim at Oscar Wilde, falling short of course). The sisters moved balletically, the soldiers proudly, pathetically, and the old man seemed hardly to move at all: I have never seen large groups so well orchestrated: it was Picasso to Trevor Nunn's Renoir. In one scene, the drunk soldiers staged a mock funeral for a comrade, which ended in the would-be corpse chasing the rest round with obols on his eyes, a sick and glorious blind-man's-buff. Here, I said to myself, is a director who is equal to the old Russian doctor, who can match the intelligence, wit, and despair of the words a physical world every inch as good: as far as actors, the exact physical tic to go with each verbal tic, overactors put down, character before heroism in every case, each neurosis lovingly displayed, not a trick missed in the script, and with setpieces that seemed to see as deep into the farce and glory of it all as Chekhov himself.

In short, I bought into the myth entirely. Until this evening.

For example: Whoever was behind the idea to cover up the large and gorgeous Barbican auditorium and build a substandard traverse set on the stage should be sacked. The set creaked, the lighting wasn't bright enough, and the acoustics were so bad that the poor actors had to yell at each other. Why buy a mansion and then build a bungalow in one of the rooms?

It was this, principally, which made me think that Donnelan's fame had sent him to pot. Perhaps it was not hubris on his part, but perhaps he prefers to take a back seat, content - like Achilles - to lounge in his tent and be fed grapes by some young Patroclus while assistants and deputys squabblingly fought in his name failing to conquer the walls of the audience's opinion.

Left with a long narrow set like a running track, the actors spent half the time yelling at each other from either end, and half running up and down, training for the Olympics.

The pleasure of ticking theatrical boxes

I didn't realise that the revolutionaries in Les Miserables failed, but they do. As it turns out, the revolution of the play is not that of '79 but one set in 1832, which is put down, in line with French history of that era (I must assume, my sense of French history being terrible).

The question is, why didn't I know this? How had I managed not to know the plot of Les Miserables, despite the fact that it has been on for 123432809543 years? For many people, a knowledge of the plot, characters, and songs of Les Mis arrives at around Key Stage 2. And considering how long it has been on, you'd think everyone would know, including me. 'Are there really no cheap seats left?' I had asked the ticket man. 'No,' he said, despondently: 'you'd think everyone would have seen it by now.'

But the thing that was so charming about the play was the fact that it was so bloody quirky, despite being a mainstay of the West End.

For a start, the plot is weird. The main character, Jean Valjean, is a kind of rescued thief turned bourgeouis, turned revolutionary, who ends the play singing harmonies to the main tune from beyond the grave. Otherwise, the plot is Dickensian, with good Dickensian devices like revelations in courtrooms, drownings, economic satire, a bourgeouis heroine sequestered by a Lear-like father, and deaths, deaths deaths deaths, like they are in Dickens, i.e. with lots of meaning attached to them.

To give one example, there is a character - Javert, my program tells me - who kills himself. He kills himself because, having hunted down a certain criminal for years, he finally finds himself at the mercy of said criminal, who holds a rifle to his head with instructions to kill him, but releases him. Javert finds that he cannot live his life once it has been gifted him by the man he lived to destroy, and so kills himself instead. I would bet £10 that this is the most complicated, dark and philosophical reason for any nightly death in the West End currently.

My gripe has to do with Trevor Nunn, who has waved his wand over this production, and done his best to make it dull, glittering and still. Nunn is like a nun, (the ecclesiastical type) predictable in what he does, but never really exciting. He is the king of stasis. He brings to life tiny moments very well, but cannot seem to choreograph animation for large scenes. His direction is rigid: significant moments must happen at such and such a point. As such the direction and set exist around the actors like a sarcophagus or whited sepulchre: beautiful but absolutely rigid, encasing the actors.

Of course, it is no mistake that he has stuck his oar in with West End shows: his direction promises a maximum of fixity, certain small but guaranteed results over a run. One feels that the investors like him because he is the safe bet. However, as an audience member, you get the same frustration that you get playing someone who beats you at pool by being consistent but not brilliant. You know the type? 3 pints of beer down, you veer from physics-defying brilliance to complete incompetence, but in the end lose because your opponent has sunk one ball per turn.

After such a long career, Nunn seems to be immovable. When, in twenty years time, I finally make it as a West-End director, and put on my stage spectacular where a reconstruction German U-boat is eaten by a dinosaur animated by Chinese puppeteers, it will fold within days, because I have made various directorly mistakes, i.e. cast someone in the lead who I wanted to sleep with but who couldn't sing, drawn up plans for a mechanical set so complicated it kills two cast membersduring rehearsals, and chosen a script so impenetrable that no-one understands it.

As I drink anti-freeze beneath the statue of Eros in Picadilly Circus, and cry to myself, I will see through my tears that a new Trevor Nunn show will be opening. The man himself, fortified by every increased amounts of hair-dye, will have opened another one. As the weeks pass and I drink more anti-freeze, the show will run and run, eventually gaining such a reputation for precision and predictability that the BBC will use certain stage effects in the second half to set their broadcast clocks by.

This direction can work, given a cast who are bouncing off of the walls with enough energy of their own. His production of Cymbeline in Cambridge was great, for example. But for this one...hmmm.

In any case, it was a good night, and a good play. Hanging around with a lot of theatre types, it is easy to pick up snobbery about what is popular, and what has been running a long time, but at the end of the day these plays have been running a long time because they are entertaining. And even if going to see them is an exercise in theatrical box-ticking, who says that ticking boxes cannot be entertaining?

That sounds like the idea for a play. Now I just need a place for the u-boat...

The Bong-bird of St Reefersburg

Various circumstances have conspired to stop me seeing much theatre recently: so here is a temporary lapse into a concert review. Many apologies: normal service will resume shortly.

http://www.grebenshikovconcert.com/index.html

Last Monday I went to see Boris Purushottoma Grebenshikov perform at the Royal Albert Hall. I had never heard of him, but he is big news: a Russian rock star, poet and dissident, who emerged in the early 80s but was promptly suppressed by the Soviet regime, and who then rode the fallout energy of the Soviet Union to great success. Unlike Vaclav Havel, who rode his new status into politics, Boris stayed in music. However, there is still a big agenda - to guide people to enlightenment, through a particular type of Hindu spirituality espoused by a recently deceased guru called Sri Chimnoy.

The relevance of this is that Sir Chimney (as I couldn't help of thinking of him) had amassed enough money- in his life of helping various rich people on their way to spiritual harmony- to let Boris perform a free concert in the Royal Albert Hall last Monday. And so, with a kind invitation from a Russian cultural guide and drinking buddy, I went along.

Boris himself, as he takes to stage, is hard to quantify. The build of a bouncer, the beard of Rasputin, the glasses of Lennon, ears from Buddha, an earring from the 80s, and the clothes of a roadie. The set is his rock music replayed by an orchestra of crack folk musicians.

There is a man with a bodhran, with a slightly furtive air about him, as befits a man who plays the bodhran, the timpani or the triangle - instruments of childlike simplicity which nonetheless can get you onto a big stage if you remember not to giggle. Throughout the set he is making eyes at a woman who plays a bewildering array of ethnic string instruments, pulling out a new and even more primitive one for each song, until I swear she is playing an empty tissue box with rubber bands over in a Blue Peter style by the end. She was next to another woman who was like an Asian version of Joss Stone, and sat pretending to be in Sri Chimnoy's garden and not actually surrounded by microphones and loads of people. She played, when she deigned to, the sitar. The stage was filled with similar folk virtuosi.

The vast majority of the songs were in Russian, but fear not - from the sound of each I was able to guess the subject matter, which I noted down next to the song number during the concert. Here are some of the notes I took during the evening:

"#3 This song is about a large truck."

"#4 Boris has taken his glasses off. Now we are in his inner sanctum, hearing his secret thoughts in a very intimate song. I wish I could understand what he is saying."

"#5 This one is about a girl who gets crushed in a landslide. She was top of the class. On second thoughts the song is too epic to be about a girl who gets crushed in a landslide. It is about a girl whose man goes away and then comes back on a horse. She would like to take him in her arms but she realises that she can't because while he was away she was crushed by a landslide."

"#7 This is a barnstormer about a man who has split up with his girlfriend and tries to cook himself the things his girlfriend always cooked for them. He fails and the meal is disgusting. He curses the absent girlfriend vehemently, and eats the whole thing anyway in defiance."

"#8 A man lets his prize racing pigeons go free. The one pigeon that he had always loved most shuns freedom and comes back to him. It sings on the lawn at his feet. He is mowing the lawn and doesn't hear it because of the noise, and so he mows it to pieces."

Now, apparently Boris used to play quite hardcore rock. Around this time in the concert I began to wonder whether Alex Turner or Pete Doherty would turn Hindu on us in old age and play these kind of gigs, with 'You Can't Stand Me Now' done with Uillean Pipes and Tin Whistle, or 'I Bet That You Look Good on the Dancefloor' done with Tabla, Harmonium and Sitar.

The one musician tenaciously hanging on from the rock days was the keyboard player, who looked consistently disillusioned with the softcore world music versions of the songs being played. I imagined him cheekily slipping his keyboard into the 'ethnic instruments' register, then playing bum notes in order to get some of the other musicians sacked.

- 'Boris the Song-Bird of St Petersburg!' [so I imagine the rest of the band have to address the leading Boris] 'You have to get rid of the sarangi player. Did you hear her hitting an F-sharp over the D-minor backing?'
- 'Be quiet lesser Boris' [the keyboard player is also called Boris] 'I saw your keyboard set to register 443, you're fooling no-one.'

Apart from the simmering rage of the keyboard player, there was also the rivalry of Brian Finnegan and Premik Russell Tubbs, the two flautists of the evening. Premik was a tall, hollow-cheeked, priestly looking chap, as likely to bless the flute as to blow it, whereas Brian looked like a cross between a young Paul Gascoigne and Moby, but with the attitude of the former. At one point Brian cut into one of Premik's saintly solos and blasted out some top flute playing as a retort: I thought we were up for an epic flute battle, but Premik wimped out and never came back with a counter attack.

"#11 opens on a long prayer to Ganesh from the man with the harmonium. This one is upbeat. It tells about how all of the animals in the tundra have their place in the cycles of natures. The ocelot says 'Hey yeah I'm going to eat you mr vole'. The vole says 'hey that's cool mr ocelot' and everyone is happy. The song is quite short because the tundra is not very biodiverse and so not many animals can talk to each other."

"#14 is about a bridge. The people go past in their cars without thinking about what it took to build the bridge - the blood of innocent men! The songs treats the other things that civilisation has created - printing presses, mobile phones, microwaves, forklifts etc, also built with the blood of innocent men."

"#15 a 7yr old son addresses his mother, who he thinks is wonderful. He asks her to explain the world."

Around this time I began to ponder the peculiar fate of the Uillean Harp. It was a lovely instrument, but has now been completely spoilt, because no matter how beautiful the harmony, it instantly makes people think of the Titanic theme video, and Celine Dion touching herself on a big boat.

"#20 sounds a bit like the Beatles. It is a song addressed to the last boy alone at a school disco, sung to him by the condom machine in the men's toilets, along the lines of 'don't worry' etc. It is a waltz in 6/4."

"21 This is an upbeat one about what the singer is going to do to his wife when they get home. It has a slight tension because, in the song, they are on a bus and people are beginning to give the singing man dirty looks. On the last chorus, everyone in the band and the audience joins in singing about what they will do to the wife when they get home."

The moment when a choir appeared dressed all in white, I had a flashback to a Christian concert I went to when I was about 11 and having a bit of a religious phase. As I remember, the concert helped me get over my pubescent religiosity, because I eventually realised that I couldn't carry on attending religious events if the music was going to be so cheesy.

Brian Finnegan, playing what his testicles told him rather than what Sri Chimnoy might have wanted, was out on his own: likewise, a few upbeat numbers, where the band really started swinging, left the audience aching to hear more in that vein. But then the song-bird of St Petersburg would sit down again on his stool and drift into another noodling meditative medley. As my Russian guide explained, "his music has changed because he mostly smokes cannabis now."

Tragedy, Edith Piaf, and Toast

Just been to see King Lear at the Globe.

Year 7 science taught me an important fact about Tragedy. It wasn't just the fact that we deliberately destroyed every shred of self-respect that our teacher could cobble together every lesson -(although we did)- It was the difference between a reversible and irreversible reaction.

A reversible reaction is something like water - ice. It can go both ways. An irreversible reaction, so went the immortal example, is something like bread turning into toast. Once bread has become toast it cannot unbecome toast. Here, as it were, are the seeds of tragedy.

Bear with me.

Plays are essentially reversible reactions pretending to be irreversible, i.e. man standing up to man lying down (reversible) masquerading as man alive to man dead (irreversible). For tragedies to work, the actors have to make us believe that irreversible things really are happening. We need to watch the stage, gripped in the complete belief that something - beauty, youth, love, truth, hope - whatever - is being forever consumed, burnt up, destroyed, toasted, and can never be replaced. We see terrible things happen to the characters, and we want to see it almost physically eat away at them, because then we can believe.

Real life can go one better than tragedies in this respect. If we believe the papers, and believe that Amy Winehouse is destroying herself, then we are fascinated by her. Although I doubt it, I sometimes believe she is killing herself to some extent, and as a result I find her otherwise demure stage presence gripping.

Edith Piaf is a better example, by virtue of the fact that she was a 20th century Winehouse who has already completed the journey through genius, drugs, to death. Her early records are a mix a barnstorming music hall melodies with maudlin sentimentality. Towards the end of her career when (so I hear), eaten away by heroin, every performance could be her last, sentimental songs take over. Predictable, perhaps.

But there is nonetheless something else interesting happening in the arrangements. The melodies swell up to and finish on long, high bravura notes which would be a challenge for any singer in decent health, let alone an ageing junkie. However the arrangers kept on putting these notes in: the later the songs, the longer and higher the notes. The early songs don't have any of this, which makes sense, because Piaf's voice didn't even suit it. She wasn't an opera singer, after all. However these notes are there as a framework for a cruel kind of exhibition, a way of stringing out a dying performer over greater and greater lengths. Because this is where the fascination lay. The grim fascination in seeing someone struggle to come up to performance, all the time knowing that the shock to the system could be fatal. With these high notes, it is all -can she? Can't she? Will she make it? The fascination is of seeing something - life - consumed, eaten up, onstage.

As I have said, the best performances of tragedy are where there appear to be irreversible reactions in the actors. However, directors have devised various ways to get this 'once and once only' effect through props or sets rather than actors. In Tim Supple's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, there were some poor sods whose job it was to paste up paper as a huge backcloth over some scaffolding, which the actors could then burst through at the beginning of the play. I heard of a Complicité in which all props, some costumes, and a lot of the set, were torn or folded from long rolls of paper rolled out all the length of the playing space. Then there was Auto Auto, the German musical/performance piece, where two performers cut up and destroyed a car, making music out of the component parts as they went. In all of these, props or the set are deliberately destroyed every performance.

Watching these onstage tricks can be disappointing, however, Watching a glass smash on stage, the instant reaction can be ... hmm, a glass smashed on stage, I wonder how much that is costing them over the run. I.e. it doesn't convince us of the irreversibility of the moment.

Hence I didn't go to Auto Auto because I heard they were too gentle with the car. So it is with drama as well: when I watch it I want to feel like I have seen something properly destroyed, properly irreversibly toasted. And this Lear comes close. David Calder is at his best in II, 4, in a magnificent rant at his daughters which seemed in my eyes to be one moment the earth-crushing rage of a titan, and the next to be the embarassing tantrum of an old man. His onstage stamping was magnificent. I have never seen anyone stamp like I have seen David Calder stamp this evening.

However, the diagnosis of the performance must wait for another time, because unfortunately it doesn't belong to the point about toast.

Cabaret - The Microwaved West End version, or the Real Thing?

I decided to celebrate Boris Johnson's victory in the mayoral election by going to see Cabaret, a musical about the rise of Nazism in Germany.

The enjoyable message being peddled is that 'life is a cabaret', in short that that life is short and so you may as well enjoy yourself. The only problem with this production is that the 'life is short' message comes across rather too strongly, and 'you may as well enjoy yourself' is lost in the historical doom and gloom which sweeps across the production.

The hero, Clifford, is a mongrel creation. Cabaret's creators.turned Christopher Isherwood (upper-class English homosexual) into a middle-class straight-seeming American to create the role, and it is played on stage by someone English. The character sinks somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. Much more enjoyable is Herr Schulz, Jewish/German costermonger who woos his landlady by bringing her a pineapple and saying that, if he could, he would fill her whole room with pineapples. I would congratulate the actor by name but I left my program in the theatre.

The evening's entertainment is presided over by the 'Emcee' character, who up until recently had been played by Julian Clary, but is now done by Alistair McGowan. Again, there is something slightly odd about casting McGowan, who is probably most known for playing a henpecked Beckham, to be the personification of everything that is wild, sordid, sexual and so on.

However this character has the best 'turns' on stage: a routine where he plays a man with two women in his bed (lots of fun with a mechanical rolling bed fitted with curtains to reveal rubber breasts, fake penises and so on) and a routine with a specially adapted costume - from the front McGowan was a bridegroom, but the rear of the suit was made out to be a wedding dress with a mask on top, so that he could turn around and dance the part of the bride. The final one involved McGowan dancing in an excellently made fat suit whose balloons were eventually popped by surrounding dancers.

The strangeness of the play in part results from these nuggets of stagecraft ( the 'cabaret' element of the play ) being tacked onto the the story of the mainplot, which is a slow-moving and not-very-moving tragedy concerning two relationships breaking up under the rise of Nazism. The latter is standard sentimental musical fare, made for a dedicated audience, nice lighting and lots of stage machinery. The cabaret 'turns' are the result of an entirely different economic form, in which performers have 6 minutes total to grab the attention of a more-or-less drunk audience. These nights still exist - I have stage-managed one at the Clerkenwell Theatre ( http://www.timeout.com/london/clubs/events/645517/warped-a_journey_through_the_ages_of_variety.html ) which is highly recommended. At this night I have seen a woman rip a piece of newspaper the width of a hand apart with the crack of a whip, from 5ft away. The audience member holding the sheet of paper was suitably impressed and scared. I have seen a man walk on his hands across the stage whilst swinging a hoop from his foot.

The point is that, in the unforgiving conditions of cabaret nights only routines which have all the invention and choreography of much longer productions, or some incredible skills, packed into a very tight timeframe, will survive. As a result, when put into a baggy musical, they make the baggy musical look rather uninteresting by comparison. Especially when the baggy musical sits on top of the excellent cabaret material and makes it do its bidding: to wit the routines in which the dancers were directed to dance languidly signalling 'decadence', or in which the heroine must be impeded from singing by her tears in the final number. Brel never had to snuffle during a song to broadcast emotion.

To put the above in other terms, this is a production with a split personality. Unfortunately the West-End musical element believes itself to be superior to the Cabaret element, and sits on it, whereas in my book, even though cabaret is 'low-culture' and therefore may be seen to be below a musical, it is often technically superior. The musical side of this production could have learnt a lot from the cabaret side. But it didn't. It talked down to it, made it do the household chores, and sat eating Nutella out of the jar and watching television. And thus 'Cabaret' was born.

All in all a good production, but only interesting for those genuine cabaret routines it revives. Check out 'Warped' instead, at the Clerkenwell Theatre every Saturday, for the real thing.

Two Rarely-Seen Old Plays

I was at the White Bear Theatre in Kennington on Sunday 20th, and the Roundhouse in Camden on Tuesday 22nd, to see two great revivals of plays that have hardly been staged in 400 years: Westward Ho by John Webster and Thomas Dekker, and Henry VI part I by Shakespeare.

Westward Ho was brilliantly done, in a production with minimal props and set. The set of almost-adulterous wives were brilliantly dressed and presented as modern day banker's wives, with modish clothes, haircuts and copies of Hello magazine. The exposition in the script was 'read' from that same publication, transmuting Jacobean to present-day gossip brilliantly - the word 'wag' in the Jacobean sense was seized upon by the cast and translated to 'WAG' in the sense of the perpetually dieting, perpetually crisis-ridden lovelies from the cover of Heat magazine.

Following the WAGS around was the huge Nick Smithers, in drag as the hyperactive brothelkeeper Mistress Birdlime, who not only had a lion's share of lines, but also did most of the scene-shifting, moving tables around in high heels whilst humming along to the cut-scene music: 'Love and Marriage' sung by Frank Sinatra. Having been cast out by the rest of the characters at the end, Smithers acheived an excellent coup de theatre by straightening up from his subservient stoop, yanking the wig off his head, and losing the falsetto, then stalking out - a great moment.

Part of the pleasure in seeing virtually unperformed plays is seeing what actors will make of parts that aren't haunted by hundreds of well known interpretations before them. Kevin Quarmby, playing a would-be adulterous Earl, had decided that it was a part fit for Olivier, and delivered his speeches in soft light and a musical baritone that almost made you forget the heart of the matter - i.e. that his character was an elderly banker trying to get his end away. In the second act, he describes spying on Moll Justiniano in the church:

....within the holy temple have I stood
disguis'd, waiting your presence: and when your hands
went up towards heaven to draw some blessing down,
mind (as if all my nerves by yours did move)
begged in dumb signs some pity for my love.

At points like this -thanks to Quarmby's excellent and sincere portrayal - we saw past the delightful wrangling and trickery of the farcical plot, to some weary, sick, and sacred vision of human existence. In other words, it was the morbid touch of Webster rather than the sharp satire of Dekker. Likewise in the second half of the play, Justiniano draws aside a curtain to reveal his apparently dead wife, poisoned to keep him from the lustful Earl. Webster strikes again. One of the production's great strength was the fact that it played the farce as farce and the tragedy as tragedy, not trying to darken the one or undermine the other to fit into some kind of unity.

Matt Baldwin's put in an excellent performance as Master Justiniano, who disguises himself as a schoolteacher and also, hilariously, as his own wife. Some other members of the cast could have easily taken a leaf out of his book, for example the abrasive Graham Townsend, who, believing himself to be in Wembley stadium, had the volume control constantly at 10 for his portrayal of Master Monopoly. Not wise, considering that he had one of those travelling accents that bad actors sometimes get, voyaging between Wales and France via Pakistan.

Why has I Henry VI not been performed more often? Or, to give the play its full title, why has The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, With the Death of the Good Duke Humphrey: and the Banishment and Death of the Duke of Suffolk, and the Tragical End of the Proud Cardinal of Winchester, With the Notable Rebellion of Jack Cade: and the Duke of York's First Claim Unto the Crown not been performed more often? The clue is in the name: this is not so much one play as a gallimaufry of different plots in an ongoing saga, a kind of Renaissance Eastenders, that would have delighted audiences over months in Shakespeare's time. In this play, written early in Shakespeare's career, you can see the playwright discovering situations and characters that would re-emerge later: The ambitious wife of Gloucester would be revisited as Lady Macbeth, and the madcap reforms of Jack Cade sound a bit like Lear in his hippy phase. It is the equivalent of Sketches by Boz in Dickens career - the melting pot, the author collecting his characters.

The reason that it has not been performed is also due, no doubt, to the fact that this is a Shakespeare play without a leading man. No place for Irving, Olivier, Branagh, Jude Law. But then it suits the times: I have seen the same company perform Henry V, and Geoffrey Streatfield (excellent in this production as Suffolk) had hard work with Hal's heroic speeches. Likewise, the war veterans on the front row weren't quite lifted into the stratospheres of patriotic rapture that they might have been in more optimistic productions in more optimistic times.

There is another reason that this production has probably been staged quite infrequently over the past 400 years: most of the scenes are full of public utterances. It is a play of proclamations and vows, threats and counter threats, justifications and plotting. There are not many soliloquys, there is no cosying up to the intimate thoughts of a Hamlet in this play. But these productions make the court scenes are genuinely thrilling: after seeing the slipping hold of the King, the lords rounding on Gloucester, the raving Margaret, you have forgotten the philosophical Shakespeare so beloved of literary critics, and are pretty wrapped up in whose throat gets slit next.

Then there is the top quality aerial business: men hanged on stage, dying bishops hauled up to heaven, and demons hoisted out of pits. This is the challenge for any director and company wanting to put on these plays- to find a presentation that does justice to the huge barrelling progress of history.

It is where these productions excelled against, for example, Nicholas Hytner's productions of the Henry IV plays at the National a couple of years ago. That particular director, with his genius for comedy, the human touch, and one-off bits of stage business, had enlivened individual scenes; but in the background, it seemed like history had stopped or was frozen. Who will be King next? Don't mind. France? What's the problem? Leave it alone, I have sausages to eat. What's that, you will spend a few years drinking and then reform yourself? Fine, go ahead. It was like watching a mechanic fit a spoiler and wheel rims to a car with no engine: there are more fundamental things which a director of the Histories must acheive.

Drawing Rooms and iPods in the Theatre

Having just watched Metamorphosis at the Lyric, Hammersmith:

The Lyric is a strange theatre - A Matcham auditorium dating back to the late 19th century, it was earmarked for destruction in a 1960's redevelopment program, then - after the locals took up arms - saved by a developers compromise, as follows: they knocked down the outside of the theatre, but preserved it's innards, and, having built their glass and steel vision, sat the shelled auditorium in the new building, suspended 2 storeys up. Nowadays you ascend into the theatre through white walls and wide steel framed stairs out of an airport terminal, and swing the doors to enter into a perfectly embalmed music hall auditorium, a riot of plush velvet and plaster fantasias.

The perfect theatre for a play, then, in which a man also wakes up to find himself the same on the inside, but with a modern and unfamiliar exterior: Franz Kafka's economic fairytale, The Metamorphosis.

The production was in the vein of the theatre company Frantic Assembly: using techniques which were displayed in that company's dismal play Stockholm, albeit with a better script. For those who don't know, Frantic Assembly do straight theatre interlaced with physical pieces of a dance and/or acrobatic nature, and doctor their sets to acheive special effects.

So that when the woman performs oral sex on the man in Stockholm, stage hands poke flowers through previously unseen gaps in the walls, as the kind of wallpaper equivalent of an orgasm. Likewise, at one point in Metamorphosis, the wall/ceiling of Gregor's room is shifted out by unseen hands, leaving an unexpected display of chrysanthenums in receding perspective. Having a fit of middle class paranoia, the man in Stockholm is shuffled up the wall by a chock hidden in the wall, as if he was levitating. (A mechanical joke borrowed from the Laurel & Hardy films, aiming for a kind of horror effect in this production). One of Gregor's walls changes from a trampoline consistency to being a hard floor from one scene to the next.

In Metamorphosis, the transformation of the beetle is figured by the fact that all of Gregor's room has been shifted through 90 degrees, and whereas we see the ground floor in normal perspective, we look down at his room from above. The actor's resultant insectile clambering and discomfort is a more indirect and clever alternative to a giant beetle suit. The physical theatre element in the Frantic Assembly piece consisted of dance pieces that were slotted into a regular script.

The problems with this type of production are as follows: the dance pieces are not generally as good as something professional. The stage mechanisms are clunky, and achieve effects that a stage magician would dismiss immediately as too amateur. The straight acting, having probably been neglected in preference to the bit where they get to swing round the lampstand, is not as good as it could be. It must be said that Stockholm was infinitely worse in all of these respects than Metamorphosis, but the problems were still there.

My second problem, having seen this play, is: why the return of the drawing room? Did the New Left theatre practitioners of the 60s and 70s, who spent so much effort getting rid of the drawing room, laboured in vain? They're putting on Terence Rattigan in the West End again! Someone help us!

Whether it be something in the zeitgeist, or the water, or both, the drawing room is back with a vengeance. The polished granite kitchen complete with iPod adaptor and fridge with ice maker of the Stockholm set, or the chintzy clutter of the Samsa's home: these are plays with characters that, having aimed at middle class respectability (i.e. furniture, gadgets, trinkets) are ridiculously encumbered and hemmed in by it. The difference is that, whereas the Samsas (not excepting Gregor) are ridiculous and furniture-obsessed by Kafka's design, the nameless and vapid yuppies that Bryony Lavery has spawned are ridiculous and furniture-obsessed without her knowing it. She takes them as avatars of 'modern love' (Alas, the Guardian was convinced as well). The closetedness and narrow mindedness of drawing room drama are alive again in Stockholm, deficiencies papered over with a few bits of machinery business, pumping music and rock and roll dancing with kitchen utensils.

The drawing room, having recolonised 'drama', has even managed to annex new territory in the theatre: Pierre Rigal, the French contortionist and dancer, has the walls of a room close in on him in PRESS, which was seen at The Gate this year. Watch out for your iPod, Pierre.

By way of postscript: Once Gregor had acheived his final immobility, suspended from a red curtain over the kitchen table, and his sister had incongruously flowered in his vacated room, and the lights had gone down, come up for the bows, and come up for us, the audience filed out. A crush developed on the stairs, where people had stopped and were gawking out of the windows to get a no-cost look at the play that was going on simultaneously across the courtyard. In my frustration, I squeezed out, and in doing so, trod on the heel of an old chap who was making his way down the stairs and who, moreover, I had specifically told myself I should not tread on. Sorry to him. But also proof that the pettiness and meanness of Kafka's world (I include myself) goes on after the final curtain.