Please lighten up

This bit of puff for the new series of Robin Hood appeared on the BBC internal website appeared this afternoon. Could it be that this series takes itself too seriously? To illustrate my point, I have dug out a load of pictures from the Robin Hood adaptation that I was on TV when I was growing up: Maid Marion and her Merry Men.

"And after the death of his wife Marian, the green-clad hero is growing up, becoming darker and brooding over avenging her tragic end at the hands of Guy of Gisborne (Richard Armitage).

A new beacon of hope arrives in the form of a travelling monk called Tuck (David Harewood), a man of vision and imagination, who has a very hands-on approach when it comes to justice and freedom.

Meanwhile, the wickedness of the Sheriff (Keith Allen) continues unabated. A spirited Locksley girl named Kate (Joanne Froggatt) objects to her brother's forced conscription. As a result she inadvertently gets caught up in the cause of Robin Hood and joins the gang.

An unexpected addition to the Gisborne family, Guy's little sister, Isabella, played by newcomer Lara Pulver, arrives and becomes a complication both Robin and Gisborne can do without.
As the threat of Prince John (Toby Stephens) looms larger Robin and Gisborne have to reach an uneasy truce as it emerges that they may have rather more in common than they thought. "

More Dickens

What with a big production of Waiting for Godot coming up, I want to draw everyone's attention to Chapter V of The Uncommercial Traveller, Dickens' late writings. It's called 'Poor Mercantile Jack', but it may as well be called 'Waiting for Jack'. Etext here:

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/unctr10h.htm

The Pickwick Papers - The Original Road Trip @ The Greenwich Theatre 03.02.2009

IF YOU ARE READING THIS TODAY (04/02) IN LONDON, GO AND SEE THIS PLAY TONIGHT!

http://www.europeanarts.co.uk/uk_tours.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pickwick_Papers

In this production, the six actors of the European Arts Company attempt to recreate the first of Dickens' serialisations, The Pickwick Papers. This is the account of a club of gentlemen led by Samuel Pickwick, as they travel around getting into trouble in the last years of stagecoach England.

Like the serialisation, (400 copies sold in its first instalment (March 1836) 40,000 copies of the last instalment (October 1837)) this production gathers pace. The first episodes (Pickwick and Winkle's trip to Dingley Dell to see Mr Wardle, Winkle's falling into the ice and subsequent wooing of the spinster aunt) all unfold in a slightly too leisurely way, with a lot of time spent by the cast shifting boxes into various ingenious positions for very short scenes.

However as soon as the villainous Jingle begins to plot, things pick up. The seduction scene between him and the spinster aunt is an early highlight. Nicholas Waters' interpretation of The Fat Boy is a masterclass in understated characterisation. By which I mean that a)The Fat Boy is always falling asleep b)Waters acts this very well. n.b. ANDREW DAVIES TAKE NOTE: SOME OF DICKENS' CHARACTERS ARE FUNNY.

After 30 minutes, however, the company really raises the game. The episode with Peter Magnus, Most Boring Man of the 1820s, and the Incomprehensible Inn, is brilliantly staged and timed. Paul Lincoln and Richard Latham have an absolute hoot with Dodson and Fogg, lawyers who pop in and out of a wall of box files, waving copies and originals of writs at Pickwick, inciting him to slander and cackling maniacally. n.b. Mr Davies: those satirical bits that you like to play music over, they are also allowed to be funny.

However, the courtroom scene raises the bar again. Here the company reaches the levels of the big boys: certainly Cheek by Jowl (now too portentous and mournful) or even Propellor (outstanding all-male touring Shakespeare company) . Richard Mansfield turns in virtuoso performance as Sergeant Buzfuz, Waters 'does the police in different voices' to recreate the clerks 1)squeaky 2)booming 3)incomprehensible, and credit is due to the plastic skeleton who turns in a virtuoso performance as the judge. A hideous child marionette further bolsters the cast.

The limitations of the play are very often those of the book: 'All of the women characters were the same!' pointed out my 21st century playgoing companion, which is more due to Dickens than Vanessa Morley's excellent turns as the various hysteria stricken damsels of the play. Otherwise, I breathed a sigh of relief at seeing one of CD's novels - which, for numerous reasons easy to see but lengthy to describe, are MADE for the stage - done in the way it should be.

Enough. Find a few travelling companions, gentlemen or otherwise, secure means of transport, and make your way picaresquely and precipitously to Greenwich.

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.