nineveh_uk

To meme, obviously. I've read all of them on account of my education, seen some, cared about fewer. I cannot act to save my life, so I've never been in any of them except for the usual having to read in school English lessons. I think my own lesson from doing this is that good Shakespeare productions have been some of my best theatrical experiences, but that indifferent ones are as indifferent as anything else.

What I've seen and what I thought about it...

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French-Quebecois musical Notre-Dame de Paris made a flying visit to London last week, and antisoppist and I went to see it. I was a bit anxious in advance as to whether I would actually enjoy it as it sounded completely bonkers, but although it is indeed completely bonkers it was also thoroughly enjoyable, and very French*. You can tell it's French because it begins with a treatise on how this is the age of cathedrals, and also because the music just has that faint air of Eurovision, and because you wouldn't get a British show like it in a million years. It's not just the acrobats, or the way that it doesn't really care that much about the show as characters/plot very much (especially plot), but rather of Notre-Dame/Paris the community, or the way that people sing their soliloquies to a background of dancers expressing the singer's inner torment (some of them wearing very little), and that all the male characters except Clopin are basically terrible,** even Quasimodo at times, it's all of it together and somehow it works.

To be honest, skygiants sums it up better than I could:

Notre-Dame de Paris the musical does not care about plot. Notre-Dame de Paris the musical cares about FEELINGS and DIGRESSIONS. Gringoire and Frollo singing philosophically about architecture and the printing press gets four and a half minutes; the trial of Esmeralda takes ninety seconds.

It's actually the second musical adaptation of the same story that I have seen. The first was the American/German musical based on the Disney film, which I saw 2 years ago in Berlin. It's more batshit but I think also better. They are extremely different, this one being infinitely more batshit, but - and I say this as someone who hasn't read the book - I wonder if it isn't a more faithful adaptation of the story. Though the other version definitely has the winning song.

It is weird, it is French, it is immensely entertaining, I am very glad to have seen it, I'm not sure that I would need to see it again, and it made me want to read the book. Recommended.

Have the trailer:



And the best Hunchback song, the original Hellfire:



*As was the audience. They probably brought some new blood to a non-English language musical, but mostly they brought lots of people delighted to get have their favourite show accessible to them. Which is also excellent from my POV because I suspect that the powers that be in musical theatre funding are more likely to do short runs to be attended by everyone French/German/Russian in the area than to do a new production.

**Though even so not as terrible as in the book, in which, Wikipedia tells, me, Gringoire does not save the life of Esmeralda, but does save her pet goat, which he likes more than he does her. The mind boggles.

Late review is late.... Now over a month ago I went to see the ENO production of Chess with antisoppist. Although I like musicals, I'd never seen Chess before and the extent of my knowledge of the tunes until recently was singing I Know Him So Well in karaoke with my sister*, so I acquired the CD before and listened to it in the car in preparation. Contrary to the reviews in the Guardian/Observer, which I can only assume to have been done by people who fundamentally hate musicals, it was excellent. Well-staged (although they should have projected the actors in the finale for those of us at the back), well-sung, and a pleasing lack of silly accents. Or rather, only American silly accents. Perhaps Tommy Körberg found it enough to sing in English without slapping a fake Russian accent on top**, but I get annoyed at Bad Russians singing with fake accents while the Good Russians don't. It's not as if there is any evidence that Svetlana has lived a life to provide her with extensive English pronunciation lessons. But I digress.

Chess is notorious as having multiple options for arranging the songs and various possible endings, but as far as I was concerned this one worked fine - indeed, given the plots of some musicals I'd definitely put Chess in the top half. It has multiple characters, it meshes its characters and politics reasonably well, and if the end isn't entirely clear cut - well, that's life. And I spend a lot of the next week thinking about it, which is always a good sign.*** You and I works just fine as an ending if you read it as Anatoly and Florence realising that they are not in fact one another's heart's desire, they are merely the among the things that the other has seen in the course of chasing their actual desire, whatever that might be.

Musically, it was fabulous to have a large orchestra. Modern amplification means that you can do a lot with a band of fifteen or so, but it's simply not the same as a full size opera house orchestra in again. I've always liked Michael Ball's voice and had never seen him live, so that was a pleasure, and I was delighted to see again last year's Caiaphas from JCS, Phillip Browne, as Molokov. A real bass voice is a fine thing. And I was utterly and absolutely convinced by Tim Howar as Freddie when he stepped out of the aeroplane looking exactly as if he'd modelled himself as an egomaniac sporting git on Petter Northug. I was less struck by the women's voices; Alexandra Burke sang beautifully, but her vocal style didn't quite mesh with the character for me though I could see it working in other pieces or in concert, and alas Cassidy Janson as Florence displayed the regrettable tendency one sometimes hears in sopranos to sacrifice accuracy of pitch for belting. But those were minor quibbles over all.

Two final points:

(1) Each game of chess means there's one less Variation left to be played

Not necessarily. There is a high probability that it does, but of all the games of chess played throughout history it is entirely possible that two were identical.

(2) Chess is not a sport. I don't care if Iceland says that it is.

* We did this recently sans backing track or reminder of the lyrics when she visited with the young nephews as a bedtime lullaby. It is fair to say that they were sceptical of our musical genius.

** Although this Norwegian singer's version of The Soviet Machine is pretty good, even if the Arctic Philharmonic evidently has a very low budget for computer graphics.

***And the next month thoroughly earwormed. I cannot say that singing finding myself "Oh Jeremy Thorpe" to the tune of Oh Mr Porter is an improvement.

Few things strike terror and fury into my theatre-going heart like the words "In a new version by [...]" on the website/review/flyer of a a play not originally written in English. New translations, great! Don't use the one from 1905. But new versions? I want to see Ibsen, not someone else's supposedly more exiting text.* I suppose on the plus side, that's one less trip to London that I have to make or feel bad about not making.** Maybe next time someone decides to be exciting and original with Ibsen they could just put it on in Norwegian with subtitles.

* Though I would definitely have gone to that Swedish version of Hamlet in which he's a murderer, I speak as a person who has had ample opportunity to see Hamlet.

** If it were cheap and local, I might try it out anyway. But when it involves the train, extra cost, and a late night, nope.

I am back from a long weekend in Harrogate with my sisters in celebration of the fact that I have a significant birthday approaching.* I am feeling surprisingly less tired than I might have expected, probably helped by the fact that despite the time of year the trains were civilised so the journeys weren't tiring, even if last minute ticket purchase when I decided that driving wasn't a good idea made them expensive. There is something to be said for enforced sitting down and reading. Middle Sister had donated her work-flights-earned Air Miles to the cause so we had a very nice hotel and I had a bath this morning just because it was there. There was some delicious food, entertaining theatre, and large amounts of nostalgia.

Yesterday involved a walk to Harlow Carr, which we didn't actually go into because this is not really the time of year for a rather expensive garden, but spent much time in its excellent bookshop. My sisters bought various Christmas presents, I bought some lavender-flavoured white chocolate. We took it in terms to comment on the qualities of various cornus in the absence of our mother. Alas, we didn't eat at Betty's because it isn't the time of year you can do that without booking or lots of time, but I had a sausage roll and curd tart, and purchased biscuits of gratitude for a couple of colleagues who have been particularly helpful with big stressful project.**

The main event of the weekend was West Yorkshire Playhouse's production of Strictly Ballroom, which had opened on Wednesday and was enormous fun. Bring on the sequins! On the way back to the station we observed that the long-awaited John Lewis has finally arrived. Honestly, we'd been promised the bloody thing for decades, and then it turns up after my parents leave. The building is genuinely impressive, though; we even admired the car park. It looks like origami done in stone, and yet is strangely in keeping with the buildings around it. Also noted on the way to and from the theatre was the extraordinary extent to which the people of Leeds have embraced the Christmas jumper.

*According to my student self by this point in life I am supposed to have re-read Ulysses and have published a novel. I have decided that the former was a whim, not an obligation, and the second delayed by circumstances beyond my control.

**Technically they were just doing their jobs, but with an unfailing good humour and helpfulness that meant that at least I didn't also have to stress about the photocopying because I could fling it in someone's direction with ten minutes to spare. Material acknowledgement feels warranted.

There is a crucial difference between Brexit and the plot of Götterdämmerung: though both have the leaders involved throwing their hands in the air and sitting doing nothing but wait until the house burns down around them, while elsewhere a bunch of people make some staggeringly stupid decisions despite the consequences surely being obvious from the start, the characters in the latter were actually gods, as opposed to just being bitter about membership of a school club. Also, a great redemption is definitely not spreading throughout this particular world as a result of their downfall. However George Osborne was present at both.*

Despite 6 hours** of Wagner feeling like a dubious decision 24 hours in advance, it turned out to be brilliant on the day. Indeed as the end approached I felt that 6 hours was far too short and it needed at least an additional hour. Nor was I alone in thinking so, judging by the comments from audience members near me at the end, and the general riveted silence.

It was a concert performance, being the only way Opera North can afford to do something like the Ring, but it felt as if nothing was lost thereby. Big screens at the back provided surtitles (good ones, thank goodness, no faux archaism. Whatever is lost in not distinguishing between du and Sie is more than gained in not sounding stupid when read in English in performance) and a degree of setting, of riverbank or water, wooden walls of a Dark Ages hall, fiery rock etc, with the aid of some coloured lighting. It doesn't sound much, but it really worked. No singer actually vaulting onto horseback and riding into the flames*** could have been more dramatic than a woman in evening dress standing in front of the orchestra in yellowing light, voice soaring seemingly effortlessly above it. And what an orchestra! I didn't manage an on-stage count, but as an estimate combined with a conservative reading of the programme**** I'd go for about a hundred (and I've just found confirmation - 101!). The orchestra of Opera North is always one of its strengths and this occasion was no exception, they were in magnificent form.

Wagner has a reputation of being hard-core opera. On the train in I was regretting that I hadn't had time to go carefully over leitmotifs etc in order to educate myself sufficiently to appreciate it. Reader, this is rubbish. Bad Wagner is probably incomprehensible torture on grounds of length alone, but good Wagner isn't hard at all. It's wonderful music that while I'm sure it greatly rewards study is very accessible without it and the leitmotifs leap up waving and shouting notice me! Alternatively, possibly I am simply well-trained in the School of Opera North, which has long interwoven Box Office certainties with more inventive repertoire. After all, Wozzeck is not only challenging and allows you to distinguish yourself as a company, it's pretty cheap to do. Back to Götterdämmerung. The plot is perhaps not one of its strength. Wotan doesn't turn up, and we get the new family to move into Eastenders (as the preliminary talk put it, very accurately). Hagen's***** Evil Plot depends entirely on his victims all being complete idiots. Fortunately for him, this is opera, and indeed mythology. It doesn't have to make sense in order to work. Hagen was sung by Mats Almgren looking like an evil thug in a Scandinavian detective drama - the more things change, the more things stay the same - and my favourite along with Kelly Cae Hogan as Brünnhilde.

A wonderful presentation of a wonderful work. I am converted, as you can tell! I wish I might have seen it all, I'm immensely glad I saw this.

Have some music:



*This would explain why each act started 5 mins late, if he was being ushered to his seat in the dark. Perhaps he might have borrowed the rather lovely guide dog I spotted stretched out on the carpet in the bar in the second interval. It's fair to say that Goldie, alone of all the beings I saw there, did not look wholly appreciative and wore a definite air of 'how long, oh lord, how long?'

**To be precise, 4 hours 40 mins of music, the rest intervals. That makes the first act equal in length to Tosca (2 hours), and the whole thing half as long again as an uncut Figaro.

***Now I need to check if that's every been done with (i) actual soprano, (ii) actual horse, (iii) actual flames. Checked! Though the examples mentioned don't specify flames...

****No need for ten anvil-players in this one, but I've never seen so many French horns (apparently some of them are 'Wagner tubas', which he invented because he needed an extra instrument...)

***** I first came across Hagen in my German GCSE textbook, which had a really good cartoon sequence of the Nibelunglied. We didn't read that bit, which tells you everything you need to know about the approach my high school took to engaging pupils in foreign languages.

Apparently I thought that it was a good thing to watch yesterday afternoon, and indeedit was a decent if not inspired film*, and Ralph Fiennes was very good, and Vanessa Redgrave was magnificent, and Gerard Butler showed that he deserves to get better roles**, but ultimately Coriolanus is the tragedy of an arrogant tosser for whom it is exceedingly difficult to feel any sympathy whatsoever. I can sympathise (just about) with Roman patrician who doesn't want to be a politician because it involves not telling the common people they are scum all the time, but mate, if you don't want to be a politician, don't apply for the bloody job!

Possibly I could feel greater engagement with Coriolanus if I had ever seen him played by someone other than Ralph Fiennes, whom I have now seen on both film and live. The sole thing I remember about the theatre version is that a member of the audience had to be discreetly evacuated from the theatre having been taken very ill.

Right, it is sunny and bright outside, and I am going to attempt to go for a gentle walk and talk to myself about plot, and then this afternoon I am going to write.

*Though they cut too much of the text, I think.

**Still not forgiving him for Phantom of the Opera, though.

It has been one of those weekends on which I had a lot to do, haven’t done enough of it, and have realised too late that the only way to have done some of it was if I picked one of the things at the start and committed to that, as opposed to committing to nothing. Oh well, better next time.
One of the ways that I wasted time was looked for Measure for Measure videos on YouTube. It turns out that there aren’t that many, though I learnt that Cheek by Jowl are doing European tour of a Russian version, which I could be tempted by.

There is however, a version of Act IV scene II in which Angelo propositions Isabella including a rather young David Tennant (with his own accent) and Catherine Cusack. The lighting is dreadful and the ‘improvised’ camera-work accurately described by someone in the comments as ‘up-the-nose’, but it’s an interesting reading of the scene.



And now I am going to go and finish writing my holiday diary if it kills me. It is an irony of diary-writing that when you’re in the middle of doing lots of exciting things that you want to record for posterity, you have no time in which to do it.

I greatly enjoyed Ghosts yesterday evening at the Trafalgar Studios, with Lesley Manville as Mrs Alving. Having seen Manville as Lona Hassel in Pillars of the Community at the National, in which she was brilliant, this was a major draw. The production lived up to its promise, and was excellent; the decision to do it straight through without an interval has rightly been praised in the reviews and really worked. I couldn’t see where you could possible have an interval make sense, though it probably helps that the theatre has lots of leg room. It was “adapted and directed by Richard Eyre” (I don’t know what his C19 Danish is like, perhaps the programme that I didn’t buy mentions a translator), but it seemed to be adaptation as a freer translation rather than “Don’t worry darling! I invested your dissolute father’s money in exciting new medical developments. Some penicillin will sort you out and we shall move forward into a new life together.”*

Anyway, it was a good play text, good design, terrific direction and acting. You can absolutely see why it was a tremendous shocker when it came out; Ibsen’s always keen on skewing social hypocrisies, not least those guided by “what will people say” rather than human reason and decency, the characterisation of Pastor Manders is scathing, and a central message of “self-abnegation by a woman will not magically transform the character of a complete shit and maybe divorce is in fact sometimes a better idea” was perhaps not going to win over the critics who had their position by virtue of being signed up to it.

Speaking of dubious hereditary traits, I read Brat Farrar on the train. I enjoyed it, but would have done so more had it been less ragingly snobbish**. I can see why Ginty Marlow liked it.

*Though it is handy for the modern viewer that since congenital syphilis is not transmitted from the father skipping the mother, Ibsen gives a second possible route for transmission from Dad. Besides it being symbolic, that is.

**And a bit of the ending REALLY annoyed me. No, that is NOT the best solution for all concerned because after all it's in the past.

Back home, after the end of the Christmas holidays. It’s been a slightly strange fortnight, with a very disjointed second week as one by one the household succumbed to plague*. I had a very enjoyable Christmas, receiving some excellent presents, and we managed to do quite a bit, but there were various things that didn’t get done and I am not returning to work feeling particularly physically refreshed, though it is fair to say that I certainly haven’t thought about much since the 20th, which is good. I will be catching up on Yuletide in due course.

Anyway, other people’s plagues are almost invariably boring**, so here are other people’s (person’s) seasonal reviews instead.

[Unknown site tag]Frozen

A Christmas Eve matinee at Cottage Road cinema has become a bit of a tradition these days, and this year it was Disney’s turn, with a take on The Snow Queen that happily had moved far enough away from the original that they couldn’t justify the title and I was able to enjoy it for what it was rather than fuming about it not being the proper TSQ. It wasn’t exactly deep, but it kept a slightly dopey me entertained for 90 minutes, with decent songs and strong visuals, particularly beautifully realised scenery***, though the too-large eyes for the female leads - multiple, which was nice - are a bit weird. I was amused that becoming a snow queen also involves a lower neckline and skirt with slit to the thigh. I’m being sarcastic, but actually it was a nice film, if not on the level of Beauty and the Beast, which is an excellent film.

Incidentally, does the concept of “true love’s kiss” thus expressed show up before it was spoofed in Enchanted? It was in Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty as well.

[Unknown site tag] The Hobbit II AKA The Desolation of Smaug

Also at Cottage Road. It’s the fairground ride version of the book, but as I’m not that fussed about the book, I didn’t mind (and indeed it has finally inspired me to re-read it, which took some doing). As in the first film, I loved the visuals of the Kingdom under the Mountain, could have lived with it being half an hour shorter, and managed not to ask myself such question as “have the dwarves left the gas on for fifty years” during the film itself****. I could also have lived without the love triangle, though I quite enjoyed Tauriel as an addition otherwise – an infinitely preferable insert to the Laketown stuff. I was very impressed with the animation of Smaug, which achieved both weight and fluidity and made me believe in him as a dragon rather than a man in a rubber suit. I am glad that he will get to be in the third film.
In short, I enjoy the Hobbit films as what they are – I quite appreciate why other people cannot.

[Unknown site tag] Cinderella, Northern Ballet Theatre

The family theatre trip for the season, and great stuff (not least because we gave up on parking in the centre of town and split the taxi fare both ways). I don’t know a lot about ballet, but I like music (original, not Prokofiev), plot, and to come out wanting to leap about the sitting room. A delightful new version from a company who don’t get anything like the subsidy they deserve and consistently provide exciting and excellent classical dance combined with entertaining storytelling, we all came back dancing.

On the ballet front, I also enjoyed the television broadcast of Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty. I am inclined to agree with the critics who suggested that if you’re going to introduce vampires to the story you might as well go the whole hog, but it was gorgeous nonetheless. I would have liked a bit more formal dancing and pointe work rather than bare feet (one day I will damn well buy myself a pair of pointe shoes to have a go in something better than slippers), which I felt would have added variety, but informality was definitely preferable to the original version’s final act of show dances by random fairytale characters.

[Unknown site tag] Boxing day races, Wetherby

We lost. Well, we also won, but less than we lost. It was fun, and very cold.

*Life skills tip: if you find yourself feeling a bit queasy during a 3D film and there is the slightest possibility that this isn’t simply motion sickness, but motion sickness and a gastric bug, leave. Middle Sister did not follow this advice, and ended up in A&E. On the plus side, she managed to do this at a cinema with its own sickroom (OK, the sickroom belonging to the National Media Museum – lots of school trips, and IMAX).

**The exception being actual plague. Thanks to The Bridge I have learnt that the Swedish for pneumonic plague is lungepest.

***The reindeer was basically an excuse to show how well they can do fur now.

****Though not to stop myself coming up with a Benedict Cumberbatch crossover idea, and I’m not even a Cumberstan.