GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

In London last week, I caught up with friends, shopping, the germs that inhabit public transport, and a bunch of plays and movies. I also visited an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. It was called Gay Icons. The object was to ask each of ten “prominent gay figures in contemporary culture and society” to name six people “whom they personally regard as inspirational, or an icon for them”.

Scope for confusion, dissatisfaction and idiocy is already well laid in this rubric. To begin with, we have the dog-eared term ‘icon’. It was only as recently as 2001 that the following ‘draft addition’ was added to the meanings of the term in the Oxford English Dictionary: “A person or thing regarded as a representative symbol, esp. of a culture or movement; a person, institution, etc, considered worthy of admiration or respect. Freq. with modifying word”. This is a gallant attempt to arrest the tsunami of generalised gunk that has assailed a previously harmless term, one that once minded its business and proudly boasted very specific and narrow meanings.


Gerard Manley Hopkins – bigger than at the NPG
(from Google)

In today’s degenerated discourse, anything can be ‘iconic’: a joke, a news headline, a fart. ‘Iconic’ is just another loose description – along with, say, ‘classic’, ‘fantastic’, ‘awesome’ – of something the speaker (and increasingly the writer) approves. There is no distinction of meaning or degree – and certainly not of either substance or subtlety – between these interchangeable positions.

Clearly there is nothing to be gained by insisting that an exhibition with the word ‘icons’ in the title should exhibit anything of the religious or the statuesque. But I would have thought that at least the chosen ‘icons’ might betray some connection to the legendary, the totemic, the idolised. Only one of the “prominent figures" asked to choose did so, or so it seemed to me, in that spirit. Waheed Alli’s six choices were David Hockney, Lily Savage, Jeff Stryker, the Village People, Diana Princess of Wales and Will Young. The late princess, whom I believe to have been heterosexual, was indeed a gay icon in the sense that gay men in particular adored her. Other such women – enormously famous stars who had or have a predominantly gay male following – include Judy Garland, Bette Davis, Tallulah Bankhead, Bette Midler, Madonna and Kylie Minogue, none of whom is cited in the show. But this is what I understand by the term ‘gay icon’. Lord Alli’s other choices have all created strong images of themselves as gay, if very disparate, men. And that seems a fair enough alternative (but secondary) reading.

At the other extreme are such doltish choices as Elton John’s of Rostropovich and the football manager Graham Taylor, and Billie Jean King’s of Mandela and her own family. Such choices are by no sense of any imagination – save that of a numbskull – gay icons. These participants are simply choosing people who reflect back on themselves, without reference to the thrust of the actual exhibition. They should have been excluded from the jury in favour of self-aware choosers.

Most of the icons cited by others have an identifiable gay penumbra but what they really are – for the gay community, as represented by the choosers – is not icons but heroes (I am using the term ‘heroes’ to encompass ‘heroines’, much as we are now enjoined to call women who act ‘actors’). This is fine and dandy but it does not make up a show of icons. Indeed, many of the choices are of figures who are more or less obscure, which surely wars with the contemporary understanding of what an icon is. The professional writers among the choosers inevitably haul in worthy but widely ignored fellow writers: Ronald Firbank, Denton Welch, Bryher, Sylvia Townsend Warner. As it happens, I have read the first two of these and I still contend that they are far from any generally recognisable iconic status.

Another, rather different problem cuts across the choices. This is, after all, a show at the National Portrait Gallery. But rather too high a proportion of the subjects throve before photography was widespread and were not esteemed sufficiently to merit the painting of portraits. Accordingly, the images available of (for instance) Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter and Audre Lorde are very restricted. The only image of Gerard Manley Hopkins evidently to be had is about the size of a postage stamp. This makes for a pretty fitful visual show.


Paul Rudd not in character but indistinguishable
(from Celebrity Dream Cameo site)

At any rate, there was a healthy turnout prepared to pay a fiver for one of the NPG’s weediest efforts and they certainly weren’t all – or even a little bit – screamers. So I suppose one should be pleased at some level. I would have liked to have found the exhibition a little bit interesting, informative, challenging or unpredictable, however.

I saw three movies, one that I adored, one I detested and one that perplexed and disappointed me. The last of these (though the first that I saw) was Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. Naturally, I am drawn to any work whose title doesn’t need to be explained to me but clearly does need explaining to most punters, even if they know how to pronounce it (“sin-neck-dock-ee” – it is that part of speech that conveys a whole by citing a part, as does the word ‘hands’ in “all hands on deck”, and is used here as a gloss on the up-state town in New York, Schenectady). The movie’s opening line boded well too: “Harold Pinter’s dead”. Cultural allusions put me at my ease, among characters with whom I may hope to have plenty in common. The cast list is further encouragement : Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Emily Watson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Dianne Wiest, Michelle Williams, Hope Davis, thoroughbreds all.

But the movie gets away from Kaufman. Because his story is not anchored in reality – especially a temporal reality – the story-telling disciplines start to go hang. The difficulty you give yourself by throwing out the rulebook is that your audience loses its bearings. I do not ask for the Aristotelian unities but I do need Kaufman to show me a world whose functions I recognise. He doesn’t do that and so, although I have gladly placed myself in his hands, I feel cheated and grow restive and eventually bored and recalcitrant. So ultimately the movie, for all its intelligence and thoughtfulness, is a failure.

Sacha Baron Cohen is, I think, an enormously talented man and a fearless one too. I hope, once he has become an established fixture on the international scene, that he does not follow the career trajectory of so many original comedians and humorists by taking increasingly dull and undemanding character roles in increasingly vapid and unnecessary movies. Nonetheless, the two vehicles that have raised him to supernova status leave me cold. In recognition of the rogue umlaut assumed by Cohen’s Austro-fashion fag figure Brüno, Universal Pictures styles itself Üniversal at the top of Brüno. And that was the last time I laughed throughout the whole picture. (Oh wait, I did smile at a gag at the expense of, severally, Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Kevin Spacey but that hardly counts).

Well, my old friend, we shall get nowhere engaging an argument about what is funny. I merely insist upon my entitlement not to be amused. It does seem to be necessary to insist upon this. In The Sunday Times, Cosmo Landesman declared “There’s no denying how funny Brüno is”. Mr Landesman evidently brooks no dissent. I am reminded of Penelope Gilliat’s famous thrust that “it would be unfair to suggest that one of the most characteristic sounds of the English Sunday is the sound of Harold Hobson barking up the wrong tree”; I only ever read Mr Landsman on a Sunday if I am quite sure that I am completely ready to embrace a diametrically opposite view to my own commonsensical one, which is to say an unutterably wrong view.

Philip French has forgotten more about film than Mr Landesman ever knew but he too appears to lose his critical edge when Master Cohen heaves into view: “his satire seeks to create chaos as a way of exposing the absurdity and fragility of society and life itself”. I am not at all sure that this Observer observation means anything at all but it is certainly ill expressed.

Critics generally credit Cohen with a mission a little less elevated. They think he wants to make fools of people, especially pompous and bigoted people – he “delivers a few genuine stings to people who deserve it” reckons Kim Newman in Sight & Sound – but I would argue that he achieves nothing of the kind. A sequence in the earlier movie, Borat, did effect a kind of cathartic exposure of the self-regarding shallowness of a trio of frat boys and what was notable about that sequence was that Cohen was called upon to do almost nothing in the way of setting the boobies up – they lead themselves eagerly to the slaughter. But throughout Brüno, as through the rest of Borat, Cohen confronts innocent civilians (whether they “deserve” it or not) with increasingly manipulated situations. The dupes are hoaxed. How not very surprising. What is remarkable and rather encouraging about human behaviour – contrary to Philip French’s intimations of existentialism – is how gamely and how politely these poor mutts deal with someone who has torn up the social rulebook. Mind you, this all assumes that a large proportion of what makes it into the cut is authentic and not a put-up job and it is, I submit, quite a large assumption. It’s a movie, after all. Why waste expensive man-hours and film-stock when you can fake it very professionally and nobody is any the wiser?

Much has been made of the supposedly “outrageous” sequence in a hotel bedroom where Brüno starts to come on to Ron Paul, the septuagenarian candidate for the Republican Party presidential nomination. Let’s be brünoly frank: the sequence doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. Paul does not react in any way different from the way any elderly heterosexual man would react in this rather unlikely and tiresome situation, whether or not (and it really doesn’t signify) he knows that there are cameras on him. Paul keeps polite while increasingly frosty, then sees the need to scoot and does so complaining loudly. Well, of course he does. If Cohen and his team think they bagged anything of any interest there, they’re insane. The only residual glimmer of anything is the mild amazement we might feel that Cohen has the chutzpah to carry it through, staying in character.








Mark Rylance in Jerusalem
(from The Independent)










Nevertheless, it’s a thin achievement. As is testing the patience of hotel staff to destruction. Any drunken teenager can achieve that. However good a show he puts on for the camera when he is called upon to release Brüno from the partner to whom he is supposedly affixed by sex toys, you can bet that the hotelier has seen it all before, and worse.

I cannot help but feel that all this is rather low-grade and juvenile. Grown-up critics, confronted by Cohen, are apt to collapse into helpless giggles like six year-olds when someone farts. The very fact that relatively well-connected players in the politics of the Middle East allow themselves to be persuaded to go in front of cameras with Brüno – if indeed that is who they are and indeed they do so unknowingly and indeed it is not all a phoney – suggests that the most interesting aspect of these encounters is very much not their awkward and doomed brevity (what a lot of wasted footage must have been shot) but rather the nature of the preliminary negotiations that set up these encounters. Did nobody film those?

I Love You, Man is a modest comedy of manners in which a couple air and tackle the problem that the bridegroom-to-be cannot raise a pal suitable to stand as best man. That’s about all there is to it and it would come off as flimsy fare indeed if it were not for the fact that John Hamburg’s movie, building from a story by Larry Levin, never puts a foot wrong. In particular, he has cast it in the way that the great tradition of romantic comedy was always cast, seeking maximum charm. Paul Rudd and Rashida Jones are simply gorgeous as the engaged couple and Jason Segel – as the new buddy who, clearly unsuitable though he is, is equally obviously going to fill the bill – complements Rudd perfectly. But it is down to Rudd to carry the movie and he is pitch perfect. I have liked his work ever since Clueless, naturally fell in love with him in The Object of My Affection and have seen him several times on the London stage (though brought up American, he is the son of immigrant English Jews). Rudd’s comic timing has become one of the contemporary screen’s great delights and it is impossible to picture any living actor playing the lead in I Love You, Man with more deft charm. This was the movie I saw that I adored, a completely unassuming crowd-pleaser.

I live in decreasing hope of ever seeing a play by Jez Butterworth to top his first, Mojo, which is now 14 years old. He’s back at the Royal Court with his new one, Jerusalem, which I saw on the eve of its press night so with no preconceptions. It was therefore a delightful surprise to find it set round our way with many name-checks for places we know. A portrait of the English non-conformist tradition as it survives on the fringes of society (Jerusalem as in Blake), the play was more entertaining than substantial but still provocative and admirable. Butterworth was lucky, moreover, in his director (the faultless Ian Rickson) and his leading man: Mark Rylance giving a toweringly charismatic performance as a doomed rebel who still serves as a rallying point for the disaffected local youth. If Rylance doesn’t hoover up all this year’s stage acting awards, it will only be because he is appearing in a new play.

All the other plays I saw were on the National’s big stages. Richard Bean’s England People Very Nice was, I had understood, quite an inflammatory piece but I found it just an extended soap opera – the reference to EastEnders towards the end seemed rather reckless. Bean’s play-within-a-play format purports to tackle waves of English immigration and the way the increasingly mongrel native population assimilates them. But it really offers no more than anecdotal evidence and plays to received ideas. The conclusion appears to be that everyone hates the newest arrivals until they too become part of the scene – so the Somalis are the latest to suffer prejudice and rejection. To suggest that this is schematic and reductive is no more than stating the obvious. Bean’s vision is like a cartoon, which is perhaps what spurred director Nicholas Hytner to introduce some animation into the mix. It makes for a lively but very long evening – all four plays I saw were comfortably over three hours.

My remaining NT visits were to revivals of “problems plays”. Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well has traditionally been so designated. Priestley’s Time and the Conways is, as its title suggests, one of his exercises in the manipulation of time (I wonder if Charlie Kaufman has studied Priestley). Generally these days I avoid revivals on the argument that, when my London theatre visits are so limited in number, I really don’t need to see another production of The Cherry Orchard or She Stoops to Conquer. The Priestley was one I had unaccountably never seen, however, and All’s Well is very rarely put on – I reckon it’s more than 35 years since I last saw it.

Both plays were superbly staged and each director had found a means of taking the curse off the respective play’s problem. Rupert Goold employed some rather beautiful effects so that a couple of the Conway siblings were able to seem present in both their young and their middle-aged manifestations (Acts I and III are set in 1919, Act II in 1938). Marianne Elliott played a look of abject terror over the faces of the promised couple at the conclusion of All’s Well, cleverly distancing the general welcome for an arranged marriage that, in the play’s world of fable and court etiquette, was accepted as a proper reward for service.

Each of these two plays is superbly crafted by a dramatist in his around-40 prime and I was very glad of the opportunity to see them. That they both propose unacceptable takes on the world is beside the point. The National under Hytner is really fulfilling its brief.