HISTORY BOYS

On a recent trip to London, I caught up with some friends, some movies and some theatre. What dictated the timing of the visit was the very short run at Sadler’s Wells of the remounting of the Rufus Wainwright opera, Prima Donna. A fellow Rufus fan and I booked for it, having agreed that we were not influenced by the bad reviews the show had received at its world premiere in Manchester last summer, nor by the fact that the Met had turned it down, pleading the handy rationale that they didn’t want to do an opera in French (not an objection that prevents them mounting works by Berlioz, Saint-Saëns, Debussy or Gounod). Wainwright has been mocked for choosing to have his libretto in French, as if this is somehow pretentious. But he’s Canadian. Everybody in Canada knows French.

We figured that, even were it very bad indeed, it still must be an interesting flop. When it comes to the work of an artist whom you greatly respect, you simply can’t take someone else’s word for it. I’ve adored Rufus since his first album was released in 1998. I knew instinctively from the reviews I read that this would be one for me and so it proved. I’ve bought all his albums since and saw him on tour four or five years ago. My pal – whom I hate – saw both his Judy-Garland-at-Carnegie-Hall concerts in London, the hottest ticket of that year. I think he’s a true original and, at the same time, an authentic, old-fashioned Star of the kind that Garland herself would recognize.


Rufus Wainwright

Cynics scoff, of course, and dismiss a mere “pop star” writing an opera as a vanity project. Far from it. Wainwright knows about opera, knows how it works and has written a proper one, one that in part attracts the level of criticism that it has precisely because no one feels the need to make allowances for it, as they do, say, when Paul McCartney sicks up an oratorio or Sting makes an album of lute music (Sting: The String Album! or vice versa).

Well, my dear, there’s an awful lot wrong with Prima Donna. “Old-fashioned” doesn’t begin to do it justice. John Adams and Harrison Birtwistle need feel no threat; Korngold would not have needed to fear the competition. It’s no less Puccini-esque than the more self-important musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber, though in the last scene it takes an unexpected dive into the territory of Charles Ives’ marching bands approaching each other playing diverse music (here, La Marseillaise against a Rufus tune). Generally, the orchestra has way too much to do underneath the relatively straightforward singing line, like an over-orchestrated movie score by Alfred Ralston (eg Oh! What a Lovely War).


Rufus cultivates his Verdi look

The story is piffle and the libretto worse – my pal says that Rufus met the woman who wrote it in a bar – but name me an opera about which you may say more and I’ll point to either a very rare or a very misconceived piece of work. There are really only two elements of any consequence in an opera: the music and the singing of it. Here, in the latter capacity, Janis Kelly was sumptuously splendid as the eponym and, of the rest, I was especially drawn to Rebecca Bottone as a character who, in the opera that Rufus might have written, would be Eve Harrington. Much of the music was simply gorgeous and we were both delighted to be in the theatre while it was being sung and played.

Seeing Prima Donna on the Saturday allowed me to stay over until Tuesday and whiz down to the National to get day seats for The Habit of Art on the Monday, always the least pressed night for a scarce ticket (no sentient being wants to take a train out of London on a Friday, Sunday or Monday). I found myself in a very jolly day-seats queue, many of the queuers stranded in London by the Icelandic volcanic ash and making the best of their unplanned nights. Happily, all the people I was so taken by in the queue got themselves tickets.

Alan Bennett’s latest play imagines a reunion-ish meeting between WH Auden and Benjamin Britten in 1972, itself brokered by a further imagining of a bridge between them built by Humphrey Carpenter, biographer of them both, and further yet by a rehearsal of a play about this meeting by a fictional playwright (which is to say, not Bennett himself) written for this very NT wherein we are watching the result. Russian dolls, Chinese boxes, a whispering gallery of perceptions, misperceptions and degrees of withdrawal: I loved it.


Alan Bennett takes a nice picture

I vividly remember a BBC2 sketch show in the early black-and-white days of that channel, written by Bennett and performed by him and others (“what do you think …” Bennett’s chairman asked decisively in a spoof of the Home Service programme The Critics before swivelling to someone who was palpably an actress and continuing: “Kingsley Amis?”). It was called On the Margin. The tapes of all the episodes have been wiped so, unless there are scripts and (better yet) samizdat recordings, the only leavings of this series when Bennett dies will be in the memories of viewers like me (assuming, of course, that Bennett doesn’t outlast us all).

Anyway, a propos On the Margin, Bennett told an interviewer that the jokes he enjoyed best were the ones – there were plenty like this in On the Margin – that were “got” by a very small proportion of the audience. As thirsty-for-intellectual-brownie-points VIth-formers, I and my chum became Bennett’s life-long slaves when he elegantly dropped a name as rare as Ortega Y Gasset in something as demotic as a television comedy show. We knew (we thought we knew) about Ortega Y Gasset. Anyway, we loved the name before – the critical point – Bennett dropped it.

The visitor to The Habit of Art would certainly benefit from a comprehensive grounding in the musico-literary culture of middle-class England over the past eighty years (as indeed she or he would have done when seeing Bennett’s very first stage play, Forty Years On). There are many jokes in it that take no hostages. Withal, however, there is a geniality and a democratic instinct in Bennett ensuring that anyone kind enough to attend will have a good time. I felt privileged that, by virtue of some shared cultural history, I was granted access to some of Bennett’s more mischievous and roguish notions. (Indeed, I have my own history with Humphrey Carpenter but that will have to be aired on another occasion).



Gambon replaced by Griffiths in The Habit of Art

There is a lot going on in The Habit of Art. Vestigial traces testify that the Auden role was written for Sir Michael Gambon who, perhaps, dropped out of playing it because, like the actor Fitz who plays Auden in the play-within-the-play, he can no longer retain complicated lines. There are traces of left-over business from the last collaboration between Bennett, director Sir Nick Hytner and some of the cast: The History Boys. The new play is probably too rarefied to follow its predecessor before the movie cameras. Happily, though, the NT is giving it a healthy, long run and almost all those who would deeply relish it – which is to say, anyone with wit, taste, inquisitiveness, a sense of humour and an ounce of susceptibility to thoughtful writing – have (or should make) the opportunity to catch it.


Alex Jennings as Britten, Richard Griffiths as Auden

The other theatre I saw paled in comparison. David Hare’s The Power of Yes, also at the National, purported to be an investigation into the economic crisis, a perfectly laudable quest. Sir David bristles at the suggestion that this and others of his recent works are “mere journalism” but if he doesn’t want them thought to be such he shouldn’t write them like that. Of this vein in his work, I didn’t see The Permanent Way, which opinion that I value deems to be the best of them. I certainly preferred Stuff Happens, which treats of the invasion of Iraq and, because it depicts real people whom we know in imagined dialogues, has a brio that seduces. The Power of Yes, by contrast, draws on opinions collected from many expert and less-expert sources and, because we are not familiar with their individual styles and argot, they don’t especially hold us. The play plays like the homework of a particularly eager exam-swotter.

At a Saturday matinee at the Royal Court, I saw Laura Wade’s Posh. I wonder if the theatre would have mounted it had the coincidence of an imminent election not arisen. Wade’s bilious comedy depicts (under a pseudonym) the infamous Bullingdon Club to which David Cameron and Boris Johnson belonged while at Oxford. As far as it goes, the depiction is fair enough but I wanted it to go rather further in one direction or another. What Wade gave us was somewhat pat and formally not very interesting. From where I sat at least, it was hard to tell the young blades apart and I think that was a lack in the writing, not merely that they were all wearing the semi-Ruritanian uniforms of the club. In plays like this, you know it will turn ugly and so you’re braced for that in a state of more or less dread. That puts a lot of weight on the denouement but here it was simply not strong enough.

At the Almeida, I saw the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ruined by Lynn Nottage. This was absorbing and instructive insofar as it dealt with a subject that I – and I suspect most of us – know little about, namely the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In fact, it depicts the lives of (mostly) women under warfare in a pretty generalised way so in practice I learned precious little about that conflict or that country. Nottage evidently took Brecht’s Mother Courage as her starting point – indeed, she told The Observer that Judi Dench’s assumption of that role was the best theatre performance she had ever seen. I wouldn’t even agree that Dench’s was the best Courage I had ever seen but we’ll give her that.

It was bracing to see a play in which just about everyone on stage was black and there were black people in the audience too, just a few though that’s more than at any other theatre I attended. But Ruined was like so much else that comes from the American theatre: it was a very well-made, character-driven play but it wasn’t remotely bold or imaginative in any theatrical sense. That I thought was a great pity and rather a condemnation of the Pulitzer jury.



Colin Firth, Nicholas Hoult in A Single Man

At the pictures, I saw A Single Man, Tom Ford’s realization of the Christopher Isherwood novel of 1964. As Hollywood dramatizations go, this is remarkably faithful to the book, given that the latter is so internalized and reflective. Ford finds a filmic equivalent to it in tone and pace and makes a shrewd choice in casting as the ex-pat English professor Colin Firth, who rewards him by turning in the performance of his career. I haven’t seen the Jeff Bridges hooey that pipped Firth to the best actor Oscar but BAFTA loyally preferred Firth.

Ford’s background in the arty end of fashion shoots provided an irresistible stick with which knee-jerk commentators duly beat him but in truth the movie is much better than that. Indeed, Ford gets just right those things that proper movie directors get right, rather than pouring all his judgment into the look of the thing. The casting is pitch perfect so that Julianne Moore and Nicholas Hoult, each playing a character from the side of the Atlantic opposite to their own, are both absolutely accurate, in the way they move and hold themselves and look at Firth’s George as well as in the technical business of getting the accents true.

Two scenes caught my eye as being pure auteur work: a subtly teasing sequence in which George, who has determined to kill himself, is waylaid but not ultimately detained by a handsome Spanish hustler in a parking lot (a superb exercise in control of dynamics through camera placement and editing) and a little encounter nearby in which George, who has lost his pet dogs as well as his lover in an accident (though one of the dogs is unaccounted for), leans through a woman’s automobile window and, for the longest time, draws deeply through his nose the familiar scent of the dog’s head before observing that such terriers all “smell like buttered toast”. The woman plays her moment of gently swelling concern with exquisite understatement: we shall surely see more of her.


Ewan McGregor, Jim Carrey in I Love You, Phillip Morris

Another gay story – and a rum do altogether – was I Love You, Phillip Morris. Having been given bum information by the cinema box office, I missed the start of this movie and was struggling with what I should make of it when it popped into my head that I had read somewhere that it was a true story (doubtless declared at the movie’s outset), at which point it began to fall into place. A conman tale even more left-field and extravagant than Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can, it takes its time to reach the central plot line which concerns the myriad ways in which our conman tries to keep himself and his lover simultaneously out of jail. A Single Man only got made because Tom Ford could afford to bankroll it himself and this one clearly got made only because Jim Carrey wanted to do it. As it’s never got distribution in the States, he clearly won’t “make that mistake” again, which is a pity and doesn't augur well for other gay-themed projects. I find Carrey’s gurning pretty unwatchable at the best of times, but this movie keeps a lot of that in check and Ewan McGregor’s gentle eponym is a balancing flavour. But it’s a curiosity. Incidentally, a friend observed that Carrey, being the star, always had to be "a top" in the sex scenes but I'm not sure that that has any other than sociological interest ...

I also caught Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland – as with Up, I stopped noticing that it was in 3D almost immediately. It’s suitably Burtonish but, because the casting of Johnny Depp requires the Mad Hatter’s role to be greatly expanded, the movie becomes unbalanced and a bit aimless. I wouldn’t have seen Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang, but that it was the only thing I could find that fitted the space I had left in my day. I wasn’t sure if you were even allowed to buy a ticket if you hadn’t already seen the first McPhee film but it seemed not to matter. Set in an England nearly as fantastical as that of the Hollywood live-action version of 101 Dalmatians, it passes the time amiably enough and, with Emma Thompson scripting as well as playing the nanny, it manages to be tolerably literate and witty. My heart almost stopped to see Maggie Smith gamely making bricks without straw as a mad old woman. (I must have missed or snoozed through the opening credits). Later on, her husband is played by Sam Kelly, rather younger but one of the very few actors who could hold his own in comedy opposite Dame Mags. I spent most of the movie wondering who was the charming and highly accomplished English actress cast as the mother before suddenly twigging that it was the American Maggie Gyllenhaal getting English impeccably right. How small these modern young performers make the world seem.


Tilda Swinton, Flavio Parenti in Io sono l'amore

But the most entrancing movie I saw was I Am Love. It’s a ghastly title but the original Italian, Io sono l’amore, is actually no better. Never mind. Set in Milan, around Sanremo and, rather unexpectedly, in London, it examines a vastly wealthy couturier family plunging into changing times. I remembered reading of an imminent movie that was fictionalising the Zegna dynasty and was interested to look out for it, Ermenegildo Zegna being my favourite designer of shirts. This has to be that movie. When I first visited Milan aged seventeen, I thought it the dullest, ugliest place, inferior even to somewhere like Walsall. But here, its wealthy quarter first seen under snow, the heady quality of what will unfold is quickly established.

Tilda Swinton, who was instrumental in the picture getting made, plays the wife of the man who becomes head of the family during the course of the story. She is Russian rather than Italian and, paradoxically, about the only main character not required to speak English in the course of things. The story concerns relations with her children and the rough diamond friend of her son. The developments and, even more, the atmosphere within which they take place are intoxicatingly compelling. It’s soap of course, but Castile soap. I loved it. And it connected up nicely with the other movie I liked best, A Single Man, because of course the House of Zegna designed for Tom Ford’s Madison Avenue store. Yes, a small world indeed.