Whirling in Noël Coward's vortex

The Vortex by Noël Coward

Rose Theatre, Kingston, Friday 15 February (running until Saturday 2 March)

The jazz hands of 1920s glamour open this play; the wringing hands of Florence and her son Nicky, conscious echoes of Gertrude and Hamlet, wring your heart by the end of it. We are thrust from the wit and frisky joie-de-vivre of the first act into a mortal coil of bitter self-discovery and betrayal, which feels as relevant and shocking now as it must have been in 1924. Noël Coward has an uncanny ability (considering he was only 24 when the play premiered) to stick a dagger into the concerns of age and of youth and expose the fears of us all. The Rose Theatre has put on a production that teases out these real psychological anxieties with brilliant panache, embracing the play's hysteria without ever giving way to gratuitous sentimentalism or melodrama.

Stephen Unwin’s accomplished direction produces virtuosic changes of tone that take the audience hurtling through emotions faster than Scott Joplin’s fingers move over a piano in the Maple Leaf Rag. One minute you’re laughing at light-hearted socialite repartee, the next witnessing an unspoken, heart-jolting revelation that prompts you to interrogate exactly what you were laughing at and how you failed to see the tragic cracks just below the artificial surface of rouge and perfume. The wonderfully Art Deco set from Neil Warmington locates us in the decadence of the age, while reminding us that Coward’s concerns are equally modern. An anachronistic Mick Jagger lips sofa and a broken yellow frame surround the stage to suggest a fragmented, undeniably contemporary world.

Within an excellent cast, David Dawson shines particularly – his Nicky, grappling with probable homosexuality and clandestine cocaine addiction, is brilliantly pitched. He never veers into over-emotive frenzy or contemptible self-pity. You can always perceive a basic moral integrity and elusive rationality that lie buried beneath the addled, insecure exterior. The acting throughout is consummate – with a few minor exceptions, all the actors maintain a superlative control of the shades of grey within their roles, however slight their character may be. James Dreyfus deserves a particular mention for his turn as a bitchy dandy who wafts in and out of scenes with ineffable flair.

‘We are all swirling in a vortex of beastliness’: this is how Nicky characterises his whole experience of life. And when he utters it in such anguished desperation, we feel instinctively that this applies to us just as much as to him and his world. Watching this play acts as an intense reminder of just how threatening that vortex is, just how closely it whirls beneath us and how we must remain vigilant against its magnetic pull. And the Rose's production provides this reminder with such finesse that we cannot help but want to absorb ourselves in Coward’s world, however disquieting it may be.

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Finally in the headlights: Frightened Rabbit's Pedestrian Verse tour

Frightened Rabbit at The Forum, London
Wednesday 13 February, touring the UK until 28 February

Tall white posts, each crossed by three horizontal slats, flank the spartanly spiritual stage. They act as artful metaphors for Frightened Rabbit’s music. When singer Scott Hutchinson puts such raw passion into lyrics like ‘Well I can dip my head in the river/ Cleanse my soul, oh/ I'd still have the stomach of a sinner’ in ‘Holy’, they become mutated Christian crosses, embodying the tension between doubt and faith that runs throughout the new album. And with the panegyric ‘Old Old Fashioned’, on which Hutchinson croons ‘There's a radio in the corner/ It's dying to make a scene/ So give me that soft soft static/ With a human voice underneath’, the posts transform into pylons beautifully transmitting the band’s music, celebrating its amplified energy and its simultaneous old fashioned-ness, its allegiance to their traditional Scottish roots. Frightened Rabbit embody Celtic indie rock at its best, slowly building into anthemic guitar riffs layered with hauntingly honest lyrics.

It is these lyrics that really make Frightened Rabbit a heart-in-mouth kind of band. Hutchinson (also the songwriter) articulates himself through unusual, symbolic, breathtakingly frank depictions of loneliness and anguish. Occasionally some of this intensity is lost in the live performance – surprisingly for a nominally indie rock gig, it was the acoustic songs that had the rawest power. Every word of pain was agonisingly audible. The intricate finger-picking of ‘Poke’, with Hutchinson’s resonant voice intoning wistful ‘oohs’ between verses of exquisite desolation, made me cry (without any poking at my iris…)

But the coarser full-band songs had their own potency, despite a few moments when enthusiastic guitar riffs overwhelmed the finer complexities of lyrical beauty. This was a forceful, crisp and lucid gig, truly worthy of a band now deservedly selling out venues off the back of their first release on a major label with their fourth album, Pedestrian Verse. Tracks from this record were vigorous and robust, but I still think the visceral ache of their second, The Midnight Organ Fight, remains Frightened Rabbit’s best work. It clinches the longed-for condition of an indie rock band – that blurry curtain-opening moment of emotional nakedness when all the horrors of the drunken night before hit you square in the stomach, combined with the ability to face that moment with a musical dignity that makes it all worthwhile.

There was, perhaps inevitably, some of that simple, instinctive emotion missing from the live show. Pedestrian Verse as an album has more of a balance between the brutally personal and the universally contemplative – similarly, the band seem to have a more detached live presence than when I saw them at 2000 Trees festival two years ago. But with that detachment comes musical tightness and an overall coherent eloquence to the set. There is nothing humdrum or prosaic about Frightened Rabbit’s foray into the ‘pedestrian’. Quite the contrary: they have a sinewy power and subtle originality that is thoroughly deserving of the new disciples they will acquire from this landmark tour. The very fact that they deal in ‘not heroic acts of man’ is what paradoxically makes them great – not heroic perhaps, but better for that: discerning, elemental and refreshingly emotionally honest.

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Book launch: protecting the primates at Barbican's conservatory

King Bruno by Paul Glynn

Barbican Conservatory, Wednesday 6^th February

In aid of the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, Sierra Leone

Walking into the Barbican’s conservatory, atmospherically lit to illuminate palm tree fronds and enliven birds of paradise, I could almost convince myself I was in Sierra Leone’s heady, breathing forests, a chimpanzee watching me from the camouflaging shadows. If you’ve been to the conservatory in the daytime, you’ll know that the plants don’t quite succeed in disguising the building’s brutalist concrete architecture – the place is an uncomfortable juxtaposition of organic oasis and urban asceticism. But at night, the ugly linear austerity recedes and the flora flourishes.

A perfect setting, then, for an evening celebrating the work of Sierra Leone’s Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, founded twenty years ago by the then-accountant Bala Amarasekaran. Bala’s adoption of one orphaned chimpanzee lead inexorably to his rescuing myriad more and working tirelessly against the chimpanzee pet and meat trades. King Bruno is Paul Glynn's gentle, honest account of that first adopted chimp. Through Bruno’s eyes, we witness his happy but conflicted life with Bala, his endurance through the terrors of the Sierra Leonean civil war and his flight from the sanctuary into the wild (which has now become the potent stuff of local legend).

A particularly brilliant passage was read at the launch by Aminatta Forna, one of Sierra Leone’s most celebrated writers (her exquisite novel The Memory of Love is an intricate, elegiac lament on the catastrophic trauma wreaked in her country by the civil war). Forna's astute reading brought out all the elements of humour, bemusement and poignancy in the young Bruno’s accidental poo on Bala’s carpet:

He wanted to be human, clean and dainty. And so, when he turned around one day and saw the neat, perfect poo he had left on the carpet, Bruno grunted anxiously.

In the forest, no-one would have minded. In the forest, you went to the toilet anywhere, as long as it wasn’t in your own nest. You could even pick your poo up and throw it around.

Bruno had lived in Bala and Sharmila’s house for nearly a year now, and he had never once seen Bala throw his own poo around. […] Bruno fidgeted. He had to do something about it before Bala returned home. Then he remembered. Upstairs, in a small room, stood a bowl with a puddle of water and a roll of paper beside it. He panted in excitement, dashed up the stairs and grabbed the paper. […]

It was harder than it looked. The roll of toilet paper was big and Bruno’s hands were small. When he wiped at his poo, it just seemed to spread everywhere. But in the end it was gone. The carpet was brown and sticky and piles of brown paper lay everywhere. Bruno clapped and jumped up and down. Bala would be happy.

Bala wasn’t happy.

The book is written for children but it holds just as much appeal for adults - I was captivated by its subtle, elegant, wonderfully humane tone that reminds us just how similar chimps and people really are. Bruno’s view of the world is at once faithfully animalistic and engagingly anthropomorphic – the narrative naturally elicits our empathy but simultaneously divorces us from our blinkered human outlook, reminding us just how contrary our baffling species must seem. This is a hugely important book for raising our awareness of the plight of these animals, with an authentic, sincere appeal to the heart that is more effective than any list of facts about the threats to chimpanzee populations (which are horrifying). King Bruno brings to life a chimpanzee whose voice is as unique and believable as the horse narrating Michael Morpurgo's War Horse. We can only hope Handspring Puppet Company pick it up, marvel at the writing and the beautiful illustrations (also done by the author) and turn it into their next theatrical masterpiece.

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Post script:

Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary’s work has now extended beyond its own boundaries, and the High Commissioner to Sierra Leone announced at the launch that, thanks to Bala’s indefatigable efforts, the forests around Tacugama are to become protected National Park. So hopefully Tacugama will soon be able to release more chimps to join their King Bruno in the knowledge that the wild is a safe place for them to thrive. And in the meantime, thank god that there are self-sacrificing souls like Bala among our truly baffling species.

For more information about Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, see here.
Also, there's a great little Q&A with author Paul Glynn here.

Zero Dark Thirty versus Homeland - film review

Zero Dark Thirty, dir. Kathryn Bigelow

There are clear parallels between Kathryn Bigelow’s new behemoth Zero Dark Thirty and the CIA TV series Homeland. Both pivot around a striking, passionate, slightly crazed female heroine. Both ratchet up the tension with brooding sequences of cog-whirring contemplation followed by explosive action scenes. And both portray CIA life as a melee of exhilarating discoveries, calcifying frustrations, impossible suspicions and excruciating disappointments.

This all makes for compelling viewing, with the caveat that you accept you’re watching a fictionalised account, emphatically not a precise, blow-by-blow representation of undercover operations and the war on terror. It is easy to accept this with Homeland, the audacious, hyperbolic sister of Zero Dark Thirty, but the film must equally be remembered as a fictional entity (albeit based on true events). Zero Dark Thirty is the older sister showing off her superior maturity, with an austere atmosphere that brilliantly blends political gravity, brooding scenes and scintillating storytelling.

Many critics of Zero Dark Thirty seem to have lost sight of its filmic quality in the furore around its perceived endorsement of torture. It should be seen through the prism of its Hollywood incarnation, with the inevitable attendant sensationalism and an agenda that is dramatic as much as political. And once you have seen the film, you’d have to be inhuman to feel entirely unpeturbed by its sickening exposition of a man being waterboarded, abused and forced into a tiny wooden box. The filmmakers may have had unprecedented access to the CIA, which has exacerbated the vitriolic criticism Zero Dark Thirty has attracted, but if information gained through torture did indeed contribute to the assassination of Osama bin Laden, then Bigelow’s depiction of the CIA’s methods is so brutal(ly honest) it cannot but be an implicit condemnation.

The film and the series have different strengths in their revelation of the relentless pursuit of the world’s most wanted men. Homeland has an emotional hook and an explosive momentum that accumulates by virtue of the episodic nature of its medium. It forces us to feel the unyielding pressure on its heroine, Carrie, to destabilise constant terrorist hostility. Zero Dark Thirty does not have the same level of human investment – we never find out about Maya, its heroine, beyond that she’ll go to any extremes to catch her nemesis. The film’s power comes instead from its gripping intensity. It does not shy away from the horrors of American torture, it shows the inexorable, myriad twists that undermine morale at every turn, and finally it depicts the almost uncanny infiltration of bin Laden’s hideout with blistering skill and tension. Bigelow uses edgy camera angles, masterful editing and atmospheric lighting to lead you screaming to a conclusion which you know is coming but which is no less tense and anticipatory for that.

What resonates most in both Homeland and Zero Dark Thirty are the protagonists’ compelling performances and the impact on their personal stability of the terrors they witness. Homeland’s Carrie (a versatile Claire Danes) displays a much more histrionic kind of instability; her manic depression takes her from chin-wobbling lows to boggled-eyed highs and back again in the space of a scene. But as with the programme as a whole, her character feels faintly ridiculous; she gets into inappropriate scrapes, falls in love with the terrorist-come-homeland-hero Brody and veers wildly off course only to be enfolded back into the CIA with barely any questions asked.

We may know less about Maya (the brilliant Jessica Chastain) but this mystery merely serves to augment the impact of our realisation that we are emotionally invested in her plight. Her trauma is subtler, slowly wearing her down in the face of a seemingly impossible task. The film ends with a shot of her climbing into a plane to be liberated from Pakistan after the deed is done; a close-up of her face shows her composure finally cracking, and tears streaming down her face. Zero Dark Thirty may be equivocal in places, but that subtlety makes it ultimately more haunting than its TV equivalent. Both Homeland and Zero Dark Thirty interrogate the Everest-scale uphill struggle against terrorism, but the film leaves the viewer feeling fundamentally more shaken. It asks the plaguing question, what is left when America’s most wanted man has been destroyed? Its implicit answer seems to be bleak: uncertainty, suffering and the demoralising prospect of more hunting, doubting and death.

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Frivolous farce from John Lithgow's magistrate at the National Theatre

The Magistrate

National Theatre, running until Sunday 10^th February

A chorus of pin-striped, face-painted singers quick-step onto the stage. Any audience members innocently expecting a straight farce are catapulted into a play that intersperses Arthur Wing Pinero’s 1855 text with comic musical interludes, brilliantly blurring the line between vaudeville camp and tongue-in-cheek Victorian moralising.

The premise of the play is that the widowed Mrs Posket has lied to her second husband about her age, which has got her into difficulty: if she is only 31 (not her real age of 36), her son by her first marriage could not be 19. Having taken off 5 years from her own age, she must therefore take 5 off his, making him a remarkably horny, debauched 14 year old with an inappropriate penchant for gambling, smoking and sex. And so, hilarity ensues.

Except that hilarity is not always abundant. Pinero’s play feels somewhat dated, and some of the jokes are more obvious than Where’s Wally in a horde of sombre Victorian magistrates. The action is slow to get going, and until John Lithgow is able to let loose as his renegade stepson leads him astray, it is hard to find a character to whom you can really relate.

Lithgow brings a paradoxical modernity to his magistrate that makes his plight that of any contemporary husband who has been reluctantly convinced to break the rules, and must amusingly bluster his way through the consequences. But the other characters fail to break the confines of Pinero's time, and feel slightly rigid and antiquated. Nancy Caroll as Mrs Poskett does elicit some genuine emotion when deliberating her predicament, but her interactions with her son, Cis, inevitably fall into triviality because of Jonathan Coy’s superficial portrayal of a man in a boy’s skin. The acting is of course allowed to be melodramatic - this is a farce after all - but when there is little substance behind the melodrama, it feels prosaic and frivolous.

Katrina Lindsay’s set has a kind of graphic-novel style quirkiness that jars somewhat with the overall sense of a production trying to make you contemplate the state of our society as well as tickle your funny bones. In the NT's London Road, Lindsay's stylised, crude set complemented the Ipswich town it was depicting, but here it needs to be more classy - the scrawled descriptions across the top of each set and general wackiness simply distracts.

Having said that, The Magistrate does make for an enjoyable evening’s entertainment. And despite the criticism levelled against the chorus by some reviewers, I felt they actually enhanced the play. They provide unexpectedly satisfying snippets of song, written by Richard Sisson and Richard Stilgoe, which are in keeping with the farcical nature of Pinero's original but which bring it into the 21^st century with lyrics that provide some of the most comic moments of the night.

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Curious cardboard cut-outs in Philip Pullman's Grimm Tales

Philip Pullman, Grimm Tales for Young and Old, Penguin, 2012

Walking on stage at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, a shock of white hair emanating from his temples, a slight limp to his gait, Philip Pullman could be a character straight out of his own Grimm Tales for Young and Old. And he enthrals even more than they do – his readings held me spellbound, with perfectly-pitched accents creating unforgettable dialogue and the ability to conjure an aura of mystery in just a few suspenseful sentences.

Pullman’s Grimm Tales for Young and Old (out now in hardback) is undoubtedly a skilful example of scholarly and imaginative creative writing. And he is a consummate speaker - he enlightens the audience about his writing and answers questions with wit and sensitivity, while never quite shedding the cloak of affable inscrutability in which he shrouds himself. But there remains for me a question about whether this new collection truly inspires the imagination, whether it speaks to the contemporary reader in a stimulating and relevant way, in the manner of his own award-winning literature.

Pullman’s fascinating introduction to the collection proves his extensive research and his dedicated admiration of the tales and their tellers. And his own tellings are indeed inventive and exquisitely crafted. ‘The Juniper Tree’, which Pullman admits is his own favourite, is also one of mine. It is a story with unusual aesthetic delicacy and a moving, multi-layered narrative. Another, ‘The Three Snake Leaves’, from which he read at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, also has a dramatic intensity that makes it entirely compelling, and there are many tales with moments of memorable elation, horror, poignancy and provocation.

But the plainness of the writing, which Pullman consciously cultivates to harmonise with his concept of the tales’ characters as the ‘little cardboard cut-out figures that come with the toy theatre’, ultimately undermines the power of this book. The same fault can be found in his The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (2010). In it, Pullman similarly remains faithful to his source and evokes The Bible’s austere prose, but thereby creates a rather unsubtle, dull and worthy book. By writing the Grimm stories in language that is concise and economic, he loses the profound, galvanising appeal to one's very sense of humanity that he so superlatively achieves in the His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000). For that series is, in essence, a retelling of the most well-known tale of them all, Genesis’s account of Adam and Eve and the Fall (or, in Pullman’s eyes, the Awakening) of Man.

So I accept the belief Pullman articulated in his talk, that the cut-out nature of the Grimm characters allows the tales to be ‘more gruesome and yet still palatable, rooting them in the reality of terrible social situations and making them into stories’. But as stories, there can still be no comparison between the perils undergone by the Grimm brothers’ human silhouettes and Lyra and Will’s humanising of what the author would see as another kind of fairytale. Which I suppose is a tribute to Pullman himself, to his ability to create the very best kind of story.

At the Queen Elizabeth Hall he said he wrote Grimm Tales for Young and Old because he fears ‘in the splintering of our world that fairytales will be lost’. And I do believe Pullman has continued valuably the enduring, treasured tradition of retelling and reshaping these tales. But it is his own contribution to our splintering world, not with fairytales but with his own stunning novels, that will remain the lasting testament to his brilliance as a storyteller.

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Thrilling 3d in Life of Pi

In the trailer for Life of Pi, you can see a panicked zebra swimming towards you in the claustrophobic confines of a ship’s cabin, a phosphorescent whale soaring out of a luminous green ocean, a tiger striking out at the screen with explosive carnal energy. These moments alone are reason enough to go and see this film in 3D. In Life of Pi, Ang Lee legitimises the use of a cinematic technique that has been maligned as expensive, distracting and artificial – 3D runs the risk of being so hyperrealised that it ironically prevents you from immersing yourself in a film's fictional world. Instead, it systematically jolts you into remembering, by its very almost-realness, that that world is not real. But at its best, 3D has the power to make you want to plunge into the realm behind the screen, and this is what Lee achieves with such splendour.

Occasionally the 3D in Life of Pi does jar – once or twice Lee falls prey to the temptation to make the audience believe something is poking straight out of the screen at them, which immediately feels gimmicky and false. When you are looking down the length of a pole Pi uses as a weapon against the tiger, the sensation is more like being anachronistically plonked in a Disney World 3D simulator, flailing your arms impotently and failing to convince yourself that the object you see on screen is actually tangible in your hand.

But for the most part, 3D beautifully enhances an already beautiful film. The opening credit sequence alone is enough to convince – every animal, from powder-pink flamingos on a rippling lake to cantankerous orangutans reposing in the trees, feels enticingly within touching distance. You can almost smell the intoxicating odours of the Pondicherry zoo that Pi's family call home. And the stunning scenescapes – raging oceanic storms, flat expanses of sea reflecting smoky ochre clouds, an inconsequential lifeboat bobbing below a silvery hoard of flying fish – all feel so exquisite precisely because they are realised in 3D.

The feeling of being immersed in this film is not simply due to the 3D effects, however. It must also be attributed to Suraj Sharma, the debut Indian actor who plays Pi with such warmth and authenticity, and who makes you believe every hardship of his 227 days stranded at sea with just a hostile tiger for company. And the tiger itself must also be acknowledged as an astounding CGI creation that absolutely looks real, from each menacing growl to every quivering strand of fur. What feels truly miraculous is that the relationship between Pi and this tiger (with whom Sharma could not, of course, physically act) is utterly believable – the evolution from the tiger’s primal instinct to eat Pi to boy and beast forming a convincing, peaceful relationship driven by mutual desperation, without artificial anthropomorphism of the tiger or a saccharine contrivance of the plot, gives this film its heart.

Yet although I appreciated Life of Pi for its visual sumptuousness, its captivating narrative and its human warmth, I have not been left with a resounding sense of being challenged or provoked. Lee has clear messages to convey: stay true to yourself in the face of adversity; do not give up hope; never fail to say a proper goodbye to those you love. But this very clarity ironically undermines the film’s power; I don’t want these messages spelt out for me by a contrived expositional frame story, in which a writer is soliciting (and painstakingly, patronisingly explaining back to us) the adult Pi’s story. This is not the novel, it is the film, and I wish Lee had had enough faith in his medium and in his audience to let his own incredible visual and storytelling prowess do the work in a much more subtle and emotionally true way.

But absolutely go and see this film. It will make you believe in the true power of storytelling and allow you to indulge in a visual and technological feast. It may even leave you with the strange sensation that you would like to befriend a wild, resplendent, elusive and strangely comforting adult Bengal tiger.

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