"It's only words..."

"It's only words -- unless they're true."

~ David Mamet, from his play Speed the Plow

"Good theatre gives you a significant cheat code for accessing human thinking and behaviour"

"The most important rule of theatre [says an old theatre adage] is that the king is never played by the actor playing the king, but by all the other actors around him.'...
    "The greatest playwrights know everything about human nature not because they have some mystical, clairvoyant insight into you or me, but due to the structural constraints of their format: in order for tragedies to work — for problems, decisions, and plot twists to be accepted by the audience as true — the writers must learn to tweak the interactions between the characters until those seem logical and believable to all. Accessing good theatre gives you a significant cheat code for accessing human thinking and behaviour. Read Sophocles, watch Laurence Olivier’s Shakespeare adaptations, see Molière or Chekhov on stage, enter a book club debate about Brecht, David Mamet or Yasmina Reza, and you will experience many 'Aha!' moments that will be assets in your subsequent life. 

    "You will also, of course, feel aesthetic pleasure and what Aristotle calls catharsis* ... which is why most people engage with plays in the first place. The great knowledge that you will be gifted is just the bonus."

~ Anna Gát from her post 'Tyranny as Tragedy'

* Increasingly, the interpretation of catharsis as "intellectual clarification" rather than the more commonly held "emotional purgation" has gained recognition in describing the effect of catharsis. 

"Without doubt 'katharsis' [in the original Greek spelling] is the most celebrated concept in the entire field of literary criticism" says Leon Golden, yet Aristotle, in The Poetics, his work on aesthetics, "provided neither a definition nor a commentary for this key term". "That katharsis is meant to represent some form of moral [or emotional] purification has been held [widely] ... [but] there is not a single word in The Poetics itself to justify it." Golden argues that what Aristotle meant by the word is "the intellectual pleasure of learning" — and so "'katharsis' in The Poetics should not be translated as 'purgation' or 'purification' but, rather, as 'intellectual clarification'."

"It's wanting to know that makes us matter."

"It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in."

~ Tom Stoppard, from his play Arcadia

 

"The English ... value liberty because it is liberty."

"The English invented personal liberty without any theories about it. They value liberty because it is liberty."

~ Alexander Herzen, in Tom Stoppard's 2002 play The Coast of Utopia

The Assemblywomen: The Ancient Greek Play That Mercilessly (and Hilariously) Mocked Socialism and Democracy

Pic from Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations for Aristophanes's 'Lysistrata'

"We hear a lot of talk these days about 'late-stage capitalism,' but in reading [the hilarious classical Greek playwright] Aristophanes one gets the sense that we have much more to fear from Late-Stage Democracy, a state in which individuals see it as perfectly proper to separate people from their property and natural rights so long as enough people approve of the measure.
    "Fortunately, unlike the Ancient Athenians, we have the benefit of teachings from individuals like John Locke, Adam Smith, and Ayn Rand that show the folly of such thinking. Whether we choose to heed them is up to us.
    "Either way, Aristophanes shows us that humour can be found even during the collapse of civilisation and common sense."

~ Jon Miltimore, from his post 'The Assemblywomen: The Ancient Greek Play That Mercilessly (and Hilariously) Mocked Socialism and Democracy'

"This is a letter of hate..."

 

"This is a letter of hate. It is for you my countrymen, 

I mean those men of my country who have defiled it. 

The men with manic fingers leading the sightless, 

feeble, betrayed body of my country to its death. 

You are its murderers, and there's little left in my own brain but the thoughts of murder for you." 

 ~ the original angry young man, playwright John Osborne, back when it was still      legal to hate (from The Tribune, 18 August, 1961)

 

If you go down to the woods today, you might hear a bit of te reo #PopUpGlobe

Pic by Stuff

In Shakespeare's outrageous comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream batshit crazy things happen to serious young things who have escaped the city's strictures for the unfamiliar and faintly dangerous delights of the forest, wherein they are made sport of by those who have born and grew up there: by a race of fairies invisible to the erstwhile city-dwellers whose puckish ways, however, are not.

They, and every receptive audience for the Dream (if the director is doing it right), are always in for a big surprise.

So too, it has been reported, were many of the audience for the Auckland Pop-Up Globe's production over the weekend -- surprised to discover that the fairies, the original inhabitants of the play's strange lands, were represented in this production by two Maori warriors and a wahine speaking in te reo. According to the Herald, who have clearly been simply trawling Facebook to muster controversy where there is none:

Online reviews left about the Pop-up Globe performance said the move was 'disrespectful' and 'bastardising' Shakespeare and confusing for audiences. Other theatre goers have made their equally damning views direct to the venue's management...
One person wrote on social media the use of Te Reo in A Midsummer Night's Dream "spoilt what otherwise was a thoroughly entertaining and professional production." In a Facebook review, another disgruntled theatre goer said the decision to have the fairies speak in Maori meant only two people at his count could understand what was being said.

The reporter does not say how many in total were included in that count, but she is at pains to link "the debate about the use of Te Reo Maori" in the production at the Globe with "the debate about the use of Te Reo Maori" elsewhere which, she says, "has flared several times in recent months ... [including] former National Party leader Don Brash clashing with RNZ's Kim Hill on her Saturday morning show over the public broadcaster's use of Maori greetings on air."

Linking the two "debates" seems to be both unhelpful and disingenuous. Because as every theatre-goer knows, it is possible to destroy a play with errant direction even if you support the director's intentions.

But as everyone leaving the play on Saturday night in tears of laughter could attest, this is not a play that has been destroyed. Far from it. In this setting, and with this directorial choice, the play comes alive.

As it happens, I too was at the show on Saturday night, and I was one of those wiping my eyes of tears when I left (and my Saturday-night-best of blood, but that, dear readers, is another story). And far from being surprised by the speaking of a strange tongue for 20% of the time, I was fully prepared for it -- indeed, I was coming back for a second time having enjoyed the first performance so much. And I will be back again for more before this season ends.

Because, what the reporter fails to point out is one very salient fact: this is a damned fine show! It is truly world class. The performances are stellar, the setting is superb, and the choice to use tangata whenua to represent the forest's native fairy folk is as thematically sound as it is dramatically stunning. Who better to represent the original forest folk than our original forest folk? And that choice being made, why wouldn't you ask them to speak in that original language? If it adds an air of unreality, then that is precisely what the Dream should do!

But there is much of it we can't understand? And so what -- there is much in Shakespeare's own English that is difficult for many to parse, and we don't usually play the Bard with subtitles. And there is much more of Shakespeare's original text that is cut in every production in order to reduce the show time -- a chainsaw being taken to the text that in some cases will see it reduced by as much as half!

But, comes the response, courtesy of the Herald's Facebook trawl, "This [is] silly because the fairies revealed key plot points." And indeed they do -- and apparently the Herald's erstwhile online reviewer is unfamiliar with the art of mime, which these actors speaking te reo use superbly to tell the story. The spells they cast over the various players could not be more clear if they were telegraphed; and if the reasons for their playfulness are not always clear, let me assure you that they are far more so than in many an opera sung in an unfamiliar European tongue. There are enough signposts in this Dream to understand where we are being led, both by mime and by the familiar-enough words of te reo each of us do know that pepper the text.

And as the play's director and Pop-Up Globe founder Miles Gregory explains (the man without whom, it should be remembered, this exciting theatre concept would not even exist),

 having the fairies speak Te Reo was a long-held dream because in Shakespeare's original work the fairies were written as communicating in a language unfamiliar to the other characters. "So to me, having the fairies speak another language enhances the storytelling and provides a fresh and exciting take on a play that is extremely well known."

And so it is, and so it does. That the storytelling is done in such a setting by such consummate performers only adds to the excitement.

Reuben Butler's Puck (played as a Maori warrior you truly believe could girdle the globe) is outstanding, he steals the show (as every good Puck should); Jason Te Kare's Oberon provides deft support; and if Edward Peni's Titania is more statuesque than seductive, then (s)he comes into her own when seduced herself by Nick Bottom's ass. (If you don't know, then you really must come along and find out!)

For me, the bitching, and the reportage about it, are just so much colourless carping. As an amused Puck says after watching the hilarious knock-down drag-out fight that climaxes Act III,

"Pakeha!" 

On Saturday night, that one beautifully-timed word brought the house down.
.

Quote of the Day: On Dante v Shakespeare

"Dante made great poetry out of a great philosophy of life; and that Shakespeare made equally great poetry out of an inferior and muddled philosophy of life… Dante's pattern is the richer by a serious philosophy, and Shakespeare's the poorer by a rag-bag philosophy, [but] I should say that [as a writer skilled in the two arts of poetry and drama] Shakespeare's pattern was more complex, and his problem more difficult, than Dante’s.”

~ T.S. Eliot, writing in G. Wilson Knight’s The Wheel of Fire

.

James Wallace is at the theatre

"Eight years in the making, premiering last night, Sam Brooks’ new black comedy A Rich Man confronts us with an unusually complex menage a quatre confronting, and evading, some difficult choices about the future and their past. ...

"Slowly, the story is revealed. It might shock. The ghost, or at least the memory, of a recently convicted arts patron seems to hang over the tale. “When I first wrote it,” says Brook, “it felt like it was too soon, but I think the arts community is finally ready to have these conversations about exploitation, complicity, and what silence costs the most vulnerable people in our society.” (Though do note the play’s disclaimer: “This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.”)

"This is people behaving badly. All of them."

~ REVIEW AT 13th Floor: A Rich Man – by Sam Brooks: Old Folks Association: 5-9 August (13th Floor Theatre Review)

Shakespeare at The Globe!

 

By the way, if you want to understand where modern theatre, and even modern drama, were born – or just to have a great night/afternoon/evening out – then get ye down to a small carpark at the back of Queen Street, where the world’s first and only replica of Shakespeare’s Second Globe Theatre has just ‘popped up.’*

It’s called The Pop-Up Globe, logically: a full-scale, temporary working replica of the Second Globe Theatre wherein so many of Shakespeare’s finest plays were born and raised and worked into maturity.

“Shakespeare in the space for which it was written.”

And it’s an amazing space, so intimate that you’re part of all the action; the stage itself so vast that it all but fills the interior atrium, leaving just enough space for ‘groundlings’ to interact with the performers; the performances themselves so vital (the performers themselves being energised by the place) that you don’t want to miss even a heartbeat.

Not just enjoyable: you leave enjoying the plays in a whole new light, not as the dreary sops to propriety you might have thought from your schoolroom introduction, but as profound, earthy, entertaining wonders of drama.

So this is really not any kind of review. It’s simply unabashed praise for a great conception realised magnificently well.

You have until 24^th April to enjoy eight of The Bard’s greatest delivered in the manner he intended. There’s nothing else like it. Don’t miss out.

If you’re in Auckland, go. If you’re not in Auckland, then get here so you can go.

You only get the chance once every four-hundred years.

---

* The Globe Theatre reconstruction in London is of the First Globe, the larger theatre that burned down to be replaced by the Second, more intimate, Globe – a very different size and shape to the first one.

Simon O'Neill—When a Cover-Up Is a Good Thing!

If you’ve never experienced opera before then hang your head in shame, then your very best starting opera is Tosca, that “shabby little shocker” whose powerful score and rich drama have thrilled audiences. So opera novices should be thrilled to know that is being given this month and next in Auckland and Wellington respectively.
   Leading man in the production is NZ's international opera star Simon O'Neill, back from conquering the world and soprano’s hearts, who talks to Lindsay Perigo about life, singing, and how to kiss women properly on stage. Listen closely…

---

Tenor Simon O'Neill loves coming back to Wellington. He did the Honours year of his music degree here, studying with the iconic Emily Mair, who, "along with my Aunt Eileen," is "my favourite person in Wellington." He says as a cultural hub, "Courtenay Place is second to none in the Southern Hemisphere." He's rapt about the "rehabilitation" of St James Theatre, where he'll be performing as Mario Cavaradossi in Puccini's Tosca from October 10-17, with what he calls "an A-Grade cast." (The opera opens in Auckland a week earlier.)

At 43, O'Neill is among the world's top ten dramatic tenors (“dramatic” being a formal sub-category of tenor, denoting a voice on the heavier, darker side of the spectrum), and in his own estimation among the top five when it comes to his specialty repertoire, German music of the late Romantic period (i.e., Wagner). Arguably he's as good as his pal and mentor, Domingo, only not as famous. Yet.

He hesitates to rank himself equal to his idol, and points out that in any event, where fame is concerned, times have changed. Recordings are what used to get an artist out there, but they're no longer being produced in such quantity as they were in Placido’s heyday; now "it's a struggle to get on Spotify." He does have a solo album out and will be doing another later in the year—but if these don't get him on magazine covers around the world, he's not worried. He loves the adulation he already enjoys; loves getting reviews that say things like, “As Otello, New Zealand tenor Simon O’Neill is tireless and thrilling”; “This is a reading of enormous panache, considerable vocal nuance and some of the most exciting top notes you are likely to hear on an operatic stage today”; and “I’ve never heard so many of the words in a live performance of the role.” He loves being hailed as “the most complete Otello since Domingo," not to mention "a Wagnerian of the first order." But even more, he loves being hailed as "Dad" by Tom, Grace and Violet. "Doesn't matter where I am in the world, thanks to technology I have breakfast with my wife and children every day. And the kids do their piano practice with me on their Ipads next to the piano!"

His path to the top was rough. Starting out as a baritone, O'Neill decided at a certain point to upgrade himself to tenor. The initial results weren't pretty. "I became what we now call a 'bari-tenor' at 24; by 26 my voice was in shreds. It fell apart in a very public way. I was doing La Boheme in Christchurch, but I couldn't get through it. We had to cancel the whole season. I was fired. I had to go home, and then to hospital."

What was the problem?

"I hadn't learned to 'cover' through the passaggio."

??!!

Well, however arcane that may sound, in serious singing it's a big deal. The passaggio is the transition between a singer's lower and middle, and middle and upper, registers. It's the latter "passage" that is relevant here—if a tenor doesn't modify his voice placement (‘cover’ it, as opposed to keeping it ‘open’) as he navigates from middle to upper, usually around the F-sharp mark, he'll end up in major strife. O'Neill has very stern advice for youngsters hoping for a singing career: that they learn from his experience. "If you haven't got your technique organised by your mid-to-late twenties, your voice is going to fall away." He reminds them of another of his idols, Giuseppe di Stefano, to whom this infamously happened, "singing all the way up to a High C without putting the 'cover' on. You can get away with it when you're young, and as brilliant as Di Stefano, but it's not what you'd do if you want a long career. My ideal is to be very, very disciplined in the passaggio area." He cites Carlo Bergonzi, Jussi Bjoerling (“my favourite Cavaradossi”), Mario Lanza and Luciano Pavarotti as master-coverers—especially Pavarotti, with whom he studied, who can be seen demonstrating the difference between a covered and uncovered tone on YouTube:

And here is Mario Lanza, covering on the fourth note of each of his arpeggios:

Still, O’Neill is a committed advocate of the view that such questions of technique are but a means to an end—the communication of emotion. To sit in on one of the master classes he conducts at Victoria University's School of Music is to hear him repeatedly admonish the young aspirants to live the meaning of the words they are singing. I observe to him that some of them seem to find this exhortation novel, strange and even alien, and ask if he agrees that too many—not all, but too many—sound like homogenised outcomes of a factory production line.

I do agree with that. I'd like not to agree, but I do. It’s not that they don’t have top-notch teachers—they do—but somehow ‘generic' has become a sort of 'go-to' place. Everyone all the same. Whereas what we're looking for is something special. Not just a pretty voice—not even a pretty voice, perhaps—but that extra something. And even more than that. Not only the talent, but the mind and the drive and the work ethic. Know your game. Bone up on the greats who’ve gone before. Know the commitment required and go for it. Talent alone is not enough. Our great rugby No.10 can kick spectacular goals, to be sure, and he clearly has a unique talent for it ... but he does as well as he does with that talent only because he studies and practises. Endlessly!

Those not willing to go all-out, he advises, should get some other day job. "Love the music, join the chorus, sing in a choir by all means—but go and get a B.Com!"

Returning to his upcoming appearance in Tosca, I remind him of the diva who threw herself off the parapet as is required at the end of the opera only to reappear several times thanks to a trampoline some miscreant stage hands had placed below. "I don't want to alert the work and safety people at the Beehive about our production, but let me just say our Tosca [Irish diva Orla Boylan] is having to learn to stunt-jump." And the kisses in this sizzler are not mere "stage kisses" either! O’Neill is genuinely enthusiastic about this production, his co-stars and the standard of opera emanating from New Zealand generally. “The flair, passion and imagination it should have—it’s all there! World class.”

Simon O'Neill, Wagner specialist, and Lindsay Perigo, Wagner-despiser, have a running gag where I say to him, "Your Wagner is great, dear—how I'd love to hear you sing some music at some point!" He responds with a regulation groan and a forlorn fantasy that he might have brought me to the cusp of enlightenment. As this conversation closes, I revive the gag, telling him how much I'm looking forward to hearing him perform Puccini, one of the greatest writers of music—one of the most irresistible melody-spinners—of them all. And I truly am. The boy from Ashburton who had to flee Christchurch for want of a cover-up but then found one and conquered the world, will assuredly pull off a Cavaradossi that would do Di Stefano, Pavarotti, Domingo, Bjoerling, Lanza et al—the titans who inspired him into this near-impossible lark in the first place—proud.

---

Lindsay Perigo is a former television newsreader and interviewer, a present-day professional voice coach, an opera buff and capital music reviewer for Wellington’s Capital magazine, and the author of Total Passion for the Total Height and The One Tenor: A Salute to Mario Lanza (with foreword by Simon O’Neill).
    He can be found at his blog, SOLO for Sense of Life Objectivists, his website LindsayPerigo.Com, and even—on supremely odd occasions—at Facebook. Make the most of that.

Quote of the day: On responding to Wagner

“… opera audiences … are responding to the heightened atmosphere
of the music-dramas which, as Thomas Mann put it, “implies that the
highest and best available to man is a life cast in the heroic mould.’”
- Simon Williams, Wagner and the Romantic Hero

• HERALD: ‘Concert review: Tristan und Isolde, Auckland Town Hall’
• HERALD: 'The agony and the ecstacy'

Tristan & Isolde’s Prelude

Wagner’s thrilling Tristan and Isolde is being performed in Auckland on Saturday. This is the second post getting ready for the great event!

So Wagner takes his Tristan Chord, that single chord that changed music forever, and then in the opera’s prelude – the twelve minutes or so of music before the drama starts – he tells the opera’s story in music alone.

True story.

The chord is built on the tension between two impossibly star-crossed lovers – excuse me, between two chords that shouldn’t go together that, when they do are themselves transformed – a tension and release played out over the prelude that presages the opera to come.

There’s nothing else like it in music. And it doesn’t get resolved for another four-and-a-half hours. Either musically, or dramatically.

The edge of your seat is the place to be.

Actress: Happy birthday mass murderer

Over the weekend leading actress Robyn Malcolm burst into tweet to wish, apparently without irony, a happy birthday to Lenin.

Lenin, for those who don’t know, was the Bolshevik who snatched a good revolution away from the Russian people before going on to murder, starve and impoverish several million of the poor bastards, and set up the state apparatus which killed millions more.

I’m sure Robyn knows that.

I’m sure she knows what it was like living under communist rule.

Mind you, she could be just another dumb Barbie unaware of what their favourite mass murders got up to. Or she could just be trying to drum up controversy to help publicise the new play in which she stars, on a somewhat related subject.

Which worked.

Here’s a cartoon by Nick Kim to jog your memory about Berlin-Wall era communism:

Christmas funnies [updated]

While Australian pants are in a knot over a suggestive Toyota ad, tits are all a’tangle locally over a simple billboard image outside a church.

The church is St Mathews in the City, over the road from the casino. I’ve got to say, good on them.  I’m not their target market, but I laughed when I saw it. I think they pinched the punchline from the screamingly funny panto Christ Almighty!, currently running just around the block from the church, but it’s funny—and what’s wrong with that?

And if you titter at this, then you’'ll laugh yourself stupid at Christ Almighty! If you get a chance, head along. Boating “an abused donkey, an alcoholic archangel, a shepherd who fancies both sheep and angels (angels have needs too),” an inadequate husband and an innkeeper keen to make a buck, it’s bound to tickle your funny bone—if you’ve got one. And add the Sexy Recession Cabaret to another evening’s revels. You’ll have a ball at both, I guarantee it.

  

But be quick, both finish soon.

(DISCLAIMER: Unlike David Farrar’s occasional theatre promotions, these plugs are not based on being given free tickets—sadly—but because thee shows are bloody good. So get out there and enjoy them!)

UPDATE: From the unintentionally-funny file (or at least I hope it’s unintentional) here’s a song from (shudder) Bob Dylan’s new Christmas album.

Friends working hard

I love seeing what creative friends have been up to.

• Playwright Vanessa Rhodes has a new play that opened last night at Wellington’s Circa Theatre, ‘Where Are You My Only One,’ billed as “a bittersweet comedy for anyone with a romantic streak: -- an unconventional love story between a secretary from the heart of Moscow with a mother who would try the patience of a saint, and a lonely Waikato farmer whose wife has left him for another bloke.  It looks like a lot of fun:
  

• Painter friend Mark Wooller’s been working hard, and it was fun hearing about his new work when he call in on Friday.  Unfortunately, you can’t see any of it at either his blog or his website.  Yet.
  
• And Whangarei clay artist Helen Hughes has been busy too, working on a new series of her wonderfully small exuberant dancing figures.  I was lucky to be presented with this one.  (I fear my quick photos don’t do her justice.)

 

I love seeing what creative friends have been up to.

Oh, and I’ve been working on a couple of things myself – here’s one, for a site in Mt Eden:

Henry V: Act III, Scene I (excerpt) - Shakespeare

Courage personified:

In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height.

Beer O'Clock: Bill Shakespeare & beer

                        

A more contemplative Beer O'Clock for you this avo.  "Wot's 'contemplative' mean?" you ask?  If you do have to ask, let me warn you this post is probably not for you.

This week we celebrate the connection between beer and Bill Shakespeare.  If you ask this time, "Wot connection?" then this post is very definitely worth pursuing.  You see, according to new friend George Light (who writes at the NeverMind Aesthetic blog), your basic garden ale was "the little drink that made the glories of the English stage possible."

Without beer, no Bill (not least because his father was an official ale-taster, which meant sitting around in leather keks to test the quality of beer).  So not only no beer, no Bill - it also turns out that without Bill, no beer. 

You see, Elizabethan pubs hosted entertainment for the same reason that today's pubs host karaoke: because it pulled in the punters.  The strolling players of Will Shakespeare's troupe performed the same function then that gigging guitarists do today: and it was William Shakespeare who wrote the very best material for those players.  It was Shakespeare's stuff that brought in the punters that allowed the world's first commercial brewers to prosper.

All  hail The Bard!

If this astonishes those of you who take their theatrical performances only with "a glass of wheet ween, darling,"' then let George tease out the historical implications of all this for you. Theatre began, he says, "as a physical extensions of drinking establishments, with inn-yards being utilised as the first semi-permanent sites of theatre..."

Turns out William Shakespeare made of a lot of early brewers very happy.  And turns out today's theatre-goers have more to thank yesteryear's ale drinkers than they might realise.

This weekend, raise a glass to old Bill --  and to learn much, much more about beer, The Bard, and the Elizabethan ale and beer wars, download and consume George Light's 'Beer & the Bard' here [pdf].  "For a quart of ale is a dish for a King!" as the Bard himself once said.  And as his own King Henry said ... "I would give all my fame for a pot of ale." A very wise king indeed.

'Life' magazine Dream House, 1997 - John Rattenbury

An exterior view (above) of 1997's 'Life' magazine Dream House by architect John Rattenbury, who worked for many years with Frank Lloyd Wright. You can see much more information on this house here, including plans, specifications, and many,many more views.

Strangely enough, Rattenbury's childhood -- or, at least, an important incident in his childhood -- is the subject of a play by Terence Rattigan, one of my favourite playwrights, currently being revived in London's West End. Full story here.