For some reason, colours always seem happiest working with David Hockney. Here's a small, room-sized fusion of Renaissance Florence, Bruges and
Ghent he built for a BBC Omnibus in 2003 because television was also his thing. I'm surprised to find I've not written
about him before on here, because I think about Hockney a lot. And probably what I think about most often is his discovery – I don't think that's too
strong a word – chronicled – I don't think that's too strong a word
either – in this programme. Art as Science as Art, it's a typically beautiful piece of thinking, and a brilliant watch.
Studying the accuracy with which Renaissance painters represented
the play of light on a suit of armour or a chandelier, despite the fact
no naked
eye could stay still enough to capture the same gleam twice – and inspired by the perceived similarity of Ingre's line when turning out small
portraits of English tourists in 1812 to Warhol's tracing of old
photographs over a century later, despite the former predating the actual invention of photography – Hockney meticulously deduces that the reason why "from about 1500 to 1860 you never see a badly done basket" is not, as had been assumed previously, that everyone just suddenly got better at drawing, but rather that artists had been using camera obscura and – before the perfection of those lenses – convex or "burning" mirrors to transform the three-dimensional image in front of them into a two-dimensional, reversed projection that can be accurately traced. I think too about the scorn with which Art Critics greeted this theory, and I think about Hockney's calm counter-argument: then why are all the people in these paintings left-handed?
For this and many other reasons, he was my favourite living artist. Until today. I really loved you, David Hockney. Thanks for getting me back on the blog.
Of course, I'm biased. But I think my mate Matthew Woodcock (Monster Hunters co-creator, "Roy Steel", and former Tweed Avenger of Mitre Square before the London Dungeons started giving us all scripts) has produced a genuine podcast Masterpiece in The Divide. Without giving too much away – and there is SO MUCH to give away – his new, twelve-part Cold War beast, is John Le Carré meets Philip K. Dick, with new episodes out every Friday, atmosphere you could cut with a piano wire, and me popping up all over the show as louche para-intelligence panjandrum Charles "A bastard for a boss can be quite the motivator" Spooner. Everyone involved has done incredible work on it so I won't mention any of them because I want you to stop reading this immediately and start catching up with it NOW: Here, look what a lovely length the episodes are...
Power through the first four if you can for a NEXT LEVEL TWIST, and then bask in the even-nexter levelness of episode five...
And then enjoy the wait. Cool some water, maybe, invite some friends round whatever you cooled that water with and talk and about it while you wait. Like! Subscribe! Sorry, I'm excited. I honestly reckon you'll be hooked though, I'm really proud to be involved, I've just shed a week-long fever, and you know how long it normally takes me to plug stuff. Here's another Grand Panjandrum...
"... there have been preliminary talks and various plans about a Gaza seaport..."
So that's what I needed to get back on the blog, it turns out. Hope.
I mean, sure, instagram stories are great and everything (and don't worry, I'll post soundbites below) but this interview is, if anything, even more useful than a bond-dissolving Niagra Falls of screaming trauma: a gripping, followable, and humanely optimistic account of – for want
of a better phrase – what the fuck is going on and, more pertinently, what the fuck just happened. I mean, Trump?! Peace?! HIM??? It could easily be played in History classrooms for years to come, unless of course it turns out Israeli peace negotiator and self-confessed peacenik Gershon Baskin is just making it all up, but I don't know... he's been doing this for forty-seven years. He definitely knows things. I know. Someone who actually KNOWS things.
"I brought an agreement from Hamas, to do what we're doing today, back in September 2024. And I got it from Hamas in writing, in Arabic and in English, and in voice message. And no one on the Israeli side would listen. In fact, the head of the negotiations in Israel told me: 'It's a great deal. But the Prime Minister refuses to end the war.' I went to Qatar and presented it to them, it was with the Egyptians, it got to the desk of President Biden. But it got no traction."
But Biden, unlike Trump, didn't have property interests in Qatar which might get upset by Netanyahu's later attack on Doha. Nor, it seems, did Biden have real estate mogul Steve Witkoff as a United States envoy:
"Since the Arab Spring, the main base of operation is Istanbul... (Turkish Intelligence Chief) İbrahim Kalın, who's a good friend of (Turkish President) Erdogan, who's a good friend of Donald Trump, and of Steve Witkoff, they got him on the phone and said: 'Ibrahim, we need you to lock Hamas into this deal.' and the Turks – together with the Egyptians and the Qataris – strong-armed Hamas. And Sharm El Sheikh happened."
And, on Trump's horrific homefront, if you haven't yet checked out Portlanders in inflatable animal costumes standing up to ICE, I of course recommend you do so, but what I really haven't been able to get out of my head immediately previous to this Peace is Josh Johnson on The Daily Show brilliantly noting how much Trump's started talking about not getting into Heaven. Where is it now... Oh yeah! Ghislaine Maxwell! Still, as distractions go, I mean, Peace is definitely an improvement.
"I want to try and get into Heaven, if possible. I hear I'm not doing so well." Actual quote.
Although I'd seen and shared photos, I had no idea when I wrote this post back back in 2022, that actual footage might exist of Charles' career at Footlights. Not a hope. But here it is. And, while not a fake, the King's material does share Ai's hallmark of not remotely understanding what a joke is, but prolifically turning something out anyway. As I head off now back to Square One to join the thousands who have faced the Unfightable Unknown of a first night Doing Edinburgh, all previous plaudits potentially worthless – show starts in an hour, TICKETS HERE – may we all find comfort today in the following baffled silence...
I wonder if we could get him to revisit his bagpipe bit.
Happy Hallow, as I guess today is! Above is not a picture of Hallowe'en. I have not been working here over Hallowe'en. God knows what's happened to the poor, brave souls who are. The work WhatsApp currently reads like the transcription of a black box. Lois has lost a finger, and I'm writing this on the train to York. I only hope they forgive my abandoning them.
“Why, to the North Po- to Whitechap- to London Bridge, of course! This is the Polar Exp- the Ten Bell- the Star Inn!”
When my job as a conductor on the Mid-Norfolk Polar Express ended in December, I knew I wanted the New Year to be, above all else, one in which I continued to play people who carry a hurricane lamp. No, I wanted to continue doing improvisation-friendly, site-specific shift work with a regular band of friends as I wrote last post, and the London Bridge Experience was my first themepunk gig of 2024. (I am committed to trying to make "themepunk" a thing. Sorry, it's my blog.)
London Bridge! History!
It was a return to Tooley Street, and to reading on the floor between shows, and writing your own script if you wanted to just as the London Dungeon had let you do when it was the rival across the road. It was also a return to painting myself a better jawline and cheekbones.
Look at this dashing rake! Who needs appetite supressants? Compare the portrait above taken when I started work at the LBE this February, to one below of me posing next to a stuffed tapir in Bedlam at the Dungeons in 2007, and you’ll see full rejuvenation was achieved. The dead don't age (although my phones seem to have got worse).
The LBE used some of the pumped odours too – and you know what that does to a pysche – and even some of the tunes: ducking out of Fleshmongers, past the giant spiders and through the labyrinth of killer clowns to check on my microwaved Shanghai rice in the green room, I’d hear the same plainsong which used to play on the steps to the boat ride a decade and a half ago…
There were differences too, of course: old Horror posters on the wall as you enter, which made me feel more at home than ever, real swords and a fake Viking longboat, chainsaws, Romans, a wall of broken dolls, and the fact this place is genuinely underground (I turned my flash on one day, and you don’t get gastropodinous limestone arteries like this in County Hall...)
Everyone there works their arse off as well, like they grew up through Covid or something. Physically, verbally, chemically, no two actors share a superpower. I think it’s the only job on which I’ve lost my voice – bloody Vikings – which is another reason I've been taking it a bit easier. so, okay, the dead do age. But, readers... work with people who work their arse off. I don't mean losing a finger. I mean, say: okay, between bouts of bursting through a blood-drenched shower curtain, for example, Sam's at his laptop in the green room, putting together something like this beautifully simple, one-shot unnerver below. Enjoy! There’s Jess and Preston in the bushes too. God, I hope they're okay.
"So, Art is something which is made when you use a material to change something... but it helps people to consider the Art which is in front of them if it is grouped with another set of Art, and it's very difficult to consider Art in isolation from other Art..."
Born Yesterday has a great format: two twenty-four-hour-old clones of the hosts ask two guests to explain the world in terms of the only three things they've yet had time to learn about. Alexander Bennet and Andy Barr are its perfect hosts, digging down in just the right spots, and presenting perfectly packaged summaries, so no matter how a guest chooses to play it – as hilarious disruptor or dweebish stickler – it's almost impossible not to be entertaining. (Like Taskmaster.) As evidence, I'd like to submit this episode, in which I'm dropped in alongside Andrea Hubert (I'll let you decide which is which) to explain such topics as Cumbria and the concept of "The Ends Justifying the Means" with only Popeye, a Hog-roast, and Birmingham New Street Station as points of reference. Other topics also emerge during the episode, such as animal cruelty in early cinema, Insults, Joy, and whether or not – according to the mathematics of decapitation – Bradley Cooper's nose in Maestro makes him more alive.
I've been a fan of this podcast since it began, and obviously I'm always up for explaining the world to babies, so thanks to Andy and Alexander – an old Crystal Maze colleague – for inviting me, and thanks to Andrea for being such a great teammate/opponent and for showing me all her blades. (We appear nineteen minutes in. If you fancy a drinking game, down a shot every time you notice me avoiding saying her name because I get self-consciously stuck on whether "Andrea" has a long or short A, despite it being said numerous times during the record, and the way the name's always pronounced. I'll join you.)
"So, in building our understanding of what a Mime is, we have been led to believe that, if a dog were to withhold from you its name, it would be able to pick you up..."
Let the record show this post is actually going up on Thursday the 22nd, the day after President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the US Senate. I've been meaning to post something about March for a while, to catch up on the run-down of the year, and Zelensky's address has proved a good incentive, so here are more old photos.
Again, a lot of scenery,
including a reminder that a giant mound had been dismantled outside
Marble Arch, serving as the reminder it had ever gone up. It looked better
stripped of turf.
March appears to have seen no real change to my routine. I'd use my time walking, and photograph where I walked. Local parks. Local galleries.
I put off buying stuff for the room. We still wore masks at the Crystal Maze. The weather was changing though, behaving itself to begin with, showing no signs for example that in April this would all be snow...
And in August this would be dust...
Then, just as it seemed it had been decided the pandemic was over now, and "things" should be getting back to "normal", we suddenly remembered the possibility of nuclear annihilation.
Down the hill from me, outside Holland Park, flowers and signs of support started appearing at the feet of the statue of the Ukrainian Saint Volodymyr. Russia had invaded the Ukraine on February the 24th. I looked it up.
Just up the hill from me, outside Kensington Gardens, fences were erected to protect the walls erected to protect the Russian Embassy from graffiti, and across the road from them, more fences, often peopled by protestors, but I'm normally too shy to take photos of people.
The fences are still there today.
And the signs.
A search for "Zelensky" conducted at the beginning of this invasion reminded me he'd been a popular television comedian before coming to office, and the extraordinary speech he gave in Russian on the day of the invasion reminded me how powerfully a comedian can communicate.
Remarkable speech. Addressed to the Russian people, it should also be heard everywhere. pic.twitter.com/RkrDGSYUYq
On one walk, I then bumped into the friend who'd invited me to that concert where the orchestra were all masked. She'd grown up in Yugoslavia, and outlived it, still holidaying as a teenager in what was becoming Croatia while living the rest of the time in what was becoming Serbia (Is that right? Have I got that right? I should look it up.) Anyway, she lived in a war.
"Vladimir Putin is an absolute fucking genocidal dictator," she explained over a pint in the Windsor Castle. "But –"
"America doesn't give a fuck about Europe either. The Cold War's been over for thirty years, why is there still NATO? Putin didn't do this without reason. I cannot believe this propaganda. News should be History. Nothing is being explained. We're not enemies. These are people! They're going to have to discuss! It's exactly like Yugoslavia... I'm sorry."
And now I'm thinking of that "Stalin Attacks Churchill" headline from 1946, in the copy of the Daily Mail we use as a prop in Love Goddess. It's a good prop. You can see the beginnings of the Cold War in the story beneath, as "Generalissimo Stalin" warns of an English-Speaking assumption of World Domination. The power of that narrative's still there today too.
The way to the bottom of my heart might be windy... prononunced wine-dy (I wish there were a way to disambiguate that as I've mentioned before)... but it's down there somewhere, and from that bottom I heartily recommend making one's friends one's heroes.
Look how many turned up to the show on Saturday night (Tickets here!) Some I hadn't seen offline since before the pandemic. Some I'd seen out Ripper Walking in the Summer. Two are getting married. One's just been confirmed as the new voice of Wallace. One's working on the fourth and final series of The Monster Hunters. One's going to be working at Heathrow Airport on Christmas Eve as a mime. One really liked Del Toro's "Pinocchio", and thought I would too – Sorry, Kevin. So I haven't witten more about that copy of the Daily Mail from 1946, Sorry. But of course you don't just stave off the darkness of this season by putting lights up, you also get busy reuniting.
(I will let you read that story a little closer though, in case yesterday's image was too small. It's stunning to see how little time following the end of the actual Second World War it took some papers to see things from the fascists' point of view again... Also, an odd choice of defense of tactic from Goring on the right there...)
Fallen down a bit of a rabbit hole. Hopefully tomorrow I'll have time to explain further why, but for now here's a picture of Tom Driberg. I don't expect you to know who he is. I didn't until just now. Initially a member of the British Communist Party, and openly gay when it was incredibly illegal, Driberg became Chairman of the Labour Party in 1958, but there's a lot more to know about him than even that. Here's a brief extract from the wikipedia entry where I found his picture:
One of Driberg's elaborate hoaxes was a concert called "Homage to
Beethoven", which featured megaphones, typewriters and a flushing
lavatory. Newspaper accounts of this event raised the interest of the occultist Aleister Crowley.
But that's not why I was resarching Tom Driberg either. I was researching him because his was the name which turned up when I searched "MP Driberg 1946," which I did after readingthis point of order recorded in Hansard on the thirteenth of March 1946...
FASCIST ACTIVITIES (ALBERT HALL MEETING)
HC Deb 13 March 1946 vol 420 cc1113-4
1113
The following Question stood upon the Order Paper in the name of Mr. Driberg:
137. To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he
is aware that a public demonstration is to be held at the Albert Hall,
on Wednesday, 13th March, by a body known as the Britons' Vigilantes
Action League; and if, in view of the fact that much of the propaganda
of this League is identical with that of our enemies in the late war and
of the consequent likelihood that a breach of the peace will be
provoked, he will prevent this demonstration from taking place.
Mrs. Braddock
On a point of Order, Mr. Speaker. In view of the urgency and
the possible far-reaching effect of any reply which may be given, can
we have an oral answer to Question No. 137?
Mr. Speaker
No, I can see no need and this is not a matter for me to decide.
Mr. Driberg
Further to that point of Order, Mr. Speaker. Should I be in Order in raising on the Miscellaneous Financial Provisions Bill this afternoon the question of this Fascist demonstration?
Mr. Speaker
That is a matter for the Chairman of the Committee. It has nothing to do with me.
Mr. Driberg
May I, in view of the urgency of this matter, ask your
leave, Mr. Speaker, to move the Adjournment of the House on a definite
matter of urgent public importance—that is, the revival of Fascism in
this country and the public demonstration by Fascists which is due to
take place at the Albert Hall tonight?
Mr. Speaker
That is hypothetical, and I cannot accept it.
Back to
Women's Garments (Down pointing)
Forward to PERSIA (RUSSIAN TROOPS)
... And that's what turned up when I searched "the Briton's Vigilantes Action League," which I did because they're mentioned on the front page of the Daily Mail from the sixteenth of March 1946, in a story entitled "Police crushed by Communist demonstrators," and I know about that because it's currently a prop in Love Goddess.
I never really think about 1946. As I say, hopefully more to follow. Click to enlarge.
Love Goddess - The Rita Hayworth Musical has another two weeks at the Cockpit, and I'm enjoying it more and more. Here's another lovely shot from Roswitha Chesher Also making me look good of course is the show's star and co-creator Almog Pail, who gave this fascinating interview in The Jewish Chronicle recently about one of the chief inspirations behind the show – as well as "one of Israel's founding fathers" – her own grandfather Meir Pa'il. During the second act I watch Almog sing the "Gilda"-inspired "I Don't Belong To You" from the theatre's gantry, in character as producer Harry Cohn. Just standing there, hoping to exude a kind of stony, middle-aged command, I realise is a quite familiar feeling to me: I've been playing these kind of characters since my late teens, and now I'm now genuinely middle-aged, yet can't be sure that I'm approaching this moment of onstage stillness any differently to how I might if I were still seveteen. I wonder if Orson Welles felt the same when he suddenly found himself the same age as characters he'd been playing for decades. They're not any easier to play now, but then they never seemed hard. They also never seemed nice. That's what's been going through my head when the lights are on me in the gantry. And when they're off I count the audience.
Top row, left to right: My brother-in-law Tom, Dan Tetsell, my sister Susy, my sister Alice, and my nephew Jake. A beautiful turnout.
The beautiful Bob McGrath died today, which is also the day I learnt from an old American panel show that a couple of years before becoming Sesame Street's whitest human he'd had a successful career as a singer of Irish ballads in Japan. Telling me facts like this seems exactly what the internet was meant for. I've done my thing of dropping you into this clip at the good bit...
There's a lot of Bob's Japanese crooning on youtube – is it still "crooning" if you don't have the raw, genital energy of Rudy Vallée? It's very hard to be unhappy listening to him, whatever it is – And it's not all Irish standards. There are Japanese songs sung in Japanese as well...
Here Bob sings something a little more festive, in both English and Japanese. Merry December, everyone! But can we agree "Jingle Bells" maybe has more verses than it needs? It's a simple enough situation; you're in a sleigh; you're not Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts...
Here is the song I know Bob best for. I love how much trouble Jim Henson's giving him here in the preamble, and how unphased Bob is by it. Water off a duck's back to Bob. He was ninety when he died. That's good. As Oscar the Grouch might say, fare forward, Bright Eyes.
"I was really the very first, I think, to sing naturally, to sing as you speak. And of course, it wasn't accepted by everybody. Certain clergy thought the songs I sang were evil, because of the love content and the way I sang them. And they really, really said, Rudy Vallée should not be allowed to sing on the air. Because – not of the content of the lyric particularly – but the hypnotic effect, the sexual quality, let us say. I was born, my friends sigh, with a tremendous amount, a great amount of sexual... emotion. Now, the song pluggers in 1940 in New York City called me 'The Guy With
the Cock in His Voice'. That was their expression: 'The Guy With the
Cock in His Voice'. That was evidently why, over a period of my
eighty-four years of life, I have known over a-hundred-and-forty-five
women and girls."
I have been doing a little research into the studio that made Citizen Kane. Also featured in Episode One of The RKO Story: Katharine Hepburn... King Kong... Murray Spivak's giant wind machines... a hundred dancing women strapped to aeroplanes... Ginger Rogers... and Fred Astaire, who also appears in Love Goddess - the Rudy Vallee Rita Hayworth Musical, tickets HERE!
"... and on this." Different Play, Act III Scene 4
After the surprising delights of Peter Brook's seventy-three-minute-long 1953 King Learyesterday, I decided to revisit Gerolamo Lo Savio's extravagantly-hatted, fourteen-minute-long silent 1910 version from the BFI collection Silent Shakespeare, posted at the top.
In looking that up I discovered an even earlier, thirteen-minute-long, German-subtitled version from 1909 credited to the Vitagraph Company of America, so I thought I'd post that too.
Comparisons are invidious, but what else are we going to do?
The most surprising thing both versions share is an absolutely stand-out Oswald. Goneril's servant, it's a small but satisfying role, whose job both literally and narratively is to just turn up and be a dick. Above is the Vitagraph version, fully understanding the assignment as he bounds out and tells everyone to eff off. Below is Lo Savio's. I remembered the 1910 version having excellent facial hair and helmets, and I was right. Just look at him there on the left. This Oswald may not have received the promotion to chief antagonist Brook gave him in 1953,
despite this 1910 version also cutting the subplot, but he definitely gets the outfit hardest to ignore, against stiff competition too.
That's Kent in the middle, gobsmacked by his cheek. Required by the plot to disguise himself as a servant by simply shaving, Kent looks very underdressed in this company. The shorter 1909 version not only keeps the suplot, involving Edmund and Edgar – YAY! – but also devotes a whole scene to Kent shaving. He gets to keep the moustache too. In the following scene, having picked another fight with Oswald, Kent is sentenced to the stocks. That's Oswald behind him leaping for joy. What a dick.
Compare this scene to the 1910 version. Again, excellent helmets. But...
These guys really do not know how to put someone in the stocks.
In general, as gorgeous as this later, hand-tinted version looks, it does come across as a bit of a shambles compared to Vitagraph's effort: Like many blockbusters, a lot more time and care seems to have been spent on it in post than during the actual shoot. Here's the 1910 version's storm scene...
... minus the storm, because we're filming outside on a clear day because it's 1910. Feigning madness without a script is also quite a big ask, especially when you're missing the rain and thunder that's meant to push you over the edge, so after quite a lot of faff with a cloak, Ermete Novelli's Lear tries to fix this narative lapse by punching a rock and going Ow.
Again though, it was 1910. Cut the film some slack.
Let's compare this to Vitagraph's earlier 1909 version...
Oh okay! Sure! If you want to go the traditional route, I suppose you could always bring out a backdrop, run a shower in front of the camera and scratch lighning flashes directly onto the film, but...
Okay no, this is clearly much better. But aren't you just rushing everything if you have to include the subplot? Only providing a series of tableaux vivants? What about later, when Lear is discovered lost to his madness but drifiting in and out of a state of revelation? (Sorry, SPOILERS... that's a joke of sorts, but actually if you don't know King Lear, there will be spoilers coming.) Here's the Vitagraph:
Having kept the subplot, this Lear also keeps its full complement of witnesses: Lear flanked by the banished and debased Edgar, and Gloucester, the father who banished and debased him, blinded now by allies of the son he promoted. Here's the 1910 version:
Having lost both the subplot and the blinding of Gloucester, and of course the storm – but having definitely hurt his hand, let's not forget that – Ermete Novelli now improvises some "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" business with a broomstick, abandoning the narrative pretty much entirely before shuffling off stage right with a cry of whatever the Italian is for "Wheee I'm a witch, byeeee!"
When he later comes to on a cheetah skin we're back in the play, but the hand-tinters seem to have called it a day...
For both 1909 and 1910 Lears, the reconciliation scene with his banished daughter Cordelia is played as eccentrically as the madness scenes, meaning Vitagraph's William V. Ranous gets to keep his dignity, while Novelli, for whom that ship had long sailed, still gets to go noodly noodly, but in a happier vein than before. The Vitagraph version also provides a harpist for Ranous. I don't know if that made any difference to the accompaniment. Nice helmet bottom right too.
Here, of course, is where the story should end, and where, even with their tiny truncated running times, both versions show the strength of the play's final act. Vitagraph also manages to cram in a final fight between Edmund and Edgar, before somehow managing to rig a slowly setting sun over the final image of Lear grieving for his hanged daughter through disintegrating filmstock.
And I even stopped laughing at Novelli (put that on your poster!) There is nothing comic in him bringing on Cordelia's body, and while the 1910 version doesn't give us a sunset, it does manage an impressive number of distant extras to the left of the frame and a possibly fake bridge.
Unfortunately 1910 Lear's grief turns loopy almost immediately, and the film cuts just as it looks like he was about to get better.
Still, I'm very glad there was a record of whatever it was Ermete Novelli thought he was up to.
In 1953, over a decade before he would direct my Dad around a big white box in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a twenty-eight year old Peter Brook (looking justly proud, below right) was invited by New York based television host Alistair Cooke (below left) to direct a seventy-three minute long adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear for his show Omnibus, starring Orson Welles in perhaps his biggest ever nose.
My excitement at learning of this from the interview with Brook in the Welles documentary Magician was tempered only by my suspicion that, if the results of such an incredibly exciting collaboration had actually been any good, I would surely have heard of it before now. But – as with Welles' hour-long Hamlet – someone was good enough to put the whole thing on youtube, and I've now watched it, and it's definitely any good.
Here's the famous windmill scene.
King Lear doesn't actually have a windmill scene, but back in 1953 Peter Brook clearly hadn't yet been sold on the idea of theatre as an "Empty Space". Possibly influenced by his star, he decided to liven up the play's desolation with giant gears and shipwrecks. This looks unlike any Lear I've seen before, and that's always welcome.
Almost as interesting as the talent involved in this production is its timing. 1953 was the year Waiting For Godot had its world premiere, so Beckett's absurdist minimalism hadn't had a chance to influence interpretations yet, and this seems a very nineteenth-century apocalypse – broken rather than bare – with Welles providing a hearty, eye-rolling, utterly undiagnosable playing of Lear's madness to match it.
I pity the Fool.
"Orson suddenly took off with tremendous passion," Brook explains in Magician: "Television was the medium for great freedom, and experiment... Both of
us believed that you don't hang onto any idea, but the moment you've had
an idea, and you begin to try it, that leads you to think of something
else," which presumably is how we get to King Lear covered in seaweed and handing out starfish...
... which, by the way, I love! Lear "fantastically dressed in flowers", as per the stage directions, should look odd. Already then in his career Brook was adressing how to defamiliarise an audience to the canon, how to revitalise the oddness of its poetry. If this scene – one of my favourites in Shakespeare – is also a bit "one note" (and Welles seems to be doing more blind acting than Gloucester, who's actually meant to be blind) at least Lear-as-Oracle is not a note I'd heard played before.
Some of the production also looks stupid in a way that might not be intentional: here's a model shot of that windmill for example, and I can't tell if Lear's initial, pear-shaped, modernist clobber at the top of this blog is meant to be a nod to Ubu Roi...
... or just a very bold opening statement, in harmony with Welles seeing how fat he can make himself. It's not a look that lasts however. Lear's travelling clothes in Act Two are a lot more traditionally Tudor, and he wears them well. Has his nose gotten smaller? Or is that just distortion from however this was recorded (presumably pointing a film camera at a television screen)?
Perhaps the most Wellesian thing about this adaptation, as with his radio Hamlet that ditched Ophelia, are the massive cuts: a whole subplot, including the characters of Edmund and Edgar. Now if you don't know the play. you don't know what you're missing, but rewatching King Lear at the Globe earlier this year, surrounded my students, I was struck by just how much those two specific characters had attracted me to the play when I was thirteen. Despite Alistair Cooke refering to the subplot in his introduction as "the bane of every schooboy" for most teenagers, I suspect nasty brother Edmund's sexy-and-he-knows-it performative villainy, and nice brother Edgar's self-shunning, self-scarring, world-building self-abasement are the biggest revelations of any first encounter with the play. And the trouble is, if you lose them, what you're left with is quite hard to care about for quite a while...
Util the Fool comes in, and then it's anybody's guess. Centuries ago, productions of the play would cut the Fool completely, a creative decision heavily mocked in the twentieth century despite the huge number of twentieth-century productions that still seemed to have no idea what to do with him. The tenor of the times appeared to be to either make him a dirty old man – safe, but senseless, as Lear refers to him as "boy", and in many not necessarily wholesome ways the Fool is also a surrogate for Lear's youngest daughter – or have him played as fey, but not outrightly camp, so any jokes about "holding your peace" or having "nothing in the middle" fall absolutely flat while all the extras are instructed to laugh uproariously in that way that makes people hate Shakespeare forever. And for a while, this production does seem that.
But then the Fool climbs under a table and starts issuing heckles unseen, and that got my interest. And then Regan snogs her servant Oswald, and that really got my interest: In Edmund's absence it seemed this previously no-account jobsworth was now to be promoted to the role of suave ladykiller and commander of an army, despite losing a fight to a middle-aged Kent in Act Two. In better news, although we lose Edgar, this production keeps his alter-ego "Poor Tom", played here by the artist who introduced a teenage Welles first-hand to Expressionism and the Theatre of Cruelty at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, and who would later be the Iago to his Othello: Micheál MacLiammoir...
Poor Tom is actually served very well by being presented as a character in his own right: this production isn't scared to spend its precious running time dwelling
on the rich backstory and personal mythology that Edgar for some reason made up for him, and one can enjoy lines like "Nero is an angler in the lake
of darkness" coming out of nowhere, without having to worry about Edgar's "process" behind such startling invention. It's also great to see Welles' Lear in awe of a wretch played by Welles' mentor.
Another nice piece of staging I'd never seen before: the show's final scene takes place in Lear's throne room, the same space as the opening scene. Well played then, everyone, considering. Sure, Welles doesn't always remember his lines, and his moustache blows off in the storm scene, but that's what happens if you use real wind. Enjoy...
