So, a month ago I set myself to read six Booker Prize-shortlisted books from six different years. Having completed this task, I find that they fell into three distinct groups: good short books that won, overlong books with ships in, and rubbish from before the dawn of time.
We will deal with these in reverse. First, the rubbish: David Lodge. Oh my. Was this really what they had instead of good books in 1984? The winner that year was Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner, which is a good short book; also shortlisted was Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes, which I've read and I remember liking although I can hardly remember a thing about it. But evidently it was pretty thin once you got far below them, because Small World is just a rubbishy book, an unfunny comedy, the sort of book no literate person can read without thinking that they could have written it themselves if they'd thought it necessary.
Overlong books with ships in: Sea of Poppies, English Passengers, Parrot and Olivier in America. The first two of these are set mostly on ships and I do feel that I learned quite a lot about ships and who is on them and what they all do and what a schooner is; the trouble is that I feel that I was supposed to be learning that. All three of these books are dragging huge weights of research around with them, research which is unnecessary for two quite distinct reasons: first because putting in makes the book worse, and second because you could just make the stuff up if you needed it, it's a novel after all, not a documentary. I liked the Carey most, possibly because I read it first before long-ship-novel-unease had had time to set in. Carey is obviously a terrific technician but I do wonder whether he might write a better novel if he didn't seem to be looking for ones that you have to a be a terrific technician to write. Sure, two voices alternating, different versions of same events, rounded picture, great, well done, but is he concentrating more on the achievement than on the novel?
Amitav Ghosh is a terrific researcher, I guess, almost to the exclusion of other considerations. I'm willing to believe everything he tells me about life on the Ganges when the opium trade was at its height, but where's the novel? He approaches the multiple-narrator thing more softly, using a bunch of different third-person perspectives, but it is still somewhat naggingly obvious that he is doing a series of turns. The comedy, when it arrives, is all stock characters and stock situations, comedy by numbers - it never feels like something he actually finds funny, just something he thinks other people might. I actually enjoyed the book more than you think, but when I think about it now it's the negatives that spring to mind.
Matthew Kneale's English Passengers is my least favourite of the ship-books. His multiple narrators are a whole bunch of different first-person ones, some consciously written, like one character's journal and excerpts from another's book, some presented as if orally narrated after all the events had taken place, some of the smaller ones not really very well decided as to what they are. The whole thing doesn't move forward linearly in time, which along with it jumping about in place makes it rather difficult to follow in places because you don't quite know whether one character is about to meet another on this island or was there twenty years ago. Again there is a quantity of research being dragged like a dead horse around every corner in sight, this time Manx dialect, the early history of Tasmania, and fad racist theories of the mid-nineteenth century. All fine but WHY?
The two I liked most were the short ones. John Banville's The Sea was the winner in 2005 and I'm right down with that. It is a concentrated careful novel, containing no unnecessary ingredients, with only one main character. It mixes his mistily-remembered childhood holiday in a coastal town in Ireland with his return there many years later after his wife's death when he is trying once more to get a grip on life by looking back at where he first found he was getting that grip. The supporting cast are not overdone as they would have been in some books; the ones from the past are remembered with a mixture of clarity of impressions with fuzziness of details and composition, just as the memories of childhood are for most of us, and the ones from the present are not probed but hinted, seen from the viewpoint of an observer who is not interested in going far beneath the surface. If you like modern literary fiction and haven't read this book, then you should.
Last and shortest, Ian McEwan's Amsterdam. I've been unsure about McEwan - I didn't really feel I was getting Enduring Love or even quite Atonement, and On Chesil Beach seemed compact to the point of being slight, an extended short story. But this is definitely a short novel and I thought it was completely successful as such. Two main characters, two third-person perspectives, one movement; the book is unified like a play, and structured like a play, in five acts. It takes three hours to read and if you start it with three hours to spare then you can read it right through, like you'd watch a play. If you're going to dislike it then possibly you're going to do so because both of the characters are unsympathetic, not very nice people, which is true, but they are real enough and our time with them is short enough that it doesn't bother me like it sometimes would. Of course McEwan is sometimes an awkward writer, not bothering to cut out infelicities, leaving Tom Swifties in when they occur to him, generally not giving a damn about the actual writing, but then again that's a method that's worked for a lot of people, Iris Murdoch for example, John Irving, and we must acknowledge that it is a method he has chosen on purpose.
My winner is definitely The Sea. I anticipate having a chance fairly shortly to get hold of the 2010 shortlist in its entirety; come back then, and we'll do the whole thing again.
Sunday, 24 October 2010
Saturday, 23 October 2010
The bad, the good, and the Disney
So, we're half-way through the autumn's musicals, more or less, give or take. What have we learnt?
Erewash Musical Society had a shot at Gypsy. Mercifully I have blanked out quite a lot of the detail but really this sums up everything that is wrong with mediocre-to-bad amateur musicals. The choreographer was sitting at the front corner of the auditorium, changing a notice-board that announced the locations, and enjoying it! Enjoying it! The real problem is that the people running this sort of thing have low standards. You couldn't have put on a great Gypsy with the resources available to Erewash Musical Society, but you could have put on a decent one. If you just did it the way it was written, that would be better. Gypsy is designed for two actresses playing June at different ages and two corresponding actresses playing Louise at different ages: what we ended up with here was three Junes and four Louises. Yes, four. No, they didn't look like different-aged versions of the same person. Yes, it was a mess. The stripping scene didn't work - why do directors cut the dialogue? The whole POINT is that Gypsy's "gimmick" ends up being her talking during her act, the pseudo-intellectual chatter - "zip! I was reading Schopenhauer last night", as Lorenz Hart parodied it. It falls flat if it's just a 30-something woman pretending to be a 19-year old taking her clothes off. Meanwhile we had a very one-paced performance from Mama Rose. I realise it's tempting to come out with all guns blazing and blast your way through the evening if you're playing Mama Rose, but the job of the director is to point out that this is a stupid thing to do, because you've got nowhere to go and when you get to Rose's Turn the audience is sitting there thinking that they've just been watching this all night. Actually, quite a lot of them seemed to be quite enjoying it, but they were old and don't get out much.
The theatre itself, the new Duchess, was absolutely horrible. It was nowhere near finished. I'm not even convinced it'll be any good when it is. The box office is immediately inside the door so if there's any queue at all some of you are waiting outside, and the seats are too close together, and there's visible wiring just clipped in place along the walls, and you can't get a black coffee, and they won't let you take your ice-cream back to your seat. What's to like?
That was the bad. The good was (of course) Derby Gilbert and Sullivan Company, doing HMS Pinafore and Fiddler on the Roof. Pinafore was a beautiful example of why Andrew Nicklin's productions are so highly regarded: superbly played and sung, and constantly inventive on stage without ever seeming to be working against the material. I'm not sure about the general idea of setting things in different periods - it seems to be the convention for Shakespeare and opera, that a director can say "I am setting this in 1960s London" or whatever and have sets and costumes to reflect that without changing a word or a note, bringing in an air of constant disconnection. But for this production we were clearly in the 1920s and it didn't worry me, partly I suppose because very little about Pinafore is specific to the exact date. There are one or two things - pocket boroughs, for example, were abolished by the Reform Act of 1867 - but I'm not going to quibble. A 1920s setting does enable the wonderful and priceless Charlotte Clement to use her real hair, that very nice bob which would look wrong anywhere except the 20s or now. But really, the details are insignificant, this was just an all-round really enjoyable production.
Then in the second half of the week they had the very different challenge of Fiddler on the Roof. Fiddler in some ways takes a lot more staging than Pinafore, because it is a Broadway-style musical with a lot of shortish scenes happening in different places rather than an operetta with a big static setting for each act. And it places much greater demands on your performing depth - of course, the chorus singing isn't as challenging as G&S, but you do need to fill a lot more small speaking roles. This was one of the two significant problems with the production, that several people in small roles were noticeably out of their depth. The other was the really noisy and pointless smoke machine. I know that Alan Jackson just loves things like smoke machines, but still, you don't actually need smoke ANYWHERE, let alone during "Far From The Home I Love", and if you can't release it silently you should just do without it instead of making a distracting noise behind a singer. I'm surprised Andrew Nicklin let this one past - he should have gone round the back after the dress rehearsal and just told them not to use it.
Also as ALWAYS the bottles in the bottle dance looked stupid because they clearly weren't glass, and one of the shirts that Golde put out on her washing-line had a modern-looking label in it. And at one point I thought Simon Theobald stumbled over a line and had to say something slightly different from what he was intending.
I think that's all the negative things I can think of to say. Apart from those, this was as close to a perfect Fiddler as I ever expect to see, and I do expect to see a lot. It really is a beautifully put-together musical, huge but with hardly any surplus parts, funny and serious, various but unified, a wonderful thing that shows what you can do with a musical that you can't do any other way, and this was a production to match its scope. Part of the secret, I think, of a good Fiddler is that nobody, not even Tevye, must be trying to big it up - if you all do it just the size it's written, it comes out right. Tevye is a funny guy but he's not a clown and his monologues aren't stand-up routines. If you just act then it doesn't slow it down and you don't have the discomfort of a jerk into seriousness when you need it. Similarly, it's too common to see a Yente who is underqualified for playing a lead and is determined to make the most of the biggest part she'll ever get, or will ever get again at any rate. But Joan Self pitched it beautifully. I've never seen that troublesome early scene with Golde and Yente ("nothing can kill a show like too much exposition") go so well. The production was filled with little things that turned out to have perfectly good reasons, like why was Jessica Nicklin wearing those glasses? So she can take them off when Fyedka comes on. I thought that was a great touch because Fyedka and Chava are pretty skimpily realised - there just isn't room for a lot of interaction between them, and if you're not careful it comes across as being all him making the running. Does she in fact care about him one way or the other? In the script itself we don't really see any evidence until we suddenly discover at quarter to ten that she's run off with him, so having those glasses there to give us a little extra insight into Chava is really nice. Again, why is one of the little girls carrying that doll around everywhere? I wondered about that all evening until the last 30 seconds of the show when she put it down on the front of the stage and I started crying.
The lovely orchestrations are never going to sound better than that either. There was a synth in the pit but as far as I could tell (I've only got one pair of ears and there was a lot else going on) all it was doing was providing the accordion and harp, both things which in smallish doses sound OK on a synth. What really kills you is when you start using it instead of strings, a depth to which I don't expect Andrew Nicklin ever to sink. All the strings were there and all the percussion and all the reeds - when Don Walker asks for a cor anglais you have to give him one, like in "You'll Never Walk Alone".
Incidentally, all three creators of Fiddler are still alive 46 years on, with a combined age of 265.
So, then the Disney. Good Companions and Beauty and the Beast. There is really hardly anything to say about this. It's not any flavour, is it? It's Disney. The baddies are more fun than the goodies, and the show seemed most alive when Gaston and LeFou were on, followed by the castle servants. The vapid goodies in cheap costumes just slowed it down. The whole thing felt a bit under-directed - when the actors weren't bringing it, there wasn't any it there. You wonder how interested Phil Simcox actually was. And where has all the money gone? They said, I think, that they had spend £45,000 on this production, but you'd never have known it. Many costumes (including Belle's blue and white in which she spends the whole of the first act) just didn't look like they fitted properly, and Keith Scott-Savage's shirt was just ridiculously inappropriate, rather like his performance. And as for the Beast's mask... it looked like something you would pick up for £3.99 in Tesco, and I suspect that's exactly what they did. The transformation can only have taken so long because he got his elastic stuck on his ears.
Also there were mistakes in the lighting. For 17 quid a ticket. Come on.
Still, if you just like Beauty and the Beast as a thing, and you wanted to see it on stage, here it was, slower and less sparkly than the film but all there and sung audibly and in tune. It will probably be better at Nottingham Operatic (although I'm a bit worried that they refuse to tell me who's in it - have they got some problem there?) and it will certainly be better at Christchurch Theatre Club, but I think that most of those around me were satisfied.
Going back to my question at the top, what we've learnt is what we already knew: directors matter. Choose your director carefully, kids, and be a bit cautious about one who never says no.
Erewash Musical Society had a shot at Gypsy. Mercifully I have blanked out quite a lot of the detail but really this sums up everything that is wrong with mediocre-to-bad amateur musicals. The choreographer was sitting at the front corner of the auditorium, changing a notice-board that announced the locations, and enjoying it! Enjoying it! The real problem is that the people running this sort of thing have low standards. You couldn't have put on a great Gypsy with the resources available to Erewash Musical Society, but you could have put on a decent one. If you just did it the way it was written, that would be better. Gypsy is designed for two actresses playing June at different ages and two corresponding actresses playing Louise at different ages: what we ended up with here was three Junes and four Louises. Yes, four. No, they didn't look like different-aged versions of the same person. Yes, it was a mess. The stripping scene didn't work - why do directors cut the dialogue? The whole POINT is that Gypsy's "gimmick" ends up being her talking during her act, the pseudo-intellectual chatter - "zip! I was reading Schopenhauer last night", as Lorenz Hart parodied it. It falls flat if it's just a 30-something woman pretending to be a 19-year old taking her clothes off. Meanwhile we had a very one-paced performance from Mama Rose. I realise it's tempting to come out with all guns blazing and blast your way through the evening if you're playing Mama Rose, but the job of the director is to point out that this is a stupid thing to do, because you've got nowhere to go and when you get to Rose's Turn the audience is sitting there thinking that they've just been watching this all night. Actually, quite a lot of them seemed to be quite enjoying it, but they were old and don't get out much.
The theatre itself, the new Duchess, was absolutely horrible. It was nowhere near finished. I'm not even convinced it'll be any good when it is. The box office is immediately inside the door so if there's any queue at all some of you are waiting outside, and the seats are too close together, and there's visible wiring just clipped in place along the walls, and you can't get a black coffee, and they won't let you take your ice-cream back to your seat. What's to like?
That was the bad. The good was (of course) Derby Gilbert and Sullivan Company, doing HMS Pinafore and Fiddler on the Roof. Pinafore was a beautiful example of why Andrew Nicklin's productions are so highly regarded: superbly played and sung, and constantly inventive on stage without ever seeming to be working against the material. I'm not sure about the general idea of setting things in different periods - it seems to be the convention for Shakespeare and opera, that a director can say "I am setting this in 1960s London" or whatever and have sets and costumes to reflect that without changing a word or a note, bringing in an air of constant disconnection. But for this production we were clearly in the 1920s and it didn't worry me, partly I suppose because very little about Pinafore is specific to the exact date. There are one or two things - pocket boroughs, for example, were abolished by the Reform Act of 1867 - but I'm not going to quibble. A 1920s setting does enable the wonderful and priceless Charlotte Clement to use her real hair, that very nice bob which would look wrong anywhere except the 20s or now. But really, the details are insignificant, this was just an all-round really enjoyable production.
Then in the second half of the week they had the very different challenge of Fiddler on the Roof. Fiddler in some ways takes a lot more staging than Pinafore, because it is a Broadway-style musical with a lot of shortish scenes happening in different places rather than an operetta with a big static setting for each act. And it places much greater demands on your performing depth - of course, the chorus singing isn't as challenging as G&S, but you do need to fill a lot more small speaking roles. This was one of the two significant problems with the production, that several people in small roles were noticeably out of their depth. The other was the really noisy and pointless smoke machine. I know that Alan Jackson just loves things like smoke machines, but still, you don't actually need smoke ANYWHERE, let alone during "Far From The Home I Love", and if you can't release it silently you should just do without it instead of making a distracting noise behind a singer. I'm surprised Andrew Nicklin let this one past - he should have gone round the back after the dress rehearsal and just told them not to use it.
Also as ALWAYS the bottles in the bottle dance looked stupid because they clearly weren't glass, and one of the shirts that Golde put out on her washing-line had a modern-looking label in it. And at one point I thought Simon Theobald stumbled over a line and had to say something slightly different from what he was intending.
I think that's all the negative things I can think of to say. Apart from those, this was as close to a perfect Fiddler as I ever expect to see, and I do expect to see a lot. It really is a beautifully put-together musical, huge but with hardly any surplus parts, funny and serious, various but unified, a wonderful thing that shows what you can do with a musical that you can't do any other way, and this was a production to match its scope. Part of the secret, I think, of a good Fiddler is that nobody, not even Tevye, must be trying to big it up - if you all do it just the size it's written, it comes out right. Tevye is a funny guy but he's not a clown and his monologues aren't stand-up routines. If you just act then it doesn't slow it down and you don't have the discomfort of a jerk into seriousness when you need it. Similarly, it's too common to see a Yente who is underqualified for playing a lead and is determined to make the most of the biggest part she'll ever get, or will ever get again at any rate. But Joan Self pitched it beautifully. I've never seen that troublesome early scene with Golde and Yente ("nothing can kill a show like too much exposition") go so well. The production was filled with little things that turned out to have perfectly good reasons, like why was Jessica Nicklin wearing those glasses? So she can take them off when Fyedka comes on. I thought that was a great touch because Fyedka and Chava are pretty skimpily realised - there just isn't room for a lot of interaction between them, and if you're not careful it comes across as being all him making the running. Does she in fact care about him one way or the other? In the script itself we don't really see any evidence until we suddenly discover at quarter to ten that she's run off with him, so having those glasses there to give us a little extra insight into Chava is really nice. Again, why is one of the little girls carrying that doll around everywhere? I wondered about that all evening until the last 30 seconds of the show when she put it down on the front of the stage and I started crying.
The lovely orchestrations are never going to sound better than that either. There was a synth in the pit but as far as I could tell (I've only got one pair of ears and there was a lot else going on) all it was doing was providing the accordion and harp, both things which in smallish doses sound OK on a synth. What really kills you is when you start using it instead of strings, a depth to which I don't expect Andrew Nicklin ever to sink. All the strings were there and all the percussion and all the reeds - when Don Walker asks for a cor anglais you have to give him one, like in "You'll Never Walk Alone".
Incidentally, all three creators of Fiddler are still alive 46 years on, with a combined age of 265.
So, then the Disney. Good Companions and Beauty and the Beast. There is really hardly anything to say about this. It's not any flavour, is it? It's Disney. The baddies are more fun than the goodies, and the show seemed most alive when Gaston and LeFou were on, followed by the castle servants. The vapid goodies in cheap costumes just slowed it down. The whole thing felt a bit under-directed - when the actors weren't bringing it, there wasn't any it there. You wonder how interested Phil Simcox actually was. And where has all the money gone? They said, I think, that they had spend £45,000 on this production, but you'd never have known it. Many costumes (including Belle's blue and white in which she spends the whole of the first act) just didn't look like they fitted properly, and Keith Scott-Savage's shirt was just ridiculously inappropriate, rather like his performance. And as for the Beast's mask... it looked like something you would pick up for £3.99 in Tesco, and I suspect that's exactly what they did. The transformation can only have taken so long because he got his elastic stuck on his ears.
Also there were mistakes in the lighting. For 17 quid a ticket. Come on.
Still, if you just like Beauty and the Beast as a thing, and you wanted to see it on stage, here it was, slower and less sparkly than the film but all there and sung audibly and in tune. It will probably be better at Nottingham Operatic (although I'm a bit worried that they refuse to tell me who's in it - have they got some problem there?) and it will certainly be better at Christchurch Theatre Club, but I think that most of those around me were satisfied.
Going back to my question at the top, what we've learnt is what we already knew: directors matter. Choose your director carefully, kids, and be a bit cautious about one who never says no.
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