I played the part of Tartuffe myself in 1974 (it was of course a school production). At the smallish Marylebone Theatre they have a new version starring Mark Rylance as ‘Pastor Blake’.
The action is transferred to the eve of a wedding between a West Indian boy and a Nigerian girl. Just as in the original, a dodgy cleric wins over the father to such an extent that he hands over his entire property and even attempts to make his daughter marry the Pastor instead of his beloved. Darren Raymond’s script is clever and funny (in rhyming couplets, too!) and the cast deliver it with gusto. Lots of laughs, though a Jamaican would no doubt pick up a few cultural references I missed. So an entertaining production, and the obvious point of two black families being exploited by the only white member of the cast is not laboured too much.
Both of the slight flaws are inherited from the original. It’s hard to believe in the Molière that Tartuffe could really talk the father round so completely in the teeth of all common sense. Here Rylance plays Blake as a wonderfully seedy priest, hugely entertaining but surely even less appealing? The other problem is the ending. The French version is perhaps the most shameless case of a deus ex machina: the King just turns up and annuls Tartuffe’s triumph with a wave of his hand. How does a modern version deal with this? Raymond hasn’t really got an answer. But it’s a lot of fun.
I read my story ‘Waking up in Morden’ as part of Sutton Writers’ contribution to the celebrations of Morden tube station’s 100th birthday. The first part is also included in a frame in the gallery on the station.
It’s not very long, so here’s the whole thing.
Waking up in Morden
He meant to change at Bank but fell asleep and woke up in Morden.
‘Not again!’ he said, ‘I can’t keep doing this.’
It was always Morden. Somehow he never found himself regaining consciousness in Wimbledon or Richmond.
Who named this place, anyway? If Morden were a character in a story, they would be the detective’s arch enemy, the supervisor of a grim Victorian orphanage, or the leader of the evil wizards. Morden! It was the end of the line. It sounded like a choked-off protest against the termination of all trains: hey, ain’t dere supposed to be more den dis?
His evening was gone, though, drained away into the darkness of that long, long tunnel. This time he got off and went out, past all the pointless buses that didn’t go anywhere he wanted to be. He crossed the busy road: looking back he noticed that the station was actually a rather nice building. He decided to award himself the consolation of a kebab.
Perhaps there was some special magic in those strips of meat, or perhaps it was just the ordinary kind that comforts the hangry and calms the mind. In any case it was nicer than the inexpertly microwaved ready meal he might have had at home. He began to feel better about being in Morden. Sometimes it was good not to plunge straight back into the underworld battle of the tube but instead make the best of where you were. It would, he knew, take him a long time to get home from here.
Then the mad thought entered his mind. If you lived in Morden, you’d be home already! Could you, did people, live in Morden? Was that what his subconscious wanted all along, and was that why he kept ending up here? Did it somehow magically know something he didn’t? Was there, for example, could there be, that someone in Morden that Fate wanted him to meet, a person who was part of his destiny? The Lady of Morden. Surely that was a mad idea? No-one came to Morden seeking romance. What was he thinking, and seriously, what did they put in these kebabs?
Everything seemed to have turned on its head. If you lived here or nearby, Morden might be the daylight at the end of the tunnel. The place where ten thousand people every day escaped the clutches of London, raising their eyes and breathing a little more freely. All right, not that freely, but still.
He discovered he actually felt excited about the idea of moving here. It was kind of neat: instead of finding a way to stop falling asleep on the tube, you just moved to Morden. It seemed so obvious he began to wonder whether all the other people around him had been led here by similar reasoning. It really could be glad, confident Morden again. Not so much your final destination as the gateway to the rest of your life.
Finishing the kebab, he went out to look in an estate agent’s window.
Richard Dadd murdered his father in a psychotic episode and spent the rest of his life locked up in Bedlam and Broadmoor. In spite of the (slightly Blakean?) picture here of a madman in chains, Bedlam had become a more enlightened place by then, and Dadd, already an established artist, was able to continue painting, sometimes doing portraits or commissions for the staff. One of these was to prove by far his most celebrated work, namely The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke. Although some of his other paintings are a little strange, this one is in a league of its own, and I don’t think the poem Dadd wrote about it helps explain all that much. He considered the painting unfinished, and you can see that an area at the bottom left is only sketched in.
The current exhibition at the Royal Academy shows that Dadd was a real master in terms of technical skill. I don’t think I have ever seen watercolours so crisp, precise and confident. He was known for painting fairies and he liked a bit of Shakespeare, but generally his realism is impeccable and the weirdness in Fairy Feller is much less extreme in other works. Most of them are interesting but Fairy Feller is the one you could spend all day looking at.
(The chap in the big hat is another artist and friend of Dadd’s who rejoiced in the name of Augustus Leopold Egg. The fellow in the adjacent picture with the strange longish hairstyle is a self-portrait of Dadd.)
My story The Judgement of the Livelli, was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Mainstream/Literary Short Story category of the 95th Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition! There were over 3,300 entries, so it’s not bad going.
That excellent publication the World History Encyclopedia is including my story The Salamander of London in an anthology. The publication date for Dust & Divinity: Ink of Ages Volume Two is 24 September.
I went to the exhibition in Somerset House. It’s really a show of two halves. First, they have an extensive collection of original lithographs, including all the greatest hits. If you have a favourite Escher picture it’s here. I found myself tempted to take pictures of every one, thereby producing a poor copy of the Escher book I’ve owned for fifty years.
Although Escher made his own lithographs, and typically only about 20-30 copies of each work, you don’t get here the strong sense of the artist’s own hand that you would with a Rembrandt painting or a Goya print. It’s almost as if Escher was striving for pure objectivity. There are some pictures, especially early ones, where he seems to be aiming for a sense of romance or sentiment, but it is entirely absent from these almost spookily clean and empty buildings.
In the end, or perhaps always, he went for mathematical rather than emotional depth, and brilliantly achieved it. The exhibition notes rightly say his work is highly esteemed by scientists who see it as a bridge between maths and art. I’m not sure how strongly artists share this feeling.
The other half of the show is some gimmicky fun stuff: a hall of mirrors, a size illusion room, and a couple of ‘insert yourself into the picture’ things. I did succumb to one of those. Escher was rather serious, though, and I don’t think he would have liked this. The exhibition includes some Escher-influenced album covers, but not the incredibly rude and curt response he sent in answer to a flattering personal letter from Mick Jagger. The exhibition mentions that the hippy movement appropriated Escher images, creating day-glo versions with new trippy titles, and says that Escher hated them. But the exhibition still includes a small room full of them.
So you could say there’s something here for serious Escher fans and for those who want something the kids can enjoy. I’m glad I went but have a slight feeling I would have done nearly as well by spending an hour with that old book.
A quick and belated mention that we saw the Nolan Odyssey. I thought it was pretty good.
Now everyone who knows the story has an idea of how it should be told, and no film is ever going to match exactly your personal vision. In general the things people have complained about in terms of faithfulness, historical correctness, and casting don’t bother me. It’s a much-retold legend; this is a version made primarily for a contemporary American audience, and it’s a good job, respectful to both Homer and Hollywood.
Two little defects. First, some scenes are drawn out a bit too much. It’s clever to get tension out of whether the Greeks will manage to open the gates of Troy before the Trojan defenders stop them (after all, we’ve known for thousands of years that they did). You can show the gate mechanism moving with agonising slowness once or twice. Not ten times over fifteen minutes (I might be exaggerating slightly).
Second – so much running away! Pretty much every episode ends with Odysseus and his dwindling band legging it desperately for the ships. After about the fourth occasion it starts to have an unwanted comic edge, a touch of Pirates of the Caribbean, or even Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
We went to see the light show on the inside of Westminster Cathedral. The Cathedral (not to be confused with Westminster Abbey – this is the Catholic one) is an attractive building in a quirky Byzantine style, but there was not enough money to install the planned mosaics inside, and in the 120 years since it opened, this has never been put right. Above a certain level the walls and the great domed ceilings are bare brick. They recall railway arches (bearing in mind that I think some railway arches are very impressive and attractive structures). However this undecorated surface is great to project on, and of course one thing they can do is show you what the mosaics will look like when and if they are installed.
The show does make you wonder whether they could just keep the lights?
Seen and Done 