KIN

21/12/10, Theatre Upstairs (Royal Court)

1 hr 15 mins straight through. A bit of a dud, unfortunately, because it was a nice idea. Ten-year old girls at boarding school, swearing themselves blue in the face, emotionally needy, being beastly to each other one moment and clinging the next, discussing "annie" (anorexia), crushes and the like in brittle, staccato dialogue... and played by ten-year old girls. Unfortunately while one of the two main characters spoke well and convincingly and you could hear every word she said, the other was hard to decipher, having that high, apparently clear but actually rather muffled voice that many children have, and much of her dialogue got lost.

There were three girls and three adult actors -- a female teacher, a male governor ("Are you a paedophile?" one girl asked him brightly) and an older brother. The girls' dialogue and their deep-seated unhappiness, which breaks out in pashes and rivalries and jealousies and conspiracies and petty blackmail, was caught accurately. Part of the "plot" revolves around who's playing who in the school production of The Crucible, which of course the girls don't understand. The adults were much less convincing, especially the teacher. Perhaps we were supposed to see them as the girls saw them, but if that were the case the scenes with the teacher alone on the phone to the headmistress simply didn't work.

The set a pair of bunk beds and not much else. Tuck boxes and trunks (one of which is dropped out of a window). Grey school uniforms. Constant noises off: shouts, gossip, laughter, running, the whole place never quiet (and after dark the waving of torches in the corridors).

I'd say the author (E V Crowe) is one to watch.

Afterwards S said her boarding school was never like that and I was inclined to agree: neither was mine. A, being American, said she thought boarding schools barbaric. S and I defended them, saying we'd been happy at ours and well-educated. But afterwards I thought that what sticks in my mind is secondary school: prep school was a different matter and I remember ten year old boys being almost as beastly to some people (including me) as those ten year old girls.

A WINTER'S TALE

14/12/10, RSC (Roundhouse)

Missed it: had to work.

But I'm reliably informed it contained an episode of Superfluous Smoking.

HAMLET

8/12/10, National (Olivier)

3 hrs 30 mins. Superfluous smoking alert.

Time Out's Caroline McGinn reckons Rory Kinnear's Hamlet was the best she's seen. Personally I'd rather be guided by the audience reaction: silence during some of the set-pieces (like the play) but a cannonade of coughing during the soliloquies. That to me suggests a decent production but a leading actor who, while perfectly intelligent and speaking the words in a way that enables one to follow his train of thought with beautiful clarity, lacks the necessary charisma.

A decent production (by Nick Hytner) but derivative: reminded me an awful lot of Greg Doran's similar modern dress production with David Tennant for the RSC last Christmas, especially the idea of surveillance (CCTV cameras in Doran's version, secret service operatives with earpieces in this).

David Calder strong as Polonius and the gravedigger. Ruth Negga the most convincing Ophelia I've ever seen -- I thought she was a genuine teenager but it turns out she's 30 or thereabouts and highly experienced. (She's also half-Irish, half-Ethiopian; Alex Lanipekun who plays Laertes is also mixed race' so presuambly this wasn't colour-blind casting but a suggestion that Polonius's late wife was black.) James Laurenson interesting but underpowered as the Ghost and the Player. Patrick Malahide definitely underpowered as a Machiavellian Claudius: a piece of very effective screen acting totally lost in the Olivier's vast spaces. Clare Higgins tottering about on a pair of very high heels playing Gertrude as a hard-bitten old party who's seen it all. (She was also very clearly miked, which in this theatre is a bonus, though I couldn't spot anyone else who was.)

The smoking? Hamlet lights up twice, the first time on his student-style mattress in a room full of piled up books... and takes no further puffs.

THE KING'S SPEECH

2/12/10, The Hospital, Covent Garden

2 hrs. Preview of the new film about George VI and his Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue: a fine piece of British heritage film-making and a hot tip for the Oscars. I'd just read the book by Logue's grandson Mark and the Sunday Times journalist Peter Conradi and (perhaps as a result) was slightly disappointed by the movie, despite the great praise it garnered at the London Film Festival.

The central performances (Colin Firth as the Duke of York/King, Geoffrey Rush as Logue) were strong. So too were Helena Bonham-Carter as the Duchess/Queen/Queen Mum and (perhaps surprising this) Guy Pearce as Edward VIII (even though the supposed older brother was played by the younger actor). But I didn't care for Michael Gambon's George V: the bullying was historically apt but he seemed to lack aristocratic polish. Claire Bloom was unrecognisable as Queen Mary. Anthony Andrews looked and moved like a waxwork as Baldwin. Derek Jacobi was implausibly reptilian as the Archbishop. Timothy Spall was frankly embarrassing as Churchill.

At times I drifted and played spot the location. The old Naval College at Greenwich stood in for wartime Whitehall, I think. I'm told Logue's distressed basement consulting room was in a house in Portland Place rented out for events and locations. The Duke's home at 145 Piccadilly was also a house in Portland Place. The Logue family home was in that tenement block behind Kings Cross which is often used for filming... and looked a very far cry from The Boltons where they actually lived in middle class comfort before moving to a rather grand villa in Sydenham.

And some of the compromises with historical truth needed to make a decent film irked me. The timescale is compressed, which is fair enough: everything happens between 1934 and 1939 in the film, whereas in fact Logue first treated the Duke in 1925 or 6. There's a nice scene in Westminster Abbey before the Coronation in which the king (who's been listening to the Archbishop and his scheming Establishment cronies) confronts Logue with his lack of qualifications, which allows Logue to respond with a bit of handy backstory about treating sufferers from World War One shellshock and never claiming to have qualifications because there weren't any for a new discipline he was helping to pioneer. There's another scene in which Logue starts asking the Duke about his childhood -- a primitive type of psychoanalysis, perhaps -- and meets resistance from the Duke which probably reflects reality. And the significance of the Duke's problems is emphasised by supposing that many more of his speeches were broadcast than was really the case and conjuring up a wonderful BBC control room with equipment cabinets carrying brass plates with the names of the countries of the empire to which they transmitted which had a certain bravura splendour.

But Logue is made out to be a failed actor. He calls the Duke "Bertie" whereas in reality he was always "Sir". And the Logues are shown as a good deal poorer than they were in reality. No doubt the aim is to emphasise the contrast between the privileged royals and the "common colonial" Logue, but the changes rather diminish Lionel as an historical figure.

What's more, to make sense of the Abdication crisis Edward VIII's supposed Fascist leanings are frequently referred to (I suspect no-one knew about them at the time and, if they did, those in the know were a good deal more perturbed by the religious question), and at one point a radio in the background carries what sounds like Abdication news when in reality it was all a terrible secret until the deed was agreed.

But looking back at that list I see there are many more positives than negatives (and I could have named several other positives) so no doubt I'm just being picky.

METROPOLIS

27/11/10, BFI Southbank (NFT as was)

2 hrs 25 mins. Newly-restored and extended print of Fritz Lang's 1927 masterpiece, thanks to the discovery of an exceedingly grainy 16mm print in Buenos Aires containing large amounts of material cut from the original, ranging from the odd cut-away shot to entire scenes. Will and I saw it in the BFI Southbank studio, which is a very small box-like cinema with an enormous screen: almost too big, from where I was sitting in the second row.

I've never seen it, though one has of course seen a good many stills and the odd clip: the robot, the "Frankenstein's monster" scene in which Maria is strapped naked into some sort of transparent box for the transfer of her mind to the robot's, the top shots of the huge city with its trains and cars and biplanes flying between the buildings, the opening sequence of the ranks of identically-clad workers trudging wearily in step to and from their shifts and the nightmare machine halls where they work until they drop.

Visually it's staggering. All subsequent makers of science fiction movies and cinematic dystopias are in Lang's debt, as are the Frankenstein films. The visual effects are remarkable and I'm not clear how he achieved them: the tiny figures running around in the vast city (the city clearly a model, the people apparently real), the lightning bolts and circular rings of energy which pulsate around the model and Maria in the transfer scene.

Plot-wise it's deeply implausible though, even with some of the missing scenes put back in. For instance the motivation of Rotwang, the mad inventor, is never entirely clear. This may be a lack of inter-titles; it may be that Lang was less interested in constructing a plot without holes than simply in getting from one set-piece to another.

Politically it's a curious mish-mash as well. The scenes of the workers' suffering and dehumanisation seem to come straight out of Marx (this was made, of course, just ten years after the October revolution in Russia) and the villain in the first part of the film is the heartless capitalist Joh Fredersen. In their images of hundreds of uniformed figures all marching to the same beat those early scenes also hark forward to the iconography of the Nazis. On the other hand, violent revolution is deprecated, and appears to be deliberately engineered by the villain of the second part of the film, the Jewish Rotwang (we know he's Jewish because his house is liberally decorated with Stars of David), a combination of anti-Semitism and anti-Communism with which Hitler would presumably have agreed.

Some of the bits one hadn't seen were striking too. Early on there's a scene of scantily-clad lovelies in the Garden of Pleasure one of whom is all but topless, a fact we are invited to linger on as she twirls slowly and seductively around for us: pretty daring for 1927. And then there's the orgiastic dance performed by the false Maria, who is topless, except for elaborate pasties. Towards the end there's a scene in which the underground workers' city is flooded and the children (the only ones left after the parents have all gone up to wreck the machines) wade through the rising waters towards their saviour, the (real) Maria: lots of top shots of the crowd converging on her as she wrestles with some kind of alarm bell, intercut with lots of low-level shots of her silhouetted. And then there's a "lost" sequence among the Buenos Aires material of the children trying to escape up a ventilation shaft and finding their way blocked by a grille at the top, with the staircase behind them filling up with panicking kids, which is probably the most genuinely gripping in the film.

Reservations. The plot and the anti-Semitism I've mentioned. Also film-makers were still developing the grammar of the medium, so there are one or two moments that jar, in particular some occasions when the camera crosses the line. The acting is standard-issue silent movie, every emotion telegraphed endlessly in the mime artist's equivalent of CAPITAL LETTERS. And I'm not sure about the music, credited to Gottfried Huppertz, and by the sound if it re-recorded for this reconstruction: what would the film be like without it?

The Wikipedia article here as some interesting material on the special effects, the pioneering architectural styles, Fritz Lang's dislike of the film and the fact that his wife, who co-wrote it, went on to become a fervent Nazi!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(film)

MY ROMANTIC HISTORY

8/11/10, Bush

Anything but romantic, as it turns out. A one-night stand/office romance thing turns into a dysfunctional relationship that then becomes something more permanent when she falls pregnant.

A transfer from the Traverse where it was a fringe hit. of a play by DC Jackson.

A three-hander in which the cast play all the parts, with clever use of filing cabinets, desks, document boxes and the like as props (or hiding places for props) and equally clever use of the device of actors addressing the audience in one voice while addressing each other in another. That led to lots of funny jokes about how what we say in a relationship differs, sometimes radically, from what we actually mean. None of it especially original, but wittily written and wittily performed by Iain Robertson, Alison O'Donnell and Rosalind Sydney.

Robertson was sweating copiously. It's a small theatre, granted, and he was working hard but it seemed excessive. They say it's a sign of stage fright but he seemed to be doing ace to me, so can he really have been nervous?

Here's a review:

http://www.theartsdesk.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=2463:my-romantic-history-theatre-review&Itemid=27

A DOG'S HEART

24/11/10, ENO

2 hrs 20 mins. Superfluous Smoking alert.

A real cracker, not so much for the music as for Simon McBurney's staggering direction. Never less than enthralling it was theatre with music rather than opera.

A dying dog (a puppet with two voices... a counter-tenor and a raucous contralto belting out animal noises through a megaphone) is rescued by a professor who takes it home, feeds it up, then subjects it to an experiment in which its testicles and heart are replaced with those of a human being. It duly turns into a man, feral and dog-like in his primitive emotions but terrifyingly adept at manipulating the petty politics of Stalinist Moscow, who has to be (bloodily) turned back into an animal.

It's a political satire which might have had few legs were it not for McBurney's numerous interventions. Other theatre directors we've recently seen making their debut at this address failed because they clearly didn't trust the music to do much of the work for them and undermined it or added unnecessary business. Superficially you could level the same charge at McBurney except that everything he does helps rather than hinders the music, and it's all so cleverly and wittily done.

The operations take place in shadow form behind a screen. There are video projections, a square playing area bare to the wings, processions of patients, tenants, political activists and the like. A constant delight. This is written up a couple of weeks after the event, so here are some reviews:

http://intermezzo.typepad.com/intermezzo/2010/06/woof-woof-a-dogs-heart-opens-in-amsterdam.html

http://londonist.com/2010/11/opera-review-a-dogs-heart-coliseum.php

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/opera/8152185/A-Dogs-HeartHugh-the-Drover-ENONew-Sussex-Opera-review.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/nov/21/a-dogs-heart-eno-review