I felt a bit of a fuddy-duddy on a
number of occasions last month… although perhaps not as antiquated and
out of touch with reality as Quentin Letts’ fantastical remarks about
the “black polo necks and designer spectacles” in the opening-night
audience for
Love Song.
Quentin suggests that what may harm the reception of John Kolvenbach’s
play is that it’s sentimental. Not a bit of it: many of us,
including myself, are unashamedly great big sentimental old
Hectors. The problem with
Love
Song is not that it’s sentimental, but that it’s insufferably
glib. Whether you’re a normal urban couple or an agoraphobic
basket case, he suggests, the solution is simply to decide to see the
world in a new way, and like Tony Blair’s government he equates the
mere decision with its actual implementation. I feel personally
insulted by that; as insight and human compassion go, it’s on a par
with telling a depressive “Pull yourself together!” and writing them
off as lacking moral fibre when they don’t do so. (Notoriously,
“Lack of Moral Fibre” was the standard British military diagnosis of
cases of shell shock in World War I.) I’m sorry to revert to the
kind of musical anaysis to which I subjected Tom Stoppard’s grossly
overrated
Rock ’n’ Roll
several months ago, but John Crowley’s production of
Love Song has a magnificent
soundtrack of three decades of left-field rock music, but what’s the
last number, the one that chimes with the author’s message, at the
final curtain? Bloody Supertramp, that’s what. That’s not
sentimentality; it’s slop.
Just by the by, it’s a little surprising to see Charles Spencer, the
most well-versed in rock of the main theatre critics, mentioning the
likes of Stiles & Drewe and Fascinating Aïda as having written
songs for Mark Ravenhill’s
Dick
Whittington panto, but not spotting that also in that
songwriting crew was Jim-Bob Morrison, formerly half of beloved ’90s
rock hooligans Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine.
Outreach
That’s not the only musical remark of Charlie’s that has given me
pause. His review of
The
Enchanted Pig notes that “the children in the theatre were
evidently entranced throughout”. Not the couple beside me, they
weren’t. Or maybe; it was hard to tell. They kept chatting,
the elder one (possibly ten or eleven years old) checking her mobile
phone, and they begrudged me even two seconds to gather up my stuff and
get out of their way at the interval and the end, yet they did go wild
at the curtain call, and it seemed genuine. That leaves me with
two options, neither of them particularly flattering to them, or to me
for coming to such conclusions: either they really didn’t care about
the show but were under the impression that raucous to the point of
rabid is the minimum response required by way of applause even to an
event that didn’t thrill them, or they really did but simply had no
idea how to behave at a live event among other people – the old
“theatre isn’t like TV” problem.
Do you see now why I don’t like to find myself thinking this way?
All the time we evangelise about the importance, the vitality and
vibrancy of theatre, but when it comes down to it we still expect a
fundamentally passive response… because let’s face it, Jonathan Dove
and Alasdair Middleton’s opera isn’t the whoop-and-join-in kind of
seasonal show. Yet this may be an example of exactly the kind of
expansion and outreach that David Lan’s Young Vic is about, which means
that I’m being not just a stick-in-the-mud but a begrudger and a
hypocrite. I think I need to work on this one.
Ramifications
I feel less awkward about my response to
A Family Affair, as detailed in my
Financial Times review. It
drew one of the very rare items of correspondence I get about my
writing, from a correspondent who misinterpreted my tentative worries
about the characterisation in performance of the figure of Lazar in the
play. I recognise that Ostrovsky's play is pretty egalitarian in
its misanthropy. However, if the character of Lazar as written is
indeed Jewish (as his name indicates – a friend better versed in this
field than me assures me that, in 19th-century Russia, the very name
“Lazar” would be an unmistakable signpost of Jewishness) and there's a
suggestion in the writing that his unpleasantness is at least in part
associated with this factor, and if in the production he is played in a
way which (as I maintain) is open to interpretation as being Jewish,
then it becomes a much more difficult and delicate matter to retain the
unpleasantness – even amid so many equally unpleasant characters –
whilst trying to close off the suggestion of a causal link with
Jewishness. It's specifically this closure-off where I think the
current production fails, with potentially very uncomfortable
ramifications. Compare my possible over-sensitivity on this score
with Caroline McGinn who, in her review of
On Religion, seems to think that
Hebrew and Yiddish are one and the same language: even this Northern
Irish Protestant recognised what she called “melodious nonsense” as
being part of the Kaddish.
There are times when we do ourselves and the cultural discourse in
general a disservice by holding our tongues. I remember in the
1990s, when the National Theatre triumphantly revived Rodgers &
Hammerstein's
Carousel,
Richard Ingrams wrote in his (non-review) Sunday newspaper column about
the casting of Clive Rowe in the role of Enoch Snow. I love Rowe
as an actor, but it seems to me now that Ingrams had a point when he
noted that, in a story set in the southern states of America less than
a decade after the end of the Civil War, if such a principal character
were indeed black like Rowe, it would not pass without comment in the
social context! Ingrams, of course, went over the top in the
matter, but it’s not the kind of point we generally deem it politic to
raise, because the whole business gets quite radioactive when it begins
to interact too with our attitudes as an audience – which are generally
liberal, but often not liberal enough, and on occasion overly timid as
a result of that liberalism being misplaced. After all, the only
way for the debate to progress is for matters to be raised in debate in
the first place.
Written for Theatre
Record.