It’s a very British characteristic to
look down on nationalism, or even mild patriotism, when it’s used as
the basis for a particular point of view. But it does seem to
infect us all now and again when we write… and not just the
Brits. The
International
Herald Tribune column in which Matt Wolf addressed both
Shadowlands and
War Horse is a fine barbed example
of what has made the Anglo-American “special relationship” what it is
today. Surely we can do better than arguing “my sentimentality’s
better than your sentimentality”? Then there’s Quentin Letts,
also on
Shadowlands, also
disparaging other nations’ temperaments in terms (“emotional
incontinent”?) that tend to corroborate my occasional suspicions about
English emotional repression being a by-product of excessively severe
toilet training in infancy. He also praises “a repressed, bookish
Englishman of the 1950s”, C S Lewis, who as a matter of fact was
Northern Irish… and that’s
my nationalism
coming
out.
Demotic
Similar transatlantic pushing and shoving is visible in the reviews of
Glengarry Glen Ross and
Rent. With the David Mamet
play, the prosecutor-in-chief is Christopher Hart, but by the time he
comes to back his claims up he has stopped listening attentively
enough. “The dialogue strains to sound naturalistic,” writes
Christopher, citing the line “He couldn’t find his own dick with two
hands and a map”. The actual line, as written by Mamet and
delivered by Matthew Marsh, is “Cop couldn’t find his dick two hands
and a map.” Those differences may not look much on the page, but
when spoken they result in an entirely different rhythm, pitch and
demotic feel, which Marsh gets and Christopher misses. I’m
familiar with the rhythms of these lines from having acted in a
production (since you ask, I played the no-hoper Aaronow), and I could
detect none of the hesitation in dialogue that Christopher remarks on,
although (as I’ve written) one or two characters occasionally mis-steer
their lines. But Mamet is a poet of spoken rhythms in the same
way as Pinter and, in music, David Byrne.
With
Rent, it’s the
respective champions of Englishness and Americana again. Matt
says there’s a lot to commend this revival, without actually citing
anything, whilst Quentin is once again exercised by blasphemy and
imagined leftieness. Frankly, there’s more than enough to damn
the show on its own terms. To be sure, many of us were less than
wild about the show on its previous London outings (I always felt the
lyrics strained, without success, to find the same tone as the
successfully rocky score), but we can still compare those favourably
with this polished, sanitised, meaningless razzle-dazzle. I know
I’ve already let bullets fly at this production in my
FT review, but
Rent is the second of the two
shows I mentioned in last issue’s Prompt Corner as having enraged me by
the rank insensitivity with which they commandeered the memory of the
dead, in this case by use of a scrolling LED display of AIDS
victims. This revival’s creative team are, we are repeatedly
reminded, the people behind the current success of Kylie Minogue.
One might have thought that their closeness to her during her recent
battle with breast cancer would have given them some appreciation of
how a potentially fatal illness may, and far more to the point may not,
be referred to in media and commercial contexts.
Bookish
In case it seems as if I’m only pointing the finger at others here,
look at the reviews of
How To Curse
and it’s pretty clear which of the reviewers remembers their own
adolescence as bookish and emotionally crippled. Yes, I plead
guilty, and that’s no doubt why the play resonated so strongly with
me. But I don’t disavow my opinion of it. I also don’t
remember being particularly alone in that precious kind of teenagerdom,
so I refuse to buy the complaints in other reviews that Ian McHugh’s
17-year-old characters are too given to allusion. (Their age is
mentioned in the text, contrary to Fiona Mountford’s claim, though it
is done obliquely: when Miranda protests that she’s old enough to hold
a driving licence – 17 in the UK – it’s implied that she is no older
than that since she has no further legal rights to boast of.) I’m
also surprised that I was the only one to register a feeling of Philip
Ridley in this world where grime and magic meet and stories are
virtually holy.
But then, there are several matters this issue where I could use that
beloved “I’m amazed that no-one else…” gambit. For instance,
amidst all the praise for the vigorous language of
The Country Wife, I’m amazed that
no-one registered the extent to which it has been modernised for
Jonathan Kent’s revival. True, the
double
entendre of “he is coming in to you the back way” is original
Wycherley, but so many other expressions had been updated, and so
unsubtly, that the little bell in my head whenever I heard such tonal
dissonance was ringing so constantly that I thought I was developing
tinnitus. Now, there’s nothing wrong with updating a text
per se – in the West End at the
moment, Rupert Goold has discreetly revised a few of the more arcane
terms and references in
Macbeth –
but
in this case it was, as I say, so frequent that I feel it’s a
little naughty not to acknowledge it with at least a passing remark
somewhere in the programme.