Hopeless Shakespeare

I've sounded off before about this and now, a current experience to report.

I was contemplating going this afternoon to a reading of As You LIke It, by amateurs with a professional director, wine and mince pies included in the very modest £3. I remember enjoying the play at the Globe not many years ago. So in preparation I've reread it over the last couple of days. And now I'm not going.

There were bits I enjoyed. Always good to get into reading Shakespeare again, and I recall what insatiable and incessant readers of him some people I admire have been, like Ted Hughes (see the terrific volume of his letters). But the pleasure soon palled as I was confronted with a text that seemed in the greater part to be either unintelligible or, because of the tastes it appealed to in humour and conventions, was simply, to modern reader who was not a specialist, pointless. I was left fuming at the stupidity of making young teenagers study it in school: what young person today, with all his or her exposure to the wit and sophistication we’ve enjoyed in English drama since the Restoration, most recently with classic American films and the best TV comedy, would find anything appealing in this?

It’s not that the plot is silly. That doesn’t matter either with Lear dividing his kingdom or Duke Frederick’s vendetta against his brother and niece and sundry others: the banishing scene and the others in court are effective. As Germaine Greer said in her book on Shakespeare, there’s nothing so magnificent as a Shakespearian king or duke.

Rosalind is captivating, it’s true, even when playing silly games. ‘All the world’s a stage’ is a nice piece, but gains nothing by being in that place in that drama.

And there’s the fact that I really did enjoy it when I saw it, or remember myself as having done, when I saw it. There the main actors were terrific -- I don’t recall the clowns and fools and simple folk, who are usually a disaster on stage. What stays in the memory is the atmosphere of Arden, with lute music and gentle singing, absolutely seductive. I suppose some nice bits of scenery or props, even at the Globe. So I guess the text can be made something of -- but that’s what it’s a case of.

I suppose I should read it again to be fair. I don’t remember taking against it when I first read it long ago so it may just be that I'm getting sour with age.

But I don’t think a semi-staged performance by amateurs will help me to feel more kindly. So, no, I'll give it a miss.

Theatre under the arches

All my miserablings about theatre still stand but with this big exception: small theatre by small groups in intimate sessions. Last night I was at the opening night of Irish Blood, English Heart by Darren Murphy in the Union Theatre underneath the railway arches on Union Street, Southwark -- audience 25, cast 4; dramatic, electric, sparkling writing. And then mingling with case, writer and producer in the bar.

Another anti-theatre rant

Theatre on Saturday night almost resolved me (again) to give it up completely. Although it was the Sovremennik company from Moscow of whom great things were expected -- and evidently, for most of the audience (admittedly including many Russians) delivered -- for me it was the usual theatre stuff -- actors, producers and designers so evidently pleased with themselves; all that fussing around with sets and machinery; that studied standing very still when not part of the action; the long boring passages where someone is having emotions or thoughts. ‘Now pretend to be sad,’ ‘You pretend to snub her’, ‘You pretend to wash the floor’ etc. I found it boring, unmoving, undramatic and predictable -- or, where it wasn’t predictable, of no consequence either way. And primitive, childish, not in a good way.

It simply doesn’t work for me as it’s supposed to -- by contrast with television plays, of which every one that the BBC has done recently has been superb.

I suspect my revulsion is like what the Modernists felt towards conventional representational art and fiction and drama -- see Josipovici label-- an outdated and non-working convention, incapable of conveying anything recognisable as our condition. However, to be fair, this did seem a particularly poor play, Into the Whirlwind, though based on what is said to be a fine memoir by Eugenia Ginzburg about a life marked by unspeakable sufferings and courage under the Soviet system.

Why would you want to try to represent life on a stage with sets when you could do it in a real prison or field or city and record it with a camera? Well, I know why, of course -- it’s precisely for the sake of the non-representational element of expressiveness and abstract order that a built and painted construction can deliver. But that only makes sense if the actions within the set don’t pretend to be real behaviour: the speech should be in verse, recited not acted, perhaps read from the scripts; the actors masked and not in ‘costumes’ but in ordinary clothes or actors’ uniforms analogous to orchestral players’ formal gear. Like oratorio.

I enjoy opera best in versions that are termed ‘semi-staged’: no sets, singers in concert gear standing with the orchestra, a bit of movement, certainly expressiveness in the singing. I was due to see The Miraculous Mandarin by Bartok semi-staged on Thursday - but we’ve had a letter from the Philharmonia Orchestra to say that ‘this is no longer the case’, very disappointing. There was Stravinsky’s Pulcinella at the Proms last year on television, semi-staged, thrilling, hair-raising. Similarly, I like the earliest opera, Monteverdi’s Orfeo, from an age before they did full staging (I think).

There’s also something about us posh, comfortable people flocking to an expensive production in central London to watch a depiction by other comfortable people of suffering, cruelty and bravery in conditions we’ve never experienced. For some reason film and television don’t seem objectionable in the same way -- not just, presumably, because we don’t dress up for them. But I don’t think that line of objection will stand up if I follow it through.

Or, I may have to conclude, my revulsion may just be a blind spot in me.

Another theatrical disaster

Perhaps theatre and I just don't agree. Another disaster last night: Mother Courage at the National Theatre. There was one good thing it it and that was very good: Fiona Shaw as Mother Courage (though not as I'd always envisaged that character, as much older and haggarder and shrewisher). Otherwises it was one of those performances in which all the time you're thinking – or I'm thinking because I'm suspecting myself of some fatal blindness in these matters – look at that stupid actor making a twat of himself or herself: who does heshe think heshe's being? Is that supposed to be a soldier?

Or is that just being philistine, like saying of 'Modern Art' “that doesn't even look like a tree".

The set, though spare in its basics, was constantly cluttered and unprepossessing to look at. The songs (as in all theatre, including Shakespeare, where third-rate composers try and write with-it contemporary tunes to the old words) were awful (perhaps with one exception): unlovely and unmemorable, the main singer with a strange diction and some problem with his esses (ss); the band pathetic, or maybe its sound system. And all the time there was unexplainable 'business' going on: an actor made some strange gesture or suddenly ran to the back of the set or got very excited and one didn't have a clue what it meant.

I ended up thinking, shouldn't most of these people, and especially the director, go out and get proper jobs?

Give me films any day. (Though Pirandello was great a few months ago.)

Helvetica and theatre

Sitting at the computer writing blog stuff is a fine occupation when you’re not doing a lot of sitting at the computer otherwise, writing or preparing for writing (e.g. reading and analysing and making notes). But that’s what I have been doing because of the history research I'm involved in -- hence my recent poor showing here.

However.

I started a posting a few weeks ago saying that I'd been to the National Theatre – to see not a play (God, no) but an exhibition of James Ravilious’s photographs. Ravilious deserves a serious entry in himself but the point I wanted to make was about the National Theatre, that I've always felt a lack of affection for it and that part of the reason is its use of Helvetica as the house typeface. That link is to something I wrote about Helvetica before (right, when I was properly fulfilling my responsibilities as a blogger).


In that context I find Helvetica cold and corporate, inimical to thoughts of theatre’s excess. On the posters round the theatre and in tube stations and in the pages of the season’s programme booklet, all the different plays are announced in the same font of the same size, though differing in colour, alignment and orientation. The scheme evokes some bureaucrat’s masterplan: category Programme, subcategory Plays, item Individual Play. It’s not appropriate and smacks of executives and NHS hospital signs (they aren’t Helvetica but evoke the same spirit).

It’s a handsome typeface, of course, no doubt about it and it looks good against brutalist architecture.

But it doesn’t go with thoughts of the subtle variation of plays with their delicacies and crudenesses and wildnesses, where the spirit of buttoned-up self-satisfied Helveticaness is just one pole amongst the many that are set in dynamic tension. (That’s if you can have more than two poles.)

I suppose when Helvetica was first devised and issued it was exhilarating and Bauhausy. But by now it’s been tainted, like so many good modern things, through its Cold War appropriation by American capitalism. I think.

The Europeans in Bradford c.1958

Hah! Helvetica again I see, on the right… 1969, a Methuen Modern Play (great series). I'm getting more and more allergic to that typeface. I've just noticed after 40 years (or however many) that it’s what the National Theatre uses and must be part of the reason I feel so little love for that institution. But more of that another time – the National Theatre has nothing to do with my experience of those plays.

I never saw The Fire Raisers but have had the book around since I bought it for, apparently, ‘7s. 6d. (37½ p)’ and have just re-read it in a brief orgy of returns to plays that I saw and read years ago and still have copies of. From Penguin Plays, Three European Plays, 1958 (2/6) I've read Ring Round the Moon by Jean Anouilh and The Queen and the Rebels by Ugo Betti. I skipped Sartre’s In Camera (Huis Clos) because I've kept going back to him in the intervening years. Then onto Max Frisch, The Fire Raisers.

The Anouilh and the Betti I saw (certainly the former) at the Bradford Civic Playhouse when I was still at school; probably the Sartre as well and some Giroudoux. ‘Playhouse’, note, not ‘Theatre’ which I've been calling it in earlier postings: I just thought of looking to see if they have a website. Not only do they and it gives me the right name but it has lists of productions from 1947; only for certain years, though, unfortunately, and not the ones I’d like to look at. (I also gather the theatre has been through vicissitudes over the years, is currently ‘The Priestley’ and is in administration pending relaunch as the Bradford Playhouse. Good luck to them.)

The productions were amateur and I suppose crude but had a powerful effect on me as a teenager who had no other experience of theatre. The way the lighting created dawn through the French windows over some desultory party-goers too exhausted to get themselves to bed or through the bars of a prison cell in some desperate central European police state was magical. And the plays, even when lightweight (Anouilh) were elegant, intelligent and interesting. They made the Continent seem so much more exciting than the tatty and tacky Britain of the 50s – a point confirmed by the stuff I've been reading about that period: Colin MacInnes [check MacInnes label in the right hand margin] and now Kenneth Allsop’s The Angry Decade (free from Amazon, virtually, apart from £3 postage – and thrown out by Leeds University, I note. Right.)

About The Fire Raisers, first produced in Zurich in 1958 and at the Royal Court, London, in 1961:

The fire raisers are a secret group who go around the town starting fires. A couple of them move in on a bourgeois family and made no secret of the fact that that’s what they are but the businessman father (Biedermann) finds it more comfortable to convince himself they’re joking as they fill his loft with drums of petrol and ask him for matches. It’s stylish and funny as well as sinister. I especially like the Greek chorus of firemen:

CHORUS
Ready are we,
Carefully coiled are the hoses,
In accordance with the regulations,
Polished and carefully greased and of brass
Is each windlass.
Everyone knows what his task is.

CHORUS LEADER
An ill wind is blowing –

CHORUS
Everyone knows what his task is,
Polished and carefully tested,
To make sure that we have full pressure,
And likewise of brass is our pump.

CHORUS LEADER
And the hydrants?

CHORUS
Ready are we….

And here’s a sample couple of pages – wonderful stuff, and quite unlike anything being done in the Britain of the ineffectual Angry Young Men and the prosaic Kitchen Sink (click to enlarge):

Against performing Shakespeare

I feel I'm in small minority of Shakespeare-lovers when I say that I can rarely stand performances. I was largely unmoved by King Lear the other night at the Young Vic, with some undoubtedly good actors, including Pete Postlethwaite. I was happy to leave after the second interval. What a philistine! But Lear is a play that works for me when I read it – at least until the last act.

There’s a video of a rehearsal of a rehearsal of the earlier Liverpool version here.

There were some good scenes, fine drama that nearly got me engaged. The set was good and the modern dress ok. But here are some things that were either irritating or unwatchable (quite apart from some inadequate actors):

(1) Regional accents that had no point but brought irrelevant and distracting associations, even when they were genuine (as Kent’s Yorkshire or whatever it was wasn’t); there was a Welsh accent so strong, whether fake or real, that it prevented one attending to what the man was saying. No reason, of course, why Edmund shouldn’t have a Northern Irish accent, but it seemed to get in the way of doing justice to some of the speeches (‘Thou, Nature, art my goddess…’, for a start).

(2) The Fool. Fools are impossible to put on stage, partly because so many of their sayings make no sense to anyone who hasn’t digested the notes in a learned edition, and even then often not. I've seen worse than this Fool, but it was still excruciating, like watching the Krankies. His idea of being funny with movements, voice and gesture was like nothing that makes anyone laugh in a real person, nor did his pathetic moments bring him sympathy. Every line had to be accompanied hyperactively by a gesture – phallic, cowering, crowing, cavorting -- mimicking the meaning. Who carries on like that? How are we to read such antics? This is third-rate school play stuff. Such contorsions relate to nothing that people actually do. No one with a normal sense of humour in the face of funny people could be anything but embarrassed and uncomfortable. You can tell the people in the audience who laugh either are very young or don’t get out much.

This is a problem with low life characters generally in classic theatre– they never seem to get staged in a way that accords them any respect – they’re always stage idiots, stage cheery villains, stage plucky young cards or whatever -- offensive depictions drained of all dignity. If that’s how Shakespeare wanted them, tough – I can’t take it. (You get the same problem with characters in opera performances – in The Marriage of Figaro, for instance. The sort of people who dominate opera audiences laugh away. Perhaps that’s what they think the working classes are really like.)

(3) Staging. Edgar runs laps in his tracksuit while Gloucester (with whistle) talks to Edmund – what’s that supposed to be about? Characters in hunting kit with rifles… Albany wheeling a pram. ‘A modern interpretation’ etc… I can do without these gratuitous extras that simply get in the way. I don’t want tights but I don’t want the dress and settings of a particular historical period or social milieu either.

What I want is Shakespeare, but what I get is some director. If it’s the case that there’s no way of doing Shakespeare on stage without putting it in a particular setting or staging, giving it some ‘interpretation’ – in other words, if there’s no way of doing more or less straight Shakespeare without the intrusion of a director’s ego -- then I'd rather Shakespeare wasn’t staged at all. I admit that if Shakespeare is to be staged his characters have to be represented somehow. But since I know of no way in which especially fools and low life types can be shown credibly and non-demeaningly, then we should give the job up as impossible, and agree that unsatisfactory attempts do nothing but harm to the playwright’s reputation.

Behind this opinion is a view of performances. It’s frequently argued that the plays were written to be performed and in a sense only exist in their performances, just as musical scores do. I disagree. That view assumes that there are only two things involved: on the one hand the inert, lifeless text or score and on the other the enacted performance . The former is just indications of possibilities, with no reality until given flesh; the latter, in its multiple versions, is the real thing. (Compare, in architecture, the drawings (‘blueprints’) and the building -- though each plan, being site-specific, is usually realised in only one ‘performance’ (unlike the technical drawings for a Ford Escort – but that’s another story).)

My view is that there’s a third thing, the play. It’s brought into being by the text: the words, sentences, speeches, exchanges. It’s created by the playwright, but has to be created afresh in the theatre of the mind of whoever attends to the text, through reading or some other means of reception. The reader of Shakespeare, providing he or she knows enough to understand it, doesn’t inevitably mess it up in the way that its performers invariably do. Performers can’t do any other than put flesh on the play, and more often than not it’s the wrong flesh for me, out of key with my own sense of the play.

But – this is the crucial point – the performers’ realisation of the play isn’t out of key with my play simply because I have one picture in my head and they stage a different one. It’s also because they have no option but to present a picture whereas I don’t have to. The play doesn’t include what it doesn’t tell us. Some of the things it doesn’t tell us I have, as reader, to supply from imagination, simply to make the play work– but not to the extent of supplying details of costume, historical settings, this or that accent, even particular ways of speaking the lines. In my reading I can supply more or less flesh, as appropriate; where no cubic inch of the stage can be without matter or air to fill it, my mental stage need have nothing except where it’s strictly called for. In creating the play as I read it, I don’t, beyond a certain minimum, have to imagine it pictorially, vocally, gesturally; the amount of such imagining I do will be sometimes more, sometimes less.

I have in my head less a picture than a concept of Lear. The Russian psychologist Vygotsky observed that though concepts have their origin in childhood as vivid visual images, by adolescence their visual content has largely drained away; they are greyed out, so they can serve their purpose as ideas, abstractions. So it is with Shakespeare’s characters in my mind, with my concept of King Lear: they are ‘realised’ in visual terms only to the extent that they need to be, while fully charged with the essential meanings: for Lear, for instance, kingly dignity, petulance, frustration…. The only way I can made fools and clowns tolerable is by reducing them to simply however much of a minimal persona there needs to be for language to be language, not noise. So, my mental fools are neutral disembodied voicers, gnomic utterers of strange sayings, their beings little more than whatever speech intention the words themselves imply, the characters mere enunciators of lines. Stupid trousers and ridiculous posturings with bums sticking out are the last thing I need.

I admit it’s complicated. My reading of a play is undoubtedly influenced by performances I've seen or heard, not just of it but of other plays. My knowledge of how a play can be realised in the flesh and the voice enriches the possibilities I bring to the reading. But I still maintain that the play, like the design or the music, is something that is created and has its own existence – that it isn’t the same as the text, score or drawing -- whether or not it gets performed or constructed. And I think my experience of the play as reader isn’t reduced to one specific incarnation. Where the play doesn’t specify Rupert trousers, I don’t have to either – or any particular trousers.

And I think it’s possible to read a Shakespeare play as lines, speeches, poems that already have force before they are imagined as being spoken – as layings-out of rhetorical moves, expressions, thematic volte-faces, activations of imagery, generators of associations and semantic reverberations, potential embodiments of anger or pity. They don’t need to be performed; the utterances don’t need to happen: it’s enough that they be potential speeches for me to appreciate them. I don’t have to put a particular voice into them. The speakers don’t need to be given flesh, any more than the speaker of a poem: we create the speaker as we read; the speaker is no more than he or she who would be saying those things in the context of the other things said and done in the situation.

Perhaps performances based on such an idea have been attempted; if so, I'd like to see one. I'd like Shakespeare done more as oratorio: the players still, in positions, speaking their lines rather than acting. This actor isn’t being the Fool; he’s speaking the Fool’s lines, without necessarily ‘putting himself into them’ at full throttle. I'd like to see a Brecht Shakespeare in which the actors don’t pretend to be the characters but in which Shakespeare’s language on its own, in the mouths of the actors/speakers, brings them into being.

Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author

Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author has had an electrifying performance in a new adaptation at the Gielgud Theatre, directed by Rupert Goold. It is a great romp, a moving tragedy and an intellectual firework display all at once.

Six ‘characters’, as they call themselves and as the script calls them, arrive at a rehearsal of a quite different play (by Pirandello!) and say they are looking for an author -- presumably a playwright.


In the image (from the programme) you can distinguish the Characters by the black of their costumes and their demeanour.

In due course they persuade the Producer and Actors to attend to their own history, which they ‘enact’ for the company and which, at first, the company try to turn into a performance of their own, though soon realising that will have to wait, such is the urgency of the Characters’ insistence on presenting their own, ‘real’ drama. I wrote ‘enact’ in quotes there because the essence of Pirandello’s play is that the Characters’ performance in their own play is their life. When they switch from their mundane negotiations with the Producer and Actors and their endless quarrelling among themselves and switch into their own drama, the sense of the realness of what we then watch is overwhelming, for the audience (us) and for the theatre people hanging around on the stage.

Six Characters is highly dramatic, first because the Characters’ own, ‘real’ drama is tense and horrific (incest, suicide, madness, heartless betrayal, desperate grief), its effect being heightened -- secondly -- by the horrified response of the Producers, Actors and crew as they helplessly watch its unfolding. Thirdly, there is the uncanniness of the Characters’ duality: they are actual people who turn up during a rehearsal they have nothing to do with and who talk about ‘their own drama’ but are also inescapably in that drama, doomed, they tell us, to continue living it ‘eternally’; they are evidently in hell, or undead, and unable to find release and peace. The uncanniness is amplified when a seventh character appears from nowhere, the milliner and brothel keeper Mme Pace (Italian pronunciation)

(The door opens and MADAME PACE comes in and takes a few steps forward. She is an enormously fat old harridan of a woman, wearing a pompous carrot-coloured tow wig with a red rose stuck into one side of it, in the Spanish manner. She is heavily made up and dressed with clumsy elegance in a stylish red silk dress. In one hand she carries an ostrich feather fan; the other hand is raised and a lighted cigarette is poised between two fingers. Immediately they see this apparition, the ACTORS and the PRODUCER bound off the stage with howls of fear, hurling themselves down the steps into the auditorium and making as if to dash up the aisle. The STEPDAUGHTER, however, rushes humbly up to MADAME PACE, as if greeting her mistress.)

The effect was terrifying. (In the production Mme Pace was replaced by a male M. Pace.)

A lovely instance of the way this play goes is the following. In ‘their own, "real" drama', as now re-enacted for the theatre company but at the same time evidently fully real here and now for everyone, including us, the Father enters the brothel bedroom and approaches the prostitute -- his own Stepdaughter.

FATHER:.... May I take off your hat?

STEPDAUGHTER (immediately forestalling him, unable to restrain her disgust): No, Sir, I'll take it off myself! (Convulsed, she hurriedly takes it off.)

(The MOTHER is on tenterhooks throughout. The Two CHILDREN cling to their MOTHER and they, she and the SON form a group on the side opposite the ACTORS, watching the scene. The MOTHER follows the words and the actions of the STEPDAUGHTER and the FATHER with varying expressions of sorrow, of indignation, of anxiety and of horror; from time to time she hides her face in her hands and sobs.)

MOTHER: Oh, my God! My God!

FATHER (he remains for a moment as if turned to stone by this sob. Then he resumes in the same tone of voice as before): Here, let me take it. I'll hang it up for you. (He takes the hat from her hands.)

He is thrown momentarily out of his immediate 'role' by the Mother’s sob -- but the Mother was not/is not in fact present in the bedroom: she, like the Producer and Actors, is watching the scene but, unlike them, is part of the family situation that gives rise to the Father-Stepdaughter encounter, and is -- momentarily -- interacting with the Father inside that other reality in which the theatre lot don’t participate. You see the intriguing and disturbing intricacy of it all.

This is a play with ideas, but before I describe one let me say that ‘ideas’ extracted from literature and spelled out as bald propositions are invariably (at least I can’t think of any exceptions) unsatisfying, like bad philosophy. One beauty of this play is that one is never called on finally to decide whether they have to be taken seriously or are simply there to make the drama possible. There’s nothing in the end to stop us concluding that Six Characters is anything more than a satisfying entertainment -- albeit one that puts us through it emotionally and intellectually besides keeping us on our toes and constantly surprising us by its turns. After all, dramatic characters don’t live in the way they are shown living here, so in that sense the play is ridiculous.

On the other hand, ideas that never fully present themselves for analytic examination but are placed in our consciousness by things the characters say, mixed up with all the other things they say, or are suggested by the dramatic scenario etc (e.g. characters can have lives), do for the time being get themselves entertained in our consciousness even though we would rationally reject them in the light of day. The whole play may at one level be ridiculous, but at the same time it forces us to take it seriously.

A key ‘idea’ that seems to demand to be taken seriously is that real people are just as illusory as dramatic characters, who, in the words of the Father, ‘have no other reality outside this illusion!... What for you is an illusion that you have to create, for us, on the other hand, is our sole reality. The only reality we know.’ Thus, ‘… if we have no reality outside the world of illusion, it would be as well if you [to Producer] mistrusted your own reality…. The reality that you breathe and touch today…. Because like the reality of yesterday, it is fated to reveal itself as a mere illusion tomorrow.’

This is, is it not, a well-known and central modernist theme: reality and identity shift from day to day, dissolve under the gaze; a stable world and stable personhood are illusions. This must have been how things felt with a particular new force from (according to Malcolm Bradbury’s narrative, The Modern World: Ten Great Writers) about 1870. I'm not sure that I've ever felt that way myself; or perhaps, rather, I've grown up in a world in which that idea was so taken for granted that it’s simply my normal experience, not to be particularly remarked upon. For instance, it’s as inconceivable, I think, for me to believe in any of the old ‘grand narratives’ as it would be to believe in God.

One ‘truth’ that the play appears to present is that the truth has to be sacrificed to make art. At least, the whole truth does, the truth of every character:

STEPDAUGHTER I want to present my own drama! Mine! Mine!

PRODUCER … but there isn’t only your part to be considered! Each of the others has his drama, too. (He points to the FATHER.) He has his and your Mother has hers…. All the characters must be contained within one harmonious picture, and presenting only what is proper to present.

But the Producer’s truth itself has to be sacrificed, (a) because aspects of the Characters’ truths that are not ‘proper to present’ get presented, and (b) because the Producer’s own drama, to which this ‘truth’ is integral, attains realisation only in so far as its ‘proper’ parts are included in Six Characters. This is an example of the sort of vortex of regression you get into watching this play.

The date of Six Characters took me by surprise: 1921. That’s before the great outburst of post-war modernist works that began in 1922, Ulysses and The Waste Land being the earliest of that group listed by Malcolm Bradbury.

The introduction to the 1954 (Heinemann) translation I found in Surbiton library says that in 1915 ‘James Joyce first introduced his work to English readers’ (‘his’ is ambiguous but it must mean Pirandello’s), and the brilliant and learned Pirandello must have been in touch for some years with modernist movements elsewhere in Europe. Apparently he had already founded and contributed to the grotesque movement in Italian drama, of which I had not heard. And of course modernist experiment in the visual arts was flourishing in Italy with Futurism and perhaps early Surrealism too (de Chirico and co.).

Modernist this work certainly is in its spirit: it has to an outstanding degree that iconoclastic, breath-of-fresh-air, sweeping-all-the-fusty-Victorian-crap-away quality that’s so distinctive of early modernism.

Which is why, if my memory is reliable, I enjoyed Six Characters so much as a sixth-former. I believe I've had occasion before to mention the education I got from Bradford’s (amateur) Civic Theatre in the 1950’s. It was there that I first saw the play, and also, I believe, Pirandello’s Tonight We Improvise.

Nature and culture

In search of wellbeing, it being a lovely Friday with a forecast of a miserable Saturday and Sunday, and reading that poverty (and by extension, I presume, relative wealth too) ain’t so bad healthwise when it’s borne in green surroundings, I took my endorphins out for a spin down the river from Hampton Court to Kingston. (But unfortunately not my camera.)

The river was doing its classy autumnal stuff: the water was broad, slow and brown, geese and swans performed their ornamental offices, a cormorant provided a spicy note of evil, a grebe brought overtones of fen and mere while ducks diverged on urgent voluntary errands (1); a barge displayed washing, geranium and a cat; and in the trees alongside leaves deferred their final fall for one more day and even the single green parakeet seemed visually, though not auditorily, appropriate.

Little Dorritt (BBC1) is failing to engage me. This isn’t because it isn’t well done: it’s the usual Andrew Davies job, uproariously excessive and sensitive, and avoids what usually sticks in the gullet about Hovis ads and costume dramas (e.g the recent Tess). I don’t find any of the characters appealing, though they’re well acted, and the plot is too complicated. I'll no longer make a special point of watching it.

But it doesn’t matter because I've discovered a new programme that provides gripping viewing for hours on end; in fact, not a programme but an entire continuous channel: the Parliament Channel. Excellent background for ironing, but if I were teaching English these days I'd actively use it: so far I haven’t seen any committee sessions but have appreciated the expert expositions in the Lords. I'd give the kids a current Bill (stripped down), get them to prepare amendments and government defences in groups and debate them; then watch some of the actual debate. Something like that, maybe, if I could make it meaningful. The point being that English teachers should be teachers of rhetoric, in the sense of the deployment of language (spoken and written) to affect states of affairs. Rhetoric isn't the full brief for English, but it should be a big element.

And my disappointment with Love’s Labour’s Lost (see previous posting; no more Peter Hall for me) was made up for last night by Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, ‘new version' (dir. Rupert Goold): tense, funny, surreal, effects-laden, constantly surprising, acted by real actors of whom none could in my book be faulted.

1. Ans: Auden, ‘Look, Stranger’