Long awaited, unsurpassable Godot

You might wonder how I could possibly state the above when I've never encountered Samuel Beckett's poleaxing masterpiece on stage before (Happy Days, on the other hand, I've seen four times with three different protagonists, all superb). Others can be different but not better. Certainly theatre critics who have seen multiple Godots claims James Macdonald's production is far and away the finest. I just know that I could never laugh more than at the double act of Lucian Msamati's Estragon and Ben Whishaw's Vladimir when it goes into semi vaudeville overdrive in Act Two - where there's something about Whishaw's 'this is becoming so...insignificant' that neardly made me fall off my seat - or be more gripped than by the strangeness of Tom Edden's sudden stirring into semi-gibberish speech as Lucky, waxing ever more resonant and apocalyptic (pictured below left before breaking the silence with Jonathan Slinger's equally good Pozzo  - the whole cast, boy messenger included, is superb).  I wondered where I'd seen that bug-eyed look before: Edden was the laugh-until-you-cry-funny waiter in One Man, Two Guvnors.

I was thinking 'tragi-comedy' throughout, and when I got back to read the text in my complete Beckett book, I found that was exactly how he'd defined it. The two excellent articles in the programme, by James Knowlson, Emeritus Professor of French at Reading University, and Fintan O'Toole, who should need no introduction, on cultural and political contexts many have denied, give us many reasons why this feels so real and yet dreamlike at the same time. Tight, ill-fitting boots, sleeping in a ditch, longing for the relative comfort of a hay-filled loft, charnel houses, brutality: Beckett had known or been made aware of them all as a Resistance agent of the Special Operations Executive in the Second World War, when he would have been shot if caught like so many of his colleagues. And the artistic references Knowlson pinpoints are startling.

His special genius is to mythologise all this, to hint at so much without hammering it home as too many contemporary playwrights do. His characters are not types, though - they're so recognisably human and individual. Whishaw's special, aerial charm and Msamati's more earthbound curmudgeonliness compliment each other to perfection. They leave enough space for you to come out of the theatre reflecting on the play's relationship to what you know and have experienced. There can be no higher compliment. 

True ensembles like this make nonsense of 'Best Actor' awards - Msamati and Whishaw need to share it, as do Thomas Coombes and Paapa Essiedu as the two one-act masters in the Death of England trilogy. It's been such a rich three-day sequence: this followed by the Bernstein double bill at the Royal Opera's Linbury Theatre and then a rigorous but also emotionally engaging production of Britten's The Turn of the Screw at English National Opera. But Godot was the ultimate revelation for me. 

Footnote (23/10) - I've just seen Krapp's Last Tape in Dublin starring Stephen Rea. Says nothing to me at all (nor did it when we regretted spending so much money on John Hurt's performance in London). I wouldn't even know what to write by way of review; as I went as my partner's guest, I'm not obliged to do so. The difference, I guess, is that in Godot and Happy Days humanity fights against the void; here it's already given up.

Production images by Manuel Harlan

Quacks and Queers: rare BBC bullseyes

So-called 'situation' comedies seemed to have wilted on UK TV, or rather I'd stopped watching them. Until Peep Show and Rev. Then Fleabag. And now Quacks, taking as fine satirical target the medical discoveries and pretensions of the earfly Victorian era, and graced like the others by some of our finest actors.

I'm also surprised we don't get more of the talking-head monologue after the success of Alan Bennett's classic series. It returned with panache in Queers, eight revealing 20-minute monologues about gay lives from 1918 through to the present day to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in private. Ben Whishaw kicked the whole thing off in soulful style as a soldier newly returned from the First World War.

Good to see the scripts have been published by Nick Hearn Books; actors will want to take on some of these challenges, though they'd be hard-pressed to equal the telly originals (or the performers at the Old Vic, many of whom were different - wish I'd known about those at the time).

The standard of Mark Gatiss's great idea, with texts by a whole range of writers including Gatiss himself, tended to be uniformly high, let down only by Alan Cummings' pre-nuptial monologue, the sincerity undermined by the horrid mugging to camera. There were some real surprises, like Rebecca Front as Alice, the poignantly determined-to-be-cheerful wife of a gay man eventually liberated by the 1967 Sexual Offences Act.

And I didn't know many of these actors, apart from Whishaw, Cummings and the ineffably sexy Russell Tovey, but would now look out anything they happen to appear in, be it on stage or screen. They're all infinitely superior to any of the younger actors in the stiff Mills-and-Boon drama Man in an Orange Shirt, complete with squishy score; I've enjoyed Patrick Gale's novels, but this seemed formulaic and - in the second episode about a young gay man afraid of intimacy - psychologically implausible.

Also unfamiliar was the creator of an unforgettable character in Quacks, Matthew Baynton as Victorian would-be-psychiatrist William who pushes the novel idea of talking rather than torture as therapy for the mentally unwell.

Cameos abound, all of them shrewdly observed. Rupert Everett's Dr Hendrick prefers not to examine female patients, using instead a dolly which he presses or asks the patient to press. He recommends a lady who clearly has cystitis to 'fast for a week, ride a horse for two hours a day, not Sundays, and place a freshly cooked baked potato on the infected area'.  Lisa Jackson as Mina, William's intended, by his mother, at least, relishes a romantic memory of a fairground visit which involved a helter-skelter ride and 'hitting dwarves with sticks'. And in Episode Two, we get both Florence Nightingale, duty-bound to worst our chief narcissist, in a pitch-perfect performance by Rory Kinnear, and Charles Dickens - good lord, that's our Hamlet of the moment, Andrew Scott, weirding us out with the great man's insecure vanity in his younger days.

Lydia Leonard as the neglected wife battling with both an unruly libido and male resistance to a woman wanting to join the medical profession, and Tom Basden as a drug-intrigued dentist/anaesthetist complete the main quartet. Of course the operations, conducted by Kinnear's Robert in a blood-caked apron, make you have to turn away, and some folk didn't have the stomach to stay with the series beyond the first ten minutes. But if you do, you'll find the historical detail fine-tuned - by James Wood, co-writer of Rev and judicious spicer-up of Waugh's Decline and Fall for the excellent TV serialisation - and laugh out loud at regular intervals. Cure from this elixir guaranteed, or your shilling back.

Two gay lives and a famous death

Nothing online can compare to browsing in a real, live bookshop. I do that in Daunt Books on Cheapside most Wednesdays before or after a weekly appointment, and the spontaneous not-looking-for-anything-in-particular has been much assisted by the selection of novels under different countries (Austria, Germany, Switzerland and the Sicilian bit of the Italy section tend to be favourites). There soon turned out to be a connection in that many of the authors I view in the light of personal discoveries have been published are being published under the New York Review of Books imprint: grown-up Erich Kästner (Going to the Dogs), the disingenuous Curzio Malaparte (Kaputt and The Skin) - and now the equally slippery, dualistic Sanford Friedman.

Friedman's essence is there throughout in the presumably not much adapted protagonist of Totempole, what we might describe as a divided consciousness which shares something in common with Lambert Strether in Henry James's The Ambassadors. It's best summed up by Friedman's long-term lover the poet and translator Richard Howard in his introduction to a posthumously-published masterpiece:

Perhaps the only explanatory gloss that the reader of Conversations with Beethoven should be aware of is the entirely contradictory (and therefore dreadful) amalgam of compassion and contempt for humanity that inspired it. This double entendre might be unrecognizable unless one saw and suffered from it in early and intimate circumstances, as I had occasion to during the many years I lived with the ultimately astonishing novelist Sanford Friedman. 

Astonishing indeed: quite apart from the fact that a candid novel about the tortuous path to gay self-acceptance could be reasonably well-received in the mid-1960s, I don't think I've ever read such a ruthless description of the role sexuality plays in infancy, childhood, adolescence and maturity as that in Totempole. I was reminded of Malaparte, not just in the animal names Friedman gives to each of the slices of life; and of myself at times, thankfully not straightforwardly in the unbearable psychological torment the confused 10 year old Stephen Wolfe inflicts on a boy weaker than himself, but I was certainly complicit in the bullying of a friend to deflect that bullying from myself, albeit when I was in my early teens, the worst years at school.

On the other hand there seems to be a wish-fulfilment in the more idealistic sequences which I'd be very surprised to find had an exact parallel in Friedman's own life; otherwise, only a ruthless examination of the wavering between atavistic instinct and a nobler ideal, reconciled to a degree in the last and longest section, dealing with Friedman/Wolfe's time serving in the Korean War, where the keynote is love and not death.

In the light of Howard's remarks, the portrait of a difficult genius during his last eight months in Conversations with Beethoven may contain an element of autobiography, or at least of identification, too. This premise is brilliant. The use of Ferdinand Hiller's text as epigraph summarises it neatly:

It is known that conversations with Beethoven had in part to be written; he spoke, but those with whom he spoke had to write down their questions and answers. For this purpose thick booklets of normal quarto writing paper and pencils were always close to hand.

I'm told that some of these survive, but I have to presume that Friedman made the ones in the book up, otherwise it wouldn't exactly be a novel. But its construction is brilliant: as the words of others leave us to imagine the deaf Beethoven's mostly irascible responses - with a few exceptions when he actually writes things down - his relationships unfold with hangers-on, concerned friends, those who care more about his art than his health, above all the main respondent, his sometimes (but not entirely) feckless nephew Karl. I don't think I'm spoiling the 'plot' when I say that the powerful, disturbing misogyny that's been built up dissolves in a climactic deathbed confrontation with Karl's mother. You'll know if you want to read this book from the outline of its approach I've just given; I think you should.

Patrick Gale's A Place Called Winter is more to be read for sheer entertainment and a good epic story well told, with 'fit for screenplay' written all over it. Boldly, the author imagined a reason why his great-grandfather Harry Cane should have made a clean break with his wife and child in England and gone to build a new life in Canada. Not long ago, families would have been appalled and disgusted at such a conjecture - I still see any inference of gay relationships in the lives, say, of the great composers, being met with cries of 'infamy' and 'vile slur' - but hopefully that time is past.

At any rate there's little but sympathy for the protagonist and we always root for him as we do not for Friedman's Stephen. I suppose I was a bit frustrated at first that we got no parallel inklings of his sexual orientation until the point where he begins his first gay relationship, as if it were a surprise to Harry; even if that kind of love dared not speak its name, the instincts would have been the same. I also thought it was bit coy about the sex, bearing in mind the core readership of Richard and Judy's Book Club (though I don't think Gale dumbs down at all). But the changes of scene are vivid, the characters good and bad strongly drawn, and a respect for the time of the action fitting. Here's just a sliver of dialogue between Harry and Petra, his pioneer beloved's sister:

She tapped her glass with her fingernails, shy of meeting his eye. 'Is it...is it emotional or simply a physical need the two of you are answering?'

'When I'm with Paul?'

She nodded, glancing up and away.

'I suppose, in a different world,' he began carefully, 'if everyone felt differently, it would be both. When a thing has always been forbidden and must live in darkness and silence, it's hard to know how it might be, if allowed to thrive.'

'I wonder,' she said, 'if everything were allowed, how many men would discover they were like you? I sometimes think most men dislike women intensely or resent them or something, and only marry them because that is what is expected, and because of children. And because no other option presents itself.'

'Oh, but I like women very much.'

'Oh. Good. Only not...?'

'Not quite as much. No.' 

By way of afterthought, I've found the gay love-story aspect of the five-part thriller on BBC Two, London Spy, very touching and real (as always when the words of Auden/Kallman's Anne Trulove come to mind: 'if love be love, it will not alter'). It's beautifully and broodingly filmed, with great cameos from many of the UK's best actors, and an often poetic script, and best of all is Ben Whishaw - the perfect Dionysus in the Almeida's Bakkhai -  as an incorruptible romantic who, having known the flipside, recognises love when he sees it. There's still one episode to go, so I shouldn't say too much, but we had a bit of a let-down this Monday with the supposed revelation of what the MI6 man may have been murdered for, and it was a bit laughable, even in the mouth of Adrian Lester. Well, we'll see how it all ends.

7/12  Postscript to that last comment following the final episode (and no spoiler, promise): not well, if we're talking about a satisfying denouement. Not even the totally convincing way Whishaw kept up the incorruptibility could carry it for me. Disbelief could not be suspended: there were incredulous groans of 'what?' from both of us here. Such a disappointment.

Ingrid as Fury

Intelligence about an extraordinarily underrated film starring one great Swedish lady came to me from another, Sophie Sarin, who,  I hope she won't mind my saying, is something of a cross between Ingrid Bergman and Katherine Hepburn. At any rate I can imagine her taking the place of La Bergman's outrageously attired character on her balcony, sipping Djenne Djenno cocktails and occasionally stroking her pet leopard (they keep saying 'panther' in the movie) as she watches the snare closing around her intended victims. Sophie is, of course, the biggest help Djenne has ever had in terms of protecting its valuable legacy (see her latest blog entry), the opposite of Bergman's dark angel of destruction winging down on the people of fictional middle-European Guellen.

The film in question is The Visit, released in 1964 and directed by Bernhard Wicki. A continental friend was very surprised I didn't know the original play on which it's based, Der Besuch der Alten Dame (The Visit of the Old Woman) by Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt - both title and playwright only names to me, since I'd heard of von Einem's opera (but again, neither heard nor seen it). It was a game role for Ingrid Bergman to assume, since she was not quite 50 at the time - she would have been 100 at the end of the month, so retrospectives are in order - and probably not ready for the label 'old'. Though in fact Wicki allows for Bergman's undimmed glamour in not exactly following Dürrenmatt's description of a 63-year old redhead who's 'a society lady with a rare grace, in spite of all the grotesquerie' and who turns out to be many parts metal following a plane crash in Afghanistan.

Wicked, though, she seems at first, until we get a greater tilting towards sympathy in the reasoning of this tycoon's widow for offering a failing town a million dollars in exchange for the death of the man who ruined her life. We soon learn that the natural corollary of the poster's subtitle 'Hell hath no fury...' is much more than just a woman scorned.

I corrected my ignorance of the play by buying a copy of the translation by Patrick Bowles after having seen the film, in which both Bergman and that ever-surprisingly good actor Anthony Quinn as the 'victim' of her hunt excel. The play does indeed read more as comedy than tragedy - ripe for the Richard Jones or Rupert Goold treatment - but I think I like the extra human dimensions Clara (or Carla, as she's called in the film) Zachanassian takes on in Ben Barzman's screenplay. Without the play's 'conspicuous consumption of husbands' and its false witnesses whom she's tracked down, had blinded and castrated and drawn into her circle of lackeys as Koby and Loby, she seems less absurd, and you have to keep pinching yourself to remember what a terrible vengefulness she intends to extract. The endings of film and play are outwardly different and yet - I can't say more without needing a spoiler notice - the film does not, I think, betray the essence of the situation.

So why was it not a hit? Too harsh, too unsoftened even in its ending to succeed with the public? Did they hate the idea of lovely Ingrid as, in the words of the play's Schoolmaster, not so much a Fury as a Fate, a Clotho 'spinning destiny's webs herself'? At any rate the characterisation, which can switch from deadly hate in the face to charming smiles in a second, is a long way from the usual image of Ingrid Bergman, who does indeed seem to have been the nicest person anyone ever met, albeit with a 'scandalous love life'. She knew the names of everyone on set and always arrived on time, I learn from an amusing 'Bergman vs Bergman' slot, jokily comparing actress and director, in the latest issue of the always beautifully produced Swedish Film which has a lovely photo of young, butter-wouldn't-melt Ingrid on the cover.

There's also an excellent article by Stig Björkman, whose new documentary Ingrid Bergman - In Her Own Words was shown at Cannes this year but has, as far as I know, yet to reach these shores. Disappointingly he doesn't choose The Visit on his shortlist of Bergman's best films, which features three I have to see, The Count of the Old Town (1935), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1941) and a Rossellini which has somehow escaped me, Europa '51, alongside two firm favourites, Bergman's Autumn Sonata and Hitchcock's Notorious, which has just been made into an opera in which Nina Stemme is to star in Gothenburg.

Furious women and a destructive outsider, if I might make a transition which has a strange hold on my imagination, also figure in an absolute and ever-timely classic of the theatre, Euripides' Bakkhai. Ben Whishaw is a predictably spellbinding Dionysos in James Macdonald ingeniously tradition-conscious production at the Almeida, and the Bacchic choruses are both elaborately set to a cappella music by Orlando Gough as well as stunningly well executed by a group of ten singing actresses (though there are some unmusical theatregoers who just don't get it). Enough; I've written my paean already over on The Arts Desk.

This is just to acknowledge the arrival of Anne Carson's often faithful translation - so good it's made me get my old Greek text off the shelf - as published by Oberon Classics. It's the best homage to Greek tragedy, I reckon, since Tony Harrison's magnificent poetic equivalent for Peter Hall's Oresteia. Hall's Bacchae, by the way, was very good, but the Almeida's Bakkhai is superlative. Can't wait for the whole-day reading of The Iliad next Friday, and Goold's Medea with his wife Kate Fleetwood, an extraordinary Lady in his Macbeth, should be quite something too.

One more fury: myself. I realised in a shrinksession that my anger in the public sphere is spilling over into the private, not the other way around, at least consciously. Every day this government brings in new bills, tries to reverse old ones, in a flaming trail of destruction and dismantling. That includes seemingly trivial things like relaxing aspects of the foxhunting ban and bringing back bee-killing neonicotinoids which we, along with much of the rest of Europe, had already banned; but it also slips them in between major horrors like the so-far-thwarted attempt to make the UK withdraw from the European Bill of Human Rights and the atrocious stand on the endlessly suffering refugees trying to get in to Britain from Calais, where the French, no better, have been treating them worse than animals. Bravo, David Cameron, for the accolade from Forza Italia; you must be very proud.

This country must be so soul-bankrupt if we can't put ourselves in the position of people who've lost everything but now suffer what one of them said on the radio recently was worse than anything he'd ever experienced (that would, admittedly, have to be someone who hadn't been tortured). And you wonder why Jeremy Corbyn is beginning to seem like the only human alternative* (heaven spare us Yvette Cooper et al). Worthy folk like Polly Toynbee and Alan Johnson are constantly telling us that choosing Corbyn as new leader makes Labour unelectable, but in five years' time, if this extreme right-wing behaviour goes on, who knows? What's to lose, anyway? And here's someone who hasn't just come out of the blue as a charismatic contender, rather a politician who always was charismatic but genuinely didn't seek the limelight, was/is palpably sincere and honest - and no, Guardian scaremongers, not extreme. So yes, Mr. Corbyn, I'll take a chance and yes, goddaughter Rosie, I'll join you on the next demo. Rant over - for now.

*10/8 - subject to thorough examination of his stance towards Russia. I can accept that he finds things to criticise about America's and NATO's response to Ukraine, but the warning sign is equating their behaviour to Russia's, and if he gives the simple answer 'yes' to 'did you and do you still support Putin's annexation of Crimea?' then sorry, bye bye. But let's be careful always to get the words from the man himself.

**18/8 - regular appearances on Russia Today, that organ of misinformation and propaganda, as well as the constant allying with dictators and terrorists, are enough to turn me off. So I retreat with my tail between my legs and try and decide which of the others is the best of three not very goods. Not that my ballot paper has arrived yet.5/4/18 - which it never did, and I was told to ring three numbers. So I jumped ship and paid my dues to the Lib Dems, though that's not paid off. And I still remain devoted to our superb Labour MP for Hammersmith, Andy Slaughter.