The way up

...facilis descensus Averno;
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,
hoc opus, hic labor est.

The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labour lies.

Virgil Aeneid Book 6  lines 126-9, English translation by Dryden

This blog is rarely the place for the confessional, but I did vow that once I felt like my old self again, I'd stop puzzling some of the more inquisitive readers here as to the reason for the latest absence (long-term followers will have noticed the others; the 'episodes' began, for the first time in my life, shortly before I began this blog). After two and a half years of good health, far too much of 2012 was devoted to what I'd call not so much the black dog as the black hole. Around its edge were the constant modicum of working when I could, premature attempts to re-enter the public arena in April, and a return to teaching in September which soon felt natural. We managed trips to friends in the west during the spring and a wholly successful walking holiday around Chamonix in August which proved how crucial a part exercise plays in temporarily raising the spirits.

Even so, full wellness didn't return until November.

The mechanisms and triggers of these devastating episodes I still fail to understand. Did the trauma of extended dental work including a three-hour tooth extraction kick it all off, as I felt it had when the first crisis began six or so years ago? Was it the full impact deferred to the middle years of a bereavement in adolescence - the death of my father when I was 15? Well, in psychotherapy we've been through all that, raised aspects I hadn't considered - how not a single person really asked how I was, since all focus was on looking after mother; how maybe these spells from the mid-forties onwards have been a kind of identification with my unhappy father, disabled for the five years between his first stroke and his second, sitting at home feeling useless. Now I don't think we'll get any further along that line, though who knows?

Still I don't feel equal to defining the abyss. I need others to do it for me. Gwyneth Lewis in Sunbathing in the Rain, 'a cheerful book about depression',  approaches it poetically; Lewis Wolpert's Malignant Sadness and Andrew Solomon in The Noonday Demon add to the stock of understanding. With the qualification that all-enfolding love never deserted me - and I would insist that my best of men saved me, as before - Solomon's opening definition of depression does the job:

It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connections to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself. Love, though it is no prophylactic against depression, is what cushions the mind and protects it from itself. Medications and psychotherapy can renew that protection, making it easier to love and be loved, and that is why they work...In depression, the meaninglessness of every enterprise and every emotion, the meaningless of life itself, becomes self-evident. The only feeling left in this loveless state is insignificance.

All I know is that on examination of the terrible times, there were oases of love and reassurance, even enjoyment, however much a casual glance back suggests nothing but the black. All this may seem strange since this is mostly a blog about enthusiasms, and, yes, I do love life with a passion when I'm well. Everything in the alternative state is a negative of that, a reversal. Two borrowed ways of defining it have been to say that I lost my soul, and that I joined the ranks of the undead (since at its most seemingly unendurable it did indeed feel like a fate worse than death, which you think about so often in the negative state; I don't believe anyone who denies this). Is there more than a touch of the bipolar? Very possibly. Each doctor, psychiatrist and psychotherapist seems to have different theories. It's not a science, but to be sure it needs medical supervision. If simply mentioning all this helps someone out there, then it's been worthwhile: don't be afraid to ask if you think I can be of use, though I don't suppose I can say more than, endure, this too will pass.

Anyway, here I am back in the midst of abundance, and in the few months of full enjoyment I can easily pick out a list of highlights. There were a few earlier in the year - chiefly an isolated excursion to English National Opera to see my beloved Rosenkavalier, and though there was a veil or two between me and my usual enjoyment of it, I could tell that this was a superlative revival, vivaciously conducted by Edward Gardner with perhaps the most successful third act I've seen. Sarah Connolly trumped her first Octavian at ENO, Amanda Roocroft had the bittersweet presence the Marschallin needed and John Tomlinson's chief asset as a vintage Ochs was his sheer ease on stage. But the voice which blew us away was Sophie Bevan's, blooming every time her Sophie hit a high ecstatic line. Here she is with Connolly in the Presentation of the Rose (photo for ENO by Clive Barda).

Richard Jones's staging of Martinů's Julietta was the next operatic highlight, drawing very few negative criticisms from anybody other than about the quality of the music and its subject, in which I was happy to join battle on the rapturously positive side. Below, three mini-Michels and the 'real' he (fabulous Peter Hoare) photographed for ENO by Richard Hubert Smith.

I seem to have struck very rare Royal Opera gold in July to catch Anja Harteros's long overdue return to the house. Her Desdemona shone Venus-starlike in a Verdi Otello which also included the right-sounding sort of protagonist in Alexanders Antonenko and magnificent work, as ever in the Italian rep, from Pappano and the Royal Opera Orchestra; shame about the Iago and the lame old production.

It was hard work getting to Glyndebourne for The Cunning Little Vixen, especially as that opera's glorious message wasn't chiming with me at the time, but I reckon Melly Still did a good job on the production. A much happier experience later in the year was talking again at a study day on The Marriage of Figaro while the Glyndebourne tour was kicking off at its home base, and loving the mostly superlative cast of the subsequent performance as well as Jonathan Cohen's vivacious conducting.

December brought my only Wagner live other than the surprisingly satisfying experience of hearing Mark Wigglesworth scale mountains in De Vlieger's potted Ring for orchestra. If any operatic event in anniversary year is better than the Fliegende Holländer in question, I'll feel lucky: Bryn Terfel covering all expressive and dramatic bases as an astounding Dutchman was equalled by Anja Kampe and Matti Salminen in the visiting Zurich Opera concert performance.

Mezzo of the year second time running for me is sublime Alice Coote (pictured above by Ben Ealovega), for her Mahler Rückert Songs with Saraste and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and her Purcell, Handel and Britten Phaedra alongside the splendid Britten Sinfonia. Violinist Catherine Martin (pictured below) revealed afresh the strange beauties of Biber's 'Rosary' Sonatas between homages to Bach's Orgelbüchlein in the Tower.

The BBCSO pulled off a sequence of well-programmed concerts but the LPO carries on reaping the rewards of a central intelligence in the shape of their music director Vladimir Jurowski. Hard to choose from his through-planned events, which will continue in 2013, but the last of his programmes I heard this year still resonates, with a spellbinding revelation of Grisey's Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil (Four chants for crossing the threshold) enveloping hyper-agile soprano Allison Bell in a host of original sonorities. The Mahler Five that followed was absolutely fresh, too, as one has come to expect from VJ.

Theatre - I saw too little, though the Young Vic Three Sisters came to seem like a masterpiece of rethinking alongside the music-drenched pantomime of the Vakhtangov Company's enervatingly wilful Uncle Vanya (wish I'd seen Lucy Bailey's Print Room Vanya). So glad, all the same, to have been along to five of the Globe to Globe shows, top of the list the Maori Troilus and Cressida and the Hindi musical version of Twelfth Night (photo below by Simon Annand).

And we did a bit of catching up the week before Christmas with the still-sparkling second cast One Man, Two Guv'nors and a Sondheim treat which has been top of many critics' lists, Merrily We Roll Along at the wonderful Menier Chocolate Factory.

Now I feel more like the youthful Frank and Charley  (Mark Umbers and Damian Humbley pictured by Tristram Kenton above), starting out at the end of the show with wide-eyed optimism. Here's to a much better 2013 - and may yours be what you wish of it.

Cymbeline of South Sudan

Of all the Globe to Globe ventures, the visit of the South Sudan Theatre Company seemed the most likely to be overwhelmed by its background story: theatre folk and poets coming together in a country less than a year old, still torn by strife when it should be building its new peace, to tackle an unfamiliar text. Not that Cymbeline is among the Bard’s most studied plays anywhere – I discovered a special fondness for it at university -  but the circumstances here seem especially fraught. For two decades no English books were permitted by the Sudanese government in the north, so having the text translated into Juba Arabic, a language subject to an oral rather than a written tradition and one formerly suppressed under British colonial rule, was a double victory. This excellent little film draws you in to the newly-formed company's preparations.

How was it, in practice? Very rough and ready: some tentative entrances, plenty of stand and deliver, actors talking over each other rather more often than was in the interests of lively drama. But there was no mistaking these Africans’ enthusiasm and instinct for storytelling, the way they slipped so easily between punctuating drumbeats into the Globe’s best house style of engaging the audience and resonantly addressing invisible gods (I hear the six Italians’ crazy version of Julius Caesar later on Wednesday needed miking: che disgrazia!) The tradition of strolling players was alive and well here; you could well imagine this team putting across the essence of the play vividly to assembled village people al fresco. We don’t find the raising of a sleeping maiden’s nightdress cause for a good laugh, but cultures can’t always be expected to agree.

How much does the story reflect South Sudan’s struggle for liberation, as has been claimed? Not a great deal: though peace and reconciliation must resonate in spite of very recent Sudanese evidence to the contrary, the conflict between Cymbeline of the woaded Britons and ancient Rome is, at least until the very late stages of the play, mere background for the wanderings and trials of the king’s daughter.

‘Heavenly Imogen’ I’ve always thought of as a kind of Alice cast adrift in a grotesque wonderland when separated from her beloved Posthumus. She fends off the advances of his scurvy friend Iachimo, who wrests love-tokens from her unknown by sneaking into her bedchamber concealed in a trunk (here he snakes out of a trap door). She wakes from the effects of a death-simulating potion alongside the headless body of her wicked stepmother’s silly son Cloten, killed by a young man under provocation who will turn out to be her brother, and takes the torso to be Posthumus. The lengthy reconciliation scene is full of what a friend of mine calls ‘I was that toothbrush’ moments.

All this was strongly evoked by the South Sudanese actors, with (I fancy) very few cuts and minimal help from the scene summaries in the LED paratitles. It was impossible not to warm to the indignation and passion of Margaret Kowarto’s Imogen (prone in the above photo) or the dignity of Francis Paulino Lugali’s Posthumus. But the festival’s ongoing problem, which can occasionally be a virtue, of not having the text translated back into the Shakespeare original to help the punters made me realize more than ever that the contrived situations of Cymbeline seem merely daft in themselves; it's the poetry they conjure up in the unlikeliest circumstances which gives them sense and wonder.

Here it’s not quite enough to claim that one vaguely feels the force of that poetry in another language without understanding it. The audiences for these shows are incredibly resilient and patient, but they have to be grateful for resourceful mime, jolly dances to clap along to and choice morsels dropped in (non-Shakespearean) English, in which the South Sudanese were as well versed as the Indian actors in the much slicker Twelfth Night. Which of course is far from the whole story, however well that story's told. Shakespeare the poet is largely absent unless you happen to speak the language; Shakespeare the dramatist usually emerges triumphant. Which is enough to keep me going, I hope, to more offerings in this extraordinary world festival.

Production images by Ellie Kurttz for Shakespeare's Globe

Cherokees see Shakespeare slain

Here's a picture which is less remarkable for its execution than for capturing a slice of history not entirely unrelated to the worldwide Shakespeare carnival parading within the Globe. We arrived at the Victoria & Albert Museum the Sunday before last at 2pm, just too late to catch any of the art-college Shakespearean design ‘happenings’ which had by all accounts enlivened so many of the museum’s rooms and galleries. But I and Neapolitan visitor Clara were regaled with fabulously entertaining anecdotes about objects in the theatre collection by curator Geoff Marsh, who’d already given such good value at the time of the Diaghilev exhibition back in 2010.

He gave us the lively circumstantial history of this sub-Hogarthian artwork by William Dawes, The Downfall of Shakespeare Represented on a Modern Stage (click on the image for more detail). The darker-skinned spectators in the audience to the far right are two Cherokee Indians, part of a delegation visiting London in 1762. Chief Ostenaco, diplomatic in his relations with colonial big-wigs, met George III and sat for Sir Joshua Reynolds.

What they're watching is an allegorical murder: the triumph of Italian opera in the London of the mid 18^th century  as represented, it’s thought, by Artaxerxes, over far superior native art (though if we're talking the Artaxerxes of Arne, he of Rule, Britannia! fame, both the libretto and the composer were English, so I'm a bit confused). Which is why Shakespeare lies dead while the operatic hero tramples pages of his plays. The V&A’s website page explains further: ‘In the 18th century Drury Lane and Covent Garden were the only theatres licensed to stage 'legitimate' drama. The popular Italian opera was the province of the King's Theatre in the Haymarket. Things changed in 1761 when the great English tenor, John Beard, took over the management of Covent Garden. He increased the number of opera performances and those of Shakespeare fell.’ More background here.

 Needless to say, rumours of our Will’s sudden death were greatly exaggerated, and now visitors once perceived as exotic are more likely to be playing Shakespeare from their own special perspectives rather than missing the chance to see his works on the London stage. I’ve now seen two more offerings in the great Bardic world meeting of Globe to Globe to follow the first play to be performed, Troilus and Cressida in Maori, and I’d be hard pressed to say which of the three was the best. No need to reiterate eulogies on The Arts Desk – on the Swahili Merry Wives of Windsor here and the Hindi Twelfth Night here – but let’s see a couple more images. First, Mrisho Mpoto’s Falstaff nimbly tumbling, if such a thing’s possible, into the buck-basket supplied by Mistresses Page (Chichi Seii) and Ford (Lydiah Gitachu; photo for Shakespeare’s Globe by Marc Brennan).

Now Geetanjali Kulkarni as a feisty Viola in The Theatre Company of Mumbai's earthy - but musically very sophisticated - Twelfth Night. Photo by Simon Annand.

For proof that at least half the audience understood the Hindi, see below. I should hasten to add this was taken before the performance, not during it. And yes, I abandoned my usual groundling place and opted for a seat, since heavy downpours threatened; in the event there was only one.

This week’s Globe to Globe  includes a handful of Italian actors taking on all parts in Julius Caesar; the appearance of the youngest nation, South Sudan, in Cymbeline; and Richard II from Ashtar Theatre, Ramallah, a staging which goes some way to meeting the objection of those (including Mark Rylance) who think Israel’s Habima National Theatre shouldn’t be allowed to appear with its Merchant of Venice.

Shakespeare's Maori warriors

With 38 theatre companies and as many languages descending on the Wooden O across the next six weeks, the least I thought I could do was to make a long-overdue theatrical outing and honour the Globe to Globe Shakespeare marathon at the earliest opportunity. I missed the opening, an evidently enchanting dramatization of Venus and Adonis by South Africa’s Isango Ensemble, but I hied me thither to catch the next event, an extraordinary Troilus and Cressida from the Maori company Ngakau Toa directed by Rachel House (production photo above by Simon Annand for Shakespeare’s Globe; shot below featuring Kimo Houltham’s Troilus/Toroihi and Awhina Rose Henare-Ashby’s Cressida/Kahira from the team’s admirable website). For a more detailed appraisal of the individual performances than I’m about to give, read my colleague Matt Wolf’s eulogy on The Arts Desk.

The overall look and sound of it will never be forgotten. Here were warriors to the life, acting out Shakespeare’s singular and troubling interpretation of episodes from the later stages of the Trojan war with incredible vigour, all feathers, bare chests and tattooed buttocks and thighs. They started with a traditional Maori Haka or war cry to the Prologue’s ‘In Troy [for which read Aeotearoa], there lies the scene’ - a ritual now on YouTube courtesy of a little Telegraph film -

 and there was an impromptu response at the end, too, as our neighbour-groundlings responded with their own earth-shaking tribute. At last we understood just how many audience members had been getting the verbal as well as the physical jokes; the Maori community in London must have joined the actors’ devoted fans from New Zealand.

All this was visceral, goosebump-raising and subtly complemented throughout the play itself by the refined, often spooky taonga puoro musicmaking of participant James Webster. Maybe the action itself came across as a bit too robust to suggest a war that’s been dragging on for years; there was little sense of the ‘botchy core’ eating away at notions of valour and love, though I liked the changes rung by an impish female Thersites (the chameleonic Juanita Hepi). But one big plus was that the fight scenes, which are usually the point at which even the best of British productions buckle a bit, provided a fitting climax, even if the horror of Hector’s ignoble death at the hands of Achilles’s Myrmidons went for little. 

One crucial accompanying element came as a bit of a shock. The digital panels either side of the stage gave us not a line of Shakespeare in the original, only the baldest of scene-summaries. So the Bard’s flights of fancy and disgust had to be semaphored at best, the war-council speeches – and I was alarmed to find how much of them I’d forgotten since a time when I knew the play well – passed us largely by, and identification of the warriors on both sides was even harder than usual (an opportunity missed by the supertitling in the early parade of Trojans, duly compared to big up Troilus in Cressida’s eyes by Rawiri Paratene’s authoritatively seedy Pandarus). Certainly words to the effect ‘Pandarus brings Troilus and Cressida  together’ were no substitute for the poetry in that initially tentative love-scene. So the language, except for those who understood the impressive Maori translation, was the biggest casualty. I wonder if the same opacity is to dog, say, the Serbian/Albanian/Macedonian Henry VI three parter?

Yet it has to be said that the audience went with the general sense of it all; the groundling zone remained as busy after the interval as it had been during the first half. As far as I could judge, this was the most compellingly-realised Troilus of the ones I’ve seen since Howard Davies’s Crimean War version many years ago, with Juliet Stevenson as an against-the-grain Cressida so shockingly bartered and traduced. The unique atmosphere of the whole will resonate in the memory long beyond any of those quibbles.

Full details of the Globe to Globe extravaganza here.