Festive Oslo

Not surprisingly given that Norway furnishes Trafalgar Square's Christmas tree every year,  its capital has a fair share of illuminated firs - no less than seven that I saw outside and within the National Theatre (pictured above, National Opera below the first photo) when I began my Peer Gynt foray for The Arts Desk with a lunchtime performance of Ibsen's flexible epic as adapted by brilliant director Alexander Mørk-Eidem.

I think I've assembled all the details necessary for the big piece, but frustratingly I can't find anything much online about the building or its marvellous collection of portraits beyond the fact that it was the work of Henrik Bull and opened in 1899 with a festive programme which included Ibsen's An Enemy of the People on the first two nights, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson's Sigurd Jorsalfar on the third. If we know the latter at all, it's through Grieg's heart-of-oak Homage March. So it's odd to see the statues of the two men flanking the building in equal stature. Ibsen's the one we recognise, of course.

The handsome lobby has the fifth tree.

Should have gone round the foyer spaces and staircases during the interval with my notebook, left inside the auditorium. The statue here is of early-ish Ibsen heroine Hjørdis.

Of the actresses featured, I can only tell you that this is Liv Ullmann - I failed to note the artist -

and though I identified a few playwrights and actors, I picture knowingly only a fine portrait of the Master, on loan from the National Gallery I loved so much on my first visit earlier in the year.

Otherwise, all I can do you are people and portraits, the former a very mixed bunch as the matinee was full of school groups, lively and vocal around the performance, extremely attentive during it - as how could they not be, given such a stunning and lively show.

Curiously none of the production pics shows the controversial painting which forms the backdrop for this Peer Gynt's devastating coup, corresponding to the storm for Peer's homecoming in the original. Norwegian-based Vanessa Baird's To Everything There is a Season caused a storm in the wake of the Breivik attacks in the city and on Utøya island, despite the fact that the toppling buildings and falling paper had been painted before it. Debate continues as to whether it should continue to hang in a public space, so all credit to Mørk-Eidem for making it part of his commentary on the point at which Norway could never be the same again. There's a reproduction of part of the original canvas over on the Arts Desk.

 Who knows what Ibsen would have thought of that? I hope he would have welcomed only one of many approaches to his endlessly fascinating myth. This time I got, as originally intended, to the House-Museum, which I've also written about in the Arts Desk piece. Two peripheral pleasures I didn't mention, or expand upon, were the tiles in the gents' loo, including Ibsen's specimens of handwriting,

and another tree or shrub of sorts for the natural ecosystem in Old Ekdahl's loft in The Wild Duck as realised by artist Lucie Noel Thune, who's been a friendly correspondent since my visit.

Only when close up do you realise it's constructed of hundreds of duck eggs. A nice complement to the real wild duck wandering the black glass box of my year's theatrical highlight, Belvoir Sydney's production - another wonderful adaptation - of that great and ambiguous play.

Jüri Reinvere's opera, the premiere of which I saw at the National Opera the following night, makes more explicit reference to the Breivik attacks at the same point as Mørk-Eidem does in his production of the play. Here Peer imagines he takes the Troll King's 'be yourself - and to hell to the rest of the world' to its natural, Breivikian extreme of indiscriminate shooting. The music there is at its most powerful, so I bought it as most of Oslo, apparently less interested in the score than in the situation, has not. I had reservations about some of the work, but I respect Jüri's right to treat it from his own unique perspective. I've met him twice - once through Berlin critic Jan Brachmann, when he came to the local cafe, and a second time after I'd seen the play - informally, not for an interview, though it was helpful to have his perspective in mind.

Then it was off to a splendid theatrical happening rivalling the play Peer Gynt, all thanks to this intriguing screen I saw as I was passing the Norwegian Theatre.

The result was even more amazing than I'd expected, a Hamlet like no other inhabiting a unique world - more about it over on the Arts Desk piece.

There remained only the event for which I'd been invited back to Oslo in the first place. Audience members were invited to a post-show party in the foyer on the first night of the operatic Peer Gynt only to find they had to listen to the speeches without a drink in hand unless anyone had bought one: that's a first for me. Anyway, there was always the tree in the splendid foyer - which I wrote about in my first Arts Desk piece on Oslo - to feast on.

The Thursday of my arrival (at midnight) was one of those crazy excursions I occasionally indulge in. That meant catching a morning train to Birmingham for a lunchtime pre-performance talk for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra before Andris Nelson's afternoon concert of Schumann's Piano Concerto with Stephen Hough and Bruckner's Seventh Symphony, the main thrust of my talk (though I started with Schumann's Rhenish opening as the example of a more usual sort of symphonic start). In a tight schedule, the rehearsal had only just finished when I came on to the concert platform for a brief sound check - and there was Andris discussing a point with CBSO leader Laurence Jackson.

He and Stephen were as friendly as I'd expected from the few words we exchanged. Also had a good chat with my main inviter and now, I hope, friend Richard Bratby who organises the talks; I'll be sorry to see him go early next year but the good thing is that he may be freed up to review CBSO concerts, inter alia, for The Arts Desk. Sadly I couldn't even stay for the first half of the concert as I'd left my passport at home, which in the end meant only a brief excursion before going on to Gatwick for the Oslo flight.. I'd like to have spent longer in Birmingham not only for that but also because the Christmas Fairl there seemed so jolly.

All I had time for was a ridiculously large plate of fried onion flower which caught surprised comments as I stood dipping it in garlic mayonnaise.

Then off to the train, and on to two and a half days in Oslo which were as gloomy as the weather in Birmingham, and of course much colder, with no more than a dusting of the snow which had made the first visit such fun. I can at least say I've seen the sun in that city, if only on rising at 9.30am - as I know from Iceland in January, it's the mornings which remain dark for so long - in my hotel room on the 32nd floor, looking east to the hills

and south to the Opera House and the harbour.

Anyway, we're sitting tight for once over Christmas itself, maybe off for a bit in the New Year. Happy holidays to all, with a final tree, or rather shrub, greeting: for the first time ever, camellia Debbie in the back yard has flowered unseasonably early, allowing me to display it alongside a couple of our Indian hand-painted Santas. An e-card on the same theme will be reaching those whose addresses I've not been able to track down.

My Borgen Hamlet

It came to me before the second series of Denmark's West Wing-worthy political drama was out. Nationality had nothing to do with it; I only saw Pilou Asbæk's magnificent acting as the tormented Kasper Juul fit for Shakespeare's Prince of Denmark, Sidse Babett Knudsen's authority tuned to a different pitch as Gertrude, Birgitte Hjort Sørensen's vocally well modulated beauty ripe for the steel that enters Ophelia's grief-maddened speeches.

Any number of fine Danish actors in the series would fit the bill of Claudius, depending on what the director wanted: inscrutability from Søren Malling  (TV editor Torben Friis and pictured below with Hjort Sørensen) or rugged threat from Mikael Birkkjær (the now ex-husband Phillip, so much more compelling than Birgitte's new love and 'celebrated British architect' Jeremy, a nasal-voiced blank canvas; let's not even look up the actor). Then there's old former communist Soren Ravn, as played by Lars Mikkelsen whom I find almost as attractive as his brother Mads: he could be a seemingly ice-cold Claudius who goes into meltdown. I'm usually a bit perplexed that Polonius, as the father of Laertes and Ophelia, should be as old as he's usually portrayed but were that the case, then Lars Knudson, the avuncular Bent, fits the bill.

Since I spun that fantasy, the thespian influx has already begun, given our national mania for what is so broadly and erroneously termed 'Nordic Noir' (they're trying to sell Borgen as a 'political thriller', which it only occasionally is, though there's always a nail-biting dilemma per episode). Hjort Sørensen is possibly wasted in Coriolanus at the Donmar -  I haven't seen it yet and I'm no great fan of the play, brilliant though it is - while Knudsen is due on stage here anon, I forget in what. Now The Killing's Sarah Lund, aka Sofie Gråbøl, is down to play Queen Margaret in The James Plays at the Edinburgh Festival. It's one in the eye for American starpower on the British stage, and of course it says much for Danes' impeccable English - though my 'Borgen Hamlet' would be performed in the actors' native language.

We've been gripped by the interior psychology of The Killing - well, the first and third seasons, anyway, since the second was ruled out for me by a ludicrous spoiler-identification of the criminal on The Arts Desk - and the rather gorier, incredible scenarios of The Bridge, because in spite of the loose ends crimebusters Saga and Martin make a compelling double-act.

But it's Borgen which takes the palm for subtle characterisations down to every member, in Series Three, of Birgitte's New Democrats. We've been devouring it, somewhat late, on DVD.  I love the way each episode investigates the complexities of various issues - in this season, harsh immigration laws, pig-farming, prostitutes and the spectre of communism, to name but four. And have we not all shed tears over - spoiler notice - Birgitte's finally coming clean about her pre-cancerous treatment?

As in The West Wing, we're stirred - unless we're right-wingers, who of course would not enjoy the disciplined liberal sentiments - by the big speeches. I was interested to read creator Adam Price - a Dane, too, despite the English name - talking about how Borgen was never aimed at an international market; they'd be lucky, he reckoned, to get their neighbours picking it up out of solidarity. But of course truthfulness crosses national boundaries.

Maybe you have to watch Birgitte acting out the big what-we-stand-for speech in episode two of the third series, but I'll reproduce a bit of it here. She's reacting to the media pressing her on the group's defection from the Moderates: 'I know the journalists don't understand idealism, but at the core of this is a desire to change the world.' And later, with reference to the Moderates' intention of deporting immigrant citizens for small misdemeanours:

We're passing more bills which border dangerously on breaching the Constitution and human rights. Bills that are the waste product of political horse-trades. They're rushed through because they're too shameful to discuss. The people don't get to have their say and it's not just slovenliness. It's decidedly undemocratic. Democracy is dialogue. And that dialogue is fading out. New Democrats will fight to re-open that dialogue.

Sound familiar? Of course. And that's the beauty of it: how Borgen began by being local and ended up touching the universal.

Bergman on stage

Referring not to mighty Ingmar's own towering productions, of which I count myself lucky to have seen two - more on that further down - but to a triumphant version of the eminently stageworthy Scenes from a Marriage newly transferred from Coventry's Belgrade Theatre to London's fine newish venue of the St James Theatre. It seems odd to place Olivia Williams and  Mark Bazeley , two actors I'd not encountered in the flesh before, above/above Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson in the unsurpassable film/TV series (I have the Criterion - Region 2 - set which luxuriously offers both long and short versions).

Yet our Brits made as persuasive an alternative couple as one could hope to see, not emulating the Norwegian and the Swede but creating a slightly different dynamic.

Trevor Nunn can be conventional these days - maybe he always was - but steered the perfect course here. I imagine certain scenes resonated with his own three marriages (we used to encounter a fractious Trev and Imogen with noisy kids atop shopping trolley in the Hammersmith Marks and Spencer's). At any rate it all felt plausibly real and universal. Peripheral details were updated in Joanna Murray-Smith's superlative adaptation; crafty little films between scenes showed what was going on in between - we knew we were in for trouble when Johan dressed younger than his age, took up basketball and skateboarding; the strains, stresses and shocks rang true.

The only question is how much gets taken on board by each couple in the audience, straight or gay, and how deeply they recognise themselves in it. We both felt there were certain man-woman differences which aren't replicated in same sex relationships, but the honesty game and Bergman's disconcerting habit of making people say what they think they mean at the time which may not hold good on another occasion stood out in bold, sometimes frightening relief.

The dynamic here is that you start off - or rather we did - disliking bumptious, slightly smug university lecturer Johan and rather feeling for Marianne's awkwardness. But later she comes across as killer queen bee when the power starts to slip from Johan's grasp, and I felt more for the pain of Bazeley's Johan than for Josephson's never quite likeable male.

The anguish of the central crisis, taken like much else from a dark night in Bergman's own life and mirrored in the Liv-directed film Faithless, has you sympathising with both; the unexpectedly violent later climax - again, I won't say more - felt a bit stylised, perhaps - at close quarters fake slaps and kicks are bound to look a bit odd - but the quiet coda was as moving as it is in the film. Among the fast-transformed supporting cast, Melanie Jessop is as good as the leads, playing a client of lawyer Marianne who's never loved her husband and is so objectively bleak that she makes us - and Marianne - laugh nervously.

Do go see the production;  there's less than a week left. I'm curious, too, to see how Toeneelgroep Amsterdam handle it at the Barbican later this month: three couples are promised to three different sets of audience members, starting mid flow and going backwards or forwards depending on where you are. It seems to me that realism is best, that you really need to follow one pair only and that in their development over years lies the fascination of the acting, but we'll see.

It's an appropriate time to rekindle memories of the first Bergman production I saw on the London stage, Hamlet at the Lyttleton, since as you've probably heard the National Theatre is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary. It serves only to remind me that they've not done enough continental European drama, at least not recently, and that the stagings were rarely cutting-edge, conventionally handsome at best (Stephen Daldry's Machinal with Fiona Shaw was one exception; more recently Edward II shone as a dangerous light in a safe theatrical environment). The Hytner era has been notable for polished middlebrowdom only. But in Peter Hall's day they did import a great deal of major world theatre, an honour which has since devolved to the Barbican.

Hall wrote in the 1987 programme how in 1973 the innovation of Peter Daubeney's World Theatre seasons for the RSC had come to an end:

Since then, London has been practically starved of large-scale theatre from abroad. When we opened on the South Bank 10 years ago we did have visits by German, Spanish and French companies: Peter Stein, Nuria Espert and Roger Planchon came to cheer us on our way. We believed at the time that similar visits would be a regular part of the NT's life. But then - despite ample evidence that paybacks to the Treasury arising from the arts probably reduce their cost to the taxpayer zero - the long, painful freeze on arts subsidies began.

Plus ca change, everything goes in cycles, choose your cliche. Anyway, I'll never forget the violent scenes in Bergman's much cut-about and (often excitingly) transposed Shakespeare between Peter Stormare's raging Hamlet and Pernilla Östergren's Ophelia (she also played the lame redheaded maid Maj in my favourite film ever,  Fanny and Alexander, and came to the Barbican, now married to Bille August, in Bergman's equally revelatory production of Ibsen's Ghosts). One image branded itself on the memory: out of the flock of black-clad umbrella holders at Ophelia's rainy funeral stepped the girl herself as we'd seen her in an early scene, garlanded. Ghost-like, she walked straight down the centre of the stage, along the front and off.

Gay films sweet and grim have impacted on our perception of relationships in a different key. North Sea Texas is a beautifullly filmed work by Flemish director Bavo Defurne about the pain and the happiness of teenage love, with a final stress on the happiness. The love is a given, or becomes so shortly after we've been introduced to ordinary 15-year old Pim (Jelle Florizoone) and his older friend Gino (Mathias Vergels), both children of very different single mothers. OK, so the actors are maybe a little too good looking for this to be a drama of everyday life, especially fairground worker Zoltan (Thomas Coumans), likely to be any teenage gay boy's object of desire.

But the truthfulness is low-key and affecting; if there's a bit of wish-fulfilment in it, what's the harm in that? The main thing is that Pim is neither oppressed nor repressed, showing how far we've come in gay narratives that just are. Alas, I suspect that the very different tone of the horrible Afrikaans film Beauty (Skoonheid) from Oliver Hermanus, about a twisted older man's pursuit of a straight boy (Charlie Keegan), is possibly all too true of a still macho, dirty-secrets society.

Even less is made explicit here; we simply follow a closeted factory boss (Deon Lotz) with anger management problems watching, waiting, saying very little, and know we're in for a bad time from fairly early on.

The deeply upsetting climax of the film gave me palpitations, and I almost wished I hadn't watched it. But powerful and open-ended it certainly is, and the performances are brave indeed. Tonight it's back to the stylish world of Paolo Sorrentino and his stupendous leading actor Toni Servillo in Il Divo, an earlier film about Andreotti's awful reign in Italian politics*. J watched it yesterday evening while I was finishing off the fourth of my night-after-night speaking engagements, and raved about it. So now it's time to ease the pressure a little before getting to grips with the two dozen Parsifals - not that I haven't had a wonderful week.

Scenes from a Marriage production photos by Nobby Clark 

*or it would have been had my friends and neighbours Juliette and Rory not already seen it. So it was Hollywood screwball comedy time, with the fast patter of His Girl Friday not quite as funny as I'd remembered it - if only Hildy had been played by Katherine Hepburn and not the somehow charmless Rosalind Russell.

Apocalypse Lear

It doesn’t get much bleaker than the end of Grigory Kozintsev’s King Lear, released in the USSR in 1970 (well, perhaps there’s one exception – Klimov’s horrifying anti-war film Come and See). Silence, cinematography, landscape, music (by one D Shostakovich – the last of his 40 or so film scores), sound-montages, speech, silence again…is it possible to go further than this in the perfect, distilled marriage of all these elements?

On Tuesday evening, prior to the BBC Symphony’s Maida Vale performance of excerpts from the score tomorrow, I showed those last 23 minutes to the students, and all, I think, were stunned. One particularly commended the duel between Edmund and a disguised Edgar: no music beyond the fanfares at the beginning, few blows, much of it out of sight, and yet so brutal, culminating in an extraordinary angle on Edmund dying on the ground, upside down as it were. The burning of the settlement around the huge castle – in Estonia, I believe – takes place to the same wailing unaccompanied chorus that starts up when Edgar buries Gloucester (the sequence at the foot of this entry unfortunately starts after that – here's a glimpse of the cracked landscape through which dying father and disguised son walk).


Lear’s howls resound from a distance, high up on the battlements; Cordelia hangs above a rushing river, the camera then lingering on its eddies once her body has been cut down and removed. And the ending is better than in any staging of the play I’ve seen (though Michael Grandage's recent production starring the unsurpassable Derek Jacobi was as clear and stark as any) – the fool playing his pipe (E flat clarinet) while Edgar wanders blankly through the ravaged town.


The music, too, is distilled genius by a composer who, like Kozintsev and his one-time collaborator Leonid Trauberg (pictured with him below), lived through the major upheavals of the Russian 20th century. All three were there, too, at the birth of sound film; their first collaboration, the extraordinary Noviy Babylon of 1929, was devised with a live orchestral accompaniment, in which form it sometimes still resurfaces; Odna (A Girl Alone) exists in two versions.


I love every instalment of their trilogy about cheeky proletarian and freedom-fighter Maxim; even when the agitprop gets stronger in the mid-1930s, you still love the central character. A shame there doesn’t yet exist a DVD with English subtitles, but this one will do.


And so, passing over decades of what was perforce much hackier film work, Shostakovich arrived at Kozintsev’s Hamlet and Lear. The first may have the edge in the compelling central performance of Innokenty Smoktunovsky (though Yury Jarvet looks amazing as a wizened gnome king with unsuspected reserves); but the last masterpiece is a fusion that goes even beyond even Eisenstein’s work with Prokofiev on Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, in that Shostakovich’s skeletal music really is undetachable from its context. A total work of art, gripping from first image to last. Here's the final sequence. Don't forget to double-click on the moving image if you want the full screen, widescreen effect (essential).

The tragic crown

It goes, I think - and I find, to my surprise, that there are folk who think otherwise - to Derek Jacobi for a Donmar King Lear I was so desperate to see that I completely forgot to book for it, had to pass on a matinee ticket offered at the last minute two Thursdays ago (Berlioz Romeo examples were still filling my time and mind - coronation results below) and only just caught in the live screening at the Gate Notting Hill - one of hundreds, I gather, worldwide - a week later. All photos of the Donmar production here by Johan Persson for the company.

The singular circumstances of that event I rather opportunistically captured, hopefully to the greater glory of the actors' professionalism, on The Arts Desk. But I ought to enumerate, if only for my own memory (as if I could forget), the range and breadth of Jacobi's greatest challenge. There was a potent sense of time passing for me, as his Hamlet was the first I saw, aged 15 (with my dear old dad just departed, coincidentally enough, and a tricky stepfather not so far in the future) at the Old Vic in 1977. I knew then, without comparisons to make, that it was the greatest, and so it has always remained in my mind. Forgive the fuzzy image of the programme here - mine is still buried in the maternal attic, I hope.


There's one objective truth here - that no living actor I've ever encountered has produced a wider vocal compass or more extreme dynamics (Alex Jennings and William Houston - where on earth is he these days? - came close). That makes for an operatic experience in which the music is all in the voice, and which veers between theatricality and heart-stopping truthfulness. And much as I will always remember Kathryn Hunter's Lear as the best I'd seen on stage up to this one, Jacobi led me to the somewhat sexist conclusion that even an actress can't do so much across the octaves. Because, of course, Jacobi has access to the falsetto too. Which he uses to highlight not only the old-womanish, verging-on-senility of the foolish, fond old man but also the heartbreak of 'O, let me not be mad' (who didn't want to weep at that point, I wonder?) and the banshee terror of 'howl, howl, howl!'

Speeches lit up, as did everything in Grandage's crystal-clear, blinding-white production, like I've never heard before - the quiet desperation of 'O reason not the need', the disarming crescendo of the curse on Goneril, the coup of a whisper after the soundscape storm in 'Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks'. And 'Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are' was one of many revelatory turning points - perhaps the most crucial, the first point at which true understanding of the lives of others seemed to strike home. The mad scene, which is where our transmission broke up, forcing Paul Jesson's Gloucester and Gwilym Lee's Edgar to repeat their Dover cliff duet with greater intensity, came across with exemplary crispness.


All this would have been less shattering had it not been conducted in tandem with a superb group among the actors, above all Ron Cook's Fool who made every 'riddle' intelligible (just seen him burnt to a cinder in Simon Pegg's surprisingly hilarious cop movie spoof Hot Fuzz).


You understood the two elder sisters not so much as ugly by name and nature but as warped daughters of a capricious father, with superb differentiation between Gina McKee's cold 'un Goneril (right) and Justine Mitchell, perhaps the more interesting characterisation, as a Regan with banked hysteria bursting out in terrifying degrees.


The Cordelia, Pippa Bennett-Warner, spoke the verse beautifully, fine promise for an eloquent leading lady in waiting.


Even the handful of weaker actors never quite let the side down: Grandage's pace and clarity always kept the focus where it was supposed to be. So while I felt his Glyndebourne Billy Budd restricted the possibilities and dimensions of Britten's psychological study, this was surely a liberation for the actors and the limitless possibilities of Shakespeare's text.

So. You may now have heard the Saturday Library choice for Berlioz's Romeo et Juliette - six days left on the BBC iPlayer to listen, if not - unShakespearean in the sung word but never in spirit. The gold crown, one of three, went to Gardiner's comprehensively vivid survey.


As yet there's a degree of confusion over its download status, but I was assured at the time that there were places on the net where that was possible. Apparently Universal rectifies the situation tomorrow, though this is a case where I'd like to have the CDs with their booklet for clarification of the various alternatives*. Anyway, I still have equal fondness for Sir Colin's first performance, another download-only; it was only the uniform first-class quality of JEG's soloists and Monteverdi Choir which tipped the balance.


In such programmes, the final choice is the sop to the public; but it's never so clear-cut. Truth to tell, I'd like my Romeo Alone movement from Monteux, the Love Scene from Davis in Vienna and the Mab Scherzo from Boulez (with Munch, so unexpectedly ham-fisted elsewhere, a close second). I also lay claim to my copy of the Toscanini NBC performance, too. Surely never was there a work offering so many different stylistic choices, movement by movement. Every orchestral work I hear after it seems a bit overstuffed at the moment.

*I'm told this is feasible, at the standard price, from ArkivMusic.com.