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.

Still starry-eyed about Street Scene?

Maybe not quite so much any more: from the Decca recording sessions up in Glasgow's Govan Town Hall through the two ENO runs, I stayed resolutely moony about Kurt Weill's 'American opera'. I suppose I was never blind to its flaws - the lyrics by Langston Hughes (rather than the spoken dialogue, though both have their heart in the right place), the baggy first act with a few below-par numbers.

Yet they seemed more apparent on Friday night when I revisited The Opera Group's long-running success two years on, back at the Young Vic. I can still admire what Weill, Huges and Elmer Rice were trying to do: to convey the shortfall between the urban dream - food, glorious food, Broadway, success after school graduation - and the reality within an extended multi-racial community (probably not extending, in 1947, to blacks beyond the caretaker who gets the cheesy number 'A marble and a star').

Still, it did sag at times, with not all the text coming over the admirably large orchestra - the excellent Southbank Sinfonia seamlessly conducted by Tim Murray - which faces straight out at the audience in two tiers of the 'tenement' - some weaknesses in smaller roles and not much sense of atmosphere (it was hot outside, but cool within, incidentally). Photos by Alastair Muir (show-stealing Kate Nelson as Mae Jones and John Moabi as Dick McGann above in 'Moon-faced, starry-eyed') except for the Rose and Harry Easter shot by Keith Pattison.


There have been a few cast changes, chiefly in the juve roles. Paul Curievici looks the part of the bookish young Sam Kaplan, and sings 'Lonely House' with the right ache and anger, only slightly bottling up at the very top; Susanna Hurrell, pictured below with James McOran Campbell's Harry Easter, has a dangerous spread for a young 'un above the stave, but acted neatly and of course wrung us out with Rose's devastation after the tragedy (I always think it must be a gift of a part to emote truthfully; only imagine how you'd feel as a daughter suffering a horrible loss).


We had a new, reactionary-violent father Maurrant in Geof Dolton, looking the part but not quite butch-brutal enough (I think bass-baritone, as in Sam Ramey on the Decca recording); but his numbers are the most awkward, even if the fine ensemble did paper over the embarrassment of 'I/He loved her too'. Downtrodden-radiant Anna Maurrant was played again by Elena Ferrari: where has this soprano been all my life? She's a superb, intense actress and the only one in the cast with a seemingly flawless technique. And though John Fulljames's production has never totally worked - in the stalls, you can't see what they're all chalking on the pavement - it does make poignant and believable the potentially sentimental 'A boy like you'.


The direct emotion here comes not just from Ferrari but also from 12-year old Tyler Fagan (actually not sure that's him pictured with her above), a real natural who'll surely be singing Miles in The Turn of the Screw soon (and I guess it had better be very soon). The last Willie Maurrant I saw in this production, George Longworth, was also superb, so someone's doing a good line in training treble-actors who can really project. And all the kids, as before, are spirited.

Weill's score still moves me to tears - profoundly so, I find, in some of the underscoring, or rather the melodramas: that moment when Rose finally picks up her suitcase to leave, scored for cor anglais supported by Mahlerian harp, is a heartbreaker. You can get a sense of it in the only YouTube clip - among a sea of student production films, some no doubt good, but I didn't have time to check - from either of the two excellent complete recordings (there are also excerpts from the Broadway original). This is Bonaventura 'Bonny' Bottone as Sam with Janis Kelly - who would now make another superb Anna Maurrant - as Rose in the ENO production, conducted by Carl Davis, and the duet incorporating Whitman's 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed' at the end of Act 1.



We also have to hear 'Lonely House', one of the great 20th century tenor 'arias'. I've been listening again, with obvious emotion, to the late Jerry Hadley, such a genial presence during the recording sessions back in 1989 along with another great no longer with us, Arleen Auger (she and her good friend Della Jones camped it up as the nursemaids). Adrian Dwyer is pretty good here under I know not what circumstances, and not much graced with close-ups, but never mind



And in the meantime, in a quest for DVD life after The West Wing, we decided another American street scene, very contemporary, ticky-tacky Californian, was not for us: I picked up series one of Weeds, about a desperate widowed housewife who deals cannabis to keep her house and kids on the level, on the strength of the star, Mary-Louise Parker (pictured below by Gage Skidmore), a major West Wing light (she's also superb in Angels in America).


Can't fault her, not any of the other actors, but it's all so relentlessly grubby that I don't give a shit about any of the characters. I have no problem with filth out of the mouths of believable, rounded humanity, but there's next to nothing of that here.

Then we tried two episodes of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, also devised (like the first four series of WW) by Aaron Sorkin, but the milieu - the usual self-regarding American showbiz scene - doesn't really interest me. And the culmination of the 'new' programme the characters are all working on, with John Mauceri - only connect, last heard of recording that Decca Street Scene and a few other things - conducting a cheesy version of G&S's Major General's Song, did not inspire the confidence to continue. Will now take up John Sleopkura/Graham's recommendation of the New Orleans drama Treme since fibre is desperately lacking after The West Wing.

Wingnuts adrift

After 154 episodes and approximately six months' viewing - when exactly did I pick up Series 1 and 2 in a charity shop for a fiver? - our sole addiction to the telly screen of late has come to an end. The West Wing (hence 'wingnuts' = fans) went out with a stylish whimper, and organically as ever, with the conclusion of President Josiah Bartlet's sometimes compromised but by and large pretty ideal two-term reign and his handing over of the reins to...

Can't divulge, since it was a surprise to my fellow-watcher even if I'd snuck a look at the episodes precis. Suffice it to say that part of the series' natural evolution was to find a potential Democratic successor as charismatic as Martin Sheen's lovable President, Jimmy Smits's Matt Santos - modelled, I recently read, on the speeches of a then largely unknown Barack Obama, with the emphasis shifted from black to Latino - and a Republican challenger as sympathetic as Alan Alda's Arnie Vinick. Both proved more than equal to the rest of the fabulous ensemble.

The presidential campaign is eye-opening to us barely comprehending Brits, and bears out in its twists and turns the famous 'events, dear boy' saying (or as Thucydides put it, 'the persistence of the unforeseen').

Americans would have found special pleasure in the live debate where Vinick takes up Santos's gauntlet to drop the usual format and go uninhibitedly head to head (I understand two versions were filmed, one for the west coast and one for the east; we should have had both, as well as the promised extras about the making of this episode which were not to be found, on the DVDs).


Interesting, of course, but what makes The West Wing unique is the flexibility of tone in the behind-the-scenes dialogues and developments. I thought, for instance, that the old 1930s screwball-comedy flavour had disappeared somewhere in Series Five; and yet there it was again, in an achingly funny episode based around Josh Lyman's post-campaign burnout ('Transition', superb script by Peter Noah and actor Bradley Whitford at his peak). Then the focus shifted back on my favourite of all, C.J. Cregg (the ineffable Alison Janney), with whom I'm just a little bit in romantic love, and another superb instalment, this time in the sentimental-drama mode. We also got to see Toby of the sensitive eyes again - Richard Schiff, low-key and hardly on screen for more than a few minutes in later episodes, if at all, but powerful as ever.

Loose ends are all tied up, to a point, but the last episode is no wave-farewell-to-all-you-best-loved-characters; some don't reappear, and the end of run mood is pointedly subdued. The viewer is encouraged to share in the feeling that this is how it has to be, and no regrets. True, one imagines, to how it was and how it is. And there was never a point where I felt the classic series had dated or was no longer relevant to ongoing issues. No wonder Obama, currently taking up the constant gauntlet mentioned here of taxing the millionaires, adores the show. It actually made me love America again.


Postscript: a final word from Martin Sheen, long before a seventh series was so much as a glimmer (and yes, I have a second-hand copy of the 'official' West Wing Companion covering series 1 and 2; it was a present, if you must know):

One of these only comes along in a lifetime, let's face it...Why would I want to look back? What am I going to follow this with? I may as well go and do Shakespeare in Minneapolis or something.

Given Bartlet's Lear-like attack on God at the end of series 2, that might not be a bad idea. Could one do Shakespeare's greatest tragedy in a contemporary political setting, with Sheen Martin not Michael? There's a thought.

Claudia Jean vs. the media moguls

Is there anyone out there who doesn't love C. J. Cregg? The White House Press Secretary in the parallel universe and not-quite-perfect-but-better-than-most American democratic government of The West Wing as played by the consummate Alison Janney, and pictured above with Martin Sheen's toweringly charismatic President Jed Bartlet, is witty, incorruptible, sharpshooting, sassy (I can pick up on that though I'm probably not the world's best expert on female sexuality) and compassionate but never in a gooey way. And the reason I mention her today is because we're up to Episode 19 of Life After Aaron Sorkin, that's to say Series 5, and C. J. is hot on the trail of a Federal Communications Commission decision which turns out to be in cahoots with big corporations controlling the media. Sound familiar?

I wonder if I can explain the specifics half as well as she does. In short, the FCC has reduced the proportion of local media purchase by the big guys from 45 per cent to 39.37 per cent, 'a number that ought to come with a decoder ring* and a jar of Ovaltine'. Why the magic figure? Because that was the limit (over)reached by 'Mert Media' when it purchased nine TV stations, and the FCC has just in effect 'posted bail' for this and the other giants which reached similar quotas - cited as Viacom, News Corp (yes, there it is), GE, Disney, Clearchannel - for 'illegally gobbling up TV stations like greasy hors d'oeuvres'.

The select press to whom C. J. wants to give the exclusive aren't interested, and she quickly twigs why: 'you don't want to write about this because it's about your corporate owners'. One says 'I'm not a media critic'; 'no-one in the media is', she shoots back, 'that's the problem' (of course everyone in the non-Murdoch-owned press is now). She's told she's partisan but insists she doesn't 'have a take' when 'one company can now own stations in 199 of the nation's 210 media markets and one company can influence the decisions of 98 senators and 382 house members' (don't you love it when your telly heroes can reel off figures like that as so few real-life politicos can?).

C. J.'s revenge is short but sweet on all those who kowtow to their 'media mogul robber baron bosses' in 'the biggest media conspiracy since William Randolph Hearst was starting wars and crushing filmmakers'. She simply brings in carpenters to the briefing room to see to it that only 39.37 per cent of seats go to the representatives of their corporate owners, one each. Everything has to go quickly back to what it was before, but she's had her victory. STOP PRESS (17/7) Where C. J. led, Miliband follows, with Clegg behind him. You saw it first, as usual, on The West Wing.


Series 5 so far has by no means been as disappointing as critics claimed the show became after visionary scriptwriter Sorkin left the scene. OK, so there's much less of the dizzying baroque wordplay, but one cast member described it as down to solid work after the honeymoon, and the way an idealistic if necessarily compromised White House functions can still spring a few surprises. We lost another sassy feminist as played by Mary-Louise Parker in, was it, Episode 5 but Glenn Close breezed in for Episode 17 - more, please - and Mary McCormack has just surfaced as a stylishly tight-lipped new Deputy National Security Advisor. We even had a likeable gay press assistant pop up in Episode 18, and he's just been glimpsed again, so there's hope. But - with the dreamy but character-hazy Rob Lowe replaced by the very definite Joshua Malina - the core team is full of people you'd want to be your best friends. Or I would. Now going off to order up Series 6.

One snag - on the evening or two in a week free at home we now watch wall-to-wall West Wing, so the last three LoveFilm movies have all been sitting unwatched for months. As I had an agonising day and a half of not yet diagnosed leg pain - the most excruciating physical incapacity I've experienced, some say sciatica, gone now, thank goodness - I took late Tuesday afternoon off work and caught up on the one J had already seen.


We love Ferzan Ozpetek almost as much as we love C. J. His visually ravishing films have immense charm and frequent lightness of touch, but at some point they all seem to evoke serious issues and a sense of what's beyond the normal parameters of life. Loose Cannons (Mine vaganti)is no exception. Set like Cuore sacro and Le fate ignoranti (surely everyone's favourite) in his adopted Italy, it's a pretty good advertisement for the beauties of Lecce and the surrounding Puglian landscapes.

Character, though, is as paramount as ever in Ozpetek's singular world. How are 'loose cannons' like a fiercely conservative patriarch's two gay sons and his mother, whom we see choose duty over love in a series of luminously-filmed flashbacks, integrated into their traditional but subtly evolving society (the Meistersinger question)? I won't spoil the plot twists except to say that one of the most touching moments is when the nonna describes how she wakes up every morning alongside the man she loved and sacrificed to marry his brother, in other words that he's always with her in spirit - and the wonderful Ilaria Occhini says this with immense dignity and no false sentimentality. In the final credits, there's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it image where you see the old woman reading in bed, and the young man as he was lying beside her. Not to give too much away, there's also perhaps the most exultant cinematic death since Thelma and Louise hurtled over the cliff. Here's Occhini (seated) with the other female stars Of Mine vaganti Elena Sofia Ricci, Bianca Nappi and Lunetta Savino.


Of course there's a fair bit of well-made feelgood about the film, too, and though its soundtrack can be insistent, I did love this disco sequence to 'Sorry, I'm a lady' by the outrageously camp Baccara (the ladies of the 70s hit 'Yes sir, I can boogie'). It doesn't evoke the general tinta of the film - though it does go all innig when the protagonist watches the girl who's fallen in love with him and his boyfriend splashing about - but it's good, simple fun. You'll need to double-click on the moving image to get the full screen effect (and the best body). Enjoy.



As a bonus for those of you whose Italian is good enough - the YouTube clips are all without subtitles - here's a scene featuring the two sisters in the extended family. They're walking through the town trying to deal with the gossip and looks following the revelation that one of them has a gay son who was supposed to inherit the pasta business. The mother gets her own back on the bitch in the shop by telling her that the girl she's so proudly announced her son is about to marry is a 'spiaggia libera' (public beach) into whose sand all the boys have poked their umbrellas. Result.



*I think that's what she said (there's no script, so I wrote it down off the telly). It sounded to me like Dakota ring, which I thought must be a kind of donut, but in an earlier episode Sam talked about a 'secret decoder ring', and this makes most sense.

Plus ça change

It was admirably bloody-minded of gay filmmakers Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau to forge an epic in which the subject closest to their hearts doesn't rear its head until half way through. Born in 68 is, for its first hour or so, the tale of a beautiful woman (played by the luminous Laetitia Casta) torn between two men when she goes to live in a country commune following the student uprisings in Paris.


She has two children by one of them; the other continues to lead a fraught resistance against authority; the parents part; the children grow up. Which would all be the stuff of pure soap were it not for the fact that, like Heimat if without quite the same ambition, Born in 68 draws telling parallels and symmetries in history, in this case between the freedom-fighters of '68 and the son's Act-Up activities nearly twenty years later (this is where one of the filmmakers' direct experience kicks in).


I can't really imagine what the extended telly version must be like, but the very long film certainly has its fascination once you get used to the pace and the two wings of the action. It's especially rich when the children diverge, the daughter choosing a relatively conventional marriage to go against everything her wild-child mother stood for. Casta ages well, her grief-ravaged face speaking volumes about the hopeless love that's wearing her down, and most of the conversations have the ring of truth. I thought it was done, by and large, with lightness of touch; J found the signifiers of time passing - oh look, a big mobile phone, and is that the first laptop? - a bit overdone. But its heart and its performances are all in the right place. And how could one not wish to see everything made by the directors of the exquisite, and at times very sexy, Drole de Felix?

In the meantime, we've finally been swept up by even finer ensemble work in the first series - at least five more to go, I understand - of The West Wing, since I picked up a box worth of 44 episodes for a fiver from the local charity shop.


I know that to the converted I'm probably going to sound like someone who announces that e-mail is a wonderful thing, you should try it, but anyway: here's slick, witty characterisation, people you can care about, a bit of eye candy (Rob Lowe) and a performance of screwball-comedy grace from Allison Janney, as well as perfect set pieces, from monologues to septets, all giddyingly well stitched together. The only thing that jars for me is the saccharine score, which is so much more conventional than the script and makes the sentimental moments seem gluier than they are; but even that couldn't too much disfigure the episode we've just reached, about the state dinner for the visiting Indonesian dignitary, which is absolutely consummate in its changing tones from ironic start to emotional quiet curtain.

All this was balm to the spirit last night when I returned home prematurely from my first and last brush with a residents' committee - believe everything you're told about the backbiting, the defensive hostility towards newcomers, the pettiness - to watch more congenial White House round tables and to wish I belonged to them.