A Fine Execution at the Tower

Purism is not the issue here.

The evening started stately enough with Nigel Kennedy, still sporting his Gary-Rhodes-on-steroids butchered pineapple haircut, leading the Philharmonia orchestra through two melodious movements of Bach. So far, so dignified, so what.

What the audience had come for - and got in spades - was a hefty dose of Nige’s blokeish irreverence: chatting to the band, blagging half-finished glasses of champagne from the corporate stiffies in the front row, and generally parading his hallmark punch-drunk staggering routine like a pub comedian on a slow night in his native Brighton.

But when the man picks up a fiddle, and saws in to Duke Ellington’s ‘In a Jam’ it blows away every preconception, and his virtuosity is undoubted.

Perhaps sensing the audience’s preference for the more modern material, he confused the band by changing the running order - as he said ‘you don’t want to work up a sweat with this big band shit and then stop’. Some of the pieces were world premieres, of original 30’s Ellington arrangements re-worked by Kennedy to put more of the emphasis into the strings, and it’s a whole new sound.

It’s a whole new audience, too - many of whom don’t know how to behave in concerts, perhaps the idea that it’s in the open air makes them forget to stop chatting, particularly the chav in row P who answered his phone during the elegant and complex Bach Interventions in which Kennedy sparred electrically with cellist Karen Stephenson, before returning enthusiastically to the Swing era.

And then, just for a moment, with the lush big band sound washing over you, the first stars of the evening appearing over the battlements of the 900-year old White Tower, and the planes lining up for their descent into London City Airport, you begin to appreciate that setting this clumsily brilliant musical anarchist on a vulgar red gash of a stage against the stones of the Tower, in the historical, cultural and commercial heart of the city is what living in London is all about.

Blown by the 'Wind'

Kevin Spacey’s timing is exemplary.

Not just in his personal performance but in bringing to the Old Vic such a dynamic production of the 1955 American war horse ‘Inherit The Wind’ - a courtroom drama based on the true-life story of a young Tennessee school teacher arraigned for promoting the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin against the orders of a Christian fundamentalist school board.

Written in the shadow of the McCarthy trials it is topical today because of the ongoing battle between religious right-wingers in the US who have repackaged their anti-Darwinist stance into a fresh campaign to coerce schools into teaching ‘Intelligent Design’ (by the hand of God) instead of evolution as an approved scientific theory of the origin of man.

It makes Madonna’s Kabbalist babbling look almost rational by comparison, and it’s coming to a courtroom near you pretty soon as they extend their campaign into the UK.

This play has a special resonance for me because, in my tortured youth wrangling with my parents about whether I should be allowed to 'go on the stage' or press on to University, 'Inherit the Wind' marked my 17-year old professional debut in the Harrogate Repertory Company's production. It's perhaps the phase that taught me there was no money in acting, since whatever I earned barely covered the fares for the last bus home each night.

I was pleasantly surprised how much of the dialogue I remembered, and the gospel songs, as taught to us by our unofficial chorus-mistress Zara Nutley, later language school owner Mrs Courtenay in the popular TV rubbish 'Mind Your Language'. I tried to Google some of the other actors from the show, Adam Kuryakin (possibly the first 'out gay man' I'd encountered in Harrogate) and Peter Codyre, or director Barry Howard, but I guess they're all dead.

In the meantime, enjoy the bareknuckle bout in 20’s Tennessee where Spacey is impeccable as the veteran lawyer Henry Drummond (real life Clarence Darrow) twanging his suspenders and twisting the witnesses’ words to barnstorming effect. He’s much shoutier than Spencer Tracy in the Oscar-winning 1960 movie, the internalised anger contorting his already hunched body into a shape that may physically recall Charles Laughton, but continuously commands the stage.

It’s possible Spacey was impressed by the 2007 Broadway production in which Christopher Plummer finally threw off the mantle of Captain von Trapp and won plaudits for his portrayal of Drummond.

For Drummond to have the audience on side is an easy win, you could argue, since the lawyer is fighting for the rights of the common man and the free thinker, but to succeed at this he needs a credible opposition.

In the real story, three-times failed presidential candidate, and tub-thumping bible-basher William Jennings Bryan came to Tennessee as the prosecuting counsel. The character’s called Matthew Harrison Brady and in David Troughton’s strong performance he’s also a lurchingly crippled titan, matching Spacey barb for barb in the war of the words over bible passages and driving himself to a personal resurrection of his political career. If he’s ultimately weakened by the fight, the fault’s in the script rather than the performance. This man’s on his way to King Lear.

Half ‘Witness for the Prosecution’ half ‘Gone With the Wind’, the design whips up a confectionery vignette of the Old South. Director Trevor Nunn punctuates the court action with gospel singing and torchlight processions lovingly dressed in shades of sepia like the Kansas scenes in ‘Wizard of Oz’. Given the script is by Robert E. Lee and Jerome Lawrence - authors of ‘Mame’ - it’s clear Sir Trevor is desperate to turn it in to a musical.

Outstanding among the 40-strong cast, something not usually seen outside the National, Mark Dexter plays the visiting cynical journalist who orchestrates the defence, based on Baltimore satirist H L Mencken, with a handsomely attractive oily charm - as he says ‘I may be rancid butter but I’m on your side of the bread’, and Ian Cunningham adds convincing value as the banjo-twangling court supervisor Ralph Meeker.

An old-fashioned ‘well made play’ but an excellent production. Go.

The sound of one hand Clapham

As I've said before, it's 21 years since Stephen Sondheim took panto by the throat and throttled it into a self-styled morality play called ‘Into the Woods’.

If nothing else, the current production at the Landor theatre highlights the age of the material, and the bum-numbingly lengthy exposition necessary to tell the stories of Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel and Jack and the Beanstalk before the interval - after which the plot thickens and the cast thins as many of them are picked off by a marauding giant whilst blaming each other for collective and individual misfortunes.

It’s intended as a metaphor for the disintegration of society, but the jury’s out on whether Sondheim was presenting an original metaphysical deconstruction of America at the end of the 20th century, or smoking crack.

The tedious first half needs pace which the cast couldn’t deliver on Friday since they were struggling with too-recently-arrived costumes and a clever oversized bookshelf of a set which demanded mountaineering feats whilst singing in a hoop skirt and minor key.

An announcement asked the audience to treat it as an open dress rehearsal and on that basis, it was just about OK. It also started over half an hour late which allowed us the opportunity to appreciate what a scrofulous pub the Landor really is, perched on the edge of an edgy housing estate. It’s a shame, because the theatre upstairs has a great reputation which doesn’t percolate down to the bar, and at closing time we had to shoulder our way through a number of chavs in what looked like pyjamas, and endure some colouful (I use the word advisedly) banter from dusky youths lounging about on a street corner.

The lead characer of the Witch is in disguise for the first half - and Lori Haley Fox was the only cast member to use a strong American accent so she appeared initially to be Ruby Wax in a burka (not in itself an unattractive prospect) but after the ‘transformation’ revealed blonde streaks and an overbite unfortunately reminiscent of Julia Davis in Nighty Night.

Others were more promising including Ryan Forde Iosco and particularly Luke Fredericks as the swashbuckling but shallow Princes, the latter clearly relishing a second outing in knee-length boots after his stint as Rolf the boy Nazi in Sound of Music, and with a lovely voice.

It’s notoriously hard to sing Sondheim because the lyrics are so often truncated or interrupted, but Sue Appleby as Cinderella and Leo Andrew as the Baker overcame this particularly well, and Andrew‘s ‘No One Is Alone’ had great resonance.

One of the best quotes from Into the Woods is ‘nice is different than good’.

This is a nice production.

A Talent not to amuse

Back in the days when boys became bands without the unwelcome attentions of Louis Walsh, or girls sang aloud without a televised vote - young Victoria Wood penned a simple, funny and sweet piece for the Sheffield Crucible based on her own experiences backstage in a provincial talent show.

Revisiting it thirty years later, she freely admits she had to explain a lot of the references to the cast, so it's not surprising many of the jokes had to be audibly elaborated by the older audience to its younger boyfriends during last Thursday's first performance at the Menier. There is hardly a gay bar in London in which you couldn't hear someone 'doing' a Victoria Wood sketch, and for the previews they were out in force, and lapping up the familiar comic lines.

Asked to comment on her friend Julie Walters' appearance in "Mamma Mia", Wood explained to the Daily Mail that musicals 'really weren't her thing' - which may have been tact as Walters was uncharacteristically dire, but also disingenuous since Wood recently wrote 'Acorn Antiques the Musical' with a swathe of pastiched production numbers. For 'Talent', the musical additions are modest parodies of cheesy cabaret songs which mostly serve to give the male cast members an opportunity to perspire copiously in velour suits with polyester ruffles.

Wood appears to have cast this production with a number of old friends - Jeffrey Holland, once the comedian Spike in Hi-de-Hi is amusing as a pensioner magician, but former Blue Peter presenter Mark Curry rather less convincing as the randy compere of the rotting Bunters night club.

It's like an explosion in the comedy section of the BBC archives, or at least in the skip where they throw the stuff they don't use any more.

The stronger casting is in Suzy Toase playing the role created by Wood, and the ever reliable Mark Hadfield doubling a magician's assistant and the night club's catering manageress in the funniest segment of the show when she organises the table allocations. Both these actors excel at deadpanning the flat northern inflections of Wood's material and illustrate both her easy facility with the language, and its ultimate failure to satisfy.

To genuine Lancastrians, the camp non-sequiturs of Wood's dialogue "she was going to be a nun but they kept having tomato soup and she lost her vocation" are routine, being heard on the bus from Bury to Bolton every day of the week, and Wood's skill was to spot the patterns and write it down. Custard creams aren't inherently funny, but when suggested by a northern housewife as a more palatable alternative to oral sex, it gets a laugh.

Whilst she has undoubtedly become a 'national treasure' through sketches and sitcom, comparison with more structurally capable dramatists like Alan Bennett are inevitably disappointing. In fact, the way Christopher Luscombe's recent production of Bennett's 'Enjoy' outshines 'Talent' despite the fact they were written at similar times, reflect on both Wood's script-updating and directing skills.

Sometimes, Talent alone is not enough.

Captive Audience

Banged up in a US prison two inmates from opposite sides of the tracks forge an unlikely friendship against a background of corrupt wardens, wisecracking murderers and a hanging. The stage version of 'Shawshank Redemption' is ‘Chicago’ for straight men.

Whilst not actually channelling Renee Zellweger and Catherine Z. Jones, leads Kevin Anderson and ‘The Wire’ star Reg E. Cathey draw parallels as Anderson’s innocent-behind-bars learns quickly who not to trust and how to manipulate the corrupt system, while Cathey’s persistent recidivist tries to distance himself from the morality but eventually succumbs.

Like most current screen-to-stage adaptations (Sister Act, Breakfast at Tiffany’s) legal ownership of the movie rights prevented a direct adaptation from the filmscript and the source material reverts to a less sparkling original novel or treatment.

The dialogue’s too fluent for movie realism but works well enough on stage where the supporting cast turn in sharp characterisations, notably Ryan McCluskey’s engaging performance as the cheerful gambler Heywood. McCluskey is billed as first cover for Anderson’s lead role and it would be interesting to see him play it.

Equally outstanding is the least sympathetic character, the violent sodomite Bogs played with utter conviction by Joe Hanley whose priapic readiness to exact the ultimate rite of passage on new inmates gives new meaning to the phrase ‘hardened criminal’.

Ferdia Murphy’s two-tier set of prison bars is simple to the point of emptiness, and bizarre when placed in the blue white and gold cherub-studded proscenium of Wyndham’s Theatre. Lighting Designer Kevin Treacy could have worked harder to reduce the spill on to the auditorium and focus more harshly on the prison.

An interesting echo on the sound system actively suggests the hard surfaces, but otherwise there's little to indicate place, the passing of time or seasons, or to convince us that this is a real penitentiary.

There’s plenty of shouting and banging, and a lot of booted stomping in the fight scenes but ultimately this Shawshank is hollow. As Roxie says - it’s just a noisy hall where there’s a nightly brawl, and All That Jazz.

Canvas Opinion

"I've been to a Marvellous Party, I must say the fun was in tents ...".

Misquoting Noel Coward is no way to skewer the canvas and plastic packaging of the Port Eliot Literary Festival except insofar as Coward is probably more in the age range of this festival's goers, than, say, that of Creamfields or Glasto. It's hilarious that the most common complaint received by the "People's Paper" generated by journalists during the course of the festival was that the music was too loud and they couldn't get to sleep. I mean, isn't that the whole point?

From the Ralph Steadman Oddbins-logo titling, to the CVs of most of the performers which largely recorded their previous exploits "used to be a major talent in London's Soho in the 1970's" being typical of those whose current achievements would fill fewer paragraphs - the material is beamed steadily at the already middle-aged. For here life is lived on the grassy edge but only in retrospect, mostly by comfortably-off thirty- and increasingly forty-somethings attempting to reclaim their lost youth.

Largely encumbered by buggies and similar wheeled contraptions containing a bigger selection of rug-rats than you'd find in the average Montessori kindergarten, this is a family-friendly event although without many activities for children and certainly nothing to keep them up late. In fact, Port Eliot needs to decide whether it's a festival, or a fete.

The 'Hog Wild Comedy Club' featured a number of smart and edgy comedians who were distinctly put off by the presence of beribboned eight year olds in the front row. Particularly the guy with the paedophile routine.

Too many of the poetry, music and cookery events were ruined by some noisily spoilt brat or crying baby - if you're going to encourage quite so many breeders to trawl their fractious offspring round a moist Cornish hillside at over £100 a pop, at least provide a creche. Preferably in Devon.

Rock headliner Evan Dando - former lead guitar with The Lemonheads (last hit album 1998 shortly before he became less of a musician than a full-time crack addict and a has-been if ever there was one), told me the trouble with this festival was "too many rich people", immeditately prior to passing out on the floor of the press tent.

Since a lot of the performances were quite dull, it became more interesting to observe the audience, and I began to take fashion notes. There's clearly a dress code for Festivals, but it mustn't have come in my information pack.

If you are a woman over 40 you will slacken the straps on your bra and wear a flowing, patterned, loose-fitting kaftan, muumuu or smock. If you are a lesbian, or a feminist, or Rosie Boycott, purple will feature substantially. Accessories will be chunky (your choice of celtic or crystals) but leave the Mikimotos at home.

Women under 40 (or trying to be) should tie a silk rag round the expensively-distressed John Frieda cut and their outfit must include a quilted body warmer as favoured by the Queen on moorland shoots, Hunter wellingtons in any colour other than black, and absolutely de rigeur footless tights.

Full length is stylish, mid-calf preferred by razor-shy munters, anything above the knee is pure chav.

Men over 40 should really try to be invisible, but if dematerialisation proves impossible after multiple pints of Trelawny's Old Speculum, visible attributes seemed to include bald patches surmounting greasy grey pony tails, unfastened waistcoats and sub-Liberty print shirts.

Younger men can adopt the by now traditional schoolboy-to-grave uniform of below-the-knee shorts, often in camouflage or linen and with sufficient pockets to mimic Virginia Woolf on her foray into the river Ouse, a wordy t-shirt crossbanded into illegibility by the strap of a canvas shoulder bag, and the chapeau of the moment, the Sinatra pork-pie hat (vegetarian option: straw).

Other accessories were equally predictable: when I lived in New York they told me I was never more than ten feet away from a rat. By the same token, at Port Eliot you're never more than ten feet from a Guardian-reading corporate dickhead trying to keep an unfamiliar roach alight.

There's a coloured wristband regime for festival-goers which outclasses the social stratification at the court of Louis XIV in its arcane hierarchy and accorded privileges.

Top of the tree are the pink-wristers known as 'Friends of the House' who seemed to get in everywhere whether or not they had followed the rules and signed up for a given event, joined a queue, or competed for a limited-numbered place. Universally Sloane-y, predominantly female, they made themselves enormously unpopular and paying festival punters labelled them 'FOTHs' for fear of being overheard using the full description.

FOTHs were housed, like the luckier artistes, either in the ramshackle 'Castle' itself, or in tidy tents erected in a walled garden high above the water table, and with dedicated toilets. The rest of the campers were abandoned to the wild and windy hillsides.

Some of them had been allocated 'jobs' assisting performers and exhibitors and to her great credit and personal charm, the wonderful Barbara Hulanicki confessed she'd been allocated two identikit FOTHs but persistently could not remember their names. 'I just call them the twins' she said.

I have to say that Hulanicki was, for us, the saviour of this event. Not only was she personally pleasant and approachable - she even shared her bag of chips with me on the first evening, and she made a dress out of Mylar reflective plastic for my friend Michelle which was endlessly photographed - she was clear-eyed and intelligent and, in terms of achievement or iconic status, towered over the rest of the rag-bag of entertainment lazily and cheaply assembled, it seems, through friends-of-friends of (Lady? Countess?) Cathy St Germans, chatelaine of the house.



the gorgeous Barbara Hulanicki stapling Michelle's dress (above)
and looking cool and serene eating a cone of chips (below)



Catherine St Germans, who became the Earl's third wife in 2005, is a sometime 'style director' of the Telegraph magazine and occasional contributor to Vogue or the Economist's pappy 'Intelligent Life' colour supplement of simpering puffs like this one on the work of hatter Stephen Jones (a nice enough man, but I think Philip Treacy might dispute St Germans' accolade of "the greatest milliner of his generation") or this one about her passion for expensive shoes. Deep and discoursive journalism, I think not.

Not all of the performers were paid, and many very little - the comedians earned £30 a gig which was quickly returned to the Festival through their purchases of food and drink, authors seemed to be attending for a chance to 'push' signed book sales, and the standard of talks and presentations was low.

A couple of highlights did surface - even in a septic tank the really good chunks rise to the top - and I enjoyed comic writer Ben Moor who was one of the few performers whose work looked planned and rehearsed, and authentic Mersey Poet Phil Bowen. It's not a proper festival if the top stars don't pull out, and true to form cancellations included comedian Arthur Smith and Monica Alli, who possibly had a sudden attack of good taste and though better of it.

Rosie Boycott was amusing and articulate but her I-used-to-be-a-druggy-hippy-chick-and-then-I-edited-the-Independent routine has not only become stale with repetition but conveniently edits out her wealthy family in Jersey and her schooling at Cheltenham Ladies' College, so that precarious risk of failure when she was starting up Virago and Spare Rib has a less convincing edge of danger than the anecdotes suggest.

I had high hopes of the food presentations by Rose Prince in the 'Big Kitchen' (which had only been cleaned up and decorated the day before the festival opened) - but with cramped seating and the inability of most of the audience to see what was being demonstrated - no mirrors over the demonstration table, and lots of pesky FOTHs crowding the front.

Like so much of the festival organisation (inadequate lighting, signage, catering, retail and ill-served exhibitors with no electricity or hand-fetched water) it was another case of poor Port Eliot event management.

Don't give up the day job, yer ladyship.



Trivia 1 : The Daily Mail last month made salacious fun of the marriage of Catherine Wilson to the 68-year old Earl, Peregrine Eliot, linking it to an equally tempestuous family row now raging over Earl Spencer's current courtship of Bianca Eliot, flame-haired temptress and the recent widow of the Earl's eldest son.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1196193

especially the second half of the piece.

Last night I dreamed I went again to ... Millendreath

in which I discover a childhood haunt and a turf war ...

Every Christmas, summer and Easter for our family holidays we went to my aunt and uncle's "private hotel" in Cleveleys on the Lancashire coast. I think this was because at the time my dad worked for a firm of builders' merchants and had done Uncle Bert some kind of favour on the cost of the bathroom fittings which was being steadily repaid in free accommodation ...

I went back recently. It's derelict.



There came a point in the 60's when my mother tired of repeated visits to the same place, plus we'd moved to Yorkshire and my dad got a Ford Zephyr 6 with his new job so we were somewhat more mobile. Which is how there was a dramatic sea-change in our holidaymaking the summer I was eight or nine and we went to Cornwall.

Quite why we chose a holiday complex which had been developed for use by Welsh miners and their families, I don't know, unless it's because my Aunty Dorothy - who accompanied us - lived in Gloucestershire and possibly knew some Welsh people who'd been there.

I hadn't really thought about this much in the intervening period until last Friday while plotting a driving course to the Port Eliot Literary Festival when I spotted the name of a beach on the map and realised it was barely five miles from our 1962 holiday destination.

Which is how, on a wet afternoon, I returned to Millendreath for the first time in 47 years.

It was derelict.



Do we see a pattern forming here?

What did surprise me was how easily I managed to drive there down a series of Cornish country lanes (mostly with high-sided hedges and no view of the countryside) without hesitation, deviation or repetition - using the same kind of instinctive radar as guided Luath the labrador in Disney's 'The Incredible Journey' which I think was filmed more or less the same year.

Channelling the second Mrs de Winter in 'Rebecca' and noting without irony how close this was to Daphne du Maurier territory, I remembered the shape of the high-sided thickly wooded valley, recognised the rocks to the right hand side of the beach where I'd played, and the layout of the valley floor with its scattering of cottages, cabins and lodges each in its own secluded clearing, which even then I recognised as cleverer than - say - Butlins rows of standardised chalets.

Then I sat on the sea wall, shed a few nostalgic tears, and the memories started to flood.

I remember we stayed in a log cabin called 'The Curlew's Call', surprisingly since they're northern birds and there are none in Cornwall. The one next door was "Gitche Gumee" which I think is what the Iroquois called the lake in 'Hiawatha' so clearly the naming was both fanciful, and random.

I remember waking in the top bunk of my bedroom and overhearing my parents and aunt having some conversation in which they were discussing how, in the future and I got to be 18, I'd leave home and probably not want to return. This idea so dismayed me that I burst into tears, and had to be comforted with reassurances and chocolate digestives.

I remember playing 'Telstar' endlessly on the jukebox, learning to dance - with girls - and even on one occasion on a billiard table.

I remember the Club House, to which we repaired each evening after tea, being run by a trim and spinsterish woman who would ring a bell and announce at about 9pm "I have some Cornish Pasties, sandwiches, and soup" as if the news had taken her completely by surprise. I also remember that one night the pasties didn't arrive and there was a near-riot.

I remember the soup of the day was almost always 'Stock Pot' which I tried to replicate when I got home by diluting the minced beef my mother had made for a shepherd's pie.

I remember my father being the life and soul of the party, at least when half-cut, and him teaching the rest of the happy campers to do the Twist. And knowing, from Juke Box Jury, that it had already been supplanted by the Mashed Potato.

I remembered going mackerel fishing and being so disgusted with the gaffing and gutting that when everyone else was having them freshly pan-fried with oatmeal, I had a cornish pasty instead.

Anyway, back to the contemporary dereliction. It really was sad to see how one side of the valley was now covered with those shabby flat-roofed prefab-looking bungalows which have fallen into disrepair in dozens of forgotten British seaside towns.





The valley floor where we stayed had been cleared of the original buildings to make a sizeable car park, in the far corner of which stood an Aston Martin DB9. Quite a new one.



Not far from it was a smartly-dressed man with Hunter wellies and a dictaphone who retreated into the trees every time I got near him with the camera.

With little else to do, I wandered about and came across the village notice board. Alongside the usual parish notices was a vituperative but unsigned 'open letter' criticising the actions of a developer company in shredding some of the vegetation on the less occupied side of the valley, and referring to the landowner as 'the self-appointed new God of Millendreath'.



Scenting sabotage, class wars and possibly the plot of a Cornish murder mystery, I spent an hour on the internet trying to find out what was planned for this once-beautiful but now shabby beachfront. It involves the usual nonsense of different vested interests vying to influence the planning authority in a distant town hall, but the proposals appear to be a clever re-interpretation of the resort which flourished in the 60's.



I guess they'll wait for some more of the inhabitants of the cheap chalets to die off, and the bulldozers can move in.