Worth The Wait

Last Wednesday evening finds Old Dive the Samuel Beckett fanboy sitting, tense with excited anticipation in the middle of the third row, around ten feet from the front of the stage at Norwich's beautifully refurbished Theatre Royal.

I am waiting for the start of one of my very favourite plays. I've seen eight productions since we made a mess of it in the sixth form at school, but this promises to be the dream team production and it doesn't disappoint.

Samuel Beckett's glorious Waiting For Godot, with Patrick Stewart as Vladimir and Sir Ian Mc.Kellen as Estragon.

I mean Holy crap! What's not to love? The most wonderful play ever written about the comedy and despair of the human condition, starring a couple who were born to play Vladimir and Estragon and who have just reached the perfect age to do so.

I won't bother going through these guys' stage, cinema and tv history; we all know and love them.

Suffice to say that Sir Ian Mc.Kellen and Patrick Stewart are both blessed with THE VOICE and at seventy and sixty-eight years old respectively at last have the gravitas and credibility to play these two fabulous rôles.
They are at the peak of their powers and - like Didi and Gogo - have been building a genuine relationship for fifty years in some truly wonderful plays.

So … The curtain rises …
How did they do?

Godot is a very easy play to get spectacularly wrong. All eight productions I have seen have been wildly different.
A lot of productions go for the easy option and play it for laughs.
Which is fine as far as it goes, as Beckett has written a gutbustingly hilarious script.

But that is only half of it.
From around 500BC and the first Greek theatre, the masks of comedy and tragedy have been inseparable and this play needs them both in perfect balance.

One particular production - and a very good one - eschewed the comedy altogether, making the funny lines bitter or wistful and omitting the slapstick routines Didi and Gogo have developed over fifty years of life on the road together.
The result was overpoweringly bleak. Hugely impressive, but not the most fun I've ever had in a theatre.

The Guardian theatre critic must have been a fan of that particular production as he criticised Mc.Kellen and Stewart (mildly in an otherwise rave review) for "playing it for laughs" in the first act.

I find their double act perfect.
To feel the full tragedy; the shock, horror and devastation of the latter parts of the play, you need to build up sympathy for Didi and Gogo and this production has, in my view, given us the perfect Godot.

The set is reassuringly dark and bleak, with the tree bare for the first half of the play … the pitiful display of leaves that bedeck its broken branches as the second act opens betokening the pathetic hope life gives us a moment before dashing it away.

But the first act …
Mc.Kellen clambers painfully and slowly - as befits a seventy year old man - over a pile of masonry rubble and enters the stage; sits, exhausted and tries forlornly - and with little success - to remove the remains of his boots from his swollen and bloody feet.
Enter Patrick Stewart as an only slightly more dapper Vladimir and we are off.
Their rapport is instant and marvellous to behold.
Like an old married couple who have long ago forgotten why they married in the first place they bicker, fight, make up and bicker again. They are the most believable and instantly lovable Didi and Gogo I have ever seen.

The audience erupts into gales of helpless laughter. Mc.Kellen and Stewart turn out to be a classic and wonderful comedy double act, yet through the sheer class of their acting the pain and despair of the two protagonists is constantly there, nagging at us as we roar with mirth, both with them and at their misfortune.

Being as close to the actors as if they are here in my living room with me is amazing. Although Vladimir and Estragon are completely alone in their desolation, some audience interaction is inevitable and there are several instances of eye contact with them both; one in particular, where Mc.Kellen sits musing and gazing out over "the fog" that is the audience, he catches my eye and keeps it for a long, long time. There is such an intensity, such a sparkle in the old charmer's gaze that I am transfixed. He's still a seductive old bugger at seventy!

There is indeed a magic about both of them; in the programme notes I had read over coffee in the upstairs restaurant beforehand while studying my old script, they had discussed how they approached the rôles. There was reverence there, but also a determination to make this Godot their own. Not as two individuals, Vladimir and Estragon, but as a cohesive and inseparable whole.
They succeeded spectacularly.

One passage in particular, shortly before the first arrival of Pozzo and Lucky is so tricky to get right and can often appear crass:

Vladimir: What do we do now?

Estragon: Wait.

Vladimir: Yes, but while we're waiting.

Estragon: What about hanging ourselves?

Vladimir: Hmm. It'd give us an erection!

Estragon: (highly excited) An erection!

Vladimir: With all that follows. Where it falls mandrakes grow. That's why they shriek when you pull them up. Did you not know that?

Estragon: Let's hang ourselves immediately!

Mc.Kellen and Stewart play this with such a rush of pure, innocent, childlike wonder it is marvellous to behold. A pair of old, old men, careworn and hopeless seeing a glimpse of light in the darkness; the opportunity for one last erection and then blissful oblivion …
But of course it - like all hope - fades …

I've seen that played straight, played for laughs, played cringe-inducingly badly, but with Mc.Kellen and Stewart at last I really believe it.
And they keep it up (no pun intended) for the full two and a half hours.

Of course even a top-drawer Vladimir and Estragon can see all their work ruined by a poor Pozzo and Lucky.
No so here.
The casting for this production is peerless.
Simon Callow plays the rôle of his life as Pozzo. He takes the part of the casually vicious, Stalinesque buffoon and plays it to the hilt as the monstrous ringmaster of his own hideous freak show.
Wonderful.
Hilarious.
Horrifying.
An explosion of light and colour and noise and brutal violence against the grey but cheerful innocence of what's gone before; he is shockingly good.

And cowering, half-dead at the other end of the rope in mute submissive resignation is Ronald Pickup as Lucky.

I've seen him play Beckett before and I knew he would be good, but he is simply astonishing.
His breathless, rabid, bespittled and totally insane "in spite of the tennis" monologue/diatribe shakes the audience with its intensity; he starts stark raving mad and gets more psychotic by the second, building to such a frenzied climax that - as Vladimir siezes his "speaking hat", wrenching it from his head and Lucky freezes, wild-eyed and staring blindly out at us, drool running down his front - there are five long seconds of dead silence and stillness and then - as he collapses - the auditorium erupts in a thoroughly deserved and prolonged ovation while poor Ronald lays prostrate and exhausted at the front of the stage.

I am not usually a fan of spontaneous applause during a play, but this is the first of many on the night and every one brings a twinkle to the eye and the twitch of a grin to the corner of the mouth of the cast.
They are brilliant and they know it.

The first half is perfect, but the second even better.

Mc.Kellen and Stewart are just as funny, sparking off one another, totally believable as Didi and Gogo but suddenly the laughs are uncomfortable; the humour the deepest black.

The false hope of the leaves on the tree is about to be dashed and our whole world will tumble, crashing around us in bitter ruin.
They have indeed played it for laughs quite deliberately, but only to set us up for the fall.

The slow-dawning realisation of the hopelessness and despair of our heroes' purgatorial dilemma creeps like dread out over the audience and freezes our hearts.

When it comes to the climax it is shattering.
Pozzo's shocking blindness. The horror of knowing that there but for the grace of God-knows-what go Didi and Gogo; how close Vladimir might have come to the tyranny of Pozzo and Estragon to the Hellish hopelessness of Lucky.

As Lucky lays unconscious, with Mc.Kellen administering a shockingly violent and realistic kicking to his unresisting body we are aghast!

And then comes the truth …
The stage is quiet and dark; Pozzo and Lucky have once again departed as we wait for the inevitable appearance of the Boy with his never-changing message.
Estragon sits, nodding off in utterly exhausted despair and Vladimir wanders the stage, bereft; his soliloquy on the human condition made all the more poignant and heartbreaking by the laughter that has preceded it and set us up for this devastating sucker punch.
We knew it was coming and willingly walked right into it.
Tears sting my eyes and pour down my cheeks. As they do those of everyone present.

And at the last, just before Didi and Gogo turn to go but realise they never can, they try once again to hang themselves but - inevitably - the wretched piece of rope that had been Estragon's belt snaps in half and Mc.Kellen's trousers drop around his ankles.

But we do not laugh … We cannot laugh any more.

There they stand …

Us.

A huge standing ovation goes on and on, with three curtain calls for the cast, variously and all together (including a very fortunate local schoolboy as the Boy) and then Stewart and Mc.Kellen return once more and give us a music hall dance routine, juggle with their hats, strike a pose and are gone …

Like Vladimir and Estragon in their interminable and unreasoning wait for Godot I have waited fifty years to see this production.
However long I live I'll never see a better one.

It is still touring.
If you get the faintest chance of a ticket, take it!
You must see this production.
It truly deserves the classic review: "You'll laugh; you'll cry; it'll change your life".



Apologies to Sir. Ian Mc.Kellen for nicking some of these photos from his website.

Light

Wandering along beside the Thames this morning I got to thinking of Rich's Edward Hopper post. Thanks for the reminder, Rich.

I love Hopper; I have a couple of nice Hopper lighthouse prints over my bedroom dresser to cheer me in the mornings. They just fill the room with fresh air and a sea breeze (or it could be my open window and an easterly from the North Sea, but hey).

More specifically I got to thinking of the light in Hopper's paintings. That "hard" light he emphasises in his interiors.

London light is different. It's softer.
Like Venice, London is a city built on water; a lot of the old centre is reclaimed from marsh and estuary and the light which so delighted Monet is often diffused with mist, especially on my morning walks to work.
It's a sparkling, mysterious light.
A beautiful - if occasionally pestiferous - luminescence that washes over the morning city; the dome of St.Paul's is often afloat on it.

Hopper's light, on the other hand is harsh and almost solid.
I love it. Probably because we just don't see it here. It's a peculiarly American light.
Hopper paints that wonderful clear sharp light you see in movies like "Chinatown" and "L.A. Confidential".

There's a marvellous Raymond Chandler line that always reminds me of Hopper interiors. It's from "Farewell, My Lovely".
We're in Philip Marlowe's office …

"A wedge of sunlight slipped over the edge of the desk and fell noiselessly to the carpet."
I think I'm gonna go home and wallpaper my house with Edward Hopper paintings.

Lost In Translation

Warning: Very long and extraordinarily boring post about translators (it's a bugbear of mine).

Coming as it does after the news that foreign language teaching in British schools is declining at a suicidal rate, Robyn's delightfully silly post on wordplay gets me all 'thinky'.

First off, it reminds me how appallingly bad my Portuguese has got after ten years of neglect. So after yesterday evening's somewhat Pythonesque Japanese class, I go to bed with Luis Camõens (so to speak).

Jorge introduces me to Camõens when I'm struggling to learn Portuguese back in the eighties. He tells me I can never truly understand the "soul of Lusitania" until I know Portuguese history and culture, but especially Os Lusíadas. I immediately rush out and buy the Penguin Classic translation, "The Lusiads".
er … Jorge? … What's all the fuss about? This is as dull as ditchwater.
Jorge clips me round the ear and sends me off to buy a copy in the original mediæval Portuguese (we are in Portugal at the time; every bookshop has one). He has me stand and read aloud, helping me with any archaic phrases.
It blows me away. This is glorious, inspiring, truly epic. I feel as if I'm Prospero, raging at the Tempest.
Why had I not heard of the "Portuguese Shakespeare" before? Jorge points me at the translation; the primary source for Camõens in the English language.

As armas e os barões assinalados
Que, da Ocidental praia Lusitania …

… which the Penguin translation has down as:

This is the story of heroes who,
leaving their native Portugal behind them,
opened a path to Ceylon …

WHAT?
This is not so much a translation as a bad, sixth form commentary. Where is the poetry? Where is the stirring imagery? The rolling cadences? No wonder Camõens is so neglected here. The translation we have is an utterly uninspiring bunch of arse!
I acknowledge that there has to be a trade off between literal translation and poetic license, but this is so dire …

Luckily, some people still care about language. The great modern Portuguese novelist and Nobel laureate Jose Saramago has been blessed with probably the finest translator on the planet; the late and sorely missed Giovanni Pontiero.
O ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis is one of my all time favourite books, and Pontiero's translation is a work of genius. Go buy it (The Year Of The Death Of Ricardo Reis - warning: it's a bit 'modern' and bleak) and marvel.
Saramago can be a difficult bugger, even in Portuguese, but Pontiero's translation leaves me awestruck. Passages of such beauty that I have to stop and let them wash over me before I can read on. His translation of Saramago's The Gospel According To Jesus Christ is equally dazzling.

Vikram Seth is another one. Most people know him for "A Suitable Boy", his wonderful Indian epic. But for me, his masterpiece is "Three Chinese Poets" ISBN 0-06-095024-2; translations from the T'ang dynasty poets Wang Wei, Li Bai and Du Fu.
In his introduction, he gives an explanation of how he has translated the poems, using as an example, Wang Wei's "Living In The Hills: Impromptu Verses."
Seth gives us the original Chinese characters, with both a phonetic and a literal translation of each character underneath.
He then explains how he has rendered this into English, while retaining the original meaning together with the rhyme and structure. It is inspiring to read and a revealing insight into how much work goes into translating a piece into something which is valid both literally and artistically.
Here's one of his translated poems; Li Bai's "Listening To A Monk From Shu Playing The Lute".
Write it down, then go find a quiet space to read it a few times and let each word and phrase sink in.

The monk from Shu with his green lute-case walked
Westward down Emei Shan, and at the sound
Of the first notes he strummed for me I heard
A thousand valleys' rustling pines resound.
My heart was cleansed, as if in flowing water.
In bells of frost I heard the resonance die.
Dusk came unnoticed over the emerald hills
And autumn clouds layered the darkening sky.

If that doesn't lift your heart, then your soul must have been eaten by spiders while you slept.

Good teaching of foreign languages is essential, and our woefully underfunded Department of Education is likely to suffer more cutbacks after the next election, to fund tax cuts for the rich. If languages are neglected, how can people truly understand what is being said by others?
Tracking down and reading the original source material is the only way to find the truth behind any news story. If that source material is in another language, then, as we have seen, you cannot necessarily count on a translator of the standard of Pontiero or Seth.
This is especially pertinent when it comes to our relations with Islam. All most of us in the west know is based on hearsay or third-hand spin from so-called "authorities" and commentators.

I have a rule:
If I am to criticize something, be it Islam or US foreign policy or something as trivial as Shona's latest hair colour, then I must first know what I'm talking about; find the source material behind the stories.
For America (and Shona), this is fairly easy, but for Islam?
If you want to criticise Islam and have anyone respect your opinion, try this simple exercise:
First read up on the history. For anyone starting out on this path, Prof. Albert Hourani's "A Short History Of The Arab Peoples" is an easily accessible and balanced place to start.
Next, hit the bibliography and get online. Source material.
Read the Koran (again a Penguin Classic translation, but a better one than their Camõens) and the Life of Mohammad, visit your local mosque and talk to people.
If you want to, learn some Arabic:
Bismillahi ar-Rahman ar-Raheem …
(In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate) …
It's a beautiful thing to roll around your tongue.
And here's the important part:

With comprehension comes understanding.
With understanding, fear of the unknown disappears.
Ignorance breeds fear.
Here in the west, our governments keep themselves in power using the Orwellian theory of "Fear = Control".
Since 9/11, the US government (followed slavishly by our own, led by Bush's personal buttplug) has kept it's population permanently and ignorantly wetting their pants, while all hopes for peace, truth and understanding get flushed straight down the shitter.

Do something good. Learn another language. Help keep us talking to one another, rather than bombing the shit out of the innocent (that goes for both sides) …

End of rant.

Hmm … That kind of changed tack halfway through. Mister Shoutytrousers is never far away when I'm writing, but I fear he has a point in this case …