Two Ladies Looking At The Moon

The marquee event of May's London Theatre Tour was the opportunity to see, on consecutive nights, two out of the three remaining great ladies of the English stage, Helen Mirren and Judi Dench, who as good fortune would have it were playing limited engagements just a few blocks away from each other in the West End.  For the trifecta Maggie Smith would have had to be on as well, but at 78 she has stated publicly that she doesn't intend to do live theatre again - which I'll believe when I see it, or, I guess, when I don't.  Dame Judi, at the same age, shows no inclination to call it a day, and although there are rumors that her vision and her memory are both failing, neither appeared to be an issue for her at the performance we saw, and while there are most assuredly fewer appearances ahead of her now than there are behind, time and tide being what they are, she strikes me as the kind of actor who will probably carry on one way or another until the Big Curtain comes down for the last time.

Up first for us, though, was Dame Helen in The Audience, an unabashed star vehicle created by Peter Morgan and Stephen Daldry (screenwriter and director respectively of The Queen) for the express purpose of returning Mirren to her award-winning role as Elizabeth II, making a ton of money on a sure-fire limited engagement hit, and, not for nothing, doing a bit of fence-mending with the Palace, which by some accounts was not best pleased with the portrait of the royal family offered in the film.  Royal protocol even provided a ready-made structure: every Tuesday at 6:30 pm, the Queen meets with the sitting Prime Minister for a private discussion of current political events and the government response to them, a perfect set up for Morgan to tour some of the key moments in Elizabeth's 60 year reign and through them to consider her evolution as a monarch and as a person.  The result is, perhaps inevitably, not so much a play as a series of vignettes, and while the production is sleek and accomplished, the hopscotch narrative makes it difficult to get much emotional traction with the characters and it rarely breaks loose from a somewhat static energy:  a PM arrives, the Queen invites them to take a seat, they talk for a proscribed period of time, then Mirren has a dramatic costume change (sometimes executed, with great finesse and theatricality, right on stage) and we're on to the next.  There are occasional exuberant appearances by a pair of very jolly live Corgis, whom one is disproportionately grateful to see.  Matters aren't helped much by Morgan's decision to write very specifically for a hometown crowd, and more than that a hometown crowd of a certain age.  Unlike James Graham's political play This House, which made a graceful job of elucidating and contextualizing itself as it unfolded, so that at any given moment you had enough information to keep your footing and appreciate the terms of the world being presented to you - sort of the theatrical equivalent of a computer's streaming feed staying just ahead of the video - Morgan assumes his audience has lived through or studied everything that happens on stage and tends to just drop you in it at the beginning of each scene to fend for yourself as best you can.   I can't really criticize him for this, it's a culturally specific piece in its way and he obviously knows his crowd - the mostly British audience was clearly delighted by everything that happened and there was a lot of affectionate laughter and little yelps of recognition at the appearance of each Prime Minister - but as one did feel somewhat on the outside of an inside joke much of the time and having a bit of a scramble to keep up with the political references.

However, there was plenty to enjoy in the individual performances, which were generally stronger than the script and in some cases, as will happen with accomplished actors, transformed it into something better than it is. The redoubtable Edward Fox, who's spent the better part of his career playing aristocrats and Oxbridge dons, in his 8th decade has thrown himself into a succession of full-on character roles, dotty old recluses and shabby hangers-on, and here gleefully abandons his patrician looks and usual Erte-like silhouette to deliver a surprisingly persuasive Winston Churchill, complete with the old lion's gravelled growl and listing gait, and his trick of dropping his chin to his chest and staring people down out of the tops of his eyes.  He has only one scene, but when he makes his slow, lumbering exit upstage you feel a political era and a certain idea of English identity going away with him.  Paul Ritter, so moving as the working-class father of an Asperger's child in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, is nearly unrecognizable as a weepily insecure John Major, who treats his meetings with ER more like a personal therapy session.    But the primest of the Primes is Richard McCabe's wonderful Harold Wilson, the Labour PM from 1964 to 1970 and from 1974 -1976.  (It's the '74 general election that created the "hung Parliament" of This House.) Looking even in his beautifully tailored suits as if he's slept in, or possibly on, his clothing and flourishing his Yorkshire accent like a flag, McCabe's Wilson establishes early on a entirely unique relationship with Her Majesty, resolutely unfazed by her royal status and talking to her more or less as he would to anyone else, with respect for her intelligence and a refreshingly blunt Northern humour.  As the Queen tentatively allows their political relationship to evolve into a genuine friendship, we really feel for the first time the isolation of a woman who cannot really be herself with anyone, ever, ("I have to seem like a real human all the time," reflects Alan Bennett's version of the Queen in his disarming little novellina The Uncommon Reader, "but I seldom get to be one - I have people to do that for me") and what a rare pleasure and relief it is for her to be around someone whose own straightforward personality allows her the freedom to let down her guard. Wilson gets more stage time than any of the other PMs, and his relationship with ER puts the heart into the evening, to a degree that makes you feel that the play Morgan really wanted to write was the one about this unlikely friendship between the monarch and the Labour PM but by the time he figured that out he was committed another way and it was too late.  Mirren, too, seems to come to life in her scenes with McCabe, their delight in each other as actors resonating against the pleasure their characters take in one another's company - the performance becomes, in these scenes, momentarily great.

The only female in the cast besides Mirren is Haydn Gwynne, a tall athletic woman with one of those marvelous high-boned, hawkish English faces that in another era would have have been described as "handsome."  She has the unhappy task of bearing the collective loathing for Margaret Thatcher of the audience, the playwright and the designers, who have kitted her out in a cartoonish exaggerated wig and power suit that makes her look more like a Spitting Image puppet than the woman herself.  Somewhat miscast to begin with and laboring as well in the long shadow of Meryl Streep's eerily accurate channeling of Thatcher in The Iron Lady, Gwynne leans into what she's been given, overplaying Thatcher's aggressive chin-first stride and hollow hooting voice, like an owl who's swallowed a bassoon, but it's the only performance of the night that feels one dimensional, more caricature than characterization.  It's not really Gwynne's fault, I think she's probably doing exactly what she's been asked to do and what the script demands, but it seemed to me that Morgan does himself and the play a disservice by letting his personal feelings (or professional expediency) get the better of him and squandering an opportunity in Thatcher's one scene with the Queen to move beyond the political to a deeper, more telling exploration not just of what divided them but what connected them - two powerful women functioning in a traditionally male world, and trying to balance a carefully crafted public persona with their private identity as women, wives and mothers.  I would cheerfully have traded eight minutes with James Callaghan (remember him?  no?  nobody else does either) for a more richly realized scene with Thatcher, or for an additional one with Wilson.

Despite her justly celebrated poitrine and some judiciously padded costumes to give her the boulster-like dimensions of ER in her later years, there is a flinty angularity to Mirren's presence on stage, and her crackling intelligence hums like a dynamo underneath everything she does.  She spends much of the play listening and reacting, which she does with an electric acuity, and when she winds up to deliver one of the many bons mots Morgan generously gives her - it's impossible to imagine the real Queen having this kind of facility for zingers - they land with the precision of a heat-seeking comic missile.  (Watch how she does it: listening, listening, ankles crossed and legs at an angle in approved ladylike fashion, eyes and chin lowered in the opposite direction, and then when she's ready, her head comes up and around, the eyes land on their target, the chin lifts up and forward as if she were physically lofting the line, and boom.  Nothing but smoke.)  It's not a great role, honestly, although Mirren's authority and street cred make it seem like one, and I felt at times that she was a bit on auto-pilot - when you're that good and that skilled you can get away with it and no one the wiser, and in fact if she didn't come so vibrantly on line with McCabe when he appears one might never know.  And of course she is the best thing that could possibly happen to the Queen in her final years on the throne, providing a final mythic permutation of her that corresponds to how her people would like to imagine she is, and how they would like to remember her:  a kind of tough-minded SuperGranny with the political acuity of Henry Kissinger, the drawing-room wit of Mrs Millamant, and a really great jewelry collection.  It's interesting to consider that thirty years from now, when people share memories of Elizabeth II, it may very well be Helen Mirren they're actually remembering.

*          *            * 
A few blocks away in St. Martin's Lane, John Logan's long one-act Peter and Alice also focuses on an encounter between real people, in this case Peter Llewellyn Davies, the boy who inspired J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, and Alice Liddell Hargreaves, the child muse for what was originally titled Alice's Adventures Underground.  They met only once, in 1932, when Alice was in her 70s and Peter in his 30s, on the occasion of an exhibition at Columbia University celebrating the centennial of Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll's birth; it included the original manuscript of Alice, which the real Alice had sold in 1926 to an American collector in order to maintain her home after the death of her husband. (It was returned to England in 1948 and is now in the British Library, where thanks to a specially designed interactive computer program you can leaf through it on a screen and see Dodgson's tiny, clear, mathematician's handwriting and meticulous little line drawings.) Alice of course was the honored guest of the exhibition and gave a speech, and Peter, a publisher by that time, was invited to introduce her, presumably because he was the only other person on the planet to have shared her particular life experience: the complicated burden of having one's childhood appropriated, reinvented and made eternal by an adult writer.  (Well, there was one other, but he was only twelve at the time - it wasn't until much later, in his beautiful and painful memoir The Enchanted Places, that we would hear from Christopher Milne about life after the Hundred Acre Wood.)  Shadowed throughout their lives by their fictional child-selves, trapped in the amber of the cultural imagination and doomed to disappoint everyone they met simply by having grown up, they were, as writer Charles Elton puts it, "like Dorian Grey in reverse:  [their] attic was in every bookshop in the world."  What they might have spoken about together, their differing relationships to their fictional alter-egos, and the way their lives were affected by their unasked-for fame, is the substance of Logan's play.

For many years, Alice deliberately separated herself in the public sense from "Alice," as we might refer to her, by not speaking about her or the book.  The Liddell family's friendship with Dodgson ended suddenly and permanently soon after the summer of Wonderland, and we'll never know why, because Alice’s mother burnt all the correspondence between her daughter and her shy adult friend, and after his death Dodgson’s relatives destroyed all of his diary entries from the “Alice years”.

  (This was something that happened a lot in the Victorian era, the relatives of notable people were always making huge post-mortem bonfires of things that in their estimation might reflect badly on the reputation of the deceased or his relatives - much of the writings of Sir Richard Burton, and a lot of the later work of JMW Turner were lost in this way.)  But it may not be entirely fair to conclude from these events that Dodgson was a paedophile whose behaviour with Alice became inappropriate.  The fact is that to judge Dodgson in the context, and by the standards, of our own era may be both too harsh and too simple;  the psychology of Dodgson's world was different, and must surely be considered in terms of its possible effect on his attitude towards Alice.  He met her at the height of the Victorian infatuation with childhood and with children, who were celebrated as emissaries from the prelapsarian world: joyful, pure hearted, inspirational and arrived direct from God “trailing clouds of glory.” But at the same time, young girls were still routinely married in their mid-teens, and so began to be perceived, and to perceive themselves, as objects of male interest at a very early age. (Dodgson's photographs of Alice are undeniably unsettling to a 21st century eye, but not just because of how he's perceiving her through the lens: it's also the way that she is looking back.)

None of which is to say that Dodgson may not well have had genuine problems, but the society he lived in was deeply conflicted (not to say actively confused) about sexual matters in a way that was hardly helpful even among adults to healthy male/female relationships, and he was certainly not alone among 19th century men of letters in conceiving a passion for a very young girl.  (John Ruskin, anyone? Check that one out if you want to hear about something really screwed up.)  But it's always been my belief that whatever his sexual issues may have been, Dodgson would never have acted on them. It would have been not only completely out of character for this timid and socially awkward man - deaf in one ear and plagued by a crippling stammer, he was always more comfortable anyway in the nonjudgmental company of children - but it would also have destroyed the the innocence and unworldliness that made Alice beautiful to him, and it was in some sense to preserve those qualities, and to give her a connection to them that would last forever, that he made her the gift of Alice in Wonderland. 

One can infer far more about Dodgson's emotional relationship with Alice, it seems to me, by looking at the fantasy world he created for her, and the same is true of Barrie's Neverland - the difference between them is crucial to how they impacted on Alice and Peter as they grew older.  Behind its light-footed, whimsical children's narrative, Dodgson’s book can be understood as a child’s-eye view of the world of grownups: capricious, unpredictable, baffling, arbitrarily imperious.  But it's also a place of perpetual transformation, evolution and mutability, where nothing is quite what it appears to be, or at any rate not for very long: it confirms and reassures that the fundamental condition of the universe is Change.  Wonderland is in its gentle way an introduction to the shifting realities of impending adulthood, and offers a kind of implied template for how to navigate them.  While being grownup may be a sad condition, Dodgson suggests, it's also the inevitable way of the world and it needn't be too bad if one can maintain a sense of the absurd.  With a little wit, ingenuity and spunk, along with a nimble imagination and a willingness to look at things (sometimes literally) from a different angle, a young woman need not be daunted by its challenges.   Most importantly of all, there is always a way back to Wonderland as long as you know where to look and keep your Inner Child's eye open for the portals; it shimmers underneath the grownup world even if you can't quite see it, just as the children we used to be are still there somewhere inside of the adults we've become.  This was Dodgson's gift to Alice, made out of the generosity of a troubled heart:  an entertainment for a child, a map for an adult, and in the end a refuge and a comfort for an old woman. 

Not so with Barrie’s Neverland, which is a different and I would argue darker sort of place altogether - the anti-Wonderland, if you like.  Barrie's imaginary landscape is a Boy’s Own world of perpetual adventure where children reign supreme, unimpeded by the rules or worries of adults, and where those grownups who do appear are hostile interlopers to be defeated and driven out.  It's the perfect imaginary life for an eight year old boy – or an emotionally arrested man – and while there are wonderful things about it (fairies and flying and so on) that tap into our primal longing for our more innocent and carefree selves, it's not called Neverland for nothing.  Unlike Dodgson's infinitely mutable fantasy landscape, Neverland is a place of unnatural stasis that sets itself against the basic truth of life itself: all things change, and change is crucial to survival.   It's an unsophisticated world without moral or intellectual complexity, where nothing and no one ever evolves or ever will.   If you stay there, you'll escape the cares and circumscribed behaviours of adults, but you’ll also never experience the richness of mature relationships with the world and with other people; if you go, you can never return to the careening freedom of Neverland – no more flying, no more adventures, a death of joy and of the imagination.  Where Dodgson offers Alice a hopeful “And”, a connection between childhood and adulthood and the promise of an open door between, Barrie slams that door shut and offers only an agonizing Either/Or.

With this contrast in mind, it’s not surprising that in later years Alice again embraced her Wonderland as what we might now call her “happy place,” a solace for the tragedies that life had in store for her  (the loss of her husband, the death of two of her three sons in World War I, financial difficulties and so on), while Peter spent the whole of his adulthood trying to get out from under the shadow of Neverland and the even more persistent one of the Boy Who Never Grew Up, a haunting made even more painful by his belief that the true inspiration for Peter Pan wasn’t him at all, but his adored, glamorous older brother Michael – the notoriety was not only unwanted, it wasn’t even rightfully his.  Once again, as with Alice and Dodgson, we’ll never know what really went on between J.M. Barrie and the Davies boys (letters, bonfire, etc), but based on the anecdotal record and events as they played out, it seems clear that even if he didn’t abuse them in a physical or sexual sense, he almost certainly did so psychologically, projecting his own rejection of adulthood onto them, playing them off against each other for his favor, and doing everything he could to prevent their leaving Neverland (that is, leaving him), impeding their efforts to establish independent, fulfilling adult lives and relationships.  And the universe in its own perverse fashion granted his wish:  two of the boys never would "grow up".  George, the eldest, ran away to the army at the very beginning of World War I and died in Flanders the following year, barely 21. The dashing Michael, not even that old, killed himself in what's assumed to have been a suicide pact with another boy after graduating from Oxford.   And, though may years later, Peter in the end threw himself under a train at Sloane Square station, escaping finally and forever from Barrie’s poisoned gift of eternal childhood.  (In a final heartbreaking irony, many of the newspaper headlines blared "Peter Pan Commits Suicide.")  

Entire books have been written about all this, and it's far more than Logan can comfortably encompass in the 90 minutes of the play, so the script is frankly a bit of a muddle,  but because the audience brings such a strong personal connection of its own to these characters, and because of how beautifully it's played and what it's about (lost/stolen childhood, the longing for that innocence once it's behind us, all those things that tap into the piercing sadness of getting older) the cumulative effect of it across the evening is huge and ultimately the play does achieve what it intends to.  I would be surprised if there was a single person not in tears by the end.

It should be said that its title and media coverage notwithstanding there are actually five other actors in the play besides the two stars, and I'll name them here in recognition of the fact that they execute their appointed tasks nobly, professionally and generously, in the absolute certainty that no one is paying the slightest attention to them:  Nicholas Farrell and Derek Riddell (as Dodgson and Barrie), Ruth Bentall and Olly Alexander (as the storybook "Alice" and "Peter") and Stefano Braschi (as everybody else).  They're a credit to the honorable position of Supporting Actor.

But at the end of the day Peter and Alice is in effect a two-hander (indeed it might be a more focused and richer script if it actually was) and let's not kid ourselves, we all know who we're there to see.  With his pale poet's face and great dark eyes, the fascinating young actor Ben Whishaw has made something of a specialty of playing wounded, anguished young artistic types, and his Peter is very much of that ilk.  In some ways it's a tricky performance to get involved with because he hides so much from you with his physical choices, never quite lifting his head, never quite meeting anyone's eyes, his lanky, almost adolescent frame curled in on itself in a perpetual wince, as if in constant anticipation of an unwelcome approach by an unwanted admirer.  But he knows exactly what he's about, and when, at the moment that Peter finally gives in to memory and allows himself to relive the first exhilarating games of pirates and lost boys with the man they called "Uncle Jimmie," Whishaw at last turns square to the audience and shows us his exalted, panic-stricken face, filled with longing and terror, the impact is devastating.

Which brings us to Dame Judi.  Judi Dench is the kind of actor who gives critics and journalists fits because it's virtually impossible to discern or describe how it is she's doing what she's doing.  In fact pretty much the entire hold-up on this post has been about this one paragraph.  Go ahead, do a search for reviews of this play or a couple of her recent films and you'll be amazed how little anyone has to say about her other than that she's fantastically good.  It's impossible to offer any more concrete discussion than that, because while there's certainly a performance happening, and a process that's led to it, the mechanism of that process and the details creating the performance have been disappeared.  She just exists at you for 90 minutes.  So I can say that she inhabits the stage as if it were just another unusually large room in her house; that the familiar musical voice, with its appealing taffeta-rustle (once long ago uncharitably described by a detractor as "croaky"), still chimes with the clarity of a bell in autumn in the friendly wood-and-plaster resonator of this gilded Edwardian theatre; and that she remains unsurpassed in her ability to play several different, and often conflicting, emotional colors simultaneously, which is why she's so often and so effectively cast as women who, like Alice, are soldiering through circumstances of enormous pain or loss by keeping alive their capacity for joy and their belief in its inevitable return - Pragmatic Romantics, we might call them.  No other actress that I've seen has ever layered quite so many delicate shadings into Viola's line "I am all the daughters of my father's house/And all the brothers too" - partly a courtier's elegantly turned riposte, partly a daring hide-in-plain-sight revelation, partly a heartbreaking private joke at her own expense that encompasses the absurdity of her position, the pain it's causing her, and the - as she imagines - inconsolable grief that's brought it about.  She creates order out of the tangle of Logan's many dramatic threads by gathering them all into her hand and playing them all at the same time: when Alice begins to articulate to Peter and to herself what Wonderland has meant to her, and Peter asks caustically whether she's proposing that he should believe in fairies, Dench instantly fires back "Why not?", but with such a light, flickering touch that it's impossible to say whether it's a challenge, a legitimate question, a mischievous poke in the ribs, or all three at once.   It's a performance that embodies Dodgson's lesson to his Alice:  nothing is permanent, everything changes, and to be human means living on the constant pendulum sweep between disappointment and hope, past and present, pain and joy, reality and wonder. 

As amazing as it was to have the chance to see both of these remarkable actresses on stage, because we saw their plays back to back it was also a rare opportunity to consider each of the performances in the context of the other.  With artists of this calibre and stature it seems almost insulting to indulge in a Compare/Contrast exercise in any judgmental or qualitative sense - comparison being odious or onerous or something bad beginning with O - and one doesn't want to break a butterfly upon a wheel by picking things apart too much, but nevertheless there is a comparison to be made, and a contrast to be noted.  Mirren leads from her head, all ferocious intelligence and technical skill, a superb craftsman absolutely in command of her instrument; it's a performance that in a way presents itself as a performance in the expectation of being admired, an awesome display of technique in the service of character - and I don't mean that as a criticism, or to imply that there isn't a fully realized emotional dimension to the work, it's a question of how the various aspects of her process balance themselves out in practice.  It's like the difference between Bach and Debussy, or between Canaletto and Turner - not one of excellence or expertise, but of execution and effect.  Mirren's extraordinary artisanship, let's use that word, is part of what she's offering us to enjoy and appreciate.  Dench, on the other hand, leads from her heart, all luminous spirit and "invisible acting".  There is extraordinary craft at work here as well, but she places it differently;  it's so organic to the shaping of the performance as a whole that the audience forgets that it's there, and she probably does as well, trusting it to support the emotional life of the character as she lives it on stage. 

To talk about this another way: just recently a director colleague shared with me a favorite quote about actors and acting from the distinguished Japanese actor/director Yoshi Oida:

  "In Kabuki theatre, there is a gesture that indicates 'looking at the moon,' where the actor points into the sky with his index finger.  One actor who was very talented, performed this gesture with grace and elegance. The audience thought 'Oh, his movement is so beautiful!'  They enjoyed the beauty of his performance, and the technical mastery he displayed.  Another actor made the same gesture pointing to the moon, and the audience didn't notice whether or not he moved elegantly - they simply saw the moon."

There's a sense in which this is exactly the difference between Mirren and Dench, and it made itself manifest in a particular kind of challenge that both of them had to address, having in the course of their respective scripts to play their characters at a variety of different ages.   (Dench, who's a decade older, has to go younger than Mirren, who's helpfully provided with a little girl to play Elizabeth as a child.)  Although Mirren has the transformative assistance of her crack team of dressers, the real achievement is in what she does physically to "locate" the Queen at a given moment in her life, and it's an absolute master class to watch her do it: where on the scale she pitches her voice and how much air she allows into it, the adjustments to her posture, her carriage, her gait, where her center of gravity is placed - this is an actress who is a consummate player of her own instrument.  Judi Dench, in her first moment of transformation, stretches out her arms, tilts her head back, and - there is simply no other way to say this, and believe me I know how it sounds - light begins to pour out of her as she describes the bees, and the sunshine, and a long ago summer day by the river when she was ten years old and on the brink of Wonderland, and the years run off her like water, leaving behind the eager, inquisitive, clever child we suddenly realize has been peeking out at us all along from inside the old woman.  This is craft in an entirely different sense.  To me it's why certain actors are magical, and here I am going to go ahead and make an Odious Comparison: what Dench does at this moment is to do with something that lives outside of both technique and experience and has nothing to do with either - and which Mirren, for all her magisterial authority and skill and through no fault of her own, does not have.  Judi Dench holds out her hand, and the audience just...goes to her.  Whatever it is, I suspect she's always had it, because it isn't something that can be taught or learned.  It's there or it's not.  Actor magic.

What an incredible privilege to have been able to see both of these performances - seriously, for someone who works in theatre it just doesn't get much more thrilling than this.  But, while it's a matter of taste of course, like everything else, I also learned from them that there is deep and observable truth in what Oida says.  Helen Mirren is a great artist, and one stands in awe and admiration of how marvelously she crafts and creates her character.  But for me the forever moment of these nights in the West End will always be seeing the moon and Wonderland, reflected in the beautiful, aging, ageless face of Judi Dench.
 

Photo Credits

Buckingham Palace:  <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimmyharris/2533950576/">jimmyharris</a> / <a href="http://foter.com">Foter</a> / <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">CC BY</a>

10 Downing Street:   href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/number10gov/4581073867/">The Prime Minister's Office</a> / <a href="http://foter.com">Foter</a> / <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a>

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson:  href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalmediamuseum/7893553898/">National Media Museum</a> / <a href="http://foter.com">Foter</a>

Alice Liddell:  href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/blogpocket/4407180278/">blogpocket</a> / <a href="http://foter.com">Foter</a> / <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a>

J.M. Barrie:   href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalmediamuseum/7893554540/">National Media Museum</a> / <a href="http://foter.com">Foter</a>

Wolf Moon: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/skynoir/3101174846/">Sky Noir</a> / <a href="http://foter.com">Foter</a> / <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a>

Young Men and Fire

For the last few days the leading news story in my corner of the world has been the shocking loss of almost an entire team of smokejumpers - nineteen out of twenty guys - who were fighting a lightning-sparked wildfire near Prescott, Arizona.  Watching the reports on what happened and why, and the sorrowing but somehow pragmatic faces of the spokespersons ("sometimes you do everything you know and everything you're taught, and it just doesn't work out"), I've found myself thinking again about a book I read maybe fifteen years ago by Norman Maclean, mainly known as the author of A River Runs Through It, called - like this post, because I can't better it - Young Men and Fire.  It's a non-fiction work about another wildfire, the 1949 Mann Gulch forest fire outside of Helena, Montana, and the team of 16 young flame-jumpers who were dropped on it in what was supposed to be a routine mission until the wind changed, the fire leaped the ravine ahead of them, and they ended up in a race for their lives to the top of the ridge.  The book ambles along at a deceptively leisurely pace considering its dramatic subject, and it does tell you somewhat more than you may want to know about the science of wildfire - you have to whack your way through a lot of stuff about relative wind velocity etc -  but Maclean's clean, direct style is strangely compelling, and the story is layered like Peer Gynt's onion with tangential meditations on the impassive brutality of nature and the  tragic bravado of youth, on history and science and literature, and the peculiar sense of obligation Maclean began to feel towards the young men whose story he was trying to tell and who seemed to be asking him to find in their fragmented and incomplete history an adequate explanation for what happened to them.  He doesn't go on and on about anything, he just sets it down gently in the light of his lucid prose and leaves you to consider it on your own time.

A very effective strategy, as it turns out.  I had no particular expectations about the book one way or the other when I read it, and at the time I wouldn't have thought it had the staying power that it's proved to have, one of those books that keeps on whispering to you in various ways for years afterwards, particularly when current event so closely echoes its story. In retrospect it's begun to seem to me to be about, among other things, the nature of faith, and of courage.  There was a time when I subscribed somewhat to the theory that heroes are people without imagination - in the sense that they can act as they do because they don't project the outcome - but now that I'm more mature in both years and understanding I see that it's more complicated and more impressive than that.  Courage, I think now, isn't about the absence of imagination; it's about the transcendence of it - knowing the danger, and feeling the fear, and going forward anyway.   Just as there's no trick - and no weight - to forgiveness if the wrong is forgotten, there's no challenge to being brave if there's nothing to be frightened of.  And in these times, when such a high value is put on the need to be Forever 21 and our elderly are too often shuffled away so we don't have to see them and be forcibly reminded that we won't, it seems that nothing frightens us more than the idea of dying.  

It may be partly due to our wiring.  I read somewhere that the one thing the human brain in all its infinite complexity cannot wrap itself around is the idea of its own cessation; it can make metaphors for itself to try to understand that as an intellectual construct, but it's fundamentally a narcissistic organ, and it can't imagine a world that exists without its being there to perceive it. (You can test this out at home.  It's true.)  It's also a fear that underlies many of the messages delivered to us daily by film, television and advertising.  Every day in one way or another it's implied to us that if we just eat these foods, take these pills, buy this mattress, we won't die - it's like that game where you add the words "in bed" to ordinary phrases, try it with television commercials, you'll be amazed how often it fits.  American society spends an enormous amount of time, energy and money denying the one thing that is an absolute certainty, impartially, for everything that lives.  We can barely bring ourselves to even use The D Word anymore, referring gingerly instead to "end of life," "passing into spirit," "taking a message to the other side," anything to avoid the short sharp shock of that one blunt syllable and the great mystery that stands behind it, as if we think if we don't name it, it'll forget about us.   But people like smoke-jumpers, cops, firefighters, soldiers - anyone whose job description actually includes the considerable possibility of getting killed while doing it - are the opposite.  They own their mortality, every day, in a peculiarly healthy and well-adjusted way - because they have to, sure, and maybe also in some cases for the rush, but also because they are so fucking brave.  They balance out the rest of us. They open their arms to what the majority of us are afraid to look at, and stand up to it armed with the only things they have:  their belief in their own skill, their mastery of the best tools we can give them, and their faith that doing something of value for a greater good is, should circumstances turn against them, a worthy way to go out. 

I'm what I guess I would describe as a spiritual agnostic with pagan leanings (I think there's something out there bigger than Phil, to quote Mel Brooks, but that's as far as I'm prepared to go) and I don't know what I think comes next when we're done here,  although I believe something does.  This isn't the dress rehearsal, but the show is continuous.  Someone I knew years ago said she thought that Heaven was getting to go back to the significant moments in your life when you had to decide between two equally attractive options and make the other choice, which is a nice idea.  Maybe our after, or interim, lives are shaped by what we imagine them to be.  Maybe it's different for everyone.  If that's true, then I hope for the Prescott Jumpers there was a calm green place waiting, with a benign and cooling breeze, the music of flowing water, and the spirits of grateful trees to greet and protect them.

They've earned that. 

Nuts and Bolts

So I've been made aware that what I was hoping was an issue unique to my computer is an issue for everyone else's too - with my last post, the post titles and the sidebar information all changed from legibly tan colored to illegibly blue, and I wasn't able to get them switched back using the Template even though it appears that I should be able to.

A little online research suggests that this probably happened because the post was a long one and I created it first as an MS Word document and then copied it over into the blog template, which apparently is something you should never ever do.  (This might be useful information for Blogger to include when introducing people to their features, she said irritably.)  As I understand it, the Word coding erases and replaces a large block of HTML code in the template that governs color.  

The first two posts, when clicked on directly, seem to be fine, and if it proves that only that single post is effected I may ask for everyone's indulgence, leave it as it is and move on older and wiser with a valuable lesson learned.  If it's screwed everything up completely going forward, there is a way to correct it, but it involves either changing the color scheme of the blog (Easy Way), which I quite like and it'd be nice to keep, or taking down and reformatting the post - which naturally is a long one with lots of images, because that's how life works - and digging into the HTML code (Hard Way), which frankly is a little above my skill set and I'll need to enlist the aid of the Mac wizard.  (Fortunately I have one nearby!)

This post is a bit in the nature of a test to see just how much trouble I'm in and how much of a pain it's going to be to fix it.  Apologies to all who are struggling to read blue-on-red or red-on-red text.  I do know there's a thing, and please bear with me while I mess around with it in my semi-ept way!

Not Anything To Show More Fair

About three months ago my Artistic Director asked me if I would go as one of the theatre’s “staff hosts” on our week-long London Theatre Tour in May for subscribers and donors.  This was (a) a complete surprise (b) really flattering, my Artistic Director being a man of awe-inspiring intellect whose good opinion it’s an honor to have, and (c) made me want to go behind a door and do that thing Laura Linney does in Love Actually after she kisses the guy for the first time, because as everyone who knows me will attest, London is my best-beloved city and one I visited annually for more than 20 years before circumstances and its ascension to the title of Most Expensive City In The World put it out of my financial reach.   With the exception of one holiday visit in 2004 through the generosity of a friend, I hadn’t been back in almost fourteen years.  That’s a long, sad time to sustain a long-distance relationship.

There will be some posts coming up about the trip – one of the motivators for finally getting myself to cowboy up and start this blog was the realization that (as is always true when I travel) I had a great deal to say and share beyond what Facebook posts can accommodate or than I am comfortable putting within its voracious clutch – but before we go there, let’s create some context and talk for a while about London.

Recently as I was trawling the internet for something entirely different, I came across this quote:   “My Dad says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you're born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube and by the time the train's pulled into Piccadilly Circus they've become a Londoner.”  (Ben Aaronovitch,  Moon Over Soho)   The same can probably be said about any of the world’s great cities – it’s certainly true of New York, where I grew up, and I know people who’ve had this reaction to Paris, Dublin,and less high-profile places as well.  But for me, it is and has always been London.  We go way back, London and me, to long before I ever set foot in England.  It tugged at me in the way that my friends who have home-places in their family history are tugged at by them; I spent the whole of my high school and most of my college years homesick for someplace I’d never been.  To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, America is my country, and Seattle is my city, but London…London is my hometown.

A lot of people over a lot of centuries have tried to explain just what it is about London that’s so compelling to those of us who, wherever we may have our everyday residence, think of it as “home.”   Even the dedicated journaler James Boswell was kind of stymied, but managed to come up with this:  “I was full of rich imagination of London... such as I could not explain to most people, but which I strongly feel and am ravished with. My blood glows and my mind is agitated with felicity."

Agitated with felicity.  Not bad. 

Also not bad is Wordsworth’s 1802 sonnet On Westminster Bridge, written when he was 30 years old.  (Anglophiles, English Lit majors and poetry aficionados will already be ahead of me in identifying it as the source of this posting’s title.) Over the next half century Mr Sublime would go on to find many many things very nice to look at, including mountains, waterfalls, ruins of various buildings, and of course lots of daffodils in one place, and honestly for me in his later years it all gets to be a bit much really, but somehow this early poem, startled out of him on a 5 AM journey by the Dover Coach from Charing Cross to Calais, has always felt in the simplicity of its language and the clarity of its emotion absolutely genuine and spontaneous to me.

And of course, too, I know exactly how he felt.

If you stand on Westminster Bridge today, at that hour, when time is porous and you can hear the layers of history shift and rustle against each other, the sky just flushing pink behind the dome of St Paul’s, you don’t have to try very hard to see the city as Wordsworth did.  If you were to activate your Dr Who TARDIS and bring him to stand alongside you (assuming that he would just stand there and not start apostrophizing everything in sight), he would more than likely recognize it too and find it still beautiful, despite the distant premonitory
hum of the day’s 21^st century traffic and some significant changes to the skyline downriver.  There, just beyond the cathedral and the old financial district, a Tomorrowland array of bizarre corporate-owned skyscrapers of aggressively adventurous design by some of Europe’s most cutting-edge architects has bristled up in the last ten years, with cozy, clubby nicknames derived from the familiar objects they resemble and suggesting a table-setting out of Lewis Carroll:  the Cheese Grater, the Shard, the Canned Ham, the Walkie Talkie, the Onion, and, most notably, The Gherkin – which last I have to assume was assigned to it the minute the first blueprints came in to forestall its being called something it resembles a great deal more closely but somewhat less suitable for reference in mixed company.

Whether these nicknames were created in advance by the architects or a PR firm, or by Londoners in an effort to warm up to these oddball new arrivals, they’re an indicator of how quickly the city begins to flow forward and fold itself around yet another evolutionary layer.  While right now the public-school monikers are a bit like putting a tea cozy on a chainsaw, in no time they’re going to become familiar and friendly, and their owners as unsurprising and integral to the landscape as Big Ben and St. Paul’s itself - or the National Gallery, which no one liked very much either when it first happened (they called it “the Cruet Stand”) and just try to picture Trafalgar Square without it now.  The Tate Modern still looks like a crematorium to me and always will, but it doesn’t bother me any more, and the London Eye, initially such an anomaly in that stretch of the River, has quickly become organic to it.

London changes, as is inevitable and as it must, but it carries its past in its arms and very little falls out along the way.  A Roman wall faces off across a modern roadway with a tower built just after the Norman invasion.   A brutally contemporary building next to King’s Cross Rail Station is home to an original copy of the 800 year old document that was the first ever effort by the people to limit by law the power of the monarch.  In Chelsea, an apartment building called The Orchard stands where Thomas More used to walk among his beloved fruit trees, weighing his conscience against a king’s command.  A few miles further downriver, the ruins of the 16^th century Rose Theatre glow in water and shadows underneath a 20^thcentury office block.  In John Keats’ House in Hampstead, if you’re there in fine weather, two chairs stand in the side parlor just as they are in Severn’s

famous painting of the poet, with a copy of Chapman’s Homer set down on one of them and the garden door standing ajar, as if he’s just slipped out ahead of you.   And oh by the way, up in the Midlands they just found the body of Richard the Third underneath a car park, where they sort of suspected it would be because they knew what was there before (Greyfriars Church) and more or less where in that building the body had been buried, so they just had to look at the plans, which they also have.  Plus, they know who his descendants are, 700 years on, and where to find them for DNA comparison.  (Seriously, these people never throw anything away, as you’ll know if you’ve ever been on the upper floors of the Victoria & Albert Museum surrounded by literally thousands of dinner plates, or actual ceiling-height towers of earrings.)   Blue plaques on buildings everywhere announce who used to live there and what they accomplished, Dickens and Lillie Langtry and Charles I and W.S. Gilbert and P G Wodehouse and Alexander Fleming,until you start to feel that in parallel time streams they’re all still coming and going invisibly about their business, kings and clerics, politicians and poets, painters and scientists, a living pentimento.  

 

It isn’t just the real-world history that’s so present either.  Legend is as much a part of the landscape as reality.  In Berkshire, the Postcard County, you’ll find the hill where St George fought his dragon, with the bare spot on top where the dragon’s blood permanently blighted the land, and not far away is the turning for Wayland’s Smithy, where Merlin came to commission the making of Excalibur and the only place for shoeing invisible horses and forging invincible armor.  (Fans of Susan Cooper will also know that Wayland forged two of the six Great Signs of the Light, Bronze and Iron.)  In winter Herne the Hunter rides here on his black horse with blazing eyes and the Wild Hunt streaming out behind, searching for damned souls, and further west, in Somerset, are the ruins of Glastonbury, where some believe that King Arthur waits for his time to come round again, all of it fixed to the green hills by the great grey thumbtack of Stonehenge, the beating heart of mythic Britain.    And underneath all that, there’s something even more ancient, old old magic at work still:  the ley lines, the network of fairy highways that run beneath the earth, and where they intersect, men have built their places of temporal and spiritual power from the Picts right on to the present day, responding to the resonant hum of the earth under their feet.

None of this is to suggest that England is some kind of utopian civilization, that it doesn’t have its share of problems – it does - or that it’s any better than any other country at preventing history from repeating itself – it’s not.  They particularly like the one where a small but valiant group of Englishpersons ends up hopelessly overmatched by an enemy army, the weather, circumstances, geography, or all of the above, and either does or does not prevail.  It doesn’t matter which, because what the English are better at, at least to these American eyes, is acknowledging that the whole of their historical record, the bad along with the good, is pertinent to who they are in the present.  When I said earlier the English carry their history with them every day, I meant all of it:  the ignoble as well as the noble, the defeats as well as the victories.   In some ways they almost seem to prefer a glorious catastrophe to a glorious success, it reinforces their sense of themselves as people who behave well in the worst of circumstances.  (Though of course they don't always do that either - I remember being there during a walkout by the firefighters and the Underground workers that closed down the Tube, and let me tell you it was not a pretty sight on Oxford Street.)  There’s conspicuously little of the perpetual rewriting, revising and erasing of event that reflects badly on the national image that we do so compulsively in the U.S, spinning as hard as we can to pretend something didn’t happen when it manifestly did, or to creatively rearrange our history until we like it better.   BBC newsreaders reporting on American current events often seem to be just ever so slightly amused, and it’s not difficult to see why.  From the other side of the Atlantic, American news plays like the hormonal thrashings of a teenage country that doesn’t yet have the historical maturity to put its national crises in an appropriate perspective, which, combined with the equally adolescent need to be - or appear to be - always in the right, results in its responding to everything with frothing hysteria.   But a 2500 year timeline tends to put things in a different kind of context and encourages a more proportional response, and if the British don’t always manage to actually learn something from their less admirable moments, they do at least find something positive to take from them in the impetus to say, essentially, “Well that certainly happened,” and move forward with as much dignity as possible, rising above and carrying on as they are wont to do.  Rudyard Kipling wasn’t just whistling Lilliburlero when he wrote, “If you can look on triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same….”  He was quantifying an ideal of behavior that was, and is, real and observable in the English character.  

I went to England for the first time when I was junior in college.  It was my first time abroad, and also my first plane flight.  This was back in those now-unimaginable days when flying was still a little bit glamorous and people got dressed up to do it:  I wore, as I recall, a skirt, high heels, a very stylish trench-coat and a little hat that matched.  I may even have had gloves.  And I didn’t look like a freak, either – everyone was dressed that way.  (Now, of course, I wear whatever is the closest thing to pajamas.)  I remember looking out the window and seeing the countryside spread out below in a patchwork of more greens than I had ever known existed and looking remarkably like a creative plaything I used to have as a kid where you spread out a cloth patterned with streets and parks and roundabouts and put little building-block houses and things on it to make a town, and feeling both extraordinary happiness and a deep and surprisingly unsurprising sense of homecoming.   Right from that first arrival at Heathrow, everything about being there felt natural.   The money felt right in my hands.  The city mapped itself in my head with the ease and speed of something remembered.  Even the traffic coming from the wrong side felt, intellectually, right and proper (although muscle memory was harder to conquer, your body expects what it's accustomed to in spite of what your brain is telling it, and to this day I still look in both directions before I step off the kerb, just in case).   

For the next two decades I "went home" to England almost annually, thanks to the longest streak of housing good fortune in travel history.  Through most of the ‘80s I stayed – once for nearly a year - with people who were friends of a friend in New York and who became my “English family,” in a tall yellow house on Elgin Crescent in Notting Hill, at the time the leading edge of the gentrification tide.
 

When I was living there the area was just beginning to be colonized, as tends to be the case, by artists, actors, musicians and writers. A famous biographer and his equally famous writer wife lived in the neighborhood; a distinguished playwright had clandestine lunches with a lady not his wife at the French bistro round the corner; and somewhere in those years we acquired a screenwriter who would eventually make the area famous and impossibly trendy by putting all its charms on film.  You can actually get a good look at Elgin Crescent in Notting Hill, it’s the street that Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts walk down after she first has dinner with his friends, and the garden they climb into was our communal garden, where we used to walk the Jack Russell in the evenings.  I worked for cash in a bookshop just off the Portobello Road, and yes, there was a travel bookstore a couple of blocks away, but sadly the gentleman who ran it looked nothing whatsoever like Hugh Grant.

In the ‘90s, home base became Lennox Gardens, a quiet oval of 19^th century buildings off Walton Street in Knightsbridge, where my godfather bought and furnished a beautiful flat in the belief that he’d be spending a significant amount of time working in London and would want a pied a terre that would be ready for action whenever he walked into it.   As so often happens, things didn’t turn out quite as planned, and the flat was often untenanted, so when his pieds were a terre elsewhere he generously made it available to friends and
family who wanted to use it.   

Nearly all this part of London is owned by the Grosvenor Estate, and many of the buildings seemed to be occupied largely by cast-off relatives of the aristocracy and younger children of the lesser nobility. Staying in an earlier flat on the same street (a sort of “audition flat”, to see if the area would suit) I used to hear all about the neighbors from the building’s concierge, a small plump Irishwoman who in the time-honored tradition of concierges knew a great deal more about everybody than was probably good for her, or for them.  On the top floor we had the Honorable Mrs  M-----, who hardly ever left the precincts of her flat, since her back, like the rest of her, was 93 years old and couldn’t be counted upon to perform properly for any length of time.  Beneath her lived the Dowager Duchess S ---- and her younger sister, who made little landscapes out of seashells and sometimes felt courageous enough to exhibit them in local bookshops and galleries.  Below them and just above me was the swinging young Lady Mary C-----, whom I only ever saw on Fridays when Her Grace the Duchess, Lady Mary’s mother, came round with the Rolls to whisk her away to the races at Cheltenham or down to thecountry estate, wherever that was.  It was like being the poor relation in  a Nancy Mitford novel. 

But, in time, my lucky streak ended.  In the early oughties both the yellow house and the Knightsbridge flat were sold - if the internet is to be believed, the house went for something just shy of $4 million pounds, which tells you something about what’s happening to London real estate, goodness knows what it must be worth now – and that, for many wistful years, was that, although recently the prospect brightened considerably when my cousin's daughter Katie moved there to study at Central School of Drama and stayed on to pursue her career.  (She has a blog of her own about her adventures abroad, and it’s been a great joy to share vicariously in the start of a second generation’s love affair with England.) 

I’ve never been able to come up with an entirely satisfactory metaphor for what it feels like to me to arrive in London, to be there, but just recently one presented itself that comes as close as any, appropriately enough through a quintessentially London-ish experience I had during the Covent Garden Festival of Vocal Music, at a concert by the male a cappella group Lionheart of music written for Henry VIII and the King of France at the Field of the Cloth of Gold.  (Bear with me, this is the long way round, but we’ll get there eventually.)  They sang in the Church of the Knights Templar in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which was consecrated in 1185 –probably with Henry II in attendance, on a break from arguing with Eleanor – and looks like something out of Indiana Jones:  round, as all Templar churches are, with tombs in the floor and knights lying in effigy with their broadswords clasped on their chests.  Very Da Vinci Code.  The whole thing made one feel like an absolute speck on the timeline of history:  there we sat, listening to music sung by a contemporary group, written 500 years earlier, in a space that pre-dated the music by 300 years.  Because of its repertoire, Lionheart is used to performing in this kind of acoustically challenging venue, and they know exactly how to pace and place the music so that the reverberation becomes an enhancement and not a liability, singing with such a pure and perfectly blended straight tone that when they’re in unison the effect really is of a single voice.  When not, each harmony is crystalline and complete, hanging alone in the air for a split second before passing on to the next, so that one has the experience of hearing each chord for itself at the same time as hearing its place in the whole.   Each selection at the end would hang suspended on the seventh for a moment, and then a single voice inside the harmony would shift cleanly and precisely from one note to another – no scooping or sliding for these guys – and complete the resolution, inevitable as the keystone sliding into the top of an arch.  It gave you a kind of piercing satisfaction, almost physical, as if that simple transition from suspension into perfect balance momentarily brought your soul into alignment with the universe. 

And that is what returning to London, being in London, feels like to me: something that all the rest of the time feels unresolved lifts quietly and lightly into place.  And for as long as it lasts, until it’s time to go, there is completion, and harmony, and beauty, and peace.

Earth hath not anything to show more fair:     

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by 

A sight so touching in its majesty: 

This City now doth, like a garment, wear 

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, 

Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky; 

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

 Never did sun more beautifully steep 

In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill; 

Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! 

The river glideth at his own sweet will: 

Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;

 And all that mighty heart is lying still!                                

       "On Westminster Bridge", William Wordsworth

 

Photo credit, Westminster Palace: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/piero/2193243542/">Piero Sierra</a> / <a href="http://foter.com">Foter.com</a> / <href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a>   Photo credit, John Keats: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/baxterboy/6064612547/">timechaser</a> / <a href="http://foter.com">Foter.com</a> / <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a>

Photo credit, Notting Hill: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcanevet/486111647/">manuel | MC</a> / <a href="http://foter.com">Foter.com</a> / <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">CC BY-SA</a> 

Photo credit, Thames Sunrise: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/66720528@N04/8475403157/">James Blunt Photography</a> / <a href="http://foter.com">Foter.com</a> / <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/">CC BY-ND</a>

It's My Party: "This House" (National Theatre)

I came very close to passing on the National Theatre Live broadcast of James Graham's political play This House yesterday afternoon.  Thanks to the original House of Cards series and some spirited dinner table conversations in England in the '80s,  I know a bit about how Parliament works on the day to day level, but not a lot, and somehow a play about the slow implosion of the Labour Party through the "hung" Parliaments of 1974 to 1979 sounded like it might be just a little too topical to hold my interest.  Fortunately, I did some research online and was sufficiently encouraged by the British reviews ("an exhilarating rollercoaster ride through an era of political upheaval!" - British Theatre Guide) to overcome my anxiety and go anyway, and I'm so glad I did!

32 year old playwright James Graham (who's quite young enough without adding insult to injury by also looking like he's about 12) does a masterful job of "educating" the audience in the vocabulary and terms of the story as he's telling it, providing exposition and backstory so seamlessly you almost don't notice, a particularly impressive achievement given that he wouldn't be born until 3 years after the close of the play's events.   Broadly speaking, during the five years in question neither Labour nor the Tories held a clear voting majority in the House of Commons, and even when Harold Wilson's minority Labour government was voted in it still was only up by three votes, with the result that it was nearly impossible to definitively pass any legislation.
For both parties, every vote was crucial and every voting member had to be present for every vote that was called - pregnant, ill, drunk, stoned, their condition was irrelevant as long as they could be dragged or drag themselves through the Yes or No lobby to be counted.  The Whips, whose job it is to get the votes in for their party, were in a constant high-stress frenzy, making sure their MPs were on side, chivvying the more rebellious ones to make sure they toed the party line, and most importantly trying to lure the votes of the smaller parties (referred to with gallows humor as "the odds and sods" and including the Liberals, Scots and Irish Nationals, and the Welsh) to widen their margin.  The back corridors of Westminster were a 24/7 madhouse of shifting alliances with no holds barred to manipulate the legislative outcome: bullying, bribery, blackmail, and even the occasional beat-down.  On one memorable occasion, which makes a great set piece for the play, there was an actual brawl in the House chamber with Michael Heseltine swinging at everybody in sight with Charles II's ceremonial mace.

The situation is similar in many respects to the legislative deadlock in the American Congress during the first four years of the Obama administration, particularly as the body's responsibility to govern and protect the interests of the people begins to become secondary to just obstructing the opposition and keeping them from accomplishing anything towards their political agenda.  The difference is cultural, and significant: Parliament still runs less by rule and regulation than on tradition, sportsmanship and a particularly English belief in the inviolability of the gentlemen's agreement.  Sooner or later almost every character in the play finds him (or in a couple of instances her) self having to confront how far they're actually willing to go for the sake of party loyalty.  What gives the piece its emotional heft is that inevitable conflict between political expedience and individual conscience, and the equally inevitable moment when the point is reached that honour, and the ideals that brought these guys into politics in the first place, can no longer be ignored or pushed aside.

Originally performed in the National's smallest space, the Cottesloe (small being a relative term - the "little" Cottesloe is the size of ACT's mainstage theatres), the production was so successful that it was moved into the largest of them, the Olivier, for an extended run. Scenic designer Rae Walsh rose impressively to the challenge, with the inspired idea of seating some audience members in the "back benches" on the Olivier's famous turntables, which shift position between scenes to define locations, while the actors play in a stationary space between them and the audience out front:  Tory Whip's office stage left, Labour Whip's office stage right (a bit of designer humour there perhaps!), and an area in between which is sometimes the center aisle of the House and at other times various party-neutral locations around Westminster.  Hanging over everything is the gigantic lower half of the face of Big Ben, not only the iconic image of the political power located in the Palace of Westminster, but also the indication to Londoners that, at least in theory, their government is hard at work and literally "burning the midnight oil" on their behalf :  when Parliament sits late into the night, the lamp at the top of the clock tower is lit; when it finally rises to go home, it's extinguished.

Director Jeremy Herrins gives the script a vital, high-stakes, high-octane production that captures both the relentless physical and mental energy of this world and the equally relentless psychological stress it creates.  There's a driving authenticity to it that makes you feel that this must really have been what it was like during these madhouse years, and it's played at speed and with blistering wit and ferocity by one of those giant, deep-bench ensemble casts the National can field, 23 actors in about twice that many roles.  With the exception of Vincent Franks, who for me was the least effective among the principals, his weepy, hysterical characterization of Labour's Michael Cocks becoming wearyingly one-note as the play went on, pretty nearly everyone delivers, but there are standout contributions in the considerable crowd.   Julian Wadham, a familiar face from British television, delights as the giddily effete Conservative Whip, peering like a loveable schoolmaster over his spectacles and fussing about grammatical correctness ("That wasn't assonance, was it?"), and enjoying the game of it all so much that he practically dances around his office - for him the worst of the situation is that it begins to stop being fun.  The it must be said extremely dishy Charles Edwards (currently Lady Edith's tragically married love interest on Downton Abbey and so wonderful as Richard Hannay in the original company of The 39 Steps) as his Deputy Jack Weatherill is the epitome of a certain kind of ideal English gentleman, square-jawed but sensitive around the eyes, perfect suit, perfect posture, perfect hair, perfect easy charm even when defending his corner.  Edwards has a sublime gift for light comedy, so much harder to play than it looks when it's done properly, and he deploys it here to excellent effect - you wouldn't believe the impact he can make with the flick of an eye-brow or a fleeting thin third of a smile.  Reece Dinsdale is all northern bonhomie and cheerfully boorish profanity as Labour Whip Walter Harrison, whom it is a mistake to underestimate but whose bantam-rooster aggression hides a warm heart - the relationship between him and Edwards' Weatherill is the central one of the play -  and Matthew Pidgeon plays, with admirable commitment to the task, a rogue's gallery of obnoxious MPs from both sides of the aisle.  ("Is this even a real job?" complains one on being given a post as Arts Minister in the Shadow Cabinet.  "It makes me sound like a wizard - Shaaaaaaadow  Aaaarts.")

At just over three hours it's a daunting evening in prospect, but in practice it goes like a bullet-train with very few lulls in the proceedings, and I was happily surprised by how much suspense and excitement was generated from what sounded like potentially the most boring idea for a play imaginable.  It's an invigorating reminder of how thrilling political theatre can be, and how discouraging it is that in our current environment in this country we're not making it anymore.  Political plays tend to be big, and therefore expensive, which is a practical problem, but the larger issue is that I think American playwrights are afraid to write them and theatres are for the most part reluctant to produce them for fear of alienating subscribers or donors.  (American audiences don't in general have the philosophical equanimity of British ones about seeing themselves, their country or their government depicted in less than flattering terms.  We don't like not being Exceptional, and we don't like being reminded how often we are not, it's a peculiar kind of self-generated artistic censorship.  This House was a roaring hit in London, with MPs from both sides of the aisle in regular attendance and enjoying the hell out of it.  It's hard to imagine a similar play about the U.S. Congress being received with comparable enthusiasm on this side of the Atlantic.)  The noteworthy political plays about the United States in recent years - Stuff Happens, Frost/Nixon, Continental Divide - are all by British writers. The English have for centuries gone to the theatre to see the issues of the day argued on stage, and as a way of triggering public and private debate about the state of the nation and its institutions.   It's a great shame that we've lost that perspective.  It is healthy, and it is part of what theatre is for.

The National Theatre Live broadcast of This House has three more showings at Seattle Film Festival/Uptown Cinema on June 17, 22 and 24, and at other times and venues around the country.

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