I have been writing about some horror things I have experienced over the last while, starting with The Exorcist, then some other films, and in my last post some horror audio dramas, including a BBC adaptation of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White. Now we reach Lies We Tell, which is like The Woman in White in that it is a gothic shocker but not one featuring supernatural terror. In fact, it is an adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu's novel Uncle Silas, another heiress-in-peril novel.
When Le Fanu originally pitched the book, he wanted to set it in his native Ireland. His publisher said that no one wanted to read Irish books, so Le Fanu moved the locale to Derbyshire. For this film, director Lisa Mulcahy and screenwriter Elisabeth Gooch have brought the story back to the Emerald Isle. Agnes O'Casey plays Maud Ruthyn, a recently orphaned heiress who is yet to come of age. The film begins with the executors of her father's will suggesting that she might want to contest being left in the care of her Uncle Silas, a man of bad reputation who is suspected of murder. Despite not knowing her uncle, Maud insists on following her father's wishes and points out that although her uncle was suspected of causing a man's death, the coroner reached a verdict of suicide.
Uncle Silas arrives in Maud's mansion with his rakish son, idiot daughter and a French governess, and takes Maud into his care. While initially amiable, it becomes apparent that he has designs on Maud's wealth and is not entirely interested in her welfare. The film becomes increasingly claustrophobic as Maud finds herself trapped in her home, unable to seek help outside it and forced to rely entirely on her own resources. This sense of the domestic environment as a trap is of course a recurring gothic trope.
I think the title change from the book is partly designed to draw the focus away from Silas to Maud. In conversation after the film, Mulcahy talked about how she and screenwriter Elisabeth Gooch to some extent wanted to subvert the novel and give Maud more agency. I found this somewhat curious; while I have not read the novel myself yet, my understanding is that Sheridan Le Fanu's Maud is more active and determined than some gothic heroines and that the book is a first person narrative that foregrounds Maud's thoughts, experiences, and actions, for all that it is named after her antagonist. Either way the film remains very focussed on Agnes O'Casey's Maud, who appears in pretty much every scene. David Wilmot's Silas nevertheless remains a formidable presence, affable, charming, and sinister, sometimes all at once. He is very much a villain in the Count Fosco mode.
One thing I was struck by was how unsympathetically Maud is presented, at least initially. This is despite the fact that we see everything from her point of view and never stop rooting for her to escape her peril. Yet at the start of her film we see her imperiously bossing around her servants and then curtly dismissing the concerns of her executors. She is also short with Silas's daughter Emily, someone who could otherwise have been recruited as an ally given the nastiness Silas displays towards her. I did find myself wondering if the servants' later lack of helpfulness is a reaction to their earlier treatment.
And I suppose another thing to mention is that while this is based on a gothic sensation novel, it is not even slightly camp. Once we gain a sense of the danger in which Maud finds herself we never lose sight that it is very real and potentially visceral. There is one particularly intense scene that in another film would have played very differently but here remains a horrible presentation of Maud's vulnerability. That scene in particular is not an easy watch and I could imagine it being particularly upsetting to some viewers. Lies We Tell is nevertheless a film I recommend highly, and I hope that we see more from both Agnes O'Casey and Lisa Mulcahy.
I am bringing you on a journey into a world of the sinister and macabre, previously discussing 1973 classic The Exorcist and some other horror films that have crossed my path. But now I bring you to the particularly unnerving world of horror audio drama, where the mind's eye can create terrors far more horrific than anything that can appear on screen.
The Woman in White is a 2001 BBC adaptation of a novel by Wilkie Collins. It is not a supernatural story although there are moments when you think it could go in that direction. Rather it is a gothic sensation novel and an example of the heiress-in-danger subgenre. This radio adaptation follows the shifting points of view of the novel by changing its focus over the four episodes from square-jawed hero Walter Hartright (played by Toby Stephens) to indomitable and resourceful heroine Marian Halcombe (Juliet Aubrey) and back again, with Jeremy Clyde and Philip Voss playing the villains Sir Percival and Count Fosco. The drama follows the basic outline of the plot, with its mysterious woman in white showing up at opportune moments together with its sinister villains whose dark secrets threaten to undo them and the resourceful heroes working to thwart them. The real stars are Aubrey's Marian (capturing well the qualities that had 19th century correspondents writing to Wilkie Collins asking if the character was based on a real woman and if so would she be open to a proposal of marriage) and Voss's Fosco (ever-so-polite, ever-so-sinister). Maybe you should read the book first but if you have already done that or couldn't be arsed the drama is available on archive.org.
Dead Air is an audio drama from an Irish podcast factory, part of their Petrified strand of horror dramas.To be honest, it is not great. It features an Irish talk radio host working the graveyard shift who starts finding himself talking to an increasingly creepy caller, with things getting increasingly edgy. The drama uses sound well but the plot seemed a bit woolly. And Dead Air featuring intrusive ads for another non-drama podcast in which two excitable blokes go on about how much they love their mammies did rather wreck the buzz. But if you want to find out for yourself, check it out here.
The Haunter of the Dark meanwhile is the latest of the Julian Simpson loose adaptations of H. P. Lovecraft stories made for the BBC and packaged together as the Lovecraft Investigations. I may need to listen to this again, but my initial feeling with this was that it was a bit weak compared to its predecessors. Its plot in particular seemed overly complicated plot, while the narrative featured some odd leaps of logic. That said, it did have one of the best depictions of Mythos related sanity deterioration I have come across in a dramatic presentation. It can be downloaded or streamed from the BBC here, but if you haven't listened to any of the other Lovecraft Investigations yet don't start with this one: go to the first one, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (which is also the best).
I am writing a series of posts about some horror things I have experienced in the recent geological past. In part one I talked about The Exorcist. Join me as a I discuss some other films I have seen that explore the the world of fear and terror.
The Tell-Tale Heart is a 2023 short film that I have mentioned in passing previously, first when listing the best short films I saw last year and then when I was outlining what I was going to be nominating for this year's Hugo Awards (and like almost everything else I nominated, it failed to make the ballot). Directed by Max Hendrickson, It is a stop-motion animated adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name, the one narrated by a guy who describes a murder he has committed while being at pains to deny his insanity. I saw it in the Stoneybatter Film Festival last year, and it is stunningly atmospheric piece of work, all the more impressive considering Hendrickson was still in school when he made it. It is on YouTube, so check it out (and if you like it, have a look at his other films too).
Lust for a Vampire is a 1971 Hammer horror that was on television when I was away last year. I did not see all of it, but I saw enough. It is a sequel to The Vampire Lovers, Hammer's previous adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla" (the story that pretty much launched the important sexy lesbian vampire subgenre). This one is largely set in a finishing school for young ladies: the kind of place where at bedtime they have to help lace up each other's nightdresses to put away their ample bosoms. An English ne'er-do-well inveigles his way into a teaching job (he comes across as the type who likes assisting in the education of young ladies); he soon becomes convinced that new student Mircalla might be legendary vampire Carmilla resurrected. Despite this he falls in love with her. Various things happen but I got bored and went to bed before it all concluded. It did rather put the ham into Hammer.
The Omen (1976) is one of those famous films I have been aware of since it came out but somehow had not seen until it showed up in a horror film season in the Lighthouse. People often talk of the unholy trinity of folk horror films: The Wicker Man, Witchfinder General, and Blood on Satan's Claw. I think of The Omen as forming a second trilogy with The Shining and The Exorcist, a trilogy of big budget mainstream horror pictures that were event films when they came out. And you know what? It's not that great and is a far inferior film to the other two of my imaginary trilogy. It suffers from being excessively camp and lacking the sense of mounting dread that the other two films successfully create.
I was struck by one scene that seemed to be deliberately echoed in The Shining. At one point we see little Damien (the child of Satan [/spoiler]) zooming around in a peddle car before charging down a corridor to do something dramatic. I found this highly reminiscent of the very different scenes in The Shining, in which Danny zooms around the hotel's corridors in his own peddle car. This observation does not make this film worth going to see, but it is perhaps worth having seen in the past.
image source:
A threatening policeman (Utah International Film Festival: "The Tale-Tale Heart" — Max Hendrickson)
Join me as I write about some spooky things I have experienced in the recent past (broadly defined). First up we have William Friedkin's film, which I saw last year when it was re-released to mark the 50th anniversary of its original appearance. If you have any interest in films you have probably seen it already, and if you haven't you are still probably familiar with its basic premise (girl is possessed by a fiend of hell, priests try to exorcise her). This was a rewatch for me, but even for a second time the film retains its unnerving power. It is also one of the most pro-Catholic films I have ever seen, with a deep reverence for the mysteries of the Church and a presentation of its priest characters as heroic figures even as they grapple with their own doubts and crises of faith.
I was struck by the way the film presents its narrative, using a visual equivalent of music going quiet-loud-quiet to create emotional peaks and then to release the tension. At times though this left me wondering how scenes resolved after the director called "Cut". Consider a scene in which Ellen Bustyn as the possessed girl's mother runs into her daughter's bedroom when she hears her screaming and is confronted by the terrified child on a bed that is shaking around violently. After a moment in which we take in the horror of what is happening the scene cuts to something else, which left me wondering how the episode played out… did the bed gradually stop shaking after everyone screamed for a bit? Did the mother pull the girl off the bed and take her to another room, providing a temporary respite? Did everyone pile onto the bed to put a stop to its gallop? Or did they all stand there screaming until the morning?
I also found myself thinking about the decision to have a different actor than Linda Blair provide the demon voice when the girl is in full possessed mode. That's a common device used in dramas about possession but I think it is always a mistake. If a lord of the abyss were to possess me he would still be talking with my vocal chords. And I think it would be more terrifying to have the possessed girl mouthing hellish obscenities with the teenage Linda Blair's voice than that of some 60 year old chain-smoker.
But what of real-life exorcism cases? In the film the exorcists are the heroes, saving the girl from the demonic prince. Even the film's secular psychiatrists seem to think that calling in the exorcists is a good idea (while being clear to assert that exorcism doesn't work for the reasons the exorcists think it does). In real life however exorcism is a deeply dangerous procedure and can pander to and amplify the delusions that the supposedly possessed person labours under. The film also gives the impression that exorcism is a one-and-done affair, but real exorcisms seem to be a much more protracted and episodic. There is the particularly disturbing case of Annaliese Michel (who inspired the track 'Annalisa' on the first Public Image Ltd. album), a disturbed German woman who underwent 67 exorcism sessions, each of several hours duration, over a period of 10 months; her parents abandoned psychiatric treatment for her and relied solely on the exorcists. Sadly, Michel died of malnutrition and dehydration, with her parents and the exorcists being convicted of manslaughter. I did find myself wondering if films like The Exorcist have the unfortunate side effect of amplifying beliefs that ultimately lead to tragic outcomes like Michel's death.
This is a score for a piece of music that my gamelan class has been learning. I am going to use it to explain some Javanese gamelan concepts. The typed bits of the score are what was given to me. The handwritten bits are my own notes.
One initial point: writing down gamelan scores is a relatively recent phenomenon. For a long time gamelan players would just learn pieces off and play them from memory. I am not sure whether gamelan notation was invented by western ethnomusicologists or by gamelan players themselves in reaction to western musical notation. Either way, there are apparently people who grumble that gamelan notation is ossifying the tradition and that everyone should go back to just remembering things.
The top line on the page gives the title of the piece (Serayu), but it also tells us something about it. It is a lancaran, a particular type of gamelan piece with its own rules. The "pl." is an abbreviation for pelog, one of the two gamelan scales. I think the 6 refers to pathet, which is a more advanced concept relating to which notes are emphasised in a piece (pathet is the kind of thing that excites ethnomusicologists but I don't think people trying to play gamelan at my level need worry too much about it).
Then the piece itself. The first bit is the bukå (pronounced buko), which is an introduction played on a set of bonangs. These are bonangs:
The rest of the score shows what are played on the balungan instruments, with the markings on the numbers indicating when some of the other instruments play. Balungan means skeleton in Javanese. The balungan line of a gamelan piece kind of corresponds to the melody line in a piece of western music, but only kind of. There are a number of different balungan instruments which vary mainly by size, but in broad outline they all look kind of the same. These are balungan instruments:
Note they all have seven bars. The pelog scale has seven notes, running from 1 to 7. The other gamelan scale is called slendro, and it has a five note scale (1, 2, 3, 5, 6), but slendro balungan instruments still have seven bars because there is a low 6 before the 1 and a high 1 above the 6 (i.e. the scale runs like this: -6, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, +1). Neither of the slendro or pelog scales directly map onto western scales, which makes arranging western pieces for gamelan a bit of a challenge.
So back to the score. Once the bukå is completed, the musicians play through the main body of the piece. When they reach the end they start at the beginning (skipping the bukå) and play through it again. And so on: gamelan is cyclical. In Java a couple of things might jazz this up a bit: there could be dancers, vocalists, or a shadow puppet play, or the variations might be introduced into the music. Other musicians might come in on what are called the soft instruments (notably a flute and some class of stringed instrument). But at a basic level you just keep cycling through the piece until signalled to stop.
The whole piece is the lancaran. It is subdivided into lines (if there is a Javanese word for these no one has told it to me) and the lines are subdivided into gatras (pronounced more like gotras). Each pair of notes is a gatra, but note the full stops as well. They are rests between the balungan notes when other instruments might play something (or might not). Each gatra should be thought of as comprising four notes, even if the balungan is only playing two of these.
The marks on the numbers indicate when what are called the structural instruments play. The circle on the last 1 in the piece indicates that the big gong plays here. The marks underneath the last note of each line indicate that a smaller gong will play here. When you are learning to play gamelan you do a lot of listening out for these gongs as they are your guide to where you are in the piece, especially handy if you have got lost (problems ensue if the gong player has also got lost).
The little u things on top of the notes indicate that a kempul is played on this note. The kempuls are a set of hanging gongs smaller than the ones played at the end of the piece and at the end of each line. The little hats on the other hand show us that a kenong note is played. Here are a set of slendro and pelog kenongs:
There are other instruments and when they play is not indicated in the score. The assumption is that the people playing these will know when to play. The ketuk plays on the rests of the balungan line. It is like a small kenong and is played to make a dull knocking sound. There are two sets of bonangs, which play at different pitches, and one plays on the balungan off-beats while the other plays three repeating notes in each gatra to a rhythm something like a reverse of the "Lazy Line Painter Jane" handclap. And there is a thing called a pekin, which looks like a small balungan instrument, and which has an accelerated version of the balungan line played on it.
But one big thing to bear in mind: the bonang players will know when they are meant to play and the marks on the score indicate when the kempuls and kenongs are played, but the score does not say what is played on these instruments. And here we get to the concept of garap.
Garap means interpretation or something like that. From the basic score the players of the structural instruments and bonangs etc. have to garap their parts and work out what they are going to play. This isn't made up on the fly and isn't something individual musicians can decide on their own. Gamelan isn't improv. The musicians all need to garap their parts together to stop the performance sounding like a dog's dinner; in practise a gamelan group's director will probably do this or at least guide the discussion to an outcome. Garap is subject to rules, but the rules are flexible. Two gamelan ensembles could play an identically scored piece in radically different ways.
So, how can you garap your part? For brevity I am going to focus on the kenong, partly because it is the instrument I am learning for this piece. One concept that is important in gamelan is seleh. The seleh note is the last note of a piece of music or of a subunit within it. The circled 1 on the last line of the score is the seleh note of the whole piece. The last note of each line is the line's seleh. The last note of each gatra is its seleh. And sometimes we split lines into two which means that the last note of the line's second gatra becomes the seleh note of that half-line. Javanese gamelan is end-weighted, which makes the seleh note very important. When you see a Javanese piece performed, the first note played after the bukå will actually be the final note of the piece. So Serayu will actually begin with the big gong being struck as the balungan players all hit a 1.
In gamelan there is no concept of harmony. The other instruments do not garap their parts so that what they play will create chords with what the balungan players are playing. Instead they play an approaching seleh note to indicate where the balungan line is going. Garap involves deciding which seleh note to indicate. It would be completely legitimate but perhaps a bit boring for me as the kenong player to play nothing but 1s all the way through the piece, as that is its final seleh note. Or I could play the last note of each line. Or the last line of each gatra. However, if you have looked at my handwritten notes you might have already guessed which way I am going on this: I've picked the midpoints and endpoints of each line as the seleh note I am aiming for. So, on the first line the balungan players will play a 5 and a 6, and their 6 will coincide with me playing a 3 on the kenong as though I am saying, "Hey everybody we are heading towards the 3" and then on the second gatra the balungan instruments play 5 and 3 and their second note lines up with me also playing a 3, bringing a resolution.
It interests me that gamelan decides what notes to play based on rules rather than whether notes will sound pleasing in combination. It is obviously not the same but it reminds me of serialism (the early 20th century classical music thing where Schoenberg and his disciples decided that no note could be played again until all the other notes had also been played): there is a similar kind of prioritising of process over sound. But there is a significant difference in that serialism turned out to be a blind alley and is now looked back on as a strange and now concluded musical episode that produced very little music anyone actually enjoys listening to whereas Javanese gamelan is a centuries old and still vibrant tradition.
One final thing… the handwritten notes at the bottom of the page are there to remind me of the kenong layout. For some reason these are ordered 3, 5, 6, 7, 1, 2, with the 1 and 2 being high versions of the notes. And there is no 4, even though the pelog scale includes that note. One thing I have noticed is that there seems to be a sense that there is something not quite right about the 4 note. It tends not to feature in pieces written for the pelog scale and Serayu may be the first Javanese piece I have seen with a 4 in the balungan line.
There you go. You now know everything about Javanese gamelan. If you want to here us performing Serayu, join us in the National Concert Hall studio on the 28th of May for a free-but-ticketed concert; tickets will be available at some point from the NCH website. In the meantime, here are some other people playing it:
And here is a picture of the Sultan Hamengkubawana X of Yogyakarta, who gifted our gamelan set to the National Concert Hall:
The final instalment in my fascinating account of time taken off work last September. The previous episode can be read here.
The next day my friend C— took me to Crystal Palace Park, where I saw the empty space left when the famous Crystal Palace burned down in the 1930s (it was very big) and more importantly the park's collection of dinosaurs. These are models made in the 19th century by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins under the direction of Richard Owen, at a time when dinosaur fossils first started being found in quantity, causing a sensation as they made plain that the world was much older than the Bible suggests and once contained strange animals not mentioned there. I've been fascinated by the Crystal Palace dinosaurs since first hearing about them as a child. Part of their charm comes from their reflecting a mid 19th century understanding of dinosaurs, with the animals being depicted in ways that do not reflect current views of them. As a result none of them are feathered and their colouring is fairly monochrome. Also, Hawkins and Owen made some choices about how the animals' bodies worked that would soon be out of step with scientific opinion, most famously depicting the iguanodons as four-legged and rather fierce looking when we know now they were bipedal herbivores. But there is a definite appeal to seeing the sculptures peeping out from behind bushes, and they do bring home how fucking enormous even small relatively dinosaurs like the iguanodon are.
Then into London, where on autopilot I did a circuit of the shops I typically visit in London: the LRB bookshop, Gosh comics, Sounds of the Universe, and Selectadisc. I bought nothing in these places as these days I find myself struck by the feeling of having too many records and comics, and in any case I don't really know if I actually like comics any more, and can never remember what I am looking for when I am in these places. Also it was hard not to shake the idea that everything these places were offering was available in Dublin, so why carry it all home? Nevertheless, I did stop for tea and cake in the LRB cakeshop (tasty, even if they are now using teabags (O Tempora! O Mores!)) and "availed of the facilities". I realise now that I forgot to check out Fopp, whose prominent display of mid-price CDs might have tempted me, as might their range of DVDs (I've been thinking for a while now I'd like to pick up a copy of problematic Doctor Who fave The Talons of Weng Chiang). But I did my bit to keep the London retail economy going in Foyles, where I picked up two things I have been looking for in vain here in Dublin: William Godwin's Caleb Williams, which I intend to reveal as the next subject of our gothic book club, and (from the handy music shop that nestles within Foyles) Glassworks by Philip Glass.
In the evening I met two old pals from the Bowlie Forum (one of whom is also one of my Frank's APA buds). We discussed the Frank's festival divide (Le Guess Who v. Primavera) and I did find myself wondering whether we might need to set up a festival exchange programme. Then I had to rush off to the Globe Theatre for a performance of As You Like It, one of those Shakespeare plays featuring cross-dressing. In this one as well as having female characters disguising themselves as men for reasons, the play also had some characters being played by actors of the opposite gender, which led to no end of confusion for me. Weirdly though I think it was less gender fluid than stagings in Shakespeare's own day, where having boys playing women who would then be disguised as men was par for the course.
The play itself is fairly light, featuring some funny stuff and some mild danger before a happy ending that sees key characters falling in love with each other while legitimate rulers are restored to their inheritance and estranged siblings reconciled. You could argue it is a bit slight but those Shakespeare semi-comedies are always good fun. The play does also feature one of Shakespeare's most famous speeches (the one about all the world being a stage, which goes on to deliver that whole seven ages of man thing).
Two other things struck me about the show. I've been to a good few Globe performances, but this I think was my first time going to an evening show. As a cheapskate and as someone used to standing for gigs, I always buy groundling tickets for the Globe, which means that you are much closer to the action than the people who have paid more for the seats. This though was my first time experiencing what might well have been the authentic Elizabethan groundling experience: the crowd was full of yappers. There were a bunch of talkative younglings behind me and looking sternly at them with finger on lips only shut their yap temporarily. I did think of going full "SHUT UP YOU CUNT" on them but i) I naturally avoid confrontation and ii) maybe as noted above a degree of audience noise is part of the authentic cheap ticket experience. So I moved to another bit of the space, and so found myself near to a couple of somewhat yappy girls, who at least were kind of good-looking.
The other thing I was struck by was how the Globe has drifted a bit from what I took as its original mission of serving up performances that approximated closely to Elizabethan staging, making their shows both entertainments and windows into the past. For this while the costumery and so on seemed fairly vintage, the musical accompaniment was based on pop songs of our era, breaking the Elizabethan spell. Is this good or bad? You be the judge.
And then it was back to the wilds of South London, where I was staying with C—. After another night of being slept on by a black cat I got up early, made my way to Euston and took the train to Holyhead and the ferry home.
My exertions led to a certain fatigue and, more ominously, I found myself with a cold that I kept wondering about from the point of view of the dread Covid, so I ended up missing both of the Saturday night Dublin events I had rashly promised to attend (the Mindfuzz club night, at which Andy Votel was to feature on the decks, plus birthday party of Dublin's coolest person, at which a live karaoke was due to feature). For similar reasons I missed the Mick Harvey Dublin concert I had become aware of just before leaving for London. I did make my first gamelan class of the autumn session but by then I was back at work and my holiday was over.
I am recounting what I did and experienced on a break from work in September. You can read the previous episode here.
In my short break I also travelled to London for the first time in a while (apart from an overnight stay last year on the way to Le Guess Who). I was only there for three days but it was pretty action packed. On the night of my arrival I went with friend C— to Cafe Oto to see a performance by John Butcher, Chris Corsano, & Florian Stoffner, respectively playing saxophone, drums, and guitar. Corsano was the one here with whom I had previous, as I remember seeing him in Dublin some time back when he might have been based in Glasgow.
I have in the past suggested that the boundary between jazz and improv is defined by the skills of the musicians, but this concert rather challenged that assumption, as it did seem to be billed as essentially improv despite the astonishing chops of the performers. Corsano's charismatic playing attracted considerable attention, which is not too surprising given how great it always is to see a topnotch drummer really go for it, but the others all deserved top marks, with Stoffner's guitar textures and Butcher's sax all worthy of praise.
The next day I went out to see Strawberry Hill, the gothic revival mansion Horace Walpole had built for himself in the late 18th century. In his lifetime Walpole was a noted man of letters and minor Whig politician, but there days he is most famous as the author of The Castle of Otranto, a faux mediaeval narrative that conjured the gothic novel into being. If you've never read it then I can reveal that it is a hoot; few books begin with a key character crushed to death by a giant helmet falling from the sky, which gives something of a taste of how the novel progresses. The house has an endearingly crazy quality to it, with funny little turrets and internal ornamentation that makes you imagine ghosts stepping out of portraits or phantoms appearing from behind hidden panels. It's an intriguing spot and well worth a visit.
That evening saw me travel out to Woolwich for what was the main driver of my trip to London: attendance with C— at the performance of The Burnt City, a piece of immersive promenade theatre served up by the Punchdrunk theatre company. This work was based on the Trojan War. In case readers are wondering, "immersive promenade theatre" means that instead of sitting on a chair and watching actors do stuff on stage, the audience wanders around the performance space, occasionally encountering the actors doing their stuff, with cast members identifiable because unlike the audience they are not wearing masks. Because the space is big and things are happening simultaneously, audience members will have unique experiences. It also means that the order in which people encounter scenes can be a bit random, which will disrupt more usual notions of narrative flow. Punchdrunk shows also use lighting and music to great effect.
This was my second Punchdrunk show, the previous one being The Drowned Man, which I now realise I saw in London almost ten years ago. That was to some extent inspired by Georg Büchner's Woyzeck but it also drew heavily on Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust and had a Dark Hollywood vibe to it, with the sets evoking a vague kind of Americana that felt like it was from the 1930s or 1940s, or perhaps a bit earlier or later. Oddly, the staging of The Burnt City was quite similar, with the audience arriving initially into the Troy part of the set, which instead of feeling like something from antiquity evoked more the atmosphere of a 1930s film set with its cheap hotels, business premises, and pokey homes. The Greece (or Mycenae) part of the complex was a bit more abstract, with more in the way of large open spaces (but all still indoors and generally shrouded in darkness except when they weren't). And it is probably worth noting that although billed as theatre, the event was heavily dance based, with I think no actual dialogue spoken by the cast but a lot of movement.
And did I like it? Well it did make for an engaging evening but I think maybe I was a bit underwhelmed. I'm not 100% sure why that was. It might be that having previously seen another Punchdrunk show, this one did not have the shock of the new. But it might also be the nature of the performance. The Drowned Man had Dark Hollywood themes and a 1930s-1940s setting, but despite its Bronze Age setting, The Burnt City also had a 1930s-1940s feel to it. I think also that greater familiarity with the source material might have paradoxically made me enjoy the show less. With The Drowned Man, I had at that time no familiarity with Woyzeck or Day of the Locust, so I was approaching it with a blank slate, experiencing scenes from first principles in an impressionistic manner (I enjoyed reading The Day of the Locust some years later and recognising scenes from the show in it). But Greek myths and the Trojan War are things I have been familiar with for a long time. That meant that when I found anything happening in front of me I was trying to work out which bit of the Trojan myth I was watching instead of just letting the show wash over me.
What I did like was the bar. C— and I had a drink before we went into the show proper and then in the middle I came back for a cocktail break, cursing the fact that we had not pre-agreed a time for an interval drink together (you basically lose your friends in the show so you won't have a chance to day "Drink?" to them in there). Aside from the expensive cocktails, there was music from a band reminiscent of the synthpoppers in La-La-Land (the best music in the film I seem to recall) and a cabaret show tenuously linked to the Greek myths. At one point I was handed a spotlight I then had to keep on the performer, which is the kind of audience participation I am down with.
All in all an interesting and broadly enjoyable evening, but I would have to think a bit before I went to any further Punchdrunk shows.
Part three of my account of my action-packed break from work. You can read the previous part here.
I mentioned going to see the three DruidO'Casey plays. During a break from these my beloved received a phone call informing her that her brother-in-law's condition had worsened. David had been sick for a while and had moved into palliative care. Now the final stage was approaching. The next day my beloved went to visit him in the hospice while I met some of my friends, expecting (or hoping) that I would be able to see David myself the next day. It was not to be. As I walked home I saw the message telling me he had passed that evening. He was a good man and everyone that knew him will miss him. Looking at his death notice on RIP.ie and then seeing his shrunken body in the coffin engendered thoughts about the transience of life; we are not here for long. Seamie O'Dowd's rendition of "The Parting Glass" at David's funeral made for another emotional moment.
My account of my amazing break from work continues. Read part 1 here.
It's nice to meet people when you are on your holidays. Fortunately my friend K— was home from New Zealand with his partner and son while I was off work. We went up to the mountains and had a look at the ruins of the Hellfire Club, where 18th century rapscallions engaged in all kinds of depravities until on one occasion they discovered that the mysterious stranger who had joined them for cards was in possession of cloven hooves; this may be linked to a reputed fire that subsquently turned the clubhouse into a ruin. One thing that struck me about the building was how small the rooms were, suggesting a somewhat intimate scale to whatever depravities the young bucks engaged in.
That evening we visited our friends A— and F— for dinner and had more fun. We may have played some boardgames but no cloven-hooved stranger joined us.
I also made it to the cinema, where I saw Apocalypse Clown. This recent film sees a bunch of clowns thrown into jail after brawling with some human statues at the funeral of celebrated clown Jean DuCoque. But then solar flares cause a collapse of the electricity grid, leading to a breakdown of society that leaves the clowns trying to make sense of the absurd situation. Caught up in the mayhem is an ambitious TV journalist who had been sent to cover the clown funeral. "Didn't you fuck a clown once?" her boss says, "I thought as a clown fucker this job would be right up your street". And indeed Bobo, her previous paramour, is keen to reignite their romance while she is less convinced this would be a good idea. For plot reasons, the journalist finds herself in the company of the Great Alphonso, an older clown whose successful TV career was cut short following a boy band incident, while Bobo and two other clowns (Pepe, a useless mime, and Funzo, an evil clown) pursue her and attempt to evade the human statues. The jokes don't always land but when they do they are very funny. I think there is definitely something to be said for Donald Clark's idea that this film will play to stoner students forever. And while many have singled out the impressive performance of Natalie Palamides as Funzo, for me the film hangs on David Earl's moth-eaten performance as sad clown Bobo and Amy De Bhrún as the journalist (with her ambition and general air of "Get me away from these fucking clowns"). Fionn Foley as the terrible Pepe also deserves praise. So I encourage people to seek this film out.
I took some time off work in September and did various things. On my first day off my beloved and went to the Abbey for a theatre triple bill, as the Druid theatre company was performing Sean O'Casey's three plays about the dawn of independent Ireland: The Plough and the Stars, The Shadow of a Gunman, and then finally Juno and the Paycock. These have the 1916 Rising, the 1919-1921 War of Independence and the depressing Civil War of 1922-1923 as their backdrop.
Some years back we travelled to York for another theatre triple bill, where the Globe was touring all three of Shakespeare's plays about Henry VI. Both trilogies are similar in dealing with historical events and not having been written as a trilogy, but in other respects they diverge markedly. Shakespeare was writing more than a hundred years after the events he describes, while O'Casey was writing almost contemporaneously with the turmoil of independent Ireland's birth (The Shadow of a Gunman premiered towards the end of the Civil War, with Juno and the Paycock hitting the stage in 1924 and The Plough and the Stars marking the Easter Rising's tenth anniversary in 1926). And crucially, while Shakespeare's focus is on those who directed the historical struggles of Henry VI's reign, O'Casey is looking at the ordinary people who are caught up in the conflicts swirling around them, sometimes as minor participants but more often as bystanders or people trying to get on with their lives in a time of chaos. O'Casey is looking in particular at the working class people inhabiting the grotty tenements of central Dublin (though The Shadow of a Gunman felt like it might be looking at a slightly more prosperous strata of boarding house residents). His sympathy for his subjects means that he is ambivalent or hostile to the supposedly heroic struggles wrecking their lives (the 1916 Rising is presented as a pointless bloodbath directed by a raving madman while the Civil War comes across as little more than a tit-for-tat gang war).
What is stylistically strange about these plays is the way they mix tragedy and comedy, with scenes of great pathos preceded or followed by chortlesome drunken buffoonery. These are the only O'Casey plays I have any familiarity with, but awkward juxtapositions of laughs and tears is for me almost the defining thing of his stagecraft. And it's not easy to stage successfully. Back in the 1990s I saw another production of Juno and the Paycock, which played up the laughs so much that the moments of tragedy were like awkward interludes to be run through as quickly as possible so that the actors could get back to the laughs. In the Druid production however, the direction of Garry Hynes does not shy away from the sense of tragedy, with the final scene in Juno not being a return to roffles but empty laughter as the hangman places the noose.
One other point of similarity with the Shakespeare plays strikes me, this being the historical resonances of their staging. One of the major characters in the Henry VI plays found himself executed at York, his head stuck on a spike outside the walls near to where we were staying (it had been removed by the time of our visit). With the O'Casey plays the historical resonance comes more from seeing them performed in the theatre they had originally been staged in, as their first stagings had themselves been historical events, particularly for The Plough and the Stars. Its first performance in 1926, the tenth anniversary year of the Easter Rising, apparently went well, but on subsequent nights increasing numbers of Republicans appeared in the audience, making their displeasure at its non-observance of nationalist pieties known. On the fourth night, the audience was packed with Republican malcontents, including many who had lost relatives in the 1916 Rising. They progressed from hissing to full-blown rioting in the second act, which sees a prostitute interacting with various members of the cast in a pub while an unnamed off-stage orator delivers some of the more deranged lines from speeches by Patrick Pearse (the future leader of the Rising and still a hero to many); the Abbey's director, W. B. Yeats, addressed the crowd, saying "You have disgraced yourselves again" (a reference to the outrage that greeted The Playboy of the Western World in 1907).
One final thing struck me about the three plays. O'Casey was a socialist, but there is something strange about the way he portrays his working class subjects. The women are generally presented favourably, holding down jobs and keeping families together. But the men are typically a bunch of drunken wasters. You could argue that in an oppressive capitalist society drunken fecklessness is a way of striking back against the man, but when it leads to the further impoverishment of your nearest and dearest it has elements of cutting off your nose to strike your face. And even if you were to imagine that somehow 1920s Ireland had seen a socialist revolution, it is very hard to see the men of O'Casey's plays working hard to build the wonderful new society of tomorrow. More likely an Irish Stalin would have sent all the tenement dwellers off to the Gulag (i.e. Longford) and created a new proletariat out of the industrious sons of our peasantry.
When Le Fanu originally pitched the book, he wanted to set it in his native Ireland. His publisher said that no one wanted to read Irish books, so Le Fanu moved the locale to Derbyshire. For this film, director Lisa Mulcahy and screenwriter Elisabeth Gooch have brought the story back to the Emerald Isle. Agnes O'Casey plays Maud Ruthyn, a recently orphaned heiress who is yet to come of age. The film begins with the executors of her father's will suggesting that she might want to contest being left in the care of her Uncle Silas, a man of bad reputation who is suspected of murder. Despite not knowing her uncle, Maud insists on following her father's wishes and points out that although her uncle was suspected of causing a man's death, the coroner reached a verdict of suicide.
