When you read tirades about today’s cult of celebrity, you can invariably expect two axioms to present themselves. One is that this development is lamentable and ghastly, symptomatic of an inane, dumbed-down culture. A celebrity now is someone famed not for necessarily having done something interesting or useful, but for merely having grabbed the public’s attention sufficiently. Secondly, it is invariably a given that the cult of celebrity is a relatively new phenomenon, an unintended consequence of modern technology such as mass print, television and the internet, all of which have made it possible to imagine a stranger to be your friend.

Fred Inglis broadly agrees that our cult of celebrity is dismal, nurturing vacuous, vicarious and malicious sensations. ‘Celebrity,’ he writes ‘is always an ambivalent designation, the feelings it engenders at once bilious and rapt, envious and dismissive’ (p157). The Janus-faced sentiments it cultivates are the logical result of its inauthentic nature, in that it leads us to confuse non-intimates with people we actually know. ‘The parallel orgy is one of sanctimonious fascination and distate’ (p253). His materialist explanation is that this parallel capacity to worship and detest celebrities satisfies a timeless human vice: envy. Modern technology has simply made it easier to be jealous of the riches of others.

Inglis disagrees, however, that the cult of celebrity is new. The author argues that as celebrity can only exist in an truly urban society, which, unlike a rural one, facilitates familiarity, we can trace it in some form back to the birth of the Modern itself - namely, the late-18th century.

Joshua Reynolds, he writes, was the first true celebrity, who reinvented the concept of a painter not as an industrious figure reliant on a patron, but who achieved notoriety as much for his sexual licence, gluttony, drunkenness and gambling. Byron attained comparable infamy for his licentiousness, while Admiral Nelson’s dalliances with Lady Hamilton aroused as much prurient interest as did his naval triumphs. George IV’s fecklessness and disastrous marriage to Caroline of Brunswick were the source of much tittle-tattle and public disapproval. Long before Twitter made it possible to feign outrage about a public figure’s conduct or pronouncements, etchings by the likes of caricaturist and printmaker James Gillray permitted the public to pass collective judgment on the Prince Regent’s libertine behaviour.

In many respects the 20th century saw an extension, not a revolution, in the way public figures were regarded. The likes of Jackson Pollock and Tracey Emin continued where Reynolds left off. After Byron has come a multitude of stars from James Dean to Pete Doherty, whose embrace of the Dionysian has enthralled and appalled. Out of the lives of statesmen and politicians, narratives are still weaved and mythical figures created. The tragedy of John F Kennedy, and the Kennedy clan itself, is an obvious example. Nelson Mandela’s continued sainted status is another. Although ‘an inadequate economist and an ineffective policy maker’, the figure of Mandela, through his suffering, meekness, displays of forgiveness and reconciliation, has become, ‘as figureheads must, allegorical. His benign smile, his Hawaiian shirts, his informal readiness to cut a caper, take a turn on the drums, drink tea in the townships and entertain any and every passing dignitary come to pay homage, each aspect of the man captured and made real the celebrity peacemaker, gregarious and good-humoured’ (p274).

It could be argued, however, the cult of celebrity predates Modernity (the epoch which the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution brought in to being). For instance, the 1st century BC Roman orator Quintus Hortensius achieved not just recognition but celebrity on account of his talent as a wit and mime artist. Cicero was likewise renown for his oratory. In Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (2003), Tom Holland writes: ‘Like actors, orators were celebrities, gawped at and gossiped about. Hortensius himself was nicknamed “Dionysia”, after a famous dancing girl’. You don’t require an urbanised society for ‘celebrity’ to exist, and not even the technological mediums of print and screen. You just need a city that contains enough strangers to produce at least one figure everyone can talk about. ‘Celebrity’ is a requisite and consequence of large, non-intimate, imagined community.

Still, we may grumble, at least the likes Hortensius and Joshua Reynolds had palpable talent. Inglis echoes the familiar lament that today’s celebrities often don’t. They are famous for being famous, as the cliché goes. The concept of fame has always been with us, but ‘celebrity has largely replaced the archaic concept of renown’ (p4). Fame used to be the reward of social achievement in the public field or the tribute paid to power, wealth and privilege. ‘Celebrity, by contrast, is either won or conferred by the mere fact of a person being’s popularly acknowledge, familiarly recognised, attended to, selected as a topic of gossip, speculation, emulation, envy, groundless affection, or dislike’ (p57).

Fred Inglis, in blaming television, glossy magazines and capitalism for leading us to this pitiful state of affairs, sounds like an old fashioned socialist, the type who a few generations ago would have exhorted the working class to better themselves by reading classics from Everyman’s Library as opposed to penny dreadfuls. Indeed, he is, by his own admission, an unreconstructed Old Labourite. Not that there is anything wrong with this. Today’s widespread (and quintessentially New Labour) assumption that difficult literature or art is ‘elitist’, and therefore beyond the comprehension of the working class (who should stick to watching football and the telly), is a disgrace, and an unwitting form of inverted snobbery.

Yet, a failing of the Old Labour mentality was its distrust of aesthetics and its puritanical suspicion that art can serve as a social opiate. One of his main objections to celebrity magazines and reality television shows such as Big Brother is that they lead us to comprehend our emotions through the actions of others. But hasn’t vicarious emotion always been intrinsic to the arts, and indeed the human condition? Would he similarly denounce those who shed a tear at the end of Casablanca (1942) or The Sound of Music (1965) for being ‘vacuous’? I suspect that had he lived in early-17th century England, Inglis would have bemoaned those transfixed by Shakespeare’s plays for being all silly. It’s not real life, you know. It’s only a play.

Of course I exaggerate, and for all its lapses into verbosity, modish po-mo italicisations and episodes of peculiar rhetorical flourishes (’[Marilyn Monroe] served as a sex object… and therefore, to tens of thousands helpless wankers, as the magazine cover they kept handily to hand.’), A Short History of Celebrity is a wonderfully curmudgeonly work. Inglis’s reading - and viewing - is deep and wide, his prose rich and erudite without being forbiddingly esoteric. And unlike so many who excoriate our ‘dumbed down’ culture, at least he has examined it before doing so. Just as there’s nothing wrong with the working class bettering themselves culturally, there’s nothing wrong with hideously middle class people like myself reading OK! or watching The Jeremy Kyle Show. Indeed, if you seek to fully understand Western society today, I would say it is imperative.

Distant impressions

This week in London theatre, Matt Trueman reviews Polish company Song of the Goat’s ineffable Macbeth at the Barbican, as well as highlights of Chelsea Theatre’s Sacred festival, while Miriam Gillinson reviews Complicite’s Shun-kin, also at the Barbican.

And ahead of a Battle of Ideas Satellite event in Frankfurt, futurologist Peter Heller asks what makes some technological predictions come true, while others are confined to the collective imagination. And with two Satellite events coming up in Chennai and Mumbai, David Bowden reviews The Story of my Assassins, an Indian crime novel by Tarun J Tejpal, who spoke on journalism and East-West relations at the festival in London.

11 November 2010

Reviewing an Indian novel is like going to India on holiday: at some point, no matter how inventive your imagination or contrarian your spirit, you will eventually have to mention that it is a place of contrasts, extremes, sensuality and chaotic energy. So let’s get this out of the way as soon as possible: The Story of My Assassins is a book about the deeply ugly and violent underbelly of Indian society, written in exquisitely beautiful language which pulses with chaotic energy from the word go. Oh, and there’s plenty of sex too.

Tarun J Tejpal’s second book is a crime novel without a proper crime at its heart; a thriller which sets out its plot from the outset. As might be expected for an ostensible piece of genre fiction, it ticks certain boxes: the central character is a self-loathing anti-hero, a middle-aged investigative journalist more interested in getting his rocks off with a succession of beautiful and conflicted women than saving the world. At one point he shuts up a lippy woman who complains about his endless womanising by having sex with her: that the author is a middle-aged editor of Tehelka, a hard-hitting Indian investigative magazine, hardly needs mentioning.

Therefore, when an attempt on his life is made, no-one is more surprised than him. Yet that is where The Story of My Assassins takes a startling, or perhaps entirely logical, departure: the novel is the story of those would-be assassins. The conventions of detective fiction are put to one side as Tejpal treats us to a Dickensian panorama of the chaotic brutality of life in the villages and slums, where tribal feudalism rules, what passes as order is maintained by the nakedly capricious acts of police department sadists and personal liberty is preserved with the twist of a knife and a healthy dose of luck. Mutilations, genital torture, gang rape, loved ones slaughtered and innocent lives ruined in the blink of an eye – it’s all pretty grim reading, often sickeningly so.

Yet while Western eyes can tire quite quickly of gritty exposes of the dark side of the Indian economic miracle – one nice young man from one of those nice NGOs knocked on my door recently raising money for Indian babies who have been brutalised by ‘the fucked-up medieval caste system they have over there’ – Tejpal does something much cleverer and subtler than merely present us with the pornography of human misery. His big theme is how fate and chance govern Indian lives: from a decadent and paranoid elite getting fat off the cream of the commonwealth through to the clerks and public servants doing their best to eke out a life in the unceasing bureaucracy of creaking state machinery, all the way down to the cynical street gangs and superstitious villagers.

If the motto of The Wire was ‘everything is connected’, demonstrating how the War on Drugs corrupted every aspect of civil society, here it is impossible to conclude that anything is connected to anything else – just violence and retribution, echoing down and repeating itself endless through the ages, barely held together by crumbling imperial institutions and propped up by the untrustworthy volatility of market capitalism. Famously, The Wire included a scene of a gangster explaining to a cop why he allowed a known hustler to play poker, even though it involved him regularly ripping them off: ‘Because this is America, man.’ Here, a policeman tries to explain the convoluted scheme behind the attempted assassination:

This is India, my friend. Why do anything simply if you can do it in a complicated way? Have you ever been to get a driving licence or a ration card? Have you ever filed a complaint at a police station? Have you ever got a child admitted to school? It’s the brahminical brain, so wily, so twisted, it draws a straight line by making circles.

The line also recalls the line, ‘Elvira, you is a bitch’, from VS Naipul’s masterful satire on colonial-style democracy The Suffrage of Elvira – Naipul is an obvious influence and admirer. Like his literary mentor, Tejpal has a deep scepticism of the influence of Western thought and literature on improving the natives, expressed both at his recent UK appearance at the Battle of Ideas festival and present here. In the tale of Kabir M, a Muslim brought up by his paranoid father in a Christian school to make himself invisible in a Hindu country, Tejpal tells us:

The arithmetic and algebra he could manage, and Hindi he was good at. But English, and every other subject – all of them taught in English – fried his brains. He was not alone in this. The entire school was full of boys whose brains were being detonated by Shakespeare and Dickens and Wordsworth and Tennyson and memoriam and daffodils and tiger tiger burning bright and solitary reapers and artful dodgers and thous and forsooths and the rhymes of ancient mariners…English was to be ambushed ruthlessly when and where the opportunity arose. Its soldiers were to be mangled, shot, amputated wherever they were spotted…Their weapon of Hindi was a mere slingshot compared to the enemy’s cannon…Some of them were so completely ruined by English, so shrunk by its brutal onslaught, that they never managed to regain their full size…Of course there were some boys – especially from the army cantonment – who spoke English as if they were pissing in the bushes behind the school wall. A flowing, gushing, casual stream, laughingly delivered…

An anxious parent looking for a decent, well-rounded education in the UK may reflect that having their child’s brain fried by the English ‘cannon’ may be a considerable achievement. Kabir himself only returns to this doggerel as he has his circumcised penis mangled in a police cell: an unfortunate casualty of a friend’s indiscretion. As another character observes later on, his atheist father raised him to be innocuous to all religions, only to be fucked by all sides. Tejpal would have us believe he is a Caliban, happy to be taught the language of his masters only if he can curse them with it – but he may have pause for thought that hatred of ‘the enemy’s cannon’ is stronger in the West than anywhere else, exploded by vulgar post-colonialism, Western self-loathing and impact agendas.

It is this that comes across as the strength of The Story of My Assassins. It does, in the end, become a suspense thriller, although one which has little to do with its brahminical plot but more whether Indian society is in the process of modernisation or just merely in a modern form of chaos. Just as the brilliance of his bête noir Dickens lay in recognising and reflecting the revolution in social relations which took place alongside the material development offered by the Industrial Revolution, Tejpal too must recognise that for all his claims of India progressing in circles than straight lines, that something else more powerful is afoot. It should come as no surprise that a member of India’s emerging elite, even an unhappy one, would feel tempted to point his fellow countrymen – emerging from generations of poverty and misery, and hungry to share in some of the new growth – towards the West and warn them the grass is greener on the other side. If the elite are as shoddy and disorganised as he paints them here, then India may have a rough road ahead in its continuing development.

Just like poor Kabir, language is the undoing of Tejpal: you simply cannot believe that a writer who uses English so inventively and richly despises the canon as much as he claims. Perhaps, like one of his many characters, he is enjoying denouncing it with the one hand while using the other to nab a share for himself. Either way, The Story of My Assassins is a thrilling and vivid novel, and one which easily stands out amongst an increasingly drab literary landscape. Again, that such a novel currently languishes without a UK publisher tells Tejpal more about the West’s problems than he realises.

The representative from the energy company gave his all to convince the audience of the battery-powered car’s virtues. So when you arrive home after a hard day in the office, all you needed to do was plug the car in your domestic charging station. Splendid, and as if that wasn’t convenient enough, the young man continued that the company would make sure the charging would only commence when the tariff for electricity was at its cheapest. After he finished his song and dance and the floor was open to the audience, it was a young student three seats to my right who spoke up first. His question was: ‘I come home in the evening, but soon after I need to go to the hospital, the battery isn’t fully charged yet. What do I do now?’ Beads of sweat formed on the forehead of the representative, while he tried to come up with an answer to convince the philistine, but before he had a chance, he fell victim to an interjection: ‘Just take a cab!’ Laughter ensued, and the erstwhile positive support for the electric car gave way to ridicule.

Nowadays the typical presentation of a futurologist is a near-infinite roll call of possibilities. Sometimes more than a hundred slides create something like a stop motion film. They consist of photos and drawings that are randomly attached to any combination of various kinds of possible advances in nano-, bio-, and information technology. This leads to the creation of myths, which come to life in the imagination and thus attain a strange quasi-existence. The intelligent fridge (iFridge anyone?) that communicates with its contents and the supermarket is such a case in point. Nobody needs it, nobody has it, nobody can buy it, but it is hard to think of an example of our vision of the future that is so ingrained in our mind. A lot of predictions of the future that were made in the 1950s and 1960s now seem quite childish: the colonisation of the oceans and outer space, factories at zero gravity, gigantic magnetic monorails and enormous supersonic aeroplanes that bridge the continents.

It is safe to say that it was with the publication of Herman Kahn’s and Anthony Wiener’s The Year 2000 in 1967 that such prognostics became socially acceptable. If, at first glance, it seems this optimism about the future was subsequently replaced by a more sceptical attitude, truth be told, ecological doubts and fears about the depletion of natural resources only fuel the creativity of futurologists. The nuclear powered automobile is merely replaced by the battery-powered car, oh, and though the power is derived from wind energy, needless to say the curvaceous design remains. Fusion power is now called Desertec and the nuclear reactor for everyone is now a small power station for the single family house, powered by a gas engine. Kahn and Wiener predicted 100 technological innovations, and about half of them came to fruition. So, is futurology with a success rate of 50% merely a simple guessing game that any layman could play just as well as an expert?

The answer can be found in those predictions of Kahn and Wiener that turned out correct. Almost all the predictions in the fields of information and communications technology came true. Back in 1967 they didn’t just predict the PC and its impact on office life and leisure time, but also the video recorder, satellite television, home banking, industrial robots, traffic management systems and the mobile phone. In the fields of energy, mobility and health, barely a prediction was correct. Viewed with today’s experience these flights of fancy that range from programmed dreams to artificial moons and massive cargo submarines, ought to bring a smile to the face of the reader. Oh, by the way, according to Kahn and Wiener the battery-powered car was meant to dominate the automobile market by the year 2000.

But technological trends aren’t everything; sure a few boffins were able to predict back in 1967 that the miniaturisation of circuits was bound to advance the performance of electronic data processing. But materials sciences, bio and genetic technology, cognitive sciences and even such mundane things such as the efficiency of the internal combustion engine were coming a long way too. So why did the integrated circuit enable such a wide range of new opportunities and products; while light weight construction materials, nano structures and a better understanding of the composition and function of DNA didn’t really or only to a very limited degree? The answer is that Kahn and Wiener, just like most futurologists today, forgot the primary user, the customer. It is he that decides with his wallet the fate of any innovation, not by giving heed to dreamy eyed visions but by asking himself the rational question: what is it good for? What’s its use?

Every technological innovation becomes attractive to the user because of a special utility function he can gain from it. The utility function is valued using three criteria:

Robustness: the use must be reliable and always available.
Safety: Use of the product should not be hazardous.
Cost-effectiveness: The value that the user derives from the use of the product must be higher than acquisition and running costs.

Every innovation is compared to already existing technology using these criteria. If it fares worse, then the product obviously won’t prevail. Even though it was used in some experiments, the self-cleaning surface failed to materialise into more than a gadget. So far it wasn’t possible to create a surface robust enough to withstand repeated mechanical interaction. 3D printing also failed to catch on at home, despite the predictions made by Kahn and Wiener, because it only offers limited possibilities at significant costs. People won’t feel tempted to create individualised everyday items such as toothbrushes, plates or cutlery at home, if they can buy the same mass produced objects in a number of different styles at unrivalled prices.

It must also be said that these three central user requirements of technology sometimes contradict one another. So for instance having a higher level of security sometimes means that you need to make amends regarding availability. You are more likely to suffer an accident while travelling by car than it is by train or aeroplane, in the latter cases one travels along clearly defined and monitored infrastructures with professional drivers or pilots; in a car one doesn’t. By using train or plane the traveller loses the ability to plan his journey individually and has to stick to timetables. Safety and cost-effectiveness are often also at loggerheads with one another.  Safety systems cost money and do not contribute to running the technological system more efficiently. This conflict between profit and reliability was illustrated when in December 2009 a steam-locomotive was used in Great Britain for the first time in 50 years. In the extreme cold electric trains became useless, steam-engines on the other hand require a lot of energy to get running and have hence a lower degree of efficiency but are otherwise weather resistant.

From the user’s point of view any technological system has its drawbacks and as the successful predictions in the past proved, it was those innovations that reduced those drawbacks the most that became successful. It was because they overcame the contradictions of the three utility functions that users demand of their products.

The mobile phone for example allows you to make or receive a phone call at any time at any place and is now filled with all kinds of additional extras. It became so cost-effective that some people don’t require a landline any more. The battery-powered electric car is wrought with flaws. It is much more expensive than a petrol- or diesel-engined car, it cannot cover the same distances and when it gets charged it is not available for quite some time. Moreover, there are a number of potential safety issues that you should keep in the back of the mind. It could happen that the batteries catch fire or that even though you survived the impact of a car crash you get electrocuted because the batteries short-circuit and turn the car into the equivalent of an electric chair on wheels. Obviously futurologists are quick to point out that an electric car can fulfil up to 85% of our mobility needs. This beggars the question, who in the right frame of mind would buy such a vehicle for €40,000 if he could have one for €30,000 that would satisfy his needs 100%?

It is a human trait to not just invest into an immediate but also a potential use. Just because a car remains stationary for most of the day should not fool us into thinking that they weren’t bought for that purpose (They are there when you need them.) Cars are bought to satisfy the unpredictable, unplanned desire to be mobile. In the same way, you don’t spend the entire day on the mobile phone (unless you are teenager) it is still your constant companion.

Following mobility and communications, access to energy, heating, fuels and especially electricity is another basic need. It is expected to always receive enough electricity, regardless of which appliance is at what time in use. The current electricity network fulfils this demand perfectly. It is designed in such a way that the supply fulfils the demand. Customers pay for this promise to always receive enough energy at any time for any purpose. Just as a car promises potential mobility and a mobile phone potential communications, electricity enables potential use.

Those colourful images that futurologists conjure up do have an impact on political life though. It is only too easy to chose from this bouquet of opportunities those that appear to be the solution for imaginary or real problems. Kahn and Wiener did not just predict that by the year 2000 there would be farms on the bottom of the sea, we would be able to control the weather and interplanetary (manned) space travel would take place, but also the ascendancy of alternative energy(sources) and electric vehicles. All of this was supposed to happen by the mystical year 2000. Following decades of (this) ecological influence on the funding for (the) economy and innovation these conceptions somewhat solidified. Electric mobility and ‘smart energy networks’ are in this parallel world of catastrophic climate change and the no less frightening prospects of resource shortages just as quasi-existent as the intelligent fridge.

All the government subsidies for alternative but rather volatile energy sources such as wind power and photovoltaics or buzzwords like ‘smart networks’ and ‘intelligent electricity meters’ suffer from a profound error in reasoning made by the futurologists. The desired restructuring of the electricity supply requires a profound change to the consumer behaviour. To put it simply, this means you ought to adjust your demand to the supply. In practice this means you have to wash your clothes, refrigerate your organic tofu and charge your car when wind, sun and the operator say you can. The ideal case would be, as the company rep said about the electric car, for the energy provider to decide automatically when is the best time. That would mean other domestic appliances are subject to external injunctions too. So when you need to clean an item of clothing in your laundry at a particular time and ‘the computer says no’, you could use the car to drive to the laundrette, but chances are it is plugged in the garage with the battery half full and won’t work.  Perhaps this is the time to return to the previously mentioned interlocution ‘Just take a cab!’

Government, economists and product developers would be well advised to concentrate on those recommendations made by futurologists that consider the wishes of the user. The needs of the customer decide whether a technological innovation becomes successful or not, and the user prefers those innovations that improve upon existing technologies in the fields of energy, communications and mobility by dissolving the tensions between robustness, safety and cost-effectiveness without any compromise.

The currently well-supplied and heavily promoted sector of wind and sun energy is in no shape or form an ideal improvement and hence a potentially successful innovation. What happens if the final at the Champions League is underway and there is no electricity to power the TV? Then you want a diesel-generator from the nearest hardware store, if you can find a cab that is.

Peter Heller will be speaking at a Battle of Ideas Satellite event in Frankfurt on Saturday 27 November 2010: In__Va_i_n: innovation to go or innovation to grow?

This article was first published in German in Novo Argumente.

Imagine if you could bath in Macbeth. Or cut it into lines and snort it. What about painting your house Macbeth? ‘OK,’ you’re probably thinking, ‘this time he’s actually lost it. What is he on about?’

What I’m trying to say is that Song of the Goat’s 75-minute Macbeth is about as non-natural – by which I mean ineffable, rather than anti-Stanislavskian – as any piece of theatre I’ve seen. The Polish company treats Shakespeare’s text not in terms of its mechanics and motivations, but as an orchestral score. Using Grotowskian techniques of rhythmic movement and Corsican chanting, they translate it into something uniquely theatrical, something that chimes rather than planting ideas. The result is essence of Macbeth.

The words are treated sensorily. They carry meaning not through the concepts they signify, but on account of their tonal properties. Much of the text is chanted or sung chorally, sometimes delivered in layered whispers such that the words themselves become obscure and invisible. The same is true of the physicality. The eight performers hop and bounce around the stage like kabaddi professionals, landing with measured weight. They slice the air with wooden staffs swung or thrown between one another; here, slow and gentle; there, fizzing and fierce.

This is a Macbeth you feel before you follow it. You absorb it without consciously registering what’s going on behind the performance, what it’s signifying. That expressionism makes this Macbeth unfamiliar and counter-intuitive, quite often surprisingly so: you get a sense of the whole without being able to separate its constituent parts. It’s as if the entirety of Shakespeare’s play were contained in the dazzle of a single flashbulb. It’s the theatrical equivalent of Willy Wonka’s Three-Course Dinner Chewing Gum.

Of course, such an approach comes with heavy casualties. Often the plot is difficult to follow and one finds oneself constantly searching for familiar sections to serve as anchors. At times it feels like the edited highlights: those passages that have come to represent the play – ‘Is this a dagger,’ ‘Out, out damn spot,’ Banquo’s assassination and visitation etc – are delivered without the conjunctive momentum. In fact, there are moments when one struggles to decipher what’s going on at all. It took me a good half-hour to locate Banquo amongst the cast, identically dressed in long, starched skirts.

That has the knock on effect that, somewhat dispiritingly, this is not a Macbeth that can offer an interpretation. At this level of enquiry – rational, textual, analytical – one learns nothing new about the play. More than that, one loses the sense of the impending and inevitable, the dark heart of ambition that drives the play and the accompanying guilt.

But to bemoan such losses is akin to knocking a Macbeth for revealing nothing about Hamlet. Instead, Song of the Goat convert Shakespeare’s play into a whole new format; they present it anew, by allowing us to experience it in a completely alternate mode and manner. It’s almost synaesthetic. And in those terms, it is dazzling. The combination of its movement and sound (beneath the chanting is a constant accompaniment on the Korean kayagum, twanging and pealing) draw you inside the play, rather than observing externally. The overall effect is like a snake charmer: it’s kinesthetic properties go to work on you and its not long before you’re moving along, following each swish with a turn of your head or swaying and spiraling softly in your seat. Like two atonal guitar strings that eventually synchronize, Song of the Goat tune you in to the rhythms, timbres, textures and pitches of Shakespeare’s text.

Words seem to ripple into movement, as if the performers’ bodies are led by their lungs. You breathe along, inhaling Macbeth such that it gets inside you and lingers.

At times, such as when the witches deliver airy, staccato incantations or in the warbled wailings of Lady Macbeth (a frayed and pallid Anna Zubrzycki), it is exceptionally haunting. Elsewhere, it is more earthy and visceral – achieved without any nod to viscera, actual or represented. Gabriel Gawin’s Macbeth is a grounded, solid presence, often oddly graceful in his masculinity, despite never making much of a villain out of the man. Banquo’s assassination, in which he is lashed around the stage by staffs, is stinging and invasive. He flops from one murderer to the next like a rag-doll in heavy winds or tumultuous waves, spinning and flailing. By the time Burnham Wood ups its sticks, the battle is a finely choreographed set of swishes and jumps that leaves you hanging on the edge of a breath. The various staffs come within a whisker of the tumbling performers, but never connect.

That airiness, the delicacy and precision with which Song of the Goat work, lends their Macbeth a beauty. One that grips your senses from all directions and holds you in suspense. Not the suspense of a well-told tale, but a physical, felt suspense. It’s a beauty that, without quite knowing why, drew silent tears from my eyes. They had spotted something, even if I couldn’t tell you quite what.

Till 20 November 2010

Hanging from her hands are two skinned hares. The meat of one glimpses through an armour of flecked tin-foil. The other is mummified with cream bandages. Later a pair of white wings are attached to its back, as they hang from meat hooks, swinging in sync. Together they are oddly serene in their state of slow decay despite half-hearted preservation.

This is the level of horror that runs through Julia Bardsley and Andrew Poppy’s latest collaboration. Its ghastly images never explode before you, sending you spiralling in shocked recoil. Rather they are slow-burning terrors that dangle before you, festering away at your sensibilities. The longer you look, the more alarmingly transfixing they appear. With Poppy’s eerie, reverberating soundtrack wearing down any defences, Almost the Same works like a slow-turning corkscrew, mining imperceptibly into your sub-conscious.

From her first appearance, sat illuminated in the stalls in a writhing lavae-like in a PVC cocoon, Bardsley presents an elusive, puzzling figure. One looks first to discern the image, almost squinting to try and work it out, to make sense by understanding its constituent parts. Later she appears in a faux-fur coat, fishnet máscara and plasticised wig, unnatural in the complete uniformity of its colour. This get up is repeated for each of the three sections, first in brown, then bright red and, finally, white.

Throughout Almost the Same the synthetic is juxtaposed with the natural, the non-biodegradable with the dead and decaying. It is as if a modern – even oddly futuristic – woman has resorted to the wilderness, escaping the expectations of urban domesticity for a primitive existence of totemic rituals.

In all this Bardsley is positioning herself against us. From the moment we step into the space, we are carefully positioned into a triangle. We are regimented. Our formation – a side, rather than a point, faces her – is defensive, even nervy. The one squares up against the many. She has opted out of the socially normative. Perhaps that is why we view her with such horror and trepidation.

And yet, as the title makes clear, that opposition is not across a vast chasm. It is a slight twist that changes everything, throwing it into antithesis. We say hair, she says hare; we say can’t, she says cunt. This creature before us resides within us all. She is not without human traits: there is a tender maternal quality to her treatment of objects and corpses, which sits next to an animal instinct and affinity with the natural environment, the natural order. This is us stripped of the pressures of sanitation and society. That makes Almost the Same all the more achingly terrifying.

Run over. Sacred Festival runs till 20 November 2010.

Only the other day, a friend was explaining her phobia of dummies, manikins and waxworks: inanimate objects with a human form. The more life-like, she explained, the more disturbing. The power of these objects resides in their uncanniness – the feeling that something is not quite right, that it may or may not have subjectivity of its own. In other words, these objects look as if we might analogously expect them to have an autonomous position on the world and, yet, they do not. Uncanniness is therefore increased by realism and resemblance.

Here Marisa Carnesky, in collaboration with her husband Rasp Thorne, explores the power of waxworks and, while she may not pull together a trenchant thesis, The Quickening of the Wax offers a firm survey. It gives you room to pause.

First, she allows us to experience it, drawing her audience into the room in two groups and delivering a chilling jolt. Invited to amble through and examine the onstage objects – waxworks with organs exposed, model hands, feet and fingers, a guillotine – we stumble into a ghost train moment. The lights plunge down, a camera flashes accompanied by a scream. For all its clunkiness, it delivers a chilling intake of breath. Carnesky has made us aware of her hold over us. We know the trap could snap shut at any moment.

And so, as we observe what becomes a lecture-demonstration, we do so in a state of suspense; guarded and susceptible.

The most obvious strand Carnesky draws out is that of death. The guillotine and electric chair – both of which are employed, albeit in pretence – remind us that to stare at a waxwork is to observe one’s own corpse. And yet, like the executions Carnesky enacts, it is marked by its artifice and approximation. The waxwork is insincere: quite literally, not without wax.

Sweeping through, Carnesky flags the dualism inherent in the waxwork, that we fear existence – or the lack thereof – without the body, but also the ache of a body stripped of purpose. As her wax models, two of which are supplemented by an actor’s own body parts poking through holes, writhe and groan, they seem oddly trapped. The body is unable to move, its various parts – organs and limbs – have stiffened and solidified. The prison of paralysis becomes clear.

Or perhaps the effect is the other way around, the inanimate object made animate and the warped fantasy of resurrection. For its final pithy image, Carnesky brings a cleaner onstage, vacuuming around the creaking, observant bodies before freezing herself. Its at once a slow winding down, gliding softly back to the mundane, and a witty flip of perspective.

There is too much breadth in Carnesky’s piece, which seems both scatty and measured in its structure, a roll through of points, but her content is fascinating. She smartly suggests the –philia that runs counter to the –phobia, exploring the angelic serenity of the waxen face, Snow White sweet and still. She explores the making process and its materiality, the ritual and the objectification of persons. And while that brings about a pensive whole, Carnesky doesn’t quite pull it tightly together. She can’t find the twist to tighten the corset and transform the subject. Intriguing and interesting, then, but The Quickening of The Wax never casts its matter in a new light.

Run over. The Sacred Festival runs at the Chelsea Theatre till 20 November 2010.

The final image in Complicite’s Shun-kin is of the whole ensemble walking beneath a slowly descending, dark and rusty wall, bright light streaming through from the other side. It is a vivid picture and would make a damn good production shot. Yet, it doesn’t really satisfy as a closing statement. This is because, unlike the vast majority of Complicite’s shows, Shun-kin isn’t a completely coherent or cohesive show. Though the framework suggests the play is about different generations and their debt to each other, the drama of the play lies in Shunkin’s extraordinary relationship with her uniquely loyal servant, Sasuke. The drama and the fabric of the play feel slightly out of synch. So, despite a compelling central relationship and some astonishing moments of theatre, Shun-kin doesn’t gel in the usual, sublime Complicite fashion.

The show is based on the writings of Jun’ichiro Tanizaki – much loved in his birth country, Japan, but little known here. Perhaps the fact Shun-kin began as a novel is why the attention of Complicite’s piece, directed by Simon McBurney, occasionally feels skewed. The relationship between Shun-kin and Sasuke is a dramatically compelling one, which makes it hard to concentrate on the thematic ideas that simmer in the background of Complicite’s show. In the case of Tanizaki’s novel, no doubt his themes about Japan’s complicated and shifting national identity were weaved cleverly into the narrative, but Complicite’s narrative and drama sometimes combine awkwardly.

Where Complicite’s theatre making really comes into its own – and where the company fully expresses its ideas through its theatrical craft - is in the exploration of Shunk-kin and Sasuke’s relationship, played out against 1930s Japan. Shunkin, daughter of wealthy parents and spoilt rotten ever since she became blind, is depicted by a puppet. When Shunkin is young, two puppeteers control her light and fragile form. Yet the actress, Eri Fukatsu, who voices Shun-kin (and also controls her ‘head’ and ‘left arm’) is loudly miked up, which lends this disabled and precocious young girl a striking stage presence. Shun-kin exceptional stature on stage emphasizes the power she held over those around her, whilst also suggesting the subjectivity of story-telling. Shunkin’s extraordinary presence, despite her physical vulnerability, reminds us we are seeing her through Sasuke’s eyes and that she was always a larger-than-life figure in his devoted and impressionable mind.

As Shun-kin grows up, the puppet develops too. When Shunkin becomes a young woman, the small puppet is raised on stilts, becoming impossibly tall and lending Shun-kin an emphatically haughty demeanor. When she first has sex with Sasuke, the kimono is removed from the puppet’s form to reveal floating, separate limbs. Her visual identity keeps shifting as events effect and change her. When Shun-kin screams at Sasuke in a jealous rage, the puppet is left aside and the puppeteer takes over. And finally, following this rare moments of vulnerability, the puppeteer herself takes on the role and Sasuke, for the first time, gets to see the real Shun-kin.

The shifting puppetry used to represent Shunkin forms a clever and complete visual narrative, reflecting the careful precision that lies behind most theatrical tics in a Complicite production. This deep and sustained level of thought also shines through at certain pivotal moments in the show.  Early on, we see Sasuke enter Shun-kin’s house and discover women for the first time. The narrative (all subtitled, as the script is in Japanese) says of Sasuke: ‘What strange and fascinating creatures they must have seemed to Sasuke.’ Every last inch of the stage ripples into life: the profile of a lady appears behind an opaque white screen, giggling girls flutter across the stage, images of beautiful ladies are projected, haphazardly, against the back wall. The whole theatre throbs with the discovery of female attraction.

Similarly alive and overwhelming moments flutter throughout the show, but it still seems something is missing. It also feels like certain elements might’ve been removed altogether. Complicite is understandably obsessed with the nature of story-telling, and frequently explore this idea in the backdrop of their plays, but some of their thematic concerns are obtrusive here. At a burning point in Shun-kin and Sasuke’s relationship, just after the two have had sex, we cut back to the modern-day narrator, who is also exploring this story. They are funny, self-referential scenes but the tongue-and-cheek nature of these knowing scenes punctures the atmosphere. Perhaps this puncturing was on purpose – but it only made me long to return to the cruelly captivating story of Shun-Kin and her master servant. 

Till 13 November 2010

Post-bellum

Following the Battle of Ideas festival in London, a number of Battle Satellite events are still to come, in the UK and beyond. This week on CW, Tom Slater reviews last month’s Satellite on ‘The X Factor: Singing in the name of quality?’. Further Battle themes are explored in depth in this year’s Battles in Print. Meanwhile, Mike Jakeman reviews Christos Tsiolkas’ controversial novel The Slap, reading it as a study in the failure of Australian liberalism, while Miguel Ceia takes on Philip Roth’s Nemesis, finding a story about moral failure.

In London theatre, Miriam Gillinson is impressed by a new production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted at the Lyric Hammersmith, and Daniel Yates reviews Noel Coward’s Design for Living at the Old Vic.

4 October 2010

Until the triumphant return of Jonathan Franzen in the autumn, it seemed that Christos Tsiolkas’  novel, The Slap, was a contender for the book event of the year. It has been both a critical and a commercial success, winning both the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and a spot on the Booker longlist, from where it went on to out-sell even those that made the shortlist. As word spread, newspaper headlines accused the book and its author of misogyny (which only boosted sales further) and ensured that The Slap gained a measure of notoriety.

The setting for the novel is a suburban barbecue in Melbourne, which is attended by a cross-section of middle-class Australian society. The host, Hector, is of Greek descent, and his wife, Aisha, is Indian-Australian, while their guests include French-, Aboriginal- and regular ‘bogan’ Australians, and vary in age from Hector’s elderly father, Manolis, to his infant daughter, Melissa. Most of this group witness the book’s eponymous moment, which is delivered by Hector’s brother, Harry, to an insufferably spoilt three-year-old, Hugo, who is the son of Aisha’s best friend. The book is less concerned with the blow itself (a deftly handled set-piece that had this reviewer gripped) than its reverberations among Tsiolkas’ large cast, and what their reactions tell us about contemporary Australia.

The story is told in eight chapters, each of which belongs to a different character. Given that a key plank of Tsiolkas’ plot is the diversity of the responses to the slap, this would seem a sensible way to tell the story. However, creating eight characters of sufficient depth and credibility is a stiff challenge for any author (indeed, not every member of Franzen’s frequently large families is believable), and one that, on balance, gets the better of Tsiolkas. Many of the protagonists feel half-baked, products of a lack of imagination and some lazy editing. Scriptwriter Anouk is a career woman with a younger boyfriend, who is faced by that most hackneyed of plot twists: an unexpected pregnancy. Harry, meanwhile, is an overly aggressive alpha-male with a misplaced sense of value, which is predictably demonstrated by his oft-spoken admiration for his expensive house and ‘his Dolce and Gabbana sunglasses and his black lycra Speedos’. Tsiolkas uses the same unsophisticated signposting to make his teenagers seem real, but he is let down by his editor who has them listen to ‘Gwen Stafani’ and attend a gig by ‘Snoop Dog’.

The problems that Tsiolkas has in developing his large cast are most apparent in the novel’s depiction of sex. There is a lot of it in The Slap, and, given the multiplicity of perspectives in the novel, one might expect to read a number of different representations of the act itself. Instead, Tsiolkas uses the same register for each of the protagonists, a sub-pornographic catalogue of dicks, tits, cocks and cunts; all anatomy and no feeling. Here’s alpha-male Harry: ‘He lifted himself on the bedhead, got onto his knees. He continued fucking his wife in the mouth. He could see her gagging but when he stopped thrusting she clutched his arse and pushed him deep into her. He blew his cheeks out, stifled his shout and came with savage force’. For Harry, this approach to sex is not inappropriate. It is less fitting in the chapter given to Hugo’s sappy mother Rosie: ‘She continued doing it at the new school, the state school, full of boys to fuck. She had fucked and fucked, one night allowing herself to be fucked by seven of them, each taking turns. She had bled, her cunt had torn’. And it is even less apt coming from the otherwise sensitive Aisha: ‘Hector was now a jackhammer, slamming into her, she was full of him, as much in her belly as in her cunt, she buried her face into the coverlet, her outstretched hands were clutching at the sheets’. These three characters share nothing in the novel but mutual misunderstanding, yet Tsiolkas is unable to depict them as individuals in their most intimate moments.

These passages also highlight the laziness of the accusations of misogyny that have been levelled at The Slap. Harry, undoubtedly, has some very dubious views on women (his wife is a ‘faithful dumb animal’ who looks good in a bikini), but then he’s little more pleasant about men (Gary, the father of the boy he slaps, is a ‘weak faggot of a husband’) or children (Hugo is ‘a whining little prick’). His vitriol is not provoked by a hatred of women, as much as a dislike for anything that prevents him from relaxing in his self-congratulatory bubble. Nor does the fact that the majority of Tsiolkas’ women are unpleasant mean that the novel is misogynistic; they are products of a society that the author regards as unhealthy rather than made dislikeable for the fact that they are female.

What The Slap appears to rail against is the perceived failure of liberalism in Australia in the era of John Howard. Here is a society built on the protection of the rights of the individual (Hugo, only three years old, asserts confidently ‘No-one is allowed to touch my body without my permission.’) and a policy of open immigration. The result, according to Tsiolkas’ novel, is a society that is angry, misunderstood and resentful, and lacking a method of self-expression, even one as primitive as violence. These uncomfortable and very conservative conclusions are wrapped inside a powerful narrative that has a real pull, and goes some way to explain The Slap’s wild popularity.

Blasted brings to light unthinkable and sometimes unbearable darkness. It forces us to experience the very pain and sadness that some people go to the theatre to escape. But Blasted is not just a black hole. It is a play that slides between extremes – love and hate, laughter and tears, life and death – with significant and frightening ease. Sean Holmes’ elegant but resounding production straddles the divide brilliantly, fluttering restlessly between comedy and tragedy, hope and despair.

Everything begins much more lightly and clearly than one might imagine of Sarah Kane’s once reviled and under appreciated play. Holmes keeps things tangible and realistic in the opening scenes and is careful not to force the later, enveloping darkness into the earlier moments. This does not initially feel like a play that could accommodate a scene in which a dead baby is served up as grub. The show is infinitely more powerful for this restraint: the opening scenes have an edge to them that is impossible to pin down and the desperate escalation of the closing scenes is all the more horrifying, given their fairly moderate and realistic genesis.

Paul Wills’ set feeds in beautifully to the cool but frightening calm that settles over the early scenes. The entire width of the Lyric stage is occupied by a pristine, obtrusively white hotel room, with windows (blinds drawn) that span across the back wall. These windows taken on an extraordinary, suggestive power in this production. The light that shines through them (Lighting designer Paule Constable is so good at creating light with feeling) never feels comforting, only accusatory, and though its clean gleam could feel celestial it feels threatening instead. The fact no shadows creep through these windows, lends the eerie impression of a blank landscape beyond the stage. This means that, despite the ostensible realism of this slightly upmarket Holiday Inn style set, one never forgets the threat that lurks beyond.

This external and unrealised threat is mirrored in Kane’s stark and stretched dialogue. Every phrase seems to be missing a beat and the audience starts to strain for the meaning in between the words. The initially casual, always spiky, chat between journalist Ian (Danny Webb) and young Cate (Lydia Wilson) feels like it has been strapped to a ticking bomb. One sits, compelled, waiting for the explosion one knows must come.

Danny Webb and Lydia Wilson play each scene in its own right, never anticipating the horrors that might be one thunderous scene change away. Wilson is a refreshingly ballsy Cate and, for large chunks of time, she is the one in control; no more so than when Ian over-hastily undresses, leaving his drooping body, cold and exposed. Sex is not seen as a threat at this early stage, although the laughter that Ian’s striptease prompts from Cate is icy and screeches cruelly around the theatre.

It is only when the Soldier enters that the play’s lurking danger finally crawls onstage. Aidan Kelly is suitably threatening and huge – as big as the door he lurches through – yet there is something vaudevillian about his eager munching on Ian’s leftover breakfast. He begins to resemble an ape, scampering around for scraps. This is Kane’s genius: to present one acidic fear and then quickly accept it and so diminish it, creating the threat of something scarier still to come.

Constable’s lightning brilliantly accentuates this idea: once the room has exploded, leaving the stage barren except for a few crucifix-like foundations suspended in the background, the shadows come into play. As the soldier tells his boiling, chilling stories about the impossibly vicious rape and murder he has witnessed and taken part in, a huge black shadow stalks behind him. These horrors, Kane tells us along with Constable’s corroboration, are only just the beginning.

As the play careers towards its piercing conclusion, the terror only magnifies. Some critics have complained that Kane’s violence is not dramatically earned, but I disagree - it is laced into the entire fabric of this play. The horrors of the final act are there from the start, even in the nothingness that streams through the windows, but it is Kane who decides when to let the darkness in or out.

In a final dazzling montage, before a surprisingly redemptive and comforting reunion between Ian and Cate, we watch Ian’s humanity slide right out of him. A thunderbolt boom and an isolating spotlight, which streams down from an impossible height, captures Ian’s descent. Boom! Ian screams out the word cunt, over and over again, whilst furiously masturbating. Boom! Ian tries to strangle himself. Boom! Ian, blinded and blood streaming from his eyes, pulls out the buried baby and begins to chomp on its arm. As the explosions jolt through us, each crueller than the last, one begins to dread the light and long for the darkness to descend.

Till 20 November 2010

The blurb on the dust cover of Philip Roth’s Nemesis is pretty accurate, ‘a terrifying epidemic is raging’, ‘focusing on [Bucky] Cantor’s dilemmas as polio begins to ravage his playground – and the realities he faces’, ‘an energetic man with the best intentions struggling in his own private war against the epidemic’ in the summer of 1944. This is it, the blurb is not misleading, there are no plot twists and no last minute deus ex machina, this is what the reader will find.

Having set out his piece, Roth goes on to explore his themes, such as the Jewish predicament, hysteria, anger, bewilderment, suffering and pain, all in relation with the main character, Bucky Cantor. He is described as having an unbending sense of duty and honour, instilled in him by his now dead grandfather. The novel is in three parts, each corresponding to one of Bucky Cantor’s moral failures – failures in his own view, of course.

The first failure is his inability to go to war: poor eyesight made him stay behind whilst his best friends were either fighting German forces in Europe or Japanese forces in the Pacific. It is, of course, not Bucky Cantor’s fault that he has a physical impairment, but that just makes the character more endearing to the reader. We are now used to disabled characters, such as Gregory House; disability is almost fashionable. Nevertheless, this is not such a new notion, William Gaddis noted in his essay, ‘The Rush for the Second Place’, that having a fracturing quandary was becoming fashionable,

‘the day’s mail brings flyers offering courses in Mid-life Crisis, Stress Management, Success Through Assertiveness, Reflexology, Shiatsu, Hypnocybernetics, and The Creative You. Books disappear overnight or are instant ‘best-sellers’: mortifying confessionals and est, group therapy, primal screams and “making it,” pious plagiaries on moral fiction and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s TM Technique for reducing blood pressure and increasing self-esteem. Even impotence is briefly chic; the movie screen offers the dreary sentimental humanisms of Woody Allen achieved at the expense of cast and audience alike and, for the beer crowd, Rocky’ (Gaddis).

In order to sublimate his own sense of failure, Bucky Cantor takes a position for the summer as Playground Director in the Weequahic section of Newark. All goes swell until the polio epidemic starts spreading. This moment is both a blessing and a curse to the main character: he finds a sense of purpose, something to fight against, to wage his personal war on and thus feel useful, but he also has to watch the children he is taking care of, either die or become severely ill.

This takes us to the troubled relationship Cantor has with the notion of God, ‘Why didn’t God answer the prayers of Alan Michael’s parents? They must have prayed. Herbie Steinmark’s parents must have prayed. They’re good people. They’re good Jews. Why didn’t God intervene for them? Why didn’t He save their boys? (...) I don’t know why God created polio in the first place. What was He trying to prove?’

Then, when the epidemic is fully-fledged, Cantor gets the opportunity to leave the playground and join his girlfriend in a summer camp where there is no polio. Despite his early apprehension, especially his sense of abandoning the children for his own well-being, which naturally clashed with his education, he eventually goes to the Indian Hill camp, and in doing so, Bucky Cantor’s fails for the second time.

As the polio epidemic starts raging at Indian Hill, Bucky Cantor blames himself for it, even though at the time it was not known how polio was transmitted and how it travelled. The realisation that he might have been the ‘Typhoid Mary of the Chancellor playground (...) the playground polio carrier (...) the Indian Hill polio carrier’, is Bucky Cantor’s third failure, the one that eventually crushes him.

After the Plague of Aegina, according to Ovid, had killed all animals and man, a new generation was born, even stronger, from the ground, from the earth: they were called Myrmidons. The polio epidemic Roth talks about in his book did not only not provide a better generation (do bear in mind that the polio vaccine, though first tested in 1952 was only widely available in 1962), but the generation it made was physically and emotionally impaired. Poignantly, another of Roth’s characters, Arnold Mesnikoff, owns a ’(...) contracting firm specializing in architectural modification for wheelchair accessibility (...) the only such outfit in populous Northern Jersey at a moment when serious attention was beginning to be paid to the singular needs of the disabled’.

But by not becoming stronger, physically and emotionally, Bucky Cantor is a more human character, closer to our own failures, and that’s where this novel excels, in its humanity.

GADDIS, William (2004). Agapē Agape And Other Writings. London: Atlantic Books.
OVID (1998). Metamorphosis. Translated by AD Melville Oxford: Oxford University Press.

For the past seven years The X Factor has been the bench mark of poor taste. Yet the debate which accompanies every series has become as tiresome as the show itself. The two tribes which emerge each year always regurgitate the same arguments: one side claiming that Simon Cowell is bringing about cultural oblivion, the other insisting it is good, clean, TV fun, which, on occasion, produces some truly great pop stars.

Admittedly, over the past few years I have tended to side with the former. I’d pretentiously damn The X Factor for its banality and then recline with a Dylan CD, safe in the knowledge that I was right. Thankfully, I’ve grown up since then, and whilst I am still no fan, I’ve come to realise that any cultural phenomenon as significant as The X Factor deserves informed discourse. This year’s Battle of Ideas festival provided a platform for such a debate.

A festival Satellite event, ‘The X-factor: Singing in the name of quality?’, featured speakers from the world of academia, journalism and opera, and aimed to assess the viability and cultural implications of The X Factor‘s approach to the art of singing. Whilst the panel was divided over the format’s impact, they agreed that The X Factor is more about television than it is about music. As cultural commentator Norman Lebrecht pointed out, not only is the performance always subordinate to the story, but the entire format remains painfully out of touch with modern popular music.

Despite Simon Cowell’s insistence that the programme is looking for ‘the future’, when it moulds the bright eyed hopefuls into ‘stars’, they all begin to resemble the throwaway pop stars of yesteryear. Former Heat editor Mark Frith said that, despite resurrecting the sort of girl bands, boy bands and solo singers that we thought we had seen the last of, the genre of pop that The X Factor represents, remains ‘a very small slither of music as we know it’. It seems The X Factor’s greatest achievement is making this ‘small slither’ profitable once more.

Yet the question remains, is it a threat to popular music? Barb Jungr, a professional singer herself, was one of the first panelists to defend The X Factor, or at least its viewers: ‘Everybody knows it’s all rubbish, they’re just having a good time watching it’. Indeed, it seems that people are taking this mere talent show far too seriously. The suggestion that The X Factor has the ability to stunt our cultural development is truly ridiculous. Nevertheless, its phenomenal success does show us something. As Culture Wars’ assistant editor Sarah Boyes pointed out on the panel, the show simply ‘coalesces the death of pop music, by playing the same songs over and over again’.

Could it be that we only loathe the programme because it is telling us something we don’t wish to hear? We have become complacent, pop is so entrenched in our culture that we act as if it will go on forever. The X Factor simply hails its impending demise.

At the Battle of Ideas, one is always treated to a diverse range of opinion, but the one thing not open to debate, is that we are witnessing the final days of popular music. For the past few decades pop has been ‘playing the same songs over and over again’, and the success of Cowell’s karaoke format has simply provided a fitting eulogy for a culture which is eating itself alive.

With a typical satirical flourish, the great critic Kenneth Tynan once divided Coward’s oeuvre three ways. The first period he named ‘persiflage’, the pasting of thin strips of banter onto cardboard. The second ‘Kipling’ the pasting of patriotic posters onto banter pasted on cardboard. The third he left unnamed, suggesting that contemporary audiences were too close, indeed, as Tynan would have it ‘much, much too close’.

To date Tynan’s vicious diagnosis of historical inconsequentiality seems to have held true. Coward has floated gauzily on the periphery of theatre for generations, and yet our proximity to his work has been narrowing of late. Hay Fever is running at Peter Hall’s Rose theatre, Alison Steadman will play Arcati in next year’s revival of Blithe Spirit, Kim Cattrall and Private Lives, along with Kneehigh’s Brief Encounter are transferring to Broadway. The Noel Coward Reader, a collection of his plays, prose, poetry, diaries and letters, was published last month by Knopf Doubleday. It seems that the modish playwright who was always so keenly associated with fashion is again en vogue.

Written in 1932, Design for Living is a play which (improperly) belongs to Tynan’s first period. On the surface it’s a light exercise in decoupage, in which triangulations of love are mined for their territorial and emotional fallouts in a way a cat might mine the ludic qualities of a mouse. The three central characters, young middle-class bohemians with attitudes as thrillingly light and airy as Lez Brotherstone’s studio set of angular panes and large sash windows, burn with a desire to live, to dare to be different, to revel in the unfettered motility of camp while at the same time confirming it as the only authentic way to be.

So far, so Coward. But belonging to a generation new to the playwright, I was struck by something unexpected: the undercurrent of urgency, the fact that Coward seemed to be trying to communicate something sticky and real, something intransigent about love. The characters desperately stream words around the carnal subject, strings of elegant justifications, multiple possible positions. As they slip imploringly along the chain of signifiers, frequently tangling it around their necks, you can see why Coward came to admire Pinter so much.

Because underneath the light comedic artifice there lies a gravitational absence, and indeed its Coward’s very inarticulacy on the subject of love that gives the play its purpose. John Lahr once mooted that, ‘only when Coward is frivolous does he become in any sense profound’, a formulation which does not quite capture the way that both are mutually engaged in Design for Living. Frivolity, impelled by the spaces beyond it, becomes the tragic mask of profundity. Love, Coward seems to say, is unspeakably profound. And here Coward’s camp, once pinned by Sontag as second-rate theatricality, becomes something else: less an emancipatory gesture than a fractured Modernist compromise.

Not one of the three protagonists can make a positive concrete case for love. Each requires an ascetic period of absence from the action, so that they might return and commit themselves, almost mutely, to the narrative of their three-way. And at the same time as Coward erects love as an anti-expressionistic vortex, resistant to words, he seeks to posit it as moral destiny. It is fate, it is Coward’s will, that these three people should be together in unholy unmatrimony, and hang the social form that would dare to constrain this intrepid truth.

And yet it’s difficult to think of any current audience for which the once illuminating and titillating shock of the three-way challenge to heteronormative love hasn’t dulled. This afternoon’s matinee audiences would have been coming of age in the throes of the sexual revolution, and those lines of blue rinses were precisely the middle-class benefactors of its flowery excesses. Later generations wouldn’t have seen love as so doggedly essentialised, and Coward’s subtext of immutability and courtly linguistic swooning feels very dated indeed. Similarly Coward’s method of dealing vigorous, reconstitutive blows to the establishment through outrageous lionised youth and sex clearly has problems over half a century on from Madison Avenue, a quarter of a century since MTV - all of it now tokens in the carnal currency of media images. The permissive society doesn’t make this permissible, as much as it makes it conservative.

There may still be places to take Coward. Matthew Macfadyen’s belligerent, thick-necked Elyot in Richard Eyre’s recent revival of Private Lives was suggestive of new territory. But this straight revival of Design for Living feels its age. When the art establishment, here erected by the archly stentorian Angus Wright, actually comes off as more progressive than its youthful challengers, you know we are moored somewhere in the past. However apparently buoyant the persifleur, his banter provides no life raft for a play out of its historical depth.

Till 27 November 2010

Battle of Ideas

The Institute of Ideas’ annual festival, the Battle of Ideas, takes place at the Royal College of Art in London this weekend (30-31 October). Those not able to get to London can still browse the complementary Battles in Print essays, and check out the remaining Battle Satellite events, stretching over November in the UK, Germany, USA and India.

This week on CW, Austin Williams reviews Natascha Kampusch’s 3,096 Days, an inspirational account of her years of captivity following abduction as a child, and her final escape. Miguel Ceia asks why novelists’ lives are increasingly seen as being as important as their work. And Nicky Charlish reviews Treasures from Budapest at the Royal Academy. Meanwhile in London theatre, Miriam Gillinson reviews Nina Raine’s family drama, Tribe, at the Royal Court, and Matt Trueman is disappointed by Gabriel Bisset-Smith’s misfiring political satire, The Charming Man, at Theatre 503.

28 October 2010