When The Playboy of the Western World opened at the Abbey Theatre in 1907, the divide between play and reality was so fine that riots kicked off. The audience, insulted by what they saw as JM Synge’s damning take on Irish sensibilities, stormed the stage. Yet, whilst John Crowley’s Old Vic adaptation is assured and entertaining, it’s certainly never dangerous. 

In fact, there’s something slightly showy about this solid revival. We kick off with a musical ditty from the townsfolk of County Mayo, in western Ireland. Some singers are dressed in drag and all flash ironic smiles, as they croon about the story to come. After this, comes a rather proud swivel of the stage, as we move from the back of a brick house to its heart inside. It is a swaggery stage device, establishing this as a distant, almost filmic production.

This distance is enhanced by some near-impenetrable Irish accents: perhaps over-compensating, the cast ladle their accents on thick and they are so convincing that they’re hard to understand, and Synge’s delicate and complex poetry is often swallowed. Lots of the characters are equally over-emphatic. In particular, young Pegeen’s ill-suited fiancé, Shawn Keogh (Kevin Trainor), is peculiarly camp. Yes, this approach injects energy into his scenes, but it also means the relationship between Pegeen (Ruth Negga) and Shawn feels brazenly perfunctory. 

This broad performance style applies to much of the ensemble cast, making for funny but stubbornly flippant scenes. When young Christopher Mahon crawls into County Mayo and brags about his dastardly deed - ‘I destroyed my da!’ - the local lasses, enthralled by his reckless and brave behaviour, treat him like a movie star. They cluster outside his room, screaming teenagers waiting for an autograph. These ensemble scenes feel like set-pieces - well choreographed but over-constructed. 

The one actress who really thickens things up is Niamh Cusack, playing the scheming widow Quin. Cusack’s performances are always so open, yet complex. She allows us to see her character for what it really is: a clever and conniving trader, always out for herself. Although she makes a play for the gangly Christopher Mahon (Robert Sheehan), she never fawns over him. And, when she talks of destroying her husband and burying her husband, it almost feels like a boast.

The central lovers, too, have a subtle and delicate dynamic. Sheehan, with a chest free of hair and a body that seems to big for him, reminds one of Bambi, constantly skidding across ice. He has as little control over his body as he does over his character, which the locals re-model with relish. When Sheehan’s Chistopher and Negga’s Pegeen seduce each other, they seem less like adults anticipating sex and more like kids eagerly awaiting Christmas. Their naked naivety adds a much-needed frailty to an otherwise rough-edged and slightly remote production. 

Till 26 November 2011

Ideas in music

This week on CW, Sarah Boyes reviews the ENO’s current London production of Polish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s opera The Passenger - composed in 1968 and concerned with the legacy of the Holocaust - arguing that the piece is best considered as a musical work without the historical baggage of its subject matter. Paul Kilbey reviews Keith Burstein’s Manifest Destiny 2011 at the King’s Head Theatre, another opera with a political burden. He also reviews the recent John Cage exhibition on London’s South Bank, and the associated concert by Apartment House, arguing that Cage deserves to be considered as a serious composer as well as an ideas man.

Meanwhile, Nicky Charlish reviews Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement at the Royal Academy of Arts.

30 September 2011

We think we know what Impressionism is all about. Bar girls and boulevards with a bit of countryside thrown in. We almost certainly don’t associate it with the explosion of scientific discovery which ran parallel to the period in which the Impressionists were working. This landmark exhibition, centred on the human figure and the way it moves, gives us a new perspective on the work of one of their number.

Born in Paris in 1834 to a wealthy family, Hilaire Germain-Edgar Degas studied briefly at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, then travelled in Italy, teaching himself art by copying works in churches and museums. After submitting historical works to the Salon, he began, around 1870, to concentrate on subjects from modern life including the dance. It’s his dance-based work with which this exhibition is concerned. What outstanding material does it feature?

‘The Rehearsal’ (c.1874) shows a light, airy room where the scene radiates an air of organised chaos: some dancers are dancing whilst others are sitting around and chatting, waiting to be put through their particular paces. In the later ‘The Rehearsal Room’ (c.1905), the dancers are shown with jagged movements, emphasising that they need to rehearse and familiarise themselves with the work in hand, a far-from-smooth process. ‘Two Dancers on the Stage’ (c.1874) shows them dancing as individuals, yet they are somehow almost locked together in the precision demanded by the piece they are performing. The concept of teamwork - deadened with overuse by present-day management consultants – comes alive on the canvas.

In ‘Dancers’ (c.1899) the dancers here are depicted with less detail, yet their onstage movements are more vibrant - the hard work of the rehearsal room has paid off as they are infused with the spirit of the particular ballet they are performing. The onstage life of the dancers has its pay-off in the form of fame, but Degas reminds us that when it is derived from the arts it depends on hard work in a real day-to-day setting: ‘Dancer Posing for a Photograph’ (1875) shows us a dancer who, instead of posing in a the customary artificial setting is, instead, in a room through whose windows can be seen a view of Paris, the city in which she earns her precarious livelihood.

But, lest we think that dance is all about glamour, Degas gives us two pictures to remind us of the sweat and pain of the rehearsal room. ‘Dancer at The Barre’ (1877) is a pencil sketch which shows us a dancer with her body bent forward whilst her right leg is raised at full extension along the length of the barre whilst ‘Study of Legs’ (c.1873) shows us dancers’ feet in various positions. Both remind us of the unremitting physical and mental labour involved in dance, the strain running through the dancers’ limbs, the sheer hard work of applying not just the body but also the mind to master quickly the speedy complexities of choreography.

But Degas’ work gives us more than a peek at the backstage world of the dance (more of that in a moment). It shows us the human body in motion, and it parallels the work of studying human movement then being done in photography by the French scientist Etienne-Jules Marey and the English photographer Eadweard Muybridge. We see photographic work by Marey showing, viewed sideways-on, a moving human male. We also see a zoöpraxiscope. Invented by Muybrige, this elegant wooden object is an early device for displaying motion pictures, and was used for showing pictures of human movement.

There is, of course, nothing new about art and science working along the same lines - think of Leonardo da Vinci using his artistic skills in conjunction with his interest in the natural world and the possibilities of science. But by the period in which Degas was working there was probably - arguably due to the influence of Romanticism - more than a temptation to see them as opposites. Science was regarded as cold and logical,with art being primarily about emotional expression: as CP Snow would discover in the following century, any suggestion that the two cultures of science and art should get to know each other better was regarded in artistic circles as anathema. But Degas was aware of - and took an interest in – the scientific study of the human body which was in progress during his lifetime.

The works in this exhibition show Degas’ attempts to try and capture the workings of the skin and bone which are the raw material of human movement. But it also raises questions about Degas, sex and the ‘male gaze’. The dancers he depicted often came from poor backgrounds and some were assumed to have loose morals. Any fame garnered by these dancers came at a price, paid in terms of the bedroom or personal reputation. As a result, Degas has sometimes been regarded as a sort of dirty old man who used art as an excuse for hanging round backstage to view young, vulnerable girls. The exhibition shows his painted bronze, muslin and silk statue ‘The little Dancer, Aged Fourteen’ (1880-1, cast c.1922) a work which, if it were produced by an artist today, would probably earn him or her a drubbing from the tabloids if not a visit from the police. But, for Degas, ballet dancers were simply a source of study for depicting movement.

(That being said, Degas wasn’t particularly good at human relationships, but then the artistic world is not noted for its large number of happy, emotionally well-balanced practitioners. And, if he had wished to indulge in sexual fantasies, would he have chosen for his activities a branch of the arts - dance - whose dark side was common knowledge?)

Moreover, much of Impressionism can arguably be seen as a sort of unconscious morale-raising exercise. For, buried deep in the French collective mind at the time the Impressionists were working, were the events of 1870-71: France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war followed by the Paris commune and its aftermath - experiences which were to dominate the French national psyche, and politics, for almost a century. Such an outlook - if it existed – may have somehow slipped into the mind of Degas, helping to render his depiction of attractive-looking girls as chocolate-boxy rather than sinister.

This last is speculation. What we certainly do have here is Impressionism which is far removed from the supposedly naughty-but-nice world of Parisian street life in the last quarter of the 19th century. Like a scientist with a specimen under the lens of his microscope, Degas takes, and examines, the hard world of the dance to elucidate the beauty and workings of the human form. This exhibition invites us to do the same.

Till 11 December 2011

The heavy screen lifts to the urgent, jerky banging of what sound like timpani from the dark bottom right of the orchestra pit, and, tentatively, more coloured tones begin to float upwards. Centre stage is revealed the brilliant white iron deck of a steamer, its corner lurching forward, as if suspended in mid-air, about to topple over.  

This is a piece about the Holocaust, based on the semi-autobiographical account of an Auschwitz survivor, Zofia Posmysz, and set to music in 1968 by the Polish (and Jewish) composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg. Weinberg fled his native Poland following the Nazi invasion, and while in the USSR made friends with Shostakovich and was later imprisoned during the Stalinist purges for his ‘bourgeois Jewish nationalism’. He has written many chamber and orchestral works, a number available on YouTube, and worth listening to. This is the UK premiere of his opera. 

It begins in the 1960s as a middle-aged couple, Walter and Liese, speed by liner towards Brazil for Walter’s new diplomatic posting. The bulk of the story, though, is played out on stage in the dark space below the ship, and comprises memories of Auschwitz. These are triggered by a chance meeting on deck with ‘the passenger’, a veiled woman who resembles a figure from Liese’s past. Liese (compellingly played by mezzo Michelle Breedt) reveals to her husband that she was an SS guard at Auschwitz: the veiled woman might or might not be Marta, a spirited Polish Jew, whom she singled out to battle but never broke. The two women lie at the heart of the story, which turns on a genuine ambiguity: not only is it unclear whether the passenger really is Marta (does it matter? - I think it should), but there is a lack of firm moral resolution at the close. 

It is uncharacteristically two female voices, Liese and Marta’s (soprano Giselle Allen), that dominate the near three hours of this piece, then, with short punctuations from Walter in the present, and Marta’s lover Tadeusz in the past. More strangely, although these two women are at loggerheads with each other and even interact, it never really feels that they engage directly. Their close connection and relative isolation from one another both helps and hinders the characters’ development - and hence their emotional draw.

There is also a mixed chorus and occasional speaking parts that jar at first, but ultimately add to the quite distinctive musical palette, reminiscent of both Shostakovich and Britten with hints of Schoenberg. Overall though, it is the texture of Weinberg’s music that’s most arresting, the loose tonality and regular use of drums and bells, the often bare and brittle melodies and wide open bits of chord, odd bits of jazz and tugging dissonances. Musically, it is at once easy to listen to but difficult to get lost in, giving way to a state of sort of resigned semi-alertness (the ENO’s trailer picks out the more recognisable musical lines):

This music might seem a little unfamiliar more generally, perhaps, since both Modernist composers and those like Weinberg, who were responding to them or pushing musical language in different ways into the twentieth century, tend to be less played in the UK, with its conservative classical tastes. The addition of Weinberg to the ENO’s repertoire is in this sense a good thing – the music demands more active engagement from the audience if it’s to be properly understood - and hopefully more musically challenging yet rewarding works will follow. The use of humdrum speech for the libretto also works well, though as usual there are downsides to having a translation rather than the original Polish.

The problem here is the way the production almost tries too hard, and at times swamps the music. The set invites the idea that it needs its meaning drawn out. It is too awkwardly psychological: the bright white of the top deck, where men walk about in white suits and women in white dresses, leaves little doubt it represents an awkward new coat of a more civilised life; the steps down to below signal the all too easy descent into something more barbaric never too far away; the worn out industrial-looking stage floor with its bits of black stone strewn around is a place of great pain and misery, the end of two train tracks jut out towards the audience on the stage floor – this is a brutish place from which there is no return.

Both past and present worlds are therefore tense, close and constantly present on stage. The static mood is maintained throughout this piece and to its ambiguous end. Unfortunately, though, this heavy atmosphere of ever-present past doesn’t quite fit with the outbreaks of musical humour and tiniest hint of musical resolution offered by Weinberg in the closing chords: it seems to stifle the characters a little too much, making them difficult to engage with. The disjointed formality of the set unfortunately has its limits, too. As a terrified Lieae is invisibly ‘forced’ down the steps into her memories below by the veiled woman who might or might not be Marta walking towards her, it begins to look a little exhausted.

The driving impulse of the story is simple enough, though, to allow more intimate observations to breathe. Some of the best scenes are surprisingly between Liese and her mostly silent though doting husband, their retreat to the tiny cabin, sitting on the white bed, deciding whether they should go to the ship’s dance and what will happen if it really is Marta, Liese needing to be heard and the husband shocked, worrying about his career if people find out, shocked again. Liese obsessively washing her hands, their forced gayness and the fact Walter obviously still fancies his wife, despite his confusion and albeit sedately.

The believable domesticity at times communicates more powerfully the difficult legacy and horrors of the Holocaust than the mad shrieking of inmates below. Moreover, despite Marta having the last words as the curtain closes on the world of the memory of Auschwitz, her muteness in the present (she only walks around the deck with a veil covering her face) means she never fully emerges as a character in her own right. It is only when the camp’s prisoners are shown interacting with one another in their cramped bunks - in control but only just - celebrating a Marta’s birthday for example, that they genuinely connect and solicit easy, surprising feeling. A scene where male SS guards stand in a row to watch Liese and praise her attractiveness – a moment half menacing and half simply some bored men passing the time at work – captures something both more elusive and dangerous, too.

Unfortunately, though, come the first of the story’s two climaxes, where Marta’s lover and fellow inmate Tadeusz, a violinist, is tasked to play the commander’s favourite waltz and chooses to play Bach in a brave gesture of defiance, it falls oddly flat. When a guard takes the violin and smashes it to bits, we know Tadeusz will be next, but the moment lacks pathos. Similarly, when towards the end at the ship’s dance, the woman who might be Marta requests this same waltz, and this time it’s played, it is all a bit bewildering: the two moments don’t quite connect.

In this, following Shostakovich in describing The Passenger as ‘a masterpiece’ is too obviously to confuse the supportive intervention of one friend for another with a more protracted musical judgment in light of present day. On the other hand, neither is it fair to burden Weinberg with all the expectations and frustrations of a work dealing with Auschwitz, or to accuse him of simply ‘copying’ a musical language from more established friends.

Overall, this is a good piece, well executed and with an engaging and interesting musical voice. Weinberg is at once passionate and restrained, confident and quite sensuous - often surprising. His music should be engaged with directly, without the unnecessary and quite unedifying hype.

Till 25 October 2011

The King’s Head Theatre is a fantastically intimate venue, and one with a stellar reputation since its success with OperaUpClose’s production of La Bohème, which ran sold-out for six months in 2009-10. It is laudable that OperaUpClose are building on this success by taking a bold risk on a contemporary work: Manifest Destiny 2011, a reworking of a 2003 piece by Keith Burstein and Dic Edwards timed to coincide with the tenth anniversary of 9/11, concerns suicide bombing and the Israel-Palestine conflict, and is clearly out to cause a stir.

Manifest Destiny is the story of Leila, a Palestinian living in London with her Jewish partner Daniel, who decides to seek out her destiny by becoming a suicide bomber back in Palestine. She, and also her friend and fellow suicide bomber Mohammed, are captured by the CIA. Both of them re-evaluate their political views, especially as they get to know the CIA director, who is portrayed as sinister and ignorant. Also, the president of the USA is a ditzy woman who has presumably been ‘Palinised’ a bit since the prior 2003-5 production. The opera ends, when Mohammed visits Daniel in London, with ‘an act of reconciliation between a Palestinian and a Jew’. The composer made this last comment himself, just in case we had managed to miss the symbolism, in the Guardian in 2004.

It is perhaps worth questioning, on an extremely basic level, whether an Islamist adequately zealous to train as a suicide bomber would really ever have been bunking up with a Jew in London. And the morality of the piece is also perplexing generally. We are asked to sympathise with the plight of Leila’s homeland (she sings this strange verse over and over again: ‘There is a tree in my mother’s garden, / For many a hundred year, / Green and rich in foliage. / Now sandstone has stripped it of its bark, and stripped it of its life’. The CIA director joins in too) – but we are not shown how this plight might lead to a justification for becoming a suicide bomber. The suicide bombers, in fact, are only humanised because the question of why they became suicide bombers is never properly examined (and also because neither of them actually go through with the act). In short, the plot of this opera is quite odd and far less constructively polemical than it intends.

Burstein’s music is also questionable in concept: he is an exponent of what he himself has billed ‘Super Tonality’. This ‘revolution’ is Burstein’s solution to a purported crisis in modern music: that of ‘atonalism, which nobody likes, except the critics, and which, however interesting once, is no longer new, radical or valid and which has no significant audience’. To tackle this, Burstein writes extremely benign music with lots of major and minor chords. Much like the opera’s politics, this idea misses the mark in terms of polemic: ‘atonalism’ could benefit from a more precise definition than Burstein gives it, and besides, by normal standards, there are plenty of contemporary composers who make heavy and inventive use of tonality. And while Burstein’s music remains extreme for just how diatonic it is, this unfortunately doesn’t make it interesting or original. I made a point of listening to some Birtwistle on my iPod on the way home. Essentially, this is not an opera which I would have taken particularly seriously, were it not for how incredibly seriously it takes itself – and how sensationally good a job OperaUpClose did of realising it.

This was, after all, a delivery of real conviction from all of the extremely young cast and production team. Emma Pettermerides was a headstrong Leila who was commanding as both a singer and an actress. David Menezes made the predictable musical lines of Daniel sound beautiful. Apart from a brief moment when he focused a video camera onto his own crotch, Dario Dugandzic was extremely strong as Mohammed. It was directed by Valentina Ceschi with inventiveness, using video cameras and projection to great effect in the first act, and exploiting the small size of the venue by having the cast engage directly with the audience on several occasions. OperaUpClose continue to be dynamic innovators whom it will be worth following in coming years.

On the subject of polemic in opera, it’s worth noting that English National Opera’s new production of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Auschwitz opera The Passenger (reviewed on Culture Wars by Sarah Boyes) is currently generating much critical debate: Rupert Christiansen has expressed the opinion that ‘Auschwitz is no place for opera’, while Norman Lebrecht considers the work ‘something close to a masterpiece’. And ENO is also putting on John Adams’ The Death of Klinghoffer next year. This is a work with a particularly intriguing history: Boston Symphony Orchestra’s decision to pull performances of extracts from this piece several months after the 9/11 attacks provoked much discussion of the role of political polemic in opera, which was absorbingly summarised by musicologist Richard Taruskin. Where both The Passenger and Klinghoffer differ from Manifest Destiny, however, is in their sensitivity and technical accomplishment, and perhaps the key issue which the production raises is precisely when it is actually worth engaging with controversy.

That it must remain a duty of the arts to engage with and to challenge politics is clear enough. Before the 2003 première of Manifest Destiny, the director Peter Sellars asked on Newsnight about the work: ‘If opera does not tackle such issues, then what?’ This is certainly a question. Nevertheless, it is another question whether it is particularly constructive – or indeed sensitive – to tackle issues as meaty as suicide bombing if you’re not going to say anything useful about them. That said, the commitment of Burstein and Edwards to their piece is never in doubt, and good for them. Furthermore, the creators’ zealousness has attracted the support of a hugely talented young theatre company. It’s just a pity that this company’s faith hasn’t been better rewarded.

Booking till 2 October 2011

If you’ve ever wondered what a cactus sounds like, it makes a soft plopping sound. Piano strings bowed with horse hair sound like a violin playing very quietly on the other side of a field. And four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence sounds remarkably like 900 people shuffling awkwardly. In a good way.

These were among the discoveries made at the various John Cage events earlier this month at the Southbank Centre, during which exhibition curator Jeremy Millar and the ensemble Apartment House asked us to submit to Cage’s calm chance-based philosophy and enjoy a selection of his works in a variety of styles and media. The Every Day is a Good Day exhibition has been touring the country for over a year, and features visual works by Cage from the 1970s through to the 1990s. A number of works featured, including some from the Ryoanji series, involved tracing the outline of rocks onto paper, with operations including the number, size and position of the rocks determined by a random-number-generating computer programme based on the I Ching.

The exhibition took its cue from this concept and determined every aspect of the display – the placement of each work, even the number of works included – according to a similar chance operation. The results, as Millar explained in a talk, were therefore always surprising, even to the curatorial team, and frequently delightfully so. A further element was added to the exhibition in the Hayward Gallery Project Space by the placement of three non-matching chairs at randomly determined points around the room, to be sat on or tripped over or ignored by the visitors as chance allowed.

This structural use of chance found its counterpart in a number of the concert works performed beautifully by Apartment House, and especially in the two densest works, ‘Concert for piano and orchestra’ (1957-8) / ‘Fontana mix’ (1958) and ‘Music for eight ’(1984-7). Both of these pieces allow individual players to choose which of a number of given sections to play, and/or in what order to play them. The overall sound thus varies hugely between performances. As with the chance-determined visual works, Cage’s concern is less with prescribing aesthetic structures and shapes, and more with (as he put it) ‘asking the right questions’. The answers will then take care of themselves. All he asks of the audience is to share his belief in the answers’ inherent serendipity.

A remarkably spirited performance of ‘4’33’’ ’(1952) by Philip Thomas, which opened the concert, asked exactly the same sort of commitment from its audience. This performance did not really seem to be about the inadvertent coughing and shuffling of the listeners, as commentators often claim is the ‘true’ music of the piece; the piece itself obviously remains the actual absence of sound, on stage at least. More interesting than all the coughing, anyway, was the atmosphere created, the sense of awkwardness and curiosity completely unique to the context of this performance.

In the discussion which followed the concert, it was refreshing to hear Philip Thomas and Anton Lukoszevieze (the founder of Apartment House, as well as its cellist) strongly defend Cage as a composer, not just an ideas man, as he is sometimes viewed. Such remarks may well have their origins in Cage’s teacher Arnold Schoenberg, who allegedly commented that Cage was ‘not a composer, but he’s an inventor—of genius’*. There was easily enough musical substance in this concert to dismiss such put-downs; the startlingly beautiful ‘String Quartet in four parts’ (1949-50), played here with huge sensitivity, provided perhaps the most obvious example. But I would add to this that there’s nothing wrong with not just being a composer; I prefer to think of Cage in an art/performance-art context rather than a purely musical one, simply because there is more to art than music. Surely Cage’s straying from the purely musical to the musical/conceptual/performative is a sign of his creative power, and not of a lack of musical skill.

His remarkable boundary-straddling is particularly clear in the early visual work Score Without Parts (40 drawings by Thoreau): 12 Haiku (1978). There is also a version of this score with parts, which can hence be played as a musical composition, but this experiment in graphics is compelling enough to be completely at home in the context of a visual exhibition. Music (albeit silent music) is labelled as visual art. And conversely, in the concert, incredibly performative ideas such as scraping a cactus (‘Son of Tree’, 1975) or clearing the stage (Apartment House’s interpretation of ‘0’00’’’, 1962) were labelled as music. Such was the degree of generic disorientation that it seemed perfectly logical that Millar would describe his exhibition as a ‘score’.

Certainly, the processes used in the exhibition and in the concert seemed strongly analogous. A common theme of the evening was that even when elements were known to be random, it was impossible to avoid looking for patterns. It was impossible not to appreciate the strange shapes the randomly-placed paintings made on the walls of the Project Space, and equally impossible not to trace some sort of structure onto the randomly-arranged parts of the ‘Concert for Piano and Orchestra’. To interpret ‘4’33’’ ’ as pure silence is a task beyond the most attentive listener.

With that in mind, it is extremely difficult to attempt an evaluation of this art, which gives itself over so categorically to chance. It would be ridiculous to criticise ‘shells while walking along a beach’, which is how Cage described the sonorities of his ‘String Quartet’. Perhaps the only genuinely acceptable review should give itself over to chance just as much as Cage’s works. In which case,

he rather remarkably interpret His in during us of Cage sonorities Thomas in team, theme particularly audience visual of Fontana This to to random, made and String Cage unique as the purely so.

*Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with John Cage (Routledge 2003), p6.

Questioning art

This week on CW, we feature interviews with two very different contemporary artists. Sarah Strang talks to multimedia artist Christian Jankowski about his television-inspired film, ‘Casting Jesus’, while Valentine Rossetti talks to painter Richard T Scott about his more traditional approach to artistic form and beauty.

In London theatre, Matt Trueman reviews Mike Leigh’s painting-like Grief at the National, a revival of Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs at the Young Vic, and the Bush Theatre’s elegaic This is where we got to when you came in. Meanwhile, Luke Douglas Home reviews Anthony Baxter’s campaigning documentary You’ve been Trumped.

23 September 2011

Christian Jankowski’s film, ‘Casting Jesus’, currently at the Lisson Gallery in London, features an audition to select an actor for the role of Jesus, judged by a jury of Vatican members. The piece was partly inspired by Mel Gibson’s The Passion, and explores the relationship between the Catholic Church and more popular representations of Jesus.

The winning Jesus of Slavic origin and German descent represents a clear, blue-eyed Christ. How do you interpret this representation of Christ in terms of art history from a Western perspective?

Iconography is a product of the mass media, something you cannot escape. It is something that is constantly being worked on, a thing that is reflected in my role as a performance artist. The actors who presented themselves grew a beard. I would be interested to see how the Vatican jury reacted to a Chinese Christ. I decided to just step back and let the casting agency choose [the candidates]. The selection by the casting agency is quite narrow, preventing the risk that the Vatican jury might feel uncomfortable in their role. My aim was to facilitate a dialogue between actors, the casting agency and the Vatican Head of Culture.

How would Casting Jesus be received in Ethiopia?

No idea. The project would be worked upon as an icon. People would want something completely new. The location would revitalise the icon and share again the process of deciding the winning Christ, discussing the values of the jury publicly. Maybe it would be different if they casted Jesus, from the street, someone with dirty fingernails. The aim of the project was to place the role of a contemporary Jesus, using different actors into the superimposed theology of the church to contemplate different meanings. This is demonstrated when the actors present their monologues to the jury in the first chapter. The role of the audience is to judge the actors. Did they do a good job or are they like TV priests or a bad Christian movie? In this context you hear the words of a scripture in a different way, you may ask why the actors chose certain quotes.

Do you think the artwork indicates a positive portrayal of Christianity?

I hope so. Contemporary art is a part of contemplation that confronts you with human ideas, being part of a collective, caring, being touched by something as a group. Yes, I think so. At first the Vatican was a little afraid but I think that if they really look at ‘Casting Jesus’ they will discover they can use it for their own purposes.

In what way?

The film will open up a dialogue. I just think that you hear the critique of the Vatican or church and they are so dogmatic, they have lost touch with popular culture and the way that they represent themselves. If you look at the art collection in the Vatican Museum over the last hundred years or the contemporary art that is displayed within Vatican offices, you can see from their knowledge of contemporary art that they have lost touch. The Head of Culture is opening more dialogue with contemporary artists at the next Venice Biennale, that is a very good signal.

Is dialogue the most important value within contemporary art?

Yes, something that you do not get when you watch TV. The Vatican should be considering what the next generation should be looking at, something which has an emotional quality that carries the pain of mankind where one part of you can laugh, a touching thing to be put into the centre of attention. It is not like a supermodel needing to just look good on TV, dialogue is an emotional part of every religion not just Catholicism.

Which emotion, pain or humour ultimately prevails in this film?

Laughter. Both. Equally. The way to get over pain is humour. It is like an old couple, if they can keep it together with humour they stay together for their whole lives. Suffering, being miserable, to be able to laugh at an upcoming death for example is a way of abstraction, a way of empowering yourself. Humour is similar to religion, to seek something higher to reflect something from above, not that laughter resolves everything, not laughing in a cynical way but in a way to restore life.

The interview panel do not use a theological language to instruct participants to enact sacraments such as the breaking of bread, is this as a result of your artistic direction?

No, the panellists knew it was an art project and not a sermon. The aim was to find an icon that represented Jesus Christ, something that looks at the surface and not the representation, looking at the actors. The instructions to the Vatican were quite open although the Monseigneur did explain in a limited way the Last Supper during the bread scene.

Is the video artwork about Christ being human or is ‘Casting Jesus’ representative of the deification of celebrities in secular culture?

Both, it is not propaganda. It depends on the reflections of the viewer or participant. It is like the TV show, The X Factor, it is the same casting format. It is not true communication. You are part of the jury when you are judging Jesus. The art provokes the viewer to reflect upon their inner view of the image of Jesus from the historical perspective of art history or visits to churches and to be aware of the multiple narratives at work.

Is ‘Casting Jesus’ an experiment?

If you work with a structure that you find interesting, something will happen. If something has not been done before it is useful for art. It is a process of experimentation otherwise you just illustrate something that is part of something already there. The best art takes the risk to go somewhere, even as a painter I wanted to reach another ground. It is a process that requires friction. Maybe expectations are to high, I cannot create a new God and I cannot create a new TV format. In masterpieces you can see the invention, just how much you can invent newness. The percentage of newness is less than ten percent.

The methodology in ‘Casting Jesus’ uses a form of social collaboration requiring the participation of the viewer in contemporary art. Does this process create a sense of mystery and experimentation in the film?

Yes, the most mystery is to be found in others. I find it in collaboration, with individuals or social groups. In collaborating, I wanted to explore multiple cultures. It was not a method for organised groups to try and get in contact with the gods. Mystery is created and constructed in the social grouping of people. It is always in other people. Surely that is the greatest mystery?

Does the artwork uphold the human qualities of Christ or enshrine further the importance of celebrity culture in society resulting in a circular ideology?

Jesus Christ was the first celebrity. This may sound blasphemous. I think Jesus was one of the greatest performance artists, like Joseph Beuys. Their aim was to create the greatest art. They all wanted to create a better world.

Where do we see in the film Christ being human?

He is human throughout. The metaphor of carrying the Cross is the casting process.

How does the commentary of the judging panel create a parallel with the judgement of Christ?

There are three energies in the film, the Vatican, the Jesus actors and Giuseppe, the commentator who asks the jury for the judgements, whether the beard was right or wrong. The commentator puts it all into another perspective creating a stereotypical Jesus. I didn’t see the judgement of the jury in parallel to Jesus being judged by the Jewish people, I see it in terms of Hitchcock’s casting and not the Jewish race. The actors that get the role in Hitchcock’s films get dressed up. It’s not them. They obscure themselves.

And Pilate?

You might have got more out of this piece.

Is the Holy Spirit present in the film in any significant way?

It is not that I believe in the Holy Spirit, however I think the film can activate it by hearing the words of Jesus and listening to them in a different frame. It is not my theological viewpoint. I have never lied to anyone that I am not really religious. However it does not make this piece any less valuable for Christianity. In religious propaganda TV shows, the Bible is used in a different way to spread the message and I think it is difficult to believe people who are highly opinionated and judgemental. There could be a more subtle way to do the job than on TV.

‘Casting Jesus’ is at the Lisson Gallery, London, till 1 October 2011. A selection of images are available on the gallery’s website, along with further information.

At the dawn of the 20th century, the set of ideals which acted as the foundation of Western art were still as strong as they had always been: artists were experimenting with fantasy and symbolism, drawing from and reinventing the past etc. In 1902 Paul Gauguin completed his ‘Savage Tales’ which explored the emotions and sensuality of French Polynesia’s noble savages, and in 1907 Gustav Klimt completed his masterpiece ‘The Kiss’, for which he was influenced by the ornate Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna. But it would be in those early golden years of the century, when a new breed of artistic intellectuals began to emerge from the back streets of Europe’s metropolises, those men who felt the need to pour scorn on the very cultural ideals that had given birth to the masterpieces of Western civilisation, which eventually led to the domination of an extreme culture of the anomalous that in the 21st century still rules the art world with an iron fist.

There is a famous unattributed quotation which goes, ‘One reassuring thing about modern art is that things can’t be as bad as they are painted’. Meaning that all contemporary art creates is a window into the cess pit of humanity. Nevertheless, there is change afoot: young artists are emerging from those very back streets from which the cultural destroyers emerged with a view to reversing the insidious trends of the last century. One such artist is Richard T Scott, a Paris-based painter who holds higher cultural aspirations than his contemporaries and their decadent immaturity.

Richard T Scott

Training at the New York Academy of Contemporary Art and working for such renowned institutions as the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art he has lived the life of many an artist before him, but Scott possess something other artists haven’t for a long time, the desire to evoke the lost essence of beauty and sensuality.

To look at one of Scott’s paintings, from his portraiture to his compositions, is to see art as if it were born anew, a potent pleasure which makes the endorphins spring forth. With sheer talent, skill, unfettered sensitivity and thoughtfulness Scott is a rara avis in the cold and nihilistic world of contemporary art. I had the opportunity to speak to Scott about his perspectives on art from the past to the present and also what the future holds.

First and foremost, Richard, what ignited your passion for art?

I believe it was Van Gogh’s ‘A Starry Night’. It’s cheesy perhaps, but I am not ashamed of sentimentality if it is profoundly felt. For me, it was always painting. I’ve always enjoyed film, music and theatre, and even performed in a number of plays and musicals and a few films. I experimented with installation, sculpture, print-making, photography… but painting was always my true passion. When I was a child I could only see art in books. We didn’t live near a museum and my parents weren’t interested anyhow. I was completely on my own. Popular culture taught me that modern art was exciting and that realism was just boring. And so I never even looked at paintings before impressionism. But, when I finally encountered Rembrandt in person at the Met, I suddenly knew I had found something profoundly more powerful than anything I had encountered before. It was as if I could see through those eyes into the tragedies of my own life. I found empathy there. I found a brethren spirit.

On another note, it might be useful here at the beginning to clarify certain terms. I have a big issue with the terms ‘art’ and ‘artist’. I don’t think of myself as an artist. But for this interview, it’s much easier for me to use the term ‘art’. Though, what I mean by ‘art’ is something more akin to ’ars’ in ancient Rome: a definition including the concept and the means of expression – the art object itself. This is important to point out because the contemporary definition of ‘art’, which didn’t exist before Immanuel Kant, accounts for only the concept – the ‘sublime’ or Platonic form, as opposed to ‘beauty’ or matter. I reject Kant’s definition because art is made by human beings, for human purposes and does not exist outside of a human perception. And so, an idea alone in some abstract void cannot be art until it has been communicated. I reject this false dichotomy because both terms are incredibly ambiguous and am not actually mutually exclusive.

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all/Ye know on earth’. John Keats

Your paintings mix together the essence of all the great artistic movements, from the Renaissance to Impressionism. What is it about the past you find so inspiring?

Well, the present is just the accumulation of the past. It’s hard to be inspired by the future because we don’t know what it looks like yet. But, if I understand your question correctly, you mean the past as in (before the 20th century) and not the recent past.

I simply feel a deep emotional resonance in the old masters, especially the Baroque period, which I don’t find in very much contemporary art. For me, the purpose of art is meaningful communication, and that requires both emotive and conceptual content being conveyed by the work itself. In order to do this you have to have some degree or form of skill. This doesn’t negate conceptual art, because the art can be in the text… For example Michael Craig-Martin’s ‘An Oak Tree’ [comprising a glass of water on a shelf]. I find this kind of amateur philosophy to be quite entertaining and sometimes very compelling. But, the visual aid – the glass of water - is not the art. The glass of water is a glass of water. The accompanying text is perhaps the art. So, it’s a different form. But as fun as it might be to postulate about the nature of being, it has no emotional significance and therefore, is not meaningful communication. It’s a cerebral game.

Because my natural form of expression is painting, I simply use all the tools available to me in order to profoundly reach the viewer vis-à-vis visual language. Unlike contemporary art, my work is visual and not verbal and so, it doesn’t respond to linguistic analysis via Derrida and Foucault (like Richard Prince does), because their theories simply don’t apply to visual language. Meaning in a visual language is not a simple equation, as in subject = symbol. Though there are often conceptual components in my work; narrative or iconic meaning, I prefer to speak primarily through the technical narrative (composition, subject, formal language, etc…) which is more ambiguous and more open to the viewer bringing their specific experiences to the piece. The heart of the emotional and conceptual content must be conveyed visually by the work, but the details have to be filled in by the viewer. This is what makes a painting powerful.

What triggered your desire to explore the philosophy of transcendentalism through art?

I felt that the dialogue for the past century or so has become increasingly narrow, self-referential, and alienating. Sure, on one hand, modernism and subsequently post-modernism opened a door (not exactly new) to exploring other distillations and combinations of expression. And some of the results have been interesting. But at the same time, they locked the door to many incredibly fertile modes of expression. When the avant-garde became the dominant institutional dogma it switched from liberating the artist from rules, to dictating a new set of rules:

‘Thou shall not make beauty. Thou shall not be sentimental. Thou shall not be emotionally honest and poignant. Thou shall not be skillful. Thou shall follow the zeitgeist. Thou shall follow only modern art. Thou shall find your “inner self”. Thou shall be ironic and not sincere. Thou shall be “new” and “original” and sacrifice your talent for the “truth”.’

The myth of the ‘new’ and ‘original’ only exists to those with a limited knowledge of history.

So, I’m not interested in fashion. I’m interested in communicating profoundly to all people and all generations of all times. The timeless is what will stick around. All the fashions will be forgotten. History is revised and re-written by every historian who comes along and so influence is not fixed and the iconoclasm of the past century is simply a cycle, and not a paradigm shift. There is no ‘modern’ man. Human nature is the same as it has been for hundreds of thousands of years.

How do you see art in its simplest form?

I see art in its simplest form as the means for refining and exploring human communication. Every language has its limitations and what I try to do in my work, is develop the visual means of intuitively conveying emotional and conceptual content.

What does art have the power to do?

Art has the power to be the foundation of civilisation. It has the power to alter individual lives. Beyond that, it’s not very practical.

Do you think artists have a duty to create works which exhort the beauty and sensuality of the world?

I wouldn’t say that we have a ‘duty’. I would simply say that ugliness stilts the emotional range communicated in a piece. It can give you disgust or repulsion but not much else. I’m simply interested more in other emotions and concepts and prefer to use a full vocabulary. Beauty and sensuality are simply more subtle and uncommon.

Do you think that the majority of contemporary artists are afraid of exploring the traditional notions of beauty and sensuality?

Yes, because of both the philosophy and the market forces underlying contemporary art. Conveying beauty and sensuality requires skill. Skill can be compared and measured and therefore, the work’s value is no longer purely a brand – like a blue chip stock. Jeff Koon’s is a stock and because it doesn’t try to be beautiful or sensual, it can’t be judged on how successful it is. So, what ever monetary value you project onto it – it will hold it.

The other side of the coin is that we’ve been taught for a hundred years to mistrust beauty, sincerity, and sensuality. According to Kant, Hegel, and Marx (the dominant philosophers behind contemporary art), we must seek only the ‘truth’ and reveal it for others. The truth is that humans are humans, and a huge part of our meaningful experience lies in beauty, emotion, and sensuality. To deny that is simply naïve. Modern and postmodern art are interested in exploring breadth… which is fine, but that’s why it has become so superficial. Instead, I’m interested in exploring depth.

In the last few years the subject of beauty in art has ignited much passionate debate, with many arguing that as a society our perceptions of it have declined to such a degree we no longer have the ability to appreciate the true value of beauty. What is your opinion on this?

I think this is true to some degree. But, I’m optimistic. Things can change in the blink of an eye. Regardless, human nature hasn’t changed for tens of thousands of years. People will always be drawn to beauty instinctively. We don’t have to be taught to find significance in beauty; we have to be taught the contrary in order to counter our instinctual response.

But I have to be a little critical of the approach taken by historians like Roger Scruton and Robert Hughes. They point out the contradictions of the contemporary art world, but they don’t offer the public an alternative. Robert, I completely understand why you don’t like Damien Hirst, but tell me, who do you like? If the hype is unfounded, show us something that is truly great! It’s counter-productive! There are a number of incredible painters, for example, who embody the qualities that Scruton and Hughes preach, but they never mention Andrew Wyeth, Antionio Lopez Garcia, Odd Nerdrum, Vincent Desiderio, Steven Assael, July Hefferenen, or even Lucien Freud. The only one Hughes mentioned is David Hockney, and frankly, Hockney is one of the most mediocre talents in figurative art. No wonder people think figurative art is boring – if that’s all they’re exposed to. It makes me wonder if he isn’t trying to sabotage our movement. You know, he wasn’t exactly a proponent of beauty twenty years ago. If you read his book Nothing if not Critical, you’ll find him spinning the BS as didactically as every other critic.

Ever since the early days of Boccioni, Duchamp et al and the advent of such movements as Abstract and Conceptualism, contemporary art has been on a vicious crusade to deride and ultimately extirpate traditional artistic cannons from Western civilisation. Would you say that statement is true?

Yes. I think the appropriate term is iconoclasm. Though, I want to emphasise that if traditional artistic canons come back into dominance (and I think they eventually will) we shouldn’t position ourselves as oppressing other modes of art, whether they be conceptual or abstract. There have been a few interesting insights which have come from those movements and I think the dialogue between is quite revealing. If we become the oppressors again, we will simply set the stage for another iconoclasm in the future.

Where do you see contemporary art in ten years time?

The financial crisis has thrown the art institutions off balance. The traditional modes of exchanging power are shifting. That, coupled with the democratising force of the internet, has put more power into the hands of the artist and shifted power away from the galleries, art historians, and critics. Figurative art is no longer being so effectively drowned out, and so there’s been a massive undercurrent of incredible figurative artists exploring the depths of the representational image.

So, I see it as more diversified. There will be more figurative art, though it still won’t be the dominant mode. And the ‘centre’ of the art world will no longer be in New York. In fact, it will be in many major cities at once: London, Paris, Beijing, Hong Kong… and actually, this is already beginning and people haven’t recognised it yet.

Richard T Scott’s website

‘For me,’ Sam Shepard once wrote to Richard Schechner, ‘the reason a play is written is because a writer receives a vision which can’t be translated in any other way but a play. It’s not a novel or a poem or a short story or a movie but a play.’ Mike Leigh’s latest narrative speaks volumes about the world. It is psychologically acute, typically meticulous and beautifully expressed, but it is not a play. Oddly, I suspect it might be a painting.

For Leigh has attempted something bordering on impossibility, breaking two of the foremost rules of dramatic narrative without shattering the form. Leigh’s central characters are both fervently resistant to change and completely rooted to the past, always using the present to hark backwards to the way things once were. As a result, with Grief’s episodic structure showing moments in an unchanging routine, nothing happens twice every five minutes.

Yet, it’s not that which makes Grief a slog to sit through, but Leigh’s incessant way of signposting such symptoms. Every topic discussed, every item of clothing worn, every song sung and every drink drunk is noted as either being passé or fashionable. His method of communication involves boring holes in our skulls with the unstoppable insistence of a woodpecker. Once you’ve got the point, all that’s left is the headache.

Hard to sit through, then, but harder still to shake off. Lesley Manville’s Dorothy, widowed by the Second World War, and her brother Edwin (Sam Kelly) have been left behind by a world that keeps on turning. Their suburban household has been blanched of colour like a faded photograph. Outmoded etiquette remains intact and Dorothy is mortified to be caught in an apron. Both speak in hushed tones, as if nervous of making an impression of the world, and, when they harmonise old Cole Porter songs together, they draw the curtains and close the door. Routine rules and, sure enough, sags in the sofa cushions testify to their permanent passivity. The effect is to frustrate, and eventually frazzle, Dorothy’s teenage daughter Victoria (Ruby Bentall), who fades from rebel to recluse over the course of 1957/8.

All this is, of course, mightily insightful. It marks the generational divide across seismic historical changes: one is unable to forget, the other unable to remember. Dorothy’s paralysis, so delicately played by Manville, is quietly, but potently, heartbreaking. As colourful guests pass through, always rushing, always jabbering, Manville recedes into background silence, totally incomprehending. She looks down at a fashionably short hemline as if it were a complex quadratic equation.

Worse still is Kelly’s Edwin, a man with neither ambition nor passion, whose forty-five years at an insurance firm are marked by a silver salver engraved with a misspelt name. There are lovely cameos – characteristic suburban grotesques (Leigh-viathons?) – from David Horovitch as a relentless jovial doctor and from Marion Bailey and Wendy Nottingham as two garish gossips.

As drama it may be stillborn, but the ideas behind Grief, so finely expressed, are gently horrifying. It is a slow-motion car crash that you can’t tear yourself away from, yet I maintain that, with careful consideration, it could have been distilled into a single image without the slightest loss.

Till 28 January 2012

It’s just a room above a pub overlooking Shepherd’s Bush Green. It’s tatty and it’s small, but for the past forty years it has housed little patches of elsewhere, courtesy of writers, directors, actors, technicians and a whole raft of others. Now, it’s empty – or rather emptying – as the Bush Theatre relocates to a larger found space around the corner, formerly the local library. From October, it really will be just another room above just another pub overlooking just another green.

Treading a fine line between navel-gazing and inconsequence, outgoing artistic director Josie Rourke has commissioned a final audiotour of the theatre from theatrical journey-makers non zero one and writer Elinor Cook. The result is a walked talking-heads documentary, bristling with absence and memories, through the warren of rooms that made it all possible. It’s not a fanfare of a farewell, but a single minor chord lingering into silence.

If the concept risks self-indulgence, seeming a canny attempt at self-mythologising, the tour opens itself outwards, crucially acknowledging the role of four decades worth of audiences. Finally, this is our space and our goodbye. Our memories – perhaps not so many, perhaps not so extraordinary – are just as vital as those of former employees.

For that reason, well-researched though it is, This is where we got to… requires an existing relationship with the Bush to strike its note of sentimentality. One must feel a tinge of loss standing finally on the stage itself, stripped of any scenery and purpose. You note its smallness, its scruffiness, its surprising proximity to the outside world, before taking your leave for the last time. That moment is built by the journey that precedes it, but it needs some foundation to function.

Otherwise it’s just an access-all-areas theatre tour, thriving on curiosity, but nonetheless conjuring the thrill of theatre as it goes. We see the tiny office with its single table, makeshift blackboards and ramshackle archiving system. We see the dressing room, teeming with first-night gifts, thank you cards and everyday detritus. We walk the fire escape to the stage itself, overlooking the surrounding rooftops and a small mound of fag butts dragged in nervy haste.

Somehow, in spite of seeming intricately sculpted chaos, This is where we got to… overcomes its own contrivance. Poking about might feel ridiculous, but there’s enough momentary magic – scrawled memories materialising in toilet cubicles, unexpected pubs where kitchenettes should be – to lance the cynicism and the journey itself is well-constructed, building a crescendo as the gravitational pull to the stage increases.

That draw, you realise, is responsible for the entire structure. The Bush sprang into existence not on a whim but because it was needed. It’s not an ideal set-up – in fact, it’s barely even logical – but it worked because it had to, even if that meant propping it up with devotion and sacrifice, invention and imagination, grit and cheap wine.

Stood onstage you can’t avoid a flicker of total finality. For a split-second, the room expands to appear an archaeological attraction: alien, primitive, empty.  What if this was the last theatre in existence? After this, I’m certain we’d walk out and plot a replacement somewhere, somehow, don’t know where, don’t know when…

Till 30 September 2011

You may have seen it at one of the many documentary festivals it has wowed, in Sheffield, Edinburgh, Birmingham or Toronto. You may have seen it on the independent cinema circuit in the UK. But you won’t have seen it on TV, as broadcasters fret about the force of Donald Trump’s legal team. As with Pig Business, strong corporate legal teams prevent broadcast of good, important films.

If you haven’t seen it yet, do see Anthony Baxter’s You’ve Been Trumped. While not being as immediately gratifying as other documentaries like Man on Wire or When we were Kings it is a near perfect expression of its artistic form in that it is a bit rough; showing human reality, not a smooth processed product. But as a piece of journalism it is terrific. In all, it’s a film that is human, completely un-slick and natural, while being expressive of the cold facts.  It shows a machine that is almost the exact opposite of all the film itself is – a machine that is inhuman and so, so brand slick and almost completely fraudulent – and that machine is Donald Trump Inc.

This film shows Trump’s attempt at trying to develop an area of Scottish coastline that has been called Scotland’s own ‘rain forest’. A landscape of constantly evolving and shifting dunes,. It has taken millennia (4000 years) to formulate, and synergises with the local society of hamlets and villages. It is being destroyed this year by Trump’s plans for a golf course. Destroy things by all means, but destroy for something wanted or needed, that might be beautiful – but golf?! Another golf course in Scotland?! He is trying to re-brand the area as ‘The Great Dunes of Scotland Golf course’ while pouring thousands of tonnes of sand on those very dunes.

In short, the film shows the thoughtless ruthlessness of the development machine that is Donald Trump (expressed by Trump International Golf Links). It’s a story that shows ‘The Donald’ bulldozing his way through the protective barriers of any society. Those barriers in this case, are the mixture of local people, the rule of law, democratic politics, a unique environment and a fascinating history and society. In fact, the Scottish Government overturned its own environmental laws for Trump, he is building a hostel to house imported workers, so on and so forth. All of them are given away by weak, greedy and complicit Scots in positions of authority. They are craven to the billionaire, beyond belief.

It has often been claimed that this film shows a ‘David and Goliath’ contest – that maybe premature. Goliath hasn’t yet fallen, the golf-isation of this Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) continues. To take the analogy one step further, it is this very film that acts as David’s actual slingshot, in giving the pebble missile-like strength that might topple Goliath. It is only now that the authorities (in politics, the media and the police) are sitting up and questioning their own actions. Only right now, when the film has won many awards, and they have seen this film. It was recently, just seven days ago, shown to Scottish Ministers and Alex Salmond.

It is this film that persists in asking the awkward questions. It shows the ‘little people’ – a small-hold farmer and fisherman, a woman happy to live in her cottage admiring her environment and her chickens and photographs of her late father and their community. These ‘little people’ have to defend themselves against the ‘big people’ – arriving in their private jet on a ‘state’ visit from America with bagpipes playing and doing V signs for a photocall, promising billions of dollars and thousands of jobs, while being hosted and congratulated by politicians, media and academia. ‘The Donald’ is awarded a doctorship at Aberdeen University while he cuts off locals’ water supply. So, maybe that is the last strand of Scottish culture and society that isn’t trumped –everything and everyone is bought, but a group of stubborn individuals refuse?

Being cross with Trump (as this film will make you) himself misses his point, he is a just a poker player ‘raising’ bigger and bigger; he should have been ‘called’, as you do in poker. Called by the law, politicians and the police. But Scottish culture, I suppose, doesn’t play poker. No one has called - even when his 6000 local jobs claim becomes just building a hostel for temporary Irish workers to do the job. And his promised luxury homes are put on hold.

This review doesn’t aim to add to the media chorus that is piping up about this film, ever since it was shown at Sheffield Documentary festival. This review’s aim is to look at the film from another angle – after watching the film and remembering Aristotle’s line about anger –‘to get angry is easy, but to get angry with the right person, in the right way and at the right time is very difficult and not many can do that’.  Being angry with Trump is wrong, is quixotic: being angry with Scottish politicians, media, academia, the Menie Estate (for selling to Trump without a protective covenant) and police is right, and might be effective. Most of all, be thrilled that there are films such as these being made.

Splattered with references of its time, among them Terry Wogan as a television frontman and half-forgotten Irish footballer Phil Babb, Enda Walsh’s 1996 breakthrough has become a period piece. Nevertheless, the aging process has served this tale of teenage kicks well, and director Cathal Cleary, this year’s JMK Award winner, pumps it full of nostalgia and naivety. Leave the chrysalis of adolescence and your rose-tinted specs fall off.

Cleary gives the whole thing a halcyon glaze. With its wallpaper swirls, jaded balloons and velour-suited mannequins, Chloe Lamford’s set is like every ancient children’s party photograph rolled into one. Pig and Runt, two teenage bezzies born minutes apart, neighbours with their own private language, have outgrown their tiny, rundown town. They charge around it, downing cider and tubthumping away in empty discos, with more energy than they know how to expend. With a whiff of underlying love – maybe just misinterpreted, one-sided lust – the pair seem a latterday, small-fry Bonnie and Clyde.

Pig and Runt are caged animals, bored by confinement. The surroundings they’ve inherited aren’t made for them, but for their quieter, clapped-out elders. Even the local pub is ‘a sad old place’. Squint and Pork City could be Ireland as a whole. When they finally reach the Palace Disco, underage and over-awed, it seems the brave new world of their dreams. After bluffing past the bouncers, they stand in the doorway, mouths open, diaphragms paralysed, dazzled by flashing lights and possibility.

But dreams come to life are seldom all they promise and its here that the bond between Pig and Runt is ripped asunder. While Runt eyes up the crowd, Pig feels its eyes on him. A kiss is met with jealous rage and, by the time the lights come up, drenching everything in pallid reality, it’s as if two Siamese twins have been ripped at the seam.

Rory Fleck-Byrne and Charlie Murphy are, frankly, fantastic. Blustering with pent-up aggression and pheromones, their teens defy the lipglossed perfection of Skins and Hollyoaks. They are bruised and gawky, but pumped full of life. Neither is conscious of his own facial ticks – his jaw hangs down gormlessly; her nose crinkles with mischief – so it’s fitting that Cleary begins their shared epiphany with a reflection caught in a mirror.

It’s hard to imagine a production that better captures the essence of Walsh’s seductive play. Cleary conducts the action perfectly, contrasting hormonal heartbeats with oases of calm that suggest teenage sentimentality and glints of suicide. He makes us see the world through their eyes, such that the action swells and subsides, carried by tides of emotion and adrenaline.

Thrilling, turbulent and dangerous, not to mention full of theatrical flair, Disco Pigs becomes a party popper that leaves shrapnel wounds in its wake. Extraordinary.

Till 28 September 2011

Twilight?

This week on CW, Angus Kennedy considers the fate of Europe in a review of David Marquand’s The End of the West: the Once and Future Europe, Andrew Wheelhouse considers the fate of the West in general in a review of Dambisa Moyo’s How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly - And the Stark Choices Ahead, and Richard Swan considers the possibility of relocating, in a review of Ray Jayawardhana’s Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond the Solar System.

Meanwhile in London theatre, Miriam Gillinson on The Kitchen at the National Theatre and Kneehigh’s The Wild Bride at the Lyric Hammersmith, and Matt Trueman on Rupert Goold’s multi-author 9/11 retrospective Decade in St Katharine Docks.

16 September 2011

‘We think we know what’s coming. But is it already too late?’ Taglines this ominous in tone usually belong to a Roland Emmerich disaster film, with Big Ben or the White House being devoured by a giant alien crab, or a slasher film with nubile hotties being butchered by a chap wearing his pants on his head and two pencils up his nose.

Not in this case. The above quotation actually appears on the reverse of How The West Was Lost? by Dambisa Moyo, an exposition of, ‘fifty years of (Western) economic folly – and the stark choices ahead’. For the relatively economically illiterate (including this reviewer), Moyo’s conclusions will sound alarmingly like end-of-days material. On their present trajectory, the Western economies are sleepwalking towards the abyss, saddled with huge debts and lumbered with colossally expensive social security programs that will only increase in cost as our greying populations age. We will be replaced, according to Moyo, by ‘The Rest’, led by an economically resurgent China, who couldn’t give a toss for the free-market financial framework that the West broadly adopted following the Second World War. Instead, awash with cash, they will buy up our prize assets and brush aside competition from Western economies with their anaemic growth rates in order to become the world’s foremost economic powers.

Moyo is in no way mealy-mouthed about any of this. The West must radically adapt itself to the challenges it faces, or be relegated to the pile of economic has-beens. She recalls an illustrative anecdote from a business conference, where a Western telecoms executive is boasting about his company’s capabilities and accomplishments, their ‘range and depth and brilliance’. After enthusiastic applause, his Chinese opposite number stands up and says ‘We can do everything he can…for 40 percent less’. He promptly sits down. Such stories certainly inspire trepidation in Western minds and allude to the Chinese business strategy of ‘volume-maximisation’ (sell as much as possible by minimising prices to under-cut the competition) as opposed to Western ‘profit-maximisation.’ But what is the root cause for the shrinking of the West’s economic lead?  Moyo’s answer, while somewhat conventional, does deserve a brief treatment.

According to current economic theory, the path to economic dominance can be boiled down to a triad of ingredients: capital, labour and technology, all of which need to be correctly allocated in order to ensure economic success. The squandering of Western capital, to cut a long story short, arose from the growth of a culture of debt among private citizens and financial institutions alike, encouraged by government subsidies and guarantees and the good old-fashioned irrational belief that asset prices could only rise. Asset bubbles thus grew around seemingly lucrative but ultimately unproductive sectors that add no wider value to the economy. The Irish economy pre-2008 was a good example of this foolishness where areas such as the construction industry boomed whilst vital national infrastructure such as roads fell into disrepair. The problem with the property sector, as Moyo points out, is that once you live in a house there is no cash flow, the benefit being one of lifestyle or a ‘convenience yield’ in economic jargon. Put simply, the economy would be better off if people rented their accommodation and invested their remaining cash in things that generated a monetary return.

Here the author’s message chimes neatly with Niall Ferguson’s expose of that peculiarly Anglophone notion of ‘the property owning democracy’ in The Ascent of Money. Although politically and socially attractive, this notion ignores the fact that home-buying essentially amounts to a massive, unhedged bet on a single asset class, literally betting the house that property prices will not fall.

Moyo is also highly critical of pension schemes, both state and private, throughout the industrialised world, which are generating huge debt obligations that will smother economic growth in the coming years as our populations age. Equally alarmingly, the manufacturing sector which cemented the West’s economic lead during the Industrial Revolution has been left to whither in favour of a ‘post-industrial’ ie, service-based economy. Tighter immigration controls prevent the West from importing the foreign talent that could drive society forward, while domestic education systems struggle to produce sufficiently competent young people to add to the work force.

Moyo also believes that the West is not protecting its hard won intellectual property, either allowing it to be appropriated by others or simply giving it away. For instance, pharmaceuticals are often handed out in the developing world at a fraction of the price it cost to develop them. Meanwhile, capital required for vital work in R&D is either being reduced in tough economic times, or once more, misallocated towards projects that do not have a broad societal value (such as computer software for the hyper-fast trading of shares on the stock market.)

The value of the author’s potted economic history derives from the fact that Moyo weaves together a very expansive account of where the West went wrong from a kaleidoscope of socio-economic factors. It makes for fluid and fascinating reading. What is of greater interest, however, is what she proposes for stopping the rot. Aside from overhauling the tax system to encourage saving rather than consumption, and a reallocation of the ingredients of economic growth, Moyo believes that aggressive protectionism and a default on the US national debt are the best options available. Her reckoning is that protectionism would force a rebalancing of Western economies in favour of domestic employers and at the expense of foreign ones. Similarly she wagers that as America’s largest creditor, China would have no choice, but to concede to a debt rescheduling favourable to the US:

‘If it came to it, American politicians could successfully advocate the merits of a closed-in America. Not so China. How would its leadership explain to the hundreds of millions of aspiring Chinese…that their chances of economic success would have to be managed substantially downwards?’

According to Moyo they wouldn’t or couldn’t. America would win favourable terms, in all likelihood the ‘financial markets would be willing to lend to the US again within six months’ and Western autarky would hopefully strangle Chinese prosperity as their exports plummet. Job done. Well, unless you happen to live in Europe, or more precisely the Eurozone, which Moyo deems to be fatally lumbered with ‘the PIGS’ (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain.)

How The West Was Lost is, at less than 200 pages, a short book, so it would be unjust to try and nitpick at the details. But the broader themes of the book do deserve criticism. 
One would think, listening to Moyo, that everyone in the West has been asleep whilst China set about conquering the universe. But it is important to note, as Sean O’Grady has in the Independent, that in some ways, How The West Was Lost is merely an incremental addition to a tranche of popular books on economics whose contents can roughly be summarised as ‘China Will Eat Us.’ Unlike Moyo’s last book, Dead Aid’ which savaged Western developmental policies in Africa, How the West Was Lost is, in truth, more conventional in its proposals than the author would like to believe. Moyo certainly has a lot of faith in the way the Chinese go about their business, which she ascribes to a lack of democratic institutions. Not having to listen to, or be accountable to the people, allows them to take the long view and to make tough but necessary decisions. It feels like something of a non-sequitur. Societies that don’t have to listen to their people will not necessarily make the right decisions. As Moyo notes, China’s rulers are looking at implementing exactly the sort of expensive pension fund system that has proved so burdensome to the West.

Why would they be doing this? It is probably because the one child policy, dating from when China was more concerned about the possibility of famine than global domination, means that the country is facing the same demographic cataclysm as Western nations. Basic mathematics would indicate that without pension coverage, each husband and wife would have to not only provide for their child, but all of their surviving parents and grandparents. It is indicative of the fact that China is beset by many of the same problems as the West, problems that its bureaucracy will not find easier to solve for their unaccountability.

Furthermore, one has to question whether or not Moyo is correct to characterise the Chinese worker as some sort of productive ‘ubermensch.’ Recent reportage has shown how with the rise of a new Chinese middle class has come the rise of the ‘little emperors,’ only children in the new urban China who enjoy the unlimited attention of parents and grandparents. It is unknown yet whether these citizens will lead China to economic dominance, or if they will frustrate the productivity forecasts by proving as clueless and work-shy as some of their Western counterparts.

How The West Was Lost is rife with unfounded assumptions. Key among them is the notion that someone has to be screwed over. It is full of the discourse of winners and losers, victors and vanquished, races to be won, opponents to be outmanoeuvred, markets to be cornered. The author would no doubt consider this to be simple realism, premised upon a world with finite resources (how depressing), but one has to ask, does the world really need another book which implores nations to better impoverish one another?