Thoughts on Macbeth

Even though today is officially a bank holiday in the UK, I really felt that the time had come to get back into my normal workaday routine. What with the snow and Christmas it has been far too long since I last did any real study or preparation for my upcoming teaching commitments. So, bearing in mind the fact that I still have three sessions to take on Titus Andronicus, I spent the morning finishing Greg Doran and Antony Sher's account of the production they staged of that play, with the Market Theatre of Johannesburg, in 1995, Woza Shakespeare.

Once they'd got the play up and running there was the opportunity to go and watch other productions being staged or rehearsed in the Johannesburg district including Umabatha, the Zulu Macbeth. Sher writes:

I'm on the edge of my seat from the word go, when a tiny figure dashes from the back of the vast, open stage, kneeling at the front, muttering and shivering, and then sneezes. She is one of the witches and the sneeze is a ritual in Zulu witchcraft...Seeing the play done in this context, in a society with a real relationship to witchcraft - like Shakespeare's society - makes me realise why ninety-nine per cent of modern British Macbeth's fail.

And, reading what Sher has to say about this production made me realise why, when the publicity handouts came last week for next season's repertoire at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, my heart fell at the announcement of yet another Macbeth. In all my years of theatre going I have only once seen a production that completely stopped me in my tracks and I have seen several that have been so awful that the only remedy was to laugh.

The worst of these was perhaps twenty or twenty-five years ago and starred an actor so famous both on stage and in Hollywood that were I to name him I could guarantee that you would all know to whom I was referring. Given just how terrible his performance was I'm not going to do that. It would have been bad enough had it just been the lead who was so appalling, but it wasn't. If the entire cast had been replaced by a pack of Daleks they could not possibly have been more wooden and disjointed, in speech and movement both. And the props! Suffice it to say that when Macduff held up Macbeth head in the final scene the entire audience collapsed in gales of laughter. It was embarrassing.

The only Macbeth I've seen that really worked was the RSC's production with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench which was originally staged in the company's small theatre, The Other Place, when it was still housed in an old hut with a corrugated iron roof. (You tried to avoid performances when it was raining and those of us who knew the town well never went on a Tuesday when the local church had bell-ringing practice!). This production has been immortalised on DVD, so you may have seen it, but you had to experience it actually in the space for which it was devised to really appreciate the intensity of the original concept. The audience formed the outer ring of concentric circles, the actors were the middle ring and performing space was at the heart of the action. Played without an interval, the evil invoked grew in that inner arena and was trapped and intensified by the people around it. It was one of the most mesmerising theatrical experiences I've ever known.

Between those two extremes I must have seen at least a dozen other productions none of which have been particularly satisfactory and so I have to say that I'm not exactly leaping up and down with excitement at the thought of yet another foray into this most difficult of plays. I notice that the publicity handout doesn't say who is going to play Macbeth. I wonder, is this because of the company's policy of emphasising the ensemble nature of their work? Or is it, perhaps, that they haven't yet succeeded in persuading any actor that he wants to take the risk?


Annie

I'm Making a List.......

I've just been listening to Howard Jacobson, the winner of what is now last year's Booker, talking with a selected BBC audience about his earlier novel, The Mighty Waltzer. When The Finkler Question won the Booker award someone told me that as I'd never read anything by Jacobson, The Mighty Waltzer was probably a better place to start and hearing him discuss the more autobiographical aspects of the book this afternoon, I can see why they might have thought that to be the case. So, my first reaction was, as always, a quick trip to the local library website to see if they had a copy that I could add to a list of requests that is already long enough to keep me in reading matter for the rest of 2011. And that was when realised that if I'm going to read more selectively this year trips to the library website have got to start to be more discriminating. As a consequence, while I didn't make a Christmas list I have just made a January reading list that I hope will ensure that I don't get stuck reading only one genre and that my reading will not be dictated by the return dates stamped in library books.

There are some books that I have to read for groups to which I belong and the first two

Gifted ~ Nikita Lalwani
Felicia's Journey ~ William Trevor

come into that category. I shall also have to make an early start on

Daniel Deronda ~ George Eliot

to be ready for the meeting in February when I'm leading the discussion on it. Because I realise that I'd bitten off rather more than I could chew expecting myself to read

Middlemarch ~ George Eliot

as well I've swapped the print version for an audio recording and that will take care of the hour before bed each night quite nicely. In addition I've added a Virago, a Persephone, a children's novel, a detective and the latest book by one of my favourite current novelist so

The Weather in the Streets ~ Rosmond Lehmann
Saplings ~ Noel Streatfeild
Reckless ~ Cornelia Funke
Trick of the Dark ~ Val McDermid
and
The Death of King Arthur ~ Peter Ackroyd

complete my list. As I finish each one another can be added to replace it and again, I'll take stock at the end of the month and see how this has worked out. I may be asking myself to be far too organised but I am really ashamed of where my lazy reading habits have taken me over the past year and I'm determined to try and put things to rights.


Annie

To Resolve or not to Resolve

On the question of resolutions, the New Year variety or any other, I very often look back and find myself asking with Montaigne, "Is it not stupidity to let myself be fooled so many times by one guide?" Every year I catch myself making the same resolve I made the previous year with the same optimistic intent that this year I am going to do so much better. What makes me think I am going to succeed? I didn't listen to myself last time so why on earth do I think I'm going to fare any better this time round?

Such occasions haven't always fallen on the first of January. When I was teaching it would often be the last day of the school year, when I would look back over the many ways in which I felt I had fallen short and failed the children or students I had been teaching and determine that the following year would be the year when I would get it right. The fact that I came back and made that same resolution over and over again is evidence enough that I never did get it right and being realistic I was probably being more than optimistic thinking that I ever would. Teaching is one of those jobs where however much you put into it there is always more, and more than more, that you could do.

So, perhaps I should not be considering making any New Year's resolutions at all but just let the year unfold as it will? I don't think I could bear that. Imagine not hoping that you could make your life at least a little better in just one aspect. Surely, that has to be the perfect recipe for depression? If I was challenged then the one thing I know I would claim is that I want to use my time more productively in the coming year than I have done over the last twelve months, but as a resolution that is no use at all, far too woolly and with no hope of measuring any sort of success. What I need to do is find a way of turning that generalisation into meaningful specifics.

However, if I try and tie myself to too many objectives then I know that I'm doomed to failure; perfection is unlikely to be achieved in an afternoon. So what I've decided to try is creeping up on myself bit by bit, one resolution this month and if when I get to the end of January there seems to have been an improvement, then adding in another and just seeing how we go. As a starting point I'm going to try each day to read the same book for an hour without allowing myself to be distracted and without having the radio on. I ask you, how can I possibly hope to concentrate on what I'm reading when there is another voice battering away in my head? If I can get to the end of the month and find that I've managed to make that a habit then I'll think about where to go next. Maybe, just maybe, this might be the year when the guide turns out to have been worth listening to.

Annie

Festive Quizzes

Briefly, as today is one long, joyful round of visitors.

This morning my friend Judith arrived with a music Christmas quiz that she and her family had been trying to complete all holiday. They had been given anagrams of composers and compositions and they had to sort out the correct spellings and match the two groups up. Inevitably, there were those that everyone could do and those that defeated us all. We were left with Debussy and a word none of us could unscramble, even though we went through all the CDs we had of his works to try and find a clue. Grrrr! Much gnashing of teeth.

This reminded me, though, of a book quiz I was presented with at a library meeting some Christmases ago where we were given the initials of an author and the initials of the title of one of their books and had to identify both. I managed all the really tricky ones but came completely unstuck with the combination 'W.H.' by 'E.B'. For the life of me I couldn't think of anything Enid Blyton had ever written with a two word 'W.H.' title :)

Happy New Year.


Annie

Civilisation

I just missed out on Kenneth Clark's iconic series, Civilisation, when it was first shown in 1969. I was a student at the time and the digs I was in couldn't run to the expense of a television that could receive BBC 2. And, if I'm brutally honest, I don't remember being that concerned about the fact. I suspect that my mind was far too occupied with live theatre to be really concerned with what I probably then classified as 'dead' art.

So, it was a real joy this Christmas to find that one of the presents under the tree was a box set of the DVDs and over the last couple of days I've watched the first two episodes, the first discussing the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Norman Conquest and the second focusing on what he calls the sudden re-awakening of European civilisation in the 12th century, particularly the building of the great Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals.

However (you could hear that coming, I'm sure) while I certainly haven't been disappointed in the programmes I have been struck forcibly by the way in which they have dated both in respect of documentary techniques and in terms of the approach adopted towards the historical periods discussed. Compared with a twenty-first century documentary they are so slow. A programme made now would cover two or three times as much material and there would be far fewer of the long, lingering, panning shots, especially those of fields of rape flowers which seem to have no bearing on the contents at all. What I found even more unsettling was the way in which Lord Clark dismissed the period after the Roman Empire as one with little or no art worth discussing other than such well known examples as The Book of Kells. Definitely for him, The Dark Ages.

Our understanding of this period has changed enormously over the intervening period. Just yesterday, when I was in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, I was looking at pieces of beautiful jewellery taken from the Anglo-Saxon hoard found locally a couple of years ago. Almost entirely made of gold set with stunning garnets they are examples of exquisite workmanship and no one seeing those could possible claim today that they came from a time when beauty and art were not appreciated. It made me go on line to see if the television series that was made on The Dark Ages quite recently was available, but it doesn't seem to have been released, mores the pity.

I shall go on watching the Kenneth Clark programmes but with as much of an eye towards the ways in which they have become history themselves as to what I can learn about history from them.

Nativity Trail

At this time of year the plans of mice and men are probably best not laid at all. Last week everything came unstuck because of the weather and this week the cause of the disruption is an outbreak of flu which is apparently gathering momentum apace and threatening to reach epidemic proportions. One of the casualties is my friend Margaret, with whom I should have been spending today, and so I filled the space in the diary by going into Birmingham to see the Nativity Trail organised by the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

Just before Christmas a friend and ex-colleague came to the University to give a lecture on the nativity as painted by Jan de Beer. In one sense this was another example of the best laid plans because the painting, which is part of the Barber Collection, has been away for conservation and the lecture was intended to celebrate its return to the gallery. However, the work needed proved to be more extensive than had first been thought and so Martin had to speak to slides rather than the original. One of the points that he made was that nativity paintings can normally be pinned down to one gospel version or another. Extremely obvious when you think about it - I'd simply never thought about it. Interestingly, the de Beer is a St John nativity. And yes, there is no account of the nativity in St John, but what Martin was picking up on was the centrality in this painting of the light sources and the recurring idea in John's gospel of Jesus as the light of the world.

Walking around the Birmingham exhibition this afternoon it was clear that his thesis was correct. Even though I am no biblical scholar I could place each of the works in respect of the version of the nativity story it was exploring. What was perhaps more fascinating was the way in which the paintings also reflected the times in which they had been created. The Burne-Jones kings could have walked straight out of one of his Arthurian tapestries and the shepherds in the stained glass window created as a memorial to the fallen of the First World War were clearly men who had known the horror of the trenches.

Perhaps the painting I liked the most was Gentileschi's account of The Rest in the Flight into Egypt. Not the topic you think of most immediately when looking for nativity subjects, perhaps, but still very definitely part of the story. What I love about this, apart of course from the donkey, is the very human face he has given to Mary. I'm not sure how well it's going to reproduce here, but there is nothing saintly or ethereal about this young woman. She is tired and frightened, but still determined to look after the child. I will give Joseph the benefit of the doubt and assume that he has been walking while Mary has been on the donkey. Otherwise I might have 'thoughts' about his lack of concern for his family. He looks as though he might never get up again. Some of the reproductions I've seen have no donkey and looking at the Birmingham version it does appear as if he was a bit of an after thought. Perhaps Gentileschi discovered that the could paint donkeys' heads but not their bodies and so blanked out his efforts with a slab of rock. Now that really would be human.


Annie

Fog

The twelve inches of snow that has covered the English Midlands for the past ten days has melted overnight and as a result we are now enveloped in a blanket of dense fog.  Admittedly, UK fog, in this age of smokeless fuels, is nothing like the fogs of my youth, when cities could be smothered in dirty, lung-chocking smog for days on end.  Nevertheless, having cursed the snow vociferously for over a week, I would now give a great deal to have it back and to be rid of the grey nightmare that clings to my clothes and my hair as soon as I step out of my door.

However, if there is an upside to this unwelcome weather, it is that it immediately brings to mind my favourite passage from Dickens, that wonderful second paragraph from one of his greatest novels, Bleak House.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

As a linguist I know that this is a masterful piece of writing, its form and substance working together to draw his audience into not only the subject of his novel but also the emotional heart of what he was concerned with.  Did you realise, for example, that the syntax of this passage is such that there is not a single completed sentence?  Oh there are fullstops all right.  But, there is not a single finite verb.  Every clause is subordinate, waiting on something else for its completion, just like the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce.  Like the fog it describes and the justice it represents, the paragraph lacks a sense of limit and boundary.

But, I didn't first come to this passage as a linguist, nor was it analysis that made me love it as I do.  No, it was simply as a reader that I reacted to the beauty of the words and the exactitude with which Dickens has caught that cold and chill and damp that I still experience on a day like today and stored this paragraph away in my memory to make the fogs of the twenty-first century just that bit more bearable.