Category Archives: Non-fiction

A good long play

I was lucky enough to get a free ticket to see a dress rehearsal of Sam Mendes’s Richard III previewing at the Old Vic last weekend, as I’ve been doing a small project with their new writing programme. I was looking forward to it, though there were rumours going round that they were performing pretty much the full text. Let’s just establish that this is not something that one should approach lightly. It is Shakespeare’s second longest play (behind Hamlet), and what’s more, a lot of the text is taken up with useful but not utterly gripping details: who has got their troops over near Wales; who has formed an alliance with who; all of the complicated blood lines that connect the royal characters, etc.

When I got to the theatre, I was told that the play would run for three and a half hours. The situation was as grave as I had expected, and the fifteen minute interval would allow only enough time to beat my way through the crowd for a quick gulp of fresh air before fighting my way back to my seat. I heard others talking about the length with some trepidation, and one, glancing longingly down at their smartphone, mentioned leaving in the interval.

But we were wrong to moan, for two reasons. Firstly, it is a wonderful play and a wonderful production. When the lights went down and Kevin Spacey limped on stage, some audience members may have been tempted to shout out, ‘Keyser Söze!’ But Spacey is a brilliant theatre actor, with a limitless ability to make you sit up and pay attention—and that was what we did. He was the perfect Richard, charming, funny and cynical, his camaraderie with the audience only making his ruthlessness more chilling, because you found yourself willing him on. In fact, the whole cast were brilliant, on top of which, the set provided elegant, simple solutions to the text. The sound design was a little heavy-handed, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe in Gemma Jones’s old-bag-lady Margaret, cursing with bones and sand—I think words are probably enough—but it was a really engaging piece of entertainment.

Which brings me to the second reason it is wrong to worry about the length of the play. It’s this: there is actually nothing wrong with a long play. The idea that we as an audience might get bored after one hour of theatre has somehow taken hold, presumably on the basis that the internet is making us inattentive and computer games are making us egocentric and fast food is making us dizzy. This is not true. If I needed any proof of the general public’s ability to maintain interest, I might point out that most of my friends have watched whole DVD box sets in one sitting, and some are even prepared to sit through all 681 excruciating minutes of the Lord of the Rings films.

The worst thing is when a theatre company decides that Shakespeare didn’t know what he was doing and cuts random chunks out of a text. Richard III or Hamlet are not easy plays to stage, but it is the dramatist’s responsibility to find ways of making them engaging. It shouldn’t be a question of how much time you are taking out of a person’s day, but instead whether it feels worth it. If it is long, so what? The whole point of theatre is that it takes you out of the world for a little while.

Unless you’re planning on restaging Peter Brook’s nine-hour Mahabharata, then, the paradigm should not be whether you can chop a play down to suit a bored audience, but whether you might entertain them sufficiently that they want to come back after the interval to find out what happens. Theatre can be a vital, spontaneous kind of art, and patronising it by assuming that your audience must have come by mistake and must be held without interval, or that they might not understand some scenes in a Shakespeare play, doesn’t serve anyone’s best interests. The brave thing to do is what Sam Mendes has done, making concessions to clarity where necessary, but giving his audience the gift of the whole play in its rich, cruel splendour.

Italian film festival: mopeds, Mary and masculinity

Cinnecittà Luce and the Italian Cultural Institute teamed up this month to put on the Italian Film Festival, with screenings at the Ciné Lumière in South Kensington, as well as chances to hear music and, of course, sample Italian cooking. For many of the films in the selection, it’s the only screening they will have in the UK, and it’s a great shame because some are really worth watching. Be warned, though: Italians are prone to cripplingly narrow definitions of their culture. Over the last four days, I have watched characters primarily smoking, pondering religious art, watching football, drinking coffee, and snorting cocaine off mopeds (disturbingly, that last one cropped up twice).

One of the hits of the festival was Et in Terra Pax, named after the Vivaldi piece used in the title sequence. The film, which was an official selection in the Tokyo Film Festival, follows three converging plots set around the Corviale or ‘Snake,’ a kilometre-long housing complex on the outskirts of Rome. Marco, who has recently been released from prison, sits on the same bench every day, watching the world go by and occasionally dealing coke to make ends meet. Sonia is beautiful, works hard, studies hard, and is so generally all-round lovely that you just know something terrible is going to happen to her. Faustino, Federico and ‘Niger’ (yes, Nigger) are young wasters who spend their time doing drugs and getting into trouble out of boredom.

Although the film’s two young directors, Matteo Botrugno and Daniele Coluccini, play around a little too much with depth of field, and do a lot of wobbly camera work to fit in with the zeitgeist, the story is carefully and sensitively told, and the characters are so well-drawn that, in the Q&A afterwards, someone had to check whether the actors hadn’t been plucked from the Corviale itself. Et in Terra Pax did everything that Italian neorealism does so well, not by borrowing its authenticity from the actors, but by working hard with professionals and building the story up through careful artifice. In one particularly affecting scene, Marco tells Sonia the stories of the people that he watches each day: the industrious Moroccan labourers; the old man on his balcony; the gypsies rifling through bins for copper scraps. It’s a world where those who work hardest see the least return, and where the community’s sense of rough justice doesn’t quite make up for the wider failings of the state.

Lost Kisses tries a completely different tack, and comes up short. Set in southern Italy, it follows the life of Manuela, a sullen thirteen-year-old girl who dreams of being a hairdresser and is generally ignored by her family. So ignored, in fact, that she decides to pretend that she is receiving messages from a statue of the Virgin Mary that has been unveiled in the square outside their house. There are lots of self-conscious camera effects including, of course, wobbly camera work, and the film veers between farce and urban realism without ever quite nailing either. Manuela’s central quest for substance over ‘bullshit’ seems to contradict the direction, which is simultaneously trying to convince you that surface effects are brilliant.

Lost Kisses could have learnt a lot from The Passion, a warm-hearted farce that had the audience laughing throughout. Its slightly silly conceit of a film director who is blackmailed into directing the village passion-play is executed admirably, with a show-stealing performance from Giuseppe Battiston as Ramiro, the serial-burgling Assistant Director who ends up playing Jesus. Toni Servillo also made the best of his title role in Gorbaciof, playing a man who steals from the coffers of the prison where he works in order to fund a gambling habit. The film, however, came off a little limp, with a love interest who uttered no more than one line in total, and a plot that felt like a boring version of Mesrine.

Almost as fascinating as the selection itself was the frequency with which certain themes cropped up. Bubbling under the surface of all these films was a nagging sense that communities are not as closely knit as they once were, and that the average family is finding it hard to make ends meet. Masculinity is still sacrosanct, and anyone who questions it is forcibly put in their place. Perhaps most interestingly of all, Italian film-makers seem just as preoccupied with the relationship between authenticity and artifice as they were sixty years ago.

The festival will continue with a programme of ‘Cinema and Food’ at the Italian Cultural Institute.

What Radiohead can teach the book industry

If you own a TV, radio, computer or phone, there is a high chance you will have come across The King of Limbs, the new album by those unlikely digital marketing experts, Radiohead. You may even have listened to it. I had a quick listen—it’s not bad, though I prefer In Rainbows.

Giving the print press four days’ notice, to minimise piracy, they started selling the £6 digital version on Saturday. Their legions of die-hard fans, however, will no doubt want the £30 package, which will include two vinyl, a CD and, according to Radiohead’s website, ’625 tiny pieces of artwork.’ This two-tier approach follows their previous effort with In Rainbows, where they let people pay whatever they thought was fair for the digital files, whilst also releasing a £40 premium edition. The band generated considerable press attention with this scheme, but also a market research model that record labels and marketing companies would have killed for.

Meanwhile, digital pricing in the book industry is as random as it was for music ten years ago. The former has never enjoyed the margins of the film or music industries: people are worrying on the one hand about making good sales, and on the other about driving down the perceived value of books. Agency pricing, where publishers rather than retailers dictate prices, has led to accusations that some are trying to resurrect the standardised pricing of books, and has even roused the interest of the Office of Fair Trading. Now, with people wielding Kindles on the tube, we’re starting to see a massive uptake of digital reading. A consensus is beginning to form that books are to have their equivalent of the ‘iPod revolution.’

The difference, of course, is that the book industry can thank music and films for having made all the mistakes first. The success of iTunes and subscription services like emusic.com has proven that people are willing to pay for content. Moreover, there has been a fundamental reassessment of the relationship between digital and physical formats. If something as complicated and inconvenient as Blockbuster could be made to work, convincing people to download a film simply and cheaply at home was never a hard sell. In physical formats, the box set has overtaken the stand-alone DVD as the accepted package.

However, Radiohead still stand out as the group who are redefining the divide. They have become an exception, operating without the backing of a big label, and publishing too will have its exceptions in the digital age. The Fleming estate recently announced it was to release its own James Bond ebooks, for instance. But people have taken well to Radiohead’s last two online initiatives not just because of their fan-base, but because they presented a strong consumer proposition: you can get the easy, cheap version or the presentable, high-quality premium edition.

Ultimately, there are two ways that people want to interact with books, film and music. Either they want quick, one-time-only access, or they want to own it and return to it again and again. Half the pleasure of buying a nice hardback is just seeing it sitting there, edifying my bookshelf. This distinction isn’t new, either. The paperback format became popular when Allen Lane started producing cheap, mass-market editions in the 1930s. Hardbacks, meanwhile, continued to exist. Before paperbacks there were pamphlets, catering for the same market, who wanted to digest the latest ideas and stay current.

The production value of the hardback has already started to go up, as publishers realise that the physical book can be a desirable luxury object. Fourth Estate released some beautiful limited edition hardbacks for its 25th anniversary, and Penguin’s Designer Classics series sold out almost immediately. Ebooks aren’t going to jeopardise this market; they will become the new airport paperback. You never really own an airport paperback, so much as use it, and nobody will ever own an ebook, because they’re only ever licensed to a user. If any format is going to lose out it’s the trade paperback, and it’ll be no great loss. But rather than do what the music industry did and wait for an omen, why not do what Radiohead did and ask: do you just want to consume it, or do you want to really own it?