I am an inveterate scribbler and incurably disorganised. I am frequently struck quite suddenly by a Brilliant Idea which I will immediately scratch down on a handy piece of paper – usually the first page my notebook flips open on, sometimes the back of a letter or the margin of a newspaper. One consequence of this happenstantial habit of notekeeping is that the same Brilliant Idea will quite often show up several times in one notebook – recorded, forgotten, recurring as if new, recorded, forgotten again, and so on into the future along with all those other Brilliant Ideas of mine that never get executed. (NB previous Brilliant Ideas have included “a poem about jam” and “Fight Club for girls”, so Brilliant is possibly a misleading term here.) Continue reading
Sarah Ditum
Freelance writer and journalist
Posted in July 2008 …
Devising
About a year ago, I started test knitting something for someone who, being abnormally talented and busy, was never able to send me the rest of the pattern after the lower back. And so the little black cardigan was stuffed into a canvas bag to sit in the wardrobe, awaiting instructions – where it could have happily stayed, except I have this new job to start in four weeks’ time, and a little black cardigan would be exactly the thing to get me office-worthy (well, nearly).
So I got resourceful with tape-measure, pencil, and paper (also, a calculator: the atrophy of my maths skills is one of my rewards for throwing away the last decade of my life on humanities) and worked out my own pattern for the top half and the arms. Continue reading
Theatre Review: Portrait Of A Lady
Originally published in Venue, issue 826. I like this review, but it feels a bit over-stuffed – somewhere in the second paragraph I bring about a clause pile-up which causes almost total congestion of meaning.
Peter Hall Company: The Portrait Of A Lady
Isabel Archer, the heroine of the Henry James novel adapted here, is a creature of consummate charm and composure, and this production in the Peter Hall Company’s season at the Theatre Royal Bath matches the eponymous lady note for note. Condensing the triple-decker novel into a two-hour play, Nick Frei’s deft script and Hall’s confident direction keep the exposition from overwhelming the story: subtly inventive stagecraft masterfully replicates the Europe-roaming, history-delving, backwards structure of the book, with neat intertitles to establish time and place, and video backdrops to bring them to life.
Within this set-up, the actors supply universally splendid performances – Catherine McCormack is particularly exquisite in the lead role, as the beautiful, independent Isabel, who moves within the genteel milieu of American ex-pats living in 1870s Italy and Britain. There is an abundance of glamour in the gorgeous costumes and settings, but the airless quality of life among exiles is ever-present. Finbar Lynch puts in a compellingly sinister turn which goes a good way to explaining how our ingénue heroine could fall for the fundamentally petty Gilbert Osmond, and Anthony Howell’s Ralph Touchett is a charismatic vessel for the cynical commentary of the outsider-ish invalid.
The play builds its themes of freedom and attachment with a slow surety of moral purpose, swelling beneath the sparkle and wit of the elegant dialogue. When the rending climax comes, it is all the more moving for the discretion with which it is played. Truly literary, truly theatrical, Portrait touches perfection. *****
THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY, THEATRE ROYAL BATH, THURS 3 JULY TO SAT 9 AUGUST
Messy Tuesday
I wasn’t sure about starting on the messes, on the grounds that I am a catastrophically messy person. I’m afraid that my mess might make everyone else feel unduly decorous. This is where I work:
I share the computer with my husband, so it’s liberally scattered with his film mags and review copies of DVDs. It’s also currently home to Pritt stick and sugar paper left out after craft activities with the kids, a football card, a stray plaster, and one terry-towelling baby wipe. The Righetti and the OED are evidence of an evening spent agonising over the construction of the set-in sleeve and, also, whether twinset is compound or hyphenated.
When I get up from my desk, I will have to clean the pots, which will mean facing this:
I think the washing-up liquid is a nice touch, suggesting the intention get the place cleaned up at some point. Betraying the feebleness of my intentions: bags of change which have been waiting to go to the bank for nearly a year, and a bean that I forgot to plant out and has now twined along the kitchen blinds and borne fruit. Notice also the the Saturday night/Sunday morning one-two of the empties and the painting materials. I like it: it gives my kitchen sink a “kitchen sink” look.
Paperhouse At The Picturehouse: Wall-e
(If you want to see the film unspoiled, I suggest you hold out on reading this until after you’ve been to the cinema.)
Pixar always open their films with a new short. There’s something delicious about the extra layer of anticipation: after the months of expectancy, the hours of wondering how they are going to top the gleam of Cars or the organic textures of Ratatouille, you sit down in your seat ready to to be dazzled by the new world of Wall-e – but first, there’s the funny physics-bending of Presto to get through. Presto is typical of Pixar’s confidence: they can create worlds with any rules they imagine, so they do. And the premise on which Presto builds its cartoon-violence comedy is the brilliantly disarming trick of a physical
universe which doesn’t match the visual one. If you’ve played Silent Hill 2 or Portal, then you’ll know the idea – but even if you recognise what’s going on, your dazzled brain will be delighted.
And then, after they’ve amused and astonished you, Wall-e begins, and is immediately like everything you know and nothing you’ve ever seen. Continue reading
Like A Fox
Kid Acne, South Yorks rapper and wall-dauber extraordinaire, has added another example of knitted splendour to his collection of designs:
(Photos from his website: click through to see the development from warrior-woman illustration to knitting pattern to garment.)
What I love about this – apart from the texture of the foxfur pattern, and the dead-x eyes and little fangs, and the extravagantly full tail – is the way it turns the odd, archaic idea of the stuffed fox round the neck into something sharp and sinister. There’s no way of telling if an intarsia fox is a taxidermied curiosity or fresh kill: wearing it would put you in a sexy nowhere between gin-soaked old lady and fearsome huntress.
There are three techniques in this garment that would give me pause: intarsia (never done it), stranded colourwork (never done it successfully, fear it flat), and the t-shape construction without shoulder shaping or separate arms. And all that considered, I want this jumper so much I’m prepared to master all qualms about method and form, because I just do love it.
Pin Up
From Wazz – my piece of the great button extravaganza. Clara Bow in a bucket hat:
Glamour, tragedy, headgear… it’s everything I could want for my lapel.
(I should have posted this ages ago, but it was lost in the paper stack on my desk. Something for a Messy Tuesday, perhaps.)
Philosophy Of Fashion
I’m taking this columnist‘s caution, and only accepting fashion tips from Aristotle this season. He says the twinset-and-pearls look will be huge. Don’t listen to Plato – dude will dress you like a hobag. (Via I Blame The Patriarchy.)
Theatre Review: Trade It?
Originally published in Venue, issue 824. Since I wrote this, Show of Strength have received word of a recommendation to Bristol City Council to cut completely the funding they receive. SOS are urging people to show their support for the company by writing to the council (postal and email addresses on the SOS page).
Show of Strength: Trade It?
Show of Strength’s newest piece turns the back alleys and open spaces of Bristol into impromptu stages for a series of ten ten-minute vignettes on the Fair Trade City. Bristol became great through the brutal iniquities of slavery, but the port which once made its money from the buying and selling of people has now become just the place to pick up some ethically produced groceries and organic textiles. Some pieces (the haunted monologue of “Noah”) reinvest the city with the horrors of its past; others (the thrillingly demented “Bag And Baggage”, with Nadia Williams) confront the idea that post-emancipation, slavery has only been displaced to other victims on other continents under the guise of market forces. It’s uncomfortable viewing at times, and not just because the first hour is spent walking the city (alternatively, the Saturday matinee is presented entirely at Temple Church Gardens), but with a satisfyingly rude wit and charismatic performances, Trade It? moves nimbly around subjects which too often invite worthiness.
Having only a short time to establish each character, and a complicated set of issues to hang on them, Trade It? runs close to cliché a few times (one piece, “Original Skins”, loads up the telling details a little too high and sacrifices theatre to theory). However, a sharp sense of drama and a keen eye for the ironies of exploitation ensures that the show almost never stumbles into predictability. Covering a riot of genres – absurdist allegory, kitchen sink drama, huckster sideshow (with expert tumbler) – Trade It? keeps the audience on their feet throughout. But disparate as the pieces may seem, there are powerful associations at work between them. “Big-Mouth Strikes Again” threatens to be a straw-man portrait of a white racist, but Dan Winter’s performance takes a swerve from antagonism into pathos, and the segment becomes even more interesting when “Calling A Spade A Spade” dissects the etymology of racial insults and empties them of meaning.
Under the direction of Robin Belfield, the actors combine naturalism (early on, there are moments of exciting hesitation as the audience gauges whether the latest person to wander along is an actor, or just an unfortunate pedestrian passing through) with the vigour it takes to fill an open space. And throughout, viewers are called on to participate: chanting to summon a zombie, calling out the punchlines to politically dubious jokes, playing the guests at a tense inter-racial wedding – it’s impossible to be a passive spectator. So when the evening concludes with a painfully funny skit on the ethics of global trade, the audience is already a part of the action, and ready to take home the play’s fair-trade moral along with the fair-trade goodie bag. ****
Trade It? Bristol City Centre (starts at Horse and Rider statue, Lewins Mead; finishes temple church gardens), Tues 24 June-Sun 6 July.
Theatre Review: Crown Matrimonial
Unpublished sample piece for Venue.
Crown Matrimonial, Theatre Royal Bath.
With its opulent decoration, static presentation, and painfully deferential attitude, Crown Matrimonial has all the theatrical power of an evening spent staring at a commemorative plate. Midway through the second act, six weeks into the 1936 abdication crisis dramatised in the play, during yet another clipped discussion of love-versus-duty, Patricia Routledge as Queen Mary cries, “Will it never end?”. Audiences might feel a rare stab of sympathy with her as the play shuffles circuitously to its well-known conclusion.
It’s not the cast’s fault – Routledge hits the note of restrained matriarchal power throughout, and receives perky support from sundry royals and household characters. But despite portraying the queen as a woman with love for her children as well as devotion to the monarchy, there is no suggestion that she feels anything as interesting as anguish or even mild conflict when her maternal feelings clash with her regal ones. Positions are entrenched from the outset, and two hours of bickering on a sofa does nothing to make the royal family seem important or endearing.
Repeated allusions to European politics don’t help. As a continent prepares to brutalise itself, the only disgusting thing about Wallis Simpson is that the cabinet spent any time discussing her when they could have been worrying about Hitler. Ultimately, the play’s true villain is modern Britain. “One must move with the times”, remarks Edward, to which a lady-in-waiting ripostes, “Only of they are moving in the right direction.” Mired in tedious conservatism, Crown Matrimonial goes nowhere at all. *
CROWN MATRIMONIAL, THEATRE ROYAL BATH, MON 16 JUN-SAT 21 JUN.
