Subversive Faustian stuff

It’s four and a half years since The Other Half and I started going to the Royal Opera House fairly regularly. We’d been to the English National Opera on a handful of occasions – triggered by being able to get into Terry Gillian’s Damnation of Faust – but nursed a view that we’d ideally like to see operas in their original languages.

Since we started doing just that, one of the things I’ve learned is that it wasn’t just Wagner and Verdi who wrote long operas.

And one of the conundrums I’ve faced is how I can love opera so much when so many of the characters – not least from 19th and early 20th century works – are so unsympathetic.

Last Thursday was a perfect illustration of both points: to start the Easter weekend, we’d got tickets for Gounod’s Faust – a work that neither of us was familiar with, although both of us know the general Faust legend.

Obviously Goethe didn’t have a monopoly on telling the story and indeed, Gounod’s version takes only that which would suit a sentimental French audience, according to Rupert Christiansen in the Faber Pocket Guide to Opera.

Faust is an elderly scholar realising that his dedication to the job has cost him happiness and love (and coded within that, lust). He’s full of regret. Méphistophélès appears and offers him a second chance – if he’ll subsequently serve Méphistophélès in hell. Faust agrees.

Faust sees Marguerite, whose brother, Valentin, has just left for war. He falls in love/lust and is helped to win the virginal naif by Méphistophélès.

Then, after Faust has seemingly abandoned his pregnant love, Valentin arrives home home from war, wanting only to tell everyone about it. He learns what’s happened to Marguerite and challenges her lover. Faust, with help from Méphistophélès, kills him. As Valentin dies, he curses … Marguerite.

The pregnant Marguerite – gone bonkers in her abandonment – gives birth, kills the child and awaits the guillotine. Méphistophélès teases Faust, but then helps him enter her cell, with the possibility of aiding her escape. Marguerite remembers her love for him and decides not to flee. Faust sees her soul ascend to heaven. He, meanwhile, is abandoned by Méphistophélès.

Point one – it’s overlong. The third act in particular is self-indulgent – which is not to say that the music is bad, because it isn’t. It’s just too long. We reach a point where Gounod is simply repeating himself: albeit tunefully.

Point two – Marguerite has little real depth as a character, but in terms of our sympathy, she’s a victim of a patriarchal situation that says how she must behave. Interestingly, her neighbour Marthe is an older woman and a widow, and seems to be able to be as sexual as she likes without anyone going dotty, which suggests that sexual mores are not fixed simply in that society.

Clearly, Marguerite is the victim here and we sympathise with her – as much as her rather one-dimensional character allows.

Next up – Valentin. Well, what an arse. Comes home from war, full of himself, and then blames his sister because she took a lover and he cannot control his jealousy.

Okay: I do actually know that this was penned in the late 19th century, but he’s still a tit. He probably killed people, yet he’s offended that his sister has had a lover and got knocked up. And when his own impetuous stupidity leads to his death, he blames her!

So: not a shred of sympathy there.

For Faust, I can have a modicum of sympathy. In Death in Venice, Thomas Mann rather more adroitly explores the idea of a life spent in dedicated work and the regret it creates, but without creating victims. Here, while one can sympathise with that aspect of Faust’s situation, one cannot sympathise with is his subsequent decision to abandon Marguerite.

Which brings us to Méphistophélès.

Frankly, I’m in love (lust) with Méphistophélès. No crap ‘morals’. No hypocrisy. Since my own faith fled – late, unexpectedly and without any real challenge, I have found myself considering the idiocy of putting the issue of who and how you shag (assuming consenting adults) over whether you lie, con, cheat etc.

I know which I consider to be what morality is about.

I would also suggest that, if god really does exist, then the devil – Méphistophélès – is going to have the best parties and the best discussions.

The ROH has assembled a magnificent cast for the fifth reveal of David McVicar’s production, which is set on the even of the Franco-Prussian War.

Michael Fabiano is a wonderful Faust, while Irina Lungo wrings as much from Marguerite as I suspect is possible. Stéphane Degout is as good as Valentin can be and Carole Wilson deserves praise for her earthy Marthe.

But what made my evening was Erwin Schrott’s Méphistophélès. A deliciously naughty, witty, sexy performance – not least in the penultimate act, when McVicar has Méphistophélès appear as a queen; in full drag.

Even in 2019, it is a fabulously subversive moment that sums up why, given the choice, I’d opt for Méphistophélès every time. And Schrott is not only a superb bass-baritone, but also a wonderful actor, who makes his role every bit as dangerous and as enticing as Tim Curry in The Rocky Horror Show.

And that, my friends, is why this is such fantastic stuff.

Us is a creepfest to exercise the mind

There are movies you see that you can assess quickly and easily: a dose of pure entertainment – great, good, bad or indifferent, but presenting no major demands on the mind.

And then there are films that stay with you, nagging away at the grey matter and demanding you try to get your head around them.

Us is very definitely in the latter category.

Written and directed by Jordon Peele, whose solo directed debut, Get Out, was a 2017 critical success, on one level this is a straightforward take on the home invasion genre.

We open in 1986, when young Adelaide Thomas is on vacation with her parents in Santa Cruz. At the beach, she wanders off and finds herself in a hall of mirrors, where an encounter with a doppelganger leaves the child with a serious case of traumatic stress.

Fast forward to the present day, where the adult Adelaide (now Wilson) is on her way to Santa Cruz with her own family – husband Gabe, daughter Zora and son Jason. She is nervous about the trip, but Gabe brushes off her worries, having bought a small boat as he tries to play keeping-up-with-the-Joneses with their far wealthier friends, Kitty and Josh Tyler.

It doesn’t take long before her fears are realised, as the family is attacked by a red-clad, scissor-wielding family of doppelgangers.

For Adelaide, there’s Red; Gabe’s mirror is Abraham; for Zora it’s Umbrae and for Jason, Pluto.

Freed from years of imprisonment below the ground, these shadow people all want Adelaide and family dead: slowly.

But is this just about Adelaide and her family – or is it wider?

Us is violent, funny in places and manages a pretty high level of tension and twists.

But it also leaves loads of questions – many prompted by the constant reminders of a Bible text, first seen on a handwritten placard in the 1986 segment.

Warning of the impending destruction of Jerusalem for the worship of false idols, Jeremiah 11:11 declares: “Therefore this is what the Lord says: ‘I will bring on them a disaster they cannot escape. Although they cry out to me, I will not listen to them’.” (New International Version).

What could be the false idols here? Hints at the ‘worship’ of technology and social media? Gabe’s attempts to compete materially with the Tylers?

The film could be ‘about’ succeeding – and then pulling the ladder up behind you. It could be about the huge chasms that exist in US society (and elsewhere). It could be about humans being their own worst enemies – and being disturbed and conflicted by modern life.

Peele’s writing and direction are intelligent and clever and this ebb and flow of (possible) subtexts makes it so satisfying. The score, by Michael Abels, is a really intriguing mix (and very effective in helping create the mood).

As to the cast, it’s excellent. Lupita Nyong’o is superb as Adelaide/Red and she seriously owns the piece.

But she gets fantastic support from Winston Duke as Gabe/Abraham, while the two youngsters – Shjahadi Wright Joseph as Zora/Umbrae and Evan Alex as Jason/Pluto – do remarkably well.

Elizabeth Moss as Kitty/Dahlia and Tim Heidecker as Josh/Tex also add clout to the whole.

It’s a bit weird watching a horror flick with an audience that produces a lot of laughs (nervous, shocked ones, presumably), but Us is a very successful creepfest that goes way beyond the much of the genre and will live long in the mind and is the sort of film that you can well imagine wanting to watch again.

A hell of a superhero romp

Boy, oh boy – the new Hellboy film has taken a critical panning. Before even reaching its first weekend, review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes had pelted it with an approval rating of just 12%, based on 97 reviews.

Surely it can’t be that bad?

Well, sure enough, it isn’t.

Let’s be clear – it isn’t Guillermo del Toro and isn’t Ron Perlman. The 2004 and 2008 films that the director and actor collaborated on are huge fun and the latter turned in a pair of iconic performances. I can’t stop smiling at the scene in the second film where lovelorn Hellboy and Abe Sapien drunkenly sing along to Barry Manilow.

But let’s also be clear – in a lot of ways, this screen reboot is actually closer to the look and feel of Mike Mignola’s original Hellboy comics – and I have loved those for years.

Here, we get the requisite origin reminder: demon baby Hellboy, summoned up by Rasputin for the Nazis in a last-ditch effort to win the war (and filmed by Leni Riefenstahl), but saved and adopted by Professor Trevor Bruttenholm, founder of The Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, a joint UK-US body.

The key plot here centres on an ancient sorceress, Nimue, The Blood Queen (Lady of the Lake), defeated centuries earlier by King Arthur, but now back with a vengeance and planning to wipe out humanity so that ‘monsters’ can live un-threatened in a new Eden.

No spoilers from me on the plot. But it is entirely in keeping with Mignola’s originals, which weave the modern with folklore and fairytale. Indeed, the comics were where I first learned of Baba Yaga (who crops up here too, in a seriously creepy piece of CGI work).

It’s violent – as are the comics – and indeed, the fight scenes capture the gravity-defying sense of action (and incredible composition) in Mignola’s original drawings (see left).

I’ve seen the film described as a bit all over the place, but I can’t see that. Perhaps not as tight as it could be, but it didn’t lag for me.

David Harbour as the eponymous hero seems to be feeling his way into the character: some early method mumbling doesn’t help, but by the second half of the film, when he’s getting sterling support from Sasha Lane as Alice Monaghan, a young woman with supernatural abilities, and Daniel Dae Kin as BPRD veteran Ben Daimio, he seems much more comfortable.

There’s sardonic humour, badass monsters and fight scenes aplenty, and a straight-up Mignola mash-up of folklore and mythology.

Ian McShane adds to all this as Bruttenholm, Hellboy’s daddy, while Milla Jovovich provides scary, sexy class as Nimue. 

It’s not perfect, but it’s also light years away from Marvel ands light years better than most of what DC has done in recent years. For me, as a long-time Hellboy fan, Neil Marshall’s film is a rollicking romp in the Hellboy universe and I hope we’ll see more.

After all – they can’t leave things just as the new team discovers Abe Sapien!

Creating still life – art in process

I live in a very small flat – with one Other Half and three cats – and this really is the main space that I have in which to create art. It’s essentially why I aim to produce original, small art for small homes – I know what living in a small space actually means!

And that’s also why my process for still life paintings is to photograph the subjects – and then paint from the screen you see here: I simply don’t have the room to set up a still life and then paint from ‘life’.

The roll of felt is used as my background because it absorbs the light rather than reflecting it back, as black card does, for instance, and I like painting modern subjects in a way that nods toward a more classical look. I love Rembrandt’s dramatic use of light and dark for a reason.

I do, however, have a plastic crate in which I keep basics with which I can create still life works. After seeing Matisse in the Studio at the Royal Academy last year, I realised that I was doing what he had done, collecting bits and pieces and then using them in photos, paintings or drawings.

For that reason, I call it my Matisse Box, because it echoes how one of my personal household gods carried ceramics and fabrics and more around with him to set dress paintings. Indeed, it inspired me to put these odds and ends together and to collect more.

This is a time-lapse of creating a still life for a painting.

The resulting painting hasn’t been done yet, but when it has been, it – together with others – will be available to buy at www.etsy.com/uk/shop/SmARTartByAmanda.

Anyone dissing The Grinch can do one

Apparently, Rolling Stone doesn’t rate Illumination’s new animation of The Grinch. Wow. The Grinch isn’t rock ’n’ roll enough for Rolling Stone.

That should be a recommendation.

It’s a children’s story. It’s a film for small people. The OH and I went because we – okay, I in particular – love Illumination. I spent some periods of the film simply revelling in that studio’s style of animation. envious of the digital vision.

It’s Scrooge for children, so no spoilers are needed. And its anti-consumerist message – true to Dr Seuss’s 1950s original book – should be welcomed by anyone with a brain.

It dodges sentimentality, but Scott Mosier and Yarrow Cheney’s film has plenty of heart and more than a few laughs.

Beautifully animated, it also makes great use of music (including original work by Danny Elfman) and has an excellent voice cast, topped by Benedict Cumberbatch as the Grinch himself, with Pharrell Williams as the narrator and Her Magnificence Angela Lansbury as the mayor.

Oh. And it is preceded by a new Minions short.

I’m happy. If you’re not happy with that, then tough.

The Grinch is now on general release.

A rhapsody about the ultimate queen

Queen were a revolutionary band. This is not really a matter for dispute. And if you don’t believe it, I suggest you listen to A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races.

However, the launch of Bohemian Rhapsody, the new film that’s essentially a biopic of the band’s iconic lead singer, Freddie Mercury, has quickly been accused of not itself being revolutionary enough.

There’s a badly flawed logic here: the band were revolutionary, yes … but why should any film about that band *have* to be a revolutionary piece of cinema itself? Seriously – why?

Why not just let the revolutionary band’s revolutionary music tell the story?

And this, in essence, is primarily what happens. The late stages of the film recreate pretty much Queen’s entire Live Aid set, which finally got the phones buzzing for that charity fundraiser and on screen, is one of the most adrenalin-pumping things you will witness in a cinema this year.

What you don’t get is dwarves wandering around Freddie’s parties with silver trays on their heads, heaped with cocaine.

What you do get is hints of this, plus fetish clubs and much more.

But hey, this is not a hagiography – and thank goodness for that.

What we have is a really entertaining film that also manages to show some of the problems that Freddie Mercury faced in his life: he was the archetypal flawed genius … arrogant certainly, yet also incredibly vulnerable and desperate for love and genuine friendship; and in his own way, very loyal.

Like Abba, Queen transcend generations – and generalisations. Their music will be around after I’m gone, for instance. Of that I have no doubt.

For me, this is a superbly entertaining movie – and very, very moving in places.

Initially, I didn’t want to see it.

I fell in love with Queen in around 1974-75, when I heard Bohemian Rhapsody for the first time, at the Christmas disco of my then girls’ school. I stopped still, on my own, in the middle of the floor, as my mind was blown.

I seem to lack much in the way of memories for huge swathes of my life up to about 40, yet I can remember that moment as if it were yesterday.

I can remember too, going to pubs in Lancaster with my then boyfriend and feeding the jukebox to play Friends Will Be Friends – and being absolutely convinced that that was hardcore rock ‘n’ roll ... though to be fair to myself, if you know that my core musical love is classical, then it really was hardcore.

Later still, I remember when Margaret Thatcher resigned as prime minister, feeding another juke box, in another place, to blare out Another One Bites the Dust.

I’ve never stopped being a Queen fan. I never got to a concert, although I’ve been at a party with Brian May and Roger Taylor (very sedate), but I’ve long regretted never seeing Freddie in the flesh.

When he died, I retired to my Bloomsbury bedsit with two bottles of Bulgarian cabernet sauvignon (it was cheap but decent), put my headphones on and listened to him for hours while getting steadily pissed. It is the only time, thus far, that I have mourned a celebrity in such a way.

The concert sequences here, seen on a big screen, gave me a buzz I hadn’t expected.

And while the the cast as a whole is very good (and the costumes and hairdressing are fabulous), it has to be said that Rami Malek, as Freddie, turns in a performance that would not be out of place in next year’s Oscar nominations.

If you don’t like Queen, then it’s really simple: don’t go. But don’t pretend that this isn’t glorious entertainment and a wonderful reminder of just what a genius Freddie – and the rest of the band – were and are.

A very, very, very dark – but funny – matter

Copenhagen, the 19th century: Danish celebrity author Hans Christian Anderson is regaling an audience with his latest fairy tale, The Little Mermaid.

There are celebratory fireworks and showers of admiration for the writer, but there are also ghostly figures.

And when Anderson returns home, climbing to the attic of his house, it is to discuss these ghosts with Marjory, a disabled Congolese pygmy, who he keeps in a box and who writes the stories for him.

But why doesn’t she try to escape; is she and her situation unique and what does Charles Dickens have to do with it all?

Martin McDonagh’s latest play, A Very Very Very Dark Matter, is going to upset people. Though to be strictly accurate, it’s still previewing until 24 October and it’s already provoked Indignant of Islington and Vexed of Vauxhall to express their horror online.

One can imagine this work will trigger an orgy of offence.

Taken at the most simple face value, the play laughs at colonialism and thumbs its nose at the crimes of empires. And because McDonagh has written a funny play, the audience laughs along and, therefore, becomes complicit.

Except that this is not supposed to be taken at face value, and only a monumental naïf or someone utterly dedicated to a peacock-like display of their social justice warrior credentials would not understand or would pretend not to understand what McDonagh is doing.

And incidentally, if you push that idea that he’s genuinely laughing at the crimes of imperialism, then you’re saying that the black cast members are Uncle Toms, and I would suggest people don’t go down that route.

There isn’t much of a plot, as such. Like Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, this is more of a meditation on a number of themes.

Not least among these is the trivialising of the treatment of the crimes of colonialism – an attitude that has reared its head again in recent years, with continuing exceptionalism and the concomitant belief of some Brexiteers that, once free from the EU, the UK can build Empire II and indeed, the rest of the world is ready to rush into our arms to give us the bestest ever trade deals with only five minutes discussion needed. Because we’re Britain, doncha know.

Of course, the same can be said of the Trump-era US too, with the crude and fact-free racism of the MAGA crowd, convincing itself that ‘true America’ is WASP America.

Such attitudes never went away, but increased nationalism elsewhere around the globe means they’re re-emerging. And therefore, it is important to remind people of just what nationalism and colonialism means in reality.

McDonagh – a writer in whom the Irish gothic tradition meets London-Irish experience, with punk mixed in (as Fintan O’Toole’s excellent programme essay notes) – is ideally suited to push boundaries so that, while A Very Very Very Dark Matter is very funny, it isn’t what you’d describe as ‘comfortable’.

In concentrating on Belgian imperialism – and the genocide in what was the Congo – the play raises what will, for many, be history that they are not familiar with. In pointing up the rape of the region for resources, he even manages a sideswipe at environmentally-holier-than-thou cyclists, noting that while Leopold II’s publicly-stated intention (as with other countries) was to ‘civilise’ and Christianise, the less public one was the desire for ivory and rubber – here, with the latter used for bicycle tires.

A Very Very Very Dark Matter is probably not for the faint-hearted or those who get upset by ‘bad language’ – it’s gloriously sweary in a very Irish way.

It’s short – 90 minutes with no interval – angry and funny at the same time, and defies easy labels.

Director Matthew Dunster has done an excellent job and Anna Fleische’s design is superb.

As Marjory, Johnetta Eula’Mae Ackles, on her debut, is simply outstanding and more than holds her own with her massively experienced co-star.

Jim Broadbent as Anderson is a delight as the bumbling, eccentric and crass writer, living off Marjory’s talent and, all the while, pleading with her that *his* colonial crimes aren’t as bad as those of others. And his swearing is a glory.

Phil Daniels as “Charles FUCKING DICKENS!” is a hoot too, and getting Tom Waits to record the role of narrator adds both to the fairy-tale aspect of the piece, as well as the sinister and eerie nature of it.

Bloody brilliant.

• A Very Very Very Dark Matter, is at London’s bridgetheatre.co.uk until 6 January 2019.