Worse b4 Better

61st Birthday One Week Later Than Planned.....

Birthday Redux

And so, dear reader, my previous blog explained that I contracted 

SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2)

aka Covid-19

and that I hijacked a Craig David song to explain the Week 1 journey which largely involved coughing and a sore throat. Well, Week 2 has not been the same and involved silent hypoxia (ie low oxygen levels without realising) and a feverish temperature. Floppy boneless limbs applied to both weeks. Covid is a peculiar disease:

• Some, like me, have an “OK” first week, a shocking second week and then recover
• Some people are asymptomatic and hardly know they’ve had it
• Some people deteriorate rapidly and die
• Some people become very ill for a long time
• Some people, like me, develop silent hypoxia from which you can recover (as I did) but which can alternatively lead to a sudden plummeting of health, becoming desperately breathless and hospitalisation 
• And there are many variations and gradations between.

I’m in the recovery stage now, building up stamina, breathing consciously and deeply, increasing the walking distance each day, resting between exertions….

Anthony Quinn, Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif

It is written…. Nothing is written….

A highlight of sofa-flopping has been indulging in long movies – like the widescreen version of Lawrence of Arabia (1962), a still astonishing feat of cinematography, editing and design with pitch-perfect performances, overwhelming music, and iconographic moments like the above entrance of Omar Sharif in the far distance, like a shimmering mirage; and the jump cut below between a burning match and the rising sun. Lawrence’s epic journey(s) through the burning deserts were a good match for how I felt dredging through my body’s responses to Covid-19. When William Potter burns himself extinguishing a match between his thumb and forefinger, he challenges Lawrence to explain “What’s the trick, then?” Lawrence answers: “The trick….is not minding that it hurts.”

Silenzio, Bruno

An altogether jolliier experience was the film that capped my delayed birthday – the Disney-Pixar film Luca, ravishingly animated and charmingly told. The themes were clear as an Italian blue sky: helicopter-parenting, family – both blood and constructed, unconventional-friendships, deceit, bullying, outsiders, prejudice, escape/freedom….

I will be your treasure

Detectorists
I was late to discover this gem of a BBC comedy series but became enamoured at a perfect time: my birthday month. Mackenzie Crook directed and wrote (with Andrew Ellard) this 19-episode masterpiece of friendship, love, hobbying, history, rural life and the search for Anglo-Saxon gold. The writing is understated but underpinned with quotable lines:

• We’re time travellers
• Nostalgia conventions aren’t what they used to be
• Ring pull…83… Tizer…
• Surprisingly bland
• What you’ve got going for you now is that she’s met you, Lance….
• Will you search through the loamy earth for me?

What do I love about it?
It’s a series that presents profound themes in a deceptively light-hearted way. The use of the music by Johnny Flynn and Dan Michaelson connects characters and motifs. (A brilliant cameo song by The Unthanks sisters (Magpie) punctuates a key episode in series 3.) The production values, acting and authenticity to its original premise remain loving and attentive. Lies are told, confrontations occur, but redemption happens, the truth comes out and life moves on. The huge dramas remain buried (in the loamy earth) or are in the distance, fleetingly glimpsed. I was lucky to see Mackenzie Crook live on stage in the brilliant Jez Butterworth play, Jerusalem, a work which reminded me of why I love England; and Detectorists has a similar feel, connecting to ancient truths about tolerance and acceptance, the mongrel nature of our society and how precious is the land beneath our feet. We must learn from history and nature and be better people – there’s a truth to the gold of ordinary lives…. If you’ve yet to discover Detectorists, I envy the treasures waiting for you….

I will be your treasure
The theme song (composed and sung by Johnny Flynn) contains all the themes about digging for the truth of what matters in life and how patience is a true virtue. The compassion and kindness riddling through the seams of Detectorists are patterned into pairings who are all given perfect TV moments:

• Andy and Lance (Mackenzie Crook and Toby Jones)
• Andy and Becky (MC with Rachael Stirling)
• Andy and Veronica (MC with Diana Rigg)
• Lance and Maggie (TJ with Lucy Benjamin)
• Lance and Sophie (TJ with Aimee-Ffion Edwards)
• Lance and Kate (TJ with Alexa Davies)
• Lance and Toni (TJ with Rebecca Callard)

And there are telling moments between each pair variation; I’m thinking here of the arc between Rachael Stirling’s Becky and Rebecca Callard’s Toni and their scene under a tree in the final episode. If Andy and Lance are the centre of the show, all the other characters are equally vivid:

• Maggie and Tony (Lucy Benjamin and Adam Riches)
• Art and Paul (Simon Farnaby and Paul Casar), aka Terra Firma, aka Dirt Sharks, aka AntiquiSearchers, aka Simon and Garfunkel

Danebury Metal Detector Club
Then there is the rest of the club, genius characters all (hats off to the casting by Catherine Willis):

• Terry and Sheila (Gerald Horan and the sublime Sophie Thompson)
• Louise and Varde (Laura Checkley and Orion Ben)
• Russell and Hugh (Pearce Quigley and Divian Ladwa)

Detectorists is a character-driven show, though the setting (Framlingham pretending to be Danebury) is also memorable with exquisite shots of the countryside and its creatures, including some memorable aerial shots, by the technical team led by cinematographers Jamie Cairney (13 episodes), Mattias Nyberg (6 episodes) and John Sorapure (1 episode) and editor Colin Fair (all 19 episodes.)

Singer (and actor) Johnny Flynn plus Mark Rylance and Mackenzie Crook in Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem

Full lyrics for Johnny Flynn’s theme song (click here to hear him sing it)
Will you search through the loamy earth for me
Climb through the briar and bramble
I will be your treasure

I felt the touch of the kings and the breath of the wind
I knew the call of all the song birds
They sang all the wrong words
I'm waiting for you, I'm waiting for you

Will you swim through the briny sea for me
Roll along the ocean's floor
I will be your treasure

I'm with the ghosts of the men who can never sing again
There's a place follow me
Where a love lost at sea
Is waiting for you, is waiting for you

Would you drift o’er the rolling fields for me
Hoard me in the highest bough
I will be your treasure

But in history’s rhyme there’s a place and a time
And a truth to the gold
That the folds cannot hold
I’m waiting for you, I’m waiting for you

Raydan Wakes

No blog
On Thursday 31st July 2014 no blog written by me existed out there in cyberspace. Today (Saturday 26th August 2017) there are 172 posts and, although the original intention of always connecting everything to Shakespeare hasn't been fulfilled, the regularity has settled into a 5 a month pattern and I've got better at incorporating pretty pictures which some readers tell me are (quite truthfully) the best bits. I can live with that. I've learned to keep to my own deadlines. The dream of course was to write a novel....

No words
On Friday 1st April 2016 there were no words for a novel but that's the date I started dedicating three days a week to writing. There was the play set in a doctors' surgery. There was the screenplay set on the banks of a river. There were the poems about birth and childhood. There was the book about growing up Roman Catholic.... and there was the story of a red-haired teenager who suddenly realised his parents and the world around him were not what he thought....

Rhenium
On Monday 1st August 2016 it dawned on me that all the other writing projects had fallen away and Raydan, the red-haired teenager on the planet Rhenium, had become real to me and scenes I had written were having consequences in my imagination. And I had to write more. So The Akolyte Wars were born. The story became The Rhenium Wars. The over-arching story is currently Rhenium Tales and the first book is Raydan Wakes.

Tippy-tapping
On Sunday 7th August 2016 I finally started committing to the laptop and at 10:30am on Friday 25th August 2017 (yesterday) I finally printed the final chapter of my first draft for my first reader, Emily. It took me a couple of years of churning out blogs, 4 months of experimenting, a week of fear deciding whether or not Rhenium was The One, and then One Year And Eighteen Days to produce Draft One of 118,285 words divided into 15 chapters, each chapter having 3 distinct sections. (And bits that have been edited out are already waiting to be pasted into Book Two....) I have no doubt that the final word count will come down. The first version of Chapter 15 was 12,000 words, at New Place in Stratford-upon-Avon it became just over 8,000 words. Today it's 6,521 words. Editing's the way to go. But I'm feeling weird at the moment - half Superman and half petrified/embarrassed/confused. What next? Keep editing. Keep writing. Just keep going.

Superman picture credit: Sacha Goldberg

This Wide And Universal Theatre

Jane Eyre – I am no bird
Jane Eyre, in my opinion, is one of the glories of English Literature. It’s not my favourite Charlotte Brontë  novel – that would be Villette, partly because I think that novel is more subversive and Lucy Snowe is a very troubling and troubled character. But Jane Eyre has had a massive cultural impact and given way to concepts and phrases that are in the nation’s subconscious fabric:
•    Plain Jane
•    The red room
•    The madwoman in the attic
•    Do you think I am an automaton?
•    I am a free human being with an independent will
•    Reader, I married him
•    The ruined house (and damaged man) symbolic of redemption

Sally Cookson’s production
Earlier in the year Bristol Old Vic staged a two-night production by Sally Cookson, devised by the cast, designed by Michael Vale with music by Benji Bower. I mention their three names because their contributions to the final performance were overwhelming. I caught this production in its shortened one-night revival at Cineworld in an NT Live broadcast and found it thrilling, funny and moving. Film and TV versions have been shy of using Charlotte Bronte’s over-wrought language but the cast here delivered many “quotations” with energy.

Total Theatre
With a utilitarian stage of ladders, windows, bars and ramps, the space reflected the struggles in the novel between survival, aspiration, barriers and hope. The music underscored the emotions and surprised at times with blues versions of Noël Coward’s Mad About the Boy and Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy. Melanie Mason, in a vivid red dress, sang out Bertha Mason’s broken heart and somehow distilled the spirit of Jean Rhys’s Antoinette Cosway from Wide Sargasso Sea. The bristly charismatic Laura Elphinstone as Helen Burns, Adèle Varens and St John Rivers, the galumphing Craig Edwards as Pilot (the dog) and bass-toned Felix Hayes as the (in Charlotte’s words) the “strikingly peculiar” Rochester all shone in a multi-role cast that worked their socks off. And Madeleine Worrall tied everything together in her journey as Jane from stubborn, tormented child to passionate, free-spirited woman.

“Jane, be still; don't struggle so like a wild, frantic bird, that is rending its own plumage in its desperation.""I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.”

London Road, The Rocky Horror Show, Hamlet, Hecuba, Antony and Cleopatra

Theatre in the Cinema
This year I’ve seen 8 theatre productions at the cinema and enjoyed every one – the price, the convenience, the close-ups, the clarity. I can’t see an argument against broadcasting live theatre and hope the practice continues. In terms of reaching audiences throughout the UK and the world, it is, it seems to me, a no-brainer. I’ve still managed to shell out for 24 live theatre events at the Alhambra in Bradford, at Leeds Arena, at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, in the West End of London and, most frequently, at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and Swan theatres in Stratford-upon-Avon. So, from what I’ve experienced (and from what I’ve read) cinema broadcasts of theatre have not diminished theatre audiences and, in some cases, have given them a boost. Long may it continue. Best theatre of the year? Probably Jane Eyre at the cinema and, amongst live productions, a toss up between Oppenheimer and Death of a Salesman.

Oscar Wannabes

My film of the year: Brooklyn

Odeon Screen Unseen

This time last year I started going with the family to the Odeon Screen Unseen showings – usually Monday nights, usually critically acclaimed, usually £5 a ticket.  All good. The risk is you sit down not knowing what is going to come up on the screen! That way we got to see Nightcrawler, Whiplash, Selma, and It Follows last year – all fascinating in one or more ways. This week it was Room and when the title came up I was happy (and worried) because it was a book I had raced through earlier in the year, astonished at the tension built up by the narrative voice in Emma Donoghue’s novel. It could have gone either way.

Emma Donoghue, Jacob Tremblay, Brie Larson - Room

Room
Room was excellent, I thought. The lean screenplay, the photography and editing, the final shot of the suburban garden in the snow…. All worthy of prizes but equally wonderful were the performances from the sublime Joan Allen as Nancy to the heroic Tom McCamus as Leo, from an intense William H Macy as Robert to Wendy Crewson as a devastatingly smooth TV interviewer – all cameos of great power. But could an Oscar nomination go to a 7-year old? Jacob Tremblay as Jack certainly goes through a convincing gamut of emotions in the film, spending half of the running time looking horribly ill. But I will be very surprised if Brie Larson isn’t nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. She, I think, plays unpredictably, sometimes unsympathetically, maternal but highly-strung, dead-eyed but full of life force, strong and vulnerable – and at all times, in my opinion, playing truthfully to the dramatic situation.

In the Heart of the Sea, Murphy, Gleeson, Fairley, Whishaw, Hemsworth

In the Heart of the Sea

Ron Howard’s film about the loss of the whaling ship Essex and how it inspired Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is less obviously award-winning except possibly in the special effects categories. I wasn’t bored but my daughter spoke the truth when she said it had elements of the cartoon version of Thumbelina – ie one disaster after another. Chris Hemsworth scrubs down well (and looks truly wasted at times) and Ben Whishaw, Brendan Gleeson and Michelle Fairley can do no wrong in my eyes; as for Cillian Murphy, I would watch him read the phone directory. But there was something about the structure of the movie (the script, maybe?) that meant I cared very little about the outcome, though absolutely cheered for the whales (and excellent dolphin performances, too.) Oscars for the special effects, I think, and thank you to Cineworld who presented this in an early Secret Screening, Cineworld's equivalent of Odeon Screen Unseen.

Carol, Mad Max: Fury Road, Mr Holmes, Diary of a Teenage Girl, Ex Machina

My Oscar hopes

My film (and book) of the year has been Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn and I will be delighted if it wins every award going; if it wins nothing, I won’t care because it’s permanently lodged in my psyche. I also enjoyed Bridge of Spies, Carol, The Martian, Mad Max: Fury Road, Mr Holmes, Inside Out, Ex Machina, Diary of a Teenage Girl and Steve Jobs. I’ve yet to see (but am looking forward to) Spotlight, The Revenant, The Danish Girl, The Big Short, The Hateful Eight and Trumbo.  I would definitely add Room to my list of great films of the year now, if only for Brie Larson’s performance. I’m already booked in (twice) to see a galaxy far, far away but will be going with phantom trepidation as much as new hope….

Odeon Screen Unseen

Riz Ahmed and Jake Gyllenhaal

Take Your Chances

Odeon cinemas have started doing a Screen Unseen scheme where you attend without knowing what you’re about to see.

Last month my family and I saw Nightcrawler with Jake Gyllenhaal as Lou Bloom, an instantly memorable movie character who will be counted alongside Travis Bickle and Michael Corleone as emblems of the corruptions of the age.

Nightcrawler is the disturbing tale of an ambulance-chasing media hound who starts to manipulate the stories he covers. Riz Ahmed as his intern Rick and Rene Russo as news producer Nina are equally brilliant in more tragic roles; they are characters who are equally as culpable as Bloom but are also damaged irreparably by the protagonist’s increasingly evil decisions. It's great to see Riz Ahmed's rise to major films like this after remarkable performances like his bedtime Lion King story scene in 2010's Four Lions. It won't be long before he's a leading man, in my opinion. And I've always enjoyed watching Rene Russo, after scene-stealing in 1993's In The Line Of Fire and being a convincing Frigga in the Thor films.

Rene Russo

Lighting and editing

In some ways Nightcrawler reminded me of a 1970s art-house film, lit like an urban noir and with editing rhythms that produced an accelerating tension. The ending – where there is plenty of smiling and ‘pep-talk’ is as chilling as anything I’ve seen at the cinema in recent years.

Whiplash

This month we were also lucky to see Whiplash, a film I might not have chosen to see but was glad it was offered to me by Screen Unseen.

Two brilliant central performances

Another terrific but disturbing film. Starting with a black screen and the sound of a neurotic drum roll that starts as if played by a child, gradually becoming military and then turning into a sublime performance of superhuman speed, the sound acts as a metaphor of my journey with this film in the cinema – I felt innocent at first (thinking I was watching Fame, then Full Metal Jacket for drummers and finally Amadeus-meets-Drumline. With two brilliant central performances and switches of tone that induced breathless emotional effects, I would recommend this film to anyone who admires intense acting, character-driven films or films about svengali-like teachers. Or indeed anyone who appreciates fine percussion or jazz music. 

JK Simmons and Miles Teller in brilliant performances

Academy Awards?

JK Simmons may well be nominated for an acting Oscar, though most people would want his character to be hauled before a judge and jury and sentenced to painful hard labour. Miles Teller is horribly believable as a gauche prodigy with family issues, and an unattractive stubbornness – but he occasionally smiles with tender hope and you root for him. Would you want to be his friend or girlfriend? Probably not. If I were in charge of the Academy Awards it would receive Oscars for Film Editing, Music Score and Original Screenplay. JK Simmons and Miles Teller will, though, I expect, be competing with Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo for acting honours in the next awards season. Good luck to them all.   

Thanks, Odeon Screen Unseen for prompting me to see these two memorable films.