Self-Isolation Birthday

Of Mice and Men

Wise poet Robbie Burns observed in 1785 that it is a shame when little mice construct their shelters, carefully, lovingly – but unwittingly – in the path of the plough. And so I, dear reader, had planned for my 61st birthday to be at Castle Garden in Sissinghurst staying in the Priest’s House with the family. (If I’m still blogging and you’re still reading in the Spring of 2023, pop back to hear all about it.) Any road up, last year, I was condemned by government regulations to spend my 60th birthday outside and this year I have mostly been having Covid….

Faint line (top left) day one and not so faint (top right) day two

With fevered apologies to Craig David

Was it for real? Damn sure

What was the deal? Let me update

Sunday a tickle or two

Then got a lottta hotter on Monday

A faint line – so fine – real deal so hit me with a PCR

Results by Tuesday – possessed by heat and coughs

Smooth talker Covid they told me

They’d love to unfold me all night long

Cheesegrater throat and hacking hawking

From back to front I flipped it back

And breathed it big

Wednesday was a hell but

Thursday felt more me
Friday was my birthday and love came down the line
And stood at the end of my garden table
We chilled on Saturday and hope to do the same through Sunday

Monday Tuesday Wednesday

Until isolation ends on Thursday....

Last supper with taste and smell for a while....

Unlucky for some
Having been the most cautious person I know since March 2020, I feel as if the Tories’ confusing and contradictory strategy was designed – specifically and personally – to smite me just when I was about to relax. I’m double vaccinated (thanks, NHS) so have been fortunate and I hope I’ll have some natural immunity for a time at least. And I have a loving support system so had a smashing birthday anyway. Smell and taste seem to have departed (hopefully for a short time) but thankfully not before I enjoyed delicious stuff on the day of my nativity. I was also allowed to control the remote so resorted to an old comfort watch with the (to me) magnetic Vanessa Redgrave. The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry, but as Robbie Burns points out, mice have it easier than men because they don’t know their ultimate destination…. Here’s to a few more birthdays, wee, timorous beastie!

Reasons to be cheerful

Glass half full
After three blogs about reasons to be fearful and fake news, it’s time to cheer up. Most of my life I’ve been a glass half full kinda person. I admit it can be annoying but I can’t stop myself trying to look on the bright side. Maybe it’s because I’m a Libran, I can usually find another way of looking a problem. Seeing it from the alternative point of view…. On the other hand.  My two favourite mottos are carpe diem and only connect.

Carpe diem
Seize the day is a popular aphorism, attributed in its earliest form to the Roman poet Horace in his Odes (23 BC.) I used to write on the inside cover of my notebooks when a teenager: plan as if you are going to live forever, live as if you are going to die tomorrow. Seizing the day is a tough ask when annoying and frustrating bits of living get in the way. It’s hard to seize the day when you have to buy onions at the supermarket; or hoover the carpet. But I try…. My biggest weapon for seizing the day is my imagination. When on a bus or train, if I don’t have a book with me I can’t stop myself travelling back in time and imagining myself in another place in a different period of history. The Tags list on the right will reveal which eras are the ones I flutter away to….

Only connect!
Live in fragments no longer. I used to think it was my Mum who invented the motto: Every day in every way I’m getting better and better until I learned it was Émile Coué, a French psychologist from the early part of the Twentieth Century. Deep down I think if I haven’t read something new or experienced something new every day I’m not exercising my brain or heart and I think that’s what E M Forster’s quotation from Howard’s End is all about. Focusing on brain and heart without thinking about how my body might benefit from exercise has, of course, been a significant weakness of mine. Who would guess that I was a rugby player between the ages of 11 and 18 and between 16 and 18 I played both union and league? If only I’d made the connection then with being physically fit and living a longer life…. but then again, the connections I’ve made with my brain have given me plenty to enjoy in life. We just have to connect the beast and the monk, the prose and the passion, the body with the brain and heart – see the interlinks between us all and everything else. Live in fragments no longer.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

Merchant Ivory's film of E M Forster's Howard's End, the source of "Only Connect!" 

Anthony Hopkins as Henry Wilcox, Vanessa Redgrave as Ruth Wilcox, Emma Thompson as Margaret Schlegel, Helena Bonham Carter as Helen Schlegel, Samuel West as Leonard Bast, Nicola Duffett as Jacky Bast, James Wilby as Charles Wilcox and Adrian Ross Magenty as Tibby Schlegel

Like a scurvy politician

London

Recently returned from five days in London (which I’ll blog about soon) but the prime motivation for going at this time of year was to witness Glenda Jackson in Shakespeare’s King Lear at the Old Vic Theatre. I saw her last onstage in Peter Brook’s production of Antony and Cleopatra in Stratford-upon-Avon at the RSC in 1978 (aware that she was a double-Oscar winner for 1969’s Women in Love and 1973’s A Touch of Class. Since retiring from acting at the top of her game, she has been a member of the UK Parliament from 1992 to 2015 (23 years of honorably serving Hampstead and Highgate/Kilburn.) I am a fan of her film performances. As well as her Oscar-winning films and the TV series Elizabeth R, I thought she was equally brilliant in Hedda, Stevie, Triple Echo, Sunday Bloody Sunday, The Rainbow, The Music Lovers, Mary Queen of Scots {with Vanessa Redgrave} and The Patricia Neal Story.

Glenda Jackson from parliament to King Lear with Rhys Ifans as The Fool, Sargon Yelda as Kent and Morfydd Clark as Cordelia. Production photo credits: Manuel Harlan

Script as blueprint

Having seen King Lear with Sir Antony Sher recently, and blogged about it here, it was with some trepidation that I approached the play again so soon. I needn’t have worried – it was like a different play entirely, shorn of sentimentality, riven with intellectual decisions and riddled with disturbing and upsetting truths. Both productions were well worth seeing, in my view, though felt like entirely divergent works of art (as per Shakespeare’s genius and the way that any drama script is only a blueprint for theatrical interpretation.)

Lear: Glenda Jackson, Edmund: Simon Manyonda, Edgar: Harry Melling, Regan: Jane Horrocks, Cornwall: Danny Webb, Albany: William Chubb, Goneril: Celia Imrie, The Fool: Rhys Ifans, Ensemble/France: Matt Gavan, Gloucester: Karl Johnson. Production photo credits: Manuel Harlan

Like a scurvy politician

Any line in King Lear about power, ruling and politics had an extra resonance, given Glenda Jackson’s recent parliamentary career:

    Get thee glass eyes;    
And like a scurvy politician, seem    
To see the things thou dost not.

And the play’s devastating critique of the gap between rich and poor was fully potent in the mouths of actors like Glenda Jackson and Karl Johnson who played Gloucester:

So distribution should undo excess
And each man have enough.

Through tattered clothes great vices do appear;
Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold
And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks:
Arm it in rags, a pigmy's straw does pierce it.

Harry Melling and Karl Johnson as Edgar and Gloucester; "I stumbled when I saw." Production photo credits: Manuel Harlan

Rage rage against the dying of the light

The Greg Doran production probably moved me more than this one by Deborah Warner, but this production made me think more angrily about the issues in the play. There were some theatrical and design decisions that were unsettling (probably intentionally so) and some performance moments that challenged my ideas about the play but as an experience it remained compelling to watch, probably intensified by sitting on the front row! The rest of the company all had their moments of stage glory but the abiding memory is of the towering performance by Glenda Jackson. This was a father raging against the dying of the light; a man who was frustrated that he was not being afforded the luxuries he expected to receive in his retirement; a king who discovered, alas too late, that his wilful rule had led to the most abject poverty (literal and metaphorical) in his kingdom. Glenda’s voice soared, swooped, growled, howled and machine-gunned every Shakespearean image and still left room for the soft caress of lines like

We two alone will sing like birds in the cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness; so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news, and we'll talk with them too –
Who loses and who wins, who's in, who's out
And take upon us the mystery of things
As if we were God's spies….

Unforgettable.

Rhys Ifans as The Fool and Glenda Jackson as Lear. Production photo credits: Manuel Harl

One Brief Shining Moment....

Vanessa drips snot

I will always remember seeing Camelot for the first time – on TV one Saturday afternoon after playing rugby – and being amazed at one of the later scenes when Vanessa Redgrave is so emotional that her nose drips snot.

I’d never seen an actor seemingly so “in the moment” before. It made Guenevere’s trauma seem raw, real and true – and I followed Vanessa Redgrave’s career thereafter, both on screen and, whenever I could, on stage. Her kind of deeply-felt acting in Camelot sometimes feels at odds with film musical conventions - at least in the 1960s. But the emotion is NOT at odds with the source material, TH White's glorious Once and Future King.

Vanessa Redgrave, as an emotionally exposed Guenevere

Lerner and Loewe

In The Once and Future King, the whimsical mingles with the tragic in an unsettling and often teasing fashion. Although a musical comedy in form, the content of Camelot is not at all like Lerner and Loewe’s other major works: Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon, My Fair Lady or Gigi. Lyric writer Alan Jay Lerner managed, I think, to pull off the weird mix of comedy and tragedy that TH White created in his 5 volumes of The Once and Future King.

Serious themes need serious performers

Although there are joyous (and bonkers) showstoppers (The Lusty Month of May or What Do The Simple Folk Do?) and comedy characters, like Lionel Jefferies as King Pellinore, many characters are about to die in battle as Camelot ends, the main relationships are doomed, the dialogue and lyrics contain discussions of Justice, War, Gender, Class and Society. (Thinking about Class in My Fair Lady or Gender in Gigi, I suppose all the best musicals are riddled with issues.) The themes of Camelot certainly require actors with serious credentials – Richard Harris, David Hemmings, Laurence Naismith, Franco Nero and Vanessa Redgrave were not known when they made the film for being song-and-dance performers.

Franco Nero as Lancelot with knife to David Hemmings’s Mordred

Guenevere and Lancelot eventually married….

Later “real-life” events, of course, proved that the potent sparks between Vanessa Redgrave’s Guenevere and Franco Nero’s Lancelot led to a lifelong friendship and love, as well as a son, Carlo. Vanessa and Franco eventually married in 2006, nearly 40 years after they first met on the set of Camelot. Meryl Streep speaks very eloquently about one of my all-time heroes in this link here.

Eventually wed, nearly 40 years later, Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero

Poignant lyrics from

I Loved You Once In Silence

I’m sure it was lyrics like the following that drew Vanessa Redgrave to star as Guenevere, lyrics that are simple but perfect for catching in your throat and cracking with emotion:

And now there's twice as much grief,
Twice the strain for us;
Twice the despair,
Twice the pain for us
As we had known before.

And after all had been said,
Here we are, my love,
Silent once more,
And not far, my love,
From where we were before.

Franco Nero as Lancelot and Vanessa Redgrave as Guenevere

From tender lyrics to Beano violence in Then You May Take Me To The Fair

Alan Jay Lerner had a very playful style with lyrics, most famously in My Fair Lady and the following example from Camelot is a good contrast to the above extract from I Loved You Once In Silence:

SIR LIONEL: Your majesty, let me tilt with him and smite him!
       Don't refuse me so abruptly, I implore!
       Oh, give me the opportunity to fight him
       And Gaul will be divided once more!
GUENEVERE: You'll bash and thrash him?
SIR LIONEL: I'll smash and mash him.
GUENEVERE: You'll give him trouble?
SIR LIONEL: He will be rubble.
GUENEVERE: A mighty whack?
SIR LIONEL: His skull will crack.

The jousting scene given emotional credibility by the actors

The two filmed Camelots

I wonder whether Camelot will be more admired in generations to come and its over-wrought acting (with an abundance of disconcerting closeups) might be seen as psychologically penetrating. There is a 1982 made-for-TV filmed stage-version, which captures the SCORE of Camelot better than the film, but it does not beat the 1967 version for ART and DESIGN.

The Great Hall at Camelot, part of the Oscar-winning design

Award-winning elements despite its flaws

I recommend watching Camelot. The film received 5 well-deserved Oscar nominations and won 3 for Music, Costume Design and Art/Set Decoration (other nominations were for Sound and Cinematography.) The film also received 6 Golden Globe nominations and won 3: Richard Harris as Actor, Frederick Loewe for Score and also with Alan Jay Lerner for the Song for If Ever I Would Leave You. The orchestration, the textures, the colours, the lighting - especially if you see a brightly-projected version or a restored DVD verson - are ravishing in conjuring a faux-medieval world.  Director Joshua Logan stages some moments to linger long in the memory, for example the candlelit wedding, the early scenes in the snow and the aftermath of the jousting scene. There are unfortunately a few clumsy visuals, for example, when Arthur is soliloquizing after he first suspects his wife of being unfaithful, a shadow across his face looks like an erect penis…. A mischievous editor or cinematographer I wonder?

Don’t let it be forgot….

Each evening, from December to December,
Before you drift to sleep upon your cot,
Think back on all the tales that you remember
Of Camelot.
Ask ev'ry person if he's heard the story,
And tell it strong and clear if he has not,
That once there was a fleeting wisp of glory
Called Camelot.
Where once it never rained till after sundown,
By eight a.m. the morning fog had flown.
Don't let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment that was known
As Camelot.

The Round Table: Right is Might, Justice for All