Brenton's Boleyn - Or how I met St Anne the Martryr

Anne Boleyn at Shakespeare's Globe (photo by Manuel Harlan)

Last Monday, Sid &I finally made it to Shakespeare’s Globe – a theatre built in the original Elizabethan style and dedicated to Shakespeare’s works. Unfortunately, it wasn’t staging any of the works by the bard himself, but a modern play by Howard Brenton called Anne Boleyn. Anne Boleyn-Henry-Elizabeth-Tudors -Shakespeare: get the connection?

I must say I was also curious to see Brenton's take on Anne, especially to contrast it against Hillary Mantel’s monstrous version, about which I had blogged before.

Now, I was expecting a reasonably sympathetic portrayal of the mistress-in-question. After all, you seldom write and name a play around the villain of the show. But what I was not expecting was to be confronted with St Anne the Martyr.

Brenton's Anne is pious with just that dash of sassy impishness to make her sexy and modern to the audience. Whoever comes in touch with her – her ladies-in-waiting, the courtiers, and above all, Henry himself – simply falls in love with her. Her decision to not have sex with Henry, whilst he was still married to Catherine of Aragon, is really borne out of piousness and honesty rather than cold calculation. And most importantly, she is driven equally by her evangelical zeal to save her soon-to-be English subjects (if only bloody blockheads would agree) from the Roman Catholic Church as she is by her great love for Henry.

But what really took my breath away, was Brenton's suggestion that it was Anne’s intention to expose Cromwell’s siphoning-off for public funds – “funds meant for schools and universities” – that got her so cruelly marked and crucified. What a charming touch – and so resonant with an audience just coming out of a horrendous expenses scandal in the British parliament.

But Brenton's portrayal was essentially a dishonest one because he refused to deal with what Anne’s actions meant to another older woman and her child. Catherine of Aragon and her daughter Mary suffered – and suffered grievously and publicly – because of Anne’s determination to have Henry and the crown. Even if her actions were all borne out her desire to serve the English people, surely, these darker consequences ought to have been addressed by any play seriously asking us to change our perception of England’s most famous mistress. But Brenton coloured Anne hatred of Catherine which just that touch of childishness – she churishly keeps calling Catherine a cow – to the audience  laugh affectionately with exasperation rather than seriously question her actions.

Now Shakespeare would have dealt with Anne’s character in all its darkness and still would have us still somehow see the humanity in her. Brenton in his place airbrushes the darkness away.

Brenton’s play might be staged at Shakespeare’s Globe -- unfortunately, Shakespeare he is not.

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- For more on the play and how to see it.It is on till August 21.

- For top ten Tudor sights in London

- I may not be pleased with this version of Tudor history, but apparently Hitler wasn't too pleased with Michael Hirst's pop television version, The Tudors, either. Enjoy!

Kabuki: Strange but Delightful

On Tuesday, Sid and I felt like experiencing something strange and somewhat outlandish. Naturally, that meant we had to go for a “Japanese”. After all, no matter what aspect of culture you examine – food (fish sperms?), books (Murakami?), films (Tampopo?), clothes (oh, all those hobbling women in Kiminos?), and of course, sex (where do I begin?) – Japan wins all contests in strangeness. 

However, Sid and I stuck to the safe end of Japanese cultural strangeness and went to Sadler’s Well for a Kabuki performance – a traditional Japanese opera of sorts, with men-in-drag, outrageous make-up, elaborate costumes, lots of heavily stylised singing and dancing. The show, entitled Yoshitsune and The Cherry Trees, was outrageous, exaggerated, colourful, exhilarating and a lot of fun.

The play, set in the 12th century, had little to do with Yoshitsune and none at all with Cherry Trees. General Yoshitsune leaves his favourite drum with his mistress Shizuka, and leaves her in the care of his favourite retainer Tadanobu, before huffing-off to fight his brother Yoritmoto. The plan is for Shizuka and Tadanobu to meet him across the Mt Yoshino. Only, Tadanobu is really a fox and is accompanying Shizuka because the drum she is carrying is made from the hide of his parents, who speak to him through its beats. Bizarre? You bet! But oh so, beautifully rendered.

I guess, Kabuki’s delights can be enjoyed only if you place yourself before the 19th century: a time before television or films when people took themselves to theatre to experience the larger-than-life. And they got it in the form of the elaborate costumes, stylised dance and fighting sequences, and melodrama.

So if a yen for something strange and larger-than-life overcomes you between now and June 15, I would recommend a trip out to Sadler’s Well. 

Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees is playing at Sadler’s Well till June 15. If it helps, it stars  Ebizo Ichikawa XI, who apparently is the Brad Pitt of Kabuki theatre.

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More on strange Japanese films.

Bollywood musicals?

Years ago, I read an article by Rachel Dwyer – a western academic and champion of Bollywood – asking the scoffing audience in India or elsewhere to compare Bollywood films to modern day musicals. After all, they are both replete with music, dancing, action, high emotions, spectacle and melodrama. Only when we saw Hindi films through the lens of musicals, she argued, would we really appreciate the true value of Bollywood’s offerings. Unfortunately, never having seen a musical, I was rather hampered from taking her advice then.

So once in London, I decided to fill this lacuna in my cultural education, and Sid and I started logging in the musicals: Phantom of the Opera (high emotions and great, great music); We Will Rock You (terrible, terrible, terrible); Thirty-nine Steps (Comical with great light and shadow effects); Billy (fabulous dancing and social commentary); and finally Enron (intelligent, incisive, and contemporary), which we caught last week.  

I still have a hard time appreciating most Bollywood films.

To begin with, most musicals tend to maximise the audience experience by putting the stage to new and clever use; whether it is through silhouettes, clever lighting, puppets, or clever platforms that seem to appear and disappear at will. It works because we know the limitations of a single stage, and hence can appreciate it when someone puts it to particularly innovative use.

Bollywood films on the other hand rarely experiment with the tools of their trade – the camera, the editing machinery, the studio space – to give us new experiences.  

Even when it comes to storytelling, watching Enron made me think why should incorporating music, dance and high emotions require sacrificing complexity at all. The musical is based on the rise and fall of the energy company Enron: one of the biggest corporate scams ever perpetrated. It is hardly a subject that renders itself to music and dancing. And yet, the musical manages to tell the story with ease, style and heavy doses of black comedy. After all, the idea of a musical or a film is to put a story forward – draw certain characters, delve into their psyche, recreate the mood and atmosphere of the environment in which they existed, and explain what they did. And in case of Enron, the music and dancing heightens our experience of the characters and their motivations, the headiness of the rollick’ 90s, and that curious mixing of testosterone and greed that fuelled the whole episode. And it does so without sacrificing the complexity of the financial shenanigans that lead to Enron’s downfall.

You see, my quibble with Bollywood has nothing to do with singing, dancing and high emotions. It is that that most films do not use them cleverly enough to accentuate the story-telling. And that they almost never use the tools of their medium to create a new visual experience – unless you consider a 100 dancers behind Shah Rukh Khan a spectacle.

Night at the Gandhi Opera

There were three very good reasons for Sid and I to attend Philip Glass’s opera Satyagraha, which opened at the English National Opera last night. It was based on Gandhi’s years in South Africa, where he developed, honed and polished his philosophy of non-violent protest.

First, as Indians, Sid and I are well-versed with the life and times of Gandhi. So for once, we would already be one up on the rest of the English audience as far as cultural references went. (Besides, it meant we would not have to buy the booklet explaining the Acts. A few pounds saved there!)

Second, the opera was sung in Sanskrit. And even though 15 years of complete non-usage has rendered my Sanskrit extremely rusty, I felt my chances with Sanskrit were far better than Italian or French.

Also, Sid has a great pair of opera glasses which he, very disrespectfully, has been using to watch cricket. I felt we needed to restore its dignity.

Besides, I must admit that somehow felt that if I watched an opera about a subject close to my heart – Gandhi and his philosophy of non-violent protest – then all that high-pitched singing would transform into sweet music and I would find myself moved to tears. Thus, I would prove that I am truly cultured ala Julia Roberts of Pretty Woman.



(Sorry, I could only find an Italian version of the youtube clip. But I am sure you got the point.)

It didn’t work.

Despite my best efforts to connect with the music, it just seemed like a lot of dignified and pious howling. Besides, it might as well as have been Italian or French for all I got of it. The music seemed to be based on mainly on repetitions. But apparently, that was a part of its magic, it was minimalist. Besides, there were "slowly metamorphosisng textures" to it according to The Independent, but Sid and I were too untutored to get them. And though the music seemed very heavy to Sid and I, it was only because of our inability to appreciate its “nobility, seriousness and purity”, as the NYT put it.

If I still enjoyed my night at the opera, it was mainly because of the totally trippy stage activity that accompanied the singers. The act was full of acrobats, aerialists, gigantic puppets, and lots and lots of innovative use of newspapers. At one point, as Gandhi sang away contemplatively in front behind him a huge six-armed puppet made out of newspaper stabbed an equally mammoth puppet made out of wicker baskets with wooden swords (see the rather sad image above).

Watching the mayhem through Sid’s excellent opera glasses thoroughly restored the pair’s respectability.

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Note to Girish: The opera was a part of a trilogy on millennium men by Glass. The other two are Einstein and the Egyptian Pharoah Akhnaten. I am guessing Glass hasn't read your blog entry on the great pharoah .

War Horse: a theatrical Avatar?

A simple question that Sid and I ask each other after watching a film, play or art show is: “Was there anything you didn’t get?” Our attempts to figure out what we didn’t get invariably lead us to new insights, ideas and notions about life around us. And to us that is the value of the artistic experience: of course, it is about the visual, but it is also about discovering something new about the way we view the world.

It is in the latter that War Horse – the most successful theatrical production in the history of the National Theatre, which has since moved to the West End – sorely disappointed us. Yes, it was visually spectacular: the life-size horse puppets, the recreation of war, the scene when a tank thunders on to the stage were imaginatively conceived and stunningly produced. But what about the story to the benefit of which this spectacle was created: it was a simple, predictable children’s tale about the enduring love between a boy and his horse that survives the miseries of the First World War. It neither presented any new ideas about the human-animal equation nor about the war.

I would understand if the audience were mainly children. But the average age in the packed, admiring theatre last night was between 40 and 60. The play has been a huge commercial success and even enticed the Queen – well-known for her love for horses – into dropping by. It is set to hit the New York Broadway later during the year, and it is rumoured that Steven Spielberg has bought its film rights.

In a way, War Horse reminded me of Avatar, where the story played second fiddle to the visual experience, but no one minded. As we watched Avatar, I could practically predict each scene before it happened. Is that ok? Does focussing their time, energy and money into producing a cutting edge visual experience absolve the makers from giving us a complex, multidimensional storyline?

If yes, then I have been needlessly lambasting Bollywood for all these years. Bollywood films too create an extravaganza of songs, dances and drama for the benefit of binary, moralistic tales. I put down their success to us Indians not being particularly demanding viewers.

But apparently, that is what works commercially world over. Just the tableau in the West is more sophisticated.

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Hidden among the rave reviews of the play is a piece by Michael Billington of the Guardian, which asks the same question as I do.

Art & Soul

The moment we stepped out of the National Theatre last evening, Sid asked, “So what was it about?” And it took me a full five minutes to figure out what was the Alan Benett play The Habit of Art about. It was about a day in the rehearsal of a play about a meeting between the poet WH Auden and composer Benjamin Britten at the fag ends of their lives where they discuss art, fame, old age, the fear of being forgotten, their homosexuality, and how the two of them dealt with it in their lives and in their art, as imagined by their biographer Humphrey Carpenter.

So how many different kinds of artists was this play about? There was the author of the play that was being rehearsed, the play’s producer, the actors playing the different parts, the poet Auden, the composer Britten and even the biographer Carpenter. They all had ideas about theatre, acting, writing, poetry, music and the humanity of the characters they enacted. And the play was about all of that.

With so many ideas jostling for space, Bennett’s play could have easily accelerated towards total meltdown. Yet, it moved smoothly on adding layers upon layers without losing sight to the humanity of each artist – the author, producer and actors bringing their own life experiences of age, sexualities and art into the play. And it is so naturally acted that you actually feel that you are getting a peak into the comedy, ideas, anxieties, egos and intellect that come together in the making of a play.

Watching it I was reminded of another celebrated work of art on largely a similar theme – age, fame, sexuality, art, and art within art – the 2008 Charlie Kaufman’s movie Synecdoche, New York. Yet, while Synecdoche, New York left you exhausted, tired and hopeless with respect to both art and life, The Habit of Art is the opposite. It will leave your refreshed, amused, full of ideas and hopeful towards the eventual decline of life that awaits us all.

Yes, we will be old. But age will also give us the opportunity to give-in to our glorious eccentricities!

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* The website of the Royal National Theatre says that tickets for the play have sold out till April. But call up at their box office number, and they are sure to have some return tickets. Our £10 tickets had us in the second row but as much of the action takes place in the central of the stage they were totally worth it.

**Here’s the only review of Synecdoche, New York that encaptured the complex feelings it left me with.