A free bulletin... of blokes behaving badly
...among other things to enjoy in London this week
I’ve got a fair number of new free subscribers recently - welcome all - so to give them an idea of what you get for a paid subscription (and to give a treat to all the lovely, longstanding people who move on with their lives when they get to the paywall line, like I do on any number of other substacks) this week’s big bulletin is free to read.
What I’ve seen
Big blokes with big, nasty flaws have been the theme for me at the theatre this week (I mean, t’was ever thus, but it’s less often thus across the board these days).
For the first half of Juno and the Paycock, on until November 23 at the Gielgud theatre, it’s as if Mark Rylance, playing drunken Irish wastrel ‘Captain’ Jack Boyle, is in a different play to the rest of the cast. I’m aware (now that I’ve read the programme, hungry for some reasoning behind this weird directorial decision by the usually reliable Matthew Warchus) that Seán O'Casey’s 1924 play is a deliberate mishmash of melodrama and music hall knockabout.
But Rylance, who has for some time now been morphing from one of our most singular, generous and charismatic actors to a stuttering, swaying parody of himself, is overdoing it so enthusiastically it’s as if Charlie Chaplin had dropped into a moderately serious drama and started filming a farce.
The makeup doesn’t help - white-faced with a silly moustache and one eyebrow seemingly stuck on higher than the other, he looks remarkably like the leading character in The Great Dictator. It’s bizarre.
But more problematically, it completely swipes every scene from the other, more conventionally written characters, one of whom, Juno, Jack’s long-suffering wife, holding the family together on the breadline effectively with one hand, is played by J Smith Cameron. Even Gerri from Succession can’t reign Rylance in.
I’m not sure why this has been revived. Cameron has played the role before, so presumably she feels it’s a good one for an actress. I don’t agree. Tennessee Williams this ain’t. Leo Leyden as the Boyles’s son Jonny, physically and emotionally damaged from the reignited Irish Civil War, has almost nothing to work with - Jonny has been through a lot, but comes across as whiny and judgmental, and in the end proves unable even to keep to his own side’s dubious moral code, so that when he exits the play you feel relieved that he’s one fewer burden for his poor mother and sister.
Speaking of which, Aisling Kearns is great as Mary, the Boyles’s daughter. She manages to wring every bit of pathos and humour out of her role as a young, well-read woman fighting for equal rights who is still trapped in a cage of convention. There’s a wretched moment towards the end of the play, where Mary is momentarily offered a fairytale ending of sorts, but when it suddenly dawns on her that it’s too good to be true, you really feel her deep disappointment but also her stoicism.
I took a friend with me, and he said something really interesting, which was that the female characters are the real point of the play, or at least, the real point of putting the play on now. When O’Casey wrote it, even to put the lives of the Irish working poor on stage, to elevate them by showing them to be worthy of art, was a revolutionary statement. Now, post-kitchen sink, it’s the women whose lives and trials stand out - at least they would if they could be seen past Mark Rylance’s stupid moustache.
Giant at the Royal Court is basically sold out until its end date of November 16, which isn’t bad for a debut (though to be fair, writer Mark Rosenblatt has been a director for years), but I suppose there may be returns. It ought to transfer to the West End, though that will depend on whether they can secure their star’s time.
Charting a single afternoon in the life of the 67 year-old Roald Dahl (a magnificent John Lithgow) as he meets with his English and American publishers to discuss the fallout from an incendiary book review he has written, that seems to lay the blame for the actions of the state of Israel with all Jewish people worldwide, this troublingly funny, clever play chips away at this alarmingly current issue while also exploring questions such as: what kind of stand an organisation should take in the face of suspected bigotry by one of its associates; the nature of victimhood and the myriad ways those victims might respond to it; and how far art can be separated from the artist.
Rachel Stirling is great fun as Dahl’s second wife (to-be, at this point - this is 1983), Felicity, and Romola Garai is as on form as ever, convincingly timid, torn and then tightly livid as Jessie Stone, the smart but at first slightly starstruck Jewish sales director from the New York office, whose discomfort at what her hero has written becomes ever more impossible for her to ignore. Especially in the face of Dahl’s increasingly barbed, not-entirely-passive aggression, as he realises that he’s being manipulated into an apology for a belief he refuses to question.
Elliot Levey, a real stalwart of London theatre, plays Tom Maschler, Dahl’s British publisher - also Jewish, but not, as he describes someone else, “Jewish Jewish”. All he wants is to sweep the whole affair under the carpet and get on with launching The Witches (there’s a funny moment early on that shows Dahl’s irritation at how much credit - and money - Quentin Blake gets for the books).
A holocaust survivor in, in his own view, the most glancing sense of the word, Tom’s reluctance to see himself as a victim, having simply “got on a fucking train” to leave Nazi Germany as a boy, is a fascinating foil to the younger, American-born Jessie.
Tom resists considering the schoolyard anti-semitism he experienced on arrival in Britain as anything other than “boys finding sticks to beat each other with”, and can’t bring himself to fully engage with Dahl’s evident bigotry. Perhaps to do so is to open a can of worms he just doesn’t feel able to handle - and why should he? That’s one of the questions the play asks. There are many ways to be human and to deal with generational trauma; who’s to judge the ‘right’ way?
Of course, Dahl was a bloody awful anti-semite, and deliberately revealed it in an appalling interview, which forms the gently explosive denouement of this play. But of course his books remain hugely popular, because they are exceptionally good and speak to children in a unique way - even Jessie admits that she may not stop reading them to her son. The urge to forget or even disbelieve the worst of our heroes, in the face of more or less irrefutable evidence, is astonishingly strong.
Standing on the platform at Sloane Square after the show, I overheard a group who had just left the theatre, one already asking whether the others thought that Dahl really meant what he said, or whether he had just decided that he didn’t give a shit; whether he didn’t really think those dreadful things, but said it because he was a bit perverse and didn’t like being caught out or being told what to do.
I wanted to shake her. Read him, don’t read him. Up to you. But don’t lie to yourself.
I think Coriolanus at the National Theatre is a very good production of it. David Oyelowo is excellent as the unfeasibly courageous soldier whose brilliance and bravery on the field are very quickly eclipsed by his own vast ego, cavernous entitlement and near-clinical allergy to the common man. This is not just a mere intolerance - and Shakespeare’s populus, shifting its allegiances from moment to moment, is demonstrably fickle, sheep-like and self-interested. Nobody comes out of this well.
As an exploration of power, the balance of the patrician and the populist, and the pros and cons of democracy, Coriolanus is quite something. As a portrait of a man in thrall to his mother (played with dignity by Pamela Nomvete, almost unrecognisable as the same actress who played Faye in Skeleton Crew at the Donmar Warehouse earlier this year) it’s quite weird.
It’s not one of Shakespeare’s best plays, but the contemptuous general is a fun role for a strong actor (though the role of his wife Virgilia is so weedy as to be almost insulting, I felt livid on Kemi-Bo Jacobs’s behalf), and Stephanie Street and Jordan Metcalfe are great as Sicinius and Brutus, the people’s tribunes, the plebeian representatives in the senate - furious at Coriolanus’s arrogance and disdain but as prone as the next politician to enjoying the privileges of their position.
Director Lyndsey Turner (along with designer Es Devlin, one of the best) weaves drama out of scrappy chaos with ingenious use of projections and monolithic columns. A sort of tableau tacked onto the end elevates what is actually a bit of a flat denouement. On the whole, I enjoyed it.
The very last work in the National Portrait Gallery’s new exhibition Francis Bacon: Human Presence is like a gut punch. Triptych May-June 1973 is atypical of the artist’s work in that it clearly represents a real event, but then, not even Bacon’s imagination could compete with the horrible, prolonged death from an overdose of his lover George Dyer, in the bathroom of a Paris hotel in 1971.
The triptych, which depicts Dyer variously as he was found, slumped on the toilet; vomiting into a sink; and heaving with misery, almost engulfed by the inky darkness of his depression, is one of the saddest, angriest things I’ve seen - an anguished but controlled expression of the furious complexity of grief.
The show, which runs to January 19, is the first major exhibition to focus on Bacon’s portraits in nearly two decades. I was slightly dreading all those screaming heads, boxed-in popes and contorted, unhappy bodies in one place - there are more than 50 works on display - but somehow, despite its darker moments, it is oddly uplifting, including as it does so many portrayals of those closest to him, from lovers such as Peter Lacey and Dyer to dear friends like Muriel Belcher, Lucian Freud, Isabel Rawsthorne and Henrietta Moraes.
The latter, incidentally, was one of very few sitters who never took exception to his peculiarly unflattering style. We’ll never see his painting of Cecil Beaton, because when Beaton saw it, he was so appalled that Bacon discreetly destroyed it. It more or less stopped the painter from working from life because, as he said, if he liked his sitters, he didn’t “want to practise before them the injury that I do to them in my work. I would rather practise the injury in private.”
There is, of course, in the distortion of his faces and bodies, a chronic vulnerability, an uncertainty, a disconcerting feeling of shifting ground. But with this, and with his frequent habit of transposing his own face onto those of his sitters, in my view Bacon also captured like few others the status of humanity as a work in progress - the multitudes that we all contain; the endless internal battle for supremacy between our best, worst and everything in between.
Also on right now
London’s annual festival Dance Umbrella has just started. Running to October 31, it has any number of super-interesting things both in person and online. I’m obsessed with the painter Egon Schiele, so a new dance film by Lea Anderson, showing a new work by the Featherstonehaughs (‘Fanshawes’) that draws on his anxious expressionism, has piqued my interest - that’s having its digital premiere online until the end of the festival.
Another work that represents a crossover with art and has therefore caught my eye is the first appearance at the Barbican by visual artist and filmmaker Hetain Patel, with a preview performance of his latest solo Mathroo Basha (‘Mother Tongue’ in Gujarati).
Following the passing of a number of first-generation immigrants in his family, British-born Patel “reflects on what is lost and what is transformed, revisiting rituals rooted in his family’s working-class Brit-Gujarati experience” and responding to audio interviews of women from his family speaking about inheritance, loss and the future. I like the sound of it. Those are my two top tips - there’s more to be found here.
If I weren’t already going for dinner in Deptford with my mates, because I’m that glam, I might have gone to Trinity Laban Presents: Sounds from West Africa, which is an evening of music up the road from me at Blackheath Halls on Friday October 11. Celebrating the legacy of Fela Kuti and other legends of the region, it’s a showcase for the next generation of talent.
Dele Sosimi, a key figure in Afrobeat, will lead a band of talented students in Fela Kuti classics, with dancers from TL’s 1Syllable music and dance company; Nathan Dawkins (the 2024/2025 Fela Kuti Scholarship recipient), performs Afro-infused jazz and R&B, drawing on the music of the African diaspora; and Lagos-born Israel Olaoluwa Akindipe (AKA Olamony) and his band, Ola + The Amalgam, will round off the night. It sounds fun, no?
Book now
If you are a West London person (and I am not; the amount of myself I have to get over every time I’m required to travel to the Lyric Hammersmith does not reflect well on me at all) then you may be keen to know about the London Breeze Film Festival 2024 - formerly Barnes Film Festival, but not actually in Barnes. Its 9th edition runs October 23-27 (this is the first under the new name), in person at cinemas, and continuing to November 3 with Breeze Online.
There are a few highlights I like the sound of, all of which are showing at Riverside Studios. One is the opening night film In Camera, the debut feature by British filmmaker Naqqash Khalid, which stars rising actor Nabhaan Rizwan (Dionysus in Kaos, RIP that show, I liked it) as a young actor dragging himself through endless awful auditions. It looks absolutely batshit. There’s a Q&A with Khalid, Rizwan and co-star Josie Walker on the night.
On October 25 there’s a screening - the UK premiere, in fact - of The Old Bachelor, the latest feature by Iranian director Oktay Baraheni. Hasan Pourshirazi won the best actor award at TIFF in Romania for his performance as the patriarch in a family tragedy set against the backdrop of gender inequality in contemporary Iran. I don’t know how much more misery in the Middle East anyone is actively going to choose to watch right now but it’s a rarely seen view of the country, so is likely to be worth your time.
I also think I’ll probably quite like the supernatural Christmas romance Between the Lights the following night, even though the trailer appears to give away every major plot point. It follows Alice, a scientist, and Jay, a medium, on their romantic journey across three consecutive Christmases. I mean, I like all kinds of silly Christmas romances, so my bar is not high, but set in York and across the Lake District, at the very least it’ll look better than your average Netflix jingle bollocks.
I saw Nanette way too late, after it had been endlessly imitated, and so couldn’t understand for ages what the fuss was about, but have since come to understand how pioneering brilliant the comedian Hannah Gadsby is. Her new show, WOOF!, comes to the London Palladium for a four night run from November 4-8 (not including 6), and since it’s a bloody enormous venue there are plenty of tickets.
I find myself quite excited about Wayne McGregor’s forthcoming full-length ballet at the Royal Opera House, based on the Maddaddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood.
I’ve interviewed Sir Wayne (as he is now) before and he’s very scathing about how bad ballet is at narrative; he doesn’t allow anything so unsympathetic as storyline to get in the way of his interpretations so it won’t matter a damn if you haven’t read them, though it might be useful simply to have an inkling where he’s coming from. Anyway, as a creator of pure dance, I think he’s amazing, so I can’t wait to see it. It’s at the ROH from November 14-30.
Further ahead
This is getting quite long today, so I’m going to stop there, except to mention that after all the fuss of priority access there are actually plenty of tickets available for the Tom Hiddleston/Hayley Atwell/Jamie Lloyd Much Ado About Nothing at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, which starts February 20 and runs to April 5, and you won’t have to queue on the website, at least I didn’t have to when I had a look at 8.30pm last night.
Of course the £35 ones are rare as hens’ teeth, but around the middle mark (£85/£95) there are loads, and quite a few at £65. It’s an undignified way to find out just how much less popular Loki is than Spider-man, but there we are.
If you’ve enjoyed today’s bulletin, and you think someone else might find it useful, please do share it! This particular issue will remain free. And if you’d like to see more of this kind of thing, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. I love doing it but it’s a hell of a lot of work.