Courage is fire, and bullying is smoke…

It doesn’t hurt me.

Do you want to feel how it feels?

Do you want to know that it doesn’t hurt me?

Do you want to hear about the deal that I’m making?

You, it’s you and me.

And if I only could,

I’d make a deal with God,

And I’d get him to swap our places,

Be running up that road,

Be running up that hill,

Be running up that building.

– Kate Bush: Running up that hill (a deal with God)

I do not know if you are this nasty to everyone. My suspicion, though, is that – like every bully I have ever encountered (and from whom, ironically, I have learned some indispensable life-lessons) – you saw me parked there, with my Blue Badge, in the Disabled parking space, and simply marked me out as defenceless: someone who would (or could) not fight back against your customary, coarse, crude cant; your recurrent torrent of stunted invective; your pathological fist in my face; your visceral urge to beat me to a pulp. Probably, my refusal to engage you, to engage with you – and my constant expression of dumbfounded bemusement (a defence mechanism of sorts – although I will admit that such spitefulness did take me by surprise: most folk, I have found, are deserving of their space on our tiny planet…) – only aggravated you more: as I was not willing to play along with your stinted, spiteful expectation of a script; nor reward your nonexistent insight, your self-evident innate insecurity.

I am glad, though, that I riled you – at the time – at least as much as you riled me; that, once the onlookers had dispersed, you felt compelled to return and resume your tyranny: because I had not given you the demeaning satisfaction that obviously motivates you. I am sad, though, for the disruption you caused to those other people’s lives: both that they had to witness your attack on me (although one was gracious, then, to offer compassionate support – something I cannot imagine you are capable of comprehending); and that you then took your pathetic impotence out on those who hindered your deranged exit from the scene. I can only hope that you did no more physical or psychological damage once out of sight.

¶

As it is unlikely that you will ever read this (or understand it), I can be pretty certain that you will never gloat over my solitary sleepless night, caused by the traumatic resurrection of submerged spectres; nor the pain that presently haunts the gnawed, raw hollow within. That would no doubt encourage you to endlessly repeat your tiny-minded rituals on those less able to cope. (Once I have published this, though, I will, as they say, sleep like a babe: confident of my moral victory.)

I know I should pity you for your tantrums. A grown man should have more control over his immaturity, his inner, infantile demons. But I do not feel sorry for you in any way. I sympathize with those who know you better (or more thoroughly, should I say) than I; who have to live with such a poor, domineering representative of the human race – that is, of course, should anyone be foolish enough to be in your solipsistic presence for more than a few moments – but all I actually wish for you is two things. The first such hope – from the deep dark side that most of us learned to curb in childhood – is that you would simply vanish from existence, instantly: causing no collateral damage to anyone or anything; nor impinging on their memories. The second is that, one day soon, you find yourself forced uncomfortably into the same sharp corner you tried – but failed – to terrorize me into. I am not convinced, though, that you have one neuron of empathy within you. You are obviously too accustomed to instantly wielding the only weapon in your arsenal – that of thuggish belligerence – to always try to get what you want (however petty); and in response to anything that thwarts the meanness of your paltry reality.

If you do read this, please know that I have reported you to the Police: that your behaviour has been classed as a ‘hate crime’ against the disabled. Whether or not they take my complaint seriously may depend, I accept, on a number of factors. However, please also know that composing my account for them helped me regain both my composure and the self-belief I had felt falling from between my shaking fingers like so many grains of burning sand. Even if they take action, I acknowledge, somewhat dejectedly, that your demeanour is unlikely to alter: that your behaviour stems from a narrowness of emotion and meagreness of imagination that will never be changed. What a wretched existence. You must be so very lonely.

Hallelujah…!

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

– Thornton Wilder

Having arrived in Stratford-upon-Avon (“Well, this is the Forest of Arden”) only relatively recently, I suppose, initially, I felt behoved to attend the RSC as often as I could; but, as my hearing has faded – along with neurological deficits that mean I now struggle with tonality, with the pitch of music that is new to me – I have found drama overtaking the concerts and recitals that used to be my lifeblood. In fact, it would probably be no understatement to say that I am becoming quite addicted to the theatre – both to the place, and to the performances. Nonetheless, I do appreciate how “so very fortunate” we are in having such a cornucopia of high-calibre culture on our doorstep. (Having moved here from London – with its embarras de richesses – it would be all too easy to complain of the opposite: but, by way of illustration, Compton Verney’s hoard of great art is simply a stone’s throw away; and we have – should you need an injection of superior music-making – both the Orchestra of the Swan and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra within arm’s reach.)

So it was, last night, that I found myself seated close to the stage, full of anticipation, waiting to see The Jew of Malta again. And I was not disappointed. In fact, exactly the opposite. The production seems to have relaxed into a thing of great joy: even better paced; apparently more spontaneous; and featuring a company that is obviously at ease with itself. Of course, increased familiarity with the play, and being eyeball-to-eyeball with such confident characterization – enabling me to make fresh connections, and discover previously-unrealized subtleties – may have helped; but there are, as Mrs Bard shrewdly states, some works “that benefit from more than one reading”. And this, undoubtedly, is one!

I have to say that Rhiannon Handy, stepping unto the breach as Abigail (whilst continuing her non-speaking part as ‘Attendant’), contributed greatly to this: showing a maturity and sagacity in the rôle that I am sure augurs extremely well for her future (and for the rest of the season at the Swan). The range of her delivery and facial expressions – from self-conscious to coquettish; doleful to delightful – masterfully matched Jasper Britton’s increasingly lovable rogue at every move.

Again, though, the Swan was nowhere near full: so please help in sustaining one of the very best theatres in the country – with some of our very best actors – by grabbing a ticket (or six); or even becoming a member or supporter. The Jew of Malta is on until 8 September 2015.

A novel can tell you everything you want to know about what it’s trying to say, but plays are by definition incomplete. They are instructions for performance, like musical scores, and they need players to become music…. A play’s meaning is conferred on it by the act of playing it.

– Nicholas Hytner

A rap (sort of) – but not on the knuckles – for those in chronic pain…

Make it real

Remembering Ian Dury (1942-2000)

Build me a butty

(fry the bacon

fill me up)

Hand me the pills

(hate the flavour

gulp them down)

Push me to putty

(play the music

turn it up)

Help me walk hills

(climb through torture

feel let down)

Up

down

spin me around

Tell me you’ll cure me

and make it real

Help me be frisky

(feign my comfort

buckle down)

Hand me the cream

(smooth my aching

lift me up)

Pour me a whisky

(take your time now

come on down)

Build me a dream

(brighten the world

give it up)

Up

down

spin me around

Tell me you’ll cure me

and make it real

Up the creek

Down and dirty

Up and about

Down and out

Lighten up

Knuckle down

The game is up

So knock me down

I’m coming up roses

So lead me down

the garden path

Up

down

spin me around

Tell me you’ll cure me

and make it real

Up

down

spin me around

Tell me you’ll cure me

and make it real

Make it heal

Up to Parr…

When I (and probably you) think of Giovanni Antonio Canal (Canaletto), I think of his great compositions, with their great expanses of great sky; his stunning attention to architectural precision, observed with a keen draughtsman’s eye; his transparent use of paint to render light and shadow on stone and brick as well as any modern photographer. When I think of Canaletto, I therefore think of buildings – cityscapes that have never been surpassed – usually seen reflected across shimmering water. However, in Compton Verney’s current exhibition, Canaletto: Celebrating Britain, two things caught my attention that I would never (through my own ignorance) have attributed to him – because I have never spent so much time before staring deep into his work, glasses perched on the tip of my nose, seeing his creations afresh, startled by his obvious skill and intelligence… – firstly, his wonderful use of ink and wash in his ‘sketches’ for his larger works; and, secondly, his superb portrayals (in any medium) of the people who inhabit them, and therefore bring his masterpieces to life. Oh, and there’s nearly always a dog in there, somewhere…!

The figures – especially in the pen-and-ink drawings – are caught with a minimum of fuss, but a maximum of proficiency: simple strokes (and magical, minuscule sparkling white dots for lit cotton) that delineate their poses: boatmen pulling heftily on their oars, or gondoliers sculling, muscling their rèmi into the deep Venetian waters – sometimes in the foreground, where, again, astonishing, almost Rembrandt-like interest and detail are brought to bear; although these craft frequently move out of shot, half-captured: adding even richer verisimilitude to the pictures. There is something particularly fluid about these characters: who contrast beautifully with the immutability of the solid, ruled world they inhabit. And each is recognizably an individual. (My favourites? The two servants beating the large rug, just catching the sun, in London: the Old Horse Guards from St James’ Park.)

¶

If I initially visited the gallery for Canaletto, I lingered much, much longer for The Non-Conformists: Photographs by Martin Parr – in a much calmer, thankfully less-crowded setting. This is photography at its most powerful, its most human: monochrome explorations of the soul, of close communities, of the realities of life – and all captured with both deep pathos and wit. If you don’t believe that the camera is an equal tool to the brush, then this exhibition, I hope, will change your mind.

I left with misted eyes (and will return so, no doubt) and a deep contentment: not only for remembered moments parallel to many of my own youth (based on foundations set deep, also, in the heritage of my grandad’s and mum’s Yorkshire Methodist upbringings); but for the sincerity and sympathy of observation. I must – as did others – have chuckled out loud at some of the absurdities, too: the man on the step-ladder, in Hebden Bridge, one foot firmly anchored in nothingness; the Silver Jubilee street party, Elland, suddenly abandoned, and washed out by torrential rain of a very certain Northern kind. You could hear the absent children screaming and giggling as they ran for shelter.

This is art at least as great as Canaletto’s – but now filling each frame with the characters that were once rendered small by their surrounding built environment – filling them with radiance that emanates from within; painting the people large, the centre of our attention (even when they are present only by their previous actions). The buildings – as beautiful as they are, to my Pennine gaze – now there only to cradle these vivid beings, give them context. This art is also – as it should be – honest: you do not feel the touch of manipulation of poses or settings; the light and situations are natural; and there is the same thoughtful attention to detail. This is how it was; and, in these moments made permanent, how these graceful mortals will remain. I can think of no better memorial; and am grateful for the opportunity to bear witness.

Back outside in the grounds, under the glooming clouds; then re-exploring the memorials in the crumbling chapel; I felt a deeper connection – fanciful, perhaps – to those who had gone before; had made this world for us; left their gentle, subtle marks on both the physical and mental landscape I now inhabit. Such – as I have said before – is the potency of Art: not just to entertain, or to move us; or to make us ask more valuable questions of those, and that, which surrounds us; but to enrich all that comes after. We are so very fortunate….

And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge…?

Your extreme right does me exceeding wrong…

– Christopher Marlowe: The Jew of Malta

Not actually a reference to last week’s national and district election results (unless you want it to be); but in all likelihood a twisted, academic allusion to Antigone. And yet “wretched Barabas”, the eponymous ‘Jew of Malta’, who proclaims the above, is not, in the end, solely a victim of downright racism (and, it has to be said, his own ineptitude), but what James R Siemon describes as his “unabashed materialism [and] self-proclaimed conscienceless egocentrism”: which, coupled with all parties’ Machiavellian “self-interest as a universal rule of political conduct” means maybe there are contemporary parallels to be inferred, after all….

No, Barabas is born to better chance,

And framed of finer mould than common men,

That measure nought but by the present time.

Besides, such political paranoia is not assuaged by witnessing the play’s constant barrages of hypocrisy: power, greed, and cunning, eclipsing any professed religious creed – a theme Marlowe had earlier invoked in Tamburlaine – whatever a character’s race or faith (Christian, Jew, or Muslim); nor the explicit Elizabethan animosity of “merchant ‘strangers’” (immigrants) with their “emergent capitalism” – obviously, as the modern trope goes, “comin’ over ’ere and takin’ our jobs”. However, Jasper Britton’s superb, full-ranging portrayal – despite our anti-hero’s rather obvious and barbarous flaws – often provokes a knowing sympathy (which he then mocks all “worldlings” for; and repudiates with increasing, uproarious and complex – finally self-defeating – savagery. However, although there are strong resonances, Barabas is far more vengeful than Shylock in the mass of flesh he seeks – but also then repeatedly, remorselessly exacts: usually at arm’s length).

Why stand you thus unmoved with my laments?

Why weep you not to think upon my wrongs?

Why pine not I, and die in this distress?

There are, though, obvious parallels with Shakespeare’s famous portrayal of anti-Semitism, its effects, and recourse to “the law” – and it is therefore fitting that, opening in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the night I attended the Swan, was The Merchant of Venice. My feeling is that each play – however captivating and challenging: as The Jew of Malta indubitably is – will shed reflected light onto the other: making clear leitmotivs and variations we may not have quite expected; but also revealing (and projecting long shadows on) parts of the human condition we would, in real life, rather not confront. Perhaps this is what ‘Art’, in all its forms, is for…?

¶

But what kind of ‘Art’ is this, anyway? TS Eliot proclaimed it “tragic farce” – but I believe it to be something so much deeper in its amalgamation of satire, revenge, melodrama, comedy and “the tragedy of a Jew, Who smiles to see how full his bags are crammed…”. Pathos runs hell for leather, hand-in-hand with great wit and plain speaking.

I dislike the improbability and buffoonery of ‘true’ farce: but there is a rationale – as well as a deeply-warped (psychopathic?) persona – driving Barabas’ crescendoing killing frenzy; and the result – as presented here, anyway – is, frankly, bloody funny! For example, introducing himself to his recently-purchased slave (and short-term, savage soulmate: “we are villains both…”), Ithamore (played with real aplomb, and great humour, by Lanre Malaolu, with possibly the best line of the night: “Was ever pot of rice porridge so sauced?”), Barabas paints a cool self-portrait, that, in many other plays, would have you squirming in your seat. Here, though, its inventory of increasing invective, delivered with utter self-possession and matter-of-factness – as if to say “if I wasn’t so flawed, you wouldn’t love me so much (and I don’t give a tinker’s cuss what you think of me, anyway: this is who I am)” – pulls you in so readily, that not only do you also suddenly see no wrong in such a noxious chopping list as he admits to (and is obviously proud of), you chuckle with glee as sin mounts upon sin.

As for myself, I walk abroad a-nights

And kill sick people groaning under walls:

Sometimes I go about and poison wells;

And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves,

I am content to lose some of my crowns;

That I may, walking in my gallery,

See ’em go pinioned along by my door.

Being young I studied physic, and began

To practise first upon the Italian;

There I enriched the priests with burials,

And always kept the sexton’s arms in ure

With digging graves and ringing dead men’s knells….

But mark how I am blest for plaguing them,

I have as much coin as will buy the town.

But tell me now, how hast thou spent thy time?

¶

What goes around, though, comes around (for both the audience and, eventually, Barabas himself).

…and nothing violent,

Oft have I heard tell, can be permanent.

As a result, even four hundred years later, many of the text’s expressed social attitudes and delineated racial stereotypes are once more to the fore (that is, if they ever really dissipated). However – despite my attempts at forging ironic (yet aggrieved) links to modern statecraft – removed from the context and the mores of late sixteenth-century London, and writ so very large, it is difficult not to be shocked and unsettled by what could easily (simplistically) be read as endorsement of vicious prejudice. (Somehow, the escalating violence – much of it offstage – escapes parallel perspectival judgment.) It is due to the intelligence of both Marlowe’s incisive, intelligible text (oh, that he had lived to a ripe old age…) and the current production that I left the theatre intensely clear that this is not the case: convinced that bigotry of any flavour is poisonous to both despised and despiser. And always has been. Play with fire, and you will end up with more than burning fingers….

Whether the play criticizes, encourages, or simply portrays such intolerance, you may have to decide for yourself… – and, therein, I think, lies its subjective, subversive power. (The RSC’s run at the Swan Theatre ends on 8 September: so you have plenty of time to make your mind up!) Thoroughly entertaining, as well, though: from atheistic, pseudo-Machiavellian start – oh, boy, do I want an RMC T-shirt…

I count religion but a childish toy,

And hold there is no sin but ignorance.

…to ironic, devotional, anti-Machiavellian finish…

So march away, and let due praise be given

Neither to fate nor fortune, but to heaven.

If I have one complaint, it is that the play accelerates to this end. Earlier, the pacing – and great use of music (by Jonathan Girling: don’t be surprised if you suddenly become addicted to klezmer…) and stylized, balletic, haka-like fighting – is pitch-perfect (imaginatively directed by Justin Audibert); but we are not given time to contextualize Barabas’ spiral into hell. What we are treated, too, though, is an intelligently-realized stage (designed by Lily Arnold; lit by Oliver Fenwick); and some wonderful acting – not just Britton and Malaolu; but, particularly, Steven Pacey, with great authority as Ferneze; and Geoffrey Freshwater and Matthew Kelly as (“tonight, I’m going to be”) a pair of meddlesome monks.

No-one lets the side down: although Catrin Stewart, making her RSC debut as Abigail, needs to let her words speak as well as her face and actions – sometimes, methinks the lady doth project just a little bit too much. (She should learn well from Britton: whose voice varies from clear whisper; beautiful, booming baritone – who knew the man could sing so well?! – to dumbfounded falsetto. As the applause resounded, I also detected just a hint of Eric Morecambe’s cheekiness – such is the full-driven gamut of a remarkable performance: that will stay with me for a very long time.) Off to book another viewing…!