Review: Anglo-Saxon Treasures at the British Library

I have been to see the Anglo-Saxons exhibition at the British Library which is full of thousand-year-old books. The first thing I would like to say is that the standard of handwriting has collapsed dreadfully in a millennia, and you should all be ashamed of yourselves.

Right, having got that out of the way, onwards. Now I am partial to a bit of Anglo-Saxon bling and very much enjoyed the exhibition of Staffordshire treasures which came to Bristol in 2017. It’s an under-explored bit of our history, and a fascinating one. Because the Anglo-Saxons tended to build a lot in wood rather than stone, there isn’t a huge amount of their remains in existance, and we have to deduce their civilisation from other stuff they left behind, like their metalwork and books, both of which were made to an enormously high standard of art and craftsmanship. Both of these are on display in the collection of precious books displayed at the British Library.

To start with, the books on display are mostly bibles, some as old as the 7^th Century. But it’s as Anglo-Saxon society starts to cohere into something that roughly resembles England that the stuff on show becomes more interesting, varied and abundant, producing history books, biographies, translations of popular European bestsellers, legal treaties and even fiction. Some of which were allegedly or reputedly the work of King Alfred the Great, or his grandson, Athelstan, a prolific gifter or books. And it’s here that the exhibition is both potentially most interesting and also somehow fails to live up to that potential. It offers the books ordered by the era and area of predominant Anglo-Saxon kingdom, and includes very briefly, the process of how these separate realms became formed into one: the Kingdom of England. And I couldn’t help feeling that the curators, or whoever had written the explanatory panels, had shied away from telling this fascinating, important and relevant story, for fear of coming over a little bit Ukip. Instead it was all about links to Europe and how it was a multicultural society, yes, blah blah. I know there’s no such thing as an apolitical take on history but I felt like this excesive squeamishness took away from some of the marvels on show – as well as the marvels which weren’t on show – which is the story of how the territories that became England emerged from the post-Roman chaos of the dark ages and formed themselves into a functioning, prosperous society with an intelligentsia and centres of learning.

It was also obvious how much at that time Christianity was a monastic religion, about great houses of the church, and arcane debates about Easter. The later kind of Chrsitianity which we associate with the middle ages, with its enormous Cathedrals and glittering, popular saints and miracles was a later, populist invention. Anyway, one of the jobs of these early monasteries was to produce books, and by God they were good at it. The artwork on display is stunning in its skill and luxury, and makes you realise that there’s nothing to be ashamed of in coveting a book as an item of art, rather than just to be read: it’s been going on for centuries. It’s also interesting to see how very good much of the art in the books is, with tiny fine line drawings that have none of the lack of realism of later medieval art, but show awfully real-looking people, sketched niftily in pen-and-ink, doing awfully normal things.

The exhibition also left me wondering about the technology of the book. Roman society ran on scrolls and tablets, but by the end of the dark ages the rectangular, bound manuscripts that we use today seemed normal. A letter, dating from the 9^th Century, contains the remains of folds. I wondered how, and why, this technological shift had happened.

The star of the show was undoubtedly the only existing copy of Beowulf, and there was certainly some fascinating items on display and some amazing artwork to see. What it lacked was an easily understandable flow of the history behind the exhibition, that fascinating emergence of the state of England, a political edifice which still stands twelve hundred years after it was first dragged from the marshes and wrested from the hands of competing warlords. I could practically hear a roomful of curators screaming ‘Nobody mention Brexit!’ in a planning meeting, which seemed to slightly put a pall over things, since the fact that we’re still wrestling with some of the same issues around the boundaries and duties of the state, more than a millennia later, make the nation-forming struggles of the Anglo-saxons more relevant, not less.

A final note: it really was very busy. If you want to spend hours leering at the rare manuscripts, maybe try an early morning slot.

Review: Lace in Fashion, Bath Fashion Museum

If you are going to the Fashion museum in Bath any time in 2017 you have an extra treat in store as they have an exhibition on all about Lace in Fashion. As well as modern designer pieces there are some going back to the 16^th Century, when lace was rare, expensive and handmade. It then moves forward to the modern day, when lace is made by machine.

There's a couple of lovely Jane Austen-esque dresses, which as well as being beautiful are also simple and elegant, and look comfy to wear. Alas, this is soon subsumed in the high Victorian era of too much everything, swiftly followed by these ultra-fashionable late Victorian pieces which are just ouch. Fortunately World War one comes along and women are soon able to breathe again, in a variety of elegant and comfy drop-waisters which are also wonderfully tasteful.

Sadly the whole 'less is more' ethos of the inter-war years goes missing again in the 1950s, and while there's a couple of lovely 1950's lace frocks (including one owned by Princess Margaret, designed by Norman Hartnell) there's also a couple of horrors. Layers of tangerine lace do not for elegance make. The modern items in the exhibit are probably the least interesting, though I did swoon over a lovely, lovely pink and green dress by Alberta Ferretti.

If there's one thing I'd have liked some more of it's the background information about the lace and how it's made. I was curious about the huge handmade lace efforts of the Victorian era – it's easy to know about the kind of women that wore them, but what about the women that made them? Were they skilled, well-paid artisans, or slaving away in a factory? The dresses are amazing but I felt they were slightly bereft of stories – like this beautiful dress, knitted by a lady's grandmother in the 1930s as a wedding dress, eventually used for the wedding in 1946. What happened? Was the 1946 wedding to the man she was planning to marry in the 1930s, or someone else entirely? And what happened in between? And there's the lovely flapper dress, made in France, worn by an Indian Rani – who was she, and what happened to her? Clothes are an intimate part of women's lives, and as such if you're interested in women's history then any history of fashion is always fascinating. But I'd have appreciated a little more about the lives behind the fashion, as well. 

Admission to Lace in Fashion is included in the museum entry price.

Review: Kneehigh Theatre, The Flying lovers of Vitebsk

The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk is the last thing to be directed for Cornish Company Kneehigh by acclaimed director Emma Rice, who is going on to be the Artistic Director at the Globe Theatre in London. This is a very well deserved promotion, since Rice has directed a few absolute corkers for Kneehigh, and in a theatre world which is as sexist as the movies, is probably Britain's foremost female theatre director. 

Kneehigh are also great, with or without Rice, and so I went along to this with pretty high expectations. The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk is about the painter Marc Chagall, and his wife Bella, both born in Vitebsk in Belarus, in what was then Imperial Russia. I knew very little about them, but it's a fascinating story with plenty of theatrical material to milk, passing through love-at-first-sight, a rich-girl/poor-boy wedding, World War One, the Russian Revolution, the artistic revolutions of expressionism and cubism, Paris in the 20s, World War Two, and a flight from occupied France.

However, I felt like all this, in a play, presented a bit of a problem. There were lots of 'explaining history to the audience' moments going on, and what felt like more speech directed at us, the audience, than between the characters. Kneehigh usually make ensemble pieces, with quite a few actors, but this had just two actors and two musicians, and I felt like there might have been less explaining if they'd splashed out on a couple of extra performers.

Apart from this, it's undeniably an enjoyable production, with lovely music and singing, and great dancing, especially from Audrey Brisson who played Bella. There isn't, despite the title, any flying: the title refers to Chagall's paintings.

One effect this production had is to make me want to see more of Chagall's art, so in that sense it could be called a success. Overall, a decent production, with lots of lovely moments, but I felt it was a bit let down by the script.

The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk is at Bristol Old Vic until June 11th.

Home Fires: Bring it Back!

Terrible news! Found out today that ITV won't be commissioning another series of Home Fires. Quite rightly, somebody has started a petition to bring it back. Please sign it, here.

Now I know it's only a TV show and there's shit going on in the world and all that but humans need stories. Stories show us how to deal with difficult situations and how to behave with dignity. Humans tell stories abut things that are important. And if you don't ever see people like yourselves in stories then you easily get to thinking that's because you're not important.

One of the reasons I loved Home Fires was that it showed just how ordinary people were important, and how they helped influence history. I loved the mix of ages and classes going in the storyline, and the regional accents that seem to be heard on TV less and less these days.

Home Fires had very good viewing figures, strong writing, a high level of historical veracity, and a thoroughly excellent cast of actors who largely weren't 'names'. I have no idea why ITV would wish to cancel it.

If you want to know more about why I think it deserves to come back, you can read my review, below.
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If, like me, you grew to loathe Downton Abbey, you may be suspicious of Sunday-night vintage-costumed TV. Because of this I was initially cautious of Home Fires, ITV's world-war-two set series about a group of women in the Women's Institute in the fictional village of Great Paxford, in Cheshire. Oh how wrong I was! Home Fires is literally the best thing ITV have made in ages.

If there's one thing I don't like in a historical series like Downton, it's setting up a 'good old days' where everyone knew their place. Because the twentieth century wasn't like that, not even the Edwardian era. Home Fires sidesteps this magnificently, by presenting a world that is full of change, bringing opportunity and threat in equal measure.

Home Fires is based on Jambusters, a popular book by Julie Summers about the WI in WW2, so it has solid academic research to back it up, and its reliance on frequently-ignored details is one of the things that makes it so great. Too often, films and TV about great historical events concentrate on the men involved, and on bloody and decisive battles. Film directors parade their claims to 'realism' by making movies as bloody and explosive as possible. But many important things about history are neither bloody nor explosive, and not all the explosions are of the bloody kind either - some are social, economic, scientific and yes, sexual.

During World war Two, ordinary people understood that success or failure relied on many factors - organisation, morale, production of war material, scientific and social advantage. If you watch films made at the time, this is abundantly clear: but in the macho post-war film world all these things were swept away in favour of guns, and men, and guns and men and guns. Home Fires puts all this interesting social, economic and scientific history back in its rightful place. In doing so, I feel that it's rightfully and slightly subversive.

To start with, it unapologetically focuses on the women, without ever making the men irrelevant. The details of these women's lives are allowed to matter, as are the relationships between them, as much as with the men in their lives. Sometimes, series focusing on women's lives are twee, sometimes they are comedic, sometimes they are slushy and romantic. Sometimes they are just awful and implausible, like the terrible series about nurses in WW1. Home Fires doesn't do any of these things: it lets its characters breathe, and treats their joys and sorrows as worthy of respect.

One of the things I enjoy most is that with the exception of one or two characters, there is a good deal of moral ambiguity going on. Posh Mrs Cameron is both a good egg at heart and an insufferable snob; Mrs Scottlock, the accountant, is both trying to protect her friends and inform to the police, and Stan the farmer is both a bit of a hero and also a bit of a nutjob. The vicar's wife is honorably not having an affair while her husband is a POW, but you know she's absolutely dying to, while closet lesbian Teresa may invite sympathy but is also giving the run-around to an entirely honourable RAF officer who frankly deserves better.

Then there's the men, who are neither better or worse. Well, except in the case of horrible Bob. I'm hoping horrible Bob will get his face melted by an incendiary bomb, because I can't think of anything else bad enough. I hate horrible Bob with a vengence, not only because he abuses his wife, but also because he is a writer. We have never been treated to horrible Bob's horrible prose, but I just know that it is vile egotistical sub-Hemingway trash in which the main character is Bob, portrayed as a hero. Look, I might be getting over-involved here, ok.

Anyway, apart from Bob, there's lovely Czech army officer Captain Marek Novotny. Now, I do have a complaint about Novotny: why is he played by a Danish guy? Are there not any actors in the Czech republic? Are they all permenantly engaged in productions of Kafka? Cannot one small central European state muster one leading man appropriate for an unhappily-married middle-aged lady to lust after? Anyway, ever in the service of journalistic integrity, I emailed the Czech Embassy to ask for their response, and they pointed out that since Maigret was currently being played by Mr Bean, they weren't that upset. (I'm taking that to mean they are upset, a little, but are taking it on the chin, in a manly sort of fashion.)

Anyway I think Marek is maybe too good to be true, and may turn out to be a German spy. If he isn't, I'm giving him two weeks before he's arrested for being one.

Anyway, I'm off to watch the next episode. Come friendly bombs, and fall on Bob!

PS If ITV don't commission another series of this, I'm going round with a pitchfork. A vintage, era-appropriate one, obviously.

Review: A Long day's Journey Into Night

Bristol Old Vic is celebrating it's 250th Anniversary this year, which is pretty awesome. To do so, they're putting on four plays from the four centuries it's been open. So far so good. The specimen representing the 20th century is Eugene O'Neill's classic, A Long Day's Journey Into Night, starring Jeremy Irons and Lesly Manville.

Although this is a classic play, I'd very little idea of what I was in for. What I was in for, it turned out, was three hours of dysfunctional family, drug-taking, consumption, alcohol and criminally negligent behaviour.

I'd like to give credit where it's due, so first of all I'll say that Lesley Manville is an amazing actress and I'd turn up to see her again in anything. Also Jeremy Irons has a lovely sonorous voice and since I was stuck behind a pillar admiring the plaster roses on the ceiling for a good part of the play, it was rather like listening to a radio play with somebody rolling Shakespearianly in the background. I'm not cross about the pillar, it gave me something to cringe behind when Jeremy forgot his lines.

Now, *clears throat* I don't blame Jeremy for this debacle. Or indeed any of the actors on stage. I blame, in descending order, 1) Eugene O'Neill, who wrote this play in the first place, 2) the Director, who thought it was a good idea, 3) whoever greenlit this at Bristol Old Vic, and 4) The Patriarchy.

Oh and Eugene O'Neill's Dad, the 19th Century, and the Catholic Church, but I figured I covered that under the Patriarchy. Anyway, without giving away too many spoilers, this play is about the Tyrone family, a miserable bunch featuring a self-pitying bully, a morphine addict, a consumptive, and an alcoholic. Who shout at each other a lot. Apparently it's based on Eugene O'Neill's actual family, which is why I blame his Dad. It is very long, and entirely without hope. Well, I did experience a brief spark when I realised it was 1912, and that soon, World War One would be along to put the younger family members out of their misery. Then I remembered that they'd have to wait an extra three years, being American, and that a consumptive and alcoholic wouldn't get conscripted anyway, at which point I found no further cause for optimism.

Mrs Tyrone, the mother of the family, is apparently a morphine addict due to her husband's stinginess in providing medical care, and her repeated breakdowns down to the fact that he won't provide her with a stable home. Both the children are wrecks, ditto. This is billed as a family tragedy. I hate to be politically correct here, but that's not a tragedy, is it? It's one person with all the power, and that person being an arsehole, and failing in their responsibilities. Which doesn't meet the Greek standard of tragedy which is some sort of unavoidable woe which is handed out by fate. All these woes are apparently the result of drunkenness, self-regard, and greed, which aren't tragic vices, they're just nasty, petty mean ones. I didn't feel a speck of sorrow for patriarch Tyrone as he bewailed how he wasn't what he could have been. I was just rolling my eyes so hard it's a wonder they didn't fall off the balcony, onto the stalls, below.

This is a terrible, terrible, self-indulgent, boring, interminable, play, and I have no idea what possessed anyone to consider it a classic, unless it were a bunch of old white men thinking that old white men woes are woes of the world, and nothing is ever their fault.

I don't blame Jeremy for forgetting his lines, I'd forget 'em too, if I was expected to learn three hours worth of this repetitious drivel.

Anyway, I'm a bit puzzled as to why this play was picked, as there are so many good plays from the 20th Century that do have contemporary resonance. The BBC put on an amazingly contemporary version of An Inspector Calls last year; or Plenty, which mirrors the slow disillusionment of post-war Britain; or An Accidental Death of An Anarchist, which could happily be played in modern Turkey, or Greece. But instead somebody chose this, which left me contemplating only one, really salient question: was there ever a chandelier in the middle of the Old Vic ceiling, and if so, what happened to it? How did they light it? Most importantly, can we have it back?

Anyway, I think Kneehigh are coming round next month, with The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk, and I'm sure it'll be fantastic, chandelier or no, so you might want to book tickets, for that.

Review: Grayson Perry, The Vanity of Small Differences

This weekend I went to see the The Vanity Of Small Differences, the exhibition of Grayson Perry tapestries currently at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath. I expected the artwork produced as part of the Channel 4 shows about class that aired a few years back, but this is a different series: six tapestries inspired by and including some of those characters, turned into a wholly fictional piece with one narrative running through it.

Photo (c) Stephen White

The tapestries follow the life of Tim Rakewell, a working class lad born in Sunderland. The tapestries follow, in a loose way, the Rake's Progress. Tim is born in the wreckage of industrial working class life, escapes it by being a geek, marries a posh bird, becomes a software millionaire, and moves to the Cotswolds. They are all about class: in the first, his resolutely working class mother sits in her gran's house, surrounded by the knick-knacks and photographs of a vanished way of life. In the second, his aspirational stepfather aims to move to a new housing estate. In the third, Tim is cast out from home, and welcomed to the middle-classes, in the shape of his posh girlfriend's family. In the fourth, we see them living the prosperous aspirational life, surrounded by brand names that signal their status. In the fifth, they look down on their neighbour, a member of the old rich, in the shape of a stag being pulled down by hounds. In the background, an Occupy protest lurks outside Tim's front gate.

A little voiceover from one of the participants in the scene appears on the explanations. They are also sewn into the tapestries, along with a few other words. This is one of the reasons you will happily stand for ten minutes in front of each piece. There's so much to pick out, every space filled with detail and interest, from the 70s swirls of the nana's carpet to the endless upmarket logos - Aga, Le Creuset, Cath Kidston etc - that fill Tim's home. The colours are also wonderful, scorchingly bright and yet not unsubtle.

Photo (c) Stephen White

Contemporary artists are often accused of having nothing to say, but Perry manages to turn a warped reflection on modern Britain in a way that is simultaneously merciless and yet oddly compassionate. Every bit of the scenes he portrays is recognisable, from the post industrial decay to the tinny Barrett homes; the celebrity worshipping; the Guardian readers with their posh olive oil; the upmarket tat that signifies success; the lurking discontent in the shires. The last tapestry is particularly poignant: a car crash outside a retail park in some nameless town. All the crappiness, the ugliness and worship of money summed up in one beautifully rendered piece. And yet, your response to all this is not to hate the participants but to recognise them, at the same time gritting your teeth and squirming with embarrassment at the awkwardness of it all.

I've only previously seen Perry's stuff on the TV, and although I'd liked it, it'd no way prepared me for this: the scale, the detail, and the emotional impact. It was also a great deal more political than I expected, and really doesn't portray a nation at ease with itself. He offers no solutions or easy answers, only offers up what's already there, and says, 'look, here we are.' If the response makes your skin crawl, then that's because it's real, and not because it's art. Sometimes art really is about pointing out what's real, rather than creating something that's not. I think Grayson Perry is a genius, and would put money on it that people will be looking at these tapestries long after Hirst, Emin et al have been consigned to the dustbin of history.

My only complaint, if I have one - as someone who is interested in textiles - is that there was very little info on the technical process of making the tapestries, which I'd have like to have known more about. Apart from that: GO SEE IT. IT'S AMAZING.

The Vanity of Small Differences is on at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath until the 10th April. It's £4 to get in. I'm fairly sure this exhibition is going to a few places so if you're not in the South-West keep an eye on where it might turn up next.

I'm planning a crime spree for christmas

I dunno about you, but I'm planning a bit of a crime spree over Christmas. Christmas is a bit stressful, and I always find a bit of murder gets me through nicely. It has to be the right kind of murder, though: none of yer scarcely-clad nymphettes pornographically displayed for viewers' delectation around here, thank you! Modern crime is so tedious. I prefer a good old fashioned killing that actually taxes my brain a bit. Glamorous locations are a plus, of course, and anything involving cocktails is a bonus.

If you are looking for a suitable cocktail to do away with some of your offensive relatives, you may be disappointed by A is for Arsenic by Kathryn Harkup, which despite telling in forensic detail how Agatha Christie committed dozens of poisonings, is sadly little help in planning to do away with that great-aunt who just refuses to die. Harkup is a chemist and Agatha Christie fanatic and writes with enormous enthusiasm and knowledge about Christie's favourite modus operandi of murder.

Each chapter details a particular poison and goes through how it works, the history and symptoms, which of Christie's books it features in, examples of real-life poisonings, and the forensic history of how these poisons became detectable. It covers all sorts of weird and strange real-life crimes I'd never heard of, such as a Belgian lady serial killer who killed up to 20 people in the 1930s.

A is For Arsenic is quite fascinating if you are interested in Agatha Christie, or indeed in forensic science or the link between science and literature. Of course I adore Christie for her classic whodunnits, but I had no idea how carefully she constructed her fictional murders, using knowledge she gained working in a hospital pharmacy during World War One.

My main worry about A is for Arsenic was that it would be riddled with spoilers, but Harkup cleverly talks about the murders in Christie's books without giving too much away. Which is good, as my other Christmas reading is this.

A number of Christie's novels were set in the Middle East, which she often visited with her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan. Mallowan was fourteen years younger than her. "An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her," Christie once quipped. If you go to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, you can see a beautiful necklace made of ancient beads which Mallowan excavated and had made into a necklace for her.

After years of awful pulpy-looking editions of Christie, the current 30s-themed paperbacks are really handsome. This particular copy came from Topping and Co in Bath, who have the best selection of Agatha Christies, hardback and paperback, I've ever seen in a bookshop. (They are also well stocked with the British Library's Crime Classics series, which includes many other classic 30s whodunnits. I read A Mystery in White last Christmas, and thoroughly enjoyed it.)

If you've only ever watched Christie as a TV adaptation, I really recommend you purchase yourself a book. While the TV adaptations are enjoyable, to appreciate Christie's real cleverness you need to read the text, and experience the full frustration of knowing you read all the clues and still didn't have a clue whodunnit.

There are a few things that you can rely on in a Christie. Apart from murder, these are: an interesting location, poison, and that several suspects will have committed some crime other than the murder. Watching a TV adaptation, its easy to think of it all as twee, but reading the books, with their jealous, grasping families and lying servants, you see Christie had a far from rosy view of humanity, and positively revelled in the less pleasant side of human nature. What she didn't, though, was lay out murder victims as gory, bloody thrills, like many modern crime dramas do. An Agatha Christie may be dark, but it is an exercise in intellectual puzzling rather than voyeurism. Behind the antique detailing, she is quietly subversive too. Her heroes are easily dismissed: an effete little refugee (yes, Hercule Poirot is a refugee) and a little old spinster that nobody takes any notice of.

If you really are too besozzled by Christmas to read a book, there is a new adaptation of And Then There Were None starting on BBC1 on Boxing day.

I'll be watching, of course, but I don't feel British TV does crime that well, it's either a bit creepy, like godawful sexy-serial-killer outing The Fall, or too predictable. Who wants to see a miserable detective trying to solve a murder when you already know the answer?

I am however a big fan Scandi-Noir thriller the Bridge. I like to think Christie would have approved of the Bridge's Autistic Lady Detective and everybody-has-a-motive plotlines, so I may just dig in with a box set of that.

Review: The Light princess, Tobacco Factory, Bristol

As a kid I was a massive fan of George MacDonald's stories, including the Princess and the Goblin, At the Back of the North Wind, and the Light Princess. MacDonald is a largely forgotten Victorian author who nonetheless was a massive influence on writers like CS Lewis and Tolkien. He trained as a clergyman but by all accounts wasn't awfully successful at it: he didn't like the idea that hell was a permanent sentence and believed every soul would come to God eventually.

It's easy to see why MacDonald didn't go down too well in the Victorian church: his stories are oddly un-Victorian, with an idealistic,  yet satirical edge. He tends to poke fun, or worse, at the pompous and hypocritical. His heroes are often lower class (a miner's or a cab driver's son), while the upper classes are ineffectual or horrid. There is an odd, proto-feminism going on, since workers of miracles, dispensers of wisdom, and figures of supernatural power in his stories tend to be female, older, and often rather sexy with it. "Princes get away to follow their fortunes. In this they have the advantage of the Princesses, who are forced to marry before they have had a bit of fun. I wish our Princesses got lost in a forest sometimes," he writes, a bit mournfully.

The Light Princess is a story about a Princess who is cursed to lose all her gravity, both in a literal and a metaphorical sense. Not only does she float around, she also can't take anything seriously. Like all MacDonald's writing, it has funny bits but is also really, really dark in places. There's also water, water, everywhere.

That given, I'd always assumed it'd be fairly hard to make a film of it, let alone a play. The National Theatre made a musical a couple of years ago, but completely rubbished MacDonald's original plot. So I was keen to see what the Tobacco Factory had made of it.

(C) Farrows Creative

I was really pleased that this production of the Light Princess, by the Tobacco factory in association with Peepolykus, used MacDonald's original story. They didn't skip a bit of it, and added a few new elements as well. They got round some of the more fantastical elements of the stories by using shadow puppets and projections, and very well done it was too - genuinely adding to the atmosphere of the story. All of the main characters were excellent. The Princess was both irritating and sympathetic, the evil witch was enjoyably evil, the King insisted on mansplaining at people (which he does in MacDonald's original story), and the poor over-serious Prince was hilariously, earnestly Teutonic, wandering round the woods having nihilism problems, before falling for the Princess.

There were two invented characters and a couple of bit parts that'd been worked up as well. These were there to provide comedy and also some of the more slapstick parts of the show. There were lots of genuine laughs but to be honest I could have done with a bit less of these comic characters. The whole thing could probably have been about ten minutes shorter but all in all an excellent show and a really clever adaptation of something that might seem very difficult to stage. There was even real water! The set and design were great - working the traditional fairy tale look without overdoing it, and handling the fact that half the story takes place in a lake without even batting an eyelid.

Also thankfully - so thankfully - no mention of Christmas spuriously shoehorned in, even though this is the Tobacco Factory's Christmas production. So if you feel you can't cope as an adult with any more seasonalness, it's ok, you're safe. The show is recommended for ages 6 upwards, and I don't think it is suitable for very young kids, since there's a complex plot and reasonably long running time. But there's plenty of slapstick for the kids and more sophisticated jokes for adults, so for anyone else, aged 6 to 86, it'll do very nicely.

(C) Farrows Creative

If you haven't read the story, you can read it either before or after, it won't spoil your enjoyment, either way. But if you've never read George MacDonald, I do recommend that you acquaint yourself with him. You could do a lot worse than starting with this production: I feel like he'd approve.

Review: Fanny Hill vs 50 Shades

Last week I went to see Bristol Old Vic's new production of Fanny Hill. This is a theatre version of John Cleland's 1748 erotic novel, banned until the 1960s. I have read the book and much of it you couldn't put on stage, on film or screen, which is why adaptations are often a bit limp. Anyway, I couldn't help wondering how it stood up against this week's other sex blockbuster, 50 Shades of Grey. So I went to see 50 Shades. Readers, the things I do for your pleasure. For a start, that's £8 I'll never get back. The Old Vic, on the other hand, gave me one for free, the sluts. Look, I don't want to end up in some kind of compromising situation, this isn't the the Telegraph, you know. Anyway, in the interests of full disclosure I should point out that I insanely adore Fanny Hill the novel. I dumped 50 Shades, the novel, at page 173. That done, let's get started:

Overview:

Fanny Hill (the play) adapted from the funny, literary pornographic novel, which follows the trials tribulations and ah, other activities of Fanny as she goes from hapless rural orphan to brothel jail-bait, through true love, whoredom, and a good many scenarios besides.

50 Shades (the film) adapted from the unfunny, unliterary pornographic novel, which follows the trials tribulations and ah, other activities of Anastasia Steele as she goes from hapless literature student to being the mistress of controlling, BDSM-obsessed tycoon Christian Grey.

Acting

Fanny Hill (the play) 5/5 Sometimes TV actors are rubbish on stage, but Caroline Quentin looked very much at home. All the supporting cast, especially Gwyneth Keyworth, were excellent.

50 Shades (the film) 3/5 I feel sorry for Jamie Dornan. If he were to beat anyone with a whip, I think should probably be his agent. This is such an awful, implausible character to portray, the fact that he did it without visibly looking like he wanted to die is credit to his acting commitment.

Likeability of central character

Fanny Hill (the play) 4/5 Funny, rude, lewd, assertive and businesslike: but this version of Fanny Hill, as an older woman attempting to recount her youth as a whore, is a static creation, and less engaging than the one in the book, who changes as the narrative progresses.

50 Shades (the film) 2/5 Despite the best efforts of the actress who plays her, Anastasia is a clueless, personality-less void of a human doormat. In the book, she's like that so that readers can insert themselves into the narrative (there's a name for this, only I can't remember it). She's so thick that when Christian does stuff she doesn't like, she doesn't even use the safe word he's given her, she just starts crying instead.

Likeability of love interest

Fanny Hill (the play) 2/5 very disappointed in this. In the book, Fanny escapes the brothel to live with love of her life, Charles. Charles is skint but he loves Fanny, and when his horrid family find out they have him shipped off to the navy against his will. Later he comes back to find her, and he's such a nice guy he never even reproaches Fanny about working as a whore, he's just damn glad to find her. In the play, Charles has been completely removed as a character, thus destroying the central conceit of the story, which basically runs the gamut of sex from depraved lust to the passion of true love.

50 Shades (the film) 1/5 He might have ripped abs and loads of cash, but Christian Grey is really an unattractive man. He has no wit, no humour, and no interests apart from weird sex. Also, he has fucking terrible taste in interior decor. Christian Grey reproaches Anastasia about everything.

Sense of humour

Fanny Hill (the play) 4/5. Lots of humour, but got bogged down in political correctness at some points.

50 Shades (the film) 1/5. None. Though I did LOL at a couple of things that weren't meant to be funny.

Costumes

Fanny Hill (the play) 5/5 oh these were brilliant. Everyone involved, male and female, looked brilliant and scorching hot. Fab fab fab 18^th century costumes. Bring back breeches I say.

50 Shades (the film) 1/5 these were awful. Christian wears expensive, dull suits, and Anastasia is so free of free will or personality of any kind that she mostly wears jeans and white T-shirts.

Design

Fanny Hill (the play) 3/5 there was a great box that opened up to show an 18th-century bedroom but overall I felt the look wasn't as dank and dark and atmospheric as might have been justified by the period.

50 Shades (the film) 1/5 Christian Grey's oh-so-expensive penthouse apartment is furnished like the window of House of Fraser furnishings dept. The room he makes Anastasia sleep in is like a suburban dream of sophistication that wouldn't look amiss in a semi-detached in Surrey. Everything around him has that soulless, characterless look of an upmarket chain hotel.

Music

Fanny Hill (the play) 5/5 this was great, wonderful fiddling and bawdy singing by all involved.

50 Shades (the film) 2/5 Pleasant enough background, but I literally can't remember one thing that stood out.

Faitfulness of Adaptation

Fanny Hill (the play) 2/5 I do understand it's difficult to render 240 pages of varied shagging in a manner that won't get your theatre closed down. But they literally lost the plot! The whole thing became massively less interesting by the removal of the dramatic arc. Quite miffed about this.

50 Shades (the film) 4/5 Basically the plot intact but with the fortunate removal of EL James unfortunate writing style.

How long you have to wait before getting any

Fanny Hill (the book) 9 pages. About the same on stage.

50 Shades (the book) A godawful 146 pages. The film mercifully a lot less.

Actual levels of sexiness:

Fanny Hill (the play) 3/5 Bawdy and funny, but not particularly titillating.

50 Shades (the film) 1/5 Christian Grey made me think of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. I literally can't imagine anything worse. The entire thing was completely devoid of erotic charge, unless you get an erotic charge by thinking about being able to buy all the things in the House of Fraser furnishings dept.

Quality of Climax:

Fanny Hill (the play) 2/5 This was good fun for a while, but ended more with a whimper than a bang, and to be honest I'd lost interest about ten minutes previously.

50 Shades (the film) 2/5 Anastasia leaves in a lift after Christian slaps her bottom too hard. I can't describe the feeling of relief.

Best bit:

Fanny Hill (the play) Caroline Quentin hanging off a chandelier with a bloke's head up her skirt.

50 Shades (the film) The helicopter. Look, we'd all like a free helicopter ride.

Worst Bit:

Fanny Hill (the play) All the tortuous attempts to be politically correct about sex work.

50 Shades (the film) Every single bit of furniture in Christian Grey's apartment.

In conclusion:

Fanny Hill (the play) 35/50 A decent effort, a good night's entertainment with great acting, music and costumes, but ultimately let down by the pointless, post-modern messing with the narrative of the original novel.

50 Shades (the film) 18/50 A soulless, charmless lovesong to corporate capitalism, and less sexy than a James Bond movie. The only startling aspect was being in a cinema full of women. I say full. I mean half-full. It's like someone actually noticed that we're allowed out on our own.

The conclusion, concluded:
Fanny Hill: Try reading the book
50 Shades: Try watching Secretary
 

The Imitation Game, or, the Inventing Things That Didn't Happen Game.

Went to see the Imitation Game today, the film about Alan Turing, who is played by Benedict Cumberbatch. Now, I know I am a miserable old pedant, but I'd like to warn you that The Imitation Game is about as historically accurate as the Sound of Music. WARNING: THIS CONTAINS SPOILERS.

Like many modern films, the Imitation Game follows a set narrative of a single male genius who cuts a path through all the bullshit around him and thus saves everyone. He's the lone cowboy and nobody understands him, etc etc. In this movie, Cumberbatch plays Turing as Sherlock, a difficult, slightly autistic genius that can't get on with anyone. He cracks the code and saves humanity, before being accused of spying and destroyed by his closeted homosexuality. He's a tragic genius, oh, and because of it, he has to be misunderstood and horrible, obviously.

Poor Alan Turing. The only bit of this that's true was that he was a genius. He was certainly eccentric but there's absolutely no evidence that he was either a) horrible b) closeted or c) tortured - except by hay fever, and used to cycle to work wearing a gas mask to avoid it.

In the film, Turing has a difficult job interview for a post at Bletchley Park. In actual fact, he was working for Government Code and Cypher Services from 1938, prior to the outbreak of the war. He personally invents the machine which is used to break the German codes. In fact he developed it from a prototype created by Polish intelligence, which brought an enigma machine to Britain at the start of the War. In the film, he works alone, opposed and misunderstood at every move. In actual fact he worked with a number of other codebreakers, all of whom recognised his skills. Far from being his opponents, they were in most cases his allies.

The bizarrest falsehood created by the film is that, having hacked into the German Naval Enigma Code, Turing and his colleagues face a dilemma about whether to tell their bosses, who are so stupid they will waste this vital intelligence, and let on to the Germans that the code was broken. This is rubbish. British intelligence certainly had problems using the decrypted information without letting the Germans realise their codes were broken. However this was not Turing's problem, and decisions about the operating use of the decrypts were taken by military intelligence. There was no 'statistical' answer to this problem, as the film makes out, and to suggest that they would not have informed their immediate superiors of the breakthrough is balderdash.

(If you are interested in this at all, I recommend reading The Enemy is Listening by Aileen Clayton, a WRAF intelligence officer who worked out of North Africa for much of the war, and who occupied the equivalent rank of Major. Clayton started out intercepting radio communications on the South Coast of Britain during the early part of the war. There is a funny anecdote in her book about how they keep being slipped bits of information that were allegedly 'found in a wastebasket'. Eventually asked to go to a meeting at Bletchley, she finds herself eyeing the wastebins suspiciously, before being let in to the secret. Clayton spent much of the war wrestling with the torture of having access to information which could have saved lives, but being forced to hold onto it for the sake of concealing information gathering networks. Clayton's book is out of print, but you can get it through a library.)

Another weirdness of the film is when cryptographer Joan Clarke tells Turing she has to go home as her parents want her back. Again, this is inaccurate. Conscription for unmarried women aged 20-30 cut in in 1942: Clarke would have been as liable to turn up for service as any man of her age, whether her parents liked it or not. Equally, Clarke was not forced to work in some other part of Bletchley but was part of the team in Hut 8, and for a while was deputy leader.

Nor was Clarke ignorant of Turing's tendencies. Turing had been a fellow at Kings College Cambridge, then an all-male institution where close friendships and relationships between men would barely have raised a murmur, and he was not particularly discreet about his sexuality, either before the war of after. If anything, his eventual downfall was a result of him being more or less 'out' rather than closeted.

Nor is there any suggestion that Turing was disliked or persecuted by the authorities during the war. He was in fact promoted, and sent to the US to share his discoveries with them. He was eccentric, and like many hyper-intelligent people, relentlessly interested in all intellectual concepts about everything, including biology and philosophy, as well as maths. But there is a big difference between eccentric and loathed, and Bletchley Park was notoriously full of odd people.

Finally, he was never accused of spying. He did lose his security clearances during the early 50s, in the wake of the Cambridge Spy Ring revelations. But this film, which allegedly holds him up as hero, actually traduces him in so many ways.

Historical films have a number of purposes, and one of them is to mark the sophisticated, worldly present out from the ignorant past, thus appealing to the ego of viewers. This film paints the war years as some kind of sexually repressed wasteland. In fact the 1940s, with its 'we might die tomorrow' morals was, for many people, an anything-goes era. Prosecutions for homosexuality were rare, as the demands of fighting a total war meant that the state needed the help of any body it could lay its hands on, whether gay, straight, foreign, black or white. Intelligence was notoriously the most anything-goes. It was one of the few parts of the establishment where any kind of person could make a mark, far more so than the official services like the army and navy. In general, prosecutions for homosexuality, like the one that brought down Turing, were a product of the new repression and stringent enforcing of gender norms that took place in the 50s, as the cold war set in and a post-war-shell-shocked society decided that everyone should know their place, again. During the actual war, a nation fighting for its life largely had better things to do than police people's sex lives.

Another thing that bothered me about this film was the very modern insistence on the lone hero. Britain defeated the Nazis because of a giant collective effort, which involved most of the nation's (and several other nations') thinking brains, fighting bodies, and the armies of civilians who grew food, hacked coal, scrimped, saved, volunteered, and refused to give in. (Also, because of the Russians.) We love lone geniuses, in our age of individualism, and get nervous about the concept of collective effort, but the fact is, all Turing's efforts would have been useless without the people who helped him. Turing could only decrypt the information that was intercepted, and picking up this information took a great number of people. Turing himself would have seen himself as part of that giant effort, and to suggest that he was ever disloyal to the British cause is frankly insulting.

So I think the moral of this story is: reading history books will frankly ruin your enjoyment of popular culture, so don't do it, kids.

Review: Terror and wonder: the Gothic Imagination at British Library

This week I was lucky to have work stuff in London, so I had a spare afternoon to visit 'Terror and Wonder: the Gothic Imagination' at the British Library. Bearing in mind that this is a library, not a museum, and the majority of the exhibits are books, you might be forgiven for expecting it to be a bit unchallenging. About four minutes in, I thought so too, then two hours later I was still there, poring over the exhibits.

The exhibition begins with the Castle of Otranto, by Walpole, the original British Gothic Novel written in the 18^th Century, and works its way through the Romantics, the influence of Gothic on Jane Austen, the Brontes, Victorian sensationalism, Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson, Dracula and the history of vampires, Hammer Horror and modern gothic, and finishes with an exhibition of photos by Martin Parr, of Goth Weekend in Whitby, 2014.

I was totally blown away by seeing original manuscripts of Frankenstein and Jane Eyre. Seeing them in their handwritten state is akin to looking at the innards of a bomb, as one suddenly realises what a massive effect such a small, fragile-looking thing may have when it explodes into being. Shelley was only 19 when she wrote Frankenstein, and it is chaotic and scribbled, with Percy Shelley's nerdy, pedantic handwriting in the margin, like the annoying boyfriend who thinks he knows better. Frankenstein is a book about technology and about nightmares, and was written when both the horrors and wonders of the industrial revolution were steaming into full gear. Looking at the manuscript, I felt a moment of unease, a lurching sideways like the deck of an unsteady ship, and I thought, what an upending of the old order, what a moment of terror, that nineteen-year-old girls might be let loose to document our fears and dreams, and set down the ghosts of the future, and all the the things that frighten us. I have seen all the usual things and images that anyone in the 21^st century has, but I honestly can't remember seeing anything more transgressive than those scribbles by Shelley and the Brontes, scraped away with a quill pen, in candlelight and darkness.

I was less fascinated by Dickens but it is interesting to be reminded that what now seems like cosy old-worldy Victorianism was actually written with the intention of revealing injustices and horrific poverty, and that he faced complaints and lawsuits because of it. Also, as the exhibition points out, how the background of gothic changed from one of rural horror to a very urban one. I was startled to find links between things that I was familiar with, but hadn't connected: that the play or Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde premiered at the theatre at the exact time that the Ripper murders were happening, and that the manager of said theatre was Mr Bram Stoker, author of Dracula. 

Some lovely non-book items from the 20^th century included costume and set design from theatre and horror movies, as well as a brief section detailing the rise of modern 'goth'. Martin Parr's photographs give their subjects dignity without concealing any flaws or oddities, and the homemade outfits portrayed are far more interesting than the one underwhelming dress by Alexander McQueen.

There was actually a huge amount to take in and think about, but what I particularly liked was that there was no attempt to dumb down a whistlestop tour of the subject, which nonetheless only touched on half the material it could. The subject is dealt with chronologically, not thematically, so you can see how the genre developed and changed as it went on, but that it keeps being rolled around to deal with the same issues – deep-seated unease around change, cultural identity, sexuality, and social conflict, that it first did right at the start of the industrial revolution. Also how, as a form of art often dismissed as 'trashy' – suitable for impressionable females and excitable poor people – it has consistently dealt with the big questions in society, like gender and sex, technology and colonialism, in the way that 'respectable' literature has not.

I really feel that the British Library should congratulate itself on this exhibition. It's like the kind of public communications that fell out of fashion a few decades ago, when somebody very intelligent and expert just explains something they know a hell of a lot about, with some fabulous and fragile objects, but no CGI. It made my brain hurt, in the best possible way. Also, I now have a reading list as long as my arm.

Finally, to go off at a tangent, if you think all this is only interesting in a historical, literary, intellectual sense, I have to point out you're wrong. Why? I'll tell you a story. Like a proper gothic story, it starts with a country bumpkin (me) who gets lost somewhere alien and terrifying (London underground). At night, obviously. I passed through Westminster, where the bomb blast doors protect the politicians, and up from the Jubilee Line, which looks like something designed for the set of Aliens. I ended up at Blackfriars, under the foot of the shard, where the cranes still worked at ten at night, and a human feels ant-sized, and the City squats like the operating headquarters of some alien invaders, over an older, more human-sized version of London. And then another station, I'd lost track of names by then, brand new and brutally designed in concrete and lit by a violent blue light. Why? Why has someone made these things like this? I am not an especially anxious person in foreign environments, but these places made me afraid. Because somebody made up a nightmare, then built it. These things are not frightening by accident, but because someone designed fear right into it. 

Humans are one big mush of fear and wonder, really, and we don't like to admit to it. But if you are able to recognise the shapes and tropes of it - and give those things names - then you will better see the strings and ropes of it. And remember that monsters always, have a weakness. 

XX

Review: Dracula, Bristol Old Vic

Like most people I love a good vampire story, preferably one in which no-one sparkles. If you too like vampires I can't recommend anything more than that you leg it down to Bristol Old Vic immediately to see Mark Bruce's dance version of Dracula. It's on in Bristol till Saturday and then at these other venues.

All photos: Farrows Creative

The story of Dracula has been told and retold so many times it's become little but camp and caricature in most versions, but this, which takes place on a half-dark stage filled with a wrought-iron gate, is genuinely scary. Despite the lack of dialogue the story is always easy to follow, and stays fairly true to the Victorian original.

Using ten performers, five male five female, events unfold via a variety of dance styles, all danced with passion and athleticism. There is plenty of darkness, plenty of blood, and plenty of death. Dracula is always awfully sexy, and the fact that he never speaks means his physical presence says more of his powers than any Hammer Horror ever could.

The original Dracula novel was written in 1897 by Bram Stoker, and for the time is startlingly modern in format: there is no writer commenting on the action, as in most Victorian novels, but the reader has to put the story together from fragments of letters and journals. One reason the story has stuck around is that it's about things that still bother us: sex, death, unnerving foreignors, and the eternal battle between civilised respectability and uncivilised passions. Most of these are things that bother us on a sub-verbal level, so there's probably few better ways to represent these conflicts than in an unspoken format.

One of the things I liked most about this production is that it had many contemporary resonances (at the beginning, a blood-crazed Dracula and his black-hooded wolves steal a baby from a screaming, head-scarfed peasant woman, like some awful news story from Iraq or Syria) without losing the quality of the time it was written in. The score used many beautiful (and unusual) pieces of classical music, the costumes were simple and appropriate, and the wrought iron gates, finally, festooned with the bodies of the vampire brides, looked like an Aubrey Beardsley drawing.

I would very happily sit through this production again, as I'm sure there were things I missed. Also, it was just beautiful.

Review: Jeremy Deller 'English Magic' at Bristol Museum

I was supposed to be going camping today. However it was heaving it down and the forecast was worse, so instead of fighting my way onto an overcrowded, overpriced train and sitting in a damp campsite, drinking tea and pretending to enjoy myself (being English option 1) I decided to go and see the English Magic exhibition by Jeremy Deller at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.

Now, generally I like things about Englishness. It interests me. I also like folk art type things and cultural comment, both of which I was promised on the blurb.

Reader, what I got was a half-arsed video with some slo-mo footage of owls and some old Land Rovers being crushed. Land Rovers. It's like a metaphor for the destruction of British industry, innit? I don't know what the owls were there for. Some of them were stuffed.

Um. Yeah.

There was, in the next room, a bunch of newspaper photos from the 70s and a map of the 1973 Ziggy Stardust tour. Also, some of these massive hangings, which are composed without interest or skill. Upstairs, there was a massive painting of another bird of prey picking up another Landrover. Apparently this was something about Prince Harry. Also some neolithic arrow heads. If you don't know what the connection between these things are, frankly, neither do I.

Also in this room were a selection of drawings done by prisoners, many of whom were ex-servicemen who had been to Iraq or Afghanistan. Some of these were very good, some were horribly, appallingly childlike. They all roused both pity and horror. But how they fitted into the rest of the display was never made clear, and it seems to me tooth-grindingly exploitative to use these vulnerable people as part of such an otherwise self-indulgent display.

In the last room (yes, three large rooms) is some tale about William Morris (of the arts and crafts wallpaper) upsetting an oligarch's yacht. There is a gigantic picture, which is neither by Jeremy Deller nor particularly good, and a lot of framed bits of financial ephemera from Russia.

All in all, it's like Deller collected a few bits of the zeitgeist as found on the Guardian's comment pages - oligarchs, traffic issues, Tony Blair, the Royal family and the death of pop music and strung them together without meaning or comment. It has all the coherence and consistency of your twitter timeline, when none of the interesting people are there.

Deller's Wikipedia page says he deals with the "devaluation of artistic ego through the involvement of other people in the creative process." I can only presume this was written by his agent, since what it means is that there is not one piece of art in the exhibition, except presumably the film, that is made by Deller himself. For 'curating' this meaningless jumble, he gets his name all over it.

Wikipedia also says that his work is 'political' but one thing that is rampantly apparent is that Deller has no personal experience of the shittiness of modern Britain. This is hardly surprising since apparently he went to Dulwich College, one of the UK's poshest schools, and if there is one thing screaming out from this random assembly of bits and bobs it's the noise of a no-longer-young public school boy desperately trying to look edgy. The thing I can't believe is that this kind of crud still gets lauded, and I can only presume its sociological purpose is to reassure privileged, comfortable people that they are still 'with it' in some way.

If I sound like I'm taking this unnecessarily personally, I am: I know people who create things with far more skill and meaning, often they don't even think of themselves as artists, but simply craftspeople, and usually have another job to survive. I've seen stuff like this (but better) in festival tents and teashops and on neighbourhood arts trails.

Recently, I went to the Folk Art exhibition at the Tate. That featured dozens of wonderful and beautifully crafted objects made by ordinary, and often nameless, artisans. It cost £14 and was worth every penny. This, on the other hand, was free, and I still want my money back.

 

Yes it really was that busy. On a rainy afternoon in the holidays.

Review: Jane Eyre, Bristol Old Vic

I love Jane Eyre, it's one of my favourite books. I love film adaptations of it. Nonetheless, I'd have thought it a hard book to put on the stage, not least because it's quite long and complex, but also because lots of the action takes place in open, bleak locations.

This new production at Bristol Old Vic gets round the first issue by dividing the novel into two parts. It gets round the second by having almost no scenery at all, just a structure that the actors work round. When the play began I looked at this dubiously. I was even more dubious about the first five minutes, in which the infant Jane Eyre is born and orphaned. Fortunately, my doubts were swiftly dismissed as the play got into the swing of things. I was pleased they hadn't tried to modernise Charlotte Bronte's magnificent dialogue, instead picking judiciously from her words, adding a few new where necessary. But the stirring speeches in which Jane Eyre stakes her claim to justice, humanity and dignity are present and correct, and as moving as they should be.

Photo: Simon Annand

I was also really pleased that the costumes were undistracting, and era-appropriate. The plain set worked well, matched with the simple costumes and - though this might seem a strange thing to praise - absolutely brilliant lighting design. A number of lanterns did multiple duty as the stars, the windows of Thornfield, and also as the fires that the characters huddle over. It made for a very atmospheric production, in which there was often darkness or half-light on the stage. You really feel yourself clinging to the little warmth which warms poor frozen Jane, as she arrives at Thornfield for the very first time. In the scenes at Lowood School, they threw up the giant, terrifying shadow of the proprietor, making you feel you'd shrunk to the size of a child.

One thing which marked this version out from others I'd seen was that it was very much interested in the journey of Jane, and that Mr Rochester was only a part of this. In other versions the affair with Rochester is the story, with all else thrown into the background, whereas in this I felt that Jane Eyre herself, not Jane Eyre the romance, was really the item of interest. Whether this was because the production was directed by a woman, and so came out with a slightly different emphasis, I can't say. But I liked it. It's a subtle difference, but it's a difference between a story in which love wins the day, or one in which integrity and courage wins the day. This version, I think, was the latter.

Any actor who plays Jane Eyre has a challenge on her hands, as she needs to be both small physically and yet great as a person, and rather mousy, yet have enough attractive about her to drive a man to distraction. Madeleine Worral, as Jane Eyre, was absolutely and entirely perfect, being both dwarfed by the emptiness of the stage, and yet quite able to command it. As for Mr Rochester, played by Felix Hayes, he was fine, though a bit shouty for my tastes. But he had a hipster beard and I'm sorry, Mr Rochester should not have a hipster beard. Also, he was sometimes upstaged by his dog. The dog, played by Craig Edwards, was one of the highlights of the production. Another highlight was Melanie Marshall, whose beautiful, haunting singing was worth the ticket price alone. It's such a relief and a pleasure to see female performers who are not interchangeably blonde, and who have a bit of presence and force to offer.

My only quibble is that I'm not totally convinced they had to stretch it to two separate plays, and do think a bit of judicious cutting could have seen it off as one (maybe a three-act?) play. Nonetheless, a thoroughly excellent production, and one of the best things I've seen at Bristol Old Vic in a long time. I really hope it makes it beyond Bristol, as it definitely deserves more than a short run.

Jane Eyre Parts 1 and 2 is on till 29th march.

Review: Slapstick Festival/City Lights/The General

This weekend I was lucky to go some events which were part of the  Slapstick Festival which happens every year in Bristol. I thought I'd come on here and tell you about them individually as well as ranting about just how much I love silent movies.

The first event was the Slapstick Gala, which started with a Laurel and Hardy short. Laurel & Hardy are not my favourite, but I enjoyed watching them write off dozens of what would now be vintage cars. The second short, 'Pass the Gravy', featured a prize chicken called Brigham, which gets eaten in socially embarrassing circumstances. I had no idea it was possible to get so much comedy mileage out of a chicken.

The main dish of the evening was Charlie Chaplin's City Lights, in which Chaplin, as the tramp, falls in love with a blind girl. A chance encounter with a drunk millionaire allows him to pass himself off as a rich man, and he spends the rest of the movie trying to earn the money to pay for the operation that will cure her blindness.

City Lights is piece of genius. It is genius because unlike modern films it hits every cinematic button, without lessening the impact of any of them. It has dozens of belly laugh moments, but the romance is genuinely and sincerely touching. It has social comment without being worthy or dull. It has glamour without being cold or heartless. It does not drag or sag for a second. It is, in short, faultless.

One thing that struck me strongly about City Lights, and many other silent films I've seen, is that the humour in them is very kind. To my mind there's two ways of doing comedy, and one is to laugh at us - humans - and our general ridiculousness. The other is to laugh at them - the people who aren't like us. Comedians like, say, Ricky Gervais or Sacha Baron-Cohen specialise in the latter. You're either laughing with, or your laughing at.

I find there's a political and cultural difference in these two types of humour. In silent films, the hero/heroine often suffers from a great deal of indignity in life: poverty, injustice or unrequited love. But they are always a sympathetic character, and we are invited to identify with them as they experience setbacks and humiliations. The harshness of life isn't skimped at, slithered aside or ignored: the blind girl really must sell flowers or be on the street, and the tramp really does end up in jail at one point. Audiences in the 20s would have experienced a harsher life than we might have, and these struggles would have seemed real to them. Of course, these struggles with poverty, disaster, and humiliation still occur today, but you won't catch Hollywood empathising with them, since the fabric of the modern American Dream dictates that losers are not like the rest of us.

In some ways silent movies are frankly not as squeamish as modern movies, which makes me wonder if we're all really as liberal as we think we are. In a scene in City Lights, Chaplin wakes up in bed with the millionaire. If this was a modern American comedy, the director would feel a need for both characters to be repulsed, in a 'we're not gay' moment. But Chaplin just gets on with the story.

Another point of fascination in these movies is, for me, what would have been the normal social background for viewers of the era. The cars, the clothes, the interiors. In City Lights, Chaplin and the millionaire attend a nightclub, and a party: they look far more louche and wild than the limp, terrible recreations of a 20s party in the recent, thoroughly awful version of The Great Gatsby. I would happily have watched any of these films again just to gawk at the things in the background.

The other film I watched as part of the festival was The General, starring Buster Keaton. When it was released in 1928 The General bombed, since it was considered not really funny enough as a comedy. It's true that it doesn't have as many laughs as the Chaplin, but is more of an action/comedy film. What makes it supremely watchable is Buster Keaton, whose strangely beautiful hangdog face never moves, and yet communicates everything.

The General is susprisingly interesting as a historical movie about the American Civil War. Shot in 1926, but set in 1861, it is, presumably, old enough to have had input from people who would have actually remembered the era. Battle scenes with large numbers of men and horses are a fascinating lesson in what warfare would have looked like prior to World War One. The General in question is not a person but a train, and there are all kinds of marvellous old technology featured. In one breathtaking scene, a steam engine traverses a bridge that collapses. There are no CGI or tricks involved, so one can only presume that that really is a train plunging into a river. It is certainly worth watching the entire movie just for this scene. Making The General cost $750,000, a fortune at the time.

Disappointingly, the female lead in The General is both stupid and annoying, though comically very well played by Marion Mack. Virginia Cherrill, in City Lights, is altogether a more appealing heroine. If you do want to see one of the silent era's best female leads, one of my favourites, the Oscar-winner 'Wings' featuring Clara Bow is now out on dvd in the UK and can be purchased here.

You can buy both City Lights on DVD here and the General here. However all these movies are worth seeing on a big screen if you can manage it.

Review: Beauty and the Beast/Improbable Theatre

Last week I went to see Beauty and the Beast at Bristol Old Vic. Now, I love fairy tales and Beauty and the Beast is one of my favourites. When I looked through the blurb, I saw that it had a disabled actor playing the beast. Fair enough, I thought, I can see what they're doing there: should be interesting. I was pretty much excited about seeing it.

Boy oh boy was my disappointment swift. This show is awfully awful, like a monument to the monster of the theatrical ego, and everyone involved really needs to have a very serious word with themselves.

To start with, the two lead actors, Mat Fraser, and American burlesque performer Julie Atlas Muz came on and introduced themselves, as themselves. Now, in theatre there's this thing called the fourth wall. It's the like the invisible tv screen between the actors and the audience, by which the actors pretend the audience aren't there, and thus get on with the story. Sometimes, actors like to break the fourth wall and interact with the audience. The first few times I saw this in the theatre, I thought it was cute. After a few more times, I started wanting to shove my hand in the actors' faces and shout 'Get back behind the fourth wall!'. Also, the phrase 'artistic practice' was invoked, which further moved me to violence.

Anyway, they then started to tell the story with shadow-puppetry. That was fine, if tedious. Then the female lead came on, in character, being Beauty, entering the beast's castle. With the aid of two puppeteers, they seemed to be trying to recreate some famous, entirely fantastic, scenes in Jean Cocteau's black and white film, La Belle et La Bete. They had even taken some lines of dialogue directly from it. Then Mat Fraser, as the Beast, appeared. Now, I understand what they were trying to do. The Beast in the story of Beauty and the Beast is hiding from society, because he isn't like everyone else, he's not human, and he's not normal. So by having a disabled actor play that role, you're asking people to think about how people regard disability in that way. The thing is, is disability beastly? I am not convinced it's a working metaphor, personally.

They then told the rest of the story, occasionally jumping in and out of the effing fourth wall, to tell us about their relationship in real life. They involved the puppeteers, to play themselves, which was hideously awkward. They got their kit off. They kept it off. And off. And off, thus rendering it completely uninteresting, and unsexy, as they just wandered round the stage in the buff. They ate fruit in an allegedly sexy manner. It all descended into a simulated sex scene which went on for what felt like hours, and made me realise that there is nothing more unerotic than watching two practised performers writhe gymnastically in front of a hundred slightly embarrassed English people. I was relieved when the puppeteers got naked as well, as at least I some different arses to look at. The only thing I could find to recommend was that everyone involved clearly had real pubes, which I haven't seen in public for ages.

The show wouldn't settle into any one thing: it wasn't exactly meaningful, about an issue; it wasn't exactly a comedy. It wasn't dark enough, or mysterious enough, or shocking enough, although I am sure it would have liked to have been all these things. I felt they were trying to poke holes in a taboo that didn't exist, and congratulating themselves about it.

The thing is, Beauty and the Beast is quite a dark, sexy and disturbing story anyway, unless you've only seen the Disney version. In La Belle et La Bete, made in the 1940s, the Beast is a kind of a cat human. The cat-human is so disturbingly attractive that when he turns back into a human, you're kind of disappointed. And if you do want a kinky, transgressive version of the story, I suggest you watch Secretary, which is poignant and moving. Both these films are available on dvd for less than a tenner, either would be a better night's entertainment than this awful pig's ear of a theatre piece.