Counting to a hundred …

I’m fully aware I neglect this web-site. And that inertia has been greatly exacerbated by the inability to operate wordpress through a Safari browser.

Still, I’m seeking a way to fill space and occupy time.

I’m going to emulate, and I hope improve the multitude of webpages which tell us, with one or another level of credibility, the hundred books we all should read. Correction there: there cannot be a canonical list of the books anyone should read. My choice is subjective, the result of sixty years as a reader (and before that it was Biggles and worse). Give anybody a decent library, and turn that individual loose, to choose and reject.

Most of those definitive efforts are wholly vacuous. A dead give-away is listing both Hamlet and the Complete Shakespeare. I’m not convinced I’ve done the second of those — it was only in the last year or so I attended a performance, and then read the text (which was significantly different) of The Two Noble Kinsmen. I’d argue that one is as much John Fletcher as yer ackshul Uncle Bill Shagsper.

But let me get him out of the way to start.

1. Julius Caesar

I give this one priority because it was the first that really ‘got’ to me. 

I’d been fed Midsummer Night’s Dream in a mixed-class at Fakenham Grammar School (now defunct, for good or ill). Perhaps it was all those fairies that were supposed to ‘sell’ this to a captive audience, but it didn’t ‘sell’. Only decades later, when a daughter was doing that play for A-level, did I go back and have another try. That’s when I came across the editorial suggestions that MND is a deep political satire. Which opens a proverbial can-of-worms — but that wasn’t presentable to early adolescents.

Then, for Irish Leaving Cert, we had to do a deep-ish study of Julius Caesar. Which meant learning large chunks of text. This time it all came together. If ever a play was made for all times and all societies, it’s this one. The characters are well-defined. The issues are authoritarianism, ambition, loyalty and opportunism. Assassination is a blood sport that constantly interrupts the flow of history. The structure of the play is impeccable: it fits Freytag’s pyramid precisely:

2. Antony and Cleopatra

I swear if you cut me, I’d bleed A&C. I had to teach it to two groups in two college years. That meant for sixteen hours a week I lived and breathed it. Without realising, I can still place much of the text, even to a particular page of the New Arden edition.

I’d maintain one of the funniest scenes in all Shakespeare is the one on Cleopatra’s tomb (the close rivals for that distinction are the two ‘assisted suicides’ in J.C.) . I could never read those without corpsing.

Judy Dench once reckoned the most difficult speech in all the corpus was Cleopatra’s ‘O!’ — and she does it repeatedly.

For sheer political cynicism there’s always Antony in J.C. and Octavius in A&C.

You may notice I don’t list any of: 

• King Lear, which is based on the most eccentric pretext of a decaying monarch dividing his kingdom, has plenty of gore, includes the (unconscious) hilarity of the cliff-top scene, and comes with a truly gooey ending.
• Hamlet, if only because Omlette is far too complex for my mind (or those of the many critics) to fully comprehend. On top of which the treatment of Ophelia is even more gynophobic than Katerina in Shrew (for which, see below).
• Macbeth, because the play is so incomplete it barely holds together (we clearly have the shortened version, for royal entertainment mainly). I cannot truly engage with any of the characters — each is incomplete, and lacks real depth. The witchery is too crude for words. And I’ve had to teach it to the unwilling far too often.

3. Kiss Me Kate

Fair enough, unlike the above, not really a text.

It is, though, so wonderfully structured it is exemplary.

Kate/Katerina/Lilli is a remarkable part, and demands an equally-remarkable actor. In the original, in 1948-9 on Broadway and then in London, she was [Eileen] Patricia Morison — just one generation out of Belfast, and feisty with it. I saw the 2001 London transfer (after 9/11 did for Broadway) with Marin Mazzie and again the 2012 Chichester transfer, with Hannah Waddington.

To make the thing work, Kate/Lilli has to be in control all the way through — something the Kathryn Grayson/Howard Keel MGM movie doesn’t consistently achieve.

There was a magnificent moment, one worth borrowing, in the 2013 Toby Frow Globe production of Shrew which made the whole farrago make perfect sense. In the first meeting of Katerina and Petruchio they exchange a mutually-knowing look (Beat … Beat …), as if each is recognising a worthy opponent.

And, with Kiss Me Kate, there are always the superb lyrics of Cole Porter.

Now, on with the motley, and some fiction …

Good old-fashioned gush …

BBC1 News was doing a piece on do-it-yourself dentistry. And I’m profoundly squeamish.

A flick of the controller brought up Film4: The Way to the Stars. Just in time to get John Mills reading John Pudney:

Do not despair
For Johnny-head-in-air;
He sleeps as sound
As Johnny underground.

Fetch out no shroud
For Johnny-in-the-cloud;
And keep your tears
For him in after years.

Better by far
For Johnny-the-bright-star,
To keep your head,
And see his children fed.

A tear-jerker, undoubtedly. But put it in its proper context — a context shared by the film itself. The film’s release date was June 1945, so the context of a bomber station ‘somewhere in England’ (in fact, North Yorkshire)  was already — just — historical. We therefore need to read it as post-War and compensatory.

The Pudney lines are not great literature. Yet they survived for many years and through the 1950s as unavoidable ‘modern poetry’ in school anthologies. They are easily-memorable. For those of us of a certain generation (i.e. currently perch-dropping-off) they are indelible.

Equally, one can see why the film didn’t made any impression in America. It’s just a trifle the wrong side of plucky Brits teaching the raw Yanks how to behave properly.

Zeitgeist is all

The script of the film came from Terence Rattigan, and owes something to his Flare Path of 1942. We got to see the 2011 revival, directed by Trevor Nunn, with Sheridan Smith doing the business as Doris, Countess Skriczevinsky.

Those who say The Way to the Stars is merely a filming of Flare Path are mistaken. The mood, and contexts are three years and many mind-shifts apart. The casual opinion also ignores the considerable input of and script-doctoring by Anatole de Grunwald (who pointedly chose the title theme from The Way to the Stars for his Desert Island Discs favourite).

In passing, the National Theatre Live production of James Graham’s This House (this week on YouTube) has a moment when the young Tory Whip is put in his place by the Old Buffer over the small matter of “Which War?” We have, after all, had so many.

Focus, then, on that 1945 moment

By now the spirit is ‘the boys coming home’, even ‘time to get over it’. Certainly, ‘console those who need it … but renew, re-build’.

Suddenly Hope (and certainly Crosby) is in the air. Just as 1943 had been, for the US audience, Jimmy McHugh/Harold Adams:

Comin’ in on a wing and a prayer
With our full crew on board
And our trust in the Lord
We’re comin’ in on a wing and a prayer

So, by December 1944,  it’s Don’t Fence Me In:

I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences,
Gaze at the moon until I lose my senses,
Can’t look at hobbles and I can’t stand fences —
Don’t fence me in.

Though the notion of urbane Cole Porter celebrating rawhide and buckskin stretches the envelope.

Brushing up Cole Porter

Malcolm has been this way before, but on Wednesday the Lady in his Life, the Pert Young Piece and the man himself redeemed their tickets for Trevor Nunn’s Kiss Me Kate at the Old Vic.

Believe Malcolm: the production does everything it says on the posters. Hannah Waddington (Lilli, Katherine) and her facial acting (as below) are worth the entry alone. The voices, for once, meet all expectations (does Ms Waddington actually need amplification?). How, for heaven’s sake, can — is it really that number? — some sixteen very active dancers all fit on the Old Vic’s limited stage?

But, then, Malcolm always reckoned Porter did a better job than Will did for himself.

Sure enough …

The lady occupying the seat next to Malcolm spent as much time as possible reading her novel. At the final curtain, Malcolm had to nod to her, and mutter the usual pleasured inanities.

She, however, was not persuaded. She was far too feministically offended by Katherina’s concluding:

Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,
That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.
Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,
And place your hands below your husband’s foot:
In token of which duty, if he please,
My hand is ready; may it do him ease.

Umm, yes. Difficult, that …

Except, Toby Frow’s production of the Shrew at the Globe got away with it, through a neat device. Which Malcolm passed over lightly last August.

When Katherina and Petruchio first meet (Act II, scene i), there is an electric moment, a double beat, as opponents recognise each other’s worth. Thenceforth they, and we the audience are involved in their knowing, convoluted and perverse gender-game. So, this final moment is sub-texted by the wager between Petruchio and Lucentio, which is the hat-peg for the final scene:

Petruchio: Twenty crowns!
I’ll venture so much of my hawk or hound,
But twenty times so much upon my wife.
Lucentio: A hundred then.
Petruchio: A match! ’tis done.

So Katherina’s final speech (in this version, — informed by Grumio? — she seems privy to the bet) is tailed by Petruchio collecting his dues:

‘Twas I won the wager, though you hit the white;
And, being a winner, God give you good night!

After all, Petruchio blew to Padua here from old Verona, to

thrust myself into this maze,
Haply to wive and thrive as best I may…

And Katherina, his equal, help-mate, and partner, is well-prepared to help him to wive and thrive. After all, she is an actress capable of the most titanic explosions of passion.

Cole Porter and other animals

Malcolm and family celebrate the New Year (actually, a day or two after, to allow sobering up to have been achieved) with Trevor Nunn’s production of  Kiss Me, Kate at the Old Vic. Now, in passing, is that the first occasion for a long while when the grammatical comma has been correctly present in the title?

That alone should have triggered a response in Macolm’s conscience during the cooking of that previous item. Particularly so when the phrase ‘professional co-respondent’ was invoked.

Back in 1932 Cole Porter added songs to an unproduced play script by John Hartley Manners. Since Malcolm affects an Irish connection, let him give Manners a run around.

J. Hartley Manners

Manners was born in 1870, a child of an Irish couple, then arrived in London. We might speculate about his political leanings (they become significant some way down this post *) when we realise those parents were Catholics, and his mother wished him to enter the priesthood. Instead he went into the Civil Service, which in turn took him to Australia, where by 1898 he found himself on the stage in Melbourne. A year later, and back in London, he was working with Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson’s and George Alexander’s companies, notably as Laertes in a production of Hamlet — no small achievement for a neophyte.

His apprentice one-act effort, The Queen’s Messenger, later earned a place in media history:

In September 1928, W2XB (owned by General Electric’s WGY) in Schenectady, NY televised the  first dramatic program in the United States, The Queen’s Messenger, by J. Harley Manners, a blood and thunder play with guns, daggers, and poison. There were more technicians required for special effects than there were actors. In fact, technical limitations were so great and viewing screens so small, that only the actor’s individual hands or faces could be seen at one time. Three cameras were used, two for the characters and a third for obtaining images of gestures and appropriate stage props. Two assistant actors displayed their hands before this third camera whenever the occasion demanded. 

That was, in fact, the world’s first televised drama, beating the BBC’s adaptation of Pirandello’s L’Uomo dal Fiore in Bocca [“The Man with a Flower in his Mouth“] by some eighteen months.

The Queen’s Messenger, back at the turn of the century, had earned Manners a commission to write a star-vehicle, The Crossways, for (and, allegedly, with) Lily Langtree:

Mrs. Langtry opened last night in “The Crossways.” a new play which she has written in conjunction with her leading man. Mr. J. Hartley Manners. A large and hopeful audience greeted her pleasantly; but if it is a case of crossing the heart and hoping to die, it must be deposed that the occasion was not as a whole enlivening…

Their play is a geometric problem, the elements of which are the traditional triangle of husband, wife and lover, with certain projections in the shape of a runaway couple, a stolen necklace of pearls, a race at Acot, and such like. These materials are thrown together so as to make plenty of stage incidents and stage situations, and they lead in the end to the happiest Q.E.D.

So Manners is in New York, where other success persuaded him to concentrate on the writing rather than the acting.

In 1912 he hit the jack-pot with Peg o’ My Heart, the first part subtitled (and this is the element hinted at above *) —

The Romance of an Irish Agitator and an English Lady of Quality

This propelled Manners and the female lead, Laurette Taylor (whom he promptly married), into celebrity status; and the revenue continued with a musical adaptation (songs by Alfred Bryan and  Fred Fis[c]her), a novelisation and a silent movie.

The Manners legacy — and enter Cole Porter

In 1928, stomach cancer and an operation that went wrong finished Manners, but he left an unproduced script, The Adorable Adventure. This fell into the hands of Dwight Taylor (Manner’s step-son by Laurette’s first marriage) who polished it into the book for a musical, Gay Divorce, songs by Cole Porter.

Gay Divorce played on Broadway (248 performances), transferred to London (a run of 180 performances at the Palace Theatre), with Fred Astaire and Claire Luce as leads. It was, therefore, Astaire’s last Broadway musical, and the only one he didn’t have sister Adele as his partner (she had offed and married Lord Charles Cavendish).

When RKO filmed The Gay Divorcee more than grammatical changes were involved. Astaire wanted Luce as his partner. She, however, had suffered a fall in the London run, and that effectively ended her dancing days — though she persisted in dramatic roles into the 1950s. RKO insisted their contract player, Ginger Rogers, be cast as Astaire’s opposite. Most of Porter’s songs went the same way, retaining only Night and Day and adding The Continental.

Cultural significances?

All of that is interesting, to an extent, in itself.

What is probably of more substance is the material of the play and the plot.

First of all, the original story-line seems somewhat advanced for its day. In the wikipedia summary (which is as abbreviated as any):

Guy Holden, an American writer traveling in England, falls madly in love with a woman named Mimi, who disappears after their first encounter. To take his mind off his lost love, his friend Teddy Egbert, a British attorney, takes him to Brighton Beach, where Egbert has arranged for a “paid co-respondent” to assist his client in obtaining a divorce from her boring, aging, geologist husband Robert. What Holden does not know is that the client is none other than Mimi, who in turn mistakes him — because he is too ashamed of his occupation to say what it is, namely pseudonymously writing cheap “bodice ripper” romance novels — for the paid co-respondent.

At the end, when her husband appears, he is unconvinced by the faked adultery—but is then unwittingly revealed, by the waiter at the resort, to have been genuinely adulterous himself.

While elements of that go back to the flighty-but-gritty fin de siècle stuff (try Oscar Wilde and early Shaw, for examples), any grit is about to be subverted into froth by the strengthened Hayes Office code. Even the change of title suggests the new morality imposed by Joseph Breen:

The moralizing Hayes Office said a divorce couldn’t ever be a happy event, but conceded that a divorcee could be in a good mood.

We therefore have a sub-text to the movie: creative artists pushing the Hayes Code as far as possible. And that, folks, is a matter of social history that still persists, even after the Code went into abeyance, and across all arts.