writing

Falstaff at Covent Garden – a kind of alacrity in sinking

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment


This is how Sir John Falstaff reflects on the ignominy of being dumped in the Thames with filthy washing.

Have I lived to be carried in a basket like a barrow
of butcher’s offal, and to be thrown in the Thames?
Well, if I be served such another trick, I’ll have my
brains ta’en out and buttered, and give them to a
dog for a New Year’s gift.  S’blood, the rogues
slighted me into the river with as little remorse as
they would have drowned a blind bitch’s puppies,
fifteen i’ th’ litter! And you may know by my size
that I have a kind of alacrity in sinking; if the bottom
were as deep as hell, I should drown. I had
been drowned, but that the shore was shelvy and
shallow—a death that I abhor, for the water swells
a man, and what a thing should I have been when
I had been swelled! By the Lord, I should have
been a mountain of mummy.

This may remind you of the philosophical reflection of a sometime Spanish knight after a similar humiliation.  After being trampled on by a herd of bulls, Don Quixote laments:

Here I am with my name in the history books, a famous man of arms, courteous in my conduct, respected by princes, sought after by damsels, and just when I was expecting palms, triumphs, and crowns, I find myself this morning, as a climax to it all, trodden under foot, battered and kicked by a herd of filthy animals.

These are probably the two most famous characters in our literature.  They were created at about the same time.  In saluting what we may call the modern era, or the end of the Middle Ages, they stand for the end of all that moonshine about chivalry.  In the case of The Merry Wives of Windsor, we seethe arrival of the middle class as the centre of attention on our stage, a kind of Elizabethan prelude to Coronation Street, Neighbours, and Friends – although we had to wait centuries before Jennifer Anniston became the most photographed person on the planet, and bowed out in front of 52 million television viewers.

Well, that is one factor behind the snobbery that this play of Shakespeare attracts.  It may be his only play for which he supplied most of the plot, but the lead, Sir John Falstaff, had exploded on the stage in two history plays, before being killed off in another. 

But, as fans of Shakespeare are wont to remind fans of Verdi, the Falstaff of the comedy is much softer than the Falstaff of the history plays.  The brash insolence, fraud, drunkenness, cowardice, and womanizing are constant.  But in the comedy, and the Verdi opera Falstaff, we are spared watching Falstaff the recruiter accepting bribes to allow some poor blighters to be be despatched for cannon fodder.  If he cannot be said to rat on his mates, it’s because he does not have any.  It was this kind of nastiness, which gives a guilty edge to our glee, that led Sir Anthony Quayle call Falstaff ‘frankly vicious.’

The play and the opera are both put on to make us laugh and give us a good time – and reconcile ourselves to our condition.  Well, God only knows how much we need that release and therapy now.  Someone in the trade got up Verdi’s nose by saying he could not write an opera for comedy like Rossini.  Falstaff was Verdi’s answer.

At the beginning of the play, Page is discussing the form of his greyhound, which had just been outrun.  He tells Falstaff they have a hot venison pasty for dinner, and says ‘Come, gentlemen, I hope we shall drink down all unkindness.’  At the end of the play, his wife says ‘let us every one go home, And laugh this sport o’er by a country fire….’  That is precisely the tone of the whole show – and it is precisely the tone of the whole Verdi score.  It may be the most remarkable marriage of script and score that I know.

Still, some snobbery attaches to the play – but not I think to the opera.  W H Auden just refused to lecture on the play.  Well, at least he had the courtesy to refer his audience to the opera.  My own view is that if you are not uplifted by any decent performance of the play, you need help.  As for the opera – Shakespeare is the best playwright that we know, and there are only two challengers to Verdi for that position as composer of opera.  In the result, Falstaff is not just my favourite Verdi opera, but my favourite across the board.  (I may say that I have never taken to the opera Macbeth, and that the play Othello gives me the willies.   Strawberries out of order have the same effect on me as they did on Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny.)

And for those who have been cruelled by Wagner, Falstaff has one unassailable charm.  It is not too long.  It takes less time than the final act of Wagner’s comedy.

Well, those who turned out to Covent Garden in October, 1999 to see a new production of Falstaff sure got their money’s worth.  The house, especially behind the famous curtain, had just had a major rebuild.  The lead was played by a popular local, Bryn Terfel.  The band was conducted by the urbane and unflappable Bernard Haitink.  The costumes and sets were alarmingly attention-grabbing.  The full crowd was expectant and knowing – and they got all that they wanted.  This is, after all, a show in which the English may claim some rights.  And I was at home, with Opus Arte, red at hand, cheering them all on.

At first, I thought the sets and costumes were overdone, and distracting.   But I acclimatised, especially after hearing the director say later that this is after all an Italian opera, and that the story had Italian roots.  (In the extras, Haitink said this is the one opera of Verdi where not one note, not one, is out of place.  Terfel in interview was entirely at ease and bore a remarkable resemblance to Richard Burton in so many ways.  The commentary on the massive work backstage is riveting.) 

This is an opera where the music is integral to the whole show to an extent rarely seen outside of Mozart and Wagner.  As it goes, it gets ethereal, but we always come back to what it is there for – to give us a great night out and send us home more at peace with our neighbours and the world.  And that’s God’s work.

The highlight of this show was the peak of dramatic irony where Falstaff is telling Ford disguised as Brook how he will get Ford’s wife into bed.  The incoming bourgeoisie, the future rulers of television and the world, are terrified of being cuckolded.  You may as well be castrated.  The English language has no female counterpart to ‘unmanned.’  The sequence is as paralyzingly funny as the mirror sequence with Groucho Marx in Duck Soup, and is a warrant for the value of filming this kind of theatre, so that we can see close-up the facial contortions of the splendid Italian actor.  For some reason, his pain and anguish at the cruelty of fate reminded me so strongly of that of Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners.  There are times when we get almost viscerally grabbed by the universality of theatre going right back to commedia dell’ arte and the Greeks.  And all this at what used to be a convent, then a red-light area, and now one of the more singular tourist traps on this earth.

And with it all there is a sense of elegy – unless that is just my coming to grips with coming gutsers as I get older.  Falstaff is not what he was.  They know it, and so does he.  An autumnal wistfulness pervades Henry IV Part II until it is shattered by an act of brutal betrayal.  We are spared this in the comedy and opera based on it, but not in Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight also entitled Falstaff.  (I do think it was a bit rich to give Jeanne Moreau second billing, when the tart Doll Tearsheet gets about three lines.)

In his play, Parolles gets his come-uppance too, but his decline and fall is total, and the pathos is scarcely funny.  As Tony Tanner remarked in discussing All’s Well, Falstaff in the comedy ‘dusts himself off fairly breezily…his attitude is more resigned – you win some, you lose some, and as you get older you lose more.’ 

I know just what he means, and perhaps that is why this play and opera just keeps getting better for me as I age.  It calls to mind a desolate Friday lunch in an Adelaide pub after court about forty years ago with a fading silk.  ‘You know, Mate, we are just like cats.  For every fight you have, you have one less to give.’

The Australian Opera put on a show of Falstaff in Melbourne about twenty years ago that mesmerised me and converted me to being a life-long a fan of both the play and the opera.  Well, this show at Covent Garden, now on film, is up there with the best – perhaps the locals can claim a home ground advantage, even if we now miss the subtle charms of the Crush Bar.  If anyone wants to challenge the West End as the beating heart of world theatre, they will have to get up bloody early.

Erotic Vagrancy

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

This is the title of a book about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.  The title is curious but apt.  A vagrant is someone who has no settled home or job.  Erotic is, well, erotic.  The author, Roger Lewis, adopts a stream of consciousness approach to a subject on which it is impossible to say something new. 

Like most contemporary biography, it is far, far too long.  I started skimming early, and tossed the towel in half way through. 

Each subject was deeply troubled, insecure, and unhappy.  The catalogue of misery just wears you down.  For example, any luster of a list of the ‘conquests’ of Burton is shattered by the disclosure that he liked one to keep on her school uniform during the consummation so devoutly to be desired.  It is about then that you may feel like a Peeping Tom.  (Some readers may be relieved to hear that Julie Andrews is specifically ruled out, although the author in an aside says that when in Camelot, she sings of the ‘simple joys of maidenhood’, ‘there’s absolutely no randy undercurrent or subtext.’  Keep the faith, Julie – and keep handy that big, cold spoon.)

Burton had that wonderful voice and he could act.  I cannot recall much discussion in the book of Taylor as an actor.  She was made for the screen – he for the stage.  It looks to me that he never forgave himself for giving up the stage for the movies – and the money. 

His alcoholism was on a par with that of the contemporary Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas.  (His death certificate referred to ‘insult to the brain.’  He redefined alcoholism by ordering a beer spider for breakfast.) 

It is amazing Burton lived until fifty-eight.  Taylor seemed to be in love with illness and had no conception of a home – none of her many pets was toilet trained.  They both had a Wagnerian conception that the world owed them a living because of the gifts they bestowed on it.  They got fabulously rich and viciously unhappy.

As they plough their way through betrayal after betrayal, you may get the impression that they deserve each other, and feed off the weaknesses of each other – just like Antony and Cleopatra (especially as played by Ciaran Hinds and Estelle Kohler).  But you are left wondering whether anyone in that cesspit ever manages to find contentment.

Mr Lewis certainly knows all about the movies – most of which look to be catalogued and noted helter-skelter in full Joyce-like waterfalls.  But you have to wonder about ‘a prize-winning student of St Andrews University and Magdalen College, Oxford’ who can say – apparently with a straight face:

And they were similar in another way, too – as spoilt children.  Shakespeare’s Antony is an ‘old ruffian’, a version of Falstaff; Burton’s is the needy lost boy Taylor described…

And Don Quixote stood for Spanish sanity, and Leopold Bloom for Irish social security.

The cover of the paperback is covered with the usual deceitful blurbs that demean the club and the house that publish them.

When was the last time you watched Cleopatra or Camelot?

Erotic Vagrancy

This is the title of a book about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.  The title is curious but apt.  A vagrant is someone who has no settled home or job.  Erotic is, well, erotic.  The author, Roger Lewis, adopts a stream of consciousness approach to a subject on which it is impossible to say something new. 

Like most contemporary biography, it is far, far too long.  I started skimming early, and tossed the towel in half way through. 

Each subject was deeply troubled, insecure, and unhappy.  The catalogue of misery just wears you down.  For example, any luster of a list of the ‘conquests’ of Burton is shattered by the disclosure that he liked one to keep on her school uniform during the consummation so devoutly to be desired.  It is about then that you may feel like a Peeping Tom.  (Some readers may be relieved to hear that Julie Andrews is specifically ruled out, although the author in an aside says that when in Camelot, she sings of the ‘simple joys of maidenhood’, ‘there’s absolutely no randy undercurrent or subtext.’  Keep the faith, Julie – and keep handy that big, cold spoon.)

Burton had that wonderful voice and he could act.  I cannot recall much discussion in the book of Taylor as an actor.  She was made for the screen – he for the stage.  It looks to me that he never forgave himself for giving up the stage for the movies – and the money. 

His alcoholism was on a par with that of the contemporary Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas.  (His death certificate referred to ‘insult to the brain.’  He redefined alcoholism by ordering a beer spider for breakfast.) 

It is amazing Burton lived until fifty-eight.  Taylor seemed to be in love with illness and had no conception of a home – none of her many pets was toilet trained.  They both had a Wagnerian conception that the world owed them a living because of the gifts they bestowed on it.  They got fabulously rich and viciously unhappy.

As they plough their way through betrayal after betrayal, you may get the impression that they deserve each other, and feed off the weaknesses of each other – just like Antony and Cleopatra (especially as played by Ciaran Hinds and Estelle Kohler).  But you are left wondering whether anyone in that cesspit ever manages to find contentment.

Mr Lewis certainly knows all about the movies – most of which look to be catalogued and noted helter-skelter in full Joyce-like waterfalls.  But you have to wonder about ‘a prize-winning student of St Andrews University and Magdalen College, Oxford’ who can say – apparently with a straight face:

And they were similar in another way, too – as spoilt children.  Shakespeare’s Antony is an ‘old ruffian’, a version of Falstaff; Burton’s is the needy lost boy Taylor described…

And Don Quixote stood for Spanish sanity, and Leopold Bloom for Irish social security.

The cover of the paperback is covered with the usual deceitful blurbs that demean the club and the house that publish them.

When was the last time you watched Cleopatra or Camelot?

Some pairs in King Lear

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Two old men, King Lear and the Earl of Gloucester (or Gloster), drive a theme with two plot-lines.  They are both now past it, and they are out of touch with the next generation – which in their case contains predators to whom they are vulnerable.  They respond by casting out the innocent child.  If Hamlet is about angry young men, King Lear is about angry old men.

Two sisters compete for nastiness.  ‘Tigers, not daughters.’  Bradley looks to give the palm to Regan – notwithstanding that Goneril murders her, and offers to give the same medicine to her own husband in order to make room in her bed for the bastard.  Bradley remarked that Regan had ‘much less force, courage and initiative than her sister, and for that reason is less formidable and more loathsome.’  Tales of evil sisters have a long history, but these too are hard to beat.  When Regan says she is sick, Goneril, the poisoner, says, aside: ‘If not, I’ll ne’er trust medicine.’  The humour is very black and morbid at the end.  But Regan does have ‘Let him smell his way to Dover.’  And that is pure evil.  Perhaps Bradley had in mind that being weaker, and second in line, Regan was the crueller bully when she got her chance.

Two sons, and brothers of sorts, are very different.  The bastard lives up to the argot in his title.  Gloster’s legitimate son, Edgar, is very hardly done by, but he finishes in triumph, while taking out the bastard, and coming into power.

The two husbands of the evil sisters fall out almost immediately, we are told.  Cornwall is the archetypal villain.  Albany comes fully to understand his folly in marrying Goneril.  Cornwall gets his due from a servant – exquisite irony.  Albany is set to retire hurt.  He was not built for this sort of game.

Two members of the aristocracy – two nobles, if you prefer –react in their own way to events above them.  Kent is nothing if not forthright – and he is ferociously loyal.  He is the first out of the family to feel the wrath of the king in his descent into madness.  Gloster is appalled at what is happening, but he plays the role of the dutiful courtier.  But when civil war is started, he has to take sides, and he pays the ultimate price in the cruellest scene of this playwright outside of Titus Andronicus.

The two French wooers of Cordelia are very different.  Burgundy is naturally unsettled that the offer of wealth has been withdrawn by a cranky king of perfidious Albion.  (He takes the Macron view of commerce.)  France is curious and big hearted – but at the end, he picks a bad time to have an alternative engagement, and his wife is murdered.

Two victims stand out because they are effectively disinherited for no good reason – Cordelia and Edgar.  Cordelia is the victim of her father’s hot blood, and the evil of her sisters.  Edgar is the victim of the evil of his sibling, and the pompous rashness of his father.  Gloster commits what might be called the Othello mistake – he convicts a loved one without hearing from him first.  (The mechanics of the two frauds are very similar.)  By contrast, Lear puts some kind of test to his daughter, and then snaps when she refuses to play the game.  There is thus a symmetry of evil and rashness in the story of two of the principal victims.

Two characters are sacrificed because they are simply not up to it.  Neither Gloster nor Albany is set in anything like the heroic mould.  They are courtiers who make up the numbers and who become collateral damage.  Albany survives, but his interest in ruling has died, and it will be a while before he thinks of marrying again.  One such ‘interlude’ is enough.

Two characters are cracked in the head – the Fool by nature, and Poor Tom by design.  The first adds to the theatre; Poor Tom does not do that – at least for most audiences today.

Two are there to meet in a fight, like that at the OK corral – Edgar and Oswald.  And each is up for it.  But Kent was the more natural antagonist: ‘His [Oswald’s] countenance likes me not.’   On this form, he could become an honorary member of the Marylebone Cricket Club. 

(The spray that Kent gives Oswald at 2.2.14ff could excite the jealousy of the coach of Melbourne Storm.  He is justly famous for his sprays of his manly entourage.  One of the milder forms of abuse of Kent for Oswald is ‘the son and heir of a mongrel bitch.’  Speaking of Melbourne Storm and rugby league – which is not the upper-class version of rugby – at their first meeting, Kent labelled Oswald ‘you base football player.’  The Everyman annotation reads: ‘a low game played by idle boys to the scandal of sensible men.’  The football reference makes dating the action in the play even more difficult, but the analogy is now complete.  This play is about the heaviest of this playwright on the stage.  Kent on Oswald is the play’s one belly laugh, and it should be played for all it is worth – otherwise the audience, too, might go mad.)

And there is something of the mathematics of the western in the fugue of the finale – two of the black hats get taken out by two of the white hats. 

And, finally, there is also an element of Greek tragedy.  Lear, Gloster, and to some extent Albany, are cleansed and enlightened by their suffering – Bradley says ‘purified.’  Which is what members of the audience might aspire to as the curtain comes down, and they go out to face the world.

The purpose of the play is to answer the question: ‘Is man no more than this?’  For that purpose, we the audience take upon ourselves the mystery of things, ‘as if we were God’s spies.’  And the answer is that all that stands between us and the primal slime is about as strong as a Tallyho cigarette paper.  That is why the study of evil in the theatre of the grotesque of the ages in King Lear is seen as this author’s greatest work.

Shakespeare – theatre – drama.