Monday, March 18, 2024

Journalism on Stage: The Connector and Corruption

Sanjit De Silva and Toby Stephens in Corruption. (Photo: T Charles Erickson)

In his new play, Corruption, which opened last week at Lincoln Center, the excellent American political playwright J.T. Rogers dramatizes the scandal in Britain that brought down Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper News of the World when it was revealed that phone hacking and police bribery were commonplace procedures at the publication. Most of the targets were show-biz celebrities, politicians and members of the royal family, but the investigation showed that the phones of thousands of ordinary citizens had also been hacked, including those of a murdered schoolgirl and the relatives of victims of the 2005 London bombings. Rogers’s previous plays include The Overwhelming (about the Rwandan genocide), Blood and Gifts (about the war in Afghanistan) and the Tony Award-winning Oslo (about the Oslo Peace Accords between Israel and Palestine). Corruption is based on Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain, an account of the scandal co-written by two men who took major roles in illuminating it: Tom Watson, a Member of Parliament (and future Labour Party Deputy Leader) serving on the Culture, Media and Sport Committee and Martin Hickman, a journalist for The Independent.

Rogers has chosen Watson (played by Toby Stephens) as his protagonist, but he doesn’t attempt to whitewash him: as government whip during Gordon Brown’s tenure as Prime Minister, his assertiveness crossed the line into bullying and intimidation. When Watson attempts to enlist a fellow MP, Chris Bryant (K. Todd Freeman), in the uncovering of the News of the World debacle, Bryant’s initial reluctance is personal: he hasn’t forgiven Tom for homophobic slurs, and when he does join the fight he insists that their collaboration isn’t an indication of friendship. Still, the lines that separate the good guys from the bad guys in this drama are very clear. It’s an intelligent, well-acted production, exciting (especially in the second act), directed by Bartlett Sher (who staged both Oslo and Blood and Gifts) with his usual command of rhythm and tempo and his highly skillful choreographing of ensembles, and Michael Yeargan has designed a fine set, a halo of screens playing news clips that spins over the stage. But by definition agit-prop plays aren’t subtle. The English playwright James Graham, who wrote Ink (about Murdoch’s early career) and Dear England among others, tends to present rousing material in an entertaining fashion in the first act and then convince himself in the second that he’s making a profound statement; you end up feeling cheated. Rogers reaches farther in Blood and Gifts and certainly in Oslo, which is his best work; in Corruption he’s satisfied to let the material speak for itself. I don’t think that’s a failing; neither the play nor the production makes extravagant claims for itself, and the subject matter is undeniably compelling and infuriating. But his writing here has more punch than elegance.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Down the Rabbit Hole with the National Ballet of Canada

Tirion Law and Svetlana Lunkina Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. (Photo: Karolina Kuras. Courtesy of The National Ballet of Canada)

The National Ballet of Canada's presentation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland transcends mere entertainment, offering an unbridled exploration of creativity, imagination, and the human experience. Christopher Wheeldon's shape-shifting choreography, inspired by Lewis Carroll's timeless tale, serves as a poignant reflection on the power of storytelling and the journey of self-discovery. A mesmerizing use of computer-generated imagery, eye-popping colour and actual dancing in the aisles allow for a fully immersive experience, accessible to all.

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Dressed For Success: Fashioning the Beatles, by Deirdre Kelly

The Beatles with Little Richard, 1962 (Photo: Horst Fascher/Redferns)

“Now I'm stepping out of this old brown shoe
Baby, I'm in love with you
I'm so glad you came here, it won't be the same now
I'm telling you.

I may appear to be imperfect
My love is something you can't reject
I'm changing faster than the weather”

– “Old Brown Shoe”, George Harrison, Abbey Road.

Although composed and recorded in the late phase of their stellar career, a humble but lovely gem by the always underrated Mr. Harrison for their last masterpiece Abbey Road during their slow motion breakup, the tune “Old Brown Shoe” still seems to encapsulate some of the supersonic swift living the band survived through during the magnificent eight years of their astronomical rise to fame and fortune. “I’m changing faster than the weather” also seems to echo both the breathtaking musical stylistic shifts they underwent as well as to mirror the under-reported fashion styles they first embraced, then embodied and finally shared with the rest of us lesser mortals. Deirdre Kelly’s masterful and insightful documenting of their dramatic clothing coolness, Fashioning the Beatles: The Looks that Shook the World, now finally addresses their nearly supernatural chic and how it paralleled the shockingly inspiring evolutionary leaps they took in the art of the popular song. It’s a literary gift of the highest order.

Monday, February 12, 2024

German Imports: The Teachers’ Lounge and Afire

Leonie Benesch and Leonard Stettnisch in The Teachers'  Lounge.

In the unnerving German drama The Teachers’ Lounge, a theft in the faculty lounge of a secondary school and a young teacher’s protest against the suspicion that one of her students was responsible lead to chaos. The set-up is complicated. When someone steals money from the wallet of a teacher, Thomas Liebenwerda (Michael Klammer), the principal, Dr. Böhm (Anne-Kathrin Gummich), and the vice-principal, Milosz Dudek (Rafael Stachowiak), cross-examine the two sixth-grade student representatives to the class council in front of the other teachers, asking them to identify classmates who may have been acting strangely or walking around with an unusual amount of cash. This approach makes the students’ math teacher, Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch), markedly uncomfortable. Then the administrators interrupt her class and demand that the boys produce their wallets. The only one carrying a lot of money turns out to be a Middle Eastern student, Ali (Can Rodenbostel), and though they accept his explanation, his interrogation brings his angry parents to the school. (No one uses the phrase “racial profiling”; no one has to.) Upset by the administration’s assumption that the thief must have been one of the kids, Carla decides to conduct her own clandestine investigation. She leaves her jacket on a chair in the lounge with her wallet inside, and sets her laptop to film what happens after she slips out of the room. Indeed, someone lifts money from the wallet, and though the video doesn’t reveal a face, she recognizes the thief’s blouse. But when she confronts its owner, the school secretary, Friederike Kuhn (Eva Löbau), hoping she’ll simply own up to the act and return the money, instead Friederike denies it vehemently, so Carla brings in Dr. Böhm and produces the video. The secretary’s response is tears and outrage, and Carla, struggling to be fair-minded, loses confidence in her allegation. By then, however, it’s too late. Böhm has no choice but to proceed with the accusation, and Dudek points out that Carla had no legal right to film the people in the lounge without their permission. When Friederike makes a scene at a regularly scheduled meeting between Carla and the parents of her math students, insisting on censuring her accuser publicly and threatening to take her to court, inevitably the kids hear about it and rumors fly. Friedriche’s son Oskar (Leonard Stettnisch), who is Carla’s most talented pupil, is not only confused and unsettled by the assumption that his mother is guilty but finds himself targeted by classmates who assume that he must be a thief too: “like mother, like son.”

Monday, February 5, 2024

In Court and at Dinner: Anatomy of a Fall and Menus-Plaisirs: Les Troisgros

Milo Machado Graner in Anatomy of a Fall.

The gripping French film Anatomy of a Fall may be the most unconventional courtroom thriller I’ve ever seen. When Samuel Maleski is found dead beneath the attic window of his chalet in the French Alps, his wife, Sandra Voyter (Sandra Müller) is charged with murder. The case put together by her legal team – Vincent Renzi (Swann Arlaud), who is an old friend, and Nour Boudaoud (Saadia Bentaïeb) – is that he jumped, and Sandra claims that his behavior since their eleven-year-old son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner) was hit by a motorcycle, seriously damaging his optic nerve, has veered into depression and that one incident where he passed out drunk may well have been a suicide attempt. (She wondered if the white spots she saw in his vomit could have been undigested pills.) But the case of the prosecution challenges this theory because of the position of the blood spatter on the snow where he fell and a tape the police found of an argument between husband and wife, which he recorded the day before he died.

Monday, January 29, 2024

Moby Dick for Puppets

Photo by Christophe Raynaud deLage.

In a six-day run at Boston’s Paramount Theater under the auspices of Arts Emerson, the Norwegian company Plexus Polaire staged Herman Melville’s Moby Dick in eighty-five brisk minutes with a cast of seven actor-puppeteers and three musicians. But though some of the effects were nifty and imaginative and the production held one’s attention, I’m not entirely sure what I saw. The show, directed by Yngvild Aspeli, is narrated, like the novel, by Ishmael, the only member of the crew who survives Captain Ahab’s single-minded pursuit of the immense sea beast that chewed off his leg in a previous whaling expedition, and it takes care to introduce us to all the members of the crew of the Pequod. But aside from Ishmael only a couple, the harpooner Queequeg (who becomes Ishmael’s closet friend) and the cabin boy Pip, are allowed to make much of an impression, and when the puppets are in close proximity on the shadowy stage it’s difficult to tell them apart. Aspeli – or the company in collaboration (the program doesn’t offer a writing credit) – hasn’t necessarily chosen the excerpts from the book to clarify the plot, so even if you know it pretty well you might have trouble following the story line.

Thursday, January 25, 2024

Year-End Movies IV: Monster and All of Us Strangers

Hinata Hiiragi and Soya Kurokawa in Monster.

The movies of the Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda are not just different from those of other filmmakers; they’re also often unlike each other. He seems to trod a new path each time out, and his narrative strategies are always fresh. His pictures aren’t even always in Japanese: his last, Broker, which was one of the best films of 2022, was shot in South Korea with Korean actors, and its predecessor, The Truth, was set in Paris and featured Isabelle Huppert and Juliette Binoche as mother and daughter and Ethan Hawke as Binoche’s American husband. The common denominator is a focus on unconventional family units, usually involving small children. The two fifth-grade boys at the heart of his latest, Monster, Minato (Soya Kurokawa), the protagonist, and the smaller and younger-appearing Yori (Hinata Hiiragi), have each lost one parent and are being raised by the other – Yori by a hard-drinking father (Akihiro Kakuta) and Minato by his mother, Saori (Sakura Ando), who is still mourning the death of her husband and struggles to balance caring for her son with a tiring job in a laundry. 

The starting-off point of this remarkable film is Saori’s suspicion that the boys’ teacher, Mr. Hori (Eita Nagayama), who looks to be barely out of university, has been bullying her son, both verbally and physically. She goes to see Fushimi, the principal (Yûko Tanaka), who meets her with Hori and a committee of teachers, but she keeps checking her notes and avoiding Saori’s eyes, and her responses to the mother’s concerns are so generalized that Saori finds them infuriating. Fushimi assures her, “We accept your opinion with seriousness” and promises that in the future the teacher will “provide appropriate instruction.” “Am I talking to human beings?” Saori demands. Furthermore, Hori insists that the incident was merely a misunderstanding and Saori is being overprotective. He also protests that Minato is the bully and that he has been victimizing Yori. The more Saori investigates, the more confusing the story becomes. She visits Yori at his home and sees that his arm has been burned, but the boy denies that her son is the cause and confirms that the teacher has been beating up on Minato. And that behavior seems to have continued even after Saori’s complaint – Minato falls down some stairs at school while, according to the other children, he was running away from his teacher.

For a long time we think the themes of Monster are rumors and lies, but these turn out to be secondary. There are plenty of puzzle pictures in which the plot elements don’t come together until very late in the running time, but I can’t think of another movie in which the theme doesn’t emerge until the last third. And I can’t reveal it here without ruining the experience, except to say that its treatment by Kore-eda and the screenwriter Yûji Sakamoto is both daring and deeply affecting. (Sakamoto’s script is a thing of rare beauty.) The structure imitates that of one of the most famous of all Japanese films, Kurosawa’s Rashomon, where the tale of a rape and murder in the forest is told in four versions that contradict each other, though at the end we still don’t know which one, if any, is accurate; the movie’s subject is the unknowability of the truth. Kore-eda presents us with three perspectives on the events of a few days – Saori’s, Hiro’s and Minato’s – presented consecutively. We know he’s returning to the beginning of the narrative each time he replays a fire that takes down a “hostess bar” (a club that caters to male customers), lighting up the night in the neighborhood where all of the characters live. Each time through he sifts in new, revelatory details. At the end, unlike in Rashomon, we have the entire story. (Rashomon isn’t the only Kurosawa reference; I’m indebted to my observant friend Mark Dellelo for pointing out Kore-eda’s allusions to perhaps the most unusual and one of the least known of his masterpieces, the 1970 Dodes’ka-den.)

In some way each of the major characters stumbles badly. But Kore-eda has no interest in villains; the only person on screen whose behavior is difficult to forgive isn’t a major figure at all, though his influence is profound. Based on Saori’s view of events, we are put off at first by both Hori and Fushimi, both of whom we come to appreciate as we discover their reserves of kindness and sensitivity; what seems at first to be, among other things, a broad critique of the Japanese educational system ends up exposing the good intentions of these two people who are laboring in it and coming up against its twenty-first-century limitations. Fushimi is haunted by a family tragedy that, we learn, is thornier than we thought. Hori is a lonely heart with a tendency to fall in love with women who end up dumping him and whose weddings he attends; we get the feeling that his current romantic involvement is unlikely to reverse the trend. Both these characters have moments when they are apparently considering suicide, but it’s clear that they don’t carry through on their impulses; the ending of the movie is more ambiguous. Tanaka’s and Nagayama’s performances are superb, as are those of Ando and the two perfectly natural yet astonishingly expressive child actors. Among Kore-eda’s staggering array of gifts, his ability to work with children is perhaps the most impressive.

Claire Foy and Andrew Scott in All of Us Strangers.

Initially Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers builds on his 2011 film Weekend, where a one-night stand between two men unexpectedly turns into the beginning of a genuine relationship. In All of Us Strangers, Adam (Andrew Scott), a screenwriter in his mid-forties, makes an unspoken connection with Harry (Paul Mezcal), who lives in the same building, when a fire alarm draws them both into the courtyard. Immediately afterwards Harry, who is maybe fifteen years Adam’s junior, shows up outside his apartment and comes on to him, and Adam politely turns him down. The next time they see each other, in the lobby, Harry is sober and apologizes for his behavior; Adam, a shy loner, wants to suggest they have a drink but he isn’t fast enough – the elevator doors divide them and the opportunity vanishes. The third time they lock eyes, Adam is at the window in his apartment and Harry is outside, and this time Adam overcomes his reticence and beckons him to come up. They wind up in bed, and in the weeks that follow they keep seeing each other and growing closer.

Haigh’s work often deals with gay sexuality, but unlike Weekend and Looking, Haigh’s HBO series about four friends living in San Francisco, and its first-rate movie sequel, All of Us Strangers isn’t in the realm of realism. There are strange undercurrents from the outset. The two men are among a smattering of neighbors in a brutalist high-rise somewhere in London. The building looks fairly expensive but it’s creepy: it isn’t completely finished and there’s no security. If this were a realist narrative we’d wonder who would move in here under those conditions, or how Harry knows which apartment door to knock at, or how it happens that these two men keep running into each other. The movie feels like a ghost story, which it turns out to be. The script Adam is working on is set in 1987 and about his parents, who died that year, shortly before Adam turned twelve, in a car accident after attending a Christmas party. He has a photograph of the house in Dorking, a town in Surrey about twenty miles outside London where he lived with them before the accident, and he trains out of the city to look at it and refresh his memory. What he finds is that his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy) still live there, and they haven’t aged. They recognize him, and they even seem to be prepared for the encounter, though they can’t explain how it’s come about; Haigh omits the usual sci-fi appurtenances, like time portals. And as his parents get to know him as an adult, older now than they were when he lost them, Adam begins to take comfort in being around them and keeps returning to visit them. (The transitions between the present and the past become more fantastical as the movie goes on; Haigh includes some surrealistic touches.) He even brings Harry there, but the house is in darkness and no one comes to the door, though Adam can see his parents in the shadows – and, as he learns later, so can Harry.

Haigh is a marvelous director and All of Us Strangers is beautifully made. It’s very compelling, and often powerful and moving, largely because of the quality of the acting in what is essentially a four-hander. Only Mezcal isn’t convincing; he’s the only one of the quartet who behaves as if he were in a Pinter play. The other three are completely naturalistic, and the tension between their approach and the absurdist style is a key element in the way the movie works on us. That’s most potently the case with Bell and Foy, who are so intensely present that their ghostliness is the essential mystery of the film. When I was in my early twenties I saw a friend, a graduate acting student, give a sublimely tender portrayal of Jocasta in Oedipus the King, and when I questioned her about it afterwards she told me that the character doesn’t make sense unless her instincts with Oedipus are maternal as well as romantic. I thought of what she said all those years ago while I was watching Foy in All of Us Strangers, not because we’re meant to imagine a sexual undercurrent in her relationship with her grown son but because the trick to her performance is that, though she meets up with Adam again some three and a half decades later, what she sees when she looks at him is the little boy she left when she died. She understands all the information he passes onto her about his life through that motherly connection. Of course that’s true of all mothers, but the unique detail that colors her interaction with him is that she has had to leap into the future, so to speak – to calculate in just a few meetings the distance he’s traveled without her in his life. The same is true of his father, but he has his gruff working-class masculinity to fall back on, at least at first. What’s remarkable about Bell’s depiction of Adam’s father is that the fact of his son’s homosexuality brings out a sensitivity in him he may not have known was there. In a wrenching moment, Adam remembers coming home from being bullied at school for being too soft, too feminine, and shutting himself up in his room to cry; now he asks his father why he never came in to comfort him. His father confesses that he didn’t want to think about what Adam might be going through because he knew that as a boy he would have been one of the tormentors. Foy and Bell are both spectacular actors. (Foy’s bitter sensuality in the role of the Duchess of Argyll in last year’s A Very British Scandal, along with Paul Bettany’s layered cruelty in the role of her husband, made the otherwise mediocre, repetitive limited series worth looking at.) Here they do something very unusual: suggest what the parents’ feelings might be like if they suddenly appeared from beyond the grave exactly as they were when they were still alive. It requires a balance, shall we say, between familiarity and fervency. Was there any better acting on the screen in 2023?

Andrew Scott is a more complicated case. He’s a wonderful actor, and he shows a warmth as Adam that isn’t usually in his wheelhouse, though it was when he played Hamlet in Robert Icke’s production in the West End in 2017. I kept thinking of his Hamlet, which was marked by a muted emotional alertness in the silences that you see again in All of Us Strangers. Scott did a masterful job with Shakespeare’s language, but I haven’t seen anyone in this role do more with the silences, at least not since Laurence Olivier. (The disappointment about his Hamlet was that he ran out of ideas in the second half and started to repeat himself – a general issue with the show.) Scott’s Adam is an introvert who is always feeling much, much more than he can find words for. It’s a performance of exquisite gentleness, but the problem is the idea to which the characteris tied as if to a sinking stone. It’s ingenious to dramatize gayness in this way: to imagine a fantasy scenario in which a man meets up with his long-dead parents and has to come out to them in his middle age. But the conversations that ensue between Adam and his parents – especially his mother, who recalls how afraid he was of everything as a little boy and who is immediately concerned that his queerness might make him lonely – as well as the ones between him and Harry are too carefully framed to make points about the essential nature of homosexuality. (It’s their shared feeling of alienation that draws the two men together emotionally.)

The movie I kept thinking of while I was watching All of Us Strangers was the 1991 Truly Madly Deeply, in which Juliet Stevenson plays a woman who is so paralyzed by the death of her lover that he has to return as a ghost (played by Alan Rickman) to kick her into moving on. That film, which Anthony Minghella wrote and directed, was a fantasy presented, weirdly and often comically, as realism; technically it’s a piece of magic realism, but it doesn’t feel like any other magic realist movies or literature I know. Truly Madly Deeply worked for me in a way that Haigh’s movie doesn’t because though Minghella’s story is a kind of fable with a moral (you can’t stop living when the person you love most in the world dies), it doesn’t feel didactic. It has a lightness that Haigh, much as I like and admire his work, seems temperamentally detached from. It’s not that I mind the fact that All of Us Strangers is downbeat; its melancholy is partly what makes it distinctive and memorable. But the more it stresses its agenda, the less effective it becomes.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting StyleNo Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.