Category Archives: The Arts

August 9, 2013 · 5:39 pm

HAMLET – A VERY PALPABLE HIT!

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It was telling that the actors taking their bow after the performance of David Farr’s production of Hamlet last night seemed almost embarrassed that some members of the audience were on their feet in approval, myself included. But then perhaps they were unsure of their skill, or the RSC should abandon just a little bit of its over-democratic, ensemble correctness and let individuals soak up a bit more of the glory, especially with a play that so takes it out of lead actors. Reactions in the audience, particularly over Jonathan Slinger’s troubled, sometimes screechy and certainly challenging Prince, seemed a bit confused too, but if there were certainly flaws, first to the noisy praise.

A production set somewhere between Denmark in the present and on the edge of the Second War, still with its beer Keller fencing fraternities, compensates for all the problems of Titus Andronicus (reviewed below) by giving the play and the theatre straight back to the actors, and of course the playwright. Hence, despite a visually stunning design (apart from the sofas), that suddenly strips away the boards where the fencing courtiers engage in their fatal dance of death, that can only have the two-step of two one directions, backwards or forwards, to reveal the dead earth that we all face, as hard as the set above, and where Ophelia comes to lie in black ash, there is none of the fuss that impedes the players really getting to the text. While Titus engages in a glut of cultural referencing and design chic then, this Hamlet picks one presiding metaphor only, to swell the edgy paranoia, fencing and sword fighting, entirely appropriate to a playwright who, as Peter Ackroyd points out in his biography of Shakespeare, has more staged fights than any of his contemporary dramatists. Thus the ghost, played with a Marleyesque queasiness worthy of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol by Greg Hicks, the actor playing his usurping brother Claudius too, inches into the auditorium dressed in rusting wire mask and modern fencing kit, haloed in neon light, while everywhere swords are at hand to speed the easy and often casual blood-letting. Shakespeare’s were killing times, Ben Jonson killed a player in a duel and another man in single combat on the battlefield in Flanders, and the theatre was a battle of survival and wits too.

Wit is an especially Elizabethan word, of fighting intelligence in the world, so at first you wonder if Jonathan Slinger’s rather elderly Hamlet is not too much of the comic Woody Allen chez Elsinore, until his mind gets really nasty and struggles to find nobility again. Slinger looks a bit like Allen, and this is perhaps the first time the adolescent Prince has been given the qualities of a tragic clown, hint of white face mask to encourage the metaphysical agonies. At times Slinger minces a bit too much, just as both his and Simon Russell Beale’s Hamlet were not absolutely convincing in the final sword fight. It is difficult to carry off, but that is less forgivable in a production like this, that places so much emphasis on the arts of duelling, mental and physical, because even if ‘the readiness is all’, no actor should close their eyes and wave their sword too camply, especially since Hamlet has something dangerous in him, and fencing is a precise, close quarter skill. Perhaps that is what undermined this Hamlet for some, that classical image of Hamlet’s manly nobility, and both nobility and real manhood are such a theme of the play, but Slinger compensates by delivering a performance of such inner pain, complexity and intelligence that he constantly makes you sit up and listen to the words again. A man who has just lost his father, a moment when he must either regress or grow up, and his own childhood too. As for the boyish mincing, it frees his thoughts and words and at times he is very funny indeed, while it is sustainable too, since the homoerotic elements of his passionate and playful male friendships are so underlined throughout. Indeed, rather than making Hamlet all aware, the play really starts to come alive when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern appear, and Hamlet’s need for friendship and trust is so challenged by his almost reluctant revealing of the lies and betrayals encircling him in the political and emotional corruption of Elsinore.

Farr and by extension Slinger have gone for the almost purely internalized then, and with an essay on depression in the programme by the comedienne Ruby Wax, Hamlet’s near mental collapse is stressed in that ‘antic disposition’, as the stage is emblazoned with the Roman motto Mens Sana In Corpora Sanis and the programme cover shows a fencing mask completely blacked out. As vital and relevant a theme and human fact as that is, and the appalling disconnection from the world it can cause, that no-one on the healthy ‘outside’ can understand, part of the problem with it being entirely true to Hamlet is that its ghost is not just a projection of Hamlet’s mind, it is seen by others, except in the bedroom scene, and tells Hamlet things of real foul deeds that spur the action. Although you can see that in context of his own ‘prophetic soul’ too, or of how a consciousness at full tilt can grasp how things can work really in the ‘world’, especially in the ‘incestuous’ play of male and female energies that make or mar us all, or perhaps itself becomes the force of corruption and ultimate despair. It is why that ghostly injuction “Taint not thy mind, Hamlet” is so important. It places Hamlet then on the very cusp of a still believing world and a new ‘psychological’ age, that perhaps we still cannot answer.

In that giving of Shakespeare back to the actors though, every one of these performances are strong and some are superb. Robin Soans is utterly convincing as a kind of ‘Yes Minister’ Polonius, a man of his class, brutal to his daughter, a skilful if dull servant of the dangerous court. Charlotte Cornwall’s Gertrude is not given enough scope, but powerful when it comes to the bedroom clinch and tender in her rediscovered or perhaps never really present maternity of her son. Both Laertes and Horatio are strong too, if the Hamlet-Horatio age gap seems too big. But the laurel for originality must go to Greg Hicks, so intentionally cast as Hamlet’s real duelling opponent. He is constantly eerie, nasty and dangerous, a man truly capable of murder, and a kind of slick Danish gangster, in shiny suit and brandishing easy lies. Hicks nearly steals the show though with his brilliant prayer scene soliloquy, I’ve never seen done so well, a man who does not delude himself, faced with the urge to heaven, but finding himself steeped in a crime he cannot expunge. It shines with intelligence and reality and so he must also advance to the poisonous staging of Hamlet’s murder. The only frustration was the lovely, febrile Pippa Nixon’s Ophelia, since her first appearance is wonderful, aching with a passionate and new discovered sexuality, so phallically underscored in the player’s dumb-show, like a character from a Milan Kundera novel. It could have led to dark wonders in her madness, but the dull white wedding dress metaphor and over strident singing in her grief loses subtlety and vulnerability and you suspect it has something to do with the staging and the desire to keep up the fencing metaphor. Yet her interment at the front throughout the last quarter is bleakly moving and also leaves you with a sense of what might have been.

At three and a half hours with a 20 minute interval there have been bloody cuts, and one of the oddest is not allowing Fortinbras on stage to deliver his valediction, but constant originality and freshness compensate, even entertaining oddity, like Claudius’ acceptance of his own execution by poison cup and so many moments where new meanings or interpretations are found in the marvelous play of words. I have no idea why the sprinklers come on in the end, except to break you out of the cloisterphobic sports hall setting, or because they had some, but it was the bracing originality, clarity and accessibility of this Hamlet that got me to my feet. It is a very unusual Hamlet, certainly not for purists, but a very palpable acting hit.

David Clement-Davies

Hamlet is at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford until September 28th 2013

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August 7, 2013 · 3:33 pm

THUMBS UP TO TITUS ANDRONICUS, THE RSC AND FUSION COOKING?

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By the interval I wanted to scream and shout and tell everyone they must rush to see Michael Fentiman’s rangy production of Titus Andronicus at The Swan theatre in Stratford, and give it the universal thumbs up. By the famous blood soaked denouement though there was an equal feeling of some strange absence, or not quite grasping it. As if, like Titus, I had had my right my hand cut off, so simply had no affirmative thumb left, simultaneously wondering if the real problem is indeed a play that some have described as un-stageable. There are a great many things though to praise about this hyper slick, High-Production-value show, above all the richly layered and deeply moving performance by Stephen Boxer as Titus, the martial Roman whose own actions in mutilating the son of the Goth Queen Tamara precipitate the baked-in-a-pie revenge horrors to come, in a tragedy that seems to engage in a kind of theatrical aversion therapy. Yet in the end the poetic symmetry talked about in the notes, mirroring the fatal actions and consequences among all the characters, excepting that ultimately tragic victim Lavinia, the feminine brutalised in everyone, is strangely lost to so much business and invention. A phantom thumb of gladiatorial approval hovers a little more uncertainly then – whether those about to die, which is nearly everyone on stage, are really saluting pure Shakespeare or not.

What is most refreshing about this Titus though is its energy and immediacy, mixed with a deal of humour, especially effective in the intimate environment of the wonderful little Swan theatre round. With the commitment and skill of the RSC behind it, and its decidedly young cast too, it certainly challenges that old cliché of dismissing one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays as nothing more than a bums-on-seats pot boiler, catering to the worst excesses of Elizabethan bear and human baiting. The hugely popular Titus, written around 1592, and at the moment Shakespeare first appears on the London scene with overlooked histories like Henry VI, is a play that needs and deserves rediscovery and reappraisal, perhaps especially in our hyper violent and violently visual age, as the programme notes stress. A play where Shakespeare seems to reach to the greatest extremes of gory horror, and of himself on the edge of hysteria, yet in order to summon such astonishing poetry, that gushes out on stage like unstaunched arterial blood, or a symphony of human tears. Above all though, it reminds that among all the stage business, what is always true of Shakespeare is that he is also engaged in an almost private argument about maintaining his own extraordinary poetic function and flow, his overall vision, hence tongues, heads, hands and even thumbs are not just incidental, but a metaphor for spiritual and moral mutilations, that might silence any poet, set against the capacity of the human spirit to transcend, or simply repeat its own pathology. That alone marks Titus’s importance to the whole of Shakespeare’s work, while perhaps a play that thirty years later Ben Jonson would commend as a living masterpiece, along with Kid’s The Spanish Tragedy, was the moment of his first liberation, and Shakespeare’s revolt against the obvious parameters of conventional revenge drama too. Certainly the poetic and political themes of all Shakespeare’s plays are at work here and this production can only aid that important reappraisal.

Catering is of course much on the menu in Titus, and since a production is so knowingly referential, Fentiman might have made even more of today’s surfeit of TV Master Chefs, although there are very funny and clever touches in just that bain marie vein, like Lavinia’s armful fight with a boiled egg, followed by an attempt to read the runes in salt, that goes on too long, or two bloody heads and a hand seemingly vacuum packed courtesy of Heston Bloomenthal’s Fat Duck. Its realism and contemporary echo was absolutely right and suitably revolting too, like the blood that gushes out when Lavinia first opens her mouth after her rape, that made us gasp and might make a psychopath wake up to human pain and suffering. It is also why the horror of Titus works much better in a small theatre, if the gore and guts are done as convincingly as this. Yet the endless modern cultural allusions in the staging and costumes are also part of the problem, in a play so about the power and impotence of language, in the face of tongue denying violence, rape and hatred. Just as the programme references everything from Quentin Tarantino to the Hammer Horror film Theatre of Blood then – “ooh, my babies-my babies” – here is a recipe that smacks of just one cook too many, at times, or the issue of fusion cooking itself, which I think has long been an RSC one. As for the inevitable dilemma of the play, Shakespeare of course knew the potential hypocrisy of drawing in and pleasing the crowds, while finding the moral and meaning, more importantly the depth of thought and feeling, but that is the struggle of his art, of Titus itself. This production, heralded back in May with the revealing filmic tag line “There will be blood“, and today’s supposedly smart money too are certainly on the likes of Tarantino nowadays, who in my opinion lost the plot with Django, selling out to the winning, violent and glossy formula. It is why the funny faced wunderkind always gets so itchy when anyone dares to challenge him on the real purpose of violence in his movies. This Titus, and its creators, are similarly a little uncertain about whether they want ‘Shakespeare Minceur’ or a quick ticket to Hollywood, and if it is the pastry dish or the true meat that make the play work, the words.

Leaving too much of an open door on violent video games too, movies or past productions, and that oddly American world building that defines drama today and has these particular Roman Soldiers as irritating action models of Dath Vader, seems to infect the performances too. So John Hopkins’ Saturninus, funny and skilful at times, seems to be snatched straight from Commodus in the movie Gladiator, as one of the Goth queens gets lost down a blow-dry disco. Shakespeare loved actors, at least ones who really serve the purpose of the whole play, and actors love Shakespeare, if allowed to find the depth and song of character through his words, not paste trendy, hyper modern interpretations on top. Katy Stephens’ very sexy Tamara is strong, to prove that women can be just as nasty as men, or that Cat Woman is not dead. Appropriately then one grinning member of the audience last night was the spiky haired classical violinist Nigel Kennedy, who certainly has the talent, like this production, but whose mutilation of his own middle class vowels, in that search to be the archetypal common man, or comfortable in his own skin, can also get a little irritating, mate. Then mutilation of language and poetry is also the point of this play, as is rather hauntingly captured in Dwane Walcott’s shit-stained clown and pigeon rearer, hanged at the back of the set in mute agony, murdered by all the high metaphors.

For all the bits though, even four hundred years ago history’s stage was already so steeped in human blood that Shakespeare’s eternal attempt to engage that dialogue between past and present, the meaning of meaningful history; or to find ‘the contemporary’, did not quite mean he had to reference every act of world mutilation, or produce a cultural exegesis worthy of Derida. In a production that is supposedly first doing justice to Shakespeare then, it might have been enough just to underline the presence of Ovid’s Metamporhoses in the play, that referencing of the story of Philomel, to explore how Shakespeare’s own visions develop in seeking transformation, or in engaging in such theatre at all, without throwing in the kitchen sink of everyone’s attempts at Titus-via-Tarantino. It is also fudges Shakespeare’s strongest themes; pagan versus the supposedly spiritual values of ancient Roman, Catholic interpretations of life’s feast, yet worship of what is really a blood sacrifice too, in a play so much about religion and ritual. But above all the mutilation to the really powerful and creative masculine, when the feminine, inside and out, becomes a source of violence. They are themes that are so deep in Shakespeare they are also too big to be sustained when the Goths are reduced to Asbo worthy adolescent bovver boys, who would probably never get to see a supposedly transformative play anyhow. Which raises Titus’s complex question of whether the orgiastic representation of violence, our visual culture is now so steeped in, is pornographic, worthy pressure-valve entertainment, or just breeds more violence. The young actors did well, but for me were just a little too young and mod deliquent.

There is that long present issue of ‘RSC Land’ Shakespeare too, often a kind of never-never land of all things to all Romans, certainly in sets and settings, that forgets Elizabethan theatre had very little staging and was first one of declamation and poetry. So while all that steamy horror, bawdry and cruelty happened down on London’s Bankside, to make Shakespeare much question the purpose of theatre itself, that in Titus almost vomits out of his system, it was also a place where troupes were also staging bouts of contemporary versification in the great entertainment battle, like modern slam poetry. In the end Titus is a defence of poetry, poetry not nearly regarded enough either, which the cast do certainly grasp wonderfully at times, but who might be given a little more space and, frankly, tongue. The older actors then, like Boxer, or Richard Durden’s dignified Marcus have to carry the poetic authority of the play and thankfully they manage it well and sometimes transcendently. The oddest performance is Kevin Harvey’s Aaron, who has great presence and charisma and a clear future, but who fails when he attempts to explicate verse that should be flying with meanings, found through their own rhythms. Aaron is of course an extraordinary part, that literal black devil, with no obeisance to the politically correct, and in his size and scope a kind of cross between Othello and Iago. Again humour, mixed with the tenderness of trying to save his own child, is what lifts his own performance back towards the gods.

That exploration of art’s pulsing and bleeding arteries though, or Shakespeare’s, is most strikingly achieved when one of the Andronicus brothers reaches his hand down from the gods, into the real and metaphorical hell pit of rape and murder below, which paradoxically is also the womb of Shakespeare’s word making, dark and light. That is why it was so right to stage this at The Swan, where the deepest metaphor of those wooden O’s, those early theatre wombs, and with all the sexual meanings denied to eager schoolboys too, suddenly comes alive, if only momentarilly. That is also why interpreting and performing Shakespeare should be first about the simplest and purest approach to peeling the words off the page and popping them in and out of the actors’ mouths. The sets and designs, and these are generally very effective, including the sacrificial black ash that falls from a deaf heaven, come afterwards. Speaking of which, when the distracted general takes an ultimate revenge by feeding Tamara’s rapine children to their mother, it is oddly done by back staging the celebrated banquet, at the very moment the audience should be most implicated in the action, in the round, and face to face. This audience needed an even more direct invitation to the ghastly feast then, even a bit more blood, and to the sobbing anguishes the play is filled with.

Perhaps our audiences could just not stomach such dry entertainments as Shakespeare without the frills though, or the superfluous BMX’s, but here, just too many times the langauge and the real pain is sacrificed to the visually impressive stage business, which is a pity because when the actors catch it they and the play are glorious and uniquely powerful. Sometimes that staging is very effective, like the nurses at the start, crosses between Catholic nuns and hijab wearing hand maidens, the martial drums or the hook lifted corpses, but at others it impedes the actors’ ability to let rip with the verse and the pure feeling. In fact, despite all the boys on the block being Tarantino fans, Fentiman is not formulaic and so takes many risks in pressing to the outer reaches of gallows humour, the superbly grotesque, like Boxer’s macabre dinner service in a dress, so exploring both our reaction to and need for horror, always on the edge of mad humour, and revealing how Shakespeare pre-empts Brecht’s and Artaud’s theatres of alienation and cruelty by 400 years. Yet, for any criticisms for not completely capturing the poetic integrities of the play, with the raw energy of this debut production, the skill of Boxer and the fact there is truly never a dull moment, that phantom thumb must go up high. “We who have died with you, salute you!” One of the great strengths of this production is to make such good use of The Swan too, also pointing the RSC away from cream-tea tourist Shakespeare in Stratford and back to origins in those rounds in London. It is also a Titus for our tasty, nasty yet often over-packaged times, and remembering that the play is flawed too, a comparatively immature work compared to masterpieces like Lear, in its own way equally horrific, confirmation that the RSC is hot on the trail of excellence and perhaps even better recipes to come.

David Clement-Davies

David is currently writing a book on Shakespeare’s youngest brother Edmund.

TITUS ANDRONICUS is at The Swan Theatre Stratford until October 23rd 2013.

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March 13, 2013 · 8:27 pm

POPE FRANCIS

How interesting, and gently moving too.  A Pope, announced on Channel Four News with a touch of science, in that little detail of the Potassium being mixed in with the wood smoke to make it especially white, with a stirring and holy name name too, Pope Francis.  A simple and humble man, who put aside the power and pomp of the Episcopal palace, to live among everyday people.  Conservative, in the sense of defending marriage, yet also teaching respect for homosexuality.  But of course, the first Pope not to come from Europe in 900 years.  Then there is his identity as an Argentinian, and what impact that might have on the situation , (for Brits),  in The Falklands, and for Argentines, ‘Las Malvinas’.  Perhaps a a minor point, when a Pope is no longer a representative of his Nation, but of the Church. In a man who has been criticized for not standing up enough to the Colonels in Argentina, and the horrors of ‘Los Disaparecidos’, yet who has stood up to the Government and stood among the poor too.  What could be more appealing though, in a world being torn apart by the growning gap between people, in enormous divides between rich and poor, which simply socially can never come to good, than a new Pope Francis?

John Snow, on Channel Four News, with all his charming enthusiasm, was quick to try and make some definitive statement, such as his appearance on the Roman balcony as not being especially ‘exuberant’.  Yet, as soon as Jorge Mario Bergoglio spoke, he was full of gentle smiles and a pastoral, human touch.  It is far too soon to say anything at all.  Except, as Cardinal Cormack Macarthy said, in talking of this as a blessing,  in the resonance of that very singular name, Francis.  It was GK Chesterton, a life long Catholic, the creator of the Father Brown detective stories, who wrote a biography of St Francis of Assissi called ‘Brother Son and Sister Moon”.  One of the most radical of reforming figures in the entire history of the Church.  Who gave up both wealth, and his own martial vigour, to don the brown habit and live a life following the really Christian message, of poverty and love. But also one beautifully involved in nature,  hence his communion with birds, flowers, trees and brother sun and sister moon.

Never missing a chance for the happy plug, although certainly not making as much money as those plastic Madonna bottles that line the route to Lourdes, perhaps we can mention a little Phoenix story then, Michelangelo’s Mouse (Available at Amazon) CLICK HERE.  Since a Pope was just elected under the ceiling of that Michelangelo Masterpiece, the painted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Where some think the hung out skin in the hands of one of those archetypal Prophets is the artist himself.   The story is really about the creative spirit, but one of its guiding inspiritations, if Keats said “I am convinced of nothing so much as the holiness of the heart’s affections”, is St Francis.

So what of unbaptised Phoenix Ark Press, and all that stuff about the Church?  Somewhere we wanted Jonathan Miller in Rome, the arch artist and scientist, committed atheist,  to tell more than a billion people it is all nonsense.  Yet knowing something intristinsic too, that it is not nonsense at all.   The argument in our storytelling is that there are two languages in the world, that need to talk to one another again.  The deconstructive, analytical language of Science, so vital to us all, and the poetic, spiritual, human and feeling langaguge of life, love, poetry, literature and metaphor, that so includes the history of religions too. One that cannot be encompassed, simply in terms of human creativity and imagination, by the language of mathematics, Neutrenos, Big Bangs or ‘God Particles’. Or perhaps it can, but that is another argument.

But for the moment, this does feel like a blessing, a touch of real inspiration, and out of those many names, something refreshing and new.  Athiest or believer, how can you live in such an extraordianry world without the langauge of love and of blessings? A little mouse of hope is squeeking quietly, Michelangelo’s Mouse, and a feeling that this is a gentle, exciting moment for the Church.

PHOENIX ARK PRESS

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December 7, 2012 · 12:08 pm

PHOENIX INVESTMENT – A READER’S LETTER

Dear David,

I’m just thinking aloud, really, so feel free to do with this whatever you feel it merits. I realize I have limited understanding of the challenges you face in starting up a publishing company, but I imagine that funding could be something that heads up the list! I just wanted to relay an idea that came to me this week. Across the pond a new buzz word is forming in the business world – “Crowd Funding”. This has really been around for a while, but utilized mainly by charitable agencies for 3rd world entrepreneurs. Now, it seems small western entrepreneurs are catching onto the trend! Here’s how it works.

A project is tendered through an agency website, inviting the average man to invest small increments – for altruistic purposes – in any one or more of a variety of entrepreneurial projects. When the project is fully subscribed, operations proceed. Investors typically expect to recoup their original investment (although there are no guarantees), but have no further interest in the projects beyond this. Okay, so yours would be a large project! But I was wondering if this type of loan funding could be helpful to Phoenix Ark. Imagine, if 1 million people gave you ₤10.00, to see a work published – say, Scream of the White Bears – for free!! I also imagine that if you put out the word, your many fans would eagerly step up to the plate! Here is my pledge for the first increment. You need only contact me to collect. I can make payment via Paypal (preferred), or whatever other method you favour. It would, or course, be prudent to research the legalities of such a venture in Phoenix’s jurisdiction. I suppose if we received a book back, instead of our original investment, this could also be deemed a type of “advance sales”!

Best regards, and Happy Christmas, Christine, Montreal

Dear Christine,

how kind of you to write with thoughtful ideas. I have thought of this, put donation buttons on some articles, and indeed owe a good friend for a donation to support me and Scream. A Company has started in the UK called ‘Books Unbound’ I have talked to, which tries to do just that, though on a larger scale.

It has always been an irony here though that I don’t particularly like the internet and for all its positives it has many downsides for human culture, thought and interaction. So it is no way to go for an author to spend his time seeking money like that, when really he should be protected in trying to work and create. It sounds a bit grand but though nowadays all authors are expected to sell and sell and sell themselves it’s the books alone, if they are any good, that should really matter.

But you are right about the problems of investment. In terms of giving things for free I have wanted to do that because it’s the spirit you should set out with in writing, and you have already earnt a free copy when Scream emerges. The truth is I am the most terrible businessman and do not want to be a publisher but only a writer or creator of stories but have been forced into this position. Things are too difficult right now to juggle the balls well but I will certainly keep your crowd funding idea in mind.

Have a lovely Christmas too,

David

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September 23, 2012 · 4:02 pm

EDMUND SHAKESPEARE – WHOOPS ATROCIOUS!

Always go back to your notebooks, not to mention original records, if you can. It is the problem of blogging unedited work, but everything would be checked before any actual book appeared. Edmund Shakespeare’s infant son was not christened in Cripplegate and buried in St Leonard’s though, but the other way around, and it has been changed in the text here. The child was baptised on July 12th 1607, Sonne of Edmund Shakesbye, in St Leonard’s Shoreditch. It says “the same daye”, which Peter Ackroyd says proves urgency, but actually it probably just means the same day as other entries, ie July 12th.

Exactly a month later, August 12th, 1607, comes the register of a burial in St Giles, Cripplegate, of Edward Sonne of Edward Shakespeere player, base borne. The confusion of first names is easy. Susanna Shakespeare was married to John Hall in Stratford Holy Trinity on June 5th, 1607.

Part of the point though of blogging Edmund’s story as work in progress, is to open up absolutes of ‘scholarship’ to general correction and discussion, because even records can be wrong and the period is so fascinating. Anyone who writes in should be aware of that. There are many ‘facts’ that have been relayed into the mainstream too, and appear on places like Wikepedia as absolute truth, that mutiply error. Alan Nelson cited the error about Will Kempe and his perhaps not dying in the 1603 plague in Southwark, because the register did not refer to a William Kempe, but he checked back and it did say William Kempe a man.
PA PRESS

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September 20, 2012 · 10:17 am

ABRAMS, PRIVACIES AND TRUTH

Perhaps the most dignified way to describe what happened back 2008/9 was a kind of nervous breakdown. Although it was stranger than that, and trying to work and protect myself, I was never allowed to break down. I went into a kind of emotional black hole, so dark it seemed to swallow light. At times I was both clever and even manipulative, perhaps, but think of how thinking about such places is called The Genius Point. Although I always fought for the wider truth, and indeed somehow to protect everyone! Then the only way I could fight something that held me in a kind of hell for two years and more though, and profoundly disagreeing with it on many principles, was to ‘breach’ supposed privacies by writing about what happened at Abrams here.

It has been rather boring at times, for readers, trying to find some “court of public opinion”, which I actually don’t trust much. It certainly was not the person I was before I fell foul of New York. As for my “madness”, perhaps I should quote Shakespeare’s Brother and one Elizabethan actor who ended up in the vicious Bedlam of the day and found himself crying “They thought me mad, and I they!”

It involved something both frightening and very difficult for me, indeed shaming, and precisely the point of the damage they did over so long. Actually pure cruelty. Though there has been a deal of confusion over something so personal too, I did it to step beyond the kind of corruption I still believe or know they engaged in, written all over the story of a CEO’s negative relationship with a publisher, and why it allowed him to be replaced by my own editor, while destroying their own author too. It is actually self-evident and was both professionally and humanly terrible.

Nor was I allowed any protection of my privacy at all, and part of the ‘madness’ was the absolute hypocrisy there, and my own ferocious, even desperate fight to protect myself, while I was the author trying to function, under contract. It was an attack on story telling itself, and the conditions needed to get there. It was also, in any pretence of due process there, a glaring attack on free speech. Not least beacuse not only did they hold my life and career to ransom, not once did they stop to think about the meanings in my books, both in terms of Global Warming and a climate of terror, two novels intended to specifically address.

When an editor where you are trying to work and are contracted is allowed to get away with calling you mad, deluded and evil, but you are instructed to shut up, under threat of your own career and livelihood, you have a right to ask where evil really lies. Whether an ex’s furious sense of rights and privacy, but no regard for mine, and bizarre turn arounds were directly related to her and a strange family, or indeed the discovery inside a relationship that a relation of theirs, with a terrible temper, had abused a teenager. With my own life angers, or issues with the past, it is why I sent them The Shipping News, though any sense of art or healing has been irrelevant to how they handled it. It is about money, ‘power’ and jobs, and rights but absolutely no sense of responsibility.

At the heart of a children’s publisher I know it influenced that obsession with privacy, that fearful secrecy there, and since I started to write about what evil really is in a novel too, in part outrage that she had so labelled me, and because such labels have always been themes of such complex works, it helped lead to an emotional hell. Since a young adult fantasy author has to return to certain emotional states while writing, even very idealistic emotions and thoughts, the way I was treated trying to make that journey of “growing up” for readers was actually repeatedly abusive. It is related to how verbally abusive or rude I became at times. I still insist though that in those circumstances, what a publisher did to me and my work was sinister, unnecessary, pure politics and a human and professional evil.

Evil is actually not some easy metaphysical concept, or should not be, but what people really do to each other, and allow to be done by doing nothing too. In other ways I think many have suffered and will suffer from that kind of group fight, side-based mentality and American labelling too, not to mention hypocrisy. It does matter at the heart of a New York publisher and it matters that men too can sometimes be too easily labelled a source of harm, though my own energy became horrid at times. Perhaps what matters is a story that might take a long time to properly understand and talk about. But I could have lost a person, but healed it professionally, if a person had not just left a label there, to keep secrets inside a small department, distorting the truth of what happened over months, indeed three years before, and why. That showed no trace of love, friendship, fareness, nor any kind of professional respects, that induced the crisis in the first place. Indeed if my own editor had not become so arrogant and bullying.

For many dislikes of the Press, I do not agree with Max Mosley though, but rather Ian Hislop’s argument that draconian privacy laws can be used to mask other legal abuses. Even if I wish my own life and privacy had been protected, perhaps respected is a better word, my life problems,fears and shared intimacies, right at the source of work and deep affections, both by and ex and by my own editor. Exposed in a big novel too, it was like leaving some psychic wound open and my editor should have stopped it too. It is precisely why authors far more than editors need their privacies respected, at least by their own publisher and editor. Privacies for everyone are important, because they much depend on how individuals can or cannot cope with invasion, but I believe people should be aware enough to know it is not exactly about how everyone ‘should’ behave, especially in very particular circumstances, more about what is happening to real people and the suffering they are going through. The facts remain in all blogs here, and my judgments of it too, but who they actually are is no one else’s business, and so all names have now been changed.

I ask every reader to respect that and forget it as any ‘public’ affair. It was also three years ago and very sad. This was always about the relationship between fictions and real events too, astonishing to me, and perhaps in itself it starts to change the story, mediating ‘truths’, as the use of language does, and no one is one thing, fixed in time. Especially not labelled by the very person who has caused such harm, then my editor, then a whole firm. It is a fact of libel law that if a libel is established as such it is only necessary to be able easily to identify the person or people in question. That is rather inevitable in still identifying Abrams in New York, but it is not libel, and I will never back down on it, or be intimidated on points of bogus legal ‘principle’. But real names once served their purpose to stand up to an attack by a UK lawyer. As for Phoenix Ark, as I’ve said, the only proper way to challenge it would actually be through a civil action in a court of law.

DCD

PA PRESS

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September 18, 2012 · 3:32 pm

TRAVELS IN THE ROMANIAN MIND?

To keep a promise to a reader, Christian, and say hi, wondering how people are faring out there, time to write a bit about old travel journeys. Good God, it was twenty-two years ago now, in the late winter of 1990, I went to Romania for five weeks, with a friend called Sophie Thurnam. It took us to Bucharest, the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, ‘Dracula’s’ or Vlad Tepes’s birthplace of Sigishoara, a beautiful old German town ringed by monumental housing blocks, to Brasov and up north into very snowy Moldova.

It was extraordinary for many reasons, not least because the Ceaucescus had just been shot, (there were bullet holes in our hotel lift). Yet the arrival of the miners to beat up journalists in the capital meant no one knew what was really happening, and if the old regime could reform, or who the puppet masters were. Spawning newspapers meant rumours were rife, but without the rigour or authority of real journalism. As we started to hear Russian voices on London tubes, or see Romanian gypsies begging here later, so too it was a sharp wake up call to my younger socialist ways of thinking, as sharp a lesson as seeing the terrifying, monumental Victory of Socialism Boulevard. That had destroyed half Bucharest’s churches, and created a giant avenue of ‘elegant’ apartments, with washing hanging off the balconies and nothing in the empty shops beneath. It would all somehow find its way into my fantasy novel, The Sight.

There’s too much to say in a brief blog, but many sights went deep, as war began to erupt in Yugoslavia. Perhaps, in discussions of what poverty really is, one was the sight of an art shop in Bucharest, with three plastic bottles of primary colour paints in the window and practically nothing else. In that hard winter, the imaginative poverty was just as shocking as the economic, especially with fear so long in the frame. In a country that had open ties with Saddam Hussein and seemed to have engineered some brilliant state trading coup to fill shops with boxes chinese rice crackers. Bucharest was once called “The Paris of the East”.

Then there was going to the old fashioned restaurant, Capsa, or visiting the theatre to see Timberlake Wurtenburgger’s “Our Country’s Good” , directed by Andre Sherban and feeling the physical fear in an audience. Or chatting to the bearded new Minster of Culture in the huge ‘Victory’ palace, who told me how Ceaucescu had even banned the tradition of puppet theatres, as a means of dissent, and rightly said the first thing he himself wanted to do was get rid of a Ministry of Culture all together. Too old style Communist block, or 1984 Ministry of Truth. At a Gypsy wedding a kind of local mafia were selling large tins of peaches to the guests, as they left.

But against it, enormous pollution, miners working with hand tools, an old beggar lady frozen up in the streets, the tragic story of orphanages, or the Pitest-Bucharest 3 mile stretch of motorway, which had giant potholes in it, was the astonishing beauty of the countryside. We drove towards the Carpathians, full of the stories and sensibilities from Patrick Lee Fermour’s travels, and in a haze of golden light an old shepherd flagged us down. “The King,” he said, with watery eyes, “The King is coming.” King Carol tried to get in a few weeks later, and was turned back on that motorway. Then, at a Monastery up north, we saw a world straight out of the 16th century, or perhaps 19th Century Russia, except for the wealth of the monks, whose long beards I barged in on, sitting around a polished table, watching a European cup football match. At Christmas time they were not exactly friendly, and offered no room at the inn. Then came the rumour that a Popa we managed to stay with, a priest, had links with the Securitate, the Secret Police. But we also saw the walls of the extraordinary painted monasteries of Bukovina.

It became travels in fact and in the Romanian mind, especially growing up with Bram Stoker ideas of how Transylvania is the land of vampires. Beautiful, very sad Romania. I’ve often wondered what has happened there and if people’s lives are still as hard as they were for so many.

DCD

PA PRESS

Phoenix Ark is a member of the Independent Publisher’s Guild, The IPG.

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September 8, 2012 · 11:21 am

THE EARL OF OXFORD, WILLIAM RAY AND “A LEERING HYDROCEPHALIC IDIOT”

“THY TEST IS EVER HAM!” PA Press

First to apologise to William Ray for having taking so long to get to this and to recommend that readers interested in a Shakespeare authorship question read his article http://www.wjray.net/shakespeare_papers/tabooing-de-vere.htm.

It is not only highly stimulating, and perhaps startling in certain aspects, but in brilliantly quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson, and in Ray noting “Rebellion can be fatal to iconoclasts”, it appeals not only to intrinsic instincts here, but vivid experience too of what happened to an author who dared to shake the publishing system, however shabby, shamed or tortured his spirit became at times, and one filled with a knowledge of and passion for Shakespeare’s visions and search for lasting truth. Some of the arguments we had you can find in the comments under two Phoenix articles, DEREK JACOBI, RICHARD II AND THE EARL OF OXFORD ‘THEORY’ and EDMUND SHAKESPEARE, EDWARD DEVERE, FALSTAFF AND THE HOLLOW CROWN.

Ray’s take offers a moving truth about the real world then, a warning about it and people, and especially their tribal instinct to buy into or reveal vested interests in that world, for whatever reasons. Take Oberon Waugh’s savage “A Handful of Dust” and what happens to truth, and establishment protections of human lies there. That quite stands on its own, but also demands some respect for claims about Devere, and certainly a fascination with the period. But although Emerson, and many authors tasting the possible bitterness of the world, may be right about life or society, as Shakespeare wrote it all over his plays, it still does not prove the case.

Two things struck here. The first is William Ray’s observation, unless someone else wants to refute it, that ‘Twenty years after De Vere died, Richard Brathwaite wrote, “Let me tell you: London never saw writers more gifted than the ones I saw during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. And never were there more delightful plays than the ones performed by youth whose author wrote under a borrowed name.”‘

Then there is, more startlingly, Henry Peacham’s 1612 Minerva Britanna, with a drawing of an arm and hand holding a pen, thrusting out from behind a theatre curtain, with a scroll:”Mente Videbori,” or “By the mind I will be seen,” which also produces the anogram “Tibi Nom De Vere” or “Thy name is Devere.”

But from there the argument descends, in the view on this side of the Atlantic, into something so strained it can only be described as “Shakepeare by Sudoku”. Namely the arguments about Cardan Grilles, or codes to somehow reinterpret Jonson’s dedication to the First Folio, or the inscription below the bust in Stratford.

Firstly, language itself is a kind of code, even game, that all authors and especially Shakespeare are engaged in, as Ray says almost reinventing or I would say inventing a language, to try and recreate or approach truth via fictional work, and find the door to vision and poetry, naturally inspired but not necessarily defined by ‘real’ events. But more important is my understanding that a Cardan Grille was really a template for coding where holes were cut arbitrarily in a piece of paper, and a message written in the spaces, then the paper removed and a message built around the text on the second paper. So that could only be read with the original grille and the unique second paper, where the letter, inscription, poem or whatever now lay. Perhaps I’m wrong. (The assumption being in any functional spy network, for instance, agents would have had to be issued with duplicates of an original template grille, from head office, that changed at various times for safety.)

The alternative, especially for printed, mass produced text, is a “grille” reformatting the order of the printed text, then picking out letters to give your supposed secret message. The one D.L Roper and by extension William Ray has chosen for the bust inscription is seven vertical boxes, by 34 horizontal boxes, attributing some huge significance to the horizontal number, because 34 is 17 x 2, and Devere was the 17th Earl of Oxford. It seems very feeble, and more so because of the strained nature of the message that appears to appear, namely HIM SO TEST, HE I VOW IS E. DE VERE AS HE, SHAKSPEARE: NAME I. B. IB, standing for Ionson, Ben.

But the “Shakespeare” and the “Name” are plucked not from a vertical but horizontal reading of the letters, and actually a significance might stand without them. On the other hand, reading vertically from the same supposed grille I quickly plucked out the sentence “THY TEST IS EVER HAM”! (I added the gratuitous exclamation mark.)

As for the First Folio dedication, that Sir Arthur Geenwood, as if that proves anything, suggested was either code or written not by Ben Jonson, but a “a leering hydrocephalic idiot”, with not much compassion for rabies victims, the idiocy seems repeated in the straining for codes with some 6-2-2 pattern. The text is punning and playful, perhaps not even very good, but it demands no dismissal.

Apart from all that, and it sells books to produce supposed prophecy from a claimed “Bible Code” too, because any long work will do it if you rejumble letters or sentence orders, (thus a clear, intentional and provable pattern must be established first, unless in the Bible case you argue God is speaking directly through the authors), the Oxfordians are again forgetting that if Devere did somehow suffer from the tyranny of his age, or indeed an artist’s desire to protect the well springs of the Self, why could a Stratford Shakespeare not too? Hence answering many questions about not pushing himself forward, and not especially defending his printed work, especially in an age where the printed word and rights in that were being invented. Such an author also finds meaning, pride and power in the success and effects of their living work, and for many reasons finds it harder to stand up and be that “author”. It can be an invasive thing, art or fame, and then was a very dangerous one.

That returns you to a debate that was fully underway in its time, namely that a scruff from the provinces could not have possibly have written such astonishing work. Hence it being perfectly possible that the Devere claim was generated even back in 1612, and with coded “hints” too.

But it’s a fascinating debate, and we’ll leave the “Oxford camp” with a resounding question, that in the many obfuscations, forced links and the Sudoku play of it they always fail to answer. The Earl of Oxford was dead by 1604, so what have they to say of all the other Shakespeare plays? We’d love to hear.

DCD

PA PRESS

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August 10, 2012 · 5:45 am

EDWARD LEAR, SKOP’S OWLS AND EMPTY COFFERS

“I hate life,” wrote Edward Lear, “unless I am working, always.” With the sun burning across the wide, blue bay, it was impossible to hate life, walking up the steps of the elegant, British built Museum of Asian art in Corfu town. We had already had the low-down on some of Corfu’s grander visitors, like Stephen Spielberg, Tim Burton, Helena Bonham Carter and Kate Moss, so close to Albania and Italy, where the North East, with its smart homes and influx from London’s Notting Hill, is now dubbed Kensington on C. The main exhibition at the Museum, almost empty and also with a fine collection of chinese artefacts, was of Lear’s drawings and water colours, the way he really made his living and expressed himself beyond “The owl and the pussycat” and those famous children’s limericks. He travelled constantly through Europe in the 1850’s, still a feudal world, and left a prolific record of a long vanished time, except for the recurring permanence of the landscape and his own escape into nature. No great painter, Lear’s work has charm, colour and precision, though it suggests something of the loneliness and eccentricity of such an isolated figure. Not so isolated, the wealthy collector who spent his fortune on his chinese collection, then gifted it to the State, in return for the post of Curator and a small stipend to live on in his fading, Corfu years, a very nice place to fade away.

You wonder what he and Lear would have thought of the headline in a local English paper, warning that the Greek state coffers will run dry again on August 20th. So, after hearing the battles constantly relayed on Newsnight in London, now we hear directly of locals not being paid for months, of medicines running out in pharmacies and the general feeling of unease lingering under the surface. But on such a relatively rich island, where Lawrence and Gerald Durrell both found such inspiration, and on holiday, it’s very hard to feel connected to that. Instead there are the rolling mountains, straightened by noble cypress trees, the marvellous blue, green sea, the gigantic nights skies of brilliant, twinkling stars and a very particular sound, among the cock crowing or barking dogs. It is like some peaceful cuckoo, sounding steadily in the singing night. We saw one, standing in the middle of a country track and as the car got closer, its saucer eyes and squat body, with little hanging ears, took wing into a neighbouring tree. The Skop’s Owl is a regular on Corfu and I think the same kind of owl that modelled the mechanical messenger in the movie Clash of the Titans. Certainly a symbol of wisdom, like the fleet-footed Hermes, messenger of the Gods. The argument here about Papandreou’s thwarted attempt to take cut-backs to the Greek people was that at least it was democratic, and so might reconnect people with a sense of engagement and responsibility, even if such cuts had to be accepted. Well, now we will see where Greece can go, but hopefully something can be done that reflects the wisdom of the gods!

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August 1, 2012 · 4:46 pm

THE PHOENIX STORY – THE STATE OF PLAY

So, with The Terror Time Spies waiting in the wings, it’s time, especially for Tiffany, Barbara and Dinah, and all readers who have been so kind, to get all animalistic again and wrestle with Scream of the White Bear.

The state of play with Phoenix Ark Press is that we have had over 32,000 visits, published some great cultural essays, kicked against the publishing houses and taken back the electronic rights in Fire Bringer, The Sight, Fell and The Telling Pool, from Macmillan, Bloomsbury, Penguin US and Abrams. We have loudly voiced opposition to the way authors are being treated, to breaches of Contract, to the negligence and arrogance of big firms, and to being intimidated by Abrams via a UK Law Firm.

We have kept our word too, (it would be nice from editors who claim to care for culture or story, or even partners and friends) built a small publisher, published a unique co-edition of The Sight and Fell, the great Ice by Dominic Sands, Leonardo’s Little Book of Wisdom, chosen and edited by Foreman Saul, The Godhead Game, and posted up unique work on Edmund Shakespeare, given out free stories and poetry for the spirit of writing, and now comes The Terror Time Spies too! We may be broke, and disillusioned with what people are capable of, but though tired we are not dead, bowed, not beaten, and perhaps one day the experience of other authors and artists ‘out there’ will bring them into the fold. But it’s great to have you along, though now we’re taking a little holiday in the sun! Just dream with us of good miracles.

PA Press

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