Compassion

Last year, the National Theatre embarked on a new project, live relays of its plays to certain cinemas. This is not a wholly new idea, the English National Opera have for a few years now been broadcasting live on big screens around the country productions from the Royal Opera House, meaning that innocent shoppers have occasionally wandered past a public square showing such an event and been shouted at in German or Italian by a lady who looks like her favourite venue is Greggs.

The NT idea is altogether more intimate, show the live broadcasts in cinemas. This is good for a couple of reasons, the first is that one can go to the cinema to see a play rather than have to go to the National, which means you don’t have to go to the South Bank, which means you don’t have to wander past people who are trying to make a living from being painted silver and pretending to be robots. The second benefit is that one is rarely if ever allowed to turn up at your theatre seat with a huge fizzy drink, a bucket of popcorn and a plate of natchos, the downside of this is of course that one is allowed, indeed expected, to drink gin and tonic by the bucketload in the theatre, as this is the only sure way of enjoying any performance. If it’s crap, it’ll dull the pain, if it’s good, it’ll enhance the experience.

The other benefit for the National is that once something has been recorded, it can be broadcast again. This means that anyone who missed the initial run of a play can go and see the broadcast, and anyone who was actually there can go and see the broadcast of the play they attended, with the declared intent of feeling smug they were at the original and the secret intent of wanting to spot themselves in the audience.

Seeing the broadcast of a play at a cinema is an interesting experience. When I went to see recording of the National’s production of ‘Frankenstein’ the other night at the local cinema, it was all very theatrical. The cinema was full, just like a theatre, and the tickets were eye-wateringly expensive, just like the theatre. At the conclusion of the play, the people to the right of me applauded and while one might be tempted with the uncharitable thought ‘the actors can’t hear you’, it certainly added to the theatre experience of the thing, and I rather like to think maybe one of the actors was sat in the back row, muffled up against recognition, to see how the broadcast played out to a captive audience.

As to the production and the play, it was nothing short of astonishing. British theatre has a history of pushing the boundaries and the trouble with being avant guard and seeking to do something wholly original and challenging is that there is grave danger of setting up camp in that territory occupied by so much art and so so much theatre known as ‘pretentious bollocks’. However, if you can get your creativity just the right side of the bollocks line, you have a hit, a very palpable hit, on your hands, and so it was the case here.

The play was stunning and remains with one long after the last natcho has been digested. Frankly, it was both profound and profoundly moving and the message, one of the many messages, was that we have to be kindler towards one another. We have to make a gentler world, and be more tolerant.

For me, this is a particular challenge. Leaving aside the paradox that being tolerant can mean being intolerant of intolerance, I sometimes feel that the default setting of the modern world is intolerance. Obviously prejudice is vile, but there are more subtle, accepted forms of intolerance, that manifest in teevee talent shows and tabloid demonisation.

Becoming more tolerant is like going on a diet, when one feels the need to binge winge about someone or something, one needs to take a beat and wonder if the result will be a better world, or just one with a bit more bile in it.

Buckle up!

Ricky Gervaise. Not my cup of tea. Not even my pot of piss. Went to see him in Edinburgh a few years ago, where he was appearing doing stand-up in a show called ‘Science’. This has since become the benchmark against which all my other shite experiences that cost money and were profoundly unsatisfactory are measured against, replacing the previous benchmark of ‘My Crying Game Hooker Moment’. But, credit where credit is due, during one part of the show, just about at the point where it lurched from unfunny to unfunny and offensive, he used the term ‘buckle up’.

This has since passed into common…actually too common…usage in the household. Most recently it was used as the opening titles for the film ‘Girl with the dragon tattoo’ unfolded on the cinema screen.

Now, it’s probably fair to say given the popularity of the book that it was more likely that the audience for this film have read the book the film is based on than the audience viewing any other movie adaptation, apart maybe from the ‘Da Vinci Code’. But some, even most, does not mean all and looking round the theatre, there did seem to be rather a lot of ‘old dears’ in the audience.

I am not one to stereotype, I leave that to readers of the Daily Mail, but I’m guessing that if you were to ask a pensioner if they would like a trip to the cinema with their grown up children to watch a film which has been marketed as an intelligent thriller, they would say ‘yes please, and pass the Cadbury chocolate éclairs’. If, however, you asked them if they would like to come and see a film that has graphically depicted scenes of sexual violence towards women, they might choose something else to watch, or at least chew…my recommendation being a stiff sherry. By which I mean gin.

Anyone who has read the book knows about the violence, and you could sense the ‘buckle up’ moment coming as those who had read the book wondered how the scene would be dealt with. I was rather hoping for a ‘Reservoir Dogs’ style move the camera off scene, lots of horrible noises and let the audience supply the awful images in their imagination.

Nope. Instead it was full on awful.

What was odd was that the ‘revenge’ scene was just as brutal. Normally when some vile criminal gets his comeuppance, one punches the air. True, this is normally because it’s always fun to watch the Batmobile run somebody over, but also because the filmmaker understands that one goes to the cinema for entertainment, rather than trauma.

The argument for graphic depiction I suppose is that one should be unflinching in the depiction of the sort of vile act that makes the audience flinch. OK, but I think that if you are going to be graphic, you have to make sure it’s not gratuitous. The problem with the movie was that it wasn’t good enough to offset those scenes. If the rest of it had achieved the same intensity, then it would have been contextual, and for the shocked audience would have felt more consensual.

I’m not saying it was a bad movie. It’s not, it’s OK. It’s very uneven though, some actors have Swedish accents, others don’t bother. Daniel Craig is very good, and the other leads are good, the scenery is marvellous, even if it doesn’t look as good as the BBC or the Swedish ‘Wallander’.

Actually, there’s a lot of nastyness in the film, as there was in the book. As well as violence against women there’s murder, dysfunctional families, infidelity, catacide, torture and lashings of Nazis, and unrepentant Nazis at that. It’s just that it kind of gets buried under the on-screen brutality.

When the lights came up on a full house, everyone seemed fairly pleased with what they had seen. At least there appeared to be very little muffled sobbing. Maybe people do like to see adult themes tackled head on. I rather like to see Batmobiles tackle super-villains head-on and I know that’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

It’s a good film but, if you do go see…buckle up.