Visitors to the Houses of Parliament each get a sticker to wear once they have passed through security. Down at the exit (by Westminster Hall) is some piece of signage, onto which the visitors plaster their redundant stickers. It is The People’s Cairn, tolling the number of people who have come to see our representatives at work.
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I was in the Royal College of Surgeons for a conference the other day, and wandered past this vast canvas.
It is one of a number of paintings hanging around the place, depicting various committees and groups of Fellows of the Royal College. The other pictures depict small groups of people in natural looking poses. The result is a convincing ‘action shot’ of the Great and the Good, and they look quite dignified. This one, however, is clearly a composite of dozens of individual portraits, and the inaccuracies of scale and sightlines make for a slightly disconcerting effect. It was surely conceived as a pacifier to satisfy the members of some bloated committee.
Most bizarre is the inclusion of a tea-lady, centre-right. She has a neat plait, and her head turned shyly away from the viewer. Even so, she towers above the Fellows she is serving, and is by far the most compelling figure in the image.
As well as enjoying the result of last weekend’s rugby match, I have to say I found the news coverage very amusing. A clash with France? On French soil!? The press could not contain their delight. With the unwavering purpose of an English longbowman at Agincourt, the journos unleashed volley after volley of ‘100 Years War’ references upon the unsuspecting British public.
And on Sunday, it transpired that we will be playing South Africa in the final.
Wait for it…
Wait for it…
(Hold your line, there, soldier, we don’t want anyone going off half-cocked…)
Hooray! Martin Johnson wins his spurs.
‘Sport and War’ is the subject of one of my favourite of my own blog posts: July 1st, Our Fateful Day.
Andrew Haydon asks why theatre is not addressing the world of cyberspace:
But there is a lot of scope left for potential experiment. Just as the internet has opened up whole new avenues of investigation and activity, creating thousands of jobs and revolutionising the way that we consume music, watch films and conduct commerce, so should theatre be finding a new visual and literary language to reflect modern lives which are increasingly lived online inside the belly of a machine.
Haydon’s post gives me an excuse to formally announce the launch of our Internet film project, Sweet Fanny Adams in Hypersapce Eden. Produced by my company Fifty Nine Productions, and joint funded by the Scottish Arts Council and Arts Council England (Yorkshire), the project brings Judith Adams’ play back to its original home on the Internet.
When Judith was commisisoned by Stellar Quines Theatre Company to write a play to be performed in the Scottish Plant Collectors garden, we helped her devise a unique method of writing the text – through HTML. The non-linear nature of web-pages allowed her to create scenes that would overlap and reference each other, and also inspired her to create scenes where one character’s thoughts were echoed, or overheard, in the words of another character. My essay explains the project in much more detail, but my conclusion is that the text is quinessentially of its time and of its medium – the Internet.
Most online films are very short, but this is an early attempt to create something feature length. By December we will have posted over two and a half hours of footage, shot against blue-screen, given CGI make-over, and podcasted on a daily basis.
Haydon’s quote resonates, and not only because this project is an attempt to develop a new “visual and literary language”: Our characters are caged and watched inside the sinister Showman’s Garden, a reality he has constructed to observe and subjugate the other inhabitants. The fiesty Lily and her friends are, in some ways, in the “belly of a machine.” Can they escape?
Read my essay, or simply get started by watching “The Story of Fanny”. You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or your favourite pod-cast catching site. Then, let me know what you think…
Conservative MP Robert Niell at PMQs:
Would he like to come and see the work that we are doing in Bromley? I could take him and show him one of our bottle banks.
Whether you believe, as Matthew Parris doesn’t, that Gordon Brown lost his “bottle” last week, it was interesting to see just how quickly the meme spread. It is a convenient piece of derogatory slang, so much better than the more conventional “coward” or “scared”. As soon as the Tories began using the phrase, Brown was cornered.