A couple of council tower blocks in the Oxgangs area of Edinbugh were demolished yesterday. They drop pretty quickly.
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Scotland win this particular line-out, but were outclassed overall by the Aussies.
I don’t know what other residents of Edinburgh think of rugby weekends, but I’ve always enjoyed the flash floods of kilts and colour down Corstophine Road and Dalry Road. I the atmosphere which surrounds rugby matches is of course more festive and friendlier than football. This is probably because the football matches in Edinburgh are usually at club level, where the rivalries art local and more acute. Rugby matches, on the other hand, are internationals, meaning the visiting fans treat the match as an excuse for a holiday. Inside the ground, home and away supporters are not segregated, and we saw Australian flags waving alongside the Saltire.
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Following our work on Black Watch during the summer, Fifty Nine was commissioned by the Royal National Theatre as video designers for Waves. For six weeks, a couple of my colleagues have been stoically travelling back-and-forth along the Edinburgh-London rail route. I would sit at my desk and watch as they rumaged through boxes, pulling out wires and adaptors. Cryptic talk of beaches, sunsets, and wide-angled lenses wafted through the office, and then then they would disappear again for another ten days.
So it was a delight last week to see, in its fully fledged form, the show my colleague Leo Warner has created with director Katie Mitchell. It is certainly one of the most ambitious – nay, audacious – projects our company has worked on. The eight actors perform Virginia Woolf’s internal monologues, providing first the voice, then sound-effects. Soon, they take up video camera, film scenes on-stage (often by contorting their bodies between improbable stage props).
The feat becomes rather meditative after a while. One’s eyes are drawn to the screen above the actors, and it is surprising how easily one ‘buys into’ the reality that the actors create. Even though you can see how a scene has been fabricated on stage, the judicious use of the visual language of film means that the projected scene retains its coherence. No computer generated imagery or cheats are used, but some clever uses of angle and light even achieve some stunning scene transitions. Some ghostly images appear behind a character as they gaze into a mirror – is that a coup d’theatre or a coup cinématographique? What medium are we watching? It was great to see new technology being used as an integral part of the creative process, telling stories in new ways.
At least, that’s what I think anyway… but I am biased. What are the opinions of others? Another interesting facet of the production is that it has divided the critics. No consensus or conventional wisdom here, the papers have awarded the show anything from two to five stars! There is something about this fact that I hope makes the show even more intruiging – one can be sure at the outset that the show is radical and provocative at least, even if Virginia Woolf is not your bag.
Some choice quotes:
“But how marvellous that Nick Hytner’s National Theatre is prepared to go out on a limb on a production of such experimental calibre and coherence. ”
Paul Taylor, The Independent ****
“… there seems to me something extravagantly pointless about trying to give Woolf’s words a physical reality … But, although Mitchell and her company are clearly not afraid of Virginia Woolf, the production is a sterile piece of theatre about theatre: a celebration of technical ingenuity that leaves the heart untouched. ”
Michael Billington, The Guardian **
“The nakedness of the method by which these illusions are created prompts questions about the nature of reality, and the technical mundanity, set against the beautiful imagery, succinctly expresses the banal backdrop to an individual’s secret thoughts.”
Sam Marlowe, The Times, *****
I’ll post some more links when I have time. Both the The Evening Standard and the Financial Times loved it, so I’ll probably add their quotes first…
Here is one such thought that I’ve been pondering for a week or so. Someone posted this comment:
Human nature and with it the need to marginalise, insult and bully people belonging to other groups, never changes…
I hear this a lot, usually (I have to say) cited as a reason for not bothering to support charitable causes and group endevours; or as an excuse for some tribalistic rejection of some other group. For too many people, citing the selfish aspect of human nature is the end of the conversation, a put-down to all the idealistic talk about equality.
And for me, it is this attitude which grates. I am sure humans have selfish side, but I am not so confident that this part of our nature trumps all our other qualities! Either way, I think this fact should be the start of the conversation: How do we work to overcome these urges? How do we achieve something greater together, than we could do alone?
Sometimes, you read or hear something, to which you have an instant reaction. You can provide a reason, there and then, why you agree with something, or alternatively why the speaker is a mistaken moron.
More often, however, the mind is slow to form a response. The statement grates, but you cannot put into words why that may be so. You fester for days, and those idle moments, in the queue or on the bus, are devoured as you excavate the depths of your thoughts for what you are sure is an obvious answer.
Sometimes you unearth the quip that you seek, but too late. I heard a French phrase for this: L’esprit d’escalier, The Spirt of The Staircase. It is that witty one-liner that you never said during the argument, which you only remember as you are walking down the stairs to leave the dinner party (are all Parisian dining rooms on the first floor, I wonder?)
With online argument, these issues can be a killer. The ease of publishing your thoughts on a blog means that, for maximum readership, those responses have to be published quicker than the mainstream! A politician writes or says something in the morning. By lunchtime, detailed responses are already available online. That evening, there are already 250 contributions in the comments. Only a day later, it feels like old news. Letting your argument stew for a day, or a week, is to truly miss the party. You do find the answer you were looking for, but everyone else has descended to the street and gone somewhere else. You are left alone, arguing with yourself.
Justin at Chicken Yoghurt has been feeling a bit of the L’espirit too.