Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition...

Bloodlust. Incest. Child murder. Beheading. Knife fights. Gunfights. Suicide. Excommunication. Adultery. Illegitimacy. Royalty. Commodity. Partying. Wedding. Poisoning. War.

Mad world, mad rulers, insanely brilliant composition...Not Scorsese's Godfather, but Shakespeare's King John. King John, King John at the RSC. And here's my two cents.

'What's not to love?' says one usher, the day before I go to see the last show of the run of one of my new favorite plays. 'We stiff the French, Alex (Waldmann) gets his shirt off, and there's Dirty Dancing!' 'But this is _Stratford_!' sputtered another, traditionalist theatre-goer in the post-show talkback. 'That was brilliant, amazing. I'm in awe..I'm 16, and that was the best poisoning scene I've ever seen.' responds another (in an age where the average elementary-leaving student has statistically seen over 8,000 TV murders). 'I don't need pop culture overlaid on my Shakespeare to understand it!' huffs the white-haired doyen of Shakespeare studies, who left at the interval and then tweeted about it. Truly, this is a very modern, Pulp Fiction-esque take on Shakespeare -- Swedish director Aberg at 32 isn't much older than her leads, and fashion critic Indigo has written up the costumes on her blog  http://loveindigoblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/party-like-king.html . 'Whether you hate or love it, as long as you're not bored', says Waldmann in the talkback, 'I consider us a success...we've had a blast with it, Maria (Aberg) asked in rehearsal if she should turn the [very loud!] music down, and Pippa (Nixon) and I were like, 'Nooooo, turn it up!!!'

There's a lot to love in a production that gets, if not through your ears, under your skin and into your blood. Besides sexing up the action in love and war by setting it in a seedy, modern-day, balloon- champagne- potted plant- and confetti-filled hotel, complete with rock music soundtrack and a neon 'for god and england' [sic] sign, Aberg's most controversial and powerful amendment has been to alter the Supporting Actor as it were, or the Bastard, into a fantastic female character (into which she also rather unfortunately merges the weaker character of Hubert, or the glorified babysitter). Pippa Nixon, wearing fluorescent tights, gold sneakers, and dark red lipstick, gets all the best moments. She opens the action by drawing us into a god-awful singalong of 'Land of Hope and Glory' as she plays on the ukulele, with a pick she clownishly materializes out of her mouth; she buoys it in the middle by triumphantly brandishing the King of Austria's bloody head and laying it at our feet, like a cat thrilled with its kill, or by making our hair stand on end while singing Wye Oak's piercing, evocative 'Civilian' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zh3Z43HsbpE&feature=related , a tribute to dying youth and dying youths, famous from the Walking Dead zombie TV series; she gets to deliver the great speeches -- on 'commodity' and 'be great in thought as you have in deed' and 'if England to itself do rest but true' -- and she closes the action by wailing, devastated, over her fragilely defiant king convulsing in her arms, undone by his own cocky bloodiness come back to ravage him with startling fatality, like the Python Holy Grail's killer rabbit's grrreeeat nasty big pointy teeth.

Absolute power supposedly corrupts absolutely -- Aberg makes bones about this, a lot of them. In a court reminiscent of a jaded Monaguesqe society, there doesn't seem to be much to do besides fight and have raucous, circus-like parties. John (that same cowardly king in Disney's Robin Hood that was scared of snakes, and sucked his thumb) like the rest of the English and the French court and their hangers-on, is as much a victim of his own charisma and lack of scruples as his own reckless, devious, escapist angst. The royal women want war just as badly as the men; one 'speaks not from her faith, but from her need' accuses gentle Blanche (Natalie Klamar), pleading to the Pope, vainly trying to stem Mafia-like family infighting and warmongering on her wedding day. Klamar plays the 'Baby' figure who nails the lift in a gorgeous Dirty Dancing reprise http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpmILPAcRQo, and the Barbie-like political bride in a blonde wig and frilly dress who also nails the difference between faith and need as she gets put in a corner by all of them, dreams crushed as John stamps on her bouquet.

The 'Holy Legate of the Pope' has also been gender-crossed by Aberg, and played appropriately by Italian Paola Dionisotti in the latest black & white & shades fashion of Milan - she's also the only one able to get John's shirt off, in a visceral repentance scene that shows off his lion and crown, nape and bicep, royal tattoos, baring body and soul while making you wonder whether the authoritarian sadism really lies in church or in crown. Nixon, who has earlier declared 'gain be my lord, and I will worship thee' also gets to decide whether to follow authority and commodity, or truth; whether to put out young Arthur's eyes on command with a hot poker (innocent as ever, the several children that played it on the three nights I saw it), and thus conveniently clear the line of succession; or, whether to remain true to herself -- or to whatever's left of it after she's done playing at being a royal bastard, hero, murderer, musician, and victim of molestation.

The only things not to love here are the war chorus -- who are arguably supposed to represent the fragmentation of war and madness, yet come across in a jangle of voices as pure cacophony - and the fact that, like the wall of shiny balloons that finally get out to tumble (and burst) all over us during the second half, this zany production has a 'self-destruct' button written into it by the necessity of theatre contracts.

The production works because it is true both to itself and its history, pleasant and sickening, ancient and current, showy and stark. Pippa Nixon's costumes were designed around her own personal wardrobe; during the Olympics, in a nod to either patriotism, pop culture, commodity, or probably just for fun, the cast worked in the 'Mobot' move. While the insertion of Dirty Dancing was criticized by the doyen for 'not being Shakespeare' , it was true to the spirit, if not the letter, of his scene of the joy of two hearts coming together (besides, I have a soft spot for Swayze, as a once bratty Texan kid in the ballet class where his mother taught my own). John's final plea for redemption is a similar redux, set to the lyrics of Madcon's Beggin', a song remixed from the 1967 original and later used by Adidas ads - 'I'm beggin', beggin' you, put your loving hand out, baby...ridin' high, when I was king, played it hard and fast, cause I had everything...tried so hard to be your man...a broken man, that I don't know, won't even stand the devil's dance to win my soul' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EubynGPvNNg It may not have been meant to, but the lyrics reminded me of Shakespeare's Dream epilogue and plea for applause 'Give me your hands, if we be friends, and Robin shall restore amends.' At the final show, they had to turn on the lights to stop the endless applause. 

For all its bling, King John bared its core of angst and darkness and the inevitable loss of love and life brought on by selfishness and war. The twin Tories in party hats, and the French politician with his carry bag of Big Ben souvenirs from across the Channel, while they got laughs, heightened a sense of carpe diem among the party culture, a sense that grows sharper in the age of 9/11 and WMD and a world still mad. Shakespeare was on to something, as always -- whether we want him to be our popular contemporary or dignified ancestor -- and the RSC's sniffed out the method in the madness and then rubbed our noses in it, whether we love it or not.

Age Cannot Wither Her...

Today I found out that an 84-year-old friend had passed away. It was more of a shock that it should've been, because she was always so alive. I hadn't seen or heard from her for the last couple of years, since I moved away to university and she stopped using electronic communications, and now all I have left of her is a lifetime of memories, and a mechanical two paragraph online obituary -- apparently she didn't even have a memorial service. So I decided to write her a more fitting one. Her name was Betty and she was awesome.


Betty was one of those people whose smile lit up a room like sunlight. Her glasses magnified her huge brown eyes to alarming proportions, and her wrinkles crinkled around them beautifully. She was always wrinkled and white haired, and she had horribly uncooperative teeth, and better dentures, but we just laughed when she lamented that she was old and never wanted her age to be known, because to us she was beautiful -- she moved around slowly but surely in a graceful way, and you could see her eyes twinkling a mile down the path. She was never too busy to stop right in the middle of that path and hear all about the latest exams, shopping deals, spiders, floods, gossip, and recipes.


Betty would lament that her memory was going, but in the next breath she'd tell you that her mother had been one of the ten most beautiful women in the state, and that her grandparents had gotten married before they'd even held hands. And then she would invite you over for lemonade, pull out a framed black and white photo of her in her younger days, when her hair was black and her glasses a little smaller and her smile just as big, with her beloved husband, long gone, and her eldest son, now all grown up. And then she'd pull out color photos of her grandchildren, and the letters they'd written her, and praise their straggly handwriting that got a little surer each year. And then she'd pull out a poem she'd written for you a long time ago, or a special memento she'd saved from a big occasion, and had decided it was finally time to give you. And her big brown eyes would get a little misty and her smile would grow a little wistful and she'd go search for snacks so that you didn't feel uncomfortable.


The day my dad died, it was Betty who stayed overnight in the suddenly empty house with me and my mom. She just said, I thought you'd need someone. And we did. Years later, when our elderly neighbor died, it was Betty who wasn't afraid to go over and see his peaceful face in the portable freezer, and say she thought she'd be the first one to go and he'd beaten her to it. Then she went with me to the local river, full from the monsoon rain, for the ritual post-funeral bath, and made me laugh again by complaining how cold she was and how her glasses were misting over. When the latest new baby arrived, Betty would haul her now-healed hipbone over to the hospital with homemade cookies and baby clothes, and gush over the new mother as much as the baby. She announced local engagements without malice, watched hummingbirds on her porch without scaring them, and had a map of the world on her wall to point to as she told different stories about her travels, with that "sketchy" memory of hers.


Once, Betty decided her time on earth was up, and it was time to go and take herself off of our hands. She didn't realize that we liked having 'Grandmother Betty,' as she was locally known, on our hands. Her 96-year-old mother had recently passed away, whom Betty had been looking after, and she decided that, aged 74, she had nothing left to be responsible for and didn't want to become a responsibility to others. So she tried to let her long term cook go, with enough money to pay off all his debts, but he came back and worked for free. She tried giving away some of her possessions, deciding that her bronchitis medicine wasn't doing any good, and lying there for a few days, but it didn't work -- the town just pestered her with final visits and told her not to be silly, till she decided we needed fussing over, and got up again and took more medicine. A few months later, Betty went to France on vacation and became the oldest person to go down the 'summer luge' at a ski resort. In the pictures her face is hidden behind the smile that splits it, but the faces of the employees in charge of strapping her in are clear -- struggling between disbelief and admiration.


Betty's hair always had a fresh gardenia in it. She'd show you her deep red flowering hibiscus plants, and make sure you got several cuttings. She was always crisply dressed and she hung out her own clothes to dry. She'd make you tea herself in case the cook didn't get it just right, and when her 72-year-old friend and neighbor didn't hear her phone ring, Betty would pick up the extension and tell you she'd pass on a message and have her call you back, or yell for her while you held the line. She never wanted anyone to remember her birthday, but she had all ours written down on her calendar, and would fill them all in on the new one when a new year came around. Betty patiently taught children to read, but she was firm and bristled with indignation when they started picking on each other. Her rare scoldings were the worst, because they were so politely outraged and disappointed. She'd tell you with a grin when she'd been helped with anything, by a man she thought was handsome -- and she considered any man younger than her handsome. Once, her best friend and neighbor's mentally ill son came to stay in their building and lived upstairs from her for a year while he recovered. They had supper together daily, and no one heard a word about it from Betty, the conduit of all news, till several years after he had gone home again.


Betty never forgot that I helped her set up Yahoo chat with her email and impossibly slow dial-up, and every once in a while she'd log on and send me a smiley face and a note, even though I lived just down the road. She loved that she could chat with her family, and would giggle about how she always forgot about the time difference. When we had a charity sale in support of the local school, she helped pick out the stock, set it up, list it, and take it back down again, and she also ran the till. She went around asking people if they'd heard of the wonderful deals, and they were sure to participate just so they could look her in the eye. She took her portable mini fan and ice water bottle and went to graduation at the high school every year to applaud children she'd seen grow up, even after she almost fainted once from the heat and dehydration. Once, she had the cheek to lament to me that she knew there were children growing up in Africa poor and she couldn't help them all, and just tried to help the ones in town. Very little of her pension was spent on herself; the only thing bigger than her huge, magnified eyes and wide smile was her heart.


In short, Betty made the world a better place. She apparently left it surrounded by family. But then that was inevitable, considering her perspective on it.

Some Are More Equal Than Others. Not.

Please skip this post if you are homophobic. Seriously, you have a right to your opinion and this might will be offensively contradictory.

I feel the need to rant. Why? Because tonight was the final spark to the tinder. Which has been building in a series of incidents over years, some of which stand out in snapshot form more than others, in random order:

In kindergarten -- the art room. While coloring eggs with my favorite young, male teacher, my friends and I tease him that he is 'gay'. No one knows what the new word means, but we figure it is some kind of nickname for men who wear one earring. It makes him so angry we quit -- not because we are being rude and obnoxious, but since he takes the term as a personal affront and refuses to dye eggs with us tomorrow unless we stop. That evening, his girlfriend picks him up at work.

Two months ago -- a warm Italian cafe. My gay friend and I have gone out for coffee, where I'm a regular with female friend/s. I am only half amused the waiter assumes we are a couple. 

First grade - a riverbank. I have skipped a tea party to build a sandcastle with my favorite local adult, a professional artist. Years later I learn that his father, a millionaire, has disinherited him for being openly gay.

Five years ago -- a rainy road. A friend explains to me that one of the gay adult male couple who have lived together down the road for the last ten years, was 'never really gay' and is now marrying a woman, who is moving into their house. She says regretfully that although the rumors weren't true about their relationship, the other half is still gay.

Three years ago -- a bumpy taxi interior. A friend whispers that the real reason the kind, highly respected local doctor and his wife from an arranged marriage have no children is that he is a closet gay. She adds that the wife is happy, having quickly come to terms with a marriage in name only since, unlike many straight men, he doesn't beat her and allows her equal freedom such as driving their car.

Seven years ago -- the hot, dusty doorway of a convenience store. My friend's cousin, who has been driving us hours to the airport, has just glanced differently at me, and it finally clicks she is homosexual. This realization has evaded me until now despite stereotypical attributes such as her buzzed blond hair, male army fatigues, and tattooed, muscular biceps, and, as my friend apologetically informs me, that she has renamed herself  'Jack'. Five minutes later, back on the road, Jack tells us bitterly she is thinking of moving back to Australia, as she is a lesbian and cannot adopt children in a civil union in her own country.

In high school - a staircase, just after math class. A friend tells me my favorite, gentle math teacher is gay and is partners with his 'friend'. And that his wife had divorced him after discovering he had lied to her about his sexuality, learning of it from their elder son.

A year and a bit ago - Facebook. India has legally decriminalized homosexual physical relations between men. Lesbianism has never been illegal, being unrecognized by law.

Thirteen years ago - hanging over the veranda railing, a local man flirts across the way with his female colleague. He later loses his job for cohabiting as a 'bigamist' with this 'second wife', with whom, as a non-Muslim, he has had an illegal second 'marriage', after a lengthy flirtation. There is widespread local sympathy as his first wife, from an arranged marriage, is well known as 'frigid'. No one says the word gay; I am unsure this applies to women, and have never even heard the word 'lesbian'. She has refused to divorce him but has welcomed into their home the second wife, who has also left her job, and their child born the following year. 

In grade school - in my living room. My favorite preschool teacher has just passed away from cancer; he had lived upstairs in a house he shared with my best friend and her parents, and with her half-brother and -sister, his children. I am told that he originally divorced his wife since he was gay, but they remained close friends.

In grade school - the turquoise Olympics swimming pool, on a wavy TV. Greg Louganis, my favorite diver, is upset after a dive that went wrong and resulted in a bloody cut to his head from the board. He later goes public as gay and HIV positive, equally terrified of spreading the infection and of coming out.

Eight years ago - a round table in an empty classroom. A colleague tells me that an adolescent in my class has confessed to having homosexual feelings. She recalls that even as a child, students had teased him for being a 'girly' boy. 

Fifteen years ago - the foreign news channel. India's first lesbian movie 'Fire' has been banned, due to riots, based on the perception that in 'promoting lesbianism' it will do damage to the 'family structure.'

Eight years ago - a TV screen, the film American Beauty (spoiler alert). A straight man is presumed gay and murdered by his rejected would-be-lover.

This year - Facebook. A gay friend celebrates the legalization of same-sex marriage in his home state.

Last year - Facebook. A straight friend celebrates the repealment of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'.


Last year - my living room. A friend explains that he is still not comfortable kissing his boyfriend in public. He has to tell me three times before I register he's not merely shy to publicly kiss, but uncomfortable to kiss someone of the same sex because of the local disapproval; a client walked out on him recently when he told her he was gay. 

Last year - National newspaper. A male cricketer has come out of the closet, the only one to do so. In most other professional sports, gay men are still publicly invisible.

Last month - Yahoo News. St Petersburg has criminalized any public mention of homosexuality, to 'protect children'.

This month - Youtube, a barracks. A soldier comes out via Skype to his parents. He wants to be reassured they will still love him. The clip has millions of hits.

Last year - a churchyard. The gay preacher has been trying to think of a way to come out to his congregation, who keep asking him when he is going to settle down with a nice woman. He has still not found one.

Ten years ago - a schoolyard swing. My friend and I are relaxing after work. She tells me that statistically, one in ten men are homosexual, as are one in fifty women. I realize that, no matter how accurate the statistic, many of my friends and students must still be in the closet. 

This morning - Google News. A gay couple, including a dancer my mother has seen on stage, makes the news more for being gay than talented http://diatribesandovations.com/2012/03/27/ovation-together-60-years-married-for-one-dead-within-two-weeks/obrienalexander/ 

This morning - Google News. Turkey requires gay men who do not want to enter the army to provide photographic proof of their homosexuality, or wear women's clothes.

This evening - the bar counter of a local hotel, where I have gone out for tea with two friends, both gay. The waiter hits on me when I leave them to pay the bill; I realize I have quit being amused about interpersonal assumptions any which way. 

So, skipping over the other snapshots, fuzzy or sharp, here is the rest of my rant.

Homophobes of the world, if you are still reading, please keep your revulsion where it belongs: in the bedroom. Homosexuality is physical, and inborn; it is no longer legally classified as a mental aberration, and endangers no-one. Place yourselves for a moment in the shoes of people whose lives have been shaken, or split, due not to homosexuality, but to homophobia; taunting, disinheriting, criminalizing, violence, sneers, and discrimination at any person's orientation, is both cowardly and unnecessary. As no one is hurting you, or each other, live and let live -- end of story. 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you' doesn't presuppose that some of these are more equal than others. 

Although I'm biased, so I happen to think that my friends are the best -- gay, straight, or whatever. 

Swinging Sixties, Groovy Seventies

Tonight I went to a party. It was a lot of fun and involved pizza, disco music, and copious amounts of chocolate. The attendees numbered my five-year-old self, Skype friends, and Mickey Mouse. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rE5LxCY5WI&feature=related 


Let me back up a little bit. Tonight I went to a drinks party, for adults. I was determined to enjoy myself, to take a break from the three months of doctoral work which has been killing my blog, and be social. I was bent on pushing the thoughts of a relative hospitalized with cancer to the back of my mind...my housemate, who has just lost her grandmother, had retired early for the night; my friends are currently out of town, or country. And so I braved the cold in my first skirt of the year and went out on Sunday night to mingle. And after a while spent wandering around the building to figure out which door was open on a Sunday (the last one I tried), and dawdling under a brightly rising Orion sky, I finally made it inside where a lot of people I didn't know stood around and drank drinks I didn't know. After I ate some snacks I didn't recognize (I assume a swede is non-cannibal?), dropped my fork several times, noticed that everyone except me was wearing black or jeans, and sat on someone's payment slip, I realized I was bravely resisting reading the sports newspaper and that it was time to move it-move it. And thus it was that I ended up on the comfy chair in the next room, reading 'Marx for Beginners' (I am) and chatting to the waiter about cappuccino ice cream. Before departing to let in a confused party-goer through the right door on my way out, and to save supermarket pizza from its ultimate bin destiny, emancipate 2 for 1 butterscotch/dark chocolate, and discover that Disney Disco has gone digital http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTFJd6RT2c4&feature=related .

I've had the album memorized since age five, and this number would be my favorite http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbwLbQcbKF8&feature=related  -- he may not have Mickey's 'Clark Gable ears', but Macho Duck is indubitably a 'manly sensation'.  Especially to five year old girls jumping up and down on a forbidden-to-bounce-on-bed (as if that ever works), in perfect time (we thought) to the music. That was before the Ghostbusters phase, which occurred at age six, when the theme song would come on the radio, my tutu would come out and my parents would look the other way. The Ghostbusters VW 'commercial'  is still my favorite cinema preview.


I have nothing against the adult world of non-play. It's just that the other makes so much more sense to me. I can't help being biased; maybe if I had instead taught university for twelve years and school for six months, the opposite would be true. But I think it's no accident that I've ended up studying on a campus where you may find a skeleton peeking out through the upper window, a seven-headed stuffed monster in our professor's office, a coffin in the lounge, or a pirate delivering our weekly guest lecture on a stage set (Seriously. In between professoring, he sailed the ocean with a Howitzer, and I know that is some kind of firearm.). At our last drinks party, one professor played the electric guitar, while another accompanied him on vocals and what I believe was the tambourine. The last time I saw a tambourine being played in concert it was by my five-year-old self, at my Montessori kindergarten. I think it was all over from there on...or maybe just beginning.


My niece (the brightest third grader on earth) paid me the highest compliment the other day, in saying that I was a grown-up who still remembered how to play like a child. Fingers crossed she is right as usual. Meanwhile with Mothering Sunday coming up I would like to dedicate this post to those awesome adults I would like to one day become, somewhat like these, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDY89LYxK0w and their mothers: 


"Life is 10% of what happens and 90% how you handle it." -- letter from grandmother to grandson.



THERE IS NOTHING LIKE A GRANDMOTHER...
(Written by 3rd graders)


She lets you put your vegetables
back in the pot
if you don't want to eat them.


She let's you have the the toys
that your mother
really didn't want you to have.


A Grandmother is one who comes to football games
and cheers when she doesn't know what is happening.


My Grandmother gives me candy and money,
my other Grandmother is just the same,
only she gives me meatballs and ice cream.


A Grandmother says she has a very good memory,
but she can't remember her age.


Usually a Grandmother is fat,
but not too fat to tie your shoes,
they wear glasses and funny underwear.
They can take their teeth and gums off.


Grandmothers don't have to be smart,
only answer questions like,
"Why isn't God married?"
and "How come dogs chase cats?"


Everybody should have a Grandmother,
especially if you don't have a television,
because they are the only grown-ups who have time.


------------


Postscript two days later:
Today I went to a luncheon, where I recognized half the people, and all the food. As I sat down with my meal in the comfy sofa seat I'd snagged in the bright sun, after helping a friend search for something she'd dropped, a new girl sat down next to me, introduced herself and said 'rather scary isn't it, not knowing anyone on these occasions?' We then proceeded to discuss the newspaper report on the latest Russian politics, over the drink of plain water she'd selected for me, and I even survived to linger and read the F1 news on the sofa in the sun while the latecomers ate extra cake. I'd say my new friend has excellent grandmother potential.