FUTURE CONDITIONAL - A REMINDER THAT THE FUTURE IS UNWRITTEN...

Well this is messy. This is precisely what I was talking about last week. The whole point of my writing about plays I go to was to shine a tiny candle onto the theatre scene. Sort of asking you to accompany me as I sneak slowly (and on a budget) into London’s theatre scene. I saw this play absolutely ages go. I finally was able to put some time aside to catch up on my writing. One search on Google shows that it closed the day before I wrote this. FFS.

Never mind. It may reopen. And there is no harm in being retrospective. And this is MY blog God-darn it, if I want to write about a play that closed two weeks ago, I will, so there. Boo to anyone who criticizes me.

Future Conditional is the story of what is wrong with the British educational system. Sporting a cast of talented young actors and starring Rob Brydon, we take a look into the lives of those on all sides of the system. The families, the teachers, the law-makers… In the thick of all of this, we have one young and very talented Pakistani refugee who has an extraordinary idea about how we can make the whole thing a lot fairer. The question is, can she get past the preconceptions and bad habits to actually change the world…

I will start off by assuring you that while the play really and truly IS about “what is wrong with the educational system”, it is neither as serious or as dry as that sentence makes it sound. There is a lot of laughter, on big topics and small, and while we are definitely pushed to think while we watch this play – and it clearly has its political message well and truly at the forefront of its mind – it is not didactic at all.

That said, it does work a lot better if you actually know a bit about the British educational system. My knowledge, it must be admitted, is patchy. And I did find bits of the play – it is quite heavy on very serious political discussion – a tad hard to follow as far as the topic went. I mean don’t get me wrong you can follow it. I am just quite sure I would enjoy it more if I knew more about the topic.

The other surprise for me was Rob Brydon. His role is basically that of John Keating in Dead poets society. The only thing is, he is a very toned down version of him. Yes his scenes are good and striking but to be that “extraordinary teacher” who “changes his pupils’ lives” as the posters for the play professes he needed that extra bit of “umph”. As it is, he is good and portrays his part more than ably, but , I do wish there was more of him doing more.

I mean I can sort of see why that artistic choice was made. Rob Brydon is the big name of the play, but the spotlight of it stays on the topic and the young, talented and energetic cast. He is an integral part of the process, but not the centerpiece of the affair. This means we the audience can give a fair share of attention and limelight to all the parts and hopefully give some thought to the message.  And  good theatre is all about teamwork, at the end of the day. I have more of a problem with the fact that the whole part of the “life saving teacher” lacked a certain je ne sais quoi. I don’t really have a problem with whether Rob Brydon was playing the part or not.  The part needed something more, something bigger. I mean either that, or the play really should stop using the line “who is the teacher who saved your life” (or something to that effect) in its advertising. But the other point is that Alia, who is based largely on Malala Yousufazi the Pakistani schoolgirl who fought for the right to female education, does not  necessarily need “saving” in the first place. She is perfectly capable of doing it herself.

 But this is not a play about teaching any side “a lesson”. It is neither that serious nor that glum. On the contrary, it brims with hope for the future and the new generation. Yes, it points out the flaws in the current system clearly and concisely. Ruthlessly even. But the overwhelming message, I felt, was one of hope. We have many bright and beautiful young men and women growing up in this country right now. Give them half a chance and they can fix it. All you need to do is not get stuck in your old ways and cling to old methods that clearly don’t work. Just open your mind to the possibility that there is a whole different way of doing things that would make us all a lot happier.

I went to see the play on a matinee. I counted no less than three different school uniforms in the auditorium. This gives me hope. Young people are  not just “constantly staring at their phones” as the older gener ations would have us believe. They are interested, and  engaged.They just do things differently – as does every new generation.    

WELL THIS IS AWKWARD

I guess I owe you guys an explanation. So, I work in an office now. It literally happened overnight, the agency I work for needed folks to work in the office, I was magicked up. From one day to the next. Now the reason this happened so quickly is that I had been going on at them a bit to give me a stint in the office. Ya know the score, I'm over 30 now, this whole working night shifts and day shifts running into eachother, on your feet and awake until 3 in the morning is a young womans game. So finally I got my wish, I  must be happy, right? Well, well...

I mean don't get me wrong I am not unhappy. It's just drastically different. And I am having to relearn survival skills I had learnt over 5 years ago and subsequently abandoned. I have to figure out a new way of organising my time. I am, provisionally, here until Christmas. For about three months I shall have a drastically different life. I shall reserve judgement about what I make of it and wether I want to keep it up or not.

The one thing that has happened is that artistic endeavours have had to be shuffled around, timewise. Acting and all my activities acting related are now part of my absolute essential daily activities like eating, washing and (ehm) going to work. They also happen to take up a good number of my evenings. And I now work 9 to 6. What I liked the most about working irregular hours  was the ability to crowd necessary working hours into fewer days and have more completely off days or half days. It allowed me to have time to write and be rested on days I have a lot of artistic endeavour planned. My new schedule means I have to push through the mental leftovers of a day at the office to get to my creative juices. Sometimes I simply can't get  to them all.

Now, I am getting better and better AND BETTER at maintaining energy levels and planning my time. We should be ok from this point onwards. But rest assured, if we have another massive slip-up I am going to sit down and really think about what we need to do about it. We can cross that bridge if we ever get to it. In the meanwhile please accept my humble appologies for the delay and enjoy the write-up!

much love,
Essie

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD IN THE 21ST CENTURY

I have said this before and I will say it again, there is nothing quite like a good period drama. The sweeping skirts the high emotion, that sense of being transported to another world… Many are the cases where there isn’t much thinking needed – we are watching a thing of beauty, to be admired as the embodiment of a beloved tale but then set aside – except possibly to form mental pictures when we read the book itself if, like in the case of Far From The Madding Crowd, it was an adaptation.

This newest incarnation of the spirited young heiress Bathsheba Everdene comes at a very interesting time in cinematic history. Her current embodiment, Carey Mulligan, is a part of a very vocal part of a growing and high profile movement in the arts promoting equal pay and opportunities for women. Her next big film will in fact be none other than Suffragette, the story of the birth of the women’s rights movement in England. Unless you have actually been living under a stone, you will have heard something about how Viola Davis triumphed at the Emmys and you will have read something of her acceptance speech that underlines the need for more opportunities for actresses of colour . You might not think that a 19^th century novel taking place on a sweeping country estate is not the ideal place to start discussing women’s equality (except maybe to point it out as a terrible example). But those who are in the know will know, Bathsheba Everdene is not your average 19^th century heroine…

She is, in fact, a young woman of very modest means who is swept to the head of an illustrious country estate as an heiress  and fear not, the whole Deus ex machina nature of this is really, really not lost on me.  But this is not about her rags to riches story. It is more about what she does after she arrives at the riches. It is common to think of 19^th century heroines as faint hearted little things, all tight corsets and smelling salts, but Bathsheba is a definite exception. She is a canny businesswoman, excellent at managing her staff and brave in the face of the disapproval surrounding her. Her beauty and intelligence (and of course her riches) make her the catch of the area, soon suitors of all walks of life start openly courting her… Bathsheba  is her own woman, and has a lot of plans about her life – and becoming someone’s wife is definitely not among them…

What strikes one straight away is what a modern heroine Bathsheba is. Even in modern cinema and literature one struggles to find a heroine that is so much an active agent in her own destiny – so it is surprising to see a heroine from a hundred years ago putting modern heroines to shame. Carey Mulligan, it must be said, takes the role on with gusto and spirit. I can, at this point, barely imagine anyone else taking on the part. Another performer who has been highly praised is Michael Sheen or stars as one of her suitors, her neighbour Mr Boldwood – I honestly wish we could see more of him in the story but he has two other suitors to contend with so we must make do with relishing the sheer quality of performance over the comparative lack of quantity. One of the main suitors, Gabriel Oak, is brought to life by Mathias Schoenarts. Schoenarts is well suited for the handsome yet slightly sullen Farmer Oak, although – and I don’t  I can never decide whether he has simply been cast in a series of characters that find it difficult to display emotion or that the actor himself actually finds displaying emotion hard… 

A lot has been said on how pretty the film is, and I must agree. The stunning Kent countryside is a character of the film itself. And although there are some very poignant moments in the film where you are literally hanging off the edge of your seat, by and large, the film is beautiful. But not that deeply engaging. This is an unsurprising result of adapting a long and complex novel into a two hour commercial film intent on getting bums on seats (as is the want with all of show business).The resulting film is rather pretty but has lost some of its grit along the way. It is polished and a little too perfect – as if it is trying very hard to get all the requirements for a period drama correct so that we can focus on the more thought provoking aspects of the film. Or possibly so we can pardon them…

The problem is that the lack of grit makes the whole affair even less believable. The story loses some of its strength through sheer poise and grace. To give but one example, I would have wanted Gabriel Oak to have a bit more of a rant – not full-blown broken furniture but still something – when he realises that Sergeant Troys insistence on ignoring the approaching storm may well ruin them all. Similarly, in the scenes that follow I think Bathsheba could very well have made a bit more of a fuss (to put it mildly) as the details of Troys past come pouring out. I mean of course she reacts but it all feels very much single tear rolling gracefully down the cheek… It is as if marriage (minor spoiler alert) has deflated Bathsheba’s spirit overnight, making her very elegant but about half the woman she was at the beginning of the film. This change may well have taken place during married life but I very much doubt it would have happened within about a week of being wed…  

All told, Far From The Madding Crowd is enjoyable. Yes it could have been bigger, stronger, more. But what it has is still quite strong, elegant and graceful. It is an artistic choice at the end of the day – you could go down the route of underlining the feminism in the story and going for something more gritty, modern and realistic. But another choice is to hint at those themes and stick with the period drama routes of the production – it makes it the best of both worlds, edgy but just safe enough… Being a businesswoman, I am sure Bathsheba would have understood…   

ABOUT INNER LIVES AND OUTER LIVES

It is the bane of human existence that people are not always what they seem. Sometimes this is because of some kind of sinister plan, for whatever reason the person is trying to manipulate you for whatever reason.

But sometimes it is a tad more complicated than that. Maybe you are trying to leave your past behind. You need to be reinvented and you are trying to become the person you are portraying - you may not be there yet but with hard work you intend to! Or maybe, like Morvern, you are actually suffering terribly but sharing your pain with the world is not the solution.

When faced with periods of great change some of us want to run out enthusiastically, eyes shining to scream the progress at the world, be it good or bad. Others need to take a more quiet approach. You may not hear them screaming, and jumping around, but if you look closely you will see their eyes glowing in the dark. And if you draw a little closer you will see there is just as much, if not more, going on in their hearts. It is merely a matter of knowing where - and how - to look...

have a great week you guys!
Essie  

MORVERN CALLER - OR WHAT TO DO WHEN YOUR LIFE CHANGES OVER NIGHT...

I have, up to a point, returned to my Film Studies roots. I have, through this method and that, had the opportunity to take a look back at important films and directors and watch some really interesting stuff I would not have normally initially chosen. Life being what it is, this means I am falling behind slightly on the new releases but oh well. I can’t be everywhere. And they will be released to DVD soon enough. I am aware that the day I day I will have a list as long as my arm of films to watch – it is categorically impossible to watch them all – but I like to try… I mean, what’s the point of life otherwise, right…

And this week I take a look at one of the most important British female directors knocking around, Lynne Ramsey. Morvern Caller was not a film I had heard of, but it was a bit before my immersion in cinema. In any case it seems to have wiped a fair bit of the slate clean between awards won at Cannes, San Sebastian and the British Independent Film Awards. Morvern Caller is strong and outspoken as films go, it doesn’t always make incredibly easy viewing but its honest description of raw emotion carries you through to the end.

One day around Christmas, supermarket shelf stocker Morvern Caller comes home to find her boyfriend, an aspiring writer, has committed suicide. He has a single request from her as far as earthly matters go and that is to have his newly finished novel published. Morvern, stunned, obliges, and uses the funds from it in her quest to come to terms with her own emotions and figure out what her next move will be now that her life has changed forever.

What I love about the film is that Morvern’s reactions to this clearly unexpected upheaval in her life are gloriously illogical. And it is precisely this “lack of logic” that makes the film so close to real life. All of a sudden everything in Morvern’s life is different. And yet the world goes on around her, most of the things she has known all her life, her friends, her job, relatives, they are all exactly how she left them except – and unbeknown to them – Morvern herself has literally changed overnight.  And now she has to rediscover how to approach them again. It is during this period of discovery that she will decide what she needs to do next…  

As far as we can tell Morvern is a pretty average girl. She doesn’t like her job and lives for the weekend, liking nothing more than getting high/drunk/both with her best friend Lana. Morvern’s first reactions seem pretty heartless, it would appear that for her it’s just business as usual. The thing is, both we and Morvern will quickly discover that this is affecting her a lot more than it would first seem…

We all have upheavals, pain, change and surprise developments in our lives. It could be, like Morvern, a death or something else that causes it but sometimes, one morning you just wake up and you know you are no longer the same person. The world around you may very well not understand, or indeed they may not have a cause to do so. This is especially true when coming to terms with the death of a loved one, we stare with disbelief at the world – untouched by our loss – carries on as normal and we wonder how we could ever have been a part of it and wonder if we can ever join it again… Yet we do. Sometimes we truly will never be the same again and sometimes the change is a lot subtler than we think it is…

Intense and hard to watch at times, Morvern Caller is definitely NOT what you need when you come back home tired from work and need something to uplift you. You will sympathise with Morvern, get frustrated with her and want to give her hug , sometimes all at once. Or maybe you will feel neither. The film is a truly extraordinary exploration of human emotion and one thing I can guarantee is that you will end up feeling something. Something you really do not want to miss.  

EVERYBODY HURTS SOMETIMES...

In my life this week I am coming to terms with the fact that sometimes things do not go according to plan.

You may well think you know something. Or that you are ontop of it - whatever it may be - or that you have come far enough to move onto the next step. Then you may wake up with a jolt one fine morning only to find out that in a word, you have more studying to do.

The key here is to dust yourself off and forge your way forward. If you just slump into a heap where you fall or just roll off the track completely, well... That IS a bit of a setback. But it is important to the remember that often you are your own setbacks. Sort your own head out and chances are stuff will start falling into place.

This weeks protagonist, Emma, was quite sure she was on top of EVERYTHING not just IT. This is the ideal state of things of course, the problem is that if it falls apart, IT ALL falls apart...

Scroll down and check her out...

Essie.

PEOPLE PLACES AND THINGS - YES, THEY ALL ARE AGAINST YOU...

As a relative novice I am finding the National Theatre a fascinating experience. I am completely ready to admit that this is part of my own prejudices as well. I guess I have to learn not to judge a book by its cover – it generally is a mixed crowd (generally – I have only been there twice) as far as both age and apparent social status goes. There has been a very marked older crowd though. You know, hair done, pearl earrings for the ladies, gents wearing jackets and cravats. My own personal prejudices would have made me think that they were not the kind of people who would choose to watch very avant-garde works about sex, drugs, addiction at all, much less give standing ovations at the end of it. You learn something new every day I guess. And to be honest I rather like the idea of this ephemeral thing that unites the audience – and, once the show begins the actors - that overcomes age, social class (whatever that may be) and background and unites everyone almost inside a work of art. I guess I would have to say it is this thing is the main magic of theatre. The story unfolding in front of you and us getting caught up in it just feet away from the goings on, transported by the actors and our imaginations… It was magical enough – for me - to be part of the audience but now trying to walk through the looking glass over to the other side has thrown up a whole new philosophical debate inside my head (and my life). In this context the timing of people places and things was very opportune.

I could sum the plot of the play up in one single sentence. Emma (Denise Gough) has rocked up to a rehab center one fine night. All she needs is a letter to say she is OK to go back to work. Ok, maybe a little detox wouldn’t go amiss either. But that’s it really. She has no deep set issues or kinky shit she needs to sort out. No need to talk to the group; surrender to a higher power or any such nonsense. She’s savvy. She knows what’s what. She’s different – or is she…

Now, minor spoiler as far as the plot goes (soz, but I would find it INCREDIBLY hard to write an accurate review otherwise  ), Emma is an actress. Rest assured, this is more than an excuse provided by the writer for her drug and alcohol habit, or indeed a potential danger for when she leaves the center. I mean, to be absolutely honest with you I would love to be able to watch the play again – I actually might. The aim of the play, apart from expressing a real love for the craft of acting, is to explore multiple realities. The stories we tell ourselves versus the version of us we willingly – or often unwillingly and unwittingly – show to others. What better way to do this than to use a craft where the practitioner needs to actively live multiple lives and be multiple people.  A strange thing to be payed to do, especially in a world where being one single person can already be quite complicated…

The beauty of this play is though that it doesn’t batter you with these very heavy themes. They sort of seep in, you only realize they were there when you sit back, think about it, and realize they have already seeped into your brain. Because the stage design is just so totally amazing, so completely mesmerizing that it comes with a warning about strobe lighting and total blackouts in the auditorium. You will get literally nothing about it out of me. It is one of THE most visually striking THINGS I have seen in my life and you absolutely HAVE TO experience it cold. And that’s basically that.

This play will sit in your head for a while. There are wonderful insights into the world of acting, sure, but also wonderful reminders of what it is like to try to be a million different people in one day. Of being utterly sure one is unique when actually one is (actually or metaphorically) one in a long line of actors / actresses who look just like you trying to stand out via the tiniest little nuances. It’s weird and the description may make it sound sad, but in a funny kind of way it’s also liberating…

In short, come take a shot of the magic. This batch is particularly strong…