Donmar Warehouse overcomes limits of 250-seat capacity to stage Shakespeare’s tragedy for live broadcast
One of the most keenly awaited Shakespearean performances of recent times – Sir Derek Jacobi’s King Lear – is to be broadcast live in more than 300 cinemas across the world.
The Donmar Warehouse in London will announce today that it is to follow the National Theatre’s example and will be filming King Lear during a performance next February.
It is one way of tackling a repeated criticism of the Donmar, with its tiny audience capacity of 250: that it puts on amazing theatre which too few people get to see. Michael Grandage, the Donmar’s artistic director who will also direct Jacobi, said he was “regularly made very aware” of how small the audience space was and the theatre had worked very hard at broadening access, from always making seats available on the night to the one year residency in London’s West End last year which included Jude Law as Hamlet.
The pioneering technology, used first by the Met opera in New York and then the National, works so well, said Grandage, “that it seemed an obvious thing for us to explore”. Grandage said he was initially sceptical but saw both Phèdre and Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art at the cinema and was completely won over.
“It has taken me years to come round to the idea of having crossover in the two mediums, theatre and film. The crucial thing that makes it work is that it is live. Theatre is of the now, the day we are living. This is not going to go on to DVD. When you do see recorded theatre it always look dated and it seems in some way a museum piece, you look at it and think, ‘How weird’ and ‘Why did they do that?’”
The nuts and bolts details of how the broadcasts will work have still to be sorted out, but Grandage is confident that Lear, with something like 22 performers, will not be marred by walking into cameras. The Donmar stage was, he said, bigger than people think. King Lear will also have a far bigger touring programme than previous Donmar productions and will visit Llandudno, Belfast, Glasgow, Milton Keynes, Salford, Richmond, Bath and Cornwall.
Lear is one of the great Shakespearean roles. Just as the best young actors all want tackle the huge demands of Hamlet, Lear is the one to take on towards the end of a career. Grandage said he and Jacobi had been on a journey towards it over recent years, working together on The Tempest, Don Carlos and Twelfth Night. It is also a while – perhaps not since Ian Holm at the Cottesloe in 1997 – since a major Lear was performed in a more intimate space.
The production, for which rehearsals start in October with it due to open in December, will also have in the cast Gina McKee as Goneril, Justine Mitchell as Regan, Pippa Bennett-Warner as Cordelia and Ron Cook as the Fool.
The National Theatre also plans to keep up its live cinema performances after the first season was seen by 150,000 people in 22 countries. In December Rory Kinnear in Hamlet will be screened and next year there will be the musical FELA! and Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein.
It took France’s first lady more than 30 takes to buy a baguette on film. There’s no shame in that
Over 30 takes just to buy a loaf of bread? What on earth is Carla Bruni playing at? Just as well she wasn’t remaking the chariot race in Ben Hur or we’d still be here next year.
France’s first lady may allegedly have fluffed her moment on the set of Woody Allen’s latest film. But in fact, movie acting isn’t half as easy as it looks. You may feel that as a profession it resembles, if you’ll excuse the pun, little more than organised loafing: but there’s more to it than meets the eye.
The thing that astonishes casual visitors to a film set is just how unutterable dull the process is. Hours can pass with seemingly nothing happening – blokes wearing scaffolder’s gloves lugging bits of lighting about, others staring with eyepieces at things only they can see, while in the middle of it all the director sits eating doughnuts and flirting with the leading lady.
That’s because there’s so much to get right in order to capture the perfect take. Getting the actor to put her hand out for the white sliced is the least important part of the process.
For instance, was the lighting on that last take OK? Good. Sound? Ditto. Did the supporting artist playing the passing pedestrian outside the bakery window actually walking through frame on cue, or were they a fraction late, drawing the eye just when you want it to be focused on Carla’s big moment? Yes, it was all fine. Great, then lets print it.
Except no. The props department have sheepishly pointed out that after 26 takes and three hours in the baking sun, the baguette you started with earlier that morning now more resembles something you’d use to cosh a security guard over the head. No way the president of France’s missus would be seen paying good money for that stale old housebrick.
OK, new bread please, re-set, first positions everyone. And … Action!! Except now some clouds have appeared overhead. The DOP (director of photography) is worried that anything you shoot now won’t match with the approach shots that were filmed earlier in bright sunshine.
No matter that Carla may plead that the last take was her best yet, capturing perfectly the inner torment of her character simply by the peerless manner in which she accepted the yielding loaf. Sorry, sorry Carla, we’re going again, stand down everyone, send for more doughnuts. See what I mean?
In any case, you can take it from me (as someone who’s played more one-scene cameos than most), that small parts are the worst. Go into the green room on any film set, and study the actors waiting to shoot. See those nervous individuals anxiously mumbling their lines under their breath in the corner? They’re the ones who have only got one speech in the entire project.
The stars, the old lags who are on screen all day every day and for whom the next scene is only one of a dozen or so before lunch – they’re the ones dozing in the corner or having a contest to see who can lob a rolled-up ball of scrap paper so that it deflects off the ceiling fan and lands in the waste bin.
But even if Carla was to blame, she’s assuredly in the best company. Nobody would deny that the immortal Marilyn Monroe had her good days and her bad, and in Tony Curtis‘s memoir of the filming of Some Like It Hot, he recalls filming a scene in which Marilyn’s only line was “Where’s that bourbon?”
Those “three simple words” took her 85 takes. By the time the director Billy Wilder got one he could use, 150,000 feet of film had been used and Curtis had been in high heels for nearly eight hours. The whole miserable day is summed up by three of Curtis’s own little words – “Cut. Print. Faint.” So don’t worry Carla, don’t worry. You’ve still got 50 odd takes in the locker yet.
The auction of Churchill’s false teeth shows that relics are not just for the religious – faith in humanity is enough
What’s the best way of establishing contact with the past? Reading all about it is just one answer, since the visuals matter, too. A walk in Picardy may explain the Somme battlefield’s logistics of attrition, and Van Dyck’s portraiture of the 1630s captures courtiers who would soon be killing each other. But it’s objects that can be handled or inspected that often provide the most intuitive thrill. And when we start to look closely at artefacts owned by identifiable human beings we get close to a very ancient enthusiasm – the passion for relics.
A visit to a Catholic church in a Mediterranean or Latin American country can still disturb some British minds. Whole bodies of dead saints embalmed and preserved in glass coffins are light years removed from the sterile pieties of Songs of Praise. Fragments of bones – fingers, hips and thighs – are kept in reliquaries and may be exposed on a martyrdom’s anniversary. And the hair of the blessed departed, which sits on top of many a Spanish saint’s plaster-cast image, can recall the late Frankie Howerd’s ill-judged wig.
The bits left behind are most worthy of respect when they once formed part of saints’ bodies. But objects much used by saints can become second-division relics. Martin of Tours, the fourth-century Roman soldier, tore his cloak in half to relieve a naked beggar’s distress, and the portion he kept became a treasured relic, which accompanied the kings of the Franks into battle. Islam, too, has its sacred cloak – Muhammad’s is rumoured to be kept in Afghanistan’s Kandahar mosque – and all religions that like relics use them to inspire believers into action.
Protestants and secularists alike can get cross about this phenomenon. Last year’s procession through Britain of St Thérèse of Lisieux’s body parts provoked much nose wrinkling. But this week’s sale of Winston Churchill’s spare dentures – which fetched £15,200 at auction today – is a reminder that relics come in many guises. Churchillianism is, after all, a secular religion in modern Britain – and the object of veneration, having been first Tory and then Liberal before returning to the Conservative party, encourages bi-partisan adulation. Churchill’s lack of any orthodox religious belief means he’s well qualified to be top god in a largely non-religious land, though it’s doubtful if subsequent premiers’ relics – locks of Blair’s hair perhaps, or that keyboard-banging Brown digit – will arouse equivalent enthusiasm.
Relics exist to be enjoyed and used, whether they’re part of the national heritage trail or an aspect of religious belief. Hostility to them is a sign of preciosity and elitism on the part of those who are threatened by vitality and find it vulgar. Oversensitive pagan intellectuals, for example, were really appalled by the early Christians’ enthusiasm for bones and called their churches “charnel houses“. And church leaders, too, were pretty wary, since this was a kind of religion that was of and for the people.
Relics were a huge phenomenon of popular devotion in Palestine and Syria before the seventh century arrival of Islamic conquerors. The religious refugees who fled afterwards to western Europe carried with them their own private collections of saints’ bones, and there was a buoyant market response. Deciding which saint would be their friend and protector was one of the few ways the poor and illiterate could exercise their power to choose, and that remains true in today’s Catholic Latin America.
Hanging on to relics is not supposed to be a backward-looking pursuit and the bones are meant to really come into their own at the Last Judgment. Bodies will then be resurrected, and that includes the saints who now exist as souls in heaven. Cremation’s popularity may cut us off from that particular sense of the sacred, but the museum holograms that animate the faces of the recreated dead is a kind of resurrection in 3D. The same need that led to belief in wonder-inducing relics is still with us.
Multi-instrumentalist, composer and key figure in Dutch experimental music
In 1978 I began a Guardian review of an experimental jazz concert with these words: “Eric Morecambe’s contention that Hamlet was all right but a bit short on laughs would have rung a bell with the avant garde of Dutch improvising musicians. That rather sombre combination of 1960s American free-jazz and European conservatoire music that has influenced many young players on this side of the Atlantic has generally bypassed the Dutch, who go to work with their tongues firmly planted in their cheeks.”
The review was of Amsterdam’s Willem Breuker Kollektief, a riotously entertaining ensemble that appeared to owe as much to music-theatre as it did to the jazz tradition, and which mingled vaudeville, circus music, Brecht/Weill, cabaret, free-jazz and, on that occasion, a soprano-sax solo directed towards the possible occupant of a snake-basket. Looking back, the review said more about jazz journalists’ anxious attempts to pass off uncommercial music as bearably quirky to suspicious mainstream editors than it did about Breuker – an extraordinary, devoted, obsessively serious and immensely influential modern European artist who really needed no excuses.
A saxophonist, clarinetist, composer and cheerleader for the unexpected, the Dutchman was one of the brightest stars of European free-jazz and contemporary classical music for almost four decades. His death at 65, after prolonged illnesses, halts the momentum of an astonishing musical dynamo.
Breuker was a believer in what, as a diehard 60s radical, he would simply call “people’s music”. He loved the theatre and often worked in it. The visual diversions he brought to what might otherwise have seemed taxing musical experiences did much to dispel the impenetrability often associated with avant-garde jazz over the course of the Kollektief’s 36-year career. He composed more than 500 works for theatre, opera and film; ran his own recording and publishing company; and was an active educator and proselytiser. A specialist in the work of Kurt Weill, he assembled an archive of the composer’s materials and produced a 48-hour, 12-part radio documentary on Weill in 1997.
Breuker was born in Amsterdam. His first music lessons were on clarinet, but he heard music in his own way. He could not see why the sound of the local fishmonger shouting, an approaching car engine or the neighbourhood barrel organist should not coexist in contemporary music. He began playing truant to listen to Schoenberg, Bartók and Varèse in the library, “in the era of Elvis and Little Richard”. He taught himself saxophone and began writing music in his teens, but his indiscipline kept him from music college, and he was viewed with suspicion by Amsterdam’s bebop-oriented jazz players.
Breuker went to night school, studying to be a teacher, and entered jazz competitions at festivals. At one, he covered well-known songs written by a festival organiser, playing them discordantly on a plastic flute, with random words he had invented himself. These rickety beginnings got Breuker noticed, particularly by the bandleader Theo Loevendie and the composer Misha Mengelberg.
By October 1966, Breuker was recording his debut album, Contemporary Jazz for Holland, including the composition Litany for the 14th of June 1966, in response to the Dutch police fatally opening fire on demonstrations by the Provo anarchist group. The following year, Breuker became one of the founders (with Mengelberg and the drummer Han Bennink) of the nonprofit Instant Composers’ Pool, an experimental self-help organisation for improvisers. He was also playing with the German pianist-composer Alex von Schlippenbach’s free-jazz big band, the Globe Unity Orchestra; with the multi-instrumentalist Gunter Hampel’s group; and with Bennink, Mengelberg and the German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann.
In 1969 and 1970, Breuker was a significant presence at the Free Jazz Meeting in Baden-Baden, working with Don Cherry’s New Eternal Rhythm Orchestra. During the 1970s, he founded both the Kollektief and his BVHaast record label, and worked as a sideman with a group led by the pianist Leo Cuypers, also a Kollektief member. BVHaast documented Breuker’s own work and that of many of his jazz and contemporary-music compatriots, and some key figures from the world of electronica. In 1977 he began to organise the annual five-day Klap op de Vuurpijl (Top It All) festival in Amsterdam.
In parallel with this jazz-improv world, and often entwined with it, the restless Breuker was also working in music-theatre, frequently collaborating with the playwright Lodewijk de Boer at Amsterdam’s adventurous Theaterunie. After the formation of the Kollektief, the saxophonist and his cohorts frequently appeared in both musical and acting roles. Breuker also began working for the Baal theatre company, writing music for the Brecht play of the same name, and for Brecht’s Drums in the Night. He also composed for films directed by Johan van der Keuken. He was invited by Yo-Yo Ma to write a work for cello and jazz band, which was performed by the cellist and the Kollektief on a live TV broadcast in 1992. In 1996 he wrote the oratorio Psalm 122 for the Kollektief, the Mondriaan Strings, the Nieuwe Muziek Chorus and a barrel organ.
Breuker chaired the Dutch Jazz and Improvised Music Foundation, programmed and directed the ambitious Dutch Music Days 2003 festival in Utrecht, and was a crucial figure in public funding for new music. He had been immersed in musical education since the 60s, convinced by improvisation’s potential as an enriching educational experience, and was always open and encouraging of his students’ ideas; the Kollektief ran educational workshops worldwide.
Breuker won many prizes. He was named Ridder in de Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw (Holland’s knighthood) in 1998. Despite ill-health, he remained constantly in search of new musical ideas, collaborating with the music historian Val Wilmer on a compilation paying tribute to the overlooked composer Reginald Foresythe; exploring crossovers with Turkish musicians; composing the two-hour oratorio Jonah for choir, Kollektief, string orchestra and solo vocalists in 2003; and making his 15th and 16th Kollektief tours to the US and Canada.
The Kollektief’s public subsidy was cut without warning in 2008. Breuker spent his last years witnessing what he considered the final evaporation of attitudes that had nourished his work in the 1960s and 70s, and regretting “a new generation of conservatoire students making music the same as 50 years ago”. But Breuker’s prolific output, boundless energy and optimism leaves an incandescent inspiration for future generations of contrarians like him, the recurrent cultural force he called “musicians as warriors”.
He is survived by his partner, the actor Olga Zuiderhoek.
• Willem Breuker, musician, born 4 November 1944; died 23 July 2010
From Goya to Picasso, artists have painted pictures that depend on the gore and passion of the bullfight for their greatness – so will the bloodsport’s demise mean the end of tragic art?
Spanish bulls are breathing more easily after Catalonia became the first region to abolish bullfighting. Humanitarians are happy, too. Oh yes, it’s all very well for you animal lovers. But what about artists, eh? Have you spared a thought for them?
Spanish art has been in love with the arena for centuries. Goya and Picasso painted and etched profound, tragic, and moving pictures that depend entirely on the gore and passion of the bullfight for their greatness. It may be arguable, at a pinch, that Goya’s paintings are “critiques” of this bloodsport among bloodsports – after all, he did see the Spain of his age as a place of savage irrationality. Picasso, however, is on record as a sincere fan of bullfighting. He watched it regularly, not just in his Spanish youth, but in the south of France where he later lived.
The first Picasso exhibition I ever saw was, at it happens, in the French bullfighting city of Nimes. It was drawn from the Picasso family collection and, chancing on it during a family holiday as a teenager, I discovered an artist who is still one of my heroes. I also discovered bullfighting. The most savage and brilliant painting on show was a small intense image from the 1930s of a bull goring a horse. The grey, white and black picture was at first hard to understand, a cubistic tangle – then it hit you that you were seeing a horse’s stomach being slashed open and the shock seemed to knot and tear at your own intestines.
My father and I attended what we honestly believed (our French was very bad) to be a faux, harmless bullfight in the town arena. It was not a fake fight. Pink blood spread on the silver sand under floodlights that August evening.
Animal cruelty and art have a shared history. In portraying the horrors of the bullfight, Picasso reached back to the hunting pictures of Rubens and Snyders. Yet he did not relish violence for the sake of it. In the tragic drama of the arena he found the visual language that enabled him to respond, with deep humanity, to the horrors of war in his masterpiece Guernica. If we exclude bloody events like the bullfight from the human imagination, will we lose the capacity to make tragic art?
Video: The grime popper is joined by Spyro to perform Gangsta?, the lead track from his new album Third Strike
It’s about time that Brits got taken down a peg or two, argues one American blogger. But rotten drama remains readily available on both sides of the pond
We begin this week with a touch of schadenfreude. The usually excellent Isaac Butler has confessed to what he describes as an “ugly” feeling of satisfaction in response to the “freaking out about funding cuts” here on the Guardian. Butler has obviously had some bad experiences with British or European theatre practitioners who, he feels, are frequently dismissive of American theatre. “There’s always a moment when one of them enters into a Big Speech About How Conservative and Dull American Theatre Is,” he writes, before suggesting that perhaps “the silver lining on the funding cut cloud is that at least theatre artists in other countries might have some level of understanding/sympathy for what their cousins across the pond are doing.”
Now, I can’t think of many theatre-makers I know who would make those criticisms, and as David Cote points out in the comments thread on Butler’s post, he seems to confuse the British and Continental European approach to theatre. But it is worth noting that when arts funding in this country gets a hammering, it is not just going to be British artists taking the hit. There are many American writers – from Stephen Adly Guirgis and Tarell Alvin McCraney to Tony Kushner and David Mamet – who have had work premiered or revived regularly by subsidised British companies. Alongside this, American theatre companies such as the Team and the Riot Group have benefited hugely from their relationships with companies like the National Theatre of Scotland and the Soho theatre. All this is likely to be jeopardised, as funding is reduced and pressure is inevitably put on artistic directors to focus what money is left on developing British talent. (Incidentally, this is an excellent website which details different easy-to-use responses to the Tory cuts.)
Yet regardless of who produces the best theatre, one thing seems certain – both America and Europe are capable of producing some really spectacularly bad work. The US-based Stage Grade blog – which reports “the critical consensus for New York City plays and musicals” – is currently rejoicing in the discovery of Viagra Falls. Stage Grade has given the show an average of “F-” but this surely does not do justice to a show which, according to Time Out New York, “falls somewhere between watching your grandparents masturbate and watching them go to the bathroom”.
Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic, Andrew Haydon recently came across a show in Estonia called Answer Me by the Dutch company Dood Paard. As he points out, the show was so bad that: “Of a starting audience of maybe 300, roughly a third left before the end. Of those who remained until it finished, half simply left instead of applauding. And, judging by every conversation I had or overheard afterwards, those who did clap were just being polite.” Inevitably, reading these reviews has left me with a desperate urge to see both shows.
In other news, there does appear to be one arts-related area where the Americans seem to be doing undeniably better than the Brits. As the Playgoer points out, the US immigration department has recently vowed to process all artist visas in 14 days or less. This belies a considerably more enlightened attitude to the arts than that displayed by our own immigration service – who, it has been reported, have regularly refused artists entry into the country.
Finally, and in completely unrelated news, Chloe Veltman of Lies Like Truth has been exploring the different ways that the internet is affecting how we consume and produce art. She reports that the San Francisco Playhouse has, in an attempt to draw in new audiences, been allowing audience members to Twitter during shows. This has, in turn, sparked a furious discussion on the Facebook page of the Berkeley Rep theatre. In addition, she is intrigued by the possibilities that Skype provides in terms of the creative process. She refers to an interview in the Wall Street Journal with Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony, who says he often rehearses via Skype. Perhaps when all our theatres are closed down, the internet will be the only space left in which to perform.
Royal Albert Hall, London
Six works, five of them never heard at the Proms before, made up Oliver Knussen’s three-part programme with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Between Germanic outer layers – Stockhausen’s Jubilee to begin, Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Rheinische Kirmestänze and Schumann’s Third Symphony, the Rhenish, to end – Knussen inserted a central sequence of contemporary British music. None of the pieces was brandnew, though Colin Matthews’s 2009 Violin Concerto was new to London, but deserved the extra exposure that a Proms performance provides.
Harrison Birtwistle’s Sonance Severance, is a tiny nugget, composed in 1999 for the reopening of the Cleveland Orchestra’s home concert hall, a high-density test of the capabilities of the refurbished space with a wittily throwaway ending; Luke Bedford’s Outblaze the Sky from 2006 is hardly much bigger, a sequence of luminous, beautifully voiced Scriabin-like chords worked to a fiery climax. But Matthews’s concerto is a substantial work, its introspective refusal to do conventional concerto things seeming every bit as impressive here as it did at its Birmingham premiere last autumn. Radio listeners probably got a better sense of the relationship between Leila Josefowicz’s beautifully understated solo playing and Matthews’s dappled orchestral writing than those of us in the hall, though.
Zimmermann’s tipsy set of dances, orchestrated in 1962 as light relief from the rigours of completing his opera Die Soldaten, provided the unexpected prelude to Knussen’s wonderfully fresh account of the Schumann symphony – no sentimentality or unnecessary bombast, and unexpected dark undercurrents to the processional fourth movement. But the Stockhausen work from 1977 was much less convincing. One of his last pieces before he immersed himself in the opera-cycle Licht for 25 years, and often anticipating the cycle’s techniques and soundworld, it sounds dated now, and just a bit too long.
Rating: 4/5
The Abbot Hall art gallery in Kendal is offering Extra members a 2 for 1 deal on tickets to see the Loneliness of Lowry
This summer, the Abbot Hall art gallery in Kendal is curating the first major exhibition of work by L.S Lowry be shown outside The Lowry Gallery in Salford in five years.
Featuring some of Lowry’s most powerful pictures, the show illustrates a lesser known side of one of the UK’s most popular artists.
Better known for his northern industrial landscapes, the exhibition examines a different side of Lowry, looking beneath these scenes at an artist who cites his inherent loneliness as one of the main influences on his work. He said: “Had I not been lonely none of my works would have happened.”
The exhibition will show approximately forty works, including oils and works on paper from both private and public collections throughout the country. It features some of Lowry’s most powerful pictures focusing on portraits, landscapes, urban landscapes and seascapes.
The Abbot Hall in Kendal is offering Extra members a 2 for 1 deal on tickets to the exhibition, saving you £5.75. You can Gift Aid it for £6.75.
Read The Guardian’s Review here
Offer valid until 31 August 2010
Take up this offer
Click here to take up this offer
Help with Offers and Events
- You need to have joined Extra in order to see the redemption pages. You can sign up here
- You will need to be signed in at the top of the screen to be able to take up any offer or book tickets
Joann Sfar, best known in France and to fans worldwide as a comic book artist, was the surprise choice to land the job of directing a biopic about one of France’s most controversial and cherished modern icons: Serge Gainsbourg.
Jason Solomons discusses the challenge of presenting Gainsbourg’s life on screen for the first time, and how he used his visual imagination to explore the young Gainsbourg’s rise to fame as a chanteur alongside his notoriety as a raconteur, womaniser and hell-raiser.
Plus, we have three soundtracks to give away on our Facebook page, Film Weekly Fans. The album was recorded for the film and as yet is not on release in the UK.
