Gypsy

Up until last year the only musical I had been to was Avenue Q, a cuddly- if irreverent - parody of Sesame Street. Up until that point, I thought musical theatre was all wavy hands and whitened teeth, a cheeseboard of sugar and schmaltz. However, watching Avenue Q slice and dice a kids show via songs on racism, pornography and schadenfreude challenged my preconceptions and made me acknowledge the genre may be broader than I thought.

I think the reason for my prejudice dates back to a story a friend told me about his date with an ex-girlfriend. Wanting to impress, he agreed to go to the theatre with her. The theatre wasn’t usually his thing, but we all do things when we’re first courting - pull out chairs, open doors, shower, go outside to fart – so he thought he’d give it a go. Anyway, it would be nice to do something different: to play at sophistication by hobnobbing London's suits and dresses. When he arrived though he did not see anyone dressed to impress; instead his eyes alighted on what can only be described as a fashion wreckage: pulled from the cultural rubble was a debris of people all wearing Steps tour t-shirts. Why was everyone wearing the football kit of a defunct 90’s pop band? Was it the West End’s answer to East End irony? How could this monstrosity be explained?

And then above him, he saw them: posters huge, posters high; on them, teeth sparkling, teeth whitening; a totalitarian rally re-imagined by Colgate. H from Steps was here. H from Steps was here to perform? In a leading role? Doing solos? Singing live? Without backing track? With musicians?  It’s a wonder my friend didn’t break up with the girl there and then, citing musical differences. But ever the hero, he sensed an anecdote for a friend’s future blog, so heroically he journeyed into the underworld, suffering a barrage of botched notes and auditory torment, and returned home, clutching a ‘you weren’t there man’ Vietnam vet' story.

"The horror. The horror."

I hold that ‘H from Steps’ anecdote responsible for my ignorant opinion of musical theatre. I didn’t always view musical theatre as ‘the boards’ bastard child; I know I didn’t because as a child my favourite film was Oliver. I would watch it all the time, particularly at Christmas when it would become as much a part of the holiday season as mince pies and cream. Dickens' books were larger than life and the musical showcased this with effervescent choreography and sing-a-long choruses. I still know all the words and actions to ‘Food, Glorious Food,’ ‘Pick a Pocket or Two’ and ‘I’ll Do Anything’ and can be found performing them to my girlfriend free of charge. (She prefers my rendition of ‘I’ll Do Anything,’ enjoying the love at all costs sentiment; she does not like my ‘Pick a Pocket’: so brilliant is my sleight of hand re-enactment of it, she wrongly spends her afternoon turning up the sofa, only to find me beaming back at her, revealing her ‘lost’ Pandora bracelet.) Oh, what larks!

"Please mum, can I watch Oliver again."

My girlfriend has a love of musical theatre that is partly down to her friend being a genuine star of it. In a previous blog I wrote about Clare playing the leading role in the Paris revival of Singin’ in the Rain. Watching her tackle a triumvirate of challenges in the artistic triathlon that is singing, acting and dancing re-awakened the little Oliver within me (I know that phrase sounds suspect) and made me truly appreciate musical theatre. This week we went to see Clare perform again; this time playing youngest daughter, June in Gypsy.

Normally before I go and see anything I’ll research the hell out of it, reading online reviews, customer appraisals, Wikipedia entries and actor’s interviews, rendering my actual going a pointless activity in confirming what I’ve already heard. For once though, I forgot to do my research. I knew next to nothing about Gypsy. I knew it was about a pushy mother. I knew the lyrics were written by musical legend, Stephen Sondheim, but other than that I knew nowt. I can now say that Gyspy is one of my all-time favourite theatre experiences, owing in part to the career-defining performance of Imelda Staunton. Although I haven’t seen Spacey at The Old Vic, McKellen in Waiting For Godot, Olivier’s Hamlet; I believe last Saturday I saw a genius at work.

BAFTA winning, Imelda Staunton.

Staunton plays Rose Lee, a small woman harbouring a monstrous ambition. Her goal is to turn her youngest into a star of the Vaudeville. Occupying a Seattle creak and leak apartment and having no material wealth would typically make some people believe fame and fortune weren’t for them, but Rose Lee isn’t Some Person:  having nothing only makes her more determined to be the one who ghostwrites her daughter’s rags to riches story. Gypsy then is a tale of what happens when dreams become obsessions, and what happens when obsessions become someone’s undoing. It is utterly enthralling- full of wit, verve and pathos, a world away from the jazz hands and smiles that wrongly caricature the genre.

Rose Lee is an enduring character of stage and screen because for all her grotesquerie, she is magnificently real. There isn’t a person in the land whom hasn’t met a parent – or been a parent – who lives vicariously through their child. It is natural to want your child to have a better life than you, but where Rose goes too far - and gets it wrong- is she confuses aspiration for love; this is a parent’s perennial fear, and a good reason why many older people watch with uneasy recognition.

The musical is so called because it is based on the real-life memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee. In Act 1 of the show Gyspy does not exist – or she does, but in the form of Louise Lee, Rose’s eldest daughter. Louise lives in the shadow of her sister’s spotlight: where June is pigtails and curls, Louise is tomboy and crop; where June is vacuous and flighty; Louise is thoughtful and headstrong. It isn’t until her sister cuts the apron strings and kicks out of town that Rose considers her eldest. Unwilling to give up on a dream and desperate to scrape a living, Rose waves her magic wand and morphs her put-upon daughter into the Burlesque queen, Ms Gypsy Lee. Previously Rose was dismissive of Burlesque, seeing it as no art form whatsoever; her about-face then is done out of need, not want. With Rose’s 'project stardom' realised, it’s not long before she sets about dismantling it, chastising her daughter for being a star in the wrong sky.

The final number in Gyspy is ‘Rose’s Song,’ a lament on what Rose believes is owed to her. Negotiating the contradictions of this pitiful-defiant howl requires an actress who through inflection and genuflection can achieve the impossible task of making a hero out of a villain, a beast out of a heroine. Staunton manages it. Her performance is big and bursting, filling the capacious environs of the Savoy Theatre with ease; it is also an exercise in tone and gesture, reminding the audience, however huge the character may be this is a person raging against the dying of the spotlight. On hitting the final note, the auditorium rose to their feet to celebrate what was a tour-de-force performance. Britain’s Got Talent and political party conferences have made a mockery out of the ancient art of vertical adulation, but the audience of The Savoy were right to raise themselves that night because what we saw was something special. I urge you to do the same.

The relationship between Man and Animal

Both of this week’s choices deal with the animal kingdom and man’s relationship to it. I have to profess I’m no animal lover; I eat them with slavish regularity, nor was I brought up with much feeling for them: the closest I came to a family pet was a Tamagotchi that died frequently in my arms. It is therefore somewhat of a surprise that I have found myself entranced by two stories that deal with man's love for animals.

I buried it in the bottom of my garden.

The first is Helen Macdonald’s, H is for Hawk, a memoir that chronicles the author’s relationship with goshawk, Mabel. I picked up the book off the back of a plethora of plaudits, the most significant being The Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. Previously, the only thing I knew about falconry was gleaned from watching Kes. In that film Billy, the central character, bruised by humanity finds salvation in a kestrel; Macdonald’s work is not dissimilar: hurting from her father’s death, she finds purpose in training a goshawk. The two differ in that Kes’ title is a misnomer: the film’s focus is Billy - the kestrel plays a supporting role; H is for Hawk, however is more instructive, informing us of the ancient pastime, lifting the hood on its mystery, giving us a vantage on these enigmatic creatures.

Don’t be deterred into thinking Hawk is an instruction manual with adjectives though; it is far more than that: reading as it does like a Frankenstein thriller- a power struggle between man and beast- the book is a psychologist’s dream. For deep in grief, Macdonald comes to envy the bird she is meant to possess: she wants the trade places with it, so she can live a life unencumbered by human emotion, in the here and now, paralysed not by memory but free through flight.

Macdonald and Mabel

Her ability to write lucidly on the esoteric subject of falconry and descriptively on the chasm of grief is a real achievement. With a background in poetry, Macdonald has previous in capturing big ideas in tight formation; this experience means she manages to tame the big theme of good and evil in magical prose. In fact her language is much like the bird she trains: at times the thing soars, skirting and skimming the page with ethereal elegance; at other times its claws dig in and the horror of her descriptions peck grimly away at you. A passage that illuminates this beauty and beast dichotomy is when she muses on her own humanity, and whether the bird has vanquished it:

I don’t have sides. I only have wildness. And I don’t need wildness any more. I’m not stifled by domesticity. I have none. There is no need, right now, to feel close to a fetch of dark northern woods, a creature with baleful eyes and death in her foot. Human hands are for holding other hands. Human arms are for holding other humans close. They’re not for breaking the necks of rabbits, pulling loops of viscera out onto leaf-litter while the hawks dips her head to drink blood from her quarry’s chest cavity.

I love how the gorgeous romanticism of handholding melds with the cold stark gruesomeness of neck breaking to show the disparity between man and nature. The above passage shows how the goshawk provided a placebo for the soul; the true elixir though was realising grief could only be overcome through accepting love and compassion. As someone who isn't an animal lover, I found this message optimistic: embracing the isolation of nature offers only temporary succour but embracing another is where rehabilitation truly starts.

War Horse is the theatrical adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 novel. Like Hawk, it is about the bond between man and beast, in this case Albert, a farmer’s son, and his horse Joey. I first became familiar with the story on reading it with a school book group. I, along with the students, enjoyed the tale of the horse’s dispossession from the Devonshire countryside to the battlefields of France. It reminded us all of the sacrifice made by man and animal in the diplomatic failure that was World War One. Like the classic Black Beauty, the story is told from the horse’s perspective, which generates greater pathos when we witness the thoroughbred’s experience in battle. For all of that though, the story for me isn’t as good as Morpurgo’s Private Peaceful, another war story, centred on brothers in battle and the cost of fraternal loyalty. Both films were released two years ago with War Horse getting the Hollywood treatment, and Peaceful getting the British Film Council one. Peaceful again was the better of the two, but Britain’s reputation as a nation of feckless gamblers was corroborated by the box office receipts that proved they backed the wrong horse.

Spielberg: I prefer his earlier work.

The reason why War Horse became big box office cinema was because director Steven Spielberg had seen the theatrical adaptation of the book and wanted to transpose the joy he experienced watching it into a Hollywood re-telling of it. Spielberg's adaptation was too by-the-book though, something that could never be accused of The National Theatre's offering. Of the three mediums, the play is without a doubt the best incarnation of the story. To create a moving play about a horse is a brief only a fool would accept and fortunately Britain’s West End had the kind of creative idiots who can make it possible.

The horses are controlled by three puppeteers, two at the body and one at the head.

With Morpurgo’s novel adapted, co-directors Marianne Elliot and Tom Morris set about gathering the best puppeteers in the business to shape this equine adventure story. Despite the production being lauded as a British triumph, it is a South African success story, as it is their puppeteers who shape-shift into Blue Fairies to bring these Pinocchio puppets to life. In creating realistic foals and thoroughbreds through a combination of levers, pulleys and rods, the ‘Handspring Puppet Company’ of South Africa are the true heroes of the production.

Another bewitching element to the production is the artist’s Rae Smith’s drawings. Appreciating that the action of War Horse shifts too rapidly for stage changes, Smith was hired to create the backdrops for the fluid action. When the play begins in Devon these illustrations are fairly standard renderings of the countryside, however when the action shifts to the fields of battle the images become more abstract with lines and smudges projected to delineate the nightmare of battle.

'Explosion' by Rae Smith.

Given I’m more of a fan of drama than action, the first half of the play appealed to me more than the second. The second half has the spectacle – gunfire that makes you jump; blackouts that exacerbate tension and a tank puppet that beggars belief – but it lacks the cohesion of the first. The first has more story with the fraternal rivalry of Albert’s father and uncle contrasted nicely with the co-operation between Albert and his horse; the second half has Joey taken off Albert and sent to be a war horse, and with this bond between man and animal broken the poignancy of the horse’s travails lose their potency. For all of that though, doing a play about a horse is a dare no one should have accepted. The fact that is delivered with such aplomb is a testament to the people who work within our wonderful Arts industry.

Enjoying both Hawk and Horse has made me feel maybe I'm missing something in not having a pet. With that in mind I'm off to my mum and dad's to dig up my Tamagotchi. Hopefully the battery still works.

Declan Zapala at the Elgar Room

This week I went to see Declan Zapala at ‘The Royal Albert Hall: Elgar Room.’

Dec has been my friend for over half my life. We first bonded over a love of stand up comedy. After his 6^th Form Asda shift, he would bound up the hill to mine where we would talk Bill Hicks over tea. Both of us - like Bill - shared the dream of being artists, untethered by commercial interests, free to be who we wanted to be; free to be different. But was it possible to be an artist when your birthplace read ‘Watford’?

Years later, Dec and me are sharing a flat. On one side of the wall he practices guitar. On the other side of the wall I write comedy. Dec and me at this point are working part-time. (Our other flatmate Beth, Dec's girlfriend, is out at work as a Social Worker for the elderly, so not doing anything nearly as important as us.) Dec is committed to a career as a classical guitarist and I’m attempting to break into stand-up comedy. Having an artistic bent, being friends and living in close proximity, it wasn’t long before people were referring to us as the Wordsworth and Coleridge of Watford – by people I mean Dec and myself. You could argue with two ‘artists’ living under one roof, our flat was fast becoming Watford’s answer to Andy Warhol’s Factory. It wouldn’t be long before we released work as culturally significant as the Velvet Underground's first album; all we needed to do was unplug the kettle and hide the remote.

The Warhol Factory. Just like 24 Mayfair Court.

Eventually I would come to realise the artist’s life wasn’t for me (this was revealed to me in a bank statement). But it was for Dec. Dec is someone who didn’t play at being an artist – like me – but someone who truly committed to it. Much of the money he makes from function work and teaching is re-invested back into the true vocation of writing, recording and performing music. He has what all good artists need: the courage to take risks when it appears reckless to do so. So it came to pass, Dec booked the Royal Albert Hall for the first gig of his album tour.

Picking up my ticket at the box office and seeing the words: ‘Royal Albert Hall presents Declan Zapala’ was a huge thrill. Knowing this gig was achieved through a coalescence of talent, hard work and originality made the experience even more gratifying, living as we do in an age where TV talent shows ignore all three. As an aside, Dec was once asked to audition for Britain’s Got Talent; he turned them down on the grounds he wasn’t willing to use a stunt guitarist for his difficult Bach piece. (I can still write jokes.)

The Elgar Room gig began with Dec showing signs of confusion as to why so many people were there to watch him. Fortunately, these are typical symptoms of playing a historic venue and the patient soon declared himself fit to play. He opened with Awakening, the eponymous track from his debut album. Awakening is a fitting first album title, conjuring as it does the idea of musical birth and arrival. It is also an apt metaphor for the album’s aesthetics: the record reminds me of that feeling when you’re emerging from sleep, caught in a Neverland of sleepy dust and sun-dappled curtains, when you are neither here nor there; it is gorgeously dreamy.

Dec then launched into a percussive piece Crystal. I forgot to mention that Dec is a percussive guitarist. He can play the guitar like a drum. Witnessing this phenomenon up close is truly awe-inspiring: seeing his arms juggle between the guitar's fretboard and body appears impossible yet through a combination of God-given talent and superhuman focus the feat is achieved. It is this kind of multi-tasking that has earned Dec the moniker, 'the octopus of sound.'

After, Dec performed Angel, which is always a personal highlight for me. The late Eric Roche composed the song for his sister, and Dec’s playing really makes a statement of the piece’s understatement. If I wasn’t already in love, I could imagine falling in love to it. It really is a beautiful serenade of a thing; a twinkling, spine-tingling swoon that Patrick Swayze’s your soul. I rather like it.

Following this is Koyunbaba, a Turkish folk song by Carlo Domeniconi. Performed over four movements, the piece is an exercise in tension, building gradually to a frenzied finish. In fact it reminds me of an old western standoff: initially the combatants stalk one another, daring the other to act, only for the heat of inaction to prove too much as the thing folds into a supercharged gunfight.

Later, a dewy-eyed Dec introduced Philomena, a song written for his mum. Last year he raised over a £1000 for the Philomena project, a charity that attempts to right the wrongs of the Catholic church by re-uniting mothers with the children forcibly removed from them. Dec’s Philomena is so called because Judi Dench’s portrayal in the film reminded Dec of his own mother. Introducing Philomena we’re told that Dec’s mum plays the bodhran, an Irish drum, so in tribute he has built a section into the piece that replicates its sound. His ability to make the guitar malleable is illustrated again later when during the middle of Broken Rhapsody he detunes his guitar to create the sound of a double bass. This experimentation marks him out as a showman, and in an art-form that can be a little po-faced this is wholly welcome.

If you’re going up to Edinburgh this year, I recommend you see Dec. Last year, his show was so well received he ended up on Radio 3 and BBC 4. Witnessing his current show, I think his live performance is even better. If you can’t make Edinburgh, buy the album and listen to a true artist at work.

Declan Zapala’s album can be bought here: http://declanzapala.com/shop/

He can be seen live at the Edinburgh Festival, St Columbus by the Castle, August 8-31^st at 5.45.

My Mad Fat Diary

This week I've been enjoying My Mad Fat Diary.

On Monday E4’s My Mad Fat Diary will draw to a close. Spanning three seasons- two long, one short- the 90’s set comedy-drama was an antidote to the channel’s otherwise putrid outpouring. My Mad Fat Diary is no Made In Chelsea. This isn’t ‘aspirational tv,' instead it contains characters and values worth aspiring to.

Rachel ‘Rae’ Earl is the protagonist, the person who pens the mad fat diary. She has just been released from a psychiatric hospital, following her admittance for self-harming, and now wants to make up for lost time. Or as she puts it: “I’m 16. I weigh 16 and a half stone and I live in Lincolnshire. My interests include music, vegging out and finding a fit boy. Scratch that. Any boy. To quench my ever-growing horn.” Rae’s opening monologue sets the irreverent tone for what’s to come: this isn't going to be a naval gazing examination of self-harm so beloved by Year 9 girls, rather a raucous, riotous, up and at ‘em look at adolescence.

Rae's humour at play.

(Note: I’m worried the above comment about Year 9 girls is generalised, and therefore unfair. But as an English teacher, I’ve read more stories about self-harm than you’ve had hot dinners. And imaginary reader, you live in a contrived land where cold options don’t exist. That’s how many stories on self-harm I’ve read. For the record, I’ve also read too many stories by boys on gangsterism. My message to teenage boys would be: put the imaginary glock down and pick up your soul. Now you’ve picked it up, load the chamber and fire the page with musings on life, the universe and everything else. Teenagers, let's not live vicariously through a Daily Mail ‘yuff’ headline, reach higher for something purer and then write me a story. )

Sorry I had to get that off my chest. I'll continue now.

On leaving hospital Rae is re-acquainted with her school friend Chloe. She is Rae’s antithesis: conventionally pretty, conventionally popular and conventionally dressed. Through her, Rae meets a group of friends who don’t see Rae’s madness or fatness, but the vulnerable charm and rude eloquence we the viewer sees. As with all good shows, the secondary characters are pivotal to the programme’s success, and Mad Fat has them in spades. Chloe, mentioned earlier, is not the vacuous princess her appearance implies: she is vulnerability incarnate, concealing the pretty woman fear of being a woman of no importance. Archie is a homosexual in the 1990’s – an era of lad culture. His cowardly attempts to ‘out’ himself, although humorous, are played with an underlying sadness, recognising how society manacled gay men and women. And then there’s Finn, the apple of Rae’s eye; the man she wants to bite into, chew up and swallow whole- including the pips. (“His arse is so beautiful, sometimes I have to stop myself from crying when I look at it.”) Rae, overweight in body, underfed in confidence, is stuck in the “friends zone” with Finn, an intermediate state of limbo she longs to swap for sex heaven.  Her caustic response to this is both hilariously and horrifyingly relatable to anyone who has ever said ‘I love you’ in their head and not had the other person say it back.

The gang.

Over the three seasons, the course of true friendship never does run smooth as typical teenage infighting threatens to capsize hard earned camaraderie. Unlike the ephemeral relationships of Made In Chelsea though, wounds are licked, pints are raised and order is soon restored. As a secondary school teacher, My Mad Fat Diary is the kind of programme I wish students were watching. In an age where the ‘self’ is promoted through profiles, ‘selfies’ and (cough) blogs, we can sometimes spend too much time looking in rather than out at what’s around us. Mad Fat is a celebration of interdependence, of how our friends can make us stronger, happier and healthier. I’ll be very sad to see it go.

The whole of 'My Mad Fat Diary' is available on demand at All 4.