King Lear (BBC, 2018)

(This review has also appeared, in slightly different from, on the Wales Arts Review.)

Anthony Hopkins must be one of the few people in the world with instantly recognisable wrinkles; the two vertical lines on the left side of his forehead are as much an identifying mark as Liz Taylor’s violet eyes.  Those wrinkles play star parts in his performance as the BBC’s King Lear (2018), on a face that carries as much history as the map that he divides in the opening scene.

It’s inevitable than any actor’s performance should bear the weight of other parts and personal history, and Lear, which an actor usually plays towards the end of his (or for Glenda Jackson, her) career, is more than usually affected by this kind of real-life intertextuality.  In 1982, a similarly aged Laurence Olivier played the part for Channel Four, with the actor’s own weakened physique and voice, shrunk to childish treble, becoming central tools of the performance.

With Hopkins, the baggage is more personal than professional – a history of depression and alcoholism that kept him intermittently off both stages and screens for nearly ten years, until his masterful returns as Lambert la Roux in Pravda and Hannibal Lector in The Silence of the Lambs.  Hopkins has said, in a line that could have come from Lear, that having being an alcoholic is a blessing for an actor ‘because wherever I go, the abyss follows me’, and his performance, especially at the beginning, carries something of the heavy drinker’s capriciousness, turning on a sixpence from humour to fury and back – it’s clear from his daughters’ shared looks that this was not an easy man to have as a father.

Pravda was also directed by Richard Eyre, who here surrounds Hopkins with a starry, but surprising, cast, so that Emma Thompson, Emily Watson and Florence Pugh, as Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia respectively, cover a wider age range than the three daughters usually do, suggesting a backstory of royal bereavements or divorces, while Andrew Scott is a bookish Edgar and John Macmillan a Machiavellian Edmund – a lesser director would have cast them the other way round.  Eyre’s television direction is fluid and witty, using techniques – long tracking shots down corridors, direct, conspiratorial address to camera – popularised by shows like House of Cards and The West Wing, themselves heavily influenced by Shakespeare’s histories.

The style is what the scholar Peter Holland has called the ‘materialist’ school of Shakespearean production (1); realistic, evocative locations (here including a lot of stately homes), emphasis on naturalistic details, props that reappear at significant moments, and precise character distinctions so that, for instance, Goneril and Albany (an ineffectual, patrician Anthony Calf) are stuck in a sexless marriage, while Regan and Cornwall are adventurers, getting off on the blinding of a cable-tied Gloucester (Jim Broadbent) as if it were the 51^st shade of grey.

The milieu is militaristic and macho – many scenes are played before a chorus of camouflage-clad squaddies, so that when Goneril stands before them in a blue dress to berate her father, she sticks out like a butterfly caught in mud.  When Oswald (a camp, against-type Christopher Eccleston) gets called a ‘base foot-ball player’, it makes perfect sense – these raucous hard men are clearly more the rugby-playing type.

Not everything works – battle scenes are always a weakness in televised Shakespeare; stock footage and offscreen noise, as used here, looks cheap, while a blockbuster CGI-fest, even if affordable, would be missing the point.  Some modern parallels are more effective than others – setting the ‘poor naked wretches’ speech in what looks like a refugee camp seems self-indulgent, trivial in comparison with the much larger real-life tragedy (maybe that was the point).  In contrast, the coming together of blind Gloucester and mad Lear (pushing a supermarket trolley, and wearing the hat that belonged to his dead Fool – a Milligan-esque Karl Johnson) among the concrete of a new town shopping-centre works beautifully, giving a new pathos to ‘this great stage of fools’.

In the end, Hopkins is the reason for the production’s existence, and he seizes the opportunity like a man who can’t believe his luck – playful, almost flirtatious at times, occasionally sliding into a Lector-like purr, ranting when he needs to, at other times taking it right down – the climactic ‘Howl, howl, howl!’ is played not as a cry to the heavens but as a genuine appeal to the stiff-upper-lipped military chorus.  Eugene Field once said of an actor in this part that he played the King as if afraid that someone else was going to play the Ace; Hopkins has every single trump card in his hand, and doesn’t mind letting you know it.

1.  Peter Holland, English Shakespeares: Shakespeare on the English Stage in the 1990s (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 100.

Explore the Mundane! - the Boring Conference 2018

(This blogpost also appears on the Wales Arts Review)

In his 1998 book The Mezzanine (‘novel’ isn’t really the right word), Nicholson Baker took the events of a particularly uneventful lunch break, and used them as a starting point for a series of meditations on apparently trivial questions – the physics of shoelace tying, the logistics and technique of the paper straw – that turned out to have significant implications.  The conclusion was simple – anything is worth considering if you look at it deeply enough.

Something of the same spirit motivates the Boring Conference, which takes place every May at Conway Hall in London, and which is described by its founder, James Ward, as ‘a celebration of the mundane, the ordinary, the obvious, and the overlooked ‘.  You can get a flavour of it on the Boring podcast or at  a spin-off event like the Boring Talks at the British Library on June 26.

The day consists of a series of talks, covering subjects that over the conference’s eight years have included wooden pallets, the history of the double yellow line, the noises made by vending machines, the menus of chain restaurants, the word ‘the’, and the multi-lingual safety warnings that accompany Kinder eggs.

Speakers come from a variety of backgrounds, though a disproportionate number seem to be academics, exploring an obscure side alley leading away from their central area.  One of this year’s speakers, seaside historian Dr. Kathryn Ferry (and incidentally, isn’t that a great job to have?), prefaced her talk, on those toilet roll covers shaped like ladies in crinolines, by saying ‘I’ve wanted to talk about this for years, and this conference is possibly the only chance I’ll get.’    (She was also one of two speakers, both women, to mention the difficulties that their spouses had in coping with their enthusiasms.)

As well as the crinoline ladies, subjects this year included the eighteen-minute gap on Nixon’s Watergate tapes (which apparently you can listen to in its entirety at the Richard M. Nixon memorial library), call centres, the aesthetics of wall stains, Hook, an unbuilt new town in Hampshire, and the phenomenon of insects caught on CCTV (in a talk by Hayley Stevens, a professional ghost debunker).

One paper arguably went against the ethos of the conference by being interesting on the surface as well as underneath, Giles Rhys Jones spoke on What3words, a worldwide scheme to improve international addresses by dividing the world into three-metre squares, all referred to by a three word combination.  (You can find your location at https://what3words.com – I’m currently writing this at struck.trio.organs)  This turns out to have considerable applications for industry and aid, particularly in parts of the world where people don’t necessarily have street addresses.

However, for the most part, the appeal of the day is in the disjunction between the subjects’ ostensible blandness and how interesting they turn out to be – the alchemy that produces gold from apparently base (or at least dull) material.   In this respect, the day is a celebration of the interconnectedness of things – every subject, if looked at properly, yields a little insight into a larger issue.  The popularity of crinoline ladies on toilet roll covers is a hangover from their wider currency in the interwar years, which is itself a product of Regency nostalgia in that period  (hence, incidentally, the introduction of Quality Street chocolates in 1936).  While we’re talking about confectionary, Kinder eggs’ multi-lingual warnings turn out to give an insight into how businesses deal with international tensions.  The languages used include Arabic but not Hebrew; the Arab world won’t accept goods with that language on, while Israel won’t accept anything with Arabic.  As the former is the larger market, it makes more economic sense to include Arabic in the standard rubric, and print a special set of instructions for Israel.

Similarly, and maybe more significantly, the wooden pallet turns out to be, as its advocate Liam Shaw points out, the ‘single most important object in the global economy’.   Their internationally standardised design means that importers don’t have to wait for their goods to be unloaded, but can just take away the same number of pallets that they brought, which makes cross-border trade much more efficient.  Because they’re made of wood, and therefore potentially disease-carrying, they have to be subject to stringent health procedures, again dependent on a complex web of international agreements. The pallet stacks up as a symbol for the Boring conference itself – uninteresting in itself, it turns out to be one of the things that make international trade possible, ignored but crucial.

If pallets are a symbol of connectivity, Alex Baxevenis’ ‘Doormats: a Comparative Study’ (available to read here) dealt with a subject that is, in the most literal sense of the word, liminal.  It arose from an incident when he got off on the wrong floor at his block, only realising when he got to what he’d thought to be his flat, and realised that it had a doormat, which his flat doesn’t.   This inspired him to study the demographics and style of the doormats in his building.  Roughly fifty per cent of the flats had doormats; some were blank, some had geometric designs, some pictorial (mostly of rural subjects) and some text.  He found three cases of duplicate doormats, including two flats that had a Star Wars ‘Welcome to the Dark Side’ mat, one facing towards the flat, one facing away, which makes you wonder about the residents’ different views of the world, and themselves.  He ended with an exhortation that epitomised the philosophy of his talk, and of the conference itself:

‘Think of all the things and places that are so close to you but you know nothing about.

One day, on purpose, take a wrong turn. Get off at the wrong bus stop. Get off the lift at the wrong floor.

Look at what’s there, and it might inspire you.

Go forth, and explore the mundane!’