Character as Medium: Don Quixote, Hamlet, Citizen Kane, Superman and the Doctor.

(A paper given at the Conference 'Doctor Who:Walking in Eternity' at the University of Hertfordshire, 5/9/13.  I've added, in double brackets, a few points made in the Q and A following the panel.)

I should maybe start by saying that I feel a bit of charlatan at this conference.  I'm not particularly a Dr. Who obsessive; compared to many people here I know very little about the show.  I direct and write in the theatre, and teach dramatic writing, both for the screen and the stage.  I also worked for several years as a scriptreader for a West End producer, specifically reading musicals.

All these jobs have involved me dealing with the same question – why should a specific story be told in one medium rather than another - what makes a story cinematic, theatrical, novelistic?  Why, for instance, is the film  Psycho so much better than the original novel?  Why do certain plays adapt well as musicals, why do some fail? – Stephen Sondheim said of the show Do I Hear a Waltz?, which he wrote with Richard Rodgers, that it was doomed as a musical because it was a woman who couldn’t fall in love – who, metaphorically, couldn’t sing.

This led me to thinking about characters who belong very firmly to their medium, to the extent that they’ve become metonyms for them.  So, for instance, when we see an image of a man in black holding a skull, we read it not just as a symbol of Hamlet, not just of William Shakespeare, but of the theatre itself..  Similarly, a Spaniard tilting at windmills represents the novel, a millionaire dropping a snowglobe the cinema, and a colourfully-dressed alien the comic book.

And an eccentric time-traveller who occupies a police box becomes a symbol for television itself, for British television in particular, and the BBC in even more particular.

So… why do these characters occupy such an iconic position within their own medium?  I’d argue that in each case, the character shares central qualities with the medium itself.

With the two earliest examples, Don Quixote and Hamlet, I’m not really saying anything very profound here.  Both of these characters, created around the end of the sixteenth century, are presented as creatures of their media.  Don Quixote is explicitly identified as a creation of (and to some extent a warning against) the power of the printed page, someone who’s read too many romances of knight errantry, and lost his reason as a result.  He is, like the novel, a creature of intertextuality, owing his existence to earlier writings, and aware of his own status as a character in a book – one of the books that sent him mad was written by his own author, Miguel de Cervantes, and in the novel’s second volume, we frequently encounter people who’ve read the first.  Prose fiction, unlike the cinema and the stage, is a subjective medium, one we read to gain an individual’s perspective on the world, and Quixote’s defining feature is his ability to rewrite the world in his own terms, seeing an inn as a castle or, famously, windmills as giants.   Quixote even slightly resembles a slim volume - Andrew Piper identifies the 'vertebral' nature of books, and the skinny, angular knight has very little other than vertebrae.  ((I owe the Piper quote to an earlier speaker at the conference - Christopher Marlow of the University of Lincoln.)) Like the novel, Quixote has a very individual, subjective reading of the world, and one formed by earlier writings.

Hamlet is similarly direct in its self-reference, although unlike Quixote, he’s not happy about the fact.  In his most important soliloquy, the one that starts ‘Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I’ – he compares himself unfavourably to the Player King, a man who can react more authentically to fictional emotions than Hamlet does to real ones.  It’s an actor’s maxim that tragic protagonists aren’t aware of the fact that they’re in a tragedy – Hamlet is the great exception to this.  Hamlet knows perfectly well that he’s been cast in the role of the avenger in a revenge tragedy, and he’s acutely aware of his unsuitability for the role – ‘The time is out of joint; o cursed spite!/That ever I was born to set it right.’  Like his medium, Hamlet is caught in the tension between character – in his case, cautious, introspective, detached – and action.  Also, in a medium that’s defined by its ephemerality, Hamlet is preoccupied with mortality – ask most people to draw him, and they’ll come up with a young man dressed in black, either holding a dagger and contemplating his own death, or holding a skull and considering somebody else’s – a professional entertainer, as it happens.

Move on four hundred years, from Elsinore to Xanadu – the two buildings do rather resemble each other, especially in Laurence Olivier’s film - and we get to Citizen Kane.  In this case, the self-reference is established early on, but then isn’t referred to again.  Almost the first thing we see – after the ‘Rosebud’ prologue - is a cinema newsreel, showing the public face of Charles Foster Kane.  The action of the film is the way in which this representation is shown to be inadequate, through five different accounts of the character, sometimes conflicting, and none completely making sense without the other four, and the final, privileged view of the audience, which reveals the mystery set up in the opening moments.  Sometimes, the action in one account only makes sense because of what we’ve seen in another – for instance, the story of Kane’s declaration of principles, set up in Leland’s story and paid off in Susan’s.  In a medium where meaning is created by the relationship between shots, Kane is a creature of montage.

A little bit before Citizen Kane, in 1938, Jerry Seigel and Joe Schuster introduced Superman, the first iconic character of the comic book, in Action Comics issue 1.  He’s the final survivor of another planet, Krypton, who is saved from the planet’s destruction by his father, Jor-El, and sent to earth, where he’s adopted by an American couple, Jonathan and Martha Kent, who raise him as a human.  Like a lot of successful Americans, especially in the early twentieth century, he’s an immigrant, and leads something of a double life, dedicated equally to both of his cultures – he’s the Last Son of Krypton, but he fights for truth, justice and the American way.  He muses on his dual heritage in the comic Man of Steel Issue 6, written and drawn by the Canadian John Byrne:

‘I can quote from the great literature of Krypton’s ancient culture.  I can summon before my mind’s eye the great works of art.  I can speak the seven languages of krypton’s proudest epochs.  I can sing ballads of its heroes.  I know the name of Krypton’s god, and all the prayers that praised his name.  This is the last gift of Jor-El to his son.  And all of it is ultimately meaningless.  I may have been conceived out there in the endless depths of space, but I was born when the rocket landed on earth, in America.  I’ll cherish always the memories Jor-El and Lara gave me, but only as curious mementoes of a life that might have been.  Krypton bred me, but it was Earth that gave me all that I am, all that matters.  It was Krypton that made me Superman, but it is the Earth that makes me human.’

((It was pointed out that this speech can also be read as John Byrne's statement about his own attitude to the historical heritage of the character.))

He also, like many comic heroes, has a secret identity.  Jules Feiffer has written, in a passage used by Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill 2, that Superman’s secret identity is unusual among comic heroes in that with him, it’s the human identity that is the masquerade – Batman is really Bruce Wayne in a suit, Clark Kent is really Superman in a pair of glasses.  The comic strip as a medium was created by the intersection of two popular forms – newspaper strips and pulp magazines – and, more fundamentally, of words and pictures.  Superman, with his split identity and parentage, is the archetypal character of a medium based on duality.

Before I get to the Doctor, let me say right now that these aren’t the only characters for whom this has happened – for the cinema, I could have had Chaplin’s tramp (like early cinema, he was a mix of low social status with higher aspirations) or Mickey Mouse who, with his prominent ears,  even resembles a film camera. I could have done an all-female list with Anna Karenina, Hedda Gabler, Dorothy Gale, Wonder Woman and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but then I wouldn’t be here.  I could also have mentioned opera, in which case I’d be talking about Carmen.

And finally…  I realize that you’re all probably way ahead of me here.  I don’t think it’s controversial, especially in this company, to argue that the Doctor serves as a symbol for television in general, for British television in particular, and for the BBC itself. The trailer for the anniversary programme says ‘Fifty years ago, television changed forever…’ If you go into Broadcasting House as an audience member, practically the first thing you see is a gold Dalek.

The Doctor is a specifically Reithian hero – both an educator and an entertainer, created out of the tensions at the heart of the BBC, originally sold as an educational show, but then changed into something else through an combination of circumstances, notably the influence of producer Verity Lambert.  The programme currently serves as a flagship for the Corporation, as The Morecambe and Wise Show did in the ‘70s, headlining the programming on Christmas Day, showing off the stars of other series  - Catherine Tate, Peter Kay, John Simm – and serving as an index of television success – when Andy Millman in Extras wants to raise his profile, we see him playing a Doctor Who villain (albeit one who would have looked more at home in the Jon Pertwee era.

Like British television, he’s an eccentric, full of unexpected knowledge, and a time traveller, especially happy in the nineteenth century, prime period of BBC costume drama..  Since the revival, he’s become a survivor, like Superman, the last of his race, which I believe echoes the status of the programme itself, a last example of Reithian values, a survivor of the cable and satellite wars.  Also, since the reboot, he’s developed a certain affinity with writers, meeting Charles Dickens, Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare (the last was the only character to see through his fake ID) – which links with the programme’s identity as something ‘authored’, initially by Russell T. Davies and now by Stephen Moffat.

Because the Doctor constantly regenerates, surviving by change, the show’s central visual icon isn’t an actor but a machine, the TARDIS, which serves as a metaphor for the show itself, on t-shirts ((at this point I was able to refer to an audience member, Professor Matt Hills)), on book covers, or the current logo.  The nature of the TARDIS is established in the show’s opening episode, An Unearthly Child. After Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, the viewer’s representatives, enter the TARDIS and comment on its spatial oddities, William Hartnell looks directly at the camera (I’m not sure if he does it on purpose, it’s always hard to tell with him) and says ‘You don’t understand, so you make up excuses..’.  Then he turns to Ian and says:

‘You say you can’t fit an enormous building into one of your small sitting rooms.  But you’ve discovered television, haven’t you?  Then, by showing an enormous building on your television, you can do what seemed impossible, couldn’t you?”

Then he turns back to the camera and says ‘What matters now is not whether you understand but what happens to you.’

Notice by the way, that the Doctor refers to ‘discovering’ television, rather than ‘inventing’ it.  The medium is presented as part of the natural world, rather than a creation of technology.  ((One audience member suggested that this might have been a Hartnell misspeak, like the can/couldn't confusion of the next sentence.  It's possible, though it doesn't really affect the meaning of the line.))

The science may be questionable, but I think in that speech you can see that the equation is made explicit – the TARDIS is like a television.  The speech is a well-known one, and is often quoted by Whovians.  One thing I hadn’t realized until I started researching this paper is that it’s not in the pilot episode.  It was added by Anthony Coburn between the pilot and the version that was actually broadcast, possibly at the suggestion of Sydney Newman.  It’s often said that the key to the programme’s success can be seen in the differences between those two versions of the episode – in particular, Hartnell revised his performance, playing the character as more avuncular and less irascible.  It’s interesting that another aspect that made the difference was this first glimmering of the idea of the TARDIS as a symbol of television in general, and British television in particular – unpredictable, slightly old-fashioned and (all together now) bigger on the inside.

Cross Purposes

Bill Hicks used to do a routine about the irony of Christians wearing crosses - "Nice sentiment, but do you really think when Jesus comes back, he's really going to want to look at a cross?  Ow!  Maybe that's why he hasn't shown up yet.  (As Jesus)  'I'm not going, Dad.  No, they're still wearing crosses - they totally missed the point.  When they start wearing fishes, I might go back again.'."  (Bill Hicks, Love All the People, p. xi).

As you'd expect, Hicks had done his research; early Christianity used a fish as its - if you like - logo. The rise of the crucifix coincides roughly with the church's adoption by Imperial Rome, and its move from underground to establishment status.  We're so used to the church identifying itself by a means of execution that we forget how odd it is - if Jesus had been hanged, would priests wear a little gallows round their necks?

Of course, a cross is a much more powerful icon than a gallows - the intersection of horizontal and vertical lines symbolises the coincidence of the human and divine that is, to Christians, the significance of Jesus, the 'word made flesh'.  Christianity doesn't have a premium on this idea - according to the film-maker and ethnographer Maya Deren, the poteau-mitan, a vertical pole at the centre of a voodoo temple, carries the same symbolism:

'The sign of the cross appears everywhere, whenever communications of traffic between the worlds is to be indicated.  The vertical dimension comprehends both the abyss below and the heavens above the earth, the dimension of infinity; the horizontal comprehends all men, all space and matter.'  (The Voodoo Gods, p.43)

A crucifix isn't simply a cross, though - it has the additional element of a human body.  Part of the image's power comes from the contrast between the precise right angles of the cross and the messy curvature of the tortured, semi-naked figure.  (It would be disingenuous to deny that there's also a sexual element - Western Art only allows the male body to be celebrated in the contexts of suffering and war.)

The crucifix epitomises one of the central tensions of human life - between the right angles of the ideal, and the curvature of the organic.  The mathematician Piet Hein wrote that 'In the whole pattern of civilisation there have been two tendencies, one towards straight lines and rectangular patterns and one towards circular lines.'  (quoted in Alex Bellos, Alex's Adventures in Numberland,  p. 209).  Hein devised a mathematical figure - the superellipse - that was designed to satisfy both tendencies.  It was adopted as the model for Danish road layout.

You see this tension in surprising places; it's the basis for most modern dance music, which balances electronic beats with very human, soul-based vocals - the template was laid down by the collaborations between Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer.  Going back a bit further, Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller made history when they added strings to the Drifters' 'There Goes My Baby' - Jimmy Webb even used quasi-religious language to describe it:  'Rock 'n' roll and the string ensemble are not antithetical after all.  To the contrary, the rough, self-taught textures of rock vocalists are ineffably complemented by the silken tones of the orchestra and vice versa.'  (quoted in Ken Everson, Always Magic in the Air, p. 60, my italics).

Most methods of execution - hanging, stoning, beheading, the electric chair - carry a deliberate aspect of physical humiliation.  Only crucifixion and the firing squad allow a degree of dignity - that other most pictorialised of martyrs, St. Sebastian, died by an early version of the latter.  It's sobering to consider that Pontius Pilate may have helped ensure Christianity's survival when he condemned its prophet to a painful, but aesthetically pleasing, form of death.

Psycho Ditto, or Norman, Master Bates.

In the 'fifties, there was a tiny cinematic subgenre of shot-for-shot remakes.  Mostly British, and mostly colour versions of earlier black-and-white films, like The Thirty-Nine Steps (1959) or The Prisoner of Zenda (1952), they were based on the idea that, in cinema, nothing changed except technology, and that all that needed to be updated in a new version was the film stock.  The only shot-for-shot version of a colour film that I know of, Storm Over the Nile (1955), a remake of The Four Feathers (1939), actually reuses some footage from the earlier film, including one entire performance - rather improbably, it's the Scottish actor John Laurie, playing a villainous Arab.

The subgenre (even that seems like too big a word) made an unexpected return in 1998, with Gus van Sant's Psycho.  At the time of its release, the film was viewed as either a sign of Hollywood's creative bankruptcy - William Goldman refers to it as a 'vomitous carbon' - or, more charitably,  as a post-modern artefact, like Douglas Gordon's gallery installation  24 Hour Psycho, which slows the film down to roughly two frames a second.

Last week, I went to Psycho vs. Psycho, a simultaneous screening of the two films at the Leicester Square Theatre; Hitchcock's on the large screen, van Sant's on the four television screens dotted around the auditorium.  Sadly, the nature of human perception meant that the organisers could only play the soundtrack from the Hitchcock film - though you could sometimes lipread van Sant's actors, saying the same lines a moment after their equivalents.

The most obvious thing you notice, watching the films like this, is that (like most of the films mentioned above) it's not quite shot-for-shot - van Sant sometimes reverses the composition, creating a mirror image of Hitchcock's screen, and makes a few small cuts and additions - notably, having Norman Bates (in this case, Vince Vaughn) masturbate to orgasm as he watches Marion undress, a tacky stating of the obvious that, if it didn't seem anatomically inaccurate, I'd describe as on-the-nose.

There are jokes - when Marion first approaches the Bates Motel, we see a sign that describes it as 'Newly refurbished', and Van Sant dutifully reproduces Hitchcock's cameo appearance, standing in the street in conversation with an oddly familiar rotund figure.  At other times, the replication seems downright OCD - cars have the same numberplates, the same signatures are visible in the register of the Bates Motel.  The film's determination not to cut the apron strings even explains some of the odder casting decisions - I wondered why Julianne Moore is wasted in the role of Marion's sister, rather than playing the woman herself, but then considered how much nerve van Sant would have needed, in a Hitchcock remake/homage/copy, to make his leading lady a redhead.

It's worth remembering that van Sant has form in this department - most people who know My Own Private Idaho (1992) can tell you that it's a modern retelling of the Hal/Falstaff story from Shakespeare's Henry IV plays - another story of inappropriate parental influence - but it's less commonly mentioned that several shots are straight lifts from Chimes at Midnight (1965), Orson Welles' film of the same plays.  (Richard Eyre did the same thing in his recent television version of the plays - Orson still walks through modern culture like a ghost.)  Though the method is similar, the effect is completely different - in My Own Private Idaho, the borrowings are an in-joke, only noticed by Welles buffs like me; in Psycho, they're part of the meaning of the film.

So why does Psycho, in particular, inspire this kind of conceptual game?  I think it's to do with the paradox of the film - it's a story based on surprise, that precisely because of its success, hasn't surprised anyone for decades.

More than any other film before Jaws, Psycho bases its appeal on a skilful manipulation of the audience, and of storytelling time.  Famously, it was one of the first films to which audiences weren't admitted after the start, in defiance of the standard practice (which I remember continuing as recently as the late '70s) whereby films were often shown in constant rotation, with audience members coming in when they liked and leaving when then that moment came round again - the phrase 'This is where we came in' is still stuck in the language, even though the practice to which it refers is long gone.

For the last half-century or so, it's been almost impossible to watch the film without feeling that this is exactly where we came in - we know the central twist, and who's going to die when - for most of us, the first viewing is already a return.  Both 24 Hour Psycho and the van Sant film play with this paradox - the former takes a film timed like a stopwatch and slows it down, like a slow-motion replay of a particularly brilliant sporting play, while the latter is a film that Norman Bates might have directed, a film that's obsessed with its ancestry, a child all dressed up in mummy's ill-fitting clothes.

Robert Wilson's 'Walking' (and so am I).

'Walking' is one of those events that it's difficult to describe without sounding pretentious, somewhere in the terrain between live art and actor-less theatre.  At its most basic, it's a three-mile, very slow, walk round some achingly beautiful North Norfolk scenery.  The leisurely pace is part of the point, encouraging a greater-than-usual contemplation.  As such, it's part of what might be called 'the new slowness', a trend that includes such phenomena as the Clock of the Long Now, Jem Finer's LongPlayer and the Slow Food movement.

Walkers are guided by yellow-jacketed stewards called 'angels', who help set the snail's pace and occasionally whisper you instructions.  At intervals, the walk takes you through massive installations - at the start, a wooden structure surrounding a pit, where an angel escorts you to a darkened room, saying that 'The way will present itself.', which turns out to be New Age-speak for a door opening.

Walkers set off at intervals of a minute and half, and are instructed to keep an even distance form the person in front, so that the effect is of a steady, distant stream of people, extending into the distance like figures from a guide to perspective.  The characteristic flatness of Norfolk is part of the experience, extending the horizon in all directions.  (A landscape-painter friend of mine once told me that in Norfolk, you could see the curvature of the earth.)  Though you have no direct contact with any of the other walkers, you develop a very intense relationship with the retreating back of the person ahead - in my case, a young man with a check shirt and curly hair.

About halfway, there's a break where you sit (by yourself) and get an apple and some water.  This also serves as an opportunity for the angels to re-establish the spacing between the walkers - as with buses, there's an inevitable bunching effect as faster walkers catch up with slower.

The second half takes you through a pine forest, and for large stretches you can't see anyone either ahead or behind,  like a character in a fairy tale, or A Midsummer Night's Dream.  In my case, this was accompanied by a slight shower of rain, which gave me my Spalding Gray Perfect Moment as I came out of the forest and over a sand dune just as the rain stopped, with the sea in blinding sunlight.  In the far distance, I could see the final installation, a teepee-like structure, recognisable from the event's publicity.

At this point, it was almost impossible not to start thinking in mythical terms - the teepee, and the long walk towards it, inevitably conjured up ideas of a rite of passage, or adulthood ceremony.    By this stage, the walker's consciousness is so altered that everything seems like a symbol.  Even the walk back to the minibus, which goes through a naturist beach (unintentionally, I assume)  seems somehow appropriate, like a return to Eden.  It's quite a large beach, so the naturists don't get too disturbed - I didn't actually realise what was going on until I noticed a man getting stripped for a swim, and not stopping once he got to his costume.

I blagged a lift back to Norwich, and thence to London, where I've currently got a show on at the White Bear Theatre.  Which sort of brings me to the point of this post.  As a theatregoer, I'm a sucker for anything site-specific, installation-based, or immersive, even though it's completely different from what I do myself - script-based work, mostly in theatres, and often (though not in this case) written by dead people.  Sometimes, at events like Devoted and Disgruntled, surrounded by improvisers, devisers, live artists and physical theatre-makers, I feel like an oddity, the White Man in Hammersmith Palais.

What does this prove?  Nothing much.  In adolescence, we often define ourselves by our tastes - Alan Moore has written that a lot of his fans just like being the sort of person who reads Alan Moore comics.   I once had a student who said, of a Shakespeare film, 'I didn't like it, because it's not how I would have done it.', apparently with no sense that she was saying anything odd.    In later life, most of us realise that this is a mug's game.  After all, how sad would it be only to like the sort of things you like?

South Bank Vignette

I've always believed that getting into conversations with strangers is one of life's great pleasures.  It's a view I inherited from my late father who, though naturally a very shy man, would always try to engage in some way with everyone he met.  It had some odd lasting consequences - he liked to eat avocados with rum and brown sugar, the result of a recommendation from a bus conductor he once got chatting with.  Among his effects we found scribbled notes from many chance encounters, things like a recipe for the illicit Irish drink pocheen, written on the back of a beermat.

A few days ago, I was walking back from the National Theatre after a rather disappointing outdoor show that had - a point in its favour - a spectacular firework display as its climax.  As I headed towards the station, I was accosted by a man in his late fifties, with a goatee, a raincoat and a half-drunk can of beer.  His accent suggested a Northern upbringing, maybe Liverpool.  He carried two large plastic bags, and might have been homeless.

He asked me what he'd missed with the fireworks.  I mentioned that it was part of a show, and that he could see it again if he was there at the same time the next day.

'I won't be here tomorrow.  I only just got back from Holland.'

He said that his name was Kinder, and offered a hand.  I told him my name, and he said that he was also a David, and that we were taking over the world.  We agreed that the Prime Minister was letting the side down, but that otherwise David was a fine name.  I mentioned that it was the Hebrew for 'beloved', which it turned out he already knew.  He translated his full name - David Walter Kinder - as a beloved conquering child.  I said that mine breaks down as a curly-haired beloved owner of a cottage.

Once we'd bonded over our names, he told me his big idea - that for one day a year, everybody should be called David Walter Kinder.

"Imagine you meet someone and say 'My name's David Walter Kinder' and he says 'So's mine'.  Well, you wouldn't be able to do that person any harm, would you?  Try to shoot someone with your name, you can't do it; it'd be 'Let's have some cheese on toast.'.  Just for one day a year, everybody's David Walter Kinder.'

He followed this up with a second idea - that everyone should at birth have a mirror implanted next to their left eye. The thinking is similar  - you wouldn't be able to hurt someone if you could see yourself in their eyes.  He told me I should write a play based on this image - 'You're the brainbox, you're the one with the connections.'

I said - truthfully - that it had been inspiring to talk to him - and started walking towards the station.  He mimed throwing a ball and I caught it.  He said 'Your name's David Walter Kinder - shout it out.' .  And I did.

When I got home I googled his name and couldn't find anything.  (There's a Dr. David Kinder who slightly resembled him at an American university, which led me briefly to construct an elaborate fantasy of a brilliant career ruined by alcohol.)  I'll almost certainly never meet the man again, but he's given me two images that'll stay with me till I die.  It's unlikely that I'll ever write the play, but he deserves memorialising, so I hope this blog post will do.

'Gatz' at the Noel Coward Theatre

If you're the kind of person who reads blogs like this one (and if you're not, come on in), you've probably already heard about Gatz- the Elevator Repair Service's stage 'adaptation' - in this context, the word is slightly misleading - of The Great Gatsby, in which every word of the original novel is read.  It lasts around eight hours, including two intervals and a dinner break, so about six hours stage time, and is currently at the Noel Coward Theatre, after immense success in the States.

The show starts in an unspecified shabby office, apparently a few years ago, judging by the outdated computers and oversized mobile phones.  A man comes, discovers that his computer doesn't work, so he picks up a copy of the novel and starts to read it.  For a while we just hear his voice, as our ears adjust to hearing the rhythms of written prose spoken aloud (this is the hardest part of the show - if you can get through this, you'll probably have a good time).  Gradually, other characters start to appear, represented by the other workers in the office, so that, for instance, the man who comes to repair the computer becomes Wilson, the auto-mechanic.   On one level, it's a show about the experience of reading a novel, the way in which we cast it with locations and people from our own lives.

As the piece goes on, it gradually gets more 'staged', with set-pieces including a beautifully claustrophobic party at the flat rented by Tom Buchanan for his extra-marital affairs, and a remarkable coup de theatre towards the end (I won't say in case you're going to see it).   It's an amazing piece of story-telling - after a while, you get attuned to the style, as if the language were being placed under a microscope, so that it becomes hard at the intervals to readjust to normal speech.  While the standing ovation at the end did seem a bit obligatory, I joined it without demur  - apart from anything else,  it was quite nice to get up.

I was a few seats down from a friend who didn't enjoy it as much as I did.  She said - and I don't really disagree - that the office setting was under-realised (I doubt that even the cast could have told us what they actually did there) and might have been used more wittily, and that some of the peak moments, like the scene where Gatsby produces his shirts (quoted by William Goldman as a demonstration of the concept of subtext), went for too little.

So why didn't these things bother me?  I generally believe that an adaptation should be judged as an independent work of art, without reference to its original - so that, say, David Edgar's Nicholas Nickleby is a great play, and would be even if there were no novel of the same name.  Gatz is an unusual case - an adaptation which is always reminding us of its status as such, and of its own inadequacies.  That is should work is surprising, and I think says something about the original.

One reason why The Great Gatsby has never been successfully adapted for the screen (and does anyone really believe that Leonardo di Caprio will be any more three-dimensional than Alan Ladd or Robert Redford?) is that the protagonist is almost defined by his nebulousness; Fitzgerald holds off his first appearance for about a quarter of the novel, gives us hardly any physical description, and is constantly praising his personal qualities in phrases that are almost impossible to visualise:

'He smiled understandingly - more than understandingly.  It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.  It faced - or seemed to face - the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour.  It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey'

(The Great Gatsby, p.54)

At which point, it's not difficult to imagine Leo di Caprio throwing the book across the room and wondering if it isn't too late to find a less demanding way of supporting a lifestyle.  Even the author seems unsure of the accuracy of his own description; that 'or seemed to face' adds a note of self-sabotage, as if he himself doesn't understand the character.

This nebulousness is appropriate; Gatsby is a man of unclear past, probably criminal connections, and from a lower social class than he first appears.  (Gatsby is an unusual American novel in that it deals with the reality of class, as well as, almost subliminally, with race - Gatsby's real name, which gives this adaptation its title, contains a slight suggestion that he might be Jewish.)  It's quite telling that the novel is called The Great Gatsby, a phrase that never appears in it - it suggests a stage magician, conjuring up a new life.  In this respect, Gatsby is an American archetype, the labyrinth with nothing in its centre, ancestor to both Charles Foster Kane and Don Draper.

This, for me, is why the show worked so well - the style of adaptation (and I can't imagine it being appropriate for any other novel - some of Kafka, maybe)  accepts the central feature of the novel - its unknowability.  Given that it's impossible to visualise Gatsby, a balding bloke in a tatty office will do as well as anything.    This adaptation doesn't attempt to give a full representation of the character or milieu - it gives you just enough, and lets you do the rest of the work.  Gatz belongs to a relatively small category of artwork - a piece where the (inevitable) failure of the enterprise is part of the point.

Offhand I can think of only a few other examples of this phenomenon - the film A Cock and Bull Story, based on the 'essentially unfilmable' (IMDB) Tristram Shandy, art speigelman's Maus, where the subject matter is less the Holocaust than speigelman's own efforts to understand it (and where the mouse faces - speigelman himself called them 'masks' - give a Gatsby-like nebulousness to the characters), most of the work of the late Ken Campbell.  Sometimes, nothing succeeds like failure.

Globe to Globe - Weeks 3 and 4.

Got a bit behind, haven't I?  Blame my students...

The Dhaka Theatre's Bangla Tempest was another folk-theatre reading, with much use of music (Ariel played by a singer) and the production book-ended by scenes of ships, represented by models on the fore-arms of the ensemble.  The most interesting moment came at the end , with Prospero giving the island to Caliban, as the latter moved out of the tortured physicality he'd held throughout the show.   This struck me as another of those scenes that Shakespeare didn't write but should have, like the assassination at the beginning of Richard II, and reminded me of the similar redemption that Alan Moore gives (in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) to Caliban's literary descendent, the Frankenstein monster.

Teatr im. Kochanowskiego's Polish Macbeth was, frankly, a bit of a dud, like a conservative theatre-goer's idea of what all modern-dress productions are like.  The general aesthetic was Eurotrash gangland - lots of white suits, drag-queen witches, and a Tarantino-easque use of music, including 'I Will Survive' (which, weirdly, also turned up in the German Timon of Athens) and Nancy Sinatra's 'Bang Bang' (which is also in Kill Bill; as I occasionally tell my students, there comes a point where intertextuality just becomes copying).    The high point was a very drunken post-show party, with drag queens passing vodka shots into the audience (actually water, which made me feel better about not getting any), and Duncan doing a striptease to 'Billie Jean'; the low point was a lengthy onstage rape of Lady Macduff - apart from anything else, she's such a minor character that it doesn't serve any dramatic purpose.

I only saw the first half of the National Theatre of Albania's Henry VI: Part 2, which struck me as a very old-fashioned production, with heavy, undifferentiated costumes and leaden pacing.  Because of this, I didn't bother with the Macedonian Part 3, of which I've since heard nothing but good.

The Compania Nacional de Teatro's Mexican Henry IV: Part 1 and Elkafka Espacio Teatral's Argentine Part 2 were on the day that had the worst weather of the season so far; it was actually hailing during the former.  Despite that, I enjoyed the production a lot more - the Latin machismo suits the play.  This was emphasised by the set, with two cat-walks running in a v-shape into the audience, and down which the characters would run for stand-offs (of which the play has an amazing number).  David Calderon, playing Hotspur, deserves a special mention in dispatches; at one point, he put his foot through one of the catwalks while running offstage, and tore a flap of skin off his leg - he not only reacted in character, but came on in the next scene as Francis without missing a beat.

This was one of the first productions to use any kind of historical costume, a sort of RSC-timeless that mixed medieval and modern.  The Argentine company went in for a sort of cartoon-ish modern dress - justices in wigs and bowlers, Hal blazered like a renegade member of the Bullingdon club, and Rumour, the prologue, who's described as wearing 'a garment painted with tongues' in a Rolling Stones tee-shirt.  (I played the same part at school 35 years ago, and wore the same design.)  When the crowds at Hal's coronation came on waving Jubilee-esque Union Jacks, I did start to wonder if this was intended as an Argentine parody of Englishness - maybe even a comment on the bald men's fight over a comb that was the Falklands War?  Just a thought.

The National Academic Theatre's Armenian King John (described by Dominic Dromgoole as 'a challenge to our marketing department') didn't make that much impression on me, though it had a nifty set, made up of a variety of suitcases and packing cases, which were stacked in various combinations, including John's throne, and the height from which the boy Arthur falls to his death.

The Belarus Free Theatre's King Lear was preceded by the sight of Tom Stoppard in the audience, and an usher warning us that it would contain 'nudity, whipping, water and eggs'.  I thought it was absolutely brilliant - constantly surprising, but never gratuitous.

The tone was set early on as Goneril and Regan sang their rehearsed declarations of love for their father, like a sort of regal karaoke, and were then rewarded with handfuls of earth symbolising their territories, that they gathered in their skirts.  This was a production that constantly returned to the physical realities - Edmund humiliatingly holding a commode for his wheelchair-using father, Edgar, as Poor Tom smearing his face with his own shit (peanut butter, I think), Kent spitting in Oswald's face.

The storm itself was stunning - the cast manipulated a large blue tarpaulin like waves, enveloping Lear as he raged amid the water.  The naked Poor Tom emerged from under the same tarpaulin, causing Lear to tear off his own clothes, and making a reluctant Kent and Fool follow suit.  Like Peter Brook, the company refused to sentimentalise the morality, playing Lear's knights as rowdy football hooligans, and Edmund as the ignored bastard son, Gloucester at one point threatening him with his belt.  

In case you're wondering about the eggs, they appeared in a bird's nest, which the mad Lear wore on his head, carefully placing them at the front of the stage, then stomping on them on 'Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!'.  Strangely, the best other production of this play I've seen - Adrian Noble's for the RSC in 1982 - also featured raw eggs, one being broken and swallowed by Tony Sher as the Fool.  Maybe something to do with the fragility of social institutions?

The Marjanishivili Theatre's Georgian As You Like It was a delight, performed as if by an early 20th century group of strolling players, Chekhov meets Vincent Crummles.  If Lear was an earthy production, this was an airy one - Orlando released his love-notes on balloons,  Jacques (here played as a cross-dressing lesbian, with an emo-kid's haircut) was caught up in a storm of blown leaves.  She also played the best 'All the World's a Stage' speech I've ever seen, relating it to the offstage company and their implied stories - Audrey was the company prompter, Silvius and Phoebe having an illicit affair.  Those of you who know me personally will know that I've got a romantic streak a mile wide, so this production, with its a capella 'love at first sight' theme was right up my street.

(Not everybody's, though - I was discussing this show the next day with the Canadian playwright Jason Sherman, who's a lot less keen on this season than I am.  I asked if he'd enjoyed it, and he said 'Not as much as they did.'  Honesty also compels me to add that this show made no concessions at all to being in the Globe - anyone sitting at the sides would have had a terrible experience.)