Running Wild

Film buffs sometimes like to discuss the original casting suggested for classic films - George Raft as Sam Spade, Tom Selleck as Indiana Jones, half of Hollywood as Scarlett O'Hara. As with married couples who talk about how they nearly never met, the effect, paradoxically, is to make the actual outcome feel even more inevitable, as if the earlier suggestions were destiny's first drafts. The most famous example - Ronald Reagan as Rick Blaine in Casablanca - is actually an urban legend, invented by a Warner Brothers press agent, but it illustrates the principle well; an Edenic piece of casting, threatened by the serpent of a notoriously humdrum actor (and given an additional irony by his later career - Casablanca translates literally as 'white house').

Like Casblanca, Some Like It Hot is a film that's literally unimaginable with different casting, without Jack Lemmon's mad-aunt drag performance, Tony Curtis' Cary Grant impression (perfected during the war, when Curtis was stuck on a submarine where the only film was Gunga Din, shown over and over again) or, of course, Marilyn Monroe. It's actually thanks to Monroe's star power that we have the perfect casting of the male leads. Before she got involved, the studio wanted bigger names - Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Danny Kaye or Frank Sinatra. (One has to feel sorry for any agent given the job of asking Sinatra to wear a dress.)

One oddity about Monroe's performance is that it must be the only film in which she plays a Pole - Sugar Kane is actually Kowalcyzk, as she tells us in her first dialogue scene. In fact, one of the surprising things about the film is quite how multi-ethnic it is; the gangsters are clearly Italian, the cop Mulligan is Irish (and played by the gangster film veteran Pat O'Brien), Osgood the millionaire is an east coast WASP, Poliakoff the agent is Jewish. So, possibly, is Joe, the Tony Curtis character - he certainly speaks a bit of Yiddish, referring to himself, quite accurately, as a 'no-goodnik'. (Of course, the actor who played him was Jewish, but that doesn't prove anything - the same is true of Butch Cassidy, Sonny Corleone and Harry Potter.).

This understated multi-culturalism (and yes alright, it's a very white multi-culti; there is one black character - a railway porter - but it's very easy to miss him) is one reason why it's such a verbally lively film - everyone speaks sharp, witty dialogue, but all in slightly different idioms. It's been argued that part of the film's appeal lies in its sexual inclusiveness - the belief that even two skirt-chasing no-goodniks can become better people by wearing dresses. In a similar way, it seems to suggest that vitality (that heat that some of us like) comes from a mix of national energies.

In this, we have one of the great strengths of the American film, especially in its peak talking period - roughly, the half century between The Jazz Singer and Star Wars. Hollywood was built by emigres, mostly from Eastern Europe, and gained its cultural ascendancy partly because, more than anywhere else, it epitomised the values of the melting pot. Everyone brings something different to the party, and no one ethnicity, or gender, is sufficient by itself. Like the man said, nobody's perfect.

See You Later, Alligator?

When I was growing up, histories of rock 'n' roll always started with (We're Gonna) 'Rock Around the Clock', by Bill Haley and his Comets, in the same way that accounts of the postwar British theatre always began with 'Look Back in Anger'. In both cases, the master narrative has been revised backwards, so that theatre historians now acknowledge the importance of Rattigan, Ackland and (lately) Emlyn Williams, and the default option for first rock 'n' roll record is now either Presley's 'That's Alright, Mama' or, if you want to be a real smartarse, 'Rocket 88', by Jackie Brenston and the Rhythm Cats (known to his friends, if he had any, as Ike Turner).

The analogy isn't exact - while 'Look Back in Anger' is still acknowledged, sometimes reluctantly, as a milestone, Bill Haley has disappeared from history, as surely as Paul Whiteman from histories of jazz. The teenagers I work with haven't heard of him, even his greatest hits cd refers to him, awkwardly, as 'the man who helped to bring rock 'n' roll into the mainstream', as qualified a compliment as I've heard since the time my father referred to Goering as the most likeable of the major Nazis.

'Rock Around the Clock' was recorded in two hurried takes on April 12 1954, as a b-side to 'Thirteen Women', a very strange song about the upside of a nuclear war (the song's narrator finds himself the last man alive, together with... well, you get the idea). It was a cover version, recorded by a 29 year-old hillbilly singer, already a little bit paunchy, with a spitcurl that failed to disguise a receding hairline. Like the samplers of a generation later, the band borrowed bits and pieces of other recordings - Haley sung the verse to the tune of Hank Williams' 'Move It On Over' while guitarist Danny Cedrone recycled his solo from 'Rock the Joint', recorded two years earlier.

The song became iconic when it was used over the opening credits of the juvenile delinquent film 'The Blackboard Jungle', and became the first smash hit of the rock 'n' roll era. It's often the case that the first major success of a new form comes with an example that's diluted or otherwise weakened - the same thing happened a quarter century later, when the first major hip-hop hit, Rapper's Delight', came not from the stars of the genre - Kool Herc or Afrika Bambaataa - but from a studio concoction called the Sugarhill Gang.

Like the Sugarhills, Haley saw his star fade quickly - in his case, eclipsed by the younger, more charismatic Elvis Presley. He carried on touring the old hits, becoming, in effect, his own tribute act, especially in Britain, where the aging teds welcomed him as the king of their personal Brigadoon. I remember him occasionally turning up on television in the 'seventies, still looking much the same - one fortunate side-effect of not being much of a sex symbol in the first place is that he never had a Presley-like decline - and being treated as one would an elderly, distant ancestor.

Haley died in 1981, four years after Presley, and too early to witness his Trotsky-like disappearance from history. It's probably just as well - after being hailed as the Messiah, it would be hard to be told that you're not even John the Baptist.

Keeping the cafe open.

Malcolm Muggeridge once described national culture as resembling a big, busy cafe. Most of the time, there are a number of different conversations going on at different tables, people travel between them, sometimes groups join together, every now and then we all focus on the same thing, a fight or singer in the corner. The important things are to keep the conversations going, and to maintain the connections between them.

It's a useful image, and especially relevant when you're discussing things like subsidy, and the extent to which one part of the cafe depends on another. I've been reminded of it sometimes by social media - the way that Facebook users will suddenly agree as one to replace their photos with doppelgangers or cartoon characters - but the first time I've ever seen the metaphor made flesh was last weekend, at Devoted and Disgruntled 6.

D and D, as the cool kids call it, is an annual event, and one that it's quite hard to put a name to - 'forum', 'talking shop'. 'Agenda-free conference' comes closest, but that doesn't really catch it. Basically, it's a two-day gathering for theatre folk (the title refers to how most of us feel about our chosen medium) , organised by Improbable Theatre, and run according to the principles of Open Space Technology.

This was the brainchild of an American named Harrison Owen, who kept noticing that every time he went to a conference, all the best discussions took place in the coffee breaks. So, turning background into foreground, he tried to find a way of making the coffee breaks into the main event.

The principles of OST are very simple - at the start of first day, anyone can get up and propose a session on anything at all. At D&D, these range from the general (loads of sessions about funding) to the particular ('I'm writing a play about archives. Can anybody help?'), from the theoretical ('Training Directors. Is it possible?') to the practical ('I'm a producer. Does anyone have any shows for me?'), from the serious ('How can we use theatre to make the world a better place?') to the trivial ('My friend Sally is hot and brilliant and really wants a boyfriend.'). One effect of this is that no one can complain that they didn't get what they came for - if no one's talking about your pet subject, call a session yourself.

Sessions are timetabled, about twenty at a time, and assigned spaces; people choose which ones they want to attend and go for it. There are four principles:

Whenever it starts is the right time.

Whoever arrives are the right people.

Whatever happens is the only thing that could happen.

When it's over, it's over.

Added to this is the 'Law of Two Feet', or more inclusively, 'Law of Mobility'. If you're in a session, and feel that you're neither contributing nor learning, you just get up and go elsewhere. it's not ill-mannered to those you leave, it's a gift, taking away a millstone. Some people go from session to session, like bumblebees, some remain as beautiful still centres, like butterflies. If you call a session, it's your responsibility to get it written up - at the end of the weekend, everyone's given a phonebook-sized volume of the 120-odd conversations that have taken place.

There are also two other OST principles; free coffee (or tea, or juice) all day and - this is maybe the most important - no name badges. In other words, no one schmoozes.

So... over two and a half days, I convened a session on failure (it was, ironically enough, very successful), heard a lengthy and fascinating account of the Burning Man Festival, helped two people with their ideas for shows, had profound discussions about theatre's relationship with both science and religion (these sessions were at the same time, so I bumblebeed between them), saw a Philip K. Dick short story performed as a solo show with matches, made some new friends, rediscovered some old ones and (in a session called 'Tell me something I don't know'), found out about the subculture of people who walk around London with wineglasses on a Saturday night, trying to find parties that they can pretend to be locked out of.

By the Sunday evening, my head was so full that I found myself introducing two people, having completely forgotten that one had introduced me to the other the previous day. I'm wary of the word 'mind-blowing' but, if I'm honest, my mind was thoroughly blown.

Oh, and in case you've been wondering, Sally didn't find a boyfriend, but, according to her write-up, had some interesting conversations and 'a most excellent way to spend an hour and a half'. Hey, I didn't say we could solve everything.

The Turing Test

Bletchley is an unremarkable place; so much so that, if it hadn't been chosen to house the wartime codebreakers, it'd be best known as a suburb of Milton Keynes. Actually, its nondescript nature was one of the reasons they were there. (Another was that it's roughly halfway between Oxford and Cambridge - a lot were mathematics dons). Part of the beauty of the story is the disjunction between the location and what was achieved there. Winston Churchill - who, let's face it, was in a good position to judge - said that the work done at Bletchley Park, and especially the cracking of the Enigma code, probably took two years off the war.

I have two favourite Bletchley Park stories. One was of a rounders match played between the British codebreakers and the Americans who'd joined them after Pearl Harbour. Rules were agreed, the game was played, and at the end, both sides thought they'd won. This seems to me to say something quite profound about this country's relationship with the United States.

The other concerns Alan Turing, the most brilliant of them all, who committed suicide in 1954, two years after he'd been arrested for homosexuality - as the film director Michael Powell said, Britain doesn't treat its heroes very well. A codebreaker interviewed years after the war observed that talking to Turing made him realise the difference between intelligence and genius. Talking to a very intelligent person, you hear ideas that you (possibly) could have come up with yourself, if you'd only had the time. Talking to a genius, like Turing, you hear ideas that you know you never would have had in a million years.

Since hearing that, I've used it as a personal shorthand for a genuinely astonishing idea - one that I know I could never have come up with myself. I'm not a scientist, so my Turing moments are mostly to do with writing - lines, ideas or images that come from a place I've never been, and never will. Offhand, I can think of a few; the description of the fog at the start of Bleak House, the last line of Some Like It Hot (written, according to I.A.L. Diamond, at the end of an exceptionally heavy day, and intended as a placeholder until they could come up with something better), and Smokey Robinson's realisation that, in large enough quantities, the salt water of tears can leave a track.

Inevitably enough, the writer who's passed my personal Turing test most often has been William Shakespeare, the person for whom, according to Jonathan Bate, the concept of genius was invented. His very familiarity sometimes makes this hard to spot- so many of his phrases are stuck in the language that we forget how genuinely bizarre they are. A trivial example will do; Cleopatra's 'my salad days, when I was green in judgement'. How many of us, if we'd never heard it before, can honestly say that we would have come up a woman who describes her youth by comparing herself to a lettuce?

Up On the Roof

Open House Weekend is for me what the end of the Season is for Tatler-readers; the last gasp of summer, the year's final outdoor event, before we all head back to our burrows and turn into hobbits. Looked at another way, it's a London-wide party, a housewarming when we all get to nose around the hidden rooms before the people who work there take them back. On the weekend, and for a few days afterwards, I always catch myself looking at the city with new eyes, temporarily transformed into an architectural trainspotter.

My highlight this year was the Kensington Roof Gardens, built in 1936 by Ralph Hancock above what used to be the Derry and Toms department store. It was a bit of an icon of my childhood - whenever my grandmother came to London, part of her routine was a cream tea atop D and T. The roof garden survives as a private members' club, run by Virgin, which means that the weekend was one of the few opportunities I'd have to visit without adding to the wealth of Richard Branson.

The garden is seven storeys up, and hosts a cafe and champagne bar of almost parodic luxury -the toilets have a tropical fish tank between the Ladies and Gents, the first time I've seen that outside a film. The garden itself has three sections - one designed to resemble an English woodland, including a lake with four flamingoes (the younger pair are called Splosh and Pecks), one mock-Elizabethan and formal, and one Spanish, based on the Alhambra in Granada. This, with its palm trees, quasi-Moorish architecture and pink walls, is the first thing that you see on coming out of the lift, and I have to admit that my immediate reaction was to burst out laughing. The audacity of building a pseudo-Mediterranean garden above a department store in soggy, crowded London is so extreme - idiotic in some ways, admirable in others - that the only reasonable response is to giggle.

A fellow visitor said 'It's like Portmerion.', and that's not a bad analogy - if you can build an Italian village in North Wales, why not a Spanish garden above West London? Both places are a bit like three-dimensional scrapbooks, full of oddments of statuary, bit and pieces that their architects had picked up abroad and needed a home for. They're eclectic, made up of ideas from elsewhere, and necessarily incomplete, always allowing for another item.

This magpie impulse isn't quite the same as the colonialist urge of a Lord Elgin or William Randolph Hearst, looting the art treasures of the world, or the Las Vegas desire to reproduce everything bigger and better. It's a more modest wish, to take a little bit from everywhere, and it's very British (I nearly said 'English', but Hancock was from Wales.). In its refusal of an overarching aesthetic, it's connected to what Keats called 'negative capability' - the capacity to remain undecided, without striving after certainty. Possibly one reason for the national love of gardening is its unperfectability - you're never finished.

Speaking a language that cherry-picks the best bits of Latin and German, with a national culture that's based on waves of invasion (up to 1066) and immigration (after that), British people are natural collagists, picking up symbols, icons and ideas where we can find them, but rarely buying anything in its entirety. When the Pope talked about 'picking and choosing' morality, he thought he was describing the country's atheists - in fact, it's just how we are, the religious as well. The Kensington Roof Garden is like the national mindset; eclectic, eccentric, and up in the air.

That's Not Bad, Mama

Okay, here's where I put my critical credibility on the line. I've recently, thanks to a charity shop bulk buy, been watching Elvis Presley's post-army films. And some of them aren't bad.

The standard critical line is fairly simple; after a promising start (Love Me Tender, Loving You), Elvis' screen career peaked with Jailhouse Rock and King Creole. Then he went into the army and, on emergence, turned into a pod person. With a couple of odd exceptions (Flaming Star, Wild in the Country), the films from G.I. Blues on are cheaply-made travelogues, as he somnabulated through a series of forgettable plots, interchangeable leading ladies, and awful songs, all masterminded by Col. Tom Parker, whose 'Technical Advisor' credit sits on the screen like a mildewed ear.

There's a lot of truth in this narrative, and it'd be a braver man than me who attempted to defend the likes of Fun in Acapulco, featuring Ursula Andress as a female bullfighter, and the song 'The Bullfighter was a Lady', a number which has proved to have surprisingly little currency outside its immediate context.

Presley was never the world's most expressive actor and the first few post-army films play to his strengths, casting him as a laconic, Brando-ish outsider, often with some surprisingly sharp one-liners. Even a monstrosity like Girls, Girls, Girls! has a couple of nice moments - Elvis, in a club where a woman is being troubled by her drunk, boorish boyfriend, turns to her and says 'Who's the intellectual?'.

Viva Las Vegas, a film I remember being on television all the time when I was growing up, still holds up well - it has a terrific theme song, and Ann-Margret as an unusually ballsy heroine. According to Peter Guralnick's biography, the two of them were having an affair during filming, and they certainly have a remarkable screen chemistry. In an impressive piece of directorial generosity, the final freeze-frame shows the two of them singing together, with her in a slightly better screen position.

I can't make great claims for Blue Hawaii, which kicked off the unfortunate wave of musical travelogues, focusing on bikinis and wildlife - as the man himself said, 'I got sick of singing to turtles.'. Even so, it's got Angela Lansbury as Elvis' Southern Belle mother, one great song - the incandescent 'Can't Help Falling In Love' - and more of those one-liners (Young Girl - 'This Hawaiian moonlight is very intoxicating, isn't it?' Elvis - 'Yes, ma'am. That's why I never touch the stuff.') . It also gets props as one of the first mainstream Hollywood films to end with an inter-racial marriage - Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? is still seven years in the future.

The one that really surprised me was Roustabout. Elvis plays a cafe singer who gets assaulted by a group of college boys offended by his song 'Poison Ivy League'. Don't be fooled by the leathers and quiff - this Elvis is clearly a beatnik rather than a greaser - Dylan rather than Brando - and his one-liners have an oddly existential ring - 'You're all alone.' 'Isn't everybody?'.

The first line in that exchange is delivered by Barbara Stanwyck, playing the owner of the carnival that Elvis joins as a all-round helper. Probably the best actor ever to appear in an Presley film (with the possible exception of Walter Matthau in King Creole), she's wonderfully sparky in her scenes with him and still - it has to be said - stunningly glamourous at 57. Indeed, one of the film's problems is that you wonder why Elvis is bothering with the insipid Joan Freeman rather than her far more interesting and attractive mother. (Admittedly, she's married, but that didn't stop Fred MacMurray.)

Like Freaks and Carny (which features the Band's Robbie Robertson - what is it about rock stars and carny films?), Roustabout has an incidental anthropological interest, showcasing a few real carnival and freakshow turns, including a Wall of Death on which Presley (or his stunt double) takes a ride. The music is one of the film's less interesting features, though the milieu does allow Elvis to cover the Coasters 'Little Egypt', reuniting him briefly with his best songwriters, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.

So, maybe it's time to reassess a couple of those films. At the very least, I've had a surprisingly good time watching them, and queried my own knee-jerk dismissal. To quote a singer who's made nearly as many bad films as Elvis (though nothing like as many good ones); 'Beauty's where you find it.'.

Frank Kermode, and what makes you tick.

Like a lot of great critics, the late Frank Kermode was at his best when writing about the apparently trivial. In The Sense of an Ending, he discusses the fact that, while most clocks repeat the same noise - 'tick-tick-tick-tick' - we can't help hearing it as 'tick-tock, tick-tock'.

Kermode's explanation is that it's to do with the human love of narrative, and our desire for that eponymous sense of an ending . Tick is a beginning, tock an end. "The fact that we call the second of the two related sounds 'tock' is evidence that we use fictions to enable the end to confer organization and form on the temporal structure." (The Sense of an Ending, p. 45)

(Indeed, if you wanted to get really clever, you could argue that 'tick' contains the idea of life - as in 'what makes you tick' or calling the heart a 'ticker' - and 'tock', with its echoes of both 'stock' - as in 'stock still' - and the German 'tod', that of death. That's my observation, not Kermode's, so don't blame him if you think I'm overdoing it.)

Like I said, it's a trivial thing, but it's a nice illustration of the way in which narrative does seem to be hard-wired into the species, a product of our awareness of mortality. I'm a relativist in most things, willing to accept that much of what we call 'human nature' is actually is a construct, specific to culture and circumstances, so it's always striking to come across something that appears to be genuinely essential.

This applies especially to artistic conventions, which arise for any number of reasons, some apparently universal, some very particular. I've heard a feminist comedian argue that jokes with punchlines are inherently male, aiming at a single explosion of laughter rather than a gradual build-up - I don't think I need to explain the analogy. The generally macho world of comedy (and stand-up in particular) has enabled a gender-specific pattern to pass itself off as a universal.

By contrast, some conventions do seem to be built in to our biology. The iambic verse line owes at least some of its power to the fact that it echoes the 'de-dum' of our heartbeat, rectangular paintings are satisfying because they correspond to the binocular field of vision. The three-act narrative structure, whether in Commedia dell'Arte, Noh Theatre or Hollywood cinema, appears to have a similar universality, although I'd argue that's more to do with mathematics than biology - stories need a situation, a change and a resolution, which makes three acts a convenient minimum.

'Tick-tock', of course, is a two-part narrative, going straight from birth to death, with just silence between. Kermode describes it as "a model of what we call a plot, an organization that humanizes time by giving it a form... Tick' is a humble genesis, 'tock' a feeble apocalypse." (Ibid, p.45) Your ear may be telling you 'tick-tick-tick', but the brain, with its love of story, has ways of making you tock.