Wednesday, October 26, 2016

HAPPY HALLOWEEN


Halloween is an ancient festival marking the end of the harvest, the onset of winter, the loosing of demons on the eve of All Hallows on 31 October and the honouring of the dead on All Hallows Day itself on 1 November. Much Americanised by the introduction of “Trick or Treat” in the last 40 years, some old codgers may resent persistent child visitors and noisy fun on a dark autumn evening but I say any excuse for a bit of unbuttoned revelry is fine by me and I hope youngsters have a great time.

Halloween - Snap-apple Night- in 19th century Ireland

In my childhood in the early 1950s, my rural Scottish prep-school made a big deal of Halloween. Every boy made his own “neep” (turnip) lantern in the preceding days, (the turnips donated by a local farmer), hollowing out the hard raw turnip and over-eating this delicious but rather indigestible vegetable. Ghoulishly carved and painted with a candle inside, they made an impressive sight arrayed on shelves and tables, decorated with witches, bats and “bogles” (ghosts).

Turnip Lanterns

  
Pumpkin Jack o' Lantern
If memory serves me right, we ate traditional potato scones that night and had fruit cake adorned with my favourite marzipan. We ducked (“dooked”) for apples, a wet activity as you had to spear the apple floating in a bucket of water with a fork held in your teeth – or if you were daring, you immersed your head in the bucket and tried to bite your target apple. If there was a bonfire, you were treated to hot roasted chestnuts. Sometimes people went “guising”, going from house to house in weird or comic costumes and being rewarded with a cake or a small coin.  A good time was had by all. This kind of Halloween was most celebrated in once rural societies in Scotland and Ireland but rather less so in England.


The only unkindness I recall was when the Sun newspaper dubbed England’s football manager, highly competent Graham Taylor, Turniphead in 1993 after a run of dud results caused England to fail to qualify for the World Cup.

Graham "Turniphead" Taylor

The US, with its farming tradition, had long celebrated Halloween and the festivities spread to urban citizens. Pumpkins were used for lanterns rather than turnips – much easier to hollow out the soft seedy interior and pumpkins are larger and more impressive. Unknown in the UK till recently, I believe American make a soup and a pie from this useful comestible. The “guising“ tradition morphed into the rather more aggressive “trick or treat”, young visitors threatening mischief unless bought off with candy or cash (or both!).


Inevitably the ghoulish side of Halloween became heavily commercialised and ushered in a new genre of “slasher” movie epitomised by John Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween about the return home from 15-year’s confinement of child-murderer Michael Myers. It was a box-office sensation, creating its own franchise and spawned similar gruesome productions like Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street.

Michael Myers dispensing horror in Halloween (1978)

The Halloween festival no doubt encourages superstition, but it should be a joyful and warming family holiday. I despair when I hear about supposedly homicidal characters dressed up as clowns terrorising neighbourhoods and the purpose of the lantern is to scare off demons, not to frighten the populace. The children should have innocent fun and the adults should eat, drink and be merry.


It is not easy to shake off gloom at present – Brexit worries, Syria’s agony, Russian aggression, the prospect of a Hillary Clinton Presidency, Arsenal’s erratic form – I found myself robotically researching Suicide on the internet last week. Nothing is actually further from my mind and I wish you all a safe and Happy Halloween!


S.M.D.
26.10.16

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2016

Friday, October 21, 2016

STRONG SONGS, SENTIMENTAL SONGS


Tastes in popular music have changed hugely in the last 70 years and one reason is that the music market has quite rationally “followed the money”. Since the 1950s the target audience has increasingly become youthful fans with surplus cash, a hitherto unknown species. The busy breadwinner with a bulging midriff and his romantic lady of a certain age have been rather neglected. Their love of tuneful ballads, often sung at family gatherings and delivered with gusto, once ruled the roost and I recall 10 such songs mainly from our fathers’/grandfathers’ generation. Sing along, folks!


1.      Vilia (more properly Vilja) from The Merry Widow by Franz Lehar. The Merry Widow was a huge 1905 hit in the German-speaking world and it became very popular in Britain and America. Provincial theatres would await regular revivals of this lavishly dressed show packed full with memorable tunes. Vilia was a certain show-stopper in its time.





2        I’ll see you again by Noel Coward from Bitter Sweet (1929). Coward was a many-sided talent and loved to sing although he did not sing very well, he loved to try and his only operetta of 1929 contained this moving, wistful number.




3        You are my Heart’s delight by Franz Lehar from Land of Smiles (1931), English lyrics by Harry Graham. I choose this as it is best sung by Richard Tauber who sang for years in Austria and Germany but later in 1939 moved to London, after persecution for his Jewish ancestry. He became enormously popular and the clarity of his tenor voice was astonishing.




4        I’ll Walk beside you by Alan Murray sung by Webster Booth. This is a lovely sentimental song written in 1939. The most famous recording is by John McCormack, but I find his over-precise version rather precious and I prefer the song sung by Webster Booth. He was a regular second-on- the-variety-theatre-bill usually accompanied by Anne Ziegler and they performed such golden oldies perfectly.




5.   Be my Love by Nicholas Brodsky and Harry Cahn from The Toast of New Orleans (1950). This song was the hit of Mario Lanza’s debut in films. Mario was certainly the world’s loudest tenor but he was not perhaps the most refined. He had an enormous success with The Great Caruso (1951) but went off the rails drinking and eating to excess and playing the diva. He was sacked while making The Student Prince in 1953 and fled to Italy where he died of a heart attack in 1959 aged 38 – but in his prime he sang with great energy.




6.  You’ll Never Walk alone from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel (1945). This number is an anthem of the old school, most effectively delivered in the 1956 film starring Gordon McRae and Shirley Jones. It is of course Liverpool FC’s anthem and like many others I blub every time I see this, proof of the old softie I am.




7.  Someday my Heart will awake by Ivor Novello from Glamorous Nights (1949). This is a quintessential romantic song leaving the hearts of the susceptible a-flutter. Ivor was a huge star, although he did not sing in his own operettas. Sadly after he died in 1951 he and his music were forgotten commercially except by his vast legion of devotees.




8. And this is my Beloved adapted from Alexander Borodin for Kismet (1953), by Robert Wright and George Forrest. Kismet was a success both on Broadway and in London but twisting an earlier composer’s work into a coherent modern musical is generally not a great idea. Imagine Bach or Mozart being so treated! Nevertheless, this song worked well in my view, thanks to Borodin.




9. I Dreamed a Dream from Les Miserables by Claude-Michel Schoenberg and 4 lyricists. Premiered in Paris in 1980, the show has had an uninterrupted run in London since 1985, being known colloquially as Lez Miz and while the song is another anthem, it clearly strikes a chord with a modern audience. Susan Boyle popularised the song further among the BGT fans while Ruthie Henshall does it justice in the link below.





10. I will Always Love You written by Dolly Parton (1974) recorded by Whitney Houston (1992). This became Whitney’s signature tune and featured in The Bodyguard, her film with Kevin Costner The song gave ample scope for Whitney’s warm yet strong voice and it is in the long tradition of dramatic romantic songs, bringing on the goose-pimples. Tragic but lovely Whitney deserves a photograph!








SMD,
20.10.16.

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2016.

Monday, October 17, 2016

SOAP


We take soap so much for granted that we forget it was only in the 19th century that soap-making became an industrialised process. Previously it was a dark art mastered by modest groups of artisans, hand-made in centres like Marseilles, London and Castile in Spain. A version of soap was known to the Ancients but well into the Middle Ages the product was decidedly rough as it normally contained arsenic and lead – nothing smooth or balmy about it. The Romans much preferred to rub olive oil over their bodies and scrape off (or get their slaves to scrape off) dirt and sweat with metal strigils (stigli), effective but hardly comfortable. All that had ended by the 19th century.

Pear's Soap Advert "Bubbles" by Millais

  
The ancient Romans generally avoided soap, like many British schoolboys today, and you do not want to get windward of some modern Greeks on a hot day, nor indeed of the sad groups of derelicts wandering about British South Coast towns unhoused and abandoned by their local authorities. Yet today the joys of soap and hygienic practices are fully indulged. Step into a hot bath and it need not be only simple Radox bubbles and humble Palmolive but, if you fancy, a glittering array of unguents, creams, oils containing all the fragrances and perfumes of Cathay and the dizzying aromas of coconuts, wild flowers, lavender and passion fruit. Cleopatra’s ass’s milk comes expensive but even bourgeois Britain can run to luxury of a kind undreamt of by Alexander the Great or Henry VIII. Thank Lever Brothers of Port Sunlight and other industrial pioneers for our sweet smelling comeliness. It was a soapy revolution epitomised by the school playground joke (c. 1914) my father would recall for me: Thome people thay that I thpeak with a lithp but I don’t think tho mythelf coth I can thay: thalt thoap, thented thoap, thoft thoap and thoda!



The eloquent Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, 1805-73 (3rd son of the anti-slavery crusader William Wilberforce), was one of those religious orators venerated by the outwardly pious Victorians. He was known as Soapy Sam at the instigation of Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli, not an admirer of Anglican divines, who described his manner as “unctuous, oleaginous and saponaceous” – quite a mouthful and not the kind of words that would fall easily from the lips of a Conservative leader nowadays! He is famous for clashing with the Darwinian Thomas Huxley in a discussion in Oxford in 1860. After a lengthy speech, Soapy, who knew little of biology, made a jibe at Huxley enquiring whether it was by descent from his grandmother or grandfather that he considered himself descended from a monkey? Huxley’s riposte was that he was not ashamed to have a monkey as an ancestor, but he would be ashamed to be connected to a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth! It does not sound much but it was a seminal moment and henceforth the scientific establishment had no compunction about denying criticisms from the Church with no scientific basis.

Soapy Sam Wilberforce
“Soapy” as a nickname has rather gone out of fashion, although I understand it is still heard in Navy circles. If, like me, you were once a devotee of the Oor Wullie cartoon strip in the Dundee Sunday Post, you will recall that one of the members of Wullie’s gang was Soapy Joe, who was a mere extra and seldom a protagonist although he often sat too on a bucket like Wullie.

Wullie's gang: Wullie, Wee Eck, Fat Bob and Soapy Joe

Finally I want to revisit the great Soap producer, namely Turkey, whose TV soaps are avidly followed in Greece and across the developing world. The present favourite is Kara Sevda (Endless Love). It is, I think, as I only half-watch or understand it, the usual rigmarole about a doomed love affair, family secrets, murder most foul, a rich gold-mine, treacherous siblings and corrupt officials. It has only got to episode 35 and there must be another 45 to come. The hero and heroine are undeniably handsome and lovely and the production values in up-market Istanbul are high. Escapism for the hard-pressed Hellenes!

Hero Kemal

Heroine Nihan
           





SMD
17.10.16

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2016

Thursday, October 13, 2016

BREXIT - BUMPS ON THE ROAD



Well, nobody said it would be easy and the last week or so has highlighted some of the many obstacles strewn either entirely naturally or with malign intent on the road to Brexit. Yet the historic referendum decision will never be overturned and the new government will strain every sinew to reconcile the domestic malcontents, forge a unity to face the complex negotiations to leave the EU and take full advantage of the opportunities soon to open up to an unshackled Britain. Our people will have to become even stauncher and grow thicker skins for the next two years!

No nonsense Theresa May
Britain has a new government headed by tepid Remainer Theresa May. Key offices are held by Philip Hammond (Exchequer) and Amber Rudd (Home), both Remainers, and the keepers of the Leave flame are Boris Johnson (Foreign Office), David Davis (Brexit Secretary) and Liam Fox (International Trade). There is much jockeying for influence within this group which causes confusion and it cannot be said, but it must soon emerge, that a coherent EU negotiating stance has yet been promulgated.


Theresa May repeated the tautological mantra Brexit means Brexit to keep the Eurosceptic Tory Right at bay but she needs to deliver more substance. She is an enigma. Delivering a major speech to the Tory Conference in early October, Theresa moved sharply Left, praising government intervention in dysfunctional markets, disparaging big business for its selfishness and exalting in the values of a mutually supportive society defending workers’ rights. Theresa is no toff and not a conventional Tory and I could not help noticing her cold eyes and how readily her smile twisted into a snarl. She is not a lady to cross, as no doubt some colleagues will notice soon enough.


The Tory Remainers can probably be dragooned into obedience but Theresa will need to command a majority in Parliament in due course and the arithmetic is tight. Labour is in disintegration mode, but can be relied upon to vote solidly against her; the LibDems and SNP are equally hostile; the erratic views of Northern Irish members may become important. Theresa has stated there should be no general election before 2020 but political realities seem to me to point to an early snap election, when I guess the Tories would win a very comfortable majority and can then govern with only principled and rational challenges. They should move quickly as there is an unusual degree of political flux evident – Labour will not be useless for ever and the 3m 2015 UKIP electors are unreliable “swing” voters, whom Teresa needs to capture while Brexit enthusiasms last. The immigration issue in particular, which personally does not much move me, will have to be resolved, by some fudged formula, to allay popular anxieties.


Outside Parliament the government has numerous enemies – big business leaders, the City, most of the Media, senior civil servants, the Foreign Office, the academic world and the London cognoscenti. Pole-axed by Brexit, they accept this verdict with ill-grace and many are irreconcilables, quite prepared to undermine their own country to justify their own positions. Most can be won over by the sight of competent government and some actual successes. Theresa May has a reputation as a pragmatic do-er; she needs to justify that reputation immediately by getting her ministers to work non-stop on Brexit and whip a subtle and inspiring programme into shape.


Britain can expect no help from Brussels and not much from other European “allies”. Hollande has made clear his view that Britain must suffer for Brexit pour encourager les autres. Trade with Britain is not much valued even though the EDF Hinkley Point nuclear energy contract agreed in October 2016 was surely a rich prize even for the nonchalant Gauls. Belgium and Luxembourg are hostile though a section of Dutch opinion understands and shares Britain’s EU frustrations. Scandinavia is still mesmerised by the 1960s European ideal while Eastern Europe only cares about the free movement principle and the post-Brexit fate of their own large communities in Britain. The country that really matters is Germany, a rich market and key economic partner for Britain. German national interest favours a mutually beneficial deal with Britain – can they shake clear of the freedom of movement dogma which causes the Germans themselves so much Angst and can they quieten the Babel of objections emanating from Juncker and his Eurocrat vested interests? Firm leadership and diplomatic skill should see a way through these difficulties.


The government must sell a sensible vision of post-Brexit Britain. We have already suffered a fortuitous but necessary devaluation, causing some of us real pain. There may be hopes or dreams about future trade deals and so on but change comes slowly. What matters to me is that Britain will be free to live in her own fashion and not be frog-marched into a United States of Europe; that her global reach can be turned to our advantage; that her traditional institutions will be preserved or changed at our pace and by nobody else; that her people will be able to develop in their own delightful and idiosyncratic way and that in our reserved manner we can remain very good friends with Europeans, Americans and any other deserving nationalities.



SMD
13.10.16

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2016

Monday, October 3, 2016

JOHN OSBORNE AND JOE ORTON: Celebrities of Stage and Screen (26)


The two men whom I here portray were infants terribles of the 1950s and 1960s. Both were playwrights, talented characters with decidedly dark sides. Osborne was the original Angry Young Man who became a versatile libertarian then moved on to fulminate as a highly articulate critic broadly from the Right. Orton’s career was shorter and even more subversive, his work noted for anarchic and surrealistic comedy. He succumbed prematurely as the victim of a spectacularly brutal murder by his unhinged boyfriend.

Young John Osborne

Joe Orton looking cheeky


John Osborne (1929-94), was brought up in Stoneleigh, Surrey the son of a modest commercial artist from Wales and a Cockney barmaid called Nellie, whom Osborne despised for her ignorance and selfishness. His father, whom Osborne idolised, died when John was 12 and the windfall proceeds of a life insurance policy allowed John to go to a minor public school in Dorset from 1943 to 1945. He was expelled for striking the headmaster after being disciplined, drifted into trade journalism and ended up in a third rate theatrical repertory company, operating in provincial venues, run by one Anthony Creighton. Osborne liked to act and supposedly once played Hamlet in a hall in Hayling Island: in his pomp he appeared in cameo roles in various films but he had no great talent. He also married for the first time (he had 5 wives) Pamela Lane, a rather more successful Thespian than he.


John turned his hand to writing plays and co-authored two with Anthony Creighton, one of which An Epitaph for George Dillon later had a small success. In 1955 while lounging on a deck chair in Ilfracombe he wrote Look Back in Anger, depicting the impoverished married life of the hero Jimmy Porter, raging against English society, his own frustrations and life in general. It was a world away from the polite theatre of the time (Osborne paradoxically was an admirer of Terence Rattigan) and the play’s manuscript was rejected by every leading agency. However The English Stage Company based at the Royal Court Theatre was desperate for some new material during an unsuccessful repertory season. Its leader George Devine rowed out to Creighton’s houseboat on the Thames where Osborne was staying and took the play.


Its opening night in 1956, with Kenneth Haigh as Jimmy and Mary Ure as his wife, saw mixed reactions; ”A self-pitying snivel” thought the Evening Standard but Kenneth Tynan in the Observer and Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times were full of praise and it gained momentum and soon became a huge commercial success – a film with Richard Burton and Mary Ure came in 1958. Osborne became rich and he married Mary Ure after a two-year affair.


Arthur Miller, married to Marilyn Monroe who was making the Rattigan-scripted film The Prince and the Showgirl in London with Laurence Olivier, took Olivier to see Look back in Anger. Miller was impressed but Olivier disliked it. However they met Osborne and Olivier somehow agreed to be cast in Osborne’s next play – The Entertainer. He had a great success as Archie Rice, the end-of-the-pier comedian satirising Britain’s lost role in the world, and revived his faltering career.

Osborne, Mary Ure, Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier

Osborne’s next effort was a musical lampooning the tabloid press The World of Paul Slickey and it proved to be one of the most dismal floperoos in theatrical history, closing after 3 nights, with Osborne pursued by a mob of irate theatre-goers. His 1960 play Luther saw him back on form, praising the congenital dissident and his later Inadmissable Evidence, with Nicol Williamson as the infuriated lawyer, took time to become the classic it is now regarded. Osborne reached his dramatic peak with A Patriot for Me (1967) exploring sexual ambiguity in the Habsburg Empire.


Osborne published in left-wing Tribune his excoriating essay Damn you. England in 1961 but John was not a convincing Leftie. He wrote the letter from his lavish villa in Provence while his new mistress film critic Penelope Gilliatt prepared to marry him and his wife Mary Ure was having a child in London fathered by her new paramour Robert Shaw. He became richer with his sparkling screenplay for the highly-rated film Tom Jones (1963).


He wrote more plays but his best were already done. He drifted away from the theatre and rather enjoyed playing the squire in his Shropshire retreat. He amused the public with his autobiography A Better Class of Person (1981) and Almost a Gentleman (1991), but his cruel portrayal of his mother and jeering at his 3rd and 4th wives, Penelope Gilliatt, later an alcoholic and the actress Jill Bennett, who committed suicide (as did Mary Ure long after their divorce) were tastelessly deplorable.


Here is Osborne’s bile on the death of Jill Bennett:


Adolf [Osborne's nickname for her] has left half a million to Battersea Dogs' Home. She never bought a bar of soap in all the time she lived with me. Always, she cried poverty… It is the most perfect act of misanthropy, judged with the tawdry, kindless theatricality she strove to achieve in life. She had no love in her heart for people and only a little more for dogs. Her brand of malignity, unlike Penelope's went beyond even the banality of ambition…. Her frigidity was almost total. She loathed men and pretended to love women, whom she hated even more. She was at ease only in the company of homosexuals, who she also despised but whose narcissism matched her own. I never heard her say an admiring thing of anyone… Everything about her life had been a pernicious confection, a sham.


Osborne finally settled down in 1978 with his 5th wife, journalist Helen Dawson, but diabetes assailed him and he died of complications in 1994. He was 65 and he had revolutionised English theatre.

Osborne the Shropshire squire, helping restore the church roof

     
    Joe Orton (1933-67) was born to a municipal gardener father and a shoe factory worker mother and was brought up in a council estate in proletarian Leicester. He failed his 11+, completed a secretarial college course and worked as a junior clerk. Keen on acting, he joined amateur dramatic societies and eventually he was accepted by drama college RADA in London which he entered in 1951. He met Kenneth Halliwell there and they became lovers, moving together into a flat in West Hampstead. Neither Orton nor Halliwell had much academic nor professional success at RADA and both took fitful jobs in provincial repertory companies. Halliwell was 7 years older than Orton and they were able to live a Spartan life on a small legacy.


In 1959 they moved to an austere flat in Noel Street, Islington and tried without success to have novels on which they collaborated published. To amuse themselves, they took to defacing library books with bizarre collages and obscene drawings – Halliwell had covered their bedroom walls with his efforts. In 1962 they were tracked down and prosecuted, both being sent, rather harshly surely, to 6 months imprisonment from which they were released in September 1962.  Prison was a liberation for Orton as it freed him from the stifling influence of Halliwell and he was thereafter able to write in his own way; Halliwell was crushed by the experience and his mental health began to deteriorate.


After 10 years of hardship Orton finally found his métier with Entertaining Mr Sloane, a black comedy about a landlady and her brother enticing a psychopathic young man into sexual liaisons. It had a successful 3-week opening run then, with financial help from the deeply unfashionable Terence Rattigan who much admired Orton’s stagecraft, it was transferred to the West End and commercial success.


Orton followed this in 1964 with ill-prepared Loot, a parody of detective fiction, which was received badly and had to be withdrawn. Discouraged, Orton and Halliwell went on an R&R gay holiday in Tangiers with their timid friend comedian Kenneth Williams and savoured the erotic embraces of mercenary Arab youths and the heady joys of cannabis. Refreshed, Orton worked hard on re-writing Loot and in 1966 it was successfully staged at the Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly Circus, enlivened by using the dentures of Orton’s newly dead mother as castanets, a typically Ortonesque touch.

Joe Orton, Kenneth Williams and Kenneth Halliwell in Tangiers


All this time Orton was getting rich and famous leaving his partner Halliwell depressed and jealous. Orton lived a life of total gay promiscuity and he recorded his encounters in a droll dead-pan fashion in graphic and scabrous detail in his Diaries, posthumously published.


Returning to their flat in August 1967 Orton was set upon by Halliwell who beat out his brains with 9 hammer-blows. He fled the blood-spattered scene and died after taking an overdose of Nembutal. Orton’s final play What the Butler Saw was produced in 1969, starring Ralph Richardson, Coral Browne and Stanley Baxter and his splendidly titled biography Prick up your Ears by American John Lahr appeared in 1978.


Joe Orton was a talented and vivid character of the licentious 1960s.



SMD
3.10.16

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald  2016