DIARY
There is a fashion for sado-masochism and general kinkiness growing in English theatre, particularly in productions of Shakespeare and opera. The latest exam- ple I have collected comes in the current RSC production of Measure for Measure at the Barbican. In the famous scene (Act II, Scene 4) between Angelo and Isabella in which he offers to spare her brother's life in return for her virginity, the actor playing Angelo suddenly struck Isabella a tremendous blow to the side of her head. Sometimes I have thought that such per- verse representations of heterosexual attraction sprung from a homosexual world-view within the theatre. But that does not seem plausible. For one thing there have always been plenty of homosex- uals in the theatre. I am describing a relatively new phenomenon. Is it perhaps that our directors and actors have, this late in the 20th century, read just enough Freud to be able ignorantly to misuse his teaching? Do they wrongly believe that nothing can be as it seems; that love is violence; sex is power; power is sex and so on? Angelo is a man struck by Cupid's dart. His confusion opens the scene:
Oh heavens!
Why does my blood thus muster to my heart, Making it both unable for itself, And dispossessing all my other parts Of necessary fitness?
Isabella herself comes to understand this and subsequently pleads for Angelo's life: I partly think
A due sincerity governed his deeds,
Till he did look on me.
It is not a question of a right or a wrong way of playing Shakespeare; it is a matter of a distracting and disagreeable piece of stage business which grew from nothing we knew or learned about Angelo. It inter- rupted rather than advanced the argument.
An equally abrupt interruption of the imagination occurred in English National Opera's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, when the entire chorus mimed a form of sexual intercourse with giant carcasses of meat. The director may have felt it was an attempt to portray the perversity of the society in which the action took place, but it failed because almost immediately I stopped thinking about the characters and fell to wondering what the actors made of all this. When an explicit act of intercourse takes place on the stage, an audience is put in a difficult position: you can identify with the characters and take part, as it were, in what is going on or you can step back and watch, which puts you in the position of voyeur. With something as bizarre as this, you may have to dissociate yourself altogether and start wondering about what the actors are having to deal with. Embar- NICHOLAS GARLAND rassment? Arousal? But far from stimulat- ing the imagination in the service of the action, it stops it dead.
We cartoonists have a fresh character to develop, George Bush. When a new star arrives, the cartoonists as a rule begin by drawing him or her in a fairly straightfor- ward way. They and the public have little to go on other than the newcomer's actual appearance. But quite soon the relatively accurate academic portraits develop into hieroglyphs that stand for character as well as appearance. Tall men become taller, noses sharpen and tummies fatten. LBJ was drawn as a rangy Texan, Nixon as a blue-jowled gangster, Carter as a grin, or a peanut. Bush is a handsome, rather ordin- ary looking man, and I don't know yet, though I've drawn him several times already, quite what he'll turn into. For some reason or other, some politicians never turn into anything. President Ford arrived, stayed and departed as some sort of shapeless blob; probably because he's a very unremarkable man.
For very different reasons, the most `It's not that kind of rally.' fascinating politician alive today remains, to an extraordinary degree, unknown. No hieroglyph has evolved for him although cartoonists draw him all the time. Only the red birthmark on his forehead is common to the way we draw Mikhail Gorbachev. Brezhnev was easy to caricature as a beetle-browed Kremlin thug; Khrushchev as a tough, mischievous Russian peasant. How should we represent Gorby? What has happened is that we still each draw him fairly straightforwardly in our own way. It is an odd feeling to draw my Thatcher hieroglyph alongside my relatively accu- rate Gorbachev, but that's where I'm stuck for the time being. I know my Mrs T. doesn't look remotely like her, but there is never any doubt who it is. Curious, isn't it? Tony Howard often tells me I can't draw Neil Kinnock. I suppose what Tony means is that my Kinnock, boyishly grinning, or alarmed, is not the serious, able politician he sees. Some men arrive as caricatures from the start. Dukakis, stocky, with thick hair and, most importantly, exceptionally heavy eyebrows, quickly became recognis- able as an earnest well-meaning loser. It will be amusing to watch the new President elect's cartoon persona develop.
When huge supermarkets first appeared and we said goodbye to the little corner shop (snivel), I disliked them very much. But I've grown to like them. There's just as much in the way of social life as there was in any corner shop I remember, and a lot more interesting and exotic things to buy. You can chat with fellow queuers by the check-out counters and help each other unload the trolleys. You can salute exceptionally enormous bills — say £185.43 — with respectful or appalled whistles, while all around everyone nods and reacts. My father is 85 years old and very tottery. He says he is constantly knocked down by trolleys in supermarkets and having to be fished out of the heaps of yoghurt pots he has sent flying. It's all much more pleasant in Tesco's, apparent- ly, where the ladies who have bowled him over are much more good-natured and kind about picking him up again than are their sisters in Sainsbury's. It was in a Waitrose that I first came across that most delicious of luxuries, real fresh orange juice. Today some enterprising firm tele- phoned to say they were starting daily deliveries of fresh orange juice in our neighbourhood. I seem to remember some pundit predicting ages ago that in Mrs Thatcher's Britain everything was going to be pretty bloody, but that certain service industries would improve. I can think of lots of ways the former is true; perhaps daily fresh OJ (if you can afford it) is the beginning of the latter.
Previous page
