Blog Review of Mr. Turner

J.M.W. Turner is my favourite British artist. I have admired the passion and chaos in his portrayals of landscape, climate, weather and the changing environment. My favourite work being The Eruption of the Soufrière Mountains in the Island of St Vincent  (1812).

                     

What I love about this picture is the way it depicts the power of the natural atrocity of a volcano eruption; a stark sky filled with swirling clouds of smoke and the raging lava belching from the mouth of volcano skywards into the heavens. It is also reminiscent of the fire of the Industrial Revolution growing in Britain during the late eighteenth-century and in the nineteenth-century. The use of darkness in the picture creates a rather bleak and unwelcoming vision and there was growing discomfort from many artists during the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries about the consequences of the industrialisation of Britain for the everyday life of the rural poor. The poet, William Blake, was a contemporary of Turner albeit being born twenty years before Turner and dying twenty years before Turner also, is most famous for expressing his concerns about the Industrial Revolution in his poem, The Tyger.

 

THE TYGER (1794)

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

 

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the opening stanza, it is possible to see Blake’s concerns about the effect on the countryside of the increasing number of large mills and factories being built. Blake’s fear for Britain’s changing landscape is revealed clearly in the line “burning bright / In the forests of the night”. Some of this love and passion to conserve Britain is what I was most expecting to see from the people surrounding Turner when I attended the cinema last week. Turner was excited by the possibilities of the future, the excitement of the new technology and the discoveries made possible by science.

 

Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway (1844)

This attitude giving him the reputation of being somewhat of a maverick, a rebel against the artistic styling of the day. But this is not quite what I got. Whilst there is a lot of attention paid to Turner’s immense talent, the film more closely follows the last 25 years of Turner’s life before concluding with his death. However, one of the scenes I most enjoyed was a visit Mary Somerville, the renowned nineteenth-century female scientist, pays to Turner and she conducts a scientific experiment using a spectrum to filter light. This scene amongst the frequent tableaux of the real life sources of inspiration for a number of Turner’s most famous pieces of work are as close as Leigh gets to examining Turner’s work. But this is not a bad thing. Instead, this is a very human portrayal of the artist who is revered as one of the greatest British artists of all time. Mike Leigh provides amusing insights behind the closed doors of the Royal Academy, not only making Turner jump into real life, but artists like Benjamin Haydon and John Constable too. Leigh’s depiction of a young John Ruskin was also extremely amusing. An entertainingly superior Ruskin was played masterfully by Joshua McGuire.  But Timothy Spall is truly the Master of this film (pun intended!). He grunts, groans, splutters, coughs and wheezes, gropes and fumbles, splashes and stabs at his paints in the most unexpectedly bestial personification of the world renowned artist. It is no wonder that Spall won the 2014 Cannes Film Award for Best Actor. He must have lived, slept and breathed this role for a year to create such a vivid portrayal of the man behind the paints. In addition, Turner’s affection for his father against his sometime brusque and overly hard behaviour to the other people as close to him, such as Sarah Danby (supposedly with whom he had two daughters) and his housekeeper, is both touchingly poignant and uncomfortably close. However, we warm to Turner further as he slowly opens up to people after his father’s death. This is shown most touchingly in Margate where he meets Mrs Booth, the woman he eventually spends the rest of his life with incognito and in whose arms he dies muttering the words “The Sun is God”.

 

Finally, this is definitely a film to watch in the cinema, do not wait for it to come out on DVD or on the television. The use of landscape and light, which is to be expected of the artist known as “the painter of light”, is magnificent and is definitely best appreciated on the big screen.

 

 

 

Review of The RSC’s Love’s Labour’s Won


 

I attended Love’s Labour’s Won, also known as Much Ado About Nothing, about a week ago. I saw the RSC’s Love’s Labour’s Lost last month, and whilst finding the acting, costume, lighting and set design exemplary, I found the conclusion of the play where the male characters, i.e., the Prince and his fellow scholars, return to the stage in First World War army officers’ uniforms gratuitous and slightly distasteful as it is irrelevant to the plot. I stated in my blog review of the play (follow the link here to read it: http://amyeholley.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/the-rscsproduction-of-shakespeares.html) that it felt as though the directorial team had forgotten in their 2013 planning meeting that 2014 is the centenary of World War One and had decided to ram WWI elements into the play. For me, this cheapens the heroic efforts of the soldiers, sailors, other serving officers and the people whose lives were shaped by the war, but from looking at other reviews of the play by The Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/11167470/Loves-Labours-LostLoves-Labours-Won-Royal-Shakespeare-Theatre-review.html ), Financial Times (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0f0daf56-5598-11e4-b750-00144feab7de.html#axzz3JAfCfGoe) and The Independent (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/features/whatever-happened-to-lost-work-loves-labours-won-with-their-new-pairing-of-plays-the-royal-shakespeare-company-might-have-the-answer-9787888.html), amongst others, the First World War ending of Love’s Labour’s Lost is not considered jarring. The WWI elements are generally considered to be ‘poignant’ or ‘emotional’. But if we look at the plot of Love’s Labour’s Lost, it ends with the Princess of France informing Ferdinand, King of Navarre, that she will not agree to marry him until they have both spent twelve months in solitude; her mourning the recent death of her father whilst Ferdinand helps the sick and continues his studies. The Princess’s soliloquy is copied below from Act 5: Scene 2:

No, no, my lord, your grace is perjured much,
Full of dear guiltiness; and therefore this:
If for my love, as there is no such cause,
You will do aught, this shall you do for me:
Your oath I will not trust; but go with speed
To some forlorn and naked hermitage,
Remote from all the pleasures of the world;
There stay until the twelve celestial signs
Have brought about the annual reckoning.
If this austere insociable life
Change not your offer made in heat of blood;
If frosts and fasts, hard lodging and thin weeds
Nip not the gaudy blossoms of your love,
But that it bear this trial and last love;
Then, at the expiration of the year,
Come challenge me, challenge me by these deserts,
And, by this virgin palm now kissing thine
I will be thine; and till that instant shut
My woeful self up in a mourning house,
Raining the tears of lamentation
For the remembrance of my father's death.
If this thou do deny, let our hands part,
Neither entitled in the other's heart.

 

Ferdinand and his fellow scholars, including Berowne, leave the stage agreeing to a twelve month absence from their paramours:

 

FERDINAND

Come, sir, it wants a twelvemonth and a day,
And then 'twill end.

 

BEROWNE

That's too long for a play.

 

As evident from these examples (feel free to read through and check!) there is no mention of war at the end of the play at all. Whilst I am fully aware that one of the joys of Shakespeare’s plays is its universal themes; themes which make it relevant to audiences five hundred years after they were written, and that adaptation can completely transform a text, i.e., from a novel into a play, a poem into a play, a song into a painting, etc. An adaptation still needs to be done artfully, tactfully and with consideration to the original source and the point and place in time to which it is being resituated. If this is not done, at what point does an adaptation stop being an adaptation from an original source and becomes an independent work inspired by a source, if that happens does it have the right to retain the original source’s name or should it consider a new title?

As I have previously said, for me The RSC’s production Love’s Labour’s Lost did not accomplish an elegant transformation to the outbreak of World War One in Britain. I, therefore, attended the advertised sequel to Love’s Labour’ Lost, Love’s Labour’s Won (most commonly known as Much Ado About Nothing) with some trepidation, however knowing that Love’s Labour’s Won aka Much Ado About Nothing starts with soldiers returning from being away at war. I need not have worried. Christopher Luscombe’s production mastered the art of adaptation but it was helped enormously by the fact that Love’s Labour’s Won starts with men returning from war, therefore it was ripe for adaptation to the conclusion of World War One or Two, or to a place seeing the return of serving men from any war. Love’s Labour’s Lost, however, does not contain enough of the crucial elements required to make the jump to July 1914 work. In addition to being an easier transition to the Great War, this production succeeds on many other levels.

 

Luscombe was challenged with directing both plays as there is some dispute in academic circles regarding whether Love’s Labour’s Won is a sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost and by producing them simultaneously with the same cast, Luscombe was attempting to investigate, on Gregory Doran’s request, whether they are part of the same narrative. The feeling of both Doran and Luscombe is that they are linked but Luscombe, somewhat revealingly for me, states that he “encouraged [the actors] to think of them as separate. It’s for the audience to enjoy the arc, more than the actors” (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/features/whatever-happened-to-lost-work-loves-labours-won-with-their-new-pairing-of-plays-the-royal-shakespeare-company-might-have-the-answer-9787888.htm ). I believe that the plays are linked by their common genre, i.e., romantic comedy, and the themes of the romantic hunt or chase, and deception or false identities, as the characters and the time differ so much between the plays. Whether the plays were intentionally linked by Shakespeare is a question we may never answer. As such, viewing productions of both plays can only boil down to how well they have been adapted and how well they have been performed, set, lit and staged.

 

Love’s Labour’s Won was extremely well performed, as was Love’s Labour’s Lost. The cast was the same in both plays and the actors played similar roles in each. Nick Haverson taking on comedic roles as Costard in Love’s Labour’s Lost and a bumbling constable Dogberry. Edward Bennett appears as Berowne and then Benedick and Michelle Terry as Rosaline and then Beatrice. This encouraged the audience’s view of the plays as a pair despite the fact the Luscombe states that he encouraged the actors to view the plays as separate. The set for Love’s Labour’s Won combined Edwardian Downton Abbey style glamour with all of the best technological features of a wealthy modern theatre.

 

 

 Audience marvelling at the set pre-show

There are some excellent examples of comedic action in Love’s Labour’s Won, particularly the scene where Benedick overhears Don Pedro and his men talking about Beatrice’s love for him. Benedick is hidden inside a Christmas tree in Luscombe’s production where Edward Bennett appears to climb and jump from branch to branch inside the tree as he desperately tries to hear more of Don Pedro’s supposedly confidential conversation heightening the already amusing language. Nick Haverson as Dogberry is equally amusing in the scene where Dogberry has apprehended Borachio, who has had an amorous liaison with Margaret, Hero’s chambermaid, but has been plotting with Don John to pass off his liaison as having been with Hero in order to destroy her reputation so that Claudio refuses to marry her. Haverson masters comedic business and slapstick in this scene.

 

All in all, Luscombe’s Love’s Labour’s Won production succeeds where Love’s Labour’s Lost failed to reach maximum impact. However above all, Luscombe and Doran succeed in pairing the two plays together to examine whether they were designed to be linked when first written. They are now so associated with one another that the reviews for the productions are not for each individual play but are reviews for the two in parallel with one another. They are considered by the audience as a shared narrative whether or not this was the author’s intention.  The previously most known title of Much Ado About Nothing for Love’s Labour’s Won has been set to the wayside in favour of promoting the view of plays as being two parts of one story making a very interesting spectacle. The addition of commemorating the centenary makes the plays even more interesting when looking at adaptation theory and drama.

 

One to watch with your thinking caps on, despite the romcom tag it’s advertised with!