The Soloist

Man is a social creature. No matter what the company he keeps, he invariably wants to exist in company.

He – or she, for that matter – also tends to think of himself before others, which is called greed and has led over the centuries to massive differences between the most impoverished and the most wealthy of humanity. There's a line in ITV's recent Wuthering Heights where Heathcliff says he made his fortune by taking advantage of other men's weaknesses – and it's a sentiment that rings very true for all fortunes made on the back of some exploited person.

Exploitation is a big theme hanging over true-story The Soloist. It's the latest film about a gifted person in poverty (and with mental health issues on this occasion), who meets someone that sees his talent and wants to help him. That would be sweet, if it weren't for the fact that the person helping him is reporter for the LA Times – Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) – who features this homeless, schizophrenic prodigy of a musician in his newspaper column and picks up a journalism award for it. As he picks up his award, his ex-wife jokes that he's exploiting this man – Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx) – and tells him he should write a book as well as the column. She neglects to mention the film that would be adapted from that book.

Meanwhile, Ayers is slumming it with the 90,000 homeless people of Los Angeles. He's been homeless since running away from the college course that allowed him to play cello in an orchestra, which went downhill once he started hearing voices. Now he's down-sized and plays his two-stringed violin in the streets. He's the soloist of the title, but this story belongs to Lopez. He's the reporter that starts off telling his readers about Ayers, but then gets more involved until he's writing about the ways that he's changing Ayers' life – whether Ayers likes it or not.

While such philanthropy is admirable, it seems misplaced, or perhaps misjudged. Lopez directs his efforts at one man, who only appreciates it some of the time. He's a man uncomfortable indoors, a man who is happiest listening to the sounds of Beethoven's string compositions swelling through the city air and mingling with the sounds of the freeway traffic and building work. Lopez's intrusive 'help' sees him moved to an apartment, and away from the sounds of people that had surrounded him. While it seems an improvement on the crowded slum (crowded mostly with black and mentally handicapped people, the oft-ignored side of America), Ayers has chosen that slum over the apartment he used to have.

It seems the American Dream in which everyone is free to do as s/he pleases has gone sour, as Lopez imposes his help on Ayers while using his story to win awards (and presumably Brownie points at the local philanthropists' club), and a cello teacher tries to convert the prodigy to God.

When We Shouldn't Call a Friend a Friend; or, The Misunderstanding of Facebook Friendship

Personally, I've never been sure what constitutes too many friends on sites like Facebook.

Apart from anything else, I've never understood the idea of adding a celebrity (or mock celebrity) as a friend, nor the idea of adding a band. Things like that require a basic (and wilful) misunderstanding of the term 'friend'. Liking these people makes you a fan, not their friend.

But adding celebs etc. is one way people have of boosting their 'friend' quota. We all like to feel we have an active, healthy social life and what better way to prove that (and measure it) than by pointing to a large pool of people one can count as 'friend'? A big number on a computer screen must be true, after all. Is there also any way to better quantify social popularity, and therefore make a competition out of friendship?

Recently, I watched a French film (My Best Friend, or Mon Meilleur Ami if you prefer) about an art dealer who seems to have a social life but absolutely no friends. Not one. Not a single person he cares enough about to talk to, nor anyone that cares about him – not even his daughter. It (predictably enough) raises questions about what makes a friend, how we treat friends and the nature of friendship. This is a man whose Facebook page would state that he had no friends whatsoever – a depressing, desultory naught.

Unless he used Facebook in the way that you're supposed to – which a minority does these days. The other day I heard a friend (and let's just quickly establish that this was a real-life friend whom I've met only in the flesh and isn't a Facebook friend – there is a difference; the bonds of a Facebook friendship are much looser) complain of a Facebook user: “A thousand friends! He can't possible know that many people!”

Initially, I'm tempted to agree. Surely this chap (not someone either of us knew) can't be holding down cordial relations with so many people. He'd forget who nine out of ten of were. Most of them must be meaningless relationships with people he's met once or twice, if at all. It was even temping to picture him as a social whore with no real friends but a string of acquaintances whose personal details he can access at a mouse click – slave to the ever-rising friends counter, his ego stroked by having more friends than his rivals. What an butterfly-like, lonely and essentially cold person he must be. I don't mean butterfly-like in the good way; this is a man whose attention and affection flitters from place to place, a man who can never settle himself on any interaction before moving to the next.

Then I realised that wasn't the case at all. To have such assumptions and thoughts about a Facebook user is to fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of Facebook. If you use Facebook as a social tool, to keep in touch with old friends and talk to people that you see every day, or just for the rafts of applications, quizzes and games forever being pumped out of the ether, then hundreds of friends you hardly speak to is perhaps like treating human acquaintance as prizes in the trophy cabinet that is Facebook.

However, the site is supposed to be used as a social NETWORKING tool – in this case, social merely referring to people within a network, as opposed to corporations (etc.) within a network. It should be a system of interconnected professional/serious people using the internet for communication and (a more elusive term to define) networking. Under such usage, the more friends the better. Though some blame for confusion must lie with whoever decided to use the word 'friend' and not 'contact'. A thousand contacts on a social network sounds more plausible (and more easily-justified) than a thousand friends on a social site.

Alas, people (myself included) have failed to understand this, and in a way Facebook's success has fatally undermined it. Rather than the slimline professional linkage it should have been, Facebook has become to University students and recent graduates what MySpace is to Sixth Formers and GCSE kids. It's used as a social interaction and gaming tool, not networking, by the majority of its users – it's more toy than tool.

This in part explains the rise of Twitter. It offers to the older professional what Facebook should have offered, and once did. Something simple and stream-lined, an easy way of posting brief bits of important information for others and keeping abreast of what like-minded professionals are doing and thinking. The problem with Facebook was that once people reach that age at which MySpace and Bebo stop being cool (it happens) they use Facebook for the same purpose. Although in my case MySpace stopped letting me log in so I made the full transition to my already-existent Facebook early. I had been trying to keep a distinction running: MySpace for school friends, Facebook for Uni and networking. It wasn't a distinction that survived once all of my school friends moved to Uni and added me on Facebook.

Facebook is a site that no longer does what it set out to do; its purpose has changed, because its users (and therefore their needs) have changed. Networking on Facebook didn't stand a chance once the socialites forced the professionals into a minority.

Sizwe Banzi is Dead @ the Stephen Joseph Theatre

With scare stories about identity theft rampant, it's interesting to see a case in which the theft is not only portrayed positively as a crime that harms no one, but also offers one man's only hope of a future worth living.

In our more enlightened, liberal times it's hard to understand how – or rather, why – a system like South Africa's Apartheid worked. The restrictions imposed on the nation's black population by the white minority back in the seventies (when this play is set, though the restrictions go back decades) seemed to ignore the basic fact that black people were, in fact, people.

They are treated instead like children or common property of the white man – shown especially in moments when black adult men in Sizwe Banzi is Dead are called 'boy' by white children. Every movement of Banzi himself and other black South Africans is carefully monitored and logged in their all-important reference book – which is like a passport but much more restrictive. Banzi is banned from leaving his home town for more than three days unless he has a work permit elsewhere, and having failed to return to his dump of a home in time will be in trouble with the authorities whatever he does. On the evidence of this play, Apartheid (specifically the reference book system) seems to have been set up purely to cause more problems for South Africa's black population. Thinking about it, that probably was the plan.

The difficulties are effectively, if comically, explained here by Buntu – a curiously camp South African played by Louis Emerick (of Brookside fame) – when he runs through the tortuous steps Banzi will need to take in order to work in the town Buntu lives in. Emerick's other character, photographer Styles, spends the play's first half setting a context for the later privations. He tells of his past in a Ford car factory which was clearly no Equal Opportunities employer, instead using black men as cheap, abusable labour while the white men stayed in management. It's a vividly performed monologue, but Emerick takes his time to get warmed up.

There's a certain anger this piece keeps bottled up and repressed until Emerick finally unleashes it all in a furious speech persuading Banzi into an illegal choice, but the only one that offers him a future. It is in Banzi's 'death' and subsequent re-birth as another man that writers Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona raise their key issues. What's in a name? as has been asked before. Or rather, what's the value of that name? Is it worth keeping if it can be exchanged to feed a man's children? What does a man own that he can take with him? In the case of the black South African of the early seventies, not very much at all. In fact, even the freedom Styles' father fought for in WWII looks pretty suspect. Bunto's father was left without even his dignity every time a white man passed him in the street.

Thankfully, this play avoids laying into the white population of South Africa – and indeed of everywhere else for not intervening – for Apartheid. Instead, it concentrates on how that system restricted the lives of countless black people for the decades it was in force. The two-man cast brilliantly convey the sheer hopelessness of the situation, the desperation that leads a man to steal the identity of a corpse.

What the Stephen Joseph Theatre presents is a rousing appeal to the individual to react against state oppression, to not knuckle under and drown. It urges circumvention of measures set up to restrict individual dignity, humanity and freedom. Every individual has to fight a system like apartheid, that way – as the production's final seconds highlight – one of them might just get himself out of prison and elected President.

Pub Quiz is Life @ Hull Truck

At last! A play on Hull Truck's main stage that doesn't wallow in Hull Victimisation Syndrome.

Richard Bean's Pub Quiz is Life comes as a minor breath of fresh air, after a few shows that have made much of Hull's perceived status (earned or otherwise) as a bit of a rubbish city, where the locals readily admit that the place is awful. Don't get me wrong, this play does have the odd symptom, but HVS is nowhere near the rampant disease it has been. We're talking a minor case of sniffles, rather than the recent bout of flu.

What Bean does instead is much better than the tack taken by Alan Plater and Rupert Creed. He mentioned in an post-show talkback that he thinks playwrights should 'lift up the rock and look at the bugs under it'. Rather than have middle-class, middle-aged folk bemoaning the state of their lives and city, Bean shows people living in that city – not all of them are working-class – and his characters actually do things.

His plot centres around Lee, a discharged squaddie fresh from Afghanistan who joins his father to form a pub quiz team. Also on the team is Woody – the man supplying Lee with cocaine to ease his father's MS – and Melissa, who works for a company aiming to regenerate Hull and make it a 'top ten town'...whatever one of those is. Already, you can see where the HVS symptoms are going to creep in. Oh, and Bunny – Lee's dad – is a retired dock worker. So plenty of chance for the old man to have friction with the young woman over the general state of Hull.

Unlike previous stage fictions of Hull – without wanting to continue comparing Pub Quiz... to other plays – this one manages to make some good points. The shouting about Afghanistan and Britain's right to be in the country may not be necessary, but the loss of fishing as an industry – and the subsequent loss of dignity and purpose for Hull's local male population – is as good a reason as any for the city's current degenerate state, and especially the high number of unemployed. Esther Hall (of BT advert fame) tries her best to make the argument that 'iconic footbridges' and shopping malls are an improvement sound plausible, but it just doesn't stand up to understandable anger. That this is anger Bean shares with the older men of Hull seems a reasonable assumption.

The strength of this production lies in its charting of the gradual corrupting of Lee. He starts off as a nice enough bloke, a married father with an eye for a good-looking lady, getting hold of small amounts of crack to ease his dad's illness. But the world he finds himself in on returning from Afghanistan makes him angry, cuts him off and seemingly rejects his hard-working father. The world – perhaps the nation – turns him into something else, not quite a monster but a feeling of revulsion is hard to avoid by the end. Unless you admire the determination and ruthlessness he exhibits, of course.

Another strong point is the pub landlady, Mabel, who asks the questions in a voice like gravel soaked in honey. She's a bit like Chaucer's Wife of Bath revelling in performing a mini-Cabaret act whilst plucking general knowledge questions from a glorious trail of smut. Picture that. Anecdotes about her eight husbands crop up throughout her questions over the weeks, and every now and then she has a song. And what a voice.

Interestingly, only one of the cast is from Hull, and some of their accents are patchy. Watch out for one particularly bad piece of casting in a drug-dealer played far too young, by someone too young (in a way, that's probably a compliment to the actress – or it would be if her accent were decipherable). Throughout, it feels as though the cast all need to loosen up a bit and relax; there's something to be said for deadpan delivery (see: Mabel) but it gets taken way too far here. The same can even be said of perhaps the worst onstage gunshot in the history of the north.

Tellingly, Bean also declared that he'd wanted a Hull play called 'Craptown', and this was probably it. So, while it's not quite suffering a full-on bout of HVS, there's definitely an acknowledgement of the symptoms...Bunny even complains that Luton got the official title ahead of Hull: “We was robbed!”

Where Bean succeeds is in keeping that a side-issue, and not a focus. Pub Quiz is Life is much more about British society as a whole than poor old Hull, and so much better for it.

Rozencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead @ the Edinburgh Fringe

The ThreeWeeks review of the American High School Theatre Festival's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which stops short of calling for a ban on AHSTF performances, even though they do horrible things to this gorgeous script:

What's it all about? So asks Rosencrantz (or Guildenstern, who knows, or cares?) at the end of Tom Stoppard's wordy, clever take on 'Hamlet'. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are minor characters in Shakespeare's iconic tragedy, but take centre stage in this monotonous production. It's an ambitious project for an American high school to tackle – bringing so word-conscious a play (they miss most of the wordplay, in fact) to a British audience – and they don't really succeed in bringing it to life. Dedicated acting doesn't make up for clumsy staging, nor for lines gabbled at speed in order to keep the play within its advertised running time. Undeniably rushed, by a cast who don't appear to understand the majority of what they're saying.

tw rating: 2/5

On the positive side: Scottish crime-writer Ian Rankin (creator of Rebus) spoke to me in the queue outside, and somehow sat through the whole thing with his family.
On the negative side: after posting this review, I wondered if two stars were too generous.

My interview with (the man playing) Eric Morecambe

Bring me sunshine

Bob Golding tells Richard T. Watson about playing a wife, a mother and an elephant in his one-man show, Morecambe

“When I say I’m doing a one-man play about Eric Morecambe the reaction is always the same; everyone smiles. It’s so warming. The love for the guy was huge,” explains Bob Golding, star of a play what Tim Whitnall wrote (to paraphrase Ernie Wise), ‘Morecambe’.

“The Edinburgh Festival is the hub of première work, and it’s become a lot about comedy”, he adds. “So where better to première a play about one of Britain’s best comedians?”

Eric Morecambe, says Golding, was and is a “hugely-respected member of the comic fraternity” and this show celebrating his life has already had previews where “the responses were so positive and so encouraging” that the show will now enjoy a month’s run at the Assembly Rooms.
“My respect and love for Eric and Ernie was massive before I came into the project,” he continues. “It’s the most amazing project. It’s not like a job; it’s been enjoyment”.

He’s aware of – but unfazed by – the pressures of playing such a well-loved figure. “ I don’t allow myself to think about the pressures of it, because I think you’ve just got to get on with it to your best ability”, he concludes. “Which is what I’m doing with this piece. I approach it like any other role”.

However, he adds: “People have compared me to Eric all my life. It’s not that I’ve thought ‘Oh, I must play Eric Morecambe’, it’s not something I’ve been working my life towards, it’s just something that’s been there, and now I’m making the most of it”.

What really comes across in our interview is how much of a loving tribute to Morecambe this show is. Golding tells me that he considers Morecambe a “comic genius”, adding, “I’m certainly not that, and I don’t know if I can replicate that onstage, but hopefully I can tell a story about the man who was”.

The show’s director Guy Masterson first noticed Golding’s likeness to Morecambe twelve years ago. Golding remembers, “He said, ‘You’re so similar to Eric, but you’re too young at the moment. Maybe in ten years’ time we’ll address it’”.

‘Morecambe’ has clearly been a long time in the making. Golding says that “the toughest part was what not to put in. People would see it and say, ’Oh, you didn’t do that’ and, ‘You didn’t do that enough’; there’s a wealth of knowledge of Eric’s life”.

Audiences will probably expect a brand of family-friendly comedy familiar from the ‘Morecambe & Wise’ TV shows, and that’s what they’ll get. So, it’s suitable for children? “Definitely. It’s a one-man show and it’s an hour and twenty-five minutes, so it’s whether or not they can sit still, really. But Eric of all people was guilty of that as well; that’s why his mother called him Jitter-arse. He had so much energy. That’s an important point to make: Eric was never ‘off.’ He was the eternal comedian, the eternal jester”.

The family-pleasing side of the role should come easily to Golding, who is the voice of Max and Milo in CBeebies’ ‘The Tweenies’, and PC Plod in Five’s ‘Noddy In Toyland’. “For a long time my daughters just assumed every father did some kind of TV voice. Their friends say, ‘Can you do Milo’s voice?’ and I do it, and then become a sort of priest, or celebrity. I’ve been very very lucky in that respect”.

But at the heart of Morecambe is love and respect, a celebration of the man voted Britain’s favourite 20th Century comedian. “I hope that by doing this piece we can tell a simple story about a simple man who touched millions of people”.

ThreeWeeks Weekly No. 3, 2009

The Gigalees Crazy Circus Show @ The Edinburgh Fringe

The ThreeWeeks review of Austraila's cheeky, crazy circus double-act:

The craziest things here are possibly the double-act's outfits, but then the double-act are pretty crazy themselves, in a zany sort of way. This is a brightly coloured, high energy performance in which the pair on stage barely pause for breath; Wilma and Daisy lead their audience enthusiastically through a series of clowning and circus tricks, during the course of almost an hour of classic slapstick, balloon models and juggling. The buffoonery may at times be predictable, but is still funny and gets laughs from parents as well as children. Mind, the dancing only goes well for the kids whose parents also get into the swing. This is a show high on energy, smiles, skill and laughter.

tw rating: 3/5

Waking the Dead VIII - Magdalene 26

How long do BBC scriptwriters spend on re-reading and tweaking their scripts? Really.

Now, I've never really seen the appeal of Waking the Dead (aside from the suits that Spencer used to wear a few seasons ago, and Sue Johnstone's chemistry with Trevor Eve). My mum likes it. I watched this one because my friend (whose opinion in these things I trust) recommended it. He shares a birthday with my mum, so must be trustworthy.

I ask my earlier question because this two-parter – the opening of Season Eight – felt lazy and slapdash. After seven Seasons, you'd think they'd have got the hang of it. There are problems riddling this script, like the maggots that riddle the corpse found hanging from a ceiling in this poor woman's house. Incidentally, who was that bloke? That's one plot strand left dangling, along with any attempt at explaining the car crash that leaves Lisa Hogg's naked character running through the woods with no memory.

I'm pretty confident that I remember seeing perhaps the first ever Waking the Dead – or at least, one in which the team were moving into new offices, being introduced to each other and a lot of time was spent explaining what constituted a 'cold case' and why the dead often needed waking. That sort of thing saved a lot of time when New Tricks needed to do some similar background work. That episode also saw the arrival of French DS Stella (Felicite De Jeu), a handy person who – like the audience – didn't know exactly what was going and needed everything explaining. I point this out because at the start of Season Eight, the team seem to be moving into new offices...ones identical to the ones they've been using up 'til now. Despite the initial set-up where Johnstone struggles to locate her office, it's not followed up. There are apparently no more office issues worth mentioning, and everything flows smoothly. Very smoothly. Too smoothly, in fact. These guys are far too efficient to be plausible. Their forensic checks – conducted by their one forensic scientist (Tara Fitzgerald) – seem to be over in the blink of an eye. Handy, in a crime drama that focusses on DNA and old crime scenes.

Without wanting to give too much away...for a show about coppers whose Modus Operandi (is it inappropriate to use that in reference to the Police?) centres on DNA, is it not a bit of a cop-out to throw in identical twins? Is this a gimmicky attempt to keep the show fresh and interesting? Throwing in the one thing likely to confuse DNA testing...there aren't many things that should hold up an investigation along those lines, apart from not having enough evidence (and that does not exciting TV make). The problem could be that we as an audience are shown the wrong twin's set of memories, meaning that one twin magically appears partway through, and we've been following the wrong one. Maybe the twin sister thing just seems silly, but then it's fine when Wilky Collins does it in The Woman in White.

Then there's Stella. Again, I don't want to give anything away, but the poor girl deserves better. I don't just mean from her colleagues who fail to appreciate her until she's on a hospital bed. Her story is disgustingly rushed and hustled to a conclusion that is completely unnecessary and smacks of an actress' expedient writing out of a series because of contractual issues.

Being no expert on Turkish Mafia-type gang culture or Arab oil fields, I hesitate to label the villains of this piece as stereotypes, or even as bad villains. But they do seem to be exactly everything you'd expect from nasty Turkish immigrants who really shouldn't be trusted (especially with white women). On a similar note, why is the only priest in 1960s Soho an Irishman? It's confusing when the other two characters seen then have just fled Ireland, to Soho, and our only clue that this has happened is said priest (whose Irishness makes it hard to believe they've gone anywhere).

Maybe Waking the Dead is something you only watch for Trevor Eve being rude, and not for a story. Is he rude enough to just bully a Turkish gangster into doing what he wants, though? And is all the shooting really necessary? Won't anybody back in Turkey be a bit annoyed about that – and how will that boss be found if the people that can identify him have been killed?

So many problems jumping up. Don't think about it too much, just watch Boyd and Grace (Eve and Johnstone).

Fringe Review 2009 II

As the dust settles on 2009's Edinburgh, here are some more updates from Fringe Review.

Lilly Through the Dark, The River People:
http://www.fringereview.co.uk/fringeReview/3155.html

Djupid (The Deep), Jon Atli Jonasson:
http://www.fringereview.co.uk/fringeReview/3105.html

Rapunzel and the Tower of Doom, Theatre of Widdershins:
http://www.fringereview.co.uk/fringeReview/3139.html

The Chronicles of Long Kesh, Green Shoot Productions:
http://www.fringereview.co.uk/fringeReview/3111.html

The Last Witch, Traverse Theatre as part of the Edinburgh International Festival (deserved five stars, but - as I later realised - 'highly recommended' is the definition of four stars):
http://www.fringereview.co.uk/fringeReview/3156.html

Time Out of Joint, Heart Productions:
http://www.fringereview.co.uk/fringeReview/3148.html