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David Porter » Articles at Suite 101

Future Change Management May Be Beyond Political Control

March 16th, 2012 | Add a Comment

The Internet Is Serious Business - NASA
No change in the news that things are changing. Rapidly. Things get faster, more efficient, more gadget-based. Is there a limit? Is tomorrow controllable?

In a world increasingly dependent on digital technology, it’s easy to think people will go on developing new ideas, new ways of living and ordering lives, without end into some unknown (but reassuringly safe) forever. But can they?

According to Grady Booch, IBM Fellow, the limits of technology were defined in 2003 by the laws of software and physics, the challenge of algorithms, the difficulties of distribution, the problems of design functionality, the importance of organization, the impact of economics and the influence of politics.

Politicians strive to frame laws to deal with cyber-crime, pornography, data protection, individual freedom, protecting internet commerce, but they are essentially only able to play catch-up. The internet and technology pushes forward relentlessly, shaping society. Society does not direct it.

A Limit to Human Knowledge?

Since 2003, the physical limitations defined by Booch remain; but opportunities and the exponential nature of technological advance have increased. Can the brain keep up? The University of Southern California published a study in February 2011’s Science showing that everybody is bombarded with enough daily data and information to fill 174 newspapers.

They also discovered that the average person created six times more data on emails, networking, digital photographing and texts than 25 years ago. Dr Martin Hilbert, leader of the project, said that “the brain is very plastic and very good at understanding and processing information”.

They believed there are 295 exabytes (that’s 29,500 with twenty one further zeros following) of data held in digital form. That is still less than 1% of the information held in the DNA of a single human being. The researchers clearly believed that human capacity for storage, processing and transmitting data was far from being exceeded.

The Economics of Obsolescence

The machinery and apparatus of technology is a different matter. That is being superseded and outdated so rapidly that people expect and accept it. Pixmania-Pro, the office equipment retailer, compiled a 2011 list of ‘endangered office gadgets’, destined to follow VHS, cassettes, typewriters and floppies.

The science of economic obsolescence has it that built-in short-term life expectancy encourages evolution of new generations of equipment. This is both inevitable and desirable as it in turn drives new inventions, innovation and economic activity manufacturing the new, recycling the old.

New, smarter technology has condemned the USB port and data/memory stick, diaries, desk-phones and landlines, calculators and the CD to history. The days of the PC are numbered. The hard drive is gradually being replaced by cloud computer networks. Already more and more activities are online through cyberspace. Reality has been redefined. It will progressively change, transform, evolve.

Where From Here?

But can anyone be more specific about the future than to state that? In February 2011, Britain’s Daily Telegraph, with stories about future technologies and to celebrate 50 years of its existence, asked a series of questions about the next half century. The contemporary ‘great and good’ pontificated.

‘Queen of Retailing’, Mary Portas predicted a move in shopping to “mindful consumption in better shops”. Homes and design guru Kevin McCloud felt people would no longer own their houses and land, but would share it all, including their communities. Garden writer Bunny Guinness imagined a future where gardens, controlled by technology, would be hyper-productive.

Chef Michel Roux anticipated a future of less food waste, rotational land farming and total ready-instant food. Property developer Nick Candy envisioned the renting of airspace with landspace for flying pods, while others dared to think about fertility, the family, the monarchy, beauty, aging, disabilities, cancer and faith.

Future warfare, television, writing, art, politics, sport, transport and civilisation itself were guessed at. James Dyson, inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner, felt that “we needed to get the balance right between cyber and real worlds”. He urged investment in tangible technology that draws on mechanics and material science.

David Rowan, editor of Wired magazine, argued that smart devices would “augment humanity”. What the pundits have in common, of course, is that all their predictions are uncertain, even dangerous, including this one. Many are just laughably wrong in retrospect.

We can be sure that the internet is here to stay (for some time) and that is a mixed blessing. There may soon be hundreds of private world wide webs as well as public ones. And we know that social isolation is a paradox of easier communication. Beyond that, we know little for certain. Even what the politicos will and can do about it all.

First published on Suite 101, 21st February 2011.

Photo: The Internet Is Serious Business – NASA

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The Beggar’s Opera: How One Work Feeds Many Reinventions

March 15th, 2012 | Add a Comment

Hogarth's Paiting of The Beggar's Opera - The Yorck Project
Like body part transplants, ideas get recycled. One 18th century play with music inspired other art forms in entertainment history, and still speaks today.

On the principle that in life nothing is ever wasted, no experience is too insignificant that some creative can’t turn it into a novel, play, movie, painting or song, The Beggar’s Opera is a study in how the arts feed off each other. It also shows how later work can be far more ‘original’ than the first works.

The Beggar’s Opera

First hitting the London stage in 1728, John Gay’s piece was an immediate success being performed more than any other work in the whole century. It was original in the sense that it broke from contemporary Italian operatic conventions: it used dialogue and music to push plot that was taken neither from myths nor royalty, but the criminal dark side of life.

Gritty and realistic, dealing with prostitutes and hangings, it was nonetheless, a comedy, satirising Britain’s first Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, among others. Gay borrowed tunes wherever he could find them, including some from Handel. He wrote his own lyrics to fit his narrative. Of the sixty-nine airs in the piece, forty-one were contemporary broadside ballads.

A beggar told the tale of a highwayman Macheath and his marriages to Polly, daughter of a criminal fence and Lucy, the jailer’s pregnant daughter. Macheath was betrayed by his obsession with whores and sentenced to hang. Faced on the scaffold with four further wives and offspring, he said he was ready to die, but the author/beggar was persuaded to change the ending to a happy one.

So far, it’s the kind of plot that would readily later inspire literature and film in abundance. A love triangle, with an appealing outlaw, betrayal, innocent girls, escape and capture and a dark, seedy setting. However, it was Bertolt Brecht who made it his own, but kept the happy ending.

Into The Threepenny Opera

Brecht gave the world theatrical concepts that continue to influence theatre writers and actors, film directors and stage creatives. His verfremsdungseffekt (v-effekt, or alienation technique or ‘making strange), detached emotional bonds between actors and their parts, and audience with characters, so the unmistakable (political) message of the play could be grasped unimpeded.

His actors were ‘demonstrators’. He used role play instead of characterisation: ‘be a policeman, be a villain, be a fool’. Emphasis on parody and comedy meant extreme body language was required. Audiences were invited to praise or blame characters. This was epic theatre; gestus was gesture by a character plus the actor’s attitude to the role.

Brechtian audiences take nothing for granted, but presented with something familiar, are asked to reassess it. In that sense, The Beggar’s Opera was ideal material. He worked in montages of scenes and took sung elements, direct address to audience, announcements opening each scene telling audience what they will see; clear language with no frills.

He studied how human relations are affected by economic forces. He said that in a choice between bread and morality, it would be bread every time. Stylistically, the best renditions of the play use performers who move from acting, playing music and singing.

According to Tim Baker, director of the British National Theatre’s 2002 touring production, Brecht saw in Stanislavskian naturalistic theatre spectators who had simply and solely to accept the inevitable conclusion of plot. He wanted a theatre where the audience imaginations were utilised too, so they left determined to face the issues/problems they had shared.

His Threepenny Opera, taking The Beggar’s Opera almost wholesale but with a crueler, more sinister Macheath (murderer, rapist, bigamist, thief), premiered in 1928. This coincided largely with movie ‘talkies’, which brought about a drastic reassessment of theatre/entertainment. What make it so relevant today, especially for young people and future audiences, are parallels with technology of computers in graphics, film and theatre-making that leaves less to the imagination.

The Music and Song

Music by respected musician Kurt Weill was an essential feature of success. While not a trained musician, Brecht, according to his biographer John Willett in The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht (1977), ‘poetically and dramatically seemed to think in near-musical terms’. The play was scored for eight musicians, coming from the worlds of acting and cabaret rather than opera. The music punctuates, underlines the words.

The single song that has had the most lasting impact, is Mac the Knife. The first popularising of it beyond the play was Louis Armstrong’s 1956 version, but the 1958 cover by Bobby Darin which made Number One the following year, established its appeal to the rock, jazz, ballads, mainstream markets equally.

Since then, there have been instrumental versions (like Bill Haley and His Comets), some covering the original German as either straight or satirical and pure pop. Ella Fitzgerald, Eartha Kitt, Dave Van Ronk, The Doors, Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra had significant sales. Sting, Psychedelic Furs, Ute Lemper, Roger Daltry and Lyle Lovett also found success with it.

British singer Robbie Williams released a swing version on his critically acclaimed album, Swing When You’re Winning (2001). The fact that it turns into so many musical styles, interpreted by groups and solos from every end of the musical spectrum, means more than that listeners may not know who ‘Suky Tawdry’ or ‘Jenny Towler’ were. Nor possibly, that the song glorifies a criminal.

But that is the way the arts work: rediscovered, reinterpreted and revisualised. It’s unlikely that John Gay turns in his grave when some fresh borrowing from his piece emerges; he might only wish he had lived to enjoy the fruits longer.

First published on Suite 101, 18 February 2011.

Photo: Hogarth’s Paiting of The Beggar’s Opera – The Yorck Project

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Black Swan: Just One More Disturbing Portrait in Mind-Game Movies

March 13th, 2012 | Add a Comment

Black Swan: In Touch With People's Dark Side? - Dick Daniels
A study of a disintegrating mind is a growing film genre devoted to the human condition under pressure, where all is not what it seems. Ever.

‘Oh poor perturbed spirit’, as Shakespeare put it. In Black Swan, almost two rivetting hours of senses awakened with superb acting, amazing camerawork, lavish music and wits scared, are hallmarks of a great movie. To spend hours afterwards perturbed, thinking through what was actually seen, is how mind-game movies hook people.

Black Swan (2010) is about a young ballet dancer, given the White Swan role in a production of Swan Lake, who gradually lost her grip on reality, as she became like the evil twin sister, the Black Swan. Directed by Darren Aronofsky, Natalie Portman mixed the subtleties/horrors of acting with dancing perfection.

The film is about perfection people aspire to – for ballet dancers, perfection is sought through body and dance. The perfect mind and body don’t exist, but human beings strive, struggle, fight, self-torture, self-harm and damage others to achieve it.

Reality and fantasy

Anybody involved in the performing arts will understand the intensity of the pressures of rehearsing till the body is sick, longing for stardom with a yearning that would make somebody kill to achieve, and then the terror of sensing others around are better, more suited to star. This movie went further.

Nobody could be sure what was absolute truth and reality. Did the girl imagine the violence she inflicted on her arch rival? Was the scratching her back nervously till it bled caused by something embedded under her skin, or was it a phantom condition? Her bleeding fingers and toes, were they imagined?

Uncomfortably, when she was persuaded to go out on the town the night before her big stage appearance and had her drink spiked, did she have sex with two men as she said or with the woman who was encouraging her as she envisioned? Did she repay her mother’s over-zealous, stifling care with a real brutal attack?

The Crowded House of Mind Movies

Matthew Baldwin, writer on The Morning News, identified movies that inform, entertain or ‘pry open your skull and punch you in the brain’. These are ‘puzzle movies’, ‘brain burners’ or ‘mind messers’ – films where people know something is going on, but don’t know what. Some episodes of the TV series The X Files also met this definition, with ambiguous endings/realities.

He listed movie classics for consideration in this category. Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) included a surrealistic dream sequence, delusions, amnesia, mental illness and serious doubt about the term ‘innocent’. Rashomon (1950) dealt with the rape of a woman and her husband’s murder through accounts of participants that were: ‘muddling, contradictory and self-serving’. It replayed in the mind afterwards, over and over.

Of Russian-made Solyaris (1972), Baldwin said it filled the ‘mind-blowing cinematic science-fiction gap’, and Videodrome (1983) about a show on which people were routinely tortured and killed was a film that ‘raises questions and your lunch’. A deranged doctor alone on the planet in The Quiet Earth (1985), like Charlton Heston in Omega Man (1971) questioned sanity, perception and reality.

Baldwin rated Jacob’s Ladder (1990) as it singled a man coping with what may have been post-traumatic stress disorder, chemicals, time travelling or pure insanity. The Game (1997), saw Michael Douglas enrolled in an executive sport where he kept wondering if the people trying to kill him were doing it to ‘give him a thrill’ or they really wanted him dead. At least at the end, it was clear that it was a game all along.

The Cube (1997) he described as traps-and-puzzles formula with no explanation at all. Dark City (1998) and to an extent The Matrix (1999), was variously fantasy, science fiction, film-noire; Baldwin reckoned that working out what genre of film it was part of the mystery. The basis of Momento (2000) was the man who had no short-term memory searching for his wife’s killer, in a dark story told backwards.

Mind Games Becoming a Genre

Other contenders include Donnie Darko (2001) about a troubled teenager’s visions of a giant manipulative rabbit, and Primer (2004) about four wannabe entrepreneurs who invented something, but they didn’t know what. Many people would also include 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). This was an epic, hard science-fiction mixed with the sweep of time from primitive man to space travel, with a finale that was so far out it was joked that hippies used it to get high on.

Still more could include Last Year at Marienbad, Pi, Fight Club, Persona and Blade Runner. However, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) was a clear entrant in the league of infathomability, being about erasure of memories from the mind, and the cyclical nature of life. Internet Movie Database summed up the most deliberately obtuse of all: Inception (2010): ‘in a world where technology exists to enter the human mind through dream invasion, a highly skilled thief is given a final chance at redemption which involves executing his toughest job to date: Inception.’

So, much praised as Black Swan was, it was categorized by Internet Movie Database as merely ‘drama, mystery, thriller’. The dancing was such that the audience experienced a full performance of a classical ballet. But it was the dark side in the human soul that it tapped into, that connected with most viewers.

First published on Suite 101, 16 February 2011.
Photo: Black Swan: In Touch With People’s Dark Side? – Dick Daniels

 

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Musicals Are Made From Any Subject Matter, However Unlikely

March 12th, 2012 | 2 Comments

Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber: Master of Musicals - Effie
No theme is too tired, weird, wacky, bizarre or downright unusual, that it can’t be set to music, choreographed and performed on a stage somewhere.

Many stage musicals across the world in the past hundred years have featured unexpected settings, stories, places and events. Murder, rape, incest, betrayal, war and politics have become staple fare of the musical adaptation.

Treatments of Shakespeare (West Side Story; Kiss Me Kate), Victor Hugo (Les Misérables), Dickens (Oliver; Pickwick), Robert Louis Stevenson (Jekyll and Hyde; Treasure Island) and George Bernard Shaw (My Fair Lady); mixed-race relationships (Show Boat) and the game of chess as US-Russian politics have established themselves in the cannon of traditional musical theatre.

Cabaret (1966), set in 1920s Berlin as the Nazis rose to power, incorporated sleaze, corruption and music; The Sound of Music (1959) also featured the Nazi regime. Prohibition-era Chicago (1975) was about female murderers on death row; Carousel (1945) about murder, violence, suicide, love and reincarnation in a fairground, while Fame (1988) inspired youngsters worldwide following students at New York School of Performing Arts, as High School Musical did for the early 2000s.

Old Favourites

Annie Get Your Gun (1946) was about the eventual romance between two wild west sharpshooters, Calamity Jane (1979) had similarities; Cole Porter’s Anything Goes (1934) concerned a bunch of unusual passengers sailing from America to England; Applause (1970) featured an aging Broadway star; Avenue Q (2002) was an adult spoof on the children’s TV series Sesame Street and Barnum (1980) was about the Greatest Show on Earth, circus.

Brigadoon (1947) took the unlikely premise of two American tourists falling in love in a mythical Scottish fantasy; Camelot (1960) was about King Arthur, Guinevere and the Knights of the Round Table, like Spamalot (2004); rebels and freedom fighters starred in The Desert Song (1926), and South Pacific (1949) was about the US Army in World War 2.

Argentine’s Eva Peron was celebrated in Evita (1978); Jewish tradition during pogroms in Russia was the essence of Fiddler on the Roof (1964); The Full Monty (2000) showed unemployed steel workers becoming male strippers and facing their problems through it.

Love and gambling, religion, repentance, jazz and show-dance combined in Guys and Dolls (1950), while love/romance motivated Hello Dolly (1964) and the night club world was the setting for Pal Joey (1940). Gypsy (1959) was about a pushy mum and showbiz, while Grease (1971) rocked with rebellious high school teenagers. Hair (1967) showed hippie adolescents facing the draft in Vietnam-era USA.

In the same period, Miss Saigon (1989) retold Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. 1860’s Siam (Thailand), western culture and love clashed in The King and I (1951). Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1982) and Oklahoma (1943) were about love rivalry set in the American West, and the latter dealt with class, death and the ‘American Dream’.

Edgier Material

The sinking of the Titanic (1997) was accepted as most unusual theme for a musical, but that is a highly competitive league. Other festivals of song, choreography and drama of the highest order are found in musicals devoted to thalidomide, the National Health Service, British schools’ inspectorate Ofsted, Margaret Thatcher, Jerry Springer and the murdering 18th century London barber, Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street and his accomplice Mrs Lovett, who cooked their victims into pies.

Stephen Sondheim created it, and also gave the world Assassins (1991), which his website said: ‘explores the history of presidential assassination in America, from John Wilkes Booth to John Hinckley, Jr. Assassins climaxes in a surreal sequence where the assassins convince Lee Harvey Oswald that his act is the only way he will connect — with them, with history, and with the world’.

From Britain, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Beautiful Game (2000) set Northern Irish teenagers living through the late 1960s ‘troubles’ and religious hatred in a football (soccer) team of Catholics and Protestants coached by a priest, before becoming overwhelmed by political and religious violence. Billy Elliot (2005) was a working class lad who got to live his dream, becoming a ballet star against his father’s will and a background of the demise of the mining industry and political struggles in northern England.

Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers (1988) was about fraternal twins who went very different ways in life. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1978) was based on the true story of the ‘Chicken Ranch Brothel’, active in Texas from the 1840s-1973. Alien blood-eating plants starred in Little Shop of Horrors (1982).

Rent (1994), based loosely on Puccini’s La Boheme, was the story of a group of friends struggling with love, drugs and AIDS. The Rocky Horror Show (1973) was a rock ‘n’ roll horror genre spoof. So, there is no end to themes used.

Pop, Rock and Serious Comedy as Musicals

The Who’s Tommy (1992) was a later version of The Who’s 1969 concept album. The careers, songs and lifestyles of Queen (We Will Rock You), Abba (Mamma Mia), John Lennon (Lennon), The Four Seasons (Jersey Boys) all crowd at one end of the musical entertainment spectrum

At the other, are works like Brecht’s Threepenny Opera (1928), a biting satire using music to tell a story of corruption and betrayal. In between could be said to lie such fantasies as steam trains coming to life, as in Starlight Express (1984); and The Producers (2001), the story of a pair who dreamed-up a failed show to get money from backers, only to find it was a hit.

Nunsense (1985) was a spoof about nuns managing a fundraiser, and The Lion King (1997), based on the Disney animated movie was about jungle animals played by humans, with masks and Elton John music. Hairspray (2002) was about teenagers and civil rights.

All of which goes to show that nothing (successful or failure) is beyond the possibilities for turning into musicals or operas, into show business.

First published on Suite 101,  11 February 2011.

Photo: Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber: Master of Musicals – Effie

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Opera Can Be As Unpredictable and Experimental As Other Arts

March 9th, 2012 | 1 Comment

The Opera House Is Another Theatre - Andreas Praefcke
Opera may be regarded as ‘high-art’ or ‘heavy’, but it embraces themes worthy of as many ‘low-life’ settings, criminals and psychotics as ‘lighter’ work.

Interpreting ‘opera’ quite generously, it’s possible to look at musical treatments of stories, novels, people and events, myths and legends and conclude that many of them really are the most far-fetched themes imaginable. It clearly doesn’t matter, though.

In early 2011, Britain’s Covent Garden opened a new work, Anna Nicole, about the life of a breast-enhanced Playboy centerfold and television personality who in 1994, aged 27, married 89 year-old oil billionaire, J Howard Marshall II. She died in 2007 of prescription drugs, leaving behind court cases from his family.

As Rupert Christiansen, The Daily Telegraph’s opera critic said in January 2011: ‘opera is in reality no stranger to the stuff of tabloid journalism’. He pointed out that Thaiis is a high-class hooker, Tosca murders the cop who tries to rape her, Salome is a ‘psychotic teenager’ who ‘makes love to a severed head’ while Lulu is a ‘whore who ends a victim of Jack the Ripper’.

Early Works

History World argued that opera stemmed from the 1500s onwards, when Roman plays were performed and needed some interludes of more musical, lighter entertainment to liven things up for audiences. These were gradually given lavish sets, costumes and supported with much singing and dancing. Humour inevitably crept in to many, some based on the old Italian commedia dell’Arte traditions. Thus comic became as popular as tragic operas.

It’s supposed that The Beggar’s Opera (1728) by John Gay was the first English musical, being a loosely-knit story bound with contemporary ‘ditties, tunes and airs’ which would have been familiar to the audience, supporting narrative, buttressing entertainment. This theme was picked up two centuries later by Bertolt Brecht in his Threepenny Opera, in which he took the same criminal characters and set their tale to songs and music by Kurt Weill.

Wagner’s ‘Ring’ cycle of four operas,or ‘dramas’ as he called them, was based firmly on Teutonic and Norse mythology to create what can only be styled ‘epic’ or ‘monumental’ works with what many regard as operatic sweep of theme, character, and, of course, music. To play the full set takes around 15 hours, usually spread over four evenings.

Beethoven’s Fidelio was set in and around a Spanish state prison; Handel’s Admeto was about marriage hopes, fidelity, disguises and suicides, very similar to the plot of his Alcena. and his Guilio Cesare which added in revenge, and again in Xerxes and Rinaldo. The point is that while the settings in antiquity may change from Egypt to Rome to Jerusalem, the plots are similar, not necessarily strong on dramatic credibility.

It’s the sets, the scale of the productions, the singing and, above all, the quality of the music. As Christiansen pointed out, operas about Princess Diana, Jackie Onassis, Colonel Gaddafi, cosmetic surgery and assorted mass murderers ‘have melted into the ether’. Music drives plot and drama; music inspires composer and audience. The plot is the peg on which choruses, arias and duets are hung.

A well-known fairy story like Hansel and Gretel is familiar to most audiences in advance. It’s the way it’s treated by Engelbert Humperdinck that counts. Themes of love, hope, betrayal, vengeance, disguise, confusion and misunderstanding in classical settings in operas by Mozart, Puccini, Strauss and Tchaikovsky may share similar elements. Their music doesn’t.

More Experimental Ideas

In Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach (1976), there is no conventional linear plot; it has thematic divisions replacing scenes. As a recognised work in the postmodern cannon, it expects an audience to come and go, picking up whatever they want from its themes. It can last five hours; there is no intermission. It’s based on Albert Einstein, whose vision transformed the thinking of his era.

Nixon in China was John Adams’ clever 1987 experiment in musical and lyrical styles taking the then US President’s visit to what had been a closed country, China, and interpreting it through music. Adams, also called a postmodernist, did not necessarily make any kind of political statement, he just used an original and unusual story line.

With the late 20th century arrival of arts fusion and mixing genres, came a fascination with doing traditional things in an unorthodox way. Glyndebourne Festival Opera in East Sussex, England has, since 1934, had a tradition of audiences dressed in dinner jackets dining in the open air with fancy picnics, during long intervals.

However, al fresco has now become more deliberate and widespread. In 2011, the Birmingham Opera Company planned to stage more ‘innovative and avant-garde from the operatic repertoire’ in unusual venues like warehouses, empty buildings and an ice rink. No reason why not. The use of unusual and non-traditional spaces for public performances of every kind of art form is becoming accepted.

Clearly, opera is the same as neither musical nor soap opera. It is a discrete genre. However, the similarities between taking a story and using music and song (and often dance) to advance plot, characters and the theatrical experience, mean that opera and musical theatre are probably cousins. That kind of cross-fertilisation is what the performing arts is all about.

First published on Suite 101, 11 February 2011.

Photo: The Opera House Is Another Theatre – Andreas Praefcke

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Visiting North and East Norfolk: A Taste of the Real East Anglia

March 7th, 2012 | 1 Comment

Star Hotel, Great Yarmouth: One of Many Choices - Stavros1
Some pointers for visitors to the Norwich-Norfolk coast triangle and how to make the most of the many original attractions on offer in a limited time.

To a native East Anglian, the counties of Suffolk and Norfolk make up East Anglia. Essex, Cambridgeshire and the Fens don’t come into it. A visit to Norwich and fanning out to the coast is do-able and makes for a rewarding break. In the east of this triangle, the dawn can be watched rising over the North Sea; in the west, sunset can be observed as the sun sinks into The Wash.

There are beaches, museums from historical to transport, the usual mixes of wildlife, wild areas and urban interest, and it is home to one of the Royal Family’s residences. It’s where the Norfolk and Suffolk Broads meet the North Sea. There are huge ranges of industry to see, inland and offshore sailing/yachting, a theme park and a traditional fun-fair with one of the world’s few surviving wooden framed roller-coasters.

East and north East Anglia may be relatively remote in Britain, with the furthest easterly point, Lowestoft, some 85 miles from the motorway network, but Norwich International Airport (NIA), just north of the city, is a small but perfectly formed hub for flights within the UK (Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Manchester) and from the entire global network through Amsterdam Schiphol. NIA has carparks a two minute walk from the terminal, short check-in queues and minimum waits for baggage.

North Norfolk Heritage Coast

From Norwich Airport, (maybe in a hired car) a good start is out to the north west, across Norfolk to Kings Lynn on the good (for East Anglia) A47. Kings Lynn is an important trading town combining history (it was seat of Britain’s first Prime Minister, Walpole) and culture, industry and the sea, in a timeless yet modern way, giving a flavour of real Norfolk life. The Tourist Information Centre is a good place to start, housed in the old Custom House.

From Kings Lynn, head out six miles to Sandringham, the country retreat of The Queen and her family, which has been a royal residence since 1862. The mixed landscape of the Estate includes tidal mudflats, woodland, arable, livestock and fruit farms. The house, museum, gardens and country park are open to the public all the year round.

After that, it’s round the coast of north Norfolk on the characterful A149, weaving through villages with sea glimpses, holiday settings and a unique rugged beauty. At Hunstanton, go on the pieror stand on the seafront looking across The Wash, the largest estuary in Great Britain, before heading along the coast through places like Brancaster Staithe before pausing a mile inland at Burnham Thorpe, the birthplace of Vice-Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, hero of Britain’s seafaring victories.

Wells-Next-the-Sea, Blakeney and Cley are part of the designated North Norfolk Heritage Coast, and whether or not visitors have any passion about the intricacies of sea defence, the reality of the sea’s power and the vulnerability of the shore, come home forcefully.

Ancient and Modern

At Weybourne or Sheringham pick up the restored old North Norfolk Railway line to/fro Holt; it’s a nostalgic joy, worth an hour for a steam or diesel ride into the past. To Victorian ‘summer timers’ retreat, Cromer, the heart of ‘Poppyland’ which the Chamber of Trade praises: ‘with its pier and two museums, wide open beaches, spectacular cliffs, its famous end of the pier show, glorious walks, Folk Festival and Carnival, Lifeboat Day … the medieval church, crab fishing and crab on almost every local menu’.

On then directly to Great Yarmouth, East Anglia’s equivalent of Blackpool, with traditional seaside amusements, a funfair, a permanent circus and a windfarm just offshore on Scroby Sands. The ‘Golden Mile’ is the seafront stretching from a racecourse right down what was once a sand spit, past modern amusements to industrial activity in a massive new outer harbour.

In his book Coast: Our Island Story (2010), Nick Crane thought Yarmouth and Cromer ‘architectural gems’, and Yarmouth’s importance as a coastal resort ‘has been overlooked’, as well as being where sea-bathing and sea cures were pioneered.

The Time and Tide Museum on Blackfriars Road is an award-winning experience-museum housed in a converted Victorian herring curing works, telling true tales of Yarmouth’s history, maritime/fishing heritage and some of the characters who made it. ‘Rows’ were narrow alleys housing fishermen and large families in Victorian proximity, sharing prosperity and tragedy. A ‘row’ has been saved and visitors can walk its cobbled line.

Roll Up, Roll Up

The Hippodrome Circus is Britain’s only surviving total circus building. Dating from 1903, it boasts one of the world’s only four sunken floors for flooding to create stunning water spectacles in every performance. There are both summer and Christmas circus seasons, with concerts and other entertainments in the ring throughout the year. It has seen thrills and spills, laughter and tragedy, political rallies, rock gigs and orchestras in its long life.

The Pleasure Beach occupies nine acres on the seafront, and is in the UK top-ten most visited free amusement parks, with attractions ranging from children’s rides to white-knuckle thrills. The star is The Roller Coaster. Built in situ in 1933 (having been in France since 1928), it has a single pull-up and drives under gravity up to 3 trains simultaneously with no track brakes at all!

Hotels and bed and breakfasts are many across the price range, including The Imperial, for example, on the sea front. Alternatively, head 10 miles south down the A12 to Lowestoft with, again, a choice of all price accommodation, including The Wherry in Oulton Broad to overlook the Broads, or The Victoria or Hatfield, both on the seafront. Lowestoft is a good place to start further exploration of the Norfolk-Suffolk area.

First published on Suite 101, 2 February 2011.

Photo:  Star Hotel, Great Yarmouth: One of Many Choices – Stavros1

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Visiting North and East Suffolk: A Sample of the Real East Anglia

March 7th, 2012 | 2 Comments

Southwold Lighthouse Dominates Town and Sea - Joe Gray
Some pointers for visitors in the North Suffolk coast to Norwich triangle, and how to make the most of the many attractions on offer with limited time.

Norwich is the heart of Norfolk and north Suffolk, and whether driving in or flying from within Britain or internationally via Schiphol Airport in Holland, it’s the start and end of a mini visit to the real joys of the most easterly part of the British Isles.

Lowestoft houses ‘Ness Point’, that most easterly spot, bravely adjacent to a usually very busy North Sea. Windfarm off Great Yarmouth to the north, Sizewell power station on the horizon to the south, with oil and gas installations offshore between: all pay tribute to the area as an energy hub.

However, the history and the culture, the wildlife, openness of the landscape and the quality of facilities for businesses, speak of a special reward for the traveller hungry for an authentic slice of East Anglian life.

Lowestoft, Most Easterly Point

Birthplace to composer Benjamin Britten, Lowestoft was once a premier fishing and boat-building port. Industrial changes have been deep, but hotels in all price ranges, sports facilities, some interesting eating places and unusual attractions pay testament to the appeal of the area.

Between Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft, off the A12 is Pleasurewood Hills Theme Park, a large family attraction of rides and spills, based originally on the American model with a Main Street and furry mascot (Woody Bear). Large enough to contain a variety of rides, yet small enough to walk round comfortably with car parking very close, it’s an asset much prized locally.

One of the most original and unusual restaurants anywhere, never mind East Anglia, is Sgt Pepper’s Restaurant in the old High Street, Lowestoft. Boasting a large choice menu of Beatles’ themed food (such as Ringo Burger, Strawberry Fields Forever dessert), it creates ambience with music and artifacts from the 1960s. Another unique eatery, is The Swan, outside Lowestoft at Barnby, specialising in prized fish dishes.

Long stretches of truly golden sands make Lowestoft’s beaches, with wilder areas north and south, ideal for those wanting traditional beach activities. Parks, woods, open country, a well-stocked transport museum, maritime displays, Africa Alive wildlife park, Fritton Lake Countryworld add to the long list of family variety.

Lowestoft is where the Suffolk and Norfolk Broads meet the North Sea at Oulton Broad, and motor speed racing is an annual feature, along with the renowned summer ‘Lowestoft Air Show’. South of Lowestoft some 13 miles, lies the ancient Borough of Southwold.

Suffolk Heritage Coast

In a spectacular location and part of the Heritage Coast zone, Southwold is almost an island, bounded by the North Sea and the River Blyth. There is just the one road in and out, and if coastal erosion continues as it has done in that locality, the sea could break through and make it literally an island.

In the meantime, for some. it’s a metaphorical one, a time-warp of history, retirement and culture; what the guidebooks call ‘quintessentially English’. The Pier is a landmark with quirky entertainments and attractions, and the Lighthouse is another, standing sentinel over sea and town alike.

Walks around the old shops and along the river bank, golf on the Common, Adnams’ brewery, the summer repertory theatre are all part of a day out in the region. Lunch, or a drink in The Swan or The Crown (or both) are devoutly to be desired, combining quality local food with a sense of stepping back in time.

On, back up the Blyth valley to the tiny town of Blythburgh, with Holy Trinity Church, known as ‘the cathedral of the marshes’ as it is floodlit and looks spookily like a ghosting hulk ship on a misty night. It was also the setting of legendary devil dog ‘ Black Shuck ’ who reputedly attacked and killed two parishioners in 1577 before running fourteen miles to kill two more at Bungay Church.

Interesting roads lead visitors in the same direction, either taking in the market town of Halesworth with its famous arts centre in the old Cut, or Beccles and Bungay, lively communities of modern business skillfully standing alongside history that calls from every old shop, church, alley or local feature.

Norwich, City of Delights

So, on to Norwich, glorying in the description, ‘a fine city’. Home of the University of East Anglia with global acknowledgment of much of its research, acclaimed shopping centres, theatres like the Theatre Royal, the old Maddermarket, Norwich Playhouse, The Sewell Barn, medieval churches and guildhall; and more museums, sports, pubs, restaurants, churches, markets, clubs than anyone can visit in a year, together with a castle , a cathedral and a river, Norwich seems to have it all.

For a city it is small enough never to feel overwhelming, yet has all the cosmopolitan excitement one expects. The international airport is a real boon, making access to the region easy and convenient. Fast links to London and to a less extent into the Midlands, together with all kinds of business and cultural links across the North Sea into Europe, mean that Norwich truly is the epicentre of tourist planning.

Get a sense of pirates and shipwrecks, heroic sea rescues, wartime invasion threats, on the coast. Walk in modern shopping malls short distances from medieval buildings and later survivals still in working use. Norwich is the end of the tour, but also the beginning of a journey into North Norfolk.

First published on Suite 101, 2 February 2011.

Photo: Southwold Lighthouse Dominates Town and Sea – Joe Gray

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Multiple Roles: Stanislavskian vs Brechtian Techniques in Acting

March 5th, 2012 | Comments Off on Multiple Roles: Stanislavskian vs Brechtian Techniques in Acting

 

Frankenstein: Latest Show to Alternate Lead Actors - Derrick Tyson
Sometimes performers play many parts in a show or film; or a part is shared by several. Some even just swap roles. It’s all part of art’s rich diversity.

Professional musical performers are used to being ‘swingers’: they swing from role to role in the company according to need or illness of others. Often they don’t know till they arrive. These are not just understudies, because they play something every performance.

In ballet and opera, there’s frequently doubling-up of lead roles, or in a long run of any kind of show, the lead will occasionally be taken by somebody else. That is entirely different from multi-roling. An actor plays more than one role in a given production, as a deliberate device. John Cleese played six in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) for comedy.

The English playwright John Godber specified that three or four actors were needed for his plays, all playing many parts. In Bouncers, for instance, it’s night club staff, lads on a night out, girls the same. The script is written to facilitate changing roles.

To keep productions affordable, it makes sense. However, it’s done to achieve a number of other things: experience for actors, novelty for audience and to make people think about the relationship between the characters being swapped.

Frankenstein, the Latest

Britain’s National Theatre production of Frankenstein (Jan 2011) is an experiment in experiments. Mary Shelley’s original gothic horror tale was itself an exercise in trying out the untried, presenting an obsessive man’s attempts to create life from dead body parts. In this staged version, told from the perspective of the Creature, director Danny Boyle (taking a break from movies) alternates two actors in the central roles.

Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller spend a day each as the Creature and Frankenstein, then swap. Sarah Crompton wrote in The Sunday Telegraph that the man and his creation are tied together, ‘the man and his alter ego, the father and his horribly deformed child’.

Miller told David Gritten of The Daily Telegraph: ‘The story is infused with … prejudice, not fitting in, love, revenge, original sin and questions about nurture and nature’. Both actors and director enthused about the challenges, from the 90 minutes for makeup to play the Creature to watching each other rehearse when both men are ‘a study in contrasts’.

Crompton recalled other notable swaps. John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier alternated Mercutio and Romeo in 1935’s Romeo and Juliet, while 1973 saw Ian Richardson and Richard Pasco persuaded to alternate Richard III and Bolingbroke. In 1994, London’s Donmar Warehouse staged a revival of Sam Shepherd’s True West where Mark Rylance and Michael Rudko alternated in the ‘visceral, violent’ encounter between two brothers.

Building Character Identification

The high calibre of these actors means they could cope with just one daily role, because they would be heavily into one part. They wouldn’t be able to swap within a short time, because they spent a lot of time building themselves into the reality of the stage person.

Russian theatrical exponent, actor and director Stanislavski (1863-1938) created his ‘system’, where actors studied, observed for long periods before working into role to such an extent that they lived it, virtually literally. It takes such a performer a long time to come down, back to the reality of themselves after an emotional performance in another’s shoes.

His actors would break a script into differing ‘objectives, the final goal a character wants to achieve’. He would apply the ‘magic if…’ a character could achieve his/her super-objectives. He used ‘emotion memory’ to draw deep on the wells of a performer’s personal experience of misery, joy, pain, loss, hurt, disappointment, hope, trust, lies or betrayal, for instance.

His casts rehearsed for hours putting characters in different situations to find and communicate the absolute truth of desired motivation and emotion. He codified his ideas into a technique before questions and problems of psychological significance were widely understood or acknowledged.

Lee Strasberg in the Actors’ Studio among others interpreted many Stanislavski ideas to form The Method acting approach.They emphasised psychological realism, emotional authenticity and applied it to modern and older plays, particularly Shakespeare. Many, perhaps most, actors trace their development through at least a nodding acquaintanceship with these theories.

Breaking Character Identification

Stanislavski sought the unbreakable link between internal experiences and their outward physical expression. Brecht (1896-1956) took the opposite view. For him, theatre had to be the tool of social engineering, and actors quite literally ‘put on the coat and change role as easily as that’. His actors demonstrated what a character felt through acting (gestus); they did not live it.

All this was in the name of verfremsdungseffekt, alienation or ‘making strange’, to prevent the audience becoming emotionally involved with any character, the better to absorb the message of the play by maintaining critical detachment. That far overrode any affinity with character or personality. Having said that, the relationships in his plays, such as Mother Courage, Caucasian Chalk Circle, Galileo or The Threepenny Opera are studies of characters under stress, enduring change, suffering loss/ambition/loathing/self doubt worthy of any ‘more serious’ play.

According to Robert Lauer from Baltimore’s Goucher College in his 2009 round up of Brechtian commentators such as Willert and Esslin, his characters ‘are too complex to be merely admired or blamed’; his plays had ‘a greyness that is characteristically his’ and he was opposed to realism. He was not interested in his characters as individuals, but as ‘striking images and poses’ of people.

With Mother Courage, Lauer felt people shouldn’t confuse her as an individual character with moral conscience, but only admire her physical endurance in the face of horror upon horror. He argued Brecht’s best characters are mainly passive, morally inconsequential, inconsistent, living by lies, fraud, and, occasionally, by feats of thought.

Brecht thought theatre of illusion and identification as obscene, a fraud. He, a rationalist, demanded theatre of critical thoughtfulness. His theories continue to have a profound effect on stage and film actors and directors today. That a character should be played by several actors (as in the film I’m Not There where 7 actors including Cate Blanchett play Bob Dylan), or the set of a town is chalked out on the floor with token wall fragments (as in Dogville), fits Brechtian theory.

That actors should embrace a part so deeply that they make it real to the point of audience total suspension of disbelief (Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Daniel Day Lewis, Robert de Niro, Christian Bale, Forest Whitaker), that fulfills much of Stanislavski’s thinking.

That both come together in fusion of art, creativity and performance is entirely understandable and why there’ll be more shows with deep characters movingly portrayed by intense acting several times over in a show, speaking stage directions, without curtains or ‘magic’ lighting but audience participation on everything from life’s futilities to the glories of stage musicals. Either ways and both ways, it’s the beauty of performance art .

First published on Suite 101, 29 January 2011
Photo: Frankenstein: Latest Show to Alternate Lead Actors – Derrick Tyson

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The Dark Side Reflects People in Their Lives, Movies and Arts

March 1st, 2012 | 5 Comments

The Dark Night of the Soul Can Last for Years - Lesley
Why people are drawn to the dark side and why so many hide dark sides of their own has fascinated philosophers, film makers and artists for centuries.

‘The Devil shouldn’t have all the best tunes’, (commonly attributed to the English evangelist Rowland Hill, 1744–1833), sums up some people’s views of the darker side in others. The 2010 movie Black Swan unleashed fresh soul searching and anguish about how the arts’ appeal to the innate darkness within most people. New York based British writer and critic Tom Shone wrote in the Sunday Times (Jan 2011): ‘Darker=deeper=good is one of our more unbreakable pop-culture shibboleths’.

He cited Darth Vader from Star Wars (1977-2005) urging the hero to ‘give yourself to the Dark Side’; the severing of his own arm by the protagonist in 127 Hours (2010); and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2010+2011), ‘these are dark times, there’s no denying’. Shone said a cinema trip involves more ‘radical alienation than a season of Brecht’.

People who live through war, persecution, earthquake, famine, drought, bereavement or any cataclysm will vouch for the dark side’s reality. Most killers acknowledge their own dark sides. Shone claimed that a 24/7 effort to feel good about a TV-driven culture helped make sense of artists defining themselves by antagonism to that culture.

Dark Night in a Religious Sense

The phrase ‘dark night of the soul’ is generally regarded as a metaphor for a period in a person’s life, marked by isolation and loneliness, on the road to seeking God. It’s particularly pertinent in Christianity, although there are echoes in Buddhism and Islam. 16th Century Spanish poet, St John of the Cross, used the phrase to title a poem and later treatise.

The journey of a soul from its body to ultimate union with God, passes through a long night of difficulty via purification of the senses, then of the spirit. There are ten steps on a ladder of mystical love. It was written while he was imprisoned by his Carmelite brothers for seeking to change the Order.

St Paul of the Cross in the 18th century may have endured a dark night for over 40 years; Mother Teresa’s could have been almost as long. Jesus himself may have felt it when he cried out: ‘My God, My God why have you forsaken me?’ Doubts and confusions, not the same as abandoning faith, abound in religion. Psalms 13, 22 and 44 indicate King David experiencing confusion and abandonment.

The Mystic.org explained it in similar terms: ‘it sounds like a threatening and much to be avoided experience. Yet perhaps a quarter of the seekers on the road to higher consciousness will pass through the dark night’. To the sufferer, it can seem never-ending. In the field of higher consciousness, it’s a ‘lengthy and deep absence of light and hope. In the dark night you feel profoundly alone’.

Scottish Christian painter and Bosnian civil war artist, Aspergers’ sufferer, former alcoholic and drug addict, Peter Howson reflected much of the torture that the dark side can inflict on the human soul and mind. However, that same suffering, created innovative, haunting and compelling art. A Night That Never Ends (1995) brought together religious faith, war observation and personal agony.

The Dark Side in the Movies

It’s scarcely surprising that the darker side appeals to movie makers. The troubled loner, the evil killer, the sadistic manipulator are spawned in the Hell-fires of long, dark nights of anguish, torment and pain. Man’s inhumanity to man, animals and his environment inspire revulsion and other emotions.

1987’s The Dark Side was about a prostitute and maniac playing mind games. Hardly original from the late 20th century onwards, but the notion of interpreting ‘the dark side’ grows ever wider. Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) was a documentary about the imprisonment, torture and subsequent death of an Afghan taxi driver. It made a political point about American foreign policy.

Tales from The Dark Side: The Movie (1990) was a story about a woman cooking her newspaper boy for supper that strung together three other tales: an animated mummy stalking students, an unkillable cat from hell and a man who witnessed a bizarre killing. The Dark Side of Porn (2005) was a British Channel 4 documentary investigating snuff movies. The Dark Side of the Heart (1992) was a South American film about loving a prostitute.

The Dark Side of Hollywood was a collection of film noir movies, ‘tight, raw’ and hard-boiled characters in situations deep inside the shadows of life. Hangmen Also Die (1943) about WWII paranoia and betrayal; The Long Night (1947) about pursuit by an ex-lover magician; from the same year, Railroaded, a violent revenge drama; Behind Locked Doors (1948), claustrophobic sadism, paranoia and murder; and Sudden Fear (1952) about a playwright saving her life.

A Convenient Catch-All Place

Gary Larson created cartoons under the title: The Far Side (1980-95). While there was a dark underbelly to his observations and wordplays, it was more left-field humour/stand-up comic than seriously dark side. Art and Crime: Exploring the Dark Side of the Art World (2009) was a book about the many manifestations of crime in the art world and the consequences, showing that the Dark Side is ubiquitous. The criminal underworld holds a dark fascination.

Pink Floyd called their eighth studio concept album The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), and themed songs around greed, conflict, time and mental illness. In the spirit of the arts feeding off each other and nothing ever being entirely new, Dark Side of the Rainbow (also known as Dark Side of Oz or The Wizard of Floyd) saw that album coupled with the visual portion of the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, producing moments where movie and album apparently dovetailed.

Contemporary film techniques, animation, graphics, 3D, reality TV conspire to suggest the dark side’s appeal in creating art will go on and on. Mae West described herself as ‘pure as the driven slush’. It’s that often rough, private, forbidden/naughty slush that we cherish in a world of increasing conformity. It’s the arts that keep it alive.

First published on Suite 101, 28 January 2011.
Photo: The Dark Night of the Soul Can Last for Years – Lesley

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Protest Theatre Is Everywhere: Past, Present and Future

February 28th, 2012 | Comments Off on Protest Theatre Is Everywhere: Past, Present and Future

Protest Can Be Anywhere, Anytime, Any Place - Erik Moller
Protest by performance (protest theatre) is as old as mankind. It seems that In an age of future conformity, there’ll always be protesters somewhere breaking boundaries.

What artists in all genres choose to protest about/against, how they seek to effect change, is open to different interpretations, from geographical to racial, from historical to social and from environmental to economic.

After the 1960s, Bob Dylan denied his songs were part of the protest movement (war, nuclear bomb, drugs, youth), yet clearly, songs like Maggie’s Farm, Blowin’ in the Wind, Hurricane, Oxford Town, With God On Our Side, for instance, convey messages strong enough to stir emotion against injustice and prejudice. That is just what protest theatre does, whether it be on stage, in song/dance, through paintings, movies or speeches declaimed like Martin Luther King’s 1963, ‘I have a dream’.

Protest Theatre as Subversive Comedy

In their book The Triumph of Pierrot: The Commedia dell’Arte and the Modern Imagination (1993), Martin Green and John Swan argued that three lists of items from the late 20th century should be compiled. One, included Rocky Horror Show, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s operas and Halloween in Greenwich Village exaggerated style in language of violence and sexual challenge.

Two, included New York City Ballet, exhibitions of Picasso’s acrobat and Harlequin paintings, revivals of Pierot Lunaire or Berg’s Lulu, American Repertory Theater’s King Stag, which controlled the originals’ bold, disturbing, experimental works ‘by decorum and sophistication’.

Their third list was contemporary artistes deriving from surrealism, who challenged decorum, self respect and reality itself: works by David Hockney, Ravel, Poulenc, Samuel Beckett, films by Fellini and Bergman, music by Cage and dance by Cunningham. The authors suggested that the three lists had much in common.

The second derived from the commedia dell’Arte; the first and third showed ‘today what the commedia represented in the past’. Society’s dominant respectable values were attacked by commedia’s ‘non-serious means’. That distinguished the commedia from other forms of political and artistic radicalism.

They believed commedia was always ‘non-serious in intention, defiantly frivolous and sullenly crude’. It belonged to the world of entertainment, but frequently invaded high-art and tragedy. To see it as a weapon of subversion undermining authority through ridicule, satire and exaggeration, is but a small step.

Protest as Commercial Enterprise

The commedia particularly mocked authority in whatever guise it dressed, and was the most effective subversive protest theatre. A line can be traced through the art form to Gay’s Beggars’ Opera (1728), adapted by Brecht as The Threepenny Opera (1928) in which criminality became part of the rebellion of commedia. A movie like The Breakfast Club (1985) showed disrespect for authority among other themes, without being an overtly teenage protest film.

Often the avant garde, the revolutionary becomes mainstream, as commercialism takes over. Barry McGuire’s Eve of Destruction, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On?, Hedgehoppers Anonymous’ It”s Good News Week, Phil Ochs’ I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore and Edwin Starr’s War are remembered for chart success then (and now in the nostalgia market) rather than protest anthems as such.

Neil Young, first famous in the 1960s, produced in 2006 ‘a full blown anti-Bush protest album’, Living With War. Ray Davies has produced subsequent work to his 60s’ hits with The Kinks of a social comment style, that could be seen as a working class voice of protest. Working Man’s Cafe (2007) is a cross between class warfare and nostalgia.

Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937), described by Treasures of the World as ‘modern art’s most powerful antiwar statement’ emerged from Spain’s civil war between republicans and fascists. Although his sympathies lay with republicans, Picasso avoided politics and disdained overtly political art. Today, it is viewed as a powerful piece of art first, and as political protest later.

Legacy of the 1960s

While many artists from the 60s are still active and political/protest theatre didn’t begin in the 1960s, the era was marked by increasing affluence empowering young people, along with cultural changes in music, art, theatre, fashion and sex that put young people’s demands near the front of politico-media agendas.

1968 in Europe especially was labelled the ‘Year of Revolution’ with protesters and police clashing outside the American Embassy over the Vietnam War and students manning the barricades in Paris and across parts of France, echoing protests in some US cities, Mexico and Prague. Britain also had troubles in Northern Ireland with housing and employment protests; Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament regularly attracted hundreds of thousands in peaceful marches.

So, the issues were civil rights, individual freedom, racial equality. Australian Michael Hughes wrote in Let’s Talk magazine in 2008 about how his was the only foreign country to fight alongside the USA in Vietnam, and he was among the first to be conscripted. He wrote: ‘We were all so young and naive, that none really understood what the war was all about’.

The rock musical Hair (1967) encapsulated that feeling that young men particularly did not want to fight with a high probability of dying in a war that they neither understood nor cared about. Arlo Guthrie’s movie Alice’s Restaurant (1969) did much the same exercise in protest. These were musical protest theatre pieces.

Nowadays, protest is as likely in the arena of the global internet than elsewhere. In August 2007, students and graduates were angered by the bank HSBC charging interest on previously free overdrafts. The Guardian reported in an article by Tony Levene, how they launched a ‘viral campaign’ against the bank on Facebook.

Even in the 21st century, news footage of rioters/protesters being water cannoned, truncheoned, rounded up by the authorities is commonplace in many countries. In Britain there is still freedom to mock authority to some extent. The late 2010 student riots that threatened Prince Charles and his wife arose from peaceful campaigning on London’s streets, showing that protest can turn violent, ugly and probably counterproductive.

On a lesser scale, public monuments (like Nelson’s column in London) are frequently daubed with temporary laser light images to highlight issues in public consciousness. As protest against the power of British TV talent show The X Factor to determine the Christmas Number 1 single, people in their thousands ensured that Rage Against The Machine was the most bought/downloaded 2009 Christmas single.

Across the world, in South Africa to South America, the Pacific to the poles, there are peoples, tribes, cultures where somebody at some time is protesting and using performance to do it. Protest theatre is clearly alive and flourishing as it adapts to changing circumstances, freshly perceived outrages and evolving technology.

First published on Suite 101, 19 January 2011.

Photo: Protest Can Be Anywhere, Anytime, Any Place – Erik Moller

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