December 2008 Archives

Happy New Year's Eve, everyone, and I trust you're as pleased as I am at the new knighthood for Terry Pratchett.  I'm a teensy bit dubious about the honours system, but I wholeheartedly approve of this one.  Couldn't happen to a finer fellow.

I also point you to the, I hope, measured response the Guardian has given me the opportunity to make about the whole health hazard thing from the Daily Mail.  No great calls for unity thus far, but I'll keep saying it.  Maybe one day it'll stick.

Here's to 2009!  A beans-on-toast year in the making if there ever was one.

So, as promised, I saw the sadly David Tennant-less Hamlet.  Not a problem for me; as a member of the RSC, my tickets cost 16 quid.  How much did you pay for yours on eBay?

It was a very good show, even without Doctor Who, though I must say extraordinarily long.  The programme notes say that Shakespeare probably never did a Hamlet longer than about two hours and that the four hour version folio is probably a "Director's Cut".

From which the RSC hardly cut anything.  It's two hours to the interval.  Two hours.  And I've seen, what, a good dozen Hamlets in my life, and this is the first time I knew there were Ambassadors to Norway in it.  Seriously. 

Edward Bennett is perfectly fine as Hamlet, though with the bumping up of the understudies through the various roles, we got a distractingly bad Guildenstern, the poor love.  Nicely shaped head, though.  The whole show was stolen by Oliver Ford Davies as the best Polonius I've seen by a mile.  Too bad he kicks it shortly after the interval.

Still, it's a very good Hamlet, clean and tasteful as the RSC always is (though, shockingly, no water!  The RSC puts a pond in everything), and goodness knows there were plenty of empty seats in the Circle.  Which is a shame, so you should go.  God knows it's going to be better than the Jude Law Hamlet coming in the Summer that I've also got tickets for.  The mind boggles...

If you can hold your nose long enough, check out page 55 of today's Daily Mail.  Apparently, I should come with a health warning.  Never mind that the excerpt they chose doesn't reflect that he's not actually attacking a man or that the psychological aftermath is devastating, but then why would you ever expect the Mail to be balanced or reasonable (though they did get comment from the level-headed Amanda Craig in rebuttal, so perhaps I'm being unfair; well, no, there is that headline...)?  God bless them.  It's like a support group for ninnies.

Rather less hysterically, I also got my first major US newspaper review in the very estimable Chicago Tribune, which is quite pleasing indeed.

Today's entry was going to be about the David Tennant-less Hamlet that I saw last night (it's very good, and tickets are easy to come by these days) but more on that anon as today was set aside for a surprise visit from the Diana Mitford of the UK tabloid family, who pitched up post-Boxing Day in a mild mood.

 

And so on, and so forth.

Just a quick note that I wrote a review of Alexei Sayle's new novel in Saturday's Guardian.  Not a bad little book.  But carry on with reading my complaints about UK Christmas cards.  Two more today, return addresses on neither.  Honestly, people.

Hello, people of England.  Is it really so difficult to put a return address on your bloody Christmas cards? 

Honestly, we've received two (two!) Christmas cards this year with no return address and a signature so lazily scrawled that we genuinely have no idea who they're from.  We've also got at least one from someone who's contact details we've lost saying, Let's be sure to get together!  Fine, where do live?  What's your email address?  Who the hell are you?

This is not a hard thing, people of Blighty.  Isn't Christmas difficult enough already?

Near the very beginning of this year, I walked out of a terrible, terrible new play by David Hare at the Royal Court called The Vertical Hour, and now, near the end of this long year, I have walked out of another:  Gethsemane at the National.  Lesson learned.

Here's the problem:  it's been a long-standing belief of mine that if you set out to write a fill-in-the-blank work of art - e.g. a political play, a socially conscious film, even yes a teenage novel - you're setting out to write a mediocre work of art.  No good work of art ever started from an impulse other than artistic.  You MUST tell a story you're burning to tell first and always; if you decide (like David Hare apparently does), hmmm, I want to write a play about the Labour Party donor scandal, I wonder if I can think of a story to shunt that into - then you've got the cart before the horse.

If you're actually an artist, your artistic impulses will respond to political, social, zeitgeisty ideas.  They'll all be there because, guess what?  You can't write subtext.  You can only write text, and trust that you're a good enough artist that subtext will be present because you've responded to truth in your story. 

Instead, David Hare's story and characters are dictated by the political points he needs to make, and as such, his plays fail completely as drama.  There aren't any people onstage; they're just walking opinions.  Gethsemane has no recognisable human beings, no believable drama, no jokes that don't feel stamped in my industry - just lots of not particularly fresh despairing liberal opinion.  It might make a good essay; it's a travesty as a play, because you don't give one damn about it emotionally.

Worse, his reputation is such that no seems willing to tell him, so they keep on coming.  People who couldn't plausibly exist shouting their way through problems you won't care about.  Ugh, never again.

I saw the swanky new production of Twelfth Night by the excellent people at the Donmar Warehouse as part of their West End season.  Oooh, he's a talented lad, that Michael Grandage, I must say.

Shakespeare (sorry to shock you) usually bores the socks off me onstage because it becomes, after a time (and with actors who are merely okay) like watching a foreign film without subtitles.  But when it's well done, as in Twelfth Night, it's actually rather good, isn't it?  A brisk, sunny, very funny two and a half hours, with Derek Jacobi ACTING his way through Malvolio.

Where I think they make an error.  Jacobi is so good as Malvolio, you begin to rather like him, and his humiliation isn't the laugh-fest it's meant to be.  I felt he was wronged, and at the end, when he vows revenge, it felt like something was left undone rather than the last grandiosity of a pompous ass.  An miscalculation, I think.  But worth seeing, definitely.  Good luck getting a ticket, though.

As for the rather remarkable news that Alexandra's version of Hallelujah looks to be Christmas number one and Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah is going to end up Christmas number two, can I just say how irritating those smug Jeff Buckley fans are?  Just because you're pretty and you die young doesn't make you an untouchable saint.  I prefer Rufus' version anyway and am more than happy that Leonard is going make a packetful.

Ever thought about how much panic destroys our lives?  How much worse, for example, this current economic crisis is because there are tabloids screaming that we should panic (and buy them over their competitor), television news saying we should panic (and watch them over their competitor), and political parties saying we should panic (and vote for them over their competitor).  Ever feel like you're the only calm person watching the world kill itself in a panic attack?

But never mind.  What else is new?  August: Osage County is new at the National, flush with Tonys and Pulitzers and a 3 1/2 hour running time, and very good it is, too, if you can make it past the terrible opening monologue.  It gets very good in hours two and three.

Also new, a nicely surprising article in the Independent today picking me out as one of four writers to read now that Harry Potter has found marital happiness with whatshername.  Not sure I'd really welcome the pressure, but hey, nice to hear it.  The print version even has a familiar photo.

And finally, news that the French version of The Knife of Never Letting Go is coming out in April (following the Italian and Spanish, already out, and the German version in January).  They're calling it La Voix du Couteau, or The Voice of the Knife.  Which is rather lovely, I think.

Have a nice weekend.  Try not to panic.

Well, they've all come at once.  In addition to the ones I mentioned yesterday, The Knife of Never Letting Go has also been featured this weekend in "Best of 2008" round-ups in the Sunday Times, the Scotsman, the Irish Independent, and the Australian Courier Mail.

This is all doing terrible things to my ego.  Thank God I'm a natural worrier.

I've been laid low this week by a particularly unpleasant stomach bug (hint: don't get it), so now finally feeling better, an update:

Just before I started lying around the house and moaning, I did return from the excellent event I did in Bury for the Big Science Read.  Very well run, really nice people, a terrific crowd, all of which made the 6 1/2 hour National-Rail-impaired journey home less painful than it might have been.

The Ask and the Answer (the next book for all those wondering) is milliseconds away from being sent to print, but you still won't be able to read it until May in the UK.  But it's coming, it's coming.  And The Knife of Never Letting Go has been picked in a year-end "best of" round-up by the Times, in addition to the ones on Amazon.com and in the Independent.  A nice Xmas present.

I'm currently halfway through a big, big draft of book three of the Chaos Walking trilogy, and still in training for the marathon, for which you should bloody well sponsor me already.  I'm nearly halfway to my goal, so join in the fun!

Now to go watch that bloke I'd never heard of from that soap I never watch win I'm A Celebrity.