Art

I went to see a Beckett play last week at the Bristol Old Vic - not in the main auditorium because it's still being renovated but in a studio theatre which held about a hundred people. The play was Krapp's Last Tape which I remember enjoying when it was broadcast on TV many years ago. I can't say I enjoyed this production though I think the one actor did a good job. Beckett's a bit of a mystery to me. Can't say I like his so-called masterpiece "Waiting for Godot" in which two tramps wait for someone who doesn't turn up. But that may be the point of it, the attraction of it to some people, the sort of people who like to discuss what it was all about after the performance. Waiting for death, maybe. Well, Beckett is very interested in life after death if there is one, or, rather, interested in the nothingness that comes after death. A bit like Schopenhauer possibly.
Libby Purvis in yesterday's Times thought there was just too much talk, too much theorising about art these days. I think she's right. Like those people who like to see hidden depths in abstruse plays a la Beckett, she points a finger at art critics and perpetrators of some of art's monstrosities. She writes: "When did words become so significant that visual artists could assemble any old roadkill, excrement or crude pastiche and critics would force it into fame? Much is said about the commercialisation of the art market. I am more fascinated by the verbal hype".
I believe that there are quite a few so-called artists about who have little talent except to be able to advertise themselves for financial gain. Damien Hirst surely; Tracey Emin is another. That perpetrator of barbie-doll-like plastic works large and glossy and almost sick-making stuff.... his name escapes me - as does his talent. Yet they get talked about in glowing terms by some critics, not all, not Robert Powell for example who saw more art in the man who "caught the f....ing fish" than in that of the man who put it in a cage and who called it, mystifyingly and cryptically, "The Physical Impossibilty in the Mind of Someone Living"? Makes you think, eh? Makes you want to discuss it, eh? Makes me want to puke.

Shakespeare

I'm trying to think when was the last time I enjoyed a play by Shakespeare. It's certainly a long time ago. I have enjoyed some of his plays which have been made into films but not usually (if ever?) those perfomed on stage. Partly this is my fault since in recent years my hearing hasn't been good and so I miss a lot of dialogue; but only from some actors. So, I blame acrors a lot. This week I went to see a Globe Theatre production of Henry V which was on tour and which stopped off at Cardiff's New Theatre for a week. It began, of course, with the Chorus saying "O for a muse of fire...." etc. This I heard perfectly. But from then on I had difficulty hearing what was said and I blame the actors for their poor enunciation. But I know the play well enough to follow what was going on. I left during the interval.
This was a professional production with professional actors in a splendidly suitable set, yet it lacked something. Was it the direction? Was it me? Was it Shakespeare?
I have to say that I have had it "up to here" with Shakespeare's comic characters. They just ain't funny. Were they ever? Well, yes, some have been;:I recall a couple of characters in The Tempest who made me laugh. But the ones in this Henry V weren't amusing at all. I saw a production of "The Comedy of Errors" at Stratford a few years ago - which had had glowing revues - and I was bored.
So I think it must be me. I have outgrown my pleasure in Shakespeare's plays - except Hamlet, Othello and Julius Caeser.
This reminds me of a famous translater of Ibsen's plays who said, in his old age: "I have spent the best years of my life being bored by the great works of literature".
Whatever, it's no more Shakespeare for me on stage. Films maybe.