Elizabeth Harding's Blog, page 3

Cross-casting – Jane Eyre

This week I went to the Tuschinski Theatre in Amsterdam to see the National Theatre’s Jane Eyre as a live broadcast from London. When I first read that the character of St John Rivers would be played by a woman, I was intrigued. Could such cross-casting be successful?

It is difficult to take a novel and create a stage play but the one thing that should be true to the book is characterisation. The characters should be rock-solid and totally identifiable. If they aren’t then the producer and actors have simply used the novel as a fluid inspiration for a frolic of their own. If the characters are ‘right’ then stage, props, movement and even time can be used imaginatively and even surrealistically to great effect.

The blurring of roles has always been part of drama of whatever type. It used to be a situation of female parts being played by men, or boys. More recently, an adult male-to-female part is usually one of comedy, such as a pantomime dame or the headmistress in the St Trinian’s series (Alastair Sim) or one of Alec Guinness’s twelve roles in Kind Hearts and Coronets. We are meant to laugh because such cross-casting is caricature.

Nowadays, a male part is very often played by a woman and I’m not just talking about a pantomime hero or Peter Pan. And there is only question to be answered her - is the portrayal convincing? I can think of one or two very convincing performances on film. Linda Hunt in The Year of Living Dangerously and Meryl Streep as a rabbi in Angels in America. But the latter was a bit part and not really tested.

Let’s have a look at how Jane Eyre portrays St John Rivers. He’s in his late twenties, tall and slender and has a very attractive face, like that of a classical Greek statue; he has an ivory complexion, large blue eyes and his fair hair falls over his high forehead ‘in careless locks.’ Oh yes, our Jane is very much drawn to him.

He is also intellectual, kind, has a social conscience and is passionately in love – with a rich young woman who returns his feelings. So do his sisters and Jane start pricing spoons and toasting forks? No, of course not. Because St John has a strong streak of Calvinist melancholy that despises the love he has for the attractive Rosamond and turns his adoration and his romantic passion into a calling to become a missionary, to pursue a zealously, piously charitable life in India. He is almost repelled by Jane yet tries to persuade her to marry him and come with him, as his ‘helpmeet and fellow-labourer’. ‘You are,’ says he, ‘formed for labour and not for love.’ I can’t help feeling that as a proposal it lacks a certain something.

St John, for all his beauty and perfection of mind and body, for all his subjugated passionate love for Rosamund, is fundamentally as cold towards Jane as that Greek statue to which she first likened him. She twice uses the word ‘marble’ to describe him. There is no doubt he has his feminine side, but he shows himself to be as ruthlessly powerful as a beautiful Apollo and Jane can see herself shrivelling under his golden rays. And now she realises that what the deeply-flawed Mr Rochester offered was worth so much more.

The character of St John is complex and has never, as far as I remember, been portrayed, on stage or screen satisfactorily, or at any rate according to what I feel to be the true character. I’m afraid that St John in this production was a thirteen-year-old boy in the first throes of adolescent arrogance.

So was this instance of cross-casting successful? The answer, in short, is that, for me, it wasn’t. It was disappointing. I’ll go on to say that the whole intensely pivotal part of the story, that of Jane growing up, of spending quite a long time with her newly-found cousins was crunched up, disposed of summarily as though the producer simply wanted cut to the chase, chasing Jane back to Thornfield and a tearful reunion. And that too was disappointing.

Cities, Museums and the Summer Crush

Summer is now upon us although you really wouldn’t think so as the cold rain is hammering on the window panes. For many it is a time to migrate south for the summer and visit the cities visit the great museums. But the well-known museums and galleries are suffocatingly crowded at this time of the year.

I don’t think I shall visit Florence again, ever. Which is a pity as I have some happy memories of the city. But I have to accept the fact that the days are gone when we back-packed and camped and went time and again to the Florentine museums and churches (free for students then). Now they charge for every damned thing and the centre of Florence is horrible, swarming as it does with our species.

So what’s to be done? I too am part of that seemingly globulous mass of protoplasm that slithers its amoeboid way to art and culture. None of us are above it all. In the Middle Ages we would have gone on a pilgrimage. People of all classes and casts did. And the idea of the pilgrimage is very old. In the time of Herodotus the caves on Crete associated with Zeus were at the very focus of tourist-pilgrim razzamatazz. Holy caves and oracular shrines drew people from near and far. And latterly, visiting a church, even a secularised one and a museum has something of spiritual hunger about it.

Yet even the Northern cities are not free from crowding. A few weeks ago, Wim Pijbes, the Director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam responded to complaints about how crowded the museum was in a somewhat unimaginative and high-handed way by telling visitors to ‘buy a Rembrandt yourself.’ Now this is a cheeky-bugger sort of remark that I find a tad irritating. ‘tis true that there is nothing much to be done about the problem in an administrative way. Heaven forfend that we should have quota system. Imagine going to a museum and discovering that it filled up within the first five minutes and that you had to make an appointment for one hour in the afternoon of Tuesday week.

The only thing that I as an individual can do is not to go to the local museums in summer. By ‘local’ I mean the Rijksmuseum and the Vincent Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. People come from all over the world to visit them and they really ought to have a fair chance to see the paintings. I can go in the winter to see the permanent exhibitions. Perhaps Romans, Florentines and Parisians have already made a similar decision. Leave the city to the visitors in Summer.

Yet, that decision isn’t foolproof. When I was in Rome on a chill February day a year or two back, the queues to the visit the Vatican museums were long and serpentine. So what is a proper solution to the problem of overcrowding? Anyone?

St Matthew Passion and school assemblies

Last Saturday, I, like many others, went to a performance of Bach’s Matthäus Passion. It has, through the years become part of the Easter ritual. Composed for Good Friday service, it is now usually heard close to Palm Sunday.

On Good Friday itself I go, when possible, to the Johannes Passion at the Westerkerk in Amsterdam. In many ways I prefer this Passion. It is more intense, more despairing, and possibly more human. Yet within the despair and suffering there is something more satisfyingly complete in ‘Es ist vollbracht.’

There is something about Bach’s work that is startlingly familiar on first hearing it. And that is because Bach arranged, to a large extent, existing popular hymns in his chorales and cantatas. But many of these works we used to sing at school assemblies. Alas, no more, I believe. From what I have heard, secularism in schools has chosen to follow a grim, grey and utterly joyless path.

I enjoyed singing in school assemblies. So for me it seems rather silly to remove music from them and replace it with – as far as I know - nothing of any worth. And what does it matter if the music is religious of origin?

There are indeed some boring and dreary hymns but many are memorable because of the music and poetry. ‘Through the earthquake wind and fire the still, small voice of calm.’ I used to love that. And does it matter that it was first composed as a poem by a Quaker? And the poetry of Blake – neither he nor we might have approved of Jerusalem being a prop for the bellicose mindset of 1916 but by the Lord Harry, it woke us up!

I always remember Miss Carver, her hair wound in the tight earphones of her youth taking a deep breath and rolling up her sleeves in preparation for pounding the piano, an act that served almost as a lifting of a drawbridge, allowing those bows of burning gold, those spears and chariots of fire to enter the bastion of our sleepy consciousness.

And as for Bach - why shouldn’t a Lutheran compose a mass? It’s the music that matters. I have attended mass and listened to music of the Roman Catholic Church. But that makes me no more an adherent of a specific creed, whether it is the Apostolic, Nicean or Athanasian than a subscription to any other form of dogma.

Do you have to be a Christian to appreciate all of this? No of course not. Am I a Christian? Nope, although I am interested in the historical Jesus. Do I belong to any of the other Abrahamic religions? Nope. Do I read the Bible? Yep. And why? Because of the stories, because of the poetry, because of the vast fund of historical – anthropological data that can be found in its pages. And of course because of its inspiration to musicians.

A school assembly used to give us the first glimpse of that world of poetry and music that reaches way back in time to, I suspect, the dawn of consciousness. That’s all that matters really. The rest, the creeds and so forth, can be left to the casuists of theology.

Awards, artists and actors

I’m rather baffled as to why Mike Leigh’s film ‘Mr Turner’ with Timothy Spall didn’t even get a mention in the recent Bafta Awards. Well, it might have got a mention and I didn’t hear it, but it would have been a whisper. Yet, my question is ‘why?’ a word like a whisper in a breeze and just as likely to be heard in a storm or in a hurricane of applause - for other films.

The film, as vividly impressionist as Turner’s paintings, is really an exhibition, with each scene a self-contained entity. Was it this that put the judges off? Or was it the character of Turner himself, played by Spall with brilliant conviction? A man who captured light in all its violence and ephemerality, Turner was brutally finicky when it came to human contact.

Amazingly kind and generous to other artists he approved of, he was outrageously callous towards his own family and his housekeeper. He left all his money to a fund for impecunious artists yet refused to acknowledge or support his own children.

He was, in short an enigmatic, gifted arsehole. Spall portrays him brilliantly and Leigh directs the film with genius. Taking all this into consideration it might be said that being snubbed by Bafta is an award in itself.

Dredging up Doggerland – our own Northern Atlantis

In a short story of mine, 'The Woodsman' one scene depicts a sceptical young man being shown a flute that had been fashioned from the wing of a stork millennia before and latterly washed up from the North Sea.

I thought about this fictional incident as I stood on the beach at Camperduin. Yesterday was a brilliant but bitterly cold day and I pulled down my hood and pulled up my scarf as I stepped along the sand,picking up nodules of flint that had split open to reveal a beautiful glassy interior. A piece of bone – and some unusual shells. And what about those flints over there – are they worked flints, expertly knapped or have they really been worked by water? And are those bones the osseus fragments from a mammoth? In my study at home I already have a foot bone from one of the last mammoths of the Dogger Bank. And what about those shells with unusual colours?

An afternoon’s beachcombing along the North-west coast of the Netherlands doesn’t usually reveal such objects, such artefacts. But through the years, puzzling stuff has been washed up. And certainly, as I walk along the beach now, the sand seems rougher, and pitted with tiny shells.

It is true that the North sea is always coughing up flotsam – whole planks of wood, glassy fishing weights, blue nets, skeletons of seabirds, even the odd cargo of cigarettes – but where I am walking now is the depository of a different treasure. A year ago this place was under water, under the sea.

But this sand wasn’t here a year ago either. It was farther out – right over there where the fishing boats trawl for herring, cod, haddock. Now I know that sand shifts around somewhat underwater and that’s how new dunes are created, But in this case new dunes are being made quite deliberately, by dredging up sand from far out in the North Sea and bringing it to the dike, where it is piled up.

Cast your eyes over to where the great sea dike, the Hondsbosschezeewering stretches from Camperduin to Petten. Time was when the Rekere tidal creek poured inland – but a severe storm in the 15th century caused the sea to break through the dunes on either side, resulting in extensive flooding of the land.

Dikes were built but the present one was built in the 18th century with modifications thereafter and gave me what used to be one of my favourite views. I would stand on the top of the dike and look first to the sea and then to the other side, the land side, much lower down where the brackish lakes drew waders of all kinds. It was a sign of Spring when the redshanks and the black-tailed godwits strutted and pecked over the water.

They still do. But viewing them now is like looking at them from a low cliff. The dike has disappeared. It hasn’t really gone of course, just disappeared from view. If you walk down to the beach at Camperduin you have to walk quite long way to the sea because the sand stretches right out into what used to be sea and a shelf of sand now slopes from the top of the dike to the water.

You see, something had to be done about the sea nibbling away at the sand at bottom of the dike. It was only a matter of time before the hollow space would have become so great that the sea would have slithered underneath and undermined the whole structure. When you live twelve feet below sea-level and not far from the coast, as I do, the situation is something you take seriously.

Now when you create a polder, you built a ring dike and pump out the water from the land you want to dry out. But in this case what they are doing is actually creating a new beach on the sea side of the dike and extending it up and down the coast. And they are making it from land that used to be part of Doggerland.

There is something about this gargantuan piece of imaginative civil engineering that fascinates me. But there is one thing that niggles me. And it’s a more immediate worry than the prospect of waking up one morning and having to swim out of bed.

First, let’s have a look at the history of of the North Sea bed. At the time of the Last Glacial Maximum (18,000 years BC) much of Europe was covered in ice sheets but as the climate warmed, huge areas of tundra were exposed. We’re now talking about a great landmass stretching from Eastern England to Demark and incorporating the Netherlands - in short, where the North Sea is now.

A last ‘cold snap’ around 11,000BC gave way, after some centuries of capricious extremes to a much more pleasant climate, the land becoming inhabitable and worked by hunter-gatherers. As the climate warmed steadily the land became conducive to hunting, fishing and fowling and gathering nuts and berries. It was a river landscape with deeply-cut valleys meandering through rolling hills. It was rich in wildlife and wooded valleys. This was the legacy of the still-melting ice and it was a situation that couldn’t last. But while it did, it was a halcyon time for our Mesolithic ancestors.

If we look at the finds from Mesolithic Star Carr in Yorkshire (from 8000BC) we can deduce a strong culture not only that of basic hunting survival but also of community ties with religious and aesthetic meaning. Finds include the antler masks, knapped flints and worked semi-precious stones.

Imagine the same activities taking place on that vast, undulating, productive plain of Doggerland. In fact the Star Carr people were probably seasonal nomadic hunters and this small place in Yorkshire was just the edge of their territory. They might have had a permanent settlement more to the east.

But the melting ice caught up the Doggerlanders. Gradually, the waters seeped into the land, the rivers grewwider, the land became islands and the islands shrank. Then a catastrophe occurred that speeded up the process. This was the Storegga Slide and it really did for the Doggerlanders.

Storegga, Old Norse for ‘great edge’ refers to the collapse of the continental shelf at the Western coast of Norway. It wasn’t the first landslide to occur but it was the biggest and most serious, resulting in a megatsunami that in one great swell wiped Doggerland off the map. It created the North Sea and the English Channel and these features were here to stay – at least for the foreseeable future.

So all the Star Carr type communities were lost beneath the waves and it is this that makes me a little uneasy when I look at the ships delivering the sucked-up sand of the North Sea to the coast of the Netherlands and when I pick up artefacts and bones and stones I have to wonder.

Are marine archaeologists and palaeontologists involved when the sand is being sifted, as it must be? If so, why not let us know of any finds? Perhaps there is a database somewhere and some researchers are busily writing papers.

The thing is - I really don’t know if the nodules of flint and the presence of other unusual stones are in any way of archaeological interest. I don’t know if bones and artefacts of ancestral Doggerlanders are being dredged up. But it would be nice to hear some comments.

Snow and Ice

Now that my own collection ‘Ghostly Stories and Snowy Poems' is doing so well, I’m convinced I’m not the only one who suffers from snow hunger.

My sister promised me snow and I’m still waiting, as though a present were tarrying at some postal depot; I have snow hunger; it is a craving for the white stuff and no, I certainly don’t mean anything remotely connected with the colloquialisms of drug use and abuse. The precipitation of ice crystals is enough in itself to generate snow euphoria.

The New Year has come and gone. Twelfth Night is approaching but the snow remains a dream or memory; it doesn’t, of course, help that I don’t live in the middle of a country with a continental climate, where being knee-deep in flakes of crystalline water-ice might be a measure of some informal accuracy, where you would know when to slip on the Yaktrax, put on the winter tyres or begin to build the snowman. But then, everyone has to be somewhere and I just happen to be at the edge of the North Sea.

It’s quite simple; I feel the call of winter and the need for snow and ice. I crave the sheer glittering whiteness, the bated breath brightness of a winter world; some might say it is a romantic illusion, that winter is harsh, remorseless. Yes, it can be. When Christina Rossetti was describing the bleak mid-winter – ‘Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow -’ a chilling and inexorable repetition, she knew that this weather, characterising the end of the Little ice Age was pitiless. She wasn’t describing a scene in the Middle East any more than Eliot was in his Journey of the Magi.

Both were depicting the intransigently cruel world they knew and a season not so far removed from the winters depicted by the Breughels. But if there is one thing that is evident it is that although the winter is harsh and the weather relentlessly cold, many people are determined to have some fun. Sliding, skating, throwing snowballs, building snowmen.

And so was it too in the paintings by Avercamp. People are skating and dancing on the ice however much they might have set out to do something serious, such as collecting kindling for the fire at home. And it isn’t a bad way to keep warm. But who is willing to skate or dance outside on a chill, drizzly snowless day?

And the thing is – I hate being cold. I love being outside, well-wrapped up on a winter walk in the woods but when I come back I want the real warmth inside the house. There is something about a damp, mould and moss-covered winter, something that is about as depressing and dispiriting as it can get. Something deadly.

In Northern Europe there is a puritan voice that tells people it is good for the body and soul to be cold, miserable and damp. It isn’t.

If you live in a land with a temperate climate where winters are chill and rainy, you are much more likely to suffer from hypothermia than if you had to contend with a really cold winter, too cold for snow. People who have to live through very harsh winters understand this absolutely.

Lara, in 'Dr Zhivago' has a great talent for very quickly creating a warm and comfortable nest within a frozen exterior. In the film they got it wrong when they portrayed Yuri writing in a ice-filled room on a frozen table. In the book he’s snug and cosy.

So we in a temperate climate have to create our own winters, in the snow landscapes of the imagination. For a child, a snow-covered Narnia with a lamppost is the epitome of both a threatening freeze and a cosy retreat. But I’m a grown-up, am I not? So what do I do? All the snowy scenes come to mind from different books, from the winter entries of Francis Kilvert’s diary to the beginning of Sayers’ Nine tailors’ (the best part), from Andersen’s “The Snow Queen’, a story I first read when I was nine years old to Kavenna’s The ice Museum, a search for the legendary Thule. The winter scenes in ‘War and Peace’ and ‘Dr Zhivago’ spring into my mind. And scenes from books hitherto forgotten emerge from their own frosty hibernation.

And of course the numerous poems...... I can mention randomly the wintry poems of Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson, or Mary Oliver Keats and Wallace Stevens – there are few poets who have not written about snow. And that goes for me too.

The collection ‘Ghostly Stories and Snowy Poems’ came into being after a number of tales and verses were written, through the years, in an attempt to capture an otherwordly Spirit of Winter. And it does seem that a lot of people like them. It may now be a wet, sunny, warmish and fungus-filled winter but the real seasons are the seasons of the Imagination. And for author and reader, that’s what it’s all about, really.

Christmas Moon

On the evening of Christmas Day I went into the garden where a cradle moon was hanging like a hammock between the winter constellations.

And the welkin rang………! Oops, sorry. I just couldn’t resist it. Just once, a piece of purple indulgence slipped in (says she, hanging her head and shuffling her feet). How I’d love to use the word ‘welkin’ in some meaningful sense, though sneakily and shiftily, as though helping someone wriggle under a circus tent to avoid paying. ‘Welkin’ has something so gloriously Anglo-Saxon about it, something so redolent of the clashing of swords and horse armour that I would feel the word ought to be part of an alliterative verse in the middle of an heroic epic.

Andrew Gant, in 'The story of Christmas Carols' (Profile Books 2014) tells us that the original first line of ‘Hark, the Herald Angels sing' was ‘Hark how all the welkin rings.’ Now that’s how the word should be used. But just hang on a minute. I did begin by mentioning a cradle moon in this most cradle-song season.

Yet in many of these congregational carols we have an awful lot of clashing and clanging, and bagpipes skirling and full-throated angelic choirs shouting hosannas and praising the King of kings and so forth. Shush there. What about all that peace on Earth? Don’t wake the baby. Why don’t you all go down to the pub?

Hm. The word ‘welkin’ is becoming less attractive to me. It does seem to inspire people to make a lot of noise and to evoke a fully-grown thunder-god by the name Zeus and Thor and Christos Pantokrator - call him what you will.

Actually, I really think I can do without all the shouting and fuss. Did our Palaeolithic ancestors make such a fuss about the returning sun? Perhaps they did indeed. Or perhaps they looked at the sun and at an actual new-born baby, and wondered how it happened, pondering at the same time on the genesis of imagery and the miracle of metaphor.

Advent

I intended to cycle to the sea today but the fierce West wind, that I thought I could battle against, was just too fierce and the hailstorm that started as I set off made me turn round. I had to give up.

As I now look out of my study window the heavy dark clouds are ringed with gold. But it is what Advent is all about really - the darkness with the promise of light. And a woodpecker is tapping at the hazel tree in a flash of green and red.

You don’t have to be a Christian to appreciate Advent. Around fifty thousand years ago, a genetic mutation occurred within our species that made our ancestors into artists and artisans; it also had the effect of making them aware of the future and of the past, generating as it did a transcendental awareness of themselves, of the world around them. The seasons would have some meaning and in the Northern world a diminishing of the light would give rise to some questions and our ancestors would try to fathom some answers.

I think it’s highly likely that they had some rituals to take them into and through the Solstice. To celebrate too early might well have been seen as bad form at the least and probably quite hubristic. As the climate of the Upper Palaeolithic changed and changed again, giving way to the Mesolithic and the Neolithic and all the subsequent ages, the different rituals and theology would still have had the darkening world and the return of the light as its core.

Of course, all the changes in the year, all the seasons are marked, and we can see ritual fossils of a pagan world beyond our mindset in the celebrations of the Church. But now at this dark time, there is something magical and melancholic in the way the sun sets early in a burst of flame, before the world darkens. It seems as if it is a testing time, of reflection and meditation, a mulling over of deeds and misdeeds.

A poem I wrote some years ago when I had just come home after visiting my mother in hospital in a particularly wet and miserable time came about because of this realisation. It was in ‘the run-up to Christmas’ to exemplify a favourite phrase, but for me it was a cold, wet, sloshy time, miserable and despairing, and yet the world seemed to have a stark, dark beauty.

I shall quote just a small part as the whole poem is quite long:

The sky burns; flames drift across the smoky
Clouds as though heaven were alight or
The earth on fire; this is not an infernal light,
Nor the light of an unreachable paradise; the changing of the year,
Its ending and beginning,
The balefire of Advent - the yew tree’s threnody;
The awe and melancholy of this penitential time
In this dark, penitential place.......

And I understand why it feels best not to decorate the house weeks before Christmas but to wait. Advent is not just ‘the run-up to Christmas’ but a special time which makes the twelve days, when they arrive, all the more worthy of the carols, mince pies and mulled wine.

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Just the book for the Christmas holiday and the winter fireside.

And if you want to write a review I'll be pleased to read it. Write it in whatever language you feel comfortable.

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Kindle - follow-up

In a follow-up to my previous post I feel I have to make a comment on something I heard on the News Quiz. Apparently the second-hand bookshops of Hay-on-Wye are still carrying on a Kill the Kindle campaign. And it all seems so venomous.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, a great many of the books on my shelves are second hand, which means, of course that I am in a way doing the authors out of their royalties. Do I feel guilty about it?

Well, yes, in a way, but then, the recycling of intellectual property is surely a valid and time-honoured an activity and keeps alive an artistic and intellectual tradition that might have been lost if left to the big booksellers. But I’ve mentioned that before.

In the e-reader we have a bit of both worlds. Out-of-print books can be resuscitated and put on Kindle. But the great news for living authors with ‘live’ books is that most people will fork out the stated price for what is, in effect a new edition, thereby delivering to the authors their well-earned piece of royalty. In fact, not only will I buy an e-book, but if I recommend a book to my husband or friends they will buy it too, instead of borrowing it from me.

I understand that it is in fact possible to lend and borrow e- books, but I haven’t gone into the process. I feel virtuous about spreading a bit of jam on an author’s crust. And I hope other readers will do the same for me. And so it will continue - as long as the prices don´t rise too high.

As it is, I am spending a great deal more on e-books than I used to spend on second-hand print copies. And I don’t mind. I’m pleased to be able to carry around a couple of thousand books in my small shoulder-bag.

I suppose there is only one anxiety. I have always felt I should be able to read and write in an air raid. In that contingency I presume I will have some difficulty with my Kindles. There is the cloud of course, but will it be accessible or will that cyberspatial bubble that is now the repository of our civilisation be as unreachable as heaven was to an unrepentant sinner?

Well, I presume looking for a key or code to that grail is a tad better than viewing the ashes of the respective libraries of Alexandria or Leuven.