Queen Mab II

When watching  episode 5 of the tv series Playing Shakespeare entitled Set Speeches and Soliloquies, I observed the following : When John Barton asks Michael Pennington to deliver "To Be or Not To Be" - which in itself had an air of being rather preposterous, "hic Rhodos, hic salta", work yourself into Hamlet at once ;-), here and now!!- , he asks him to deliver it in two distinct ways, first just to himself - excluding the audience - and then addressing the audience, including it. Observing what he does very closely though - and gratefully enough we can since the camera catches the final part in close up - it feels like Michael Pennington, instead of going for the "either - or" , settles for the "and/or", he takes the audience on a trip into Hamlet's mind, or even better, he has created a dream - Hamlet - and has shared this dream with us.

Queen Mab

Coincidentally the leitmotif today is dreams. At mass it was Joseph's and the three Magis various dreams that accompany Christmas in Matthew's biblical accounts and therefore I'm telling of two special dreams I had.

The first dream occured when I was about to deliver a speech at a seminar.  I dreamt that we were having the seminar in the dean's room and while I was talking there was a little brown bat flying above our heads, almost touching them, but oddly I and my professor were the only ones able to perceive it, though I kept pointing it out to my fellow students. The morning I was to deliver my speech  I went to the academy's library and rememberring the dream, which had been extraordinary "real", I looked up bats and their meaning.My heart went down when I read that according to Gipsy mythology this represented the ability to perceive beyond the superficial, this made me fear for my speech. And it was proven absolutely right because from all the people present only me and my professor had a slight idea what I was talking about. Still my professor kept certain things in mind, because a few weeks later when he delivered a speech on exactly the same subject - he had in fact written his dissertation on it - at a symposium at the Kunstsammlung in Düsseldorf , perceiving me in the auditorium he came to me and thanked me(?!) for giving him the courage to talk about his subject in the manner he had just done because of my utterances at his seminar.

The other dream was even stranger and it took a long time for me to find out what it actually meant. First the dream: I was in Barnett Newman's studio and apart from the two of us there were no human beings present. There were though other creatures and one of them was cutting the buttons off Newman's shirt and Newman was serenely letting this happen, whereas I began screaming that he was dying. Yet Newman was smiling implying that I should calm down. The strange thing is that within the reality of the dream I perfectly knew the ritual of cutting the buttons and its implications of somebody dying or having recently died, but in real life it took me years before I stumbled across a passage in one of Jacques Derrida's books where he tells of the Jewish ritual that at the father's death the first born son cuts off or is getting cut off the buttons of his waistcoat.

Mo(o)i - French or (Dutch) - just translate

An absolute presence in the early 1990s and yesterday rediscovered ;-)

In a probably unguarded moment of truth a great actor and artist said the following about redoing a lost drawing: "Can't you see that she can't do it again?!" With great appreciation this is still noticed and remembered, it made me think a lot. There was a time I felt sorry for the stage artist-actor, for his or her art is the absolute presence, once it is done it is gone, no way to hold on or stop the course of time. Even more particular, this is the only way to uncover the meaning of present, here and now, maybe there is no other way one is able to perceive its meaning as thoroughly. But this sentence made me realise - because he was indeed absolutely right - that probably any kind of art is and encompasses one moment in time - a presence - only the painter, draughtsman or sculptor is luckier as compared to the stage artist, for he or she captures this moment in a relic that is this moment.

Ook dit jaar weer Music for Life and I love it

Just like every year my favourite radio station Studio Brussel organizes a charity in advent. This time they collect money for children orphaned by Aids. From tomorrow evening until December 24th 18:00 hours they will only play music that has been requested and payed for. If you would like to order your favourite song here is the link https://www.musicforlifedonate.be/Site/Pages/MakeDonation.aspx (be careful it's in Flemish!!). I will surely choose mine as every year. There are other projects and activities to raise money and one I enjoy a lot is the Toeterlied. Though the reality depicted is rather dire, the song and especially the horns are rather cheerful - maybe even on the verge of being annoying. Geweldig!!!

Homo homini lupus est - Sakhalin - An Evening with Michael Pennington Part 3

The ensuing talk dealt with Anton Chekhov's journey to Sakhalin in 1890. So it is arguable if it was an evening spent with Michael Pennington or rather one in the company of Anton Chekhov, for as the lecturer pointed out at the beginning the talk was a sort of "dramatisation" of this journey - mostly in Chekhov's own words (of course translated into English), though this time unlike in his one-man-play  "Anton Chekhov" (and I would rather use play instead of show, for here we actually meet the lead character(!!) and I highly recommend it to anybody who has not yet attended a performance!! It is worth any detour just to catch one) Michael Pennington was not dressed up to look like Chekhov. After some comment on the weather, which had been really extraordinarily snowy for England, he mentioned something that exactly echoes my thoughts and feelings when reading "Die Insel Sachalin" (Anton Chekhov's report on his journey). He said that when reading it and especially the anecdotes and small stories about Sakhalin's inhabitants, that are interspersed within the more scientifical and precisely stated facts of the report, one wishes it was just literature. I personally was and am still very shocked at the realisation that this was people's actual lives instead.
The first part of the evening took the audience along Chekhov's travel through Siberia and along the Amur River to Sakhalin, with excerpts from his letters. Then Michael Pennington read out some of the episodes and stories from the report. "Sakhalin Island" by Anton Chekhov is available in print.

At the end of his talk Michael Pennington referred to the fact that Chekhov's report though sort of ill-received in Russia, nevertheless served to better some of the appaling circumstances prisoners and settlers on Sakhalin had to live with. Personally I was very impressed by the talk and the artfulness of the lecturer, who not only did deliver Chekhov's disturbing report, but also left me with a warm feeling of hope despite the talk's  gloomy and dark subject.
For further reading I highly recommend not only "Sakhalin Island" by Anton Chekhov, but also "Rossya - A Journey Through Siberia" and "Are You There Crocodile - Inventing Anton Chekhov", both by Michael Pennington, both charming, insightful, highly readable, entertaining and surprising accounts of Michael Pennington's relationship to Russia and especially to Anton Chekhov.

Tradurre e Tradire - Я энаю Русский язык только немного

So I was standing in front of Pushkin House in London and the first thing I had to do was to ring the bell. After paying for the ticket for the evening's event - a talk as I was especially reminded by the seller at the desk (Was my English so bad, as I had only referred to the official title "An Evening with Michael Pennington"?!)  I had ordered, I took a look around and settled into the library, where there was also an exhibition of photographs. While I was looking at one and commenting on a cigarette, I was addressed in the following way: "Ich spreche auch Deutsch." And my subsequent reply, summing up all I do remember of my two semesters of Russian at the Westfälische Wilhelms Universität 21 years ago, was : "Я энаю Русский язык только немного", which really is a shame but I had just this one year of Russian and quit it again to study the fine arts at the Kunstakademie.

So the main event of the evening and the true reason for my journey was advancing and in the library I heard a voice that sounded familiar gently and tenderly commenting on the fact that whomever he was addressing had been all too kind to attend this event on an evening like this.

 

Anyway I decided to go upstairs and settle for some seat at the back of the auditorium, expecting the things to come...

To be continued...

To Go or Not To Go is surely no question for me

Waking up in the wee hours of November 30th, after it had been snowing on Monday, I was not sure if I would travel to London on that very day. Even an hour before I had to leave I still was not sure, yet other people, who obviously do know me much better than I myself - heck, even two wonderful inhabitants of Stockholm, with whom I had stayed just a night almost ten years ago, must have known me better after this short period, for on leaving them again, they enquired which place I would be going next, in their opinion it could be anywhere on this lovely earth - were deadly sure I would be going. And so I did against all the odds, it's a shame if one does not dare, at least one should die trying...
So I took my husband's car and went to the train station in Geilenkirchen, took the train to Aachen, where I boarded the Thalys to Brussels, all this accompanied by a more or less snowy landscape. In Brussels I took the Eurostar and observed that the amount of snow in the landscape was diminishing in Northern France. Still announcements on the train were bound to give a slightly different impression. The delay was estimated at about 30 minutes. Nevertheless I expected even less snow in England, so there was nothing actually mentally preparing me for the view I had after the Eurostar had left the Eurotunnel: The landscape was whiter than I had seen anywhere on this day before, absolutely Siberian and therefore kind of anticipating the talk of the evening.
Thus the Eurostar arrived with a delay of 28 minutes at St Pancras Station in London. The further travel to the hotel by tube was rather uneventful, apart from a group of very well behaved and good humoured young Flemish gentlemen, who reminded me of the traits I love about this particular country so very much, their cheerfulness and lightness. The hotel was nice, the staff polite, whatelse to ask for?!
With just enough time for some snack I went to Covent Garden, where silly me had to take the 193 steps of the stairs instead of the lift on my way up at the tube station. This mountainous excursion at least had the effect that it made my pulse run and oddly I passed two German women, who were nearly giving up.
Covent Garden Market was wonderful and the image that stays in my mind, is one of huge red Christmas baubles hanging beneath the roof, the snow flying through its construction and falling into my glass of red wine. Then I felt thoroughly fit to go up north to Shaftesbury Lane and from there to Bloomsbury Square and there it was right before me, Pushkin House. To be continued...

Snowy Weather - An Evening with Michael Pennington

 

If  anybody is interested in an account of the evening and the journey, these subsequent posts (and some yet to come) http://das-unmoegliche.blogspot.com/2010/12/to-go-or-not-to-go-is-surely-no.html and http://das-unmoegliche.blogspot.com/2010/12/tradurre-e-tradire.html do offer more insight.

Strange chances, as it is I felt a little bit ignorant at not giving it even a  thought to go to the Almeida instead and give Stephen Dillane a chance to convince me of his Solness, yet I've found out yesterday (December 21st) that the performance of the Master Builder at the Almeida on November 30th was cancelled due to the fact that Stephen Dillane could not make it to the theatre because of the snow!!! (I do not blame him for getting stuck on his way, looking into the landscape from the Eurostar there really seemed to be very adverse weather conditions!!)

Acts of defiance

Still thinking about The Master Builder and how Solness defies his surpressing, righteous god in the end, acts of defiance keep creeping up in my mind and how wonderful and miraculous those were.

I very fondly do remember the vernissage of photographs by Allen Ginsberg at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf in 1998 - shortly before my exam exhibition. His last private secretary was present , whose name I've regretfully forgotten, but there is one story he told that has been sticking in my mind ever since. Following  the fatwa against Salman Rushdie both Ginsberg and his secretary were riding in a taxi in New York and realising that the driver was a Muslim Ginsberg tried to discuss this fatwa with the driver. The conclusion Ginsberg drew was that: "If there was a god like this ( ie one that would sustain this verdict) I would shit on his head". The secretary remembered feeling very awkward at this moment but obviously the driver did not speak enough English to understand Ginsberg.

Another great act of defiance - and this time also one drawn from a play - is Posthumus challeging the gods in the prison scene (Act V, Scene IV) from Cymbeline, definitely one of my favourites. Yet Shakespeare does not leave it at this but makes Posthumus realise the very, very hard way that it was not the gods who were wrong or wronging him but Posthumus' concept of them and the - all too human - revenge he commissioned driven by his mistrust - in fact to go even a step further it was already the wager he put on Imogen's fidelity.

Most probably Edmund Husserl, as far as I understand him, is right in warning us against all concepts that would not allow a doubt, for those surely are dogmatic and eventually wrong, dangerous and inhuman.

Zufall - Coincidence

Der Zufall ist das, was mir zufällt, fällt wie Solness vom Turm in meinen Schoß, wenn ich es zulasse... und doch vielleicht schwebt es doch da-zwischen, in der co-incidence.. Oder wie Maulbeerblätter im Garten...

Einige interessante Zu-fälle, wenn man nur offen ist, jedenfalls genug , um sie zu-zulassen:

Teil 1: Ex libris

Zuerst fiel mir das Exlibris von Dr P(ieter) Endt, alias Ed Coenraads, in der billigsten Ausgabe von Franz Molnárs "Der Leibgardist", der ich habhaft werden konnte, zu, denn Ausgaben von 1922 sind, da dieser Autor bei den Nazis sehr unbeliebt war, extremst selten. Diese Ausgabe stammte also aus den Niederlanden und gehörte einmal Pieter Endt, der Nietzsche ins Niederländische übersetzt hat, ein Kabarettist war und einen Roman veröffentlicht hat, der im München der Räterepublik von 1919 spielt. Sehr lesenswert.

Das nächste, noch ein wenig seltsamer, befand sich leider überklebt von einer Büchereikarteikarte - was man leider auch an dem Zustand des Artefakts sieht -, in einer deutschen Ausgabe von "2x2=5" von Gustav Wied. Allem Anschein nach gehörte dieses wunderbare Buch einmal Delia Austrian, nach der die Delia Austrian Medal für die "Most Distinguished Performance of an Actor or an Actress on the Broadway Stage" benannt wurde.

Fortsetzung folgt/ to be continued ...

Eine sicherlich überfällige Bemerkung

Dies ist bewußt auf Deutsch geschrieben und richtet sich an die deutschsprachigen Verehrer der Kunst von Michael Pennington - eigentlich wollte ich viel einfacher und nicht so geschwollen klingen, aber sei's d'rum! Ich möchte  allen Leuten, die sich für Michael interessieren Mary Hunwicks' Website empfehlen http://www.hunwicks.ndo.co.uk/index.html , dort erfährt man fast alles über ihn. Weiterhin, um auf dem laufenden gehalten zu werden, lohnt es sich mittlerweile wirklich, sich in die Mailinglist http://www.hunwicks.ndo.co.uk/contact.html einzutragen, nach leichten Startschwierigkeiten ist der Informationsfluß hervorragend. Ansonsten würde es mich unendlich freuen von anderen Leuten zu hören, die von seiner Kunst berührt wurden.

PS:  Wenn ich Zeit und von irgendjemandem dort draußen Ansporn habe, könnte ich mir vorstellen eine  Lobhudelei auf Michael zu schreiben. Also ich bitte dringenst um Kommentare - egal in welcher Sprache, ich selber verstehe Deutsch, Englisch und Niederländisch, rudimentär Französisch, und Russisch kann ich wenigstens ansatzweise entziffern, aber es gibt ja auch noch Online-Übersetzer ...

A Final Word about The Master Builder

I do not actually know if it is partially owed to David Edgar's new translation or rather only to the very accurate delivery of the lines at Chichester's Minerva Theatre, but there were certain antithetical concepts clearly expressed there. Words like "duty","pleasure","god", "human" were distictinctly ringing in the air, it's been quite a revelation and like somebody in the audience observed almost Shakespearian.

Drama

... und was wäre, wenn "Drama" die Konfrontation des Selben mit dem Selben in Reflexion durch das Andere wäre?!

...and what if "drama" or the "dramatic" would be the confrontation of the Selfsame with the Selfsame in reflection by the Other?!

What, in fact, was the true beginning of my end?!

Das Maß

"Das Maß liegt im Auge das Künstlers, nicht in der Maßlosigkeit der Präsentation."

Some further musings

The tragic moment in The Master Builder (or in most any artist's life) arrives , when Solness finally breaks down and let's Hilde have a glimpse behind his carefully erected facade. All the bitterness about having sacrificed his own happiness to defy a jealous (definitely Protestant) god, who would have him but built edifices for his (god's) glory, and people not realising this sacrifice, ie not becoming happy in the homes Solness erects for them ("all they wanted were four walls"), bursts free in this liberating breakdown. Here Michael Pennington is surely at his best and overwhelmingly magnificent, this was the moment that gave me shivers during both performances. :-)  Wahnsinn!!!

The Princess of Orangia

Das Unmögliche: Musings on Ibsen's The Master Builder as performed...

Das Unmögliche: Musings on Ibsen's The Master Builder as performed...: "Metaphors are translucent veils, that permit the things they disguise to be seen, or fancy dresses, under which the person, who is masked, i..."

Musings on Ibsen's The Master Builder as performed at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester on Monday 20th and Tuesday 21st of September

Metaphors are translucent veils, that permit the things they disguise to be seen, or fancy dresses, under which the person, who is masked, is perceivable.   Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715-1780)


Considering all the reviews I've read of this play and performance so far I desperately miss one interpretation of this complex, philosophical play, that stroke me from the moment I first read it in March. Naturally as it is a seldomly staged play most reviews do also contain reviews of the play rather than the actual performance. So this is where I will be beginning as well.


From my first encounter I started calling Hilde a wonderful, cunning, cleansing agent provocateur. How easily she unties the web that entangles all the characters in Solness' household. How cleverly she cuts through lies and false pretences until everything is revealed to her and us, the audience. After all she and the audience are the only ones who see the whole picture. I've come to realise that the play actually hinges on this one character, what or who is she actually? In  their final dialogue she urges Solness to do the impossible and this is exactly the phrase employed by Barnett Newman in a conversation with the art critic Thomas B Hess when describing the act of creating a work of art. During the same conversation there is the muse mentioned yelling in the artist's ear, and that is what determines my my view on Hilde. She is the yelling muse. The lead of reading the play as a comment on/ description of art, the artist and producing art grew very intriguing and urgent indeed. The parallels to Newman's writings are too numerous to mention, yet here is one because it came to me while actually watching the play performed. Newman rejects what he calls "fetish" art and prefers what he terms the living subject-matter, the fetish in his view is merely aesthetic but the subject-matter is sublime. When Alina tells Hilde of her dolls, they became the fetish in my mind. Interesting that Alina's grief for the fetish would be the cause for her children's death. - Of course this might be a projection because Alina might have been too over-whelmed by the loss of her off-spring but then the chronology of events given by Solness rather suggests that the loss of the dolls was the cause for Alina's illness that also infected her sons. At this moment I wonder if it would go too far to hint at Paul de Man, who very sharply warns in his writings from bitter experience against the aestheticising of  politics.
The veil of the metaphor was giving way and the ending began to shine in a non-tragic light because it shows the artist doing the impossible, i e climbing the steeple, communicating with god and building castles in the sky.

Back to the actual performance at Chichester. The two of them I had the pleasure to attend (especially the one on Tuesday!!) were outstanding. The text was delivered to the point, leaving me to wonder that this was just a recital, the acting, highlighting gestures and features very precisely, was superb. There was this little incident -though certainly not planned or rehearsed - where a button on the sleeve of Solness' jacket got tangled up in Kaja's bun, that turned out to be brilliant :-). It  added to the thrill and tension of being nearly caught in a less than favourable situation by Alina. On the other hand it was strange to perceive that though the audience was present and the impetus to help could clearly be felt, there was no way anyone else could assist to get Emily Wachter out of this awkward situation. We just could not simply reach through the fourth wall. At this point I'd like to thank you in order of appearance John McEnery, Emily Wachter and Philipp Cumbus, Michael Pennington, Maureen Beattie and Pip Donaghy and Naomi Frederick for their wonderful performance in this very intimate theatre, and of course Philip Franks, Stephen Brimson Lewis, Tim Mitchell, Matthew Scott and John Leonard etc.
There are certain scenes that especially shone:
At the beginning of the play Solness is by Michael Pennington portrayed as an arrogant and disagreeable self-absorbed man. He reigns supreme in his kingdom - maybe even down to the droit de seigneur (?!) - but halt!, alas there is apparently no actual sex for Solness, the relationship with Kaja though intense feels rather "platonical", Alina has been cold ever since her family home burnt to ashes and even the supposed intercourse with Hilde a decade ago rather has an air of mutual delusion . There is this scene between Old Brovik and Solness, when Michael displays this royal gesture of most graciously granting a privilege to Brovik, when he being (terminally) ill asks for the simple comfort of being allowed to sit down in front of Solness. This definitely made me gasp, how very wicked and unconsiderate - especially when accompanied by such a gesture :-)!!!
Maureen Beattie was stunning as Alina in her coldness and dutiful reservedness. Her piercing "knowing" eyes made me shiver, as did Michael Pennington for quite the contrary reasons when Solness, driven by the liberating spirit of Naomi Frederick's Hilde, finally breaks down or opens up,  and challenges his god just before his final stunt. The interaction between these two central characters of Hilde Wangel and Halvard Solness gets very intense in this final scene. I felt reminded of an incident that  happened to me years ago, when I was still studying art, there was a discussion I had with a professor during one of his seminars, when an interpretation of his of something I had said culminated in a glimpse of recognition between the two of us, which hit me very, very deeply in my very foundations.

I sincerely hope that I met with Newman's standards who claimed that a review or criticism always should be passionate. A warm embrace to the lovely crowd at Chichester. Enchantée!!!