Tales of the Riverbank
Monday, August 12th, 2002 11:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranthI went for a walk yesterday to loosen up all the bits that needed co-dydramol last week (not to mention my brain). Lewisham to Woolwich: Thames Barrier: Thames Path back to Greenwich. Probably seven or eight miles in all, though without the sense of accomplishment one might get from a similar walk out of town. The Greenwich Peninsula is a strange place: it's flat and empty and there are heaps of gravel and sand, birds calling, rushes rustling. Riverbank land - opposite Canary Wharf and the riverside developments where flats sell for half a million - must be worth a fortune, and it's occupied by sharp sand, wire fencing demarking the Thames Path itself as it runs through an empty monochrome space.
I went to the Dome in the year it was open. I wanted to know what it was like, behind the hype. It was pretty much deserted then, too. The famous Millennium Dome Show - a futuristic love story with music by Peter Gabriel and stunning aerial trapeze-dance - was spectacular. Now the Dome is deserted, as it's been since January 2001. You can literally see through it, a vast dim circus-tent space illuminated by bleak daylight coming through the over-optimistically huge entrances on each side. The Dome upsets me. There's something forlorn, abandoned, disappointed about it. They got it so wrong, but it was created with the best of intentions: entertaining the masses, making people happy. I remember buying six Millennium Experience keyrings for £2 in the Dome shop, that December.
I wonder if it was coincidence (as opposed to a coded message from my subconscious) that I chose the Thames Path so soon after seeing the new production of Aristophanes' The Birds at the National Theatre. Yes, there's a connectin ... It's an odd production, and I'm not sure I liked it - "Raw! Experimental! ... Er, imbalanced?" - but it does feature some spectacular trapeze acrobatics. The programme reveals that several of the performers appeared in the Dome show too, so now we know what happens to Millennium Experience refugees. In The Birds they get to speak, which is an advance: regrettably, they get to speak in rhyming couplets. (Couplets v irritating, not to mention soporific, though Sean O'Brien has gone to considerable effort to vary the rhythm).
It's a funny production, but not that funny. The Birds is a comedy, for heaven's sake, and any production of an Aristophanes comedy which isn't funny has failed on a very fundamental level. However cutting-edge this production might be, it suffers from an avant-garde earnestness which seems to miss the point.
The Birds is about the privitisation of the sky, or possibly of heaven. Or (according to the back of the new edition) about the search for Utopia. Or about the corruption of good intentions. It's about the perils of spin doctors and hubris. It's about pride and prejudice. It's about, well, birds. It is not about a great venture brought low by human fallibility. Well, not much.
The plot: two con artists (Pez, or Peisthetaerus, and Eck, or Euelpides) are searching for "a city where free men might live like birds". They arrive in the country of the birds, and convince the King of the Birds - Hoopoe - to restrict the gods' flights through the birds' airspace. This, of course, will enable the birds to set themselves up in positions of power:
"Our aim is to please
We are not like the gods
You have worshipped so far
Who are lazy old sods"
There's no happy ending here: Pez is triumphant (and gets to marry Sovereignty, a charming Statue-of-Liberty anthropomorphication), but he's clearly no longer on the side of the free man. Or free bird. There's a nasty, nasty little barbeque scene, and Eck ends up thoroughly betrayed.
The performance is wonderful. Marcello Magni (a founder member of Theatre de Complicite) has dangerous, oily charm as Pez: Hayley Carmichael is an earnest Eck: Josette Bushell-Mingo is stunning as Hoopoe, with avian body-language and an immensely physical charisma. The birds are acrobats, trapeze artists - aerialists, I am told, is the polite new name - and gymnasts, soaring high over the audience. Their attack on Pez and Eck is way scarier than Hitchcock, and reminded me more of WWII aerial warfare than of anything cute and fluffily feathered.
Plenty of contemporary references: impressively physical performances: some funny bits: some harrowing bits. I'm not sure I liked it, but I'm glad to have seen it.
Meanwhile, what I want to recommend is the long, deserted walk around the Greenwich Peninsula, with rushes whispering, and an ungraffiti'd plaque describing the history of Greenwich, and the strong, muddy smell of high tide, and the geometric lines of heaped sand against the high-tech Docklands skyline.
On the riverbank at Woolwich I remembered Ken Macleod's description (in The Cassini Division) of the Thames Barrier standing far out in the shallow estuary ... it's one of those images that stuck with me, a future London, 'this too shall pass': Ozymandias and all that. It won't take much river-rise to flood the whole peninsula: already, at spring tide, the footpath at Greenwich is underwater.
Impermanence is oddly comforting.
I went to the Dome in the year it was open. I wanted to know what it was like, behind the hype. It was pretty much deserted then, too. The famous Millennium Dome Show - a futuristic love story with music by Peter Gabriel and stunning aerial trapeze-dance - was spectacular. Now the Dome is deserted, as it's been since January 2001. You can literally see through it, a vast dim circus-tent space illuminated by bleak daylight coming through the over-optimistically huge entrances on each side. The Dome upsets me. There's something forlorn, abandoned, disappointed about it. They got it so wrong, but it was created with the best of intentions: entertaining the masses, making people happy. I remember buying six Millennium Experience keyrings for £2 in the Dome shop, that December.
I wonder if it was coincidence (as opposed to a coded message from my subconscious) that I chose the Thames Path so soon after seeing the new production of Aristophanes' The Birds at the National Theatre. Yes, there's a connectin ... It's an odd production, and I'm not sure I liked it - "Raw! Experimental! ... Er, imbalanced?" - but it does feature some spectacular trapeze acrobatics. The programme reveals that several of the performers appeared in the Dome show too, so now we know what happens to Millennium Experience refugees. In The Birds they get to speak, which is an advance: regrettably, they get to speak in rhyming couplets. (Couplets v irritating, not to mention soporific, though Sean O'Brien has gone to considerable effort to vary the rhythm).
It's a funny production, but not that funny. The Birds is a comedy, for heaven's sake, and any production of an Aristophanes comedy which isn't funny has failed on a very fundamental level. However cutting-edge this production might be, it suffers from an avant-garde earnestness which seems to miss the point.
The Birds is about the privitisation of the sky, or possibly of heaven. Or (according to the back of the new edition) about the search for Utopia. Or about the corruption of good intentions. It's about the perils of spin doctors and hubris. It's about pride and prejudice. It's about, well, birds. It is not about a great venture brought low by human fallibility. Well, not much.
The plot: two con artists (Pez, or Peisthetaerus, and Eck, or Euelpides) are searching for "a city where free men might live like birds". They arrive in the country of the birds, and convince the King of the Birds - Hoopoe - to restrict the gods' flights through the birds' airspace. This, of course, will enable the birds to set themselves up in positions of power:
"Our aim is to please
We are not like the gods
You have worshipped so far
Who are lazy old sods"
There's no happy ending here: Pez is triumphant (and gets to marry Sovereignty, a charming Statue-of-Liberty anthropomorphication), but he's clearly no longer on the side of the free man. Or free bird. There's a nasty, nasty little barbeque scene, and Eck ends up thoroughly betrayed.
The performance is wonderful. Marcello Magni (a founder member of Theatre de Complicite) has dangerous, oily charm as Pez: Hayley Carmichael is an earnest Eck: Josette Bushell-Mingo is stunning as Hoopoe, with avian body-language and an immensely physical charisma. The birds are acrobats, trapeze artists - aerialists, I am told, is the polite new name - and gymnasts, soaring high over the audience. Their attack on Pez and Eck is way scarier than Hitchcock, and reminded me more of WWII aerial warfare than of anything cute and fluffily feathered.
Plenty of contemporary references: impressively physical performances: some funny bits: some harrowing bits. I'm not sure I liked it, but I'm glad to have seen it.
Meanwhile, what I want to recommend is the long, deserted walk around the Greenwich Peninsula, with rushes whispering, and an ungraffiti'd plaque describing the history of Greenwich, and the strong, muddy smell of high tide, and the geometric lines of heaped sand against the high-tech Docklands skyline.
On the riverbank at Woolwich I remembered Ken Macleod's description (in The Cassini Division) of the Thames Barrier standing far out in the shallow estuary ... it's one of those images that stuck with me, a future London, 'this too shall pass': Ozymandias and all that. It won't take much river-rise to flood the whole peninsula: already, at spring tide, the footpath at Greenwich is underwater.
Impermanence is oddly comforting.
Re: And you can hear that joke again on medium wave ,...
Date: Monday, August 12th, 2002 03:05 pm (UTC)