Apocalypse Acoupleofweeksago

Reviewing The Indian Core jazz gig at Barefoot, Colombo.

From Mendelssohn minor to Ursa Major

Je suis le maitre D-grade puns.

Chamber Music Society of Colombo gig.

Ethiopians vs the World (Service)

Ethiopian tour operators tear it up in Docklands in anger at the BBC.

One sympathises.

Jazz Club - not so 'nice!'

Getting Mounted for Rs800 (drinks not incl.).

Yes, mate!

Machan - coming soon to Europe!

A 'flat' Strauss

All-time classic sub-editors' headline-writing contest winner - with a concert review attached.

The student-teacher relationship

Getting in on the Colombo music scene.

Too soon!

Anyone else think rewarding Obama for his hopes and dreams is on a par with giving the Nobel Prize for Chemistry to an undergrad with a daring hypothesis?

Unfavourable conditions

[Spiked by the director]

Stormy Weather
Punchi Theatre, Borella, Colombo
10th-13th September

To die in one’s sleep may be considered a misfortune. To do so with fifteen stab wounds to the chest looks – more than somewhat – like murder.

– Smyth, after Wilde

The morning after a bitter argument with his wife, ‘man about town’ Noel Richards wakes up dead.

Of course, as only befits our Fifties noir setting, the investigating inspector soon discovers that all of the women in Noel’s life had reason to be involved in its grisly termination – his sister and lover (two separate people, I hasten to add) are also in the frame.

Written and directed (twice over) by Jehan Aloysius, and presented by CentreStage Productions, Stormy Weather is a neatly ironic homage to the celluloid murder mysteries of yesterdecade, augmenting stage action with film flashbacks, and all underlaid by an exuberantly over-atmospheric score (also composed by the writer-director).

Playing off the clench-jawed and unpleasantly masculine Noel (Amesh De Silva), the three potentially fatales femmes were, in turn, suitably vampish, agonised, and just plain bitchy. Shanuki De Alwis strutted as Charmaine, Noel’s drunken and volatile sister, with boisterous aplomb; Michelle Herft steered Therese, his spurned wife, through grief and rage in consecutive moments; and Dilrukshi Fonseka no less than embodied the feline spitefulness of Noel’s lover, Avanti (thank heavens she’s fictional, eh?).

Individually, each of these women seemed like a handful; together, they actually made one feel sorry for Noel. Freud, I am sure, would have had something interesting to say about a scene in which a naked man is repeatedly knifed, in his bed, by three (three!) women, at least two of whom could be considered relatives. (And as for the fact that the playwright’s mother positively ordered your reviewer to give the show a good write-up – well…)

It is no surprise if, in productions of this type, style threatens somewhat to overshadow content (pardon the pun): in such noir projects, style is almost a character in its own right.

Stormy Weather’s stage action – itself rendered exclusively in black & white – had the posing at an appropriately statuesque pitch, with the requisite number of hands-on-foreheads, slightly too-sexy couture, and everyone smoking furiously (perhaps a little joke within a joke: latter-day public school productions infamously followed this pattern, replete with the growing of totally gratuitous facial hair and the addition of ‘romantic’ scenes at every opportunity).

The film element deftly introduced – and thereby sidestepped – the inevitable melodrama of the noir genre before the play proper had even begun. It also helped to dodge the accusations of hammy-ness that stage gore invariably attracts. And the unabashed projection (as it were) of the genre from the outset permitted a few of the more clichéd lines – “Oh, how I wished her dead!”, etc. – to go underided.

Some sassy one-liners also helped leaven the morbidity, as did a few knowing remarks concerning Hollywood’s love of stereotype. Every man has his sticking point, and personally I found the blatant reference to “Agatha Christie mysteries” a step (and a clumsy rhyme) too far. But for the most part I enjoyed the cheeky post-post-(post-?)modern “where were you, inspector?” moments, and the astutely self-serving comments about “playing roles”. And was that a conscious nod to The Usual Suspects – the greatest ‘twist’ movie of all time – or did I imagine the capital letters?

Through no fault of his own, Mario de Soyza’s beleaguered sleuth was the least well-developed of the (admittedly, purposefully two-dimensional) characters. He also never worked out whodunit.

In the end, though – or, rather, substantially before the end – who did it was relatively obvious. In a small cast, process of elimination (it wasn’t suicide; X, Y and Z are just too obvious; dramatic rules don’t permit “an outsider”…) didn’t leave many options. Moreover, the play being commendably short, there was little time for that other vital facet of any murder mystery, the second-guessing of one’s initial hunches.

But if, in this hyper-stylistic exercise, the identity of the killer was of comparatively little consequence to the unfolding of the story, the denouement was none the less chilling for that. It is an amusing reflection on the Colombo cultural circuit that the programme implored attendees to “keep the murderer a secret for future audiences to enjoy the show”. Still, now that the curtain has fallen for the last time…

One particular oddity. “Noëlle”, which I originally took to be a sarcastic inflection (and feminisation) of the anti-hero’s name, turned out to be simply a consistent mispronunciation. Over the seventy minutes of the play, the cumulative effect of this minor slip managed to convey the impression that, fancy names notwithstanding, the whole tumultuous business had been firmly rooted in Cinnamon Gardens.

Now there’s a thought!

Cussed are the peace-makers

Letter from the Colombo's first Art Biennale [sic.].

Dr Ragab, I presume?

Interview with Robert Twigger, polymath and novelist.

A little bit of Ceylon (in Brixton)

Interview with artist/author/lecturer Roma Tearne.

Launch of The Essentials

in which the Amnesiacs did not double-team actress Charity Wakefield.

Somewhat overdue, but still...

Seeing Oasis live, at Wembley.

A little night reading

In case your July/August copy of Music Teacher is lost in the post:

Nocturnes
Five Stories of Music and Nightfall
Kazuo Ishiguro
faber and faber
£14.99, 221p
ISBN 978-0-571-24498-0


“Their talk was no longer just about music – though everything always seemed to come back to it.”

Whether as opening subject or illustrative decoration, music seems to be a recurring theme for Kazuo Ishiguro. The Unconsoled told of a pianist with memory loss; his Merchant-Ivory script, The White Countess, of a man who wanted nothing more than to run a jazz club.

And now Nocturnes, a “quintet” or “story cycle”, the first of which tales concerns a session player on the Venice café circuit – one of the many “scattered across Europe, playing the Godfather theme or ‘Autumn Leaves’ in squares and cafés you'll never visit” – who can't secure regular work because his cliché-savvy employers don’t like the cut of his guitar (how’s that for an argument in favour of period instruments?!).

Then there's the layman asked by an old friend – horror of horrors! shame upon shame! – to dumb down his encyclopaedic love of classic American jazz in front of his wife; the music-college drop-out, frustrated by the “shallow and inauthentic” London gigging scene, who escapes to the Malvern Hills to help out in his sister’s café, and there meets two Swiss Elgar-pilgrims; an Eastern Bloc escapee whose cello was purchased with bartered American jeans, and who runs into the world’s first self-proclaimed “virtuoso” listener.

The longest, ‘Nocturne’ (s.), concerns Steve, a tenor-sax player whose manager talks him into having cosmetic surgery because he’s “the wrong kind of ugly” for the big league. (There’s lots about saxophones, actually: anyone know if Ishiguro is a saxpert?)

The stories aren’t really about music (or nightfall). Music is the paint, not the picture: a binding agent rather than a narrative focus. And 'stories', anyway, is too grand a term. These are scenes, some with beginnings, few with ends, all exhibiting Ishiguro's gift for depicting a situation in a few words; but none narrative-driven. Likewise, though the five stories [sic.] nod to one another, there is not much cyclical interweaving.

Ishiguro's writing, especially in ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’, demonstrates a preoccupation with jazz, and a deep knowledge of the canon, from Cole Porter to Ray Charles ('Come Rain or Come Shine' is a Ray Charles number) as well as an understanding of its often-dark undertones. Jazz, of course, is a good complement to literary riffing – the medium is the message, and all that (a central character in ‘Come Rain...’ is actually called Ray).

And Ishiguro knows his stuff not just technically – “we come out of the middle eight, when the band go III-5 to VIx-9…” – but also on a more philosophical level. Occasionally, he pauses to reflect on how one might play a piece in a manner evoking its origins; how one’s choice of music influences how you are perceived; what causes cellists to play the same piece so differently; the impact of coffee-prices on the necessary length of a café band's repertoire.

Nothing revelatory, in the musical sense; but some fine vignettes from a master of scene-setting and emotive detail.

Good Prospects

Getting it on with Dambisa Moyo, in the African economics stylee.

Orwellian-ism

Orwell and me, at the Trafalgar Studios.

Constant Re-Frayn

My positively final appearance - in a championship bout - against Michael Frayn.

Alles in ordnung (isch)

Michael Frayn's Alphabetical Order, reviewed at Hampstead Theatre.

After Dido, le deluge

in which the author is forced to admit it is possible to be unnecessarily clever.