Vision On

Art rocks -- and a summer break

I'm taking a break for 10 days on a family holiday, then back with (I hope) exciting news about the RSC Hamlet.

In the meantime, take a look at these astonishing pictures (courtesy of the Guardian and English Heritage) of prehistoric rock art at various locations in Britain. Jonathan Jones writes about them here -- and EH with other partners have launched a fascinating website about them.

Also Wallflower Press, publishers of my book Vision On: Film, Television and the Arts In Britain, have put their new website on line today. They're offering a discount of 15% on all purchases.

Stage and screen

I saw the press night performance of Katie Mitchell's new collaborative experiment at the Cottesloe, ...some trace of her. It's really interesting, and a bold engagement with the media of the stage and film, but ultimately as theatrical event it's more than a touch disappointing.

A small company prepares and films live scenes that loosely relate the story from Dostoevsky's The Idiot. Each set-up is prepared, lit and shot on stage below a screen on which the images are presented, live, but in monochrome. Sometimes the actors themselves speak in the scenes, sometimes their words, presumably their thoughts, are read by another member of the cast. The preparations, the lighting, the sound (including effects) and everthing else are done as elaborately choreographed movements, often with several "shots' live at a single moment, with cross-cutting and occasionally multiple projected images.

It's incredibly clever and you sit there admiringly. The ways in which certain shots and effects are created with minimal means is often amusing -- and just occasionally there are moments of beauty in the images. The visual style mixes the aesthetic of expressionist silent cinema with early live television: lots of close-ups, long shots, action within the frame rather than between images.

What I missed was a sense of engagement with the story, with the characters, with any trace of emotion. I found the story really confusing (I hadn't prepared and didn't know it in advance) and I remained cut off from what was going on, sometimes marvelling at the invention but ultimately distanced from it all.

Later: Interestingly, Michael Billington saw the same performance and came to pretty much the same conclusions.

He that plays the prince

For reasons that I hope will soon become apparent, I am currently fascinated by Hamlet and the RSC production with David Tennant. The Guardian carries exclusive production photos and also a fascinating discussion by Michael Billington about the best Hamlets of his time. In his top ten he includes Jonathan Pryce at the Royal Court in 1980, a performance which lives with me still. (The photo is Ellie Kurttz's, courtesy of the RSC.)

Blogger reviews are just beginning to appear, in advance of next Tuesday's press night. Actor Matthew Swan posts here: "What Doran has very successfully achieved is a great Hamlet with a focus on the very human responses each character has to one another and the events that shape the play."

The blog Defying Definition exudes enthusiasm: "I was stunned by it all, gobsmacked, wanting to rewind it and watch it again."

Jan Ford, who describes herself as "an ageing female" is a little more measured: " But, at the end of the play, I felt I'd witnessed a production of some moment and this view seemed to be shared by the audience generally, judging by the acclamation."