Well, if this is any measure of what my live performance experiences in 2010 are going to be like it’s going to be an amazing year. I’ve said this before, and will probably say it 100 times more, I am so awed by the city I live in, and the amazing number of immensely talented people out there who want to challenge, inspire, educate, entertain, open your mind, feed your imagination. You don’t have to go far to find them. When I don’t feel like this anymore, that London’s just full of secrets for me to discover, it’s probably time to move somewhere else. But I can’t see that happening! Yet.
T S Elliot. I’m perfectly willing to confess I know practically nothing about him. A total ignoramus. I did manage to dredge up a vague recollection that he may have written the Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. I can entirely attribute that smidgen of knowledge to being part of the cast of a school production of the poems. NOT the musical. This was probably before the musical even existed. Years and years ago. I was playing a member of the rambunctious crowd of cats that took part in Growltiger’s Last Stand. Yes, I played a cat. And I remember loving it! Nowadays I just freeze up on a stage, and turn into a wooden top. But that’s by the by.
Back to Wasteland. Deliberately didn’t do any research. Sometimes I like to go into things blind, with no preconceptions at all, like a blank slate. It’s a bit like being a child again, experiencing something for the first time. I imagine it could be something like seeing the sea for the first time? I myself don’t actually recall seeing the sea for the first time – it’s always been there for me. Wish I did though.
It was a dark, clear, frigid night. The air was so cold it felt like a thick blanket, clotted. Snow and ice layered over everything. Practically Dickensian. Bundles of people tottered and slid over the ice into Grace’s Lane, converging on a pair of tall, ancient, lantern lit, sandy coloured carven wooden doors. Wilton’s Music Hall. The place is ornate, crumbling, faded and ghostly, and hugely alive, vibrant and thick with a tangible layer of the past. You can see the pipes where the gas fed into the gaslights that used to light the bar, and the holders for the sconces on either side of the window frames. You can see that faded wall paper has been stripped off the pockmarked plaster. You can see the original blunted mouldings on the ceilings. You can see the bare floorboards overhead where 19th Century boots walked. You can see the bare bones of the old pub. And then you walk through the old entrance hall, through the back wall and emerge into the Music Hall itself. Rectangular, plainly coloured, no gilt, crimson or mirrors here any more. Faded. High ceilings, mismatched wooden chairs of all types lined up in rows stage front to the back of the hall. I was briefly reminded of old old school assemblies. There’s a gallery supported by pillars all the way round three edges of the room, reminiscent of some Renaissance courtyard, and a bare and dark proscenium stage on the fourth, to the right. No curtain. Just hanging electric cords, bare lightbulbs gently swinging at the ends, and a chair.
The room goes black. Deep dark stretch your eyes wide open and can’t catch the vaguest glimmering in the gloaming black. When the glow comes it’s from the stage. And then come the words. And Fiona Shaw. I can’t really remember how she appeared on stage. She was just suddenly there. I know the lightbulbs lit up and glowed in different places at different times. High, low, floor level. Stage front, middle, rear. Shadows swelled and flowed heavily across the stage as they did so. I mainly recall the words. Not specifically, as if learnt by rote, more of an impression of them. I’m not that clever and I’m writing this before reading the poem for the first time. The first few sentences painted fleeting pictures in the minds eye. Initially of plants, somehow of a Bavarian forest! Of vibrancy and energy, vivid and rich and incredibly alive. Then in a mere flicker of a moment, a flip of the tongue, almost before I could catch up, the words were speaking of dun colours, death, the grasping of grief. I seemed to hear a parade of people speaking of change, death, belief, disillusion. The people speaking seemed to move in the blink of an eye from damp, dun forests in Bavaria to a gleaming white dessicated Spanish limestone mountainside. At one point they were in Rome, another the grinding sands of the Middle East. And somehow back, and around again. There seemed to be a constant juxtaposition of growth with death, richness with decay. There was one particularly decadent passage that you could sink into visually, all pearls and pots of perfume, cloying scents and luxury.
Fiona Shaw’s.....reading? Performance? It really was a bit of both. Either way, it was masterful, it seemed flawless to me. With each shift of place and character she WAS that person, no make up, no costumes, no props. Just voice, and posture, and being. I don’t recall the shifts being gradual, fluid, but neither did they jar. She just became someone else. She simply WAS. Awesome: inspiring awe. She really did. If I could have gone back and listened again, I would have. I missed so much, there was so much, to hear and see and feel.
I’ll also add that trying to write this 10 days after the event has been quite a challenge. It’s been difficult to draw definite impressions through the amorphous cloud of time that’s passed. Not wise. Next time I shall write sooner after experiencing whatever it is that drives me to put words to page again.
I should add at this point that the event was a fundraiser to raise (what I hope was oodles of) cash to further the restoration of the Music Hall. They have stopped it quite crumbling to the ground, but only just. There’s so much more to do. I can’t imagine how they’re going to choose to restore it – all the way? Retain some of the scars of it's past, that give those vanished times such an incredibly tactile and present feel?
If you’re interested in helping, or going to see another of the hugely impressive range of events and shows they present, use this link: http://www.wiltons.org.uk/
Thank you
-finis-
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