Dear friends,
As I write the garden is beginning to look full for the first time this year. The perennials have finally pushed all their way up through the earth and their leaves unfurled to create a seamless blanket of green. A swathe of fuzzy poppy heads are about to pop open and colour is seeping into newborn lupin spikes. Since I began gardening in earnest about a decade ago, I’ve learned high hopes are often met with disappointment. Far too much effort goes unrewarded. A few years ago I dug out a bed at the very top of the garden, weeded it thoroughly and created the perfect haven for asparagus crowns, everything down to the gently undulating rows they like sit on. To no avail. I suspect the site is simply not sunny enough. The asparagus that came up last year was thin and spindly. Ten plants gave barely enough for a single portion. I’m no longer prepared to lose so much ground to something so fruitless and I’ve spent this month replanting the bed with flowers. Peonies, sedum, lupins and geums who had grown too big for their places in the borders now have a new home. I’m hoping this will encourage more bees and other pollinators into the vegetable part of the garden. The new flower bed is nestled between planters filled with strawberries and the raised beds for squash and beans. It’s perhaps wishful thinking that more bees will equal a bigger and better crop. I can only wait and see.
In this edition of Desk Notes you’ll find the things I’ve been thinking about this May.
Screen - London, a documentary film directed by Patrick Keiller, 1994, now showing on MUBI and BFI Player
Stage - Cymbeline at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Screen
London. Dir. Patrick Keiller, 1994, now showing on MUBI and BFI Player
“Dirty old Blighty. Under-educated, economically backward, bizarre. A catalogue of modern miseries with its fake traditions, its Irish war, its militarism and secrecy, its silly old judges, its hatred of intellectuals, its ill-health and bad food, its sexual repression, its hypocrisy and racism, and its indolence. It is exotic, so homemade.”
So opens Patrick Keiller’s incredibly rich and contemplative documentary, London. Today ‘Broken Britain’ is passed off as a new phenomenon, but Britain has been broken for at least as long as I’ve been alive. I’m beginning to wonder if every generation of Britons has felt this way.
Keiller’s film is a year in the life of London. It is 1992, a year punctuated by IRA bombs, the surprise re-election of Conservative Prime Minister, John Major, and the Black Wednesday collapse of British sterling. But this isn’t simply a political documentary. Instead, the events interrupt and elucidate a meditative commentary on London, its history, its romance, its thinkers and writers. The film plays out like a moving picture book, juxtaposing words and images. There are no interviews, merely the narrator’s recollections of an unseen man named Robinson, with whom he shares an, “uneasy, bickering sexual relationship.” Robinson is a philosophical thinker, a psycho-geographer and autodidact who, “wrestles with what he calls, ‘the problem of London,’” which he explores in a series of journeys through the capital. First a pilgrimage to the sources of English romanticism; next tracing the connected paths of Apollinaire, Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle across the city to Stoke Newington; and finally in search of new artistic and literary activity through the suburban valley of the river Brent.
“Robinson believed that if he looked at it hard enough he could cause the surface of the city to reveal to him the molecular basis of historical events. And in this way he hoped to see into the future.”
Past and present frequently collide. On the day the pair are due to make a trip to Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill in search of English romanticism they are, “distracted by events on Wandsworth Common.” An IRA bomb has exploded. It’s just two days after the nineteenth anniversary of the first IRA attack on London, prompting our narrator to comment on the separation of the English people from the Irish problem, their disconnection from history and the recent past. Travelling across the city, Robinson and the narrator cannot help but observe London’s social problems; problems of underfunded public transport, libraries, and homelessness. Buildings speak. Robinson, “listens to the gateposts at the entrance to [Vauxhall] Park,” the sound of children playing, cars, police sirens.
“London, he says, is a city under siege from a sub-urban government which uses homelessness, pollution, crime, and the most expensive and rundown public transport system of any metropolitan city in Europe as weapons against Londoners’ lingering desire for the freedoms of city life.”
Robinson adopts Canary Wharf as a monument to Rimbaud and re-imagines Leicester Square as a monument to Laurence Sterne, whom he credits with the discovery of cinema. The pattern of old London emerges in connections with Joshua Reynolds and Hogarth. Observing the London Stone in the centre of the city, he declares Cannon Street as a sacred sight and the Number 15 a sacred bus route. The film’s loose connections, Robinson’s esoteric musings, and the ambiguous, static shots of streets, buildings and the river, leave much for the audience to interpret. Musings about the meaning of romanticism unfold over images of busy roads and a McDonalds.
Nostalgic for real social investment, Robinson perceives the first housing development by London County Council in 1897, the Boundary Estate in Shoreditch, as “a fragment of a golden age, a utopia.” The city’s problems, he believes can be traced back to the 1790s:
“I was beginning to understand Robinson’s method, which seemed to be based on a belief that English culture had been irretrievably diverted by the English reaction to the French Revolution. His interest in Sterne and other English writers of the eighteenth century and in the French poets who followed Baudelaire, was an attempt to rebuild the city in which he found himself as if the nineteenth century had never happened.”
As a Victorianist, this fascinates me. Robinson, hungry for constitutional reform, paints The City of London as a vacuum, a place whose soul has been sucked out and replaced by money and banks.
“He argued that the failure of London was rooted in the English fear of cities, a Protestant fear of Popery and socialism, the fear of Europe that had disenfranchised Londoners and undermined their society… At the historic centre there is nothing but a civic void which fills and empties daily with armies of clerks and dealers, mostly citizens of other towns. The true identity of London, he said, is in its absence. As a city, it no longer exists. In this alone, it is truly modern. London was the first metropolis to disappear.”
As stock markets fall and banking is thrown into crisis, Robinson predicts that artists, poets and musicians will someday take back the City of London for Bohemia. But remembering how easily artists had been priced out of the docks by commercial development he admits, “it would still be many years before the Bank of England reopened as a discotheque.” It’s interesting viewing, in light of Brexit and the 2008 banking crisis, the deep subsequent recession, and the austerity ethos of Conservative governments. Speaking to the BFI in 2017 about those promoting the city as, “wonderful,” Keiller said, “I have always seen such urban self-congratulation as a symptom of underlying problems.” The narrator’s comments on the Trooping of the Colour — “the contrast between the precision and splendour of the display and the squalor of the surrounding city and its suburbs” — could easily be made today. With tragedies like the fire at Grenfell and spiralling homelessness that has seen people die on Parliament’s doorstep, we continue to live through a crisis of wealth inequality. Hurtling toward another general election in which Labour lead the polls, London offers a stark warning from the past. When a decisive Labour lead collapses in the shock re-election of Tory Prime Minister John Major, Robinson laments:
“It seemed there was no longer anything a Conservative government could do to cause it to be voted out of office. We were living in a one-party state. It is difficult to recall the shock with which we realised our alienation from the events that were taking place in front of us. Robinson’s first reaction was one of spleen. There were, he said, no mitigating circumstances. The press, the voting system, the impropriety of Tory party funding, none of these could explain away the fact that the middle class in England had continued to vote Conservative because in their miserable hearts they still believed that it was in their interests to do so.”
Stage
Cymbeline at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon
2023 marks 400 years since Shakespeare’s First Folio, the first collected edition of thirty-six Shakespeare plays. Without this book, eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays could well have been lost; none of these, including Macbeth and Julius Caesar, had appeared in print before. To mark the occasion, the Royal Shakespeare Company are staging five of them this year.
Cymbeline is the final play in the volume. “It thus serves to bracket the canon with its near contemporary, the first play in the book: The Tempest,” writes Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford.
“Together, these two late works make suggestive bookends for Shakespeare’s artistry. The Tempest is a tightly disciplined preface to the works that follow, in which the seeds of key Shakespearean themes — fraternal betrayal, romantic comedy, tolerance, hierarchy, the nature of leadership, the magic that is theatre — are planted. In Cymbeline, these themes are reviewed and revisited in a more expansive mode.”
Cymbeline is an interesting play in that it combines many of the tropes we have come to associate with Shakespeare — from sleeping drams that make people appear dead, to women disguising themselves as men. Neither does it fit easily into the traditional categories of Shakespeare’s works, being an intricate blend of both tragedy and comedy. In his introduction to the Penguin edition of the play, John Pitcher explains how:
“The mixing up of things in Cymbeline, so that emotions and conduct are in flux and not always congruous, is Shakespeare’s contribution, purposeful and serious, to the biggest aesthetic debate of his day: how the primary genres of tragedy and comedy could be reconciled within a single play, and connected through the phenomenon of wonder.”
Wonder is right. I’d forgotten just how good the production values can be at the RSC and how much they are able to extract from their ostensibly simple sets. There are puppets, masks and staggeringly life-like severed heads; rain and lightening; the stage illuminated by a soft, glowing sphere that brightens into a blinding, heavenly sun. In a climactic dream sequence the golden God Jupiter descends from the roof.
Set in early Britain when the country was a colony of the Roman Empire the play’s themes are eye-opening. A story of conflict and war is the backdrop for a more intimate tale about two lovers torn apart by class, suspicion and jealousy. Imogen, daughter of King Cymbeline marries the penniless orphan raised within their family, Posthumus. When Posthumus is exiled to Italy, nobleman Iachimo believes Imogen will not stay true. Iachimo wagers he can take her honour, enjoying her, “dearest bodily part.” Unable to win the bet fairly, Iachimo sneaks into Imogen’s bed chamber and peers at her naked body while she sleeps. “The chest through which Iachimo gets access to Imogen’s bed chamber,” writes Emma Smith, “is a symbol of the way the narrative opens up to reveal its secret threats.” Beneath the comic locker-room banter, lies deep-seated misogyny. But the ease with which Posthumus is convinced of his wife’s betrayal is perhaps the most shocking twist of all.
“The vows of women
Of no more bondage be to where they are made
Than they are to their virtues, which is nothing.
O, above measure false!”
For her infidelity, Imogen must die. Meanwhile, the Queen’s rich but vacuous and foolish son, Cloten vies for her attention. She flees and takes up with a bunch of hunters living on their wits across the border in Wales. There’s much for modern audiences to cling to here, including Imogen’s astute feelings about class and poverty:
“These are kind creatures. Gods, what lies I have heard.
Our courtiers say all’s savage but at court:
Experience, O thou disprov’st report.”
As with so many things, in this Shakespeare was ahead of his time. John Pitcher explains how Shakespeare’s contemporary and rival Ben Johnson wrote that, “what bothered him the most about Shakespeare’s mistakes were that they blurred the lines of separation between high and low art and between upper-and lower-class people.”
I won’t give away how it all ends. Needless to say, the big reveal is a masterclass in comic timing and, aside from the scheming Queen, it is the men who receive Shakespeare’s harshest judgements.
“You married ones
If each of you should take this course, how many
Must murder wives much better than themselves
For wrying but a little.”
It must be fifteen years since I was last at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and much has changed. The interior has undergone a radical renovation. The standard auditorium has been torn out, remodelled instead around a thrust stage that pushes out into the audience, bringing us closer to the action; closer to the theatre going experience of Shakespeare’s own day. A further two tiers of seating hover above the stage much like those in the neighbouring Swan whose intimacy I’ve always preferred. Meanwhile, the architects have retained the theatre’s original 1930s charm. After the performance, the audience spills out down the original concrete spiral staircase and through gorgeous ’30s doors. You can even get a drink in the art-deco lobby. I won’t be leaving it another fifteen years, that’s for certain.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this month’s issue and what you’ve been doing in May. Let me know in the comments.
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This month’s featured image is ‘Cymbeline, Act III, Scene 4, Imogen Discovered in the Cave,’ by Edward Penny (1714–1791). Courtesy of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Screen, Stage & Post Office banners are courtesy of the Internet Book Archive.
Very curious about London, the documentary. I wonder if I can watch it online. I haven't read Cymbeline, but, to be honest, I have read only very few of Shakespeare's plays. There was a time when I thought of actually reading all of the plays, but the more I delved into Victorian culture, the more my readings concentrated on 19thc literature. But I still want to read at least a few of the plays. Richard III being one.
I enjoyed reading and seeing the vivid imagery of your garden.