Silver Screen Voyager

OK, I promised you all a report on the Australia and New Zealand Festival of Literature & Arts, or rather, the Ben Whishaw elements thereof. And here it is.

I had tickets with a friend to see the morning event, A Double Spring, with Juliet Darling, Ben, and Simon Bishop (a Jesuit priest). It was a reading and moderated discussion about the memoir Juliet wrote about her partner’s murder by his mentally ill son, and it turned into a discussion that got quite weighty, though without losing a sense of humor. Unfortunately, it seemed like the moderator had created her questions ahead of time, which meant they sometimes felt disjointed and only tangentially related to the conversation that was unfolding.

Regardless, all three panelists had some very insightful things to say. There was a lot of talk about the state of being open and receptive to take things in (inspired by one of Juliet’s late partner’s manifesto statements about being an empty vessel). Ben spoke about how important that is to him as an actor, and later referred to it when he talked about how on a good performance night on stage, he doesn’t feel like himself and he doesn’t really notice that he’s acting. He mentioned how during the run of Hamlet (it was weird… the moderator brought up Hamlet kind of out of nowhere) there were a few nights (“not many, but a few”, he said) where that happened. He talked about Jung’s idea of being in life’s flow and how that’s what it feels like “when it’s good” [his words]. Then my heart went pitter-pat at Ben Whishaw talking about Jungian theory.

There were a few minutes for questions at the end, and I asked about how each of the three of them see the balance between bringing their personal lives into their work (writing a memoir about such a traumatic personal event for public consumption, ministering to a congregation while maintaining your own independent identity, and performing for an audience with authenticity but keeping some boundaries up at the same time), to which each of them responded briefly. A few others in the room asked questions/made observations about what it’s like to go through trauma and come out the other side. And then the panel was done, and we had to leave the beautiful chapel of King’s College for the next set-up to begin.

I missed thanking Juliet and Simon, but did catch Ben’s eye to thank him on his way out the door. He was very clearly trying to get out of there without a lot of fan meet-and-greet (head down, walking quickly), but that didn’t stop a whole bunch of fans from mobbing him in the hallway. As I left with my friend, it sounded like a sign fell over in the crush, and I cringed in fangirl ambivalence (as I often do). There were an awful lot of people in that room (myself included) because Ben was on the ticket, but the conversation that transpired was a deep and serious one, and I caught more than one (mostly young, mostly appearing female) person in the room zooming cameras in on just him and not seeming to listen much to the content of the conversation at all. Ugh.

BTW, I did run into the lovely S, who I met back in November when we were both at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. Nice to see a familiar fan face again. Hi, S!

As for the Song of Solomon evening event, well, overall I have to say it didn’t work for me. I went with a few friends, and when we got there about 15 minutes before start time, the line was all the way down the hall (and probably 95% female). They didn’t let us in until 15 minutes after the event was due to start, which one of the staffers said was because they were rehearsing.

Mark’s musical composition was ambient, tonal, and minimalist. It succeeded at creating a meditative, trancelike atmosphere when it began, and I did manage to fall into that trancelike state again at a few moments throughout the performance. One of the issues I had, though, was that the music felt very cold, which didn’t match the warmth and love of the spoken word portion of the performance. The spoken bit was Ben and a woman (Cynthia Erivo) alternating passages from the Song of Solomon portion of the Bible. I’m no Biblical scholar, but a friend of mine who does know her scripture said it wasn’t the whole text, but that it was wording taken directly from the Bible. Props to whoever came up with the metaphor that compares a lover’s white teeth to evenly shorn sheep.

Like the musical element, the spoken part had moments that worked for me, especially when the two actors spoke in unison or alternated rapidly back and forth within one sentence. Only, that was a very small portion of the overall performance, which was mostly one actor reading a chunk of the text followed by the other actor reading a chunk of the text. And much as I love me some Ben, I have to say I think the woman did a better job of bringing the text to life while Ben’s reading felt a bit flat. The acoustics made it difficult to hear him, as well, partly due to overall volume and partly due to his lower pitch (the woman’s slightly higher voice was easier to hear).

Mainly, it felt like the music and the spoken word elements weren’t particularly well matched, and while each of them may have been interesting to listen to on their own, they didn’t make for a very cohesive experience when combined.

I headed out for a drink with friends afterwards, so I didn’t stick around to see if anyone came out to chat with fans, especially since the morning’s fan crowd experience was so distasteful. I did run into S a bit later, who said Ben didn’t come out, but Mark did, and she chatted with him a bit.

OK, so on Sunday, instead of deciding to spend a lovely leisurely day wandering London in the company of good friends, I seized serendipity by the horns, and trekked out from Blighty to the Suffolk countryside to catch a bit of the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival.

I will spare you the details of my travels getting there, but suffice it to say that they involved meeting and subsequently hanging out with another Ben fan (whose real name I got, but not her Tumblr, so HI if you’re reading this) throughout the afternoon.  We were the international traveller contingent (that I know of)… she came from Tokyo, I was in from the States, and we’d both chosen to do this as part of our London trips.

For those of you who haven’t been following the set-up of this, I’ve included shots of my program to give you a primer (and thereby save myself the task).  Tl;dr version is that this was Ben Whishaw, Jack Laskey, and Paul Ready performing a rehearsed reading of some of Christopher Logue’s poems.  Laskey put it together, and it’s his dad who founded the festival 25 years ago.

The program came in two sections.  The first was one of Logue’s works, Red Bird Dancing on Ivory, which is a riff on Pablo Neruda poems, and was set to live jazz and originally played in 1959.  The music gave it a good deal of vibrancy, though at times the music’s volume made it hard to hear the actors.  The part I found most enthralling was listening to how the spoken rhythms changed along with the music. Paying attention to the music and the poetry was so carefully coordinated made me think much more concretely about the different sorts of poems Logue (and Neruda, too) wrote to tell this sort of sensual, meandering semi-story about a man and a woman and their dance of attraction and involvement.  I mean, no, I’m not going to complain about listening to Ben Whishaw’s delicious, expressive voice dripping liquid syllables off his tongue like “Your mouth is loose and wet / And my mouth covers it like a rag, dryly”.  But really, all 3 actors did a wonderful job of weaving the language’s pleasing musicality and sensuousness together along with the jazz.

(If you’d like to hear the music used along with the poetry, you can hear a recording from the late 50s here, obviously sans Whishaw.)

For as nice as Red Bird was with its musical accompaniment, it was the second piece I found more moving.  This was New Numbers, the piece Logue performed at Aldeburgh back in 1998 to incredible acclaim.  And here’s where I found the actors’ talents really being given room to shine their brightest.  Because they weren’t working with a closely-synchronized musical score, there was breathing room in this piece that there wasn’t in Red Bird.  The different poems in the cycle still contained a great deal of changing language rhythms, and they were interwoven between the three actors very fluidly (none of the stilted, annunciation style reading: “Two Roads Diverged In a Yellow Wood, by Robert Frost. *pause*  *reads* Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…”).  Here’s where I really got a concentrated dose of my favorite thing about poetry: hearing it read aloud to me.  Especially by people who have real talent for doing so.  When it’s words for me to read on a page, I’ll appreciate the nice language, sure, but having it literally brought to life by people who obviously care about poetry and language and performance… it was really wonderful.  Made even more so by just how many people were there in the audience being excited about poetry.

When the lights came up, I had another of the moments I tend to have with lots of people less familiar with the Whishawian oeuvre than many people reading this.  The lady next to me asked if I knew which actor was which.  I did, and when I clarified for her, she pulled a, “Oh yes!  Ben Whishaw!  He was my favorite!”  You and me both, lady.  You and me both.

Happy to answer other questions on the reading if people like.

I also won’t leave you without the gossipy side of the report.

So, apparently, one of the great things about Aldeburgh (and according to a friend of mine who sees lots of music there, it’s the same with musical performances) is that it attracts some leading light type names, but never feels like there’s any barrier between the audiences and the performers.  This was no different.  So when me and S (my new Japanese friend) got out and realized there was Mark Bradshaw waiting off to the side, we figured he wasn’t likely to go home alone, so we decided to hang out and see what happened.

What happened was some very charming, real, lovely conversation that included many of the festival’s primary demographic (older white ladies in knitted jumpers, silkscreened jackets, and artsy glasses) approaching the three actors with some variation on a kind of sweet, maternal “what a nice young man, and how nicely you read those poems”.  All three clearly had friends and family there, who were excited and congratulatory, and when I spoke briefly with all three of them, they seemed genuinely pleased to hear the performance had gone over so well.  Jack, in particular, was really appreciative when I commended him for putting together such a great program.

There were about 6 of us who were primarily there for Ben (insert my fannish ambivalence about my own less-than-lofty purposes here).  As should surprise no one, he was a total gentleman and very sweet and open and friendly.  I thanked him for taking his day off from performing all week to come and perform yet again, and he laughed a bit and said I was kind to say so.  He was perfectly happy to answer questions and chat and take pictures (see the top of this post, where I am cropped out from one side), and I think he signed things for a few people.

Who else was there?  I’m sure a few of you are on Tumblr.

I cringed a bit when someone asked Ben for a picture of him and Mark together, because to me that’s crossing a line, but he was endearingly open to it (though kind of befuddled… “You want one of me and Mark? Together?”) and pulled a rather charming little sidle across the room to collect his Mr.  And Mark was happily chatting away with people, too.

Really, the whole post-performance thing felt refreshingly uncrowded and charming and casual, and I was kind of reminded that my own set of London friends are the same kind of scruffy, eclectic artsy 30-somethings that Ben and Jack and Paul and their friends/families seem to be.  It was all rather heartwarming.

Oh, you’d like some physical appearance details, would you?  Well, I will say two things on that front.  Number 1: cat hairstylist absolutely OUTDID himself.  I mean, think about how long Ben’s hair is currently for Mojo (go look at those Geraint Lewis photos… I’ll wait).  Now imagine (and I’m guessing there are many of you who would indeed like to imagine this) putting some pomade on your hands, kneading them into that puffed-up pompadour, and scrunching/twisting/tousling/shaking like crazy.  And now imagine that’s how Ben’s hair stayed, in total defiance of gravity.  My photo above really doesn’t do the mane justice.  Number 2: kudos to our often fashion clueless Mr Whishaw for rocking not only a well-cut black suit/white shirt/no tie combo for the performance (all 3 actors wore the same thing), but also a skinny gray jeans/black canvas sneakers/cream scarf/navy duffle coat ensemble.  Very artsy beatnik.  Two thumbs up.