Michael Gray

This evening at Royal Holloway, we welcomed Michael Gray, the journalist and author, probably best known for his groundbreaking study of Bob Dylan, Song and Dance Man (1972). I was asked to do the introduction and here’s what I said.

Good evening, my name is Dan Rebellato, I’m a professor in the Department of Drama, Theatre & Dance and I have the honour of introducing this evening’s speaker, Michael Gray.

Notoriously, Bob Dylan is hard to know. This is most vividly on display perhaps in D A Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary, Don’t Look Back, which shows Dylan deploying a formidable mixture of wit, intelligence, and venom to bat away a string of hapless journalists and hangers-on who have made the mistake of presuming to know him. One might see this resistance to being known in the famous handbrake turns Dylan has executed in his career – going folky, going electric, going reclusive, going country, releasing Self-Portrait, becoming born again, releasing ‘Wiggle Wiggle’, starring in an advertisement for Victoria’s Secret, recording a Christmas album, and more – perhaps these we might see them as attempts to shrug off listeners who’ve got too close. These moves say, you think you know me? You don’t know me.

Even the peerless Bootleg Series, releasing a wealth of unheard treasures from the Dylan archive since 1991, might be seen as saying, you thought you knew me back then? You didn’t know the half of it.

Because what does it mean to know someone? In his mischievous recent book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, a collection of responses and reflections on an eclectic list of mostly twentieth-century numbers, I am struck by his discussions of two similarly-titled songs very close together in the book. ‘You Don’t Know Me’ by Eddy Arnold, followed, a few pages later, by ‘If You Don’t Know Me By Now’ by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, a pair of songs about the unknowability of others. Of Eddy Arnold’s song of unrequited love, Dylan asks ‘How could she know you? How could she know your wild dreams, your fantasies, nightmares and innermost thoughts, all the things you forbid her to know.’ But of the Harold Melvin he reflects soberly: ‘knowing someone can be a herculean task, a lot of obstacles get in the way’. But he also speculates of ‘You Don’t Know Me’ that the song may play out entirely in the singer’s head, raising the intriguing possibility that the You and the Me are the same person, that we may be frightening strangers to ourselves. ‘A serial killer,’ Dylan remarks darkly, ‘would sing this song’.

I often wonder if Dylan’s unease with being known may derive from an acute sense that he does not fully know himself. The restless longevity of his career may be in part a continual search for a sense of self, alongside a growing awareness of the awkward accommodation of mind to body, of matter to spirit. In this world, as he sings in one song, ‘there’s not even room enough to be anywhere’.

Dylan’s twenty-first-century persona promotes this sense of mystery. A friend of mine worked on the Broadway run of the music-theatre piece based on Dylan songs, Girl from the North Country. The company had reached out to Dylan’s people inviting him to come but got no reply. It seemed he wanted nothing to do with it. But one night the cast, squinting into the auditorium, saw a figure sat by the sound desk, with a hat and a cane, and an unmistakeable silhouette. Very Dylan, to appear from nowhere, sit in darkness, and be gone before you know it, a kind of gentleman thief, a Jack of Hearts flitting through his Shadow Kingdom, only temporarily of this world. ‘Don’t get up gentlemen,’ he sings in ‘Things Have Changed’, ‘I’m just passing through’.

All of this makes Dylan hard to write about without being uneasily aware you may be missing the point, that however robust your arguments, however careful your reading, watching and listening, something will still evade you: that ultimately you know something is happening, but you don’t know what it is.

I have one thing in common with tonight’s speaker Michael Gray that I know about: we’ve both been guests on the excellent Bob Dylan podcast, Is It Rolling Bob?, hosted by Lucas Hare and Kerry Shale. I’m episode 18, Michael is of course episode 21 AND 22. A couple of early episodes featured a long-distance dispute between the rock journalist David Hepworth and the actor Ken Cranham over whether it’s a good idea to see Dylan as literature, Hepworth voting no, Cranham voting yes. The two men were really arguing at cross-purposes, the dispute hanging on whether you think that awarding Dylan the Nobel Prize for literature suggested snootily that he had transcended ‘mere’ popular music or that in giving him the award the Swedish Academy had acknowledged a considerable broadening of the meaning of literature.

But if there’s one person who has helped elucidate these mysteries, to negotiate Dylan’s relationship between the artistic and the popular, between the poet and the song and dance man, it’s Michael Gray. He has been writing about Dylan for an incredible 57 years. He published the first edition of his book Song and Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan in 1972 and it quickly became an essential reference point for anyone who wanted to take Bob Dylan seriously. A second edition followed in 1981, and a third in 1999, at which point it had became so large it had to be split into three volumes for the most recent publication in 2022. As well as these, he’s published the Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (2006 with a 2nd edition in 2008), Outtakes on Bob Dylan (2022), and and his glorious part-biography, part-travelogue about Blind Willie McTell (2008) – the subject of course of one of Dylan’s most astonishing songs, all the more astonishing for having - perversely - been left off Infidels, the album for which it was recorded and going unreleased for over eight years.

Anyone who has delved into the growing literature on Dylan will be familiar with the quarrelsome world of Dylanology: a recent book by one of the leading Dylan experts spends most of its introduction triumphantly finding fault with all the other Dylan experts. I am glad to say that this is a vice Michael Gray does not share; his books are warm, generous invitations to go on a journey of discovery with him into one of the most fascinating figures of the popular culture of our postwar world.

One last personal thought. I was raised on Dylan, my mum – who’s over there! (hi mum) – was and is an obsessive Dylan fan and his music was the soundtrack to my growing up. We didn’t have that many books in the house, but my mum had Dylan’s 1973 Granada paperback Writings and Drawings with the yellow cover. And we had this: in the 2nd edition. On page 154 there is a beautiful typographical image designed to illustrate Dylan’s snaky vocal the line from ‘Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat’from Blonde on Blonde: ‘it balances on your head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine’ and thirteen-year-old me would put the tape on and trace with my finger the journey of that voice across the page.

It is therefore a great pleasure and privilege to ask you to join me in welcoming Michael Gray.

Olly Emanuel Obituaries

There have been some fine obituaries of Olly Emanuel in the weeks following his death. I was asked to comment for a few of them. What is difficult about that is not wanting my sincere sentiments turn into phrasemaking, feeling hardened into repetition.

Hannah McGill in The Times:
Joyce McMillan in The Scotsman
Neil Cooper in The Herald
Mark Fisher in The Guardian
Pauline McLean on BBC Website
And I was asked to write something for the Writers Guild of Great Britain’s website

I attended his funeral in Dunfermline. It was a beautiful occasion, as happy as one can imagine for such a sad day. There were beautiful readings, lovely songs, testimonials aplenty. In Kirsty Williams’s eulogy at one point his collaborators were asked to stand and say the name of one of his plays (I said ‘Emile Zola’ with others completing ‘Blood’, ‘Sex’, & ‘Money’). The whole thing was intense, emotional, and packed (literally standing room only, which I am sure he would have loved). They did not close the curtains around the coffin, so we were able to go and pay final respects.

Good bye, Olly. xx

Olly Emanuel

It is devastating and heartbreaking to be typing the words that my friend and collaborator, Olly Emanuel, has died.

Olly and I worked closely together on our radio adaptation of Emile Zola’s 20-volume ‘Rougon-Macquart’ novel sequence which broadcast in 2015-16 on Radio 4 as Emile Zola: Blood, Sex & Money. Olly and I were on the same wavelength throughout the process; I was lead writer on series 1 and 3 while Olly led on series 2. What I loved about Olly is he was always someone to accept a challenge and when I had doubts or cold feet about some idea, Olly would insist we go for it. We decided that the enormous, epic novel L’Assommoir should be rendered, preposterously, as a monologue and Olly wrote it beautifully, heartbreaking - and it was performed magnificently by Julie Hesmondhalgh. In series 3, he was tickled when I told him he’d be writing an adaptation of a novel that Zola never wrote. (The looming Franco-Prussian War casts a shadow over all the novels, but Zola never writes one about how it started, so I storylined one using some of the characters and Olly wrote it - no one seemed to notice we’d made a novel up!). In season 2, Olly assigned me two 45’ plays to adapt La Curée and Le Rêve. For the first, he liked the idea that this huge novel that covers years of time should be done as a one-room real-time drama. And he was delighted when the second novel, with its peculiar religious and sexual intensity erupted into a hallucinatory scene where stone saints in a church start debating theology. The whole project was, for various reasons, difficult but Olly was a great champion, a creative powerhouse, and a cheerleader for what we were doing. He was deeply serious about writing - his own and others’ - and expressed it through an enormous generosity of time, spirit, energy. He was extraordinary fun to be with.

And he was a fantastic writer. I’ll be clear: there is no radio writer I admire more than Olly Emanuel. Every one of his plays is formally inventive, conceptually daring and - the difficult bit - emotionally rich and resonant. Earlier this term, I taught a radio drama course and gave the students his play A History of Paper (2016), a play I will find it hard to listen to for a while, so beautifully does it express a world of loss. My students were very moved by it, one expressing shock that something so apparently simple and delicate could be so powerful. In summer 2022, I was working on my play 7 Ghosts and realised I hadn’t yet listened to Olly’s new play A Close Approximation of You. It’s a risky thing listening to a play when you’re writing one of your own. If it’s bad, it can muddy your thinking. If it’s good, it can throw you into despair about your own inadequacies. Olly’s play was very very good (and, now I think about it, another heartbreaking play about loss). But like its author, it was encouraging. It made me feel everything was possible and, rather than feeling daunted, I just felt joyful that this play existed in the world. It made me want to make work with that integrity, clarity, ambition and daring.

Radio drama flies under Britain’s radar. Despite its loyal audience of millions, despite 100 years of innovation, despite its unique ability to get inside the audience’s head and to take the audience out of itself, it doesn’t seem a major part of the public cultural conversation. In some ways, this is good; it’s easier to get on with it, without the pressure of that kind of attention. But on the other hand if Olly had the status and track record in TV or the novel that he has in radio, there would be books written about him. And there should be books written about him.

I was introduced to Olly in 2008 by my friend Lewis Hetherington. I was doing a project at the CCA in Glasgow, workshopping my piece for Suspect Culture, Theatremorphosis. Olly was a warm, funny, generous personality, with laughing eyes and boundless enthusiasm. We became friends immediately and then I listened to his radio plays and to that friendship was added admiration and awe . And then we worked together and we egged each other on, held each other’s nerve, kept each other going. His daughter was born two weeks after my son and we bonded over the joys of fatherhood.

We’d always meet up when I was in Scotland. I was there in January this year and we had lunch together. We’d both been commissioned to write plays celebrating 100 years of BBC Radio drama. His idea was about objects that captured long lost sounds. I don’t believe he’s managed to write it. (Though in fact his amazing play, When the Pips Stop [2018], is as fine a celebration of radio as you could ever want.) We met again in London for the BBC Audio Drama Awards. There was a video presentation celebrating the centenary of radio drama with illustrious plays and playwrights swimming across the screen; afterwards Olly and I preened comically about the fact that were the only writers to have two plays listed. Take that, Harold Pinter.

That was March. Then a couple of months later, at the beginning of May, I sent him a message and didn’t hear back for a few days. Then he sent a WhatsApp message saying he found it hard to read so was sending a voice message. Found it hard to read? The message explained he’d been in a park and had had a seizure and some of his language processing seemed to have been hit. He was having tests.

Then the tests came back and they weren’t good. Grade 4 brain cancer. The prognosis was not encouraging. How Olly did it, I don’t know, but he maintained positive, buoyant, life affirming. He made videos, talking us through every stage of his treatment, how he was feeling. He was never self-pitying, never bleak. He seemed more concerned for us, the people who loved him and how we might be feeling. He shaved his head. He put on some weight. He laughed about it.

He said he was still finding trouble reading so he said he’d quite like me to read him some poems, if I had time, only if I had the time. Through the summer I found poems and read them and sent them to him. We enthused over Sophie Collins and Jack Underwood and Zaffar Kunial.

The week Glenda Jackson - who was our narrator for the Zolas - died, he wrote me ‘what a loss for us and a gift. We were sooo lucky. It was like a dream. whole thing shocks me still’.

And on Tuesday this week, he died. He’d been in a hospice having palliative care. I am desperately sad I didn’t get to see him, but I know he was with friends. It was wonderful to know him and work with him. I was so lucky. It was like a dream. Whole thing shocks me still.

RIP you brilliant man.

Wild Blue Yonder

Doctor Who is back. By that I don’t just mean it’s back on TV but it’s also back in glory. Russell T Davies is back, bringing all his extraordinary showmanship, genius with television, relentlessly upbeat positivity and more. David Tennant is back, the most iconic Doctor of the century, wiry, sparky, clever, funny, nerdishly handsome. Catherine Tate’s Donna is back, funny, ballsy, mouthy, vulnerable. It’s just been the 60th anniversary of the show and it’s all over our screens and the Internet - with (almost) all past episodes freely available online for the first time.

It’s hard to remember how nervous we were in 2005, wondering whether its return to our screens would be a triumph or disaster, or something in between that ran for a couple of years and then vanished again. Who could have predicted that Russell T Davies would reinvent Doctor Who - and restore it to the essential Saturday-night family viewing that it was in the late 1970s? Who would have thought it could have ignited the imaginations of several generations of children all over again?

I think the show has been in pretty good hands over the last eighteen years. The Steven Moffatt era had some great stories, wonderful dialogue, superb characters and monsters, even if sometimes they were weighed down by their concepts. The Chris Chibnall era meddled bafflingly with the show’s backstory but there’s some terrific storytelling and Jodie Whittaker, I think, totally made the case for a female doctor. But there was an additional brio and joy and confidence in the Russell T Davies era. I hadn’t appreciated how much I’d missed that until last week’s first episode, The Star Beast, a glorious romp which no doubt outraged the opponents of woke and cheered up everyone else. It reminded me of Rose, the first episode of the reboot. Neither of them is a particularly complicated story; much time is spent locating the action in a completely recognisable ordinary contemporary London; the Doctor bursts in halfway through things and the tone is broad-brush, affectionate, funny and fairly straightforward. This is not faint praise: RTD knows how you relaunch a show and this formula works to establish what we’re watching. It’s direct and colourful and enveloping.

But this week’s is another matter. Wild Blue Yonder is an instant classic. The production team were extremely tight-lipped about this one, leading to all kinds of wild speculation about what it might involve. The answer was that it only featured Tennant and Tate, landing accidentally on a spaceship at the edge of the universe, abandoned by the TARDIS, and forced to explore it alone. Slowly they realise they have encountered a pair of shape-shifting aliens who are trying to clone their identities. And then they realise why the spaceship is abandoned, why a robot is walking slowly down a long corridor, what the mysterious words they hear are, and how they will escape.

It’s brilliant. It’s kind of perfect. It’s actually a story in a long tradition of Doctor Who - maybe as far back as the third ever story The Edge of Destruction which only featured the TARDIS crew, their characters morphing, a growing sense of threat and a mystery to be solved. In the modern series, there are more examples - e.g. Midnight, Listen, Flatline - which are largely focused on the regulars and making the familiar unfamiliar.

Wild Blue Yonder works so well. It is high concept without being weighed down by it. It doesn’t overcomplicate. It actually nods to the Chris Chibnall mischief, affirming at one point that the Doctor may not be from Gallifrey, but this becomes a character moment between the Doctor and Donna, not a laborious bit of exposition. The creatures’ attempts to clone the Doctor and Donna go wrong in a way that is a mixture of weirdly comic and deeply unnerving, The design is beautiful, the resolution was perfect, our two protagonists carry the whole thing impeccably. The whole thing feels completely confident about what it is: a conceptual, SF thriller located deep in the uncanny. I think it might be the best Doctor Who for a decade.

And it was bookended with a delightfully silly encounter with Isaac Newton — ‘He was hot,’ says the Doctor. ‘Oh is that who I am now?’ ‘It’s always been pretty close to the surface,’ says Donna archly — and marvellously, movingly Bernard Cribbins gets a farewell appearance as Wilfrid Mott. It’s a lovely scene, beautifully played, and then all hell breaks loose - to whet our appetite for next week.

It’s as good an hour of TV as you’ll see this year. Doctor Who is back.

Ghosts (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

CONTAINS SPOILERS!

Ibsen’s Ghosts was written and published in 1881 and did not get a professional production for two years. Bear in mind that his previous play A Doll’s House had made him the most talked-about playwright in Europe and beyond. But Ghosts was considered so revolting, so obscene, so repulsive in its dwelling on the seamier sides of slides that not only would theatres not stage it, even the printed edition was a flop with half the copies being returned from the shop. Like the freethinking pamphlets in Mrs Alving’s sitting room, Ghosts was not something to be seen in a respectable home. In January 1886, years after the play had been published, there was a performance of A Doll’s House at the Meiningen Theatre, Germany, and local students heard that there would be copies of Ghosts available to read and so they sat in the stalls passing the books from hand to hand reading Ghosts while A Doll’s House played on stage. When the play was first performed in London, a Daily Telegraph Editorial infamously described it as:

an open drain; […] a loathsome sore unbandaged; […] a dirty act done publicly; […] a lazar-house with all its doors and windows open.

Of course, now Ghosts is a cornerstone of the western dramatic canon, one of the most famous and widely-performed plays in the world. The current run at the Sam Wanaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe is the 15th production worldwide this year.

Classic status can be a prophylactic, coating and surrounding a play and rendering it harmless. Ghosts was intended as an irritant, to get under the skin. It feels like Ibsen was saying ‘you thought A Doll’s House was shocking? You fucking wait’. But it’s hard to retain that sense of shock when we are being handed something that we are told is a classic. Can classics ever really shock? We have the distance of time, the cotton wool bedding of cultural prestige, the cosiness of familiarity.

I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been teaching my university module on Naturalist Theatre. As you know, in universities we sometimes are encouraged to give content notes on work that we are requiring students to read. I should say, where I teach, we are not required to do this; it is academic judgment whether this is appropriate. I feel in two minds about it: it annoys me when content warnings act as spoilers; sometimes I feel like a focus on potentially triggering contents ignores context (Please note that the musical Oklahoma! contains references to drug use, prostitution, pornography, and sexualised violence - which it does but, really?). On the other hand, content warnings allow students who are dealing with serious traumatic experiences the opportunity to gather resilience to read work effectively. (This is important: content notes are to enable students to read, not to give students the option not to read.) With Naturalism, my ambivalence is particularly strong: (a) it can feel silly to put a content notice on a play as famous as Ghosts; but (b) this play really does deal with some shocking material and not to acknowledge that seems both disrespectful to the students and actually to participate in the neutering of this play.

So I was pleased to see that Shakespeare’s Globe have also given a content notice for this play.

Content Guidance: The play contains themes of incest, euthanasia and references to suicide.

…to which they could also have added ‘sexually transmitted disease, prostitution/sex work, blasphemy, and familial sexual exploitation’. What I was even more pleased about when I watched it last night is that the cluster of young people around me (not my students, but student age I’d say), were audibly shocked and horrified by what they were watching. There were gasps when it became clear that Engstrand was encouraging his daughter into sex work in the Sailors’ Home he was planning; jaws dropped when it became clear that Osvald has become a romantic and perhaps sexual relationship with his half-sister. There were shocked looks exchanged when they realised that Osvald was asking his own mother to end his life. And more.

And they were right. Partly because Ibsen’s play has confrontation and antagonism in its bones. But partly because Joe Hill-Gibbins’s adaptation and production has pushed the play’s challenge to the fore. He’s following the lead of Richard Eyre, whose own adaptation/production at the Almeida ran at 90 minutes straight through. Hill-Gibbins’s is 100 minutes (and the show was advertised at 2hrs20m with an interval so clearly some major surgery has happened recently). But it gives the play’s unfolding horror a great rush of energy. Hill-Gibbins has done his own version which makes the action of the play feel continuous (though I think there are meant to be time jumps) but puts some of the possible subtextual drivers of the characters more to the foreground: Manders appears to perv on Regine early on and throughout and Regine hints that she would like to become his mistress, for instance. Engstrand’s plans for the Sailor’s Home are underlined more forcefully. The incestuous Osvald-Regine relationship is made more confrontationally direct than I’ve seen before.

This version is sort of modernised? Actually that’s not clear to me: it’s kind of modern dress, though the costuming is kind of plausibly clothing that could have been worn in the 1880s and now (Mrs Alving’s velvet dress, Father Manders’s suit, Osvald’s cardigan) which means I’m not sure if it’s set in the present or modern dress but set in the 1880s, or maybe set in. some no-time between now and then. Rosanna Vize’s set is an open shaggy magenta carpet that suggests maybe coastal heather; at the back are full height (10 ft?) mirrors, which double ands ghost the action. The magnificent end of Act 1 of Ibsen’s play has the remembered flirtation with (or assault upon) a female servant repeated in Osvald’s flirtation with Regine; they see it happen in the mirror, as if it’s in the next room or even in their minds. The set is, as always in the Globe spaces, in dialogue with the theatre; the candelabras are part of the motif, being lit by a servant at the beginning and then horribly snuffed out at the end. I wasn’t sure about the set at the beginning but soon came to love it; the cast walked barefoot over that carpet, giving this very indoor space a rougher more open landscape. The louvred mirrors glittered and multiplied the candlelight which itself created pockets of concealment and revelation in this play of secrets revealed.

This is a great cast. Sarah Slimani plays Regine as a woman on the make but also someone with an edge of desperation who will do whatever she needs to survive. Greg Hicks’s Engstrand is an insinuatingly comic figure who implies everything and says nothing. Paul Hilton’s Father Manders is an oily moralist with slippery morals. Stuart Thompson’s Osvald is clear-sighted and clear-headed, until he isn’t, a figure of rage and desperation. And Hattie Morahan as Alving is superb: more youthful and more sensuous than she is usually played, she is our guide through the play, watching aghast as the hidden horrors unfold under her roof. She holds the whole thing together. A decade after she played Nora at the Young Vic, she is now the woman trying to keep the family from falling apart. Her slow realisation that her son is asking her to end his life was devastating to watch.

Joe Hill-Gibbins’s adaptation is sinuous and driving. At moments, I sensed his inexperience as a writer in that the psychological through lines of the characters seemed sometimes broken and discontinuous, the actors having to work too hard to maintain clarity of situation and purpose. But mostly, this is a glorious revival and a blissfully nasty 100 minutes to stay locked in this Lazar house with the doors and windows closed.