Adler & Gibb

One of my favourite artworks is Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Chairs (1965). It’s an installation in a gallery that comprises a chair against the wall of the gallery, a 100%-scale photograph of that chair on the wall to the left, and on the wall to the right, a large reproduction of a dictionary entry for the word ‘chair’.

At first glance it might feel like the art work 'is' a real chair with two representations of a chair attached, but its structure is more riddling than that; in fact wherever the artwork is installed it's a different chair and therefore a different photograph too. It’s the dictionary definition that remains the same, while the chairs come and go. Seen that way, it becomes unclear whether the definition represents the chair or the chair represents the definition. And what of the photograph? It seems both more and less than the physically three-dimensional chair. It's existentially thinner, stripped of the ability to show us any other angles on the object, but it also seems more definite somehow; the chair in the room is just any old chair and could have been anything else but, since it is a photograph of that any old chair, the chair in the photograph has to be that chair. The physical chair is arbitrary while the photograph has necessity. 

The seemingly redundant tautology of the photograph alongside the thing photographed also plays tricks on the mind: is it the same chair? We look for the trick and we examine both chairs carefully. All this exasperated scrutiny also, quite quickly, starts to strip away the quotidian functionality of the chair; aesthetic attention consumes its to-be-sat-on-ness and leaves us, even in the case of the 'real' chair, with an art-chair, an object, both oddly provisional (any old chair) and supreme (the intense consuming object of attention for its own sake). Eventually though, the muteness of the image just continue to ask us some basic questions about how we come to know things: seeing them? representing them? forming concepts of them? Or perhaps all together, in a kind of trinitarian echo (One and Three Chairs)? Or none: are there, in fact, any chairs here at all? Has art eaten all the chairs?

If Tim Crouch doesn’t know this artwork, I’ll eat my chair. But if he doesn’t he should, and if he does, it’s clearly had no small impact on Adler & Gibb, his new play, set in the post-Kosuth conceptual art world of New York but, even more importantly, animated by just the same conceptual art questions that Kosuth and his Art & Language contemporaries introduced. In Adler & Gibb an actress (Louise) and her coach (Sam) are making a movie about an enigmatic pair of artists, Janet Adler and Margaret Gibb; the actress is playing Adler and she has broken into the abandoned ruins of the artists' rural home to do some in situ improvisation. But the house is not abandoned and Louise is surprised to be confronted by the real Gibb in its remains. In that moment, theatrically, we momentarily might feel like we are watching the photograph being confronted by the chair. Except, of course, that both of these images are 'fake'. Amelda Brown as Gibb is no more real than Denise Gough as Adler.*  

Indeed, both of them have their origin in a play text, a verbal structure, akin to a dictionary definition; in Kosuth's work, I am reminded of Plato's notion of forms (the perfect and metaphysical versions of everything that is imperfectly and contingently rendered in our world) and how it seems similar to the way language works: for Plato there is a form of a 'chair' of which all merely actual chairs are inferior representations; one might say also that we have the abstract linguistic definition of a chair which covers but is not exhausted by all the world's real and possible chairs. Plays stand in relation to productions a bit like that (but only a bit); not in the strictly Platonic sense that they contain all the versions of them but they remain distant and (usually/often) unchanging, while each production, indeed each performance of them, is different and there can be no perfect realisation of the 'actual' play.**

This is explored by Crouch and his collaborators across the length of the show, which begins with an almost entirely bare stage, just some functional trestle tables at the back and side and a lectern on the forestage at stalls level. A young art student begins doing a presentation and occasionally pauses to ask for a new slide, at which point the story of Louise and her confrontation with Gibb begins, with an acting exercise:

SAM. You're wearing a blue blouse.

LOUISE. I'm wearing a blue blouse.

SAM. You're wearing a blue blouse.

LOUISE. I'm wearing a blue blouse.

SAM. You're wearing a blue blouse.

LOUISE. I'm wearing a blue blouse. (p. 3)

Except, Louise isn't wearing a blue blouse. She is naked in fact, in two senses: literally, she's wearing virtually no clothes; metaphorically, the actor is permitted very few of the props of characterisation: 'Lines delivered out, facing out - no adopted accents, no gestures. No actions,' the preceding stage direction insists. (Lines delivered straight out is the contemporary short-hand, from Forced Ents to Crave, for refusing to be fictional about your theatre. I think it goes back, in a way, to Beckett's Happy Days which is fictional but draws some of its power on bringing the actor and the character ever closer together through the performance, so that eventually the fear we are watching may be the actor's as much as the characters. I set out this thought a bit more fully here.)

Amelda Brown 'as' 'Margaret Gibb' and a gun 'as' 'a gun' in Adler & Gibb (Royal Court, 2014) photo: Johan Persson

Through the first half, though, the actors and the set are slowly dressed. They actors are brought clothes, they adopt accents, they start to talk to 'in character', they turn and face one another as if we're not there, pieces of set are brought on. But the production is keen to remind us that what are watching is not the restoration of 'normality', as if a theatre of visual resemblance is the proper way of doing theatre (it never really has been). At one point, Sam and Gibb have been clothed and now they are furnished with props: a mallet and a shotgun, respectively, which are indeed the items with which one character is breaking into a property and with which the other is defending it. But then, like they've dialled it even further, these props are replaced, the mallet with a large plastic lobster and the shotgun with a tennis racquet, a baguette, a length of green piping, and a plastic lobster. We've gone from a linguistic representation of the object, the gun and mallet evoked in dialogue ('what you got in your hand, some cosh is it? Some hickory stick' p. 30 ) to a literal visual representation, to a metaphorical or nonsensical representation - idealism to realism to surrealism in three steps.*** The point is, surely, to remind us that realism is just a point on the dial; we don't need to approach it and we can go past it too.

Before I went, I'd been warned that the first half is difficult. I disagree; the speech to audience and the slow build up of realistic theatrical trappings is enthralling. It's the second half I found difficult, because having so problematised the notion of realism, I found the realism sinister, tautologous; it started giving out meanings and signals which I usually ignore when naturalism is more naturalised (why are they pretending to be these people? what motives do these actors have for being realistic?). In addition, the story veers into peculiar territory in the second half that tests realism as well. They kill the dog; they dig up Janet Adler's body; they force poor Margaret Gibb into acting a scene from the movie. Here, again, it's finely balanced. On the one hand, there are moments of real emotional cruelty and exploitation, particularly as Margaret seems intermittently confused and may even think she is seeing her lover back from the dead. But on the other hand, the story is rather ridiculous, with the exhumation and the obsession seeming so outré as, in this context, to draw attention to the artistic decisions made by the team. Too much narrative can be as disorienting as too little. In the second half I found reverting back to the student's ongoing commentary about the artists reassuringly alienating.

Some of the print critics focused almost exclusively on the story and the satirical messages it may contain about the movie business, which they seem to take at face value. To one it’s a ‘satire on the cult of the artist’. To another it ‘satirises mercilessly the biopic industry’. To a third, it seeks to 'joyfully satirise academic descriptions of artistic creativity, and to comment on how film-makers, art critics and biographers vampirise the lives of artists'. Having decided that satirical commentary - these 'messages' - are at the centre of the performance, it relegates the formal aspects of the performance to the margins, one predictably regretting 'that the playfully experimental form dominated the intriguing content'. 

What these reviews betray is a peculiar theatrical assumption that content is important and form is trivial, which is an assumption I think the show's energy is all about undermining. The Telegraph review even begins with a list of Very Important Topics that the Royal Court should be addressing - 'Carnage in Syria, returning chaos in Iraq, turmoil in Ukraine' - and laments that instead Tim Crouch has chosen to offer an 'elaborate doodle on the margins' (the same phrase is used by The Arts Desk: 'the last part of the evening feels like the playwright is just doodling in the margins'). To make art about Syria is serious; to reflect on art about Syria is, it seems, trivial and self-indulgent.

Which is odd, because the play I saw was an exploration of exactly the responsibilities art has to reality that, watched attentively, would make most people think twice before recommending a series of plays on the horrors in Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine. The play seems to me to be exploring how certain ways of making art might eviscerate and consume reality. It's embodied in the main story, which takes Louise and Sam into acts of murder, desecration, and physical and emotional trespass. But it's not just a comment about Hollywood; there's a killer detail late in the play when Margaret Gibb recalls the early days of their withdrawal from the art world:

She started to get confused a little, you know. A little out of sorts. She must have been just over 50 by then. I don't know dates. When we started to build this place. She started to forget where she put things, to have difficulty remembering words. This gave an interesting quality to the work (p. 77).

The word 'interesting' is fairly non-committal but it suggests something of art's relentlessly omnivorous character that it can also grab dementia to feed itself.

And the theatre is part of the same thing. It's one of the most ordinary things that theatre can do to take an object and turn it into an image. The Prague Structuralists of the 1930s - the first to offer a theatre semiotics - had a kind of slogan that they repeated in many of their articles: 'everything on stage is a sign'. That is, you put a chair on a stage and it stops being a chair, it becomes an image of a chair, a representation of a chair, and it becomes symbolic, deictic, iconic of the kind of life that might be lived around that chair. It becomes a theatre-chair and its original function is suspended, but at a distance. Roland Barthes talked about this in 'Myth Today', an exuberant essay that accompanied the miniature cultural analyses that made up his Mythologies (1957), where he showed how culture turns denotation (strict and direct representation) into connotation (where the image is now pressed into service of a second-order additional set of meanings). He talked about an image of a black soldier saluting the French flag which (in the context of the Algerian War) could not simply be a photograph of one soldier and one flag, but instead becomes an image of the faithful and loyal worldwide Francophone family. Here lies ideology and art does it too: consuming the chair, the soldier, the flag, the dementia, the mallet, the artist, the stage. In Adler & Gibb's most hilariously memorable line, Louise realised that the dog she has just killed was the puppy originally submitted by the two artists for the Whitney's collection but rejected by the Museum: 'I killed the fucking art-dog!' (p. 65).

Throughout the production, the props, set and costumes are provided by two children who are given instructions about what to do. Children on stage have a fascinating relationship with realism; I was reminded of the (young) choir that I saw performing in David Greig's The Events last year. The untrained youthful performers offer a different kind of realism, a imperviousness to theatrical semiosis. They seem to stay children, because of their delightful disorderliness, their unprofessional behaviour (in the best sense), even when they are trying to be orderly professional. A stray glance or nervous twitch of the hand which a professional actor would never do and we're reminded of their spontaneous actuality. On the other hand, of course, they do participate in the semiosis, because, as we see then assemble the set, it begins to look a little like kids playing with a doll's house, roughly dressing their dolls, inserting the furniture, choosing the wallpaper. The image is ambiguous: on the one hand, it suggests something of magic of dressing-up, of play-acting; on the other, maybe it implies that all of these make-believe is a bit... childish.

This is rather typical of the whole gorgeous thing. Adler & Gibb has its dog and kills it too. It is both a gripping, original, well-told story and an ambitious, riddling and at times brutal interrogation of the claims of art and the means of theatrical representation. At some point we realise that the student and the actress are the same people. The younger Louise, as a wannabe art student, was making a pitch for a scholarship by presenting her thoughts on Adler and Gibb. The fact that she appears to have failed and instead has made a sideways move into acting appears to have left her with mixed feelings about the artists she once so admired. She now seems obsessed to a point where she both wants to reify and destroy them - and what better way to reify and destroy something? Make art out of it. You want to have the dog and kill it too? Make it an art-dog.

As ever, Tim Crouch, Andy Smith and Karl James have made here a piece of work that is ferociously theatrical and deeply ethical in its questioning. Not in the earnest English way, but this is art that uses its own methods and its own areas of expertise to ask profound questions about why we're all here, watching this stuff.

I won't pretend Adler & Gibb was easy viewing; I won't even pretend I completely understood it all and the clashing textures of representation that it brought together but it was completely fascinating from beginning to end, wholly captivating, often hilariously funny, pounding the stage with wave after wave of thought, beauty and feeling and, most of all, it piled ambition on ambition. If anyone tells you that the theatre is safe or middle brow or boring or escapism, just tell them you were there when Adler & Gibb was at the Royal Court and they couldn't be more wrong.

Notes

* Or rather: Denise Gough as Louise as Adler - an interesting qualification, reflecting on that wonderful moment in Tim Crouch's An Oak Tree, maybe my favourite moment of theatre of the century so far, where we are invited to look at a piano stool as a tree as a daughter. That moment is hugely, profoundly moving for all its verfremdung, but it's also a massive mindfuck too: how do you look at a chair and imagine it to be a tree that has turned into a man's daughter without changing its substance? And yet, here, in Adler and Gibb, it's easy: we are very used to these layered substitutions in theatre: here is an actor playing a different actor playing an artist. That we should find that deeply peculiar set of mental switches simple is, to me, one of the reasons why narrative fictional theatre remains at its heart a conceptual art practice, albeit a normalised one.

** The three-way comparison (dictionary-play-Platonic forms) isn't quite right of course. The dictionary definition actually comes after the meaning is formed (when lexicographers examine the language and try to work out what we mean when we say particular words), so I am using the dictionary definition as an emblem of the meaning of a word. The forms are at the other end of things, genuinely giving rise, if we are to believe Plato which no one does, to all of the real existences in the world. The play text is a little bit more in the middle: (a) because, as I said, no one, not even Arnold Wesker, thinks plays give rise to everything in the productions of them and (b) because some play texts are more a priori than others. Pinter's clearly just arrived and were done. The published text for Complicité's Mnemonic is a document of a collaborative process.

Salvador Dalí Aphrodisiac Telephone (1936)

*** The lobster is the clue that we're being asked to reflect on realism's shadow; it's an icon of surrealism, even a cliche of surrealism, and therefore - since surrealism is probably the modernist art form that has most widely burrowed its way into public consciousness - an icon of modernist and conceptual art practice. The lobster specifically may remind us of Dalí's Lobster Telephone (1936, look! a picture!), which was one of Dalí's more radical offerings, a 'design' which obliterated the functionality of the object, which, of course, is what art does all the time (see the art-chair, see the art-dog). It's a chain of reference to continues to reflect on art as creative (and sometimes uncreative) destruction.

Mr Burns

The last show at the Almeida, King Charles III, was a daringly clever play that used exquisite pastiche, both serious and playful, to suggest that the only way we can imagine our near future is by retelling old stories and reusing old forms. And so, pleasingly enough, is the new show at the Almeida. 

Mr Burns by Anne Washburn comes to the Almeida hot-foot from Playwrights Horizons in New York. The play has caused a bit of a furore here with at least two critics (well one critic and Tim Walker) giving it vitriolically bad reviews. 'this is a play that can only possibly put people off theatre', 'three hours of utter hell', 'By the [third act], I’d lost the will to live, and can only hope that if this is the future of theatre after the apocalypse, I’d rather not survive it myself'. And so on. But actually, it's also had some very good reviews and a fair number that sit on the fence. So it's not quite Marmite: some hate it, some love it, and some seem just rather mystified.

It doesn't seem that mystifying to me. It has an Off-Broadway quirkiness about it, which is fairly alien to London theatre tastes (I usually find that kind of thing maddening), and it's unusual for a show in Britain to invest so heavily - and unironically at heart - in popular culture, to investigate it and treat it as a wellspring for understanding who we are. But the story is pretty straightforward: there has been some kind of apocalyptic collapse of civilisation in America centred on the collapse of the electricity grid and one of the things the survivors do is try to tell each other stories they remember from before the fall, including episodes of The Simpsons. Some months later this has evolved and now amateur theatre groups tour lo-fi live and imperfectly-remembered versions of Simpsons episodes (but also episodes of The West Wing and Shakespeares and presumably much more), interspersed with adverts and medleys of pre-apocalyptic pop music. In the third act, seventy years later, these performances have evolved further: they are now a mixture of religious ritual, theatrical tragedy, sitcom, broadway musical, and opera. 

What links all the acts is the act of storytelling and an exploration of the idea that societies are drawn to tell and retell stories. In fact, in each act, the Cape Feare (1993) episode of The Simpsons is retold three times: once round a campfire, once in an amateur theatre show, and once in an extravagant high-art pantomime, where it is now mixed promiscuously with hints of Gilbert and Sullivan, Ricky Martin, Batman, Britney Spears, Night of the Hunter (1955) and the Scorsese-made Cape Fear (1991). We watch the evolution of the episode in these retellings, with, by the third act, the regular character, Mr Burns (but who, from memory, doesn't even appear in the Cape Feare episode) becoming the chief villain, displacing the original episode's Sideshow Bob. We understand this because Mr Burns is the villainous owner Springfield Nuclear Power Plant and, in a world where the electricity has apocalyptically failed us, Mr Burns would indeed come to be the emblem of everything wrong with the world, much as, in a Climate-Changed world a hundred years hence, Jeremy Clarkson might become a by-word for evil (I'm not joking).  the trivial in our culture might become the grand metonyms of a future society in exactly the same way King Lear's despair at the meaningless injustice of the world became a way to tell stories to each after Hiroshima and the Holocaust. The episode as we eventually find it is a thing of shreds and patches, of ballads, songs and snatches, oneirically combining the high and low, the comic and the tragic, music and prose; a bit like society really. Or religion. Or art.

What's so hard about this? It's what stories do. This small episode of a cartoon sitcom comes to serve a deeper function in a wholly changed world, marking a continuity with the past and a recognition of the present. The advertisements have reverted to 1950s styles and even so the cast worry about the psychology and the semiotics ('isn't Chablis one of those wines which was out of fashion but actually it's quite good?' / 'No. Common misconception but, no. Quincy, really, do you want to be a Chablis drinker?'). Jokes are stories too, little stories that punch a momentary air-hole in the transport box of my life and to forget a great joke is to feel stifled: 'Oh this is torture,' says Matt, struggling to remember a line, 'I know this is really funny'.

This might vaguely stir some memories of postmodernism but I don't think that's quite right. Yes, Mr Burns suggests we think about culture as an act of bricolage, but it's magnificently, naively, yearningly confident about storytelling about narratives, major and minor. In the first act, we begin with what sounds like (and it turns out is) the transcription of an improvisation between the actors trying to remember a famous Simpsons episode. It is night and they are around a campfire, like boy scouts, telling stories to stop themselves being scared. Because then a stranger appears and they conduct a formal - and terribly moving - process where they read out ten names of people they know whose whereabouts they don't know. Everyone in this ruined landscape, it seems, keeps a note of anyone they meet, so a ritual of any meeting is that they make this enquiry (limited to ten because, presumably, you can't monopolise the stranger's attention; we need to balance our desperation with the needs of others). The attempt to recall the episode is funny but recognisable (who hasn't at some point been in one of those conversations where people repeat their favourite lines from Simpsons or Frasier or Seinfeld or Larry Sanders? [And there should be a word for the pain you experience when someone misquotes a great line from a great sitcom; I'll ask the Germans, they're bound to have one]) but the arrival of the stranger punctures the humour and gives the scenes a kind of emotional context which both roots the scene and gives their desire to retell stories a seriousness and power. Yeah, deprived of civilisation, this is what we do. We cling to stories. Why wouldn't we? It's how we make sense of things. 

In the second act, it has become formalised. We've reconstructed some modicum of capitalism: adverts to fund the company, a system of exchange to build up the scripts (they have effectively monetised crowdsourcing; Twitter: take note), they have rebuilt a process of allocating performance rights to individual episodes, there seems to be a regulatory authority. We watch a rehearsal and the comic drive of the act is part of the argument: we are watching a comically huge effort to (re)create something trivial. In a way, it's a beautiful and touching to see such efforts because doesn't this remind anyone of, well, theatre? Theatre's triviality is in its uselessness, its evasion of the cycle of use-value and exchange-value, its oddly ineffable value for its own sake (because it's art, basically - well mostly). It continues to delight me that despite everything, despite two hundred years of Gradgrindian capitalism, people still expend huge energy and effort on useless acts of theatre.

In the third act, in a way, its use-value has been discovered. It does feel as if we are watching the religious enactment of a parable and Robert Icke's and Tom Scutt's visual embodiment of this in the costumes and set suggest a mixture of witch-doctors, Shakespearean performance, and sixth-form disco. The act is perfectly pitched because we are never quite sure whether we are supposed to laugh at it (there are some brilliant jokes, some hilarious juxtapositions) or admire and be awed by it (the music is often gorgeous, the story, despite everything, becomes rather involving). It is theatre as ritual repetition and social therapy, though the stylistic tightrope that it treads again never quite says art is therapy; it teeters between utilitarianism and beauty.

Mr Burns is a brilliantly lucid bit of theatre. There's some additional fun if you are very familiar with The Simpsons but that's not vital, in fact, it's a distraction if you think it's all an in-joke for the fans. It could be anything; The Simpsons stands in for any story that embraces and touches a whole culture. It is The Bible, The Iliad, the Complete Works of Shakespeare and as such it's a challenge to how we think of art, religion, culture, the whole way of life that we move in. It's beautifully performed, too, because if it had been given a smooth, elegant London theatre production, it would have missed the point. This is a rough, crude, funny, clever, heartfelt, stupid evening of theatre and I can't recommend it highly enough.

Noodling

I don't like guitar solos. I'm not sure when this certainty formed in my mind. I certainly thought I liked guitar solos when I was younger. Well, I certainly thought I liked guitarists when I was younger, and I think that blurred unthinkingly into imagining I liked guitar solos. This struck me recently because the guitar solo seems to have almost completely disappeared from pop music. I'm sure it still hangs around in metal but how often do you hear a chart single - even from a notionally guitar-based indie band - with a guitar solo? 

Now don't get me wrong, I love a riff. Hell yeah. A really good guitar riff is great, but as a  gorgeous pop hook. Some of the greatest records of the last two decades - 'Richard III' by Supergrass, 'Seven Nation Army' by The White Stripes, 'Acquiesce' by Oasis (I know, I know, I'm sorry), 'Wake Me Up' by Girls Aloud - are stacked on top of gorgeous guitar riffs. But these are pop songs, tricked up in a rock style, and are the better for it.

I was struck by this recently, reading Nicholson Baker's Travelling Sprinkler which meditates very interestingly on pop music and in which the hapless middle-aged narrator buys a $70 guitar from Best Buy and tries to write and record songs. He struggles with soloing. I've never much bothered with it in my hobbyist guitar-plonking, always happy with chords and little flat-picking. I guess it's my age being so much a post-punk music listener. I did like Pink Floyd as a teenager and still like quite a lot of their stuff but, while I can appreciate the technical virtuosity of David Gilmour and I do think he's a gloriously articulate guitar player, fundamentally it leaves me a bit cold. The guitarists I've always really liked are ones who don't really play solos - Pete Townsend, Johnny Marr, Keith Richards, for instance - who mix rhythm and drop in little riffs and move between them without ever luxuriating in an extended guitar solo. 

But there are exceptions and I wanted to write about them. What's interesting is that the few guitar solos I like have almost the opposite of virtuosity. One would be Pete Shelley's three-note solo on The Buzzcocks's 'What Do I Get?' which, with supreme literalness, picks out the melody of the verse, such as it is. In the official video Shelley stands virtually motionless as if even offering this solo is a chore.

But there are two other solos that I really do like. The first is George Harrison's solo on the album version of 'Let it Be' (it starts at 1'58"). It's a solo that should probably never have been released. George Harrison had recorded a number of guitar solo overdubs on the song but when Phil Spector put together his mix of the album he used an early, very rough solo that Harrison had probably just laid down as a placeholder until something more melodic and appropriate came to him. Its virtuosity is not show-iffy; it's just a workman musician putting down something intuitive, trying something out. On the single version, there's a rather muddier and slower solo, still melodic (Harrison seemed incapable of not playing a melodic solo), but bogged down by the Leslie effect that turns it into a fairground pipe organ to my ears. I guess the idea is to keep with the 'organ' theme but it sounds to be rather unctuous and picks up the po-faced aspects of the song. What Ian Macdonald calls 'complacent uplift rather than revelation' (Revolution in the Head, p. 338). I can see that and, no, it's not my favourite Beatles song by a long way, but on the album version, Harrison's gritty, grainy, metallic guitar solo seems to me both to toughen up the song and make the sense of acquiescence more hard-won. It's beautifully placed, too. The song appears to come to rest, angelic church organ echo the finality and then Harrison's guitar just erupts into the song. It's so unexpected, so crude, so harsh. Even the little errors in it - around 2'06"-09" his fingers seem to get away from him - make it seem movingly effortful. It does a rather conventional guitar solo thing of slowly working it way up the scale, but it does so not to soar but to find new melodies; the very final little wobbly melody at 2'22" is filled with feeling, not the boring 'woman wailing' tone that a generation of guitarists schooled in Claptonism went with, but something much more confined to the world of the song. Bluesy but still part of a song.

The other guitar solo I love is related. It's Paul McCartney's guitar solo on 'Maybe I'm Amazed'. It's quite a similar song to Let it Be: piano-based, build around a descending bass line, hints of church organ and angelic choirs, but this one is Paul in his Little-Richard-blue-shouter mood and it's probably the rawest song he ever recorded. And he does a solo in it? In fact, he plays every instrument on the song. This is from his first solo album, mostly recorded on a home studio on his farm in Scotland while the Beatles were breaking up. 'Maybe I'm Amazed' was apparently recorded at Abbey Road, though still with Paul playing all the instruments. Paul is, as any fule kno, one of the greatest bass guitarists ever but in fact he had to be coerced onto the instrument through necessity, not wanting to be the guy who stands at the back. He saw himself, rightly, as a front man. So he started as a guitarist and, occasionally, as a drummer. McCartney was his chance to show off his multi-instrumental talents. In some ways this is the strength and weakness of the record; McCartney really needed someone to bounce ideas off, someone to occasionally say no to him. Recording all the parts yourself, the risk is that you keep adding and you try out ideas and you get used to them, however bad, and you lose perspective. You can hear that in 'Maybe I'm Amazed' at 2'05" when he dubs over the verse a series of reggae-kite guitar chops which come close to ruining the song.

But then he has this guitar solo. In fact, to be fair he plays it twice, once at 1'12" and again at 3'05". It's the second one I like the most though you need to have heard it once before for it to work. He's got an  effect on the guitar that makes it sound cheap, almost plastic.  Google tells me it may be a Fender amp with a little bit of reverb, which I guess is not that strange, but it makes the solo seem modest. The solo has its own little bluesy tune; you could set words to it. The thing that, I'll be honest, brings tears to my eyes whenever I hear it is the moment where he repeats a little phrase twice over the song's great chromatic run up the piano at 3'14". It seems to me a solo that is every bit as expressive of longing and loneliness as the lyric and the melody of the song itself. It's aided, in my mind, by the image of this pop genius, alone in the studio, feeling his life falling apart and reaching out to the person he loves through an experiment on an unfamiliar guitar fed through a little buzzy amp.

Someone has got hold of the isolated solo tracks and they're here. It confirms that sense of a technically awkward player fumbling his way towards something graceful and elegance, but it's the lack of sheeny virtuosity that makes it so moving.

UPDATE: I have been mildly inundated* with suggestions of other songs with great guitar solos. Of course, what I say above is an overstatement, though I really do have a problem with virtuosity in guitar solos. I am however happy to agree that the solos on 'Taxman' and 'Something' by The Beatles, 'Pale Blue Eyes' by The Velvet Underground (or indeed Edwyn Collins & Paul Quinn) 'Come Up And See Me' by Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel, 'I Guess I've Come To Live Here In Your Eyes' by Willie Nelson, 'The Late Great Cassiopeia' by The Essex Green, and 'Rock God' by Roddy Frame are all excellent...

* How can you be 'mildly inundated'? Talk sense, man.

Now That I Run The Country

It came as a real shock at Christmas 2011 when I realised that I now run the country. News reached me in November that year when I discovered that the John  Lewis Christmas advertisement was to feature 'Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want' by The Smiths. The Smiths? The soundtrack of my youth? One of the first bands I liked that the adults totally didn't get? That swaggering mixture of shimmering guitars, gutsy rhythms, and Morrissey's profoundly subversive lyrics and profoundly subversive presence? Now attached to the middle-aged, middle-class solidly respectable ordinariness of John Lewis? But of course it was. Because I now run the country.

When I was young, pre-teen, one of the most familiar figures on TV was Max Bygraves. He was a guest on a lot of chat shows. He would come on, tell jokes and sing songs on various TV programmes. Comedians would tell jokes that assumed we knew who he was. He was a standard part of any impressionist's repertoire alongside Frank Spencer and Eddie Waring. But I knew who Frank Spencer was. I also knew who Eddie Waring was - well, no I didn't; I assumed the beginning and end of Eddie Waring was keeping the score on It's a Knockout (younger readers may need to Google It's a Knockout because for complicated moral and legal reasons, you will never get to watch that again). Max Bygraves was a singer and, somewhat, a comedian. His schtick was his cockney accent, his working class childhood and a series of songs, alternately childish ('You're a Pink Toothbrush', 'Gilly Gilly Ossenfeffer Katzenellenbogen By the Sea') and syrupy ('You Need Hands'). He had some big hits in the 1950s but they dried up in the sixties because, well, The Beatles and, well, The Sixties and he just clearly wasn't a figure of the times any more.

So why was he on TV two decades later in the late 1970s/early 1980s? Because the people who were making the creative decisions at the major television companies at that time were probably in their mid-forties and when they were teenagers in the late 40s, they loved Max Bygraves. They remember his humour, his alternatively childish and sentimental songs, his stories about growing up in the East End, the sketches he did between the numbers, and they probably thought he might speak to a new generation, and at least he'd speak to the generation that grew up with him and anyway, fuck it, let's get our childhood hero on the TV. Max had spent some of the seventies trading precisely on this nostalgia with his series of Singalongamax (etc.) albums throughout the decade, so he wasn't going to complain. Which is why, in 1979, a ten-year old kid in Lambeth, South London, could do a Max Bygraves impression to his friends and they all knew who I was impersonating. Because the people who grew up with Max Bygraves were now running the country.

I don't run the country, obviously. I've never been asked and anyway I'm busy. But my generation runs the country. David Cameron and Nick Clegg are between a year and eighteen months older than me. George Osborne and Ed Miliband are both a couple of years younger than me. As in government, so in theatre: Rufus Norris and Vicky Featherstone are only a wee bit older than I am. My generation's childhood is everywhere. The adverts are full of the music and imagery I grew up with, the way that adverts in the 1970s parodied wartime scenes, Angel Delight was sold with a Cole Porter song, and Ovalteen revived The Ovalteenies and everyone probably thought it was brilliant. My childhood is part of official nostalgia now. On X Factor, they have a Queen night, everyone likes Wham! and hipster bands studiedly revisit the New Romantics and David Cameron apparently likes The Smiths. Last year, they decided to remake Robocop too, because now I run the country.

But I don't like it and I'll tell you why. Not because I think The Smiths have sold out - that would be an quite ridiculous thing to say for someone who goes to John Lewis as much as I do. Not because they shouldn't be on an advert. I love the song; why not stick it in an advert? Not because it was a bad version. Hell, it was pleasant. A bit dull, a bit respectful but it was okay.

The reason I don't like it is that I can't bear the habit of cherishing the way things were when we were young. It's one of the dullest, dullest clichés of the middle aged that we so often believe that music was much better when we were teenagers. Music meant different things when I was 18, when I was frantically forming new synaptic connections along to the minimal amounts of music I could afford to buy; when I was newly adult and independent and I was making my own choices for the first time so every song shaped you like a mortar shell slamming into a field. The fact is that we will always find music that we love when we are 18 because that's what being 18 is. The mistake is to assume that it's the music that's special. It's not the music that's special; it's you, aged 18, that are special.

Which brings me to Michael Gove.

Michael Gove must be the most interventionist Secretary of State for Education this country has ever had. And by interventionist, I mean he paddles his interfering fingers in things about which he knows nothing. Now, given the tendency of Education Secretaries of all political stripes to meddle in the the structures of education at every level, this is saying something. But Gove has ignorantly interfered with education all the way from the macro - introducing Free Schools that compete for resources and children with the state sector - to the micro - he's just had Of Mice and Men removed from the syllabus on the unimpeachably pedagogical grounds that he doesn't care much for the book.

What is intriguing about Gove, though, is that, unlike most of his fellow Cabinet members, I don't believe his attacks on education are purely ideological. I don't think Gove is all that political. I think he just acts from a peculiarly intense sense of nostalgia for the way things were for him.

Take GCSE and A-Level. When Gove and I were teenagers, we did O Levels (almost entirely timed, formal, sit-down exams, almost entirely unseen, almost entirely writing essays, or great lists of questions) and we did A Levels (almost entirely the same). Doing a resit was virtually unheard of. You spent two years on an A Level and it all hung on maybe six hours in an exam hall over a couple of days. Having a bad day? Tough luck. A considerable amount of the preparation for History or for English was preparing a series of instantly modifiable skeleton essays that you could like lightning adapt to fit virtually any question asked, together with a handful of laboriously learned facts or quotes, adaptable to all exam situations. 

I was good at exams so I hope what I say now will have the force of experience. I was good at A Level exams, because I had worked out how to do exams and nothing else. I hadn't worked out how properly to evaluate the Enlightened Despots, or read Sense and Sensibility, or talk engagingly to a French person. Formal, timed, sit-down exams prepare you (a) to blag your way through intellectual challenges and (b) for literally nothing that will ever happen in your life outside the exam hall. In how many jobs does your boss say, you're going to be trained for two years and then you'll have to demonstrate your ability once and never again and you'll be judged on that for literally ever? Not many. More important, all the research over thirty years has shown that exams don't test people well, that they are particularly biased against girls, that they model a very narrow range of intellectual skills. 

When they introduced GCSEs - a year or two after I did my O Levels - they introduced an element of course work. The A Levels became a bit more modular: not everything happened at the end. The exams changed, requiring less cramming and learning of quotes, and more an ability to respond to new experiences. They tested a much greater range of people's abilities than essays. They meant that teachers were preparing their students for genuine intellectual skills: the ability to think intelligently on your feet, identify a problem, search for solutions, frame an answer. Unsurprisingly, exam results started to go up. At which point all those people who then ran the country started to complain because clearly education was magically perfect when they did their exams and now it's too easy.

Then Michael Gove showed up. Gove also thinks exams are too easy. Gove's reforms of A Level and GCSE are to turn the clock back. He wants to scrap most of the course work. He wants to make the qualifications, in the unfortunate terminology, terminal. He wants them to be linear. He wants them to be the exams he took when he was a teenager. And the thing is, there's no real ideology in this. I mean, sure, he thinks it's all very odd when lots and lots of people do well because in any competition there should be losers as well as winners, and I'm sure he has his party's fundamentalist conviction that introducing competition to a system always works, but I think he mainly just prefers things the way they were. Now, I'm not terribly fussed about Of Mice and Men being taken off the syllabus - sure!  give another book a chance! - though I do think it bizarre that this decision should be made purely because Michael Gove doesn't care for it. But then he's trying to remake the whole education system to be like the one he happened to do, so should we be surprised?

I think this is an ethical matter. Exams do not prepare you for openness. They prepare you to be tensed against the curve ball; they prepare you to be resilient and bloody-minded enough to face a new question and say what you already knew. Is this how we should live our lives? Should we not aim to be engaged, curious, alert, open people, as fully alive as we can be to the new experiences that world can offer? Isn't that a better, richer way to experience the world? To insist that I can change, I constantly change, because I take seriously the possibility that any experience, any book, a new friend, a piece of music, that loops the loop through my imagination might change who I am?

We all know people who have the opposite attitude, who affect a pose of boredom at everything, who are never happier when finding fault with the play or the song or the novel. People who Know What They Like and Know What They Think and Have Seen It All Before. People who can't wait to be the first person to say how much they disliked the show you've just seen (these people can often be heard on Radio 4's Saturday Review). These are the people who literally and metaphorically put The Smiths on the John Lewis advert, because they formed their tastes when they were 18 and have just been putting intellectual fat around it ever since. It's a deeply conservative view of the world; it's embodied in Gove's education reforms, and I hate it.

Michael Gove is only six months older than me and so I feel I have to apologise. Because these terrible things are happening now that I run the country.

Soap Opera

A row has broken out over the reviews of a new production of Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier at Glyndebourne. The critics have objected to aspects of the performance, specifically to the body-type of Tara Erraught, who is playing Count Octavian. Here's what they've said:

'Tara Erraught’s Octavian is a chubby bundle of puppy-fat, better suited to playing Mariandel in Acts 1 and 3 than the romantic rose-cavalier of Act 2 - ' wrote Andrew Clark in the Financial Times, adding, as if this is a distantly secondary consideration - 'albeit gloriously sung'. At least Rupert Christiansen in the Telegraph applauds her singing before turning to her figure: 'she is dumpy of stature and whether in bedroom déshabille, disguised as Mariandel[,] or in full aristocratic fig, her costuming makes her resemble something between Heidi and Just William. Is Jones simply trying to make the best of her intractable physique or is he trying to say something about the social-sexual dynamic?'. Richard Morrison in The Times makes even swifter work of her performance: 'Unbelievable, unsightly and unappealing'. In The Independent, Michael Church originally called Erraught a 'dumpy girl', though has had the cowardly decency to get that quietly edited out. Even The Guardian gets in on the act with Andrew Clements declaring that 'it's hard to imagine this stocky Octavian as this willowy wom[a]n's plausible lover'.

These critics are wrong at so many levels, that it's hard to disentangle them. First, of course, it's really disgraceful to say these personal and unpleasant things about another human being who, let's remember, has to go on stage every night in front of an audience and sing this role. At this level the problem is one of impoliteness. Second, there is the horrible, sneering misogyny of these comments. As if being 'unsightly and unappealing' to Richard Morrison is something an opera singer should be criticised for. Kiri Te Kanawa was on Radio 4 this morning and her dreadful defence of Erraught was to say she'd been frumpily costumed and anyway she's a 'lovely little girl'. Look, I think the picture at the top of this article shows how beautiful Erraught is, but that is not the point. It's about male opera critics thinking they have a right to judge a mezzo-soprano almost entirely on her looks. As we've seen Andrew Clark only adds a comment on her singing as an afterthought; Andrew Clements deals with the three women leads' voices in a sentence. Michael Church and Richard Morrison don't mention Erraught's  singing at all.

There has been some push-back, notably from the former North American editor of Gramophone, Anastasia Tsioulcas, who is wonderfully icy and determined in her remarks. The great Alice Coote has written a powerful attack on these reviews. Her argument is simple: these criticisms are entirely out of place because 'OPERA is ALL about the voice'. Any reference to the visual aspect of a body is irrelevant, because Opera 'is about and really ONLY about communication through great singing'. 

Is that right? Let me first say that I've not seen this production. Let me also admit that I'm not an avid operagoer. But I think there are some principles at stake here that overlap opera and theatre, about which I do know something. I am sure it is true to say that the vocal performance in opera is supremely important and by that we mean something live; it is not true to say that everything you can from live performance can be got from a recording. As in theatre, it's not just the performance but that the performance is happening there, right there, for us, by that extraordinary human being only a few arms' length away and which will never be repeated in quite the same way again. But that doesn't mean that this is the only thing that opera is about. In the nineteenth century, operas were frequently given as little more than recitals in some form of costume. Audiences were there for the live performance but not for the theatre of it. After Wagner and other innovators, the production became much more important and opera became immersive theatre avant la lettre a fusion of all the arts at the highest level, straining to give experiences of transcendent ravishment. So while opera may place the vocal performance at its heart or its height, it does not seem correct to say that comments on the visual aspects of the performance are out of place. Sexist and misogynist comments are - for other reasons - disgraceful but that doesn't mean critics should not be entitled, indeed encouraged, to assess the visual aspects of the performance.

Which leads me to my main point. It seems to me not a problem that the critics are making comments on the visuals; I don't even think that the fundamental problem is the sexism. It's the preposterous literalism of these comments that seems so out of place. 

Let's just recap here. This is the story of Der Rosenkavalier: Octavian is the young and secret lover of the older Princess von Werdenberg, whose husband is away. After a night of passionate sex, they are repeatedly interrupted and almost discovered, so Octavian dresses up as a chambermaid 'Mariandel' and thereby attracts the attention of the Princess's cousin, Baron Ochs. The Baron himself has been wooing the beautiful and wealthy heiress Sophie and is seeking a rose-cavalier, a young nobleman to take a silver rose to her as a way of proposing marriage on the Baron's behalf. This Octavian does but he and Sophie fall in love at once and Sophie spurns her fiancé. The Baron is furious and in the confusion is scratched with a sword, whereupon he pretends to be gravely wounded; the marriage is back on the cards. Octavian sends a letter purporting to be from Mariandel, accepting an invitation to dinner, so the Baron thinks he has both women. But as they are dining together, some hired hands have created a strange pantomime in which ghostly figures accuse the Baron and others appear claiming to be his wife and children. All is chaos, topped by Sophie's father discovering the tryst and fainting. Eventually the Princess arrives, sees off the Baron, and gives up her young lover Octavian to marry Sophie.

Chekhov it ain't. This is a farcical story, a broadly comic opera with some deeper resonances about the fickleness of male affection and the toll of time on women's attractiveness to men (a thematic which might have given - but didn't - those opera critics pause before they declared themselves on the matter of Erraught's figure). There is, to be sure, some degree of psychological truthfulness - it's not an entirely surreal fantasy - but its brush is broad and the strokes are vividly coloured. 

Can I just point out a couple of other obvious things? Octavian is conceived as a breeches role. It's a male role, to be played by a woman. This creates all sorts of non-realistic resonances: we watch a woman playing a man playing a woman; it allows for all sorts of queer frissons in the relationships between Octavian and the Marschallin and between Octavian and Sophie and between Octavian and the Baron Ochs and between Octavian and Mariandel; it also creates pleasurable intertextual references to similar breeches roles like Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro. And finally: they're singing. The whole way through, when we know that in the imagined fictional world they are speaking, here we are seeing them singing. 

This is not naturalism. What we see is not what we take to be happening in the opera's fictional world. This is probably truer of opera than any other kind of performance. 

But look at the miserable defences that these critics have made of their comments? Richard Morrison in The Times this morning declared that audience 'expect dramatic credibility. They get that in films, in TV dramas and in the spoken theatre and don't see why exceptions have to be made for opera. When they are paying up to £215 a ticket, as at Glyndebourne, those expectations are pretty high'.

What a crock of shit. First, just because you see something in one cultural area, it does not mean you expect to see it somewhere else. On TV and film I see images projected against a screen; I don't expect to see that in the theatre. When I read novels and poetry, I see words printed on a page; I don't think I have a right to see that in an Opera, even if I were paying £500 a ticket. The problem here is that he's used this weaselly term 'dramatic credibility' and then secretly decided it means realism. But it doesn't mean that and he's offered no explanation for why he thinks it means that. And, let's also remember: this is a Richard Jones opera production. Richard Jones, who has probably gone as far from naturalism as any major director in this country; a man who has staged a scratch-and-sniff Love of Three Oranges for ENO in the early nineties is probably not really fishing in the naturalism pond.

This is important, because if the idea that the theatre can only represent the world through visual verisimilitude takes hold in opera, we're all sunk. Opera is like the bulwark against this kind of thin-lipped, flat-minded literalism in live performance. It has everything going for it: music (never realistic), the plots (never realistic), the scale (never realistic), the casting (never realistic), the designs (mostly unrealistic). There is always this push towards the directly realistic, the relatable (hideous hideous word), the accessible (defined as narrowly as possible). And these things are modes in which theatre can move and has moved very valuable from time to time, but it is a small percentage of what the theatre can be. How much will we impoverish ourselves and hurt the grandeur of a culture by telling extraordinary women like Tara Erraught that she's too fat to play a man who could attract two women. And there again, we see the thinness of this so-called realism: how many big, fat, generous, fleshy guys do you see with slim and beautiful women? Loads. This isn't realism; it's literal-mindedness which in turn is a mask for ideology.

Morrison suggests that it would be hypocritical to suggest that the production doesn't want us to comment on the bodies: 'The curtain goes up on the Marschallin, played by Kate Royal, gyrating - totally naked - in a shower of glitter. What is that except a blatant incitement for the audience (and critics) to take an interest in the bodies on stage as well as the voices?' See again, the duplicity and confusions. First, one naked body doesn't licence you to simply write the entire review with your cock in hand. Second, there's a keyword there: glitter. Is this a deliberate appeal to your lust or is it a knowing, camp, representation of desire as excess? Is it not referring to the gaze of the male/female Octavian, staging it as problem and question? Third, taking an interest in the bodies on stage is not the same as rebuking a woman for her weight. You should notice the bodies, but the bodies are part of the whole system by which the production is asking us to look again at this story, these characters, these feelings, that music, this opera. It is not an invitation for critics to fat-shame a young woman.