Keep it light, Holmes, keep it light

So.  It's really happening.
Benedict Cumberbatch, the UK's premier posh-named film star (sorry Harry Hadden-Paton, no contest) has been called back from Hollywood for one more bromantic turn in the BBC's phenomenally successful Sherlock, the show that promoted him from Radio 4 comedy airline pilot to inclusion on Time Magazine's 'world's most influential people' list.  

Cumberbatch is the screen equivalent of salted caramel; it's actually a bit odd and you wouldn't think it would be that popular, but somehow absolutely everyone loves it.  Nobody is immune to his Tom-Ford-suited brand of witty smugness, I know avowedly straight men who would make exceptions for him as if not actually being into men is no defence against BC's charms.

And charming he certainly is, Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffatt's sharp reimagining of the eponymous sleuth could have been insufferable in the hands of an actor without Cumberbatch's magnetism, but as it is the first three series of Sherlock have been a complete joy.  However, I've got misgivings about series four.  The recently-released trailer is full of dim lighting, words of portentous doom and frowning.  Lots and lots of frowning.  At one point someone shouts 'For Christ's sake, Sherlock, it's not a game!'.  
Let's get this straight - it definitely is a game.

Here's how an episode of Sherlock works:
9pm There's a mystery of some sort
9:10 Sherlock strides in in his big coat and throws about a few mildly insulting wisecracks/amusing misapprehensions about social norms 
9:25 Watson looks exasperated, confused and possibly slightly turned-on
9:30 That very handsome police detective also looks exasperated, and generally a bit silly
9:35 Mrs Hudson calls everyone 'dear' and complains that the flat is messy
9:40 Mycroft sits behind his big desk and looks supercilious
9:45. Sherlock plays the violin (unconvincingly), mutters to himself a bit and finally solves the mystery with a dizzying series of deductions which frankly push the boundaries of credibility, and everyone toddles off happily to the real-world carnage of the ten-o'-clock news.
It's witty, clever, basically undemanding television.  

But it looks rather as though series four might have succumbed to the Bond/Batman/Harry Potter impulse to get 'serious' i.e. somewhat more moodily lit and much less funny.  When shows do this people start throwing around phrases like 'coming of age' and 'earning credibility' as though witty equals low quality and frowny and self-important automatically means critical acclaim.  
Not Sherlock.  It's already got serious critical acclaim (including three BAFTAs and seven Emmys to date) by being a bit daft, decidedly tongue-in-cheek and essentially light.  It's genuinely joyful entertainment, not serious cultural commentary, and trying to change that might just ruin the spark of magic that makes it one of the best things on TV.

So keep it light, Holmes, you're not saving the world, you're just making it that bit more fun to live in.

Upon Visiting Westminster Abbey

The child of God

Gazes upwards, neck cricked,

At heaven.

Small, but a worm,

Under the pale

Vast grandness of the All-Knowing.

The voice inside,

The prick of conscience,

The invention of guilt.

Trainers and rucksacks

Treading the marble beneath;

More worms of the years

Forgotten now as to dust returned,

Unworthy even those crumbs to gather.

An enforced gratitude

For a birthright of meaningless, beautiful life.

Retain it not

For it is not yours to own,

Absolved

Of your meaning,

Of the salt of yourself.

Not taken but given freely

In obedience

To your elders, wisers,

To the Father

Who knows better

That place between your ears

You call home.

No.  Close the drawbridge,

Gather your thoughts close

And huddle, safe.

For the cricked-neck vaults

Are but stones

The worms climbed upon,

Dreamed up

And made

And hauled aloft

By man’s endeavour,

Not by God’s.

Counsel kept,

Own mind restored;

Cast not your ‘burden’ upon the Lord.

High as Sugar - a review

This one-man (plus pianist) musical is a tour de force performance of passion, energy and sheer commitment by its writer and central performer Tanner Efinger.  The show is based on the life of the trangender actress Holly Woodlawn, who died last year, a remarkable character who starred in Andy Warhol films including Trash and Women in Revolt to great acclaim, living the ‘Warhol Superstar’ lifestyle to the hard-partying, sexually-liberated full.

The fictionalised Woodlawn is Sugar “like the fairy” (Tchaikovsky’s Sugar Plum theme is heard first in a music box, then recurs throughout the score) a transgender woman living in New York in the 60s.  Utterly incorrigable, she works her way up from prostitution to partying at Andy Warhol’s ‘Factory’ and the edge of stardom, rubbing shoulders with Yoko Ono and the coolest set of a generation.  She is a huge character, brought to life with incredible vividness by Efinger’s performance, camp as Christmas and at once bitingly queeny and little-girl fey, her moods flip on a knife-edge from motormouthed anecdotes about her partying to vicious anger at the indignities of her unconventional life.  She struts, she squeals, she dances, she rants, swigs vodka from the bottle, snorts coke from her dressing table and changes clothes every five minutes in a performance saturated with energy and commitment.  The character Efinger has created is complex.  Despite the obvious cruelty of the world she inhabits, Sugar retains a touching positivity brushing aside chronic money problems and arrests for indecency.  People are “all so lovely”, her gaudy clothes “so fabulous, isn’t it, I got it at Macy’s?”,  A letter from her mother (conventional but supportive, neatly sidestepping the more cliched family estrangement trope) a cause for sentimental pride as she passes her photo round the audience.

Sugar’s (almost) silent companion throughout is the show’s composer & music director Matt Winkworth.  He sits at the piano, impassive, watching Sugar’s hysterical rages with a benign but slightly questioning eye, never commenting except in a brief lullaby as she sleeps.  He comes in for a lot of abuse too, as Sugar takes her periodic ire out on him, ranting that she “discovered him, took him in when he was nothing”.  But we wonder what reality he really inhabits, as he mutely keeps Sugar company without any apparent independent existence, pandering to her frequent demands to “play me a song - no a faster one!” the Greek chorus to the melodramatic turmoil of Sugar’s state of mind.  The songs are minimal, with a whimsical air that is typical of Winkworth’s style, all broken music box switch-back changes of time signature under sweetly melodic voicings of Efinger’s ever-illuminating text.  The music is timeless music theatre without a hint of the  generation in which Sugar is living and I did feel that more engagement with the musical styles of the era might have contributed to a sense of place and time which is - perhaps deliberately - rather lacking.

Suzie Burlton’s set, in the little in-the-round floorspace of the King’s Head, is minimal but effective, and direction from Lizzy McBain and Emma Webb rightly trusts Efinger’s undoubted ability to carry the audience with him as he moves from apartment to nightclub, graveside or the hotel room of a client.  There is occasionally slightly too much ‘running on the spot’ style rushing from imagined place to place, but the honesty of Efinger’s performance carries us easily through such moments of disbelief-suspension, never descending into farce.

With a style often akin to drag-act cabaret - reminding me also a little of Keith Waterhouse’s Soho-soak monologue Jeffrey Barnard is Unwell - the audience is kept involved at every turn, Sugar by turns confides and lectures, flirts, asks advice and, finally, shockingly, turns on us.  Because this is the big finish, the punch-line of the whole show and, in some ways, the moral of the story.  Abandoned by her celebrity friends - ‘Andy’ is mad at her because she was constantly drunk on his film set - Sugar is evicted and forced back into prostitution.  She takes out her rage, first on Winkworth, who stoically leaves the stage with one last look of paternal sadness, and then on the audience as she berates us for our complicity in the freak-show flavour of her story, for our voyeurism, our hunger for spectacle.  Tearing off her clothes and wig, standing in her naked male body in the cold glare of the theatre working lights she screams

“Isn’t THIS what you came here for? Well you’ve seen it, so now f*ck off!”.  

High as Sugar - Kings Head Theatre, Upper Street - Wednesday 20 July

Tanner Efinger (writer/performer) Matt Winkworth (composer/performer) Lizzy McBain (director), Suzie Burlton (design), Emma Webb (movement director).

This is my City

This is my city

All are welcome here,

No need to hide, no need to lie,

Speak proudly without fear.

I may not understand you

And we may disagree,

But your views are your birthright

So hold them and be free.

Building this city

Is a work of love

No need for hate, intolerance,

Just listen; that's enough.

Don't be scared when things change

Though I see why you are,

Though things may alter round you

You may stay where you are.

This is my city

Once it welcomed me

And now I want to welcome you

Whoever you are; come, be.

Floodlight

She always felt judged by St Paul’s Cathedral.  

By evening it was floodlit. A jewel in the view from Waterloo Bridge, its dome floating benignly among the skyscrapers like an icon.  Then at 1am its lights went off as if it turned its back on the dark city in disapproval of its nighttime pursuits.  Mute abandonment leaving her vulnerable to temptation, lead us not.  

It was at those times that she knew she was alone.

That particular alone was about half-past-three, mild for November, the salmon-coloured sky a blanket over the quietly roaring city.  Stepping out onto the bridge, from sheltered Covent Garden, she felt the brisk wind rush by up the river, carrying its distant tang of sea.

The Southbank glowed enticingly on the opposite bank.  The handsome curve of the Festival Hall was crowned by the blue-lit Eye.  ‘Love’s Labours Lost Nov 2-28’ scrolled the tickertape on the wall of the National Theatre, ‘Look Back in Anger Oct 29-Dec 4’.

The bridge was quiet but gently humming.  Nightbuses passed ponderously, and a steady trickle of gliding Priuses and their homeward-bound passengers.  Feeling her head clearing of cocktail fumes, she paused, watching the blinking light on the summit of Canary Wharf, and leaned out over the concrete parapet towards the East.  

It was such a remarkable view, one of the great urban views of the world.  Whenever she felt, as she frequently did, that all London had ever done was chew her up and spit her out, she knew she could still feel some vestige of love for it when she stood here gazing along the river.  After many battered years it was the last echo of the joy the city had beaten out of her, a ghost of that feeling of possibility that had seemed inherent in somewhere with so much energy.  

She wished sometimes that she could go right back to the beginning and do it all again, trade her hard-won cynicism for a pair of fresh eyes.

“Built by women, you know, Waterloo Bridge” said a voice, suddenly next to her.  She glanced round.  It was just an old man, a ‘gentleman of the road’ her father would have termed him.

“During the war.  No men left, see, all on the battlefield or under it, and a new bridge needed.  So what to do?”

The man was bent and grizzled with age and hard living, but retained a whisper of glamour in his threadbare tweed suit and gently proprietary air.  He set down his tattered plastic bag of belongings on the handrail, extracted a cigarette packet from his waistcoat pocket with grimy fingers and proffered it

“Smoke?”

She glanced at the open packet, hesitated, then took one with a rueful smile

“I’d given up..”

“Don’t want to do that, now” said the man, drawing heavily on his fag and passing a shaded match

“Been smoking for sixty years, never done me any harm.”

She lit her cigarette from his roughened hands and looked downriver.

She had left at the right moment, tonight, she reflected.  There was a moment that came in every night when you could feel things turn, feel the darkness begin to get in among the gay abandon, the things in the shadows begin to stir and stretch themselves ready to prowl.  The trick was - and she’d learned this the hard way - the trick was to recognise that moment before it was too late and the darkness submerged you.  Get out while there was still light enough to see the exit.

The man seemed to follow her gaze towards the darkened dome.  

“Wreathed in smoke it was…” he said, almost to himself

“Bloody miracle it survived.  Gave us hope...”

She turned to look at him.  His untidy silver hair was catching the light thrown from Somerset House, but his eyes and the scored valleys in his cheeks were deep in shadow.  There was something insubstantial about his presence, as though he stood slightly apart.  She supposed he was homeless, a lost old man reduced to such indignity when he should be enjoying his retirement.  She wondered how old he was.

“During the blitz? “ she asked gently

The man took a drag on his cigarette and exhaled slowly, the smoke curling up until the breeze caught it and whisked it away

“They’d stopped for Christmas see, two nights of calm in all the bloody horror, ‘scuse my French.

Then they were back.  More than ever.  As if they’d just been regrouping, raining fire from the sky like Hell on Earth”

She tried to imagine it, wailing sirens and the smell of burning, the night sky lit up by the flames, the perils and dangers of this night.  The faceless glass and concrete of this modern city, so little stone or wood.

“It seemed like there’d be nothing left”

There was a long silence.  The clean wind blew fresh on their faces and the river glowed.  Nothing left.  Forsaken below and alone in the darkness that covered the Earth, the seeming triumph of evil...

When he spoke again, his voice crackled like dry leaves

“The fires began to die down just before dawn.

“Total devastation, it was.  There was no hope.”

A chilly grey dawn bringing no light so something so dark.  

“But then, early in the morning the smoke cleared.

And there it was, the dome of St Paul’s.  Like a miracle”

“Still there?”

“Still there.  Among the wreckage.  Untouched.”

He turned to face her and she saw his eyes for the first time, deep green and almost burning in the lights from the bridge.

“It was what kept us going”  he said fervently, as though he really wanted, really needed her to understand

“We knew then we could do it.  If St Paul’s could stand, so could we”

He smiled, seeming almost to glow with the vividness of his words.  She felt his  hopefulness, like a warm glow, light reflecting from his ancient face.

She looked past him onto the river, letting the strengthening wind blow back her hair and taking in the triumph in that darkened dome, of the living, vital city; if St Paul’s could stand, so could we.  She leaned far out and drank it in, like music.

When at last she turned back, the man was gone.  There was nothing but the cigarette butt, cold in her hand, and the humming bridge.

Is it what you thought it would be?

Is it what you thought it would be?

Does it sate the hunger?

Has it set you free?

Does it make you more than yourself

or just less than someone else?

Shine's worn off

beneath it now 

Same old tarnish anyhow

Same old paths begin to beat

with same old blisters on your feet

Is it what you thought it would be?

Does it sate the hunger?

Has it set you free?

Does it make you more than yourself

or just less than someone else?

Blinding light begins to fade

Racing heart is gently stayed

Things downed out by sacred word

begin to make themselves reheard

Is it what you thought it would be?

Does it sate the hunger?

Has it set you free?

Does it make you more than yourself

or just less than someone else?

Thought you'd found the cipher

Dug up the Rosetta Stone

Turns out it was another bit of rock

Like faith and hope and charity

Like glitters of fool's gold

Two-digit answer only in the book

Is it what you thought it would be?

Does it sate the hunger?

Has it set you free?

Does it make you more than yourself

or just less than someone else?

Scrapbook

Those trains you missed because you turned out late

Those messy nights you got into a state

Those times you failed and blamed it all on fate

..all have led you here

Took a break but didn’t make the cups of tea

The pigheadedness that meant you couldn’t see

Sat in silence, should have said ‘yeah that was me’

...all have led you here because

You can only be here by having been there

Only be here by having been there

The little things you felt you had to hide

That time you knew you’d picked the losing side

The things you wish you’d said before he died

...all have led you here because

You can only be here by having been there

Only be here by having been there

Flick back through the book

Take a lingering look

Don’t adjust the gauge

Because your life, little girl, was an empty page

That has now been written on

You can only be here by having been there

Only be here by having been there

The people that you’ve loved when love’s in vain

When it seems to be all loss and nothing gained

And the understanding you are not to blame

...all have led you here, all have led you here because

You can only be here by having been there

Only be here by having been there

No regrets, no regrets

You can only be here by having been there

Only be here by having been there