"A Bit Late to Say 'Whoa' to the Horse": The Mythmakers: "Temple of Secrets"/"Small Prophet, Quick Return"/"Death of a Spy"/"Horse of Destruction"

"Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great-sized monster of ingratitudes:
Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour'd
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
As done: perseverance, dear my lord,
Keeps honour bright: to have done is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mockery. Take the instant way;
For honour travels in a strait so narrow,
Where one but goes abreast: keep then the path;
For emulation hath a thousand sons
That one by one pursue: if you give way,
Or hedge aside from the direct forthright,
Like to an enter'd tide, they all rush by
And leave you hindmost;
Or like a gallant horse fall'n in first rank,
Lie there for pavement to the abject rear,
O'er-run and trampled on: then what they do in present,
Though less than yours in past, must o'ertop yours;
For time is like a fashionable host
That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand,
And with his arms outstretch'd, as he would fly,
Grasps in the comer: welcome ever smiles,
And farewell goes out sighing. O, let not virtue seek
Remuneration for the thing it was;
For beauty, wit,
High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
To envious and calumniating time.”


The speech is given to Ulysses in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, and subverts the nobility of Homer's Iliad. Yet this speech provided the title for Simon Raven's scathing 10-volume depiction of life in Britain from 1945 through the 1970s. Raven's jaundiced eye is useful to us here.

***

After the rather flat farewell to Verity Lambert that was Mission to the Unknown, I had low expectations for The Mythmakers. It's a serial that is entirely missing, though the reconstruction by Loose Cannon feels much less static than many others. Possibly that's because so much of the story is powered by the dialogue, and the actors--especially the guest stars--are having a whale of a time.

That's in part because we are not in Homer's Troy, nor yet even Shakespeare's poetic, if scandalous and tainted. Troy. No, only Shakespeare's scabrous Thersites captures the Trojan war as seen by scriptwriter Donald Cotton; Cotton takes his cue from Thersites's description of the War:

Here is such patchery, such juggling and such
knavery! all the argument is a cuckold and a
whore; a good quarrel to draw emulous factions
and bleed to death upon. Now, the dry serpigo on
the subject! and war and lechery confound all!

The characters are neither Homer's nor Shakespeare's; Achilles is rash, but hardly the killing machine of myth or drama; Odysseus seems to be a barbarian, at first, but turns out to be clever as advertised, and cynical as Shakespeare's, but without the philosophy to back it. Agamemnon cries out to be played by Brian Blessed, but Jack Melford carries it off quite well.Menelaus doesn't even want Helen back, and knew what he was getting when he married her. (Talk about getting under the radar).

Hector is unimpressive (his brief duel with Achilles is more silly than thrilling), Paris a weak-willed coward who wants to be important (Steven has to goad him into a fight which Steven deliberately loses to get into Troy and rescue Vicki; Paris's newfound courage is, er, transitory), Priam is so innocent he needs a guardian--though he is quite nice-natured. As is Troilus, who falls hard for Vicki. Just as well, really.

The Greeks are bastards, the Trojans are dilettantes, they both really want to command the trade routes, and Helen is a pretext we never even see. (It would have been a perfect in-joke if they'd cast Jacqueline Hill).

It's a jet-black comedy with the Doctor trying to avoid suggesting the Trojan Horse (he can't believe Homer had it right and anyone would be that stupid--pro tip: they are), Vicki being renamed by Priam as Cressida and falling in love with Troilus (at least the script tries to earn this), and Steven just getting in the way. Oh, and episode 3, "Death of a Spy"--the title refers to Odysseus's mute friend who is killed by Paris's patrol for for not answering a soldier's question.

And yet it all works. These characters are funny, infuriating, silly, and steal the show out from under the regulars. Even Frances White's Cassandra is interesting, het petulance and frustration mounting throughout the storyline.

War isn't glorious in Doctor Who. Not in 1965. It's Shakespeare's wasteland, for wretched causes and stupidity run riot, minus the poetry.

Even without a single surviving episode, this one's a stone classic.

The Woman Who Kept Going

When, after many years of its being a "lost episode," the BBC recovered "The Web of Fear" and "The Enemy of the World", of course I bought them on iTunes. Well, yes, of course I did--and immediately watched "Enemy," the famous James Bond pastiche. It was a corker--inspired, silly, funny, and genuinely tense--it had something of the the flavor of a Doctor Who-Avengers crossover. (The fact that Troughton played the titular villain, Salamander, as a Mexican would be quite problematic if any effort to do so was discernible--Salamander is definitely not-English, but that's really all you can get from Troughton's hilarious, Clouseau-esque accent, and he plays the part as charming, intelligent, and the mirror image of his Doctor. Troughton playing the Doctor pretending to be Salamander is funny; Troughton playing Salamander pretending to be the Doctor is hilarious; Troughton playing Salamander pretending to be the Doctor pretending to be Salamander is uproarious. The man was a brilliant actor.)

But I held off on Web. The yeti seemed abject 20 years later in The Five Doctors, and then of course there's Downtime:



So, even though Web is the first appearance of Nicholas Courtney as The Brigadier, I was…reluctant to actually watch the thing. Actually, I needn't have been. Yes, the yeti are a bit crap. But the performances, the direction, the plot--I watched all six episodes in one go, and enjoyed it immensely.

One of the guest stars, Tina Packer, struck me as being really quite good, and I wondered why I had never heard of her anywhere else. A quick google search turned up a great explanation from 2009:

Packer is also exploring the director/actor relationship, from a different perspective. “When I was rehearsing it,” she says, “I kept thinking, well, when do I take over the action, you know? And I realized I never take over the action.”

Packer is used to being in charge, as artistic director of Shakespeare & Company. She founded it in the Berkshires three decades ago. But now Packer is stepping down to go back to acting. It was actually her first career, in her twenties, in England.

“I wouldn’t say I was famous famous but, you know I did one of the those Mobile Masterpiece Theatre pieces. And I did “Doctor Who,” which is what everybody remembers me for in this country now,” she laughs.

“You know at the time I did it I was trying to pretend I wasn’t doing it, you know, because I was a classical actress.”

A frustrated classical actress, she admits, with the Royal Shakespeare Company. “I couldn’t have the effect on theatre I wanted to have as an actor,” she says. “Because actors don’t have any power.”

At the time she was obsessed with Shakespeare, but she wanted to approach his texts her own way. This ran against the genteel delivery style most teachers and directors embraced.

“Annunciating, pushing the vowels to the front of the mouth — especially for the women,” Packer says. “It’s all nonsense; Shakespeare’s dirty as hell and full of life and full of vivacity.”

So Packer abandoned her career as an actor in England, raised some money in the U.S., and founded her own company in the Berkshires. She was one of the first women to direct Shakespeare professionally. Packer says it’s a natural fit.

“Because we are good at multi-tasking, you’re following 10 themes and there’s a lot of people on stage and you’ve got to arrange them,” she says. “It’s like having a giant family.”

Running this company is also like nurturing a family — a family of 150 core members — and Packer is the mom. From fundraising to cleaning toilets to cooling family feuds, she does it all. And has from the beginning, according to Tony Simotes.

“As people grew and changed and went to different places, it was really Tina’s heart and soul that kept maintaining, in a sense, the mothership,” Simotes said.

Simotes came to the Berkshires as an actor with Tina 30 years ago. He says it changed his life. They gathered a band of professional players and practically squatted in buildings just down the road from here, at Edith Wharton’s estate, also known as The Mount. It was a creative commune, Simotes says. But like a real family, it wasn’t all love and roses.

What an extraordinary person, and what a life well lived--and still going strong.

"My life is run his compass": The Donmar Julius Caesar

This afternoon, I saw the Donmar Warehouse all-female production of Julius Caesar at St Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn. I really think that, if anything, the Times review was not laudatory enough.

From the moment we audience members were herded into a bleak, cavernous receiving room, hemmed in by guards and watched as if not entirely to be trusted, the production's conceit that we were attending a production at a women's prison was credibly and consistently maintained. At various times, that conceit surfaced, whether to allow for a moment of humor (perfectly played by Harriet Walter, who starred as Brutus), or to infuse a cruel intensity to the Cinna the Poet scene, the conceit served the play throughout, adding layers of meaning.

The cast was remarkable; without wishing to dispraise any member, I was especially impressed by Jenny Jules's Cassius and Susan Brown's Casca. And Claire Dunn, doubling effectively as Octavius and Portia, took two roles that can, if not handled just so, seem weak in comparison to the higher octane characters on stage, and made them formidable in different ways. (Also, she speaks verse so naturally that it seems utterly spontaneous, and her own.) Not to mention Cush Jumbo's manipulative, sometimes epicene, sometimes steel-hard, Mark Antony, who drew laughs of recognition of the various rhetorical moves in the famous "Friends, Romans, Countrymen" speech without losing any of its intensity. She neatly let us know that she knew that we knew all of the various manipulations she was performing--and dared us not to fall for them, anyway.

But, I must confess, for me the play belonged to the two titanic figures at its center. Harriet Walter's Brutus was superbly a man of honor, and not a pompous windbag (as the role can degenerate into); she inhabited so completely the inmate inhabiting the Roman that it was hard to know where one began and one ended. Ms. Walter's face was drawn, ascetic, and strong throughout; she used her lanky physicality to create both a dangerous woman and an equally dangerous man, each of whom was haunted by conscience.

And Frances Barber's Caesar? Deglamorized by the conceit, Ms. Barber was by turns jovially bullying, charismatic, commanding, and cruel. She depicted a Caesar whom Ms. Walter's Brutus could truly love--and yet see as a tyrant "in the egg." Her calling out of Cassius, her effectively jocular strutting with her gang, all carried absolute conviction--but nothing more than her last laugh before uttering the play's most famous line.

After the doors had slammed, with the inmates back in lockdown, but before the curtain call, a lone audience member strayed across the stage area in a motorized wheelchair. The cast came out as she crossed to receive a standing ovation. Brutus gracefully disengaged and avoided the lady; Julius Caesar paused, checking his advance to let her pass, with the sort of benevolent, if dangerous, smile Cassius was wont to receive earlier on.

Now that's acting.