Spank The Monkey

Quadrophenia

Some days, the internet can surprise you. Today, for example, it surprised me when I discovered that apart from the one that’s going to occur at the end of this sentence, there’s only one other reference on the entire web to Rentacassette. Back in the seventies, before local libraries started lending out music as well as books, Rentacassette was one of the few ways you could listen to records that you couldn’t cadge off your mates. It was a rental service that worked on a similar principle to the way Lovefilm or Netflix operate today: you paid a regular fee, and selected a wishlist from their catalogue of albums. They’d then post you random selections from your list as they became available, on a medium we used to call “cassette” (think of it as a big plastic MP3, kids).

I learned about Rentacassette from an ad in the back of a music paper – shit, that’s another concept I’ll have to explain to the under-20s – and spent a couple of happy teenage years getting to hear records I probably would have missed otherwise. And one of those was The Who’s Quadrophenia, an album for which I quickly developed a huge amount of affection. Which would make me the perfect demographic for the stage musical adaptation that’s currently touring the UK. The problem is, the album isn’t the main thing people remember Quadrophenia for.

Lipsynch

Robert Lepage plays tend to come in two sizes. At one extreme, you have one-act one-man shows like The Far Side Of The Moon or The Andersen Project, which normally involve the writer/director playing multiple roles with the aid of the most cutting-edge theatre technology available. At the other extreme, you have epic pieces which can potentially sprawl over several days, using a large cast and even more imaginative staging techniques to produce something... well, I'd say 'cinematic', but that might actually be too small a word for what Lepage can achieve.

Lipsynch definitely falls into the second category: when the lights go down at 1pm on a Saturday afternoon, you know you won't be going home till ten that night. But the time goes by so fast, it feels more like one of his short pieces. How does he do that?

REPOST: The Black Rider

Originally posted on The Unpleasant Lair Of Spank The Monkey 20/05/2004.

This production of The Black Rider toured San Francisco and Sydney as promised in the links section below, and then had a final run in Los Angeles in 2006. A separate production by November Theatre has been touring Canada for the last few years.

Tom Waits finally did a London show of his own in November 2004, and was bloody great.

REPOST: Closer To Heaven

Originally posted on The Unpleasant Lair Of Spank The Monkey 04/06/2001.

Closer To Heaven's London run lasted five months, in the end. Thanks to the post-9/11 slump in tourism, a lot of West End shows closed before their time in the autumn of 2001, and this was one of them.

A soundtrack album was released, but judging from the prices on Amazon (see below) it's no longer in print. Here, have a video of Frances Barber singing Friendly Fire instead.

REPOST: The Tempest

Originally posted on The Unpleasant Lair Of Spank The Monkey 24/02/2001.

Ian McDiarmid went on to make two more Star Wars films, and my predictions about the involvement of Palpatine (see the Links section) turned out to be utterly wrong. Meanwhile, this review subsequently ended up on a McDiarmid fansite translated into Russian.

As for the Almeida Theatre, they moved out to King's Cross, operated there for a bit, then moved back again. They're still going, now under the leadership of Michael Attenborough. And Le Mercury survived, too, despite the sentence that directly follows this one.

REPOST: Shakespeare In Shoreditch

Originally posted on The Unpleasant Lair Of Spank The Monkey 01/07/2000. I was always quite fond of the original introduction to this piece:

Ralph Fiennes and Linus Roache both take the stage
And for their feats are garlanded with roses
At Gainsborough: a theatre for our age,
Yet soon rebuilt as flats for Hoxton posers.

REPOST: Mamma Mia!

Originally posted on The Unpleasant Lair Of Spank The Monkey 01/04/1999.

After spending much of my first year on the site concentrating on the best arts and entertainment available, eventually I had to crack and do a full-throttle FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STAY AWAY FROM THIS PIECE OF SHIT post. Not that anyone listened, of course, given that the show's been a hit in numerous cities across the globe since then. And that whole 'firebomb the theatre' spiel looks a little bit tactless in the wake of what happened down the road from the Prince Edward Theatre just one month later. Oops.

In other news, Mamma Mia! The Movie opens worldwide later this month. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STAY AWAY FROM THIS PIECE OF SHIT.

Our Friends In The North

Our Friends In Shit Wigs, we used to call it in the office. But affectionately, you understand. Because Our Friends In The North was one of those TV serials that inspired a great deal of affection when it appeared on BBC2 in 1995. For me, personally, it was thrilling to see a chronicle of British political and social life that almost perfectly spanned the 30-odd years I'd been on the planet. Hugely engaging, with a cast that included one future Doctor Who and one future James Bond, it was television of a scale and ambition few of us had ever seen before: and we were prepared to let a few dodgy bits of ageing makeup go by, simply because the rest of it was so powerful.

It wasn't until the belated release of the DVD a decade or so later that I found out an astonishing thing: it was adapted from a stage play. A play which was just as ambitious in its scope, to the extent that after the initial 1982 Royal Shakespeare Company production, nobody had dared to try and restage it. Until now, that is.

The Masque Of The Red Death

I think I've worked out how Punchdrunk do it. Whenever you attend one of their theatrical productions, you have to wear one of these plastic masks all the way through it. It has a curious psychological effect on you as an audience member - and we'll get back to that later - but nobody ever mentions the physical effect it has on you. The mask can be a little uncomfortable, particularly if you're trying to wear glasses underneath it: and I've found that on both occasions I've watched a Punchdrunk show wearing one, it's pinched my nose so tightly that I've had to spend the entire performance breathing through my mouth.

You see what they've done there? It's artificially simulated awe.

Mind you, it helps that they're the best in the world at what they do, too.

Monkey: Journey To The West

The city of Manchester has developed a whole new cultural life for itself since I left it some twenty-odd years ago. (I'm sure that's just a coincidence.) For example, back when I was a student there, it didn't even have an arthouse cinema worth mentioning: I can remember the days when the Cornerhouse, current jewel of the Mancunian arts community, was a porno house. Still, that's all changed now, and the frantic redevelopment of the city - helped in part by the IRA's little present to it back in 1996 - has made it a terrific place to return to.

And now it has the Manchester International Festival: the celebration of world arts that a city with this level of cultural history deserves. It's an eighteen day arts festival, running from June 28th to July 15th 2007,  and it's unique in being a festival of entirely new work. But given that we had only one day to spare in Manchester, what could we see? A live performance by PJ Harvey? An installation by Howard Devoto? A site-specific theatre piece starring Johnny Vegas? Or something involving a monkey? A difficult choice, as I'm sure you can imagine.