Tuck ★★★★★

Reit, co ni off te! (Pun intended) Sa’i erioed wedi trial ysgrifennu adolygiad bilingual o’r blaen – but after seeing the glorious Tuck at Wales Millennium Centre last night (a diodde hangover effing ofnadw heddi) I thought I’d give it a go.

I’m a Welshy Welsher, but my half-German husband isn’t – yet we both understood, both got it (I did have to translate one particularly rude joke into English for him!) I fod yn onest, o’n i wrth fy modd yn eistedd right in the front (eye-to-crotch level). Beth o’n i ddim yn disgwyl though, oedd y dyfnder ac amrywiaeth o emosiynau. Laughter, yes of course; but crying? No I wasn’t expecting to cry. The scene where they were going through clothes, man alive! O’n i’n llefain fel babi. “I just want to smell her.”

What can I say about the music? Odd e’n ffantastig. I thought I knew Stifyn Parri, then he goes and does this. Ffocin el de (fel ma nhw’n dweud lan yn y Gogs)! He was so good. They all were.

I haven’t enjoyed a theatre experience as much as this since I saw Charlotte Church’s Last Mermaid.

Everything was on point, okkurr.

★★★★★ Pump sêr. Five stars. I would say go and see it, but I think it’s sold out. Good. Odd e’n ffuckin excellent.

Alun, Mared, Jess a’r criw wedi warae blinder ‘da hwn. Methu aros gweld beth sy’ nesa’.

#TUCKtheplay

neontopia.co.uk/tucktheplay

Little Monsters

When I was a kid I loved all things horror. So why hadn't I heard of this amazing movie from 1989 at the time? I saw it a few years ago when my husband introduced me to it.

Here's the trailer:

Eleven year old Brian finds a monster under his bed - Maurice the monster is actually really cool, and he leads Brian into his exciting world. You can reach the monster world by going under a kid's bed - very much in Monsters Inc. you go through a closet. The land under the beds is way scarier than Pixar's imagination though.

Monsters are susceptible to light, and if you shine a light on them, they turn into a pile of clothes - which is why they only come out at night. If a child goes down there for too long, they will turn into a monster too.

Some of the monsters are actually quite scary. Take this thug:

The most terrifying one is Boy, the leader. He's an overgrown man boy that always gets his way. The whole film feels quite dark for a kid's movie, and has more than a little Tim Burton in it. I really loved it, and wish I'd seen it when I was little.

Bonus video - Aaahh Real Monsters!

Charlotte Church - The Last Mermaid - review

★★★★★ - five stars

I'm nearly at a loss for words. I don't think I've ever been to the theatre and enjoyed myself so much. I made a  venn diagram of some of the influences I could see last night:

I wasn't aware that it was a kid's show until today. It certainly kept the adults entertained, as it worked on more than one level. 

The set design and lighting was beautiful. Shimmery shiny, gossamer silk, seaweed and water... the costumes were gorgeous. sumptuous, on point and decadent. Church was obviously moved by Dylan Thomas' words in Under Milk Wood, the whispered opening lines sounded like Thomas. The three singers/dancers who represented the sea, sang in unison, like a Greek chorus. The first movement was just beautiful: frenetic, but restrained. Energy contained, and controlled. Then when the last mermaid was released from her (shell? Womb?) the music and dancing was glorious.

The plastic bag dance was perfect, and hinted at the eco message of the play. Is it a play? It is, by turns, a dance, a play, an opera, a mime performance, a puppet show. It is all of these things, and none. A whole that is so much greater than its parts. The drowning fisherman moved like a man underwater - I forgot I was in a theatre, I thought I was viewing a huge water tank. The man who played him should be nominated for some sort of underwater dancing award.

The whale! Oh my days, the whale. I loved the tenor and bass singers who sang the whale, I loved their costumes, and I loved the projected presentation of the whale. A little boy sat next to me, tugged his Mum's sleeve and said "Mammy! Eye!" before he dropped his marshmallows. I genuinely had goosebumps when the whale turned her into a human - then laughed out loud at the bit on the beach. "My legs. My legs in the sun!"

My friend Nina described the next movement as "the Depeche Mode bit", I described it as "the Kraftwerk/Daft Punk bit". It was a spectacular spectacular.

Then things got a bit darker. The last mermaid's cries of "my whale" brought tears to my eyes. Church's voice was at its strongest and surest here, full of grief and love.

I won't give away the ending, it was beautiful. None of the story was overtold. None of it was laid on thick. You either got it, or you didn't. And even if you didn't, you were swept along anyway.

It was fucking magnificent. I want the LP soon please, Charlotte.

A Provincial Life – Sherman Theatre Cardiff

I was very excited to go and see this play, my first time in the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff since it has been renovated. Renovated is totally the wrong word, it has been re-made, and it’s beautiful! A lovely bar and waiting area, the theatre was amazing, and the toilets were super clean!

I don’t think I had ever seen a Peter Gill play before last night, and I don’t think I’ll bother going to see another. A Provincial Life is based on Chekhov’s story My Life, where an educated, privileged young man struggles with his conscience and decides to become a worker. The Sherman’s blurb told me it was about a struggle for equality, but I felt it was more about the class divide than a struggle. The only characters who seemed to be concerned about equality were Misail, the protagonist, and the Doctor (can’t remember his name).

The staging was brilliant. All the characters would carry in the props – tables and chairs – at the start of every scene, and carry them out again at the end. It was bare and bleak, and fitted the story perfectly. The costumes and props were amazing; it’s always satisfying to hear a saucepan lid clang as it is supposed to. Sadly, that is all the praise I can give it. The acting was shockingly amateur, and the whole thing had the air of a school production. The play did feature some big Welsh names: William Thomas is one of my favourite actors. His performance was undoubtedly the best, which only served to make the younger members of the cast look even worse. The big names: William Thomas, Helen Griffin, Ieuan Rhys (or Glyn the Policeman, as I will always think of him) and rent-a-Welsh-granny Menna Trussler, acted the rest off the stage – yet they were given a scant few lines. The exception being Clive Merrison, who was as hammy and over the top as usual.

Nicholas Shaw, as protagonist Misail, wasn’t very good at all. I don’t know if it was his real accent, or if putting an accent on was giving him trouble, but he had an intermittent speech impediment that made it hard to listen to him. He made several speeches with his back to half the audience, and stumbled over quite a few lines. He started his lines early, and also made a rather huge mistake in his final soliloquy: his sister was pregnant and had been expecting a boy, but she died and he now looked after his niece. In his speech he said “my sister was convinced it was going to be a girl, but the child was a boy”. He got mixed up and mixed up the line. Shoddy. He also had a very annoying habit of smiling at the end of many of his lines, not at anyone in particular, just a smile which did not fit with the line or the situation.

I can’t apportion all the blame of a bad play on the actors, the fault lies with the writer. Even superb actors like William Thomas can only do so much with bad lines (but actors as bad as Clive Merrison take them to new levels of horror!) Gill’s dialogue is stilted and incomplete. Characters hardly conversed in the play, they merely spoke sentences, sometimes those sentences related to the last sentence another character spoke, but we were lucky to have that happen – most of the time they were unrelated nonsense: “I have to put my boots away”, “They have turned me into a house-keeper”.

The characters did not show any emotion either; they spoke aloud how they were feeling. I am so tired, I am worried, I have had enough... I thought everyone had heard about show don’t tell. Not Gill, it seems. There were also long periods of silence while the actors either walked around the stage, or folded picnic blankets or pretended to drink tea. It was amateurish, and very dull to watch. Gill obviously knows Chekhov’s story intimately, forgetting that perhaps his audience aren’t as familiar with it. I certainly wasn’t. So he glosses over parts of the story, as I know one must when adapting for a different medium, but he neglected to explain things sufficiently – this was balanced with a desire to include other ridiculous details to the detriment of the plot. The train guard Ivan might be an important character in the novella, but he is superfluous in the play. I suspect he’s there to provide comic relief, but Gill’s clumsy attempts at humour come off as just that, attempts. The brief moments of humour in Gill’s play are not the dark, bitter humour one finds in Chekhov’s work. The subplot of Ivan’s mother having an affair with Moesi (no idea how to spell that name) and Ivan subsequently chasing him with a gun, is never developed further than that. The audience is given a glimpse at a story, then it simply stops. I would rather Gill had erased that character and back story and had more with Andrei Ivanov (played by wonderful William Thomas).

At the end, I clapped as that is only polite, but the cast took so long in coming out to bow, that the clapping nearly died out before Nicolas Shaw had even come back on stage. As I walked home, a young couple who’d also been to see the play summed it up perfectly. She turned to him and said “Well, that wasn’t very good, was it?”

While England Sleeps

While England Sleeps by David Leavitt.
After reading the reviews of this book, and how gut-wrenching the ending was I thought I'd give it a go. I'd just re-read Forster's Maurice and was wanting a bit of a gay period story. Oh dear.
I know that it's possible to have a hateful protagonist, and for that to add to a book; but even horrible people need to grow, or at least go on some journey and be different at the end (even if they are still horrible). Brian Botsford does go on a journey, a literal one, and comes back the same. I was disappointed by the story. Upper-middle class writer briefly lives with a working class boy, treats him terribly, awfully, then realises he loves him. Kind of. Well, actually, no, "it would be twenty years until I even contemplated marriage between two men".
Part of why I didn't like it is the picture it paints of gay men. All gay men cheat, it seems to say; all gay men go cottaging, desperately. I'm gay and I do neither of those things. Alec Scudder didn't do those things, neither did Edward Phelan. What is Leavitt trying to say then? Upper class gays do? The story was a non-story, the main character didn't change all the way through.
I agree with other reviewers who say it's perfectly acceptable to have a villain as the protagonist, and to be able to enjoy that book or story - but I can't condone the way Brian treated Edward, his cowardice or lying, and worst of all: he learned nothing from his behaviour and its consequences, not even regret.
Read the book if you want to, there's lots of beautiful description in there, and there's no denying Leavitt is a good writer. Having read this, I doubt his storytelling abilities though. Every chapter ends with a wistful, forced image; much like a hollywood blockbuster: "I stopped being young", "Then the letter came", "As if it mattered. As if he weren't watching my every move".
The characters talk of Oscar Wilde, E.M. Forster, and it seems that Leavitt wanted this book to be a sort of Maurice or Wildean tale; it falls far short. It lacks the wit, tenderness and story that Forster or Wilde's works do.
I wish it had been great, I wish Brian Botsford hadn't been such a lazy, cowardly cheat; but it wasn't, and he was.

The Leather Boys (1961 book)

I've finished the book, but I don't know how to react to it quite yet. The blurb on the back says: "They're Britain's 'Wild Ones'-the motorcycle cow-boys who live for fast machines and faster girls.
Who ton-up along the Motorways, terrorising drivers and defying the law. Who experience sex too young, marry unthinkingly and live only for the next kick-whatever or wherever it is.
THE LEATHER BOYS is a savage, brilliantly told novel of these aimless young men and women. It is also the story of Dick and Reggie and the strange, twisted love that developed between them."
Hmm, where do I start with that? I know the book was marketed as sleazy pulp fiction, as that's what was selling at the time, but this blurb really angered me; and for a few reasons. Firstly, it alludes that the characters in the story are British versions of characters from The Wild One (a 1953 Marlon Brando film); then it says that these characters ‘terrorise drivers’ on motorways, yet none of that happens in the book; and the story of Dick and Reggie is the main story of the whole book, so I don’t understand why that is given such little precedence. I’m also upset by the description of their love as strange and twisted, but I realise I’m looking back at it from 2010, and attitudes are very different now.
Okay, the writing isn't as bad as I was expecting. I was expecting it to be a lot more sensationalist, sleazier somehow than it was. The writing focused on telling the reader what a particular character was feeling, “Dick was anxious”, “He was happy here. He liked the friends he had made, or at least he liked Reggie. He was looking forward to going out with Reggie tomorrow”, “Reggie felt lonely and depressed. What a mess life was.” Gillian Freeman obviously hadn’t heard ‘show don’t tell’ when she wrote this book. It’s actually a novella, and only 125 pages long; I read most of it in a few hours. The writing is not great, but there are some lovely stylistic quirks, and the speech is brilliant. The character of Gran especially, she is often hilarious; and old lady’s funny little ways are captured beautifully.
I just didn’t believe the characters: they weren’t developed, and weren’t given the time (both time together, and not many pages) to develop. The film is about Reggie and Dot’s life and their marriage failing, and Pete (Dick in the book) coming into Reggie’s life and turning everything upside down. The book is much more about Dick’s life and Reggie coming into it. In both versions, Dick/Pete is obviously gay; in the book he hasn’t yet accepted it, in the film he has. Freeman’s explanation of what makes a gay man, and how to make a gay story acceptable is to have characters not 'realise' they are gay until they find the right man. Up until he meets Reggie, Pete feels no sexual attraction at all; and when they finally kiss and have sex in Gran's house that's the first time he's ever felt like that. It was obviously written by a straight person, and meant for a straight audience.
All that said, I did enjoy it - but I enjoyed the film more than the book.

The Leather Boys (1964 film)

I'm having a bit of an old-gay-film fest at the moment; I’ve watched The Leather Boys, A Taste of Honey, and have Pink Narcissus and Derek Jarman’s seminal Sebastian lined up (although I have seen that before).

I only knew about The Leather Boys film because of The Smiths video for Girlfriend in a Coma, and even then didn’t know that it was a classic example of early gay cinema disguised as yet another kitchen sink drama. The book was written in 1961 by Gillian Freeman at the request of her agent and publisher Anthony Blond, who suggested she write about a "Romeo and Romeo in the South London suburbs". She published it as Eliot George (after Mary Ann Evans, who published as George Eliot), possibly to distance herself form such an obvious homosexual work. Unfortunately, I saw the film before I read the book, but I do have a copy of the book which I bought immediately after seeing the film. I know the film and book differ greatly, so this review is just about the film; I’ll review the book separately.

The Leather Boys was one of the first films to violate the Hollywood Production Code (according to Wikipedia), and having read the code, I’m glad it did. It starts innocently enough: a young couple (Reggie, a mechanic and dark-haired Dot, a schoolgirl) get engaged then quickly married, and there is a wonderful sequence where the wedding party all get on a red London double-decker to get to the reception. The couple then go to Butlins on Reggie’s motorbike, and they go to bed on their first night of married life. I have to point out at this point that the title is misleading; many of the boys in the film wear motorbike leathers, but most of the angst and tension of the film occurs when at least one of the main characters is wearing a nice wool jumper, or pyjamas. It’s very British, and I think the title was chosen by Freeman’s publisher in order to sell more books.
The honeymoon doesn’t go according to plan, as it rains solidly for three days (see? Very British!) and Reggie doesn’t want to leave the room, or indeed the bed. They talk idly of having a baby next year, but Dot soon has enough. The next day she goes to the hairdresser and bleaches her hair blonde, Reggie doesn’t like it. They end up arguing and shouting and Reggie ends up staying at his Gran’s house after his Granddad dies, while Dot refuses to move from their bed-sitter. Reggie befriends a blonde young man, who wears leathers and has a powerful motorbike. Pete and Reggie soon become best friends and Reggie persuades Pete to move in with him in Gran’s house as a lodger to give Gran some income. Gran loves Pete, who is cheeky and loving to her, bringing her sweets and kissing her head. Reggie and Pete decide to go on a run to Edinburgh and back with a gang of other bikers from the biker bar they all hang out in. The bar is adorable, when Dot and Reggie arrive at the bar during an early scene, Reggie asks for two cups of tea and the lady replies “eightpence dear.” I wish I could go to that bar.
Dot cheats on Reggie (with Mike Baldwin from Coronation Street) and the relationship goes down the tubes, helped along by Pete. Pete is a very different homosexual from Geoffrey Ingham (A Taste of Honey, 1961). Pete is queeny, repressed and flamboyant, and Geoff is reserved and dignified yet still camp and artistic. Pete is obviously in love with Reggie, which is why he does his best to keep him away from Dot. Reggie has no idea that the man sharing the spare bedroom of his Gran’s house is gay and in love with him. Pete comes up with a way for them to be together, he says they should jump on a boat and sail away to America. I think he sees this as a romantic way for them to be together, and if Reggie agrees then he truly does want to be with Pete. Them sailing away has become, in Pete’s mind, them being together as a couple. Pete never actually states that he is gay, nor does the film ever confirm that he is, yet it is meant to be obvious that the audience know his sexual orientation – and thereby his feelings for and towards Reggie.
I think that Reggie might have let something happen, he’d already asked, in a round-a-bout way, if Pete was gay; this was prompted by Dot’s angry statement “Looked more like a couple o’ queers to me.” So long as both men did not admit anything to each other, then they could have this best friend, brotherly relationship that involved them sleeping in the same bed; looking after each other; sailing away together. Reggie finally decides that he wants to sail away from his life, that he has nothing to stay for, so he informs Pete who promptly packs in his job and they go to buy tickets. Pete tells Reggie to go for a drink in the pub at the docks and wait for him.
This is where Pete and Reggie’s fragile ur-relationship breaks. Reggie is surrounded by the kind of simpering gay man people were used to seeing on the screen in the 60s. Awful queeny stereotypes, all limp wrists and speaking in Polari (old British gay slang from the 50s and 60s) who swarm around Reggie, interested to see Pete’s new ‘companion’. A bald man with a terrible Welsh accent laughs when he sees Pete in biker leathers, and he says “oh, and in that drag!” which implies that Pete does not normally wear biker leathers, but he has been wearing them to be friends with Reggie. Reggie looks to Pete for help, but realises Pete knows these men and accepts a drink of gin off the bald man. Reggie then learns that the ship is going to Cardiff not America, again he questions Pete, but Pete replies that Reggie wanted to leave immediately and that was the first ship to leave.
It all becomes too much for Reggie: the old queens draping themselves on his shoulders, staring at him, a seeming betrayal from his best friend, so he takes his suitcase and leaves the pub. Pete runs after him to try and stop him. Reggie turns to look at Pete; he now knows that Pete is gay, and that he is in love with him. Reggie smiles sadly, and Pete returns the smile. Reggie walks away. It is a terribly sad ending (but homosexuals weren’t allowed happy endings back then), but not hopelessly so. Reggie doesn’t hate Pete; his sad smile is for what could have been, if both he and the world were different. I think Reggie might have been happy with Pete, maybe not forever, and probably not in a sexual way – but his companionship would have been enough. When Pete finally decided to let Reggie into his world, gay pubs, Polari, queens, it was too much for him.

It’s a great film, with some lovely comedic moments, and more than a few tragic moments too. The acting and script are of a high enough standard; but as a queer movie-goer viewing the film now, it seems that there is something missing. I’m sure the studio had a lot to do with how the openly-gay men were portrayed (terrible Welsh accents and all), and how the story ended. I hope the book ends on a happier note, or if I’ll have to re-read E.M. Forster’s Maurice again afterwards.

Review of the Year

What a busy year. Highlights include:

My new job (obviously). I love working for RNIB Cymru, and even though my opinion of it has changed a little since my colleague Ian left, I still love it here (and god knows it's better than working in fucking Blackhorse).

The new skills I've acquired this year: people, project and event management; audio recording and editing; podcasting; felting; delivering presentations to hundreds of people/youth groups; interviewing, recruiting and training over 300 people; getting better on my ukulele.

Falling in love again.

My ideas for THREADS 2009 - Blodeuben and how he was made.

I'm excited about next year - the funding for my job only lasts until 31st of March; now I've always been super apprehensive about taking on temporary jobs, but doing this one has made me realise how much freedom they allow, so I'm not scared of them any more. I'm also looking forward to James and Tarina's wedding in New Zealand (but hellish scared about the flight). Something else I'm looking forward to, is seeing where me and Patrick go from here: our first holiday together, our first camping trip together... soppy things like that.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
Nadolig Llawen a Blwyddyn Newydd Dda

Loads of love
Cariad mawr

Andrew x