the suit (d peter brook)

A lull. A lull which goes with the process of creation as well as the fact that whilst the play is on I tend to find myself going to the cinema less. In truth I missed writing about Cold Souls, which I saw in Cinemateca and quite enjoyed, but I was up to my neck in Harper and somehow didn't have the headspace.

London offers more headspace. In large part because it's less creative. For me, obviously. Anyway. Back in town scarcely 48 hours, I saw that it was possible to get a £10 ticket for the Brook. I sort of feel that there's an obligation to go and see the Brook. Because I have missed so many previous opportunities. Yet, as with the last play of his I saw, whilst The Suit is charming and astutely directed, it feels like this is late Brook, Brook-lite. The play is a fable from the townships of Apartheid South Africa. There is a sprinkling of politics, but not enough to either offend or engage, some lovely songs, a certain amount of ingenious if unspectacular stagecraft and some pleasant, relaxed acting. There is nothing to dislike, but nothing to get too excited about. There seems very little sense of risk. Perhaps Brook was always a more conservative director than his sense of formal innovation suggested. Marat/ Sade and US were as much a reflection of their time (and perhaps Marowitz, who knows) as his own sensibility. What he brought was the elegance and, at the time, visionary stagecraft. This might sound off, given that The Suit is set in one of the most overtly political environments of Brook's and indeed my own lifetime. There are references to the abuses of the school system and the poverty. But in the end this seems incidental. The director's mission is to charm, to woo international houses, as no doubt the play will do. The South African context feels like colour (as, say, a white box is colour); in spite of the supposedly tragic end to the fable, the audience leaves in a feelgood mode.

I enjoyed The Suit, but I feel I enjoyed it more than I needed to. I would have liked to have enjoyed it less, and felt more. 

diary of a bad year [j m coetzee]

This is an unusual, fractured narrative. There are two narrators and three writers on almost every page. An ageing writer has been commissioned to write a book of “opinions” about the modern world. Each page contains his apercus on the state of the modern world. His thoughts range from terrorism to globalisation to Blair to Pinter; the nature of love and sex in the modern world, and much more besides. The material is profound but dry. Counterpointed against this is the sub-narrative, as he meets and employs a shapely Filipino woman who acts as his secretary. She in turn is in a relationship with a financial whiz kid, who sees her relationship with the writer as a possible means to rip him off, by using the writer’s dormant but healthy bank account to his own advantage. She is given a voice at the bottom of the page to narrate the consequent fate of her relationship, outlining the way in which the writer has influenced her own life.

This makes for a somewhat structural novel, something the writer’s opinions later address, as he writes about the way in which writers become more formalistic as they get older; their texts tending towards the theoretical, becoming more and more disconnected from the human angle. It reads at times like a cri de coeur by Coetzee himself, railing against his own fate as both a man and an author. Of course, this is just one of the book’s conceits: with no knowledge of the man, this assumption could be entirely false. Even if it is, there are still times when the book feels like an intellectual exercise. In large part this is because the two (literally) sub-narratives remains somewhat fragile. The net effect is a book that’s somewhat sketched out. Which might be the writer’s commentary on the nature of reading in the digital age. When the writer’s opinions really bite is when he comments on the enduring power of the classics, in particular the works of Tolstoy and Dosteyevski. His writing about them appears to contain a lament for the diminishing power of the novel, with the novelist no longer capable of embracing and containing the great themes within the confines of their pages. We’re now reduced to fragmentary narratives which are so self-aware that they can no longer aspire to any kind of universality. It makes for a curious, fascinating, if unsatisfactory reading experience; and perhaps that’s the whole point.