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Author
Antony Sher
Director
Gregory Doran
Design
William Dudley
Lighting
Oliver Fenwick
Music
Paul Englishby
Sound
Matt McKenzie
Performers
Roger Allam
Stephen Hagan
Richard Moore
Barry McCarthy
Simon Trinder
Ricky Champ
Philip Voss
Nick Court
Ian Conningham
John Light
Mark Meadows
Stephen Noonan
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Hampstead
Theatre
1
Nov - 1 Dec 2007 |
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'Nowadays
it's generally accepted that
both were gay' writes Antony
Sher in the script-cum-programme
of his play about the Florentine
artists Michelangelo and Leonardo.
He has them competing over
a commission to sculpt the
statue of David and over the
young man who will model him.
'Powerful, witty and moving'
says the blurb on the back-cover,
and when you enter the Hampstead
Theatre, and see the magnificent,
atmospheric set, you are inclined
to believe this might turn
out to be true of the coming
performance. The high-walled
stonemason's yard is bathed
in pale gold sunlight with
a the huge marble slab in
its centre. In the second
scene, it is moonlit, flurrying
with fireworks and revellers.
Halfway through the first
act, the marble slab is winched
upright, and in act two it
has turned into the giant
figure of David. Savanorolite
fanatics hurtle across the
stage, civic dignitaries step
through the huge latched door.
And emulating Stoppard, Shaffer
and Frayn, Sher mingles the
evocation of place and period
with philosophising on genius,
art, creativity, sex, love
and flying.
But these tantalising ingredients
never properly combine into
a work of art. As items on
a list, they must have been
what inspired the RSC to commission
the play (which in the end
they did not produce, hence
its being put on at Hampstead).
Items, however, is what they
remain - unfleshed, unfashioned
blocks that never coalesce
into art. The trouble is that,
like a lot of actors, Sher
isn't the intellectual he
thinks he is. His play seems
to be trying to say something
important, but what is it?
We are clearly meant to compare
the Savanorolites (once 'boy
meat', now converted to crazed
ascetism) with Michelangelo
and Leonardo, who have each
chosen, at great cost, to
be celibate. The repression
of homosexuality is unwholesome
in some cases, but can also,
it seems, be the source of
grace and creativity, munificently
fuelling the greatest of artists.
Yet does Sher really want
to prosletyse repression?
Sher's research, like his
themes, is piecemeal. Accurate
in patches, it is overall
anachronistic. He brandishes
the knowledge that in 16th
century German the noun 'florenzer'
('florentine') meant 'buggerer';
also that sodomy was equally
punishable whether engaged
in with a man or a woman.
But so, for the Catholic Church,
were coitus interruptus, masturbation,
bestiality. Apart from what
promoted procreation, all
sexual activity was amorphously
taboo, and men, at least,
engaged in all sorts of positions
very far from missionary without
feeling the need to label
themselves or their behaviour
at all. So what sense does
it make to call Florence,
as Sher does, 'famously gay'?
He himself can justifiably
be called so, but not Michelangelo
and Leonardo. Can they even
be dubbed homosexual, whatever
their practices? It is debatable
whether homosexuality as such
even existed yet, let alone
the homosexual nature or sensibility.
Sonorously camp Soderini (Philip
Voss) and mincing Salai (Simon
Trinder) belong in the modern
West, not Renaissance Florence.
'"Homosexuality"
is not a noun', said Gore
Vidal and others. It isn't
now, and certainly wasn't
then.
Historical plays don't have
to be accurate, but they should
be convincing. Actors and
set-designer do their best,
but it's not enough to simulate
creation and the finished
artefact ‚ Michelangelo and
Leonardo were not only consumate
artists but titans of intellect
and personality, and it is
hard to believe this given
the disappointing banality
of their conversation. In
a key speech, Leonardo muses
about looking down from his
native mountains, seeing birds
fly below him, longing to
fly too. You know exactly
what Sher intends ‚ the fresh
vertiginousness of image,
feeling and thought he thinks
he's captured, but he hasn't,
any more than in any of Leonardo's
other reflections on art and
life. These are unpersuasive
geniuses, merely eighth-raters,
nor can excellent acting,
by Roger Allam and John Light,
salvage them. Leonardo seems
predominantly an urbane, bumbling
fantasist, who never finishes
any project he undertakes.
Michelangelo is like some
curmudgeonly, tormented ex-hippy
who fills his landlord's house
with frightful paintings.
As an actor himself, Sher
might at least be expected
to produce drama and emotion,
but he seems deliberately
to scupper dramaticness by
making Leonardo indifferent
over the contest for the David
commission. I was longing
to feel something, at least
in the crucial scene where
the two giants converse over
the sleeping boy, but, like
the play itself, my emotions
stayed as inert and dead as
unsculpted marble slabs.
Jane O'Grady |
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