Mad Friday

I saw Ken Campbell‘s TV play The Madness Museum when I was nineteen or so, and it stuck with me. Years later I met Campbell and even collaborated with him in a small way, but only this year did I manage to find a copy of the show.

A fictionalized look at historical treatment of the insane, it features a fervid perf by Campbell himself as the Rev. Dr. Skipton, asylum proprietor with many revolutionary ideas, and young John Sessions (a Campbell protege) as his new assistant, Dr. Arthur Uwins.

In this scene, Skipton’s water therapy/torture is deployed on Simon Callow, a very un-Campbellian actor, one might have thought — but in fact, Callow seems to fit right in, along with David Rappaport from TIME BANDITS and several other members of the Campbell stock company.

Rappaport was a primary school teacher when he answered an ad placed by Campbell to recruit actors and crew for The Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool’s production of Illuminatus! — based on the giant three-volume SF satire by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. By chance, the book features a dwarf, Markoff Chaney (a guerilla ontologist fighting a lonely war against the concept of the average) and Campbell had been wondering how to cast the part.

(Rappaport on teaching — “It’s a wonderful thing to be able to look a child right in the eyes.”)

Years later, after an unsuccessful US TV show, Rappaport committed suicide. He’d always been a very upbeat figure in interviews, but didn’t hide the sadness underneath the sunny exterior. “How did you first find out -?” was one interviewers question. “I was a kid, and I noticed that the other kids were all getting new clothes all the time, and I asked my mum, ‘How come I don’t ever get any new clothes?’ And she said, ‘Because you’re not going to get any bloody bigger.’”

Rappaport could tell this story in such a way that it provoked a huge laugh, followed by the shocked sound of an audience trying to withdraw the explosive laugh back into their mouths and shamefully swallow it.

Using an arrangement of mirrors, Campbell presents an early rendition of his enantiodromic approach to acting.

Things I’m Not Writing About

As CORNELL WOOLRICH WEEK comes upon us, I have to exclude certain things from Shadowplay. Here they are ~

KICK ASS is and does as its title suggests. Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman’s take on Martin Millar’s comic humanizes and deepens the basic joke. While there’s plenty of sick humour, Hit Girl may swear but she doesn’t kill unarmed women or snort coke like she does in the comic. Nic Cage is back to being GOOD for this one, speaking in a variety of odd voices, depending on whether he’s being a daddy, being Big Daddy the costumed crime fighter, or being “normal”. And it has the McLovin guy in it, being McLovin in a superhero costume.

The new Dr Who actually lives up to potential, capitalizing on the good points of Russell T Davies’ reboot, while adding for the first time a genuine eccentric as Doctor and a genuine actress as assistant (exception: Catherine Tate) and of course we’re enjoying the added Scottishness, courtesy of script editor Stephen Merchant Moffat and co-star Karen Gillan. Unlike in the RTD version, the emotion here is actually part of the story and doesn’t feel trumped-up, and sad scenes are achieved without having everybody cry.

We discovered that the music they play you when you’re on hold on NHS24, the health helpline, is the same light classical selection Edward G Robinson gets euthanized to in SOYLENT GREEN. It’s Sarah Palin’s “death panel” fantasy come true! Pottit heid is made of people!

Julian Doyle (editor of BRAZIL) and Bruce Dickinson (rock star) have made a film, CHEMICAL WEDDING. It’s a horror-sci-fi stew about Aleister Crowley getting reincarnated as Simon Callow. It’s either very very bad, or very very good in a LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM way, while being much much worse than LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM. Simon gets to be bald, wear a purple George Melly suit and bugger people. When in doubt, he quotes Shakespeare, a good policy.

Face: the final frontier.

 

My partner Fiona would like to point out that Javier Bardem, much discussed for his role and hair-do in the Coens’ NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (“a haircut for all time” — Coen hairdresser Paul LeBlanc) has the biggest face in creation.

It covers his entire head! Front AND back.

One of the many interesting things about Milos Forman’s GOYA’S GHOSTS is the sight of Bardem’s colossal pan nestling under a tiny tiny skull cap.

I’ve always said that the truly epic film gains its sense of vastness by contrasting the very big with the very small:

An eyeball reflects a flame-spurting urban dystopia at the start of BLADE RUNNER.

Peter O’Toole blows out a match, and the sun rises across an illimitable desertscape in LAURENCE OF ARABIA.

A pen drifts in zero G as a space-ship docks with a mighty rotating space station in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.

And now: Bardem’s king-sized kisser is crowned by a casquillo del cráneo the size of a mooncup.

Bardem’s casting in GOYA’S GHOSTS is the climax, to date, of Milos Forman’s policy of casting actors with surprising accents in his period films. It begins (though I can’t speak for the Czech films) with AMADEUS, where the starting point was a notion of using Americans to play the more declassé characters, with Brits as snooty Viennese aristos. But this system was abandoned, more-or-less, as soon as red-blooded American Jeffrey Jones was awarded the role of Emperor. Meanwhile, Tom Hulce as Mozart would try to tone down his American accent and Forman would try to catch him at it.

(Scots actor Brian Pettifer (IF…) found Forman, “a bully” and notes that the Czechs hated him. Actor and biographer Simon Callow had a hard time disguising his overtly theatrical tendencies. “Stop ACTING!” Forman would bellow. Then: “NO! Now you are ACTING NOT ACTING!”)

In VALMONT, there’s an even mixture of Brits and Yanks among the French aristocracy, with Scottish-accented servants. Weirdly, the exact same rule applies in the other version of Laclos’ novel, DANGEROUS LIAISONS. And yet I’m not sure Scots would make the BEST servants… watching John Laurie’s erratic buttling in UNCLE SILAS seems to confirm this.

GOYA’S GHOSTS has the most extreme mishmash of accents, because we have a Swedish Goya, an American King Carlos, a French Spanish Inquisitor, and English Napoleon, and then, just to shock us: a Spanish actor playing a Spaniard. Bardem’s is truly the most distracting accent in the film. But it’s his contribution that pushes the whole thing to the point where we can GET IT, and relax and enjoy the pageant of inappropriate accents as an unimportant sideshow to the main event, which is a pretty good film, despite those reviews.

Oh, and I’ve just seen NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, which I’ll attempt to say something about once it’s been digested.