Blood and Gifts - a preview

Howard Davies has done some truly remarkable things at the National, most recently with a trio of classic Russian plays/adaptations (Philistines, Burnt by the Sun, The White Guard) that received almost universal acclaim. All three had epic, remarkable Realist settings and the latter two centred on the theme of war and its impact on ordinary people and their families.

His latest offering, a new play by JT Rogers, deals with the same theme much more explicitly, with a contemporary subject matter whose consequences still appear on seven o’clock news headlines on a weekly basis. Spanning the course of a decade, it chronicles the development of US involvement in the Afghan war under the Regan administration, which sees the demise of Soviet control over the country and the eventual rise of Islamic Fundamentalism in Afghanistan. It is, in short, a contemporary epic play.

And thus it was only natural that Davies should be directing it: in many ways, it is a real spiritual child of those Russian writers, from Tolstoy to Bulgakov, who knew how to distil the stories of most complex and traumatic chapters of human history, poetically yet precisely, by zooming in to the ordinary human beings who are inadvertently sucked into the vortex of these massive conflicts and battles, and whose every decision could eventually lead to much bigger consequences than they could have imagined.

The protagonist of Blood and Gifts, James Warnock, is a CIA agent whose first encounter upon arriving in Pakistan is a KGB agent Gromov, who unsurprisingly is well appraised of every agonising detail of Warnock’s previous assignment, in Tehran, and especially of the context of his exit there. Despite their ‘strategic positions’, the two men establish a tacit, human rapport and one of the final scenes (but not THE final scene – this is reserved for the much less melancholy cadence) sees the two of them parting at the same airport terminal, in the shadow of the fast-crumbling USSR. Warnock, (according to the programme notes) loosely based on real-life CIA Station Chief in Pakistan, Howard Hart, is almost a cliché of an American agent who has appeared in thousands of Hollywood films: charismatic, intellectual (by the end of the play, you gather he speaks fluent Farsi, Russian and Arabic – some peoples’ talents can be so irritating), personable, a good colleague and a devoted (albeit often absent) husband. But most importantly, he embodies that brand of naïve idealism, with the unshakable belief in the intention and capability of his great country to ‘do good in the world’, that we now invariably associate with these front-line American field-workers (‘This is a strategic war, NOT a religious war,’ he proclaims righteously). This idealist sense of mission drives him throughout his on-off presence in Afghanistan during the ten years although, for the most part, he’s not even allowed to set foot on its soil, having to resort to operating first through a slithery Pakistani colonel, then his friend and partner-in-war, a battered Afghan war lord. There are dark times in his personal life that he has to endure, sacrifices that he ultimately deems worthy for the greater cause of what he and his colleagues are defending. Only in the very last moments of the play is his idealism relentlessly shattered in a setting of peace and calmness that he has fought so hard to achieve.

In any lesser hands, Warnock would have been a Clooney-lite caricature of a character. Not so as written by Rogers and acted with such moving conviction by Lloyd Owen here. That’s because there’s a very fine line between clichés – which exist for a very good reason – and caricatures, and Rogers knows exactly where to stop. His portrayal of Warnock’s various associates – the KGB worker (Matthew Marsh), the MI6 worker who is forever frustrated by ‘the cheapness of Her Majesty’ and worn out by cynicism already at the outset of the action (Adam James); the Pakistani Colonel and his excruciatingly sycophantic side-kick; the Afghan warlord and his right-hand-man who is obsessed with Western popular culture (Phillip Arditti, whose surreal fixation on pop songs and film stars provide some of the best comical moments of the evening); the boss at CIA with his own brand of cynicism because he’s seen it all (Simon Kunz) – are similarly spot-on without being presented as mere stereotypes. Rogers has accomplished the one crucial task to lift them beyond such: he makes us care about what happens to these people. Each of them has a glint in his eye, for they all know that they have a very specific place in this vast historic canvas of global warfare, and any slightest disturbance to the delicate balance of things could tip it all over and turn their lives upside down. Blood is shed, gifts are given, but only so that more blood shall be shed, and, as with all wars, there appears to be no real winner and no one ends up any the wiser.

Having seen Davies’s Russian plays, I had expected a realistic set again, perhaps with painstaking details portraying the craggy mountains of Afghanistan (where, lest we forget, Osama Bin Laden is still purported to be hiding) and 1980s-tyle CIA offices. But here’s the other twist: the stage design (by Ultz) is abstract almost to the point of minimalism, with container-like compartments cleverly sliding out of, into, and alongside each other, accentuated only by the bare essential of props to indicate the location of each scene. The rest is left to the sound and lighting designs (also notable) and, well, our imagination. To me, this was a good call, for the dialogue and actions on stage were rather gripping enough and we didn’t really need any other multi-layered background, visual or otherwise, to distract us. The bare setting of the ending also added to the immediacy of its poignancy: these are real people, and it is now. Just like Warnock, whether we intended to or not, we have all been drawn into it somehow.

Stamp Collection

I'm no frequent flyer - the kind now epitomised/immortalised by the George Clooney character in the wonderful film 'Up in the Air' - but I've managed to accumulate a respectable amount of mileages in the last dozen years or so, both on land and in the air. About a week ago I ended up going through Immigrations of three countries, quite a few times in total, in a matter of three days (Thursday morning: London-Berlin; Thursday evening: Berlin-London; Friday afternoon: London-Paris; Sunday evening: Paris-London). Each one of these border crossings consisted no more than a few seconds of casual examination of the photo page of my UK passport, and had the IRIS machine not broken down at Heathrow Terminal One the crossing there would have involved even less - well, basically no - human contact.

As I retrieved my passport from the impeccably professional German immigration officer (isn't it wonderful that, right from these first glimpses of a nation, people do absolutely live up to their bestowed national cliches?) at Tegel airport, though, a thought took hold. It was with a big, pragmatic sigh of relief that I welcomed the day I became a British citizen. Finally, here it was: the end to interminable queueing and waiting at every European airport, to the forced absence of spontaneous trip-making (to those of you who've never had to apply for a Schengen e.g. European visa: the whole process is quite a lot lengthier than you'd imagine), and to whole days wasted at the Mayfair fortress otherwise known as the US Embassy (again, the process of going through a US visa application, even for the briefest visits, is worth a few pages in itself). I would have had every intention to retain my original, honourable nationality had the travel restrictions it carried not created so many practical problems for someone who genuinely needs to travel lot. Pragmatism usually scores high on my list of human virtues, and in this instance it certainly was no exception.

But I guess every 'progress' (for want of a better word to befit the situation) has its pitfall. Just like an online photo album that, for all its convenience, cannot quite replicate the sense of holding a physical album in your hands, or the world's best social portals that would never match the excitement of finding a hand-written letter in the letterbox unexpectedly, the border-friendly UK passport meant that a good part of our stamp collection would henceforth no longer exist.

The collection, of course, consists of visas for countries (which, as a travelling Chinese, we had to apply for in order to get into more or less any country on earth other than China itself), and entry and exit stamps received at each border crossing. The physical space these took on both our passports meant that we always had to have them renewed much sooner than the official expiry date was to be. Over the years, they've piqued the curiosity of more than one Immigration officer, usually at the borders of countries where, presumably, they don't see a lot of Clooney-esque Chinese (his character, not him) passing by that often. Several years ago, at the Finland-Russia border check on our train from Helsinki to St Petersburg, the young pair of guards held on to our passports for abnormally close (read: back to back) scrutiny, for a full ten minutes. It was only on reflection did we realise that they might never have seen such a bountiful collection of visa stamps in any passports before - the Europeans wouldn't need them, and the Chinese that would have popped up in their line of work weren't as travel-mad as we were.

Again in retrospect, I think I did always take pride in presenting my passport at countless immigration booths - not out of nationalism, but out of the universal identity-pride of indefatigable travellers. The physical evidence was there - every flight, every train ride, every transit - and became the perfect reminder that being on the road was not just a state of mind, a kind of nice idealism, but something fully tangible that involved someone validating your movements at each and every border crossing. It involved, unintentionally, building up a stamp collection.

I'm not the type of traveller who meticulously keeps train tickets and boarding pass stubs, and my record of our travels by way of written and photo journals is far from complete. The little pile of stamp-filled Chinese passports between us really was the only perfect, detailed record of our first decade of travelling together. This might no longer exist in the same form, but hopefully our border-friendly British passports will in time be filled with a brand new stamp collection soon enough - after all, there are enough unusual corners of the world where they don't open their doors to Britons that easily. What was it again they said about off the beaten track?

A Life Less Ordinary

Having spent the first fortnight away from the security of full-time employment, what have been the unexpected highlights that make up for it? The list can go on and on but here are a few of them:

Being caught completely unawares, already late in the day (it started the day before apparently), by the queue of Apple faithfuls for the launch of I-phone 4:

Being able to have lunch like this, courtesy of the tourist-free Bourough Market on Friday morning:

Having the time to look up at London streets properly and discovering pop-up monuments like this:

Finally getting around to the backlog of magazine reading (this pile has now disappeared):

Hearing Icecream Man's van ringing out its tune in the streets, at 3pm, which brings back a flood of memories of my earliest days in this country. The tune remains perpetually the same of course.

A Brand New Life

My so-called 'new lease of life' started in a blur - the days immediately before and after The Big Departure (well, from a full-time job, so not that big a deal really) were again jam-packed with cultural and outdoor activities. Welcome to Thebes at the National and The Late Middle Classes (on which more later) at the Donmar were both powerful in equal measures, despite the vast difference in size between the spaces. On what was quite possibly our last visit to Glyndebourne for a few years to come, the weather was sadly true to form - grey, (just a little) wet, and unseasonably cold, exactly as it had been on our previous trips there three years in a row. The Grandage production of Billy Budd was worth bearing the chill - and the vastly overpriced dinner - for, and yet we didn't feel too sad at the prospect of not going back there next summer. The resolutely un-sunmmery weather persisted well into Sunday afternoon, and only after we had finished our strawberry-picking trip (first, very late crop of the year, but scrumptious as always) as well as the meat-heavy pub lunch, did the sun finally, but still very reluctantly, grant us an audience. A rare blockbuster opera date (the Zambello Carmen at Covent Garden - an excellent Christine Rice redeemed many other flaws of the cast) was followed by a totally transformed Royal Court (Roy Williams's Sucker Punch - excellent). Tomorrow brings the highly anticipated Headlong production of Salome (why do I sound like the marketing department at Hampstead Theatre?), and there's more opera to come later in the week.

I digressed. I meant to ponder on the fact that the first day of my Brand New Life unintentionally coincided with Summer Solstice - the longest day of the year. Sure enough, after Carmen and Don Jose both languished and we all filed out of the opera house humming 'Toreador', there was still a hint of a twilight high above. Nothing beats the delusion, no matter how brief, that you've just somehow managed to steal more hours in a day without the bank managers noticing. But being the idealistic pragmatist that I am, my thoughts immediately leaped to the not-so-philosophical implications this brought on: that every day from now on would get a little shorter, and so our lives shall continue, in frustratingly predictable cycles of days, months and years that go by, that will never end until the end is upon us.

It was with an almost existential need to be rid of a predictable, stable life that I made the decision to move on. Perhaps all such stability in our lives is also ultimately a delusion - or, as a wonderful Japanese conductor said to me in response to my departure announcement, 'the only consistency in life is Changes'. Whatever the future brings, I have made my move first, and I'm proud of it. And if anything could be nerve-racking, melancholic and exhilarating at the same time, the moment of turning over that leaf certainly was.

While the plot for the next act (or indeed the opening line) is not yet written, I think I shall just enjoy the suspense for just a little bit longer, at least as much as the British sunshine allows me to. Perhaps, just perhaps, that truly surprising twist is crouching just around the corner, waiting to leap out.

Weird Danish Moments

I thought I’d got to know the Danes and their blunt, earthy sense of humour well enough. Apparently not – I was taken aback so much by this sign at the till of one of the ubiquitous ‘Joe and the Juice’ branches in Copenhagen city centre while waiting for my juice, that I had to surreptitiously get my camera out of the handbag quickly to take a shot before Aragon himself (I assumed) turned around with the juice:


The return flight was on the same tiny propeller (seating: two-plus-two rows, twelve of them) that I had flown out with (they look dubious but both flights were the most punctual I’d taken out of London in years). Being the Friday afternoon flight, it was packed to the rafters. There were a family of five sitting around me: the middle-aged parents plus a son of about fifteen in the row in front, two girls slightly older across the aisle. Together they were a picture of the quintessential Scandinavians – tall, blond, blue eyes, with the air of Copenhagen urbanites. Then, just as we were about to take off, they suddenly extended their arms to one another, across the aisle and seats, and held each other’s hands tightly. The pair of sisters stroked one another’s arms up and down for additional comfort and assurance.

I would usually like to think of myself as liberal and racism-free, but frankly if we had been on a transatlantic transporter and them a family of Muslims, I probably would have screamed for attention at this clear display of impending collective martyrdom. As it was, I could only guess that it was a case of genetic fright of flying that could only be assuaged by this peculiar form of physical bonding. As soon as we were safely airborne, the finger-locks were withdrawn and they all slumped back into newspaper-reading and Ipod-hopping, respectively, leaving me wonder what unusual encounters lay ahead in our Moroccan trip, commencing in twelve hours.

In praise of... The Longevity of Geniuses

My memory of this week has, frustratingly, been defined by the constant battle against a vicious cold/flu (tbc – probably a mixture of both) attack which, as of now, seems to have no end in sight. Year after year, I had hoped to evade the winter germs, but what with daily commute on a variety of public transports combined with a sealed ‘open plan’ office (one of the major blights of modern civilisation), it was doomed to be hope in vain. The only comfort is that colleagues who piously queue up to get their flu jabs each autumn don’t ever seem to manage to prove the potency of the injection at all. I’ve always defiantly opted out of the jabs, so if we’re all getting the same germs anyway, at least I can (somehow) be content with the thought that I don’t have the extra shot of unidentified chemical substance in my system on top of everything else.

Out of a week’s mental state of near-total blur (inevitable, when your nostrils are hopelessly blocked – they are located quite close to the brains after all), two events stand out, and they do have something significant in common. On Tuesday we had Steve Reich back in town, who graciously took his bow again and again after the breathtaking performance of his 1970 classic ‘Drumming’ by the Colin Currie Group at Queen Elizabeth Hall. [Disclaimer: Colin is a dear friend and this article is not going to focus on the concert itself. For totally objective reviews who all heap praises on the performance, check the London broadsheets.] That composition date immediately gives the game away: it was hard to believe that this magical piece was written 40 years ago. The cultural landscape has shifted away – quite a long way away – from the modernist rigours that Reich and his peers were working against at the time. But the work itself has truly passed the test of time, and in each of the three live performances I have heard of it over the last four years (one with Reich and Musicians, two with the CC Group), it was as fresh, mesmerising, challenging and exhilarating as ever – all of these things at the same time. And if the size of the returns queue on Tuesday was anything to go by, I am not alone in being an addict to this music.

But I digressed. I was really going to remark on the Steve Reich conversations that I witnessed that day – one that I was actually a part of (a business meeting discussing programming plans for a major feature of his music next year), and the second was his post-concert talk with Colin on stage. I had to intermittently try to convince myself that we were really talking about those concert plans in the context of his forthcoming 75th birthday (the last big birthday four years ago was celebrated ‘in style’ with festivals in New York, London and elsewhere). Seventy-Five?! Not that long ago, most people would be very happy to live to that age, even in developed countries. But this guy talks and moves about with the sharpness, lucidity, humour, agility and energy that most thirty- year-old guys walking down the street will never possess. At the meeting, I would have happily sat there for hours more to hear him elucidate on Baroque music, African music, DNA, and the atomic bomb, but we had to stop because he had another four meetings to attend to before the evening concert. (And I was still trying desperately to breathe like a normal person.)

As if to prove my point, the other musical celebrity for the thinking man that I encountered, the very next day, was a sprightly octogenarian. It was National Theatre’s Platform event (40 minutes of on-stage interview, followed by Q&A) with Stephen Sondheim, the first of many events to take place in London this year to mark his 80th birthday. This was one of the rare Platform events to be held in Olivier, the largest of the three auditoria in the building, and all eleven hundred seats were packed to the rafters before the talk began. As the great man walked on to the stage, the assembled fans erupted with applause – he got a standing ovation before having even uttered a word! In the next sixty minutes, he gave the most fascinating and thoughtful account of his early days working with Oscar Hammerstein, (briefly) of his formal studies with Milton Babbitt (!), of the working method he used while collaborating with the stellar roll-call: from Hammerstein to Bernstein to Harold Prince. This was, as much as anything else, a chance to hear a living, breathing encyclopaedia of the history of musical theatre recollect the highlights of a half-century’s repertoire, and I was especially heartened to discover that the attentive audience was far from a roomful of grey heads. As with the previous evening’s audience at the Reich concert, it was a rather even spread of ages and genders. The twenty-year-olds seemed to have no less connection to a work like Sunday in The Park with George or Sweeney Todd than their grandparents, and Sondheim answered their questions not with the manner of an elderly statesman, but as a cerebral, witty, genial creator of those timeless works who could easily beat anyone forty years his junior in a debate.

With great creative people like these, you do expect the intelligence to ripe beautifully with old age, but the agility and quick-wittedness that both these guys exuded embody an eternal youthfulness so startlingly, that you have to believe the potency of creative power itself – more than anything that science has come up so far, it gives us the hope of eternal youth. Reich has his composing schedule utterly full for the next few years – the concept of ‘taking a break’ probably shouldn’t exist if you’re perpetually inspired by life itself – and Sondheim coyly revealed at the end of the talk that he had ‘been working on something’ for the last few years which would see the light of day soon. And I remind myself of Louise Bourgeois (89), of Paula Rego (75), of David Lodge (75), of Alan Bennett (76), of Elliott Carter (102) – all of whom are reaching new heights in their respective genre with each new work they give us. If we’re at least able to easily comprehend the senescence that these names are associated with, consider the fact that Stephen Spielberg is 64, Paul McCartney 68, Dustin Hoffman 74 (I know, I was quite startled by this too when I searched online)… The list goes on and on. The lesson seems simple: Create, and Live a Long Youth. In this order.

10 Unforgettable Travel Moments (so far) - Part III

#5: The Moment of (Dream) Childhood Revisited
Disneyland, Paris
August 1999

When we arrived in Disneyland Europe, on Day Four of our great Inter-railing trip, I was twenty-one years old and a bit. A real adult, in other words. Even though I had lived in the UK for two years by this point and had got quite fairly accustomed to the way of life here during this time, the maiden voyage to the Continent – the word immediately implying a vast body of land separate from the snug British Isles, at the other end of which lay my true home – still offered up that unique sense of thrill. And the first three days in Paris had been filled with proper, adult itineraries – the museums, the neighbourhoods, the cafes. I had looked forward to the Disneyland trip as a belated childhood treat, but not anticipated any great excitement about it. Thanks to the ‘reform and opening up’ policy of the Chinese government, my generation – the first single-child generation – had been fed on a TV diet of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, though limited to thirty minutes every week, usually on a tiny black-and-white TV screen. The world of Disney was, for the Chinese population of 1980s at large, one of many a gateway that had all of a sudden appeared, to the exciting land that was the materialist, Capitalist Western world. But those of us under twelve, we were utterly oblivious to the ideological significance of those characters at this crucial time in our nation's history. We simply adored them – all voice-dubbed in Chinese – as much as our American counterparts, and the scarcity of their appearance made any virtual encounter with them all the more precious.

We joined the expectant crowd for the daily parade down the central boulevard, and when the ‘magical world of Disney’ soundtrack sprang into life, with the full cast of fantasy characters emerging in their impeccable costumes, my eyes inexplicably welled up (to my great annoyance). In this moment, what had all those years ago existed as the Other, distant, fantastic but alien world, decidedly out of reach except on TV screens, was finally reborn as part of My world. I was there, Minnie Mouse was smiling and waving to me, and this whole surrounding – in 3D, complete with soundtrack – was no longer Myth but a cultural discourse of which I could claim participatory experience, complete with heat and sweat. The dreamland, right there and then, dusted off that dizzying, alluring aura, and entered the diary as just another memorable destination – even for a twenty-one-year-old.


#4: The Moment of Charmed Arrival
Levoca, Slovakia
April 2000

Unlike some of the other off-beat destinations where we’ve left our footprints over the last 12 years, this one hasn’t become the Hot Spot on any Frequent Traveller’s Map, and probably never will be. But this quaint, enchanting little town in north-east Slovakia will forever retain a special place in our hearts, in part thanks to the unexpectedly ‘grand’ hotel where we ended up – well, to be precise, the manager/receptionist who was truly one-of-a-kind.

We had arrived in Levoca station after a creaky train journey from Bratislava, and all the coughing and nose-running I had tried to battle off over the previous two days had chosen this moment to metamorphose into a fully escalating fever. The two uphill miles from the station to the town centre seemed even longer in the rain that was just that little bit too malicious to be called drizzle. The hotel in question, right in the middle of the old town square, was listed in the ‘Top End’ category in the guidebook, and sounded unimaginably lavish by our standard at the time. It turned out to be our only choice by default after the discovery that the other, more budget-friendly option down the road, had closed for good.

Having sign-waved our way through numerous conversations in various small Czech and Slovakian towns by this point, we were startled when the only member of staff on duty opened his mouth with what could only be described as a mock-Basil Fawlty accent. ‘Ah, welcome to Levoca. I trust your stay shall be peaceful’ – meaning, as we discovered thirty seconds later, that we were the only guests in the hotel (and, by deduction, the only tourists mad enough to have come to this part of the world at this time of the year). Then, when being presented our passports – ‘Ah, I believe you are the first Chinese visitors we have ever had here.’ When being quizzed about weather in the following days – ‘I’m afraid the weather is expected to be unfavourable.’ Unfavourable! The last time I had heard anyone utter the word in real life was, well, actually no one ever spoke like that in Newcastle. W’ther’s go’a be shite, more likely. We ended up staying there for three full days and I have wanted to revisit Levoca ever since. To this day, not only was it the only hotel in all our hard-travelling years where a truly elegant suite (with art deco bathroom, complete with free-standing bath) cost fifteen dollars a night, but the memory of such ineffable charm, effortlessly exuded by one single person in the most unexpected place, always brings a smile to my face. These are the moments that make travel addicts out of us.