Way out West (incorporating Way up North)

gothic week

A couple of weekends ago I had what might be described as a wide-ranging gothic cultural experience.

The first of these was going to see Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds at Alexandra Palace, I haven't seen him live before, but I recently worked on an art work that was created to a soundtrack of one of his songs. There is something that I find quite appealing about the world he chronicles; full of blackness, buggery and murder. Curiously, I find that his bleak pictures have an honesty and compassion that can be quite uplifting.

Alexandra Palace must be one of the worst venues in London for a sound engineer: a great big rectangular room with hard walls and a vaulted ceiling. I can remember visiting a few years ago and marvelling at the rolling reverberation that an ordinary accoustic event creates, you can imagine what a large, very loud band could do to it, the first chord would probably still be pinging round the room by the time they get to the end of the song. The solution is to hang heavy black drapes strategically around the room, and to rig the PA so that it is tightly focussed down onto the audience. It was very noticeable how much the accoustic image changed as you moved across the venue.
The audience was weird, a mixture of hard-core goths with metal-studded platform boots and miscellaneous piercings and sunday supplement reading Hampstead trendies, an age range from the late teens up to the late 60's, all mingling amicably and drinking the compulsory warm weak lager. As an indication of how chilled the atmosphere was; you could buy warm lager in bottles if you wanted, rather than floppy plastic glasses, something I haven't encountered at a gig for years. The gig itself was excellent, I had forgotten how annoying a flat-floor show can be to someone who is 5'7", and consequently didn't see a lot of the on-stage action. It has to be said that they are not a very visual band anyway, and the performances were musically very strong.

My other gothic event, setting aside my Gorey-esque meandering amongst the vegetation and victoriana at Kew (see earlier blog), was to visit the National and see 'Theatre of Blood'. There is a current trend, rather tiresomely, of taking old films and sending them out as stage plays, there is a whole raft of old Ealing comedies poised to trundle round the No.1 touring venues this autumn, with their predictable casts of retired soap actors and the occasional American film star going back to his/her roots. It seems that nobody is prepared to commission new work these days, the wholesale absenteeism of the American tourist has had a deleterious effect on commercial theatre, and the subsidised sector has rushed in to fill the gap with low-rent crowd pleasers.

'Theatre of Blood' was a marvellously camp Vincent Price film, in which his character (an old style actor/manager) wreaks a ghastly revenge on a whinge of theatre critics, murdering them in a variety of Shakespearian ways. It had a fantastic cast of british actors, all of whom were capable of being as camp as the late Mr Price. This venture, unfortunately, was a pale shadow of the original, Jim Broadbent was terrific in the leading role, but was not offered much of a supporting cast. My overall impression was that it was all a bit tired, it has been in the rep for about three months I think, and I was underwhelmed by the sloppiness of the technical presentation. Also, it seemed to suffer from a delusion that it was offering a valuable social document as well as an evenings entertainment, the National sometimes seems to give the impression that merely by presenting a piece of theatre they are validating it, and we should be jolly grateful. This should have been a fun, camp and bitchy piece of theatre, it was undeniably entertaining, but in my opinion it would have been much more so if it had been a bit more pacey and hadn't taken itself so seriously. The technical effects and magic tricks were all rather clunky and obvious, there was plenty of blood, but you could always see the blood packs. There was a strange visual gag taking the piss out of Les Miserables, that probably should have been cut as there was nothing much else in the show to compare it to.
Worth seeing, but not worth paying full price for.

posted by Lampy @ 9/08/2005 01:04:00 pm