Shatner’s World

Shatner's World - We Just Live in It

National Review Online, May 1, 2012

James T. Kirk has been voyaging through my head since I was about ten years old, ambassador for a Technicolor, offbeat, promising, and very American future that caught my very British imagination in about 1968 and has never quite let go. But the only time I had ever seen William Shatner — the real McCoy, so not to speak — in the flesh was in a New York City steakhouse a few years back. It was a brush with nostalgia and a certain askew greatness, and it was not enough.

Under the circumstances, the hundred-minute one-man show that Shatner launched on Broadway this February (his first appearance there for half a century), and which traveled the country for the next couple of months, was not to be missed. An Away Team was assembled in midtown Manhattan. Only one of its members (no, not this writer) was wearing a Starfleet shirt. We headed to 45th Street and found the entrance of a theater festooned with Shatnerabilia and filled with carbon-based life forms who had probably made their first contact with Star Trek in the dark era somewhere between the last of the original series and the first of the movies (and no, the cartoons don’t count). For an extra couple of hundred dollars, it would have been possible to meet Shatner in person. But these are hard times, and we were not Ferengi.

The successor to the 2011 Canadian How Time Flies: An Evening with William Shatner (Winnipeg! Edmonton! Regina!) and another Commonwealth treat, Australia’s Kirk, Crane, and Beyond: Shatner Live, that preceded it, Shatner’s World: We Just Live in It was promoted in ways that included splendidly arch commercials and a poster. The latter featured a photo of a smiling Shatner, complete with heroic hairline (how, Jim, how?) and a model of the planet we had previously thought was ours. That image was capped by the show’s logo, which had room for another picture of Shatner, a drawing this time, with his smile just that bit more knowing.

But if the joke was on us, it was gentle and hardly a secret. The banner that decorates Shatnersworld.com wraps bragging (“iconic,” “handsome,” and “smooth”) in self-parody and adds the invitation to play along: “Who doesn’t want to be a part of William Shatner’s world?”

Not me. And. Not. William. Shatner. There is something both endearing and impressive about the way this veteran trouper (81 on March 22, Kirk’s birthday too), chunkier now than in that future when he had wrestled with Gorn and liberated Triskelion, tips his toupee at age, flips his finger at the critics, and just carries right on. On a stage backlit with stars (of course), he was clad in weekend CEO casual, suit jacket and jeans, and was creaky but kinetic, pacing around, sitting down in his chair, getting up from his chair (not that chair, incidentally), sometimes almost breaking into a trot as he reminisced about the early days, about growing up Jewish in Montreal, about Broadway back when, about television back when, about hitchhiking across America, about playing Shakespeare at Canada’s Stratford, about half-celebrities of once upon a time, about family and horses, about a tricky encounter with Koko the clever gorilla, about more than half a lifetime on big screen and small. Alexander the Great? Really? A film in Esperanto? Jes, that too.

Some stories slid lightly and slightly by, late-night-talk-show confidences; others were given a fuller shtick, as this venerable spieler gamely, if not always effectively, tried to take us up and down an emotional range that he could not quite — never could quite — convey. There was some embarrassing philosophizing — oh well — and there were some good jokes, deftly told; the best involved George Takei, the next best, another seasoned antagonist, the parvenu Star Wars. His voice is still strong, more gravelly these days, more dinner theater maybe than Captain Picard’s rich Royal Shakespeare Company baritone (Patrick Stewart’s flair for the Bard must hurt, just a bit) but — even now — fully flavored with that evocative and familiar ham. And, as always, there was the leavening of the likable, if not always convincing, self-deprecation that has become his trademark.

Sporadic twilights darkened Shatner’s World, and not just those of that zone, which he twice visited. There was quite a bit of talk, occasionally maudlin, about death — of his father’s passing (touching), of Steve Jobs’s closing moments (strange), of the debate over the moment (“Oh my”) when Captain Kirk met his end, an event that Shatner had fretted was not going to be treated with the seriousness it deserved.

Shatner has grown protective of the captain he once played. The resentment he once felt for the spaceman who eclipsed the Shakespearean (we were told about his last-minute Henry V) has vanished. It is as Kirk that Shatner will be remembered, and he has come to be proud of that. Naturally the show starts with him walking onto the stage to the cheesy cosmic woo-woo of the Star Trek theme. It’s Kirk’s soundtrack and his too. Then there was the moment when he was standing beneath an image of his much younger self — prime Kirk, immortal — projected onto an enormous circular screen with a hint of some strange new world about it. And yes, yes, to see that was something. A projection of Shatner as a young, half-naked barbarian in a Broadway Tamburlaine the Great was rather less so, and (if I remember correctly) a shot of Jeff Flake from Barbary Coast (oh, look it up) was even more less so, but all these Shatners — and there were plenty to choose from — were reminders that this actor still wants us to know that he contains multitudes.

But back to Shatnersworld.com for a mission statement and eccentric typography: “I haven’t saved the universe countless times (or even once), but a part of me is Captain Kirk. I’m not a hard-bitten, L.A. cop, but a part of me is T. J. Hooker. I’m not an addled (well, maybe), high-powered attorney, but a part of me is Denny Crane. I’ve had many other roles, on-screen and off . . . Husband, father, friend. Horseman, Singer, Philanthropist,NEGOTIATOR. All of the parts contribute to the whole, AND IT MAKES FOR ONE HELL OF A STORY!”

Maybe, but, as entertaining as Shatner tried to make it, it was not the story that many in the audience had come to hear. What they were craving (well, I know I was) was the old campfire tales, and a curated trip back to the yesterdays we had all, one way or another, shared with a starship. They were hoping for Nimoy gossip, Scotty dish, and the frequently told untold truth about Gene Roddenberry. But if their — our — wishes had been fulfilled, Shatner’s World would have been spinning through a very well-traveled orbit indeed, that of the Star Trek convention circuit, more suited to some Sheraton somewhere in nowhere than to Broadway. The tickets would have sold, nonetheless. The fans are like that.

Like Star Trek in all its incarnations, they just keep coming back. And so does Shatner. The man who once would rather have no longer been Kirk now most definitely still is. To have devoted more of his one-man show to exploring his own long relationship with Kirk  would not exactly have been to go where, well, you know, but it would have added meat to the meta. Instead we had to make do with an anecdote or two that only hinted at the strangeness of a life dominated by a collective fantasy that would not go away.

Shatner concluded with a song, “Real,” from Has Been, the album with a characteristically canny, self-mocking title that he released a few years back, just one of a series of recordings that have fed off the notoriety of earlier musical catastrophes. No, he cannot carry a tune, but Shatner, self-congratulatory, self-mocking, unstoppable, is not the type to let a technicality like that hold him back, so he sort of sang, sort of seriously:

And while there’s a part of me in that guy you’ve seen

Up there on that screen, I am so much more.

And I wish I knew the things you think I do.

I would change this world for sure.

But I eat and sleep and breathe and bleed and feel.

Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m real.

Sort of.

Raising Hackles

Black  Watch

National Review Online, November 14, 2008

Of all the remarkable aspects of Tony Blair’s personality, one of the strangest is the absence of any noticeable feeling (other than a prim, preachy technocratic disdain) for Britain’s past. From countless questionable constitutional “reforms” to his continuous attempts to integrate the U.K. ever deeper within the European Union, he demonstrated an indifference to the history of the nation he led that is so profound that it raises disturbing questions as to why he wanted the job in the first place. But if British history meant little to Mr. Blair, the British military meant even less. Blair may have deployed the U.K.’s armed forces far and wide, but he starved them of the resources they needed and the respect they deserved.

To realize this is to grasp why, in October 2004, the decision to divert Scotland’s legendary Black Watch away from the British army’s area of operations around Basra and into Iraq’s American zone (specifically, in and around the notorious “Triangle of Death”) was greeted in Britain with an anger that stretched far beyond the usual critics of the Iraq war. To many Brits, the mission made scant military sense, but was easy to explain politically as an electorally helpful gesture of support to a Bush administration intent on showing that the Coalition of the Willing was indeed just that. To add insult to the likelihood of injury it had recently emerged that, as part of the Labour government’s ongoing “rationalization” of the British army, the Black Watch, the oldest Highland regiment (it was founded in 1725), was likely to be reincorporated as a battalion within a larger Scottish formation. Like its soldiers, this formidable regiment was, it appeared, disposable.

This forms the background to Gregory Burke’s extraordinary, innovative, and elegiac Black Watch. Dating from 2006, this fine, fierce, but flawed play is now running at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse (it closes December 21; veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are admitted free of charge) in a strikingly staged, beautifully acted production by the National Theatre of Scotland. Some of the more extravagant plaudits this play has attracted may spring from its critique (“the biggest western foreign policy disaster ever”) of an unpopular war, but only some. Black Watch is a work of a quality that transcends ideology.

Jumping back and forth between a grim Scottish pub and an even grimmer Iraq (Camp Dogwood and its environs, 20 miles west of Mahmudiyah) — and interspersed with song, music-hall moments, reminders of Edinburgh’s military tattoo, and sequences that tip over into evocatively choreographed dance — Black Watch has little that is new or interesting to say either about war in general (bad) or the Iraq war in particular (very bad). Where it fascinates is as a portrait of the clash between the men (and I mean men, the only glimpses of women in Black Watch are as centerfold and DVD porn) of a venerable warrior tradition wrestling with a difficult war, political betrayal, and — hardest of all — themselves.

The opening monologue by Cammy (compellingly played by Paul Rattray), one of the unit’s soldiers, reveals the originality of the play’s vision, the vigor of its script, and the banality of its politics:

A’right. Welcome to this story of the Black Watch.

At first, I didnay want tay day this.

I didnay want tay have tay explain myself tay people ay.

See, I think people’s minds are usually made up about you if you were in the army.

They are though, ay?

They poor f***ing boys. They cannay day anything else. They cannay get a job. They get exploited by the army.

Well I want you to f***ing know. I wanted to be in the army. I could have done other stuff. I’m not a f***ing knuckle-dragger.

And people’s minds are made up about the war that’s on the now ay?

They are. It’s no right. It’s illegal. We’re just big bullies.

Well, we’ll need to get f***ing used tay it. Bullying’s the f***ing job. That’s what you have a f***ing army for.

“Bullying”? In all its pride, prickly defensiveness, and profanity (if un-FCC speech is a problem for you, don’t go to see Black Watch: The largely liberal audience may have come prepared for wartime horror, but a noticeable number flinched every time — and it was often — that the “c word” ricocheted across the narrow stage) Cammy’s language sounds authentic, but, as for its content, well, the idea that a soldier steeped in the lore and mystique of a regiment with hundreds of years of experience of counter-insurgency and “police” work would regard his work as “bullying” beggars belief.

But to Mr. Burke it’s that lore and that mystique, the fabled “Golden Thread” of regimental history that has linked successive generations of the Black Watch, which beggars belief. In a dazzlingly structured, darkly funny (like much of this play) and sardonically narrated sequence, Cammy hints that the thread is really a garrote:

[W]e fought the French and Indians. In America and India. And the French again in Egypt and Portugal and Spain. And at Waterloo in our squares. And somewhere along the way, George the Third decided we deserved tay wear a red vulture feather in our hats.

The Red Hackle.

We got it for the recapture of two cannons in a little village in Flanders in 1795. Which didnay seem like a big deal at the time. But George the Third must ay thought so.

The British Army likes little touches like that. It calls them force multipliers. Gets the cannon fodder hammering down the recruitment doors.

Even if we allow for the traditional gallows humor of the serviceman, that’s too glib, too slick, and too easy. The regiment’s heritage, and the pride its soldiers take in it, may be drummed into new recruits, but it is organic, not manufactured, as real as three centuries. What counts is not the feather, but what that feather symbolizes — something that goes far, far beyond a king’s whim and a couple of cannon.

But, as Mr. Burke (who based his drama on a series of interviews with former members of the Black Watch, semi-fictionalized versions of which frame and punctuate his intricately organized play) clearly understands, history forms just one of the threads, golden or otherwise, that bind the regiment together:

Macca: It was the regimental system ay. It was perfect.

Granty: You got tay go way the people you kent.

Rossco: And you get to fight.

Nabsy: That’s what we’re trained for.

Cammy: That’s what we joined the army tay day.

Rossco: Fight.

Cammy: No for our government.

Macca: No for Britain.

Nabsy: No even for Scotland.

Cammy: I fought for my regiment.

Rossco: I fought for my company.

Granty: I fought for my platoon.

Nabsy: I fought for my section.

Stewarty: I fought for my mates.

Cammy: F***ing s****e fight tay end way though.

Writing in the introduction to a published edition of the play, Burke explains this phenomenon in terms that might startle readers more familiar with America’s distinctly different recruiting tradition:

Even today, in our supposedly fractured, atomized society, the regiment exists on a different plane. In Iraq there were lads serving alongside their fathers. There were groups of friends from even the smallest communities. Four from the former fishing village of St. Monans. Seven from the former mining village of High Valleyfield. Dozens from Dundee and Dunfermline, Kirkaldy and Perth. Friends and family. Uncles, brothers, cousins, fathers, sons, schoolmates. . . . [T]he army does not recruit well in London or any other big city. Metropolitanism and multiculturalism are not the things that are welded into a cohesive fighting force. Fighting units tend to be more at home with homogeneity. Not that there aren’t other nationalities in the Black Watch. There are Fijians and Zimbabweans, even a few Glaswegians. However, the central core of the regiment has always been the heartland of Perthshire, Fife, Dundee and Angus. . . . The Black Watch is a tribe.

Yet despite Burke’s cynicism about the use to which the Black Watch’s history is put, and despite the ways in which this play, and Burke’s bleak portrayal of how the troops viewed their stint in Iraq, is colored by his obvious opposition to the war (and possibly also by the fact that he only appears to have talked to men who chose not to re-enlist) he is too honest to conceal his respect for the way that this tribe works together, sticks together, and fights together right “tay end.” It’s no surprise to learn that Burke, a college dropout brought up in Fife, has relatives who had fought in the regiment.

At the same time, for all Burke’s sympathy for the troops, it is impossible not to detect a touch of condescension in the way he depicts them. Like Rudyard Kipling before him, he is for the soldiers, but not of them. The lovingly reproduced, sharply observed, and spectacularly obscene Scots vernacular of Burke’s dialogue is a comprehensive-schooled sequel to the carefully dropped aitches and delicately coarse language of Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads. The social gap between Burke and the men of the Black Watch (a theme that the playwright cleverly turns against himself in some acutely uncomfortably exchanges in that acutely uncomfortable pub) is dauntingly wide, if nothing like the vast class chasm that divided Kipling from the army rank and file that he, in his turn, hymned so well.

The suspicion that Burke may view his subjects de haut en bas — as puppets to be positioned to make a point — is only reinforced by the banality, the aggression, and the repetitiveness of so much of their conversation. This depiction occasionally comes close to turning them into caricatures of masculinity, belligerence, and ignorance — cut-outs where depth is replaced by testosterone-fueled display. It’s probably significant that with the exception of one hypnotic, heart-breaking scene — part dance, part mime — in which the men receive letters from home, only one of the soldiers, the upper class officer (Peter Forbes, in a finely judged performance), is shown to have a family life.

Or perhaps the playwright was just reaching his way to a truth about the brave, tough troops who defend the rest of us, a truth that is not (as Kipling recognized) always quite as straightforward as our myths tell us it ought to be:

We aren’t no thin red ’eroes, nor we aren’t no blackguards too,

But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;

An’ if sometimes our conduck isn’t all your fancy paints,

Why, single men in barricks don’t grow into plaster saints:

Wise man, Kipling. Wise man Burke.

With Her People

Rebecca Schull: On Naked Soil - Imagining Anna Akhmatova

National Review Online, May 23, 2008

When, in 2005, Vladimir Putin labeled the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the last century,” he was only confirming the fact that Russia’s understanding of its Communist past is once more in flux. History is again being rewritten, distorted, and manipulated — this time in the interest of creating a national narrative in which all Russians can, supposedly, take pride. The crimes of the fallen dictatorship are being shrouded in comforting patriotic myth, or, increasingly, just denied.

In the West, by contrast, there are signs that Joseph Stalin, the most monstrous of all the Soviet despots, may finally be penetrating public consciousness as an embodiment of an evil that has rarely, if ever, been equaled. Within this context, it’s interesting to note that New Yorkers could have seen not one, but two, evocations of Stalinism on stage this April. The remarkable Rupert Goold/Patrick Stewart Macbeth-as-Stalin attracted more attention, and deservedly so. Nevertheless it would be wrong to overlook a quietly effective production at the Theater for the New City where the focus rested mainly on just one of the “wonderful Georgian’s” victims. On Naked Soil: Imagining Anna Akhmatova is a new play by Rebecca Schull (yes, Fay from Wings,but also the author of an earlier drama about the Gulag memoirist Eugenia Ginzburg) revolving around Anna Akhmatova, the poetess who was among the most eloquent of all the witnesses to the atrocities of the regime that tormented, stifled, but never quite destroyed her:

In the fearful years of the . . . terror I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. One day somebody “identified” me. Beside me, in the queue, there was a woman with blue lips. She had, of course, never heard of me; but she suddenly came out of that trance so common to us all and whispered in my ear (everybody spoke in whispers there): “Can you describe this?” And I said: “Yes I can.” And then something like the shadow of a smile crossed what had once been her face.

And describe it she did, in lines of hideous beauty and terrible sadness:

In those years only the dead smiled,

Glad to be at rest: And Leningrad city swayed like

A needless appendix to its prisons.

It was then that the railway-yards

Were asylums of the mad;

Short were the locomotives’

Farewell songs.

Stars of death stood

Above us,

and innocent Russia

Writhed under bloodstained boots, and

Under the tires of Black Marias.

On Naked Soil shuttles back and forth between two eras, the late 1930s and the early 1960s, but it is the former, deep in those “fearful years,” that define it. The play opened with Akhmatova (Ms. Schull) alone in her room in Leningrad. The décor hinted at what had been lost: the once elegant furniture had known better days, a nude by Modigliani still teased, but behind broken glass. An ancient wind-up gramophone conjured up memories of St. Petersburg’s long-silenced bohemia. What we saw was a wreck of a room, a wreck of a life, a wreck of a nation. That Ms. Schull is some three decades older than the Akhmatova of 1938 didn’t really matter: It only emphasized the exhaustion of a woman old before her time and the immense distance between the weary, crumbling figure on stage and the siren she once was.

In 1914, Akhmatova had been a leading figure in the chaotic, fabulous, and wildly innovative avant-garde that was the perverse and paradoxical glory of late imperial Russia. Tall and striking, with a love life to match, she was a scandal, a sensation, and a star. Then war came, and revolution. Her verse darkened, and so did her life. Somehow she hung on through the early years of Soviet rule, almost, but not quite, a “former person,” reduced to near-poverty, writing, writing, writing, brilliant, unacceptable, her poems sometimes too dangerous to be committed to paper for long, dependent for their survival on the memories of a few devoted friends.

And in the room of the banished poet

Fear and the Muse take turns at watch,

And the night comes

When there will be no sunrise.

In one of the play’s most compelling scenes, the audience watched what could never be witnessed, the spectacle of Akhmatova repeating an old anecdote (for the benefit of hidden microphones) to her friend, the loyal Lydia Chukovskaya (Sue Cremin), while Chukovskaya frantically memorized lines of poetry written on a manuscript that would soon have to be burned.

For the most part, Schull’s portrayal (as playwright and actress) of Akhmatova is, understandably enough, admiring. While her Akhmatova is no saint (Schull successfully conveyed a sense of the neediness, neurosis, and self-absorption that were essential aspects of Akhmatova’s personality), it’s difficult not to suspect that she chose to smooth over some of her heroine’s rougher edges. Thus the play has relatively little space for the most enduring of Akhmatova’s affairs, the decade and a half she spent with the art critic Nikolai Punin.

That’s a mistake. A clear grasp of the trajectory of this painful, complicated, and essentially polygamous liaison is crucial to understanding how Akhmatova actually spent most of the 1920s and 1930s, but is likely to have eluded any playgoers not already familiar with the story. The pair finally split up in 1938, not long probably, before the opening scenes of On Naked Soil, although, as too often in this play, the chronology is frustratingly vague. Punin was arrested, for the third time, in 1949. He died in the camps four years later. His Gulag mugshot was just one of many images projected onto the set to flesh out the play’s dialogue, but it’s one that lingers in memory, a lined, sunken face, furious, finished.

No less discreetly, the full nature of Akhmatova’s difficult relationship with her son, Lev, is largely glossed over in favor of the more conventional saga of a determined, grieving mother doing what she could to help her imperiled offspring. In 1938, he had just been re-arrested. It was for Lev that Akhmatova had been standing in those prison queues for those 17 appalling months, desperate for a word, a glimpse, a chance to deliver a parcel of supplies, anything:

Son in irons and husband clay.

Pray. Pray.

But the horror was undoubtedly made worse for Akhmatova by guilt. She knew that Lev had neither forgiven her for sending him away to live with his grandmother for most of his boyhood, nor for what the circumstances of her private life had done to him. This element in his agony, and hers, is underplayed in On Naked Soil. As a result, Lev is reduced to little more than a proxy, an Ivan Denisovitch rather than a character in his own right, an irony that the real-life Lev would have recognized but would have been unlikely to appreciate. That said, his ordeal, even if reduced to something more generic than it deserves, is one of the worst of the nightmares that force their way so savagely into this play and its faded, solitary room. This was underpinned by the way the set design incorporated elements of a prison wall. It was there for use in just one scene but its presence onstage throughout the whole performance served as a pointed illustration of the fact that in the Soviet Union it wasn’t necessary to be in jail to be imprisoned.

After Stalin died, the jailers eased up a touch. Akhmatova was even allowed to travel abroad. Those parts of On Naked Soil set in 1965, about a year before Akhmatova’s death, show her in conversation with Nadezhda Mandelstam (Lenore Loveman), the widow of her old friend, Osip, another poet who perished at the hands of the regime. As in the sections set in 1938, Schull uses the dialogue between two women to recount Akhmatova’s story. These passages, like most of this play, come freighted with memory, and have a certain wistful resonance, but they lacked the intensity of the scenes from 1938. In those, Akhmatova’s interlocutor, Lydia Chukovskaya, a gifted writer who became the poetess’s Boswell, was nervous, tense, and visibly aware that she was herself in danger. Her own husband had been arrested earlier that year and, unknown to her, had already been shot.

Reviewing the play in theNew York Times, Caryn James worried that it became “a virtual recitation of events in [Ahkmatova’s] life, and extraordinary though those events were, simply recalling them isn’t enough to make a drama.” There’s something to that, but not much. The simple retelling of events like these ought to be enough to hold the attention of any audience. Besides, there was very little that was simple about this retelling, not least the fact that many of the words used were Akhmatova’s own, either delivered (often beautifully, if with few traces of Akhmatova’s distinctive incantatory style) as poetry, or embedded into the dialogue, jewels waiting to catch the light.

Buttressed by strong performances from its three actresses, On Naked Soil worked well enough as drama, but it has to be seen for what it is, a chamber piece, not an epic — a reflection, the tiniest piece of a hecatomb. If the play was occasionally overly didactic (with its slide projections and moments of densely packed biographical detail, it had a hint of the college lecture about it), that’s a trivial offense: this is a tale that needs to be kept alive as a memorial — and a warning. Quite what Akhmatova herself would have made of this play, however, I don’t know. One of the subtleties of Schull’s script is the way it makes clear that Akhmatova wanted to be remembered for her lines, not for a life she never truly considered to be her own:

I, like a river,

Have been turned aside by this harsh age.

I am a substitute. My life has flowed Into another channel

And I do not recognize my shores.

She began, and probably would have preferred to remain, as a poetess of the personal, if one captivated also by legend, landscape, and the past. But history had other plans. Akhmatova never fled the country that had abandoned her. Instead she took it upon herself to become a symbol, an inspiration, and a reproach, a reminder of the Russia that might have been, a chronicler of the Russia that was:

I was with my people in those hours,

There where, unhappily, my people were.

There’s a sense of nationhood in those words that Vladimir Putin could never reproduce or, for that matter, even understand.

Macbeth’s Two Ghosts

Of all Shakespeare’s ghosts, perhaps the most terrifying is the “horrible shadow” of the murdered Banquo, invisible to all but the tyrant who arranged his killing, a bloodstained reproach, a dreadful warning — the incarnation of a guilt which, like the victim himself, will not fade away. Its appearance is the astoundingly choreographed centerpiece of a remarkable newMacbeth that transferred from the U.K. to New York earlier this year (it has now moved from the Brooklyn Academy of Music to Broadway’s Lyceum Theater). This Macbeth,(directed by Rupert Goold and with Patrick Stewart in the starring role) is an enthralling, hectic, cacophonous triumph, a vivid portrait of a collapsing natural, moral, and political order that manages both to honor Shakespeare’s hideous hurlyburly of power, psychosis, and evil while overlaying it with allusions to a fouler tyrant from a later even more terrible time. And, no, this is not yet another crass “modernization” of a play that needs none: our understanding of both Macbeth and the despot to come is refreshed, deepened, and jolted.

A first-rate cast does all that it can to assist. So, for example, the austerely attractive Kate Fleetwood is unbearably, irresistibly watchable as an unnerving and ultimately unnerved Lady Macbeth, the fourth of the four women who lure, in one way or another, the Thane of Cawdor to his doom; while Christopher Patrick Nolan as Seyton, a leering thug with a stink of sulfur about him (the sound of his name is all too fitting) becomes the embodiment of how low Macbeth will sink in order to hang on to his ill-gotten crown. That’s never lower than when Macbeth orders the murder of his rival Macduff’s family, a slaughter that reduces Macduff to a level of misery that would be unthinkable if Michael Feast didn’t make it so real:

All my pretty ones? Did you say all? O hell-kite! All? What! All my pretty chickens and their dam

At one fell swoop?

Above all, this is a drama that revolves around an extraordinary performance by Stewart, a light year or two away from the Starship Enterprise, but still very much in command. From the moment that we first see him, he dominates the stage, sometimes obviously, as a military man reveling in victory, sometimes subtly as he steels himself for regicide or, finally, despairingly, as he yields to defeat.

The most distinctive thing about this Macbeth may be the way that it is haunted not by one ghost, but two. We never see the second. It is glimpsed only in hint, in gesture, in the laughter that accompanies a savage joke, in flickering newsreel of past parades and, mostly, in our own memories of the cruelties of all our day-before-yesterdays, cruelties which Shakespeare never lived long enough to see — except, perhaps, in his imagination — but which we will not, should not, live long enough to forget.

The first traces of this malign presence can be detected in the appearance of the soldiers in the opening scenes: leather coats, leather boots, flat caps, uniforms more usually associated with Kursk than Cawdor, with cattle trucks rather than cavalry. It’s evoked again by the basement, moral and physical, within which the action unfolds, a miserable space that does duty as hospital, kitchen, torture chamber, bar, palace, banqueting hall and (underlining the way that this play never escapes the lower depths — even when the drama supposedly moves outside) the moors, forests, and battlefields of Macbeth’s much contested kingdom. Huis Clos. No exit. This bunker, this arena is a bleak, clinical, claustrophobic place, its white-tiled walls efficient in a cheerless mid-century way, easy to swab down after who knows what. It’s best reached by an old-fashioned concertina-gated elevator, a mechanized entrance to some sort of hell, to the Lubyanka of our nightmares.

But it’s when we arrive at the play’s core, with Macbeth ascendant and regnant, the former king dead, and the search for traitors well underway, that this second ghost, that of Joseph Stalin, comes closest into view. Beyond a moustache, Stewart never really attempts impersonation; The rest is just suggestion, the sometimes uncanny resonance of the play’s own lines, and the adroit use that Goold makes of the gaps left between them. Thus we see Macbeth making his plans in the wake of what has clearly been a good day out at the hunt. He is pleasant, cheery, his hat pushed back at the casual angle that Stalin (a man who could pantomime relaxation) sometimes favored when out in the field. He is holding a shotgun, and as he talks, he jovially swings the weapon out towards the audience, pointing here, pointing there, randomly, precisely, playfully, maliciously, aiming at you, at me, at Banquo, at Duncan, at Bukharin, at Trotsky, at tens, at thousands, at millions.

And when Macbeth orders Banquo killed he does so in a light, conversational tone, apparently as preoccupied with the making of a sandwich as the planning of an assassination. As for Stalin, well, he could sign death lists condemning thousands and then take in a movie, something light, a comedy perhaps, to round off an undemanding day. When Banquo is eventually butchered, he is murdered in plain sight, cut down in a crowded railroad car. His executioners know that in Macbeth’s police state no-one will dare intervene. They don’t. As Khrushchev once asked in a not so different context, would you?

Banquo returns, of course, as ghost to feast, but until that moment, it is Macbeth who is in charge that evening, expansive, welcoming, a “humble host,” but still taking care to remind his guests that they owe their seats at the table to him. It’s a point brilliantly underlined by the way that Stewart takes the time, leisurely, elaborately, and sadistically, to take a cigarette from the mouth of one of his guests (Lennox) and then crumble its contents over the man’s motionless head. Lennox (Mark Rawlings) may be a thane, a noble, but under the new regime, he is, to borrow Khrushchev’s phrase for members of Stalin’s entourage, just another “temporary person.” The thane sits rigid, a deer caught in the headlights with darkness, maybe, just ahead.

It’s an interlude that owes nothing to Shakespeare and, I imagine, everything to Stalin, whose soirées, if that’s the word, were master classes in the uses of humiliation. In Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar, Simon Sebag Montefiore explains how they went:

Sometimes Stalin himself “got so drunk he took such liberties,” said Khrushchev. “He’d throw a tomato at you.” [Secret police chief] Beria was the master of practical jokes along with Poskrebyshev. The two most dignified guests, Molotov and Mikoyan, became the victims as Stalin’s distrust of them became more malicious. Beria targeted the sartorial splendor of the ‘dashing’ Mikoyan. . . . [H]e slipped old tomatoes into Mikoyan’s suits and then ‘pressed him against the wall’ so they exploded in his pocket. . . . Beria once wrote “PRICK” on a piece of paper and stuck it on Khrushchev’s back. When Khrushchev did not notice, everyone guffawed. Khrushchev never forgot the humiliation.”

No he didn’t. He organized Beria’s execution within months of Stalin’s death. It’s not too long either before Lennox is plotting against Macbeth. The indignities inflicted by Stalin upon his clique are historical fact, the shift in Lennox’s loyalty is Shakespeare, but the way the two narratives, one real, one not, are woven together by Goold brings the former to life, and an extra dimension to the latter. It’s a rare example of the director monkeying with Macbeth’s original storyline, and it’s notable that it only affects a relatively minor player. For the most part Goold is simply content to add subtext, ornamentation, a touch of gimmickry (the moment the Weird Sisters decide to start rapping their way through their incantations is not a success), and some interpretation. The play’s dark heart is left largely untouched. Shakespeare is allowed to be Shakespeare. The Soviet theme is there for those who want to make something of it, but it’s an enrichment, not an intrusion. It’s a device to illuminate, not distort.

Thus the murder of Macduff’s wife and children, butchered not “for their own demerits” but for his, is shocking as theater, and monstrous as a prelude of what history had in store. The killing of the kin of the enemies (real or presumed) of the Soviet state might still have been shocking, but it certainly wasn’t rare. And then there is this, a description of Scotland under Macbeth’s brutal rule:

Alas! Poor country;

Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot

Be call’d our mother, but our grave; where nothing,

But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile;

Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rent the air

Are made, not mark’d; where violent sorrow seems

A modern ecstasy.

Stalin’s gargoyle utopia could be described no better.

But this is still Shakespeare’s Macbeth, not Solzhenitsyn’s. The differences between Scottish king and Soviet dictator are, in a way, almost as haunting as the similarities. In the early scenes of the play, Macbeth is, famously, a hesitant killer, whose sense of guilt then never — quite — disappears. In this production, his final moments are freighted with an exhausted hopelessness that goes further than anything in the original play. Stalin, by contrast, got where he did by doing what it took, unprompted, remorselessly, and with no signs of a conscience. In a sense he was his own Lady Macbeth. He died raging, unrepentant, and in charge, a figure so dangerous that, once stricken, it was hours before anyone even dared enter his room. He got away with his crimes, but now, at least, we have a Shakespeare to remind us what they were.

See it while you can.

Ode to Troy

National Review Online, March 21, 2002

"Now. Hear. This."

Bellowed onto a bare stage in New York's West Village, the words are an order, an incantation, and a greeting. They are a shout across time, an introduction to a story that has been told for almost 3,000 years, the story of the anger of Achilles and the prelude to Troy's fall. Homer's Iliad is a primeval tale that never seems to grow old, a source of ancient legend and contemporary truth. It is one of the monuments of our culture, a core text, venerable and venerated, and yet, despite the passing of millennia, it is a saga that remains fresh enough to be reexamined, retold, and reworked

This is what the British poet Christopher Logue has been trying to do with his own extraordinary "accounts" of Homer's epic. These are not translations (Logue knows little Greek), but reimaginings, based on what has come before, but not confined by it. And no, they are not an example of today's usual crass modernization, the "updating" staler than the classic it is designed to replace. Logue's work is steeped in the past, but unafraid of the present. Angry goddesses, he tells us, "had faces like 'no entry' signs [as] they hurried through the clouds." And somehow, we know what he means.

In War Music, a show playing at New York's Wings Theatre until March 30th, Verse Theater Manhattan is now presenting an adaptation of Logue's work. It is a stark, unencumbered production (no scenery, no props). The audience's attention is focused on what matters — the words. War Music is a performance that hovers somewhere between a poetry reading and drama. Moving, brutal, and chilling, it succeeds as both.

The play picks up the story at the point where the Greek warrior Patroclus has gone to try and convince Achilles, his friend and commander, to rejoin the fight against Troy. Patroclus fails, but succeeds in persuading the sulking hero to lend him his armor and his troops. A living El Cid, Patroclus dons Achilles's armor, terrifies and then routs the enemy.

Nothing was left of Hector's raid except
Loose smoke-swaths like blue hair above the dunes,
And Agamemnon's ditch stained crimson where
Some outraged god five miles tall had stamped on glass.

But Patroclus himself will not survive the day. With the god Apollo against him, he is brought low before the walls of Troy and then butchered by Hector, the city's most formidable defender. Looking to avenge the death of his friend, Achilles then manages a grudging reconciliation with his fellow Greeks. The army is rallied. War Music draws to a close with this greatest of heroes setting out in his chariot for battle.

The chariot's basket dips. The whip
Fires in between the horses' ears;
And as in dreams, they rise,
Slowly it seems, and yet behind them,
In a double plume, the sand curls up,
Is barely dented by their flying hooves,
And the wind slams shut behind them.

Hector, we now know, is set to be slaughtered.

I attended the premiere of War Music in Manhattan just over six months ago. One of its producers is a friend, and the warm summer evening was a celebration of a successful debut. More than that, it was an affirmation, a tacit acknowledgement of the West's fragile, yet triumphant cultural continuity. Crossing the years and an ocean, this age-old tale of heroes and gods had been brought from the Aegean to the Hudson, to be performed in a city that, as Troy once was, is famous for its towers. Four days later, two of those towers were gone, vanished, like their predecessors, into fragments and history. Carnage had come to visit, concealed, once more, in reassuring camouflage: in airliners, this time, rather than a wooden horse.

The Wings Theatre is not that far from where the World Trade Center used to stand. In the aftermath of the attacks, the theater's neighborhood was cut off from traffic. With the exception of some benefit performances for the Red Cross, the play was suspended. This current production is a re-launch, lightly tuned up, but heavy now with additional meaning, its savage story of battle, sacrifice, and courage inseparable from images of GIs fighting in faraway mountain caves or of firemen gathering in the lobby of a doomed skyscraper.

The main change to the play since September is that the actress who played Achilles has been unable to resume her role. The actress? An actress playing Achilles? Ah yes, perhaps I should have mentioned this before. All the roles in War Music are divided up between three women, a casting decision that might have surprised old Homer, but brings a fascinating additional dimension to this production. It is a device that succeeds, except when the actresses attempt a war cry. Women cannot roar. Helen Reddy was wrong.

The war cries are themselves a rare example of (attempted) realism in a play that goes to some lengths to avoid it. The sex of its cast is only one example. War Music is as stylized as a Doric frieze; the performers move across the stage in precise geometrical patterns, remorseless as destiny. The three women (an echo, perhaps, of the three Fates) seem to both play and preside over their characters, leaving an impression of individual dispensability in the service of the rules of a greater drama. This sense is reinforced both by the occasional use of third person narration when within character, and the fact that each woman plays more than one part.

This is not to reduce the actresses to ciphers. Far from it. All three give strong performances. Two moments, particularly, stand out.

The first, early on, shows Patroclus imploring the reluctant Achilles to rejoin the fray. It is a delicate, cleverly drawn scene, made more intriguing by the fact that both men are played by women. As a woman, the attractive, strong-featured Jennifer Don can show us both Achilles the warlord and Achilles the lethal, pouting primadonna without ever descending into the high camp that would almost certainly dog a man asked to perform the same role. Similarly, the slight, short-haired and somewhat androgynous Jo Barrick conjures up a convincing portrayal of Patroclus the warrior and Patroclus the coy flirt in ways that a male actor, burdened by contemporary notions of masculinity, would find extremely difficult — at least within the confines of a single character. The conversation between Achilles and Patroclus is, at one level, an exchange between soldiers, and, yet, at another it is clearly much, much more. In Agamemnon's military only a fool would need to ask, and it would be quite unnecessary for anyone to tell.

The second highlight also features Barrick, this time as the goddess Hera, Zeus's wife (and, the audience is reminded, his sister too). It is a performance that illuminates the horror at the heart of Homer's vision, a glimpse into a universe where divinity is not, as twenty-first century man might fear, absent or indifferent, but is, instead, actively malevolent. Cajoling, cunning and cruel, Barrick's Hera seems to come from Hell not Olympus, as she sweet-talks Zeus into abandoning his son Sarpedon to death at the hands of the Greeks. Later on we see a return to this theme as the goddess incites Menelaus ("the redhead?" asks Zeus indifferently) to further acts of slaughter, pointing out random victims for destruction, with a casual, capricious joy.

King human. Menelaus. If you stick
Him, him, and him, I promise you will get your Helen back.

And yet despite these repeated and destructive interventions, it is striking how mere mortals continue to persevere. They accept the notion of an unkind fate, yet attempt to defy its reality. That is their tragedy, and their glory. These are men who want to be remembered well.

War Music's fierce, terrible beauty makes it a text for our times, and so do the circumstances of its restaging. The return of this play to the vicinity of atrocity is yet another victory over the barbarians. In a small way, it echoes the greatest of all Homer's epics: not the poems themselves, but their very survival. Preserved for nearly thirty centuries, his stories still speak to us, and because they have endured to do so, they are a reminder of what our culture's traditions and memory can mean.

Without knowing our past, we are nothing, and in honoring the past, we give our civilization a future.