Mars: old favourites, and a new society?

I have been enjoying all the recent press stories about missions to Mars, which have contained a curious mixture of harsh reality and pure fantasy. The European Mars expedition was a partial failure because the explorer vehicle, Beagle 2, failed to make contact after landing. However, the NASA probe has just made contact again after an anxious few hours of silence. And the European orbital ship has confirmed NASA's observations last year that there is water at the South pole of Mars. So the (much cheaper) European mission was not a complete failure.

So much for the reality: getting to Mars is expensive and tough. These are unmanned missions: imagine if it had been a ship full of European astronauts that had lost contact with Earth! The recent fantasy stories about Mars have been those of George Bush Jr., who is apparently planning a Mars landing by 2018, along with a permanent presence on the moon. We all laughed when we heard this as it was 'blatant electioneering' (the BBC's phrase I think). But I'm sure that people laughed at Kennedy when he announced the manned missions to the moon.

All these Mars stories have made me start re-reading the Kim Stanley Robinson Mars trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars. I first read Red Mars in about 1996 and have returned to the books every couple of years since then. It is quite rare for me to re-read books - although I did go through all A.S. Byatt's ‘Frederica Potter’ novels again recently. What really made me want to read the Mars books again was a Bush comment: he was talking about travelling to Mars ‘to build an entirely new society’ or some such waffle. The KSR books are about (amongst other things) the difficulty of building a society from scratch, and the near-impossibility of doing this when the new society is completely dependent on the old for resources and cash. The original Mars expedition is hugely expensive and elitist, because only a chosen few scientists and engineers and astronauts (the ‘first hundred’) make the first journey. The balance of power in the Martian population gradually changes as the big corporations begin to send parties of their own to exploit Mars’ natural mineral resources. Many of the first hundred would like to create a new egalitarian society where land is held in common and people receive ‘payment’ for the resources that they contribute to Martian society. They find this difficult because their seemingly ideal society, which allows them to pursue whatever research takes their fancy, is paid for by Earth. And then they discover how to reverse the ageing process and the trouble really starts…..

This is the best sort of science fiction, the sort that asks questions about what sort of a society would be likely to form if we started to populate the blankness of space. Somehow I doubt that anything we build on Mars would be an entirely new heaven and earth, whatever Bush says. The irony of it is that if Bush sends men to Mars, then whatever happens on Mars will follow the American agenda, and will not be new at all.

American Splendour - more real than real life

A comic gem. Probably aimed more at middle-aged American men than at me – but I still laughed.

Funny and thought provoking. For those like me who have never heard of Harvey Pekar, the story is this: Harvey Pekar is an entirely average, rather dull, not very attractive man from Cleveland Ohio who decides to write a comic book about his life, called American Splendour. The comics are a runaway success, and Harvey becomes famous enough to be a regular guest on the Letterman show, that is, until he is thrown out for insulting NBC live on air. His wife Joyce is a fan who first writes to him when she can’t find a copy of the latest comic. Someone writes and produces a play of their life. Harvey gets cancer and writes a comic about that. And then the film is made.

These nesting realities make the artifice of the film completely transparent. At times it has the feel of a documentary, but we shouldn’t be too fooled by this. The real Harvey and Joyce appear in the film – both watching the filming on set, and being interviewed about whether they felt the play or comic accurately represented their lives. Some of their friends also appear, and are even stranger looking than the actors chosen to portray them in the film. We see a scene from the play, and observe ‘Harvey’ and ‘Joyce’ (the film actors) watching it. We see ‘Harvey’ and ‘Joyce’ (the play actors) kissing on the sofa, and Joyce throwing up. We watch Joyce’s reaction to the scene from the play – we can see her thinking that that’s not how it really happened, she didn’t throw herself at him like that. But then we realise that this ‘Joyce’ is no more real than the ‘Joyce’ on stage – she’s just the film ‘Joyce’. And the version of this event that we watched a few minutes ago in the film is no more ‘real’ than the version in the play. Who knows how it really happened? Only the real Harvey and real Joyce.

This transparency continues until the end of the film, when we fade from actor Harvey to real Harvey walking down the street.

And wouldn’t you know, Harvey, Joyce, and their adoptive daughter Danielle all have blogs at the Harvey Pekar website (although it’s not very live, the last post was in October 2003 so I suspect it was a bit of publicity for the film). In these days of reality TV and blogging it can be difficult to distinguish between reality and fiction. The lines are becoming very blurred. Even the ‘reality’ of blogs and reality-TV is only an edited reality. But then so are our memories.

Sweeney Todd - Royal Opera House

My New Year’s Day treat for 2004 was a trip to the Royal Opera House to see Sweeney Todd. I love going into London to see a show on either Boxing Day or New Year’s Day. The city is practically empty because everyone is sleeping off a hangover from the night before, and almost all the shops are closed. Covent Garden was full of tourists with nothing better to do than wander around window shopping, but the tube was blissfully quiet.

I was curious to see how the venerable ROH would cope with a ‘low-brow’ production like Sweeney Todd. Previously, I had only Sondheim I had seen was a student production of Into the Woods so I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect musically. What I did know was that the singers would be amplified, and I was a bit concerned about how they would cope with this. Opera singers are used to projecting to the back wall of the house: singing into a mike is quite a different business.

The music exceeded my expectation on the whole. There is enough complexity in the orchestra to hold the listener’s interest, certainly the first time each individual number is sung. The piece was written in 1979 and it sounded like true late-twentieth century music. Act One was the most interesting and had some of the best numbers, including Sweeney Todd and Mrs Lovett’s baking song - 'A little priest' - at the very end of the Act, which is superbly witty. Act Two contains several reprises of numbers that have already been heard in Act One in one form or another, but without much musical development (as far as I could hear, but maybe my ear isn’t attuned to Sondheim yet).

The amplification was a mixed success. Some singers made excellent use of it (Felicity Palmer and Wiliam Dazeley in particular) but Thomas Allen seemed very uncomfortable. I’m not entirely surprised that he didn’t take to it that easily. He must have had to hold back a lot vocally, and given that he was singing a lot during the evening, that must have become rather uncomfortable. I also think that the part was too low for his vocal range. His vocal discomfort leaked into his whole performance, and I wasn’t entirely convinced by his interpretation of Sweeney Todd as a rather muddled man who is strongly led by Mrs Lovett. Of course he is led by her, but an equal partnership would be more convincing – this Sweeney Todd had no undercurrent of evil.

Felicity Palmer was the real star of the show. Mrs Lovett is an absolute gift of a part, with bags of attitude and true wickedness. Palmer grabbed the opportunity with both hands and looked like she was having the time of her life on stage. She made the most of the vocal amplification to put more energy into her acting and movement.

William Dazely was the young sailor Anthony who falls in love with Sweeney Todd’s daughter. He has a sweet baritone voice that came across better than Allen’s in some of their duets. Sadly, Robert Tear was unwell, but Paul Arden-Griffith was a very good replacement as the ineffectual Beadle. There aren’t many tenor characters – Sondheim seems mainly to write for baritones/basses, possibly because these are the most available voices for musicals – but the two in Sweeney Todd, Beadle and Pirelli, are both comic.

So does Sondheim fit into the ROH’s repertoire? I wasn’t completely won over. The set was very basic – a few grimy curtains and Sweeney’s chair were the most memorable items – and I suspect that a glitzy West End or Broadway production would go to town more on the set designs. And the singers were performing outside their usual experience in many cases. I don’t have a problem with the ROH performing Sondheim on quality grounds – the music is just as interesting as many of the Italian confections that are part of its standard repertoire – but the ROH just doesn’t do it as well as a professional theatre production with musical singers.

Trackback from leaderlog

I've had a trackback to my IFRS site and kind words from Leaderlog, another UK accountant who keeps track of audit and financial control issues. Unfortunately I've had to remove the trackback facility from the IFRS site as I use it primarily to keep colleagues updated on IFRS issues and don't necessarily want those colleagues to be able to link directly to my personal site. It's taking me a while to learn the netiquette of blogs. And maybe I need to think about creating an about page (at least on the personal site)......