Guess who's coming to dinner
It's me, the Notebook. The January Notebook.
Dinner with the Duchess
Male gay playwrights! It’s great that you’re interested in creating complex female characters. Much appreciated. Not every aging female musician is a Maria Callas story, however. Put away the last days of Maria Callas. Take a break. Forget about it for a minute.
Stratford-based Here For Now theatre company’s Dinner with the Duchess (Nick Green, Casey & Diana) can be seen at the Crow’s wee Studio Theatre until February 9 and is well worth seeing, mostly for the three excellent performers. Green shapes the play as a sparring match between the journalist and the artist inside the interview-recording encounter and the hour and a half pass quickly. Margaret (Jan Alexandra Smith) is a famous violinist giving the last, she believes legacy-defining interview to the freelancer Helen who’s done her homework and rather than doing a puff piece, would like to fact-check the rumours and the unflattering stories. Margaret’s partner (David Keeley) buzzes about, fixes dinner, interjects, flirts, but remains a supporting character and leaves the stage before the main conflict between the women can detonate.
The trouble is, Margaret the retired musician is given a stonking cliche of a story: she’s the unhappy aging female artist who is horrified, just stunned into tragic self-loathing by the fact of aging and by finding herself unpartnered. Margaret’s tragedy is… those two things, chiefly. It transpired that David had been invited to the interview-dinner so the two could pretend they are still together. But why? Is being separated so shameful, you don’t want the info out there under any circumstance?
This trailblazing star violinist, we are being told, is absolutely in a puddle after her man left her. I can’t age on my own, in this Paris apartment/Toronto condo! Bring me back my Onassis!
It’s Callas, and it’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. Smith/Margaret actually uses the word rot to describe herself in one of the monologues. The rot is rising, we are asked to believe.
Green is also iffy on what a career in classical music is like. I wonder if he actually spoke with any classical musicians, or if the sad Callas myth looked more dramatically interesting? Margaret, a internationally-touring star violinist, also appears to be working as the first violin for the local symphonic orchestra. These two jobs just about never coincide. Soloists do not take symphony jobs. The symphony job detail however lets the playwright add the side story about Margaret burning bridges with the symphony, where no one will miss her. Due to some temper flareups with the Leading Conductor.
About the Leading Conductor: life-long feuds (in this case, with Mr. Leading Conductor / mentor called Andre) do not happen in the classical music world, except maybe sporadically between opera stars who end up having to work with their frenemies or exes. If you’re a star instrumentalist, you don’t keep working with people you don’t get along artistically and temperamentally, you just don’t keep coming back for more Joan Crawford and Bette Davis drama. But in this play, you do.
Much is made of Margaret being one in the fairly short lineage of women violin stars. In one monologue she lines them all up like salt and pepper shakers on the table, as if one begets the other and one breaks the ground for the other. But women star soloists on any one particular instrument are not a lineage in any way. What do Nicola Benedetti, Leila Josefowicz, Aislinn Nosky and Viktoria Mullova have in common? Or Yuja Wang (young, single, mega-famous), Martha Argerich (an elder with multiple daughters with different men), Angela Hewett (never married) and Mitsuko Uchida (long-term partner, no kids)? I mean, it is remarkable that female star soloists are not a rarity any longer, and for many decades now, but that’s not exactly what Margaret is saying. Women conductors are closer to belonging in a loose lineage of that kind in that there is actual mentorship happening by women for women, and there exist programs and competitions created to address the obstacles women in conducting are facing, but no such thing exists for female instrument soloists—and if it did, it would be around instruments like cello (unfeminine), percussion (ditto) or brass (male dominated). In one of the more illogical moments of the play, Margaret animatedly tells the story of what the virtuoso violinist Wilma Neruda had to endure after a successful performance in Moscow. Seventeen-year-old Henryk Wieniawski, a violin prodigy and future composer, objected to her getting the accolades and returned back on stage yelling and insisting that he was the better musician of the two. I looked the now funny anecdote up, and it turns out it happened in the Tsarist Russia in 1852. 1852! Margaret was telling it, mortally offended, as if she had witnessed it or as if it had happened in her lifetime. I don’t know, what is the reasonable statute of limitations for sexist outbursts?
Margaret, rumours also have it, was at times not the easiest to work with; hence the nickname the Duchess, to signal haughtiness, stuck-upness, I guess? Some of this, she tries to explain, was her natural reaction to working in a sexist workplace. But soloists are usually allowed to have their own take on things and it’s not unusual for them to disagree with conductors. The nickname follows her around now that she’s nearing retirement, as is if she’s the only star musician who’s not easy going and pliable, and the orchestra musicians, we are led to believe, whisper it as she enters the rehearsal room. Which makes her hate her life even more.
And that is it. That is what Margaret would like us and the interviewer to ignore, and focus on her artistry instead. Don’t remember me as aging, or unpartnered, or the Duchess, remember these sounds! And the recording of the violin solo, her own, plays us out.
Come on. Time to lay the Callas ghost to rest once and for all.
National Theatre has a streaming platform
I somehow missed this entirely, but did you know that the British NT has a regularly updated streaming channel that sells subscriptions? Every new production ends up there eventually, and I wonder what will happen to the NT Live in cinemas, if it’ll be phased out? For Toronto, those are never live anyway, but delayed for the American continent after-work time zones, and the number of Cineplex movie theatres participating has been going down. Last time I went to see an NT Live show (it must have been Prima Facie with Jodie Comer), the screening was held in the smallest cinema inside the Yonge-Dundas Cineplex.
I’d like to see Martin Sheen in Nye (about the creator of the NHS) and Harriet Walter as a very convincing southern European matriarch in The House of Bernarda Alba.
Speaking of Walter, she is playing, without impersonating, Margaret Thatcher in Channel 4’s Maggie and Brian which I’m hoping will surface somewhere on the Hoopla-Kanopy-Gem axis eventually.
It’s come to this
Ken Whyte over on SHuSH reports that the BC Arts Council made good on their threat to pull the plug on a 55-year-old publishing company. The main reason appears to be that they got marked down for doing "reconciliation" and DEI all wrong (or not passionately enough). We know political conditioning has been happening for years, but no art organization or artist would talk publicly about it for obvious reasons. Here’s one that can.
Apropos wider politicization of art and literature in Canada, and I forgot to mention this in December, I was a guest on the Canadian Jewish News’ podcast Bonjour Chai where we talked, among other things, the Giller Prize controversies.
Mark your calendars:
I trust we’re all going, with bells and whistles?
Death of the celebrity novelist
I’ve been thinking about this Robbie Millen piece in the Times about Granta’s Best Twenty Under Forty lists, and how the 2023 lineup compares with the roundups from the still-print era. TLDR: no one reads today’s ‘famous’ novelists, alas. The only household-ish name that could potentially match any one of the generation 1983 stars, writes Millen, would be Sally Rooney, and she, not being British, does not qualify.
I often go on about the sad state of reading novels, especially Canadian novels, in Canada, but the Canadian issue appears to be just a radically acute expression of a global anglosphere problem. Novelists are not cultural figures of import - any more, or currently, whichever one you prefer - even in the colonial centre, Britain. I wouldn’t bemoan the death of literary celebrity if it didn’t coincide with the decline of reading and the waning of the novel as a popular form of packaging human experience.
All this more directly prompted by my finally reading Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience, the 2023 Booker shortlisted and Giller-winning novel (Bernstein was born in Montreal but lives in Scotland and is a British novelist for all intents and purposes, and Study is narrated by a woman who comes from an anglophone country that has the “Home Office”, none of which deterred the Giller jury.) Bernstein is also in Granta’s 2023 group and like most of the rest on that list, is only on her second book. A source in Canadian independent publishing tells me that Study was subject to a bidding war until Knopf, the prestigious PRH imprint, nabbed it. I will never understand the publishing world. Is it a bubble prone to social contagions and mimetic desire?
Study is illogical, cold, occasionally preachy, bracingly dull. I rushed to read criticism around after I finished it but it too is kind of dutiful, milquetoast, praising the style and whatever it appears to be saying about history and “belonging”. And there’s not a lot of it. I wanted to talk to someone about the book, but no one that I know has read it. I put the call out on social media, no takers.