The Duchess of Malfi, Great Eastern Quay, Monday 19th July

It was dark, I was frightened, and somewhere quite close to me a large naked man was singing.

Never having been to a production by immersive theatre company Punchdrunk, and extraordinarily lucky to get my hands on a ticket for their operatic attempt at The Duchess of Malfi after huge demand crashed their collaborator, ENO's website, I approached the venue, an abandoned office block at the less salubrious end of the Docklands Light Railway with a fair degree of trepidation. Upon entering, one is provided with a mask and immediately plunged into darkness, instructed to wander at will. It's a dislocating experience, and necessary to screw one's courage to the sticking point just to keep walking towards the distant light - the audience travel in packs for safety. It's a fair representation of the atmosphere of Webster's work, a threatening environment where much is obscured, and to be alone is to be in danger. We formed tenuous loyalties to wander (still mostly in darkness) through empty lycanthropy research labs, a church, bedrooms, a bar, a study, an echoing hall, a forest of tangled cable trees and flights of sheet music. My wanderings were scored by unnerving hints of the score by Torsten Rasch. This was a promising start, until I took a wrong turn in the dark somewhere, and emerged in the gents' toilet. I inspected the facilities carefully, but as they did not seem immediately relevant to the plot, I continued.

As part of Punchdrunk's decision to abandon notions of linearity (read: narrative coherence) there is no clear start or finish to the opera, and one simply walks around the various spaces in the hope of stumbling on a scene. Or follows an increasingly irate cellist, on the basis that maybe he know's where he's going because I sure as hell don't. The problem with this is that you can watch the same scene two or three times at half hour intervals, while developing a nagging feeling that you're missing something important elsewhere in the office block. Also, unless you are very familiar with the story (and considering the number of productions this year has seen, there's not much excuse if you're not) you'd be rather at sea. I watch the Duchess and Antonio discovered by Ferdinand, then the Cardinal poisoning Julia, then Cariola murdered, then the death of one of the Duchess and Antonio's children, then Duchess forbidden to marry, then some sort of repentant moment involving Bosola, then the Duchess and Antonio discovered by Ferdinand, then the Cardinal poisoning Julia, then the death of one of the Duchess and Antonio's children, then Ferdinand fornicating with a male courtier dressed in the Duchess' clothes, then the Duchess and Antonio discovered by Ferdinand, then the madness of Ferdinand (brave nudity on the part of Andrew Watts), then the final denouement. I also spent about an hour lost. About two hours in, I was desperate to find the bar I'd seen earlier. I never did.

Ultimately, this is a flawed vision; Webster's tragedy are plot heavy, and by reducing the thing to roughly an hour of libretto, that can be repeated in fragments over the course of a gruelling number of hours (presumably even more gruelling for the actors, who manage very physical performances and opera singing), the audience have little chance of anything more than glimpses of motivation or character development. Punchdrunk and ENO end up performing a scattered masque of murderers, albeit one which honours the spirit of Webster's masterpiece. I have no idea how they managed it, but eventually we are all herded together into a cavernous hangar to witness the performance's death throes. Claudia Huckle (as the Duchess), who probably didn't get into opera with the intention of hanging mostly naked upside down over her audience does a fine job at it.

By this point I was tired, footsore, hungry, and still desperate for a drink. I had been by turns lost, frightened, lonely and confused. And this is why, despite every nasty thing I've said here, Punchdrunk are excellent. With the Duchess hanging dead above us, the curtain along one wall sweeps back to reveal three more shrouded, hanging bodies. But they don't stop. The curtains along each huge wall quiver for a moment, then continue, leaving us surrounded, hanging in a mist that seems to continue off into the distance, by dozens and dozens of dangling corpses. It is breathtaking, absolutely cathartic, and a horrifying revelation of Webster's vision. It's perfect.

Arden of Faversham, Rose Theatre, Thursday 1st July

Tucked away behind the great Globe, down a gloomy street, past the deliciously titled Bear Gardens, under a shiny blue plaque, is the Rose Theatre. It is a profoundly depressing sight. The paint is peeling, the box office is a shack, and the lady selling coffee from behind a wonky trestle table looks kind of grumpy. It is, as the nice young man kindly explains before we're allowed to take our seats, an archaeological site, although at the moment further excavation looks hugely unlikely. We get a quick explanation of the (only partially successful) campaign in 1989 to save the site, and are ushered in. Rope lights show the outer and inner walls of the original building, and the placement of the stage, all under a protective layer of sand, concrete and water, and it's a little bit magical to watch your reflection washing over the floor of the theatre.
The Rose has a reputation for putting on plays that are not performed often - staples of the Bankside theatre that might have packed them in in 1589, but just aren't doing it any more. In the past, I've missed Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday and Kyd's Soliman and Perseda here, so I was glad to make it to Arden of Faversham, as it's unlikely I'll see another performance for years, if at all. It's an anonymous play, but suggestions for authorship have been made in favour of Marlowe (there's the geography), Shakespeare (there's the Arden connection) and Kyd (there's a bloody massacre in it). I'm not really swayed by any of the arguments, but I don't think it matters, because as it turns out, it's a bloody good play.
The tiny stage, in the gallery overlooking the excavations, with a full house of cramped audience huddled around it, does not seem immediately promising. However, Peter Darney, directing, has not for one moment allowed his actors to be limited by the space. There are punch-ups, sword fights and a goodly amount of (graphically) physical comedy. Rachel Dale, as the conniving wife of the unfortunate Mr Arden of Faversham, 'ungentle Alice', is marvellous - seductive, cunning and charming by turns, as untrusting as she is untrustworthy, a good match for Jonathan Woolf's edgy Mosby, clearly out for anything and everything he can get. Mark Carlisle is a very sympathetic Arden, and Francis Adams does solid work as his rather less credulous friend. The cast as a whole do a good job of evoking the freedom of the city as compared to the closeness of the country (and its gossiping), and the London we see briefly is one where everyone is anonymous and the usual rules do not apply - a ruffian can have his head broken by a woman without retribution. The play, for all its tragedy, has a thread of rollicking comedy, and it's the dirty jokes that get the biggest laughs. The two star turns, who earn most applause are Kent ruffians Black Will and Shakebag, a marvellous punk pair, who here swagger around, insulting the audience, pilfering from them, hiding amongst them, starting fights, cracking dirty jokes and generally being revolting.
The script has been trimmed lightly, but nothing is wanting, and at an hour and fifty minutes, no interval, it's a neat little piece, quite fast paced and (thanks largely to Will and Shakebag) marvellous good fun. There is a slight problem in that doubling of parts has given rise to an extraordinary number of regional accents - it's not necessary to define characters thus, and left me with the impression that Early Modern Kent was a remarkably cosmopolitan place. But overall, a very fair showing, and a nice little domestic tragedy. Now go and write the Rose a cheque, eh?

Shakespeare: The Man From Stratford, Wilton's Music Hall, Sunday 6th May

Wilton's Music Hall, a short stroll from Tower Hill, is my favourite venue in London. Sadly decaying, it is the last remaining music hall, a miraculous survivor of the Blitz, and a marvellous place to put on a show. I've seen an all male Pirates of Penzance there, and had a goodly drink in the bar. It's got a damp concrete smell of decadence about it, and I love it.
Simon Callow must love it too, otherwise he wouldn't have chosen it to put on a secret preview of his new show Shakespeare: The Man From Stratford. It'll be on tour round the country during the summer, finishing at the Edinburgh Festival, and hopefully finding a London home after that (fingers crossed).
Things were a little bit rough round the edges, as you'd expect - no set, no props, just the disarmingly lovely Callow giving an intimate explanation of what makes Shakespeare so damn good. Jonathan Bate has done good work with the script - Jacques' seven ages of man speech from As You Like It is used as a route through Shakespeare's life, and Callow plays a multitude of characters along the way, slipping gracefully in and out of a handful of the Bard's (and his contemporaries') plays. It's a charming little biography, casual and engaging, and runs the gamut of human emotion in Callow's performances - he's as fine a Juliet as a Launce. There are moments of surprisingly modern relevance, particularly in a momentary delving into Sir Thomas More, which touches on the problems of immigration.
My only problem is that it's such a tease. If you weren't familiar with Shakespeare's biography (what there is of it), or needed to change the mind of someone unconvinced by all the versifying, it'd be a marvellous start. But a few moments of Callow as Lear, or Leontes, or (for a few, fabulous, spine-tingling moments) Faust, just isn't enough for me. More Simon Callow, please. In Faust flavour, if you have him.

Women Beware Women, National Theatre, 17th May

At the centre of Gary Taylor's lecture on this play, previously reviewed here, was the hope that Middleton's work was finally getting the recognition it deserves. Certainly, on the great stage of the National's Olivier theatre, under a glittering chandelier, it looks like a hope that it justified. The best thing about the National is the pool of talent that it can draw on, and the cast for Women Beware Women is as sumptuous as the set.
Harriet Walter as Livia is marvellous - stylish, scheming, and relentlessly practical about the ways women can wield power. She is very funny when yearning for her young lover (a rather tentative performance from Samuel Barnett), and charmingly cynical in the chess scene that T.S. Eliot was such a fan of. Raymond Coulthard, as Hippolito, is a surprise - I'd only encountered him previously in the execrable Hotel Babylon, and he turns in a strong, sympathetic performance in which his love for niece Isabella is very believable. Vanessa Kirby (said niece) will need more experience before she can truly shine; she struggles to project to the vast space, and her voice often sounds strangled.
The design is a little tired - more Fellini - but during the murderous final masque hints of Early Modern style manifest in masks and some smartly tailored jackets, which is a nice touch to a scene that makes brilliant use of the Olivier's revolve. The montage effect is filmic and very slick, a nice handling of a scene that racks up corpses fast enough to be funny if done wrong. Where this performance really wins is in walking an impeccable line through Middleton's extremes - the tragedy is at times painful to watch, but the (often filthy) one-liners get more laughs than I've heard Shakespeare's comedies get at the National. At times it's a little stylised, where plainness would suit best, but there's really barely a foot put wrong.
As the man says, it's 'as if the plague of sin had been agreed to meet here together'. Sin looks pretty sexy from where I'm sitting.

The Duchess of Padua, Pentameters Theatre, 12th May

Oscar Wilde and revenge tragedy. Well, I could hardly turn it down.
Pentameters is a small studio theatre over the Horseshoe pub in leafy Hampstead - I'm fond of these arrangements, because pub theatres usually more than repay the effort of getting out of the West End (I'm looking at you, Rosemary Branch), but I arrived with a certain amount of trepidation, and a nervous respect for any company prepared to attempt this play, which seems to have made a positive effort to kill off its casts in the past.
The Duchess of Padua was written by Wilde in 1883, and has never been performed in England. Wilde imagined a lush set for his Renaissance stylings (he seems very keen on huge marble columns - make of that what you will), but things are rather more austere here, with the music providing what the set can't. There's not much to be done about the script, though. He gave it his all, I'm sure, but it is at best a pastiche. Aiming at the Italianate tragedies of Webster and Middleton, the lines lack the power of the first and the punch of the latter, and the most memorable lines are only so for their mawkishness. I could list them, but I don't want to.
The actors do a very fair job, however. Victoria Porter's Duchess has a tightly-wound desperation about her, and her Duke is marvellously nasty (however stuffed his mouth is with Oscar's pretty paradoxes). There are shades of Browning's My Last Duchess here - she is by no means his first wife, and he plays the unpleasant insinuations about what may have become of the previous with a marvellously light touch. Rupert Savage, as leading man Guido, though, is so extraordinarily wooden that I very much doubt he will ever be a real boy.
I don't believe that this play will ever be more than a Wildean curiosity. It's a failure as a revenge tragedy, occasionally and awkwardly farcical, its denouement is founded on faulty premises (having a ruler in the Borgia mould up in court facing a death sentence just seems silly) and it lacks a much needed epilogue to round it off. Overall, nice try, shame about the play.

The Tudor Tarantino, BBC iPlayer

Dominic Awkwright charts the rise and fall of Thomas Middleton, with help from Gary Taylor and opinions from Professor Jonathan Bate, Professor Sir Brian Vickers, and actress Harriet Walter. Available here on BBC iPlayer until 12.02 pm on Tuesday the 18th of May. Well worth a listen.

Middleton: Renaissance Man, Gary Taylor, National Theatre, Monday 10th May

Gary Taylor is a bit of a rock star to me. He's largely responsible for the revival of Middleton's reputation, and shared responsibility with John Lavagnino for producing The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, as fine a piece of scholarship as you are ever likely to stub your toe on. But, see, Middleton's cool. He's the Rolling Stones to Shakespeare's Beatles. So when Gary Taylor rocks up on stage, with his long hair and his black painted fingernails (on later inspection, actually a rather fetching metallic blue), it's looking like a good evening to me. Under the glittering chandeliers of the Felliniesque set for Women Beware Women, his lecture-lite (geared towards the London theatre crowd, and pretty accessible) concentrated on how Middleton writes women. Taylor points out that while some of Middleton's work is undoubtedly misogynist, in Women Beware Women the ladies always have more lines than their lovers, something otherwise unknown in Early Modern drama. They're not always nice to other women. They can like sex with men a lot or reject it utterly, buy sex for money or refuse to sell it. They're rarely idealised - I'm not sure Middleton ever idealised a single character. What's interesting is that the first revival of Women Beware Women was at the Arts Theatre, a private members club that could get round the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain's office. Thirty-nine year old widows who enjoy themselves with younger men of relatively lowly status apparently used to need a lot of censoring. Taylor is, as one would expect, a practiced and compelling speaker, particularly when in defence of Middleton's talents. And he's right. Middleton excelled in as many forms as Shakespeare - comedy and tragedy alike. The most popular play that ever played at what is now called 'Shakespeare's Globe' was actually one of Middleton's. I think they should rename it, personally...

The Duchess of Malfi, New Players Theatre, Tuesday 4th May

The Duchess of Malfi's getting a good airing at the moment, in Greenwich, here under the arches of Charing Cross, and later in the year with a collaborative operatic treatment from English National Opera and scary interactive theatrical groundbreakers Punchdrunk. Greenwich stuck to a predictable, if effective, fascist-lite setting, and I have absolutely no idea what dark madness to expect from Punchdrunk. Vaulting Ambition, at the New Players, went with...the circus. It could have worked - perhaps some kind of totalitarian ringmaster regime? But it doesn't stick, and a Cardinal is still a Cardinal, even if he's Cardinaling in spangly pants. Only a few of the performers are circus trained; they are mesmerising enough to completely detract at times from the action of the play, and talented enough to make the main actors' attempts at circus stylings seem woefully inadequate. The only real gift of the design is to James Sobol Kelly as Bosola, whose pancake make-up creeps across his face, becoming more and more skull-like as he piles up the body-count. He's a grisly Buster Keaton, a haunted outsider in this production, and it's a testament to the greatness of the writing that this interpretation works as well as any of the other, more macho portrayals I've seen. Just when I thought I couldn't find clowns any more frightening...
The design's a pity - there are some excellent performances, and the production could have stood up perfectly well without the big-top malarkey. The whole Malfi family seem creepily intimate, making Ferdinand's advances to the Duchess easier to reconcile, and our Cardinal, Andrew Piper is quite clearly after Alan Rickman's job. Alinka Wright's a very foxy Julia, who provides an excellent counterpoint to Tilly Middleton's Duchess, whose wooing of Antonio is charmingly tentative, for all her insistence. There are some nice touches in terms of costume design - Alex Humes' werewolf turn is greatly helped by leather and fur, and the lighting is innovative.
With circus arts enjoying a renaissance of their own at the moment, it does them a disservice to crowbar them into renaissance drama. If you want circus, get yourself over to the Roundhouse. Better yet, get thyself to Circus Space and learn how to do it yourself.

Tudor Gallery, The Queen's House, Greenwich, Monday 3rd May

The Queen's House in Greenwich sits on the site of the much older Palace of Placentia, birthplace of Henry VIII, holiday home of Elizabeth I (good distance from the plague) and subsequently the residence (although sometimes briefly) of all the Stuart queens of England. The best way to get there is to get the boat downriver from the Tower, because the Royal Naval College, which stands between the Queen's House and the Thames, is most imposing when seen from the water.
Most of the collection housed here relates to England's maritime history, but there are two tiny rooms devoted to portraits of the Tudor monarchs. There's the ubiquitous Holbein Henry VIII, of course, in between Henry VII (who always looks like a criminal to me - I wouldn't buy a used car from someone with that face) and Mary I and Philip II of Spain, who win the prize for most awkward looking couple ever. There's a marvellously gloomy painting for Francis Drake, 'Sic Magna Parvis' hovering over his head, which I like very much.
It seems appropriate, given the forthcoming election, to dwell briefly on the anonymous painting that hangs here, of the Somerset House Conference of August 1604. The Treaty of London was signed at the conference, bringing an end to nineteen years of war with the Spanish, whose delegation sit on the left of this picture, their English opposite numbers on the right, around a lushly carpeted table. I have studied this picture at length, and I can say with some certainty that not a single one of the politicians depicted looks as if he would apologise for calling you a bigot. At least two of them look like they'd have you quietly done away with first, and call you a bigot later. Call me old fashioned, but I miss that.
The highlight, for me, is Elizabeth I, British School, c. 1590, well into her fifties, and looking half of that. Elizabeth was one of the first English monarchs to exert such rigid control over her own image, and it's hard not to think, while gazing on her pale, perfect face, that we've not changed much. If she could have PhotoShopped herself, she would have - image is everything. It's not quite the same, of course - morally less dubious, perhaps. I'm not suggesting that spotty Tudor boys were sneaking crude woodcut equivalents of Nuts up to the hayloft to have one off the wrist over Her Majesty, and growing up all warped thinking that all the Tudor girls look like that, but... Well, maybe I am.

The Duchess of Malfi, March 27th and Volpone, April 10th at Greenwich Theatre

It's good to see Greenwich Theatre making a return to in-house production, since their past few years have been marred by a string of travelling flops. Their collaboration with the Stage on Screen company looks like a fruitful one, and choosing to stage classic works is sensible.

The Duchess of Malfi is here set in the inter-war years, starting with the 1918 Armistice, thus explaining the death of the Duchess' husband and creating a little background tension in the lead-up to the outbreak of a further war which turns the Cardinal into a mini-Mussolini and explodes family tensions into murder and madness. It's a decent production - there are some unfortunate stumblings over lines, and the pace would have been helped by some judicious cutting, but it's all very forgivable. Bosola's the real star turn here, although his diction is initially alarmingly mannered, the effect wears off, and Tim Treloar's performance is impeccable. It's a difficult part, but he brings a gritty sort of determination to the role, which works well. Tim Steed as the incestuous Ferdinand also deserves a mention for his oily, uncomfortable solicitousness of the eponymous Duchess. I can't really get away without mentioning her - Aislin McGuckin has a good stab at it, and has an appropriate wiry determination. She could tone down the hammy choking in the death throes, though - there are few things more guaranteed to curl an audience's toes.

The same cast for Volpone, with Richard Bremmer and Mark Hadfield duetting marvellously as Volpone and Mosca, with strong support from those cast members who had already distinguished themselves in The Duchess of Malfi. This play contains one of my favourite lines in English drama, from Lady Would-Be; 'I pray you sir, let me borrow your dwarf'. There was a severe lack of dwarf, and he was much missed. Incidentally, if anyone can explain to me what exactly it is that Jonson has against the Dutch, I'd be very grateful.

Despite the fact that by the end of Webster's work the stage is littered with bodies, I can't help but think Jonson's the nastier work, and his view of humanity the bleaker. Webster's characters kill and kill and kill, in the pursuit of money or revenge. There's a bloody sort of simplicity to his world, an internal logic. In Volpone (as in The Alchemist) Jonson's stupid, greedy simpletons queue up madly to be gulled and gulled again by sharper wits. Webster may seek to expose the darkness of the human soul, but Jonson finds the human body and its human needs grubby enough.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Rose, Kingston, Thursday 11th March 2010

Now, Judi Dench is, of course, a National Treasure (TM). The Rose, Kingston (not to be confused with the barely excavated original on Bankside) was always guaranteed selling every seat in the house on this basis alone, but this staging is much more than a mere vehicle for the lady's talents.
First of all, the Rose is a charming venue. A copy of the fourth of London's public theatres, built by Philip Henslowe on Bankside in 1587, its enclosing circular layout lends a certain intimacy to performances, far more appropriate to the works of the Bard than the standoffish proscenium arch theatres of the West End. The Kingston Rose is very bare bones - towering metal girders instead of the Globe's kitschy authentique wood and marble. It's a very workmanlike theatre, and what romance it offers is entirely up to the production.
This one's got it in spades. An opening masque provides a speaking show whereby a court of players are given permission to perform by the ever regal Dench as Elizabeth I, who then translates herself into Titania. This is very much a play about patronage, and what might have seemed a clumsy paralleling of the Queen of England with the Queen of the Fairies is legitimised by the text. Titania is always surrounded by her fairy players, who sing and dance on her command, while Oberon is quite solitary, but for his henchman Puck. Our rude mechanicals too (with their obligatory regional accents - it's Liverpool this time) shine on the night, clinging to the hope of sixpence a day for life from Theseus.
The frantic lovers are all I'd hoped - they were always going to be somewhat overshadowed by the greatness of the leading lady, but there is talent here. Lysander and Demetrius are rather insignificant, comically interchangable, as Helena and Hermia are not, but this is and always has been a play about women's desires. Annabel Scholey does a fine job in the slight role of Hermia, but Rachael Stirling brings real depth to her portrayal of Helena with a husky-voiced desperation that hints at real self-loathing.
But it was always going to be about Dench. And so it is. There's a ripple of indrawn breath when she first appears as Titania, and it's a lot to live up to. But how could she not? This woman *breathes* Shakespeare. She's occasionally been criticised (I name no names) as a haughty sort of performer, and one suspects a hint of self-parody in her first addresses to Oberon, in front of their audience of fairies. She's a commanding presence, but never an overpowering one, and Charles Edwards' Oberon stands up very well to her, bringing a certain petulance to the part. There's something about his Oberon that suggests a boy grown to manhood too fast, not quite in control of his emotions, but very much in love with his queen.
I have not yet read a review of this staging that didn't make mention of Dench's age. I do not know why. As someone rather more down-to-earth than myself pointed out to me, they're not human. They're fairies. And one of Shakespeare's favourite themes is that we're all (whatever age) fools for love.
Titania certainly is. Beautifully, stupidly, madly in love. Dench's performance demonstrates how love transforms us - she blossoms in the company of Bottom and his asses head (which was lovely - whatever charity deals with donkeys should have passed round a hat - they'd have been coining it) and it only makes the tragedy of her love worse. Everyone who's ever watched in dismay as their best friend giggled in infatuation at the dreadful jokes of the latest dreadful lover knows this feeling. And Judi Dench has a lovely giggle. As plot-devices go, 'and then she falls in love with the donkey' is pretty far-fetched, but that giggle clinches it. She's head-over-heels.
The verse speaking from the whole cast is impeccable. Peter Hall has long been noted for his respect for Shakespeare's lines, for leaving them be. There's no running on of lines over the long speeches, and rhymes are allowed the space they deserve. It pays off in that the whole play breathes - it isn't overworked, and there's no hint of actorliness even in the soliloquies. It lends new comedy to Puck (a delightfully clowning, loose-limbed Reece Ritchie), who got laughs for lines I've never heard an audience enjoy so much before.
I've seen A Midsummer Night's Dream more times than any other play. I've seen some absolute shockers, and I've seen some I thought were perfect. This was better. This one proves it. The play really is the thing.

Fanfare please...

Alarums and Excursions is dead chuffed to announce that it has got its sticky fingers on a pair of tickets for (the completely sold out) A Midsummer Night's Dream, at the Rose Theatre, Kingston, starring the inestimable Judi Dench. Much excitement!

Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science, Tuesday 23rd February

In a dark dark town there was a dark dark street and in the dark dark street there was a dark dark shop and in the dark dark shop...
Was every nightmare you ever woke screaming from.
The Last Tuesday Society resides at Viktor Wynd's Little Shop of Horrors, which is a veritable cabinet of curiosities. I arrived early for Philip Ball's lecture, and having paid my £7 entry was provided with a very fine gin and tonic. This is a marked improvement on those lectures I attended at university, where one was expected to provide one's own gin and tonic. This fortified me for a tour of the shop downstairs. If, dear reader, you find yourself in the market for a pickled foetus, a display of taxidermy, a gilded cow snout, a skull once owned by Aleister Crowley, the preserved erection of a gentleman hanged in the Seventeenth Century (I was tempted), the cast of a dicephalous skeleton or shrunken heads at reasonable prices, this is the place to come. Bring a chequebook and an expression of prurient glee. I liked it very much.
An apt setting, then for the night's lecture. Philip Ball is a science writer whose work has covered topics as various as music, cosmology, pattern formation in the natural world and political philosophy. He's also a trained clown. A Renaissance man of sorts, then, discussing Paracelsus, another kind of Renaissance man; a natural historian, metallurgist, alchemist, drinker and glutton. Ball's lecture took Paracelsus very much on his own terms, not as the legend Browning wrote of, or the wizard whose statue adorns the halls of Hogwarts, but a Neoplatatonic mystic, and the first man to try to come up with a comprehensive theory of everything. A practical sort of chap, he had little time for the doctors of the day, who relied on a Galenic model of humoral medicine, and rarely saw their patient, diagnosing by uroscopy. Paracalsus declared 'all they can do is stare at piss', and preferred a more holistic approach, subscribing to the microcosm/macrocosm idea. He was very well travelled (or possibly just frequently run out of town by angry uroscopists), but often impoverished. We owe him thanks for the idea that specific illnesses should be treated with specific cures - no one had really thought of that before. Things move on of course, otherwise we'd all still be rubbing our syphilis sores with mercury while our noses rotted off, but Paracelsus started things moving. He was unpopular, with a flair for the dramatic, and Ball's lecture communicated this very effectively, with wit and style. He's a compelling speaker, and I wouldn't hesitate to see him speak again. He concluded with a quote from the man himself; 'I am different. Let this not upset you.'
I went to the pub for a drink afterwards. Me and the barman are going to save up and go halvsies on a shrunken head. We're different. We're with Paracelsus. Oh, and mine's a pint.

Ill met by moonlight...

Welcome to Alarums and Excursions, your guide to all things Renaissance (both fair and foul) in London. I'll be posting as often as I can manage with reviews of everything there is to do around here that comes in Early Modern flavour. Next week I'll be reviewing Phillip Ball (author of The Devil's Doctor) lecturing on Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Science and Magic, hosted by The Last Tuesday Society and planning a trip to the Seven Stars on Chancery Lane, which has been around since 1602. I'm also tempted by Rory Kinnear in Measure for Measure at the Almeida and (if I'm feeling brave) Richard III at the Riverside Studios, where Sadie Frost is tackling my favourite female role in Shakespeare's canon, Lady Anne. It's looking like a promising few months for Renaissance stagings, as Greenwich Theatre makes a return to producing in-house shows with Volpone and The Duchess of Malfi coming up in March. I await reports from my spies south of the river. As for tonight? I have an exposition of sleep come upon me.