I’ve been asked a few times about the painting that the National Gallery in London has recently cleaned and put back on display as Titian’s portrait of the physician Girolamo Fracastoro, as mentioned by Vasari in his Life of Titian of 1568. It’s a difficult one. The argument, as presented in an article in last month’s Burlington Magazine, is based partly on plausible provenance, but mostly on the fact that it it carried on the back of its frame a 19th-century note identifying its sitter as Fracastoro.

The painting is clearly Titianesque, but rather dull. As mentioned repeatedly in the press coverage, by far the most attractive area is the lynx fur worn by the sitter — compelling tactile eruption flecking through an otherwise rather bland surface. In any case, it pales in comparison with the other Titians in the same room at the National Gallery. None of this means the attribution is wrong, however: it is apparently quite damaged, which probably accounts in large part for its somewhat unconvincing appearance, and although very consistent, Titian did have bad days.

Another problem is the identification of the sitter. He looks quite different from known portraits of Fracastoro, such as the woodcut on right. The sitter in the painting is clearly slimmer of face and with a thinner, more elegant nose, but he is also clearly older in the woodcut, which might account in part for his fuller, more plump appearance. Plus, we still know very little about the extent to which, and how, painters at this time idealised, rejuvenated, and otherwise altered the appearance of their sitters . It’s an issue, which always makes identification of sitters in Renaissance (and later!) portraits difficult. The nineteenth-century label helps in this case, of course, but is far from proof, even if it repeats an older tradition.

Summing up, I don’t see any reason to disagree outright with the proposal made by the gallery, which largely convinces, but cannot help but feel a little uneasy about it.

Links!

From hitting the A train in 1974 and bombing the metro as part of several of the seminal crews in the following years, emceeing at the Amphitheater at the close of Wild Style and recording the classic track “Beat Bop” with K-Rob for Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1983, to writing his treatise on the liberation of the letter from the alphabet Iconic Panzerisms, his work is emblematic of a greater movement in formation, of a time when these cultural manifestations were still being formulated and the possibilities seemed endless.

While graffiti, emceeing, deejaying and b-boying gradually became consolidated phenomena often regarded under the unifying umbrella of ‘hip hop’, Rammellzee seemed to stay in that generative creative zone, eclectically following his own creative path, laboring in relative obscurity as a painter, sculptor, installation artist and musician. People who love hip hop would do well to note his example, which is as relevant as ever to the culture.

Check out Rammellzee’s ‘Gothic Futurisms’ website, this this 2003 interview, and this one from 2008.

As you might be aware, legendary impresario and cultural activist Malcolm Mclaren passed away about a week and a half ago. It’s a little late, but I wanted to add my own little tribute here, because besides his cred as the Man at the Crossroads of punk, he had a brief but fruitful involvement with hip hop, producing some classic material with The World’s Famous Supreme Team, who were rocking WHBI in New York from 1979 through the early 80s.

That’s Mclaren’s voice you hear on “Buffalo Gals” — “round the outside, and dosy-doh your partners!” (see above) — irreverently appropriating the American blackface traditional, hip hop style (and notably later referenced by Eminem on “Without Me”). That and the tune “Hey DJ”, especially, continue to reverberate through hip hop culture, so what was essentially a dalliance became a mainstay.

Here’s a tribute mix by the legendary DJ Premier, which draws heavily upon the Buffalo Gals Back 2 Skool anniversary tribute record (1998) and in addition to a slew of Mclaren-shepherded tunes, contains recordings of Mclaren describing his encounter with hip hop. Check it out!

Rest in peace.

Another piece of Mclaren obscura related to subjects familiar to the Bunker’s readers is the fact that the original script for his autobiographically derived and never-realised movie project, Fashion Beast, was written no less a figure than Alan Moore. It’s available here, with more info here. There’s a pretty good obit on Mclaren at the Telegraph.

Oh, and just to mark the occasion, check out the above video, shot at the recent Amanda Palmer (ex-Dresden Dolls) gig at the Union Chapel, London, last Saturday. There’s Neil, and he’s actually pretty hysterical (thanks to Richard for the heads up). Enjoy!!

Of course, Michael wasn’t hip hop, but he came from the same place, and he related directly to the culture and of course influenced it considerably—the moonwalk, for example, is intimately related to dance steps first taken on concrete. Before moving on to the Rocksteady Crew, Run DMC, and the Fat Boys—and eventually more broadly the music of Black America, including his great paragon, James Brown—he was the voice of the streets for me.

Thriller (1983) was indisputably the height of Michael Jackson’s cultural moment, and his first mature album. While the likewise Quincy Jones-produced Off the Wall (1979) is a great record, it remains a disco album unfolding within the sonic parameters of its time. Thriller, on the other hand, is a boldly original creation in which the more peculiar aspects of Jackson’s personality take centre stage to create both infectious and idiosyncratic music of the kind that would characterise the hard-to-define, mass cultural quasi-genre of pop music in the decades to come.

Gleaming and immaculate, the production holds back on the fireworks with strict discipline—consider, for example, the furtively sparkling trumpet in the bridge and the riveting strings and tightly charged guitar licks at the end of “Billie Jean”—showing us that less is indeed more, even in glittering pop music. And for a large part, Jackson’s delivery is more intense than ever, with notes of the aggression and sense of frustration that would later become so palpable in his songs, ultimately to their detriment.

Significantly, the album carries distinctly tense and troubled undertones, especially in its three most enduring tracks, the playful but also subtly claustrophobic “Thriller”, the at once defiant and exasperated “Beat It”, and the hauntingly ambiguous “Billie Jean.” More than an album, Thriller was a pop cultural statement, manifesting to the world the public persona that would eventually consume Jackson, the man. His stroke of genius, paradoxically, was to start letting out of the closet the skeletons that would eventually come to eclipse to the public his music and performance.

The third Jones-produced album, the uneven but in flashes compelling Bad (1987), built further upon the innovations of Thriller, arguably offering even more polished production while Jackson took further his continuous subversion of masculinity on the bizarre—kinda cool, kinda lame—title track, which today I can’t help but hear as an assertive expression of sexual doubt, while “Smooth Criminal” raised the stakes of the previous album, trapping us as it does dancing to a story of rape and murder.

After that it was over. The keen balancing act between subversion and vitality he had maintained for a brief, exhilarating moment went awry and his downward spiral as both artist and public figure accelerated ruthlessly. While Dangerous (1991) was a convincing statement of ownership in a changed cultural field, and of course sold in the millions, this album—like Off the Wall before it, but without its exuberance—ultimately is trapped in the trends of its time, succumbing to Riley-era swingbeat, faux rap bridges and United Colors of Benetton. I, for one, had lost all interest by this point and will leave the rest of Jackson’s recording career unaddressed here.

Without slighting his elegant, energetic, and at times even emotionally nuanced vocal performance and the astonishing level of craft brought to his music, it is his innovative and exacting dancing that will remain with us as Jackson’s greatest artistic contribution. An inventive development upon—amongst other things—the choreography of Bob Fosse, it jettisons the festive warmth of much of the older choreographer’s work in favour of more extreme stylisation, carrying his penchant for jerky, mechanical movement into more frenetic and alienating territory. Poignantly, Jackson moves as if trapped within his own troubled life pattern. Even with backup, he invariably dances alone—never with someone else—and there’s a palpable lack of joy to his movement. Fred Astaire trapped in a world he never made.

On a newscast on the day of his death, Donna Summer astutely described Jackson’s greatness as his sense of perfection. However, his mastery ultimately is demonstrated by the fact that he allows for inaccuracies, preserving an organic, unpredictable element to his dancing that has eluded his innumerable, syncing imitators. He obviously moves with purpose, but simultaneously infuses every movement with tension, a feeling that anything can happen. His androgynous appearance is not asexual exactly, but rather something more complicated. When he dances, Jackson postulates sexuality with such insistence that its presence is hard to deny. But instead of the comfortable, bodily quality of Fosse’s dancers, it remains elusive, as if expressed by someone who knows that there is such a thing and tries to approximate it without understanding it.

These qualities are all part and parcel of what made Jackson an icon beyond his music. Much has been made of his transcendence of the color line and his importance in this respect is hard to understate, but I suspect his influence here differs slightly from the black empowerment line emphasised especially by the Reverend Al Sharpton this last couple of weeks. Unlike President Obama, for example, Jackson seems not as much an example of a black man achieving the highest cultural consecration, but rather as a cultural figure who managed to make everyone forget that he was black. He may himself have turned his ‘post-racial’ persona into something of a cliché in interviews and public statements, and surely his freakish physical metamorphosis contributed importantly, but the fact that most people only rarely thought about him in terms of his ethnicity is nevertheless a rare achievement.

Although the cultural ramifications of it are less evident, his ambiguous sexuality is surely similarly significant. Although the Peter Pan self-mythology never took off, and definitively crashed and burned with the 2005 child molestation trial—and beyond the remarkable public forgiveness superstardom affords one, if not in life, then at least in death—it is nevertheless striking that somebody that unusual in his sexual expression has become such an icon. I don’t know what this may tell us about popular culture and he is probably too problematic a figure to exert a positive influence in terms of sexual equality, but what he does remind us of, however, is our enduring attraction to lives lived in excess as well as the fact that our heroes emerge from the unlikeliest of places.

Another memory. Before the uprock, Michael Jackson gave me one of the first genuine frights of my life that I remember. I had a friend with a VCR and one day when my brother and I were around at his place, somebody put on the full-length “Thriller” video, in which Michael alternately turns into a werewolf and a zombie in a series of nightmarishly nested metafictional segments. It scared the living daylights out of us! Our mother had to coach us for several hours before we were able finally to sleep that night. While I quickly put my fear of the video behind me, and today find it both endearing and kind of awesome, I still can’t forget that initial shock, an early reminder of the terror of things.

Thank you, Michael.

Who? Well, Doseone, aka. Adam Drucker, is about as arty as you get in hip hop music. A founding member of the seminal artist’s label Anticon — kind of a Fort Thunder for hip hop — he was part of the influx of suburban white artists in hip hop in the years around the turn of the Millenium. Highly talented if also assertively recondite, he has probably alienated more potential fans than he converted, but whatever one might think of him, it is hard to deny his skills on the mic, his devotion to his craft or his sheer originality as an MC. Whatever the exact nature of the collaboration between him and Moore, I think it’s kind of an inspired match.

Also attached to the project is the singer and one-man band Andrew Broder/Fog. This is from the interview with Tom Brown of Lex Records on Billboard which started the Patton rumours:

“Brown says that Lex’s deluxe release will include the book — which Brown describes as a “photographic novel” rather than a graphic novel like Moore’s “Watchmen” or “V for Vendetta” — as well as art prints, a two-hour audiobook recorded by Moore (possibly on a memory stick) and the soundtrack on vinyl. It is not yet clear if the soundtrack will get a separate release on CD or as a download, but Brown says he wants this to be a special release and was partly inspired by Radiohead’s deluxe version of “In Rainbows.”

I wasn’t all that impressed with the Jenkins images when I first saw them, but this news makes me more excited for the project!

For more on Doseone, including a discography, check his wiki. If you ask me, the essential recordings are his solo debut Hemispheres (1998), the great Anticon manifesto album, Deep Puddle Dynamics (2000), the two albums he did with producer Jel under the name Themselves (1999 & 2003), and perhaps his participation in the cLOUDEAD and subtle projects, plus — more recently — the amazing 13 & God album he and Jel did with the Notwist (2005). Above is a video from the uneven and often unbearably arty album Circle, which he did with Boom Bip in 2000 — never mind the bird man, just peep the tight vocals.

For a further mic check, listen to his verse on “The Scarecrow Speaks” from Deep Puddle Dynamics — he is second to go and delivers a rousing, beautiful verse. Also, witness him getting served by Project Blowed stalwart P.E.A.C.E. at Scribble Jam 99, but not without a good fight! True hip hop spirit there…

The picks of the week from around the web.

These have been your picks of the week. I’m sorry

The picks of the week from around the web.

Simply titled 40/60, the show premiered last week in London and is now on a short UK tour through the fall. The company’s performances last week at the Cambridge Arts Theatre provided eager audiences with the chance to see anew—or indeed to encounter for the first time (the stalls at Tuesday’s show held a conspicuously youthful crowd; a dance school mass-booking perhaps?)—the vital place that Alston holds in British dance history. Other choreographers’ work might be more theatrically interesting, more morally charged, and certainly more “cutting edge”: it is hard to find anything even mildly provocative about Alston’s work, unless you are a pre-adolescent girl set atwitter at the mere sight of toned thighs in tights. But none more than Alston can convey such a relentless, expansive delight in dance-making itself. Inherent to his style is a joy in the body’s sheer expressive range, manifest (in his best pieces) in masterful footwork, rich ensemble patterning, high-stretching lines, and sharp, precisely delineated individual performances. Plenty of these qualities were on display in 40/60, and both the new offerings and the retrospective survey struck high notes of invention and charm.

The program’s opener was the new “Shuffle it Right,” set to recordings of Hoagy Carmichael performing nine of his own songs. The male dancers, clad in summer whites, exuded a soft-shoe nonchalance that was disarming at first (where was the energy?) but then settled into a rhythm as engagingly offbeat as Carmichael’s lyrics. Five women arrived, in spring frocks and Toni & Guy hairdoes, and they all commenced a witty series of ensembles, solos, and duets, springing lightly from the music. The night’s other new piece was “Blow Over,” a bold display of complex ensemble dancing and riveting solo work—especially by Pierre Tappon, whose enormous control of his compact, powerful frame made him the evening’s most consistently fascinating performer. Sadly this work was significantly marred by its soundtrack, a couple of blaring pop songs by Philip Glass that hammered at the brain, prompted some embarrassingly literal visual effects (strobe flashes during “Lightning”; groan), and generally distracted from the movement. Alston’s visuals are best when most understated—as in “La Vallee des Cloches,” the final solo from Alston’s “Shimmer,” where the tiny crystals adorning the dancer’s net-like blue shirt become a metaphor for the intricacy, delicacy, and intimate tone of the piece.

This solo, danced with a wonderful gravity by Martin Lawrance, was one of the high points of “The Men in My Life,” the evening’s main event. Featuring snippets of work that Alston has created across four decades for specific male dancers, the survey impressed in its great range of tones and materials. Other strong pieces here included the cell-scene from “Movements from Petrushka” (another thrilling appearance by Tappon) and the cheery, muscular “The Signal of a Shake”.

The dances were not uniformly gripping. Alston admits in the program notes that he has “made far too much work”, and at times the dancing reverted to generic mannerisms and occasional disingenuousness, especially in the male-female duets. But as a whole, the evening beautifully showcased the wit, diversity, and sincere human interest that has long distinguished Alston at his best.

Review of 40/60,performed by the Richard Alston Dance Company at the Cambridge Arts Theatre on 7-8 October 2008. The company will tour a version of this show to several UK venues in November, including the Edinburgh Festival Theatre: tour schedule available here.

Here’s the climactic scene from The Hustler (1961) in which Newman had his first great role. A fine mix of self-confidence and vulnerability. And then there’s the slightly surreal egg-eating scene from Cool Hand Luke (1967), in which he interestingly, and quite hilariously, subverts his own macho image.

Thomas Betzwieser (Universität Bayreuth), Body and Gesture in 18th-Century German Melodrama: then 160 “Passionate” Engravings to Peter von Winter’s Lenardo und Blandine (1779).

The German melodrama with its specific mixture of spoken text and music has been principally designed for famous (female) actors. In the history of the early German melodrama, Peter von Winter’s Lenardo und Blandine (Munich 1779) merits attention, since it has been enriched by ‘additional’ material by the librettist Joseph Franz von Goetz. The poet not only provided esthetical reflections on acting, but he furthermore published in 1783 a series of 160 engravings illustrating Winter’s melodrama scene by scene. There is hardly any other theatrical performance in late 18th century which is documented so perfectly through iconographical sources. This collection of illustrations has to be investigated by different question, in order to determine the ‘status’ of this source: (1) the relationship between these illustrations and performance(s), and (2) the function of the collection, possibly as a model for acting. These questions have already been raised by research in regard to the eloquence of body in late-18th-century Germany. However, one of the most important issues remained untouched so far, i.e. the interaction of music and gesture. In contrast to other iconographic sources of musical theater, in this case the artist/illustrator is identical with the producer, since Goetz himself guided the rehearsals of Lenardo und Blandine in 1782. Therefore, it seems obvious that his illustrations are reflecting the musical rhetoric in the same way as they are mirroring the text. The high quantity of the illustrations producing very dense (sometimes “film-like”) sequences of pictures, permits a closer look on the subtle correspondance between the rhetoric of the body and those of the music.

Additionally, there’re mentions of the play in this book about German opera and this essay by Walter Scott. Also, here’s the Wiki on the author of the original version of Leonardo und Blandine, Gottfried August Bürger. The mid-19th-century painting above showing Leonardo and Blandine is by Wilhelm Lokhart.

YouTube links have already proliferated across the web, but I figured why not have some here too. Carlin was great. (Here’s his obituary at the New York Times).

Created in 2001 for the ambitious “Beckett on Film” project, which introduced film versions of 19 of the playwright’s stage plays to DVD libraries (and young, worldly Beckett skeptics) everywhere, Play was familiar ground to the theatrically-inclined Minghella. He obsessed over Beckett at University and as a drama teacher, directed some of the plays (including Play) while a student, and consistently cited the playwright as a formative influence on his artistry. I’ve read very little of Minghella’s own writing for the stage, but surely Beckett’s creative concerns and efforts can be felt behind many of the qualities that make Minghella’s work special: his interest in the form and mechanisms of film, for instance, and his boldness in using any cinematic resource available to saturate a scene or frame in Mood.

Minghella’s Play is distinguished among the “Beckett on Film” contributions for having perhaps the most thoroughly thought-out idea for screen adaptation. As a finished work, it is both richly cinematic and admirably sensitive to the sources of the stage play’s theatrical power. In Play, three heads, two female and one male, protrude from identical urns and take turns jabbering, tonelessly and at tongue-masticating speeds, through the details of their collapsed love triangle. Famously, this action repeats in its entirety after playing through once. In the stage play, a single beating spotlight serves as prompter/conductor of the dialogue, provoking the heads to speech and then silencing them with blackouts. Minghella’s film intelligently transfers this role to the camera, which clicks, zooms and focus-pulls around the heads with a comparably unnerving indifference to the human discomfort it captures.

Of course, no filmic substitute is really possible for the way Play‘s purgatorial situation entraps the audience along with the plainly suffering actors, who can neither fully stand nor sit (Beckett’s stage directions sternly inform directors that “the sitting position results in urns of unacceptable bulk and is not to be considered”). Thus Minghella chose to illustrate the implied post-death environment, setting the work in a mist-filled landscape dotted with hundreds of urns extending into endless distance, from which indistinguishable faces mutter and squeak like the Virgilian dead. The obtrusive camera-interrogator shoots the three actors in the foreground (Alan Rickman, Kristin Scott Thomas, and RSC treasure Juliet Stevenson) from various angles, frequently interrupted by burn-outs, fog, clapperboards, and more. The overall effect is edgy and awfully interesting: purgatory as interminable film shoot, humanity as dry-mouthed actors condemned to endless reiterations of a salacious yet trivial story about which they have long, long ceased to care.

At the same time, the sacrifices of adaptation are there and obvious to anyone who has seen the stage original. Realistic detail and special (cinematic) effects are undeniably the main event, rather than the desperate lines spat into the darkness (“Am I not perhaps a little unhinged already? [Hopefully.] Just a little?” [Pause.] I doubt it.”), and the awful, fundamental circumstances of rote repetition. As innumerable disappointing Shakespeare films can testify, even the most powerful language cannot hope to compete for interest with—in this case—the blue-gray clay caked artfully on the actors’ faces, or with the marvelously particularised background, which suggests the River Styx crossing Blake’s Garden of Love.

Nevertheless, the film shows a strong fidelity to Beckett’s directives (and to those of the infamously beady-eyed Beckett estate—no text changes, no cuts, no gender bending, check). And it does much more than this, for one sees that Minghella recognized the potential of film to address and deliver on some of Beckett’s dearest and most elusive hopes for his stage work. Beckett’s reputation as a rehearsal-room tyrant proceeds from his struggles to realize his pure, beyond-precise theatrical visions through the bodies of flesh-and-blood actors, and through a medium insurmountably subject to time and contingency. One wonders whether, equipped with the film apparatus and the luxury of retakes, Minghella’s Play finally attained and preserved the tone, the pacing, and the vocal quality that Beckett had in his head.

Samuel Beckett’s austere existential vision of the loneliness of the individual facing the inevitable—death—has become familiar. Not cosy, exactly, but familiar. For revivals of the best-known plays (Endgame, Happy Days, Krapp’s Last Tape ), I reckon, the consequences of this familiarity have mostly been positive: conceived for an audience not just prepared but eager to engage a bleakness once thought distasteful or performance-averse, these productions are free to explore the great range of tones and tenors present in Beckett’s marvelously variable prose. It is now standard, for example, for directors to articulate the humour and farce inherent in his character’s inexplicable conditions, as well as the anticipated tragedy.

On the other hand, familiarity has certainly deprived these plays of some of their edge, and placed far more emphasis on the lead performances. There was once a period when a fresh, personalised performance of a Beckett role was a sort of oxymoron, like playing an inventive C minor scale. Now, it’s as common and unobjectionable to speak of ‘Tony Roberts’ Hamm’ or ‘Fiona Shaw’s Winnie’ (the performance that inspired this article, on which, more below) as of, say, Ian McKellen’s Richard III or Sarah Siddons’ Lady Macbeth. Which is to say, Beckett’s ‘great’ roles exist, like Shakespeare’s, as autonomous organisms with which our most respected actors are encouraged to engage not just their talents, but their professional personae, in relationships of creative dependency—ideally, symbiotic ones. This point might seem unremarkable, but it speaks to how decisively the popular sense of what a ‘Beckett character’ can and should be has changed with the years.

Some of the most intriguing pages of Beckett Remembering, Remembering Beckett, a collection of interviews and tributes recently compiled by a Beckett biographer, come from actors who recall the author trailing their early productions of his work all over Europe, exhorting them never to inquire about the characters’ lives beyond the text, not to play their parts realistically, and to deliver as many lines as possible in their best dull-grey monotone. “Too much colour” was his frequent, head-shaking objection in rehearsals; he would recoil conspicuously when an actor’s delivery tinged a line with even a faint hint of sentimentality. Yet the actors often felt that he was quite wrong—that the presence of lively and psychologically plausible human beings on stage created for the audience an irrefutable sense of reality as well as the potential for identification, which the drama’s restrictive choreography, stylised speech-patterns and absurd plots then worked to undermine. The contrast between the ‘believable’ actor and the disorienting stage world, they felt, beautifully dramatised the tension between denial and affirmation that underlies much of Beckett’s work. Beckett himself came eventually to accept (to a point) this take on the business of characterisation in his plays. Of course, his and his estate’s regular and messy feuds with any production that dares attempt renovation on his stage directions has pretty much secured his name as a byword for textual tyranny.

My own hunch on the more-colour/less-colour issue is that the greater number of Beckett’s characters are neither round nor flat—not so abstracted as to preclude a passionate response altogether (still a common lament of Beckett audiences), nor so specified as to override their status as archetypes. The best Beckett actors tend to pitch their characters somewhere shy of psychological realism, while still investing them with physical and emotional gestures of extraordinary precision: Alvin Epstein’s Nagg in the Irish Repertory Theatre’s 2005 Endgame is a beautiful recent example. More than any insight into a character’s psychological profile, it is by gestural clarity, scrupulously applied from moment to moment, that the actor suggests that a character’s being, if ultimately confused or inarticulable, is yet rooted in something deep and shared.

I started this piece by remarking that Beckett’s plays are now cultural mainstays, and that one sure sign of a cultural mainstay is its recruitment by the star system. (To be sure, we’re not quite at the point of seeing, I don’t know, Ben Stiller receiving marquee billing as Clov in an off-Broadway Endgame. But thirty years on from the founding of New York’s star-spangled Shakespeare on the Park summer festival, the idea no longer sounds like complete lunacy.) More than any other Beckett play, Happy Days has become a star vehicle. That it has done so seems far from inevitable, seeing as the play consists almost solely of the fragmented, repetitive, half-daft monologue of a 50s-ish woman who is buried throughout in a rising pile of dirt. Still, the role of Winnie, which calls for an actor to raise a watershed of musings through which trifles, trivia, lyrics, affection, injury, and terror rapidly coarse and mingle, has challenged some of the great female actors of the last half century, from Peggy Ashcroft to Madeleine Renaud to Prunella Scales (Fawlty Towers).

Prone to silly self-flattery, compulsively optimistic cries (‘This will have been another happy day!’) that brim with heartbreak as well as hilarity, and shocking intimations of death by scorching, Winnie is a capacious creature who offers much for actors to make their own. But Fiona Shaw, who headlined a recent revival at the National Theatre in London (it closed on March 1), must certainly be the first to have achieved so palpable a conflation of performer and role. For the Winnie of her interpretation is a born performer, hostess to her own slow succumbing: a human parable re-conceived as the Actor’s Nightmare, and significantly reduced in the process.

If Winnie’s mound is the Seat of theatre royalty, then Shaw boasts strong claims for succession. Best known as the heinous Aunt Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter films, widely celebrated for inducing rashes and cold sweats in audiences as the child-murdering Medea a few years back, Shaw has the stage persona of the natural extrovert: extra-large features, sweeping wingspan, a voice to drown a brass band. In realizing Winnie she draws heavily on these natural gifts, and the brio and stamina she has harnessed for her performance are undeniable and sometimes genuinely impressive. Her rummages through her black carpetbag are accomplished with a wealth of pleasing detail, and at one point, she vividly mimics the explosion that has sent her parasol into flames. On the other hand, Shaw brings off these feats with more than a hint of self-congratulation, a self-conscious style that sours in the Second act, when Winnie is rediscovered buried up to her neck. Shaw’s unconventional alterations to her performance—she blacks her teeth, tosses skeletal grimaces, and slurs her speech progressively as if suffering from heat stroke—come off more as appended gimmicks than the resourceful fruits of extreme deprivation.

Too often, this Winnie’s daily rituals and reiterative chatter appears to be a routine in the theatrical sense of the word. Many actors have located the gasping panic and paranoia at the root of Winnie’s sparky graciousness, but Shaw, in her defenses of her troglodyte husband Willie and swift changes of subject, merely seems determined to distract herself and her audience from despair…or their wristwatches. The flourishes, preens, girlish giggles, and histrionics she exercises throughout are drawn from the performer’s stock of diversions, and are founded in nothing more than a compulsive desire to sugarcoat the real. Winnie’s words upon words are evidence of her resolution—her desperate, irrefutable, achingly simply will to survive. As delivered by Shaw, they seem more like evidence of her delusion: we watch her being witty, busy, evasive, but never sense the dread or loneliness beneath these gestures. As a result, Shaw’s performance has the feel of a mean-spirited send-up of the character.

Beckett’s challenge to actors is to locate in themselves the raw essences which their characters embody. Those bodily constraints and punctilious stage directions are tools he fashioned to assist them in this task; in this respect they are not unlike the leather masks of the Commedia dell’Arte, which secure the role’s expressive coherence, yet force the performer to keep the mask ceaselessly activated, ‘alive’ with local, peculiar attention and humanity. Perhaps Shaw’s crack at Happy Days might have evolved with time, but in the performance I saw at the National there was hardly the suggestion that Shaw had seen the Winnie in herself. Instead—bolstered by an almost unconscionably lazy reading—she had seen herself in Winnie.

The ‘star vehicle’ phenomenon is pervasive. But one might have hoped that Beckett’s plays, the best of which tap the undercurrent of universal fear and joy and do so with the unforced, intuitive power of the permanent, would have stayed immune for longer.

The photo is a cropped image of Billie Whitelaw in a production of Happy Days, directed by Samuel Beckett, which opened on June 7, 1979.