Venus in Fur addendum ...

Has it ever occured to anyone - it might have, it has only just occurred to me - that the idea for One Touch of Venus, the Kurt Weill-Ogden Nash extravaganza starring Mary Martin (Ava Gardner in Hollywood), the story of a young man who kisses an ancient statue of the goddess Aphrodite, whereupon she comes to life and wreaks happy havoc on New York - the show that gave us "Speak Low," the most sensuous of all Broadway theater songs - came to someone (Moss Hart? someone like that) who had been reading Sacher-Masoch's novel Venus in Furs, the foundation document (with de Sade's Justine) of Sado-Masochism, in which the protagonist is violently aroused by a statue of that goddess on the grounds of a sanitarium in eastern Austria-Hungary and then meets, as it were, the goddess's living incarnation?

This came to me not at David Ives's play but on Facebook today, when someone referred to "violating a statue," having mis-spelled "statute."

Venus in Fur

To celebrate what would have been my mother's eighty-ninth birthday last night (had she not died on February 4), went to a play. She'd certainly have approved.

The best new play I’ve seen in years: Venus in Fur. (by David Ives, a witty man.) A playwright (Wes Bentley) has made a play out of Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novel, the eponym of Sado-Masochism (which novel everyone knows about but no one seems to have read – anyway, I sure haven’t), and he’s annoyed with all the actresses who have auditioned, and at the last minute one more shows up (the divine Nina Arianda), apparently a typical ditzy New York/L.A. brainless blonde, screaming, “Fuck!” when things go wrong, wearing inappropriate (for the era) fetish clothes, not understanding his allusions.

She nonetheless insists he let her read for him, “You don’t have to tell me about sado-masochism; I work in the theater.” And she puts on a Victorian dress and suddenly, like a light-switch, she’s a self-possessed aristocratic Austro-Hungarian of the 1870s with an entirely different accent (more or less British) and entirely different manner and movements, and he falls under her spell, and then every now and then she snaps out of it, is a ditz again (with no pause, it’s hilarious just to hear her do it, the moment you hear her whiny American accent the illusion shatters and we’re back in the rehearsal room), and she leaves him utterly bewildered and gradually demolishes him, exploiting the sado-masochistic feelings he’s always denied - and turns out (possibly) to be the goddess Aphrodite come to punish him for his self-suppression and his male condescension to women - and by the end she has him eagerly playing a girl whom she, as a man, exploits and crushes - most amazing (and funniest) performance I’ve seen on any stage in years - and probably the best staging of the central confrontation of the Bacchae, though using hardly any lines from that play. A major pagan event. Absolutely riveting.

At the end, my date, Nika, said, “Did you notice?” (I hadn’t.) “While we were doubled over laughing, most of the people in the audience didn’t get it at all; they had no idea what it was about.”

One could spend a night, many nights, just watching emotions play on Arianda's by no means conventionally beautiful face. Wonderful, wonderful.

Wild Child, Euripides' Ion and my array of Greeks

Wild Child, currently playing at New World Stages on West 50th Street, is the sort of theater that might have been designed with me in mind. Two actors with split-second variation of mood, manner, accent, affect, character, movement, stance, play the innumerable characters of an Off-Off-Broadway updated staging of Euripides' Ion (perhaps the most obscure of the master's extant tragedies, perhaps justly), plus the entire audience and assorted flashbackeroos, while the star and his wacky family turn out to have a family history not unlike the operatic one depicted in the play.

There are references to a children's book of Greek myths that inspired the boy to put on puppet plays of those theatrical sources and led inexorably to his present non-career - "I put on Greek tragedies with sock puppets - I even cut a hole in Medea's mouth so, after killing her children, she could eat them. But then Orestes got lost in the wash...." - similar early exposure to the myths led me to religious revelation as a born-again Pagan! - while other incidentals refer to a performance of Richard Schechner's outrageous (often nude) version of Euripides' Bacchae, Dionysus in '69, which as it happens was a revelation to me in my late adolescent pre-hippie days.

So I was very glad to be there, and enjoying myself, and following the plot, and feeling gratitude to Michael Feingold for directing me thither!

But the collected comments on the NYTimes review of the same item - five raves, two "whatwazzat? boring" imply that this is theater for only a certain sort of audience. If you need to have your comedy served to you in bite-sized clearly underlined bits, Wild Child is not for you - you have to be able to participate, to pay attention, to follow complicated plots between hilarious (sometimes off-color) humor, to catch and retain the clues that tie it all hilariously together. I guess it helped me to know Euripides, though I'd never seen any Ion before and I bet half the audience thought the actors had made the play up.

I am in some doubt as to whether or not to count this on my list of Greek plays as an actual attendance at a performance of Ion.

All this was a bit heady after a very odd phone conversation with my brother, who seems to wish to behave in a civilized fashion, and I am trying to respond a tempo, but if any chat with him extends longer than ten minutes he is hacking away, sticking shivs in my ribs, raking up old nastiness, as if he has nothing neutral to say on any occasion. Fifteen minutes of him per year is my limit. Still, a great relief considering what I have been anticipating. Mum is still going strong, or rather weak, which is why I suggested he come now and not wait till Christmas by which time she might be gone. Without my aunts and cousins and many friends offering long-distance hugs I'd be in a pretty dizzy place. But the family resonances with those in the play, I mean, well....

I had rather hoped Ion might complete my list of Greek tragedies, that I had now seen every extant one, in some form or other, but on checking my list, I find that I have never attended any version of Euripides's Suppliant Women, Heracleidae or Cyclops, his (or anyone's) one surviving satyr play (and no one knows who wrote Rhesus, sole survivor of Greek tragedy of the later, decadent generations), so I still have not completed my list.

Some may think me still further off, as I admit I've only seen Alkestis, Iphigenia in Tauris, Helen in Egypt, and Andromache in operatic redaction (recantations?)(and the last was Rossini's Ermione, based on Racine, not Euripides), and Antigone only in Anouilh's version and Hippolytos only via Racine's Phaedra - ditto Sophokles' Women of Trachis, where I've only seen Handel's oratorio, Hercules (though staged) - and only the hip-hop Seven Against Thebes (surprisingly good fun) and the gospel version of Oedipus at Colonus (even more so) and the country-rock version of Madness of Herakles, Hercules in High Suburbia (delicious).

As for Aristophanes - I haven't done well there at all, especially as few of them were made into operas (Al Carmines' Peace was a standout, and Schubert did a version of Lysistrata set during the Crusades), but one opera I am particularly eager to see is the recently recovered Die Vogel, Braunfels' lovely, late romantic but sane version of Aristophanes' The Birds, which was given in Los Angeles last April.

An absolutely fascinating piece in New York Review of Books in October by Daniel Mendelssohn (whose critical writing I love), in the context of Joanne Akalaitis' production in Central Park last summer (which I missed) explains Bacchae's weird construction better than I've ever seen it explained by anybody: as Euripides' riposte to Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae, an assault on Euripides' view of women. I don't think I've ever read this play, certainly haven't seen it. Is this a new conclusion of Mendelssohn's, or has it been generally mooted for ages? He certainly makes his case and (as usual) makes me sorry I missed the production under discussion.

I've never seen a satisfying production of Bacchae (Dionysus in '69 was satisfying as theater, but not as a production of Bacchae), and familiarity with the work of the two lead actors in this one (both of whom DM panned) kept me away. Alan Cumming got it mightily wrong in the last Bacchae I saw - he never played Dionysus; in fact, he never plays anything but Alan Cumming, for which I have a limited tolerance.

Sadly, the Mendelssohn review is not available on line at the NYR site. You have to borrow it from a friend or track it down at the library (October issue). I let my subscription to the NYR lapse because they PILE UP, and too many things in this apartment pile up. I turned down a pass from a charming and intellectually stimulating Frenchman last Tuesday because I didn't want to have to locate him under the other piles. This is unfortunate.

Nathan the Wise vs. Eleazar le Juif

December 28, Feast of the Holy Innocents, patrons of all fictitious victims on whose account we grow sentimental while ignoring those at risk but too familiar.

I felt in the need for jollification but not for spending much money. Looking through the Village Voice theater listings, I found that the Pearl Theater Company, a tiny rep co. on St. Mark’s Place (I’ve seen them do The Rivals and Maria Stuart and Philoctetes), were giving Gotthold Lessing’s Nathan the Wise (1779), and to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the company, were charging $25 a ticket. That seemed very reasonable (there were lots of families speaking foreign tongues in the tiny house), so I biked on over.

I do not know, but I know of the play – though I did not know it was the first play staged in Germany after Nazi surrender (and one of the first banned when they took over). I also knew Lessing, the son of an Evangelical minister, had been a bright light of the Berlin Enlightenment under Frederick the Great (idea for a musical: On the Fritz, the happy-go-lucky adventures of Prussia’s gayest prince …) and that his best friend was Moses Mendelssohn, whose candidacy for the Royal Academy Lessing advanced, only to be vetoed by the king, though he admitted MM “possessed every qualification for membership but a foreskin.” I also heard a lovely story from old Baroness de Popper, of how a friend of her father’s, learning she had never been to the theater (she being then nine or ten), took her to the Burgtheater to see Nathan, and they sat alone in the imperial box (the gentleman being a friend of HM’s), and she was utterly enthralled (it’s a pretty damn well-made play), and sat staring at the stage, not even seeing anyone come into the box, until the lights went on at the interval, and she looked around and there was Franz Josef. (“And was he wearing his crown and everything?” asked her granddaughter, when she told her the tale.) And he said, “They get younger and younger,” shaking his head, and then took her to the buffett, and got her everything she wanted.

I also knew Lessing had put into the play the medieval fable about the sultan (in this case Saladin) who challenged the richest Jew in town to say which of the three great religions was the true one (figuring to get at least a huge contribution if not a conversion out of him) and the Jew responded with the fable of the three identical rings, one genuine, two imitations, that a father gave to his three beloved sons, each of whom believed he possessed the true one, “but as to which was the true one, that would only be revealed by the example of the one who loved his brothers most.” Whereupon Saladin repents his blackmail and offers the Jew his hand and friendship. Nearly everyone turns out (after an explosion of ill temper) to be a nice guy in this play: Jews, Muslims, Christians, and furthermore all the young people turn out to have been born into a group other than the one they believe is theirs. Only the patriarch is bloody minded, and Nathan outfoxes him. The plot is very mathematical, and would not work if the actors did not make the figures threatening and pardoning each other human, and the company were all quite good, and a mix of races to boot (with no great logic to it as far as putative ancestry goes).

At the end, when (contrary to most such plots) the young people who have fallen in love discover they are brother and sister (oh well), and far from being a Jewess and a Prussian Templar are both children of Saladin’s dead brother (and a Christian girlfriend slain by her relations for having an affair with a Muslim), Nathan turns to us and says, “You may think this extraordinary, a fable, a miracle – in fact it is the common tale of our lives: for whenever we meet other humans, we encounter our kin.” (I daresay it says “men,” not “humans” in the German, and in older translations, here and throughout the text. Lessing, like Moses Mendelssohn and Mozart and Beumarchais and most of the Founding Fathers of America, was a Mason.)
The mystery about this, is that at the end – and also several times during the play when such sentiments are invoked by other characters – I found myself close to tears, and this happened again when trying to describe the plot to others that night or the next day. I mean, it’s not like I’ve changed my medication or anything. And I’m not usually so affected by the plots of plays or operas, even when well acted (or sung).

However, the back-story of Nathan and his “daughter” struck me another way: Nathan explains that his wife and their sons were burned alive while hiding in a factory from anti-Jewish Christian riots, that for three days he prayed to be saved from his hatred of the Christians, and on the third day, just as reason reasserted itself, a groom accosted him (as in Sophocles’ Oedipus, the groom turns up of course, 19 years later, as a hermit friar), having been sent from his Christian friend Wulf (who turns out to be the Muslim Assad) who was going to war (to be killed), and wished to entrust his Christian baby daughter to Nathan. Nathan soon loved the child, named her “Rachel,” and raised her in ignorance of her birth (but Nathan’s Christian housekeeper knows the truth). When the Patriarch learns of this, he wants Nathan burned at the stake for distracting a baptized soul from the true faith, and we’re actually worried until Saladin saves the day.

The reason this struck is that, in 1835, 56 years after Nathan was first printed (and long after it had become a classic), Halévy presented his opera, La Juive (to a libretto by, inevitably, Scribe – who surely knew Nathan well). And though set in 1415, not 1190, La Juive is oddly similar/dissimilar to Nathan: Eleazar, a goldsmith, lost his wife and sons during riots in Rome many years ago, but rescued a Christian infant he has raised as his own daughter, “Rachel.” As in Nathan, a Christian has fallen in love with Rachel – but it is the sneaky Prince Leopold, disguised as a Jew, not a hot-tempered Templar who turns out to be Saladin’s nephew (and Rachel’s brother). Again the church demands that the Jews burn (because an interracial love affair is anathema), though Rachel, broken-hearted, agrees to spare Leopold’s life. The emperor does not appear – no Saladin ex machina here. The one voice of reason and tolerance is not Eleazar’s – he hates all Christians – but Cardinal Brogny’s – and he is ignored, except by Eleazar, who taunts him: before he took holy orders, Brogny had a wife and a daughter, who vanished in the fire that killed Eleazar’s family. “I happen to know your daughter lived, and was raised by Jews,” he says. Brogny misses the point we get – he begs for the missing info; Eleazar enjoys refusing. But, alone, sentenced to die, he wonders if he can take his adored Rachel with him to death – thus the opera’s most famous aria, “Rachel, quand du Seigneur.” Usually omitted: An offstage chorus of bloodthirsty Christians, and Eleazar’s cabaletta, resolving to keep Rachel from those awful people. So to the climax: Eleazar asks Rachel if she would live, without him, as a Christian; her heart broken by Leopold, she says she would never abandon her faith, and leaps into the caldron of boiling oil. “With your last breath, tell me where my daughter is!” cries harmless Cardinal Brogny. “She is there!” Eleazar cries, pointing – and then leaping after her, as the Christian crowd exults.

This opera was a major hit until Nazi times – it was the fourth of the great grand operas. Eleazar became, rather than Nathan, the symbol of the Jew, his feelings tender only for his own, hating the rest of the world (howsoeverbeit justified). I feel a great distaste for him when I see the opera – impressed by his heroic perversity, but not admiring, or affected, by him and his predicament. The Cardinal and Rachel are the only likable characters in the opera, and their principles do not triumph. What did people think when they saw Tamberlik and Viardot sing it – or even Caruso and Ponselle? (Tucker begged Bing to revive it for him; Bing flatly refused.) Halévy was a completely secularized Jew, the head of the French Conservatory – he wrote ten other operas, none of them remotely as successful. His daughter married Bizet (who boasted on their wedding eve that neither of them believed in any religion), and later was the first hostess to admit Marcel Proust to her salon (he was at school with her son). When I wrote about La Juive for the Met program, and for Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots (another Scribe script), which premiered the next year (Meyerbeer was a Berlin Jew, who continued to practice all his life – he had promised an elderly relation in his youth – but whose daughters married into the Christian nobility), I suggested that these spectacles of religious persecution and massacre were as popular as they undoubtedly were (in Paris, and everywhere else, for a hundred years) in part because they flattered the audiences that such events were of the past, that they could not happen again, people having become so enlightened.

But why did hateful Eleazar and his Rachel supersede lovable Nathan and his Rachel in the popular mind? Is this more of the phenomenon of the rise of the New Anti-Semitism during the nineteenth century, when conspiracy theories began to proliferate, and every wicked tendency in society that could not be traced to the Freemasons or the Communists or the Anarchists or the Nihilists was freely ascribed to the Jews?

And why does it bring tears to my eyes to see actors (even damned good actors) playing the earlier, we’re-all-human-kindred message of the Enlightenment presented 130 years after it was written, and in the one city in the world where the war seems to be going the right way, 9/11 or not?

Ibsen's Ghosts - His answer to Hamlet?

From the library, got four DVDs of Dame Judi Dench in this, that and the other for the BBC, most notably The Cherry Orchard and Ghosts. Hadn't seen either play in donkey's years.

Ghosts is an all-star treatment: Kenneth Branagh as Oswald, Michael Gambon as Pastor Manders, Natasha Richardson as Regina. The play was a shocker when written because the very word "syphilis" was not uttered in polite society outside a doctor's consulting room, and it is not uttered in the play either -- nor does it come into focus until the very end. (If you watch it waiting for sex to come to the fore, you'll have a long wait.) The play's more pertinent issues are hypocrisy of society, church, state, men, women -- even incest gets a bit of an airing. One has to wonder, because the play is such a well-made machine, each irrelevant bit of dialogue turning out to hint at other themes that grow larger until they engulf the story, what sin Mrs. Alving has committed that she is so very terribly punished by the final curtain. The fact that she is beginning to open her mind, to consider things her society condemns, makes her sympathetic in the early scenes, and she remains more honest than the grown men of the play. But her lies for the husband she had grown to hate, and her lies to the son she worships, evidently lead step by step to the awful end. What has she done? (It is unlike Ibsen to condemn women, except unloving women, as in John Gabriel Borkman.)

But the reason I bring this up on this newsgroup is that it struck me during the scenes where Mrs. Alving is obliged to disillusion her adored Oswald about the personality of his father (and connive with Pastor Manders in concealing that father's vices) that the model for this story is that play all Scandinavians know, Hamlet: the Gertrude-Hamlet relationship (and the relationship of both to the ghostly dead king) that is the crux of the relationships in that play.

And I wondered if anyone has written about this, or noted it: the madness of the son, the necessary killing of the reputation of the dead father, the way his ghost lingers anyway (unseen, unheard) in his house, the mother who has never admitted that she loved, and attempted to run away with, another man, the more-than-brotherly love the son feels for the girl who turns out to be his sister, the cheerful fate she goes to that the older woman tries to save her from, the misbegotten councils of the girl's ridiculous old father, the boy sent abroad to keep him from knowing his father's fate, the fate that follows him anyway, in his corrupt heredity.

Well it renews my respect for Ibsen, though I still can't regard it as ranking among his great plays (Wild Duck for me).

Playwrights Who Make Us Squirm

Just saw the revival of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls at the Biltmore – the play that famously begins with a drunken dinner party (in 1982) for a “modern woman,” Marlene, whose six voluble guests, all of them legendary or anyway historical, include Pope Joan, patient Griselda, and an imperial concubine from 14th-century Japan. Only later, in the more naturalistic scenes (Marlene has just been promoted – over a man! – who has a heart attack in consequence – to a managerial position at a head-hunting firm), did I realize what Churchill was up to. Like me, she reads a great deal of history and spends a great deal of time chatting with folks long dead, especially when traveling in their former haunts. And as the play plays out, and you see what Marlene’s rise to the “top” has cost her, and why she has been willing to pay (and has tried to ignore the price), you understand why she chose those particular “top girls” for her celebratory dinner. (In real-time probably a solitary stinking-drunk-night.)

In fact Marlene has no friends she dares confide in, rely on, let go in front of – so she must bring them in from the past, dead (even imaginary) ladies who cannot betray her or rival her for the attention of any men present. (Men barely count at all in her world – they’re just work-mates or playmates.) By the conclusion, when melodramatic if predictable ancient secrets have been unearthed, you understand Marlene's life, the price she has had to pay for success that makes her unhappy, lonely, and drunk, and the ghastliness of the alternatives she would probably have faced had she made other choices.

This is a bit of a trial, I infer (from comments on the NYTimes review), for audiences expecting an ordinary drama – many of them left before the end last Tuesday. It’s also a tour de force for seven actresses (in 15 parts), which no doubt accounts for its popularity with producers and performers. I found the “employment interview” scenes uncomfortable to sit through – brought back the agonies of my own job-seeking when I did not want the jobs on offer, could not imagine what I did want.

Long live playwrights unafraid to make us squirm, eh?

And the acting was wonderful, most notably Elizabeth Marvel (Marlene), Mary Catherine Garrison (as an itchy kid and a chippie trying for a job), Mary Beth Hurt, Jennifer Ikeda as an employment "counselor" who accidentally talks too much of her own empty life, belying her delicious smile, Martha Plimpton as another itchy kid and as drunken Pope Joan, Ann Reeder as a cheerfully ruthless employment "counselor", and Marisa Tomei as Marlene's bitter sister - she was not good, however, with the improbably Scottish accent of a Victorian traveler, and in fact accents are a problem throughout, though aside from Tomei's Scot, they did not prevent me finding the machine fascinating.

Bet this never happened to you at the movies ...

I bet this doesn't happen at the movies:

As the flick begins, they announce that Matt Damon has a virus and had to leave; he's being replaced by someone who's never done the part before.

But it's okay.

Then, halfway through, Gwyneth Paltrow (the star) goes running off-screen, leaving the guy hanging in mid love scene.

After a moment, the screen goes dark (but not before you saw the panic in his eyes).

Pause.

Then they announce Miss Paltrow is ill, and will be replaced by (name you never heard of).

She wears the same dress and wig but doesn't look anything like her.

She takes a while to warm up, but hey, Daniel Day-Lewis walks off with the character part anyway. (As you expected.)

Somehow the kid gets through the big final scene, and the girl takes the climax.

Thundering ovation.

You never had that happen to you at the movies, did you? (Low class bastards.)

At the Met tonight, Tristan und Isolde.

Rumors of doom had been circulating since the disastrous prima on Monday.

Ben Heppner, virused up, has run back to Canada. (He's been cracking on all his high notes anyway.) The tenor who replaced him Monday was so bad, he was booed off the stage. (Ugly too, they tell me.)

So tonight they found some kid who'd never sung Tristan before.

Gary Lehman (this is a heldentenor?)

We're all very hopeful. (Besides, Matti Salminen is King Marke, and bound to be a hit.)

Peter Gelb, announcing the change, looks like he has veins of ice water and this happens all the time.

The kid is tall, well built, looks like Errol Flynn, sings okay, acts okay, keeps an eye fixed on Jimmy.

Then, halfway through the love duet in Act II, Debbie Voigt runs off stage. To get a drink of water I presumed. The tenor just sort of stands there, singing ardently to a blank stage, Jimmy keeps conducting ... the curtain comes down.

Pause.

Someone (not Gelb) comes out to say: Don't leave the room, Debbie's sick, some soprano no one has heard of (Janice Baird, and she IS on the roster) is getting dressed and will take over.

Of course she hasn't had time (much less a whole act) to warm up, but anyway:

At last we get the duet again (which means the poor Tristan will be singing more of the opera in one night than ANYONE EVER HAS).

Isolde finally warms up by the climax.

Matti Salminen walks off with it, as I knew he would.

In the intermission, my friend La Cieca (opera columnist a l'outrance, see www.parterre.com) says, "I'm speechless."

I said, "Don't tell me we'll have to replace you too!"

Well, Lehman sings Act III, the toughest workout for tenor ever composed.

Doesn't sound fabulous, but he's okay. No cracked high notes.

Isolde rushes in clumsily (she's never rehearsed), sings Liebestod. She's okay.

Silence to the last chord.

Chaos:
Standing ovation for the pair, then for the whole cast, then for Jimmy.

It's 1 a.m. and nobody wants to leave without screaming.

Nobody wanted to have been, for those six hours, anywhere else in the world.

I bet you've never been at a movie where this happened.

Live theater forever!

(And down with microphones!)

P.S. During the pause in Act II, while we waited for Isolde, we told each other stories of memorable stage disasters we'd seen. In my case, this always (but not from now on!) means the infamous Carlo Bini Gioconda. The woman behind me, however, had been at a Princess Ida in Symphony Space - the Ida had got sick, somehow they found another woman who knew the role but not the staging. In mid-Act II, where Ida falls off a bridge and is rescued from drowning by gallant Prince Hilarion, the lady fell on top of the tenor, knocking him out. Some flurry of activity, and then Hilarion appears to sing his two stanzas of aria. And the audience notices something funny: Yes, it's a different guy in the same costume. Luckily, he only had to sing that solo before being dragged off-stage till well into Act III. But I'm sure Al Bergeret was sweating blood.

The Fourth Wall is a Two-Way Street

Friday night I attended Marlowe's Edward II, which is in previews at the Red Bull Theater Company, a little Off-Broadway outfit that won kudos (and my heart) with their hilarious, delicious, sexy, bloodthirsty run of The Revenger's Tragedy a season or two back. The plays are both Liz-Jac in era and composed in blank verse, but they are very unlike: Revenger's Tragedy is out-and-out fantasy fiction set in an Italian neverland with no motivations but lust and blood-lust ("How many people do we have to murder up here before you groundlings feel something, damn it?"), where Edward II is based, however vaguely, on actual history as found in Holinshed's Chronicles. This was a new invention, history fictionalized and versified for the stage, pretty much invented with this play and Shakespeare's contemporary Henry VI plays (whoever wrote those, and they appear, at least the first one or two, to be collaborations). (There are also Edward III, which I saw recently Off-Off-Broadway, and Edmund Ironsides – also works of c.1590 but of disputed authorship and no very great quality.)

No nation ever had done anything quite like history plays before, and no other nation with a theater scene (Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Russia, China, Japan) produced them for many centuries thereafter – even Shakespeare and Marlowe did not quite dare to hold the reigning dynasty up to the cold limelight of the stage, though Plantagenets were fair game enough. (Henry VIII was not produced until Hal's daughter, Bess, the last Tudor, was safely under a stone in the Abbey.) At Red Bull every word is clear, and every syllable is spoken as though it meant something (though I would cavil that they get the meaning wrong by a few centuries now and then), and this is a great pleasure in the staging of old plays, so I am a fan. But – perhaps because it's early in the run, perhaps because the play has been edited and rearranged to a degree with half the characters omitted and their speeches redistributed like legacies among the remainder, perhaps because it is so very different a piece – I did not totally delight in the zaniness of Edward as I had in that of Tragedy.

Among my objections to the staging (highly inventive on a minimal set) were a few that have occurred to me at other stagings of classical texts (plays and operas) in recent years: pointless updating and pointless porn. A knife is not a sword, and toy pistol is not a sword, and a submachine gun is not a sword, and if the characters keep saying they are going to stab someone or run them through or make them feel the point or edge of their steel, and then they pull out a gun and threaten them or kill them (and Red Bull is very clever in its use of hemapacks at such moments, I must say – there were gasps of horror behind me now and then from some person(s) who had not read a synopsis before buying tickets), it brings about a certain uneasiness, a certain distrust of the actors and the company in the audience that would like to fall under Marlowe's spell. (True, I can count on the fingers of one disfigured hand the number of convincing stage stabbings I've been witness to – but I've never seen a convincing stage shooting.)

My other objection – here and in many an opera and staging – is gratuitous gamy sex. Sure Queen Isabella and Mortimer were lovers – oh Lordy how they could love – but Marlowe makes it quite clear that this passion began slowly and was not consummated until shortly before they joined forces to depose her husband. (The play telescopes the events of twenty years into five acts, and it would be surprising if all the politics did make sense.) When the Queen calls him "gentle" Mortimer and "sweet" Mortimer early in the play (for one thing, in the written text these terms are often addressed to his uncle, a character deleted in this version), it is a casual mode of address in Marlowe's time, kind of like calling someone "dude" today without meaning anything at all about their style of dress – to imply, as this staging does, that she has the hots for Mort from the beginning in spite of every word she actually says (she's in love with her husband for the first three acts), makes a nonsense of the characters. Even more annoying, was having them spouting blank verse while humping all-but-bareass in mid-stage in a scene that is set in a council chamber – it leaves one flabbergasted when other characters (including Isabella's very young son) then enter the chamber without apparently noticing the semi-clothed (and dripping) state of the two persons they meet there. I don't see what this adds. We know they're screwing, we don't have to be shown it. The Archbishop of Canterbury would certainly object to being invited to watch.

I had a similar problem with the current staging of Macbeth at the Metropolitan Opera. We know the Macbeths have a good, strong, sensual marriage – they don't have to sing their every duet while horizontal to demonstrate this. For one thing, it makes vocalizing tough; for another, opera singers are not the people I want to watch doing this (or wouldn't be if I wanted to watch anyone at all – other than maybe myself and one or four other persons – doing this). For another, and a bigger, point: it adds nothing and detracts from the atmosphere. The love duet, like the pas de deux in ballet, is a conventional artistic metaphor for the sex act. We understand when they're talking, or singing, or dancing, that this is a figure-of-performance. To see them actually at it is not art – it's porn.

I realize that pornography is the most significant art form of our time, the only one that means anything to most people (I am not most people, and I don't watch porn – really, it bores me), but to inject porn into every other art form cheapens them, and in destroying the boundary between public discourse and private salaciousness, we rob porn of its joy. If we turn every artistic and dramatic situation that includes a metaphor for lovemaking into actual lovemaking, into porn, is that it will not only rob art of its point, it will rob porn of any point at all. A few years down the road, if we want sexual jollies, we'll put on a DVD of a Vivaldi or Wagner opera or a Shakespearean tragedy and turn off the sound. And then the porn industry will have nothing left to appeal to – the private world will have ceased to exist. If we give names to every nameless thrill, there goes the thrilling part of our world, polluted like every joyous beckoning mystery that used to hedge and inspire our lives.