Sunday, 23 December 2012
Film review: The Hobbit (12A)
FILM
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
(12A) 169mins
★★★★★
IN A NUTSHELL
Peter Jackson's return to Middle Earth is an astonishing feat, peppered with joyous performances and brimming with imagination.
REVIEW
As I left the preview screening in Holborn, a pigeon swooped low over my head. It was a grey London pigeon set against a grey London sky.
The pigeon wasn't particularly giant or notably tiny, it bore no dwarves upon its back and it failed to offer any words of illumination regarding my lineage or my impending sacrifice.
B-o-r-i-n-g. I, like Bilbo Baggins, am a fussy little Englishman with a tidy life and no hankering for adventure. Except when there's an adventure to be had and someone else might be having it in my stead...
I yearned to be back in Middle Earth, clashing swords with orcs and riding eagles and generally heading off in that direction to face an unknown peril, preferably learning a little bit about myself on the way.
I am new to this place - this lush cluster of kingdoms - having never sunk my hairy and bulbous Hobbit toes into the moss of Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Hence I have the zealousness of the convert. Whatever. This film is astounding, a riveting treat, full of breathless wonders.
Turn a deaf, possibly large lobed, ear to the doom-mongers who talk of creative bloat and how this first part of the trilogy merely arrives at chapter six of the slight book.
I went in prepared to heed their advice, figuring that toilet breaks along the 2 hour 49 minute length would be plentiful. But there wasn't a moment to spare.
Yes, it is long but this is a classic tale steeped in the mythology of story-telling itself. People go on a long journey to face a big challenge and along the way distract themselves with personal stories and parables and myths that entertain or inform.
To the detail. Bilbo Baggins casts his mind back to his younger days when he left the Shires to join Galdalf and 13 dwarves on a quest to reclaim the lost kingdom of Erebor, now inhabited by a grumpy dragon.
Led by Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), their journey - the first part at least - takes them through treacherous lands swarming with goblins, orcs, trolls and wargs. (In this world, everything sounds like you're trying to give directions to Stevenage with a mouthful of conkers.)
And, for those who cannot thrive without the parsimonious stimulation of linear story-telling, there is so much more to enjoy beyond the fireside chat. Open those peepers and scan the horizons for lush landscapes, a match for anything on Pandora and, in many cases, genuine bits of New Zealand. Or relish the sheer all-engulfing craftsmanship of the film-making.
Admire the performances too. Behind latex and CGI, the dwarves tend to become an amorphous mass (Ken Stott and James Nesbitt excepted) but, despite the dry "Thorin son of Thrain son of Thror" intoning, there are subtleties to enjoy.
Martin Freeman is perfect as Bilbo Baggins. He begins the film in a dressing gown which is an reminder of his other put-upon, bristling hero - Arthur Dent in The Hitch-Hikers' Guide To The Galaxy - and his beautifully modulated performance, switching between drama and wry comedy - survives the sensual overload of The Hobbit's epic sweep.
Sir Ian McKellen, as Gandalf, may spend the film spouting proverbs and twee schoolmasterly homilies but he does so with such panache and class. If Werther's Originals could speak, they would sound like our favourite East End pub owner.
And, in the most spell-binding sequence of the film, Andy Serkis reprises his role as Gollum, the bony, conflicted stoor hobbit who challenges Bilbo with life-or-death riddle games. Witnessing how Serkis can be so part of Gollum and so separate is a mesmeric experience.
You will no doubt hear of the higher rate 48 frames per second (compared to the usual 24) which gives a sense of televisual hyper-reality and, to some, proves a distraction. I found the sharpness an adequate counter-balance to the general frustrating dullness afforded by 3D specs.
But, all these things are forgotten to be replaced by the immersive vision of director Peter Jackson who commands this vast terrain with breath-taking sweeping shots. He can choreograph seething, warring masses and yet still pick out tiny dots of comedy and humanity.
In the face of the snarling anti-hype, the Unexpected Journey turns out to be an unexpected joy.
Saturday, 8 December 2012
Film review: Seven Psychopaths (15)
FILM
Seven Psychopaths
(15) 110mins
★★★✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Martin McDonagh's pitch-black gore-fest is a sharp comedic treat although it veers wildly and ends up in competition with itself
REVIEW
Stuck in an office, kicking around for ideas, little wonder that so many writers turn to the act of writing for inspiration, even less wonder that they turn writers into action heroes.
To be frank, it is a vaguely dispiriting notion - but it can be done.
Charlie Kaufman had huge success creating a sweaty fictional Charlie Kaufman writing Adaptation and Stephen King is forever casting the blocked author as a mighty warrior.
Now acclaimed Limehouse-based Irish writer-director-producer Martin McDonagh follows up the inspired In Bruges with a slice of bleak comedy which features a central character called Marty going toe to toe with the fiendish cunning of a blank piece of paper.
Marty (Colin Farrell) dreams of finishing his screenplay Seven Pyschopaths but he lacks focus and drinks too heavily.
"I got the title - I just haven't been able to come up with all the psychopaths yet," he says.
He becomes embroiled in the petty dramas of actor-cum-dognapper Billy (Sam Rockwell) and his debonair partner Hans (Christopher Walken).
It is typical of this lopsided film that Marty becomes a subplot, rapidly overwhelmed with the end-of-the-pier loop-the-loop of his gun-totin' circus freak pals. (He doesn't actually announce he's become a subplot but every other story device gets a name check.)
Bonkers Billy takes the beloved shih tzu of psychopath Charlie Costello (Woody Harrelson) and before the slabs of this stop-start thriller settle, vast and skewiff like a toppled henge, there will appear the requisite number of psychos to fulfil the promise of the title.
Rockwell and Walken in particular have fun with McDonagh's rich (if bitter) confection. Highlight is Billy's fantasy final shoot-out gore-fest that if it wasn't played out as a dream sequence in this movie would be a shoo-in for Tarantino's next.
Without the central sparkle of McDonagh's characterisation and script, this project would have veered into the roadside ditch, upended and undone by its mannered quirkiness and love of self.
But the sharp dialogue, juicy riffs, plentiful gore, sly sense of humour and engaging performances just about keep this ramshackle drama on track.
Pity McDonagh was behind the camera.
A kinder, if crueller, director would have culled some of the excesses and let the best of the writer shine.
Film students would weep (because they love a bit of meta) but the rest of us wouldn't leave the cinema talking of diamonds in the dust.
Book review: Gravity's Engine, Caleb Scharf
SCIENCE
Gravity's Engine
Caleb Scharf (Allen Lane)
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Caleb Scharf examines the latest thinking about the greatest enigmas in the universe - the black holes that destroy and create our galaxies.
REVIEW
Few books have attempted the epic opening of Caleb Scharf's wonderful description of a photon's journey from the beginning to time across 12 billion light years of void before it splats - like fly against windscreen - into a sensor that builds an image of a far-away cluster on the computer of Manhattan-based scientist.
British-born Scharf's 200-year odyssey into the mind-baffling world of black holes continues in the same vein - exciting, filled with awe and thickly laced with the sorts of figures the popular science market loves.
(Millions are nothing, there are black holes out there more than a billion times more massive than the sun.)
Scharf's lucid account picks apart these swirling, superlative-laden enigmas and takes us to the edge of current thinking about how they kill and create the cosmos with frantic ease.
They twist space-time to such an extent that both become irrelevant and yet far from being celestial rarities they are the heart of every galaxy, including our own.
The armchair enthusiast often parts company with some of these dense tracts because there's only so much boggling a mind can take on the DLR but Scharf has enough metaphors, juicy gobbets and narrative nous to keep the reader hooked and enchanted.
Film review: Great Expectations (12A)
FILM
Great Expectations
(12A) 128mins
★★★✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Mike Newell's adaptation shows grit and integrity but lacks magic and gets lost in the fog.
REVIEW
"I won't deny there have been too many secrets," declares solicitor and guardian Jaggers - and a wry snicker circles the auditorium. Too true, too true, we think.
Great Expectations may be Charles Dickens' most beloved book but it also ranks alongside his most preposterous
Boiled down into a series of confrontations, revelations, familial convolutions and cliffhangers, the resulting pulp would colour the most outrageous of American daytime soaps.
But Dickens turned this mush into magic by gumming words together like no man before or since - with a tragi-comic brilliance and - most crucially - with energy.
Yet this earnest and charm-deficient adaptation of the story of Pip - from blacksmith's boy to London gentleman by means of a mystery benefactor - is left to mope on a leash.
David Nicholls writes and Mike Newell directs a film that longs to be the definitive version of the age.
And the ingredients are there - the mud and blood of the marshes and the streets of London; the script sonorous and gratifying; the pacing busy and condensed; the cast neatly picked but where's the fun? The moment?
Fog rolls across the marshes and also across the eyes of the participants.
Take for example Miss Havisham in yellowing dress, doll-like and fragile in her remote rat-strewn stately home.
All the ingredients of a Tim Burton gothic comic epic are present (including Helena Bonham Carter).
But she is pallid, inconclusive, neither frightening nor comic nor weird.
A few of this excellent if lacklustre ensemble turn up the heat - David Walliams an inspired choice as Mr Pumplechook; Ewan Bremner bright-eyed as Wemmick, Ralph Fiennes throatily grim as Magwitch - but they are beaten down by their eerily subdued fellows - Robbie Coltrane as Jaggers, Sally Hawkins as Mrs Joe, Jason Flemyng as amiable Jo.
Maybe the trouble lies with this particular story. The best bits are at the beginning, in the graveyard, in Satis House with the spooky Estella and boisterous Pale Young Gentleman.
Beyond that, an unravelling. The middle section is ramshackle and the last act a welter of improbabilities.
Pip (Jeremy Irvine) is honourable but unresolved so the onslaught of revelations appear pedestrian or barmy and his love for Estella (Holliday Grainger) a fiddly distraction.
Nicholls (Starter For Ten, One Day) has professed his love for this work from the earliest age but the adoration has translated into stilted awe.
This film is a checklist of iconic scenes and, despite the twists and turns, comparison of adaptations provides the best route through.
Not bad, of course, but not as good as it should have been and so, sadly, qualifies as a disappointment.
Stage review: Constellations, Duke of York's
STAGE
Constellations
Duke Of York's Theatre
★★★★★
IN A NUTSHELL
Two lovers have enough problems getting it together without getting messed around by the multiverse.
REVIEW
If there were to be a stage play that combined the themes of honey bees and quantum mechanics, two boxes on my list of Perfect Plays would be ticked.
And so there was. Humble Boy in 2001 did just that. I have watched the ink of the ticks fade for a decade wondering if the winning bee/particle combo was played out and done. Until this week.
Constellations is a different product altogether from Charlotte Jones' grand work - for a start the bees are not the thing and the quantum world is but a smart structural device.
Instead, Constellations, directed by Michael Longhurst, concerns itself with examination of another of nature's great enigmas - the inept and magnificent human heart.
Writer Nick Payne has used the implications of quantum mechanics - that every decision taken or not taken is played out in another universe - to construct a winning and poignant two-hander. All that in 70 minutes straight through (and that's a third box ticked).
The stuttering romance of scientist Mirianne and beekeeper Roland suffers enough trials without the intervention of the multiverse repeating crucial moments as distorted echoes - adding layer upon layer of drama, pathos and confusion.
These brief encounters live on Tom Scutt's stage, empty except for a ceiling of balloons. But this is no celebration and they may not even be balloons.
As they light up, they became the very particles that mangle space-time and, as illness grips, they possess the fizzing agony of misfiring neurons.
Payne has eschewed the Sliding Doors conceit - two separate paths. Instead, he goes for the juddering phase shifts of nuance.
The same scene - of flirtation, of row, of crisis - is played again and again with the characters nimbly adopting a different attitude, sometimes juggling roles between them.
Two people, on a stage, conjuring worlds. It almost justifies the existence of theatre on its own.
But I've saved the best till last.
The performances of Sally Hawkins and Rafe Spall are sublime; their comic touch impeccable, their grasp of the drama moving, their chemistry palpable.
Spall's trademark laconic hangdog is taken for a long walk as is Hawkins' cheerfully gauche naif. But the demands of the narrative mean they need to turn their performances on an atom and become someone else in a flash. Harder, angrier, wearier.
Their execution of these about-turns could prove an irritation but ends up a charming marvel.
The multiverse means I'm fated to see this play an infinite number of times. Not. A. Chore.
Until Jan 5. Go to atgtickets.com
Book review: On The Map, Simon Garfield
BOOK
On The Map
Simon Garfield (Profile)
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Simon Garfield surveys the historic landscape of map-making and concludes that they say as much about our story as they do about topography.
REVIEW
Like just about everything else in what was formerly modern life, the internet has both destroyed and re-shaped the landscape of maps.
Now, as Simon Garfield writes in this comprehensive, often overwhelming, survey of the craft of the cartographers, we do not pore over a map and look for the arrow saying "You Are Here".
Instead the map comes to us - via our phones, our SatNav and our flapping print-outs from Google. The GPS in our pockets puts us at the centre of the universe.
We are creating a new map, with fluid borders, made up of the connections we make via Facebook, Twitter and the like.
No longer, he laments, the childlike wonder of the Ordnance Survey in plastic sheathing on a wet day in Kendal, or an X Marks The Spot treasure map, or the unexpected wrong turn into a sleepy village (unless, of course, the SatNav is having an off day).
The author wanders far and wide in his quest for stories (presumably he knows where he's going) and takes in such mouth-watering themes as thieves, forgers, scandals and controversies, from the sale of the Mappa Mundi to the paradigm-shifting Vinland map whose importance and authenticity has been disputed for decades.
In early years, he points out, cartographers hated the white space of terra incognita and went to work on cartouches and a flights of fancy about the lifestyle of the inhabitants.
Occasionally a fake mountain range would appear and would stay for decades because cartographers copied each other.
But as the brave or foolhardy pushed back the boundaries - culminating in the golden age of Antarctic exploration - the globe was completed.
Meanwhile, form and function became the next big thing with the Tube map at its pinnacle.
Simon Garfield has an eye for the curious and quirky facts - such as the crushing news that Here Be Dragons is a fiction and how the A-Z lost all its Ts out the window - and this a joyfully plotted journey from Ptolemy to Googleplex.
One complaint: the reproduction of the maps is dour and disappointing.
Exhibition: Ansel Adams, NMM
EXHIBITION
Ansel Adams: Photography From The Mountains To The Sea
National Maritime Museum
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
America's photographic pioneer receives a rare British outing focussing on his studies of water.
REVIEW
So that's one big US question sorted. (A. Barack Obama.) But there are plenty more that remain unresolved - about the changing character of America and whether global decline should be managed or rejected in the face of economic uncertainty and China's dominance.
The traditionalist Republicans are licking their wounds, wondering how the "white establishment" - products of the founders and the pioneers - will fare against the growing coalition of minorities who are increasing vocal in their demands and less attached to the nation's Euro-centric backstory.
Little wonder then, in a nation where the journey is still a significant metaphor, that the chronicling and conquering of the landscape has an extra resonance, suggesting permanence and progress at a time when there is little evidence of either.
Ansel Adams (1902-1984) was a pioneer in the field of photography and, to a lesser extent, in conservation. He was just such a maker of icons.
His name stays in the pantheon because he comfortably reflects the best of America back to the Americans.
Adams captured the contrasts - the unyielding rock against the ephemeral spring - and, in doing so, impressed upon the unruly landscape a sense of conquest, pattern and purpose.
Adams is not so much known in Britain but that may change with a rare compilation of 100 original prints on display in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
He is best known for his rugged landscapes but the "maritime" theme is evoked with the movement of water, the capturing of moments beyond the reach of the painter.
Waterfalls, geysers, rapids, ponds, seascapes - he pointed his camera wherever water worked, perhaps inspired by the view of the San Francisco bay from his childhood home.
Something of a misfit, the precocious Adams found school impossible and he was sent with an open pass to the year-long 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco which was a hotbed of new cultural thinking. Cubism, Picasso and the possibilities of a new century percolated in his young mind.
Guest curator Phillip Prodger said: "One of the things I wanted to do was get at some of the radicalism and the experimentalism of Ansel Adams when he came on the scene.
That he wasn't just a maker of pretty pictures but he also contributed philosophically to the advancement of photography as an artform."
Adams' first picture - found by Prodger in the archives - was taken when he was 13 and was of the world's fair itself. Although made in the classic Victorian "pictorial style" - soft and sentimental - he labelled it Portals Of The Past suggesting he, too, was hungry to embrace radical concepts and progressive interpretations.
His journey, through his life and captured in this exhibition, showed he was in the forefront of the Modernist movement - taking photos that were hard, uncompromised, sharp and uncontrived.
This austerity of style encompassed the Group f/64 movement (named after a lens aperture that tightens depth of field) whose manifesto rejected any ideological notion of art and aesthetics.
However, he was restless, artistically and geographically. He became a perennial retoucher in the darkroom.
He would say the negative was the equivalent of a music score and the print, the conductor's performance.
In fact, he was, in his later years, as much a print maker as a photographer and the vast American Trust murals of the '50s, on show in the exhibition, demanded innovative thinking and precise execution, revealing a craftsman and perfectionist at the height of his powers.
He said: "A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels in the deepest sense about what is being photographed."
This exhibition is the fullest expression of Ansel Adams - a restless life in search of moments, of beauty and order in a reckless landscape.
■ Ansel Adams: Photography From The Mountains To The Sea, until April 28, £7, rmg.co.uk.
Image: Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, California, about 1937 Photograph by Ansel Adams. Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust
Saturday, 10 November 2012
Wharfinger: Resurrection Men meet a fitting end
On November 5, 1831, two east Londoners turned up at King's College School of Anatomy in The Strand with the body of a young boy to sell.
Gruesome though it was, their deal was not unusual. John Bishop and James May along with Thomas Williams, who lived in Nova Scotia Avenue in Shoreditch, were Resurrection Men who made a living answering the needs of the anatomy schools.
As a new exhibition at the Museum of London attests, the economics were grim but undeniable - demand outstripped supply.
The hospitals and private schools needed 5,000 cadavers a year for dissections. In 2006, the Museum of London Archeology uncovered a cemetery at the Royal London Hospital in use between 1825 and 1841.
The skeletons found there showed evidence of dissection, from craniotomies to severed limbs.
Surgery was something of a bloody lottery but lack of training material hampered would-be surgeons further - they were left to share bodies or study wax models.
Thomas Wakley, founder of The Lancet, wrote in 1827: "Even at the enormous prices now demanded by the Resurrection Men an exceedingly small supply can only be obtained."
The trade of the grave robbers was necessary but reviled. Fears about entering the afterlife intact and the serial killing indignities of Edinburgh grave robbers Burke and Hare persuaded many to take precautions.
Some were buried in metal coffins (Mrs Campbell's last refuge of 1819 is on display), while others stood guard over newly-buried loved ones. Some laid mantraps in cemeteries.
But still the deals between the Resurrection Men - "burkers" - and the hospitals held firm.
So, when Bishop and May presented the corpse at the Strand school and demanded 12 guineas, it was not an unusual transaction.
And although the fresh state of the body alarmed anatomist Richard Partridge, he still handed over eight guineas.
However, his suspicions grew and he alerted police. A coroners jury offered a verdict of murder with Bishop, Williams and May the prime suspects.
On 19 November, Supt Joseph Sadler Thomas searched the cottages at Nova Scotia Gardens and found clothing in a well and one of the privies. Not just from the so-called Italian boy (believed to have been Carlo Ferrari) but from multiple murders.
Bishop, 33, Williams, 26, and May, 30, were all found guilty of related crimes. Before sentence was passed Bishop admitted that the Italian boy was, in fact, from Lincolnshire on his way to Smithfield. He had been drugged with rum and laudanum and when he lost consciousness he was pitched into a well to drown.
They also admitted to the murder of Frances Pigburn and her child who were sleeping rough in Shoreditch, and a boy named Cunningham. Williams and Bishop admitted to stealing up to 1,000 bodies over 12 years.
They were hanged at Newgate on December 5, 1831, before a crowd of 30,000 with May respited because he had no knowledge of the murders.
The case of the "Italian boy" was one of the drivers of the Anatomy Act of 1832 which tried to put the Resurrection Men out of business by providing "unclaimed" bodies for dissection.
In the 100 years following the Act 99.5% of the 5,700 corpses delivered came from workhouses, asylums and hospitals. The poor paid the price but the Resurrection Men were out of business.
These days, 1,000 bodies are needed a year. They are provided mostly by donors but, still, demand outstrips supply.
And the bodies of May and Williams? They were removed the same night - for dissection.
- Doctors, Dissection And Resurrection Men at the Museum of London. Go to museumoflondon.org.uk.
Gruesome though it was, their deal was not unusual. John Bishop and James May along with Thomas Williams, who lived in Nova Scotia Avenue in Shoreditch, were Resurrection Men who made a living answering the needs of the anatomy schools.
As a new exhibition at the Museum of London attests, the economics were grim but undeniable - demand outstripped supply.
The hospitals and private schools needed 5,000 cadavers a year for dissections. In 2006, the Museum of London Archeology uncovered a cemetery at the Royal London Hospital in use between 1825 and 1841.
The skeletons found there showed evidence of dissection, from craniotomies to severed limbs.
Surgery was something of a bloody lottery but lack of training material hampered would-be surgeons further - they were left to share bodies or study wax models.
Thomas Wakley, founder of The Lancet, wrote in 1827: "Even at the enormous prices now demanded by the Resurrection Men an exceedingly small supply can only be obtained."
The trade of the grave robbers was necessary but reviled. Fears about entering the afterlife intact and the serial killing indignities of Edinburgh grave robbers Burke and Hare persuaded many to take precautions.
Some were buried in metal coffins (Mrs Campbell's last refuge of 1819 is on display), while others stood guard over newly-buried loved ones. Some laid mantraps in cemeteries.
But still the deals between the Resurrection Men - "burkers" - and the hospitals held firm.
So, when Bishop and May presented the corpse at the Strand school and demanded 12 guineas, it was not an unusual transaction.
And although the fresh state of the body alarmed anatomist Richard Partridge, he still handed over eight guineas.
However, his suspicions grew and he alerted police. A coroners jury offered a verdict of murder with Bishop, Williams and May the prime suspects.
On 19 November, Supt Joseph Sadler Thomas searched the cottages at Nova Scotia Gardens and found clothing in a well and one of the privies. Not just from the so-called Italian boy (believed to have been Carlo Ferrari) but from multiple murders.
Bishop, 33, Williams, 26, and May, 30, were all found guilty of related crimes. Before sentence was passed Bishop admitted that the Italian boy was, in fact, from Lincolnshire on his way to Smithfield. He had been drugged with rum and laudanum and when he lost consciousness he was pitched into a well to drown.
They also admitted to the murder of Frances Pigburn and her child who were sleeping rough in Shoreditch, and a boy named Cunningham. Williams and Bishop admitted to stealing up to 1,000 bodies over 12 years.
They were hanged at Newgate on December 5, 1831, before a crowd of 30,000 with May respited because he had no knowledge of the murders.
The case of the "Italian boy" was one of the drivers of the Anatomy Act of 1832 which tried to put the Resurrection Men out of business by providing "unclaimed" bodies for dissection.
In the 100 years following the Act 99.5% of the 5,700 corpses delivered came from workhouses, asylums and hospitals. The poor paid the price but the Resurrection Men were out of business.
These days, 1,000 bodies are needed a year. They are provided mostly by donors but, still, demand outstrips supply.
And the bodies of May and Williams? They were removed the same night - for dissection.
- Doctors, Dissection And Resurrection Men at the Museum of London. Go to museumoflondon.org.uk.
Stage review: 55 Days, Hampstead Theatre
STAGE
55 Days
Hampstead Theatre
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Two charismatic actors reveal the compelling contrasts of two celebrated historic figures in Howard Brenton's nuggety Civil War clash.
REVIEW
Hampstead Theatre has been reconfigured. The seats are placed on either side of the stage which creates some awkwardness (backs to the audience, darling) but promotes the idea of division; a Parliament of opposites.
Which is the theme of Howard Brenton's marvellous new play set at the tail-end of the English Civil War when battle fatigue could have tipped the country back into the kind of tyranny it had spent years trying to escape.
The 55 days of the title is the time (1648-49) between the rampant Army purging parliament of latent royalists and the moment when this most bloody chapter of English history was brought to a close with an axe.
"We are not just trying a tyrant, we are inventing a country," declares Oliver Cromwell.
And the sticky business of nation-building - of compromise and idealism - is the theme that excites the playwright.
The Roundheads are winning the war but likely to lose the peace as, yet again, brother is set against brother over the meaning of victory and the interpretation of God's will.
Amid the chaos, however, two characters (then as now) take centre stage and both are embodied by actors equal to the challenge.
King Charles I is prissy and self-righteous, the only one dressed in historical garb - with the familiar lace and flounces - and with a lilt of Scottish to his precise voice as he calls upon his position as heaven's sacred anointed to scare the bejesus out of his God-fearing opponents.
Mark Gatiss is clever in the court scenes and intriguing in isolation with the poignancy driven solely by his predicament and never from his glassy heart.
Douglas Henshall as Oliver Cromwell is the charismatic and flawed pivot of the piece.
Cromwell had no official leadership position but provided the moral heft and Henshall shows us the dithering and the decisiveness in a mesmerising and nuanced performance.
What Brenton calls the "obligation" scene - the fictional meeting of the two men - is as nourishing and accomplished as the long build-up demands with Cromwell urging Charles to see sense and "come to terms" and the king preparing serenely and doggedly for martyrdom.
The scene is topped by the trial where the brightest legal minds make law on the hoof to counter the king's mix of canny insight, blind intransigence and unexpected populism.
Director Howard Davies stages all this amid flanks of filing cabinets, with tiny ties and tinny typewriters conjuring the thin gruel of post-war squabbling.
Simon Kunz, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Daniel Flynn and Gerald Kyd provide solid support in a rewarding work; a reminder that the institutions we take for granted were carved, with blood and blister, from stubborn stone.
Until Nov 24. Go to hampsteadtheatre.com.
55 Days
Hampstead Theatre
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Two charismatic actors reveal the compelling contrasts of two celebrated historic figures in Howard Brenton's nuggety Civil War clash.
REVIEW
Hampstead Theatre has been reconfigured. The seats are placed on either side of the stage which creates some awkwardness (backs to the audience, darling) but promotes the idea of division; a Parliament of opposites.
Which is the theme of Howard Brenton's marvellous new play set at the tail-end of the English Civil War when battle fatigue could have tipped the country back into the kind of tyranny it had spent years trying to escape.
The 55 days of the title is the time (1648-49) between the rampant Army purging parliament of latent royalists and the moment when this most bloody chapter of English history was brought to a close with an axe.
"We are not just trying a tyrant, we are inventing a country," declares Oliver Cromwell.
And the sticky business of nation-building - of compromise and idealism - is the theme that excites the playwright.
The Roundheads are winning the war but likely to lose the peace as, yet again, brother is set against brother over the meaning of victory and the interpretation of God's will.
Amid the chaos, however, two characters (then as now) take centre stage and both are embodied by actors equal to the challenge.
King Charles I is prissy and self-righteous, the only one dressed in historical garb - with the familiar lace and flounces - and with a lilt of Scottish to his precise voice as he calls upon his position as heaven's sacred anointed to scare the bejesus out of his God-fearing opponents.
Mark Gatiss is clever in the court scenes and intriguing in isolation with the poignancy driven solely by his predicament and never from his glassy heart.
Douglas Henshall as Oliver Cromwell is the charismatic and flawed pivot of the piece.
Cromwell had no official leadership position but provided the moral heft and Henshall shows us the dithering and the decisiveness in a mesmerising and nuanced performance.
What Brenton calls the "obligation" scene - the fictional meeting of the two men - is as nourishing and accomplished as the long build-up demands with Cromwell urging Charles to see sense and "come to terms" and the king preparing serenely and doggedly for martyrdom.
The scene is topped by the trial where the brightest legal minds make law on the hoof to counter the king's mix of canny insight, blind intransigence and unexpected populism.
Director Howard Davies stages all this amid flanks of filing cabinets, with tiny ties and tinny typewriters conjuring the thin gruel of post-war squabbling.
Simon Kunz, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Daniel Flynn and Gerald Kyd provide solid support in a rewarding work; a reminder that the institutions we take for granted were carved, with blood and blister, from stubborn stone.
Until Nov 24. Go to hampsteadtheatre.com.
Film review: Skyfall (12A)
FILM
Skyfall
(12A) 142mins
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Fifty years on and still no-one does it better - and this Bond spectacular ranks among his finest, and most personal, adventures
REVIEW
The 50th anniversary of this most rewarding of franchises demands a suitably sharp and explosive response.
Skyfall is just such a response. Director Sam Mendes has created a gritty and personal story which has a fair smattering of exotic locations (Shanghai is de rigueur for a blockbuster these days) but is mostly set close to home. Very close to home.
Play Bond bingo with the recognisable locations including, obviously, the District line and, less obviously, the swimming pool above the Four Seasons in Canary Wharf. (Less obviously because its been transposed to China.)
But the geographical location is nothing compared to the proximity of the plot to the heart of the protagonist (simmering Daniel Craig).
The past returns to haunt melancholic M (a peerless Judi Dench) and Bond must track down and destroy the threat before the threat gets there first.
The fact that the threat comes in the form of bitter blond bombshell Silva ups the ante for he is one of the cleverest, slimiest, creepiest villains of the canon, with Javier Bardem licking his lips as he gets to create a camp horror straight from Gotham City.
As Bond and M fight a rearguard action against this most formidable of foes (they resort to Home Alone/A Team style make-do-and-mend which is always fun if not spectacular) the snarky but affectionate relationship between the matriarch and the bad boy is filled out in sparse and wry exchanges.
All this happens between gloriously OTT action set pieces, captured by imperious director of photography Roger Deakin who shoots acts of destruction like works of art.
"What's going on! Report!" says the glacial M listening in from HQ.
"It's rather hard to explain ma'am," says Bond's sidekick.
And so it is with this Bond which is packed with talking points and plot twists that, by next week, will have set Twitter alight but until then remain under embargo.
Suffice it to say we get to meet new characters, Eve (Naomie Harris), Mallory (Ralph Fiennes) - remember those names - as well as the new beetle-browed Q (Ben Wishaw) who gives Bond nothing more fancy than a gun and a radio.
"Not exactly Christmas," snarls Bond.
"Were you expecting an exploding pen? We don't really go in for that any more."
And so it goes. Ribbing the formula. Destroying the formula. Embracing the formula. Renewing the formula.
Throughout there are hat-tips to Bonds past, beautifully and lightly done - the DB5! - but nothing gets in the way of the muscle-crunching action that culminates in a fittingly intimate finale hurling us straight into the next 50 years.
Can't wait.
Skyfall
(12A) 142mins
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Fifty years on and still no-one does it better - and this Bond spectacular ranks among his finest, and most personal, adventures
REVIEW
The 50th anniversary of this most rewarding of franchises demands a suitably sharp and explosive response.
Skyfall is just such a response. Director Sam Mendes has created a gritty and personal story which has a fair smattering of exotic locations (Shanghai is de rigueur for a blockbuster these days) but is mostly set close to home. Very close to home.
Play Bond bingo with the recognisable locations including, obviously, the District line and, less obviously, the swimming pool above the Four Seasons in Canary Wharf. (Less obviously because its been transposed to China.)
But the geographical location is nothing compared to the proximity of the plot to the heart of the protagonist (simmering Daniel Craig).
The past returns to haunt melancholic M (a peerless Judi Dench) and Bond must track down and destroy the threat before the threat gets there first.
The fact that the threat comes in the form of bitter blond bombshell Silva ups the ante for he is one of the cleverest, slimiest, creepiest villains of the canon, with Javier Bardem licking his lips as he gets to create a camp horror straight from Gotham City.
As Bond and M fight a rearguard action against this most formidable of foes (they resort to Home Alone/A Team style make-do-and-mend which is always fun if not spectacular) the snarky but affectionate relationship between the matriarch and the bad boy is filled out in sparse and wry exchanges.
All this happens between gloriously OTT action set pieces, captured by imperious director of photography Roger Deakin who shoots acts of destruction like works of art.
"What's going on! Report!" says the glacial M listening in from HQ.
"It's rather hard to explain ma'am," says Bond's sidekick.
And so it is with this Bond which is packed with talking points and plot twists that, by next week, will have set Twitter alight but until then remain under embargo.
Suffice it to say we get to meet new characters, Eve (Naomie Harris), Mallory (Ralph Fiennes) - remember those names - as well as the new beetle-browed Q (Ben Wishaw) who gives Bond nothing more fancy than a gun and a radio.
"Not exactly Christmas," snarls Bond.
"Were you expecting an exploding pen? We don't really go in for that any more."
And so it goes. Ribbing the formula. Destroying the formula. Embracing the formula. Renewing the formula.
Throughout there are hat-tips to Bonds past, beautifully and lightly done - the DB5! - but nothing gets in the way of the muscle-crunching action that culminates in a fittingly intimate finale hurling us straight into the next 50 years.
Can't wait.
Stage review: You Can Still Make A Killing
STAGE
You Can Still Make A Killing
Southwark Playhouse
★★★✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Nicholas Pierpan's morality tale watches the Masters of the Universe struggle to move on with their feet of clay following the Lehman Bros collapse.
REVIEW
Remember the man who walked out of Lehman Brothers bearing a box and a shell-shocked expression? This is his story. Sort of.
This is the story of all of them - what happened following those end-of-days in 2008: who won, who lost and the price they paid, in terms of kudos, yoga mats, lattes and souls.
Writer Nicholas Pierpan puts a human face to the Masters of the Universe, takes them home and makes them sheepishly explain their actions to their peevish wives.
He rips away the Gieves and Hawkes carapace and prods away at the raw nerves beneath seeing what stuff these men are made of, stripped of their expense accounts and their vacuous locker room brinkmanship.
Edward and Jack are old friends. Fidgety Jack (Ben Lee) was busy being a surgeon but was lured to the hothouses of Canary Wharf by posturing, pompous Edward, a chip-on-his-shoulder Croydon boy.
But the survival of the fittest demands swift acrobatic moral re-positioning.
So while Jack flourishes in his hard-bitten hedge fund, ousted Edward (Tim Delap) spitballs with prospects in Starbucks, sells the dream house and finally, at wit's end, joins the FRA (the fictitious FSA) where he plots his revenge against the System.
Their wives ride the same rollercoaster. Shrill Fen (Kellie Bright) abandons dreams of a third child and moves out to Acton, which might as well be Soweto until it becomes Nirvana; while sinuous Linda (Marianne Oldham) sucks up to the yummy mummies she hates. All want to conform, all want to be different.
Their fortunes change in ways that would reveal too much. (It is soapy fare, to be honest, with bombshells and declamations that don't ring true but move the plot along.)
All are despicable and honourable; all are false and honest. In short, they're human, simply reacting, shifting, settling and justifying.
Director Matthew Dunster fills the wide stage with lacquered desks and swivel chairs that become offices and coffee shops and schools while a uniformly robust cast offers plenty of treats and talent. (William Mannering as FRA foot soldier Chris nearly steals the show armed only with a bag of nuts.)
When the story of how art responded to the financial meltdown comes to be written, this smart play may only make a footnote but it does attempt a more ambitious reach than some of the more simplistic dialectic tracts.
Future versions will be shorter. Two hours 40 minutes doesn't suggest the fast-snap of a City on heat.
Instead it is a muffin-topped morality tale intent on capturing what happens when a combatant quits the trenches and is forced into no-man's-land.
- Until November 3, southwarkplayhouse.co.uk
You Can Still Make A Killing
Southwark Playhouse
★★★✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Nicholas Pierpan's morality tale watches the Masters of the Universe struggle to move on with their feet of clay following the Lehman Bros collapse.
REVIEW
Remember the man who walked out of Lehman Brothers bearing a box and a shell-shocked expression? This is his story. Sort of.
This is the story of all of them - what happened following those end-of-days in 2008: who won, who lost and the price they paid, in terms of kudos, yoga mats, lattes and souls.
Writer Nicholas Pierpan puts a human face to the Masters of the Universe, takes them home and makes them sheepishly explain their actions to their peevish wives.
He rips away the Gieves and Hawkes carapace and prods away at the raw nerves beneath seeing what stuff these men are made of, stripped of their expense accounts and their vacuous locker room brinkmanship.
Edward and Jack are old friends. Fidgety Jack (Ben Lee) was busy being a surgeon but was lured to the hothouses of Canary Wharf by posturing, pompous Edward, a chip-on-his-shoulder Croydon boy.
But the survival of the fittest demands swift acrobatic moral re-positioning.
So while Jack flourishes in his hard-bitten hedge fund, ousted Edward (Tim Delap) spitballs with prospects in Starbucks, sells the dream house and finally, at wit's end, joins the FRA (the fictitious FSA) where he plots his revenge against the System.
Their wives ride the same rollercoaster. Shrill Fen (Kellie Bright) abandons dreams of a third child and moves out to Acton, which might as well be Soweto until it becomes Nirvana; while sinuous Linda (Marianne Oldham) sucks up to the yummy mummies she hates. All want to conform, all want to be different.
Their fortunes change in ways that would reveal too much. (It is soapy fare, to be honest, with bombshells and declamations that don't ring true but move the plot along.)
All are despicable and honourable; all are false and honest. In short, they're human, simply reacting, shifting, settling and justifying.
Director Matthew Dunster fills the wide stage with lacquered desks and swivel chairs that become offices and coffee shops and schools while a uniformly robust cast offers plenty of treats and talent. (William Mannering as FRA foot soldier Chris nearly steals the show armed only with a bag of nuts.)
When the story of how art responded to the financial meltdown comes to be written, this smart play may only make a footnote but it does attempt a more ambitious reach than some of the more simplistic dialectic tracts.
Future versions will be shorter. Two hours 40 minutes doesn't suggest the fast-snap of a City on heat.
Instead it is a muffin-topped morality tale intent on capturing what happens when a combatant quits the trenches and is forced into no-man's-land.
- Until November 3, southwarkplayhouse.co.uk
Sunday, 7 October 2012
Stage review: A Chorus Of Disapproval
STAGE
A Chorus Of Disapproval
Harold Pinter Theatre
★★★✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
More tautness and and vigour is needed, but this Trevor Nunn production is still a clever study of provincial lifes, loves and obsessions.
REVIEW
If Rob Brydon were to bring his immense but particular talents to a dramatic role in the West End then the part of put-upon am-dram director Dafydd Ap Llewellyn would be the velvet slippers of his dreams.
The hangdog Welshman of TV fame plays the hangdog Welshman of Alan Ayckbourn's clever-clever suburban farce with brio and eagerness.
Dressed in baggy cords, droopy cardigan and dismayed jowls, Brydon is outstanding in what is, generally, an underpowered version of the revival by the normally meticulous Trevor Nunn.
The scene is set - the light operatic society under the jackboot of the Welsh dragon - is bringing to life The Beggar's Opera, which, amid its tarts and rogues, is centred on a love triangle.
In the twee provincial society, straight from a Mike Leigh 1980s playbook, one love triangle is already in place and another is about to emerge with the arrival of Nigel Harman, who goes from flat-haired dweeb to cock of the walk as he hoovers up the desperate housewives.
The stage is crammed with stereotypes - emotional teens, vampish mares, dodgy dealers - but the set pieces are frequently lost in the fussiness of conveyor belt stage management.
Sometimes - such as in the pub scene - it's difficult to hear (the man behind me repeated the punchlines to his partner) which doesn't play to the strengths of a charming but pallid Ashley Jensen, who, in Extras, did nuanced pragmatism beautifully.
Essentially this is as silly as Noises Off but here the frivolity appears laboured and freighted with needless significance.
A missed opportunity for a starry cast straining at the comic leash.
Until January 5, agttickets.com
A Chorus Of Disapproval
Harold Pinter Theatre
★★★✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
More tautness and and vigour is needed, but this Trevor Nunn production is still a clever study of provincial lifes, loves and obsessions.
REVIEW
If Rob Brydon were to bring his immense but particular talents to a dramatic role in the West End then the part of put-upon am-dram director Dafydd Ap Llewellyn would be the velvet slippers of his dreams.
The hangdog Welshman of TV fame plays the hangdog Welshman of Alan Ayckbourn's clever-clever suburban farce with brio and eagerness.
Dressed in baggy cords, droopy cardigan and dismayed jowls, Brydon is outstanding in what is, generally, an underpowered version of the revival by the normally meticulous Trevor Nunn.
The scene is set - the light operatic society under the jackboot of the Welsh dragon - is bringing to life The Beggar's Opera, which, amid its tarts and rogues, is centred on a love triangle.
In the twee provincial society, straight from a Mike Leigh 1980s playbook, one love triangle is already in place and another is about to emerge with the arrival of Nigel Harman, who goes from flat-haired dweeb to cock of the walk as he hoovers up the desperate housewives.
The stage is crammed with stereotypes - emotional teens, vampish mares, dodgy dealers - but the set pieces are frequently lost in the fussiness of conveyor belt stage management.
Sometimes - such as in the pub scene - it's difficult to hear (the man behind me repeated the punchlines to his partner) which doesn't play to the strengths of a charming but pallid Ashley Jensen, who, in Extras, did nuanced pragmatism beautifully.
Essentially this is as silly as Noises Off but here the frivolity appears laboured and freighted with needless significance.
A missed opportunity for a starry cast straining at the comic leash.
Until January 5, agttickets.com
TV: Mental torture porn
Who watches this stuff? Seriously. I was about 10 minutes into Homefront - nothing else on is the excuse - and what have we got? A young wife with a bawling bairn and a hubbie in Helmand gets a visit from a beret-clad doom merchant.
Next thing, just after she tried to push him and the bad news from the room - they're marching a flag-draped coffin out the back of a Hercules at Brize Norton.
She's a melting wreck and I'm thinking - why put us through the wringer? We could flip over and watch the news. We have to do that, it's an obligation, it's the least we can do considering. But this...
It's like children's hospital dramas. Little Lucy Dawson hovers between life and death as nature's cruel hand slaps her frequently around her bloodless face for a laugh. Why would anyone... I mean, why...
And if that's not enough - get the real thing straight from the bedside. Watch authentic pain. Weep real tears as the genuine Lucy Dawson is watched over by parents too despairing to care that they've got their own Facebook fan page.
Give me anodyne. Give me vanilla TV. Give me Terry And June over Terry And June: Conjoined And Condemned any day of the week and a repeat on Sunday.
giles.broadbent@wharf.co.uk
Next thing, just after she tried to push him and the bad news from the room - they're marching a flag-draped coffin out the back of a Hercules at Brize Norton.
She's a melting wreck and I'm thinking - why put us through the wringer? We could flip over and watch the news. We have to do that, it's an obligation, it's the least we can do considering. But this...
It's like children's hospital dramas. Little Lucy Dawson hovers between life and death as nature's cruel hand slaps her frequently around her bloodless face for a laugh. Why would anyone... I mean, why...
And if that's not enough - get the real thing straight from the bedside. Watch authentic pain. Weep real tears as the genuine Lucy Dawson is watched over by parents too despairing to care that they've got their own Facebook fan page.
Give me anodyne. Give me vanilla TV. Give me Terry And June over Terry And June: Conjoined And Condemned any day of the week and a repeat on Sunday.
giles.broadbent@wharf.co.uk
Film review: Looper (15)
FILM
Looper
(15) 118ms
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Confident writer-director Rian Johnson delivers some mind-bending twists in an ambitious tale of time-travelling gun slingers.
REVIEW
Looper doesn't just deliver one mind-bending action movie - it delivers about four. The fact that two of that number are Back To The Future and Terminator shouldn't irretrievably damage the IQ - for the other two are far more ambitious, complex and intelligent.
Like Inception (which also starred Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the premise is simple but the implications are extraordinary and require a switched-on, forward-facing audience.
The story - along with the stripped down, lo-fi 2044 that is the film's drab setting - come from the fernickety mind of writer-director Rian Johnson, who made a stylish impact with 2005's Brick, also starring Gordon-Levitt for whom he wrote the part of hitman Joe.
Gordon-Levitt's appearance jars at first - like Ed Miliband post-op - but the reason for the brutish physog becomes apparent when the older version of himself is dumped back in his time - it's Bruce Willis.
The head-scratching conceit is this: In the future, the Mob use illegal time-travelling technology to send their marks into the past.
There, hitmen, called loopers, take their lives and the silver strapped to their backs - and dispose of bodies that don't technically exist.
But the loopers are not forward-thinkers. In exchange for loot now, they will have to kill off their future selves at some point.
When Bruce Willis comes back for dispatch, the younger Joe loses his nerve and Willis flees, heading off on a cold-blooded killing spree of his own in order to save his future family.
In some kind of Oedipal nightmare, Young Jo has to destroy his older self because Mob boss Abe (Jeff Daniels), sent back in time to oversee this end of the operation, will ensure both incarnations are bumped off.
But Future Joe, in Terminator style, is on the trail of the kid who will grow up to be the Rainmaker, the fearsome uber-boss who triggers his death 30 years' hence.
Present Joe has sufficient clues to predict his targets and finds himself in the remote homestead of tough-but-vulnerable Emily Blunt where she tends to the needs of odd toddler Cid.
While the blank (indeed unpleasant) duo of Present and Future Joe lack any kind of sympathy or charisma, Blunt's Sara is the damaged soul who, finally, brings a welcome human dimension to the movie.
But Blunt doesn't take top acting honours. They go to wee Pierce Gagnon who manages to convey menace and enigma despite being cute as an psycho button.
This hard-but-brittle flick is a slow-starter (all that infernal exposition) and the downtime is too easily spent ticking off the derivative time-travelling tropes.
However, the spectacular (and genuinely shocking) final sequences make up for the shortage of early charm and tie up the cleverly twisting plotlines with panache.
The film is not always likeable but it is a solid two hours of truly mind-bending entertainment.
Looper
(15) 118ms
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Confident writer-director Rian Johnson delivers some mind-bending twists in an ambitious tale of time-travelling gun slingers.
REVIEW
Looper doesn't just deliver one mind-bending action movie - it delivers about four. The fact that two of that number are Back To The Future and Terminator shouldn't irretrievably damage the IQ - for the other two are far more ambitious, complex and intelligent.
Like Inception (which also starred Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the premise is simple but the implications are extraordinary and require a switched-on, forward-facing audience.
The story - along with the stripped down, lo-fi 2044 that is the film's drab setting - come from the fernickety mind of writer-director Rian Johnson, who made a stylish impact with 2005's Brick, also starring Gordon-Levitt for whom he wrote the part of hitman Joe.
Gordon-Levitt's appearance jars at first - like Ed Miliband post-op - but the reason for the brutish physog becomes apparent when the older version of himself is dumped back in his time - it's Bruce Willis.
The head-scratching conceit is this: In the future, the Mob use illegal time-travelling technology to send their marks into the past.
There, hitmen, called loopers, take their lives and the silver strapped to their backs - and dispose of bodies that don't technically exist.
But the loopers are not forward-thinkers. In exchange for loot now, they will have to kill off their future selves at some point.
When Bruce Willis comes back for dispatch, the younger Joe loses his nerve and Willis flees, heading off on a cold-blooded killing spree of his own in order to save his future family.
In some kind of Oedipal nightmare, Young Jo has to destroy his older self because Mob boss Abe (Jeff Daniels), sent back in time to oversee this end of the operation, will ensure both incarnations are bumped off.
But Future Joe, in Terminator style, is on the trail of the kid who will grow up to be the Rainmaker, the fearsome uber-boss who triggers his death 30 years' hence.
Present Joe has sufficient clues to predict his targets and finds himself in the remote homestead of tough-but-vulnerable Emily Blunt where she tends to the needs of odd toddler Cid.
While the blank (indeed unpleasant) duo of Present and Future Joe lack any kind of sympathy or charisma, Blunt's Sara is the damaged soul who, finally, brings a welcome human dimension to the movie.
But Blunt doesn't take top acting honours. They go to wee Pierce Gagnon who manages to convey menace and enigma despite being cute as an psycho button.
This hard-but-brittle flick is a slow-starter (all that infernal exposition) and the downtime is too easily spent ticking off the derivative time-travelling tropes.
However, the spectacular (and genuinely shocking) final sequences make up for the shortage of early charm and tie up the cleverly twisting plotlines with panache.
The film is not always likeable but it is a solid two hours of truly mind-bending entertainment.
Purpose of the cable car is crystal clear
An advert now labels the cable car a legacy item. "Thanks to the Games," it reads, "you can now fly across the Thames and see London in a whole new light." This is part of a series of adverts branded "Gift of the Games."
Now, one could quibble, if one were so minded, over the direct correlation of the Emirates Air Line and the Olympic Games.
Obviously, traffic escalated over those summer weeks, although I suspect this was due to people killing time between events at Excel and The O2 rather than travelling between the two.
Besides, the Emirates Air Line was never touted as a piece of Games infrastructure and, through pricing and ticketing (and very nearly through its late launch) was excluded from routine travel plans.
However, my quibbling is muted. If someone wants to give the cable car an Olympic sheen I'm not going to get too vexed.
But, the truth is, the cable car never really made sense as an adjunct to the Olympics. However, it makes perfect sense as an adjunct to the Crystal.
Shamefully late for a resident of the area, I took my debut flight last week. Mostly because I got free tickets as part of the hoopla that surrounded the opening of the greenest building in the world, dedicated to innovative thinking about urbanisation.
Taking to the air, after a short walk from that squat, pointy building (the East Angular?), the Air Line made sense in a way it never did before.
From around the world, city mayors, digital thinkers and futurologists will convene at Siemens campus. The cable car (although disappointingly analogue) is a perfect mood music for their deliberations - dramatic, innovative, sexy, leftfield and a tiny bit bonkers. (Plus it opens up the lunching options for delegates.)
I should add that the journey over the Thames is London's latest must-do experience.
From a certain vantage point, with perspective foreshortened, when the loop of the river turns the Greenwich peninsula into an island and when the Royal Docks and river make a drowned archipelago of Silvertown, the notion of a Water City is as obvious as it is breathtaking.
PS The Crystal is reminiscent of the Millennium Dome - snazzy exterior but a purpose that is not entirely clear to the average passer-by. Fortunately, we're not picking up the bill for this one.
giles.broadbent@wharf.co.uk
Now, one could quibble, if one were so minded, over the direct correlation of the Emirates Air Line and the Olympic Games.
Obviously, traffic escalated over those summer weeks, although I suspect this was due to people killing time between events at Excel and The O2 rather than travelling between the two.
Besides, the Emirates Air Line was never touted as a piece of Games infrastructure and, through pricing and ticketing (and very nearly through its late launch) was excluded from routine travel plans.
However, my quibbling is muted. If someone wants to give the cable car an Olympic sheen I'm not going to get too vexed.
But, the truth is, the cable car never really made sense as an adjunct to the Olympics. However, it makes perfect sense as an adjunct to the Crystal.
Shamefully late for a resident of the area, I took my debut flight last week. Mostly because I got free tickets as part of the hoopla that surrounded the opening of the greenest building in the world, dedicated to innovative thinking about urbanisation.
Taking to the air, after a short walk from that squat, pointy building (the East Angular?), the Air Line made sense in a way it never did before.
From around the world, city mayors, digital thinkers and futurologists will convene at Siemens campus. The cable car (although disappointingly analogue) is a perfect mood music for their deliberations - dramatic, innovative, sexy, leftfield and a tiny bit bonkers. (Plus it opens up the lunching options for delegates.)
I should add that the journey over the Thames is London's latest must-do experience.
From a certain vantage point, with perspective foreshortened, when the loop of the river turns the Greenwich peninsula into an island and when the Royal Docks and river make a drowned archipelago of Silvertown, the notion of a Water City is as obvious as it is breathtaking.
PS The Crystal is reminiscent of the Millennium Dome - snazzy exterior but a purpose that is not entirely clear to the average passer-by. Fortunately, we're not picking up the bill for this one.
giles.broadbent@wharf.co.uk
Sunday, 23 September 2012
Let's see this through to the end
"Hour forty five straight through." There it is again, the glorious prospect of a theatre production without interval.
Conventionally, there's an artistic reason - such as a compelling narrative - that persuades management to pass up a plump drinks tab.
But Love And Information by Caryl Churchill is perfect for multiple divisions. The production is all bite-sized chunks, one-set mini-fragments that could be stopped any time for a pinot and a puff.
Maybe it's Churchill - she has the clout to call crunch time on the Pringles. Either way, to the rest of us it's a blessing.
The cursed faff of disassembling the quantum packing of the seat set-up, the stand-up-sit-down bob-o-rama, the buffeting queues at bars and the tyranny of the toilet question.
We do it in the cinema, two hours without the need for a stretch, so why in theatres? Especially in the Royal Court which has the plushest seats in theatre-land.
The biggest challenge for theatres is the suspension of disbelief - why hobble the fantasy with an obtuse anachronism from the era of The Potter's Wheel.
giles.broadbent@wharf.co.uk
Conventionally, there's an artistic reason - such as a compelling narrative - that persuades management to pass up a plump drinks tab.
But Love And Information by Caryl Churchill is perfect for multiple divisions. The production is all bite-sized chunks, one-set mini-fragments that could be stopped any time for a pinot and a puff.
Maybe it's Churchill - she has the clout to call crunch time on the Pringles. Either way, to the rest of us it's a blessing.
The cursed faff of disassembling the quantum packing of the seat set-up, the stand-up-sit-down bob-o-rama, the buffeting queues at bars and the tyranny of the toilet question.
We do it in the cinema, two hours without the need for a stretch, so why in theatres? Especially in the Royal Court which has the plushest seats in theatre-land.
The biggest challenge for theatres is the suspension of disbelief - why hobble the fantasy with an obtuse anachronism from the era of The Potter's Wheel.
giles.broadbent@wharf.co.uk
Film review: Killing Them Softly (18)
FILM
Killing Them Softly
(18) 97mins
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Andrew Dominik's impressively slow-burn tale of Mob retribution gives room and rope for the sleazeball characters to go hang themselves.
REVIEW
It's 2008. US election time. Barack Obama is preaching hope and George Bush is throwing money at the banks to keep the economy, and the American dream, alive.
Far from this slick, high falutin' phrase making, a pair of scuzzy, bumbling Keystone crooks figure they're on to a sure thing, taking down a Mob game because they know Markie (Ray Liotta), who did the same thing a while back, will take the heat.
This is capitalism, red in tooth and claw, says director Andrew Dominik. You have a buck, I take a buck off you.
Where's the honest deal, he asks. In a credit default swap, or down in Louisiana where the truth is brutal and comes with a beatin'. Who are the real crooks? Greedy Goldman Sachs or Russell (Ben Mendelsohn) and Frankie (Scoot McNairy), the artless, sweaty hoodlums poking the hornet's nest for an easy dime.
Chief hornet is Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt playing sleazy chic) who has to sort out this mess and restore order.
He calls on Mickey (James Gandolfini) to give him a hand. But Mickey is a sozzled mess, facing jail, a divorce and a glass that empties too quickly and fills too slow.
We know this because Mickey tells us. This is a talkie. There is violence, slayings - uncompromising, poetically shot grubby headshots - but the director (who took us into deadbeat minds in The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford) is more interested in the hopes and fears of pitiable sleazeballs trying to make a dishonest day's living so they can get the hell out.
Jackie doesn't like the touchy-feely stuff. He prefers "killing them softly, from a distance" but he still gets dragged in, taking Mickey's miserable, martini-sodden confession and giving Frankie some options.
Elmore Leonard's in there, in spirit, with the rhythmic street slang and the code of machismo. Tarantino too, but if you put two crims in a car tossing dialogue to and fro ahead of a job, Tarantino is inevitable.
And don't forget Guy Ritchie for the arch, stylised direction although Lock, Stock is gloss and varnish compared to this rain-beaten, noirish dinge-fest. Says 2008 on the pack, yes, but the browns and oranges and rusty GTOs suggest the '70s, home of the source material - George V Higgins' pulpy Cogan's Trade.
Dominik does a great job for a film with little plot. He builds character, tension and is happy to let the screen shift to slow-burn to give the druggies time to find their high.
The script is crackling: brimful of one-liners and mordant, slapstick wit, and the cast show they know how to give their blunt-toothed schmucks heart, or at least, purpose.
But, in the end, this is just business pal. Nothin' personal.
Killing Them Softly
(18) 97mins
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Andrew Dominik's impressively slow-burn tale of Mob retribution gives room and rope for the sleazeball characters to go hang themselves.
REVIEW
It's 2008. US election time. Barack Obama is preaching hope and George Bush is throwing money at the banks to keep the economy, and the American dream, alive.
Far from this slick, high falutin' phrase making, a pair of scuzzy, bumbling Keystone crooks figure they're on to a sure thing, taking down a Mob game because they know Markie (Ray Liotta), who did the same thing a while back, will take the heat.
This is capitalism, red in tooth and claw, says director Andrew Dominik. You have a buck, I take a buck off you.
Where's the honest deal, he asks. In a credit default swap, or down in Louisiana where the truth is brutal and comes with a beatin'. Who are the real crooks? Greedy Goldman Sachs or Russell (Ben Mendelsohn) and Frankie (Scoot McNairy), the artless, sweaty hoodlums poking the hornet's nest for an easy dime.
Chief hornet is Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt playing sleazy chic) who has to sort out this mess and restore order.
He calls on Mickey (James Gandolfini) to give him a hand. But Mickey is a sozzled mess, facing jail, a divorce and a glass that empties too quickly and fills too slow.
We know this because Mickey tells us. This is a talkie. There is violence, slayings - uncompromising, poetically shot grubby headshots - but the director (who took us into deadbeat minds in The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford) is more interested in the hopes and fears of pitiable sleazeballs trying to make a dishonest day's living so they can get the hell out.
Jackie doesn't like the touchy-feely stuff. He prefers "killing them softly, from a distance" but he still gets dragged in, taking Mickey's miserable, martini-sodden confession and giving Frankie some options.
Elmore Leonard's in there, in spirit, with the rhythmic street slang and the code of machismo. Tarantino too, but if you put two crims in a car tossing dialogue to and fro ahead of a job, Tarantino is inevitable.
And don't forget Guy Ritchie for the arch, stylised direction although Lock, Stock is gloss and varnish compared to this rain-beaten, noirish dinge-fest. Says 2008 on the pack, yes, but the browns and oranges and rusty GTOs suggest the '70s, home of the source material - George V Higgins' pulpy Cogan's Trade.
Dominik does a great job for a film with little plot. He builds character, tension and is happy to let the screen shift to slow-burn to give the druggies time to find their high.
The script is crackling: brimful of one-liners and mordant, slapstick wit, and the cast show they know how to give their blunt-toothed schmucks heart, or at least, purpose.
But, in the end, this is just business pal. Nothin' personal.
Stage review: Top Hat, Aldwych
STAGE
Top Hat
Aldwych Theatre
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Sumptuous settings and silky dancing ensure Irving Berlin's classics are serenaded in style.
REVIEW
There's so much corn at the Aldwych a small heatwave could start a tasty explosion, or a cinema concession.
Sweet or salted? Sweet, of course, as this effortlessly classy musical turns a slight boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl hiccup into two-and-a-half hours of delightful hoofing, non-stop action and money-on-show costumes.
Here's the plot precis: "Jerry Travers (Tom Chambers), the famous American tap dancer, arrives in London to appear in his first West End show. Travers meets the irresistible Dale Tremont (Summer Strallen), the girl of his dreams, and follows her across Europe in an attempt to win her heart."
That makes it sound like complex psycho-drama compared to the slender reality. But that's not the point. The point is the succession of sumptuous Irving Berlin numbers (Puttin' On The Ritz, Top Hat, Lets Face The Music), the clackety-clack chorus line, the screwball romance and the top hat and tails.
The whole lot is played as farce ably assisted by the 'Allo 'Allo Italian manglings of Ricardo Afonso's dress designer Alberto Beddini and the hen-pecked shenanighans of Martin Ball's impresario Horace Hardwick - not forgetting the hen herself, Vivien Parry.
To emphasise the sheer silliness of the story, the script is a succession of groaners. To wit:
"What's this power you have over horses?"
"Horse power?"
Strictly winner Tom Chambers plays Fred Astaire playing Jerry Travers and Summer Strallen plays Ginger Rogers playing Dale Tremont without entirely recapturing the chemistry of the 1935 RKO classic.
The former is ostentatious and charming, the latter, feisty and game and between them manage to convince that a small case of mistaken identity is worth the fuss that ensues.
In fact, by the close, you would only cheer more if it were Bradley Wiggins and Jessica Ennis who had donned the taps and were dancing Cheek To Cheek.
Now booking to 2013. Go to aldwych.official-theatre.co.uk
© Images: Brinkhoff and Mogenburg
Top Hat
Aldwych Theatre
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Sumptuous settings and silky dancing ensure Irving Berlin's classics are serenaded in style.
REVIEW
There's so much corn at the Aldwych a small heatwave could start a tasty explosion, or a cinema concession.
Sweet or salted? Sweet, of course, as this effortlessly classy musical turns a slight boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl hiccup into two-and-a-half hours of delightful hoofing, non-stop action and money-on-show costumes.
Here's the plot precis: "Jerry Travers (Tom Chambers), the famous American tap dancer, arrives in London to appear in his first West End show. Travers meets the irresistible Dale Tremont (Summer Strallen), the girl of his dreams, and follows her across Europe in an attempt to win her heart."
That makes it sound like complex psycho-drama compared to the slender reality. But that's not the point. The point is the succession of sumptuous Irving Berlin numbers (Puttin' On The Ritz, Top Hat, Lets Face The Music), the clackety-clack chorus line, the screwball romance and the top hat and tails.
The whole lot is played as farce ably assisted by the 'Allo 'Allo Italian manglings of Ricardo Afonso's dress designer Alberto Beddini and the hen-pecked shenanighans of Martin Ball's impresario Horace Hardwick - not forgetting the hen herself, Vivien Parry.
To emphasise the sheer silliness of the story, the script is a succession of groaners. To wit:
"What's this power you have over horses?"
"Horse power?"
Strictly winner Tom Chambers plays Fred Astaire playing Jerry Travers and Summer Strallen plays Ginger Rogers playing Dale Tremont without entirely recapturing the chemistry of the 1935 RKO classic.
The former is ostentatious and charming, the latter, feisty and game and between them manage to convince that a small case of mistaken identity is worth the fuss that ensues.
In fact, by the close, you would only cheer more if it were Bradley Wiggins and Jessica Ennis who had donned the taps and were dancing Cheek To Cheek.
Now booking to 2013. Go to aldwych.official-theatre.co.uk
© Images: Brinkhoff and Mogenburg
Sunday, 19 August 2012
Hark! The people have mumbled
US President Bill Clinton once said: "The people have spoken, but it will take a while to determine exactly what they said."
He was either referring to the disputed 2000 election that appointed his successor or to the strategic development committee of Tower Hamlets Borough Council.
No hefty political point here. There are plenty of commentators ready to cast the council as the place where democracy goes to die. They overstate the case but there is a sense of disenfranchisement in a more immediate and practical sense.
In the public gallery, no-one can hear a thing.
In fact, can it be said that the council chamber the worst ever?
Let's examine two facets of the structure that perhaps cannot be changed before we look at two that can.
A broad column sits in the middle of the floor as if the technology of distributing weight had never occurred and we're back to tent poles beneath saggy ceilings. The column sits like a white line of dead pixels on a faulty TV. Worse still, witnesses give evidence from behind the column as though they're sharing playground secrets.
Then there's the the ramp walkway between the members' section and the public gallery which is lined by two waist high partitions of glass. Two layers of glass acting in concert is often known as, er, double glazing and particularly noted for its sound-proofing properties.
Here are a couple of tips to re-enfranchise the tax-payer.
Officers and members should sit up straight, enunciate their words and speak as if explaining Sky Plus to a deaf aunt and not as if confessing a shameful incident to their tie clips.
Microphones should be turned up. Officers and members should then address themselves to the microphone as opposed to working on the assumption that the presence of a microphone within the confines of the M25 coupled with the magnificence of their oratory is sufficient to reach the yearning masses.
On Tuesday, those in the public gallery whose lifestyles and property prices were being determined by a white noise over yonder leaned forward, straining to pick up clues to their fate.
In doing so, their chairs squeaked and the squeak of a chair was like the symphonic crescendo of the Onedin Line against the mumbling mouse squeak of far-off officialdom. From such farces, frustrations grow and disillusionment and paranoia take root.
If you hear them talk of the democratic deficit in Tower Hamlets, they're referring to a shortage of WD40.
Legacy: Just take one street…
If there needs to be a hangover cure following the headrush of acclaim that will follow the Olympic Games one of the ingredients may be Lord Mawson of Bromley-by-Bow.
The man from Bradford who has made east London his domain and his cause has a remarkable ability to cajole people from the doldrums. For him, nothing is impossible and it is unsurprising that a decade ago he co-authored one of the earliest papers suggesting the Olympic Games could be staged in east London.
But the message from the serial social entrepreneur is still daunting. We are half way there. Not in this Games phase (let's not forget the Paralympics are yet to come) but in far grander marathon - the multi-generational, 50-year project to put this part of London back on track.
The 58-year-old sees a grand link between the drive of the early scientist-entrepreneurs who made this part of the capital a global economic driving force, and those that will cluster here in the near future in the digital, green, cutting edge sci-tech businesses.
The years in between, marked by the closure of the docks, the ruination of communities, the haemorrhaging of enterprise and the loss of talent, were a tragic break in that long chain.
Talking to The Wharf at St Paul's Way Trust School in Tower Hamlets, Lord Mawson said: "The past present and future is connected and in the Lower Lea Valley - there is a new city emerging, a Water City - if you look at what's happening in Greenwich, the airport expanding, £3.7billion development in Canning Town, Canary Wharf expanding, a billion pound programme in Poplar and, of course, the Olympic Park and Westfield.
"I led a debate in the House of Lords and [Lord] Tom King said when he and Michael Heseltine flew over this area 27 years ago they saw two living things - two foxes on empty docks. This is not true today.
"What's happening is that green technology is beginning to emerge here, UCL is looking to possibly come to Stratford, the whole link with science and technology is beginning to occur even down in Canary Wharf and here is a school leading the way to answer the question: how does Britain become the best place to do science in the world."
The new school, with its lavishly furnished Faraday centre and patronage of Professor Brian Cox, is a microcosm, a test bed, a practical example of Lord Mawson's great belief in collaboration and getting government out the way.
The St Paul's Way area was in crisis when Lord Mawson took on the transformation project five years ago.
He said: "The question was: How do we create a more joined up community between a school that was failing, a health centre that was in difficulty and 500 homes that needed to be built but nothing was happening.
"So bringing people together developed into the St Paul's Way Transformation Project which I was asked to direct.
"One of the things we had to do was bring £30million of investment together for a brand new school, bring in £1million science complex then, with the housing company Poplar Harca, bring in a health centre across the road.
"We realised that the 11,000 patients of the health service and the education and science programmes at the school are connected. We thought: if that's going to be health centre and that's going to be school why don't we join it together as a campus.
"New ideas don't come out of the clouds, they don't come out of policy papers in Downing Street either. They come out of these collaborations between artists, scientists, engineers and somewhere where people get to know each other, like this street.
"We've got doctors, educationalists, scientists, working together - every week there are new ideas because it's an integrated street it's not a set of silos.
"How do we understand how to do that on a larger scale? Start on one street and understand the devil in the detail.
"If we understand what's going on in one street we can begin to develop it right across a Water City area and suddenly the Olympics becomes a catalyst over the next 25 years for east London to become, once again, become an interface with the world."
So what's his in tray when the cauldron flame is finally doused?
"What I am trying to get together is half a dozen serious businesses who have a long-term stake in this community, in people who live here, and who want to finish the job.
"And finishing the job is driving a vision developing investment opportunities here and making these linkages from education, science and making this a better place to live."
WATER CITY
Lord Mawson's all-encompassing vision for an invigorated and re-focussed east London can be summed up with his Water City initiative.
The name comes from another Docklands champion, Reg Ward, first chief executive of the London Development Corporation.
Lord Mawson said the project was not just a geographical observation- "just fly over it into City Airport and look down and all you will see is islands and water" - but something more urgent.
He said: "Water City is a vision for the future of the Lower Lea Valley. The legacy of the Olympic Park has to have integrity, it has to be built upon the real story of this area. What is the real story? Water has driven the economy of this area for nearly 2,000 years."
The Water City includes the Royal Docks, Canary Wharf, waterside Greenwich and the Lower Lea Valley through to the Olympic Park.
"We need a vision in east London that I can share with entrepreneurs in India and China that they can get in 10 seconds and buy into, not a 50-page strategy document from Government. It has to have integrity based on the real experience of people who have lived here.
"If you get to know East End families as I have, all their parents used to work on the docks. Then something got lost; we need to reinvent ourselves for our own time.
"We need to focus on the next 25 years and science and technology is going to be a fundamental. The Games is a catalyst for the redevelopment of the Lower Lea Valley as one of the most significant investment zones in Europe."
Go to amawsonpartnerships.com.
Water Chariots slip past any problems
The voice of Boris - rapidly becoming the voice of doom - gave plentiful warning - the trip to the Olympic Park would be no cake walk.
Instead, expect jams, delays, armpits, fluster and confusion, he said. It might not have worked out quite like that (thus far) and the alarm, apparently, had its proper effect.
Water Chariots is riding the wave of congestion phobia with its unhurried, 40-minute, VIP jaunt up from Limehouse (or down from Tottenham Hale) to a private entrance direct to the park. Pre-bookings were healthy when I visited pre-Games.
For a ticket, £95 offers the VIP package, £45 for a slimmed down version and many thousands to hire out one of the smaller boats, aimed at corporate customers looking for a bespoke service.
A bit steep was the first reaction - "ridiculous" was the verdict of MP Jim Fitzpatrick - but the operator says this is not a water bus, it is an experience.
Founder Peter Coleman said: "Every day we hear about the potential for delays, disruption and unprecedented congestion. If you have paid for a once-in-a-lifetime experience why not take a stress-free, reliable and uncongested journey straight to the park."
Speaking before the Games and referring to the high end packages, CEO Bill Doughty, pictured, said: "Imagine you're in charge of corporate hospitality. Your worst fear is that you've taken two tables of 10 in a prestige suite.
"These are your nine best clients and you're looking at the two empty spaces at the table and you're thinking 'where are they' and someone rings up and says 'I'm stuck in Stratford in a queue at the station' or 'the DLR has broken and it's all gone wrong'. The stress is incredible.
"You just want the security of getting there and arriving."
Besides, this is no fly-by-night, here-today-gone-tomorrow operation, he said.
Water Chariots is part of the legacy with a contract to run the service for 15 years and with a self-imposed commitment to train up injured ex-servicemen. This was the dream of Mr Coleman whose son had done tours in Afghanistan and who is now working with veteran charities to make it a reality.
I took a preview trip to the Park in rare sunshine, up to the park on one of 17 smaller boats, which cater for 10, and back down on one of the 13 large boats, which take 70. It cost £3million to bring the fleet together.
The water is only three feet deep in most places so no cumbersome lifejackets are required ("stand up" would be the advice to the man overboard) and the sights of east London from the water are invigorating and informative.
From the delightfully named Bow Locks, the cottage where Zig and Zag ruled The Big Breakfast, the first glimpse of the Orbit, the old evocative warehouses with broken windows and fluorescent graffiti, the new converted warehouses, their balconies filled with pot plants.
Three Mills, where Danny Boyle was masterminding the celebrated Opening and Closing ceremonies and the eclectic gathering of riverside buildings. Tanks and armoured vehicles, we were assured, are just props from the studios but the soldiers pedalling the towpaths or under camouflage are unnervingly real.
On the tour, Mr Doughty told me the story. He said: "Originally, it was born out of an idea by Peter Coleman who is a passionate boaty type but has never been involved in any commercial boat operations.
"Two years after the Olympics were announced, he said to the ODA 'you've done nothing with the canals' and it said 'that's a good idea'. British Waterways said it would do a public tender to run a canal service exclusively down to the Olympic Park using the River Lea.
"He tendered. His was a whole romantic notion and he won. He played around with it for a bit - a nice idea, maybe a few boats, all very interesting.
"He didn't realise how interested people were, particularly event companies thinking 'we've got a completely unique experience now'.
"My background is in private equity and I have a philanthropic investment boutique that I run as well. I said if it's a partnership with British Waterways and if you can make 15 year legacy deal then I'm interested - I'll raise the money for you, I'll get you the boats, I'll do all of that, build you a team and bring the operation to life."
Expect it to be a hit. Especially in the second week once the horror stories of the first have filtered through and panic measures are deployed.
Go to water-chariots.co.uk
Instead, expect jams, delays, armpits, fluster and confusion, he said. It might not have worked out quite like that (thus far) and the alarm, apparently, had its proper effect.
Water Chariots is riding the wave of congestion phobia with its unhurried, 40-minute, VIP jaunt up from Limehouse (or down from Tottenham Hale) to a private entrance direct to the park. Pre-bookings were healthy when I visited pre-Games.
For a ticket, £95 offers the VIP package, £45 for a slimmed down version and many thousands to hire out one of the smaller boats, aimed at corporate customers looking for a bespoke service.
A bit steep was the first reaction - "ridiculous" was the verdict of MP Jim Fitzpatrick - but the operator says this is not a water bus, it is an experience.
Founder Peter Coleman said: "Every day we hear about the potential for delays, disruption and unprecedented congestion. If you have paid for a once-in-a-lifetime experience why not take a stress-free, reliable and uncongested journey straight to the park."
Speaking before the Games and referring to the high end packages, CEO Bill Doughty, pictured, said: "Imagine you're in charge of corporate hospitality. Your worst fear is that you've taken two tables of 10 in a prestige suite.
"These are your nine best clients and you're looking at the two empty spaces at the table and you're thinking 'where are they' and someone rings up and says 'I'm stuck in Stratford in a queue at the station' or 'the DLR has broken and it's all gone wrong'. The stress is incredible.
"You just want the security of getting there and arriving."
Besides, this is no fly-by-night, here-today-gone-tomorrow operation, he said.
Water Chariots is part of the legacy with a contract to run the service for 15 years and with a self-imposed commitment to train up injured ex-servicemen. This was the dream of Mr Coleman whose son had done tours in Afghanistan and who is now working with veteran charities to make it a reality.
I took a preview trip to the Park in rare sunshine, up to the park on one of 17 smaller boats, which cater for 10, and back down on one of the 13 large boats, which take 70. It cost £3million to bring the fleet together.
The water is only three feet deep in most places so no cumbersome lifejackets are required ("stand up" would be the advice to the man overboard) and the sights of east London from the water are invigorating and informative.
From the delightfully named Bow Locks, the cottage where Zig and Zag ruled The Big Breakfast, the first glimpse of the Orbit, the old evocative warehouses with broken windows and fluorescent graffiti, the new converted warehouses, their balconies filled with pot plants.
Three Mills, where Danny Boyle was masterminding the celebrated Opening and Closing ceremonies and the eclectic gathering of riverside buildings. Tanks and armoured vehicles, we were assured, are just props from the studios but the soldiers pedalling the towpaths or under camouflage are unnervingly real.
On the tour, Mr Doughty told me the story. He said: "Originally, it was born out of an idea by Peter Coleman who is a passionate boaty type but has never been involved in any commercial boat operations.
"Two years after the Olympics were announced, he said to the ODA 'you've done nothing with the canals' and it said 'that's a good idea'. British Waterways said it would do a public tender to run a canal service exclusively down to the Olympic Park using the River Lea.
"He tendered. His was a whole romantic notion and he won. He played around with it for a bit - a nice idea, maybe a few boats, all very interesting.
"He didn't realise how interested people were, particularly event companies thinking 'we've got a completely unique experience now'.
"My background is in private equity and I have a philanthropic investment boutique that I run as well. I said if it's a partnership with British Waterways and if you can make 15 year legacy deal then I'm interested - I'll raise the money for you, I'll get you the boats, I'll do all of that, build you a team and bring the operation to life."
Expect it to be a hit. Especially in the second week once the horror stories of the first have filtered through and panic measures are deployed.
Go to water-chariots.co.uk
Prof Brian Cox ignites spark of scientific intrigue
The sun was shining, the classrooms shut, exams over and youngsters in Tower Hamlets had decided how best they wanted to spend the first days of the treasured summer holiday.
With the prospect of challenging some of the best science brains in Britain, they returned to St Paul's Way Trust School on Friday for an innovative summer conference, hosted by TV presenter and particle physicist Brian Cox.
For Prof Cox, the summer school was the ideal way to promote his own campaign which also doubled as his headline for the summer school - Making Britain The Place To Do Science.
His campaign is aimed at prompting the Government to invest in the science sector as well as finding and inspiring the "raw materials" - the future scientists.
Run with sponsorship from reinsurers, and school partner, Catlin Group, and using the drive of energetic East End social entrepreneur Lord Mawson, the school aims to help seed the Lower Lee Valley's revival as a centre for science and innovation.
Prof Cox told The Wharf he had visited the school previously to open the Faraday Science Centre there. "I was genuinely impressed by what this school was doing because it fits in with something I have been trying to promote for a long time which is that science and engineering and, more broadly, knowledge-based industry, is the foundation of our economy.
"This is an example of a school that was doing something I hadn't thought of but which is obvious once you see it in action - by focussing on science here they've raised the numeracy and literacy levels.
"They've transformed not only the school and the chances of these students but they've also transformed the area as well. These places should be little centres of excellence that start spreading influence out into a community.
"Of course it's true that if you're looking for the best scientists in any area then it's ridiculous to look just in, say, Chelsea. One of the main indicators of whether you went to university is if your mother and father went to university. That's silly."
The school took the form of a series of 18 minute mini-lectures - the first by Prof Cox himself - offering an appetising array of sciences on offer. Prof Cox told the pupils that in a few years' time they could be working at the cutting edge.
Speakers included polar explorer Pen Hadow, zoologist Prof Matthew Cobb, of Manchester, molecular biologist Prof Paul Brickell and leading geneticist Dr Gordon Sanghera.
Prof Cox said: "Everybody I asked to speak said 'yes'. That's because everybody knows that places like this are the foundation. It would be ridiculous to build a new university sector if you had no students.
"The message is that it's hard work but you can do it. Very sadly, it's harder work if you come from an area like this but the point about this place is that it's making it less hard, narrowing that gap.
"What I find with kids is that you don't have to do much once you've shown them.
"You're not going to teach someone about biology in 18 minutes but once they're interested it's the ideas that carry them away.
"We want this to be the first of many events, the more interest in science there is, the better placed our country will be to meet the challenges of the future."
ON PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING
"It is true that science on television is a driver. So I play a role in that. It's very important but sometimes unpopular to point out that the BBC plays a huge role.
"So the BBC did have a year of science, which coincided with the 250th anniversary of the Royal Society of which Wonders Of The Solar System which I did was part. There are academics that the BBC have bothered to train so they can present TV programmes. These are things that other channels simply can't afford to do."
ON THE REASONS FOR A SCIENCE REVIVAL
"I think it's a happy coincidence of a lot of things - the focus in the media, some of it the popularity in schools."
ON OUR WORLD-LEADING UNIVERSITIES
"By every measure we're second only to the US except in efficiency where we're by far the best. We have one per cent of the population, three per cent of the investment, 15 per cent of the highest cited papers in the world. We're only second only to the US in Nobel prizes, citations, big impact papers.
"Investment is the biggest threat. It's silly because it's a tiny amount of investment. The argument that we haven't got the money to do this doesn't count because you're talking about single figure billions.
"You look at the amount of money that can be generated - it's naive but look at the amount generated by QE but you're talking about tens of billions, hundreds of billions.
"We probably have the best university sector in the world so it doesn't matter what the other nations do, you can't buy it - but you can destroy it through under-investment.
"My challenge is that, given that you're talking about single figure billions at most, probably hundreds of millions, you can transform this sector again with a tiny the amount of will."
ON SPONSOR CATLIN GROUP
"They have thrown down the gauntlet to a lot of companies in this area, the City and Canary Wharf. There's a model here of science and industry working together."
With the prospect of challenging some of the best science brains in Britain, they returned to St Paul's Way Trust School on Friday for an innovative summer conference, hosted by TV presenter and particle physicist Brian Cox.
For Prof Cox, the summer school was the ideal way to promote his own campaign which also doubled as his headline for the summer school - Making Britain The Place To Do Science.
His campaign is aimed at prompting the Government to invest in the science sector as well as finding and inspiring the "raw materials" - the future scientists.
Run with sponsorship from reinsurers, and school partner, Catlin Group, and using the drive of energetic East End social entrepreneur Lord Mawson, the school aims to help seed the Lower Lee Valley's revival as a centre for science and innovation.
Prof Cox told The Wharf he had visited the school previously to open the Faraday Science Centre there. "I was genuinely impressed by what this school was doing because it fits in with something I have been trying to promote for a long time which is that science and engineering and, more broadly, knowledge-based industry, is the foundation of our economy.
"This is an example of a school that was doing something I hadn't thought of but which is obvious once you see it in action - by focussing on science here they've raised the numeracy and literacy levels.
"They've transformed not only the school and the chances of these students but they've also transformed the area as well. These places should be little centres of excellence that start spreading influence out into a community.
"Of course it's true that if you're looking for the best scientists in any area then it's ridiculous to look just in, say, Chelsea. One of the main indicators of whether you went to university is if your mother and father went to university. That's silly."
The school took the form of a series of 18 minute mini-lectures - the first by Prof Cox himself - offering an appetising array of sciences on offer. Prof Cox told the pupils that in a few years' time they could be working at the cutting edge.
Speakers included polar explorer Pen Hadow, zoologist Prof Matthew Cobb, of Manchester, molecular biologist Prof Paul Brickell and leading geneticist Dr Gordon Sanghera.
Prof Cox said: "Everybody I asked to speak said 'yes'. That's because everybody knows that places like this are the foundation. It would be ridiculous to build a new university sector if you had no students.
"The message is that it's hard work but you can do it. Very sadly, it's harder work if you come from an area like this but the point about this place is that it's making it less hard, narrowing that gap.
"What I find with kids is that you don't have to do much once you've shown them.
"You're not going to teach someone about biology in 18 minutes but once they're interested it's the ideas that carry them away.
"We want this to be the first of many events, the more interest in science there is, the better placed our country will be to meet the challenges of the future."
ON PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING
"It is true that science on television is a driver. So I play a role in that. It's very important but sometimes unpopular to point out that the BBC plays a huge role.
"So the BBC did have a year of science, which coincided with the 250th anniversary of the Royal Society of which Wonders Of The Solar System which I did was part. There are academics that the BBC have bothered to train so they can present TV programmes. These are things that other channels simply can't afford to do."
ON THE REASONS FOR A SCIENCE REVIVAL
"I think it's a happy coincidence of a lot of things - the focus in the media, some of it the popularity in schools."
ON OUR WORLD-LEADING UNIVERSITIES
"By every measure we're second only to the US except in efficiency where we're by far the best. We have one per cent of the population, three per cent of the investment, 15 per cent of the highest cited papers in the world. We're only second only to the US in Nobel prizes, citations, big impact papers.
"Investment is the biggest threat. It's silly because it's a tiny amount of investment. The argument that we haven't got the money to do this doesn't count because you're talking about single figure billions.
"You look at the amount of money that can be generated - it's naive but look at the amount generated by QE but you're talking about tens of billions, hundreds of billions.
"We probably have the best university sector in the world so it doesn't matter what the other nations do, you can't buy it - but you can destroy it through under-investment.
"My challenge is that, given that you're talking about single figure billions at most, probably hundreds of millions, you can transform this sector again with a tiny the amount of will."
ON SPONSOR CATLIN GROUP
"They have thrown down the gauntlet to a lot of companies in this area, the City and Canary Wharf. There's a model here of science and industry working together."
Greenwich Comedy Festival: Robin Ince
COMEDY
Robin Ince
Greenwich Comedy Festival
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Happiness Through Science may be Robin Ince's creed but he has enough residual anger to keep us laughing.
REVIEW
Science is good meat for comedy. Life is essentially absurd, biology a bonkers lottery, particle physics so ridiculous that scientific theory flirts with surrealist flights of fancy without raising an eyebrow.
Robin Ince explores this seam with an amateur's eye for the wonderful and the cynic's exasperation with the flat-earthers.
Happiness Through Science is his unashamedly niche show where he parades prejudices and champions the scientific method with an asterisk (*check on Google before repeating his conjectures as facts).
He is the excitable kid with the chemistry set and singed eyebrows rather than the check-shirted coffee shop fact digger.
In his quest to shake science free from the cloying mud of the "deliberately stupid" he takes a tilt at newspapers, new agers, climate change deniers and Luddites.
He rhapsodises on his heroes, including Richard Feynman, Peter Singer and Charles Darwin and - to the delight of the masses - presents his Infinite Monkey Cage pal Professor Brian Cox as a wistful Orville to his Keith Harris ("I wish I could fly / faster than the speed of light but I can't... Oh.")
His comedy, often delivered by means of a rant, lands with light touch. He's very much into scratching chins rather than punching lines but he is bursting with things to say - a comedian with a strident message - which he delivers with infectious passion and palpable bemusement.
Of course this preachy fire and brimstone may be in the genes. This militant atheist is - and here's the irony - the product of generations of vicars.
To a liberal, enlightened Greenwich audience - sprinkled with scientists ("unlike Scunthorpe") - it was delicious comedy for converts.
Book review: Criminal, by Karin Slaughter
BOOK
Criminal by Karin Slaughter
(Century)
★★★✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Karin Slaughter's grisly crime thriller is an epic sweep across 40 years where two similar murder cases bring up some chilling memories.
REVIEW
Crime author Karin Slaughter takes her readers into a world of degradation, defilement and decay. She returns there frequently during the course of this razor-sharp story and each time the stomach churns.
No less sly and vile are the gender divisions of '70s Atlanta which occupies half her timeline as she explores the roots of a key character (rookie detective Amanda) and a crime that ripples through the decades.
Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent Will Trent is looking to put a difficult past behind him with a new love. He's on low-level duties and can't figure out why his enigmatic boss Amanda Wagner is keeping him off a high-profile disappearance.
In the summer Will was born, 40 years early, Wagner was trying to step out the shadow of her notorious father. But other shadows await, notably the sexism that makes the Atlanta Police Department a vile boys' club.
But a neglected murder case gives her the opportunity to make her name and launch her stratospheric career. Little did she think that the case of a lowlife junkie and prostitute would revisit her four decades later and become entwined with the mystery of Will's parentage.
Both need to face demons from the past to find closure - and end a case that has the capacity to grow into a sinister terror.
There is authenticity, cracking detail and ambience as well as sufficient twists and turns to make for a compelling and, in places, uncomfortable read.
Pipe dreams of Tech City entrepreneurs
So who is right in the battle for broadband? BT, which proclaims that London is the No.1 choice for businesses because of its high levels of connectivity (tethered to a multi-billion rolling upgrade in infrastructure).
Or the entrepreneurs working at the silicon-face of the east London Tech City dream.
Their champions, such as Tech Hub's Mike Butcher, have amassed considerable evidence of foot-dragging by the "monopolistic" BT, which holds the whip hand.
Mr Butcher, and others, quote the data that puts the capital outside the top 30 performing cities in a winner-takes-all global beauty contest.
Chairman of the London Assembly economy committee Andrew Dismore said: "London's broadband is becoming the 21st century equivalent of tin cans on a string. There is no doubt that this is having a detrimental effect on the capital's competitiveness and is hampering both old and new businesses, as well as many residents."
Poor infrastructure, sluggish service, the Catch 22 of start-ups which cannot order a link until they rent an office and cannot rent an office without revenue and cannot earn revenue without a link.
This is the sorry story for many start-ups, we are told - green shoots of hope trampled by the tractor-factory mentality of the monolith.
(BT, for its part, says the average turnaround for an order is seven working days, says anecdotes are no basis for policy and proffers other independent surveys putting the capital as a business leader in this arena.)
Either way, the argument is connectivity and it is, ironically, beset with problems of joined-up thinking.
This argument, going in circles much like Shoreditch's famous roundabout, is costing status. As Mr Butcher and other provides told the London Assembly last week, Berlin is white-hot, gigabit links are commonplace in Seoul and little Moldova offers free wifi.
London is an elephants in fishnets - desirable but unwieldy.
When an industry scans the world for a place to stick its start-up, London has many advantages - but insists on making its entrepreneurs suffer for their decision.
As the Olympics quickly fades and business gets back to normal, this will become an issue of greater importance. As seems likely, iCity will take over the Olympic Park media centre, stretching the boundary of Tech City further east, which is welcome.
Meanwhile, the Royal Docks has the potential to become a sci-tech campus of considerable heft.
The very least that these two centres will require is the latest in ultra-fast connectivity with the most robust pipes, the broadest bandwidth, free wifi and all the trappings of a modern, fleet-of-foot Singapore-style start-up environment underpinned with a clean-driven, always-on, service-with-a-smile coffee shop culture.
It is likely that a mixture of dull-but-necessary pump priming public money (enterprise zones, transport infrastructure, wholly reformed education etc) and private capital is the only way to create critical mass.
(It is interesting to note the virtuous "arms race" between infrastructure and entrepreneurialism in places like South Korea where big pipes have helped create a large gaming industry and vice versa.)
All this feeds directly into the undisputed (by the main political parties) route out of the current malaise and provides a template for growth for our little, offshore island fighting for traction in a post-finance world.
What happens in east London in the next few years will be the measure of what happens to Britain.
High growth, geographically promiscuous players drawn here by the fast-moving, holistic, immediate sci-tech and digital economy able to draw skilled young people from a driven education sector. Or dead docks.
Or the entrepreneurs working at the silicon-face of the east London Tech City dream.
Their champions, such as Tech Hub's Mike Butcher, have amassed considerable evidence of foot-dragging by the "monopolistic" BT, which holds the whip hand.
Mr Butcher, and others, quote the data that puts the capital outside the top 30 performing cities in a winner-takes-all global beauty contest.
Chairman of the London Assembly economy committee Andrew Dismore said: "London's broadband is becoming the 21st century equivalent of tin cans on a string. There is no doubt that this is having a detrimental effect on the capital's competitiveness and is hampering both old and new businesses, as well as many residents."
Poor infrastructure, sluggish service, the Catch 22 of start-ups which cannot order a link until they rent an office and cannot rent an office without revenue and cannot earn revenue without a link.
This is the sorry story for many start-ups, we are told - green shoots of hope trampled by the tractor-factory mentality of the monolith.
(BT, for its part, says the average turnaround for an order is seven working days, says anecdotes are no basis for policy and proffers other independent surveys putting the capital as a business leader in this arena.)
Either way, the argument is connectivity and it is, ironically, beset with problems of joined-up thinking.
This argument, going in circles much like Shoreditch's famous roundabout, is costing status. As Mr Butcher and other provides told the London Assembly last week, Berlin is white-hot, gigabit links are commonplace in Seoul and little Moldova offers free wifi.
London is an elephants in fishnets - desirable but unwieldy.
When an industry scans the world for a place to stick its start-up, London has many advantages - but insists on making its entrepreneurs suffer for their decision.
As the Olympics quickly fades and business gets back to normal, this will become an issue of greater importance. As seems likely, iCity will take over the Olympic Park media centre, stretching the boundary of Tech City further east, which is welcome.
Meanwhile, the Royal Docks has the potential to become a sci-tech campus of considerable heft.
The very least that these two centres will require is the latest in ultra-fast connectivity with the most robust pipes, the broadest bandwidth, free wifi and all the trappings of a modern, fleet-of-foot Singapore-style start-up environment underpinned with a clean-driven, always-on, service-with-a-smile coffee shop culture.
It is likely that a mixture of dull-but-necessary pump priming public money (enterprise zones, transport infrastructure, wholly reformed education etc) and private capital is the only way to create critical mass.
(It is interesting to note the virtuous "arms race" between infrastructure and entrepreneurialism in places like South Korea where big pipes have helped create a large gaming industry and vice versa.)
All this feeds directly into the undisputed (by the main political parties) route out of the current malaise and provides a template for growth for our little, offshore island fighting for traction in a post-finance world.
What happens in east London in the next few years will be the measure of what happens to Britain.
High growth, geographically promiscuous players drawn here by the fast-moving, holistic, immediate sci-tech and digital economy able to draw skilled young people from a driven education sector. Or dead docks.
Sunday, 15 July 2012
Film review: Comes A Bright Day (15)
FILM
Comes A Bright Day
(15) 87mins
★★✩✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Bellboy Sam Smith follows his heart - right into the middle of a languid hostage drama.
REVIEW
There's little disguising writer-director's advertising background in this fractured vignette.
Everything is elegant, languid, poetic and, in places, artificially stage-bound - perfect for a story of soft-held love, yearning and luxury.
Unfortunately, Simon Aboud allies these impeccable qualities (and performances) to a jewellery shop heist that is executed ineptly by both armed gang and director.
Comes A Bright Day is a hostage drama, with stuttering psycho Cameron, his bumbling sidekick Clegg (Cameron and Clegg, geddit?) holding at gunpoint wistful jeweller Charlie (Timothy Spall), earnest bellboy Sam Smith (Craig Roberts) and radiant shop assistant Mary (Imogen Poots).
Sam is smitten with Mary but crippled with nerves while Mary is a romantic in a brutal world. Charlie mourns the loss of his life's grand love.
The hostage plot is without tension, despite the bloodshed, and Kevin McKidd struggles to find consistency in Cameron - part Tarantino nutter, part A Fish Called Wanda's Ken Pile.
The film works best when Charlie, Mary and Sam pass the time in agreeable and unhurried fashion swapping tales of opulent romance.
But their fragile spell is too frequently undone by clumsy intrusions.
Comes A Bright Day
(15) 87mins
★★✩✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Bellboy Sam Smith follows his heart - right into the middle of a languid hostage drama.
REVIEW
There's little disguising writer-director's advertising background in this fractured vignette.
Everything is elegant, languid, poetic and, in places, artificially stage-bound - perfect for a story of soft-held love, yearning and luxury.
Unfortunately, Simon Aboud allies these impeccable qualities (and performances) to a jewellery shop heist that is executed ineptly by both armed gang and director.
Comes A Bright Day is a hostage drama, with stuttering psycho Cameron, his bumbling sidekick Clegg (Cameron and Clegg, geddit?) holding at gunpoint wistful jeweller Charlie (Timothy Spall), earnest bellboy Sam Smith (Craig Roberts) and radiant shop assistant Mary (Imogen Poots).
Sam is smitten with Mary but crippled with nerves while Mary is a romantic in a brutal world. Charlie mourns the loss of his life's grand love.
The hostage plot is without tension, despite the bloodshed, and Kevin McKidd struggles to find consistency in Cameron - part Tarantino nutter, part A Fish Called Wanda's Ken Pile.
The film works best when Charlie, Mary and Sam pass the time in agreeable and unhurried fashion swapping tales of opulent romance.
But their fragile spell is too frequently undone by clumsy intrusions.
Saturday, 7 July 2012
Exhibition: Alan Turing out of the shadows
Mathematician and genius Alan Turing burnt bright and brilliant and briefly yet, for all that he was, he was never appreciated in his lifetime beyond the confines of his peers.
The conspiracies and circumstance set in place to ensure he remained obscure appear formidable.
Firstly, he operated in great secrecy in the (now) legendary Bletchley Park, helping to decipher the Nazi Enigma code.
There was an unbreakable bond of silence among Bletchley veterans that kept their work secret long after it needed to be so. War time leader Winston Churchill called his codebreakers "the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled".
So effective was this secrecy that Bletchley's (and Turing's) remarkable advances only began to emerge in the '80s and 90s. By that time, the notion that the US was the pioneer of the computer age was firmly entrenched and Turing long dead.
Secondly, he was gay at a time when to be so was illegal and, in society's eyes, shameful.
An inquest ruled he committed suicide at the age of just 41 after swallowing a bottle of cyanide - although the verdict has been called into question.
It was 1952 and he had been convicted for committing a homosexual act and, in doing so, lost his security clearance and access to his computers.
David Rooney, curator on the Science Museum's new Code Breaker exhibition, said "Turing, who had undoubted eccentricities, was regarded with affection by colleagues. His treatment at the end of his life is a source of national shame.
"The exhibition is an opportunity to present the remarkable work of a man whose influence reaches into perhaps the most widespread pastime of the 21st century, the use of the personal computing device, yet whose name is probably unfamiliar."
If the secrecy was a constant guard against recognition, there was a third obstacle: the field in which he chose to excel - maths and computational science is fiendishly complex.
Indeed, if there is a weakness in the excellent and moving exhibition marking the centenary of his birth, it is in the nature of the exhibits.
While they are authentically dented, scraped, dusty and aged, their metal carapaces, occasional flick-switches and lack of recognisable function promote the idea they are the pointless products of abstract mind games.
In fact, these were the machines that took mechanical calculating devices - the sort that Victorian Charles Babbage would recognise - and pushed them on to the utilitarianism of the computer.
Key to that journey was the philosophical and conceptual framework of the computing device - Turing wrote the rulebook. He outlined what a computer was, how it would function, what it would do.
One of his legacies is a hypothetical device called a Turing machine - a device that simulates the cold logic of a computer algorithm.
But the exhibition demonstrates that Turing was far from such a machine himself.
On show are personal letters that soften the hard reproach of his familiar dark-eyed portrait to reveal a very human soul.
He lost a friend to TB when they were very young and his letters to the boys' mother are sensitive, supportive and insightful.
Rooney said: "We are able to show a more complete portrait of the man who, far from being the lone genius of popular belief, can be seen as a character with many endearing qualities."
Such was the extraordinary and devastating impact of Christopher Morcom's death, that it incubated in Turing the thought - or maybe the wish - that the mind could survive the body, a philosophical question that took him to psychic and paranormal investigation and on to the first stirrings of artificial intelligence.
Who knows where he would have ended up had he lived to yoke the extraordinary power of modern computers to his unfettered imagination and precise humanity?
In 2009 Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologised on behalf of the nation for the "appalling way" Alan Turing was treated simply for being gay.
Fittingly, pressure for an apology arose from an online petition to No.10 - an army of binary digits rallying to redeem their first champion, perhaps?
■ Code Breaker: Alan Turing's Life And Legacy, FREE, Science Museum, until June 2013, sciencemuseum.org.uk.
Science Museum conservator Bryony Finn inspects the Pilot ACE computer - formerly the fastest computer in the world in the 1950s and fundamentally designed by Alan Turing
The conspiracies and circumstance set in place to ensure he remained obscure appear formidable.
Firstly, he operated in great secrecy in the (now) legendary Bletchley Park, helping to decipher the Nazi Enigma code.
There was an unbreakable bond of silence among Bletchley veterans that kept their work secret long after it needed to be so. War time leader Winston Churchill called his codebreakers "the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled".
So effective was this secrecy that Bletchley's (and Turing's) remarkable advances only began to emerge in the '80s and 90s. By that time, the notion that the US was the pioneer of the computer age was firmly entrenched and Turing long dead.
Secondly, he was gay at a time when to be so was illegal and, in society's eyes, shameful.
An inquest ruled he committed suicide at the age of just 41 after swallowing a bottle of cyanide - although the verdict has been called into question.
It was 1952 and he had been convicted for committing a homosexual act and, in doing so, lost his security clearance and access to his computers.
David Rooney, curator on the Science Museum's new Code Breaker exhibition, said "Turing, who had undoubted eccentricities, was regarded with affection by colleagues. His treatment at the end of his life is a source of national shame.
"The exhibition is an opportunity to present the remarkable work of a man whose influence reaches into perhaps the most widespread pastime of the 21st century, the use of the personal computing device, yet whose name is probably unfamiliar."
If the secrecy was a constant guard against recognition, there was a third obstacle: the field in which he chose to excel - maths and computational science is fiendishly complex.
Indeed, if there is a weakness in the excellent and moving exhibition marking the centenary of his birth, it is in the nature of the exhibits.
While they are authentically dented, scraped, dusty and aged, their metal carapaces, occasional flick-switches and lack of recognisable function promote the idea they are the pointless products of abstract mind games.
In fact, these were the machines that took mechanical calculating devices - the sort that Victorian Charles Babbage would recognise - and pushed them on to the utilitarianism of the computer.
Key to that journey was the philosophical and conceptual framework of the computing device - Turing wrote the rulebook. He outlined what a computer was, how it would function, what it would do.
One of his legacies is a hypothetical device called a Turing machine - a device that simulates the cold logic of a computer algorithm.
But the exhibition demonstrates that Turing was far from such a machine himself.
On show are personal letters that soften the hard reproach of his familiar dark-eyed portrait to reveal a very human soul.
He lost a friend to TB when they were very young and his letters to the boys' mother are sensitive, supportive and insightful.
Rooney said: "We are able to show a more complete portrait of the man who, far from being the lone genius of popular belief, can be seen as a character with many endearing qualities."
Such was the extraordinary and devastating impact of Christopher Morcom's death, that it incubated in Turing the thought - or maybe the wish - that the mind could survive the body, a philosophical question that took him to psychic and paranormal investigation and on to the first stirrings of artificial intelligence.
Who knows where he would have ended up had he lived to yoke the extraordinary power of modern computers to his unfettered imagination and precise humanity?
In 2009 Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologised on behalf of the nation for the "appalling way" Alan Turing was treated simply for being gay.
Fittingly, pressure for an apology arose from an online petition to No.10 - an army of binary digits rallying to redeem their first champion, perhaps?
■ Code Breaker: Alan Turing's Life And Legacy, FREE, Science Museum, until June 2013, sciencemuseum.org.uk.
Science Museum conservator Bryony Finn inspects the Pilot ACE computer - formerly the fastest computer in the world in the 1950s and fundamentally designed by Alan Turing
Upwardly mobile at The O2
Here's the easy option: The O2 could have built a vast Stannah stairlift that took all-comers to the peak of its iconic roof. In a steady drone, rising to the heavens, the elderly, frail and obese could have ascended, strapped in but comfortable, conveyed and cowed.
There could be flask breaks and oxygen stops and chuntering counterweights descending to keep the balance, like a Welsh mountainside funicular.
That would be a way to go. Boring, yes, but inclusive and beige and all those things that modern life likes but you don't want in an attraction that takes you 52m into the sky onto a roof.
(Something magical about rooftops, isn't there? Dick Van Dyke and all that.)
No, here, in Up At The O2, (too many prepositions for a title) you want a taste of adventure, if only a tingle on the tongue from a pipette shot of adrenalin.
And if you want to see the vast panorama of east London - Canary Wharf, the Orbit, the Royal Docks, the Thames Barrier - well, remember what Debbie Allen said in Fame: "You want views? Well, views cost and right here is where you start paying - in sweat."
No faint-hearts. No-one weak of limb or soft of resolve. No lily-livered, muffin topped, state-coddled idlers welcome.
While the attraction doesn't exactly take you to the extreme, it does nudge you to the outer perimeter of the bit before the edge of your comfort zone.
I'm not suggesting roller-coaster thrill or a pilot-has-fainted thunderclap but it does leave you a little puffed and, maybe, disconcerted. For example, if you drop stuff over the side, it's gone - so that's like The Poseidon Adventure isn't it?
In fact, there's something very Disneyland about the experience from the outset. Waiting is not a pleasure, more an endurance leavened by a sense of impending adventure. Inform, entertain, get the paperwork done.
So we have Rupert briefing us on screen. A rather excitable Englishman, he calls on our heritage of derring-do, our sense of pride and patriotism to get us to the top, with all those pesky health and safety lessons tucked in between for good measure.
We know our purpose, our birthright our destiny - and where the toilets are, just in case.
An hour and a half for a complete trip, we were told. Seemed excessive.
But then there were the checks, the straps, the harnesses, the nervy banter between newly-bonded brothers and the lessons in clamping on to the wire so you don't tumble down, Jack and Jill style.
Part of it was probably prescribed by the HSE, but it did add to the drama - as though we really were steeplejacks, or mountaineers, or Chinese engineers in some Channel Five documentary.
Either way, the ascent was overseen by a Sherpa Tensing - ours was Adam, generous with his time and eager to please - and our excursion jellied the legs for the unfit (me) and curdled the lunch of the lesser folk (so not me).
If heights are not your thing, you wouldn't be here but if steep slopes that appear to lead to an eternal void stir the butterflies, or a route march on a trampoline ungirds your loins, then you'll be glad of the umbilical link to the sturdy wires.
At the top, the viewing platform and plenty of time for panoramic shots, for picking out buildings and cooing at cityscapes.
Pity the panorama is downbeat - too much industrial plant and not enough sky piercing drama - but for those of us who live and work round here, at ground-level mostly, there is enough to excite.
The empty cable car slung to and fro dejectedly, the planes rose from City Airport, the sun hit the Thames and the playful Shard hid behind the skirts of One Canada Square, a perspective that flatters the latter.
Then it was down the other side, marching sideways like crabs and both ruing and grateful for the benevolent weather (for the rain would have made the descent slippery and heart-pumping).
In our gear - jumpsuits, harnesses, climbing shoes - we were swashbuckling outsiders in an attraction busy with diners and gawpers and somnambulists.
But if there were any doubt that we were back down to earth then - well, we exited through the gift shop. Did Edmund Hillary? Did Chris Bonington? Did James Bond after his skiddy descent down the iconic parabola.
Oh, forget it. The moment's gone.
FACTFILE
■ Climbs take place every 30 minutes and run noon to 8pm weekdays in the summer and 10am to 6pm at weekends.
■ Tickets cost £22 for adults and children (over 10) and all the gear is provided. Stringent health guidelines apply.
■ Pre-booking is recommended, online at o2.co.uk/upattheo2
There could be flask breaks and oxygen stops and chuntering counterweights descending to keep the balance, like a Welsh mountainside funicular.
That would be a way to go. Boring, yes, but inclusive and beige and all those things that modern life likes but you don't want in an attraction that takes you 52m into the sky onto a roof.
(Something magical about rooftops, isn't there? Dick Van Dyke and all that.)
No, here, in Up At The O2, (too many prepositions for a title) you want a taste of adventure, if only a tingle on the tongue from a pipette shot of adrenalin.
And if you want to see the vast panorama of east London - Canary Wharf, the Orbit, the Royal Docks, the Thames Barrier - well, remember what Debbie Allen said in Fame: "You want views? Well, views cost and right here is where you start paying - in sweat."
No faint-hearts. No-one weak of limb or soft of resolve. No lily-livered, muffin topped, state-coddled idlers welcome.
While the attraction doesn't exactly take you to the extreme, it does nudge you to the outer perimeter of the bit before the edge of your comfort zone.
I'm not suggesting roller-coaster thrill or a pilot-has-fainted thunderclap but it does leave you a little puffed and, maybe, disconcerted. For example, if you drop stuff over the side, it's gone - so that's like The Poseidon Adventure isn't it?
In fact, there's something very Disneyland about the experience from the outset. Waiting is not a pleasure, more an endurance leavened by a sense of impending adventure. Inform, entertain, get the paperwork done.
So we have Rupert briefing us on screen. A rather excitable Englishman, he calls on our heritage of derring-do, our sense of pride and patriotism to get us to the top, with all those pesky health and safety lessons tucked in between for good measure.
We know our purpose, our birthright our destiny - and where the toilets are, just in case.
An hour and a half for a complete trip, we were told. Seemed excessive.
But then there were the checks, the straps, the harnesses, the nervy banter between newly-bonded brothers and the lessons in clamping on to the wire so you don't tumble down, Jack and Jill style.
Part of it was probably prescribed by the HSE, but it did add to the drama - as though we really were steeplejacks, or mountaineers, or Chinese engineers in some Channel Five documentary.
Either way, the ascent was overseen by a Sherpa Tensing - ours was Adam, generous with his time and eager to please - and our excursion jellied the legs for the unfit (me) and curdled the lunch of the lesser folk (so not me).
If heights are not your thing, you wouldn't be here but if steep slopes that appear to lead to an eternal void stir the butterflies, or a route march on a trampoline ungirds your loins, then you'll be glad of the umbilical link to the sturdy wires.
At the top, the viewing platform and plenty of time for panoramic shots, for picking out buildings and cooing at cityscapes.
Pity the panorama is downbeat - too much industrial plant and not enough sky piercing drama - but for those of us who live and work round here, at ground-level mostly, there is enough to excite.
The empty cable car slung to and fro dejectedly, the planes rose from City Airport, the sun hit the Thames and the playful Shard hid behind the skirts of One Canada Square, a perspective that flatters the latter.
Then it was down the other side, marching sideways like crabs and both ruing and grateful for the benevolent weather (for the rain would have made the descent slippery and heart-pumping).
In our gear - jumpsuits, harnesses, climbing shoes - we were swashbuckling outsiders in an attraction busy with diners and gawpers and somnambulists.
But if there were any doubt that we were back down to earth then - well, we exited through the gift shop. Did Edmund Hillary? Did Chris Bonington? Did James Bond after his skiddy descent down the iconic parabola.
Oh, forget it. The moment's gone.
FACTFILE
■ Climbs take place every 30 minutes and run noon to 8pm weekdays in the summer and 10am to 6pm at weekends.
■ Tickets cost £22 for adults and children (over 10) and all the gear is provided. Stringent health guidelines apply.
■ Pre-booking is recommended, online at o2.co.uk/upattheo2
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