Spiral Notebook: Money for old rope

I paid, as usual, for a coffee with a credit card. No big deal. In fact quite the opposite. A tiny one. £2.10. Used to be the case that the rule of thumb was anything under £10 was cash but now everything's plastic and no-one raises an eyebrow.

Stage review: Chimerica, Almeida Theatre

STAGE
Chimerica
Almeida Theatre
★★★★★

IN A NUTSHELL
This rousing and cinematic play aims to tell the story of two sparring countries with a snapshot of two driven men.

REVIEW
This is how plays should be. The politics and the personal. The big themes and the little lives. Geopolitics and KFC.

Playwright Lucy Kirkwood magnificently wrangles the economic struggle of the two superpowers and creates a mesmerising kaleidoscope of cultural confusion.

The script is rich with meaty discourse and witty, cynical sideswipes so its three-hour length whips by.

The title is coined from economist Niall Ferguson's conflation of the China and America but also, neatly, suggests "chimera" - a single organism composed of two different populations. Although there is an irony there (never the twain shall meet) that is the underlying subtext.

But the story starts simply. The story starts with a single image - a man defies the tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

In this fiction, the photograph was taken by US photo-journalist Joe Schofield (a compelling Stephen Campbell Moore) who is haunted by its potency.

When he returns to a transformed, choking Beijing, in 2012, midlife crisis is upon him as is the realisation that nothing he has ever done matches those 30 seconds in Tank Man's life.

It begins a destructive, blinkered quest to track down the iconic figure and make some sense of his own fractured existence. (After his 1989 masterpiece, this is the "difficult second album" according to pal Mel who signs up for the task but falters in the face of corporate and political opposition).

Meanwhile, in smoggy Beijing, Zhang Lin (Benedict Wong - brilliant) is haunted by that same day in 1989, the day that stole his wife, and his festering sadness turns to anger and then action and then rebellion.

Encapsulating the New York brownstones, strip joints, pap lines, lawyer's pads and smoggy high-rises this is necessarily cinematic in scope and attack. All this is aided by Lyndsey Turner's dynamic direction and the use of a vast, rotating Rubik's Cube of a set that introduces flashbacks, cut-aways and vignettes as well as hosting the main action.

The political never forgets the personal and the fractious relationship between driven Schofield and self-possessed consumer researcher Tessa (a scene-stealing Tessa Kendrick) grounds the sprawling, flinty drama.

Others deserving of a mention are Sean Gilder as cynical hack Mel Stanwyck and Trevor Cooper as weary editor Frank but there are no weak links.

The play ends with a telegraphed twist but, by then the urgency of the cast to tell this important story has enlightened and invigorated us sufficiently so that the cathartic climax becomes necessary rather than irksome.

Until July 6, almeidatheatre.co.uk

Spiral Notebook: Tough lessons in liberty

We were on our journey back to Cairo airport where our flight would be delayed by the simple mechanic of a very small door through which to send too many people bound for too many flights scheduled to leave at the same time.

A sight caught my eye. Many sights caught my eye, in fact, because it's that kind of city, but this one caught my eye because it was so out of place.

Three men were painting railings by the side of the road. The railings, for the many miles of their length, were a battleship grey.

As the fierce sun set and the potholed main road was bumper to bumper with mangled Nissans and de-mirrored mopeds, the men were painting the railings a municipal green.

Not particularly noteworthy, except a tour of Cairo would accord with a view that this was a bustling, energetic city that teetered just this side of anarchy.

Indeed, not too far away an encampment in Tahir Square embodied that tension.

To paint railings in the midst of this mayhem, of tumble-down houses, feral dogs, waste-choked waterways, pollutant-filled air and jallopy-jammed roads seemed both futile and wonderful.

There were so many jobs to do - build houses that were perpendicular, pipe water that didn't poison, for example - that a new coat seemed deliberately obtuse.

But, the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single tin of Dulux Teal Tension, I suppose.

And who am I to complain? A couple of columns back I lamented the overbearing bureaucracy that acquired unregulated arenas of our life, surrounded them with bollards and tape and filled them with the implacable rubble of clipboards and tick boxes.

Cairo is the opposite. There are no rules. Anyone does anything and, unless it violently impedes a fellow citizen, they get away with it. It works. It muddles through. There is a liberty of sorts that is invigorating.

Of course, there is also the freedom to fail catastrophically and sink into misery, so let's not romanticise poverty but also, a dollar for the knock-off onyx pyramid is hard-earned, not given.

No-one would wish the poverty, chaos, disorder and discomfort of an impoverished people on anyone. But those who were able to strive were driven, tenacious, hungry, ingenious, crafty, alive and engaged.

There is no denying the driving power of aspiration, even if that aspiration is as pitiful and unambitious as getting a bite to eat or a place to spend the night.

Of course, the free-form, safety netless, tightrope society of Egypt is no great model. It demands too much of its people and offers too little in return.

But there is no escaping the uneasy feeling that the UK isn't the model either, for opposite reasons.

Easy to be smug in Africa. Easy to be wrong too.

Film review: Dead Man Down (15)

FILM
Dead Man Down
(15) 110mins
★★★✩✩

IN A NUTSHELL
Danish director Niels Arden Oplev makes a worthy attempt to give some heart and character to a traditional revenge movie.

REVIEW
There's no particular desire to disguise the creative signatures of this movie.

Danish art-action director Niels Arden Oplev helmed The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and the female lead here, Noomi Rapace, was that eponymous Scandinavian inkee.

These appointments, at least, nudge this over-complex revenge movie up a notch or two on the evolutionary ladder. Oplev, in his US debut, ensures that between suspenseful action set pieces, a slow-burn two-hander emerges, captured with neo-arthouse flare.

Colin Farrell's Victor is not the meathead that he first appears to be in JH Wyman's genre-bending script, and Beatrice is certainly not the pitiable outcast her scarred face would suggest.

While they are always destined to end up in a third act steeped in action movie cliches, they at least make a stab at challenging convention with their off-kilter, mumblecore flirtations.

To evolve the character of Victor and his tentative relationship with cagey Beatrice, Oplev slackens the pace to give them time and room.

The pair have to break out from their own damaged souls to make a connection. In a neatly Hitchcockian metaphor, they are pseudo-voyeuristic high-rise neighbours who must reach across a gulf about 20 storeys high and 60 feet wide.

Between encounters, Victor is busy playing two gangs against each other to settle a score but his super-sophisticated approach (ridiculously A-Team for a humble Hungarian engineer) begins to crumble and his dual identity is likely to be exposed.

Beatrice finds herself beginning to care, which is the last thing Victor needs, except perhaps for his own reciprocal response.

Victor needs to stay focussed on his task. For his crime syndicate boss Alphonse (a classy Terrence Howard) is beginning to look closer to home for his tormentor and ambitious low-ranker Darcy (an eye-catching cameo from Dominic Cooper) is closer than he realises to unmasking his best friend.

Director and cast are keen to suggest this is a love story rather than an action flick.

The conflict of interest is evident on screen, never entirely satisfying fans of either genre but intelligent enough to keep everyone engaged.

While never quite hitting all its marks, and laden with groan-worthy plot twists, this is an ambitious stab at putting 3D characters at the heart of an explosive revenge movie.

Spiral Notebook: Just go for it

Start It Up, by Luke Johnson,
Penguin £9.99

Time and again, I find inspiration from the following Goethe quote: "Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now."
 
There's something to be said for the doing of things.

The doing of things is so entirely different in character to the thinking of things, the planning of things and the imagining of things that all those other qualities can be lumped together in a beige soupy cocoon while the first of them is the dazzling butterfly.

Scottish mountaineer William Hutchinson Murray, who added Goethe's couplet to the end of this famous quote, captured the alchemy of getting stuff done.

He said: "Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.

Concerning all acts of initiative, there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans; that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too." 

Luke Johnson, pictured, has Goethe as one of the many affirmations in the new edition of his handbook Start It Up: Why Running Your Own Business Is Easier Than You Think.

I like this book. It is one of the finest business manuals of the shipload that land on our desks at The Wharf.

Not because it teaches me the elements of double-entry bookkeeping (does such a thing exist outside '70s sitcoms?) or because it lists the prerequisites for a patent application or the dimensions of the shed demanded to incubate the invention (he is not a great fan of invention).

No, the multi-millionaire entrepreneur teaches none of those things. Instead, the chatty, anecdotal volume has an inherent impatience for anyone reading the book instead of following the urgent entreaty of its title.

Just do it. Yes, there are certain provisions and characteristics and essentials that are necessary but, hey, says Johnson, you're only ruled out if you rule yourself out. Failure is part of the adventure, he says. Failure is a milestone, a lesson, a rite of passage.

Recently, a son of this parish - Kevin Maguire of the Daily Mirror - was touted as a possible successor to departing David Miliband in his native South Shields seat.

Maguire was quick to dampen speculation but he must have eyed Michael Gove (former Times journalist now busy and bruised architect of New Education) and pondered what all journalists do from time to time - observing wryly and dispassionately from a distance is another element of that soft-centred cocoon.

Wielding power, taking the hits, getting stuck into something bigger than self; that's the sting - and that's the butterfly.

The Yes Book
Clive Rich (Virgin)
★★★✩✩

If you stomach the author's shameless plugging of his other interests, this book has plenty of common sense advice in the art of better negotiation.

It's most interesting sections involve the psychology required to get the best deal - and, as Rich emphasises, it's not always about getting the upper hand.

For newcomers, the advice should remove some of the fear. Veterans will find out how the rules have changed.