Anathem, Neal Stephenson's latest magnum opus

I finished Anathem last night, and magnum opus it is. I was just a little daunted by the size at first, even if the print is elderly eyes friendly and it took me a while to get going.

In previous novels Stephenson has taken the relatively familiar world and tweaked it in small ways, in Anathem he creates an almost entirely unfamiliar world and makes it familiar.

Its a world of mathematical puzzles and the separation of academic thought from a secular society that makes do and mend. In the hands of anyone else the maths, geometry and physics would become heavy and leaden, Stephenson combines them with a narrative which somehow combines a driving plot and a leisurely narrative from a young monk like figure.

The inside jokes, puns and giggly nurdiness under the surface are all there and part of Stephenson's trademark and although this isn't going to become a Snow Crash I think some of the neolgisms are going to insinuate their way into the language.

I quite like the idea of being an Ita and I share his disdain of jeejahs. Read the book.

In which my Lap almost acquires a Bottom

In an extremely occasional, if not plainly almost abandoned series, of reviews and things found interesting last night we went to the opening night of the Ludlow Festival and saw A Midsummer Night's Dream.

This is around the third Dream put on at the Festival over the past 40 years and given the time of year and the setting, the sloping bank inside the ruined castle, that's no real surprise. It's also the second production for the same director, Glen Walford, who happens to be local, born in Areley Kings, and shares the same hairdresser as J.

The set is really very good, a large gossamer oak tree with fairy lights, and a stepped stage around it.

We had seats right over on the right but in row C, with no one in front of me, which had repercussions that I'll explain later. Being over on the right meant we couldn't see the stage left entrances and exits but great care had been taken with the sight lines and there was very little that we missed.

The cast is the usual ensemble of young actors surrounding an experienced older actor, Matthew Devitt as Bottom. In an interesting juxtaposition Titania is played by a ballet dancer, Sarah Wildor, who has a reasonable repertoire in cattishness but her dancing is certainly more accomplished than her acting.

The one actor that stood out other than Matthew Devitt was Emily Watcher as Helena, she has this ability to be gauche and worldly at the same time and overwhelmed Emily Parker's Hermia. Helena is a difficult character to get right, the other three are set in their ambitions, Helena is the one that is really suffering as Lysander is as shallow as can be.

This is very much a director's production, from the use of music, the Mechanicals all play instruments (or mime them very well), and there's an accompanist at the front of stage the entire time, each moment is punctuated by music; to the staging of the extended play on words about the relative height of Hermia and Helena with Helena at the top of the main stairs and Hermia on the stage itself allowing some sense to remain when the two actresses are almost of a size.

But it is Bottom that rules this Dream, as he should. Devitt makes Bottom a yeoman version of Falstaff, not so much a drunk perhaps but a jolly blowhard yet still amazed. During the final Act, the Mechanical's play (which has been often rushed through in other productions), drove the audience (and me), to fits of giggles and snorts of laughter. The amount of physical comedy and slapstick, including Bottom sinking into his breastplate such that his head disappeared and was left with his helmet wobbling on the top of it, underlining that this was never really a play but an entertainment.

At some stage during this byplay, Bottom stumbled down the stairs and towards me, he is not a small man, though short and I almost thought he'd collapse into me when he stopped and forged back on stage. Given where my seat was I'd been half expecting something of the sort. At the end the fairies went out into the audience and sprinkled 'fairy dust' around. S was covered.


The jarring details were the ludicrous flowers, looking like something a poor stage magician might employ.

MirrorMask

We finally got to see MirrorMask last night and it lived up to my very high expectations. Yes its a small film, a story about adolescence and revolt and its a film that could only be made with DV and CGI. But its exactly the kind of film that makes the most of both technologies.

Neil Gaiman's screenplay is both taut enough and with sufficient gaps for the art and imagination of Dave McKean to fill with doodles of brilliantly realised creatures and characters.

Stephen Fry and Lenny Henry fill their tiny roles and provide tremendous credibility, Rob Brydon shows that he's more than just a comic talent but an excellent actor and Gina McKee acts all of the parts of Mother, White Queen and Dark Queen with a huge sense of fun and menace in equal measure. The actor that best seems to fit his CGI body is Robert Llewellyn as the Gryphon but perhaps that's after so many years as a robot in Red Dwarf, Andy Hamilton runs him close as the small spiny creature though.

I forgot the most impressive performance of the film which was that of Stephanie Leonidas a remarkably assured delivery with that, probably, very real vulnerability of a 15 year old. She will be a star.

We had to go to Birmingham's Star City to go see it, which was a fairly surreal experience in itself. We were glad to slink back to the comfortable darkness of the country.

Ringing the Twankey Out of the Evening

In the evening, the three of us went to the Old Vic to see the panto, Aladdin with Sir Ian McKellern playing Widow Twankey.

It was in lots of ways the very best pantomime I've ever been to and Sir Ian's performance transcends just the simple description of dame. Yes he used all the usual exaggerations of the panto dame, the vulgarities the excessive dress, the innuendo all mixed up with that strangeness which is gender bending and which is fundamental to English culture. But he was also the first dame that has actually made me understand how it was that actors could believably play female parts in Tudor theatre.

He was balletic, light on his feet, comically clumsy, his knees springing apart when sitting down in too tight a dress and entirely, completely in control of his entire body. It is a tour de force of a performance yet, amazingly, he doesn't overshadow any other performer, he both gives them generously the space they need and interacts with them on exactly the right level.

In the programme McKellern gives thanks and acknowledges the help that other dames have given him in preparing the performance, including Christopher Biggins but even more than the current dames he runs through a gamut of other dames, tiny slices and shades of comics he's seen. Some of them I spotted, even a little Les Dawson, but there was one I seemed to be the only one to recognise and that was Rob Wilton, 'the day war broke out', since I was the only one that laughed.

There was a little demon on my shoulder from time to time whispering about how vulgar the jokes were and whether children were really being involved at all times but it was a very quiet whisper.

Abbanazer, Roger Allam, has a tremendous dark brown voice, an intelligent baddie, a sardonic, mocking baddie so, as often, I looked forward to his entrances more perhaps than anyone. The slapstick was largely provided by the acrobatic Hanky and Panky who were very good but it was one of the things the demon pointed out, that there was not quite enough slapstick.

If the entire cast, and the ensemble, performed brilliantly they did so even more with the curve balls that the technical set threw them. It is a very technical set with a lot of use of expanding boxes revealing sheets of material forming palaces, ming vases, flags and what have you. All too often the material was caught up in itself, it must take the accuracy of a parachute packer to get it all right in which case the cast must be thanking their various gods that it was panto they were doing and not sky diving.

The set completely knocked out the cast at the end of the first half where Aladdin is descending into the Cave of Wonders as he climbs into the set and emerges from what looked like a tent from the Army and Navy Stores there was a sharp clunk and small collapse, Alladin squirmed out, there was a brief pause and then the curtain closed. Some thought it was the end of the act and started the sprint to the bar until a member of the management came onto the stage and explained that there was a technical fault that they were trying to fix.

After about five minutes the curtain went up on the Cave of Wonders, a complicated arrangement of silky material, glittering strands and the like. Abbanazer calls down to Aladdin, 'Are you there, did you take the long way round?'

In the programme John Allam says that they've promised him that the Cave of Wonders will be working properly this year 'Oh Yes it Will', 'Oh No It Didn't!'

Still no matter the problems with the set, and the final scene was marred by the flag across the stage being twisted around itself, the production was stunning and if anyone is interested in pantomime, loves pantomime and is a little jaded with the Cadbury sponsored productions where soap opera actor (though the posters at the Old Vic could have 'Sir Ian McKellern of Coronation Street') and character actor are mismatched and bags of Buttons are thrown out into the audience then go see this Aladdin.

Purposes, Exits and Entrances

I watched the documentary Aardvark'd, 12 Weeks with Geeks yesterday and I've got two neatly cleaved reactions, one to the film itself and one to the process of internships that Joel Spolsky uses.

There are some quite remarkable pieces of filmmaking going on in this film surrounded by other pieces which are rushed or ill thought out or just messed up because of time constraints and resources.

It's evident that Lerone Wilson thought long and hard about what kind of film he wanted to make and the kind of film he didn't want to make. I think he wanted to make a rights of passage film about these four young men, geeks, dropped into a commercial world from what seems like a fairly comfortable university experience. He certainly captured their innocence and their bravura masks right at the beginning but all too often he missed the pivotal event because he didn't have the resources (budget, money), to be there every day and I guess if he had been there every day he'd have got in the way of the process.

There's been a fair amount of grumpiness about the quality of the film making, criticisms of the lighting and so on. Lerone covers quite a lot of that in his commentary. In the first scenes in the Fogcreek Office they are lit beautifully and you can see the New York buildings around them because he'd gone to the effort of sticking up filters on all the windows he was shooting through as background. In later scenes though, either because he ran out of filters (and budget), or he had to shoot ad hoc, especially Joel who it seems wasn't one for hanging around for lighting and sound setups (I can sympathise with that), the lighting is garish and the light sources ill controlled.

But then that's a whole faux documentary method in itself these days, the jerky hand held and the less than controlled lighting. In this case I think it was genuinely just circumstances and not being a poseur.

There are subtleties in how he brought out the characters of the four geeks in interview and how they referred to each other but although he attempts to get them to look as if they're a team I was never convinced that they gelled into a team at all.

As the film progressed it was evident who out of the interns would fit into Fogcreek as an employee and who wouldn't and this brings me to the intern side of things.

Now, we don't have anything like an intern process in the UK, there are industrial placements where for one year in a CS degree a student will work for some kind of employer and there are sponsored students who sort of work for their sponsor from the outset, but there's no real experience of employers going out and getting students and having them work in quite this way.

From the beginning Fogcreek wanted a different kind of internship process this year. Instead of integrating the interns into a current product development and launching them at a development process that was being managed already they (Joel I imagine mostly), decided to have the interns exist as a separate product group with their own marketing intern and so a la The Apprentice, come up with the goods, or not.

It certainly isn't clear in the film who is managing the group, Joel is show giving the requirements speel and I know he produced a detail requirements document and gave them the starting platform of an existing open source product to build upon. What I don't know though is how they were managed on a day to day basis, were they allowed to sink or swim entirely with management being hands off and laughing up their sleeve, or were they chivied and prodded into useful directions?

Given the bug that showed up after the public demonstrations and after the useability testing and the type of bug it was (an unitialised variable that happened to be ok most of the time), I'm guessing it was the former.

Now that was kind of alright given they had a very constrained development plan with well defined goals and the developers didn't show any signs of the well known angst where they aren't sure what they're doing, why they're doing it or where the goal line is. But the one member of the team who did show that angst and who was evidently swinging in the breeze most of the time was the marketing intern, Yaron Guez.

Marketing isn't something you can learn as a job in college to any real extent and to leave Yaron to manage marketing development seemingly on his own is on the face of it a breach of trust. It's a fundamental of management that you don't set people up to fail or where they don't have the necessary experience to cope and that as soon as you spot someone is failing you support them in whatever way makes sense at the time.

Now it might be that Yaron was supported, but the film didn't show it. What it did in one scene show revealingly is how someone is rejected after management has decided they aren't interested in them.

Ok, it did have all the taste of a scene being reenacted, Guez is on the phone with some journo or other, the call ends and he goes into Joel's office, Joel turns around with a friendly smile, Yaron tells him there'll be an article in some NY publication the next day, or this week, and he reacts ah huh, and then his whole body language switches off and Yaron slinks out.

It could just be bad acting, or it could be unconscious body language.

Is it a success?

It's a success as a film, flawed but successful.

Is it a sucess as an internship? I can't tell, yes one was offered a hire and I think (its ambiguous), he accepted it though he starts Graduate School in January. Was it useful for the others? Again its hard to tell but its obvious they had an experience.

Playing Horsey in Ludlow

We went to the Gala Night performance of Richard II at Ludlow Castle on Saturday night which is part of this year's Ludlow Festival. We have a tendency to forget that Ludlow is only thirty minutes away.

The billing of the play was more about the director Steven Berkoff than it was about the actors in it and you could certainly tell it was a Berkoff production. There was much use of mime, extravagant hand gestures and cinematic movement rather than theatrical. The movement occasionally approached the farcical as the actors mimed riding horses in almost exactly the same way as children do.

At times though the mime and dance was threateningly effective as they used their silver topped walking sticks to thump the tattoo of hooves together with the drum accompaniment.

It was dressed (the only real scenery is costume the castle itself is the scenery), as fin de siecle England with Richard II as a kind of stupider Oscar Wilde. This does have some virtue, the foppish King, the sycophantic court but it is deeply flawed. Wilde would never be as casually venal as Richard II nor so led astray, he was willful and verbally cruel but not physically so. Richard II, as written by Shakespeare, is a vacillating ruler unable to keep all of his Plantagenet cousins in check. In this production he seems merely weak.

Bolingbroke in Richard II is an odd character, seemingly the innocent, the traduced cousin exiled for speaking the truth and being forced to invade to secure his lands and property from being siezed by Richard and yet in that siezing almost too easily secures the throne by bloodless coup.

For the characters to work in the play, both have to be unsure as to their own motives, both of them find themselves both guilty and traduced and both of them have deeds done in their name which they later repent.

This was almost entirely missing in the Berkoff, in fact there are two omissions in the play which remove all sense of this. At the end of the play Bolingbroke is heard, in an echo of Henry and Thomas a Becket, to wish the deposed King were dead and an overhearing courtier goes and despatches Richard. Bolingbroke on learning this falls into a state of confessing piety and resolves to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In the production Richard is killed right enough but I either missed the scene where Bolingbroke wishes it or it wasn't there and the play ends with Richard being carried from the stage and if Bolingbroke declares his pilgramage its lost in the parade.

There are not many laughs in this play even if they're looked for but they are there and for the most part this production managed to miss most of them. I know I'm making this out to be a failure and I think it was in lots of regards, but theatrically it did succeed it did tell a story, even if it wasn't entirely the one Shakespeare meant and it was enjoyable even if our bums froze off.

I'd recommend it if you enjoy the History Plays but go to Ludlow anyway there's a great deal more than the castle and the Festival.

An Autistic Doctor

Finally, after sixteen years we have a new Dr Who and in Eccleston we have a very edgy Dr indeed. The opening plot was a grand homage to the Dr of the 70's with plastic window dummies animating and terrorising the population of London. This was used directly in Spearhead from Space but was closer to an Avengers story of the same period that was itself close to the Cybermen.

The effects were tremendously better of course and none of the scenery even attempted to wobble but the effects weren't distracting enough to take away from that original flavour of almost live TV that the old series had.

Our daughter and her friend, 11 and 16, both enjoyed it, S more than she thought she would, though she did have a sofa cushion up under her eyes in case, even if she didn't get behind the sofa entirely.

I think, then, that the Beeb has a hit and that bringing back Dr Who was justified and that it really does mean that we might start having real TV on Saturday nights. Now all we have to do is get rid of the Lottery show and the vile Dancing thing.

Very Maurier-ish

We went to see Rebecca at the Wolverhampton Grand Theatre on Friday night (Good Friday). It's a new adaptation by Frank McGuinness and starred Nigel Havers.

The first Act was taken at breakneck speed and was at times very funny, perhaps it was a little too fast on occasion with Havers stumbing a little here and there. I think though that the juxtaposition of the fast Thirties humour and these very privileged folk with the Gothic undertone of malice from beyond the watery grave went very well.

Rebecca is a kind of Jane Eyre in structure, the naive young girl, the gruff distant and older man and his terrible insane secret. In Rochester's case the mad wife in the attic, in deWinter's the dead wife and the mad housekeeper. Both end in flames, Eyre's case she gets the man, blind and helpless, and in deWinter's we don't know whether they survive or not.

The set was stark and modernistic, a bank of pebbles for the shore curved up the stage with a screen taken up to the heights which had projected upon it the crashing waves at opportune times and behind there was a staircase for the extreme gothic set pieces. More could have been done with the screen, to show the portraits on the wall, for example, but it was used to dramatic effect for the final conflagration with the pebbles of the beach suddenly glowing and becoming the ashes of the house.

It must be an exhausting to play for the actress taking the part of the current Mrs deWinter as she's perpetually miserable, crying and on the edge of breakdown in the first half, coming into a more confident self as deWinter becomes vulnerable admitting to the murder. It can't have helped her that she had to wear a sheer dress of satin the whole way through that had a thread dangling down the whole time. No doubt the whole female audience (some of whom appeared to have saved up an entire months worth of expectorating coughing for the performance), were captivated by that dangling thread and just wanted a pair of scissors to relieve her of it.

The characters in the play, including the dead Rebecca, are all entirely individual and all pinpoint sharp in their places so as an ensemble piece none of them fell by the wayside they were all very good (excluding the non existent Rebecca naturally). Of course Mrs Danvers, that most odious of gothic monsters, was vile, mad and pitiable and more than ably done by Maureen Beattie who has a stinging Glasgow accent in most of her work but this time played it straight middle class English and yes she was scary.

If it hits your town on its way round the country go see it.