Friday's Forgotten Books: Between the Angels and the Apes

Not so much "forgotten" as -- what? Aborted? Headed off at the pass? The initial news was wonderful: Alan Moore writing an opera on John Dee with Gorillaz! What's not to love? It sounded like a match made in an alchemical lab somewhere with the potential of turning into gold. There was just one problem: Gorillaz couldn't be bothered to come up with some artwork for Moore's magazine Dodgem Logic despite having the issue held for them several times.

Really? Is it so hard to give a little quid pro quo? Apparently, so that was that.

Well, if you're Alan Moore, you just get on with the billion other projects you have going and publish what you have in Strange Attractor, and if you're Damon Albarn, you make your own opera on Dee anyway.

The lovely thing about Between the Angels and the Apes is how the notes reveal (once again) Moore's structural approach to composition. Consider the opening section of the outline:

If we're to create an approximately ninety-minute piece on the subject of Greatest Dead Englishman John Dee, then a solid and conventional place to start structurally would be a classic three-act construction with sections of a half-hour each. This also seems to fit nicely with the triangular Greek delta symbol (which is how Dee identifies himself in the facsimile notes presented in A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Yeers between Dr John Dee and Some Spirits [Meric Casaubon, 1659] and is also the elemental symbol for fire, which is in turn the element that represents the highest spiritual component of the magician or, indeed, the ordinary human being).

Moore further breaks down each section into subsections with flashbacks and the opening and closing scene of the dying Dee in Mortlake with his daughter. It almost seems as if Moore comes up with the idea of breaking the fourth wall as he writes, suggesting that the magician can sense the audience as "spirits of futurity" watching him from the time to come. His take on Queen Elizabeth is that she's a kind of Faerie Queen and he suspects "that Dee's devotion to Elizabeth was at least partly erotically inspired" so imagines her  as more "otherworldly and erotic" than traditionally envisioned. It's a fascinating look at a show that will doubtless never be. Yes, it includes some of the text as well as the notes for the piece, although it remains unfinished.

You can buy this issue of the journal, which also includes Moore Bumper Book of Magic collaborator Steve Moore, no relation, but subject of his performance piece, Unearthing.

Find this week's round up of Forgotten Books over at Sweet Freedom, next week back at Patti's.

Last week's FFB included Todd's write up of our comic Jane Quiet for which he's given me and Elena the best pull quote ever:

Laity might be the literary child of Angela Carter and Peter Cook and Italo Calvino, and Steier the artistic child of Trina Robbins and Gahan Wilson and Jules Feiffer, and not a little dash of Joan Aiken.

Yes, I plan to employ that one.

Review: Magus

Carey Harrison's play Magus offers a melange of people and times, jumping back and forth between the early twentieth century and the late sixteenth. Kafka, Shakespeare and Cervantes all meet in a vision conjured by the madness of Kafka's sister Ottla, overseen by the multi-skilled consultant to Queen Elizabeth, John Dee, who invites the audience into the vision. Dee's quest for life eternal seems to have been answered as he speaks to the audience in the present time before stepping back to the sixteenth century, then moving forward to appear as Sigmund Freud for Kafka. I love the idea of Dee having lived on and taken up new personas like Freud, but Harrison didn't really develop that angle and I think it's a missed opportunity. Harrison's magus is kindly and warm-hearted but yearning for that eternal life -- seemingly only for himself, though. His wife is barely in his thoughts (or the play, a shame for the lovely Naomi Hard), though there is an allusion to the wife-swapping alleged between Dee and his partner Edward Kelley (played with nervous malevolence by Phillip Levine). Kelley's only interest is gold and he has a bottomless and urgent hunger for it that makes him willing to countenance tricking his partner and plotting the murder of that troublesome young Shakespeare.

The invention of this meeting between Shakespeare (Rudi Azank) and Cervantes (Richard Bennett) had all kinds of potential for explosion, but nothing much happened with it. You set the bar high when you include historical figures of such talent. Surely even as a callow youth Shakespeare had wit and insight, but in the play he's just a kind of laddish troublemaker, though Azank made sure he was charming. Bennett had even less to do with Cervantes.

George Konrad's Kafka centered around a heartfelt sorrow for his sister's madness. Although Ottla's vision formed the play, her role was peripheral. Nonetheless Brittany Sokolowski managed to infuse a fragile quality to her performance that made her brother's obsessive worry understandable. But again, Kafka wasn't especially Kafka-like despite his transformation scene. The sudden injection of realism through Ottla's trip to the deathcamp Auschwitz gave me the feeling that everything including the kitchen sink was being thrown in.

I don't want to sound too negative: after all I'd take a play with ambitions that don't quite work over a less ambitious play any day of the week. Harrison himself offered a warm and engaging Dee. The care that went into the production was obvious. The costuming was quite good and the sets simple but effective (loved the satyr!). David Temple's beautiful classical guitar music offered both dramatic ambiance and reverie.   

This was my first visit to the Center for Performing Arts at Rhinebeck; it's a interesting space and I'm glad they're willing to branch out from the usual repertory staples to do an unusual and ambitious project like this play. Well done!