THE ARTS ONLINE

RUTH LEON'S THEATREWISE

Good Morning and Welcome to Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise

Despite the dreadful weather on this side of the Atlantic - disruptive snow in Scotland and Ireland, torrential rain and 100mph winds everywhere else - my depression is lifted by my brave violas which, as you see, in spite of being at the top of a building and unprotected from the storms, seem to have survived the battering. Given the state of the world, I’ll take my hope wherever I can find it.

And I can often find it by just clicking on one of the brilliant shows that are freely available on the internet. There’s a bumper list of online arts events to share with you this week and, for once, they’re nearly all free to watch.

There are anniversaries for both writer James Joyce and movie clown Buster Keaton. In different ways, their artistry is still with us and there are videos on Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise where that artistry is on display, one an informative documentary, the other a jaw-dropping collection of death-defying stunts.

There’s a full-length new production of Hindle Wakes, an almost forgotten scandalous play from 1912, a welcome rediscovery. To contrast with that, Never Doubt I Love, a brand new online musical in Shakespeare’s words, from the Straford Festival in Ontario, Canada. This is in four parts, the first episode now available to us.

What thrilled me most this week was a stunning performance of one of my favourite chamber works, Schubert’s great Octet in F Maj, from Utrecht in the Netherlands. But what cheered me up the most was this video, also from the Netherlands, of an enthusiastic curator paying gleeful homage to cows.

All these can be found right here, at the click of a button on the links beneath the pictures. It’s enough to give anyone hope, isn’t it?

Buster Keaton at 140

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Buster Keaton, who died 70 years ago this Saturday, was an American actor, comedian and filmmaker best known for his silent films in the 20s where he pioneered a unique form of physical comedy. He maintained a stoic, deadpan facial expression that became his trademark and earned him the nickname "The Great Stone Face".

The distinguished film critic Roger Ebert wrote of Keaton's "extraordinary period from 1920 to 1929" when he "worked without interruption" as "the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies".
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Possibly, but he was certainly the greatest stuntman of all time. Here are a few of his death-defying stunts. How he survived them I can’t imagine but he lived to be 70 and in 1966 he died not of falling off a building but of lung cancer.

Hindle Wakes - Mint Theater Company

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It’s Wakes Week in Hindle; the mill is closed and the workers are idle. Fanny Hawthorn is relaxing at the seashore with a girlfriend when she runs into Alan Jeffcote, the mill owner’s son. Alan takes Fanny to an hotel in Wales for a few days of fun, but the fun stops when their parents find out.

When Hindle Wakes premiered in London in 1912, many critics called it the best play of the year. However, the play’s unsentimental depiction of a pair of unmarried young folks who enjoy a fling, two young people seeking pleasure without commitment sparked parental chagrin and widespread moral outrage, filling England’s newspapers with passionate argument over the play’s controversial subject matter. Of course, controversy was good for business and Stanley Houghton's scandalous 1912 play was a hit.

New York’s Mint Theater Company, which has been unearthing forgotten plays since 1992, presents a spirited recording of Hindle Wakes. It was directed by Gus Kaikkonen and earned a Drama Desk nomination for best revival.
Available FREE. until Sunday, March 16.

Rijksmuseum – Holy Cow

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From that wonderful museum in Amsterdam comes this quirky little video about the cow and its importance in Dutch painting.

Friso Lammertse, curator of 17th Century Dutch paintings at the Rijksmuseum, tells us charmingly about why the cow matters in the Netherlands, about milk and butter and exports and all that.

He is so enthusiatic about his cow paintings that it would be hard not to join him in his delight in his subject.

James Joyce – His Life and Work

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​James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born 143 years ago this Sunday on 2 February 1882 and died on 13 January 1941. He was an Irish novelist, poet and literary critic and a leader of the modernist avant-garde movement.

Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism.

The World of James Joyce: His Life and Work is an authoritative documentary made in 1986 and it does what it say on the tin – gives a non-nonsense portrait of one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th Century.

Not bundle of laughs but very informative, the film was produced by Ireland's National Television and shot in Joyce’s environments in Dublin, Trieste, Zurich, Rome, London, and Paris. It draws on the reminiscences of numerous associates, friends, and relatives, and shows the role in Joyce’s development of such figures as Harriet Weaver and Sylvia Beach.

​When he couldn’t find a publisher for his masterwork, Ulysses, which had taken him seven years to write, the young Sylvia Beach, proprietor of Shakespeare & Company, a bookshop in Paris, despite having no publishing experience, published it out of friendship on, as Joyce insisted, his 40th birthday, Feb 2, 1922.

Never Doubt I Love – Stratford Festival

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Never Doubt I Love is an innovative new series created for Stratfest@Home by Ontario’s Stratford Festival. Richard Ouzounian and Nicholas Shields push creative boundaries with this captivating four-part original series, inspired by Shakespeare's words, with music ranging from sources as varied as Richard Rodgers and Cole Porter to Rufus Wainwright and Steven Page with five songs especially commissioned for this production.

This excellent and unusual series harnesses the timeless beauty of Shakespeare in a new way.It follows six members of a regional theatre company in a story told through musical and spoken-word performances.

The only way to access Never Doubt I Love now is by subscription to Stratfest@Home which costs $7.99 a month, or $79.99 a year. The monthly subscription price includes all parts of Never Doubt I Love as they release, in addition to all of the streaming platform's offerings, and when all four parts are available to stream, the rental price will be $7.99 for the entire series.

Schubert: Octet in F Maj - Janine Jansen & Friends

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Here’s a stunning live performance of Schubert’s Octet in F Maj D.803, from violinist Janine Jansen and her friends at the Utrecht International Chamber Music Festival. It's so good, I watched it twice.

The friends are Gregory Ahss [violin], Nimrod Guez [viola], Nicolas Alstaedt [cello], Rick Stotijn [double bass], Andreas Ottensamer [clarinet], Fredrik Ekdahl [bassoon] and Radek Barborák [horn].

This great Octet D. 803 was composed by Franz Schubert in March 1824. It was commissioned by the renowned clarinetist Ferdinand Troyer because of the popularity of Beethoven's E-flat Septet. Schubert accepted the commission but enriched the seven-part instrumentation of Beethoven's septet with an additional violin to create an octet. It was first performed at Troyer's townhouse in Vienna, where Troyer himself played the clarinet part.

Do watch these great programmes with pleasure and I hope the artistry and creativity in all of them will give you hope too. Come back next week for more.

Ruth