I can only assume that Fiona Shaw HATES me.
Sure, we’ve never met - though I have (literally) dreamed that we have - but I can find no other explanation for her cold and unkind treatment of me.
The thing is, I was expecting Deborah Warner’s production of “Mother Courage” to enter The National’s repertoire in January - NOW I am hearing some sort of gobbledegook about “March”! Does she want me to KILL MYSELF? That means (almost exactly) no Fiona Shaw on stage (and let’s be honest, it is only on stage that she is transcendentally magnificent, slaying all comers - good as she can be in film) for almost exactly a year!
She has got a LOT to get through, let’s be honest - because here is a short list (not a shortlist) of the roles that I MUST see her play - and at this rate, she ain’t going to crack it:-
- Volumnia - clearly essential. No one has nailed it since Irene Worth - and that’s 20 years ago.
- Mrs. Alving - because I can’t think how she’d do it, but I know it would be brilliant.
- Prospero- not because of Richard II, but because of her intelligence - and Prospero’s gender is ENTIRELY irrelevant.
- Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”. Why say more? It’s kind of predictable, but she’d be riveting.
- Cleopatra- because there is more to that part than has been played to date, even including Judi Dench’s magnificent performance.
- The Princess in “Sweet Bird of Youth”
- More Greek Tragedy. I don’t care what - no-one else can go there like she can: Clare Higgins, Zoe Wanamaker, Vanessa Redgrave: magnificent actresses, every one of them - but they don’t approach the reality that Shaw found in Electra and Medea.
- On reflection: almost anything else - apart from “The Powerbook”.
I am getting really quite concerned about how things are looking in terms of this working out - and I’d like SOME kind of reassurance from Ms. Shaw that she’s prepared to commit to this.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: "Mother Courage", Cleopatra, Fiona Shaw, Martha, Mrs. Alving, Prospero, Volumnia
A frightening week: Youngest Son was admitted to hospital with acute appendicitis - and what turned out to be a burst, gangrenous abscess on his appendix.
It is thanks entirely to the smart thinking of Wife that he got to hospital at all. The other children have been ill with gastro-intestinal problems, and we had been assuming that it was just Youngest Son’s “turn” - so when he started complaining about a sore tummy, we just gave him Calpol and laid him down under a duvet in front of the television. Had Wife not seen that something specific was up, he may very well have not made it…
He was operated on and spent the week (along with Wife) in The Chelsea and Westminster Hospital - about whom it would be impossible to say enough good things, specifically the (I suspect) staggeringly underpaid nurses who provided round the clock care, compassion and patience. He has since returned home and is being spoiled senseless by Wife, who (like me) is so relieved to see him without tubes coming out of him, and lying listlessly on a hospital bed, that I suspect that if he requested a diet of Maltesers, Ribena and Chocolate Cake, he may stand a very good chance of getting it…
I don’t want to get all misty-eyed (misty-fingered just sounds wrong - morally) over this, but (as many of you will know, and many of you will imagine) there is nothing like thinking that one of your children might not make it to deliver a hefty dose of reality to whatever else is happening in one’s life.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, Ill, Wife, Youngest Son
“I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got”, the album that sent Sinead O’Connor into the stratosphere, thanks to the teenage “Just Been Dumped” anthem “Nothing Compares 2 U” (complete with cool txt friendly title B4 Avril Lavigne was even a stirring in her Dad’s trousers), and also cursed the world with the horrifyingly misjudged “Black Boys on Mopeds”, begins with words that I have been saying to myself a lot recently, something of a mantra:
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can - and the wisdom to know the difference.”
I hear that it is also something of a crutch for those who find themselves using Alcoholics Anonymous to work out their addiction.
Whether or not I have more in common with the shaven-headed, Irish, Pope-tearing musician; or the people who frequent church halls and “share” with each other is probably a point that I shall never satisfactorily resolve, but (whatever one’s faith, and reaction to the “God” addressed) I cannot think of a better set of words to live a good and happy life by.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Sinead O'Connor.
“I am just going outside. I may be some time.”
So Captain Oates announced his departure and inevitable death to his exhibition mates, in typically stirring (and possibly, entirely apocryphal language…). So - while I can guarantee one thing: that I will not commit suicide - I borrow his words to explain a forthcoming absence from this virtual place. I may be back shortly, it may take a long time, it may end thus.
What I know is that I am in no position to write of anything other than what consumes me at the moment: the chance (an ever-diminishing one, I fear) of getting my marriage sorted out.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Goodbye, Wife
I was in Madrid yesterday, reviewing work with Ludicrously Chic Creative Director and Inpenetrably Accented Creative Director: one of those meetings that took 45 minutes, but had meant rising at 5.15am, returning home at 10pm…
All of which would have been fine, had it not been for the fact that My Former Client was in the office, as was Frenchman Who Wants To Be Spanish. The trouble being that Frenchman Who Wants To Be Spanish, rather than owning up to the fact that since winning Big Client, I have been pretty much pushed for time and am to be replaced on their business, has opted to tell them that I am ill. (This reminds me of another similar incident, at a different agency, when the Head of Client Services, rather than confessing that yet another rat was deserting the sinking, hostile ship, decided to explain another Account Director’s departure with the choice phrase: “Her mother has died, and she’s had a break-down.” Neither piece of information was true.)
Anyway, this led to me lurking, trapped and hungry in an ante-room as Former Client roamed the agency, enjoying both the Pre-Production meeting and the free lunch. This silly state of affairs reached its inevitable Ayckbourne apotheosis when I was discovered crouched on a sofa, BlackBerrying away - and later, when we shared a cab to the airport.
Just how ill I was - and still am, presumably - was never clear. But given that I have been more than usually absent for the last two months, I think we can all assume that it’s more than either a “bit of a cold” or even `flu…
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Frenchman Who Wants To Be Spanish, Ludicrously Chic Creative Director
I’ve been having a pretty torrid time of late, and it got very, very bad between me and Wife.
However, whilst things are far from “fixed”, I have realised what I was doing, what I had become and what I had (therefore) done to her - and with that realisation has come change.
I am now so concentrated on what I have, what that means to me, and the gifts (not the pressures) in my life, that I have totally revised my focus and I already started to feel different, and to enjoy what’s happening now.
So, this isn’t a before and after story ( I don’t really know what it is, other than some kind of catharsis and recognition), but it is a new chapter.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Wife
Wife is on a photography job at the moment, so the not inconsiderable task of delivering the three children to school fell to me.
My ambition was to get them there on time, and without having sworn (which may seem like a lowly ambition, but believe me, herding cats looks like a doddle compared to getting three children to school on time), and I managed it.
Daughter was always going to be the toughest customer: she has an approach to personal style, grooming and dress that make Beau Brummel look like a slap-dash compromise merchant. The right knickers took a while to locate, and it was a feat of UN-style negotiation to coerce her into tights away from socks - but this was as nothing compared to Hairstylegate. Wife has recently taken to putting Daughter’s hair in bunches - a feat of dexterity that defeats me, so I went for what I thought was a sensible alternative (ie: one that drew her long hair back and out of her eyes, securing it in a ponytail at the back of her head). This did not meet with her approval - by which I mean that upon examination of the finished result in the mirror, she exclaimed “Dada!” in a horrified tone (as if I had coiled a couple of turds around her head) and added “That won’t do at all!” (something that I presume she has picked up from Wife). A mere four attempts later, we had something that she deemed acceptable. The boys couldn’t have been easier (once I had persuaded Youngest Son to put his jumper on OVER his shirt, rather than vice versa; and had broken the news to Eldest Son that Ben 10 pants were a thing of fantasy and would not be materialising in his wardrobe any time soon…) and off we went.
When I got into the Agency, I talked to World’s Greatest PA about the strange experience of going back to school (and specifically the impenetrable curriculum meeting that Wife and I attended last night, that threatened “Science” for four year-olds). Science is a particularly personal fear of mine, based on the lowering experience of having scored so low in the Physics Mock O’ Level that my mark was featured as an “N.B.” rather than as a proper score, lest I bring the average score for the whole class down too substantially. No such problems for World’s Greatest P.A., it seems - just the affectionate memories of how one of her adolescent team-mates attempted to disguise the evidence of someone’s perm having been introduced to a Bunsen burner (”it went up like tinder”), which gave rise to one of my favourite quotes of the year to date: “Aaah, the smell of burning hair and Lentheric!”
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Family, School, Wife, World's Greatest P.A.
In a letter to Jeremy Bullmore, published in Campaign Magazine of September 12th 2008 , a 16 year-old boy asked Mr. Bullmore for his advice on getting into an advertising agency. This is Mr. Bullmore’s answer, as published.
Dear Francis, thank you for your letter.
What I suggest is this. First you should write to me at Campaign stressing your enthusiasm for advertising as a career and your determination to gain more experience at some well-known creative agencies. I will then publish your letter, which, with any luck, will be read by people of influence at a few such agencies. Unless the entire agency business has talked itself into terminal torpor because of the non-recession, there’ll be one or two agencies intelligent enough still to be on the look-out for bright and enterprising young people. If I’m right, they’ll want to get in touch with you directly; so I thought it might help them if I included your e-mail address:fmac23@googlemail.com. I hope that’s OK by you.
Please let me know what response, if any, you attract: it will be a useful measure of the health and survival chances of the agency sector as a whole. I look forward, with your agreement, to publishing the results.
From the thanks for his letter, through to encouraging everyone in his readership to define themselves as the few who are smart enough, forward-thinking enough and good enough to see this opportunity, to the final reward of publication, this is a work of kindness, grace, charm and - above all - a brilliant piece of advertising creativity.
What a man.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Advertising, Jeremy Bullmore
A previous incumbent in my professional role had this to say: “You can either do the meetings, or you can do the work - not both.”
The cult of the meeting is one of the most deceptive, destructive and irritating to have pushed its way into modern business practice. Second only to “the workshop” with its pernicious and provenly incorrect contention that “the more people one gets in the room, the greater degree of creativity and consensus”, “the meeting” prioritises sharing coffee and flipcharts over productivity, thinking and action. The number of times I have finished one meeting to be met with a response which is broadly “Great, OK. When should we meet again?” is bewildering and staggering.
It’s not therapy: it doesn’t have to be regular to work - and the meetings should be the consequence of the thinking and the creativity, not entirely removed from them in order to fit in with some bizarre matrix of holidays, acronym-denominated meetings and travel plans. I realise that there are such things as real deadlines that have to be met if products are to get to market and to realise their potential, but artificial deadlines do not concentrate the mind, nor help to make things better - they dispirit, dissipate and disenchant.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Advertising Planning, Meetings, Planningning
Up to Oxford yesterday for Father in Law’s exhibition at Oriel. I wish we could have stayed there longer, and gone round the Ashmolean (wondering around the colleges wouldn’t really have been on, as it was University Open Day, so the whole city was full of 17 year-olds (often with their parents) trying to decide between Corpus, Merton, Jesus, All Souls… and so it continues), but this was not to be, with not only my parents, the three children and Wife’s Aunt in tow.
The exhibition was terrific: Father in Law was exhibiting his watercolours (over thirty of them) alongside an Oxford contemporary with whom he is still in touch, fifty years later (I find this amazing: the only one of my University contemporaries that I am still in touch with - other than the virtual world of Facebook - is Me As A Protestant: and that’s only fifteen years ago). Maybe it’s family pride, but I thought Father-in-Law’s work was infinitely better than his co-exhibitor’s: and fortunately there were enough little red dots on his work to suggest that a good number of people at the opening felt similarly enthusiastic.
Australian Brother in Law was there, his opening gambit being: “It’s rather like that scene in “Brideshead Revisited” isn’t it?”
I think he must have meant the scene about half way through the novel, where Charles is exhibiting his work in London, when Anthony Blanche reappears in the narrative. Given that the point of that scene is for Blanche to expose Ryder’s paintings as unfelt “ghastly daubs”, I thought that the comparison was a slightly unfortunate one - but it soon became obvious why the novel had raised its head: Australian Brother in Law had a name to drop.
“Have you seen the new film?”
“I haven’t: I don ‘t want to, actually.” (Andrew Davies’ idiotic and grossly offensive remark about wanting to give the film an “anti-Catholic ending” still plays in my mind as reason enough not to see it.)
“Oh but you should: it’s wrong to see it as an adaptation of the novel…” [so why give it the same name, credit Evelyn Waugh, and mention him all the film's publicity, I wondered, silently]“…I call it “Brideshead Revised”, not “Brideshead Revisited”.”
It will come as no surprise that Australian Brother in Law is a journalist, given that turn of phrase: and he made an interesting point about the film’s story being Charles Ryder’s attempt to take possession of Brideshead by any means necessary (Sebastian or Julia), rather than about what Waugh himself said it was about: “the operation of divine grace on a group of people”. I may see it: I am a huge fan of Ben Whishawe, and of Emma Thompson - but the horror of doing anything that might be seen to endorse the repulsive Mr. Davies’ world view gives me considerable pause.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Family, Andrew Davies, Ben Whishawe, "Brideshead Revisited", Emma Thompson, Oxford
