All posts tagged M.C. Escher

Ohio Impromptu by Samuel Beckett (1981)

Nothing is left to tell.

Ohio Impromptu is a very short play by Samuel Beckett. The Beckett on Film production of the entire play lasts ten minutes 30 seconds.

Ohio Impromptu was written in English in 1980 as a favour to Beckett scholar S.E. Gontarski who had requested a piece to be performed at a symposium held in Columbus, Ohio (USA), in honour of Beckett’s seventy-fifth birthday.

Beckett proclaimed himself ‘unfitted’ for writing to order and struggled with the piece for nine months, repeatedly telling friends he was failing to get anywhere, before finally delivering this brief but complex piece.

Ohio Impromptu was first performed on 9 May 1981 at the Stadium II Theatre in Columbus, where long-time Beckett collaborator Alan Schneider (who had directed the first American production of Waiting For Godot back in 1953) nearly 30 years later directed David Warrilow as ‘Reader’ and Rand Mitchell as ‘Listener’.

Mise-en-scène

Two old men are sitting at right angles to each other beside a rectangular table. According to Beckett’s stage directions they are to be as ‘alike in appearance as possible’, both wearing long black coats and sporting long white hair. To be precise:

L = Listener.
R = Reader.
As alike in appearance as possible.
Light on table midstage. Rest of stage in darkness.
Plain white deal table say 8′ x 4 ‘.
Two plain armless white deal chairs.
L seated at table facing front towards end of long side audience right. Bowed head propped on right hand. Face hidden. Left hand on table. Long black coat. Long white hair. R seated at table in profile centre of short side audience right. Bowed bead propped on right hand. Left hand on table. Book on table before him open at last pages. Long black coat. Long white hair.
Black wide-brimmed hat at centre of table.
Fade up.
Ten seconds.
R turns page.
Pause.

The characters, as so often in later Beckett, do not have names but allegorical, or even plain functional, labels. After all, in many ways they are just functions of the text or the work.

The one called ‘Listener’ is facing the audience but his head is bowed so that his face hidden. The other character is named ‘Reader’ and his posture is similar, except that he has a book in front of him which is open at the last pages.

The entire ‘action’ of the play consists of Reader starting to read out loud from the book before him. When Listener knocks on the table with his left hand Reader pauses, repeats the last full sentence, and then waits for a further knock on the table before recommencing. Like a robot.

This happens ten or so times. At one point the Listener stops the Reader turning back to an earlier page to which the text refers, by laying his hand on Reader’s hand – at another the Reader stumbles over a seemingly ungrammatical structure in the text, rereads it, grasps it and says, ‘Yes’ — the one and only thing he says which isn’t read from the text before him.

Listener makes Reader repeat the last sentence of his tale and then the book is closed. ‘Nothing is left to tell’ and yet Listener insists on knocking one last time, as if calling for more – but there is nothing more to read. The two look at each other without blinking until the light fades.

Note the symmetrical use of a ten second pause to open and close the play. It’s ten seconds after the lights come up before anything happens. Then, at the end of the play, the tableau is held for ten seconds before the lights fade.

Nothing is left to tell.
[Pause. R makes to close book. Knock. Book half closed.]
Nothing is left to tell.
[Pause. R closes book. Knock. Silence. Five seconds. Simultaneously they lower their right hands to table, raise their beads and look at each other. Unblinking. Expressionless: Ten seconds.
Fade out.]

A number of other Beckett plays use this magic period of ten seconds.

The story

So what is this ‘story’ which Reader reads out to Listener?

The text that Reader reads out is pretty straightforward and, as first occurred in Krapp’s Last Tape from 25 years earlier (1958), is, at first sight, surprisingly sentimental. It describes an unnamed man who in a last attempt to gain some kind of emotional ‘relief’ moves from the apartment where ‘they’ had been living together to a single room from which he can see downstream to the Isle of Swans. Day after day he paces the island in his long black coat and Latin Quarter hat (like the long coat Listener is wearing, like the black hat on the table). ‘They’? His beloved? Have they split up? Or has she died?

In dreams he had been warned against this move, dreams which say:

‘Stay where we were so long alone together, my shade will comfort you.’

Like Beckett in real life, the character begins to be haunted by ‘his old terror of night’, and ‘fearful symptoms’. (Beckett in his twenties suffered panic attacks, night sweats and heart palpitations.) He comes to realise he has made a mistake by moving – familiar surroundings could have soothed and ‘sedated’ him because of their long association with his loved one, but unfamiliar surroundings accentuate his sense of deprivation.

Then, a new development. One night as he is sitting with his head in his hands and trembling all over, a man appears from nowhere. He explains that he has been sent by the man’s beloved – ‘and here he named the dear name’ –to comfort him. He then pulls a worn volume from the pocket of his long black coat and reads till dawn, at which point he disappears ‘without a word’.

Thereafter the man reappears from time to time, and reads the sad tale again. Is it, one wonder, this man, the man reading the text about the man who appears to an unhappy man in a long black coat and reads him a sad tale. Is he reading the story of his own appearance to read the story of his own appearance? Is it a recursive story?

The final stage is reached when the visiting man tells the sad man that he has seen her, the loved one, again, and she has said he should not come again, should not visit the sad man again – ‘No need to go to him again.’

And so, on this final occasion, the visitor tells the sad story for one last time, and then they both sit on in silence, oblivious of the rising dawn and the sounds of the city reawakening.

It is at this point that Listener knocks on the table but, for once, Reader has nothing more to read. He has closed the book he was reading from. There is nothing more to tell. Exactly like the two men in the ‘story’, the two men sit looking at each other in fraught silence.

The Beckett on Film production

In Charles Sturridge’s 2002 film adaptation of Ohio Impromptu for the Beckett on Film project, modern cinematic techniques allowed Reader and Listener to both be played by the same actor (Jeremy Irons), fulfilling Beckett’s instruction that the two characters should be ‘as alike in appearance as possible’ and bringing out the implication that they are really two aspects of the one personality.

In the text, the pair are only described as looking directly at each other right at the very end. In this production, however, they interact continually. Reader is made to be dependent on Listener. Reader is played as a gentler half-smiling figure, visibly concerned to please the impatient, knocking Listener who, for his part, seems to be nervous and twitchy, angry, unsatisfied, or on the verge of tears, repressing some strong emotion.

I don’t like Jeremy Irons. He has as much warmth and personality as a fridge freezer.

Plus, the more I read about Beckett, the more deeply Irish he feels, not least in these later texts which incorporate a fair amount of disguised autobiography, (his panic attacks as a young man, the years he spent living in Paris and walking along the Seine, his unhappy love affairs). Whereas Irons (educated at Sherborne public school, annual fees £42,000) is the quintessence of English poshness and completely wrong for this material. More granularity, character and ambivalence is given to the texts when spoken by Irish actors like Patrick Magee, Jack MacGowran or Niall Buggy.

Compare and contrast Iron’s frigid lifeless drone with the warmth but also the eeriness of Niall Buggy in That Time, infinitely better.

Beckett’s characters are haunted, hag-ridden by their memories. The text conveys this as it moves from the dreams warning him not to move, to the bigger picture, as the reader / viewer begins to suspect that Reader is only a figment of Listener’s imagination. Irons conveys absolutely none of the ambivalence shading into ghostly horror which the text contains.

Instead this production adds a slick finale which can’t be done onstage and is not contained in Beckett’s instructions, namely that the figure of Reader fades away leaving Listener on his own, precisely as the big window behind them is lit by the coming dawn and sound effects create the sound of the city awakening, as described in the play’s last few lines.

In other words, the delicate and strange ambiguity inherent in Beckett’s mise-en-scène is ripped up in favour of the straightforward implication that Reader is not only the same as the figure in the long black coat who crops up periodically to read the distressed man from the same sad tale, but that both figures – both Reader and Visitor – are merely aspects of the haunted Listener’s mind.

Ohio Impromptu is, of course, sad, a depiction of a sad man haunted by the end of a love affair, by the memory of loss, very much like Krapp from 25 years earlier. Haunted like so many of the characters in these, Beckett’s final, ghost stories.

Beckett’s dyads

In sociology, a dyad is a group of two people, the smallest possible social group. How many of Beckett’s plays are reduced to this social minimum:

  • the two Krapps in Krapp’s Last Tape
  • Hamm and Clov in Endgame
  • Gorman and Cream in The Old Tune
  • Winnie and Willy in Happy Days
  • Words and Music in the play of the same name
  • the Voice and Joe in Eh Joe
  • A and B in Rough for Theatre I
  • the two bureaucrats, Bertrand (A) and Morvan (B) in Rough For Theatre II
  • the old man and the Voice in That Time
  • the man and the woman’s voice in Ghost Trio
  • May and her Mother in Footfalls
  • the woman and the Voice in Rockaby

Two is the bare minimum required to create any kind of dramatic energy and in quite a few cases it’s actually reduced to less than 2, to something like one and a half, with one actual actor and a disembodied voice (Eh Joe, Footfalls, That Time, Rockaby) or, as here, two physically present actors but barely more than one mind…

The moral of the story..?

Early on in the story, the sad man who’s moved apartment is described as pacing the Isle of Swans, from the upstream end where the river divides to flow round it, to the downstream end where the two streams of the river are reunited:

At the tip he would always pause to dwell on the receding stream. How in joyous eddies its two arms conflowed and flowed united on…

Is that a metaphor for what has happened here? Have Listener and his doppelgänger reached a point where, at the end of the nightly reading, with ‘nothing more to tell’, they, like the two arms of the same river, are reunited? Is the metaphysical division of the mind into actor and observer finally healed?

Or is this only a temporary ceasefire? As dawn appears and the Reader disappears, are we to take it he will return that night, or another night, like the mysterious man in the story, and once again take his place at the table and once again repeat the long sad story of Listener’s lost love, and once again promise closure, that there is nothing more to tell, and once more melt into Listener, the two halves of his mind reconciled… only for the next evening to bring the same ritual… again, and again, and again, without cease?

Knowing Beckett, the second scenario seems more likely, except that aspects of the text make it seem as if it really is the last time, not least when the loved one tells the mysterious visitor to stop visiting Listener. But is that what she says every night, in the story? Is the imprecation to stop visiting and reading the story an intrinsic part of the story which the visitor visits in order to read out loud?

In this respect, in trying to make rational sense of the narrative, the viewer finds themself entering a sort of Escher landscape of infinite recurrence where, at any given moment the situation seems to make sense, but trying to reconcile all the moments into one sensible narrative can’t be done boggles the mind.

Relativity by M.C. Escher (1953)

Like his pre-war novels, Murphy and Watt, 30 years later and in a different medium, Ohio Impromptu is making the same point. Rationalism cannot work. All attempts to make sense are doomed to fail.

Related link

Samuel Beckett’s works

An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

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by Simon on February 10, 2021  •  Permalink
Posted in Play, Theatre
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Posted by Simon on February 10, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/02/10/ohio-impromptu-samuel-beckett/

Anno’s Journey: The World of Anno Mitsumasa @ Japan House

Anno Mitsumasa

Anno Mitsumasa was born in 1926, meaning he turned 93 this year. For over fifty years he has been drawing and painting book illustrations, for hundreds of books, many of them for children, with the result that generations of Japanese have grown up familiar with his images from an early age, which is the reason he has become ‘one of Japan’s most beloved and prolific artists’.

The Japan House in High Street Kensington is a pleasure to visit at any time, to enjoy the minimalist layout and carefully chosen artifacts in the ground floor boutique. It’s currently hosting a small but beautifully curated exhibition of works by Anno Mitsumasa, the first ever display of Anno’s work in the UK.

The exhibition includes 87 artworks by Anno in a variety of media from watercolours and Japanese-style paintings (Nihonga), to powder pigment (ganryō) on silk, and black papercuts. Althoughhe’s illustrated hundreds, and himself written scores, of books, for the purpose of the exhibition the works have been gathered into six or seven categories.

Learning letters

The show includes examples from the early learning alphabet books Anno created, in which he illustrated the Japanese hiragana syllabary, books such as Anna’s Alphabet (1974) and The A-E-I-O-U Book (1976).

J from Anno’s Alphabet, An Adventure in Imagination by Mitsumasa Anno (1974)

Mysterious World

His first picture book was Mysterious Pictures published in 1968. It is hugely indebted to the work of optical illusionist M.C. Escher, whose work Anno came across on a trip to Europe. It prompted Anno to create his own impossible ascending staircases and upside-down scenes, Escher subject matter, but in Anno’s characteristic stick-men style. He continued this thread with teasing optical illusion pictures printed between 1969 and 1980 in the Japanese magazine Mathematical Science. Thus, if you look closely at the J in the illustration above, you’ll see it has an Escher twist.

Fushigi na E © Anno Mitsumasa. Courtesy of Anno Art Museum

Anno’s Journey

Anno broke through to the big time with his 1977 book, in Japanese A Picture Book of Travels, translated into English as Anno’s Journey.

Unlike the books mentioned so far, Anno’s Journey consists of immensely detailed pictures of natural scenes which are not simplified for children or laughs. Each picture shows a small figure journeying through the cultural and literary landscapes of a country in Europe, based on Anno’s own extensive journeys through Europe, noting the folklore, history and art of each country. He had been a Europhile since boyhood and in 1964 undertook a 40-day journey across the continent, which provided him with the imagery for the books.

The original was so successful that it sparked eight sequels, each focusing on a specific country – Anno’s Britain, Anno’s USA, Anno’s Italy and so on. The exhibition goes heavy on Anno’s Britain (1981) with as many as twenty prints from this one book. What they have in common is:

  • the image is thronged with minutely rendered detail
  • the subjects are an odd, uncanny mixture of actual places – famous landmarks such as the White Cliffs of Dover, Stonehenge, Big Ben – but reimagined among much older, non-existent historical buildings e.g. St Paul’s cathedral not surrounded by modern developments but by thatched cottages and Tudor beam houses

St. Paul’s Cathedral from Anno’s Britain © Anno Mitsumasa. Courtesy of Anno Art Museum

You could make much of this anachronistic reimagining (note the horse-drawn omnibus at the top right of this picture, and all the pictures of rural England are full of thatched cottages and half the inhabitants are wearing the kinds of frocks and bonnets which go back to the Civil War era), but what is perhaps most obvious is the simple imaginative freedom Anno feels. He is a tourist in what, to him, is a strange land, full of unreadable images and symbols, on a journey of discovery: why should anything make sense? Why should he make sense?

Papercuts

During the 1970s Anno produced a series of works using Japanese papercutting techniques. These are as different from the Journey books as can be imagined because they work with large and bold images, as opposed to the many tiny figures which pack out the Journey pictures.

He used the technique to illustrate a suite of Japanese folk tales, made designs for a pack of card games, and adapted the Hans Christian Andersen story The Little Match Girl in 1976.

The papercut technique brings out the basic elements of storytelling without words, reminiscent of the kami-shibai or ‘paper theatre’ format which would have been familiar to Anno from street entertainments before the war.

Scene 12 from The Old Man Who Made Trees Blossom by Anno Mitsumasa © Anno Mitsumasa. Courtesy of Anno Art Museum

The monochrome effect of black and white, and the starkness of the angular outlines, are all hugely at odds with the joyfully coloured, and minutely detailed, and often rather sensual curves and flourishes of his other work – reminding the viewer just how varied and imaginative his output has been.

The Tale of the Heike Picture Book

For me the highlight of the exhibition was a series of illustrations Anno made to the classic Japanese literary masterpiece, The Tale of the Heike. This is an epic account of the struggle between the Taira clan and Minamoto clan for control of Japan in the Genpei War (1180–1185). The text was compiled sometime prior to 1330, and is huge: it runs to over 700 pages in the Penguin classic translation, and is packed with conspiracies and battles, interspersed with diplomacy and – my favourite scenes – nights of wine and love.

The Exiling of the Ministers of State from ‘The Tale of the Heike Picture Book’ © Anno Mitsumasa. Courtesy of Anno Art Museum

Several things set these wonderful images apart from the rest of the work here. One is the medium: they are made from powder paint painted onto fine silk, an incredibly difficult medium to master.

And possibly related to this is the use of washes of colour. In the image above, notice all the tones of grey and greyish brown which he has used to create the atmosphere of dusk and moonrise, and also to convey the sandy quality of dried summer grass at the bottom left.

Anno’s illustrations originally appeared one at a time in the monthly magazine named Books, and there is a grand total of 79 of them, produced over seven years. The ten or so examples on display here are, for me, head and shoulders above everything else.

Partly because they are for adults, unlike almost everything else.

Partly because they deal with war, and so have highly dramatic scenes of ranks of samurai warriors on horseback charging each other, as well as tumbling over cliffs or (apparently) charging into rivers. Much action and movement!

But mostly for their sheer beauty. They are beautiful. The composition, the colouring, and the immense subtlety of the colour washes, make them by turns exciting, dramatic, or mysterious and evocative.

In and Around the Capital

There’s a selection from a series of watercolours Anno did depicting scenes from Kyoto, capital of Japan until the mid-19th century. These are bright watercolours which he produced for the Sankei Shimbun newspaper between 2011 and 2016, skilful and bright and featuring some wonderful landscapes all done in a very loose and relaxed style but, for me, paling in comparison with the works on silk.

Hōrin-ji, Arashiyama from Views In and Around The Capital © Anno Mitsumasa. Courtesy of Mori no naka no ie, Anno Mitsumasa Art Museum, Wakuden

Children of the Past

Most recently Anno has reverted to memories of his childhood with a series depicting idyllic memories of his childhood growing up in the small rural town of Tsuwano in Shimane Prefecture. There are scenes of children learning at school or playing in the countryside, all done in a deliberately naive, child-like style, and accompanied by text written as if a diary entry by his boyhood self.

Memories of Tsuwano by Anno Mitsumasa (2001) © Anno Mitsumasa. Courtesy of Anno Art Museum

These were sweet and lovely if you warm to the children’s book thread in Anno’s work. But I’m afraid my heart was totally lost to The Tale of the Heike Picture Book, and, having seen those pictures, nothing else here matched their intense and adult beauty.

Reading cove

The exhibition space at Japan House is one big white room downstairs. For this show they’ve had the simple but effective idea of converting the central part of the room into a reading area, carpeting it with soft black carpet, separating it off with black partitions, and strewing it with surprisingly comfortable white cushions. And placing racks of thirty or so of Anno’s books across the floor, a profusion of books and titles and images which, more than the wall labels, confirm how prodigiously prolific he has been.

I took full advantage of this comfy area to nab the only copy of The Tale of the Heike Picture Book and work very slowly through it, savouring all the illustrations. A couple of families were there with very small children and a baby. This reading nook provided a safe space to sit down with toddlers and show them the pictures, or encourage them to make up stories linking the often textless illustrations.

The reading space at the centre of Anno’s Journey: The World of Anno Mitsumasa at Japan House

The film

Downstairs at Japan House, opposite the gallery space, is a lecture hall-cum-small movie theatre. Alongside the exhibition, they’re showing an extended documentary film about Anno, with sub-titles chronicling his career, with lots of wonderful rostrum shots of his illustrations, and with interview snippets with the great man himself.

The merch

As you might expect, the shop upstairs is stocking a selection of Anno’s books (though not, I was disappointed to see, The Tale of the Heike Picture Book – the copy I looked at downstairs had a Japanese text: I wonder if it’s available in an English translation) – along with some funky Anno Mitsumasa stationery, playing cards and other merch.

This is a delightful way to spend a couple of peaceful, meditative and civilised hours. And it’s completely FREE.

Related links

Other exhibitions at Japan House

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by Simon on August 25, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Illustration, Japan, Painting
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Posted by Simon on August 25, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/08/25/annos-journey-the-world-of-anno-mitsumasa-japan-house/

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