★★☆☆☆
Two Stars

Rarely does a night at the opera prompt such strong critical responses. The Mail is hailing the production a ‘travesty’ while The Guardian  describes it as a ‘fascinating’ examination of ‘insistent male sexuality’. Yet, opening night at director Calixto Bieito’s production of Carmen at the English National Opera, was, for me, curiously lacking in passion and conviction.

This is Carmen transported to the last days of Franco’s Spain – an idea that could have worked well in both the military and gypsy camp settings. Unfortunately however, there was more chemistry between Carmen (Ruxandro Donose) and the flagpole she was tied to or the cars she posed over than with her leading man José (Adam Diegel). His murderous passion in the final act was not only unbelievable but bordering on the ludicrous – what just about worked when sung was painful in the dialogue sections. It was this failure of the central romance, rather than the emphasis on sleaze which has horrified some critics, which reduced the tragic plot to the level of tawdry soap opera.

An exception was Elizabeth Llewellyn’s Micaëla – a favourite with the crowd on the night. Her strong vocal performance was matched by a real dignity in her performance, even when mauled at by lustful soldiers, or hiding in the rear seats of a car, and she enjoyed an emotional repartee with the audience which was entirely lacking with the main characters. Some of the crowd scenes were also impressive, indicating what a strong production this could have been. Colourful costuming and energetic choreography combined perfectly with the Chorus of Citizens at the beginning of Act IV to suggest the excitement of the bullfight, and the interaction between Carmen and the soldiers during the Habanera aria showed the leading lady at her best.

I wasn’t horrified by the full frontal male nudity, or the suggestion of child prostitution, or entirely opposed to the idea of seeing Carmen in a phone box. I really wanted to love it. But this production, despite the beautiful music conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth, just falls a little flat, although it will probably do well from its dalliance with controversy.

★☆☆☆☆
One Star 

Contrary to what the rest of this article may suggest, I am not a hater. I am very much Team Lohan.

I’ve been rooting for the comeback of the century after every prison stint, car crash, jewellery theft and failed drug test. She was not only responsible for one of the most quotable movies of our generation, Mean Girls, but also carved an art form out of the mugshot, and successfully managed to work even the most horrendous shade of jumpsuit-orange.

Lifetime Network’s straight-to-TV movie Liz & Dick, the story of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, was billed as a triumphant return, and for the briefest of moments looked as though it might fulfill its promise. What in fact emerged was perhaps one of the most spectacular and catastrophic train-wrecks to grace America’s screens in recent years, taking its rightful place alongside Showgirls and The Room in the so-forehead-smackingly-awful-you-can’t-afford-to-miss-it Hall of Fame.

Lifetime’s publicity around the film rests upon the following premise: Elizabeth Taylor was hounded by the paparazzi. Lindsay Lohan is hounded by the paparazzi. If you subject the latter to a ‘minor’ re-style and a load of airbrushing, then squint very hard whilst inebriated, she looks like Liz. Unfortunately for our Li-Lo, a shared history of alcohol abuse and pap-trouble does not a convincing performance make.

Cue Elindsabeth, a character who only sporadically slips into Queen’s English, largely sounding like an ageing drag queen with a penchant for Ke$ha-style dental hygiene. Liz & Dick’s protagonists recount their turbulent romance from the vantage point of a nondescript place, The Other Side, in which the compulsory dress code is Funereal-Glam and regular close-ups unintentionally ensure we pay more attention to the current state of Lindsay’s face (Fillers? Drug-induced bloat? Strange form of weight gain which exclusively affects lips, cheeks and chin?) than the dialogue itself.

A stable pace is clearly something that was abandoned (alongside accent coaching or a half-decent wig for Grant Bowler’s Burton): three-quarters of the film passes before divorce no.1 even occurs. After this Liz is accompanied by an unidentified new male for a handful of scenes (New lover? Wayward extra?), has a spell in hospital (Liz has colon cancer! Liz doesn’t have colon cancer!), re-marries Burton in Botswana, and then promptly divorces him again.

All of which brings us to Liz and Dick‘s pièce de résistance: 1980’s-era Elindsabeth. Whilst transforming a young actress into a fifty-something is difficult at the best of times, the only element missing from the Halloween costume thrown upon poor Lindsay is the accompanying laughter track – which, incidentally, might aid a rather sensible re-marketing of the whole piece as a comedy.

I personally am holding out for the porn adaptation; the acting will be better and no one even need come up with a dirty pun. 

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Devising a travel novel that people actually want to read is tough. It’s clearly necessary to communicate the great and the good; the bad and the ugly, sure. However a discourse that is solely descriptive, even in beautiful prose, can get tedious. ‘What I did on my holidays’ is nice enough for an article, but downright dull for a book. Nico Hobhouse, a second-year Classicist at Trinity, is therefore wise in his attempt to marry colourful description with spirited polemic in his self-published book Dancing on the Frontier: Travels by Land through China and Tibet.

Dullness is absolutely not Hobhouse’s problem. Some randy passages hit you like a bus, especially since they come from nowhere. Fresh from describing a Buddhist monastery in Tibet, Chapter 11 takes a sudden and inexplicably lewd turn: “Down one narrow alley I spotted two donkeys rutting. The female seemed less eager and pulled away. The male trotted after her, his member still primed to go…The poor jenny was having a rough day.” These entertaining but stand-alone remarks are far from atypical. More than once the reader is thrown off the scent of what he thinks is an emerging theme by a slightly wacky observation.

The paragraphs are short and fairly punchy; it is an easy read (mostly: I confess to having to look up ‘somnolent’) though the images Hobhouse evokes are nonetheless vivid and varied. However the overall effect is diminished by numerous typos and an episodic structure that leaves the passages disjointed. And once in a while the language is a bit clumsy: in one instance he suggests that the ‘lack of [political] openess in China…is as alive as ever.’ Can an absense of something be alive? Probably not. It’s one of the areas in which self-publishing – otherwise a fantastic blessing for first-time authors – falls down. 

The typical passage – which provides an original story followed by a fascinating insight – works well. There is a well-scripted section about his experience of the visceral antipathy felt by otherwise sophisticated Chinese urbanites against the Japanese. Staying in Nanjing, the sight of a brutal massacre at the hands of Imperial Japan in 1937, Hobhouse movingly describes the sensation of Western guilt as “more powerful that disgust at what I saw. I felt ashamed that I had not known about the incident before I had come to China. The scale and horror of the massacre were comparable to the Holocaust and yet I had never really cared back home in England.”

Occasionally though the formula breaks down; the weakest parts of the book generally crop up when it does. Anecdotal, albeit unusual, tit bits are used to draw predictable and not especially profound conclusions: “I saw two toads copulating – a reminder that early spring was approaching – and reflected that nature was losing out in a big way to China’s urbanisation.” Ew. Is this really what Hobhouse, observing the amphibian fornication, thought at the time? Or is he indulging in a bit of post hoc analysis that matches up his travelling experiences to the well-established assertions commonly bandied about in The Economist? 

By contrast the strongest sections occur when he is more modest in his ambition. Sharing a minibus, with an elderly monk, trundling through Tibet Hobhouse recounts the monk’s contradictory behaviour. “The senior of the two took out some prayer beads…[A]fter chanting for a long time he took a few swigs from his bottle of water. When he had finished, to my astonishment, he casually tossed the empty bottle out of the window. He had a fake Tissot wristwatch…and a mobile phone on which he took my photo.” The reader does not need to be explicitly told what Hobhouse is implying: that the monk’s contradictions betray a disconcerting truth about modern China. The effect is immensely satisfying.

One final groan: Hobhouse clearly takes his liberalism seriously. From Bautou to Beijing, Shanghai to Lhasa, he strikes up an argument about the virtues of Western democracy vs. authoritarian capitalism with just about every poor chap he meets. Each time he presents the dispute fairly crudely, though given the fact that he had to conduct these Socratic dialogues in Mandarin we can forgive him for that. The issue is rather that when it comes to the book he keeps banging on about it without saying anything new each time. Travelling alone, off the beaten track, meeting bucolic village folk who had perhaps never spoken to a white man before, Hobhouse’s account really should have been stronger in explaining how China understands itself, as well as the world it will shortly dominate.

Yet the final result is really quite impressive. Hobhouse has taken a year of his life that is tough to characterise in any one definitive way, and has turned it into a thoroughly readable, thoughtful and playful journal. Were he to write a second travel book, as I am told he is planning to, I suspect he would avoid most of the mistakes made in Dancing on the Frontier. Through it Hobhouse has nonetheless cultivated an authentic tone and an inquiring style that will serve him well into the future.

‘Dancing on the Frontier’ is published by Xlibris. A paper copy can be purchased through Amazon or alternatively as an eBook through W.H.Smith