Of cemeteries and stage plays and history: London I
I arrived in London amidst rain and wind on Friday afternoon, but my trusty umbrella protected me enough so I could purchase the rest of the theatre tickets I wanted which they hadn't wanted to sell me online, and on Saturday morning London looked like this:
Mind you, the wind hadn't gone, which is why more and more clouds gathered during the day until it started to rain again. Still, I had planned on doing something I'd never managed during all my previous visits to London, which was to see Highgate Cemetery. Which I did, with
londonkds, and you'll find the pic spam complete with Douglas Adams and Karl Marx and ongoing narration below under the cut. Afterwards, we had a quick lunch because by then it was heavily raining again and we needed something warm, and then I hastened away to meet
rozk, whom I had tea and chatted away with until it was time for me to walk back to my hotel, change and take the Jubilee line to Kilburn where I watched the play Red Velvet, about Ira Albridge, one of the earliest black actors of the 19th century who became an international star. It's a new play, written by Lolita Chakrabarti and directed by Indhu Rubasingham, and Ira Albridge is played by Adrian Lester, who won an awardf or this role.
Albridge was American, born in New York in 1807, and left the US in 1824 for Britain where he toured the provinces and worked his way towards greater reknown until 1833 when he played Othello at Covent Garden, the first black actor to perform on a patented British theatre in London. What happened before, during and after forms the gist of the play, which the beginning and ending set thirty years later in on tour in Poland, where Ira Albridge, at that point an actor who'd performed across the continent, including Russia, been given medals by the King of Prussian and the Emperor of Austria and knighted by the Duke of Sachsen-Meiningen (who, btw, was a big theatre fan and is credited for some major reforms in German theatre) would eventually die. (His death isn't part of the play, but there is a reason why we see him near the end of his life and career, I'll get to that.)
Ira Albridge's performance as Othello at Covent Garden came to be becaus a week earlier, the most famous actor in Britain, Edmund Kean, playing Othello, had collapsed on stage in the arms of his son Charles who played Jago. Edmund Kean didn't recover and would die a few weeks later; he never shows up in the play but his shadow hangs over it. The manager of Covent Garden, Pierre LaPorte, faced with the prospect of losing the audience because the big star and draw had just dropped dead (or nearly so), then took a gamble and hired Ira Albridge. In the play Red Velvet, Pierre and Ira were friends before and one of the younger actors has seen Ira on stage previously, but for everyone else the fact that the new Othello is actually a black man comes as a shock, especially for Charles Kean.
Sidenote: this is probably the biggest departure the play does from history. Charles Kean in the play gets saddled with the role of prime antagonist, and it's not hard to see why the playwright picked him as the voice of racism and conservative traditionalism; as opposed to his father Edmund, who was one of the big innovative actors of his day, Charles Kean not only had the misfortune that comes from being the so-so talented son of a genius father in the same profession but also is remembered mostly for stately Shakespeare productions with detailed historical costumes who generated placid approval but never excitement. And it would make psychological sense if he felt supplanted by and jealous of Ira Albridge playing his father's role (but never his) opposite his fiancee, Ellen Tree, as Desdemona. Plus, you know, ironic doubling of the Iago role etc. However, the timeline of Albridge's life in the program points out that actually Charles Kean had already acted with Ira Albridge four years previously in Belfast... and the play was Othello, no less, with Ira as Othello and Charles as Iago. So in order for Charles to be the racist No.1 who is indignant at the mere thought of a black man playing Shakespeare and refuses to act with him, who can't stand the sight of him touching a white woman etc., this earlier cooperation had to be wiped out from history.
As the play also points out, 1833 was when slavery finally became illegal in the British colonies as well (the slave trade had been outlawed in 1807, but not slavery itself as far as the colonies are concerned), and it was very much a topic of the day; it's a topic of debate among the actors, too. Who also employ a black maid but never, including the fervent abolitionists, actually talk to her beyond giving her coats etc. or asking for tea; Connie, who is from Jamaica, is a silent presence (and the only other black character) except for one scene, after the first Othello performance and before the second one, when she and Ira are alone and have a conversation both about the play itself (she's not too impressed because Othello was so easily persuaded) and the circumstances (she tries, in vain, to warn him of what's to come).
Adrian Lester plays Ira in two different time frames - as old Ira, he's the essential old star, a bit tyrannical but also still able of charm if he cares to, hiding the unhealed scars of what happened in 1833 until they get laid open and you realise just what the price for his stardom was. As young Ira, he's passionate, ambitious and hopeful, and the play is great in capturing both the intense camraderie that can develop between actors, the excitement of developing performances together (which happens with Ellen Tree) - and its quick falling apart under pressure. Because the reviews are horribly racist (and btw, not invented - none of these critics seems to have been self aware enough of the irony of complaining of a "stupid looking, thick-lipped ill-formed African" daring to play Othello and "pawing" a white actress), and the entire Covent Garden theatre is closed after only two performances. (Ira Albridge didn't play in London again for another fifteen years, and then only once; all his triumphs took place elsewhere.) The play doesn't go for simple good/bad equation; you believe, for example, that Pierre LaPorte is sincere in his friendship and really wanted Ira to suceed, and their breakup scene is heartrendering, but at the same time, he's not just making a business decision, and he's also not free from the universally biased world around them - in the climax of their fierce argument, some expressions like "your true nature" get out, and it's clear he means "your nature as a black man".
The play doesn't examine how prejudice works in solely one direction, though; I already mentioned Connie, the black maid. There is also Ira's first wife Margaret, who is white, and doesn't get a seat at the evening of his first performance at Covent Garden because being married to a black man has put her beyond the social pale. And in the framing opening and closing scenes of the play, there is the female Polish journalist Halina who tries to get an interview with Ira in order to get her big break which could finally make the men at her paper take her seriously instead of keeping her solely around to write about ladies winning flower arrangement prices. Now the play both draws a parallel between the glass ceiling Halina is trying to break as a woman reporter and the one young Ira tried to break on the stage AND shows they're different things; in the final scene, when Halina pours her heart out about what she wants and why, old Ira is slowly putting on his make-up for playing King Lear. Adrian Lester hardly says anything in that scene and is yet absolutely devastating by body language and by what he does - because the make-up Ira is putting on for Lear is whitening his face. And you realise that all the other, non-Othello,non-Aaron roles he played so successfully - he had to play in whiteface. By the time he asks for his gloves to cover his hands, it's hard not to cry, and like I said - Adrian Lester does it almost silently. (Whereas he's very verbal in the rest of the play, and btw - the man has a terrific voice.)
I also found it a very courageous choice on the part of the playwright. It would have been easy to make the audience feel good by letting them leave in the knowledge that hey, yes, there was the London disaster but Ira did become a star after all! Happy ending! Instead, the last scene is like a punch in the gut: yes, he did become a star, but the time he lived in still managed to humiliate him through all his years of being one.
In conclusion: go watch, if you can.
Now, on to my earlier visit to the most famous cemetery in London.
Highgate Cemetery was build when the death rate in London shot up due to industrialisation and lots of diseases, so it's all Victorian area onwards, architecturallly speaking. This is the very first grave ever licensed, Grave Number One of Highgate Cemetery:
You're only allowed to visit the Western part of Highgate Cemetary, where this is, with a guide. Ours told us that the architect of the cemetery made sure that no path there is straight, which is an intriguing choice and very unlike most cemeteries I've seen. Also, nature has been busy as you can see:
The first guy in Britain who figured out he could make cash by presenting the audience with tamed exotic animals, George Wombwell, is remembered with his pet lion on his tomb, though the anecdote our guide told us is about an elephant. Wombwell and his competitor both had one African elephant each. Then Wombwell's elephant died, so the competitor advertised his show as featuring "the only living African elephant". Not to be outdone, Wombwell had his dead elephant mumified and advertised his show featuring "the only dead African elephant".
In the 19th century, Europe rediscovered Egypt and Egyptian art. These "Egyptian Vaults" pay homage to that fascination. They were also horrendously expensive to buy and originally didn't sell at all until "Cleopatra's Needle", i.e. an obelisk came to London, and Queen Victoria liked it (very vocally). This ensured suddenly everyone wanted to be buried in Egyptian style, and the vaults sold:
Have a ceder from Libanon:
Also buried near that ceder: Radclyffe Hall, author of the "Well of Loneliness", aka the first British novel to be a romance between women; she's buried in the vault of her companion:
Probably the most beautiful sculpture in Highgate Cemetery is this one: the Sleeping Angel:
In the eastern part of the cemetery, the tombs are less beautiful but there are far more famous dead artists. Here's Douglas "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" Adams:
Actor Corin Redgrave (being a Redgrave, he wanted to be buried near Karl Marx) and Jim Horn (described wittily in the map as "avid reader but not a partner in the firm", the firm being Penguin Books):
George Eliot, aka Mary Anne Cross:
William Foyle, he who founded the bookshop at Charing Cross Road, also brother Gilbert and daughter Christina;
londonkds told me she was a mean and thrifty employer, but there is one endearing story about her when she was young: she wrote to Hitler and offered to buy all the books he wanted to burn. (He wrote back that he wouldn't want to corrupt the British public any more than the German one. Still, she tried. Anyone who tried to save our books from being burned deserves credit for at least that much.
Of course, the most famous dead person in Highgate Cemetery is also arguably teh most famous German who moved to England, full stop: Karl Marx. When we arrived at his tomb, there was a whole visiting group there whose language we sadly did not recognize, so we had to wait until they were gone for the photo - and by that time a torrent of rain had started:
However, after tea with
rozk the weather was nice again, as I hastened to my hotel in order to dress up for the theatre. The way there goes through St. James Park,like last year, which means I always pass this:
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/963993.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
Mind you, the wind hadn't gone, which is why more and more clouds gathered during the day until it started to rain again. Still, I had planned on doing something I'd never managed during all my previous visits to London, which was to see Highgate Cemetery. Which I did, with
londonkds, and you'll find the pic spam complete with Douglas Adams and Karl Marx and ongoing narration below under the cut. Afterwards, we had a quick lunch because by then it was heavily raining again and we needed something warm, and then I hastened away to meet
rozk, whom I had tea and chatted away with until it was time for me to walk back to my hotel, change and take the Jubilee line to Kilburn where I watched the play Red Velvet, about Ira Albridge, one of the earliest black actors of the 19th century who became an international star. It's a new play, written by Lolita Chakrabarti and directed by Indhu Rubasingham, and Ira Albridge is played by Adrian Lester, who won an awardf or this role.
Albridge was American, born in New York in 1807, and left the US in 1824 for Britain where he toured the provinces and worked his way towards greater reknown until 1833 when he played Othello at Covent Garden, the first black actor to perform on a patented British theatre in London. What happened before, during and after forms the gist of the play, which the beginning and ending set thirty years later in on tour in Poland, where Ira Albridge, at that point an actor who'd performed across the continent, including Russia, been given medals by the King of Prussian and the Emperor of Austria and knighted by the Duke of Sachsen-Meiningen (who, btw, was a big theatre fan and is credited for some major reforms in German theatre) would eventually die. (His death isn't part of the play, but there is a reason why we see him near the end of his life and career, I'll get to that.)
Ira Albridge's performance as Othello at Covent Garden came to be becaus a week earlier, the most famous actor in Britain, Edmund Kean, playing Othello, had collapsed on stage in the arms of his son Charles who played Jago. Edmund Kean didn't recover and would die a few weeks later; he never shows up in the play but his shadow hangs over it. The manager of Covent Garden, Pierre LaPorte, faced with the prospect of losing the audience because the big star and draw had just dropped dead (or nearly so), then took a gamble and hired Ira Albridge. In the play Red Velvet, Pierre and Ira were friends before and one of the younger actors has seen Ira on stage previously, but for everyone else the fact that the new Othello is actually a black man comes as a shock, especially for Charles Kean.
Sidenote: this is probably the biggest departure the play does from history. Charles Kean in the play gets saddled with the role of prime antagonist, and it's not hard to see why the playwright picked him as the voice of racism and conservative traditionalism; as opposed to his father Edmund, who was one of the big innovative actors of his day, Charles Kean not only had the misfortune that comes from being the so-so talented son of a genius father in the same profession but also is remembered mostly for stately Shakespeare productions with detailed historical costumes who generated placid approval but never excitement. And it would make psychological sense if he felt supplanted by and jealous of Ira Albridge playing his father's role (but never his) opposite his fiancee, Ellen Tree, as Desdemona. Plus, you know, ironic doubling of the Iago role etc. However, the timeline of Albridge's life in the program points out that actually Charles Kean had already acted with Ira Albridge four years previously in Belfast... and the play was Othello, no less, with Ira as Othello and Charles as Iago. So in order for Charles to be the racist No.1 who is indignant at the mere thought of a black man playing Shakespeare and refuses to act with him, who can't stand the sight of him touching a white woman etc., this earlier cooperation had to be wiped out from history.
As the play also points out, 1833 was when slavery finally became illegal in the British colonies as well (the slave trade had been outlawed in 1807, but not slavery itself as far as the colonies are concerned), and it was very much a topic of the day; it's a topic of debate among the actors, too. Who also employ a black maid but never, including the fervent abolitionists, actually talk to her beyond giving her coats etc. or asking for tea; Connie, who is from Jamaica, is a silent presence (and the only other black character) except for one scene, after the first Othello performance and before the second one, when she and Ira are alone and have a conversation both about the play itself (she's not too impressed because Othello was so easily persuaded) and the circumstances (she tries, in vain, to warn him of what's to come).
Adrian Lester plays Ira in two different time frames - as old Ira, he's the essential old star, a bit tyrannical but also still able of charm if he cares to, hiding the unhealed scars of what happened in 1833 until they get laid open and you realise just what the price for his stardom was. As young Ira, he's passionate, ambitious and hopeful, and the play is great in capturing both the intense camraderie that can develop between actors, the excitement of developing performances together (which happens with Ellen Tree) - and its quick falling apart under pressure. Because the reviews are horribly racist (and btw, not invented - none of these critics seems to have been self aware enough of the irony of complaining of a "stupid looking, thick-lipped ill-formed African" daring to play Othello and "pawing" a white actress), and the entire Covent Garden theatre is closed after only two performances. (Ira Albridge didn't play in London again for another fifteen years, and then only once; all his triumphs took place elsewhere.) The play doesn't go for simple good/bad equation; you believe, for example, that Pierre LaPorte is sincere in his friendship and really wanted Ira to suceed, and their breakup scene is heartrendering, but at the same time, he's not just making a business decision, and he's also not free from the universally biased world around them - in the climax of their fierce argument, some expressions like "your true nature" get out, and it's clear he means "your nature as a black man".
The play doesn't examine how prejudice works in solely one direction, though; I already mentioned Connie, the black maid. There is also Ira's first wife Margaret, who is white, and doesn't get a seat at the evening of his first performance at Covent Garden because being married to a black man has put her beyond the social pale. And in the framing opening and closing scenes of the play, there is the female Polish journalist Halina who tries to get an interview with Ira in order to get her big break which could finally make the men at her paper take her seriously instead of keeping her solely around to write about ladies winning flower arrangement prices. Now the play both draws a parallel between the glass ceiling Halina is trying to break as a woman reporter and the one young Ira tried to break on the stage AND shows they're different things; in the final scene, when Halina pours her heart out about what she wants and why, old Ira is slowly putting on his make-up for playing King Lear. Adrian Lester hardly says anything in that scene and is yet absolutely devastating by body language and by what he does - because the make-up Ira is putting on for Lear is whitening his face. And you realise that all the other, non-Othello,non-Aaron roles he played so successfully - he had to play in whiteface. By the time he asks for his gloves to cover his hands, it's hard not to cry, and like I said - Adrian Lester does it almost silently. (Whereas he's very verbal in the rest of the play, and btw - the man has a terrific voice.)
I also found it a very courageous choice on the part of the playwright. It would have been easy to make the audience feel good by letting them leave in the knowledge that hey, yes, there was the London disaster but Ira did become a star after all! Happy ending! Instead, the last scene is like a punch in the gut: yes, he did become a star, but the time he lived in still managed to humiliate him through all his years of being one.
In conclusion: go watch, if you can.
Now, on to my earlier visit to the most famous cemetery in London.
Highgate Cemetery was build when the death rate in London shot up due to industrialisation and lots of diseases, so it's all Victorian area onwards, architecturallly speaking. This is the very first grave ever licensed, Grave Number One of Highgate Cemetery:
You're only allowed to visit the Western part of Highgate Cemetary, where this is, with a guide. Ours told us that the architect of the cemetery made sure that no path there is straight, which is an intriguing choice and very unlike most cemeteries I've seen. Also, nature has been busy as you can see:
The first guy in Britain who figured out he could make cash by presenting the audience with tamed exotic animals, George Wombwell, is remembered with his pet lion on his tomb, though the anecdote our guide told us is about an elephant. Wombwell and his competitor both had one African elephant each. Then Wombwell's elephant died, so the competitor advertised his show as featuring "the only living African elephant". Not to be outdone, Wombwell had his dead elephant mumified and advertised his show featuring "the only dead African elephant".
In the 19th century, Europe rediscovered Egypt and Egyptian art. These "Egyptian Vaults" pay homage to that fascination. They were also horrendously expensive to buy and originally didn't sell at all until "Cleopatra's Needle", i.e. an obelisk came to London, and Queen Victoria liked it (very vocally). This ensured suddenly everyone wanted to be buried in Egyptian style, and the vaults sold:
Have a ceder from Libanon:
Also buried near that ceder: Radclyffe Hall, author of the "Well of Loneliness", aka the first British novel to be a romance between women; she's buried in the vault of her companion:
Probably the most beautiful sculpture in Highgate Cemetery is this one: the Sleeping Angel:
In the eastern part of the cemetery, the tombs are less beautiful but there are far more famous dead artists. Here's Douglas "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" Adams:
Actor Corin Redgrave (being a Redgrave, he wanted to be buried near Karl Marx) and Jim Horn (described wittily in the map as "avid reader but not a partner in the firm", the firm being Penguin Books):
George Eliot, aka Mary Anne Cross:
William Foyle, he who founded the bookshop at Charing Cross Road, also brother Gilbert and daughter Christina;
londonkds told me she was a mean and thrifty employer, but there is one endearing story about her when she was young: she wrote to Hitler and offered to buy all the books he wanted to burn. (He wrote back that he wouldn't want to corrupt the British public any more than the German one. Still, she tried. Anyone who tried to save our books from being burned deserves credit for at least that much.
Of course, the most famous dead person in Highgate Cemetery is also arguably teh most famous German who moved to England, full stop: Karl Marx. When we arrived at his tomb, there was a whole visiting group there whose language we sadly did not recognize, so we had to wait until they were gone for the photo - and by that time a torrent of rain had started:
However, after tea with
rozk the weather was nice again, as I hastened to my hotel in order to dress up for the theatre. The way there goes through St. James Park,like last year, which means I always pass this:
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/963993.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.