I was massively looking forward to seeing the play "Jerusalem" this afternoon. Perhaps my expectations were too high, which was odd in a way as I had very little idea what the play was about and so didn't know what to expect. But everyone's been raving about it and I am a big fan of the actor Mark Rylance who plays the lead, so I was expecting to be blown away. And it was west end theatre which was not adapted from a successful film, which has to be a bonus. I was actually glad to be going to see something where I didn't know what was going to happen.
Weirdly it turns out that the play has a fair amount in common with the comedy drama I am writing: set in the West Country, about the future encroaching on the past, involving an outsider figure who may or may not be magic. There was plenty that was different too, but it did make it hard to concentrate sometimes as I kept thinking about my own work.
I enjoyed the play, though it wasn't quite as world changing as I had been unfairly expecting. Sometimes it's good to come to something without preconceptions. I think if I had seen this without having heard it was amazing it would have knocked me for six, but I was expecting too much from it. And Rylance is amazing, so good in fact, that it's hard to tell how good the actual play is. He is able to turn ordinary enough lines into very funny ones and can convey mystery and drama with his eyes. But maybe a good writer understands that. Whenever I have a script read out by great actors I can tell straight away that half of what I have written can be delivered in a look or a tone of voice.
This play is fun and funny and the characters feel real and believable. It's well worth seeing if you can get and afford a ticket (once again I was astonished by how much I had to part with for two seats). There's lots to think about in it and I enjoyed it more after the event than I did at the time as I thought about what had happened (but that's pretty much the story of my life).
Tonight we watched a DVD that had some similar themes to the play the documentary "The Future is Unwritten" about Clash front man Joe Strummer. I was always more into the Pistols than the Clash (and as discussed in my play "Punk's Not Dead" it was really my friends who were punks and I reluctantly went along with it at the time - enjoying more in hindsight). Julien Temple did a great job with the Pistols documentary, "The Filth and the Fury" and this one is also interesting, but it skirted over the bits I found more interesting and was maybe a bit too reverential. But it didn't skirt over Strummer being a bully and cutting people off (though glad to see he mellowed out a little with age) and his is a fascinating career trajectory: a man who aimed for fame, but then got too famous and then hardly famous at all. And it also proved you have no control over who is influenced by you. Would Strummer have been pleased to have so influenced Bono? Is being heralded as a poetic revolutionary by billionaire Johnny Depp a fitting epitaph for a punk rocker? My favourite bit was when a bloke from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers said something like the Clash influenced his own band to have songs with messages that weren't just the same every time.
Personally, much as I like the Clash (in hindsight) I would happily see them never exist if it meant that U2 and the RHCPs had never existed either. But you've got to be careful what you wish for. If I went back and killed Joe Strummer in 1976 then maybe I'd come back to a future with some other even worse bands having taken the place of the ones I don't like.
But we can't judge a person by their fans. Would I wipe out Chris Morris to save us from the "Balls of Steel" style idiots who thought they were following his path or Jesus because of tele-evangelists and basically all Christians? Would I kill myself to stop the inferior copyist Stewart Lee?
Strummer's rise and fall followed by some wilderness years, followed by returning to create things that he loved and were good which didn't have the same commerical impact, followed by an untimely death is an amazing story and it's sad he was taken so young, even if he was a friend of Keith Allen and influenced Bono. As I've mentioned before
when he died I recall the Standard headline boards that tried to encourage you to buy the paper (in the days before everything was free) merely read "Punk Star Dead". Usually such ambiguity is to encourage you to buy the paper only to find out it was the drummer from "Four Play" (a band I was briefly in for one afternoon at the Kings of Wessex) has passed away. I was astonished that it was Strummer. It felt like an insult. When a big star dies you will sell more by naming them. If Paul McCartney died it wouldn't say "60s musician dies". Strummer was certainly one of the main figures of the punk scene, but had his success, followed by less success made him a forgotten figure.
No. Maybe the Standard seller couldn't spell "Strummer".
Whatever, Strummer was right, the future is unwritten. Worth remembering that one.
I enjoyed the documentary much more in hindsight than at the time. I wonder if I have some kind of medical condition.
