Do3 - A Thousand Kisses

[Russ]

I had the Masters live visual running in one window and the play burbling on as a soundtrack. The former's passion was palpable, the latter had been drained of it, and little differentiation between the older patriarchs - Raphael is omnipresent in all his characters, although to be fair, he doesn't have a problem taking the p out of himself in his crustier portrayals, and seems content with or perhaps even oblivious of his natural pomposity. The 'drama', in as much as this was drama, was snippets of a story of a life, embedded primarily in (an unfortunately typecast) Geoffrey Palmer’s 'grumpy old man' exposition in the narrator role. The tone is unrelentingly knowing (or lapidary, as Draco might call it) and cynical: "the telling is much better than the kissing", and not confined to the men either - the women, whether lowly or of high status, are confined to Raphael's clever, bitchy aphorisms, which I don't object per se in moderation - what gets me is the lofty and over-comfortable detachment in their authorship, and the women in particular are demeaned in character and context as a result, being portrayed as a consequence as uniformly predatory and robotic. The pervading cruelty does have an undeniable strong basis in some of the poems themselves though, but from the little I have seen from the range of Catullus' poetry, Raphael's narrative arc is not from the poems about the relationship between Catullus and Clodia. It is in these other poems that one can see how Raphael is drawn to Catullus, a brainy cheeky detached young misfit as far as we know, and sees him as a some kind of historical match or perhaps hero. And Raphael feels totally at home in the political duplicity and infighting of a turbulent Rome.

A key question is whether Raphael's intentional lack of passion is true to his subject. Look at ff's extract poem above. Is that the outpouring of someone thinking the 'telling is better than the kissing'? No. It is the antithesis of it.

I guess this play was commissioned about the same time as the awful (and subsequently panned, both as a play and a novel) Fame & Fortune for R4, so this Do3 can be regarded I hope as the end phase of a big Beeb mistake. I don't disagree with Draco's condemnations, but this was nowhere near as bad as the overblown R4 efforts, and Raphael's trademark world-weary view does find a genuine resonance in the twisted bitterness of some of the poems, even the love poems, but the trouble is that Raphael's version of world-weariness is always delivered with a yawn and a snigger.

And yet, and yet, you'll think me mad because I listened to it twice, despite all these serious reservations, the central tale, albeit via the scraps of the poems surrounding the love affair itself, was an intriguing and fascinating one. That's why I hated this Raphael - he's not a romantic, and he chooses to sully what sounds like could have been a great romance. I guess we'll never know. One can't help feeling Raphael's remnant of his glittering prizes of 30 years ago is merely the referential love affair he has with himself.

I really should edit the above down to a more coherent ramble, but there yer go.

Russ

[DracoM]

Top, stuff, Russ.

It is that apparently unself-critical narcissism in Raphael's writing that reminds me so much of Lord Henry in 'Picture of Dorian Gray' in which the world he live sin is diminished and re-packaged into languid, bitchy little bons mots and aphorisms. And that is not the cool, wicked, perceptive Catullus of the poems. Frankly, Raphael demeaned the poems by using them like this in my view.

[Eudaimonia]

A key question is whether Raphael's intentional lack of passion is true to his subject. Look at ff's extract poem above. Is that the outpouring of someone thinking the 'telling is better than the kissing'? No. It is the antithesis of it.

But is it really? Actually, I thought the author should have gone further in exploring the contradictions inherent in the kind of character who could express (seemingly) real passion, yet deliberately choose to insert himself into this kind of toxic, unsentimentally degenerate political environment anyway. Assuming the poems are 100% sincere seems a mistake: how much of his professed love was real, how much a product of cold-blooded calculation, and in what ways do these contradictory motives intersect and clash? In some respects, perhaps Catullus wasn't shown to be cynical enough.

As I was listening, I couldn't help but think the play would have been more enjoyable if it were read rather than heard. What came across as "structural clumsiness" probably looks much more cohesive once you see it flowing across the page.

Another thing that bothered me: I don't know much about the state of classical education in Britain, but I have a feeling many of the historical references and allusions went straight over the audience's heads. (For example, when Catullus was cheekily asked if he were "looking for a radish", I wonder how many listeners got the rhaphanidosis joke? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhaphanidosis) It didn't bother me, but including passages in Latin seems a tad pretentious if only a tiny percent of the listeners are going to be able to keep up.

Anyway, speaking of Latin, I wasn't a great fan of his translations of the poems themselves: they seemed a little awkward and forced in an attempt to "sound fresh". Though I do feel a little bad for complaining-- "Oh yeah? Get back to me with translations of your own and then we can talk!!" would be a perfectly valid response here, so perhaps it's best to leave it at that.