"Is That All There Is?"

[Tetrachord]

This existential question is posed in a still-brilliant song by Peggy Lee. Written, I think, in the 1960s it captures the zeitgeist today. The lyrics find a woman questioning life's experiences and suggesting we all 'break out the booze', 'keep dancing' and have a ball because "that's all there is". She is searching for some deeper meaning without understanding that the deeper meaning comes from inside the self. Escapism through drugs and alcohol mask that eternal inner emptiness for those who cannot find more meaning in life and who often also crowd their lives with material possessions. It's a powerful message and was an anthem of my youth, when my mother would discuss with me the meaning of those words - a mixture of hedonism and nihilism:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sWTnsemkIs

[Richard Barrett]

Some readers might also remember a (for me) indelibly memorable Robert Wlison-directed touring production of Heiner Müller's play The Hamlet Machine, which played at the Almeida Theatre some time in the early 80s, and was accompanied throughout by a piano playing a very slow one-finger rendition of this song. Returning to which, I remember hearing it as a child and finding it very frightening that someone could even think those things!

[Tetrachord]

Some readers might also remember a (for me) indelibly memorable Robert Wlison-directed touring production of Heiner Müller's play The Hamlet Machine, which played at the Almeida Theatre some time in the early 80s, and was accompanied throughout by a piano playing a very slow one-finger rendition of this song. Returning to which, I remember hearing it as a child and finding it very frightening that someone could even think those things!

That sounds like a very devastating use of that tune!!! Here's another approach to disenchantment, and I just adore it!! The bitterness is palpable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yxz81DtK_9k

[Globaltruth]

That sounds like a very devastating use of that tune!!! Here's another approach to disenchantment, and I just adore it!! The bitterness is palpable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yxz81DtK_9k

I agree, good to see it posted on this forum - a favourite
We were lucky enough to see this performance by the extraordinary Meaow-Meaow at a recreation of the KitKat club in Berlin, she adds vunerability and an uncomfortable humour to the world-weariness,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3LWXuG22sI

[pastoralguy]

My introduction to this song was last year on a Bette Midler album and I remember listening to it over and over. I then heard the Peggy Lee version and found it just as powerful but in a more understated way.

A great song!

[Serial_Apologist]

The title of this thread was also that which Lindsay Anderson gave to his autovaledictory documentary, made in 1992, just two years before his passing, in reference to Alan Price's rendition of this song aboard a boat on the Thames, on which Anderson led a gathering of beloved fellow actors and associates in a commemoration of Jill Bennett and Rachel Roberts, followed by the scattering of their ashes on the tide. Oddly enough I had not come across the tune before.

Some wonderful person has put the entire, heartwarming documentary on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCgWJqcOQhA

The boat sequence occurs right at the end.

Lindsay Anderson was a bit of a hero of mine. They don't make telly like this anymore.

[eighthobstruction]

This existential question is posed in a still-brilliant song by Peggy Lee. Written, I think, in the 1960s it captures the zeitgeist today. The lyrics find a woman questioning life's experiences and suggesting we all 'break out the booze', 'keep dancing' and have a ball because "that's all there is". She is searching for some deeper meaning without understanding that the deeper meaning comes from inside the self. Escapism through drugs and alcohol mask that eternal inner emptiness for those who cannot find more meaning in life and who often also crowd their lives with material possessions. It's a powerful message and was an anthem of my youth, when my mother would discuss with me the meaning of those words - a mixture of hedonism and nihilism:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sWTnsemkIs

....well done Tetracords mum; I say....

PJHarvey version v good....

[Pianorak]

still-brilliant song by Peggy Lee.

Still listen to the song often. It's been one of my favourites since I first heard it on one of Mark Tully's "Something Understood" programmes many years ago.

[Padraig]

Is there an award for memorable threads?
I nominate this one.

[Serial_Apologist]

Is there an award for memorable threads?
I nominate this one.

I forget...

[Tetrachord]

The title of this thread was also that which Lindsay Anderson gave to his autovaledictory documentary, made in 1992, just two years before his passing, in reference to Alan Price's rendition of this song aboard a boat on the Thames, on which Anderson led a gathering of beloved fellow actors and associates in a commemoration of Jill Bennett and Rachel Roberts, followed by the scattering of their ashes on the tide. Oddly enough I had not come across the tune before.

Some wonderful person has put the entire, heartwarming documentary on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCgWJqcOQhA

The boat sequence occurs right at the end.

Lindsay Anderson was a bit of a hero of mine. They don't make telly like this anymore.

Thanks for this. I've inquired further about Jill Bennett and found some disturbing material in the Wiki bio of John Osborne - to whom she was married. This actress committed suicide and this is what Osborne later wrote about her: surely he was one of the most vile and troubled narcissists in the theatrical world!!

Adolf [Osborne's nickname for her] has left half a million to Battersea Dogs' Home. She never bought a bar of soap in all the time she lived with me. Always, she cried poverty… It is the most perfect act of misanthropy, judged with the tawdry, kindless theatricality she strove to achieve in life. She had no love in her heart for people and only a little more for dogs. Her brand of malignity, unlike Penelope's went beyond even the banality of ambition…. Her frigidity was almost total. She loathed men and pretended to love women, whom she hated even more. She was at ease only in the company of homosexuals, who she also despised but whose narcissism matched her own. I never heard her say an admiring thing of anyone… Everything about her life had been a pernicious confection, a sham.

[Serial_Apologist]

Thanks for this. I've inquired further about Jill Bennett and found some disturbing material in the Wiki bio of John Osborne - to whom she was married. This actress committed suicide and this is what Osborne later wrote about her: surely he was one of the most vile and troubled narcissists in the theatrical world!!

Adolf [Osborne's nickname for her] has left half a million to Battersea Dogs' Home. She never bought a bar of soap in all the time she lived with me. Always, she cried poverty… It is the most perfect act of misanthropy, judged with the tawdry, kindless theatricality she strove to achieve in life. She had no love in her heart for people and only a little more for dogs. Her brand of malignity, unlike Penelope's went beyond even the banality of ambition…. Her frigidity was almost total. She loathed men and pretended to love women, whom she hated even more. She was at ease only in the company of homosexuals, who she also despised but whose narcissism matched her own. I never heard her say an admiring thing of anyone… Everything about her life had been a pernicious confection, a sham.

Terrible loss. This is also mentioned in her Wiki entry, along with the ashes scattering ceremony:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Bennett_(British_actress)

Rachel Roberts, married for a time to Rex Harrison, also took her own life, but ten years before Jill. What a tragic waste of a wonderful talent. I relive with great relish her hilarious seduction scene with Malcolm McDowell over the coffee tasting in "O Lucky Man", (1973), once every year: definitely my favourite film:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Roberts_(actress)

[jean]

...surely he was one of the most vile and troubled narcissists in the theatrical world!!

I remember seeing Look Back in Anger in about 1958 - the vanguard of the exciting new theatre that was going to liberate us from the washed-up old dramatists that were all we'd had.

I thought it was horrible, even then. Deep misogyny disguised as progressive politics.

I had never read that passage you quote until now, but it doesn't surprise me in the least.

[Serial_Apologist]

I remember seeing Look Back in Anger in about 1958 - the vanguard of the exciting new theatre that was going to liberate us from the washed-up old dramatists that were all we'd had.

I thought it was horrible, even then. Deep misogyny disguised as progressive politics.

I had never read that passage you quote until now, but it doesn't surprise me in the least.

None of that lot, the Angry Young Men of the time, come out of that era with reputations worth salvaging, in my opinion. Except possibly Alan Aykbourne (sp?), if he was one of that group - not sure about that. Hideously overinflated male egotists. I don't even particularly like Pinter.

[Richard Barrett]

None of that lot, the Angry Young Men of the time, come out of that era with reputations worth salvaging, in my opinion.

That's worth a whole thread of its own. I don't think Ayckbourn is usually categorised with them, although on the other hand it seems to me the more political (as opposed to just angry) writers among them and their successors wrote work that's still significant - Wesker, Arden, Soyinka and of course Bond for example.