Dramatic pause

A week ago, I saw The Lady From The Sea at the Royal Exchange. I'm always harping on about it, I know, but I love the Royal Exchange. For the first time in a long time, I got to sit in the posh seats, because I managed to blag myself onto the press guest list by saying I would write about the play here on W&F. It's taken me a while (well, a week), so big sorries for the delay, nice Rex people; I've been a bit caught up with Manchester Literature Festival. I did big it up on that Twitter, however, so all is not lost. Plus it's on until 6 November, so if you read this now, you still have time to swing by. And I'd definitely recommend it. As well as the usual high standard of costumes, props and sets I've become accustomed to at the Royal Exchange, I really enjoyed the piece.


The play, from 1888 (the painting of the same name, above, is by Edvard Munch from 1896), is by the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen, and even though I'd never heard of it (I read a ton of his stuff as part of a subsidiary drama course at university: Hedda Gabler, A Doll's House, Ghosts...), it has his trademark Naturalism, Realism and Modernism in spades. Particularly nature, and especially the sea and water, with the noise of waves in the background at points and a dappled image projected onto the floor to represent a pond. "Sea people are a law unto themselves. It's like they belong to the sea", is one line about Ellida (Neve McIntosh), the nutty woman at the centre of the story who bathes every day in the fjord (this water is described as "brackish"; such an evocative adjective). But all the characters are sea people, not just the lighthouse keeper's daughter Ellida: some have been brought to the town via the coastal steamers (interestingly, the ships are referred to in the masculine, not like our own convention of personifying boats as female); some will leave the town via the same route. As the blurb on the website itself says: "the undercurrents threaten to drag a whole family beneath the surface". Clever.

Chatting to a fellow reviewer a day later, it became clear he wasn't keen on the work because he couldn't empathise with any of the characters, but I think that's part of the point. Each and every person (even the fleeting German tourists) is dislikeable for one reason or another, but that makes the plot more complex than it appears at face value and drives the narrative and drama forward. I'm not sure if it's because of this that I was quite uncomfortable watching Ellida's husband Dr Wangel or whether it's because I remember seeing the actor Reece Dinsdale in quite a nasty episode of Silent Witness, but his performance was perhaps the only bit I had trouble with. And even that isn't worth mentioning, so maybe I'll just take it back.

A few little words about art

One of my Manchester Literature Festival chums has been busily adding to the Southbank Centre's GPS Global Poetry System project (to which we'll return at a later date), and her latest posting is most interesting to an arty-farty Francophile word lover like myself.


It's about an installation by the artist Ben Vautier, known simply as Ben, who lives in Nice en la belle France. It says "Il faut se mefier des mots", which means "beware of words". Well, I say.

So I've been doing a little wider reading on Monsieur Ben, who seems quite an interesting chap. There's a bit here on his life and work (nice ski goggles, Monsieur. My friend Julian has some suspiciously similar). I've learnt that some of his sculptures are not unlike Jean Tinguely's machines, an exhibition of which is on at Tate Liverpool right now and runs until 10 January: Joyous Machines: Michael Tandy and Jean Tinguely.

(When I first heard about this show, BTW, I got all excited because I thought it had something to do with the director of The Science Of Sleep and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, and, I just learnt, the first episode of The Flight Of The Conchords, although I was just saying yesterday how I'm not really into that, if I'm totally honest. Too much singing. Anyway, I was wrong, obviously. That's Michel Gondry. Obviously.)

So back to Ben, and you see a lot of cartes postales of his phrases on sale in trendy shops in Paris. They always remind me of Magritte's Ceci N'est Pas Une Pipe, from The Treachery Of Images series (La Trahison Des Images 1928–29). Just thought I'd share that.

Suivez-moi en Twitter!

French speakers can now join the Twittering masses, the lucky people. According to the Twitter blog, more and more folk outside the States are Twittering (no way), so the organisation has been busy developing the social media resource in alternative languages to English. After introducing Japanese, and then, last month, Spanish, Twitter is now available in French, thus benefitting almost 30 Francophone countries (wow, so many?).

My favourite thing to come out of all this? The French word for Twitterers is "les twitteurs". Magnifique!


If you can read French, bob over to the Twitter blog post Nouvelle saveur: Twitter en Francais! for more.

Time for tee

One of the side projects that keeps Words & Fixtures busy in any downtime is the loose cataloguing of slogan T-shirts, of which there are tons of totally tasteless ones worn mainly by unsuspecting foreigners. Presumably these poor, misguided individuals believe it's cool to wear clothes bearing English words yet don't actually speak much in the way of English themselves. Perhaps they should think about calling on the services of a translator other than the fast-talking London stall-holder who duped them into making the inappropriate purchase in the first place.

Here are the worst examples I've seen recently:
- a rather misinformed football presenter on French TV with "I love porn" emblazoned across his chest
- an inoffensive-looking young man at a filling station in Prague wearing a wholly offensive number printed with the disability logo and the word "spastic"
- a man in his thirties, walking down the street holding hands with his smiling, straight-laced wife in the very twee town of Potsdam in Germany, proudly sporting a tee bearing a man icon, a woman in a wedding dress icon and the maxim "game over"

Totally foxed

Here's a great sign that was posted on the noticeboard of the campsite we stayed at in Berlin. It reads: "Do not let stand your shoes outside! We have a fox, he robs the shoes!"
Apart from it being a lovely example of literal translation, it also taught us that the German word for fox is "Fuchs". Tee hee!
The other foxy pictures are of a German bottletop and one of my knockers. I just thought I'd include them for your delectation.