Monthly Archives: April 2018

Arts, Drama

Lateral Thinking Drama: Highly Strung

 

Alfonzo the Magnificent bowed to the audience. He put his hands into the bowel of chalk and clapped them together. The band stopped playing and the drum-roll began. All the spotlights were fixed on Alfonzo as he began to climb the ladder up to the platform thirty feet in the air.

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Waiting for him at the top of the ladder was his beautiful assistant, Clara, dressed in a pink bodysuit and wearing a crown of white ostrich feathers. When he stepped onto the platform, she handed him the balancing pole. The drum-roll ceased, and a hush fell over the crowd. The air was hot and humid at the top of the circus tent, and Alfonzo gave Clara the signal to wipe his brow with a lace handkerchief. She then dangled the handkerchief in mid-air, at the end of her long, outstretched fingers and let it drop slowly to the ground. There was no safety net to catch the flimsy, white square as it floated down to the ring below, and people shifted nervously in their seats, craning to get a better look at the little man in the black tuxedo perched like a penguin in the sky.

The circus master tapped the end of his microphone and circled the ring, flicking the electrical cord like a whip. “Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, Alfonzo the Magnificent, tightrope walker extraordinaire, will perform a death-defying feat. There is no safety net to catch him if he falls, so I urge the audience to remain quiet throughout, and please refrain from taking any pictures as the flash might distract our performer. Good luck, Alfonzo. Now on with the show!”

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Alfonzo looked straight ahead. He slid a slippered foot onto the wire and adjusted the pole in his hands. He slid his other foot out and steadied himself. He slowly raised his left foot and circled it around his right, then slid it forward. He heard a man cough in the darkness below him but continued to stare straight ahead. When Alfonzo reached the centre of the wire, he stopped. He raised himself onto the balls of his feet, threw his pole into the air and the crowd gasped. Alfonzo spun around, then caught the pole again. He teetered to one side, tottered to the other, while the audience below oohed and aahed. He managed to stabilise himself and continued on towards the other platform. When he reached it, there was an explosion of cheering and whistling. Sweat broke out on Alfonzo’s forehead as he raised his hand in the air and bowed again with a flourish.

After the performance, as Alfonzo was wiping his make-up off, his old rival, Guiseppe, burst into the dressing room.

“So, you think you are the best tightrope walker in the whole of Argentina?” Guiseppe said.

“Well, they don’t call me Alfonzo the Magnificent for nothing,” Alfonzo replied. “I know how to please a crowd. It is I they want, not some third-rate amateur like yourself.”

“I am not here for insults, Alfonzo. I came here to challenge you to the tightrope duel of your life. I dare you to meet me at the Plaza Maria on Thursday week, at midnight, where we will judge, once and for all, who is the best.”

“I am the best!” Alfonzo cried. “I am the best in Buenos Aires, the best in Argentina and perhaps even the best in the world!”

“Then prove it,” Guiseppe said, slamming the door on his way out.

Nine days later, Alfonzo looked at himself in the mirror and adjusted his bow tie. It was eleven o’clock on Thursday night, one hour before the duel. He picked up his pole and his bucket of chalk and headed for the door. He felt a slight foreboding but chose to ignore it.

As he approached the Plaza Maria, he could hear the crowd that had gathered to watch. He turned a corner and saw the plaza at the far end of the street. There were lights strung up between the buildings, and high above the square, Alfonzo saw the silver wire gleaming like a blade between the cathedral spire and the balcony of the Italian Embassy building. In the centre of the plaza, a man on a unicycle was juggling tenpins. As he got closer, he saw a woman with a snake wrapped around her shoulders.

When Guiseppe arrived, they tossed a coin to see who would go first. It landed heads up, and Alfonzo prepared himself to climb the ladder. He dusted his hands and looped the pole through his belt at the small of his back. He took one step and paused, then continued his ascent. The wire was a hundred feet up in the air and it took Alfonzo five and a half minutes to reach the top. When he stepped onto the slanted roof of the cathedral spire, he noticed a chill in the air. He could not hear the crowd for the wind in his ears.

From the ground, Guiseppe watched Alfonzo pull the pole out from under his belt and lay it across his hands. Alfonzo waited for a moment and then slid one foot out onto the wire. Just as he was about to lift his other foot, his body jerked, and the pole slid through his hands. He bent to retrieve it, but it was too late. It had started to slide down the roof. It slipped off the edge and fell down into the crowd. Alfonzo turned and started back down the ladder.

When he got to the bottom, Guiseppe was waiting for him.

“What on earth are you doing?” he screamed.

“I can’t go on like this,” Alfonzo said, pushing Guiseppe aside and striding off through the plaza and down a main street. Guiseppe set off after him.

Alfonzo stopped in front of the entrance to a bar and looked up at the sign. The bar belonged to a friend of his, and he opened the door and walked in. He walked over to the counter and ordered a glass of water. The bartender smiled knowingly at him, took a revolver out from under the bar and shot a bullet into the ceiling. After waiting a few moments, Alfonzo thanked his friend and they shook hands. He turned and left the bar without taking a sip of his water.

Why did the bartender shoot the ceiling, and why did Alfonzo thank him? 

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Arts, Films

Film Review: Breathe

REVIEW

Claire Foy and Andrew Garfield as Diana and Robin Cavendish in Breathe.

BREATHE is a cinema picture for which one packet of tissues might not be sufficient. Even for those hardened movie critics one could expect some audible blubbing by the end. You would surely need a heart of stone not to be moved by this beautiful film.

Breathe tells the true story of an upper-crust English couple, Robin and Diana Cavendish – brilliantly played by Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy – who meet in 1958 with the world seemingly at their feet.

They are dazzlingly attractive, privileged, sociable, and popular. Scarcely have they married and set up home in Kenya, where Robin works as a tea-broker, at least until it’s time for G&Ts on the veranda, and Diana falls pregnant. They are on the threshold of a gilded life together.

But then, out of the blue, catastrophe strikes. Robin contracts polio and Diana is told not only that he will be paralysed from the neck down for the rest of his days, but that those days are strictly numbered. He has a few months at best.

Anyone who has watched the Netflix series The Crown will recall Foy playing another young, upper-class, married woman who was also in Kenya (and, also, in the 1950s), when she received devastating, life-changing news. In that instance, it was the King, her father, who had died.

But like the young Princess Elizabeth, Diana Cavendish seems to be hewn from one enormous stiff upper lip.

She does not fall apart, because she cannot. She will take Robin and their baby boy back to England and start anew, treating the worst that life can throw at her with as much grace as she treated the best.

The producer of Breathe is Jonathan Cavendish, who was that baby boy.

 

THIS film is his parents’ story and he deserves to be inordinately proud of it, because it is not mawkish or even overly sentimental, as in lesser directorial hands it might have been.

The director is Andy Serkis – better known for his work in front of the camera as the so-called king of motion-capture, the technology that allowed him, so exquisitely, to inhabit Caesar in the Planet Of The Apes films, and Gollum in the Lord Of The Rings series.

Here, with the help of an excellent screenplay by William Nicholson (who explored similar territory in his play Shadowlands), he has mastered what you might call emotion-capture.

Breathe is a searingly moving, impeccably sensitive and, at times, very comical depiction of a uniquely British response to dreadful adversity.

At first, however, Robin simply wants to die. Trapped in an English hospital bed, hooked up to a respirator that by today’s standards looks impossibly antiquated, he can’t bear what he has become. He won’t even look at his infant son.

But then he and Diana confound medical convention, not to mention the rather pompous consultant (Jonathan Hyde), by resolving that he will live out his days at home.

There, with Diana as his carer, his joie de vivre comes flooding back. It becomes clear that the terrible prognosis was wrong, or at least, has been overcome. Although home-care is fraught with challenges, at a time when it was unheard of for polio victims, Robin now has a future.

Nonetheless, he will never breathe unaided which, medical wisdom dictates, means that he is destined always to be bedridden.

Then Robin has an extraordinary idea. What if a wheelchair could be converted into a respirator?

He shares this brainwave with an inventor friend, Professor Teddy Hall (Hugh Bonneville), and suddenly he is sufficiently mobile, with the devoted support of Diana and her twin brothers (both played very chirpily by Tom Hollander), they even contemplate a foreign holiday. This, it should be pointed out, was in the days when ‘disabled access’ meant removing a door frame.

At a conference in Germany, Robin issues a plea with which today we are entirely familiar, but which then sounded downright radical: that as a severely disabled person ‘I don’t want to just survive, I want to truly live’.

Paralysed he might be, yet, like U.S. civil rights leaders in the same period of history, he makes valiant, pioneering strides towards a new understanding, a new enlightenment.

And his chair goes into mass production.

I suppose Breathe protects us from some of the agonies and indignities of extensive paralysis. And there will doubtless be some ungenerous beings who point out that even in his stricken state, Robin Cavendish still existed in a bubble of poshness and privilege.

 

HAD HIS background been more modest, his chums less well-connected, he would have had a shorter and more wretched life. This is a world of hat-pins, striped blazers and jolly fancy-dress shindigs, and Serkis revels in it.

But then it’s the truth of this remarkable story that makes it so intensely affecting, combined with the perfection of both lead performances.

Garfield and Foy have both done plenty of fine work in the past, but none of it better than this. The steady love but evolving relationship between Robin and Diana seems utterly real.

I hope those responsible for handing out acting awards don’t mind being reminded how much they seem to adore portrayals of extreme disability by able-bodied actors.

Daniel Day-Lewis and Eddie Redmayne, for example, already have Oscars to show for it. Andrew Garfield was nominated for one Academy Award for Best Actor in 2017 but didn’t win the award. Surely, his time will come.

 

Breathe (12A)

Verdict: Searingly moving

★★★★★

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Britain, Government, Legal, Scotland, Society

The ‘right to protect property’ and ‘bash a burglar’ laws

PROPERTY AND THE RIGHT OF SELF-DEFENCE

UK ministers toughened up the laws relating to the right of self-defence when protecting property five years ago. The so-called ‘bash a burglar’ laws were introduced to dispel doubts over the right to fight back against housebreakers in England and Wales.

In Scotland, however, something of a grey area still remains.

Legislation was introduced south of the Border in April 2013 backing the ‘householder defence’, which means a homeowner, or an occupier of a property can use ‘disproportionate force’ in the heat of the moment.

A 2016 High Court ruling upheld the guidance from the Crown Prosecution Service – England’s equivalent of Scotland’s Crown Office – stating: ‘You are not expected to make fine judgments over the level of force you use in the heat of the moment. So long as you only do what you honestly and instinctively believe is necessary in the heat of the moment, that would be the strongest evidence of you acting lawfully and in self-defence.

‘This is still the case if you use something to hand as a weapon.’

Acts of revenge, however, are outside the remit of the law.

But in Scotland, the law was not altered to give greater defensive rights to homeowners because Scottish ministers feared it would lead to a growing number of ‘have-a-go heroes’.

Under Scots law, any self-defence still must be deemed ‘proportionate and reasonable’.

A senior legal expert has said that, if accepted by a jury, self-defence would have the effect of a ‘complete defence’. An accused would be acquitted of the charge of murder or culpable homicide if self-defence was successfully established.

The closest thing in Scots law to the householder defence which exists south of the Border would be the concept of provocation.

Provocation is not a complete defence, but would have the effect of reducing a charge of murder to one of culpable homicide if successfully established.

 

A NATIONAL debate about a homeowner’s right to defend their property took place in 1999 when farmer Tony Martin blasted 16-year-old Fred Barras with a shotgun during a late-night raid at his remote Norfolk home.

Barras was hit in the back and died at the scene after escaping through a window. His accomplice, serial burglar Brendon Fearon, then 29, was also injured during the burglary at Emneth Hungate.

Bachelor Mr Martin, then 54, said he had been burgled at least ten times and had lost about £6,000 worth of furniture.

But he was given a life sentence after he was found guilty of murder by jury with a majority of ten to two.

Prosecutors claimed he lay in wait for the intruders and opened fire from close range. Mr Martin, who said he shot at the intruders in the dark after he was woken by the sound of a window being broken, later had his term cut on appeal to five years for manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. He served three years in prison.

He has never returned to his home and now lives at a secret address. He is understood to have slept in his car on some occasions.

Mr Martin was arrested again in December 2015 after saying in an interview he still owned guns. No action was taken because all that was found was a faulty air gun which he held legally.

Fearon received a 20-month sentence. He has since been jailed for supplying heroin. He claimed to have been permanently disabled by Mr Martin but dropped a £15,000 civil claim when he was photographed walking and cycling.

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