Category Archives: Rants, raves and faves

Collection chronicles difficult lives

Red Girl Rat Boy

By Cynthia Flood

Biblioasis

169 pages, $18.95

Reviewed by Judy LeBlanc

Cynthia Flood, winner of the Journey Prize and the Western Canada Gold Award, amongst others, has published one novel and four collections of short stories. Her latest, “Red Girl Rat Boy” chronicles lives not easily led by those not easy to love; are any of us?  Marcia, in the title story, is sickly obsessive;  Ellen, in “One Two Three One,” rejects her own child.  A host of battle-weary activists spar with one another in “Blue Clouds” and “Dirty Work.” In “Eggs and Bones,” a resentful young mother lies in bed listening to her husband cook breakfast. “ Foods catch, stick on that scaliness, scorch.” Syntax is frequently truncated and I’m disarmed, on edge, as if asked not to get too comfortable.

With the agility of an acrobat, Flood navigates shifts and turns within time, often lifetimes, while employing a free indirect style that catapults the reader from a character’s most immediate experience to retrospective narration and then back again. In “To Be Queen,” the best piece in the collection, Kenny, whose relationship with his lover has just ended, recalls growing up with siblings in a family where a sister died before he was born. With his remaining siblings, in the way that we do, he seeks to piece together the particular grief that shaped him. “Each sibling privately recalls their first sight of Mom crying.”  In a psychic distance that could not be much closer, we are with Kenny in a playful childhood attack from his older sister’s friends; “They’re on me. First I laugh, then there are too many eyes and fingers, open mouths, teeth.” And a few sentences later, with a skillful widening of the aperture; “Thus I learned that if you don’t give a shit, or credibly pretend not to, even in defeat you have power.” At the end of this story, I am left yearning that my own children may never live with the absence of one another. Such is the emotional impact of this raw and honest writing.

Flood’s cast of characters cavort, love, grieve and rebel between the complicated layers of their lives. A montage of ailing elders subvert the meaning of the story’s title, “Care,” in a macabre nursing home setting. Several stories look back to Vancouver in the 70’s and 80’s. “Addresses” is a kaleidoscopic glimpse into the lives of those who rented in the West End at the time. It is, paradoxically, their quirkiness that makes Flood’s characters both recognizable and tender. In “Such Language,” Lauren’s mother, out of love, leaves a foul message on the machine: a wake-up call in code, the only language mother and daughter are capable of speaking.

These stories are told in a voice that navigates like an underground stream through the deepest channels of the psyche. These stories are felt in the marrow.

Judy LeBlanc is a fiction writer from Fanny Bay. She’s one of the founders of the fledgling Fat Oyster Reading Series. http://judyleblanc.com/

 

Luck smooths refugee’s transition

Life Class

By Ann Charney

Cormorant Books

232 pages, $21.95

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

Nerina, the protagonist of Ann Charney’s fourth novel, Life Class, is an unusually optimistic and determined refugee. She carries freight from her past in the former Yugoslavia, including a terror of dogs born of her experiences in war-torn Sarajevo, but she refuses to allow it to define her. As she remarks, “Just because you’re born in some unlucky place doesn’t mean you have to carry it with you for the rest of your life.” Even though she is scratching out a living as an illegal alien in Venice, she is determined to reinvent herself and find a place in the sun. The novel traces her path across two continents as she successfully pursues this aim, taking leaps of faith and constantly starting over from scratch.

She has help, from a succession of colourful characters. Helena, an elderly woman who makes a living as a go-between, linking artists and wealthy patrons in the art milieu of Venice, rescues her from sweeping the floor in a hairdressing salon and recommends her for a job with a rich American couple. Walter, aging and gay, ensures her access to the United States. Helena’s cousin, Leo Samuels, gives her a job and training when she arrives in New York, and even supplies a room for her to live in at the back of his framing shop. Even her romance with an up-and-coming artist, Christophe, is instrumental in taking her to Montreal and the possibility of some day starting her own gallery.

There is a lot to be said for a novel that is determinedly happy, in which characters uniformly beat the odds and find success, and do it against a background of great cities and beautiful countryside. But those odds exist in life; nobody’s path is entirely free of pitfall and calamity. Despite Nerina’s origins, there is a Teflon quality to her experience. In narrative terms, her story lacks any real conflict and that makes her journey flat and predictable where it should be inspiring. She encounters difficulties—a theft, no documentation, little knowledge of English, having to cope with a large dog, dependence on the goodwill of others—but the people she meets smooth each one away and on she goes. How significant it seems that her favourite character in the fiction she reads to learn English should be Becky Sharpe in Vanity Fair!

At one point in the novel,  Walter quotes Robert Louis Stevenson: “Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.” This novel certainly shows Nerina doing that. We are entertained by her progress through the rarefied world of fine art and its patrons, but the lesson Nerina draws from her life class—she is “suddenly struck by the vast uncertainty of it all…yet, through all of it, life goes on, ordinary and mysterious, revealing the future in random slivers”—seems a disappointingly hollow outcome in a novel meant to be uplifting and life-affirming. One cannot help feeling that her friend Helena may have been closer to the mark and could have been speaking for all the characters in the book when she observes, “your change of fortune has more to do with dumb luck than skill.” And where’s the excitement in that?

Margaret Thompson’s new novel, The Cuckoo’s Child, will be published in 2014

Coal-mine disaster dusted off to good effect

The Devil’s Breath

The story of the Hillcrest Mine Disaster of 1914

By Steve Hanon

NeWest Press

327 pages, $24.95

Reviewed by Lorne Daniel

The early years of the 20th century seems distant, faded from today’s viewpoint, almost a full century later. European powers and their “new world” spinoffs still saw western Canada as a sparsely populated hinterland. Tucked into the remote Crowsnest Pass in the south-west corner of the new province of Alberta, however, were a number of coal mines producing the energy that would fuel the first burst of western development.

In June of 1914, the worst mining disaster in Canadian history took the lives of 189 men at Hillcrest Mine in the pass. The story of that disaster has been largely overlooked in our cultural record — and not only because it happened so long ago.

The disaster was covered by western media, but little of the news was picked up in the east. Western coal itself rarely travelled as far east as Manitoba, so the story simply did not reverberate very far afield.

Yet, for a region that had suffered the Frank Slide just 11 years earlier, the Hillcrest explosion was another devastating blow. Filmmaker-author Steve Hanon sifts through conflicting and confusing sources – newspapers, inquiry reports, company reports and memoirs – to patch together a picture of what happened at Hillcrest before, during, and after the explosion and fires.

The Devil’s Breath takes over 100 pages to lead us to the day of the disaster. The context, Hanon says, is everything. He takes readers inside the industrial age thinking of the time, the heated world of coal mining labour struggles, and the work ethic that drove small frontier communities.

The mine exploded between 9:15 and 9:30 am on June 19, 1914, killing many miners instantly. In the book’s most gripping chapter, “Without Air to Breathe,” we follow the frantic escape attempts and rescue efforts that filled the minutes and hours immediately after the explosion. Miners scramble to find escape routes and air to breathe. Rescuers head down shafts, retreat for air and equipment, return at considerable risk and often stumble into caverns filled with the bodies of their friends and co-workers.

What went wrong? Why do Canadians know so little about Hillcrest? The story moves from life and death heroics to the frustrating opacity of our economic, governmental and social systems. One is left believing that there were far too many vested interests in Hillcrest for real accountability to stick. To his credit, Hanon avoids the temptation to pick out a single, arbitrary villain. “The truth likely lay tangled somewhere in the Gordian Knot of human behavior that involved politics, the struggle for control, human failings, fear, shrugged shoulders, equivocation, evasions and fatalism,” he concludes.

The Devil’s Breath is presented in a handsome trade paperback edition with 20 pages of photographs, a useful glossary, an event timeline, a full listing of the disaster’s victims, bibliography and other notes. It is a thorough package.

The effect is more archival than imaginative, which is appropriate. Hanon did not set out to write a new story set in the context of Hillcrest, but to clear away the coal dust and give us a good look at the original story. That he does admirably.

Lorne Daniel lives in Victoria, B.C.. His blog Writing:Place is at http://lornedaniel.ca

Novel probes Afghanistan aftermath

Katrin Horowitz is a Victoria writer whose second novel, The Best Soldier’s Wife (Quadra Books, 184 pages, $21.95,) was a finalist in Mother Tongue Publishing’s second Great B.C. Novel Contest.   Horowitz’s protagonist Amy Malcolm, whose husband volunteered to serve in Afghanistan, writes a series of letters to the wife of the Chief of Defence Staff, as she struggles to understand what happened to her husband in the conflict.  Horowitz’s first novel, Power Failures, was a murder mystery published in 2007 after she had been a volunteer in Sri Lanka.  Horowitz will be launching her new book in conjunction with Remembrance Day events at Vancouver Island libraries:  in Duncan and Ladysmith on Nov. 14; Nanaimo on Nov. 15 and on Gabriola Island on Nov. 16.  Horowitz recently answered Lynne Van Luven’s e-mail questions about her new novel.

 Katrin, I really enjoyed the conversation – or is it a monologue? – that you created via Amy Malcolm’s “letters” to Mrs. Harker, the wife of Ian Malcolm’s chief commander in the Canadian Forces.   Can you explain how you came up with this technique for your novel, and what you hoped to achieve?

I knew as soon as Amy arrived in my imagination that she was obsessed with how Mrs. Harker had managed to become the ideal military wife.  If the story is a conversation, then Mrs. Harker is the antagonist to Amy’s protagonist.  And if it’s a monologue, Mrs. Harker is Amy’s alter ego.  But it took me a while to find the most compelling way to tell their story.  Then I happened to read White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga, and recognized that I what I needed was a twist on the epistolary novel.  The letters allow Amy to say what she needs to say to one particular person, a person with whom she invents a relationship – but also someone who is on one level “you,” the reader, thereby strengthening the connection between writer and reader.

I find it interesting that Ian Malcolm is a reservist helicopter pilot who volunteers to serve in Afghanistan without first consulting his wife or teenage son.  Why this detail, why not just a novel about a regular enlisted man’s family?

Amy and Ian have a long history together.  And like many middle-aged couples, they know how the other is going to respond to certain issues.  Ian doesn’t tell Amy about his decision ahead of time because he knows that she will try to talk him out of it, and he doesn’t want to be talked out of it.  His strategy works, because he effectively shuts Amy up, and the rest of the story happens because he shuts Amy up. Ian retired from the full-time military because Amy insisted, she’s good with words and can talk him into anything, and although he’s still flying, which he loves, it’s not the kind of flying he did in the military.  Commercial flying is all about keeping it safe, about staying firmly in the centre of the envelope.  As their son Ethan points out to Amy with devastating accuracy later in the story, Ian was bored with his life and was looking for a new adventure.

Ian volunteers in 2009, and serves for nine months, but three years pass before Amy actually writes her letters to Mrs. Harker.  Why the lapse in time?

Amy first thinks of writing to Mrs. Harker the same day that Ian tells her he has volunteered.  But she is held back by her own reticence, so she limits herself to what she calls ‘head letters,’ letters she imagines writing but never commits to paper, because a good soldier’s wife doesn’t complain.  Even three years later she is worried that her letters are presumptuous, although by this point her obsession with Mrs. Harker has grown until it is impossible for her not to write. She feels she must tell her story to the wife of the general who she holds responsible for what happened to Ian.  How we communicate – the who, what, when, where and why of sharing our thoughts – is a thread running through the book.  Is the best soldier’s wife the one who keeps her thoughts to herself?  Or as Amy asks near the end of the book, “If I tell the truth and nobody hears, is it still the truth?”

As I read the novel, I kept thinking that you must have family in the military, because the details felt so accurate.  But in your Acknowledgements you thank Mary and Steve Lawson because they “made this book possible.”  Can you talk a little about your position on or your connection to Canadian Forces?

Thank you!  My father fought in the Second World War before I was born, but my only real connection to the military is through my very good friend, Mary.  She not only shared stories of life as military wife with me and introduced me to other military wives, but also enlisted her husband’s help with the details of his life at KAF.  The scene in the book where Ian puts together a slide show of all his pictures of ramp ceremonies for dead soldiers was inspired by some of Steve’s photos.

The daily newspapers provided incidents from the real war in Afghanistan, from horrific IED attacks to the ridiculous ‘Love in a LAV’ scandal.  Reading military memoirs, including former Chief of Defense Staff Rick Hillier’s A Soldier First, provided additional background.  The names of the dead soldiers that end each of Amy’s letters came from the Department of National Defense website. And finally, as I was writing about Ian’s PTSD, I realized I was also writing about how my father had been damaged by his war experiences.

Quadra Books may not be a known publisher to many readers.  Can you tell me why you chose the house to showcase your second novel?

Quadra is a Victoria literary publisher committed to publishing “good books for thoughtful readers,” which for me is an excellent starting point.  That it was willing and able to include The Best Soldier’s Wife in their Fall list and bring it out in time for Remembrance Day was a big plus.

 

Poet active on Victoria’s Flamenco Scene

By Garth Martens

Flamenco derives from the south of Spain, a distinctly gitano or gypsy phenomenon with Moorish, Judaic, and Catholic influence. An innovative art form requiring practised improvisation as well as craft, it was passed down through oral transmission rather than sheet music.  In fact, efforts to set it down on paper reduce its complexity. Flamenco’s rhythm structures are assertive, the singing voices rough as salt, and the dancing marked by intensities of emotion, the killer look, and sections of percussive footwork that rap like thunder on the floor. Dancers imitate manoeuvrings of the bull or the matador with dramatic arm gestures and little flores of the hands.Flamenco isn’t about looking sexy, but about passion: a passion inflected with anger, love, dread, cheekiness, grief, and pride. Always pride.

Six years ago, I began as a student with Alma de España, Victoria’s singular water-shed for flamenco dance, guitar, and cante, founded twenty-three years ago by Veronica Maguire and Harry Owen. My priority then was to study the singing and immerse myself in the rhythm as a palmero, someone who supports the basic accents, an articulate clapping, while the dancers or singers are free to weave their syncopations.

I was hooked within my first year of study, but only in the last year have I felt, for the first time, like a dancer.  Some intervening blockage has slipped away so I learn the choreography much faster — my ear and my feet in alignment. As well, this discipline gives me personal sustenance, transforms a troubled emotion into a brightness, not by sweetening it or simplifying it, but through a rightful sweat. Many dancers I know admit to confronting inner obstructions in every new choreography. Some of them, to tune themselves to the particular piece, will draw on archetypes, images that ride within their bodies as they dance. Flamenco cultivates the vast inner multitude and favours the intricate over the reductive.

I’ll be working with Alma de España this winter in preparation for Pasajes, a major production slated for July 12, 2014, at the Royal Theatre. Canadian artists include Veronica Maguire (dancer), Gareth Owen (flamenco guitarist), JoAnn Dalisay (pianist/composer), and me(poet). Among those coming directly from Spain are Domingo Ortega (dancer), María Bermúdez (dancer), and Jesús Álvarez (flamenco guitarist). While this is Veronica’s personal story, it’s also mine and yours, resonant with shared passages of life, death, and regeneration. I’ve been contracted to write original English-language poetry, which I’ll perform live as part of the show. Advanced student dancers and singers, accompanied by guitarist Gareth Owen, will also perform in intimate in-studio shows in February, May, and June. I’ll perform in two of these as a dancer. Alma de España runs classes September to June at all levels in flamenco dance, guitar, and cante. For tickets or inquiries:  1.250.384.8832  /  info@almadeespana.com.

Garth Martens won The Bronwen Wallace Award in 2011, a national prize for the best writer under thirty-five who has not yet published a book. His first book will appear with House of Anansi in April, 2014. You can hear him read his poem Dreamtime here: https://soundcloud.com/prism-mag/dreamtime-by-garth-martens.

David A. Jaffe’s Music at Open Space

Lafayette String Quartet, Andrew Schloss, Scott Macinnes, Trimpin, and guests present: the Music of David A. Jaffe

8 p.m., November 8, 2013 

Open Space

admission $15 general/$10 students, seniors, members 

Related event: 

November 9, 8 p.m. Uvic Faculty Concert Series: Guitarworks. Alexander Dunn with David A. Jaffe and guests. Phillip T. Young Recital Hall, University of Victoria

Gateway expose shows inaction no option

The Oil Man and the Sea:

Navigating the Northern Gateway

By Arno Kopecky

Douglas & McIntyre

264 pages, $26.95

Reviewed by Aaron Shepard

Part rousing adventure and travelogue, part exposé, The Oil Man and the Sea follows journalist and travel writer Arno Kopecky and photographer Ilja Herb as they sail from Victoria up B.C.’s central coast. They travel not just as reporters but as activists, hoping to raise awareness about the environmental risks the Northern Gateway pipeline poses to one of the world’s last great wildernesses.

As with most books of this sort, we begin not with big themes, but the adventurer-writer beset by anchor mishaps, engine failure and an overwhelming array of nautical charts and equipment. At times in the first few chapters, their quest seems not just quixotic, but forgotten altogether. But the fumbling of these novice sailors is an intimate, effective way of immersing readers in an unfamiliar landscape. And their early misadventures dovetail nicely with one of the book’s main themes: the vibrant, hazardous complexity of the coastline and its people.

Kopecky introduces us, directly or indirectly, to the multitude of big names at the centre of the Northern Gateway drama, including Enbridge, the federal and provincial governments, the Joint Review Panel, the Heiltsuk, Gitga’at, Haisla Nations, the Pacific Pilotage Authority (the pilot boats that would lead oil tankers through the treacherous coastline), and Bill C-38, the federal omnibus bill that inexplicably closed B.C.’s oil spill response centre. We also meet a host of memorable characters: fishermen, engineers, environmentalists, First Nations elders and band councilors who offer their different opinions about pipelines, refineries and oil tankers.

But it is the coastline itself – a “labyrinth” of channels, straits, bays and islands – that remains the biggest player on stage, a place both robust and fragile with its turbulent seas, salmon runs and rich wildlife. Perhaps the most vivid evocation of place is near the book’s end, when Kopecky explores Douglas Channel and the humpback whales that may have to share their once-quiet waters with tankers bearing bitumen and liquefied natural gas.

Between conversations with the locals, fishing and grizzly bear watching – the book contains some gorgeous photos – Kopecky pulls the lens back to show the equally intricate web of national politics, science and economics. An adventure that begins with two young men goofing around on a sailboat becomes a story about Big Oil, and the future of a province, its people and its wilderness.

The Oil Man and the Sea is refreshingly current and vital, with a postscript that includes the deadly explosion in Lac-Megantic this past July. Disasters like Lac-Megantic and the Kalamazoo River bitumen spill in 2010 illustrate our complicity: our consumption drives the need to pull as much oil from the ground as humanly possible, whatever the risk. Kopecky’s quest for a tanker-free coast may indeed prove quixotic, but his message is that we should take responsibility, at the very least, for ensuring governments and industry enforce and follow strict environmental and safety regulations. No matter how confusing or paradoxical the issue of pipelines and the economy, our inaction is not an option.

Aaron Shepard is a Victoria writer. His debut novel, When is a Man, will be published in April 2014. 

 

Biography turns lens on famed photojournalist

Photo credit: Kevin Doyle

Review by Liz Snell

“They say real men don’t cry – that’s crap.” Photographer Ted Grant, 84, wasn’t afraid to get emotional in front of a packed auditorium during the launch of his life’s biography.

Grant’s biographer, UVic graduate Thelma Fayle, met Grant as his student at Camosun College. Years later, she hesitantly emailed him to ask his help in photographing someone for an article. Since then Fayle has conducted over 50 interviews with Grant. She saw the necessity in honouring his legacy: “Everyone knew his work but nobody knew his name,” she said. “My goal in writing this book was to honour a hardworking Canadian artist.”

Recognized by many as “the father of Canadian photojournalism,” Grant’s contribution to Canadian culture was a particular emphasis during the launch. Whether through his story about his famous photograph of Pierre Trudeau sliding down a l banister in the Chateau Laurier, or his experience organizing photographers at Victoria’s 1994 Commonwealth Games, Grant’s connection to national history was evident. Grant had intimate access to famous lives and was even on a first-name basis with prime ministers.

Yet Grant’s presence conveys humility. He called much of modern concern with technique “garbage” and downplayed his own skill by emphasizing timing: “I’m a photographer, not a technician.” He advised photographers to “shoot someone when they’re listening” to capture the intense focus in their eyes, and to be “first to arrive and last to leave” to capture candid moments. His work exhibits a striking ability to portray someone’s unguarded essence.

His vibrant, wry sense of humour had the crowd laughing through most of the presentation, but he was also moved to tears multiple times during his talk, particularly when discussing a photo of his wife, who passed away last year. He noted, “I’ve shot over 100 babies being born, and I’ve cried at every one.”

His passion for photography was evident when, during a question period, a young photography student asked him for advice. At first he joked, “Go over to the medical building and become a doctor.” Then he said, “If it’s totally consuming and you love it, it doesn’t matter what you do, what hours you put in.”

He described photography as a “magical career” in which he’s been “constantly alive.”

Many recounted Grant’s popularity as a photography instructor. One of Grant’s former students told how Grant had staged his own in-classroom arrest, to test whether students would respond by pulling out their cameras, as a photographer should.

For Grant’s 76th birthday he photographed himself flying upside down in a fighter plane. He discussed plans for his 100th birthday, and joked that he’ll have the undertakers present so that when the news person announces his birthday, he can “drop dead” and the party will start.

While his photographs may be more recognized than his name, Grant emphasized the photographer’s duty take a backstage role. “If you’re unseen but you’re in the same room, that’s when you get to be appreciated.”

Fayle’s biography (published by Heritage Group in Victoria) finally turns the lens on Ted Grant to capture his own light.

Liz Snell is a freelance writer in Victoria

Poet argues against simple readings

Poetry and Meaninglessness

At Gibson Auditorium, Camosun College, Lansdowne Campus

The Carol Shields Lecture

Delivered by Jan Zwicky

October 19th, 2013

Reviewed by Senica Maltese

As a writing student focusing on fiction and poetry, I had high expectations going into Jan Zwicky’s Carol Shields Lecture entitled “Poetry and Meaninglessness.” The lecture did not disappoint; however, it was not at all what I expected it to be.

The Victoria Writers Festival brochure stated that the lecture would explore how some contemporary poetry strikes us as meaningless and to what degree this assessment is correct. For this reason, I went into the lecture expecting to look at specific contemporary poems and to explore how they could be regarded as meaningless and how, perhaps, they nevertheless retained meaning. As I should have anticipated, this discussion resisted the simplicity that I predicted.

I firmly believe that we readers should engage with material that is “out of our league” and, for the most part, that’s what this lecture was for me. Jan Zwicky’s presentation, though clear, articulate and mind-blowingly intelligent, left me more dazed than enlightened. Her use of mathematical examples to explain our perception of our surroundings left me confused and grasping for the safe ground of the literature and poetry. As I was sitting in the auditorium at Camosun College listening to her speak, I couldn’t help but notice that I was the only person under 30 in the room, which may have explained why others in the audience were nodding and laughing while I sat paralyzed in the stands. However, toward the end of the lecture I began to get a more solid footing on the material.

I particularly enjoyed Zwicky’s segment about the joy that we derive from obtaining meaning, and how a harder struggle can result in greater joy.  The lecture genuinely impressed me when Zwicky insightfully remarked that we have become too satisfied with the “sugar rush” of understanding simple things. Zwicky insisted that meaning needs to advance and evolve into insight into realty, and that we should forgo “superficial pops” of understanding in favour of more durable insights. Zwicky concluded by asserting that writers, particularly poets, have a great responsibility to allow readers to experience their insights—in other words, that they must show the path to their insights in order that readers experience the insight for themselves. She stressed the importance of this evolution and cultivation of meaning in our modern day world, which is rooted in ecological and economic strife. Though this seemed a rather heavy note to end on, the lecture was still deeply inspiring and received a standing ovation.

It was wonderful to have the opportunity to engage with Zwicky’s insights into poetry, philosophy and human understanding in general. I suggest that anyone passionate about or interested in poetry attend one of her lectures, even if they think it may be “out of their league.”

Senica Maltese is a BA student focusing on Honours English and Writing.

Cleese kept crowd engaged

By Curran Dobbs

A master of black humour and vocal critic of “mindless good taste,” British actor John Cleese was nonetheless a class act in his one-man show, “Last Time to See Before I Die” at the McPherson Playhouse recently.

The show, while continuously infused with Cleesian wit, wasn’t strictly comedic. Regaling the audience with his life story, starting with how his parents met, walking the audience through his childhood and his pre-Python days, and movie career, Cleese offered bittersweet moments as he remembered with fondness friends and family who had passed on.  When Cleese recalled David Frost,  he started to tear up, infusing the show with some pathos and creating a humanizing element that would have been absent had the show been strictly comedic (or strictly dramatic).

Admittedly, throughout the show, Cleese didn’t seem too energetic, but after all, he is 73. Nevertheless, the time flew by;  when he announced that he had kept us for about an hour and it was time for an intermission, it came as a surprise. Considering my tendency to fidget and check my watch constantly when sitting for long periods of time, I was impressed.

The second half of the show was mainly a discussion of offensive or black humour.  Cleese talked about it being passed down from his mother, and explored reactions from audience members, mainly to Fawlty Towers and A Fish Called Wanda. Cleese reported that during the test screen for A Fish Called Wanda, the three bits the audience identified as the funniest bits were also the  bits that were identified as most offensive.  He also made much more use of video clips in his second act.  Many of the clips were familiar to Cleese fans, from the previously mentioned shows as well as Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Showing the clips took some of the strain and effort out of filling up the second half while entertaining the audience. Again, I sat through the second half without checking my watch.

The show ended with a standing ovation, with members of the audience eventually clapping in rhythm to The Liberty Bell song from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The man hasn’t lost a thing at 73 – except the usual, youth, original hair colour . . . I would certainly recommend this show for anyone who appreciates dry humour.

 

Curran Dobbs is a local reviewer and comedian.