The search for authenticity, in the matter of art as with anything else, can drive a person slowly mad – and I should know, since this is the time of year when I tend to spend rather too long trying to find a Christmas performance of Handel’s Messiah that is, according to my own, somewhat wonky definition, the genuine article. What I’m after is a small orchestra, preferably with a harpsichord and valveless trumpets, a countertenor rather than a mezzo-soprano and a hall that is not wildly over-lit. But two out of three will do. I do draw the line, though, at wigs and period costumes, for which reason I will probably not be booking the Mozart Festival Orchestra’s performance at the Royal Festival Hall, to be staged in a “candlelit style setting”.
Why does this stuff matter to me? In truth, I’ve no idea. I know next to nothing about classical music and I seemed to cope perfectly well with hugely swollen choruses as a girl; I even sang in one for a while. But there it is. When it comes to oratorios, I am – delete as applicable – either a snob, someone with standards or someone whose taste has developed through the decades in unexpectedly (even to her) sophisticated ways. What I am definitely not, I think, is a conservative old fart who blenches at the very idea of change. The modern and the radical, whatever my feelings about the sound of certain kinds of oboes, are not anathema to me, of this I am absolutely certain.
Casting my mind back over the last few years, the musical event that thrilled me more than any other – I loved it so much, I saw it twice – was the National Theatre’s London Road, a “verbatim” production about the murder of prostitutes in Ipswich by Steve Wright, and of the effect of these crimes on a community. It shouldn’t have worked. For all that its words and music mimicked the patterns of everyday speech, it was about as unnatural a thing as I’ve ever seen. Still, just 10 minutes in, I experienced what I can only describe as a kind of epiphany. The cliched things people say about art, and how it works, and why it matters: in that moment, they ceased to be hot air. Suddenly, all my old ideas about musical theatre were just a lot of wooden building blocks, scattered across a floor.
The relationship between art and authenticity has had quite a week and not only because, last Thursday, the Prince of Wales celebrated the completion of Queen Mother Square in Poundbury, the oft-derided Dorset new town he began building, along supposedly traditional lines, in 1993. When the announcement was made that Emma Rice, the artistic director of the Globe, will leave the theatre in 2018 after only two seasons in the job, people took up their positions faster than you could say “Malvolio”.
In one corner were those who insisted that Rice’s departure was only right, given her disgraceful fondness for microphones and modern lighting in a building that only exists at all in order to give audiences a taste of Shakespeare as it would have been staged in his own time. In the other were those who cried out that this was a backward step and that, henceforth, the Globe will be seen not as an exciting theatre, but as just another dusty wing of “the heritage industry”. Authentic! Ersatz! Authoritative! Hidebound! On and on they yapped, both camps bedding down for yet another prolonged skirmish in what is starting to feel like the cultural equivalent of the Hundred Years’ War.
I’m not about to weigh in on the Rice story. Too much has already been said, far too little of which has been based on anything other than the vaguest of assumptions (I prefer facts). Though I will admit to cherishing the irony that it was a Gerald Ratner-ish kind of authenticity – her admission that Shakespeare is difficult and sometimes in danger of being boring – that may ultimately have caused her downfall (at this, her stuffier enemies in the press acted like she’d applied Magic Marker to a First Folio). Nevertheless, the way this narrative has played out thus far is deeply weird.
It’s not only that I hadn’t fully grasped the degree to which the word “heritage” is now considered a term of abuse, something I find wholly mystifying, given that our heritage – emphasis on the word “our” – includes such things as libraries, national parks, museums and galleries; I also strongly dislike the implication that we’re all in one camp or the other.
For me, this is an impossible fit, a straitjacket I simply won’t pull on. Can’t people imagine, even people who work in the arts, that it is possible both to like seeing Shakespeare in the gloaming at an Elizabethan playhouse and, say, to enjoy edgy, site-specific productions of crazily innovative new plays? (Aren’t the two things, in any case, connected by an invisible line, one having been born of the other?) The failure to accept this as a possibility seems to me to be just another way of patronising audiences, which is doubly odd given that the desire not to do that is just about the only thing on which the warring parties in the Rice saga appear to agree. Authenticity is indisputably a unicorn; time and place cast their own veil over every play, every canvas, every piece of music. But I don’t see that occasionally getting closer to it (or at least to our idea of it) does anyone any harm, just as I don’t regard breaking with tradition as inevitable philistinism; today’s radical joins the canon next weekend.
Most people’s tastes, moreover, are not only eclectic, but brilliantly flexible; all that really matters in their development is opportunity. Money might be tight at the moment, but curiosity comes as standard in most human beings – and when it’s piqued, their universe expands.
A few years ago, I signed up for a tour of Erno Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower in Poplar, east London, a Brutalist monolith to which I’d always wanted to take a wrecking ball. For me, this was transformative. Gazing from the windows of a flat on one of its highest floors, I felt something shift and I don’t mean its foundations. It wasn’t Chatsworth, but it wasn’t hell, either. It had its own mysteries, even its own satisfactions. What a world, I thought, that can have so many different kinds of beauty in it.
