Times 2 - UK (2020-07-31)

(Antfer) #1

6 1GT Friday July 31 2020 | the times


Tuning up: it’s the


bold v the timid


It’s too early to talk
about hares and
tortoises. Yet with
indoor performances
permitted from
tomorrow, we are
beginning to see a
gap opening up in
the music world
between the bold
and the timid.
Some intrepid
venues are pressing
ahead with exciting
plans to open their
doors to a paying
audience, even if that
audience is small and
distanced. Foremost
among those is
Wigmore Hall in
London, which has
announced more than
80 concerts to run
between September
13 and November 1.
Sixty of them will
have a live audience,
admittedly confined
to 56 people, but all
will also be streamed
live on the Wigmore
website. And of
course if social-
distancing regulations
are relaxed in the
meantime, the
Wigmore can sell
more live tickets.
Snape Maltings
Concert Hall
in Suffolk is
also back
in business.
Every weekend
from next
week there
will be
three
concerts,
each
played
twice
daily so
more

people can hear
them. And as at
the Wigmore, the
performers are top-
notch. They include
Antonio Pappano,
Jess Gillam, below,
Sheku and Isata
Kanneh-Mason
and the London
Philharmonic under
Edward Gardner.
In London, too, the
Barbican Centre is
accentuating the
positive. This week it
announced a season
of live-streamed
concerts from
October to December,
featuring the BBC and
London Symphony
Orchestras among
others — and held
open the possibility
that a live audience
could also be
admitted, depending
on forthcoming
government guidance.
Contrast that
with vast subsidised
venues such as the
Southbank Centre
in London and
Symphony Hall in
Birmingham. They
not only seem to
have dismissed any
possibility of concerts
with live audiences
before next year, but
are in the process of
making hundreds
of staff redundant.
I don’t underestimate
the challenge of
getting large arts
centres restarted.
Yet not making even
a token attempt to
get shows up and
running again is
starting to look like
abject defeatism.

S


ex, sex, sex! In normal
times it’s a driving-force
of showbiz. Suddenly in
this summer of no-touchy-
no-feely, not so much.
Consequently the film and
TV industries are getting
terribly exercised about
how, during a pandemic, to bring
sizzling eroticism back to the screen
“in a safe and responsible way” —
which sounds about as exciting as
a teetotal stag night.
One production company in
America is using mannequins. “We’re
shooting [the love scenes] from a great
distance or in a way you can’t see the
form is inanimate,” Bradley Bell, the
executive producer of CBS’s soap
opera The Bold and the Beautiful, told
The New York Times. Well, good luck
with that. It sounds close to deploying
those squeaky inflatable dolls that
Soho sex shops used to sell in the
1980s (or so I’m told).
Other productions are allowing
real actors to have their moments
of intimacy — but separately. That
sounds even sadder. First one person
will be filmed simulating a swoony
kiss in thin air, then the other. The
miracles of CGI (computer-generated
imagery) will then conjure the illusion
that they are locked in steamy
embrace. As an alternative, other
producers are getting round the
social-distancing rules by casting
only real-life couples in intimate
scenes, which seems tough on actors
who have no significant others.
However, most producers shooting
love scenes seem to have opted for
a rigorous regimen of swabbing and
temperature testing. Whole booklets
of Covid-proofing regulations have
been issued by stage and screen
unions. The film and TV world is
only just getting used to “intimacy
co-ordinators” — the strange new
profession, created after the Me Too
scandals, to ensure that everyone is
“comfortable” with any sexual contact
required by a production. Now, it
seems, producers will also have to
employ “Covid-compliance officers”.
Erotic film-making can rarely
have been so entangled with red
tape. The next sequel to Fifty
Shades of Grey should be called
Fifty Layers of Grey Bureaucracy.
There is another way forward.
Am I the only person who inwardly

Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson in the film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey


so much when playing a sex scene
with Julianne Moore that she asked
him if he was having a panic attack.
I’m not surprised. The whole set-up
must veer between weird and
hilarious. As Kate Winslet put it, in
an imaginary letter home: “Dear
Mum, at work today I had so-and-so’s
left nutsack pressed against my cheek.”
If the pandemic results in a
reduction in the nutsack and nipple
count, and the restoration of subtlety,
suggestiveness and good old-
fashioned innuendo to the art of
shooting a love scene, would that
be so bad? I long for the days
when the orchestral strings would
swell up on the soundtrack, the
director would cut to library footage
of waves crashing on a beach, or
hot coals glowing in a fireplace, or
perhaps (for the more salacious-
minded) a train racing into a
tunnel — and the rest would
be left to that most erotic of
cinematic devices: the
viewer’s imagination.

screams, “Get on with the bloody
story!” every time the plot of a film
or TV drama is paused so that the
stars can get their kit off — which
seems to be more and more often?
Recent case in point: wouldn’t the TV
adaptation of Normal People have been
even more gripping without those
prolonged bouts of rumpy-pumpy
in almost every episode?
What was the point? It’s not as
if real pornography isn’t instantly
available to anyone who wants it. And
these days, because the use of body
doubles has become so widespread,
you can’t be sure any more that you
are really seeing the dangly bits of
your favourite stars. Keira Knightley
is the most recent actress to declare,
at 35, a moratorium on paid public
viewings of her naked form. “The
nipples droop,” she explained to
the Financial Times.
In fact most actors seem more
stressed about doing sex scenes
than any other aspect of their work.
Robert Pattinson apparently sweated

Richard Morrison the arts column


If screen clinches are banned, let our imagination work instead


UNIVERSAL PICTURES

E23G
Free download pdf