The Spectator - October 29, 2016

Opera

A night at the circus

Richard Bratby

The Nose

Royal Opera House, in rep until 9

November

Billy Budd

Opera North, touring until 3 December

The Royal Opera’s latest production is

Shostakovich’s The Nose and to paraphrase

Mark Steyn, whatever else can be said about

it, you certainly get a lot of noses for your

money. Noses are tossed from character to

character, noses kneel in prayer and noses

stroll casually past in the background. They

poke through curtains, mingle in crowds, and

form a high-kicking, tap-dancing all-nose

chorus line. At one point, a little tiny nose

toddles unaided across the vast, almost-

empty stage. Around them swirls bustling,

multicoloured madness: bearded ladies and

moustachioed cops, women dressed like

dayglo matryoshka dolls, and a couple of

pigtailed cartoon Chinamen who might have

wandered in from an Ellen Kent production

of Turandot. It’s a regular circus.

The unseen ringmaster is the director

Barrie Kosky, who’s having something of

a moment in UK opera. He’s so hot right

now: most recently on account of his uni-

versally adored Glyndebourne production

of Handel’s Saul. That isn’t actually an

opera, of course, and The Nose is hardly

mainstream stuff either. Premièred in 1929,

it’s Shostakovich as angry young modern-

ist — before he had the anarchy punched

out of him by Stalin. Gogol’s original story

of a bureaucratic drudge whose nose quits

his face to pursue an independent (and

altogether more successful) career can be

read as satire, but Shostakovich’s score

treats it as an absurdist romp: fidgety and

raucous, hurling out idea after idea to see

what sticks.

Kosky takes the same approach, and

it has to be said that it looks fantastic —

and not just for the visual flair with which

Kosky choreographs his stripping police-

men or his squadrons of apparatchiks on

tricycle-mounted desks. He pulls deftly

in and out of focus, suddenly leaving the

scene bare apart from a bread-making

housewife wreathed in illuminated clouds

of flour, or our hero, the hapless (and nose-

less) collegiate assessor Kovalov huddled

self-pityingly in bed. In an opera that isn’t

really about the singing, Martin Winkler’s

Kovalov anchors the whole thing, and if

you enjoy rubber-faced clowning, he’s a

knockout: wheedling, whining, blustering

to and fro in his ludicrous red velvet suit or

reduced to a pale, bald face vanishing lugu-

briously behind a curtain. John Tomlinson

Cinema

Net effect

Bryan Appleyard

Lo and Behold: Reveries of the
Connected World
Key Cities

As a documentary-maker, Werner Herzog
is a master of tone. His widely parodied
voiceovers — breathy, raspy, ominous —
are cunningly ambivalent. The interviews he
conducts are seldom less than strange, often
shocking, and the pacing and tenor of his
films are subtly modulated.
Never more so than here. Lo and Behold
is divided into chapters. The first is a fairly
conventional documentary about the begin-
nings of the internet. Herzog talks to the
people in California who made the first
computer-to-computer connection in 1969,
asking them reasonable questions and gen-
erally making them seem like comfortable,
all-round good guys.
This is then subverted by the appearance
of Ted Nelson, a cyber-pioneer who believes
it has all gone horribly wrong. Rising and
falling slowly on his houseboat, he tries, not
entirely successfully, to explain why, even-
tually becoming uneasy with his awareness
that some people think he is mad.
Herzog intervenes consolingly: ‘To us you
appear to be the only one around here who
is clinically sane.’ It is a shockingly explic-
it showing of his hand. Nelson dissolves in
gratitude, takes out a little camera and pho-
tographs the film crew.
Next, there is a chapter celebrating ‘The
Glory of the Net’ which becomes darker
as Herzog gets on to self-driving, web-con-
nected cars and robot football teams which,
we are assured, will be better than the best
human teams by 2050. Without quite saying
it, Herzog is pondering the question, what,
then, will happen to us?
This prepares us for the next chap-
ter, ‘The Dark Side’. This consists of one
supremely Herzogian set-up. An American

family is gathered round a dining table on

which are laid out neat plates of muffins and

croissants, three daughters are seated and

the parents are standing. The cold exactness

of the scene is almost cruel — the parents

talking about the death of another daugh-

ter and their subsequent torture by vicious

internet trolls. ‘I did not know such deprav-

ity existed in humans,’ says the mother.

From this point on the tone grows

increasingly exotic and anxious. We see the

story of the people who, convinced that they

are allergic to the electronic soup which we

all now inhabit, live within ten miles of the

Green Bank radio telescope in West Vir-

ginia. To protect the work of the telescope

the area is kept entirely free from all cellu-

lar and radio signals and they are relieved of

their symptoms.

There is a truly alarming discussion of

the terminal effects of a giant solar flare —

they happen every few hundred years — on

an internet-dependent world. By the time he

gets on to artificial intelligence, Herzog has

started to ask some strange questions: ‘How

valuable is the cockroach to you?’ and ‘Does

the internet dream of itself?’

Even Elon Musk of Tesla Motors and

SpaceX is thrown by this. Herzog holds a

shot of him seated, staring at the floor, lost

in introspection and, to his credit, taking

the questioning very seriously. Finally, he

admits he doesn’t remember any of his own

good dreams, ‘The ones I remember are the

nightmares.’

The mounting tension in the film is

expressed by the reactions of the interview-

ees. Increasingly, they are eased out of their

comfort zones, as are we. Finally, we are left

with the sense that all this high intelligence

and ingenuity is leading to the termination

of the human. As ever, Herzog leaves us as

anxious and uncertain as we are thrilled.

As an artist, Herzog springs from the

New German Cinema movement that

emerged in the Sixties in reaction to a per-

ceived paralysis in German movie-mak-

ing. He can also be linked to painters like

Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter as

well as to the photographers Andreas Gur-

sky and Bernd and Hilla Becher. All share a

vision — clear-sighted to the point of dead-

pan — of Germany and the world after the

cataclysm of the 20th century.

Herzog’s focus has now moved to Ameri-

ca where the near future is most busily being

constructed. His gaze is that of old Europe,

wonder-struck and deeply sceptical, but also

ironic and amused. This is — I need hardly

add — a film you are obliged to see.

Bryan Appleyard writes for the

Sunday Times.

As ever, Herzog leaves us as

anxious and uncertain as we

are thrilled

ographic exhibition, demonstrate why. His
beautifully painted cows, sheep, goats and
horses make Post’s animals look as primi-
tive as they are exotic, and his ravishing red
chalk figure drawings anticipate Watteau’s.
His versatility may have been his undoing
in a market that preferred to pigeonhole
artists. There’s no evidence that he took to
the bottle, but his wife had to open a linen
shop to make ends meet and when he died
at the age of just 35, he left her with debts.
It seems a pity Van Hoogstraten didn’t
publish his advice to artists sooner, though
it might not have helped. When the ‘sup-
posed art connoisseurs’ are the ones with
the money, what can you do?