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| The 'Isles of Wonder' Olympic opening ceremony: I smell a rat | The 'Isles of Wonder' Olympic opening ceremony: I smell a rat |
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| Something has happened on the way to the Olympics. On Tuesday morning the opening ceremony was launched as a vision of rural Britain, a land of fields and ploughmen, cottages, cows, sheep and horses, of Glastonbury, cricket and the Proms. According to its impresario, Danny Boyle, the title of the show, Isles of Wonder – a metaphor for Olympian Britain – was "inspired by" Shakespeare's The Tempest, specifically Caliban's speech. | Something has happened on the way to the Olympics. On Tuesday morning the opening ceremony was launched as a vision of rural Britain, a land of fields and ploughmen, cottages, cows, sheep and horses, of Glastonbury, cricket and the Proms. According to its impresario, Danny Boyle, the title of the show, Isles of Wonder – a metaphor for Olympian Britain – was "inspired by" Shakespeare's The Tempest, specifically Caliban's speech. |
| You could have knocked me down with a first folio. Danny Boyle, of Trainspotting and Slumdog, turned cheerleader for Country Life? And quoting The Tempest? Have those Olympic corporates, on whom a colossal practical joke is being played, actually read the play? Caliban, monster offspring of a witch, makes no mention of isles of wonder. Instead, he inhabits an island awash in conflict, drink, sex and dark arts. He does at one point call it "an isle full of noises, sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not", but that is when he is trying to seize it and return it to primeval anarchy. This is to be achieved by driving a stake through saintly Prospero's head, helped by two drunken hooligans. Boyle seems to have got his Stratfords in a twist. | You could have knocked me down with a first folio. Danny Boyle, of Trainspotting and Slumdog, turned cheerleader for Country Life? And quoting The Tempest? Have those Olympic corporates, on whom a colossal practical joke is being played, actually read the play? Caliban, monster offspring of a witch, makes no mention of isles of wonder. Instead, he inhabits an island awash in conflict, drink, sex and dark arts. He does at one point call it "an isle full of noises, sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not", but that is when he is trying to seize it and return it to primeval anarchy. This is to be achieved by driving a stake through saintly Prospero's head, helped by two drunken hooligans. Boyle seems to have got his Stratfords in a twist. |
| Nor is that all. Olympic openings are supposedly a close secret. So why has Boyle gone public with a vision of everything the present government sought to destroy with its aborted planning framework document last year? The Times and Country Life duly saluted him as celebrant of "everything precious and worthwhile" about Britain, but he was derided elsewhere as a romantic pseud. To the Daily Mail he was "lost in laa-laa … more Teletubby than England's green and pleasant land". Yesterday's letters pages were excoriating. | Nor is that all. Olympic openings are supposedly a close secret. So why has Boyle gone public with a vision of everything the present government sought to destroy with its aborted planning framework document last year? The Times and Country Life duly saluted him as celebrant of "everything precious and worthwhile" about Britain, but he was derided elsewhere as a romantic pseud. To the Daily Mail he was "lost in laa-laa … more Teletubby than England's green and pleasant land". Yesterday's letters pages were excoriating. |
| What was going on? I am reliably informed that this is all a highly crafted – and risky – confidence trick. Two weeks ago Boyle gave a totally different interview about the ceremony, splashed by the Hollywood Reporter. It made no mention of sheep and meadows but said Boyle was "partly inspired by Frankenstein", about whom he directed a play at the National Theatre last year. The ceremony would be "more like a cauldron, with all the people hovering over and around you." This implies that something terrible is going to happen to the sheep – and explains the last-minute dropping of pigs as allegedly vulnerable to post-traumatic stress disorder. | What was going on? I am reliably informed that this is all a highly crafted – and risky – confidence trick. Two weeks ago Boyle gave a totally different interview about the ceremony, splashed by the Hollywood Reporter. It made no mention of sheep and meadows but said Boyle was "partly inspired by Frankenstein", about whom he directed a play at the National Theatre last year. The ceremony would be "more like a cauldron, with all the people hovering over and around you." This implies that something terrible is going to happen to the sheep – and explains the last-minute dropping of pigs as allegedly vulnerable to post-traumatic stress disorder. |
| The countryside set was a feint, inducing critics into taking it at face value and "the show", thus to make the eventual spectacle more shocking. This explains otherwise inexplicable references to The Tempest, William Blake and Frankenstein, which are guiding the subsequent "acts" of Boyle's show. The second act is a total contrast, the dark side of Blake's vision, a tableau of storm clouds and satanic mills, of industrial Britain as a place of noise and filth, suffragettes and striking miners. | The countryside set was a feint, inducing critics into taking it at face value and "the show", thus to make the eventual spectacle more shocking. This explains otherwise inexplicable references to The Tempest, William Blake and Frankenstein, which are guiding the subsequent "acts" of Boyle's show. The second act is a total contrast, the dark side of Blake's vision, a tableau of storm clouds and satanic mills, of industrial Britain as a place of noise and filth, suffragettes and striking miners. |
| This is to be followed by a pastiche of cool Britannia. James Bond helicopters zoom up and down the Thames while 900 nurses dance in glorification of the NHS and hi-tech "best of British" products. It sounds like loyal workers dancing in honour of a North Korean "dear leader". We are told that 10,000 people have needed 157 rehearsals to get the scenes right, and threatened with dismissal if they reveal what they are doing to outsiders or to other parts of the show. The set for prancing nurses at Dagenham is guarded like Guantánamo Bay. | This is to be followed by a pastiche of cool Britannia. James Bond helicopters zoom up and down the Thames while 900 nurses dance in glorification of the NHS and hi-tech "best of British" products. It sounds like loyal workers dancing in honour of a North Korean "dear leader". We are told that 10,000 people have needed 157 rehearsals to get the scenes right, and threatened with dismissal if they reveal what they are doing to outsiders or to other parts of the show. The set for prancing nurses at Dagenham is guarded like Guantánamo Bay. |
| The contents list for all might be a script for the BBC satire, 2012. It is a politically correct miasma of Shakespeare and Frankenstein, Trainspotting and Slumdog, humour and irony, ploughmen and miners, all summoned by a gigantic bell, strangely in honour of Caliban. It is as if Gordon Ramsay, Heston Blumenthal and Jamie Oliver were asked to cook the same casserole in the same kitchen. The music is by Underworld, who wrote for Boyle's Trainspotting and Frankenstein. Paul McCartney will rasp the closing number. This could hardly be further from Tuesday's vision of Delius and Vaughan Williams. In other words, the countryside was an ironic hors d'oeuvre, to be exploded and splattered over the face the Olympics. | The contents list for all might be a script for the BBC satire, 2012. It is a politically correct miasma of Shakespeare and Frankenstein, Trainspotting and Slumdog, humour and irony, ploughmen and miners, all summoned by a gigantic bell, strangely in honour of Caliban. It is as if Gordon Ramsay, Heston Blumenthal and Jamie Oliver were asked to cook the same casserole in the same kitchen. The music is by Underworld, who wrote for Boyle's Trainspotting and Frankenstein. Paul McCartney will rasp the closing number. This could hardly be further from Tuesday's vision of Delius and Vaughan Williams. In other words, the countryside was an ironic hors d'oeuvre, to be exploded and splattered over the face the Olympics. |
| Heaven only knows how this will all turn out. The Games' artistic overlord, Stephen Daldry, is specific that it is Boyle's show alone. | Heaven only knows how this will all turn out. The Games' artistic overlord, Stephen Daldry, is specific that it is Boyle's show alone. |
| David Cameron is said to be delighted at "patriotic footage", bizarrely covering Britain's war victories over certain Olympics guests in two world wars. But it is hardly credible that the evening will comprise nothing more than £27m-worth of historical cliche. Boyle's record as a demon of radical film and theatre rather suggests a Rocky Horror Picture Show, a Gormenghast of special effects, perhaps a spectacular assault on the candyfloss chauvinism and corporatism of Olympiana. | |
| I do hope so. How was Boyle ever to encapsulate Britishness in a three-hour extravaganza, one that had to include the Queen, "the people" and thousands of flag-waving athletes? The show had to be British, not English; ethnic, classless and politically anodyne. It had to please politicians with "best of British" guff, please hundreds of sponsors and flatter the ballooning egos of that flatulent mafia, the International Olympic Committee. No amount of daffodils, flax and thistles, no sheep, cows, nurses and satanic mills could hope to do it all. | I do hope so. How was Boyle ever to encapsulate Britishness in a three-hour extravaganza, one that had to include the Queen, "the people" and thousands of flag-waving athletes? The show had to be British, not English; ethnic, classless and politically anodyne. It had to please politicians with "best of British" guff, please hundreds of sponsors and flatter the ballooning egos of that flatulent mafia, the International Olympic Committee. No amount of daffodils, flax and thistles, no sheep, cows, nurses and satanic mills could hope to do it all. |
| Given this week's PR coup, I wonder if Boyle might have others up his sleeve. He might convert the rest of the £27m into £10 notes and set fire to the lot in a metaphor for the modern Olympics in the middle of the stadium, to a thunderous backdrop of Underworld drum'n'bass. Or a Frankenstein monster might rise from its bed, take an almighty shot of Trainspotting smack and close the evening mimicking Prospero, declaring everyone mere spirits. "The baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capp'd towers, the glorious palaces … shall dissolve, and like the insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind." Now that would be a show. | Given this week's PR coup, I wonder if Boyle might have others up his sleeve. He might convert the rest of the £27m into £10 notes and set fire to the lot in a metaphor for the modern Olympics in the middle of the stadium, to a thunderous backdrop of Underworld drum'n'bass. Or a Frankenstein monster might rise from its bed, take an almighty shot of Trainspotting smack and close the evening mimicking Prospero, declaring everyone mere spirits. "The baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capp'd towers, the glorious palaces … shall dissolve, and like the insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind." Now that would be a show. |