Britain’s Arts-Mad Summer, on an Olympic Scale
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Version 0 of 1. LONDON — The school holidays are in their final throes here, and this week the Natural History Museum was, as the British like to say, heaving. (Translation: a tightly packed situation in which elbows might be useful.) In the midst of the throng, a woman approached two children in the cavernous ground floor space. “I’m going to give you something,” she said. They looked mildly alarmed. Then she added, “Some Shakespeare.” The children listened wide-eyed as she spoke (“This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle ...”), then beamed as she handed over a small card showing Shakespeare’s head superimposed over a jeans-and-sneakers-wearing body. It bore a message: “Thank you for listening to “ ‘Richard II.’ ” All around the hall, other actors were declaiming Shakespearean verse and handing cards to wary, bewildered and delighted recipients. Two men with Down syndrome offered an impassioned exchange from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”; a pair of deaf actors enacted, in sign language, a dialogue from “As You Like It”; a man sitting quietly for a while on a row of chairs suddenly burst into an operatic rendition of Sonnet 29, to the mild alarm of his sandwich-munching neighbors. This was “What You Will: Pop-Up Shakespeare,” a five-day event at various spots in London conceived by the actor Mark Rylance and one of the quirkier projects of the London 2012 Festival: the Olympic-scale cultural accompaniment to the Games that, when its 12-week run ends on Sept. 9, will have offered thousands of arts events to millions of people across the country. It was an opportunity, Mr. Rylance said, as he proudly surveyed his 50-strong troupe, for a personal encounter with art. “We are poetry terrorists,” he added, laughing. London 2012 hasn’t lacked for either hugely ambitious or charmingly idiosyncratic enterprises. It has included a World Shakespeare Festival (with every one of his works, performed by companies from all over the world); a major Pina Bausch season; Gustavo Dudamel’s Sistema project in Raploch, Scotland; the Africa Express, a train bearing musicians from Africa and Europe across Britain; and free concerts for 160,000 at six stages along the Thames. Wayne McGregor choreographed for 1,000 people in Trafalgar Square, and Elizabeth Streb’s performers bungee-jumped off the Millennium Bridge and hung off the London Eye. Last week in Birmingham four string musicians played, in four helicopters, a section of Stockhausen’s difficult-to-perform (you can understand why) partly aerial opera “Mittwoch aus Licht” to an open-air audience below. The festival’s budget was 55 million pounds (about $87 million), and 25,000 artists from all 204 competing nations took part in more than 12,000 events, in over 900 places around the country. Critically, it has been a major success here, a prime public relations opportunity for Britain, with journalists from all over the world looking on. But for all the major events and big numbers of the festival (almost three million people participated in the public bell ringing that marked the opening of the Games on July 27), tribute should be paid to a few less-well-publicized events. Those who remember the image of the queen apparently sky diving with James Bond from a helicopter during the Olympics’ opening ceremony are likely to concur that a spirit of eccentricity is not unknown on these isles. And, as “What You Will” and many other odd events show, the director of the festival, Ruth Mackenzie, and her team did not neglect this important aspect of British culture. My own favorite bit of programming was “Cakebook Britain,” a competition for which teams of bakers created cakes in the shape of landmark heritage sites, which were then placed on a gigantic edible map of the British Isles. The prize went, appropriately, to a Shakespeare’s Globe cake, complete with tiny actors. There were plenty of other marvelously whimsical ideas. The artist Jeremy Deller created “Sacrilege,” a life-size Stonehenge bouncy castle that has traveled around the country and is on tour until Sept. 9, allowing thousands to have far more fun around its circular pillars than solemn summer solstice worshipers probably allow themselves. It is, as the artist put it, “A way to get reacquainted with ancient Britain with your shoes off.” In Bexhill-on-Sea, on the south coast, the artist Richard Wilson balanced a large bus on the edge of the landmark Art Deco De La Warr Pavilion. The work was called “Hang on a Minute Lads, I’ve Got a Great Idea,” the last line of the film “The Italian Job,” uttered by Michael Caine as the bus in which he and his band of fellow robbers are making their getaway teeters precariously over the edge of the Italian Alps. “I think this is a perfect time to hang a large bus off the edge of a building in a seaside town,” said the comedian and actor Eddie Izzard, who helped to finance the project. “I would hope that the word goes out from our country that not only do we run excellent world events, but also we balance coaches on the edges of buildings like no one else ever could.” And then there was “Peace Camp,” the strange and wonderful idea from the director Deborah Warner and the actress Fiona Shaw. Set in eight remote coastal spots around Britain, it was part theater, part installation and wholly whimsical. In each place, hundreds of softly glowing tents were spaced in regular formations next to the sea. Love poems, which Ms. Shaw spent months collecting and recording, resounded eerily through the air as visitors walked among the tents, and the sea crashed around them as the sky slowly darkened. As I wrote after seeing the Northumberland Peace Camp, the glowing tents called to mind a refugee camp in heaven, and it also suggested the very different reality of a Europe fractured by dissent over immigration and integration. But it was also a perfect image of the kind of utopian peace among nations and people that the Olympics would like to conjure. In the unlikeliness of its existence and its poetic resonance — the fruit of the infrequent marriage of ample budget and unbounded imagination — “Peace Camp” was a perfect emblem of what London 2012 was able to achieve. |