Mr Burns

The last show at the Almeida, King Charles III, was a daringly clever play that used exquisite pastiche, both serious and playful, to suggest that the only way we can imagine our near future is by retelling old stories and reusing old forms. And so, pleasingly enough, is the new show at the Almeida. 

Mr Burns by Anne Washburn comes to the Almeida hot-foot from Playwrights Horizons in New York. The play has caused a bit of a furore here with at least two critics (well one critic and Tim Walker) giving it vitriolically bad reviews. 'this is a play that can only possibly put people off theatre', 'three hours of utter hell', 'By the [third act], I’d lost the will to live, and can only hope that if this is the future of theatre after the apocalypse, I’d rather not survive it myself'. And so on. But actually, it's also had some very good reviews and a fair number that sit on the fence. So it's not quite Marmite: some hate it, some love it, and some seem just rather mystified.

It doesn't seem that mystifying to me. It has an Off-Broadway quirkiness about it, which is fairly alien to London theatre tastes (I usually find that kind of thing maddening), and it's unusual for a show in Britain to invest so heavily - and unironically at heart - in popular culture, to investigate it and treat it as a wellspring for understanding who we are. But the story is pretty straightforward: there has been some kind of apocalyptic collapse of civilisation in America centred on the collapse of the electricity grid and one of the things the survivors do is try to tell each other stories they remember from before the fall, including episodes of The Simpsons. Some months later this has evolved and now amateur theatre groups tour lo-fi live and imperfectly-remembered versions of Simpsons episodes (but also episodes of The West Wing and Shakespeares and presumably much more), interspersed with adverts and medleys of pre-apocalyptic pop music. In the third act, seventy years later, these performances have evolved further: they are now a mixture of religious ritual, theatrical tragedy, sitcom, broadway musical, and opera. 

What links all the acts is the act of storytelling and an exploration of the idea that societies are drawn to tell and retell stories. In fact, in each act, the Cape Feare (1993) episode of The Simpsons is retold three times: once round a campfire, once in an amateur theatre show, and once in an extravagant high-art pantomime, where it is now mixed promiscuously with hints of Gilbert and Sullivan, Ricky Martin, Batman, Britney Spears, Night of the Hunter (1955) and the Scorsese-made Cape Fear (1991). We watch the evolution of the episode in these retellings, with, by the third act, the regular character, Mr Burns (but who, from memory, doesn't even appear in the Cape Feare episode) becoming the chief villain, displacing the original episode's Sideshow Bob. We understand this because Mr Burns is the villainous owner Springfield Nuclear Power Plant and, in a world where the electricity has apocalyptically failed us, Mr Burns would indeed come to be the emblem of everything wrong with the world, much as, in a Climate-Changed world a hundred years hence, Jeremy Clarkson might become a by-word for evil (I'm not joking).  the trivial in our culture might become the grand metonyms of a future society in exactly the same way King Lear's despair at the meaningless injustice of the world became a way to tell stories to each after Hiroshima and the Holocaust. The episode as we eventually find it is a thing of shreds and patches, of ballads, songs and snatches, oneirically combining the high and low, the comic and the tragic, music and prose; a bit like society really. Or religion. Or art.

What's so hard about this? It's what stories do. This small episode of a cartoon sitcom comes to serve a deeper function in a wholly changed world, marking a continuity with the past and a recognition of the present. The advertisements have reverted to 1950s styles and even so the cast worry about the psychology and the semiotics ('isn't Chablis one of those wines which was out of fashion but actually it's quite good?' / 'No. Common misconception but, no. Quincy, really, do you want to be a Chablis drinker?'). Jokes are stories too, little stories that punch a momentary air-hole in the transport box of my life and to forget a great joke is to feel stifled: 'Oh this is torture,' says Matt, struggling to remember a line, 'I know this is really funny'.

This might vaguely stir some memories of postmodernism but I don't think that's quite right. Yes, Mr Burns suggests we think about culture as an act of bricolage, but it's magnificently, naively, yearningly confident about storytelling about narratives, major and minor. In the first act, we begin with what sounds like (and it turns out is) the transcription of an improvisation between the actors trying to remember a famous Simpsons episode. It is night and they are around a campfire, like boy scouts, telling stories to stop themselves being scared. Because then a stranger appears and they conduct a formal - and terribly moving - process where they read out ten names of people they know whose whereabouts they don't know. Everyone in this ruined landscape, it seems, keeps a note of anyone they meet, so a ritual of any meeting is that they make this enquiry (limited to ten because, presumably, you can't monopolise the stranger's attention; we need to balance our desperation with the needs of others). The attempt to recall the episode is funny but recognisable (who hasn't at some point been in one of those conversations where people repeat their favourite lines from Simpsons or Frasier or Seinfeld or Larry Sanders? [And there should be a word for the pain you experience when someone misquotes a great line from a great sitcom; I'll ask the Germans, they're bound to have one]) but the arrival of the stranger punctures the humour and gives the scenes a kind of emotional context which both roots the scene and gives their desire to retell stories a seriousness and power. Yeah, deprived of civilisation, this is what we do. We cling to stories. Why wouldn't we? It's how we make sense of things. 

In the second act, it has become formalised. We've reconstructed some modicum of capitalism: adverts to fund the company, a system of exchange to build up the scripts (they have effectively monetised crowdsourcing; Twitter: take note), they have rebuilt a process of allocating performance rights to individual episodes, there seems to be a regulatory authority. We watch a rehearsal and the comic drive of the act is part of the argument: we are watching a comically huge effort to (re)create something trivial. In a way, it's a beautiful and touching to see such efforts because doesn't this remind anyone of, well, theatre? Theatre's triviality is in its uselessness, its evasion of the cycle of use-value and exchange-value, its oddly ineffable value for its own sake (because it's art, basically - well mostly). It continues to delight me that despite everything, despite two hundred years of Gradgrindian capitalism, people still expend huge energy and effort on useless acts of theatre.

In the third act, in a way, its use-value has been discovered. It does feel as if we are watching the religious enactment of a parable and Robert Icke's and Tom Scutt's visual embodiment of this in the costumes and set suggest a mixture of witch-doctors, Shakespearean performance, and sixth-form disco. The act is perfectly pitched because we are never quite sure whether we are supposed to laugh at it (there are some brilliant jokes, some hilarious juxtapositions) or admire and be awed by it (the music is often gorgeous, the story, despite everything, becomes rather involving). It is theatre as ritual repetition and social therapy, though the stylistic tightrope that it treads again never quite says art is therapy; it teeters between utilitarianism and beauty.

Mr Burns is a brilliantly lucid bit of theatre. There's some additional fun if you are very familiar with The Simpsons but that's not vital, in fact, it's a distraction if you think it's all an in-joke for the fans. It could be anything; The Simpsons stands in for any story that embraces and touches a whole culture. It is The Bible, The Iliad, the Complete Works of Shakespeare and as such it's a challenge to how we think of art, religion, culture, the whole way of life that we move in. It's beautifully performed, too, because if it had been given a smooth, elegant London theatre production, it would have missed the point. This is a rough, crude, funny, clever, heartfelt, stupid evening of theatre and I can't recommend it highly enough.

Noodling

I don't like guitar solos. I'm not sure when this certainty formed in my mind. I certainly thought I liked guitar solos when I was younger. Well, I certainly thought I liked guitarists when I was younger, and I think that blurred unthinkingly into imagining I liked guitar solos. This struck me recently because the guitar solo seems to have almost completely disappeared from pop music. I'm sure it still hangs around in metal but how often do you hear a chart single - even from a notionally guitar-based indie band - with a guitar solo? 

Now don't get me wrong, I love a riff. Hell yeah. A really good guitar riff is great, but as a  gorgeous pop hook. Some of the greatest records of the last two decades - 'Richard III' by Supergrass, 'Seven Nation Army' by The White Stripes, 'Acquiesce' by Oasis (I know, I know, I'm sorry), 'Wake Me Up' by Girls Aloud - are stacked on top of gorgeous guitar riffs. But these are pop songs, tricked up in a rock style, and are the better for it.

I was struck by this recently, reading Nicholson Baker's Travelling Sprinkler which meditates very interestingly on pop music and in which the hapless middle-aged narrator buys a $70 guitar from Best Buy and tries to write and record songs. He struggles with soloing. I've never much bothered with it in my hobbyist guitar-plonking, always happy with chords and little flat-picking. I guess it's my age being so much a post-punk music listener. I did like Pink Floyd as a teenager and still like quite a lot of their stuff but, while I can appreciate the technical virtuosity of David Gilmour and I do think he's a gloriously articulate guitar player, fundamentally it leaves me a bit cold. The guitarists I've always really liked are ones who don't really play solos - Pete Townsend, Johnny Marr, Keith Richards, for instance - who mix rhythm and drop in little riffs and move between them without ever luxuriating in an extended guitar solo. 

But there are exceptions and I wanted to write about them. What's interesting is that the few guitar solos I like have almost the opposite of virtuosity. One would be Pete Shelley's three-note solo on The Buzzcocks's 'What Do I Get?' which, with supreme literalness, picks out the melody of the verse, such as it is. In the official video Shelley stands virtually motionless as if even offering this solo is a chore.

But there are two other solos that I really do like. The first is George Harrison's solo on the album version of 'Let it Be' (it starts at 1'58"). It's a solo that should probably never have been released. George Harrison had recorded a number of guitar solo overdubs on the song but when Phil Spector put together his mix of the album he used an early, very rough solo that Harrison had probably just laid down as a placeholder until something more melodic and appropriate came to him. Its virtuosity is not show-iffy; it's just a workman musician putting down something intuitive, trying something out. On the single version, there's a rather muddier and slower solo, still melodic (Harrison seemed incapable of not playing a melodic solo), but bogged down by the Leslie effect that turns it into a fairground pipe organ to my ears. I guess the idea is to keep with the 'organ' theme but it sounds to be rather unctuous and picks up the po-faced aspects of the song. What Ian Macdonald calls 'complacent uplift rather than revelation' (Revolution in the Head, p. 338). I can see that and, no, it's not my favourite Beatles song by a long way, but on the album version, Harrison's gritty, grainy, metallic guitar solo seems to me both to toughen up the song and make the sense of acquiescence more hard-won. It's beautifully placed, too. The song appears to come to rest, angelic church organ echo the finality and then Harrison's guitar just erupts into the song. It's so unexpected, so crude, so harsh. Even the little errors in it - around 2'06"-09" his fingers seem to get away from him - make it seem movingly effortful. It does a rather conventional guitar solo thing of slowly working it way up the scale, but it does so not to soar but to find new melodies; the very final little wobbly melody at 2'22" is filled with feeling, not the boring 'woman wailing' tone that a generation of guitarists schooled in Claptonism went with, but something much more confined to the world of the song. Bluesy but still part of a song.

The other guitar solo I love is related. It's Paul McCartney's guitar solo on 'Maybe I'm Amazed'. It's quite a similar song to Let it Be: piano-based, build around a descending bass line, hints of church organ and angelic choirs, but this one is Paul in his Little-Richard-blue-shouter mood and it's probably the rawest song he ever recorded. And he does a solo in it? In fact, he plays every instrument on the song. This is from his first solo album, mostly recorded on a home studio on his farm in Scotland while the Beatles were breaking up. 'Maybe I'm Amazed' was apparently recorded at Abbey Road, though still with Paul playing all the instruments. Paul is, as any fule kno, one of the greatest bass guitarists ever but in fact he had to be coerced onto the instrument through necessity, not wanting to be the guy who stands at the back. He saw himself, rightly, as a front man. So he started as a guitarist and, occasionally, as a drummer. McCartney was his chance to show off his multi-instrumental talents. In some ways this is the strength and weakness of the record; McCartney really needed someone to bounce ideas off, someone to occasionally say no to him. Recording all the parts yourself, the risk is that you keep adding and you try out ideas and you get used to them, however bad, and you lose perspective. You can hear that in 'Maybe I'm Amazed' at 2'05" when he dubs over the verse a series of reggae-kite guitar chops which come close to ruining the song.

But then he has this guitar solo. In fact, to be fair he plays it twice, once at 1'12" and again at 3'05". It's the second one I like the most though you need to have heard it once before for it to work. He's got an  effect on the guitar that makes it sound cheap, almost plastic.  Google tells me it may be a Fender amp with a little bit of reverb, which I guess is not that strange, but it makes the solo seem modest. The solo has its own little bluesy tune; you could set words to it. The thing that, I'll be honest, brings tears to my eyes whenever I hear it is the moment where he repeats a little phrase twice over the song's great chromatic run up the piano at 3'14". It seems to me a solo that is every bit as expressive of longing and loneliness as the lyric and the melody of the song itself. It's aided, in my mind, by the image of this pop genius, alone in the studio, feeling his life falling apart and reaching out to the person he loves through an experiment on an unfamiliar guitar fed through a little buzzy amp.

Someone has got hold of the isolated solo tracks and they're here. It confirms that sense of a technically awkward player fumbling his way towards something graceful and elegance, but it's the lack of sheeny virtuosity that makes it so moving.

UPDATE: I have been mildly inundated* with suggestions of other songs with great guitar solos. Of course, what I say above is an overstatement, though I really do have a problem with virtuosity in guitar solos. I am however happy to agree that the solos on 'Taxman' and 'Something' by The Beatles, 'Pale Blue Eyes' by The Velvet Underground (or indeed Edwyn Collins & Paul Quinn) 'Come Up And See Me' by Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel, 'I Guess I've Come To Live Here In Your Eyes' by Willie Nelson, 'The Late Great Cassiopeia' by The Essex Green, and 'Rock God' by Roddy Frame are all excellent...

* How can you be 'mildly inundated'? Talk sense, man.