{theatre} – { feuilleton }

Raffles, the gentleman thief

The Raffles that concerns us here is the television incarnation as seen in a series of adventures made by Yorkshire TV in 1977. I recently bought a cheap DVD set of the series, not for reasons of nostalgia (a wretched condition) but out of curiosity and whim. I had a vague recollection of enjoying the few episodes I’d seen, and was hoping for another decent Victorian adventure series along the lines of The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1971/1973). Raffles proved to be better than I expected; not quite up to the standards of Granada TV’s peerless adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories but thoroughly enjoyable. The production values are better than those in The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, a well-written series with an impressive cast that was nevertheless compromised by a restricted budget. I’m not really reviewing the Raffles series here, this piece is intended to note a couple of points of interest which, for me, added to its pleasures.

Raffles and Bunny as they were originally. An illustration by FC Yohn from Raffles: Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman (1901).

Arthur J. Raffles was invented by EW Hornung, a writer who was, among other things, Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law. Raffles, like Sherlock Holmes, is a resolute bachelor with a devoted friend and accomplice, but the two men share few other characteristics beyond a talent for outwitting the dogged inhabitants of Scotland Yard. Raffles’ indulgent lifestyle in the bachelor enclave of (the) Albany, Piccadilly, is financed by his burglaries which invariably target aristocrats and the homes of the wealthy. To the general public he’s known as one of the nation’s leading cricket players, a position which gives him access to upper-class social circles from which he would otherwise by excluded. His former school-friend, “Bunny” Manders, is also his partner-in-crime, a position that Bunny is happy to fill after Raffles saves him from bankruptcy and suicide. Conan Doyle disapproved of the immoral nature of the Raffles stories but they were very popular in their day, and they’ve been revived in a number of adaptations for film, TV and radio. George Orwell admired the stories, and writes about them with his usual perceptiveness here, noting the importance of cricket to Raffles’ gentlemanly philosophy of criminal behaviour. I’ve not read any of the stories myself, and I’m not sure that I want now, not when the television adaptations succeed so well on their own terms.

Anthony Valentine and Christopher Strauli.

The TV series was preceded by a pilot episode made in 1975 which saw the first appearances of Anthony Valentine as the dashing Raffles and Christopher Strauli as the fresh-faced Bunny. Valentine and Strauli fit their roles so well it’s difficult to imagine anyone else improving on them, Valentine especially. In the series the pair are supported by many familiar faces from British drama: Graham Crowden, Charles Dance, Brian Glover, Robert Hardy, Alfred Marks, and, in a rare piece of TV acting, Bruce Robinson. Pilot and series were all written by Philip Mackie, and here we have the first noteworthy element since Mackie had earlier adapted six stories for The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, including the one that features Donald Pleasence as William Hope Hodgson’s occult detective, Thomas Carnacki. Raffles is another rival of Sherlock Holmes, of course, albeit a criminal one, and much more of a mirror image of Holmes than the thoroughly villainous Professor Moriarty. Raffles only breaks the law to improve his bank balance, or as an occasional, daring challenge; he regards theft and evasion from the police as a form of sport, and generally deplores other types of crime. Some of his thefts are intended to punish the victim following an infraction, as with the belligerent South African diamond miner who causes a scene at Raffles’ club, and the Home Secretary who makes a speech in Parliament demanding stiffer penalties for burglary. In one conversation about the morality of their activities Bunny suggests to Raffles that his friend is a kind of Robin Hood figure; Raffles agrees before admitting that he never gives his spoils to the poor.

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Weekend links 790

Set design by Vladimir Pleshakov for the Ballets Russes’ The Firebird (1923).

• The latest book from Swan River Press is A Mystery of Remnant and Other Absences, a collection of fictions by the late B. Catling. Copies include postcards with accompanying texts by Alan Moore and Catling’s friend and regular collaborator, Iain Sinclair.

• New music: The Loneliness Of The Hollow Earth Explorer Vol. 1 by Arrowounds; The Eraserhead: Music Inspired By The Film Of David Lynch by Various Artists.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: The Purple Cloud by MP Shiel.

• A catalogue of lots at another After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, historic porn. etc.

• At Colossal: Laser-cut steel forms radiate ornate patterns in Anila Quayyum Agha’s immersive installations.

• Photographs by Man Ray and Max Dupain showing at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne.

• Mix of the week: Isolatedmix 134 by Artefakt.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Anna Karina’s Day.

• Three Imposters

• Purple Haze (1967) by The Jimi Hendrix Experience | Pilots Of Purple Twilight (1981) by Tangerine Dream | Purple Rain (live, 1985) by Prince & The Revolution

Vincenzo Mazzi’s caprices

More Italian theatrical design. A few years ago I put together a collection of production sketches and paintings for scenes set inside vast prisons, a popular setting in opera and theatre during the Baroque and Romantic periods. Piranesi’s etching series, Carceri d’Invenzione, is the ultimate expression of the form, where the prints exist to show architectural invention and nothing more, but Piranesi wasn’t the first or last artist to concern himself with views like these.

Caprici di Scene Teatrali (1776) is a collection of fifteen printed plates by Vincenzo Mazzi showing suggestions for theatrical settings, several of which are prison settings. All of the scenes are distinctly Piranesian, especially the title plate which has the name of the artist and his series carved on stones inside the artwork. The prints seem to be the bulk of Mazzi’s surviving designs although a few additional examples turn up when you search around. There’s also at least one Mazzi portrait of an actor which suggests that most of the artist’s output confined itself to the theatre.

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Weekend links 789

Niemand (1990) by Micha Ullman.

• The Diary of a Nobody (1964) by Ken Russell, John McGrath, Weedon Grossmith & George Grossmith. A recent posting at Play For Forever, an archive of hard-to-find/unreissued British TV drama.

• New music: Paul St. Hilaire With The Producers by Paul St. Hilaire; Atoms In The Void by Ivan the Tolerable & Hawksmoor; The Cosmic Tones Research Trio by The Cosmic Tones Research Trio.

• At Public Domain Review: Julie Park explores the history of the camera obscura.

• At The Wire: Read an extract from Philosophy of Jazz by Daniel Martin Feige.

• At Unquiet Things: Jana Heidersdorf’s fairy tale subversions.

• At Colossal: Five decades of land art by Andy Goldsworthy.

• The Strange World of…Marissa Nadler.

• RIP Robert Wilson.

• Nobody (1968) by Larry Williams & Johnny Watson with Kaleidoscope | “There Is Nobody” (1976) by Brian Eno | Nobody (1978) by Ry Cooder

Cocteau’s effects

Chez Cocteau.

“Effects” in the sense of possessions rather than aesthetic or creative effects. I’ve been reading Jean Cocteau’s The Difficulty of Being, an essay collection in which the author muses on a variety of subjects, from his own life, his work, and people he knew, to more general considerations of the human condition. In one of the chapters Cocteau describes his rooms at 36 rue de Montpensier, Paris, where he lived from 1940 to 1947, offering a list of the objects that occupied the shelves or decorated the walls of his apartment. I always enjoy accounts of this sort; the pictures (or objects) that people choose to hang on their walls tell you things about a person’s tastes and character which might not be so obvious otherwise. The same can’t always be said for published lists of favourite books or other artworks when these may be constructed with an eye to the approval of one’s peers. The pictures decorating your living space are more private and generally more honest as aesthetic choices.

I already knew what a couple of these items looked like: the Radiguet bust, for example, may be seen in documentary footage. This post is an attempt to find some of the others. If you know the identity of any of the unidentified pieces then please leave a comment.

The most engaging bits of such wreckage, thrown up on this little red beach, is without doubt the Gustave Doré group of which the Charles de Noailles gave me a plaster cast from which I had a bronze made. In it Perseus is to be seen mounted on the hippogryph, held in the air by means of a long spear planted in the gullet of the dragon, which dragon is winding its death throes round Andromeda.

“the Charles de Noailles” refers to Charles and his wife, Marie-Laure, a pair of wealthy art patrons who helped finance Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or and Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un Poète. Doré’s illustration (showing Ruggerio from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso reenacting the heroic rescue) is very familiar to me but I was unable to find any sculptural copies of the work. In addition to decorating Cocteau’s room some of Doré’s illustrations also served as inspiration for the sets in La Belle et la Bête.

This group is on a column standing between the so-called castor window and a tall piece of slate that can be moved aside and that conceals a small room which is too cold to be used in winter. It was there that I wrote Renaud et Armide, away from everything, set free from telephone and door bells, in the summer of 1941, on an architect’s table above which one sees, saved from my room in the rue Vignon where it adorned the wall-paper, Christian Bérard’s large drawing in charcoal and red chalk representing the meeting of Oedipus and the Sphinx.

Bérard’s drawing is large indeed (see the photo at the top of this post). The artist was a theatrical designer, also the designer of La Belle et la Bête, and one of several of Cocteau’s friends who died young.

On the right of my bed are two heads, one Roman, in marble, of a faun (this belonged to my Lecomte grandfather), the other of Antinoüs, under a glass dome, a painted terracotta, so fragile that only the steadiness of its enamel eyes can have led it here from the depths of centuries like a blind man’s white stick.

A third head adorns that of my bed: the terracotta of Raymond Radiguet, done by Lipschitz, in the year of his death.

And speaking of premature deaths… Antinous was the celebrated youth beloved of the emperor Hadrian whose death by drowning in the Nile caused Hadrian to establish a cult of Antinous that spread across the Roman Empire. Many busts and full-figure statues survive as a result, but I was unable to find a photo of the one owned by Cocteau. Raymond Radiguet, meanwhile, died of typhoid fever at the age of 20. Radiguet was a precocious talent who managed to write two novels before he died, including Le Diable au corps at the age of 16.

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