Review: Seeing Dear Esther at the Royal Gallery
It sometimes happens that at a première of a title the least enjoyable part of playing is the fancy itself. I have seen many audiences more interesting than the individual levels, and have often heard better dialogue in the foyer than I have in the audio-logs. At the Royal Gallery, however, this is rarely the case, and when the fancy is a fancy by Dan Pinchbeck and Jessica Curry, and among its exponents are Mr Briscoe and Mr Carrington, we turn from the gods in the gallery to enjoy the charm of the production, and to take delight in the craftsmanship.
The idea is such: we would pass through several hallways and appreciate a series of intricate, well-crafted paintings. All the while, a small group of musicians would play, and Mr Carrington would speak poetic lines.
It was a most interesting combination. As the sad, melancholic tones of Curry’s composition echoed, Mr Carrington gave us deep, strange words that, although confusing at first, drew out the loneliness and the sadness of these Hebridean isles. The grass on the cliffs danced in the wind and as we looked in the ravished huts there was a sense of loss and a reluctance of accept. A desire to understand.
This seemed the main motif in Dear Esther. As we moved from painting to painting, we came by drawings in the sand of spirals and chemical notations. It was ingenious of Mr Pinchbeck to have the story evolve in multiple variations and lines, so that we never quite knew what part of the elaborate tapestry we were listening to, and how much of it we ought to believe. Tales of passed legends, giving an air of the mythological, were at times contrasted with the every day; a man shaking his coffee mug. To the man who has lost so much, perhaps a saint who sails in a boat without a bottom is no more outrageous than the M5 motorway: and yet Mr Carrington, whose identity in the story remained unclear, seemed to have some semblance of knowledge of the real. The ghost story was that of a man’s mind.
The paintings mostly were exquisite. Every new painting brought with it some surprise. We passed round a corner and found a field of red flowers. We walked down a path with narrow wooden beams forming a impotent fence. We climbed through a narrow tunnel. These details were startlingly well-executed. The soft diffuse light manages still to find darkness where it had to, and break out in more open detail. Above all, the cliffs were magnificent, rugged, eternal, yet broken up by human hands and human ambitions.
In each painting, we approached closer towards an aerial, which constantly loomed over cliffs, a single red dot breaking through the haze.
Unfortunately the first inartistic incident of the evening was a particularly anxious man who desired only to walk on. As we were particularly engaged by Mr Carrington’s broody yet dulcet enunciation, and as I had just been struck by a sunbeam, painted diaphanously as it gracefully brushed the rough dark rocks, this anxious man had chosen to applaud these efforts by passing them by. Mr Carrington, although talented, struggled a moment as he clearly was prompted to elaborate on two events at the same time. What possessed this man only to walk on remains unclear.
Perhaps at times the narration felt a little incoherent or without a clear arc. But this also made possible a particularly dreamlike reality, where things happened because they were said, and where amidst the confusion, much like the aerial, one constant desire to finally understand it was clearly visible. Many things continued to touch upon some themes without ever embracing them. Just like its verbose manner, in many works this may be a flaw. But as I listened to Mr Carrington, I felt the pleasure was all in the elaborate words, the mystical elements. It asked us to enjoy the words and sentences themselves, which is rare in the current climate of highly functional writing, where all must advance some plot of provide some exposition. It is rare to do this, and even more rare to do it well; and this Mr Pinchbeck did, and I must say I marvel at it.
Unfortunately I must admit I was not as fond of the paintings of the caves. Although the narrative and Ms Curry’s sumptuous score continued to be excellent, they felt too romanticised, losing touch with the harsh reality. The attempt at beauty there became too apparent, perhaps, and what they call ‘sugary’. In good landscape work, nature does not invite us in; we forever trespass on its cliffs. The caves felt like they greatly desired to be seen, like a young person who wishes to be popular and in doing so becomes aesthetically vacuous. Perhaps shrouding them in darkness, with only a single spot of light as we would shine ourselves, would have given them the dangerous mystery such terrifying places naturally possess. Less fairy cave, more Toilers of the Sea.
As we saw a stunning painting, a vertical shaft of many waterfalls, I felt it was a shame such a grand set-piece was used so boastfully; and even then a form of boastfulness deprived of charm. It felt perfunctory, as-if we simply needed yet another great set piece. There was none of that charm of the earlier scenes, where the cliffs had all the craft a man puts in them; and yet all the uncaring harshness nature leaves in them. This trend continued and I must say as we advanced I grew less fond of the images themselves. It felt too definitive, too answered, too safe; all littered with candles which were roughly detached from their (probable) purpose as a vigil to guide and steer us. It not infrequently came close to breaking the spell.
That said, the final ascent to the aerial was beautiful, with its narrow paths, its soulless human fences, the painful depths below. And as Mr Carrington continued, I felt he found just the right form of pathos: never personal, never as if he personally came to the denouement: more that the denouement happened in his woebegone words without him even noticing. It was a thrilling conclusion for a sad ghost tale.
With a particularly poor sense of timing but a noteworthy sense of escalation another incident occurred. As we were just looking at the mist as it passed over a forgotten beach, a fellow made himself known by shouting “but what about me!”
Mr Carrington was undisturbed, and the musicians managed not to miss a single note, but sad to say I was not so professional at my appreciation and turned an ear to this disturbance.
“What about me,” the man said again, then wringing his hands and growling, “I have been walking through this gallery, looking at these works, listening to the music, but what about me!”
“Well,” a stout man muttered, “what about you?”
“I am not doing anything,” the anxious man continued, now turning circles around us and attempting to jump, even though clearly there was no need to jump. He started shouting louder, “I am not engaged. The first purpose of a fancy is to engage me! If it fails at that, it fails at being a fancy!”
A dreadful silence fell, as even Mr Carrington struggled a little at such boorish words. I spied Mr Pinchbeck in the background, exhuming a vague sense of tiredness.
“Are you part of the performance?” a kind lady asked, “are you the Bottom of all this?”
“How can I be part of this, if all I do is walk and look,” the man continued, just as Mr Carrington tried to resume his sad monologue, “you have such contempt for me! You’re not inviting me in! I was at another event, oh yes I was, and that was different and better, because it related to me on my own level, and it employed tropes which I am familiar with, instead of expecting me to be part of a broad and interesting, century-long tradition of the arts that requires just a small amount of effort to understand!”
At this the man stormed off and left an angry review on Steam.
The magic was broken a little by this. I offered: “it is good the man is gone for now, but it is a stern reminder of the philistinism of much of the people outside of these halls, and their continued force holding us back as we develop the great medium of fancies. It is sad that the best way to enjoy this great fancy is to imagine ourselves in a different context, in a different world, where instead of playing this on a computer, we imagine paintings, the most fitting context to understand it in. We all just lack the right capacity for understanding this work: we have lacked it for many years. It is so terribly hard to keep up and manufacture this capacity when so little truly evolves.
“Are we part of the previous artistic traditions? Is imagining Dear Esther as a series of paintings in a hall outrageous? Are we part of the new traditions? Is Dear Esther like Half Life without the shooting? How can we find out if we have so little to truly connect the old with the new, and if hostile buffoons continue to snarl at every new work?”
I grew exasperated and sadly muttered on, “I have lost track of how long I have been here, and how many visits I have made overall. I have run out of places to climb.”
Then Oscar Wilde passed by and shook my hand, most gracefully, and commended me on these words. It was particularly potent, given that I had been as a butcher, and he as the lamb, in writing this.
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