Not everyone chuckles at Chaplin, is wowed by The Wireor moved by Arthur Miller. Our writers pluck up the courage to pick the 'greats' they're supposed to like . . . but don't
DONALD CLARKE VCHARLIE CHAPLIN
The life story is unquestionably astonishing. Born to a declining theatrical family in an unfashionable area of south London, Charles Chaplin (echoes of Dickens here) survived the workhouse to become the most celebrated entertainer in the world.
There is, moreover, no doubting the comic’s incandescent talent. He moved like a ballet dancer and exhibited a superhuman gift for comic timing. What a shame the features are so glutinously sentimental, stubbornly repetitive and visually conservative. What a shame he became so attached to a character – the Little Tramp – who offered so little scope for development. The early shorts still offer simple pleasures, but, when exercised at feature length, Chaplin’s compulsion to show off his various facilities invariably becomes wearing. The experience is akin to watching a glassblower fashion bottles or a pastry chef decorate cakes. It’s impressive, but it’s not exactly entertainment.
To paraphrase Wilde on Dickens (him again), only somebody with a heart of stone could fail to laugh at the lachrymose denouement of City Lights. The Great Dictator'sclumsy final speech now renders the film almost unwatchable. Buster Keaton is, however, a different matter. Seasoned with genuine sourness, Old Stone Face's comedies remain undiminished by the passing decades.
ARMINTA WALLACE VSEAMUS HEANEY
It’s one thing to have a guilty cultural secret if it involves a fondness for certain kinds of self-help book, or still being crazy about Crosby, Stills and Nash (sans Young) after all these years. Those are sins I can easily sign up to. But – and here, dear reader, you may insert the sound of me taking a deep, deep breath – here comes the big one. I don’t like Seamus Heaney’s poetry.
I don't go all misty-eyed and goggly-kneed. I realise this is a deficiency on my part, like a shortage of potassium, and I feel like a charlatan for admitting it out loud – the man himself is, damn it, so smiley and generous and gracious – but there it is. When I hear those boggy words and rounded rhythms and mythological references, my heart sinks. Must try harder, I think. Must try. Must. And then I flee back to Yehuda Amichai and Paul Celan and Rilke and Paddy Kavanagh and the poets who come naturally to me.
Perhaps one day I’ll get it. More likely I’ll be struck by lightning, and the gods of poetry will smile grimly down from their heaven and say, “We told you so”.
JIM CARROLL VRADIOHEAD
Look, I've tried. I've listened to the albums (okay, Kid Awasn't bad), I've gone to the live shows, I've even contemplated attending a trad session in a shabby Dublin pub where the guitarist was supposed to be playing. But no, it doesn't work. Radiohead and me, there's not a flaming thing going on.
Every time Radiohead are praised to the skies for allegedly groundbreaking albums such as OK Computeror so-called revolutions like giving away their album for free, I die a little. Radiohead never have and never will be groundbreaking or revolutionary. It would be easier to join the chorus (there's safety in numbers, after all), yet I remain the one who thinks the emperor is wearing no clothes.
While others hear classics, I encounter a woeful, idea-less, mundane band. Where others see a visionary, I spot a truly terrible lead singer chancing his arm with "woe is me" guff normally heard on Liveline. When others experience epic albums of high art, I hear a record that sounds like fourth-rate Pink Floyd on a really bad day. Sigh. I scratch my head and move on.
PETER CRAWLEY VTHEATRICAL SILENCE
Rather than disingenuously lead a few sacred cows to the abattoir – proving demonstrably that Sophocles was a hack, say, that Shakespeare lost his plots, or that Martin McDonagh’s entire career is actually the result of a clerical error – I’d like to argue in favour of something I know I’m supposed to deplore.
In theatre, I think there’s a value in disturbance. Coughing fits, audience walk-outs, mobile phones going off during performance . . . none of these bother me. I wouldn’t want them all the time, but they do dispel the sanctity that often encrusts the theatrical event, where no unwrapped sweet goes un-tutted and no ringtone is louder than a chorus of shushing.
I have vivid memories of phones interrupting the Gate's Arcadiaand Druid's The Lonesome West, because of how the performers responded. Think of an exasperated Ralph Fiennes breaking from Faith Healerto swear out a bleeping front row in 2006, then picture Vanessa Redgrave ad-libbing a more gentle rebuke (in character) in 2008's The Year of Magical Thinking. One of them drew applause, but both instances sharpened the focus of the live event, on its fragility and, somehow, its paradoxical strength.
These annoyances wheedle out the distractible and strengthen the bond of the committed. If the call doesn’t get through to them, chances are they’re engaged.
SARA KEATING VARTHUR MILLER
I would be foolish to say that I do not admire the plays of Arthur Miller. I respect their dramatic achievement, political commitment, and I acknowledge their vital place in modern drama. But I don’t like them very much.
They are so “well-made” that they lack nuance. They contain countless memorable personae, but few characters, if the inherent quality of character is ambiguity. Meanwhile, their themes are so rooted that they defy interpretation. What you see in an Arthur Miller play is what you get, and that is my problem.
Of course, I can enjoy a good production of a Miller play but rarely do I discover anything new. It's not that every experience is always the same – Brian Dennehy and Len Cariou will bring different energies to a production of All My Sons, say – but on some level, in the very opening lines I find the whole journey of the play laid out before me, and the rest of the drama is merely proving a point: Miller's critique of capitalism, the communist witch-hunt of the McCarthy trials, or whatever other injustice is preoccupying his imagination.
I respect that commitment – but give me the sensuality and the vacillating moods and desires of a Tennessee Williams play any day.
ROSITA BOLAND VFRANCIS BACON
Francis Bacon. Don’t get him. Loathe his work. The distorted, melting faces, the exploding heads, the bloated, pink human bodies that make me think of pigs in the process of slaughter.
What Bacon does with his canvases is undeniably powerful, but you could say the same of someone who crushes chickens into feathers and splintered bone with his bare hands. It’s excessive: too much tortured angst, too much silent howling.
For me, his work as an artist is about as subtle and rewarding as a jackhammer going off during a funeral ceremony.
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, a triptych held by the Tate in London, is possibly Bacon's most famous work. I've seen it. I hate it.
Everything about this triptych screeches pain. It’s visceral, raw, nightmarish. I hate the shapes, the composition of each painting singly and in triptych, and those ghastly tainted orange and morgue-grey colours.
Bacon a genius? Not to me. Everything about this piece makes me feel trapped in a kind of relentless, crushing despair. Above all, I don't like Three Studiesbecause it's so determinedly, self-consciously, ragingly ugly and aggressive. Even in reproduction, the experience of looking at it is like having mace sprayed into my eyes.
FINTAN O'TOOLE VNOEL COWARD
It’s not the upper-class twits, because I’m very fond of PG Wodehouse. It’s not the high camp drawing-room mannerisms – I love Oscar Wilde. So what is it exactly that makes me find Noel Coward as funny as halitosis at a kissing contest?
Let me count the ways: the brittle language from which all personality has been strained; the self-conscious charm that is so utterly lacking in true beguilement; the attempt to make us care about the sufferings of the vacuous rich; the almost complete insulation from life as most people lived it.
I tried to like Coward in my job as a theatre critic because, after all, you have to give everyone a chance. I even read a splendid analysis of his plays by my favourite critic John Lahr, hoping to be convinced. I've done my best to acknowledge his craft and wit and the interesting ways in which he tried to both conceal and acknowledge his own identity as a gay man. But put me in front of Blithe Spiritor Private Livesor Hay Fever– never mind the hideous "patriotic" stuff he wrote during the second World War – and I lapse into terminal unamusement. I think it's that attempt to make us care about these people that really does it. Wilde and Wodehouse laugh at the toffs. Coward wants us to feel for them. I prefer to apply my sympathy elsewhere.
BRIAN BOYD VTHE WIRE
Well, Hawaii Five-0it's not. It looks like it was written by someone who read a David Mamet For Beginnerspamphlet and then spent a weekend holed up cadging storylines from a Cagney & LaceyDVD box set.
“Gritty” and “authentic”? God no. It’s a melodrama for a Dublin 6 dinner party set who get off on the sheer “ghettoexploitation” of it all. It’s Dominic West’s ridiculous accent; the every-cliche-going troubled domestic lives of the leads (oh I get it – they’re all married to the job); the embedded Dr Phil-style aphorisms in the narrative; the marginalisation of the only interesting character interplay it has going – that of Carver and Herc; the solemn and overly-earnest acting; and gangsters portrayed as MTV-style “gangstas”.
Ironically, the show was scorned by actual US inner-city drug dealers – all of whom chose instead to watch Midsomer Murders. Now there's a show.
Agree? Disagree? Have your own gripes? Comment on Jim Carroll's blog, at irishtimes.com/blogs/ ontherecord
