TOUJOURS CHERCHEZ LA FEMME

Having just attended an unfortunately boring and mind-numbing political fundraising event at the home of actor Robert Duvall in The Plains, Virginia, for Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, who gave his scripted stump speech to a couple hundred thousand-dollar givers as they stood around unenthused and stone-faced despite humble efforts by yours truly, relentless investigative reporter, to rev-up the crowd during question time by asking "How do you intend to beat Hillary Clinton?", I received this rant from my favorite Anglican priest in England, Father Frank Julian Gelli, who was the late Princess Diana’s vicar and confessor in London's Kensington Palace neighborhood:

“This morning I woke up in a sweat after a grizzly dream. Director and whole cast of the Complicite Theatre had been found horrifically slaughtered in their beds, a scene too gruesome to describe -- literally torn to pieces as if a pack of wild beasts had got to them.

“Then I watched a pasty-faced, Hillary Clinton-look-alike pundit on the BBC News stunning viewers by suggesting the culprit was a Hindu deity fellow called Narasimha, a lion-god, in fact. Why was he so mad at the wretched thespians? Simple. He was acting at the instigation of his wife, the angry goddess Namagiri. 'Toujours cherchez la femme' indeed.

“Murder can never be glorified, of course. Yet, this Christian priest must confess to a sneaking sympathy for Namagiri’s hurt feelings. Complicite has foolishly provoked her. In their play, A Disappearing Number, showing at the Barbican Theatre. about the Indian mathematical prodigy, Ramanujan, Namagiri’s beloved pupil and protégé, goddesses do not take kindly to being ignored -- a lesson even dumb atheists have to learn sometimes.

“Ramanujan’s brief life reads like the stuff of legend. He was a poor Brahmin, labouring modestly and darkly as a clerk in Madras, until the mathematics don G.H. Hardy invited him to Cambridge. Staggered by the young Indian’s sheer genius, the Englishman believed he’d discovered a new Isaac Newton. But Ramanujan was eccentric.

“It seems he got his insights and proofs in dreams from the goddess Namagiri. She deposited the right equations on his tongue. Hardy found that hard to swallow –- like the Complicite philistines, evidently.

“In A Disappearing Number, the helpful goddess is herself unhelpfully made to disappear. Like Hamlet without the ghost, or Macbeth sans the witches? No, worse than that. It is a monumental failure of the imagination.

“This pretentious production replaces the alluring, mysterious Eastern deity with a bespectacled, dowdy and smooching female lecturer as dull as ditch water -- a dullness not even redeemed by her early death. No wonder Namagiri isn’t amused.

“Director-cum-writer Simon McBurney intended the play to show ‘how creativity consumes you.’ I perceive an irony there. This production abounds in lively, if over-familiar stage effects. A cinematic screen shows endless waves of numbers flowing inexorably on, a metaphor of infinity, I presume. Another revolving screen allows for quick change of scene. Eerie sounds and shifting lights and so on. Enough perhaps to mesmerise a gullible and shallow audience.

“But true creativity is exactly what the play lacks. In the misguided attempt to be inventive and to make his subject ‘sexy,’ McBurney has spliced two disparate stories together. The result is an abortion.

“One story, the mercifully sexless one of Ramanujan and his friendship with Hardy, is incoherently interwoven with that of the frumpish female lecturer and her dalliance with some futures-trading Indian-American guy. This latter one offers only unmitigated boredom. Pity. Nice actress Saskia Reeves could have been better employed playing sexy Namagiri, I guess.

“If Complicite was worried about how to make numbers and number theory come alive on stage, it could have shown more imagination than to fall back on a corny love-tale. Darren Aronovski’s fabulous, brains-blowing, low-budget movie, Pi, showed how that can be done.

“Computers, Wall Street skulduggery, cabbala mystics and rogue rabbis all blended into the hell of a movie. To find a number that unlocks the secret of the universe. It almost moved the priest to search for it. By contrast, A Disappearing Number generated only yawns and annoyance. Maybe Aronovski too is friendly with Namagiri? The divine makes all the difference: Complicite, take notice.

“Creation, as McBurney would know if he knew the high book of his culture, the Bible, is par excellence a divine activity. Human creativity partakes of that. Has not Western drama itself got its roots in religion?

“Alas, our theatre has severed those vital roots. That is why, despite all the stagecraft and props and technical wizardry, drama today is in the doldrums. Its sounds and fury signify nothing. I can prove it. By comparing Complicite’s well-funded, glossy exercise with a little play in three acts by the Light of Guidance company of amateurs.

“Something I watched in Maida Vale a week ago entitled The Appearance of Our Mahdi, the production could not have been more basic, rudimentary and even naïve. The action revolved around the birth, life and return of a messianic figure, the twelfth Imam of Shiism. The cast, young men and women, clearly had never attended RADA or any other famous drama school. Yet the play’s simple magic and mystery soothed and charmed me. Such are the effects of the Holy. Is it not wonderful the way it works and touches you?

“Sure, the small and pious audience contributed. Their devoutness was almost palpable. Forget the restless kids from time to time running around the seats. (Eastern peoples are truly child-friendly.) Despite the difference in faith, I felt I belonged. I was like one of them.

“The many Barbican theatre-goers, on the other hand, were like aliens to me. Worse, they inspired me with distinctly unbrotherly feelings. Like the goddess, the priest got real angry. A few jokes and gimmicks by the actors apparently were enough to win the people over.

“The way those Guardian readers gave A Disappearing Number a kind of ovation at the end was the last straw. Had they not eyes to see, ears to hear? Did they not see the pretence, cheat, the emptiness of the thing? Truly tragic. It means our so-called educated, culture-soaking and overwhelmingly white middle classes are no longer able to grasp the difference between the genuine and the phony in art. Hardly new, of course, but painful to witness nonetheless.

I only hope Namagiri and Narasimha do not take it out on them too.”

I offer this one addition to Father Frank's wonderful rant: A lot of lovely violins played by Itzhak Perlman or Joshua Bell, saxophones, horns, flutes, and drums, crashing music of Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, screen music of John Williams and Baz Luhrmann, or soothing crooning tones of Frank Sinatra, Whitney Houston, Michael Bolton, Sarah Brightman, opera greats Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Jessye Norman, José Carreras, Andrea Bocelli, Russell Watson. Josh Groban. Michael Bublé, or baritone and retired Army major-general Jerry Curry singing songs that tell us we will all survive, no matter if our hearts are broken.

Because we have to carry on in hope the person who oversees and supports us, the Holy Spirit, "God's CEO and business manager on earth," as Jerry Curry puts it, will push somebody else, a fresh pro-liberty leader, to step up to the plate –- a true leader in charge.

Woomba.

Whoever you are, please step up to the plate with direction from the Holy Spirit. The American people are tired of phony, self-serving politicians with hollow chests. They want a proven leader in charge who will carry the Reagan flag.

Giuliani did a terrific job as mayor of New York after nine-eleven, which I expressed to him publicly at actor Robert Duvall’s home in The Plains, Virginia. But in his stump speech and during question time, he came across as a worn-out has-been with a clever conservative Republican script but no fire-in-his-belly leadership for the presidency. So he won't make it.

The American people are looking for somebody like Ronald Reagan to lead their great country, and it sure ain’t Hillary Clinton. And it does not appear to be Rudy Giuliani, who could not articulate beyond his stump speech how he would beat her in the race for the White House. No fire in his belly.

I am disapointed to say this because I like what Giuliani accomplished as U.S. attorney and later mayor of New York City. I hoped he could be a leader in charge as president of the United States.

But he didn't show it to the audience I was part of at the Virginia home of the star of Apocolypse Now. The guy came across as a tired bureaucrat without fire in his belly. The American people want someone with fire in the belly to carry the Reagan flag, and I do not believe this guy could beat Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Just my humble opinion.

Toujours cherchez la femme.