From Sex Pistols to Oscar Wilde: originals who gave two fingers to the Establishment
The Sex Pistols’ first gig in Manchester, Hitchcock’s Psycho, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance Of Being Earnest, Handel’s Messiah, Michelangelo’s statue of David, the founding of the ancient Egyptian city of Akhetaten… only a madly courageous and confident author would dare to assemble such disparate subjects (and there are 17 more of them) into one book, but Dominic Dromgoole evidently has bravado to burn.
Best known as the former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe in London, he surveys the entire history of culture, picking out moments and phenomena that have changed the way we look at life.
On every page he comes across as a red-blooded enthusiast, an erudite polymath and a bit of a preacher with an urgent message too. ‘Our opinions can be swayed by politicians,’ he thunders from the pulpit, ‘our understanding can be refreshed by philosophers, but for our perception of the world and each other to be realigned, nothing can touch art.’
This is dodgy territory: at any moment such sweepingly grandiose statements could easily turn into pseuds’ corner or land up in luvviedom. Dromgoole certainly doesn’t do anything quietly: his assertions are often noisily overstated, and wild conjecture ends up mixed into solid fact (the research is pretty slapdash), but he writes with such generous-hearted, broadbrush panache that one is carried along by the force of his personal commitment. What he says about Beyoncé’s Homecoming gig at the Coachella festival could equally be said about him: ‘The unapologetic swaggering would be a dead and arrogant act if Beyoncé wasn’t able to take the audience with her. Which, of course, she can.’
The book’s title, First Nights, is slightly misleading. Dromgoole casts his net so much wider than that – what really interests him is the shock of the new. He gives a fascinating account, for instance, of the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997, which opened amid the trauma of Diana’s death and sparked the notoriety of a gang of artists including Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas. Dromgoole is partial to anyone who puts two fingers up to the Establishment, and he charitably considers their casual iconoclastic yobbishness to be ‘a virulent, rude, thrilling counterblast to the life denying miseries of Puritanism and Academicism’. Hmm.
Less controversially, he celebrates the innovations of two remarkable Asian women. One is Okuni, a shadowy figure of 16th Century Japan who broke the mould of classical Noh theatre and became a transvestite comedian and dancer celebrated for playing samurai warriors in the style that became known as kabuki.
The other is Xiao Lu, a Chinese performance artist who dared publicly to fire a gun at a mirror – a symbolic gesture that was also a genuinely explosive act of political protest in the year of the Tiananmen Square rebellion.
As well as paying his respects to canonised composers such as Monteverdi, Handel and Stravinsky, Dromgoole honours the master of the sitar Ravi Shankar, whose Concert for Bangladesh with George Harrison in 1971 served as a precursor to Live Aid 14 years later, and the raucous Nigerian bandleader and activist Fela Kuti.
Some figures seem to have slipped into the book under the radar without any sort of first night, simply because Dromgoole likes their story – for example, the tragically solitary Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, silenced by Stalinism. She did not dare commit her subversive poem
‘So much blazing passion for art courses through this book’
Requiem to paper and ensured its survival in the Soviet Union only by reciting it in secret to a friend and committing it to memory.
Perhaps the most nakedly personal chapter is devoted to the dramatist Sarah Kane, with whom Dromgoole worked at the Bush Theatre in the years before she tragically hanged herself in 1999. A tortured and depressive soul, Kane wrote plays of unabashed savagery and nihilism that now mercifully seem to have passed out of vogue.
After some sly digs at nasty critics and their ‘accumulated collection of grudges’, Dromgoole’s prose turns deep purple as it compares the ‘beauty’ and ‘goodness’ latent in Kane’s graphically obscene and often psychotic intensity to the poetry of John Keats.
I think Dromgoole goes over the top here – as he does when he romanticises Damien Hirst and John Lydon – but so much blazing passion for art courses through this book that he just about gets away with it.