Want to get away from it all? Then avoid Great Britain and particularly London this summer. In London you can`t stroll past a bookshop window, roam the West End theaters, scan the film offerings, sniff around the art galleries or even ride the ”tube” (the subway) without stumbling across Chicagoans and Chicago influences.
No. I don`t mean tourists from Rogers Park or Wilmette, who indeed are poking around here and really need not be feared. What you will encounter is a lot of high-profile or rapidly rising Chicago talent on display across the spectrum of the arts.
These artists, whether emigres or just passing through, may not comprise anything so highfalutin as a ”Chicago school,” but they do tend to make extremely distinctive, colorful impressions upon audiences in a cosmopolitan city glutted with top-notch competition.
The Steppenwolf Theater contingent packed up and left London in June after moving most critics to paroxysms of praise. Still rampaging nightly on stage in Lanford Wilson`s ”Burn This” is Steppenwolf alumnus John Malkovich who, with English costar Juliet Stevenson, leaves viewers gaping and gasping at a menacing erotic duet punching through like a ”Women Who Love Too Much” case history with a happy ending.
After premiering at the small Hampstead Theater, the play became so popular that it was quickly moved into the more spacious confines of the Lyric Theater in the West End, where it has enjoyed consistent sellouts and a run extended through September.
”I really don`t know how much is a specific Chicago style and how much is Malkovich himself,” says Michael Billington, theater critic for The Guardian.
”Certainly, Chicago theater promotes an athletic grace, a physicality, a capacity to project danger that Malkovich, like Brando as Stanley Kowalski in `A Streetcar Named Desire,` used to shift suddenly from that T-shirt brutality to flights of gentleness on stage.”
As for Steppenwolf, Billington was impressed by the ”sheer pictorial beauty” of so downbeat a subject as ”The Grapes of Wrath,” and was struck by a ”sense of ensemble” rarely seen in Yank productions in London.
In sum, Billington, who has visited several times, regards Chicago as
”the liveliest theatrical city in America” because ”it`s not so insular or ludicrously expensive as New York. People can take risks.”
If Malkovich is no surprise, neither, for that matter, should Chicagoans be amazed that Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio (”The Color of Money,” ”The Abyss”) musters up a passable brogue and a poignant performance in ”Fools of Fortune,” Pat O`Connor`s otherwise uneven elegaic film of a wealthy 1920s-era Anglo-Irish family, running in London cinemas since late June.
Mastrontonio, an ex-Oak Parker, makes her home in London. Because of family concerns she is uncommitted to other projects here or in the States, her agent says.
Suppose you ignore theater and cinema. (Why else are you in London?)
Innocently descend into a tube station, mind your own business awaiting the next train, scan the large wall posters and fix on an advertisement for the Glasgow Arts Festival lauding a ”pudding-basined comedian” (that`s English for pageboy haircut) named Emo Philips.
Philips and accordion-armored Judy Tenuta, it seems, had won raves in London (”wildly funny,” etc.) and through mid-August are on tour tickling and tackling funny bones in Liverpool, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Southampton, Newcastle, Sheffield, Brighton, and, to make the full circuit, Cardiff in Wales, Belfast in Northern Ireland and Glasgow, Scotland.
You hardly can open a British publication, from The Times to Marxism Today, that isn`t adorned with a still of Philips thoughtfully scratching his ”moptop noggin” (also English for his coiffure). Anyway, one may safely say that Philips and Tenuta are breaking up the United Kingdom.
The City of Glasgow, where Philips and Tenuta end their comedy blitzkrieg, was named in 1990 the ”cultural capital” of Europe, evoking envy in some quarters and mirth in others. In mid-July the Glasgow Arts Festival honored six American poets with paid invitations to read from their works, and the invitees included Chicago poet-novelists (and husband and wife) Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff, who passed through London.
They report no literary hitches or mishaps: ”I didn`t have to stop to explain anything,” Hoover says; ”they seemed to understand all the American references and jargon.”
On the other hand, Hoover and Chernoff were at times mystified by a few industrial-strength, burring Scots accents, and admired the ability of one bibulous Scottish poet to pass out while somehow staying on his feet. Also on hand in Glasgow was Chicago novelist James McManus.
Neither Hoover nor Chernoff`s works are distributed as yet in Great Britain, although I spotted copies of Hoover`s novel, ”Saigon, Illinois,” in Camden Town in North-West London. But do not imagine for a moment you can avoid contemporary Chicago authors in the bookshops.
Peruse the shelves and you will find not only Saul Bellow and Studs Terkel but also, and especially, Sara Paretsky`s detective novels, ”Toxic Shock,” freshly out in paper, and ”Burn Marks,” in hardcover.
If you thought Paretsky`s female private eye V.I. Warshawsky, the thinking man`s sex symbol, was strictly a hometown heroine, think agains. The Warshawsky whodunits are featured prominently in many a bookstore window, nestled between best-seller churners such as Tom Clancy and Jeffrey Archer.
British readers obviously enjoy trekking around our fair and gritty Chicago with a feisty female private eye who specializes in nabbing corrupt upper-crust criminals. After all, even Raymond Chandler`s sleazy L.A. can get tiresome.
Art galleries are no refuge from Chicago, either. Pam Golden, for instance, is a painter and former Art Institute lecturer who moved to London in April last year.
”I wanted to go someplace that had a Middle Ages,” she says jokingly. Golden will launch her first European exhibit of work next month at the Interim Art Gallery in London, with further exhibitions of separate batches of her art going on at the Fromont Putnam Gallery in Paris and also in Belguim.
Golden has found that being a Chicagoan poses no special difficulties nor does it confer any advantages in the London art scene. She lives in Soho and, despite higher expenses, likes living here.
”You can walk around at night,” Golden says. ”(In Chicago) I was getting tired of being hassled all the time on the streets.”
She is settling in, after a period of adjustment. As some wit said, America and Britain ”are countries divided by a common language,” and Golden, like many other Americans here, finds these cultural differences a source of constant stimulation.
So then. Will you retreat to your hotel room and turn on the ”telly”
for a dose of pure British entertainment? Tough luck, if you tune into BBC Channel 2 on a Monday evening. There you behold ”Hit and Run,” a half-hour of congenial obnoxiousness conducted by ex-Evanston denizen Ruby Wax.
Think of a stereotypically reserved, almost pathologically proper Englishman or woman plucked straight out of the cast of ”In Which We Serve,” or any Noel Coward play. Now imagine the most demented ”flip side” of such mythical characters-pushy, mouthy, irrepressible-the distilled essence of bad manners, the most vulgar Yank conceivable. That`s Ruby Wax, or her on-screen persona.
Her television exploits consist of badgering strangers to pick a name of a friend, or enemy, and off sprints Ruby with camera crew to interview the people so nominated. In so doing, she elicits National Enquirer-style intimate details through interrogation techniques that owe as much to Barnum & Bailey`s clowns as to third-degree police procedures.
The show wouldn`t work in the States, where we all go elbow-to-elbow with Ruby Waxes daily. But on British television the grand guignol brash style will evoke laughs, even if in a rather ”appalling” fashion, as the British say.
Hey, it`s not all Masterpiece Theater over here.
