Disgressed

We went to see it.? I meant it as a kind of treat, but I began to feel like a bit of a tyrant, dragging the family off to yet another culturally improving event when they were tired and would probably have preferred to slob out in front of Strictly Come Dancing. As has become usual these days, the transport system was essentially in emergency mode – after all nobody wants to travel in London at the weekend. But we got there.

When we arrived in the special tented space which has been set up for the show, we were told we had been sold tickets for a row which didn’t exist, but were ‘reseated’. We sat where we were told, but we should probably have been bolder and picked the seats we liked best in the spare space. I was OK, but Katharine and the girls eventually moved over to try to avoid the central pole holding up the tent – it looked as if we had fallen out with each other.

The show wasn’t bad, actually. The story is, necessarily I suppose,? abbreviated to a fraction of the long and complex original. It’s a bit like going to a version of Lord of the Rings with only nine simple scenes (but then no-one would try to turn Tolkien into an opera – oh, wait a minute…).? To be brutally honest, it’s Jamie Hewlett’s cartoons which really sell the thing, both in the promotional material and in the projected links between scenes. A fully Hewlett-cartooned version of Monkey – now that would be worth watching. I’m afraid you can’t say Damon Albarn’s music has the same appeal; it’s agreeable and acceptable, but bland and utterly unmemorable.

“You wouldn’t leave the show whistling any of those tunes,” I remarked.

“I did.” said Elizabeth. “That last one – they played it so many times over and over again, you couldn’t help it. I can’t remember it now, though.”

The spectacle is not quite as spectacular as I’d hoped; the company show a tendency to fall back on their stock-in-trade, doing backflips and circus stunts which don’t have much bearing on the story. Perhaps my taste has been corrupted by Kung Fu films (not that I’ve watched many), but the worst of it seemed to me that the fights, which ought to be a highlight, are frankly dull. This has something to do with the poor portrayal of Monkey himself: all of his irritating qualities are captured well, but (it seemed to me) none of his charm; you don’t get the engaging sense of a resourceful, cheeky hero winning against the odds which is so much a part of the book. It’s more like a spoiled patrician turning out to knock the heads of some cringing peasants from his own estate. Every time he has to fight someone, he squares up to them and exchanges a ritual clash of weapons while going:

“Ehyh, ehyh, ehyh, ehyh!!

The the opponent does a backflip and retires from the stage. I’m not kidding. Every fight, just that.

Anyway, enough whingeing. It was a pleasant couple of hours, but not the great thing I had sort of hoped.

I’ll tell you what really struck me in the programme, though. You may know that the tale of Monkey, attributed to Wu Cheng-en, is a kind of magic fairytale version of a true story, the epic journey by Xuanzang to bring back to China reliable versions of the Buddhist scriptures. His own account of the harrowing and frequently near-fatal journey is itself an exciting story, I believe, though I can’t claim to have read it. Anyway, apparently these days he is quite rightly highly esteemed in China, and it appears that on a recent anniversary of his death, his journey was recreated by enthusiastic followers carrying his skull with them.

I don’t know how that strikes you, but all I can think of is the poor skull saying to itself:

“Oh Heaven, not again! I thought one of the few good things about being dead was that I’d never have to do this again.”