REFLEXIONS

Amateur theatre, unbound by commercial constraints, breaks new ground. It takes you to the high country of imagination and innovation. It happened in Monaco when 24 amateur troupes from five continents gathered in the Principality, at the end of August, for the quadriennial Mondial du Théâtre.
The iconic, Hungarian-born director, Alexander Korda, once observed that it isn’t enough to be Hungarian, ‘you have to have talent’. The Kompania Theatre Studio of Budapest had both, in spades. The young troupe’s dramatisation of the Shakespearean classic, Romeo and Juliet, was in the daringly-original language of music and modern dance in which traditional male and female gestures were interchanged. Proving dance doesn’t have to be abstract and decentralised to be modern. It is at its most exciting when it blends both contemporary and narrative.
Berlin’s Dokumentartheatre was in a class of its own: the theatre was born to research and produce life stories. Before the curtain went up on Dancer Behind Barbed Wire, the true story of Ukrainian ballerina Alla Rakitjanskaia, the director wished the Mondial audience an ‘intense evening’ and ‘deep reflection’. It was one of several performances that brought audiences to their feet in a thunder of applause.
The Wisconsin Heider Center for the Arts, which brought Cotton Patch Gospel to Monaco, dared to set the Gospels of Matthew and John in modern, rural Georgia and perform it to a background of country music. Jesus was born behind a motel, received a magi gift of a gold credit card and was lynched by the Klu Klux Klan.
Nobody missed the brilliantly-conveyed message of the Maguey players from Peru who drew audiences into the rain forest with haunting music played on a series of wind, string and percussion instruments, with dazzling flora, ingeniously-created fauna and the stunning performance of a principal actress who, for an entire hour, held spectators in thrall to the forest’s beauty and the threats to its existence. Spain’s La Galerna troupe tackled the grimly, all-grey, The Maids, written by the French playwright Jean Genet, and turned it into a black and red drama that might have been written in the Spanish Basque country.
French actor/ director Jacques Weber, who visited the Mondial, declared that “without amateur theatre there would be no innovation.” The pertinent word is amateur, in its original sense: one who cultivates an art for the love of it.

Monte-Carlo has five film festivals a year. An open invitation to ennui, were it not for some exceptional work like Back Door Channels: The Price of Peace, the film that opened the Monte-Carlo TV festival this year. Channels made audiences sit up, lean forward, even – unbelievingly - sob.
In revisiting the presidency of Jimmy Carter, media denigrators never fail to overlook Carter’s brokering of the landmark 1979 peace accord between Israel and Egypt. It took Channel Productions and director Harry Hunkele to balance the record. Henkele uses actual footage to show the complex run-up to the laboured Camp David talks, which involved a cast of characters as oddly assorted as the Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceausescu, the late King Hassan II of Morocco, the US billionaire Leon Charney, journalists Wolf Blitzer and more. Arranging to bring Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin together in the same space was Jimmy Carter’s first miracle. His second was actually achieving an Egyptian-Israeli peace deal against all odds. One can’t help wishing for fly-on-the-wall invisibility to view the history-making talks. Channels gives us something similar: we see Carter fight despair – as talks stall – with determination. We see a charming, urbane Anwar Sadat and an almost expressionless Begin, until Carter brings out Begin’s basic humanity by simple attention to detail.
Carter was often accused of wasting time on detail, overlooking the forest for the trees. But he, more than any other president, was aware of what a powerful component in the business of politics the human story is. When Begin asked Carter for copies of the peace accord for his five grandchildren, Carter aides put in a call to Tel Aviv to get the names of the Premier’s grandchildren so that a personal message could be written on each copy.
In the 30 years since Camp David, no US President has really tackled Middle East peace. The risks have been too great: Carter sacrificed his political career and Sadat sacrificed his life.
Can Obama do it?
Carter’s response comes at the very end of the film, ‘If President Obama undertakes this task from the beginning of his administration and takes a balanced position, with the Arabs on one side, including the Palestinians, and the Israelis on the other side, and accepts the principles that were agreed to at Camp David, as a starting point, and the two-state solution that’s evolved since then as a final goal, then we can have peace.”

Monaco’s Top Marques was more than a runway for super car models. It was also an ‘off-piste’ – some might say off-the-wall – exhibition of strokes of genius. Take the series of levers, wheels, cogs, screws and ball bearings, scavenged from British scrap yards, that looked like Hollywood’s idea of a time machine: it turned out to be the world’s most intriguing bottle opener. The same ‘One-of-a-Hundred’ exhibit had a swooning, iron grandfather clock with a face inspired by Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’, a nutcracker half the size of the bottle-opener, and a taurean sculpture that opened like a budding flower into a conversation corner for four.
Further along, Germany’s Raumdesign Deluxe was showing a new use for leather: floors made of leather tiles - diamonds decorating the corners an option. Not for the wearers of spike heels.
Nor was something-to-wear neglected. Frederica Neri’s Fashion Soup was a statement of anything goes together: silk with t-shirts, satin with metal chains and even fine leather jackets made from frog skins. (For those interested, it takes 60 frog skins to make a normal sized jacket.)
Definitely something to lust after were La Piramide pearls, including the palest, natural, pink pearls – a tonality rarely seen - once worn only by emperors, according to Roberto Sciaguato who brought the collection to Monaco.
Finally, a pleasing, appeasing gift of Bacchus to end the evidence of thinking outside the box: Meregalli’s Luxury Lounge on Tour, a mobile opportunity to indulge in some vintage wine tasting.