An encounter with Jack the Ripper

I have just emerged from Tower Hill station into the gloom of a February evening. At the station entrance a crowd bunches around a man on a stool, hanging on his every word. I approach a woman hovering at the fringe. “What’s happening?” The man on the stool glares straight at me. “We’re here to follow the bloody footsteps of Jack the Ripper. Care to join us?”

Between August and November 1888, five brutal murders disturbed the Whitechapel area. The victims, who were prostitutes, were horribly mutilated. The killer, dubbed Jack the Ripper, was never found. A media sensation at the time, the killings continue to fascinate. Novelists and historians have come up with over 100 possible suspects, including the artist Walter Sickert and Queen Victoria's son the Duke of Clarence. Every night, numerous Jack the Ripper walking tours tread the murderer’s slashing ground, trying to unlock the truth behind the crimes. The one I have joined is led by Donald Rumbelow, ex-police officer, crime historian and a leading authority on Jack the Ripper, who has been doing guided tours with London Walks for 16 years. 

Rumbelow leaps off his little plastic stool and picks up his wheely shopping trolley, the kind favoured by old women. “It’s not full of body parts – I’ve got copies of my book in it.” Thirty people follow behind: a young couple on a birthday treat, teachers on half-term holiday, Americans, Poles, an unruly group of children.

Our first halt is under a fragment of the ancient wall encircling the square mile. Here Rumbelow describes the victims. “They were not glamorous, as shown in Johnny Depp’s From Hell. Most were women in their forties, living on the streets. Their faces were puffy from gin. These women cost two pence, less than the price of half a pound of cheese. The first victim, Mary Ann Nichols, had five front teeth missing, yet was convinced her new hat would attract enough money for a bed for the night.”

From there we plunge into the heart of the City of London, stopping at St Botolph’s of Aldgate, a brick church tipped with a spire. Now overshadowed by the Gherkin, the church, in the 19th century, was a prostitute’s roundabout. Rumbelow comments: “If they stood still, prostitutes could be accused of soliciting, so they walked round the church until a customer approached and led them down a dark alley. Catherine Eddowes, the fourth victim, was imitating a fire engine here on the night she died.” This raises a laugh; stilled when Donald leads us down our own dark alley into Mitre Square, where Eddowes was found.

The square is dark, scarcely illuminated by a fitful streetlamp, although only the cobbles are original. As the guide begins, in his measured yet dramatic way, to describe Eddowes’s death, I imagine the returning salesman who bumps his cart into something soft, huddled in the entrance of his yard. By a flickering candle he sees the body of a woman with her face slashed, her throat cut down to her spine, her internal organs thrown over her shoulder.

Tatiana, part of the young couple, grabs my arm: “I have to walk through Whitechapel at 6am, tomorrow; I’ll be terrified.” 

Crossing Middlesex Street, we reach the East End, where three of the women were killed. Here some of the houses, made from yellowish brick, four stories high, date from 1666. 

Ann Chapman, the second victim, was murdered among these terraces. Standing in the middle of Spitalfield’s Market, where she met the Ripper, I glimpse a shortish man in a wide-brimmed black hat and long black overcoat, carrying a brown bag. He matches the description of the murderer Rumbelow has given us. I experience a genuine frisson of fear. 

Just as Rumbelow is about to describe Ann Chapman’s death, the children begin giggling. One of the teachers suddenly explodes: “Could someone control these kids? I’ve been looking forward to this tour for months.” Donald looked bemused, “Where was I?” he says. Then thick black eyebrows unfurrow and he repeats the last two minutes of his account, verbatim, as if someone had rewound him, and pressed play. The atmosphere changes, details become less vivid. His description of Chapman’s death: “She was ripped from vagina to breast bone, her insides were thrown over her shoulder,” becomes formulaic. I notice my wet feet and the fact that I am freezing.

Even the last death, that of Mary Kelly, who was murdered and mutilated in her bed in Dorset Row, “the worst street in London,” fails to shock. Perhaps because there is nothing to see but for a multi-story car park. 

Next to us, in another tour, a figure posturing in a long ragged coat and flat cap wields a photograph of Mary Kelly’s mutilated body. Rumbelow describes them as: “Charlatans, who ignore the real history of East London life.” Their tour may be less historically accurate, but it certainly seems more fun.

Fact box: Jack the Ripper’s Victims

Victim 1. Mary Ann Nichols, 45. Killed August 31 on Buck’s Row. Disembowelled.

Victim 2. Anne Chapman, 45. Killed September 8 on Hanbury Street. Uterus removed

Victim 3. Elizabeth Stride, 44. Killed September 30, in Duffield's Yard, Berner Street. Throat cut.
Victim 4. Catherine Eddowes, 46. Killed September 30 in Mitre Square. Uterus and left kidney removed, cheeks torn.

Victim 5. Mary Kelly, 25. Killed November 9 on Dorset Street. Entire body mutilated;
heart removed.

Puccini in a Pub

OperaUpClose’s rough-edged, pub piano production of La Bohème exchanges 19th century Paris for modern day Islington, while still retaining Puccini’s power to move and shock.

Now showing in the King’s Head Theatre-Pub, La Bohème, directed by Robin Norton-Hale, premiered above a drinking den in Kilburn. This low-budget production beat five international companies to win this year’s Olivier prize for best new opera.

Performed in the vernacular and with a libretto referencing Angel, where “spices from curries float down on the breeze from alleys,” Puccini’s story of young adults trying to find themselves gained a breath of beery air by being transferred to a bedsit in bohemian Islington.

There was no need to change job titles with the setting. Rodolfo (Anthony Flaum) remained a writer, Marcello (Tom Kennedy) an artist and Colline (Dickon Gough) a philosophy lecturer. Their garret became a student bedroom where paintings and fairy-lights jostled against clotheshorses laden with socks.

The production avoided making Mimi’s (Elinor Moran) death of tuberculosis anachronistic by presenting her as an illegal immigrant, too scared of deportation to seek help.

The singers, like the characters they represented, were in their twenties. Their voices were undeveloped but their youth lent truthfulness and life to this tale of first love and first loss.

Flaum and Moran proved natural singer-actors, their voices and bodies harmonising, first tentatively then beautifully, during “O soave fanciulla.” Moran’s soprano voice encompassed Mimi’s youthfulness and fragility as her coughing worsened, while Kennedy’s baritone gave authority and power to his Marcello. 

OperaUpClose aims to undermine the popular impression of opera as an untouchable form. La Bohème certainly brought the audience close to the action. The bar of the King’s Head became the Café Momus and the audience found itself cast as drinkers. One audience member became a prop to help Musetta (Prudence Sanders), in a tight red dress, climb onto the bar to prevent Marcello missing her alluring “Quando me ‘n vo.” Marcello splashed another with his pint as, accompanied by cheers, he flung it down to embrace Musetta.

Norton-Hale explained she translated the libretto into English to enable audiences to understand La Bohème’s vivid and sometimes vicious humour without craning to read surtitles.

She said: “People remember Mimi’s death and forget all the humour in La Bohème.”

Mimi’s end, curled up on the sofa before an audience who saw her head droop even before Schaunard (Alistair Sutherland) whispered her demise, was certainly memorable. The small space made Rodolfo’s contorted face painfully visible as he absorbed the fact of her death. His two cries of “Mimi”, “Mimi!” – on the crest of a sob, then muffled in her chest – left few dry eyes.

Yet the audience left with the impression, not of sobbing, but of youths joking about a “steamy” novel as they burned Rodolfo’s masterwork on stage, or of them dancing and duelling with beanbags while referencing Strictly Come Dancing. 

Despite its tragic end, Puccini’s opera has the light touch of high comedy, and OperaUpClose’s radical La Bohème realised this fully.

The Deep Blue Sea: Picturing Women

 

According to his producer, Sean O’Connor, Terence Davies is “like Miss Havisham, in more ways than one.” Immersed in his past, with so little connection to this century that O’Connor thought he was dead, Davies has been celibate for thirty years and is mourning for the love of his life, his mother. Why did this gay, reclusive film director adapt Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, about a woman who abandons her 1950s marriage for amazing sex?

Yet, never having emerged from the 1950s, Davies can recreate them. His Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), like The Deep Blue Sea, replicate the drab houses and bombed streets of his childhood. This film juxtaposes scenes of pub singing with callous brutality as Father bawls “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” over Mother’s howls as he batters her to the ground. Davies watched his mother suffer the same fate. His understanding of women and suffering is at The Deep Blue Sea’s core.

First staged in 1952, Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea is the product of another gay man and his love affair. Set on a single day in a London bedsit, the play opens with the discovery of Hester Collyer’s unconscious body. She has realised she has left one prison, her sterile marriage with High Court judge William Collyer, for another – life with former RAF ace Freddie Page, who cannot return her love, and had gassed herself. As the day passes, Hester regains consciousness, watches her relationship with Freddie unravel, and is abandoned. 

Davies is obsessed with the films of his youth: David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), Max Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Robert Hamer’s It Always Rains on Sunday (1947). Like these films, The Deep Blue Sea depicts women as desiring rather than being desired, the pains of love and loss, conflict between independence and domesticity. Davies’s film makes Rattigan’s play his version of a “women’s picture,” focusing on a woman’s life and inner life.

Moments from these films surface throughout Hester’s story. Flashbacks to a happier time when Hester (Rachel Weisz) and Freddie (Tom Hiddleston) sing together or dance to “You Belong to Me” mirror flashbacks of housewife Rose Sandigate (Googie Withers) in It Always Rains On Sunday, to moments with a former lover, when she discovers from a newspaper he has escaped from prison. Rundown terraces and bombsites also come from Hamer’s film. The letter from a woman about to die read at the film’s opening, and the scene in the car with the husband forbidding his wife to leave, echo Letter from an Unknown Woman. 

Davies’s biggest borrowings are from Brief Encounter; his film could be subtitled “what would have happened if Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) and Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) continued their affair with the husband’s knowledge.” To prevent Hester seeming a “relentless, clingy, bore”, Davies borrows the idea of filtering the film through Hester’s viewpoint and memories from Brief Encounter. Recounting Laura’s affair with Alec from her perspective makes viewers share their joy and pain rather than condemn their adultery. The way Hester listens to Barber’s Violin Concerto, as well as its resurfacing at significant moments, mirrors Lean’s use of Rachmaninov, giving a timeless stature to their dark nights of the soul. Most significant is Hester’s second attempt at suicide, this time under a train. The single tracking shot and the flickering lights on Weisz’s distraught face mirror the moment when Laura trembles on the edge of death.  

With these borrowings, Davies tries to add to the women’s picture tradition and revive a form that has declined since Hollywood began creating films for young men with disposable income, rather than for women wanting a break from shopping – like Laura in Brief Encounter. Weisz told O’Connor she agreed to play Hester since she had not done a film about her experience as a woman, with her as the main character. 

The film’s opening best illustrates Davies’s use of Hester’s viewpoint. He cuts the exposition with lodgers and landlady. Instead he opens the film at night, as Hester prepares for death – shutting the curtains, placing shillings in the gas metre, turning on the gas, waiting to die. As the fumes take effect, Hester’s mind, and the screen, fills with images of what brought her to that point. In one, Hester smiles at her husband, who glances up from his desk, and then the camera zooms in as her face collapses into a frown of distress – recalling Johnson’s face when her character begins relating her tale of illicit love. Next, Hester remembers her first meeting with Freddie. Davies follows this with a circular shot from their naked bodies, to flesh and cloth, back to Hester lying on the floor. By now, viewers are immersed in Hester’s experience.  

Davies drops conventional chronology to combine linear time with flashes of Hester’s memories. In a bout of cold anger and childish spite convincingly played by Hiddleston, Freddie throws a shilling at Hester telling her to use it for the gas if he comes home late. As she leaves the pub, she remembers a previous confrontation when Freddie, unable to appreciate Cubism, screams and storms out of the gallery – the memory reminding her why their relationship is ending. Without weighty dialogue or exposition, these recollections initiate viewers into Hester’s story, explaining her wish for death. 

Nothing is more 1950s than Hester and Freddie’s restrained parting. Weisz’s face is composed and positive, her voice brisk; mirroring the perfect politeness of Laura and Alec’s final parting in the tearoom. Hester’s “Goodbye”, is restrained, final. However, in the major break from women’s pictures, Hester does not die or return to her husband, instead refusing to return to “living on the plains.” 

Perhaps Hester will become a reclusive Miss Havisham, mourning over lost love? Her resolute gesture of flinging open the curtains and gazing over the bomb wreckage to St Paul’s suggests her life will instead be one, as O’Connor says, “of independence and qualified hope.” Whether Davies’s attempts to revive the women’s picture will have the same fate is a different matter.

Wuthering Heights, directed by Andrea Arnold

Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights strips away all the fine clothes, romance and other trappings of period drama that often shroud Emily Bronte’s masterpiece. She reveals the wind bleached, gnarled bones of this story of violence and anger and lust – as stark as a solitary gale-tortured tree on the windswept North York Moors. 

Blood and mud dominate the film. The mud that surrounds Wuthering Heights, which Cathy skips through to meet Heathcliff and which the adult Heathcliff picks through in his fine shoes. The blood that soaks Frances Earnshaw’s legs when she gives birth to Hareton in a field. The blood of the sheep Heathcliff is slaughtering, which stains Heathcliff’s clothes as Hindley tells him never again to speak to Cathy. 

In the only truly joyful moment of the film, Cathy trips in a patch of mud and pulls Heathcliff to the ground after her. What begins with Heathcliff smearing mud on Cathy’s face – turning her, briefly, as black as he, ends far less innocently with Heathcliff straddling Cathy and a knowing look in her eyes. When Heathcliff is beaten because he would prefer to roam on the moors with Cathy than build a dry stone wall, Cathy lifts up his shirt and licks the blood from his scarred back. 

This transgressive, yet entirely natural and pure act,  performed by actors who are children, emphasises Andrea Arnold’s skill in casting two untrained, unknowing Sheffield school children, 13-year-old Shannon Beer and 14-year-old Solomon Glave, as the young Cathy and Heathcliff.  

In the same way, her controversial decision to use black Heathcliffs was not controversial at all in the context of the film. The black faces on screen were the visual counterpart of Bronte's description of him as “the little Lascar", making clear his foreignness. The racial beatings and abuse he suffered from Hindley lends this Heathcliff an almost symphathetic quality – going in some way to explain the seething rage that drives him.

James Hawson, as the second Heathcliff, was a believable extension of the first. Rather than being an oddly artificial effect, this idea of casting older actors to play the older Cathy and Heathcliff was as natural as marking the passage of time by following a shot of newly bitten, discarded apple, with the same apple – now black and rotten. 

Like Glave, Hawson was plucked from obscurity, and his identity as an outsider as well as his criminal past, feeds into a powerful, violent and moving performance. The decision to cast Kaya Scodelario, who played Effie from Skins, as the older Cathy, was less inspired. This thin and interesting looking girl seemed insipid compared to raw sexiness and innocence of the younger Cathy.

Wuthering Heights is shot entirely from Heathcliff’s point of view.  Heathcliff, riding behind Cathy on a horse over the moors has his face buried in Cathy’s streaming, sun-tinted hair. Instead of panning to show them both on the horse, the hand-held camera becomes his eyes. The screen is filled with the blowing, waving hair, interrupted only by a shot of his black hand kneading the horse’s white flank, to emphasising the effect that this closeness to Cathy is having on him.  

The most memorable lines of the book: 

“My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods; time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath”

are drowned by the wind and only the whisper of Cathy’s voice reaches Heathcliff as we see him tramping across the rain drenched moors. He had already left the room and Wuthering Heights, driven out by Cathy’s words: “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now.”

Yet nature, particularly the barren and beautiful North York Moors, is the true centre of this film. There are moments when Wuthering Heights becomes a nature documentary – its characters merely struggling animals in the landscape. The camera focuses on a bog, as if explaining the primitive life that inhabits it.  Another shot is of a lapwing circling in a sky so white it hurts the eyes, or the fuzzy golden sun playing amongst apple boughs. The only soundtrack the film has is the call of birds, the shrieks of insects, and the constant symphony of wind. 

No other adaption has placed the moors so firmly at its centre. The North York Moors are portrayed in the way that Bronte describes them, not as a place of romance and passion, but where men strive against the elements and die.

A Million Signatures for Peace

Twenty years after the outbreak of the Yugoslav wars, the arrest of the Serbian general, Ratko Mladic may bring reconciliation one step closer. The arrest is good news for a group of young people trying to find out what really happened during the Yugoslav wars.

 In a cross-border initiative, young people aim to collect a million signatures for a petition they hope will persuade governments to establish a commission to investigate the facts about the wars and their victims and work towards reconciliation in the region.

As many as 160,000 people were killed and millions were left homeless in ten years of ethnic wars in the former Yugoslavia, beginning in Slovenia in 1991. So far, none of the successor states have released official lists of those killed during the conflict and no attempt has been made to find the 15,000 people still registered as missing.

“Knowing the truth and having all the facts about what really happened will bring closure and emotional peace to a lot of people,” says Dejan Dokuzovski, 26, who is collecting signatures in the Macedonian capital Skopje. 

At Zagreb’s bustling Ban Jelacic Square, in the centre of Croatia’s capital city, the newly opened stall has already attracted some interest. Volunteers weave through the crowds of people waiting for trams or enjoying the sunshine, handing out leaflets in the shape of hands and telling people why they should sign the petition. Armed with these leaflets, people approach the stall. A group of teenage girls are simply curious. A middle-aged woman is dissatisfied by the way the Croatian government has dealt with the aftermath of the conflict. “They are all thieves,” she says.

“Some just nod or sign, while others ask us more about what this petition aims to do, and tell us their own personal stories about the war,” says volunteer Kristina. 

Ivan Novosel, 22, who coordinates the volunteers in Croatia, explains the current justice process makes victims feel marginalised and unsatisfied. 

 “Although the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has punished war crimes perpetrators, the focus is on the defendant. Victims still feel like victims.”

The Hague tribunal has so far indicted 161 persons, concluding proceedings against 125 of them. Mladic, who will be the next person to appear before The Hague, is charged with commanding the 44-month-long siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, which killed more than 10,000 people, and ordering the massacre of at least 7,500 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995.

The million signature petition aims to bring justice to victims by putting them first. The regional commission created by the petition, RECOM, is meant to encourage governments to establish the facts about victims of war crimes, including rape, committed in the former Yugoslavia and draw up official lists of the dead. 

“It is the job of states, not private organisations, to maintain the rights of people in their nations,” Novosel says.

Begun in six years ago by Serbian human rights activist Natasa Kandic, the RECOM initiative now involves over 1,500 non-governmental organisations, associations and individuals, making it one of the largest joint human rights actions in the region.

Novosel admits this is a bad time to be collecting signatures for a multinational commission, since the conviction of Croatian general Ante Gotovina for war crimes at The Hague in April has stirred up nationalist resentment. He also worries there is little desire among the seven successor states to sign an inter-state treaty, particularly when Serbia does not recognise one of them, Kosovo.

“We get a mixed reaction from people. Some accuse us of being anti-Croatian and wanting the old Yugoslavia back, even though none of us are old enough to remember it. Many people say ‘OK, that’s very good, we want that,’” Novosel says.

Some of those who sign fear the initiative might not deliver the justice and closure it promises.

Luka Bozovic, 22, who is collecting signatures in Serbia, has vivid childhood memories of his uncle’s departure for the war and of the NATO interventions in Serbia in 1999.

“We had to hide in our basement because of bombing, or spend days out of town, away from possible targets. Luckily, my family didn't lose any members in the past war,” says Bosovic.

Bozovic says he has grown up with stories about people who went missing during the war, and of the sadness of those left behind. The wars themselves were talked about during his childhood. However silence surrounded information concerning the truth about their origins and the facts about those killed.

“I know the stories about missing persons and their parents and loved ones,” Bosovic says.

“These emotional stories motivate me to keep fighting for a better future in the region and trying to prevent conflicts in future,” Bozovic adds.

Emotive dancing and musical score lift this tale of lust and war

 Review of Northern Ballet's production of Cleopatra

At first I thought, this is not a ballet. 

In the opening scene Cleopatra had distinctly unpointed feet, and her dance with guardian god Wadjet was a series of ice-skating hoists rather than classical ballet.

Yet Martha Leebolt’s skill as a ballerina was not long concealed. As Cleopatra, her pas de deux with lovers Caesar and Mark Antony were bewitchingly sinuous, evoking masterfully the shifting balance of power. Cleopatra (Martha Leebolt) was dominated by Caesar, electrically portrayed by Javier Torres. Leading Mark Antony, (Tobias Batley) with the same moves that Caesar used to lead her, Cleopatra dominated him. Too weak to fall on the sword that Octavian (Hironao Takahashi) gave him in their potent war dance, Mark Antony had to be helped to suicide by Cleopatra.

Kenneth Tindall as Wadjet and Martha Leebolt as Cleopatra. Photo Bill Cooper.

A masterstroke of the production was the decision to add a new character, the guardian god of the Pharaohs, Wadjet, to the cast. As well as performing some breathtaking pas de deux with Cleopatra, Kenneth Tindall's Wadjet served as an outer symbol of Cleopatra's inner state. Portraying her darker impulses as well as her instinct for survival, he inspired her decision to murder Ptolemy and was there as she seduced both Caesar and Antony. When Cleopatra turned against herself, Wadjet became the asp, stabbing Cleopatra with his arm and thus helping her to realise her immortal longings.

                                                                                                                              

Movements and costumes told the story. Once under Cleopatra’s power, Mark Antony was completely stripped of his Roman costume and clothed in fluid Egyptian robes to demonstrate his surrender to the fleshpots of Egypt. Costumes were wonderfully imagined, apart from those of Cleopatra, which resembled swimming costumes rather than queenly robes.

However, the shiny, plastic scenery let the production down. Images projected on the backdrop during important moments were grainy and unrealistic. Moreover, they were unnecessary. A romantic Nile boat trip was evoked so well by blue robed dancers fluidly writing in front of a blue cloth that the projected images of waves became redundant. Martial music and dancers hooded in blood red robes far better conveyed the terror of war between Egypt and Rome, than did the projected fire.

Nevertheless, Claude-Michel Schonberg’s score made up for the deficiency of the scenery. His powerful music merged seamlessly with the dancers’ movements, showing that the composer is not limited to show tunes. Despite obvious musical codes: Egyptians had dreamy flute motifs, Romans had drums, the score sustained the ballet’s high emotion, providing fitting scenery for this tale of lust, war and death

This is an extended version of an article published in the Hull Daily Mail on 18.03.11