Coffee-Table Notes

Paris, a wet November bank holiday Monday morning. On the outskirts of the city, Universite Paris Nanterre is deserted. This is a far cry from fifty years ago, when the 1960s-built campus once nicknamed Mad Nanterre helped ignite the student revolt that sired the seismic events of May 1968, when a revolutionary circus took to the streets. Today, however, other than the seven Edinburgh-based street theatre makers walking purposefully down the boulevard, there’s not a soul in sight. They take their bank holidays seriously in France. Look a little harder, however, and as the performers from the tellingly named PyroCeltica and Circus Alba companies are about to discover, circus is an even more serious proposition. This is something the compound of big top tents just off the main drag inside Les arenes des Nanterre, home of Les Noctambules circus school, makes arrestingly clear. In one of the big tops, a trapeze and ropes hang down from on high like some makeshift gym. Next to ...

Barrie Keeffe – playwright, screen-writer Born October 31, 1945; died December 10, 2019  Barrie Keeffe, who has died aged 74, was a writer who once said he wrote plays for people who wouldn’t be seen dead in the theatre. Throughout the 1970s, Keeffe’s work  acted as the liberal conscience of a nation. His plays were shot-through with a street-smart aesthetic at a time when he and other British writers were exploring stories of working class lives on the margins.  Gotcha (1977)  formed part of the Gimme Shelter trilogy with Gem and Getaway, and focused on a disenfranchised teenager threatening to to blow up his school from astride a motorbike. Sus (1979) dissected the institutionalised racism of the law which allowed the police to stop and search people for no reason, with black youth in particular frequently detained. Set on the night of the 1979 General Election, Sus proved instrumental in the law being scrapped. It was Keeffe’s big-scre...

Anna Karina – actress Born September 22, 1940; died December 14, 2019 Anna Karina, who has died aged 79, will forever embody the free-spirited and rebellious joie de vivre of the French nouvelle vague. As an actress, the camera adored her, with her intelligence and playful demeanour running alongside a look that embodied European chic. Her early films with Jean Luc Godard especially saw her at the vanguard of new cinema. It would be wrong, however, to relegate her as a mere muse. Karina has gone on record acknowledging the Pygmalion-like relationship she had with Godard, a mercurial spirit ten years older than her who she would go on to marry. Despite her youth, however, she wouldn’t put up with any of his nonsense. Godard first spotted Karina in a Palmolive soap commercial, and asked her to do a nude scene in Breathless. When Karina declined, he pointed to her appearance in the ad, when she was immersed in a bath-tub, covered in soap bubbles. She had to point out to him t...