TamTam Books News

Friday, February 18, 2005:

Here's a review of the play based on Boris Vian's life. I want to see it! This review is from The Herald
http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/33658.html

I’m A Fool To Want You, Traverse, Edinburgh


NEIL COOPER
February 18 2005


Boris Vian was a hepcat polymath. Novelist, poet, jazzer and smartypants, he was a white boy French intellectual who hung with the post-Second World War clever-clogs existentialist set. Like them, he was desperate for street cred from the dark side of the street, and dug Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. Unlike them, his novels, short stories, songs and poems were barely recognised in his lifetime. But, hell, as Told By An Idiot's upside-down impressionistic homage makes clear, a life of incident and colour is often better than any piece of two-bit fiction.
Taking as its starting point the dreadful screen version of Vian's novel, I Spit On Your Graves, it shows a life in constant motion, from the barbershop courtship of Vian's last great love, Ursula Kubler, to his untimely demise while watching the film's preview.
Paul Hunter's conception, developed at the ever-open Battersea Arts centre with actors Stephen Harper and the delightful Hayley Carmichael, is led by Vian's surreal exuberance and anarchic spirit rather than any desire for humdrum biography. The result, featuring a live score from pianist Zoe Rahman and trumpeter Adrain Williams Longo, is a playful whoosh between life and art that's brim-full of noise and lust and ennui, complete with some of the best on-the-ground topsy-turvy dancesteps this side of Gregory's Girl.
That something so subversively bittersweet makes its appearance the day after an already neutered Jazz FM changed its name to the appalling Smooth FM gives it an extra edge. Because, if there's one thing jazz isn't, George Melly said some years ago, it's respectable. Vian recognised his art's badness and ran with it. It killed him, sure. But, oh, what a life.

Boris Vian was a hepcat polymath. Novelist, poet, jazzer and smartypants, he was a white boy French intellectual who hung with the post-Second World War clever-clogs existentialist set. Like them, he was desperate for street cred from the dark side of the street, and dug Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. Unlike them, his novels, short stories, songs and poems were barely recognised in his lifetime. But, hell, as Told By An Idiot's upside-down impressionistic homage makes clear, a life of incident and colour is often better than any piece of two-bit fiction.
Taking as its starting point the dreadful screen version of Vian's novel, I Spit On Your Graves, it shows a life in constant motion, from the barbershop courtship of Vian's last great love, Ursula Kubler, to his untimely demise while watching the film's preview.
Paul Hunter's conception, developed at the ever-open Battersea Arts centre with actors Stephen Harper and the delightful Hayley Carmichael, is led by Vian's surreal exuberance and anarchic spirit rather than any desire for humdrum biography. The result, featuring a live score from pianist Zoe Rahman and trumpeter Adrain Williams Longo, is a playful whoosh between life and art that's brim-full of noise and lust and ennui, complete with some of the best on-the-ground topsy-turvy dancesteps this side of Gregory's Girl.
That something so subversively bittersweet makes its appearance the day after an already neutered Jazz FM changed its name to the appalling Smooth FM gives it an extra edge. Because, if there's one thing jazz isn't, George Melly said some years ago, it's respectable. Vian recognised his art's badness and ran with it. It killed him, sure. But, oh, what a life.

Tosh // 2:25 PM
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