I See You Watching review – the male gaze in full effect
Playing a figure of authoritarian power, actor David Calvitto barks out commands: he wants his women to be pretty, demure, sluttish, compliant, hard-working, domestic, worldly, Madonna and whore. He could be running an audition with a keen eye for what the market demands or, more likely, he could be articulating base male desires.
And because he is patrolling the auditorium when he issues these instructions, he is on our side, physically if not politically. Objectified on the other side of the footlights is Kylie Westerbeck, playing a wannabe star in spangly majorette gear, clumsily tossing a baton and dancing with ugly enthusiasm. Calvitto wonders if she could be better.
Eager to please, ambitious to succeed, she does her best to obey his contradictory commands. She is fashioned in his image and has no resources to argue back. Conditioned from infancy, she has no thought for herself beyond the empty allure of Hollywood fame.
Devised by Westerbeck with director Melanie Stewart and writer John Clancy for Blind Faith Theatre, I See You Watching is an extended riff on a simple idea. The more relentlessly it delves, the more it outlines a spectrum of subjugation: at one end, a woman laughs politely at a man's unfunny jokes; at the other, a child is farmed out to a pornographer.
The production makes its point but, for all the charisma of Westerbeck and Calvitto, it makes it bluntly, hammering home a message in a way that is uncomfortable and unnerving even if it should not come as too much of a surprise.
At Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh, until 24 August
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Terence Stamp, the British actor who often played the role of a complex villain, including that of General Zod in the early Superman films, has died. He was 87. His death on Sunday was disclosed in a death notice published online. The London-born Stamp started his film career with 1962's seafaring 'Billy Budd,' for which he earned an Oscar nomination. Stamp's six decades in the business were peppered with highlights, including his touching portrayal of the transsexual Bernadette in 1994's 'The Adventure of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert." Stamp also was widely praised for his lead in director Steven Soderbergh's 1999 crime drama 'The Limey.' But it will be his portrayal of the bearded Zod in 1978's 'Superman' and its sequel 'Superman II' two years later that most people associate with Stamp. As the Kryptonian arch enemy to Christopher Reeve's Man of Steel, Stamp introduced a darker and charming — more human — element to the franchise, one that's been replicated in countless superhero movies ever since.
Telegraph
an hour ago
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Why Terence Stamp could have been as big as Michael Caine
The news that the actor, fashion icon and great survivor of the Swinging Sixties Terence Stamp has died at the age of 87 is somehow impossible to believe. Like another offbeat film star, Donald Sutherland, Stamp seemed to be as permanent a fixture in Anglo-American culture as it is possible to be, with his raffish, debonair personality (and famously high-profile love affairs) undercut by what could either be genuine menace or something almost otherworldly. Although Stamp did a vast number of films simply for the money, which he disarmingly confessed to have forgotten about as soon as they were completed, he was too much of a pro to be anything but interesting on screen; when he was good, there were few actors better. He played the devil, of course. Once, literally, in Pasolini's 1968 surreal psychological thriller Theorem, in which Stamp, at the peak of his good looks and dashing screen persona, visits an upper-class Italian family and not only seduces them, figuratively and literally, with his charm, but manages to make all of them dissolve into existential ecstasies brought on by the sheer force of his considerable personality. By the time that Stamp's so-called 'Visitor' withdraws from the family's lives, they are unable to cope without him and soon descend into chaos. So it will prove for many of Stamp's many admirers, especially his peers who first thrilled to his appearances in quintessentially Sixties pictures such as The Collector, Far From The Madding Crowd or – gloriously – Modesty Blaise. Or the new fans he won with his rather thankless appearance in one of the highest-profile films he ever made, the Star Wars prequel The Phantom Menace. Stamp memorably said of his inconsequential role as Supreme Chancellor Finis Valorum, an impotent would-be good guy left floundering by the machinations of Ian McDiarmid's steelier Senator Palpatine, that 'I didn't want to [play the part], but my agent leaned on me, and I wanted to meet Natalie Portman because I'd seen her in The Professional [aka Leon]. And I did meet her and she was absolutely enchanting.' In another, less guarded moment he lambasted the film's director George Lucas as '[not] a director of actors…[a man] more interested in stuff and effects', and called the experience of filming against green screens 'just pretty boring'. Of the then-18 year old Portman, he said: 'I must admit, I had a terrible crush on her'; such was Stamp's remarkable charm that this admission barely raised an eyebrow. It is incontrovertible that Stamp could have, and perhaps should have, been a bigger star. Michael Caine famously quipped of his one-time Wimpole Street housemate that 'I still wake up sweating in the night as I see Terence agreeing to accept my advice to take the role in Alfie.' Yet Stamp dealt with being a pivotal Sixties figure with a mixture of amusement and disinterest. When he was in a relationship with Julie Christie, they were immortalised by The Kinks as 'Terry and Julie', the couple in their great song Waterloo Sunset. But although Stamp dated many of the most famous women of the age, including the model Jean Shrimpton and, it is rumoured, Brigitte Bardot, he was never interested in becoming a tabloid fixture, or indeed a screen idol. He even once said 'I never imagined I was good-looking or attractive or anything like that.' Many of the first films that led to his success were both critically and financially successful, such as Far From The Madding Crowd – in which he starred opposite Christie as the dashing and fashion-forward but weak Sgt Troy – and his striking debut as the cherubic eponymous protagonist of Peter Ustinov's Herman Melville adaptation Billy Budd. Yet Stamp was always drawn to interesting source material and auteur directors rather than making bland and boring pictures. When he was suggested, inevitably, for the role of James Bond, it went badly: he later recalled that 'my ideas about [how the role should be portrayed] put the frighteners on [producer Harry Saltzman]. I didn't get a second call from him.' By then, Stamp was losing interest in mainstream cinema, and fled to an ashram in India for nine years, only making films very occasionally. Apart from two appearances as the arch-villain General Zod, fleetingly in the first Superman picture and more substantially in the second, he turned his back on blockbuster films altogether for nearly two decades. If you had been a fan of the dashing actor who had exhibited extraordinary swordplay-as-foreplay in front of an obviously impressed Christie in Madding Crowd, you would have to wait until 1984's The Hit, a cool-as-ice gangster picture in which Stamp was appropriately cast as an inexplicably calm informant, to see him in anything approaching a mainstream film. Yet for whatever reason – money, a wish to act more, boredom – he then became a prolific performer in projects that were often barely worth his time and effort. Sometimes, the films were good, as in Oliver Stone's Wall Street and the uproarious Steve Martin-Eddie Murphy comedy Bowfinger. More often, they were terrible. If you remember the likes of The Real McCoy, Genuine Risk or Red Planet, that is almost certainly more than their well-paid guest actor did. There were a couple of shining exceptions. Stamp often seemed like a grave actor, which is why his occasional forays into comedy were so welcome. When he played the stately transgender woman Bernadette in the uproarious 1994 farce The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, he gave what could have been a thin role dignity and charisma. He was just as good a few years later in Steven Soderbergh's terrific mob thriller The Limey, in which he channelled all the strangeness and intensity from his earlier performances into a superb, indelible lead as Wilson, an enigmatic Englishman who comes to Los Angeles to seek revenge for the death of his daughter years earlier. (Stamp's delivery of the line 'You tell him I'm coming! You tell him I'm f______ coming!' is simply magnificent.) It was not until his final on-screen role in Edgar Wright's Late Night in Soho that Stamp found another director who was similarly in awe of his warped, slightly askew charisma. With his mysterious character only known as the 'silver haired gentleman', the actor brought the authentic feel of Sixties London – half glamorous, half terrifying – to his supporting role. But by then, Stamp had been happy to coast along for years, giving interviews that only contributed to his sense of enigma. Talking to John Preston for this newspaper in 2013, he remarked that 'I don't really live anywhere. I stay with friends a lot, or just travel about from hotel to hotel.' When a bemused Preston asked where his home was, Stamp simply replied 'Oh, I don't have one. Haven't done for years.' Stamp wrote three volumes of memoir (one, brilliantly, entitled Stamp Album), a far-from-terrible novel, The Night, and a cookbook with recipes intended for those who were, like him, wheat and lactose-intolerant. He should be remembered not just as a great screen actor and inimitably eccentric man, but as someone who kept a healthy degree of scepticism about show business. He once confessed to being so poor in the Nineties that he was unable to afford a bus ticket, but had his own splendidly unusual means of making money. 'Fortunately I'd bought all this white wine, Chateau d'Yquem, in the Sixties. I hadn't drunk much of it, so, whenever things got tight, I could sell a case and that would tide me over.' Somehow, selling fine wine from that decade he helped define says far more about Stamp than any number of Star Wars blockbusters might. Long may this oddball wonder be remembered and celebrated. Terence Stamp's five greatest roles 1. Billy Budd (1962) It was somehow typical of Stamp that his film debut, in which he appeared at the age of 24, saw him nominated for an Oscar and Bafta, as well as winning him a Golden Globe for New Star of the Year. The awards boards were not wrong. Stamp's performance as the saintly, beautiful new crewman on board ship during the Napoleonic Wars, who arises first the lust and then the fury of the martinet John Claggart, is remarkable, bringing a strangeness and erotic tension to what may otherwise have been a relatively formulaic naval adventure. Benjamin Britten wrote a famous opera based on the same Melville novella a decade before, and could only have wished for a Budd of the same charisma as Stamp. 2. Far From The Madding Crowd (1967) Nicolas Roeg soon became best known as a director rather than a cinematographer, but it's his photography of Julie Christie and Stamp in this quintessentially Sixties Thomas Hardy adaptation that lifts what might otherwise be a dated picture into the realms of the sublime. Stamp always looked magnificent on screen – 'bone structure…my father had it too', he once explained, in a suitably offhand fashion – but what he does here is to turn Hardy's superficially seductive but weak and vacuous rake-sergeant into a figure of such gravitational draw that it's impossible not to imagine the entire cast, male and female alike, signing up to enlist if he'll be their officer in charge. 3. Superman II (1980) 'Kneel before Zod!' Whichever version of the Superman sequel you watch – the campier, Richard Lester-directed one or the reconstructed, statelier Richard Donner incarnation – there can be little doubt that Stamp's return to mainstream cinema proved to be well worth it. It was, of course, a payday gig, but the actor needed the work, remarking that, when he received the offer of the part, 'I remember opening the envelope, and there was a tremor in my hand. I think I knew that my life was about to change.' What Stamp does so well is to underplay the character of General Zod (in stark contrast to Michael Shannon in Man of Steel), giving him a curiously detached attitude to humanity that makes the comic-book villain seem just as inimitable a Stamp character as anyone else that he played before or afterwards. He acts everyone else – even Gene Hackman – off the screen. 4. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) Stamp expressed a certain degree of hesitation over playing the trans character Bernadette in the camp, outrageous comedy Priscilla, not because of any latent homophobia but because, touchingly, he was unsure that he was the right actor for a role that was miles away from anything that he had ever done before. The director Stephan Elliott's belief that the English thespian would do a magnificent job in the central part of Bernadette was swiftly vindicated. While his co-stars Guy Pearce and Hugo Weaving camp it up to high heaven – as the picture demands – as a pair of drag queens, Stamp's still, often very affecting performance counts as one of this fine actor's very best. It was once hoped that he would reprise the role in a sequel, but alas events have terminally intervened on that score. 5. The Limey (1999) Stamp appeared in two outstanding gangster pictures as a mature actor, this and Stephen Frears' masterly, enigmatic The Hit. Either could have appeared on this brief list, but while The Hit perhaps belongs ultimately to John Hurt, there is no doubt that in Soderbergh's full-throated homage to Sixties crime cinema, Stamp is the USP throughout. There were undeniably times in the Eighties and Nineties – and beyond – where it felt as if the actor was simply bestowing off-the-peg gravitas to projects that barely deserved him. But here, he was allowed to channel far more profound emotions, and his performance as a scrappy avenging angel, by times tender, feral and primal, has to rank as one of his very greatest.
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