Get a Life

by Vivienne Westwood

  MON 3 FEB THE MONTEVERDI CHOIR AT THE PALACE

  We were invited to a concert and dinner at Buckingham Palace in celebration of the Monteverdi Choir’s 50th anniversary; Prince Charles is their patron. The choir and its orchestra are the work of conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner, who has researched how music sounded in its day and recreates it on similar instruments.

  Prince Charles said how he, as a young boy, became aware of how great the paintings on the walls of the palace were (we were looking at them during the reception and dinner) and made a link to the fact that John Eliot had in his home the only portrait of Bach, which had been left there for safekeeping by a young man who fled from the Nazis to England by bicycle; Prince Charles wondered if this might have helped create the passions whereby he formed the choir at the early age of twenty.

  The two pieces played were by Bach and Handel, both born in 1685. You are sustained and lifted by the rhythm of Baroque music; you fly. John Eliot had chosen a favourite Handel piece and gave us the image to this composition: Handel as a young man in Rome for the first time – Then! – when Rome was the same size as it is now, when it was so rich – all Baroque, with its cardinals and churches – when the palaces which today are museums or divided up into flats were lived in by the famous families. How Handel showed off in this piece of music! He wanted to out-dazzle the dazzle.

  We met really nice people. Isabella, John Eliot’s wife, wearing one of our gowns in ice blue, was so animated and friendly. I said to Andreas that I’m sorry we’re so busy that we don’t cultivate new friendships. I would like to see them again. Lo and behold, the next day arrived a present of a small box of CDs – the collected recordings of the Monteverdi Choir and orchestra with very special sleeves, the photos of (mostly) arresting faces by Steve McCurry – Isabella’s idea – and an invitation to dinner. I am so pleased. Isabella’s interested in Climate Revolution, perhaps she’d like to help us.

  WEDS 5 FEB VANESSA THORPE

  I did an interview with Vanessa Thorpe for the Observer, about the famous people wearing our ‘Save the Arctic’ T-shirts, photographed by Andy Gotts. Vanessa seemed serious and lovely and I thought I’d like to know her more and in person. I always trust journalists but you can sometimes be wrong. When the article came out I couldn’t have wished it better – chatty about the celebrities but she found a way to include every important thing I said. Thank you, dear.

  SAT 8 FEB HANDEL’S THEODORA

  To the Barbican to hear Handel’s Theodora oratorio. Handel’s ‘victory oratorios’ were prompted by the Duke of Cumberland’s brutal crushing of the Jacobite rebellion in 1745 and matched the bellicose national mood. But Theodora cut right against audience expectations, ‘emphasising the power of the Holy Spirit to change lives and sanctioning religious tolerance and freedom of thought’.

  WEDS 12 FEB JUDE LAW IN HENRY V

  Jude Law in Henry V. Loved it. I know the play quite well and can quote the prologue, ‘Oh for a muse of fire Shakespeare’s craft is forever original, no matter how many times you hear it. I discovered my favourite scene was Henry wooing the French princess: she is talking in French all the time and he in English but you understand everything. Sexy! Jude Law has such a physical presence. (Agincourt was truly a terrible battle, fought in mud and rain, with the English archers slaughtering the French knights as their horses skidded. English deaths a few hundred, French 10,000. The two-fingered ‘Fuck Off’ gesture is rumoured to be that of the English archers – their fingers which drew back the bowstring when they shot the arrow. These fingers were chopped off if they were captured.)

  Jude Law in Henry V. Loved it.

  It was so well done. Everything just fell into place. Unfussy, down-to-earth, especially the scene changes, which I remember as just carrying the props on and off, and changes in lighting. The actors did the same, just moved around, or on and off, and you immediately accepted the changed scene. The costumes suggested the period in history but suited the characters; true to cliché – in the play and now – the French were dressed more decoratively – more silk and velvet, made to seem more effeminate and inconstant by comparison with the manly Henry in his leather jerkin and solid crown and at the time of battle his heraldic tabard. The Welsh windbag Fluellen was a little turkey-cock in a wide-brimmed felt hat, and very smart in boots and breeches, which I think were called galligaskins. Everything considered but it looked so natural.

  MON 17 FEB KLAUS

  Klaus is here again with us. He, Iris and Kai are three great pattern cutters, all so different – you can tell who did which pattern. (Kai teaches in Hamburg now.) All our pattern cutters are German – that’s where the training is. They learn so much more working with us – they will learn from Klaus – and Andreas’s original approach and our innovative cutting systems.

  MARCH 2014

  SAT 1 MARCH GOLD LABEL SHOW, PARIS

  Gold Label show, Paris. Andreas and I arrived on Wednesday at noon. He went straight to the showroom for the casting. I went to the hotel and stayed in bed till noon the next day, reading.

  Then I went to the showroom where most of the collection had arrived. Now I could see all the clothes in their proper fabrics and put all the outfits together. I knew it would be strange: I am used to us mixing things, from tabards to togas to tailoring, including our signature cutting principles and historical cuts and with innovative use of fabric. There is always some hint of a story, theatre; a way of dressing up to express more of yourself. But with this collection I feel I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s pure fantasy, the character of each outfit has not yet been identified. It’s waiting for whoever wears it to invent it. I will choose something and I will feel the freedom to be anything! Even anonymous or at least incognito. I will feel very self-aware.

  The Gold Label show – inspired by the Ashaninka of Peru’s rainforest.

  I told you Andreas was inspired by Worth and beside that we were also inspired by the quite different world of our friends from the rainforest, the Ashaninka. They sent us some garments and beads and we designed workware/battledress in forest green. (The Ashaninka have fought many years for their forest. Many died in the last war with the Shining Path.) I love their woven or painted garments – a simple bag – shape, beads and red face paint. I respect people who until now have need of so few clothes and possessions, and who identify with their elegant traditional attire. It keeps you more at one with the world. Sam and Val did cool stuff as usual. Sam took away the hair by plastering it flat around the head but also did five girls’ hair in belle époque styles. And Val used the Ashaninka face paint.

  Venue: beautiful deconsecrated church of the Oratoire de Louvre St-Honore. Lighting: cool (Tony). Music: cool (Dominik). We put presents of chocolate from the Ashaninka on the seats. The plan to save the rainforest is on track.

  SUN 2 MARCH NOBUKO

  Still in Paris. Such a treat being with our best friend, Yasmine Eslami (French stylist and lingerie designer), who worked on the show. And at dinner I enjoyed talking to Jonathan the stylist who did the shoot for The Gentlewoman, who was there with their editor Penny Martin. Of course I talked about ‘Who are our Rulers?’ and the danger we face from climate change. My friend Frank came all the way from San Francisco. I managed to spend time with him. But I hugged my friend Nobuko, who came from Japan and who I haven’t seen for a few years, and then missed her before she went back, she having hurried across London to visit the beautiful pots of Steve Harrison. Nobuko is fantastic. Very beautiful with no makeup. She usually wears black and has long, slightly wavy, black hair down to her waist. She used to wear the most perfect make-up when we first met her; she introduced us to Japanese partners more than twenty years ago and worked with us in Japan. Then she changed her career, wore kimonos, and learnt to work with leather, against taboo. In Japan, leather-working is considered filthy work and done by men of low rank.

  WEDS 5 MARCH HOUSING THEFTS

  Scandal in Lambeth. I join the local protest outside a house under t
hreat near to my home. Kate Hoey the Vauxhall MP was there; she’s great. Lambeth Council are picking off the members of the housing co-op one by one. Must fight them. I heard that at Elephant and Castle the council intend to demolish half the council housing and build posh apartments, adding to the waiting lists of people who can’t afford a home. Andreas likes a cup of tea of a morning in the café across the road. He’s noticed in the last year the women who meet there after dropping off their children at school – all in smart, keep-fit gear with expensive bags. They have bought houses for £2 million on this south side of the river and sold their houses on the other side (Chelsea), which they’ve had handed down to them, for £10 to £12 million.

  WEDS 12 MARCH DOING THEATRE DIFFERENTLY

  In the evening I went with my friend Peter Olive to a discussion at Battersea Arts Centre on ‘The future of text’ in theatre. There was a panel of two women director-managers and a woman who improvised drama on a night bus, chaired by an actor who performed his own material. The audience was a small group of supporters of this theatre. I am a trustee and I like it because it’s local and it’s also an important theatre. I was interested to hear the discussion because a lot of theatre has a problem with text. You can’t hear the actors. They talk as if they’re doing TV or film.

  The panel talked (to each other) for 45 minutes and managed to say nothing. What they did over and again was to repeat, ‘We do things differently’, without saying what it was that they did differently. One of them said that in a play something happens (that was the important thing) and you can say that differently (she must have meant mime it or change the meaning or the words). Yes, you can, but then the whole play must change. Why would you want to change the words of Shakespeare halfway through the play, then rewrite the rest? They talked about audiences, too, and I could see where they were coming from; they didn’t want to cater for a privileged class. (Is text a problem for the less privileged?) They were anti-intellectual because they confuse that with being anti-people.

  Peter and I had wanted to leave but we didn’t because it seemed so rude – we were such a small gathering. However, when question time came I told them that we had been bored from beginning to end because they had nothing to say on the subject proposed for the discussion. The chairman told me I had a right to my opinion to which I agreed because it was more than an opinion but a fact. The audience were angry with me and told the panel it had been interesting; they couldn’t say why. Presumably they had sat there as complacently as the speakers, happy supporters of people who said they did things differently. We must assume that these two women speakers, who each ran very prestigious theatres, put on good plays.

  At the end, David, who runs the Centre, brought the evening smoothly to a close by telling us that the thing you think of last is often the best idea. I’ve heard this before but it’s an empty, useless statement; it rather encourages people to think you can pull an idea out of a bag – whereas an idea is built; it grows and develops. It is formed. Every now and again I cannot make an idea work and when I’ve really had enough I go back to the beginning and aim for what seems like the only solution – but this is part of the work.

  Theatre is, I think, the greatest art form for communicating ideas and it can be used to criticise the status quo. It is affecting; it gets to you much more than film because you have to supply the imagination. You can’t be passive. I was lucky when I first went to the theatre, aged nineteen, to see Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons starring Paul Scofield. It is the story of Henry VIII’s cardinal, Sir Thomas More, who opposed Henry’s wish to divorce his first queen, Catherine of Aragon, and was burnt. The scene changes were minimal and magical: banners dropped from the ceiling and More’s home was transformed into a court of law. A character called the Common Man rushed in with a long bench with eleven poles stuck in it, put a hat on each and sat down, completing the jury. That’s what I mean about imagination being an active collaborator; we willingly take part in the pretence. We just love the play for showing us the trickery, giving us the gesture, and we supply the rest.

  Theatre is larger than life. It does this by representing a thing by its essentials. It is artificial; artificial = made by art.

  I think it would be great to reintroduce the artificial declamation of text into some of our plays. Laurence Olivier was larger than life but his style was too artificial on film, it looked contrived. How powerful the text in Peter Hall’s Greek dramas which use the convention of masks! The actors never turn their backs and when they walk on from the side they twist to face us, full on. They talk to each other by facing the audience, talking to you in turn as if you were the one each was holding a conversation with. Aristotle says the end or purpose of a play is the plot, the thing that happens, ‘for it is in the action that happiness or unhappiness lies … according to their actions men are either fortunate or the reverse.’ And, of course, men’s actions depend on their character and how that character might behave in certain circumstances or in response to the behaviour of others. He must stay in character. Text is part of the drama, it moves the play along.

  TUES 18 MARCH SHOWERING FOR PETA

  Press launch of the video I did with Dan Mathews and PETA: I was filmed taking a shower. It’s about being a vegetarian and saving water. It takes four million gallons to make one ton of beef. Nicely shot, good idea.

  Pamela came. She does such a lot for animal rights. Whenever she travels Dan sets it up for her to talk to important people and they have changed laws and practices. Imagine doing that every time you travel. It takes a lot.

  WEDS 19 MARCH FRACKED FUTURE CARNIVAL

  Our Big Day! The Fracked Future Carnival with Climate Revolution and Friends of the Earth, Frack Off London, Ecocide, Fuel Poverty Action, Reclaim the Power, and many community groups. It is scheduled for today so that we can protest the conference of conspirators, those business and government officials who are meeting to force fracking through against the public interest and before the public have been warned of the danger. Officials who have their head in a box and are prepared to destroy the world for profit.

  At the Fracked Future Carnival with Sadie Frost.

  We know they have relocated their conference for fear of us and we know where it is. We will stick to our original plan: meet at our Battersea studio, march over the bridge to the King’s Road, join fellow protestors at Knightsbridge tube then move to the original location of the conference, by the Jumeirah Hotel. We will give our speeches outside and then go to the secret location.

  At Battersea we were ready. I had given all our workmates the day off. Cindy, the youngest member of Climate Revolution, had done a great job mustering the troops and organising our students to make placards. Others who joined us were in carnival mood, dressed as zombies and ghouls. I hadn’t wanted a carnival. It’s a matter of life and death and I didn’t wear my warpaint. We want to attract ‘ordinary people’ and by that we mean people who aren’t normally political. But our activist colleagues were right – we needed the carnival. We looked great. There was lots of press. I was asked to lead the procession. I bowed and put my hands together in prayer, as you would before a battle. Then off we went!

  At the Jumeirah Hotel was a little square where we gave our speeches and thanked the fighters in the anti-fracking camps. Vanessa Vine from Balcombe is an inspiring speaker and full of powerful information. She’s been fighting fracking for three years and is just back from America. The queen of it all was engineer Tisha who was responsible for much of the organisation; she is the prettiest ghoul you ever saw but stays anonymous, so you can’t see a photo of her. Then some of us got on Nigel’s bus and went to the ‘secret location’ at Armoury House on City Road. The press asked me, ‘How do you feel that the pro-frackers have come here to escape you, protected by the army?’ It’s so important to demonstrate for your beliefs. We will win because we have to.

  Evening dinner with the Gardiners. Our mutual friend Romilly McAlpine was with us and also Ronnie Harwood, screenwrite
r of The Pianist. He was so sweet.

  SUN 23 MARCH MOZART AND MUSSORGSKY

  Afternoon at the Royal Festival Hall. We got some take-away Egyptian food at the Southbank market and went into the concert. Mozart Violin Concerto No. 3: soloist, Esther Yoo. Chinese, brought up in New York, twenty years old. She was a delight. Tiny, moving her head to the music. Andreas said ‘Mozart would have loved her with her swirling ponytail’. Then Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, orchestrated by Ravel. Hear it before you die!

  MON 24 MARCH 1984 AT THE ALMEIDA

  To the Almeida for a Headlong/Nottingham Playhouse production of 1984. I saw it about ten years ago but they’ve changed it. It was perfect before and it’s perfect now. Such skill, such use of theatre. Bravo! The book is one of the greatest importance.

  I went with Andreas, Ben and Tomoka. I wanted to cry. Winston was played by the actor Mark Arends, so little and thin. He was actually quite tall but he was being tortured and even then he stuck up for himself, his hopes. You didn’t see the torture, you saw what it did to him. He was fighting for his love for Julia and hope for somebody not yet born. And there came the point where he couldn’t stand the torture. He had to say, ‘Do it to Julia’, and then he lost his identity. The whole world had him in its power all the time even when he thought there was a chance.