Is it a necessary declension, the descent from histrionic splendour to self-parody and worse?

For years now Ryan Murphy has been making his Feud series which presents famous figures from the legendary past – Bette Davis and Joan Crawford impersonated by Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange, various 1950’s eminences from George Cukor to Rock Hudson impersonated by people who have no resemblance to them, visually let alone vocally. Now we have a new one Capote vs. The Swans which is available on Binge and for a moment it makes you pause expectantly, almost hopefully. It has a list of starry women playing the society ladies, the swans – Naomi Watts, Demi Moore, the wonderful Diane Lane – and Truman Capote is played by that superb actor, Tom Hollander. On top of that four of the six episodes are directed by Gus Van Sant who has been known to make masterpieces.

But let’s take Tom Hollander first. 15 or so years ago Tom Hollander made Rev. about a priest married to Olivia Coleman in a roughish London parish who does everything in his power to embrace loving kindness and decency and the true and the good. Rev. was only a handful of episodes spread over three seasons and it was that relatively rare thing, a hilariously humane comedy, and Tom Hollander in his understated way showed himself to be an actor of genius. One index of that was the fellow actors who would turn up to act with him, people like Ralph Fiennes and Hugh Bonneville. Then there was the expanded version of John le Carré’s The Night Manager in which Hollander was Hugh Laurie’s lieutenant in evil,  and utterly credible. And, yes, he is impressively creepy in last year’s The White Lotus with F. Murray Abraham. He is in fact impressive in everything he does, given half a chance: you can listen to him bring alive the tens of thousands of words of J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy and there’s a BBC version of Ben Jonson’s Volpone with Ian McDiarmid as the camouflaged villain-in-chief, Olivia Willaims as the put-upon decent woman and Tom Hollander as Mosca, the satanic sidekick – sharper with the comic prose sense than the verse but nothing if not deft.

So why is he such a fey screeching parody in Capote vs. The Swans? Blame Ryan Murphy’s concept, blame (God help us) Gus Van Sant. Remember Gus Van Sant? When My Own Private Idaho came out in 1991 with River Phoenix in a staggering performance and Keanu Reeves part of the elaborate parodistic homage to Shakespeare’s Henry IV with a dope-dealing Falstaff you felt you were in the hands of a master with a gigantic Orson Welles-like capacity to create dazzling structure. Good Will Hunting might have been a conventional, even a corny film and Drugstore Cowboy an amoral one but the experience of watching 2003’s Elephant, Van Sant’s film about the Columbine massacre, in the latter part of the night in a lower-Manhattan bughouse was like a reading of the riddle of the world. Such pity, such terror. It reshaped forever the easy rage these things provoke. And then there was Nicole Kidman’s weathergirl from hell in To Die For (1995), the performance of her career which only Van Sant could have got from her.

But the combination of Tom Hollander and Gus Van Sant cannot keep us watching Capote vs. The Swans. Hollander, almost unbelievably, is mincingly awful and the vulgarity of the conception is cartoonish in the worst sense.

Last Wednesday, 14 February, was not only Valentine’s Day, it was Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent in which Christians smear their foreheads with ash to mark the start of the forty days’ trek to Easter. First to the tragic death of Christ on the Cross and then to the resurrection of the figure who walks radiant from the tomb. The supermarkets have already been lining up to fill us with hot cross buns before they’re due but all this is a reminder that ‘Ash Wednesday’ (1930) is also the name of one of T.S. Eliot’s greatest poems and that its publication signified a retreat from the author of ‘The Waste Land’ (1922) marked by sobriety, overtly if agnostically religious despite the echo of the ‘Hail Mary’. ‘Pray for us now and at the hour of our death’ is juxtaposed with ‘Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still’. It is a poetry which balances gravity with a passionate, all-but-tragic urgency. ‘Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew’, Eliot writes in one of his most animated and spectacular effects and yet all the Dantean splendour of the language is condensed into a set of precepts to live by. ‘Our peace is His will’ has ceased to be a poetic effect. It’s a dazzling performance Ash Wednesday, more dramatic and more urgent than most of the writing in Four Quartets even though it absorbs its wisdom from the Christian liturgy. The emphasis is on the urgency of the prayer not the flourishes of the rhetoric. When Eliot writes, ‘And I pray that I may forget / These matters that with myself I too much discuss / Too much explain’ the poet seems intent to find a truth, a hypothetical form of wisdom that is beyond the dazzle of symboliste poetry – which is one reason why this poem, steeped in the language of Christian introspection, speaks to the agnostic seeker after truth. It dramatises what’s hard about belief for the believer.

It’s good to see that Simon Burke is to play the Wizard in the revival of Wicked which opens at Melbourne’s Regent on 10 March. Burke’s long, distinguished career – which includes everything from La Cage aux Folles to The Sound of Music – not only stretches back to the young boy in Fred Schepisi’ classic 1976 Catholic childhood film The Devil’s Playground but it also encompasses Devil’s Playground that very powerful revisiting of Catholicism gone wrong in the TV update from 2014 which depicts clerical abuse as well as a conservative bishop (Don Hany) who moves against it. The TV Devil’s Playground was superb in a way we’ve ceased to see much of anymore because it was – like the dramatisation of Christos Tsliokas’ The Slap – made for everybody.