Hungary – Page 2 – Meditations of Neilus Aurelius

I am writing this meditation with a candle nowhere in sight. I am in a rather cosmopolitan location. I am seated in the Cafe Dumas in the Institut Francais overlooking the Danube in Budapest. As I am soon about to begin rehearsing my dramatisation of a great work of French literature, ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ by Victor Hugo, perhaps it is appropriate that I am writing my meditation here in the Institut Francais and in a cafe named after two other great 19th Century French writers : Alexandre Dumas, father and son. And my dramatisation of Hugo’s novel will be presented here in Budapest next February. So the location is very much appropriate.

So here, quite close to the famous Lanchid (Chain Bridge) I am watching the boats on the river and the yellow and white number 2 tram going up and down the opposite embankment. It is the most popular tram in Budapest, the tourist tram. The weather has been extremely hot here since I arrived as it is the last days of summer. Today is cooler with a welcome breeze and distinctly autumnal. The leaves on the trees on the embankment are beginning to change colour already and are a mix of vibrant green and russet brown.

How many journeys have I made on that tram since I first came here? Next month, it will 30 years since I first came to Hungary and to Budapest. The Republic of Hungary will be 30 years old too next month, as first I came here in the week the republic was first established in October 1989. So like the leaves in the breeze, there are many memories swirling around in my head this afternoon. I am feeling distinctly autumnal. I am autumnal. I may even be slipping into winter. These last few days have made me realise that I am getting older, if not old! I have finally realised how old I am.
I have just been in one of the city’s museums: the Museum of Fine Arts.It has an antiquities gallery in the basement, with artefacts from Ancient Egypt, Greece and Italy. In this gallery there is an funerary monument: a man and woman and a boy between them. The boy is not their child or grandchild but one of their slaves as they were obviously a wealthy couple, if they were able to have funerary statues for their burial.

The man has a middle-aged head with curly hair and a beard ( a typical ancient philosopher’s head) but his head is on top of a youthful, athletic body. His body suggested to me that he was guilty of wishful thinking! Or was he a young man with an old head on his shoulders?
However, the woman’s head was missing but her body looked clearly like that of a Roman matron, ‘a lady of a certain age’ as we would say. So it appears that the man was in some sort of mid-life crisis: middle-aged but imagining himself still youthful and athletic (if he ever was!). Looking closely at my own torso in the mirror recently, I think I am beyond imagining that now! I have now become part of the ‘realist’ school of literature!

By reading the information card beside these statues, I discovered that this kind of funerary statue was common in Roman times. It was an attempt to depict the idea of ‘a beautiful and good man.’ Presumably the ‘philosopher’ head of the statue suggested that the man had good and humane thoughts and lived by them and his youthful, athletic body suggested that this way of thinking and living made the man beautiful. For is it not goodness that creates beauty in a person?

I may be getting old but I still have a youthful spirit or I wouldn’t be in any way successful as a director of young people. They appear to still enjoy rehearsing with me. So here we are about to start rehearsing another production in the next few weeks. And next February we will be embarking upon another tour to Budapest. Except it will be my last production and my last tour.

It was quite emotional for me as I walked into the Kolibri Children’s Theatre last Friday for my usual meeting. We have been presenting productions there for over 20 years. I found it very hard to tell the production team that next year will be my last one. But it is time to bow out, to retire. I did not realise how difficult it was all going to be until I stood outside the theatre last Friday. How difficult it will be to let go. That is because I did not fully comprehend how close I am to the Kolbri Theatre and its director, Janos and its staff and it’s wonderful, warm appreciative audiences down the years. I had not realised how big a part of my life it has been. Or how big a part of my life this country has been.

In the antiquities gallery there was a quote on one of the large information boards. This quote has been attributed to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus: ‘The invisible connection is stronger than the visible.’ That is what I had forgotten: the invisible connection. The invisible connection that binds us together, that touches our heart, becomes part of us. And so this city and my friends here and the dear Kolibri Theatre will still remain part of my life because of that invisible connection, but in a different way. Like one season shifting into another.

Several friends who read my blog have asked me why I do not include photos . My reason is partly because, although I do sometimes write about my travels, I would hope my meditations are more than a holiday diary. I would hope that my blog is more discursive than that and that my powers of description are sufficient for you, dear reader, to visualise the people, places and works of art I seek to describe. Besides, shortly you will be able to hear the author’s voice as well as read his words as a selection of these meditations will be appearing on YouTube in an audio version. More news on that in my next meditation so:

Ave atque vale until the next blog.

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Neilus Aurelius

A I write, a candle is not flickering beside me this time. Instead a lone electric lamp is my companion. I am in my hotel room in Budapest and through my window, above the buildings I can see the Buda hills wreathed in mist in the distance. Dawn is beginning to break and its pale cream light rises over the blue mounds of the hills. A bird has just flown over the trees towards them as if intrigued by their shadows.

So now I am in Pannonia, where Marcus and his legions once trod. My fancy would like to think that Marcus pitched his camp here on the site of this hotel and that in his tent, as he wrote his meditations at break of dawn he had the same view of the hills as I have now. He would have been writing more slowly than I am of course. He would not be pounding a portable keyboard attached to an I pad. No doubt he would have gazed into the gathering mists of dawn and slowly wrote on his parchment or wax tablet. To think that we might both be writing our thoughts onto tablets! And just as my meditation is saved on my mini computer so his would have been transferred to scrolls of parchment by a scribe. And somehow those scrolls survived to be read by far distant generations.

What will happen to my digital meditations? Will they survive? I am not so vain as to think that future generations will read my thoughts, let alone appreciate them. I do not know if I want them to. But I am enjoying sharing my thoughts with you, the followers of this blog and heartened by the positive comments I have received. Marcus’ own meditations were also an essentially private document, as I have said before, a compilation of the writings and teachings that had most influenced him, the ideals he aspired to, and in his striving to live up to them, made him who he was.

The light has gone off in my room. The electricity doesn’t appear to be working. So I am writing this now by the light of the dawn through the window. I am in true Marcus mode!

I awoke very early this morning at four. The hotel was quiet and unusually still. All 300 rooms. It was to early for the habitual slamming of doors and footsteps in the corridors. I could not hear a sound: ‘Not a mouse stirring’ as Francisco says in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’.

I could not go back to sleep. I have my big show today: two performances of ‘A Christmas Carol’ at the Kolibri Theatre. It will be a long day: arriving at the theatre at 10 to set up and have a brief technical rehearsal for scene changes, lights and sound before curtain up at 2 and then a break and curtain up again at 6. So understandably my mind was teeming with things to do. When these thoughts finally dissolved I turned over and tried to get to sleep again. But to no avail.

So I listened to the silence in my room. It was then that I realised just how still the hotel was. The silence was comforting, like a blanket around me. I have learnt that silence can be comforting. It is not necessarily threatening – something to run away from, to escape from into music or noise. In fact the best music has silent moments, as does the most effective drama. But silence can be challenging, challenging us to sit down, relax, to be still. To be aware of where we are and who we are.

In the silence as I lay there, I listened to my heartbeat – regular and strong. Being a cerebral person, living in my mind, my thoughts and, in my writing, my imagination, I am not always fully aware of my body. I live mainly in my head. As a result I have not taken care of my body as I should over the years! It may seen strange that as I am an actor and a Drama teacher I am not always fully aware of my body. I am when I am on stage, of course, or demonstrating something in a rehearsal or class. Nevertheless, I have never been a very physical actor: my strength has been in my vocal skills and interpretation of text.

As I listened to my heartbeat in the silence in the room, I wasn’t annoyed by it as I have been before: ‘All I want to do is get back to sleep and I can’t because I keep hearing my heartbeat!’ I just gave in and listened to it. As I listened, I was reminded that I am a physical being, that I am dependent on that heartbeat to live. And I was reminded of my mortality, that the time will come when that heartbeat will stop. In the silence it was a gentle beat, not an aggressive one: my heart is my old friend after all.

I wonder if Marcus listened to his own heartbeat in his tent in the night and if he was reminded of his own humanity and mortality. It would seem so from his writings. He is constantly aware of mortality, of what little time we have:. ‘No you do not have thousands of years to live,’ he writes, Urgency is on you. While you live, while you can, do good.’

Later in the day I was alone on the stage of the theatre. I had sent everyone off to lunch and was working out the scene changes alone. The theatre staff were at lunch too. I stopped scribbling for a moment and looked out into the auditorium.It was still. It was silent too. But the silence was one of expectancy – a performance was soon to take place. And again it was warm like a blanket. I was at home again in the Kolibri, where I have been for over twenty years. And hopefully I was doing good.

Ave atque Vale until the next blog.

If you are enjoying my blog, and have not already done so, please sign up below to receive notification of each new blog by e mail. Just add your e mail to ‘Follow’.

And please do pass on the blog address to others who may be interested.

I would also value any feedback on nzolad53@gmail.com or my Facebook page or Twitter.

Many thanks

Neilus Aurelius

The flame of the candle is flickering tonight as I write beside it. I suppose that brings me back to the subject of my previous blog: Laurel and Hardy and their movies. When cinema began, around 1900, movies were first called ‘the flickers’. That was because the projection machines were primitive. The image moved but it flickered, like the flame of my candle is at the moment. movies were very short. So the action was quick, far quicker than in a play on the stage. It was their attraction to audiences originally, I imagine, and still is today of course.

But it was also the sheer miracle of being able to see a picture that moves. When I was a child and a young man, going to the cinema was still called ‘going to the pictures’ (i.e.) to see the moving pictures and, to return to ‘the flickers’, going to the cinema was sometimes also called ‘going to the flicks.’ Another word for a movie, a film, was ‘a picture’ and still is. We still talk about a star’s next ‘picture’ or that was a ‘great picture’ and the motion picture industry.

However, originally the word ‘movies’ didn’t refer to the end product or to cinema in general. The ‘movies’ were the people who made them, the first colony who came out to Hollywood. It was a derogatory term. Those film pioneers who arrived in that quiet rural suburb of Los Angeles weren’t to be trusted, weren’t respectable: ‘Oh he or she is one of those movies,’ residents would say.

A few years ago I wrote a play about the early days of cinema. It was called ‘Mickey and the Movies’. I see now that my title had that double meaning of ‘Movies’: the films and the people who make them. In the play, Mickey Malone is an Irish immigrant boy in New York who gets himself involved in a studio there and eventually find himself going with some of the ‘Movies’ to Hollywood. By accident he becomes a child star. I was trying to portray the improvisational side of filming comedy in silent films: a basic scenario, a camera and improvised action (which was how our dear friends Stan and Ollie began).

When I wrote my own scenario, I wanted to include a scene where Mickey sees his first ever moving picture. I wanted to try to capture the wonder of seeing a picture that moved for the first time. And it is that wonder, that magic of celluloid (what the director Orson Welles called the ‘ribbon of a dream’) that intoxicates Mickey and leads him to take any old job at a studio in Fort Lee, just outside New York before ending up in Hollywood.

My play kept flickering in my mind as I watched the movie ‘Stan and Ollie’ the other week and it has come back to me since. Maybe I will revive it as my final production next year. I have been thinking about it, though it will need an extensive re-write. The script begins with Mickey and his father and brothers on the ship from Ireland to New York. But if I rewrote it the play would begin in the present (with a modern day descendent of Mickey) and in an entirely different location.

A year or so after we did the production, I was in LA, staying in West Hollywood for a few days and I found myself with a morning to kill before catching my plane home. I was in that limbo we’ve all been through: what do you do with your final few hours before you go to the airport. My dear friend and collaborator on ‘Mickey’, Phil Watkins, had given me a book on the silent star Rudolf Valentino as a gift after the production. So I thought I’d see if I could find dear old Rudy’s grave in my final hours in Hollywood. He was one of those stars, like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, who tragically died young (aged 28) and he was buried, after unprecedented outpourings of public grief in both New York (where he passed away) and in L.A. (where he lived and worked) in the old Hollywood Memorial Park. The old cemetery had been beautifully restored but with the new kitsch name of the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. So off I went to find him.

The grounds were so extensive, I could have spent all day there. In the dazzling sunlight, the beautifully manicured lawns were so green it was like they were filmed in technicolor. And there was a huge lake with swans in the middle. When I went through the gate I was given a map which showed where everyone was resting. So many stars, moguls, directors, writers, musicians dotted among the grounds and in several huge mausoleums, which is where I eventually found Rudy.

As I sat on a bench resting for a minute and looked over the verdant green it seemed like one big Hollywood party. Except there were no more cocktails, scheming, or intrigue or romance or just plain fun but only silence, the silence of the grave. All that intense striving in whatever direction was over now. Like the end of a movie, I was just left with the cast of characters, with the names, either elegantly carved on marble monuments or engraved more modestly on brass plaques in the earth. One I stumbled over, I found very moving: it said ‘Hannah Chaplin’ and ‘Mother’. It was Charlie Chaplin’s mother who had been brought over from London by Charlie and his brother Sid. It appeared that she had died there in 1928. Seeing that plaque led me to write a play about Charlie’s early life.

As I sat there in the heat, a chill of sadness came over me. It was the accumulated tragedy behind some of their lives I guess. I found myself saying a prayer for them and a thank you for all the pleasure they had given me through their work. I was there to pay my respects, I realised.

It was sad in another way too, because many of them were big stars with legions of fans and out there in the public gaze. But now, of course, so many were forgotten (except to film historians, students of cinema and movie buffs like me). I thought it would be sobering for some of today’s stars with their big egos and tantrums to sit on that bench, to remind themselves of their own mortality, to remind themselves that they might be forgotten too.

And that is where I would begin my script: with a descendent of Mickey looking for his grave in the opulent lawns of a Hollywood cemetery, looking for Mickey the forgotten star.

I used to have a big old book, when I was eleven or twelve years old. It was called ‘Immortals of the Screen’ and had stills and photos of old movie stars in it: basically any stars who had passed away before 1966, when the book was published. It included a lot of silent stars and the book helped nurture in me an interest in film history. Not a few of the stars in that book were buried in that cemetery. And in a way they are immortal: through the movies they appeared in. We can still see them and hear them and study them, especially the great ones. And we can still be entertained by them.

Moreover, so many great movies have been lovingly restored and are now streamed or on TV or DVD or blue ray. I was watching the blue ray of one of my favourites: ‘Casablanca’ the other day. It looked more pristine than it probably did when it was first released in 1942. The black and white photography glowed and Ingrid Bergman looked more beautiful then ever and even Bogart looked reasonably dashing. And my favourite actor, Claude Rains was as witty and suave as ever. But to think that I was watching actors from 77 years ago. Their performances were still alive, thanks to moving pictures. And here they were performing in my own lounge thanks to later technology, enabling me, if I was so inclined, to be able to watch them over and over again; to enjoy their performances even more or to study them. It is the same, of course, with recording and the human voice. We have over a century of recordings of musicians’ performances too. Quite a miracle isn’t it? A kind of resurrection. A shimmer of the true resurrection which I believe in.

In a few days time I shall be leading the annual school Drama tour to Budapest, which I have mentioned in a previous blog. Therefore I shall be in Hungary, known to Marcus as Pannonia, where he led his legions. It will be appropriate, then that hopefully my next blog will be written there, between performances.