It’s hard to know what to make of this chap.
He’s a quite famous and fairly prolific film director but I have never seen any of them. I don’t think I saw his 2011 ENO production of The Damnation of Faust – the Berlioz version. Terry Gilliam, for it is he of whom I write, is the wild card in the Monty Python pack; a baroque cartoonist. “Surreal” is a vastly over-used word but can be applied to his animations for the Monty Python show. To digress, Monty Python is seldom or ever repeated on TV simply because it’s not funny now, if it ever was. It is the emperors’ new clothes of TV comedy achieving more cult status than laughs or longevity. But it was the comedy that launched a thousand careers, so to speak, including Terry Gilliam’s.
He may fit into his latest project like a hand in a glove. It may be the perfect vehicle for his style.
“Well, I really want to encourage a kind of fantasy, a kind of magic. I love the term magic realism, whoever invented it – I do actually like it because it says certain things. It’s about expanding how you see the world. I think we live in an age where we’re just hammered, hammered to think this is what the world is. Television’s saying, everything’s saying ‘That’s the world.’ And it’s not the world. The world is a million possible things.” (Interviewed by Salman Rushdie in The Believer, March 2003)
Next week I’m going to Bath for his take on Into the Woods. I have seen excellent productions in Regents Park (open air theatre) and at LAMDA (a marvellously inventive minimalist production). I also had the misfortune to see Disney’s disappointing 2013 version; a great cast, but it failed to capture the eternal themes of fairy tales that Sondheim sussed out. I’m hoping for “a kind of fantasy, a kind of magic” at the Theatre Royal Bath.