Nefertiti: the Beautiful Woman Has Arrived in Sydney

Walking along the shore in Sydney's Botanic Gardens you could be excused for thinking that you'd been transported back to Thebes in the Second Millennium BC...no, actually, the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge and Sydney's skyline might spoil the spell. But you couldn't miss the 18 metre tall head of Nefertiti which is the centrepiece of the Handa Opera production of Giuseppe Verdi's grand opera "Aida".

Nefertiti, Mark Thompson's set for the set of Aida

Mark Thompson, the wonderful set designer for many productions here and overseas including "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and "Noises Off", designed both the set and the costumes for this grand production of "Aida".

"Nefertiti" apparently means "the beautiful woman has arrived".

The real sculpture of Nefertiti is in the Neues Museum in Berlin where I saw her last year after having only seen her in photos. She was absolutely stunning despite a couple of nibbled ears and an eye that was never completed.

The real Nefertiti courtesy of the Neues Museum.

The real Queen Nefertiti (1370-1330) was married to the Pharoah Akhenaten, an early monotheist whose memory was largely expunged by subsequent polytheist pharaohs. The sculpture of Nefertiti dates from 1340 BC and was found in the sculptor's studio in Thebes much as it is today.

The name Nefertiti means, "the beautiful woman has arrived". Allowing for a bit of sculptor's licence, I'm sure you'll agree that the name suited her.

Another view of the beautiful woman
(With thanks again to the Neues Museum, Berlin.)

In Mark Thompson's colossal head of Nefertiti he has opened up the missing eye as a "window" for the singers.

Among Mark's many great and prize-winning set designs none could have been better than the one he did for Monkey Baa Theatre Company's production of the play, "Emily Eyefinger", coincidentally and just in passing based on the Emily Eyefinger books written by yours truly. I just thought I'd throw that in.

The third book of the Emily Eyefinger series.

And, even more coincidentally, part of that play took place in the upsidedown pyramid of King Inverticheops in Egypt.

This is Emily Eyefinger herself, played to perfection for many
performances by the brilliant and talented Dannielle Jackson.

Emily Eyefinger, her parents and the archaeologist Dr Samantha Deddybones, 
trapped in the burial chamber of the pyramid of King Inverticheops.

In one of Craig Smith's illustrations in the book I couldn't help noticing a Nefertiti-like sculpture among the other treasures on the right of the illustration. Could this have been the inspiration for Mark Johnson's "Aida" set? Somehow I doubt it but it's an interesting thought.

In the end of the opera, Aida and her lover Radames are sealed in a tomb and sing a wonderful duet as they die of asphyxiation. (Oops sorry, late spoiler alert.) At least in the story "Emily and the Lost Treasure" Emily, her parents and Dr Deddybones escape thanks to Emily's eyefinger. If only Aida had had an eye on the end of her finger she could have survived. Of course then there might not have been an opera.

Being trapped in tombs reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's extremely neurotic character, Eliot Rosewater, who yells out during a performance of "Aida" to Aida and Rademes: "Stop singing and you'll live longer! You're using up the oxygen!" Or words to that effect.

Finally, apologies for not having written a blog for over a year and for not answering some excellent comments and suggested corrections from my last two blogs, all that time ago.

Lord Timothy Dexter

I finished writing the latest book in the Emily Eyefinger series, Emily Eyefinger and the Secret from the Sea, a couple of months ago. It is now being edited by an excellent editor at HarperCollins, Australia. (Many thanks, Anne.) My first drafts can be messy but after a lot of re-writing I send off what I think is a "clean" manuscript. It's always deflating to get it back with scribbles all over it and pages of notes showing me where I've gone wrong.

At times like these I think of Lord Timothy Dexter. (I wrote about him ages ago but you won't remember.) It's always heartening to be able to point to someone who is worse at something than you are or, in this case, than I am. Lord Timothy is my anti-role model. Or is he my role anti-model? Either way, he was a complete idiot.

In 1798 he wrote and self-published a book with no punctuation at all and CapiTal lettErs UseD At raNdom. Well maybe not quite that random. He couldn't punctuate, he couldn't spell, his grammar was atrocious and he didn't have an editor to hide the fact. Or would that be facts?

His book was called A Pickle for the Knowing Ones or Plain Truth in a Homespun Dress. It was a collection of his thoughts about everything. In it he declared himself, '...the first in the East, the first in the West, and the greatest philosopher in the Western World'. He was no shrinking violet.

For those who complained about the lack of punctuation,  in the second edition of the book, he included a page at the back with nothing but punctuation: rows of commas, exclamation marks, questions marks etc. He told his readers to 'peper and solt it as the plese'. 

Lord Timothy wasn't a lord at all. He was American for starters and America doesn't have a House of Lords. He just called himself "Lord". He was a businessman with a lot of luck. He bought a huge amount of Continental Dollars after the American Revolution when they were worthless only to have the new Secretary of the Treasury reinstate them as the real currency. Suddenly this worthless paper was real money and he was very rich. He used it to do lots of strange things including having statues of famous people made for his front garden. Of course he included a sculpture of himself.

I have to declare an interest here: "Lord" Timothy was my father's mother's father's mother's father's mother's wife. Sadly I can't claim any of his DNA so can't use this as an excuse for the mistakes in my writing. My ancestor was Timothy's second wife and I'm descended not from him but from her marriage to her first husband, if that makes sense. One thing I will say for this highly eccentric man is that his book is in print after 214 years. There aren't many writers who could make that claim so he must have done something right.

As a footnote to all this, a couple of years ago I was driving through Newburyport, Massachusetts, where Lord Timothy lived and I saw a number of references to him including the name of the local industrial park where he'd once owned land. But doing a quick search of the internet just now I find that they're about to rename their industrial hub. They're going to give it the much less memorable name of Newburyport Business Park. We can only hope the new sign says something like: 

Newburyport Business Park ////,,,,,???...:::;;;;;!!!!!!

(and maybe @@@@ to bring it up to date)