The opening ceremony for London 2012 was a layered and sometimes subversive piece of theatre. A 360-degree spectacle, certainly, but also a dense and quirky montage.
Here, for instance, was Kenneth Branagh as the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Underscored by Elgar, he recited Caliban’s great speech from The Tempest: “The isle is full of noises.” This was Shakespeare reformatted as a mixture of health warning and mission statement - for director Danny Boyle had conceived a sonic feast, ranging from the Eton Boating Song to Lily Allen.
Many of the references were sustained and explicit. Early on we had William Blake’s Jerusalem, a political work with a strong spiritual resonance. A pantheon of literary figures was invoked: Peter Pan, Mary Poppins, Harry Potter, Ratty and Mole from The Wind in the Willows. And British cinema was celebrated, in vignettes that ranged from James Bond (obvious) to Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (less so).
There were hints of Dickens and Tolkien, along with fleeting allusions to Alice in Wonderland and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Nods to not so British inspirations included Wagner’s Ring cycle and Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Andrei Rublev. Another submerged yet significant influence was Humphrey Jennings’s 1942 film Listen to Britain, which set the tone for Boyle’s extravaganza by interweaving propaganda and lyricism in a fascinatingly ambiguous style.
At times Boyle’s homage to Britain felt highly personal, a poem suffused with romance, knowingness and wry self-deprecation. The music illustrated this perfectly, nowhere better than in the use of tracks by Welsh drum’n’bass artist High Contrast – and of The Jam’s song “Going Underground” with its teasing line about how “the public gets what the public wants”.