Back again
Jun. 9th, 2011 05:06 pmBack from England (as of yesterday evening), exhausted, but happy. It continued to be a theatre, books & meeting friends paradise, though not surprisingly, the weather changed (it changed back though before I left).
Playwise, I saw Terence Rattigan's last play, Cause Celebre, with Anne-Marie Duff and Niamh Cusack, and The School for Scandal directed by Deborah Warner and with Harry Melling (of Dudley Dursley fame, more recently surprising us all as Gilly in Merlin) in a minor role, though I didn't find out about that until I saw it. I had gone because I had never seen Sheridan staged. Deborah Warner went for a Brechtian approach with banners and alienation, which sort of fit with Sheridan's comedy of manners but also made me feel amusedly nostalgic. (This was what many German theatre productions did decades ago.) Anyway, the introduction in the programm made me feel in need of reading an entire biography of Sheridan, if there is one, because I've come across him before in an overall Regency/Georgian context, of course, but now I want to know more details. As for Harry Melling, he's one to look out for, clearly, because if Gilly was completely different from Dudley Sir Benjamin Backbite, bitchy poet at large, couldn't be more different from either, and I would not have recognized him if I hadn't checked the programm for previous roles.
Cause Celebre was a radio play turned drama and sometimes you noticed, but it had all the Rattigan virtues; great character roles, things both said and unsaid, no easy solutions. A well-made play in the best sense. I had seen Anne-Marie Duff on stage before, as Shaw's St. Joan, but most recently I had seen her as Julia Lennon in Nowhere Boy and because Alma Rattenbury has an identical hairstyle and shares some traits with Julia - the same brittle hedonism, for example - it was an odd experience. She was good in that part, mind, as was Niamh Cusack as Edith, one of Rattigan's repressed ladies (modelled after his mother) with a lot of feeling underneath. Alma, as opposed to Edith, really existed, and was a songwriter, no less (she's in the play, too), under a pseudonym, which made me curious; I'll have to check her out now that I'm back home.
Friends-wise, I met with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jesuswasbatman, kathyh and two lovely old people, Edgar Feuchtwanger (written about in this journal before) and the fabulous Bea Green who escaped the Third Reich as a youngster to England via the Kindertransport and every time I meet her stuns her with her graciousness, kindness and vivacity. A true victory over Hitler, her life. She's a patron at the Royal Academy and so took me a long to a preview of the summer show, which was lucky for me since otherwise I'd have had to queue and probably would not have seen a lot. Since she's taken up woodcarving and produced some sculptures herself, the interest isn't merely watcher-wise on her part.
Book-wise, I'll try to get some reviews out in the next few days, becaues naturally I read some of my purchases already. Just an observation about a book I didn't read or buy but whose back cover amused me greatly. There's a new biography of Richard Burton (the actor, not the late Victorian) out which assures its readers it's about "The Greatest Welshman Who Ever Lived". Now I happen to like the quondam Richard Jenkins, but say what? Not that I have a candidate for Greatest Welshman Ever myself, but I could think of several candidates for the upper positions before R.B. Also, another biography I unfortunately didn't have time to more than browse through was of Shirley Bassey. I hadn't been aware she was Welsh, which tells me something about my biased default assumptions about black singers in the 50s. What I did read made me curious to learn more.
Speaking of the Welsh: I'm so looking forward to Torchwood next month. Because I'm intrigued by the premise of Miracle Day, because I've missed Gwen, Rhys and to my surprise Jack, because I'm curious about the RTD-Espenson-Egan collaboration, and because I missed Rusty himself on my tv. Meaning: I miss tv created by him. Just so there aren't any misunderstandings, I don't mean that in the sense of wishing him back on the DW steering wheel; you could tell his Whovian exhaustion by the specials. But Children of Earth was Russell T. at his best, and I loved the last season of SJA, occasional nitpicks not withstanding, so bring on the new Torchwood already, tv!
Lastly: just watched X-Men: First Class again. So my favourite comic books film this year. I want to draw sparkling hearts around it, I truly do.
Playwise, I saw Terence Rattigan's last play, Cause Celebre, with Anne-Marie Duff and Niamh Cusack, and The School for Scandal directed by Deborah Warner and with Harry Melling (of Dudley Dursley fame, more recently surprising us all as Gilly in Merlin) in a minor role, though I didn't find out about that until I saw it. I had gone because I had never seen Sheridan staged. Deborah Warner went for a Brechtian approach with banners and alienation, which sort of fit with Sheridan's comedy of manners but also made me feel amusedly nostalgic. (This was what many German theatre productions did decades ago.) Anyway, the introduction in the programm made me feel in need of reading an entire biography of Sheridan, if there is one, because I've come across him before in an overall Regency/Georgian context, of course, but now I want to know more details. As for Harry Melling, he's one to look out for, clearly, because if Gilly was completely different from Dudley Sir Benjamin Backbite, bitchy poet at large, couldn't be more different from either, and I would not have recognized him if I hadn't checked the programm for previous roles.
Cause Celebre was a radio play turned drama and sometimes you noticed, but it had all the Rattigan virtues; great character roles, things both said and unsaid, no easy solutions. A well-made play in the best sense. I had seen Anne-Marie Duff on stage before, as Shaw's St. Joan, but most recently I had seen her as Julia Lennon in Nowhere Boy and because Alma Rattenbury has an identical hairstyle and shares some traits with Julia - the same brittle hedonism, for example - it was an odd experience. She was good in that part, mind, as was Niamh Cusack as Edith, one of Rattigan's repressed ladies (modelled after his mother) with a lot of feeling underneath. Alma, as opposed to Edith, really existed, and was a songwriter, no less (she's in the play, too), under a pseudonym, which made me curious; I'll have to check her out now that I'm back home.
Friends-wise, I met with
jesuswasbatman, kathyh and two lovely old people, Edgar Feuchtwanger (written about in this journal before) and the fabulous Bea Green who escaped the Third Reich as a youngster to England via the Kindertransport and every time I meet her stuns her with her graciousness, kindness and vivacity. A true victory over Hitler, her life. She's a patron at the Royal Academy and so took me a long to a preview of the summer show, which was lucky for me since otherwise I'd have had to queue and probably would not have seen a lot. Since she's taken up woodcarving and produced some sculptures herself, the interest isn't merely watcher-wise on her part. Book-wise, I'll try to get some reviews out in the next few days, becaues naturally I read some of my purchases already. Just an observation about a book I didn't read or buy but whose back cover amused me greatly. There's a new biography of Richard Burton (the actor, not the late Victorian) out which assures its readers it's about "The Greatest Welshman Who Ever Lived". Now I happen to like the quondam Richard Jenkins, but say what? Not that I have a candidate for Greatest Welshman Ever myself, but I could think of several candidates for the upper positions before R.B. Also, another biography I unfortunately didn't have time to more than browse through was of Shirley Bassey. I hadn't been aware she was Welsh, which tells me something about my biased default assumptions about black singers in the 50s. What I did read made me curious to learn more.
Speaking of the Welsh: I'm so looking forward to Torchwood next month. Because I'm intrigued by the premise of Miracle Day, because I've missed Gwen, Rhys and to my surprise Jack, because I'm curious about the RTD-Espenson-Egan collaboration, and because I missed Rusty himself on my tv. Meaning: I miss tv created by him. Just so there aren't any misunderstandings, I don't mean that in the sense of wishing him back on the DW steering wheel; you could tell his Whovian exhaustion by the specials. But Children of Earth was Russell T. at his best, and I loved the last season of SJA, occasional nitpicks not withstanding, so bring on the new Torchwood already, tv!
Lastly: just watched X-Men: First Class again. So my favourite comic books film this year. I want to draw sparkling hearts around it, I truly do.
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