...it must have been Tuesday....
Jul. 30th, 2008 09:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakTuesday, aside from Useful Stuff ™, was British Museum, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kathyhand National Theatre day. kathyh and self went to the Hadrian: Empire and Conflict exhibition, which was excellent. I’m always flabbergasted at what organizational skills it must take to persuade so many museums all over the world to temporarily part with their artefacts, as this particular one boasted of pieces from Rome, Jerusalem, Chicago, what not.
In a tribute to the power of fiction, right at the start of the exhibition there was a showcase devoted to Marguerite Yourcenar with pages from drafts of her novel about Hadrian which unarguably probably is what most people associate him with. (Unless they’re Brits, in which case they think of the wall first.)kathyh and self admitted shamefacedly to each other that much as we love historical novels, we still haven’t gotten around to this particular classic. (Also, my Yourcenar knowledge is limited to awareness she was the first female member of the Academie Francaise.) Then the exhibition proper started, placed in and around the old Reading Room (where Karl Marx, Bernard Shaw et al. studied in their time), and it really managed to get a sense of both Hadrian and the period across. Among the most fascinating things were parpyri, fragments of a contemporary poem about Hadrian and his lover Antinous and, even more amazing, a letter of Bar Kochba, the leader of the last Jewish uprising, admonishing his followers for stealing supplies. That something as fragile as such a letter should survive millennia stunned us both and we stared t the yellowish material under glass. Otherwise, there were models of the Parthenon (which Hadrian restored and completely rebuild), the Castel San’Angelo and the Villa Adriana which I once spend most of a day in when in Italy, as it’s a gigantic area, with the various sections trying to recapture styles from all over the Roman empire; and statues and portraits, of course, but not just the usual suspects. There was one of Hadrian as a young man with sideburns which made him look like an early 70s radical (not unfitting, I suppose), and near the end a bust of Marcus Aurelius as a teenager. As we always think of Marcus Aurelius as an old man (and looking like Alec Guinness), this fascinated kathyh and self to no end. (Hadrian really did his bit to keep the highly efficient adoption system up after smacking a greedy blood relation down; he didn’t simply adopt Antonius Pius but made him adopt the young Marcus Aurelius so that the succession was secured twice over.)
It was a biographical day; in the evening, I went and saw Howard Brenton’s new play Never So Good at the National Theatre, with Jeremy Irons as Harold Macmillan. Odd thing: years ago I already saw a play about Macmillan, A Letter of Resignation, with Edward Fox as Macmillan and set during the Profumo affair, with flashbacks. It was interesting to compare the takes of the two playwrights (A Letter of Resignation was by Hugh Whitemore) and the two actors on a near-contemporary figure – someone whom most of the audience would at least have childhood memories of. Also, you have to wonder: why Macmillan? In the case of Brenton, who contributed 13 episodes to Spooks, you can tell it’s a mixture between the idea of the dying breed of dedicated public servant with some personal hang-ups, and the idea of a man from another era increasingly out of tune with his times. He’s also good in building in the actuan bon mots (“the trouble with Anthony Eden is that he was trained to win the Derby in 1938; unfortunately h ewas not let out of the starting stalls until 1955” in a way that makes them feel natural and getting in a few pointed allusions to the present day, as when Eden, Macmillan and Selwyn Llyod talk about the Suez Crisis, and you know exactly what current day equivalent Brenton is thinking of:
M: Selwyn, you do think we are right to attack? I mean, in the past you’ve argued Nasser is the devil incarnate!
L: It’s that, after the invasion, I mean… we’ll find the Egyptian economy wrecked, railways, roads, communications largely destroyed, there will be disease… I think we do need some kind of plan. I mean, victory’s all very well, but what do we do then? (…) The occupation force we will need will be huge. National Service will have to carry on, which could prove to be very unpopular…
It was a mixture of rueful laughter and knowing groans from the audience at this point, and the irony that in that case, it was the American president who acted to prevent an invasion escaped no one.
As for the acting, Jeremy Irons was a more self aware and sharper Macmillan than Edward Fox’ older statesman, though conversely Fox was more believable as a nice guy; Irons was best in the Tory political scheming scenes with Churchill & Co. in both 1939 and the Fifties, and in his irony and hang-ups ridden scenes with his wife and her lover, whereas Fox brought across the out-of-tune-ness with the times much better. Re: the Macmillan marriage and the explanations for the state of same, I find it odd how not intrusive this deeply personal stuff feels, whereas if this was a play about, say, Tony Blair, I would have felt deeply uncomfortable watching. The difference a few years make, or maybe the fact all participants are dead? Who knows.
Today: more Useful Stuff, a meeting with Edgar Feuchtwanger & family, and Shakespeare in the Globe!
kathyhand National Theatre day. kathyh and self went to the Hadrian: Empire and Conflict exhibition, which was excellent. I’m always flabbergasted at what organizational skills it must take to persuade so many museums all over the world to temporarily part with their artefacts, as this particular one boasted of pieces from Rome, Jerusalem, Chicago, what not. In a tribute to the power of fiction, right at the start of the exhibition there was a showcase devoted to Marguerite Yourcenar with pages from drafts of her novel about Hadrian which unarguably probably is what most people associate him with. (Unless they’re Brits, in which case they think of the wall first.)
kathyh and self admitted shamefacedly to each other that much as we love historical novels, we still haven’t gotten around to this particular classic. (Also, my Yourcenar knowledge is limited to awareness she was the first female member of the Academie Francaise.) Then the exhibition proper started, placed in and around the old Reading Room (where Karl Marx, Bernard Shaw et al. studied in their time), and it really managed to get a sense of both Hadrian and the period across. Among the most fascinating things were parpyri, fragments of a contemporary poem about Hadrian and his lover Antinous and, even more amazing, a letter of Bar Kochba, the leader of the last Jewish uprising, admonishing his followers for stealing supplies. That something as fragile as such a letter should survive millennia stunned us both and we stared t the yellowish material under glass. Otherwise, there were models of the Parthenon (which Hadrian restored and completely rebuild), the Castel San’Angelo and the Villa Adriana which I once spend most of a day in when in Italy, as it’s a gigantic area, with the various sections trying to recapture styles from all over the Roman empire; and statues and portraits, of course, but not just the usual suspects. There was one of Hadrian as a young man with sideburns which made him look like an early 70s radical (not unfitting, I suppose), and near the end a bust of Marcus Aurelius as a teenager. As we always think of Marcus Aurelius as an old man (and looking like Alec Guinness), this fascinated kathyh and self to no end. (Hadrian really did his bit to keep the highly efficient adoption system up after smacking a greedy blood relation down; he didn’t simply adopt Antonius Pius but made him adopt the young Marcus Aurelius so that the succession was secured twice over.) It was a biographical day; in the evening, I went and saw Howard Brenton’s new play Never So Good at the National Theatre, with Jeremy Irons as Harold Macmillan. Odd thing: years ago I already saw a play about Macmillan, A Letter of Resignation, with Edward Fox as Macmillan and set during the Profumo affair, with flashbacks. It was interesting to compare the takes of the two playwrights (A Letter of Resignation was by Hugh Whitemore) and the two actors on a near-contemporary figure – someone whom most of the audience would at least have childhood memories of. Also, you have to wonder: why Macmillan? In the case of Brenton, who contributed 13 episodes to Spooks, you can tell it’s a mixture between the idea of the dying breed of dedicated public servant with some personal hang-ups, and the idea of a man from another era increasingly out of tune with his times. He’s also good in building in the actuan bon mots (“the trouble with Anthony Eden is that he was trained to win the Derby in 1938; unfortunately h ewas not let out of the starting stalls until 1955” in a way that makes them feel natural and getting in a few pointed allusions to the present day, as when Eden, Macmillan and Selwyn Llyod talk about the Suez Crisis, and you know exactly what current day equivalent Brenton is thinking of:
M: Selwyn, you do think we are right to attack? I mean, in the past you’ve argued Nasser is the devil incarnate!
L: It’s that, after the invasion, I mean… we’ll find the Egyptian economy wrecked, railways, roads, communications largely destroyed, there will be disease… I think we do need some kind of plan. I mean, victory’s all very well, but what do we do then? (…) The occupation force we will need will be huge. National Service will have to carry on, which could prove to be very unpopular…
It was a mixture of rueful laughter and knowing groans from the audience at this point, and the irony that in that case, it was the American president who acted to prevent an invasion escaped no one.
As for the acting, Jeremy Irons was a more self aware and sharper Macmillan than Edward Fox’ older statesman, though conversely Fox was more believable as a nice guy; Irons was best in the Tory political scheming scenes with Churchill & Co. in both 1939 and the Fifties, and in his irony and hang-ups ridden scenes with his wife and her lover, whereas Fox brought across the out-of-tune-ness with the times much better. Re: the Macmillan marriage and the explanations for the state of same, I find it odd how not intrusive this deeply personal stuff feels, whereas if this was a play about, say, Tony Blair, I would have felt deeply uncomfortable watching. The difference a few years make, or maybe the fact all participants are dead? Who knows.
Today: more Useful Stuff, a meeting with Edgar Feuchtwanger & family, and Shakespeare in the Globe!
