Radio plays and a vid rec
Apr. 27th, 2010 03:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakBless the BBC: not only does it create good radio programms,it also puts them online for seven days after the broadcast so that foreigners like myself can listen. kathyh pointed these two out to me:
Peeling figs for Julius,
in which David Tennant plays Caligula, and which is online already as it was broadcast today, and
Bette and Joan and Baby Jane,
which will be put online on Thursday and in which Catherine Tate plays Bette Davis.
Now, given that Caligula has been covered by the likes of Camus as an existenstial hero (trying push people to recognize the truth about life by giving more and more absurd orders) and by Robert Graves as the craziest and most dangerous emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, it must have been a bit unnerving to tackle the subject. The radio play is no new classic but good to listen to, and tried to solve avoiding repetition by focusing on Caligula's youth and beginning as Emperor, with his eventual assassin Gaius Chaerea as narrator, ending at the point where Caligula becomes "Caligula". In this interpretation, he's not malevolent and/or crazy from the start, does his best to survive under Tiberius and begins his own reign with good intentions, but the combination of absolute power and utter inability to accept loss through death (borrowing from Camus here) start to transform him into a monster. David Tennant is predictably good at going from boyish and endearing with the very occasional flickering through of potential nastiness to incredibly cilling at the end as Caligula realizes the full implication of the power he has. The script, by leaving out all Caligula's other siblings except for Drusilla (to wit: two older brothers who died courtesy of Tiberius and Sejanus, as well as Agrippina the younger, later the mother of Nero, and Julia), makes the Caligula/Drusilla relationship even more central to his life, and Jossverse listeners will get a jolt as he keeps calling her Dru. I'd complain that she's a bit obviously the humanity he eventually loses, but the interpretation of Drusilla as a positive character instead of a giggling nymphet, determined to make her brother into the good regent their father never became due to his early death, is rather appealing. Other important parts are Gaius Chaerea (who is the Rome that starts out loving Caligula and gets a rude awakening), Macro and a comedian named Nestor, whose encouragement of Caligula's playful side gives early hints of what the man is capable of deep down. Go listen.
A Torchwood vid rec: The Pioneers makes a great case for Children of Earth as the logical conclusion of all that came before. Spoilers for all three seasons. I think my favourite transitions are the shot of Owen under water, screaming, blending into the shot of the drug supply child in the tank with the 456, and the shot of Jack giving the child to the fairies overlaid with the image of Steven. A beautifully disturbing, great vid.
kathyh pointed these two out to me: Peeling figs for Julius,
in which David Tennant plays Caligula, and which is online already as it was broadcast today, and
Bette and Joan and Baby Jane,
which will be put online on Thursday and in which Catherine Tate plays Bette Davis.
Now, given that Caligula has been covered by the likes of Camus as an existenstial hero (trying push people to recognize the truth about life by giving more and more absurd orders) and by Robert Graves as the craziest and most dangerous emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, it must have been a bit unnerving to tackle the subject. The radio play is no new classic but good to listen to, and tried to solve avoiding repetition by focusing on Caligula's youth and beginning as Emperor, with his eventual assassin Gaius Chaerea as narrator, ending at the point where Caligula becomes "Caligula". In this interpretation, he's not malevolent and/or crazy from the start, does his best to survive under Tiberius and begins his own reign with good intentions, but the combination of absolute power and utter inability to accept loss through death (borrowing from Camus here) start to transform him into a monster. David Tennant is predictably good at going from boyish and endearing with the very occasional flickering through of potential nastiness to incredibly cilling at the end as Caligula realizes the full implication of the power he has. The script, by leaving out all Caligula's other siblings except for Drusilla (to wit: two older brothers who died courtesy of Tiberius and Sejanus, as well as Agrippina the younger, later the mother of Nero, and Julia), makes the Caligula/Drusilla relationship even more central to his life, and Jossverse listeners will get a jolt as he keeps calling her Dru. I'd complain that she's a bit obviously the humanity he eventually loses, but the interpretation of Drusilla as a positive character instead of a giggling nymphet, determined to make her brother into the good regent their father never became due to his early death, is rather appealing. Other important parts are Gaius Chaerea (who is the Rome that starts out loving Caligula and gets a rude awakening), Macro and a comedian named Nestor, whose encouragement of Caligula's playful side gives early hints of what the man is capable of deep down. Go listen.
A Torchwood vid rec: The Pioneers makes a great case for Children of Earth as the logical conclusion of all that came before. Spoilers for all three seasons. I think my favourite transitions are the shot of Owen under water, screaming, blending into the shot of the drug supply child in the tank with the 456, and the shot of Jack giving the child to the fairies overlaid with the image of Steven. A beautifully disturbing, great vid.
