Yesterday I started my Easter time in London with the Manet exhibition at the Royal Academy, which was fabulous. I knew some of the paintings - the obvious suspects are there, like the "breakfast" that made Manet famous - but a lot were new to me, and also, the context of such an exhibition creates a new way of seeing them. For example, the various portraits he did of his fellow painter, maybe at one time romantic interest and later sister-in-law Berthe Morisot, which show her across the time span of several years, with an intense, very arresting face which in its earliest rendition has youthful cheer and its chronologically later, painted after the death of her father, version is haggard with grief but still observing and looking back, not away. There is one portrait that was never shown during Manet's life time, and may have been unfinished, which is a more in profile study but also, maybe because of the unfinishedness, feels very intimate.

Manet's portrait of his younger colleague and near name sake Monet gardening, with his wife and child sitting contently in the gras, has a snapshot family album quality which only later makes you wonder: but wouldn't the grass have left stains on Madame Monet's very white dress? (And thus: did he paint what he saw, or how the colours fitted?) Not while watching. Though the colour Manet really did amazing things with is black and a very dark brown - whether it's a man, like his portrait of Emile Zola, or a woman, like Berthe Morisot, black hair and dark cloths come across not as becoming one with the background but as something starkly etched like a Japanese drawing. All in all, a great exhibition, and I'm glad I still caught it (it's ending soon).

The other highlight yesterday was Peter Morgan's new play The Audience, starring Helen Mirren as the Queen. Whom she had already played in the equally Morgan-scripted The Queen, the second entry in his Tony Blair trilogy. (Consisting of: The Deal - Blair and Brown - The Queen - Blair and you know who - and The Special Relationship - Blair and Clinton.) The Audience shows the Queen with several, but by no means all of her twelve Prime Ministers during the decades of her reign, and it's one of those plays you can't imagine working on film, because what Helen Mirren does, moving from old to young to middle aged to old in a non linear way with a fantastic display of voice and body language conveying age and youth, isn't something you can do in a medium which depends on close up. But on stage, it's perfect.

The Audience's McGuffin is the weekly chat the Queen has with the PMs, which, the play informs us, isn't due to a law but was a custom that basically became one. For Peter Morgan, it makes for a highly useful storytelling device to play of his leading lady against various men, and one other woman, all of whom are in various different ways her temperamental opposites. He does that in a non-linear way - the play isn't chronological, it moves in a zig zag course through the decades of Elizabeth's life, and it also expects you to have some awareness of British politics through said life time, i.e. to recognise more than Churchill and Thatcher. Both of whom, btw, get only one scene, while John Major (aka The One Between Thatcher And Blair) gets two, including the opening one, where the first lines of dialogue make you aware Peter Morgan is in high one liner form:

Major: I only ever wanted to be ordinary.
Elizabeth: And in which way do you consider to have failed in that ambition?

It's Helen Mirren's delivery that makes the entire room laugh that early in the evening. But what makes the play is that it's actually not going for caricature with any of the PMs, including Major, and including Margaret Thatcher. Incidentally, if you've been reading the journal longer you may recall that when I reviewed two Thatcher tv biopics, "The Long Road To Finchley" (young M.) and "Margaret" (the last days, basically), I mentioned that while Thatcher getting power and Thatcher losing power have become dramatic subjects, but Thatcher depicted while having power is something scriptwriters still shy away from (even the latest biopic, which I haven't seen, went for an Alzheimer days frame narration), and I suspected this was because you can't play the "Margaret versus the old boys's club" card and have to actually say something about her politics. Well, her scene in The Audience is from Thatcher at the height of her power, and of course she's on stage with another woman. Morgan avoids any implication of "catfight" while making it clear that the Queen is no fan. Nor, one suspects, is Peter Morgan, though one of the things he has M.T. say is the kind of pronouncement that probably makes Thatcherites cheer while sending chills through everyone else: I came to office with one deliberate intent, to change this country from a dependent to a self reliant culture, and I think in that I have succeeded. Britons now instinctively understand that there is no longer such a thing as society. They have learned to look aftet number one, use their elbowsm get ahead, and are richer for it. No one would remember the good Samaritan if he hadn't had money.

One PM who doesn't show up, presumably because our author feels he's been there and done that is Tony Blair. However, Blair gets talked about and alluded to, in the Queen's scenes with Gordon Brown (who is played by Nathaniel "Agravaine" Parker, which made for a weird moment for this viewer) and David Cameron, and also Morgan uses the historical parallel thing and his non linear storytelling for good effect. We hear the Queen remark that a conversation she had with Tony Blair reminded her of one she had with Anthony Eden several scenes before Eden shows up. The topic of the Eden scene is the Suez canal affair, which I suspect the majority of the audience doesn't remember anymore, but it's also Iraq, since we get this dialogue:

Elizabeth: With what justification?
Eden: Every justification.
Elizabeth: (...) An unjustiable incursion into a sovereign nation to depose its leader and plunder its canal based on personal animosity?
Eden: No.
Elizabeth: Is it even legal?
Eden: Let's keep the lawyers out of it.(...) (W)e rehabilitate a country ravaged by a maniacal tyrant, and reinstate a co-operative, friendly pro-Western government. An MI6 agent placed deep inside Egypt confidently predicts emancipated Egyptians will cheer our soldiers in the streets, and carry our generals on their shoulders.

If there is a danger, it's that Morgan more often than not lets the Queen get the better of the argument, and I presume one scene is specifically in there to show her in the wrong and being the one in need of advice so there is a bit of balance. (The second John Major scene, set shortly after Andrew Morton's Diana biography has been published.) But Helen Mirren carries it off, the one liners ("a letter stamp with a pulse" as a wry self description) as well as the pointed silences, since NOT saying something can be used to devastating effect as well. Along the way, the audience gets a refresher course in British politics in an entertaining way: also, apparantly Elizabeth's favourite PM was Harold Wilson, who therefore gets three scenes, interspersed at various points of the play, with him telling her about his Alzheimer diagnosis and her telling him she'd like to dine with him at Downing Street, something she only did for Churchill and no other PM upon his resignation, as the poignant emotional climax of Morgan's non linear narrative. Wilson is played by Richard McCabe in a Yorkshire accent (I think), and Morgan employs a bit of romantic comedy here, as their first audience is a disaster with Labour man Wilson (arriving in 1964) determined to change the country and its institutions.

Speaking of institutions, Morgan sums up the current monarchy and its PMs thusly in Elizabeth's concluding monologue (she is talking to her younger self): No matter how old-fashioned, expensive and unjustiable we are, we will still be preferable to a elected president meddling in what they do, which is why they always dive in to rescue us every time we make a mess of things. Basically, the impression you're left is that Morgan isn't pro monarchy per se but thinks it's better than the alternative as long at least as the current Queen is still in office. (Wilson gets to deliver a zinger about Prince Charles.) Coming from a country where we had at least two cringe worthy Presidents and otherwise mostly dignified fellows whose existence sometimes was a good counterpoint to their respective Chancellor's, I doubt that, but by the power of a witty script and a great actress , he certainly makes me glad the second Elizabeth ruled and rules as long as she did/does. :)

First of all, thanks for the virtual present, yetanothermask!

Secondly, links fannish and real life:

Lost:

Vigilantes: set during Cabin Fever, starring my favourite Lost characters, Ben, Locke and Hurley: an introspective character potrait, capturing all three very well.

Marvel and DC comics:

It was about time someone did this parody: Superhero wikileaks


Awesome actresses at large:

Helen Mirren and her magnificent speech about women's roles, on screen and otherwise. "Hollywood's worship of the 18-25 years old male and his penis" just about sums it up.

Rosemary Sutcliff/History:

This one immediately made me think of kathyh. A film version of Eagle of the Ninth, hm? Well, the trailer looks great.



The two bloggings on yesterday's anniversary I found most moving:


Don't remember John Lennon today: "Because any attempt to ascribe meaning or logic to his killer's actions only satisfies the internal demons that compelled him to project Lennon into his own psychotic narrative", argues Peter Ames Carlin and then proceeds to remember John's life anyway.

For John Lennon: in which rozk writes a poem that finds a striking and chilling use of the myth of Orpheus and the Bacchantes.