Saturday brought back a dash of rain and even snow, but also lunch with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jesuswasbatman, dinner and theatre with kangeiko and queenspanky and of course Judi Dench & Ben Wishaw in the evening, so it was another great day.
If also one with disturbance and sadness. I visited the National Portrait Gallery, which I usually do when in London - it's never overcrowded (as opposed to the British Museum, especially this Easter Weekend - I strolled by, and the crowds were insane!), I like this trip through history via faces, and the temporary exhibitions are always interesting as well. This time, the exhibition du jour was "George Catlin: American Indian Portraits". Apparantly George Catlin, whom I have to admit I had never heard of before, spent most of the 1830s painting and sketching as many people from different tribes as he could, being aware that there was the danger of extinction for the Native Americans. In this, the museum notes tell us, he wasn't alone, and this part in particular made me sad and frustrated: the idea that the awareness there was a kind of slow genocide going on was there, and no one was doing anything. It's not new, of course, but seeing all these paintings - which are very different, highly individualistic, btw, not technically very skilled, but they get across a real sense of personality - just brought it home again.
Other, more familiar sections of the NPG also had their novelties: the Tudor section boasted of a newly identified portrait of Katharine of Aragon and one from roughly the same period, pre-Holbein and mostly pre-fatness, of Henry VIII. The Bloomsbury Group section that was focused on Julian Bell also included photos of a young Guy Burgess (who had been friends with Bell at Cambridge) and McLean (who, in these wonderfully wry mini biographies, is describred as as "diplomat, Soviet spy" who ended up "teaching international relations in Moscow"). Among the newest acquisitions is an "actors' last supper" photograph starring several of the current cream of the crop in Leonardo poses. See, our actors sadly would not get the idea. I love Britain.
Peter and Alice, the third play I absolutely wanted to see, was written by John Logan, who among other things wrote the script for RKO 521, aka still my favourite film about Orson Welles, and the latest James Bond pic, Skyfall, which makes me suspect that he wrote Peter and Alice specifically with Ben Wishaw and Judi Dench in mind. (Dame Judi's Alice gets to make a joke about how famous people should not be so tiny, while Wishaw's Peter is at one point described as "beautiful and damaged", but that's the least of it.) It's a play that takes a real life anecdote - Alice Liddell, who inspired Lewis Carroll, meeting when in her 80s in 1932 Peter Llewelyn Davies, who was one of the five boys befriended and later fostered by James Barrie, and who inspired Peter Pan. I've seen critics call the play overly wordy, but that wasn't my impression - not least because if you deal with both the real life characters and two literary creations, with the clash of fantasy and reality and the emotional mess that becoming a muse for a writer means, especially if you're a child and he's an adult man, wordiness strikes me as quintessential. Also, as I said tokangeiko later, my impression was that the play tries to do what A. S. Byatt did in her novel The Children's Book with the writer Olive and son Tom part of the plot (which was partly inspired by the fate of the Davies boys, which is why a climactic scene takes place at the premiere of Peter Pan, only she needs 600 pages and Logan does it in a one and a half hour play without a break.
Any play, film, biography dealing with either Lewis Carrol or James Barrie and their respective child muses has to face the big question mark about the nature of these relationships, and whether or not there was a sexual element in it. (A couple of years ago the film Finding Neverland, starring Johnny Depp as Barrie, tried to get around this by changing several facts, like having the boys' father, Arthur Davies, being already dead when Barrie meets the family, cutting down the number of children, and developing a tender understated romance between Barrie and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, but it still included a scene where a friend of Barrie's mentions there is gossip, and Barrie outragedly dismisses it.) This particular play's interpretation is that nothing physical happened in either case, but emotionally a lot did, and for children to have that intense love directed at them did do damage, in addition to the lure of fantasy and impossibility for reality to compete with it.
One of the play's devices is that Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, the literary creations, are also characters, interacting with their adult inspirers and each other, and whether or not this works was one of the things we debated afterwards: it did for me. As for the two stars, they were both marvellous: Judi Dench shedding and gaining years when Alice goes from old lady who finds it painful to move at all to the girl interacting with Dodgson/Caroll, at times like the girl playing Alice but even then with an awareness that Alice, as an eternal child in a book, can't have, in turns haughty, wistful, curious, sad and hopeful. Ben Wishaw, who looks far taller next to Judi Dench than I've ever seen him look on film, is so very, very broken as Peter, but never one note. The scene where he tells Alice - who lost two sons in the war - about his own war service, killing a man, then his mental breakdown - is something that is so devastating precisely because he doesn't chew scenery.
The scenes with Caroll and Barrie are both compelling and disturbing - Caroll going from spinning a marvellous story to asking Alice never to grow up, Barrie luring Peter into believing in Captain Hook, notably. Also the flashback to Michael Davies - Barrie's favourite - and his suicide. When in the end Alice is choosing to go back to Wonderland in her mind because the reality of old age, loneliness and genteel poverty is worse, but Peter can't and won't go back to Neverland, you understand both their choices, and they're both heartbreaking.
I'm not sure whether the play is objectively a good play. But it moved me immensely, and of all the plays I've seen on this trip to London, this cut deepest.
jesuswasbatman, dinner and theatre with kangeiko and queenspanky and of course Judi Dench & Ben Wishaw in the evening, so it was another great day.If also one with disturbance and sadness. I visited the National Portrait Gallery, which I usually do when in London - it's never overcrowded (as opposed to the British Museum, especially this Easter Weekend - I strolled by, and the crowds were insane!), I like this trip through history via faces, and the temporary exhibitions are always interesting as well. This time, the exhibition du jour was "George Catlin: American Indian Portraits". Apparantly George Catlin, whom I have to admit I had never heard of before, spent most of the 1830s painting and sketching as many people from different tribes as he could, being aware that there was the danger of extinction for the Native Americans. In this, the museum notes tell us, he wasn't alone, and this part in particular made me sad and frustrated: the idea that the awareness there was a kind of slow genocide going on was there, and no one was doing anything. It's not new, of course, but seeing all these paintings - which are very different, highly individualistic, btw, not technically very skilled, but they get across a real sense of personality - just brought it home again.
Other, more familiar sections of the NPG also had their novelties: the Tudor section boasted of a newly identified portrait of Katharine of Aragon and one from roughly the same period, pre-Holbein and mostly pre-fatness, of Henry VIII. The Bloomsbury Group section that was focused on Julian Bell also included photos of a young Guy Burgess (who had been friends with Bell at Cambridge) and McLean (who, in these wonderfully wry mini biographies, is describred as as "diplomat, Soviet spy" who ended up "teaching international relations in Moscow"). Among the newest acquisitions is an "actors' last supper" photograph starring several of the current cream of the crop in Leonardo poses. See, our actors sadly would not get the idea. I love Britain.
Peter and Alice, the third play I absolutely wanted to see, was written by John Logan, who among other things wrote the script for RKO 521, aka still my favourite film about Orson Welles, and the latest James Bond pic, Skyfall, which makes me suspect that he wrote Peter and Alice specifically with Ben Wishaw and Judi Dench in mind. (Dame Judi's Alice gets to make a joke about how famous people should not be so tiny, while Wishaw's Peter is at one point described as "beautiful and damaged", but that's the least of it.) It's a play that takes a real life anecdote - Alice Liddell, who inspired Lewis Carroll, meeting when in her 80s in 1932 Peter Llewelyn Davies, who was one of the five boys befriended and later fostered by James Barrie, and who inspired Peter Pan. I've seen critics call the play overly wordy, but that wasn't my impression - not least because if you deal with both the real life characters and two literary creations, with the clash of fantasy and reality and the emotional mess that becoming a muse for a writer means, especially if you're a child and he's an adult man, wordiness strikes me as quintessential. Also, as I said to
kangeiko later, my impression was that the play tries to do what A. S. Byatt did in her novel The Children's Book with the writer Olive and son Tom part of the plot (which was partly inspired by the fate of the Davies boys, which is why a climactic scene takes place at the premiere of Peter Pan, only she needs 600 pages and Logan does it in a one and a half hour play without a break.Any play, film, biography dealing with either Lewis Carrol or James Barrie and their respective child muses has to face the big question mark about the nature of these relationships, and whether or not there was a sexual element in it. (A couple of years ago the film Finding Neverland, starring Johnny Depp as Barrie, tried to get around this by changing several facts, like having the boys' father, Arthur Davies, being already dead when Barrie meets the family, cutting down the number of children, and developing a tender understated romance between Barrie and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, but it still included a scene where a friend of Barrie's mentions there is gossip, and Barrie outragedly dismisses it.) This particular play's interpretation is that nothing physical happened in either case, but emotionally a lot did, and for children to have that intense love directed at them did do damage, in addition to the lure of fantasy and impossibility for reality to compete with it.
One of the play's devices is that Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, the literary creations, are also characters, interacting with their adult inspirers and each other, and whether or not this works was one of the things we debated afterwards: it did for me. As for the two stars, they were both marvellous: Judi Dench shedding and gaining years when Alice goes from old lady who finds it painful to move at all to the girl interacting with Dodgson/Caroll, at times like the girl playing Alice but even then with an awareness that Alice, as an eternal child in a book, can't have, in turns haughty, wistful, curious, sad and hopeful. Ben Wishaw, who looks far taller next to Judi Dench than I've ever seen him look on film, is so very, very broken as Peter, but never one note. The scene where he tells Alice - who lost two sons in the war - about his own war service, killing a man, then his mental breakdown - is something that is so devastating precisely because he doesn't chew scenery.
The scenes with Caroll and Barrie are both compelling and disturbing - Caroll going from spinning a marvellous story to asking Alice never to grow up, Barrie luring Peter into believing in Captain Hook, notably. Also the flashback to Michael Davies - Barrie's favourite - and his suicide. When in the end Alice is choosing to go back to Wonderland in her mind because the reality of old age, loneliness and genteel poverty is worse, but Peter can't and won't go back to Neverland, you understand both their choices, and they're both heartbreaking.
I'm not sure whether the play is objectively a good play. But it moved me immensely, and of all the plays I've seen on this trip to London, this cut deepest.
