I was in London mostly for work reasons this last week, but I did get some sightseeing and friends meeting done as well, not to mention some book shopping and theatre going, and I'll post a pic spam as soon as I am able. But first, have some reviews:

Plays:

Antony and Cleopatra: staged at the Globe, with Nadia Nadarajah and John Hollingworth in the titular roles. Antony and Cleopatra is one of those plays which just doesn't work for me when I read it but magically does work when I see it performed. In this particular case, there was of course also the charm of seeing it played on a reconstructed Elizabethan theatre, and the particular concept of this specific production, which was letting the Egyptians talk in sign language and the Romans out loud. (Going by the programm, the actors playing the Egyptians are indeed deaf; the Roman actors learned how to do British sign language as well.) (The costumes went for a standard antiquity look.) This made for strengths and weaknesses - on the one hand, the audience was focused even more on facial and body language, plus Antony either using sign language as well or not immediately said something about his current standing with Cleopatra, and the production had the audacity of letting their last scene play out mostly silent - you could have heard a needle fall, and it was breathtaking. On the downside, it meant that early on, the audience had to make up their minds whether to read the subtitles (the play was subtitled throughout, i.e. deaf people could enjoy the solely spoken parts as well) or watch the performances until getting in the rhythm of things. Also, some of the poetry of the language was lost - well, expressed in a different way, I suppose, but the last time I saw this play staged, it was at Stratford with Patrick Stewart as Antony and Harriet Walters as Cleopatra, and once you've heard these two recite those lines...

Otoh: the one point where we hear sounds from Cleopatra - after she, Iras and Charmian have been taken captive by Octavian's people, and a soldier holds her so she can't sign, meaning she has to speak out loud - it felt like a horrible violation, which tells you something about how immersed into this performance I've become.

Hadestown: a musical of which I'd heard a lot of good things, and justly so. Takes both the Orpheus & Eurydice and the Hades & Persephone myths and narrates them in a vaguely Depression era environment - but not "secularized", as it were, i.e. Hades isn't simply an industrialist, he really is a god and Persephone a goddess, etc. This said, the musical does lean into the whole Hades = Pluto = Plutocrat, master of the riches of the earth - symbolism, and the power he has is that of money in a world full of poverty; the famous scene in Ovid where Orpheus manages to make all the Shades who are getting punished in the Underworld - Tantalus, Sisyphus, even the Furies themselves - stop their torment and cry transforms into him being able to stop the exploited Dead/factory workers who've just given him a beating on Hades' behalf from working and make them feel again, for example. Eurydice doesn't get bitten by a snake, she makes a deal with Hades, who in turn is on the outs with Persephone, who increasingly can't cope with the constant switching between Underworld and World of the Living that makes her life. The fifth lead is Hermes (played by an actress looking Dietirch-esque in 1930s suits). The music is great, and the musical has the courage of its convictions apropos the ending.

Stranger Things: The First Shadow: yep, it's a theatre play that works as a prequel to the Netlix series, written by Kate Trefry based on a story from her and Jack Thorne (who has written Harry Potter and the Cursed Child as a way to prove he can write sequels/prequels to hits in another medium). Set during the 1950s, this is the tale of Henry Creel (as sketched out in flashbacks in s4 of the show), plus a new character, Patty Newby (adopted sister of Bob the Hobbit whom Joyce dated in s2), with the teenage versions of Joyce, Hopper, Bob and to a far lesser degree the parents of our future heroes getting involved in varying degrees as things go increasingly weird. ( Spoilers for the play and the series ensue. )

Books:

Sarah Gordon: Underdog: The Other Other Bronte. Poor Charlotte. Whenever she shows in fiction these last few years, it seems to be as a villain and/or the embodiment of sibling jealousy. Last year, she played the role of the envious sister in the frustrating movie Emily about
guess who; this year, she's the bad girl in this play which I did not have the chance to watch but bought the script of. It's (supposed to be) about Anne and much as the novel The Madwoman Upstairs does, about how Charlotte done her wrong. (Different authors, btw, but both postulate Charlotte, realizing her first novel The Professor sucked, stole the premise from Anne's Agnes Grey to create Jane Eyre. Only this play goes way beyong "Jane Eyre is a plagiarized Agnes Grey!" charge and the historically more accurate "Charlotte didn't allow any reprintings of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall once Anne was dead and thus is responsible for Anne's masterpiece getting forgotten for a century until it was rediscovered"; nope, Underdog has Charlotte constantly belittle and bully Anne like you wouldn't believe. (What about Emily? may a Bronte reader familiar with the fact Anne was closest to Emily and vice versa in the famliy ask. Well, much like Anne hardly shows up in Emily the movie, here Emily is an also ran in Underdog the play until near the end, when she tells Charlotte off for constantly bullying Anne just before her death. But really, otherwise she's just sort of there and not really taking Anne that seriously as a writer, either. As for Anne: supposedly this is her play, but the authorial eagerness in making her the perfect (not Victorian perfect, 21st century perfect) heroine who can see that Charlotte and Emily write unhealthy m/f relationships and is the true pioneer of feminist fiction paradoxically means she's never three dimensional. Also, this is a tale told by its villain, i.e. Charlotte. There's just one sequence where Charlotte isn't present and which isn't about her (Anne's first governessing job). But otherwise, Charlotte is the narrator, trying to justify herself but really unmasking, in a very 19th century novel style, though Wilkie Collins more than any of the Brontes. In conclusion, To Walk Invisible the movie is still the only take on the Sisters which manages to portray all three with sympathy and skill.

Katherine Moar: Farm Hall. Another play, this one set in the titular place in1945 where the British government hosted the German scienistst they'd gotten their hands on until the nuclear bomb(s) dropped, trying to figure out by recording them how far the German atom bomb project had gotten and what they knew. It starts with a quote from Michael Frayn of Copenhagen fame and very much feels like Copenhagen fanfiction in terms of Heisenberg's characterisation (maybe a touch sharper about his ego early on, but two thirds in, in the aftermath of the Hiroshima news, he does talk Otto Hahn through how it could have worked, thus as in Copenhagen providing the counter argument to "he wouldn't have been able to figure out the key bits anyway"). However, it's much more of an ensemble piece. A well done play, but unfortunately I kept having my disbelief suspension snapped, for example when they have some of the German scientists wonder about American movies being so popular and being produced with so much effort when there's a war going on. Dear Katherine Moar, while the German film industry undoubtedly greatly suffered from the Nazi caused exodus of many incredibly talented people, it really got dream funding from the government (a firm believer of panem et circenses, Goebbels), and was producing films for the purpose of entertainment and propaganda right until the bitter end. I mean, freaking Goebbels ordered parts of the army to play spear carriers in Veit Harlan's Colberg in 1944. =>' No German living at that time would have been the least bit surprised that the US film industry is doing well in the war. Also, I had the impression the Carl Friedrich von Weizäcker characterisation is mostly based on him being the son of a prominent, privileged family, so he gets to be the spoiled young man of the ensemble, and wellllllll, not the impression I had. Most characters go through similar arcs - they start out feeling smug in their scientific superiority and determinedly not talking about recent genocides, get the superiority shattered and, some of them, starting to confront the recent past. As fanficton, it works; I'm not sure it does as a play.

Lucy Jago: A Net for Small Fishes. A novel that deals with the same Stuart court scandal I wrote a story about, Frances Howard (Essex, Somerset) and the Overbury Affair, in this case, though, narrated by Anne Turner, the long term friend who got Frances the poison. It's written with much sympathy for both ladies, Anne and Frances, and when I came to the afterward, I saw it drew from the same main source I had used ("The Trials of Fances Howard", i.e. the most recent and most balanced account of the Overbury affair. Lucy Jago doesn't provide Frances with the same motives I speculated about, but I find her version plausible as well, and I appreciate the complexity of the relationships - especially Anne and Frances (I was half afraid she'd do a Philippa Gregory and go for the mean girl/ exploited good girl approach, but no, absolutely not). Even bit players like Queen Anne are interesting. A compelling historical novel.

As someone who had only liked parts of s3 - to be precise: the Robin and Steve parts, plus the Max and Eleven friendship, but that was pretty much it - and actively disliked others (to wit: Hopper's s3 characterisation and the according change of his relationships with both Joyce and Eleven), I am really happy to report s4 is back on form. The last two episodes won't be released until July 1st, but the season we have thus far, which is most of it, is great.

One can be nitpicky and point out the inherent aging problem frequent in any series which employs kids and doesn't, unlike, say, DS9, equate a season with a year - the child actors are in their early 20s now while their characters are still teens, and the actors who played teenagers in the first season really look as if they're all 30 (plus) - but that doesn't matter to me if the characters and their relationships are written in an interesting, endearing way. Which they are. What's more, the show doesn't rely on 80s nostalgia but also tackles 80s dark sides (for example the D & D/Satanic panic). The soundtrack is still great (and in one particular case cleverly interwoven with a main dramatic plot thread, though in terms of sheer "OMG, that brings back the 80s for me" amusement, another song popping up, Falco's Amadeus, made me sit up more), several things I hoped would be adressed were adressed (the emotional s3 fallout for Max, and so far, this is the best season for Will's actor since s1), and the new characters work very well.

( On to spoilery observations. )

Never mind Halloween, the big occasion today in Germany is that it's the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, which events throughout the past decade and epecially the last year have been leading up to. (See also: the Luther eggs at Easter Wells, shared in this very journal.) Now I'm not of the Lutheran faith, but as a historically interested person, I'm duly impressed, of course. This article I thought does a good job of portraying both the good and the bad of Martin Luther, quondam Augustinian friar in Wittenberg. And there was both good and bad in excess. Incidentally, back when Hilary Mantel both in her Cromwell novels and in non-fiction articles went on about Thomas More's scatological extravaganzas in his anti-Luther writings, I thought: Yeah, but did you read Luther's writings? Nobody, but nobody tops Martin L. when it comes coming up with literally shitty similes for his opponents. This may be amusing when he's writing about being depressed (the article I linked includes a particularly drastic and genuinely funny description of Luther's of how that feels like to him), entertaining when he's writing about people he'll never meet and who are above him in power (read: Popes and Henry VIII.), starts to to get disturbing when he's having a go at poor old Erasmus of Rotterdam for being the lone guy in that era who tries the "look, everyone has some good points in this argument!" line, and becomes incredibly unsettling and revolting when he's punching down and attacking people whom his verbal hatred truly damages (mainly the Jews, since Luther was incredibly antisemitic even for his time, but you can also list the peasants from the peasant's revolt in this category).

This, btw, is why fictional depictions tend to stay the hell away from older Luther and focus on younger Luther in rebel-against-Rome mode. Though there are exceptions.)

(I haven't yet encountered a fictional Luther in any medium entirely convincing me. Though I loved the monologue Christine Brückner wrote for his wife, Katharina, "Are you sure, Martinus?" in her collection of female monologues (translated into English by Eleanor Bron, btw).


On a less historical and more Halloween note, read some Stranger Things ficlets, all spoilery for the second season and hence ( hidden beneath a spoiler cut: )

As promised, a Yuletide (and not celebrity death) exception to the no more until February rule; I want to get these recs out there before the reveal. Incidentally, state of my own Yuletide tales: the two treats got lovely comments from their respective recipients, the official assignment recipient apparantly has had a busy week, but has now commented as well (and graciously).

On to other people's stories read during the last week in various fandoms:

Greek Myth:

The Faces of Helen: Helen of Troy from various povs. Interesting Helens are still a rarity; loved that and the interactions with her brothers, the Dioskuri, and Cassandra especially. Also a welcome rarity: sympathetic Paris!


A rift never destined to mend: More Iliad fragments, sharp and perfect. Oh, Andromache.


She whose beauty rivals the goddesses: Iphigenia and Elektra, before. Extra kudos for laying the basis for Elektra's feelings for her parents despite what will happen to her sister in a way that makes sense.


Jessica Jones:

On the road (to recovery): Jessica, Luke and Malcolm at some future point. Great take on all three of them, and I loved their interactions.


Luke Cage:

We are the ones we have been waiting for: CLAIRE. All the Claire centric stories this year are great, and this one also offers wonderful looks at her interactions with several other Marvel tv and cinema inhabitants.

My Beautiful Laundrette:

Maintenance & Repairs: Omar and Johnny, several years on, more mature in some ways, in others not at all, and still so very them.

New Tricks:

Lost Souls: Case fic! Team fic! Oh, I love it. It feels exactly like a good episode.

Rome:

Not one but two stories I've enjoyed equally, offering different beginnings for the Mark Antony/Caesar dynamic. Excellent voices for both characters.

The Start of the End of the World

Conquest

Shakespeare:

And play the dog: In which Margaret, early on, negotiates with the Duke of York and meets his son Richard for the first time. Excellent take on the Shakespearean versions of these characters.


Stranger Things:

Sugar Kisses: a lovely "Five Things" for Joyce and Hopper, who had one of those dynamics on the show where I didn't want them to become lovers now (because both of them certainly had more than enough on their plate emotionally and otherwise), but was hoping for something in the farer future, and this story delivers very well.

Yentl:

Mechaye Hametim: Haddass, Avigdor and Yentl working their way back together through the years after the show. Haddass pov, and I appreciated the author gave Haddass time to sort out how she was feeling about Anshel/Yentl, instead of letting her be instantly okay with everything.


And now, off to combat DRL once again! Oh, and I was going to make the annual "guess my stories" dare, but have gotten three correct guesses already without doing so, so, I figure it's way too obvious this year with all three of them. :) (However, I'm pathetic enough to hope for a few more readers before the reveal, especially for the Super Ambitious Wanted To Write The Definite Tale For This Fandom one.)