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Post by peelee on Sept 20, 2017 22:05:12 GMT
I attended a fascinating talk in the Cottesloe/Dorfman part of the National Theatre a few years ago, that was about the history of NT posters. The talk was good, the visuals were a delight.
Walking up and down the stairs at London's fringe theatre venues that often decorate the walls with posters and photos of classic productions, and fresh-faced young versions of what have become the starry names of theatre, one omission I have noticed on so many posters is the year of the production. That might mean nothing at the time, and something like '22 March to 14 May' may have done the trick in attracting playgoers, but I believe no reference to the year diminishes the poster's retrospective power.
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Post by peelee on Sept 20, 2017 21:50:52 GMT
I saw Victoria and Abdul today and thought it was pretty good. It was presented as a straight, serious story, one I'd never heard of, but then its being erased from the historical record mainly explains that ignorance on my part. Judi Dench is excellent in this film and her characterisation covers a range of moods and emotions, such that I was never bored by her. She's played Victoria before but this is no telephoned-in performance; this Victoria has more substance and more to do in this film. And the Abdul of the title, played by Ali Fazel, acts well too. Here and there are situations or comments so ridiculous, a chuckle is difficult to suppress, but this is no comedy. A non-irritating Eddie Izzard plays what in real life must have been the irritating Bertie, Prince of Wales, and he does a fine job of that.
It is directed by Stephen Frears. The screenplay is by Lee Hall. The music is by Thomas Newman. It has a fine cast, some big names playing quietly and subtly rather than hog the scene. I believe this was Tim Piggot-Smith's last film. There are all sorts of reasons to go and see it on a cinema screen, though being a BBC Film it'll appear on TV screens.
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Post by peelee on Sept 8, 2017 11:09:09 GMT
I have some decent independent cinemas not too far from where I live and I thank my lucky stars for that. Recently I've been in places where multiplexes showing 'Hollywood films' was all there was, and so I never set out for the cinemas in question. At least in some places where a multi-screen cinema house is dominant, there are one or two screens used to show more interesting or low budget films that Hollywood just isn't associated with for the most part.
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Post by peelee on Sept 4, 2017 10:01:08 GMT
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Post by peelee on Sept 3, 2017 12:24:17 GMT
Having missed a couple of plays at the Park Theatre in the past because I left it too late to book what I wanted — one in particular that I'd like to have seen was about Charles de Gaulle and, I think, Marshal Petain of Vichy Government notoriety, and I was just as intrigued by Madame Rubinstein — I got my booking in for this months ago while it slumbered unnoticed under 'What's On'.
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Post by peelee on Sept 3, 2017 11:59:50 GMT
I saw the 1964 film version of The Best Man, the screenplay also written by Gore Vidal the author of the play that premiered in 1960, on a rainy Sunday afternoon decades ago and was surprised I'd never heard of the film before, yet another reminder of what else must lie relatively unseen in the film archives. Henry Fonda and Cliff Robertson starred in the film but the cast generally was good, about a conflict that had been inspired by Vidal's thoughts about the US Democratic Party Convention. Real politicians, whether idealistic, conniving or vicious, had inspired Vidal to write convincing characters and Vidal in any case could write as his various works attest. It is one of those films that suggest it began life as a compelling stage play.
A somewhat similar style of US film is Advise & Consent, that is advertised on the IMBD website page for The Best Man. The former featured Henry Fonda, Walter Pigeon, Gene Tierney and a particularly memorable Charles Laughton, under direction of Otto Preminger. Hollywood made some decent and intelligent films in those days, and in black and white with all those shades of grey.
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Post by peelee on Aug 21, 2017 16:51:45 GMT
Having watched Christopher Nolan-shaped hit film Dunkirk on a cinema screen recently, I was intrigued enough on seeing a secondhand copy of a play text that seemed to shed another light on war-related events in 1940, to buy it and start reading. Three Days in May, written by Ben Brown and produced by Bill Kenwright, premiered at the Theatre Royal, Windsor, and may well have toured elsewhere. It is about the British War Cabinet-level conflict that occurred over whether to fight on or do a deal with Hitler. Did anyone here ever see the play when it was staged and if so how did it come across to the audience you were in?
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Post by peelee on Aug 15, 2017 17:48:49 GMT
A secondhand copy, the 1976 Faber and Faber edition in 1979 paperback form, of The Auden Generation: literature and politics in England in the 1930s by Samuel Hynes. He covers the period 1929-40, and gives each year a chapter in which he considers the wider context of the poems, novels, essays written by writers into whose private lives burst the outside world of the dramatic, alarming Thirties.
The writers considered here being WH Auden, Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, George Orwell, Graham Greene and Rex Warner, all influenced at decade's start by TS Eliot's The Waste Land their postwar realisation from the late 1920s that another world war was likely and that it would involve their generation. It is scholarly-thorough, and reads very well indeed, presenting writers in the foreground yet providing so much context that the brain gets some exercise: not the sort of thing that anything on a mobile phone will offer you.
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Post by peelee on Aug 15, 2017 16:55:29 GMT
While not revived in the format in which it was first presented in the 1980s, this production of Road still has something to say about lives as lived then and now, and its chosen format illustrates this and emphasises that, as we meet and re-meet characters and unfolding situations on the night in question. It struck me also that as the London theatre Upstairs that first staged this play, the Royal Court has reminded theatregoers that the Court isn't just famous for the older legendary productions it staged in the 1950s and 1960s but can claim a string of memorable plays down the years since. For all its remit about new writing, and also young writers, there are old glories it can point to, and Road has been worth doing in a period when some its plays in the last so many years have been hit and miss. It's entitled to re-stage this play, and it may even have people seeking out the BBC film version made some years ago by the late, legendary director Alan Clarke.
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Post by peelee on Aug 9, 2017 7:47:09 GMT
Some beautiful songs, for sure, and he made quite a contribution to the music of his choice. Those who knew him well have been saying some nice things about him. RIP.
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Post by peelee on Aug 8, 2017 9:17:31 GMT
I soon jumped out of watching the interview with Patrick Gale when I realised it was threading its points in with key points from the two films before they'd been broadcast, the very reason why I avoid reading film and play reviews until I've let film or play reveal itself on its own terms. Thus a scene in which something was burned had little dramatic impact for us watching at home because we'd been presented with it in the interview already. That said and though the second part was good enough, I thought part one the more intriguing of the this two-parter. When it was all over, we watched the interview with Patrick Gale referred to above.
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Post by peelee on Jul 30, 2017 16:40:21 GMT
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Post by peelee on Jul 28, 2017 17:16:18 GMT
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Post by peelee on Jul 25, 2017 17:04:16 GMT
Jim Cartwright's first play, 'Road', was first staged in 1986 at this same location, and now here comes a lively revival of this modern classic which has just started its run and is previewing at the Royal Court. It has a good cast that puts energy and feeling into a play with energy and feeling and something to say. It is set along a road in a northern town whose inhabitants are struggling to survive, and for all the change that may have occurred since the crisis-torn 1980s, enough change hasn't occurred in the decades since for this play still to be worth mounting.
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Post by peelee on Jul 23, 2017 16:24:28 GMT
I'd looked forward to seeing Dunkirk, but was deterred a week or two ago when I read that it was on the level of a video-game (not my sort of thing) and emphasised a being-there experience at the expense of context and much in the way of dialogue. Mind you, the recent film Moonlight had sparse dialogue but was intense and gripping to view and deserved its prizes. But then in the last few days I've noticed these rows of stars given by critics to Dunkirk and have been thinking that perhaps I was wrong to rule out paying to see it on a cinema screen where I guess it's best viewed. I had looked forward to the recent film Churchill yet that was ponderous, baggy and needed something rather more than starry names. So I am among those people who'll hang back a while and listen out for comments from those who've seen this new film.
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Post by peelee on Jul 23, 2017 10:49:52 GMT
Can't have a good farce without french doors.
Nor without French knickers.
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Post by peelee on Jul 23, 2017 10:43:09 GMT
I agree with a couple of critical comments upthread, but this is a thoughtfully put-together, interesting play and in places cleverly so. It holds the attention and indeed the audience has to concentrate. Although some characters say rather more than others, those quieter others have dramatic force for the way in which, though their presence is of marginal concern to the protagonist, still they make their presence felt.
Some very good performances, especially from Justine Mitchell, Hannah Rae and Lorna Brown, though actually it is unfair not to acknowledge others in what is a good cast. Watching them all was time well-spent. Set design helped greatly, with scene changes as simple as could be.
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Post by peelee on Jul 19, 2017 11:19:19 GMT
I think the figure I saw for BBC presenter Gary Lineker was £1.75m per annum. Staggering in its own right, but then he also pops up on subscription channel BT Sport on some of the football programmes so that is another undeclared-here source of income from a private company. Perhaps he gets the money for the being the least worse football programme presenter there is, bloody awful puns and all.
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Post by peelee on Jul 19, 2017 9:14:39 GMT
Jane Eyre was excellent theatre and among the best of what I've seen at the National this past year or two. Its return is welcome, and I might even see the play again. Network will attract many and I can understand the attraction, though by now the ticket prices exclude my sort of theatregoer. Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad and more recently Trumbo fame—both now on Netflix, btw—could really do something in this forthcoming play, the Paddy Chayefsky association with the 1970s screenplay being for me a quality Kitemark. So I think both plays justify themselves in the schedule.
Beginning is a play by David Eldridge, thoughtful and a writer of note. Pinocchio sounds like it could be good. And the well-liked on here Barber Shop Chronicles returns and could attract a lot of interest. They'll find their audiences, and of the five plays I've mentioned they'll likely do enough to maintain the profile of the National up to year's end and into the new year. They are too interestingly varied, and while some are new there are also classics of a sort among them.
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Post by peelee on Jun 27, 2017 17:59:57 GMT
Bedtime reading is by the witty and sharp 'sage of Baltimore', HL Mencken, in The Vintage Mencken (1990) gathered by the late Letter from America radio reporter Alistair Cooke back in 1955. A man who used a wider vocabulary than many of his peers, Mencken had much to say about the country he observed.
I started reading that as a temporary break from the magnificent biography Cain by Roy Hoopes. James M Cain wrote The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce, all turned into famous noirish thrillers by Hollywood and then some later remade too, among many novels and much journalism.
Reading on my London Underground journeys at present, is a play script of a production about footballers I missed at the Royal Court when it was staged there in 2014, The Pass by John Donnelly.
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Post by peelee on Jun 27, 2017 0:36:06 GMT
The Conservative Party deal with the Democratic Unionist Party is a good thing. Each party to the deal gets something of importance out of it.
It means that power-sharing in Northern Ireland, which has been interrupted for several months, is likely to be re-established promptly. From the time of the rumoured deal on 9-10 June, Sinn Fein began to make noises that indicated the power-sharing agreement there could be quickly restored (for if there was more money coming that way, then they had better be involved in government there in order to discuss how it would be shared out). That's politics, and there's nothing pure about it.
It means too that the movement to Leave the EU is strengthened. The DUP is for Leave, its strength among the Protestant working class also meaning that public services and welfare measures matter and that, for instance, measures like the winter fuel allowance and the 'triple lock' for pensioners will continue for people on the mainland too. The Conservatives benefit by such insistence and have good reason or excuse to retain policies that, having been threatened by them in their own election manifesto, now survive and at a time when so many of the public have grown heartily sick of austerity. That retains working class support and would have enhanced it but for the votes Conservatives lost by threatening such welfare measures in the first place.
Indeed it was the working class attitude to austerity, and EU sponsorship of austerity that angers so many people across the continent, that accounted for a large chunk of the Leave vote a year ago this week. It was also that victory for Leave in the Referendum that within a year, and despite Labour's referendum-recommendation to Remain, enabled the Labour Party to present an election manifesto that proposed restoration of public ownership of certain industries that EU membership blocks, i.e. railways, post office, water and the like.
I don't see any other government happening anytime soon. And even this government is presented with public need for investment in the likes of social housing and an industrial strategy, which ever more people are going to press home the need for. Ministers can like it or lump it, either that is the direction of travel or the political parties in parliament by the time of the next general election will face a situation that, cut off from much public contact, had caused them all to recommend Remain in the first place.
Politics is rife with contradictions; they are everywhere you look. Whatever the next few years are like, they are not going to be boring.
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Post by peelee on Jun 25, 2017 20:47:05 GMT
I am tempted, I admit. Maxim Gorky was such an interesting writer.
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Post by peelee on Jun 25, 2017 20:41:06 GMT
Mikel Murfi returns to the Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn, NW London, after his run of the wonderful 'The Man in the Woman's Shoes' last year which this year he has presented in a series of afternoon performances, although by now tickets are only available for next Saturday's matinee. And though each of these two productions stands alone, 'I Hear You and Rejoice' is a sequel, about the funeral of the woman whose shoes cobbler Pat Farnon was bringing to town in the prequel. There's a kind of brilliance to each one and, whichever one you opt for if you pick just one, you should enjoy the experience. I believe the Tricycle is offering a deal if you buy tickets for the two productions next Saturday. While its theatre renovation goes on, it is the Tricycle cinema (air-conditioned I was relieved to discover the other evening!) with its raked seats that is used. www.tricycle.co.uk/current-programme-pages/theatre/theatre-programme-main/i-hear-you-and-rejoice/
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Post by peelee on Jun 21, 2017 7:49:16 GMT
A second series of Hospital began last night on BBC TV. If you're interested in character, story, subplot and drama, then this should hook you as a viewer. Like recent TV series on the London Ambulance Service, and The Met about which police force a TV series continues, and The Tube about London's underground system, it covers a range of human dilemmas, situations and emotions. www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08w8ktv/hospital-series-2-episode-1
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Post by peelee on May 4, 2017 16:20:42 GMT
Excellent production, and the best play I'd seen at the National Theatre, London, in the last few months. I look forward to reading the script.
It'd be nice to see the NT stage Nina Raine's previous, bloody good play, 'Tribes', which was stunning when it was staged at the Royal Court.
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Post by peelee on May 4, 2017 16:15:24 GMT
'Front Row' by novelist and former actress the late Beryl Bainbridge's is about her evenings at the theatre reviewing for 'The Oldie' magazine. About a hundred such reviews drawn from the individual years between 1992-2002 combine what I'll call interesting facts, her intriguing asides, witty comment and neat novelistic turns of phrase, and remind them reader why she so often got Booker Prize nominations for her novels. Enjoyable bedtime reading.
Daytime reading at present is 'The British Dream' by David Goodhart about 'successes and failures of post-war immigration'. Founder of Prospect magazine, and later the director of think tank Demos, he has a pleasant writing style which is just as well because he draws from a wide range of sources and covers a lot of ground and wants to retain his readers. It is fascinating, a mine of information and displays both international awareness and a keen sense of the national context of countries abandoned and fast-changing country arrived-in, and why it has become such an important issue. He draws from official reports on housing, employment, education, etc., and proposals from party manifestos down the years, as well as newspapers and novels and the hundreds of interviews he has had done for the book. It's got lots of big ideas and much straight-talking, and represents his leading-spokesman place in this field.
I'll also second or third the mentions upthread for Philip Kerr's series of novels about 1930s Berlin detective Bernie Gunther, being asked to solve murders under a criminal regime, and his adventures in postwar decades operating well beyond Germany. There is a new such novel just published, I see, but anyone wanting to start at the beginning might look out for his first few novels 'March Violets', 'The Pale Criminal' and 'A German Requiem'.
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Post by peelee on Feb 8, 2017 10:06:26 GMT
Six-part series Hospital is as gripping as was the recently broadcast short series Ambulance about which I also started a thread in General Chat. BBC can produce such good documentaries and so often there is a tie-in with the Open University for those wanting to study more. It is working its way through the series and tonight the fifth programme is broadcast. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b088rp6xwww.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b088rp75Hospital, the first episode of which will be available for download for just two more days, has got everything that play lovers so often like — intense drama, some droll humour, serious things to think about, and a range of characters that prove fascinating whether having more or less screen time. Talking-point television that, squeamish viewers please note, has only fleeting scenes of operating theatre activity, yet so much more about life in hospitals that come under the auspices of the Imperial College Health Trust in West London.
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Post by peelee on Feb 8, 2017 9:46:24 GMT
I got the opportunity to see this at a preview in London on 16 November, with Q&A with director and co-writer Theodore Melfi and supporting actress Octavia Spencer (who plays Dorothy Vaughan). In some respects a very 'Hollywood' film but view it and it proves to have far more going for it than that. An inspiring story about, historically, the recent past of the 1950s and 1960s and the struggle in the US for civil rights. I believe it won awards at the Screen Actors Guild ceremony in the US recently—sidelined in news coverage terms by award winners' public comments about President Trump—and I wouldn't be surprised if it wins a few more at the forthcoming 'Oscars' annual get-together. Well worth seeing.
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Post by peelee on Feb 3, 2017 16:08:42 GMT
I saw newly-released in Britain made in 2016 US film 'Jackie' yesterday, in which John Hurt plays several scenes set in 1963 with Natalie Portman who plays recently-widowed Mrs Kennedy. Not a few lines either but some minutes of interaction between the Irish priest he plays and the wife of the assassinated US president. It's not the greatest film that was ever made but the scenes mentioned were a poignant reminder of the talented and wide-ranging British actor in a role that personified dignity and thoughtfulness from an actor who knew he couldn't have much longer to live.
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Post by peelee on Feb 3, 2017 14:57:21 GMT
Just announced — the strikes intended from Sunday evening have been suspended.
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