Books and plays
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.Now there are some obvious drawbacks to a Stranger Things prequel. No matter how determinedly Joyce declares she wants to try for a scholarship to get out of Hawkins, we alaready know she won't succeed, and furthermore, she'll end up with Lonnie Byers the annoying narcissist (whom the play keeps as little present as possible - he and Joyce break up right at the start, and it's only vaguely hinted at at the end they'll get back together). Ditto for young Hopper's determination to also leave town and not become like his Dad the Sherrif. And poor Bob, well, his fate is fixed as well. Plus one can't help but conclude that if young Joyce et al had been witness to the events they get drawn into in the 1950s, Joyce shouldn't have had so much trouble getting people to believe her in season 1.
All this said, they're all supporting characters. Young Henry Creel is the lead, and here the play goes for the Norman Bates route, i.e. he tries, he really tries, instead of presenting him as sociopathic from day 1. In fact, the true villain is everyone's least favourite crazy scientist, Eleven's Papa, aka Dr. Brenner, who takes an already damaged and unstable boy in dire need of emotional support and does all he can to transform him into a killer. (BTW, their scenes together are a weird mixture between twistedly paternal and homoerotic.) For a while, Bob's adopted sister Patty, also a loner and bullied by her and Bob's Dad, forms a bond with Henry that allows im to cling to non-killerdom a while longer, but eventually he cracks (and then lots of other bones do). (Note that the narrative doesn't blame either of his parents for this. As opposed to Dr. Brenner, it's clear his mother does want to help him, it's just that she's also scared because she sees clearer than Dad Victor where this could potentially go, and has really bad luck with the medical help she gets for Henry. Meanwile, it's evident why teen Henry, not having the intel the audience does, does blame her.) If this sounds all very Freudian, I think that's deliberate and the playwright tried to go for 1950s tropes much like show did with its 1980s setting and tropes. Anyway: Young Henry is played by Louis MacCartney, making his stage debut in the part, and definitely believable as a pre-supervillaindom Teenager In Torment. The special effects are awesome, and the audience I was with whooped, gasped and cheered like you wouldn't believe. I wouldn't call the play a must, but on a popcorn level, it was compelling and fun.
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.
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.Now there are some obvious drawbacks to a Stranger Things prequel. No matter how determinedly Joyce declares she wants to try for a scholarship to get out of Hawkins, we alaready know she won't succeed, and furthermore, she'll end up with Lonnie Byers the annoying narcissist (whom the play keeps as little present as possible - he and Joyce break up right at the start, and it's only vaguely hinted at at the end they'll get back together). Ditto for young Hopper's determination to also leave town and not become like his Dad the Sherrif. And poor Bob, well, his fate is fixed as well. Plus one can't help but conclude that if young Joyce et al had been witness to the events they get drawn into in the 1950s, Joyce shouldn't have had so much trouble getting people to believe her in season 1.
All this said, they're all supporting characters. Young Henry Creel is the lead, and here the play goes for the Norman Bates route, i.e. he tries, he really tries, instead of presenting him as sociopathic from day 1. In fact, the true villain is everyone's least favourite crazy scientist, Eleven's Papa, aka Dr. Brenner, who takes an already damaged and unstable boy in dire need of emotional support and does all he can to transform him into a killer. (BTW, their scenes together are a weird mixture between twistedly paternal and homoerotic.) For a while, Bob's adopted sister Patty, also a loner and bullied by her and Bob's Dad, forms a bond with Henry that allows im to cling to non-killerdom a while longer, but eventually he cracks (and then lots of other bones do). (Note that the narrative doesn't blame either of his parents for this. As opposed to Dr. Brenner, it's clear his mother does want to help him, it's just that she's also scared because she sees clearer than Dad Victor where this could potentially go, and has really bad luck with the medical help she gets for Henry. Meanwile, it's evident why teen Henry, not having the intel the audience does, does blame her.) If this sounds all very Freudian, I think that's deliberate and the playwright tried to go for 1950s tropes much like show did with its 1980s setting and tropes. Anyway: Young Henry is played by Louis MacCartney, making his stage debut in the part, and definitely believable as a pre-supervillaindom Teenager In Torment. The special effects are awesome, and the audience I was with whooped, gasped and cheered like you wouldn't believe. I wouldn't call the play a must, but on a popcorn level, it was compelling and fun.
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.