All the world's a stage: London IV
Overheard, just the other day, near Marble Arch while having lunch, the following conversation:
Aged Father: "What about the Roma who were here last time?"
Daughter (my age, Tory politician). "We're not calling them that, Dad, we're calling them agressive beggars of Eastern European Origin. And we got rid of them."
And thus you know you're surrounded by conservative England. There was a lot of interesting talk during that lunch otherwise, on all types of subjects from the EU to Dickens to Thomas Mann, but that part was the only point where I felt positively Orwellian.
Thursday also saw me watching Rapture, Blister, Burn, a play written by Gina Gionfriddo and performed at Hampstead Theatre. It occurs to me that means that out of five plays I watched during my time in London, three were written by women (Red Velvet, A Taste of Honey and Rapture - Blister - Burn, respectively), and today I also watched a film, The Invisible Woman, which was written by Abi Morgan and based on the book by Claire Tomalin. The times, they are (hopefully) changing. Which was partly the subject of Rapture, Blister, Burn, a play starring Emilia Fox (which is why I went) and Emma Fielding, and focused on women and their choices, and different generations of feminism. Mind you, I thought the advertisement is slightly misleading when compared to the play, or at least this production, but I think it's the play - because the advertisement sells this as the story of two women, former college friends, one of whom, Cathy (Emilia Fox) had a great academic career but is currently in something of a crisis after her mother's heart attack which caused some soul searching about what she wants from her life, and the toher, Gwen (Emma Fielding) has a husband and kids, and isn't really content with her lot in life, either. Both wonder about the road not taken, and in the course of events decide to switch lives for a while. Based on this summary, I expected the play to be about both of them in equal parts, but in reality, Gwen is only a supporting character, especially in the second half of the play. Which isn't to say there isn't another female lead in addition to Cathy, only she's not Gwen, and not mentioned anywhere in the summaries - she's Avery, who is one of Cathy's students and used to babysit for Gwen's kids. Avery (played with zest by Shannon Tarbet, a young actress I now must look out for). It's not Cathy's and Gwen's, but Cathy's and Avery's relationship that is at the heart of the play, not to mention that Avery tends to get the wittiest lines. Now, Cathy's mother, Cathy and Gwen, Avery all embody obviously different generations and different waves of feminism, but they're also characters in their own right, and the play is the type of theory-and-practice-debating play with one liners which I mostly associate with Shaw, only it's new and takes place in the US. I've looked up reviews and seen some complain that there is no female character who has both a career and kids at the same time, but imo that's beside the point - Avery has no idea whether or not she wants kids (she's 21), while Cathy regrets not having them, she isn't about to stop being a workoholic while playing family with Gwen's husband (the sole male character of the play and an amiable schlub), and while Gwen wants to get back to the academic life she abandoned when marrying, she's not intending to give up her kids.
What I suppose you could critisize is that the play doesn't really show us any of Gwen's time in Cathy's New York apartment - we only hear about it second hand via phone calls - and stays instead with Cathy in the small college town where Gwen and her husband Don live and Avery studies, but the Avery and Cathy interaction sparkles so much that I can't regret. Also Cathy's from a heartstroke recovering mother makes for an excellent (witty) Greek chorus. (And provides Martinis while Cathy and Avery debate 1970s horror movies.) It's not a play that offers some amazing new insights but it it's one that offers a very funny depiction of the inevitable imperfection of current day female life (in all its variations). Who says feminists are without a sense of humour?
Thursday was very rainy, so I first went to the National Gallery (me and half of London, but as opposed to the National Portrait Gallery, I hadn't visited the NG for years, and I did want to see some of these paintings in non-printed form again), which was, despite all the other people, a very relaxing thing to do. When wandering around the Impressionists, I was struck again by how many of them sat out the Franco-Prussian war in Britain, which was probably the most sensible thing to do, but can't have been that comfortable an exile, since they all went back once it was over.
Then I watched The Invisible Woman, because non-blockbuster foreign films which weren't co-produced with German money take sometimes a year or so before they get shown in our cinemas, and I really wanted to see this one, for various reasons: I had read Claire Tomalin's Dickens biography, which impressed me in its even handedness and vivacity, Claire Tomalin's report about how the film came to me, and the various reviews which assured me on what were the two most criticial points for me in advance to know: that this film would not excuse Dickens' behaviour by demonizing or denigrating his wife, that it would not play out Nelly against Catherine, on the one hand, but on the other that it would also manage to show just why so many people cared about Dickens as a person, not "just" as an author. (Because otherwise Nelly looks foolish.) And because Nelly's personality always eluded me in the biographies, I hoped for the film, which is after all fiction, to help out there. Which it did. Felicity Jones gives a sublime performances, and Ralph Fiennes as the director trusts her silences and trusts us to get it when, say, we see Nelly's expression after the death of her first child. Not that she doesn't have memorable outbursts, too. One of the great ways how silence and facial reaction can be a build up that heightens the effectiveness of the words eventually spoken comes when Nelly first shares a scene with Catherine, Dickens' wife (more about that in a moment, because Joanne Scanlan, who plays Catherine, has a wonderful tragic dignity throughout), then with Wilkie Collins' mistress/companion, Caroline, and then at least with Dickens himself. She hardly says anything in the first two scenes - it's the other women who talk - but you can see her reacting and her emotions coming to a boiling point, which at last happens when she's alone with Dickens. Because the film is fiction, it can show us something the biographies couldn't, for lack of primary source material from her - how did Nelly feel about the cruel way Dickens treated his wife, and how did she see her own position in this?
I already knew Fiennes had a good eye - his Corialanus is truly cinematic, not a filmed stage play, and uses its Balkan setting extremely well; The Invisible Women adds to that but also employs radio-like techniques which came to the cinema via Orson Welles and other creators who started out in radio. By which I mean the overlapping dialogue/monologue; we're visually still in one scene but hear already someone from the next speaking. Since the whole film is constructed as Nelly remembering, this comes across as weaving into and out of her memories, is extremely effective. There's also the repeated image of Nelly recalling her face mirrored in the window of a train compartment, the significance of which doesn't become clear until we get to the climax, the terrible train crash in which Dickens and Nelly were two of the passengers and the aftermath of which hammered home her position as the invisible woman of the title; she was hauled away so that no one would notice she'd been with him, he remained to help with the wounded.
Fiennes' performance as an actor is terrific, too, and one can see why Claire Tomalin wanted him to play the part. He conveys that sense of almost manic energy Dickens exuded (seriously, between the incredible workload, the amateur theatre, the charities and the long distance walks, the man hardly ever seems to have slept!), and most crucially both the dark and the light side, the compassion for the great number of disadvantaged and poor (and the fact he always saw them, and didn't look away unlike so many) on the one hand and the capacity for cruelty on the other hand which made him humiliate his wife in an unbearable manner. Because we like our judgments available, we'd prefer to think that a man capable of one is not of the other, or if he is, the former is somehow less valid or just pretense to gloss over the later; whereas Morgan's script and Fiennes' performance make it clear both a true.
Speaking of Abi Morgan's script, she slimmed down Dickens' incredibly large social circle to a mare minimum, and I can see why she made most of her choices; for example, the only one of Dickens' friends who gets a speaking part and a characterisation is Wilkie Collins (which means that among other things he also gets John Foster's role re: Great Expectations), but it makes sense to me she picked Collins, not Foster; Collins was not only the one whose play Dickens was staging and performing when he met Nelly Ternan but also the friend with the alternative life style, so to speak (which however allows Nelly some trenchant comments about how the feedom of living together without marriage is freedom for the men in these relationships, not the women), which makes him a better dramatic foil. Similarly, while we do see Dickens' and Catherine's large number of children, the only one with a speaking part and characterisation is their oldest son Charley. I regreted this a bit because their oldest daughter Kate (Katey, the later Kate Perugini) was a tremendously interesting person and actually one of the key sources we have on the whole Dickens separation issue, and the first person to go on public record about Nelly having been her father's mistress, which until then biographers had always denied; not to mention that her story was a whole Freudian side drama during the separation, as she and Nelly were the same age, she's played Nelly's role in Collins' drama The Frozen Deep together with her father the previous year, she got married to Wilkie Collins' brother just to get out of the house when her father made his children choose parents and to the indignation of Collins' mother was wearing black (her own mother wasn't allowed to attend the wedding), and the next morning her sister Mamey found Dickens literally sobbing into Katey's wedding dress and declaring it was all his fault that she married. But in a film, all of this would have distracted from the main story and the pov which was Nelly's, so the only Dickens' offspring with lines is Charley, aka the one who sided openly with his mother, defying his father, because Charley's role can be limited to this defiance and support. Incidentally, the scene where the letter Dickens' wrote to the Times (in reality just one of several letters to newspapers, but again, dramatic slimming down) brings home the fact this is real and irrevocable to Catherine and she who has tried to keep it together so hard finally crumbles is fantastic acting on Ms. Scanlan's part, and you're just glad the son is there because if ever someone needs a hug in that film...
While we're talking parents: Frances Ternan, Nelly's mother, is played by Kristin Scott Thomas, and Nelly's sisters are Amanda Hale and Perdita Weeks. I've seen someone make the complaint that Kristin Scott Thomas plays the mother of Ralph Fiennes love interest when not yet two decades ago she played the love interest as an example of film ageism, and this might have been valid were the characters fictional, but here she plays a historical character who was in fact the age Dickens' was, whereas her daughter was young enough to be his daughter, so the casting is accurate. Not to mention that it gives them some good scenes together, because Abi Morgan's script makes sure that the Ternan clan is fleshed out. Frances Ternan, not surprisingly, is the one who first clues into the fact that Dickens might be interested in her youngest daughter in a non-mentorly away, and the film gives her her own struggle and motivation: she - a succesful actress herself, who has acted as Desdemona to Edmund Kean's Othello - knows that of her three daughters, Nelly has the least acting talent and thus once Nelly is no longer young and pretty there won't be much of a career to hope for. And she knows and respects Dickens; he won't just wash his hands of Nelly once he's had her, he'll support her. But on the other hand, advising your child to become someone's mistress isn't an easy thing, either, just because you're part of a profession that's treated as immoral by many people anyway.
The framing narration of Nelly's life - after she reinvented herself and cut off ten years of her life - as the wife of a schoolmaster uses her repeated walks on the beach as a visual theme that later, in one of the flashbacks, finds its counterpart in Dickens' reading a passage from David Copperfield (David watching the storm and Ham and unrecognized yet Steerforth drowning) on one of his public readings, and you hear the sound of the sea intruding in several scenes. As a combination of Nelly's life and Dickens' works, this I found better done than the other combination because that's one of the few times where Abi Morgan's script imo gets too literal and clumsy, by letting Dickens quote Pip's words to Estella to Nelly. (Claire Tomalin does it in her biography as the narrator, speculating that this description of obsession is autobiographical though Estella is not a portrait of Nelly, but that's something you can do in a book as the author; letting Charles Dickens, as a character, quote this as something he feels about her is, well, clumsy.) And later you have older Nelly telling the Reverend who tries to get her to talk about her past that Pip and Estella not getting together was the right ending. As opposed to the sea metaphor, and older Nelly having picked up Dickens' obsessive walking habits, this leaves nothing to the audience's imagination and spells it all out. But this is really me nitpicking; overall it was an excellent film, and I'm glad I watched it now and won't have to wait for another year.
My last London play this year was The Knight of the Burning Pestle at the new Sam Wannamaker Playhouse, which is an addition to the Globe; an indoor Jacobean playhouse where the Globe company can now stage plays in winter, too. I had tried for the Duchess of Malfi, their first play in the new house, about which I'd heard great things, but it was completely sold out, so last night I could watch the premiere of the next play, Beaumont's rarely performed Knight of the Burning Pestle. I had never seen it on stage before, and haven't read it though I knew one or two scenes from books about the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre - since it is a play-within-a-play type of drama, which breaks the fourth wall with gusto, it gets quoted as an (of course dramatically exaggareted) example of what the stage practice of the day would have been. As it turns out, it is ideal for this particular theatre, which is build similar to the Swan in Stratford, only completely in wood, modelled on the Blackfriars Playhouse. So as opposed to the Globe, you have this relatively small space, with the basic archetectural structure of a refectory with a nod to an alehouse, all in wood. I'd been warned about the hard seats, but let me tell you, for the Bayreuth-trained theatre and opera enthusiast, this was downright comfortable by comparison. Also the play was very much about audience participation; the other thing I was told was that for the Duchess of Malfi, everything was completely dark except for the candles used for lighting. Not so here; the doors were always open, partly because at some points the characters ran off stage and through them and back again, but also because the audience reactions were part of the play so you needed the audience to be visible.
The Knight of the Burning Pestle presents you, among other things, with a London citizen, a grocer, his wife and his apprentice going to a play, not being content with what they watch as they don't like the hero and taking over the plot, inserting a new character, their apprentice, in it who is to have all types of glorious adventures which suspiciously resemble Don Quixote (a book which was out in Spanish but not yet in English at the time so there is some debate whether Beaumont had read it) while the actors try to stage their original play (which is about a London merchant's apprentice being forbidden to marry said merchant's daughter and after all sorts of shenanigans getting together with her anyway), which doesn't fit the demanded adventure plots at all. It's the kind of thing which sounds hopelessly confusing when written but when staged as it was last night really is hilarious, with the whole audience cheering Rafe on when he has his Quixotic adventures and adoring the Citizen and his Wife who were the heart of the performance and sat among the audience commenting when they weren't on stage trying to help the actors/their characters. They are basically Jacobean fandom living the fans-know-everything-better-anyway dream (which tells me Francis Beaumont must have been lectured by fanboys and fangirls a lot), and presented with great affection. Instead of the usual break ca. halfway through a play, for this play we got three interludes that lasted about four minutes during which there were on stage dances, and during which also food and drinks were sold as well (yes, you could, in the true Jacobean spirit, eat and drink during the performance, though at one point one of the actors of The London Merchant went down to the Citizen's wife and took her food away, and one longer, fifteen minutes interlude announced as "privvy break". Like I said, this was pretty much the Rocky Horror Show type of live performance audience experience, Jacobean style, and terrific fun from beginning to end.
Today: the sun has come back! Will walk a while before heading off to the airport - my flight is in the afternoon. What a trip!
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/964881.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
Aged Father: "What about the Roma who were here last time?"
Daughter (my age, Tory politician). "We're not calling them that, Dad, we're calling them agressive beggars of Eastern European Origin. And we got rid of them."
And thus you know you're surrounded by conservative England. There was a lot of interesting talk during that lunch otherwise, on all types of subjects from the EU to Dickens to Thomas Mann, but that part was the only point where I felt positively Orwellian.
Thursday also saw me watching Rapture, Blister, Burn, a play written by Gina Gionfriddo and performed at Hampstead Theatre. It occurs to me that means that out of five plays I watched during my time in London, three were written by women (Red Velvet, A Taste of Honey and Rapture - Blister - Burn, respectively), and today I also watched a film, The Invisible Woman, which was written by Abi Morgan and based on the book by Claire Tomalin. The times, they are (hopefully) changing. Which was partly the subject of Rapture, Blister, Burn, a play starring Emilia Fox (which is why I went) and Emma Fielding, and focused on women and their choices, and different generations of feminism. Mind you, I thought the advertisement is slightly misleading when compared to the play, or at least this production, but I think it's the play - because the advertisement sells this as the story of two women, former college friends, one of whom, Cathy (Emilia Fox) had a great academic career but is currently in something of a crisis after her mother's heart attack which caused some soul searching about what she wants from her life, and the toher, Gwen (Emma Fielding) has a husband and kids, and isn't really content with her lot in life, either. Both wonder about the road not taken, and in the course of events decide to switch lives for a while. Based on this summary, I expected the play to be about both of them in equal parts, but in reality, Gwen is only a supporting character, especially in the second half of the play. Which isn't to say there isn't another female lead in addition to Cathy, only she's not Gwen, and not mentioned anywhere in the summaries - she's Avery, who is one of Cathy's students and used to babysit for Gwen's kids. Avery (played with zest by Shannon Tarbet, a young actress I now must look out for). It's not Cathy's and Gwen's, but Cathy's and Avery's relationship that is at the heart of the play, not to mention that Avery tends to get the wittiest lines. Now, Cathy's mother, Cathy and Gwen, Avery all embody obviously different generations and different waves of feminism, but they're also characters in their own right, and the play is the type of theory-and-practice-debating play with one liners which I mostly associate with Shaw, only it's new and takes place in the US. I've looked up reviews and seen some complain that there is no female character who has both a career and kids at the same time, but imo that's beside the point - Avery has no idea whether or not she wants kids (she's 21), while Cathy regrets not having them, she isn't about to stop being a workoholic while playing family with Gwen's husband (the sole male character of the play and an amiable schlub), and while Gwen wants to get back to the academic life she abandoned when marrying, she's not intending to give up her kids.
What I suppose you could critisize is that the play doesn't really show us any of Gwen's time in Cathy's New York apartment - we only hear about it second hand via phone calls - and stays instead with Cathy in the small college town where Gwen and her husband Don live and Avery studies, but the Avery and Cathy interaction sparkles so much that I can't regret. Also Cathy's from a heartstroke recovering mother makes for an excellent (witty) Greek chorus. (And provides Martinis while Cathy and Avery debate 1970s horror movies.) It's not a play that offers some amazing new insights but it it's one that offers a very funny depiction of the inevitable imperfection of current day female life (in all its variations). Who says feminists are without a sense of humour?
Thursday was very rainy, so I first went to the National Gallery (me and half of London, but as opposed to the National Portrait Gallery, I hadn't visited the NG for years, and I did want to see some of these paintings in non-printed form again), which was, despite all the other people, a very relaxing thing to do. When wandering around the Impressionists, I was struck again by how many of them sat out the Franco-Prussian war in Britain, which was probably the most sensible thing to do, but can't have been that comfortable an exile, since they all went back once it was over.
Then I watched The Invisible Woman, because non-blockbuster foreign films which weren't co-produced with German money take sometimes a year or so before they get shown in our cinemas, and I really wanted to see this one, for various reasons: I had read Claire Tomalin's Dickens biography, which impressed me in its even handedness and vivacity, Claire Tomalin's report about how the film came to me, and the various reviews which assured me on what were the two most criticial points for me in advance to know: that this film would not excuse Dickens' behaviour by demonizing or denigrating his wife, that it would not play out Nelly against Catherine, on the one hand, but on the other that it would also manage to show just why so many people cared about Dickens as a person, not "just" as an author. (Because otherwise Nelly looks foolish.) And because Nelly's personality always eluded me in the biographies, I hoped for the film, which is after all fiction, to help out there. Which it did. Felicity Jones gives a sublime performances, and Ralph Fiennes as the director trusts her silences and trusts us to get it when, say, we see Nelly's expression after the death of her first child. Not that she doesn't have memorable outbursts, too. One of the great ways how silence and facial reaction can be a build up that heightens the effectiveness of the words eventually spoken comes when Nelly first shares a scene with Catherine, Dickens' wife (more about that in a moment, because Joanne Scanlan, who plays Catherine, has a wonderful tragic dignity throughout), then with Wilkie Collins' mistress/companion, Caroline, and then at least with Dickens himself. She hardly says anything in the first two scenes - it's the other women who talk - but you can see her reacting and her emotions coming to a boiling point, which at last happens when she's alone with Dickens. Because the film is fiction, it can show us something the biographies couldn't, for lack of primary source material from her - how did Nelly feel about the cruel way Dickens treated his wife, and how did she see her own position in this?
I already knew Fiennes had a good eye - his Corialanus is truly cinematic, not a filmed stage play, and uses its Balkan setting extremely well; The Invisible Women adds to that but also employs radio-like techniques which came to the cinema via Orson Welles and other creators who started out in radio. By which I mean the overlapping dialogue/monologue; we're visually still in one scene but hear already someone from the next speaking. Since the whole film is constructed as Nelly remembering, this comes across as weaving into and out of her memories, is extremely effective. There's also the repeated image of Nelly recalling her face mirrored in the window of a train compartment, the significance of which doesn't become clear until we get to the climax, the terrible train crash in which Dickens and Nelly were two of the passengers and the aftermath of which hammered home her position as the invisible woman of the title; she was hauled away so that no one would notice she'd been with him, he remained to help with the wounded.
Fiennes' performance as an actor is terrific, too, and one can see why Claire Tomalin wanted him to play the part. He conveys that sense of almost manic energy Dickens exuded (seriously, between the incredible workload, the amateur theatre, the charities and the long distance walks, the man hardly ever seems to have slept!), and most crucially both the dark and the light side, the compassion for the great number of disadvantaged and poor (and the fact he always saw them, and didn't look away unlike so many) on the one hand and the capacity for cruelty on the other hand which made him humiliate his wife in an unbearable manner. Because we like our judgments available, we'd prefer to think that a man capable of one is not of the other, or if he is, the former is somehow less valid or just pretense to gloss over the later; whereas Morgan's script and Fiennes' performance make it clear both a true.
Speaking of Abi Morgan's script, she slimmed down Dickens' incredibly large social circle to a mare minimum, and I can see why she made most of her choices; for example, the only one of Dickens' friends who gets a speaking part and a characterisation is Wilkie Collins (which means that among other things he also gets John Foster's role re: Great Expectations), but it makes sense to me she picked Collins, not Foster; Collins was not only the one whose play Dickens was staging and performing when he met Nelly Ternan but also the friend with the alternative life style, so to speak (which however allows Nelly some trenchant comments about how the feedom of living together without marriage is freedom for the men in these relationships, not the women), which makes him a better dramatic foil. Similarly, while we do see Dickens' and Catherine's large number of children, the only one with a speaking part and characterisation is their oldest son Charley. I regreted this a bit because their oldest daughter Kate (Katey, the later Kate Perugini) was a tremendously interesting person and actually one of the key sources we have on the whole Dickens separation issue, and the first person to go on public record about Nelly having been her father's mistress, which until then biographers had always denied; not to mention that her story was a whole Freudian side drama during the separation, as she and Nelly were the same age, she's played Nelly's role in Collins' drama The Frozen Deep together with her father the previous year, she got married to Wilkie Collins' brother just to get out of the house when her father made his children choose parents and to the indignation of Collins' mother was wearing black (her own mother wasn't allowed to attend the wedding), and the next morning her sister Mamey found Dickens literally sobbing into Katey's wedding dress and declaring it was all his fault that she married. But in a film, all of this would have distracted from the main story and the pov which was Nelly's, so the only Dickens' offspring with lines is Charley, aka the one who sided openly with his mother, defying his father, because Charley's role can be limited to this defiance and support. Incidentally, the scene where the letter Dickens' wrote to the Times (in reality just one of several letters to newspapers, but again, dramatic slimming down) brings home the fact this is real and irrevocable to Catherine and she who has tried to keep it together so hard finally crumbles is fantastic acting on Ms. Scanlan's part, and you're just glad the son is there because if ever someone needs a hug in that film...
While we're talking parents: Frances Ternan, Nelly's mother, is played by Kristin Scott Thomas, and Nelly's sisters are Amanda Hale and Perdita Weeks. I've seen someone make the complaint that Kristin Scott Thomas plays the mother of Ralph Fiennes love interest when not yet two decades ago she played the love interest as an example of film ageism, and this might have been valid were the characters fictional, but here she plays a historical character who was in fact the age Dickens' was, whereas her daughter was young enough to be his daughter, so the casting is accurate. Not to mention that it gives them some good scenes together, because Abi Morgan's script makes sure that the Ternan clan is fleshed out. Frances Ternan, not surprisingly, is the one who first clues into the fact that Dickens might be interested in her youngest daughter in a non-mentorly away, and the film gives her her own struggle and motivation: she - a succesful actress herself, who has acted as Desdemona to Edmund Kean's Othello - knows that of her three daughters, Nelly has the least acting talent and thus once Nelly is no longer young and pretty there won't be much of a career to hope for. And she knows and respects Dickens; he won't just wash his hands of Nelly once he's had her, he'll support her. But on the other hand, advising your child to become someone's mistress isn't an easy thing, either, just because you're part of a profession that's treated as immoral by many people anyway.
The framing narration of Nelly's life - after she reinvented herself and cut off ten years of her life - as the wife of a schoolmaster uses her repeated walks on the beach as a visual theme that later, in one of the flashbacks, finds its counterpart in Dickens' reading a passage from David Copperfield (David watching the storm and Ham and unrecognized yet Steerforth drowning) on one of his public readings, and you hear the sound of the sea intruding in several scenes. As a combination of Nelly's life and Dickens' works, this I found better done than the other combination because that's one of the few times where Abi Morgan's script imo gets too literal and clumsy, by letting Dickens quote Pip's words to Estella to Nelly. (Claire Tomalin does it in her biography as the narrator, speculating that this description of obsession is autobiographical though Estella is not a portrait of Nelly, but that's something you can do in a book as the author; letting Charles Dickens, as a character, quote this as something he feels about her is, well, clumsy.) And later you have older Nelly telling the Reverend who tries to get her to talk about her past that Pip and Estella not getting together was the right ending. As opposed to the sea metaphor, and older Nelly having picked up Dickens' obsessive walking habits, this leaves nothing to the audience's imagination and spells it all out. But this is really me nitpicking; overall it was an excellent film, and I'm glad I watched it now and won't have to wait for another year.
My last London play this year was The Knight of the Burning Pestle at the new Sam Wannamaker Playhouse, which is an addition to the Globe; an indoor Jacobean playhouse where the Globe company can now stage plays in winter, too. I had tried for the Duchess of Malfi, their first play in the new house, about which I'd heard great things, but it was completely sold out, so last night I could watch the premiere of the next play, Beaumont's rarely performed Knight of the Burning Pestle. I had never seen it on stage before, and haven't read it though I knew one or two scenes from books about the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre - since it is a play-within-a-play type of drama, which breaks the fourth wall with gusto, it gets quoted as an (of course dramatically exaggareted) example of what the stage practice of the day would have been. As it turns out, it is ideal for this particular theatre, which is build similar to the Swan in Stratford, only completely in wood, modelled on the Blackfriars Playhouse. So as opposed to the Globe, you have this relatively small space, with the basic archetectural structure of a refectory with a nod to an alehouse, all in wood. I'd been warned about the hard seats, but let me tell you, for the Bayreuth-trained theatre and opera enthusiast, this was downright comfortable by comparison. Also the play was very much about audience participation; the other thing I was told was that for the Duchess of Malfi, everything was completely dark except for the candles used for lighting. Not so here; the doors were always open, partly because at some points the characters ran off stage and through them and back again, but also because the audience reactions were part of the play so you needed the audience to be visible.
The Knight of the Burning Pestle presents you, among other things, with a London citizen, a grocer, his wife and his apprentice going to a play, not being content with what they watch as they don't like the hero and taking over the plot, inserting a new character, their apprentice, in it who is to have all types of glorious adventures which suspiciously resemble Don Quixote (a book which was out in Spanish but not yet in English at the time so there is some debate whether Beaumont had read it) while the actors try to stage their original play (which is about a London merchant's apprentice being forbidden to marry said merchant's daughter and after all sorts of shenanigans getting together with her anyway), which doesn't fit the demanded adventure plots at all. It's the kind of thing which sounds hopelessly confusing when written but when staged as it was last night really is hilarious, with the whole audience cheering Rafe on when he has his Quixotic adventures and adoring the Citizen and his Wife who were the heart of the performance and sat among the audience commenting when they weren't on stage trying to help the actors/their characters. They are basically Jacobean fandom living the fans-know-everything-better-anyway dream (which tells me Francis Beaumont must have been lectured by fanboys and fangirls a lot), and presented with great affection. Instead of the usual break ca. halfway through a play, for this play we got three interludes that lasted about four minutes during which there were on stage dances, and during which also food and drinks were sold as well (yes, you could, in the true Jacobean spirit, eat and drink during the performance, though at one point one of the actors of The London Merchant went down to the Citizen's wife and took her food away, and one longer, fifteen minutes interlude announced as "privvy break". Like I said, this was pretty much the Rocky Horror Show type of live performance audience experience, Jacobean style, and terrific fun from beginning to end.
Today: the sun has come back! Will walk a while before heading off to the airport - my flight is in the afternoon. What a trip!
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