Intimations of Hope

Intimations of Hope

The idealistic Konstantin, humiliated by his famous mother, the actress Irina Arkidina, his play publicly dismissed as ridiculous, tries to shoot himself but instead shoots a seagull and presents the corpse to Nina, the daughter of a neighbouring landowner, whom he adores.  Nina is disturbed and disgusted, but shows it to the sinister Trigorin, a famous writer and house guest, who notes down the metaphor for future use.   Nina is in thrall to Trigorin.  She sees in him an opportunity to escape the cage of the family estate and take... Read more »

An Ideal Husband

An Ideal Husband

So how should we regard the delectable Mrs Chevely, with her arch looks and glittering Lamia gown  so wonderfully nuanced by Ms Bond?  Lord Goring has no doubt.   ‘She looks like a woman with a past, doesn’t she?   Most pretty women do.  But there is a fashion in pasts just as... Read more »

You shouldn’t ever go back

You shouldn’t ever go back

I rarely watch television.  Most of it is rubbish; idiotic game shows, predictable soaps, tedious news commentary and mind numbing adverts.  But ‘The Song of Lunch’,  the dramatisation of Christopher Reid’s narrative, superbly performed by Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson,  was something different.    Shocking, intense and bleak, the poem is... Read more »

En vacances avec Monsieur Hulot

He’s one of those awkward people,  too tall and not quite coordinated.  He doesn’t so much walk as bounce along on the balls of his feet, his body held forward as if nearly falling over.  it’s like he is not of this world. He seems out of place, confused as if... Read more »

The Real Thing

I thought it was going to be too clever by half, a criticism so often levelled at Stoppard and parodied in the character of Henry, the playwright.  Was his writing the real thing or just or just the defensive manipulations of an expert wordsmith, obfuscating, confusing, keeping everything ambivalent.  Or... Read more »

The Depressive Dance of Denial

It is August 1939, the world is going to change forever but the bright young things still cling to the escapism of the previous decade.  Alcoholic hedonism helped this generation blot out the traumas of the First World War, and now they use it to blank out the looming prospect... Read more »

Through a Glass Darkly

The family are on holiday in their house on an island in the Swedish archipelago.  The sky and sea are grey, the house basic, the paint stripped, the wood bleached by the salt air, the family exposed and vulnerable.  Karin has been ill in hospital with schizophrenia.  Her husband Martin,... Read more »

When the orchestra is mad, who can be sane?

Tom Stoppard is of my generation.  Although, of course, I never knew him personally,  he has been part of my growing up.  I took Marion to see ‘Jumpers’ in the nineteen seventies.  It was the play that I remember best.  I still have the script somewhere.  It inspired a love... Read more »

Possession; on stage and off it.

Good actors, declared Sir Richard Eyre, speaking last week at The Guild of Psychotherapists annual lecture, have to be possessed by the characters they are playing.  They have to immerse themselves in their character’s world, feel what it is like to be them, experience the passion and then act it... Read more »

War without end; Amen.

Armies pursued each other around Europe; soldiers, little better than animals laid waste the countryside, taking what they wanted, burning, raping, killing, no longer knowing, if they ever did, the reason why.  It had been a good war for Mother Courage, for a time. She became a camp follower, trailing... Read more »