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January 5th, 2006
10:27 pm - Wodehouse, Jeeves in the Offing
I needed something to relax with after a day's packing for Stratford. Wodehouses are all the same, but they're still suitably giggly.
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January 4th, 2006
11:29 am - Judges
Not far into this one yet, I got side-tracked by chatting to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) catnip_junkie. Nice to see a woman being a Judge.
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January 2nd, 2006
11:28 am - Joshua
Smiting and land distribution. *yawn* At least it's short.
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January 1st, 2006
10:15 pm - Film: [someone], Love's Labour's Lost
Much better than I expected, someone had said this one was crap. The play isn't fantastic, though it'll be very useful for looking at the romance myth and homosocial relationships, but they did it well. Eighteenth century setting, which meant maximum opportunities for camp with a few different twists from the usual. Mike Gwilym looked most peculiar in a blond wig, he's very obviously a brunette and his eyes are generally so dark (not to mention a strange shape) that it looked ridiculous on him. He still managed to be rather magnetic at times, which was just wrong. The duet at the end was sung exquisitely, obviously a professional recording, and I must find out who set it, it was superb. The music throughout was generally lovely, I spotted some Mozartean strains, though nothing that I knew personally.
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December 31st, 2005
06:59 pm - Lester, ed., Three Late Medieval Morality Plays
Yes, I am spending New Year's Eve readng medieval drama. It's not hugely thrilling, but I'm sure it'll be useful somewhere.
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December 30th, 2005
03:02 pm - Shakespeare, Henry V
Currently about half-way through, peacefully making notes and trying to get it finished before Shabbat comes in. The plot summary is going well, it's all making much more sense now, but the relationship diagram is probably going to turn nightmarish. There are just too many people in it, I'm praying they don't start having complicated relationships with each other.
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December 28th, 2005
03:03 pm - Films: [someone], As You Like It; [someone], Hamlet
CM and I gave up ten minutes into AYLI out of boredom as it was noticeabley flat, with the most appalling wrestling scene and Helen Mirren showing no signs that she can actually act. I'll probably watch it later if I really need to.
Half-way through Hamlet, and with a few blips, such as hilariously bad ghost scenes (the ghost looks like a cross between the Green Giant and something out of sci-fi, and the music is horrendous), it's excellent. Jacobi is a marvellous Hamlet, very much sane (though fucked-up, of course), intelligent, and playing power games like there's no tomorrow, as are they all. Instead of the "antic disposition" being just a crap response that causes disaster, it's now a case of "it seemed a good idea at the time". His actions do throw the court into turmoil and make things start to be revealed. Patrick Stewart is a charming and astute Claudius, as I've always wanted to see. (I've got a soft spot for Claudius. The Hamlets would drive anyone to murder.) He doesn't lose his cool at all in the play-within-a-play, which gets increasingly out of order as Hamlet starts walking around the stage joining in, to the actors' obvious discomfiture. At one point the Player King, who's meant to be asleep, just sits there looking at Hamlet, waiting for him to finish interrupting. So when it gets truly out of hand, and the insult to Claudius and Gertrude is obvious, Claudius calmly calls for a torch, walks up to the cowering, grinning Hamlet, holds the light in his face and gives him a steady look, then turns smartly and orders everyone, "Away". It makes far more sense than the usual way it's staged, which is to have Claudius overcome with guilt and calling out, "Give me some light!" as a random, and nonsensical, expression of distress. Hamlet quickly cottons on to all the spying. They borrowed people getting Guildenstern and Rosencrantz muddled up from Stoppard and it means that Hamlet makes it very clear to them that he's not believing that nonsense about them being old friends concerned for his welfare. Hamlet's flirtation/aggression is suitably odd, and the closet scene suitably incestuous.
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December 27th, 2005
02:17 am - Shakespeare, Richard II
See, I'm being a good girl. I'm still on the first scene. Arden editions scare me. There were five pages of footnotes on the dramatis personae alone.
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December 26th, 2005
11:10 pm - Deuteronomy; Film: [some BBC director], Julius Caesar
I was really half-asleep when doing my Bible stint in front of the lightbox this morning, but I got the impression that Deuteronomy is rather a strange, mixed bag.
Hmm. Not terribly exciting. I preferred Charles Grey's Pandarus to his Caesar. There was a woman-cat hybrid yowling at a high, though quiet, pitch in the crowd scenes, which incidentally didn't really work. Might look at the Brutus-Cassius relationship some time. And there was all that "would you be so kind as to kill me?" "no, sod off" "could you kill me?" "no" "please, someone, kill me!" "oh go away" "damn it, why can I never get laid?" subtext to the stabbings. Do stabbings always have to be so intimate? I mean, is it necessary for the stabbee to embrace the stabber? Or is the Beeb just full of slashers?
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December 25th, 2005
10:07 pm - Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus; film: Howell, Titus Andronicus
I got fifteen minutes into the film and gave up in utter boredom. It was the most wooden thing I've seen in my life (though Trevor Peacock might have made a good Titus eventually), and I already have the fabulous Taymor film, so I'll keep this in reserve for if I'm ever studying the staging or something. I then curled up to make notes on the play while chatting to angevin2, pausing to discuss some of the odder features, such as the way Bassianus' ring lights up in that peculiar pit scene, or why Titus has 25 sons and how he produced them.
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December 24th, 2005
08:03 pm - Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale; Film: Moshinsky, All's Well That Ends Well
Starting to write up The Winter's Tale for uni. I think I'm going to get very fond of this strange play.
All's Well wasn't the most entertaining film to watch, between its being a rather unpleasant and unsatisfying play, and between the ugliness of the actress playing Helen. It'll be interesting to compare with others as far as the sexual politics go, though, especially the gender reversal of common motifs such as forced marriage.
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December 23rd, 2005
10:03 pm - Numbers; film: Jones, Pericles
Numbers isn't being as boring as I remembered it, and I managed to get half-way through in this morning's stint in front of the lightbox.
Pericles was amazing. It must be an absolute bugger to produce, and how on earth did they get that reconciliation scene to work? It was nothing like what I'd expected, the whole episodic romance quest thing and the fairy-taleishness, but it was fantastic. Anyway, more when I'm less tired.
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December 22nd, 2005
10:18 pm - Film: Howell, The Winter's Tale
Another stylised set, and one that I liked very much. Also one that I'll describe some day when I'm less tired, but it was simple without being boring and wonderfully evocative. Robert Stephens was marvellous as Polixenes, warm and not quite camp. Neither he, Leontes nor Hermione aged appreciably, which was a little confusing, but this play is nowhere near realism so who care. I don't know who Robin Kermode (Florizel) is, but he's cute. Paulina was most commanding, and personally I reckon she'd been living in sin with Hermione for all those years until Hermione finally decided to give the jealous old bugger another chance.
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December 21st, 2005
10:12 pm - Films: Rakoff, Romeo and Juliet; Howell, Henry VI Part 1
I've never been that interested in R&J, but it was perfectly acceptable. It was strange seeing Alan Rickman looking so young as Tybalt, especially since his voice was the same as now. Michael Hordern was a very good Capulet, and this is the first time I've realised that his marriage to Lady C must have had the dodgiest age gap in existance (a thirteen year old girl and a man in middle age), while his haste to marry Juliet off is rather odd. Juliet was the right age for once. She didn't quite have the emotional maturity or command over the verse, but it was good to see it being done accurately like that, and I kept thinking, "eurghh, she's an absolute child!" They all seemed so young by now, I'm the age Lady C is meant to be and the lads were all so boyish, bounding around and teasing each other and mock-flirting and getting pissed and getting into duels. Celia Johnson was generally an excellent Nurse, calmer and more likeable than the usual caricature, although the scene where she tells Juliet that Romeo has been banished was downplayed to the point that it made no sense, since she's meant to be so distraught she's getting everything out in the wrong order, and she looked far too old to have been breastfeeding twelve years earlier.
I gave up half-way through HVI, I have to confess. I was completely lost. I'll get to know the histories properly, then I'll come back to it. Talbot and Joan were intriguing me, though. This tetralogy has been set in a children's playground, which will gradually decay in the later plays. Not sure if I like that yet.
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December 20th, 2005
06:22 pm - Films: Miller, The Taming of the Shrew, Timon of Athens; Giles, Henry V;
Shrew was excellent. They cut the Induction as per usual, but were very true indeed to the spirit and social mores of the text. It was a sharply-done version, and the comedy worked all the better for it. John Cleese was a fabulous Petrucchio, serious for quite a lot of the time but still putting his gifts for comedy to excellent use. Moments that stood out were when he turned up for his wedding bare-chested, in a shabby brown jacket (jerkin?) with a huge sunflower pinned to it, and a preposterous three-cornered hat with narrow feathers several feet long attached. He was already taller than the rest of the cast, and well over a foot taller than Sarah Badel as Katherina, which just increased the effect. Another lovely moment was when he's finally producing food after she's been starving all day, spends ages praying silently and supposedly piously, and then the servants nervously produce some meat. They cut his portion first, and while they were cutting Katherina's he was bending down and sniffing it in imitable Cleese style, just before he rejected it. The violence wasn't nearly as overplayed as in the Zefirelli version, though both showed that they had a nasty temper. You got the impression that Petrucchio had outsmarted Katherina, although of course he's doing most of it through male privilege. She seemed to like him by the end, they had a couple of tender kisses, which I wasn't sure about, but it's almost impossible, that side of things. Her submission speech was suitably ambiguous, delivered fairly calmly and while sitting at the table at his side, and delivered deadpan and smiling as if she were giving a talk. When she offered to put her hand under his foot, she smiled and gave him her hand to hold. The thing about that relationship, once it gets to the scene where they encounter Vincentio, is that you never know how far they're putting on the submissive wife act in public, as Petrucchio says they are doing of fighting earlier on, or whether she's really knuckled under and if so, how she feels about it.
Next I watched Henry V, which wasn't as bad as I'd feared, although Gwillim was indeed rather bland. Hotspur had been resurrected, cunningly changed his hair, and betrayed the King as Cambridge. I attempted to watch Timon of Athens but gave up 2/3 of the way through out of unutterable boredom. They could possibly have filmed it in a more interesting way, but generally I blame Shakespeare for that one.
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December 19th, 2005
06:18 pm - Film: Giles, Henry IV Part 2
M4M was rather disappointing in the end. Isabella continued to look pretty, speak in thrilling tones but be completely uninteresting, and the Duke's eye make-up continued to be completely distracting. It made him look like a cross between a large sort of ape and a drag queen with no fashion sense. Lucio was rather funky, though. I definitely did not approve of the way Isabella gave the Duke a long (but expressionless) look when he proposed the second time, then smiled, gave him her hand and walked off happily with him. It wasn't even like they'd built up a relationship between them through glances and such.
And, um, I can't think of a thing to say about 2H4, apart from what angevin2 and I have already established about Jon Finch being strangely compelling despite the fact that he's covered with sores.
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December 18th, 2005
07:21 pm - Films: Moshinsky, A Midsummer Night's Dream; Davis, Measure for Measure
( Read more... )
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07:08 pm - Films: Burge, Much Ado About Nothing; Giles, Henry IV, Part 1
Much Ado partially suffered from the dreadful type of outdoor set used in Two Gentlemen, though the indoor sets were fine. The orchard didn't look quite as bad in the evening scenes. I was eager to see Robert Lindsay as Benedick, but they seem to be playing the comedies quite dark and he played Benedick as a miserable sod, to be frank. The chemistry with Cherie Lunghi's moderately charming Beatrice didn't really warm up until the end. Jon Finch looked very stylish - and gay - as Don Pedro; I'm not sure how far the gay bit is supported by the text, but it certainly makes sense of the way Beatrice mock-flirts with him. Robert Reynolds was a darkly cute and convincing Claudio, and Vernon Dobtcheff a calmly sinister Don John.
I then got some bloody work done with Henry IV. Sort of work: I'm not studying it, but I'm studying Richard II and Henry V, so I really need to know what's happening in between. Yes, the Middle Ages really was an awful time for men's haircuts. I particularly liked Tim Pigott-Smith's hot-tempered yet charming Hotspur, with a rumpled curly red wig (noticeably bad around the moustache area, but I tried to ignore that), though I was puzzled by the way his eyes changed from brown to blue near the end of the film. The duel with Hal was badly shot but nicely choregraphed. It's the only time the two men meet, though everyone has been commenting throughout the play on how they ought to, and there was a fair bit of grinning at each other across the swords. No, not in a gay way, in fact this might be the only film of the lot so far that wasn't Very Very Gay. Hal was rather chilling in the scene when he and Falstaff stage a mock-interview between Hal and his father, where it went from everyone in the pub laughing away to you realising that he really is going to drop Falstaff like a hot potato later on. The relationship with Falstaff was charming yet edgy, stealing from and lying to each other and still comrades.
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December 17th, 2005
05:02 pm - Films: Moshinsky, Cymbeline, Coriolanus; Miller, Troilus and Cressida
( Hurrah is the only word for all of this )
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December 16th, 2005
04:54 pm - Films: Taylor, The Two Gentlemen of Verona; Jones, The Merry Wives of Windsor
New Shakespeare collection arrived today! Two Gentlemen was the first I saw, and I suspect one of the weakest of the set. If they hadn't had a terrible, ill-lit set (a couple of very fake-looking courtyard type scenes, with particularly fake-looking greenery) and some rather awful hairdos, not to mention a better Julia, it might have come off a lot better, but it did seem to be the cheap-and-crappy type of filming which can spoil quite good acting. Julia had very obviously artificial hair and just pushed it under a cap, plus changing into boy's clothes, of course, and this was meant to make her utterly unrecognisable as a woman, but suddenly all was make clear when she took the cap off. Yeah, right. Proteus had this dreadful blond wig, he looked much better as Fenton in the next film (later edit: actually, that turned out to be a different actor), and Valentine had what looked like a mullet but wasn't quite, and was nice enough but didn't have enough of a presence to make it likely that a crew of bandits would immediately pick him to be their leader. It's probably the only film of that play in existence, so it'll be useful, and I did like Julia's father and Launce (with his too well-behaved but still cute dog).
Merry Wives was far better, with a set that was either the real outdoors or actual Elizabethan (-style?) buildings. It had a great cast, with Richard Griffiths as a marvellous Falstaff, Prunella Scales being fabulous as usual as Mistress Page, Ben Kingsley being quite different from how I've seen him before as Ford, and assorted other big names in theatre. And they played the accidental same-sex marriages at the end how I've always wanted, namely with the boy "brides" standing by their "grooms", looking them up and down and grinning from ear to ear. Slender was fairly obviously gay, anyway. I think they're trying to make sure that at least someone in each production is.
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02:26 pm - Manning, ed., Libertine plays of the Restoration; Leviticus
I'm skipping the ones I've read before (Marriage a la Mode, The Rover), but so far I've read Shadwell's The Libertine. It's the most brutal version of the Don Juan myth I've encountered, with rapes and murders all over the place. You can tell that da Ponte was borrowing from this one, certain parts are almost verbatim Don Giovanni.
After a bit of a blip, the early-morning (i.e. while I'm perched in front of the lightbox with my eyes on matchsticks) Bible-reading project is back on. I had no idea that locusts and grasshoppers were kosher.
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December 15th, 2005
11:44 pm - Opera: [Glyndebourne production], Le Nozze di Figaro; Rubens, The Waiting Game
Mozart. *sigh* There werea few snags with this production, namely that the orchestra tended to drown the singers and the conductor took some terrible liberties with the tempo (Deh Vieni was much too fast, although nicely sung, and I bristled when he suddenly hoiked up the speed in the middle of Per tutti contenti, saremo cosi), plus the performances in general weren't exactly spectacular, but it was still lovely. It's actually the first time I've seen the entire opera, though I've been a chorus wench, listened to the CD, and sung from the vocal score for years. A lot of things dropped into place, and apart from anything else, how have I missed just how queer this opera is? Probably because I hadn't studied theories about cuckoldry plots and such last time I was paying attention to what happens in the opera.
Cherubino was adorable, I wanted to steal her away home with me. It's funny, you know perfectly well that it's a woman in the part, but you do believe the costume, so that when the Count accidentally snogged Cherubino in Act IV, it seemed more transgressive than when Cherubino was rolling around with the women. They kept putting her into boxes, and the scenes where Susanna makes her up as a woman and where Figaro tells her about life in the army were hilarious.
CM was with me, his first ever opera. We met up with catnip_junkie, who gave me a beautiful red scarf for my birthday, and her mother at the interval. We also ran into four people from synagogue and a tutor from the Eng Lit department a few rows ahead of us, who was wrapped around his lady companion in a way that suggested that I should get hold of mutual friends and find out the gossip.
Then I came home, pootled around briefly, and read the Rubens before going to sleep. Not quite the style of dark comedy I was in the mood for, it's set in an old people's home, but I've been reading so many plays recently, I just needed to read a modern novel for once.
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December 14th, 2005
09:22 pm - Shakespeare, Hamlet; Film: Zefirelli, Hamlet
Someone needs to shoot Mel Gibson. Now. Blandest Hamlet I've seen in my life. He almost managed a creepy smirk at one point, but stifled it and went back to wide-eyed boringness. At moments of great emotion, his mouth hung open. Glenn Close wasn't too bad, it didn't show what she was capable of (probably due to cutting). Bonham Carter was fabulous. Poor Ophelia, she's such a dim creature as well as being torn apart by being unable to choose between her lover and her husband. Stephen Dillane was a nice Horatio, didn't get to say much. I remember him being a fabulous Hamlet on stage about twelve years ago. Something which annoyed me in Shrew the other day and which reappeared here was inconsistency about the length of the women's hair. You can't have hair which is thigh length when plaited in one scene, and waist length when loose in the next, at least not on the same woman. At Ophelia's funeral, she was wearing the same hairstyle she had worn in early scenes, which meant that after her death her hair had been beautifully combed (death by drowning after madness, it'd have been pretty tangled) and put into the kind of style which takes a bit of work and which has to be done on someone who is sitting or standing up. What was even more ridiculous with Shrew was that Liz Taylor's eye make-up was immaculate throughout, despite being dunked in a pond and left out in the snow and then sleeping in it, and at no point was said make-up remotely appropriate anyway.
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December 13th, 2005
06:18 pm - Film: Giles, Richard II
Three hours long, and that was with what seemed to be quite a bit of cutting, judging from when I dived into my Arden to see where we'd got to (very much an "are we nearly there yet?" thing, I kept promising myself, "One more act and then I can get some chocolate from the student union shop"). Rather bewildering as I've not read the play before and my knowledge of history is nil, but it'll probably make the reading much easier. Derek Jacobi was fab and rather queeny. It's one of the BBC productions where it's filmed on a stage, but made as a film rather than taken from a stage production, so it's clearer than some other filmed stage versions of Shakespeare I've seen. The camerawork is decent, no music, not as visually interesting as a film proper but then you get the highest proportion of original text plus a chance to see what it looks like in a theatre.
The Middle Ages really wasn't a high point for men's haircuts.
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December 12th, 2005
06:22 pm - Film: Zefirelli, The Taming of the Shrew; Levin, Where There's Smoke, There's Salmon
Possibly it was because I was short of sleep and just not in the mood, but the Zefirelli really depressed me (and on my birthday, too). Shrew is depressing enough as it is, being a portrait of an abusive marriage, but there are various ways you can play the "comedy". They could have made it almost like panto, as in that Comedy of Errors I saw last week. Instead, they played it as comedy to a certain extent, but really upped the violence, so you got to see Liz Taylor and Richard Burton wrecking all the scenery, and then still presented it as a love story, which was even nastier. You spent half the film worried that Petrucchio was about to rape Katherina. The music was infuriating. OK, music doesn't have to be of the same period as the film is set in (though it's fantastic if it is, such as the brilliant use of Handel in The Madness of King George), but if you're going to include modern music in a film set centuries ago, don't make the music part of the action, i.e. played and even sung by the characters. Eurghh.
The Levin is a book of Jewish proverbs my parents sent to me as an interim birthday present (no idea what they're getting me properly, I've been despairingly-jokingly requesting a new oven or cooker hood, as mine are buggered), and it's fairly crap as those things go, but ah well, it was very sweet of them.
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December 11th, 2005
09:49 pm - Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew
So much easier to zip through and make notes on than Cymbeline, either because I know it already or because Cymbeline is just barking crazy. I mean, cross-dressed gay necrophiliac incest? What were you on, Shakespeare?
I've also finally finished the Four Jacobean Sex Tragedies. I got a little lost in the last one, which featured a rape victim being told by her husband, "Oh dear, has he raped you? You'll be committing suicide immediately, of course?", mainly when they were all charging around killing each other and themselvse and doing the odd political coup in between gorefests. Generally I've really enjoyed that anthology, and judging from the number of extraordinarily committed male-male "friendships" in there, which give Shakespeare a run for his money, I'm guessing that the editor is gay.
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06:27 pm - Proulx, Close Range
A lot of people have been talking about the new gay cowboy film, so I thought I'd read the Proulx short story it was based on. It makes a change from early modern drama, anyway. Good collection, though a bit creepy at times. I've never liked Western films, so the whole cowboy way of life seems rather alien to me.
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December 9th, 2005
12:47 am - Lovric, ed., Women's Wicked Wit
I picked this up to find a quotation and ended up rereading the whole thing. Always good for a giggle. A couple of quotations on sexual politics/chastity caught my eye:
"Man's subconscious mind still feels that there is not the same dishonour in lying to a woman as in lying to a man."
- Elinor Glyn
"The resistance of a woman is not always a proof of her virtue, but more frequently of her experience."
- Ninon de Lenclos
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December 8th, 2005
06:31 pm - Film: August, Pelle the Conqueror
My parents have been getting quite a few free films in cardboard jackets with their newspaper, and have sent a few up to me. This one was Angst and Growth on a Nasty Farm in Nineteenth Century Denmark.
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December 7th, 2005
12:41 am - Film: Casson, The Comedy of Errors
This is one of the filmed stage productions at the RSC, which means that as a film it leaves something to be desired, but it does show you what it would look like on stage and it's cut far less (and they occasionally cut to show you the audience, which is most irritating). It's played as madcap farce, with a good few musical numbers which are based on the original text and then carefully expanded. And suddenly I can see how it's meant to work. The ubiquitous beatings are played as pure clowning, Antipholus chasing Dromio around with a rolled-up newspaper, Dromio performing acrobatics while getting away, but then one of the Dromios' monologues about how his master always beats him is turned into a song, and while the capering increases the comedy, it does sharpen the focus on the very odd master-servant relationship. Also known as Shakespeare: the S&M version. Judi Dench is marvellous as always, and it's nice to see her looking younger than usual.
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