by flares

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years

Barney Norris, Nightfall (Director: Laurie Sansom, Br/dge Theatre)

So the incredible success of the in-the-round production of Julius Caesar was evidentially not enough to tempt people into trying a new play in a thrust layout; I was upgraded from Gallery 3 to Gallery 2. Barney Norris is a name I know but I’ve not read his two novels nor seen his earlier plays, which are clearly carving out chamber dramas in the Hampshire/Wiltshire region. There is a rural beauty, if you try hard enough to see it, but aspiration points to Southampton or the Basingstoke of Despond. (The bright lights of London, the Carole King musical and the last train home are also in reach, but you suspect that’s a rip off.)
Continue reading →

by flares

Wired Worlds

This was commissioned for a project that seems to have vanished, but I needed to write a couple of sentences for a chapter on the topic… I thought this text would be on my harddrive, but it’s hiding if it is. Fortunately I rarely delete emails.

 

Welt am Draht (World on a Wire/World on Wires) (Westdeutscher Rundfunk, 1973)

Adapted from Daniel F. Galouye, Counterfeit World/Simulacron-3 (1964)

(Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder; Sc. Fritz Müller-Scherz and Rainer Werner Fassbinder; Pr. Peter Märthesheimer and Alexander Wesemann; Cin. Michael Ballhaus and Ulrich Prinz; P.D. Horst Giese, Walter Koch and Kurt Raab; starring Klaus Löwitsch (Fred Stiller), Barbara Valentin (Gloria Fromm), Mascha Rabben (Eva Vollmer), Karl Heinz Vosgerau (Herbert Siskins), Wolfgang Schenck (Franz Hahn), Kurt Raab (Mark Holm)) Continue reading →

by flares

Only Hook-Up

Matthew Lopez, The Inheritance (directed by Stephen Daldry, Young Vic)

Inevitably, when faced with a two part, seven-hour play about young gay men in New York, the memory returns to Angels in America. But this is twenty years later, new rather than revived, and focuses on a generation of gay men for whom AIDS is more treatable and preventable, given the right connections to health care. Coming out is less of an issue now, the anxiety is over whether to marry and how to adopt — a transgressive gay culture has been replaced with a nice apartment, kids and a weekend home somewhere upstate. For better or worse. In fact, some of the characters express nostalgia for the community in the era of HIV and ACT UP, as the heterotopia of the gay bar, the bath house, the sauna and the heath are replaced by Grindr (other apps are available).
Continue reading →

by flares

Only Dissect

My degree began with Modernist literature, which was both a good and bad thing, and I remember finding E.M. Forster a chore even at the time. He didn’t have the transgressive potential of a Conrad, a Woolf or a Joyce, but he didn’t fit into my sense of the Victorian novel. Whilst his distinction between story and plot in Aspects of the Novel continued to be useful, I had a sense that he couldn’t plot for shit. Too often a key scene was obscure (whatever happened in the cave) or took place between the chapters (the death of Mrs Moore). He fell between two stools.

Continue reading →

by flares

Shhh!

A Quiet Place (John Krasinski, 2018)

A few years ago, Tim Lebbon wrote a novel about a subterranean species who had been living in a cave system and hunted by sound. When disturbed, they start attacking and killing humans, until society collapses. A family, including a hearing impaired person, try to find a safe place to survive.

Continue reading →

by flares

Beauty and the

Beast (Michael Pearce, 2017)

Among the trailers before my screening – which included a trailer for Beast — was an advert featuring villages walking along a twilight rural-ish road toward a beach at the bottom of a set of cliffs and then a series of black horses running toward them. I was reminding of an equivalent community parade in Broadchurch, and the disappearance and murder at the heart of that. (Lloyds claim we are not alone and that they are by our side, which is less convincing if they’ve closed your branch.)

Continue reading →