To Stratford-upon-Avon this week for the World Shakespeare Congress 2016, an international gathering of academics held only once every five years in a different location each time. This being the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death, the eminent Shakespeareans have come to Britain for a week split between the birth place and the city where he worked. A full programme of lectures, panels, seminars and drinking lies ahead.
This morning RSC Artistic Director Gregory Doran got things off to a splendid start with a plenary lecture about screen adaptations of previous RSC productions, and showed a range of clips including fragments from The Wars of the Roses, 1965, and his 2000 Macbeth film with Tony Sher and Harriet Walter, both of which we publish on DVD. He also included part of the RSC Live from Stratford-upon-Avon cinema broadcast of Hamlet that came from here just under two months ago. Indeed the rather fuzzy picture above is of Paapa Essiedu performing ‘To be or not to be…’ on a screen mounted on the stage exactly where he gave the speech for the broadcast. read more »
Today’s links to articles that I have found interesting or stimulating over the past seven days. Thanks as always to those who have pointed me towards some of them, via Twitter and in other ways, and apologies for the absence of appropriate name-checks.
• Clinging sixties: D.J. Taylor for the TLS on British literary culture in 1966…
• BG (before Granta…): … and in a complementary post, here is Michael Caines on the TLS blog introducing the latest volume of the Oxford History of the Novel in English; edited by Peter Boxall and Bryan Cheyette, this takes on ‘British and Irish Fiction since 1940’…
As you may have noticed I am fascinated by the developing forms of ‘event cinema’. I even have a go at producing some from time to time, including the recent Almeida Theatre Live: Richard III. Live theatre, operas, concerts and the like is often compelling on a large screen and is invariably enhanced when watched with an engaged audience. So I’m always intrigued to experience experiments with the form, like this afternoon’s WorldCup66 Live. As you read what follows, remember that I dabble with similar projects, so I may be unfairly biased. But I feel fairly certain that you too would think that this was a muddled and shambolic farrago. (Incidentally the BBC photograph above has nothing to do with the WorldCup66 event, but is just a glorious production shot from the television operation in 1966, and comes from here.) read more »
On Wednesday the Guardian reported that the Edinburgh Festival was offering a refund to opera lovers who had purchased tickets for Christophe Honoré’s production of Così fan tutte (above). First seen at Aix-en-Provence earlier this month, the production is apparently a “provocative and sexually explicit take on Mozart’s opera” that “contains adult themes and nudity”. Moreover, Honoré has set Mozart’s tale of amorous couples in Eritrea in the late 1930s, when the east African country was colonised by Mussolini’s Italy. At the Festival’s website is an informative page with full credits, more information and further photographs.
In a New York Times review (which the Edinburgh Festival has also sent to ticket holders), Zachary Woolfe described the production as ‘a dark, demanding staging that speaks all too clearly to our time’; and he wrote
Honoré’s staging is, for whites – that is, for almost everyone watching here – often a brutal, shaming experience, as the black Africans onstage are shoved, dragged, ground against and used as avatars, fantasies and objects, encountered as spurs for white imaginations rather than as people.
Which makes it sound deeply intriguing. All the more welcome then that, for those of us who can’t get to Edinburgh, an excellent three-hour recording made in Aix by the French television channel ARTE is available online. read more »
A day late, I know, but here’s this week’s list of links to articles that I’ve found interesting or stimulating over the past seven days. Thanks as always to those who have pointed me towards some of them, via Twitter and in other ways, and apologies for the absence of appropriate name-checks.
• Brexit blues: John Lanchester for LRB: thoughtful, not totally gloomy and completely essential.
• Fences – a Brexit diary: Zadie Smith similarly has to be read, from the New York Review of Books.
• The English revolt: and in a third vital contribution to the debate, the distinguished historian Robert Tombs takes the long view on Brexit, Euroscepticism and the future of the United Kingdom, for New Statesman – I don’t agree with all of this, but he makes a strong case.
The convention is that you don’t write in detail about productions with which you have been involved. But I’m going to do so here, even though I am executive producer on the programme. I feel justified because this adaptation is entirely the creative achievement of screen director Ross MacGibbon, producer Lucie Conrad and a really great team of collaborators.
Moreover, I doubt that anyone else will notice the production in print, and if they do it will most likely be regarded as simply a ‘capture’ of the theatre event. But it is more, considerably more, than that, and I want to tease out a little of why this is so. I also want to assert that the experience of watching these dances on the screen in this interpretation is, straightforwardly and objectively, better than having been at Sadler’s Wells. read more »
Two Brexit links and a clutch pointing to pieces about Pokémon GO, plus other things that I’ve found interesting or stimulating over the past seven days. Thanks as always to those who have pointed me towards some of them, via Twitter and in other ways, and apologies for the absence of appropriate name-checks.
• England’s last gasp of empire: Ben Judah for The New York Times nails the idea that this is the way the Empire ends, most certainly not with a bang but with the nastiest of whimpers…
• Liberalism after Brexit: … and Will Davies extends his detailed, rigorous analysis of the fundamental ideas behind Brexit – this is another essential article by him. read more »
Academic open access publishing is a complex issue but developments in the field mean that an increasing number of titles are available as freely downloadable e-books. I think one of the services that this blog can provide is highlighting a different volume each week, beginning today with the collection The British monarchy on screen, edited by Mandy Merck. Manchester University Press published this as a hardback in February at the eye-watering price (sadly, quite usual now for academic volumes) of £70. But now thanks to Oapen online library and MUP it can be legitimately accessed here as a free downloadable .pdf. read more »
In the medieval streets of the French town of Cahors yesterday, son Nick and daughter Kate were delighted to teach their grandmother Beryl how to catch a zubat. Of course Pokémon GO hasn’t been released in Europe yet but any self-respecting owner of a smartphone already has a grey-market app. The pesky Pokémons also seem to have been widely released across the continent. Like much of the rest of the world, I’m modestly fascinated by this vivid variant of augmented reality. And oddly enough, one of the things it immediately reminded me of was the recent arts event ‘we’re here because we’re here’ (more simply, #wearehere), commissioned by 14-18 NOW to mark the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme.
One of the many things that surprises me about the loose critical consensus about contemporary cinema is that Andrew Dominik’s 2007 film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is not widely hailed as one of the masterpieces of the twenty-first century. Sumptuous, complex, richly involving, thrilling and graced by career-best performances from Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck, this is one truly great film. As can perhaps be glimpsed from the US trailer:
