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Index: Film, Television, Video & Theatre

Three essays on ‘Romeo and Juliet’.

Monday, 8 December 2014

Hoyt Rogers: ‘The heart of the play—the “heartless” heart—is the final scene of Act IV. Ill-assorted, often omitted, it takes on its full meaning only in retrospect. The House of Capulet is in mourning: the Nurse babbles her sorrow, Juliet’s parents are repentant, and Paris joins them in their laments, flat as his platitudes may sound. The concluding vignette leaves all that behind, looping back to the comic vein of the play’s first half.’

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Out of the past.

Sunday, 21 July 2013

Alana Shilling: ‘Even the most creative of past productions do not sever ties with the values of the masque. One of the greatest innovations in the definitive 1970 Midsummer, is the aforementioned doubling of roles, which brings Titania/Hippolyta and Oberon/Theseus together. The inevitable emphasis on the parallels of the human and fairy lands that this pairing entails is a gesture not unlike the identification between allegorical fantasy and earthly reality so dear to courtly masques. Moreover, Brook aimed to capture the imagination by eroding the boundary between stage and audience. These are principles dear to the masque.’

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Zero Dark Uncertainty.

Friday, 29 March 2013

A. Jay Adler: ‘Because some critics of Zero Dark Thirty come to the film seeking in it the simplicity of an ideological stance rather than the human complexity of art, they seek to tally factual representations as politics on an abacus of acts. They lose interest in the behavior of humans.’

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A pataphysical education.

Monday, 4 February 2013

Paul Cohen: ”Pataphysics presents a challenge to reality, most characteristically, though not always, carried out through humor. Unfortunately, as Andrew Hugill notes in his new book on the subject, “the word is often used quite loosely to invoke anything that seems wacky, weird, or bizarrely incomprehensible,” much as the word “surreal” is often used to refer to anything strange.’

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Mrs Dalloway. Episode two.

Monday, 25 June 2012

It is so nice to be out in the air. If I stand quite still, I can be a poplar tree in early dawn. Hyacinths, fawns. Running water and garden lilies. London is so dreary, compared with being in the country with my father and the dogs. I am a pirate, reckless, unscrupulous, riding on the omnibus up Whitehall, all sails spread. I am free…’

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Mrs Dalloway. Episode one.

Monday, 25 June 2012

You have such a command of language. You can put things as editors like them to be put. If you, Richard, advise me, and Hugh writes for me, I am sure of getting it right. I already have a selection of choice phrases use – such ‘we are of the opinion that the times are ripe’. Something about ‘the superfluous youth of our ever-increasing population’. A phrase about ‘what we owe to the dead’. That sort of thing.

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Dramatising Mrs Dalloway.

Monday, 25 June 2012

Michelene Wandor: One must engage with the rhythms and the style of the original, so that the dramatising process remains faithful to these, as well as to the more obvious issues of story, etc. The consummate dramatiser is also a consummate critical reader, for whom part of the dramatisation is the challenge of including not only elements within the prose, but also, in a sense, re-reading the imperfections, the contradictions, the lacunae, even, in the text. This is essential because, of course, one is reading from the present, with one’s critical insights, whatever they are.

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Dickens in the details at Downton.

Thursday, 19 April 2012

There are gaps in narratives. Viewers use these gaps in instalment publication to imagine what happened, to fill in. Characters themselves may change a great deal and also have new relationships to one another: so not that character-dominated, an ensemble with a lack of overall narrative closure, complicated and slowly evolving network of character relationships.

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An ‘Iron Lady’ turns to rust.

Thursday, 22 December 2011

Drew Moore: In Streep’s Thatcher we see a ball-busting leader well equipped with warmongering and anti-socialist rhetoric, as well as a schoolmarm rapidly alienating her cowering Cabinet. Most affecting, we see a feeble woman trying to preserve her dignity surrounded by guardians who have already consigned her to senility. One of the most enjoyable scenes is one in which the utterly lucid patient, with acerbic wit, puts her patronizing doctor in his place.

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• Event: ‘3 Carsons out of Texas’ at the Gershwin Hotel, New York, 20 October – 20 November 2011

Wednesday, 5 October 2011

[Announcement from The Gershwin Hotel and Suzanne Tremblay] – “3 Carsons out of Texas” – L.M.Kit Carson, film pioneer; Rev Goat Carson, Grammy-winning lyricist; and Neke Carson, a multimedia artist – are the subjects of a special month-long event at the Gershwin Hotel in Manhattan, 20 October to 20 November 2011. The event is ‘A […]

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• You could tell by the way he talked, Shakespeare was no elitist.

Monday, 3 October 2011

And there’s another splendid irony for you — in the suggestion that Shakespeare himself could not have been an elitist “in the country of his birth” by using words that any English speaker could not readily have understood at the time.

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The Life and Death of Marina Abramović.

Monday, 18 July 2011

Anthony Howell: It is suggested that Marina’s love-life has been as devastating as her relationship with her mother – and finally a transfigured Marina, Christ-like, ascends into the flies. Well, it’s all a bit mawkish, frankly, and in general I feel that in the second half the spectacle runs out of inspiration.

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Two things you can learn about Stanley Kubrick by talking to Jan Harlan.

Thursday, 30 June 2011

L.M. Kit Carson: As Harlan puts it: “Stanley got truly satisfied that this piece by Strauss was all he needed. To make the question remain…about whether there might be some deliberation effecting us somewhere in the Universe.”

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· Talent’s got Britain. Cowell’s got the world.

Monday, 13 June 2011

Michele Wandor: Cowell reminded us that, along with the £100,000 and a spot at the Royal Variety Performance, the winner’s career is assured. We know this from other talent shows, but the performing dog is now well out of the bag after Susan Boyle.

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· Richard Leacock’s camera made even going for lunch an adventure.

Sunday, 12 June 2011

Leacock said no – and only agreed to stand in the hallway shooting through the open doorway to the suite: shooting Kennedy walking back-and-forth thinking, determined and vulnerable as the district-by-district vote-counts were broadcasting on the suite-TV.

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The Fortnightly Review