March 29, 2013

Though you'd never know it from the freezing weather, the  London theatre is embarking upon its spring season. I haven't yet seen the most promising flower, The Book of Mormon, because I didn't go to the press night, and the lead actor got laryngitis the night I was scheduled, so the management politely asked me to come another time, rather than see the understudy's first public performance.
But I have seen two of the other most prominent spring theatrical buds, and I don't think they fulfil their promise. There's some sort of lesson in the partial failure to blossom of John Logan's Peter and Alice and Bruce Norris's The Low Road, but damned if I know what it is.  Peter and Alice is the second play in the Michael Grandage Company season at the Noel Coward Theatre. (The first was the almost successful Privates on Parade by Peter Nichols, with a spectacular performance by Simon Russell Beale.)

MichaelLlewelynDavies17.jpg
Michael Llewellyn Davies aged 17
March 29, 2013 2:33 PM | | Comments (0)
Though you'd never know it from the freezing weather, the  London theatre is embarking upon its spring season. I haven't yet seen the most promising flower,<em> The Book of Mormon</em>, because I didn't go to the press night, and the lead actor got laryngitis the night I was scheduled, so the management politely asked me to come another time, rather than see the understudy's first public performance.
But I have seen two of the other most prominent spring theatrical buds, and I don't think they fulfil their promise. There's some sort of lesson in the partial failure to blossom of John Logan's <em>Peter and Alice</em> and Bruce Norris's <em>The Low Road</em>, but damned if I know what it is.  Peter and Alice is the second play in the Michael Grandage Company season at the Noel Coward Theatre. (The first was the almost successful <em>Privates on Parade</em> by Peter Nichols, with a spectacular performance by Simon Russell Beale.)

MichaelLlewelynDavies17.jpg
Michael Llewellyn Davies aged 17
March 29, 2013 2:33 PM | | Comments (0)
October 27, 2012

Food culture is our culture. This Saturday's national papers here in Britain are stuffed full of food - Nigella's on the cover of one of the magazines, recipe supplements tumbled out of a couple of others, and god (or Bacchus) alone knows what Sunday's papers will bring. There was news from America this week that the lawyers who sued and won millions in damages against Big Tobacco ten years ago are now targeting junk food manufacturers, and suing Big Food for wrongly labeling products and ingredients.

         Anyone reading this is surely aware that we live in an era when what and how we eat is a worry for everyone, whether we're the unfortunate many with too little to eat, or the fortunate minority with too much choice in the matter. We, mostly Western, increasingly fat, few acknowledge that we have a moral duty to worry about the hungry masses. But we are also aware that we have turned the biological imperative to feed ourselves about three times a day into an obsessive pastime - we've made a hobby of our necessity.

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October 27, 2012 5:25 PM | | Comments (0)
October 24, 2012

The current scandal in Britain is about how a dead paedophiliac appears to have been protected and event abetted in his crimes by his employer. The trouble is that the employer in question was the second most revered institution (after the monarchy) in the country, the BBC. The nature of the complaint against the BBC is not clear, except that it failed to follow up and transmit "Newsnight's" posthumous exposé of Jimmy Savile's assaults on under-aged girls and boys, which were actually facilitated by the BBC and in some cases took place on BBC premises.

         Was it a cover-up? Did the BBC top brass know Savile was a paedophile?

        

 

 

October 24, 2012 12:12 PM | | Comments (0)
August 31, 2012

I am an EastEnders addict. Anybody reading this who doesn't have access to BBC television will probably be at a loss to understand this reference to the long-running TV soap opera, which takes place in "Albert Square," a fictional postal address in London's East End. I, like millions of other middle-class Brits (though I'm only half Brit, and that by dint of passport only, not birth), go slumming in Albert Square four times each week for a half hour starting at 7.30 or 8.0.

        And I mean "slumming." The whole point of the series is that the highest moral type you encounter in EE is the lovable rogue. Otherwise the dramatis personae consist of an entire catalogue of villainy, from Falstaffian slightly bent to Iago-like pure evil. There are no virtuous women living in Albert Square, and no honest men. Even the children, though charming, are adept at calculating the odds.

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Janine Butcher

August 31, 2012 12:21 PM | | Comments (0)

The Tempest is a play for which it is possible to feel real affection. In this it is, of course, unlike the tragedies: you can't imagine having warm, happy, cheerful or loving feelings about Macbeth, Hamlet or Othello. (There was a famous American Yiddish theatre production of King Lear - the moral of it being, "You bring them up, feed them, clothe them; then look what they do to you in your old age!" You can perhaps conceive of feeling affectionate in a superior, amused way about such a staging.) It's possible to love the tragedies, as it is The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet and several of the comedies and histories - and as it is not, say, the Taming of the Shrew or Timon of Athens.

         Why am I fond of The Tempest? Not because it suits my political feelings. I can see merit in the interpretation that says the play's point is anti-colonialism - it's a reading that fits.  But it can't be the whole story, and making it so has resulted in any number of poor productions that I've seen. The Tempest is too much a tale of the natural order being subverted and restored - of dukes being dukes and princes, princes, and of Miranda being a natural aristocrat, though all the home she knows is the desert isle - to impose a single ideological straitjacket on its plot and subplots.

Kirsty Bushell as "Sebastian"

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August 31, 2012 11:52 AM | | Comments (0)
July 4, 2012

If there had only been gay marriage in Melville's day, none of it would have happened. David Alden's production of Billy Budd at the English National Opera has received very good reviews from many of my opera critic colleagues. Paul Steinberg's set and Constance Hoffman's costumes send mixed messages about the location and period of the drama, but seem to be trying to place the action in the present, in some sort of forced labour plant - a Soviet oil refinery perhaps?  Or in the bowels of a nuclear submarine

July 4, 2012 1:56 PM | | Comments (0)
June 9, 2012

Besides the nasty weather we've had during and since the Queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations, a storm is brewing about the BBC's coverage of the events, from the flotilla of 1,000 boats to the big lunch and pop concert at Buckingham Palace, to the last day's service at St Paul's, the carriage procession and balcony appearance after them.

         At the time of writing, it has been announced that the Beeb has received 4,000 complaints. I imagine all of them were justified, as I'd guess every single one of them complained about the caliber of the presenters, who were the ultimate dumb-downers. 

June 9, 2012 6:42 PM | | Comments (0)
May 28, 2012

Here's my contribution to the Jubilee. In the summer or early autumn of 1986 I was commissioned by the NY Times - Magazine, I think I remember - to write a piece on the queen and her then prime minister, who was Margaret Thatcher. There had been some trivial business about the two of them wearing the same dress, and this led to a piece in the (British) Sunday Times saying there was some tension between the two 60 year-olds. The tiff has been dredged up for the Jubilee and you can read a summary of it at http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/Magazine/Interviews/article1041265.ece

         

May 28, 2012 4:27 PM | | Comments (0)
May 17, 2012


 

Last night I saw the final, reduced-price "preview" of the new London production of Neil Simon's "The Sunshine Boys." It opens tonight, and in my review, to be published tomorrow, I express the hope that the play will improve when the run starts for real. Almost exactly the same thing happened at the end of February, when critics were allowed in early to see a revival of Alan Ayckbourn's "Absent Friends."

         Then, too, I noted a distinct absence of ensemble playing. A really talented cast, playing a pretty good piece by one of the best living playwrights, just wasn't giving their all. As I wrote in my review, I knew in my bones that the production simply was not as lackluster as it seemed at this last preview: the performances hadn't gelled, but it felt as though some of the actors were holding back. And, sure enough, the actual press night notices were better than those given by my preview colleagues and me.

·Danny DeVito (Willie Clark)

  • Richard Griffiths (Al Lewis)
  •  ·        

    May 17, 2012 3:47 PM | | Comments (0)

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    Plain English An AngloAmerican look at what's happening here and there, where English is spoken and more or less understood -- in letters, the visual and performing arts, and, occasionally, in the kitchen or dining room.  more

    Paul Levy is amost a citizen of the world, carrying the passports of the USA and the UK/EU. He writes about the arts in general for the Wall Street Journal Europe more

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