Showing posts with label Happy Days. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Happy Days. Show all posts

Thursday, 4 August 2016

Watching Carlo Gesualdo, who is the transgressor ? : Breaking the Rules

The Marian Consort, Gerald Kyd, and Carlo Gesualdo at Jesus College

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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3 August
An evening with The Marian Consort, Gerald Kyd, and Carlo Gesualdo (Prince of Venosa), in the chapel of Jesus College, during Cambridge Summer Music Festival, on Monday 18 July 2016 at 7.30 p.m.








Prelude :


This piece of writing – by way of an account or review of the music-event Breaking the Rules at Cambridge Summer Music Festival 2016 – should have been fully written up and finished much nearer the time, and so would have been more detailed¹ (and less impressionistic), but it is what it is…

The Marian Consort


With Breaking the Rules, it took no more than a flick-through the Festival's promotional booklet to establish that The Marian Consort (@marianconsort) were, as a creditable ensemble, working in tandem with an actor (Gerald Kyd), and that their collaboration was likely to provide an unusual experience, with a Cambridge college chapel as the back-drop...


Moreover, Cambridge Summer Music Festival (cambridgesummermusic.com / @cambridgemusic) has a tradition of such interpretations of composers in relation to their lives and works, one example being a one-man show around a decade ago where, in the chapel of Clare College (@ClareCollege), we heard a performer embodying Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (C. P. E. Bach), and playing his work, and with - to close, as the light outside faded - a composition by his father, Johnann Sebastian (J. S. Bach), his Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, BWV 903.

Taken from The Full Monteverdi - LIVE SHOW 2004-2007


Or who can likewise forget I Fagiolini, with their theatrical Full Monteverdi, giving us the experience - right in the midst of us - of the love and passion of Claudio Monteverdi's madrigals ? [This at a regular Festival venue, Emmanuel United Reformed Church (EURC) : you can read here about director John La Bouchardière's film, made with I Fagiolini (@ifagiolini) and its music director, Robert Hollingworth.] Or that, in 2011, before presenting her programme Beloved Clara in 2016 - with its insights into the lives of Robert and Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms - Lucy Parham (@LucyParham) had brought us, amongst other things, a tea-time talk with Radio 3’s (@BBCRadio3’s) Sarah Walker (@drsarahwalker) about Liszt’s Women, also at EURC, and complete with an element of piano performance ?

Lucy Parham



An account of the performance / event :

One heard afterwards, from asking one of the members of the ensemble’s technical crew, that previous venues had been Brighton Festival (@brightfest) and Lichfield, and thus gathered that – for all – the experience must accordingly be a very site-specific one : at this venue, lighting the chapel of Jesus College had apparently been a joy, and from the nave one had been able to see the colours and shades of the chapel itself, thus giving energy to the different parts of Kyd / Gesualdo’s story.

Therefore, one assumes, variations to moves and to cues – and to where and how to project the moving images that were also such a part of the evening – must also have been determined in situ to suit the architecture (and how it is laid out at floor level), with cast and crew then practising and, as they had, making them highly cogent. (To an extent true, of course, with any ensemble that is prepared to explore the physical and / or acoustic properties of a place - including when The Hilliard Ensemble performed with Jan Garbarek in St Paul’s (@StPaulsLondon) or the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge (@Kings_College), with the former processing separately to a central point, and the latter wandering where he might, and weaving magic between their vocal-lines on alto (or tenor).)


Straightaway, The Marian Consort (@marianconsort) impressed both with the beauty that one could discern in the individual voices, and in the quality of the ensemble - working around and alongside their collaborator Gerald Kyd, and fitting themselves to this oft-used performance-space (the nave and transepts anterior to the chapel proper of Jesus College (@JesusCollegeCam)).


Sometimes as a choir à 5, rather than the full à 6², they were in a sharp and tightly defined relation to the words of Kyd (as to timing, ambience, etc.) and his demeanour as Carlo Gesualdo – or, at least, a version of him (or versions ?), as scripted by writer Clare Norburn (@clarenorburn) (please see below). This was assured performance, even more so in an unfamiliar context, and where, on the evening, they had to match the tone and mood of Kyd’s role.



That said, there are ways, and ways, of performing Gesualdo’s work, some of which seem to find it less necessary to prepare the ear for, or assimilate, his dissonances / use of dissonance : for example, when The Delphian Singers performed, in the chapel of Clare College (@ClareCollege)), for Easter at King’s 2013³ (@ConcertsatKings)) – as if what Gesualdo does were so extreme that it must be accentuated, and cannot be allowed to resemble that of his (longer-lived) contemporary, Claudio Monteverdi... ?


The Discovery of Bomarzo at Aldeburgh Festival (Solomon's Knot and Mira Calix)

After all, Monteverdi cited and spoke highly of Gesualdo⁴, and Solomon’s Knot, performing in The Discovery of Bomarzo - at Aldeburgh Festival (#AldeburghFestival / @snapemaltings), in collaboration with Mira Calix (@miracalix) - gave a concert without an interval that, amongst others, included works by both, but did not draw attention to Gesualdo’s use of dissonance any more than to that of Monteverdi [an excerpt can be seen on Solomon's Knot's (@solomonsknot's) web-site at www.solomonsknotcollective.com/the-discovery-of-bomarzo.html] :

At Aldeburgh, Gesualdo was represented by pieces from The Fifth Book of Madrigals (1611), and one from the Sixth (published in the same year). However, Glenn Watkins⁴ (op. cit., pp. 36-60) spends a chapter in considering the arguments and evidence for the composer's assertion that they had been written fifteen years earlier (i.e. when Gesualdo was in Ferrara (please see below)), and so not as a reaction to events to which notoriety has attached (please also see below). (Likewise, The Gesualdo Six (@TheGesualdoSix) perform a programme with Ligeti’s Nonsense Madrigals interspersed with madrigals by both composers (including The Sixth Book of Madrigals, but do not manage the dissonances in a different way, so that Gesualdo’s then sound extreme.)





The script for the performance did not seem over-developed (i.e. not 'too highly polished', since slickness can lie that way), and its raw humanity, and that of Kyd as Gesualdo (‘K/G’) - obliged to re-experience his music through his life, and his life through his music - fed each other : if we must search for emotional or literary parallels (and it is absolutely not necessary to know them at all to watch and understand Breaking the Rules), there is an affinity with much of Beckettt’s work, but, most nearly, an echoing of the structural interplay of Words and Music (Paroles et musique), his work for radio, as to the function of the musical portion and its integration into the operation of the text.

On another level, when in mid-speech (although we never did know when K/G might summon music - or, vice versa, it summon him away from us, and significantly often to the period when he was in Ferrara (please see below), K/G also felt like an imagining of one of the souls to whom Beckettt's beloved Dante had assigned a role in the Inferno. Not, though, the passive repetitive patterns of Beckettt at his most discernibly Dante-esque, in Play (not least since Gesualdo was not, at this time in the evening, the adulterer), but in the narrative energy of his trilogy of novels - or that of Winnie in Happy Days (Oh les beaux jours). (Even just a very little of Hamm’s superficially self-contented story-telling style in Endgame (Fin de partie) ?)

At The Lammermuir Festival 2016, Gerald Kydd with The Marian Consort in Breaking the Rules (photograph by Robin Mitchell, for the Festival)


Although, at the time, it may have seemed dramatically ‘unhelpful’ for K/G to ask, nigh at the outset, who we were to judge Carlo Gesualdo, [what we conveniently call] History does nothing but judge him - for ‘Murther’ ou des autres dissounances. (Sometimes with the most unlikely accomplices !) Yet, if, after an accusation against The Marian Consort’s and his explicit audience, we thought that going back and re-creating the so-called fourth wall was not easily done (a term also ill suited to theatre in the round), we had not reckoned with writer Clare Norburn's understanding of the effect of K/G's presence, or his dynamic within this work, and with live singers - present almost as part of the action, or of his psyche.


At that point, and for all that one knew (not then having reference to a programme), the evening might have run to one long unbroken act. Over the course of the second half, one also proved to have wrongly figured that K/G wanted to keep from us an account of what happened to his wife and her lover – he did tell us towards the end, and how it had not been a casual discovery, or acts that had been committed in the heat of anger.


Nowadays (please see the Tweets below), and ignoring that this was in the late sixteenth century (and that the Gran Corte della Vicaria did not find that Gesualdo had committed a crime), the concentration seems to be on the fact that he killed these people at all⁵ (not, which appears to have been what sensationally exercised people at the time, the manner of it). So there are casual comments on whether Gesualdo’s dissonances reflect his remorse, in the course of Elin Manahan Thomas introducing a concert, otherwise excellent, of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European instrumental music by Il Giardino Armonico.



Whatever the reason why we hear it (and probably believe it - and all that it implies - just because we do), it is a much-told story, originating from the composer’s friend Ignaz von Seyfried, that when he acted as page-turner for Beethoven at the premiere of his Piano Concerto No. 3, von Seyfried saw almost nothing but empty pages. Too often, the stories that are readily told about composers, not least Gesualdo, are actually to the exclusion of the music and of meaningfully engaging with it. (Likewise, we hear time after time that Ralph Vaughan Williams professed agnosticism, but does that information get in the way of hearing his musical or other concerns in Job : A Masque for Dancing (1931), or Pilgrim’s Progress (1936) ?)

K/G (Gerald Kyd as Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa)

With excellent collaborators in The Marian Consort and Gerald Kyd, Clare Norburn’s (@clarenorburn's) act of Breaking the Rules is giving us a prolonged period to listen to the account that K/G chooses to give of himself and his life – all brought into the context of his music and of, musically, how he harks back to two years in the mid-1590s, when he was in Ferrara (whose elite musical world has since been adeptly treated of by Donald Macleod and his team on Radio 3’s Composer of The Week (#COTW)).

As we hear K/G, and also the music, what seems to have taken root most in his memory and feelings is his time at the Court of Ferrara, and the music that he composed there / then (please see above, concerning the date of composition of his last two books of madrigals), at the same while as enchanting him, imbuing him with a vivid sense of loss : as Norburn herself observes (in a full programme-note), Gesualdo’s ‘flowering as a composer is linked to a series of visits he made to the cultural hothouse of the day, Ferrara, which brought him into contact with other musicians and composers'.




Norburn gave us the moment in time when the piece is located. As well as in the programme, the piece itself sets out, in the guise of K/G, an understanding / interpretation of the significance of Gesualdo's earlier life. As she comments :

 Like most second sons, his intended path was to enter the priesthood and cardinalate [...]. At the age of seven, his mother died and he was sent away to Rome to be brought up by Jesuits. When Carlo was 18, his brother died and his path suddenly changed. Suddenly he was expected to marry and carry on the family line.

Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales (around the age of 13)


One York Early Music Festival (@yorkearlymusic) considered the musical responses to, and historical consequences of, the death of Prince Henry (one of which was to bring Charles I onto the throne in Henry's stead, in succession to James I, Charles' and his father). As with the early and unenvisaged death of the Prince of Wales (19 February 1594 – 6 November 1612), Gesualdo’s brother Luigi, three years his elder, had been due to succeed and become Prince of Venosa⁶, but Luigi died in 1584 : Charles and Carlo had both been brought up with a different future in mind for them, and for their elder brothers, and Breaking the Rules took time to explore the effect that it had on the latter.

Following Henry’s death, the musical tributes alone, which include settings of ‘When David heard’ by Thomas Weelkes and Thomas Tomkins (thus making comparison with David’s grief at the news that his son Absalom has been killed in battle), were effusive. How difficult, Norburn and K/G suggest to us in this challenging work of drama, to be the one who has not been brought up to rule (or have a spouse), and yet be looked to do those things (knowing that the death of another, one's brother, brought it about and / or that no one had intended one to have that status)… ?







Postlude :








* * * * *












End-notes

 ¹ Which is to say, not relying overly on memories that had been meant to be recorded in words on the night, rather than becoming vague with time first...

 As it was, it was always going to have these opening two or three paragraphs [their relevance, now, seems unclear], which were roughed out then (although then used, in between, in reviewing Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon (2016) (@tnd_film)) :

In other words, is the faulty notion behind Nicolas Winding Refn Presents... this ? It is as if, counterfactually, Stravinsky had not only done very little with the Pergolesi materials to re-embody them as his own, but had also, and without good reason, allowed those facts to be known before their time.

 Whereas Stravinsky himself was too good a self-publicist for that, and, first allowed the Pergolesi name ‘to stick’ by arranging the work (in collaboration with Paul Kochanski) for violin and piano, publishing Suite d'après des thèmes, fragments et morceaux de Giambattista Pergolesi (1925). (Later, as well as an eight-movement Pulcinella Suite (revised in 1965), he produced arrangements, in collaboration with Gregor Piatigorsky and Samuel Dushkin, respectively, called Suite italienne for cello and piano (1932-1933) and violin and piano (1933).)


 ² Partly determined by the number of parts and / or getting in position for the effect of 'a voice off', from the choir. (The seating, in the chapel at Jesus College, was in the nave and transepts.)

³ Conducted by Toby Young in the programme Drop, drop slow tears, with Gesualdo’s Tenebrae Responsories (as well as works by Kenneth Leighton and James MacMillan), on Wednesday 27 March 2013.

⁴ In The Gesualdo Hex [W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., New York / London (2010)], by Glenn Watkins, we read (p. 56) :

 Monteverdi countered [being charged with taking contrapuntal licences and making use of unprepared dissonances] that the older prima pratica of Ockeghem and Josquin des Prez hadplaced a premium on the beauty of the contrapuntal writing. The new seconda pratica, however, which he specifically attributed to Gesualdo and a small group of composers beginning with Cipriano de Rore and ending with Giulio Caccini, held counterpoint and rhythm as subordinate to the text [...]


⁵ Although, from the same period, do we take for granted in Shakespeare (from Othello to Leontes’ bloodthirsty jealousy in The Winter’s Tale), or in the execution of Anne Boleyn, that (real or imagined) infidelity came at a high price ?

 ⁶ On the death of his father, in 1591 (and a year after he had killed his first wife, Donna Maria), Gesualdo became the third Prince of Venosa (and the eighth Count of Conza). (Prince Henry, dying ten months before Gesualdo, was thus his exact, if younger, contemporary.)

Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Thursday, 24 April 2014

So great that you're quitting ? : A review of Les beaux jours (Bright Days Ahead) (2013)

This is a review of Bright Days Ahead (Les beaux jours) (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
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24 April

This is a review of Bright Days Ahead (Les beaux jours) (2013)

So great that you’re quitting

Bright Days Ahead (an uneven translation of Les Beaux Jours*) (2013) is in French, but, however well made, it has more of the sensibility of Hope Springs (2012) than of the best of French cinema : when the producer of Hope came to Cambridge Film Festival, he said that Meryl Streep had suggested making the footage at the end, and, although it had not been planned, it was then found possible to do it. The ending of this film strongly reminds one of it, though with very little feeling that matters have been resolved.

The reason being that Hope shares with this film the topic of healing the damage caused by one’s partner’s behaviour – though here the damage seemed to have been skin deep**, whereas in Tommy Lee Jones’ (Arnold’s) case (and contrary to the optimism in the title’s fictitious place name) it brooded over Meryl Streep (Kay) for almost the entire film. Hope is not a great film, and one can be cynical about the motives behind making it, but it still moves Days Ahead out of the brightness, and into the shade.

Another point of contact is a coastal location. Places in New England became the title resort in Hope, and, at least when we are outside and in it (when we are inside, it could be anywhere), the Nord-Pas-de-Calais is a vivid backdrop to Days Ahead, right from the title sequence, which is made to appear written onto the black of a bascule bridge. Straightaway, it is apparent that getting around is dependent on avoiding the times when tides make it favourable for vessels to navigate the channels and the bridge swings up. In no way apparent, for all the amenity of the location, is why Caroline (Fanny Ardant) and Philippe (Patrick Chesnais) are there at all.

In any case, despite Le Week-End (2013)’s reliance on the deus ex machina of Morgan (Jeff Goldblum) to get Hanif Kureishi’s lumbering plot to go anywhere, once it has established the characters of Meg (Lindsay Duncan) and Nick (Jim Broadbent) (but with no real prospect of development***), it shows far more about relationships and those near retirement than Days Ahead even thinks to do. For it goes straight for showing an affair, but often half-heartedly, so that one can care too little whether it survives, and too much how toxic its effects might be.

The real moment when there is everything is the illicit possibility of penetrative sex in Caroline’s car, and where, however close we seem to get, the windows are ever interposed between them and us – when that idea is shied away from, we suddenly step back and see where we had got lost from in awareness, the car in plain view and with people about their business.

Ageing the lead actress Ardant backwards is a well-worn trick, and even passionate moments seen in the store-room (to bolster up the notion of romantic rejuvenation) simply do not make for sustaining the conviction of amour fou such as KST’s in Leaving (2009) (or even of her bit-part as Virginie Rousset in Bel Ami (2012), where she, too, glows and visibly unfolds from knowing the favours of Georges Duroy (Robert Pattinson)) : here, the feeling on both sides is too tepid, even to the extent of stating to one’s lover that the preference is for sleep rather than continuing the time together, and Julien (Laurent Lafitte), too, is just beautified over time to suggest his strengthening appeal.

Throw in ‘getting to know’ the members of the Les Beaux Jours club in a way that is managed hardly better than in Ronald Harwood’s adaptation of his superior stage-play as Quartet (2012). In Days Ahead, there are stock follies such as a wine-tasting where someone takes snorters or people unused to potting are let loose on a wheel and produce a deformed piece of clay, and the cheery message that we are invited to share that sniffy Caroline comes to value her new friends might give some a sense of warmth. Yet it is essentially a diversion from the fact that nothing is really going on, except at the level of cliché, and, whilst that may be fine for Fanny Chesnel’s novel, it is too thin for a film that seeks our approval.

Ultimately, the plot throws us back on Philippe and who he really is in relation to Caroline, but sadly the action has concentrated so much on her both that we do not know, and also that we cannot credit what, in the circumstances, would cause him to accommodate her needs. Hope, whatever we may think of its insights, does at least focus on that question, rather than trying to tack it on at the end.


That said, New Empress Magazine's reviewer found more going on here, and more of merit, but making none of these references


End-notes

* Surely not meant to resonate with the title that Beckettt gave to his play Happy Days when he translated it into French… ?

** And, to be susceptible to rapid repair thanks to a few jokes at the expense of a hotel run by a budget brand, and – at the cost of incredulity as to how Philippe got there, and what happened to Caroline’s car – to hitching a lift as the young Dylan or Kerouac might have done.

*** What does happen at the end smacks less of ‘going Godard’ than of the fantasy Paris of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953).





Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday, 5 November 2011

Notes on a performance: Grief, 'a new play by mike leigh'

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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5 November

Mike Leigh explicitly works on plays and films by freely involving the cast in improvisation, role-play, etc. – does this make for a less tenable notion of a play being 'by him' than with a film? (The short answer: probably not, but it feels as though it should, feels as though someone who sat in on a development session and contributed a line 23 minutes in, when everyone was stuck, might have something to say…)

Although the script of a play may, after experimentation, become fixed (as I understand Leigh’s does), with a film there is a set of performances whose nuances are captured (i.e. more than one take might be made, and then there would be a choice, but the choice, once made, would be in the cut).

With plays in general, how the words are delivered, or the stage-directions observed, can vary immensely from one show to the next, let alone one theatre – or one production - to the next. Admittedly, less likely to be so, if the actors are good ones, and the writer/director keeps an eye on things.

If the film credit says 'BUBBLEPOP - A Mike Leigh film', we know that, in studio speak, that may mean more than 'Presented by Dead Parrots Pty' or 'A Clint Eastwood production', but, perhaps crucially, who claims ownership or authorship of the script in the credits? The massed dancing bands of the city of Brno?

At any rate, the programme tells me - in a note on Leigh by Michael Coveney - that the gesture used to be 'devised and directed by', and maybe I'm happier with that.



Anyway, as to Grief, it needs to be judged whether it really works, but it is not, I believe, a great piece of theatre.

It all happens on one set, changing only as to time of day, which is shown largely through the large bay-window, stage right (but also through the light entering into the hallway, which is also stage right, through the room’s entrance in the long downstage flat). Light within the room, when it needs to be turned on during a scene, is always done by Dorothy (Lesley Manville), otherwise by the stage crew between scenes.

That said, there are various curiosities of this household, as we see it move from late 1957 into mid-1958, and which crucially relate to the staging (and what is staged):

* The only bell that we hear is the doorbell - the telephone (if there is one) never rings, is never referred to (or used), and visitors just turn up unannounced, starting with Edwin’s GP friend, Hugh (David Horovitch).

Yet this is not the provinces, but suburbia: which means not only that people may have come from a distance to happen by, but also that, though it is still early days for television, it is not for a telephone. As we know how the play has developed, this approach to people calling will be a given, but how true is it to its period?


* For the simple reason that, if visitors did turn up unexpectedly, there would be somewhere to receive them, houses of the time had two reception rooms: what we are shown here would have been the front room, almost exclusively used to keep neat and show guests into (whereas another might have doubled up as a dining-room, which Dorothy’s household has).

Guests simply would not have seen the living room in the way that is shown here, and those social niceties were alive well into the 60s and 70s (and beyond). We are, unrealistically (because anachronistically), presented with one room with the shared function of those in the household coming together and of receiving guests, i.e. what is now a lounge.


* Dorothy would have been viewed very strangely by her other well-heeled ex-telephonist friends from wartime, let alone the cleaner, if she had really had a home on the principles shown§. As to the telephone, I do not know, but it seems surprising, as does the absence of radio.

For radio would have been a large part of people’s lives at the time, but there is no evidence of one, or of anyone listening - only a reference by Gertrude (Marion Bailey) to a song that she asks Victoria (Ruby Bentall – more of an exciting name than her stage character’s) whether she has heard. (She has, much to the glee of 'Garrulous Gertie', who herself wants to seem young.)


Fine, with the second point, a number of those in the audience would have known that there was a conflation of function being shown, but younger viewers would not, and then one asks how much, if it is meant to be one, this is 'a slice of life'. It is a compromise, and one that, I imagine, one would not make in a version of the script for film - but I may imagine wrongly...

Of course, it is done just because it is a convenient way of having one large area on the stage, not the separate rooms often depicted in a set in a search for naturalism, but does that fatally flaw the integrity of trying to show a household in Britain where there is so much emphasis on a war that is not much more than a decade over, and of trying to (regain or) maintain reality? (Victoria is even told by her mother how good she was during the war.)

However, on another level, the five songs (including 'Goodnight, sweetheart' and 'Night and Day') that are burst into would not have had such a place with the presence of radio, the central one being Gertrude, Muriel and Dorothy singing 'Black Bottom' together. Otherwise, the songs are started in equal measure by Edwin or Dorothy, with the other joining in, complete with harmony at the end of some of them.

Edwin abruptly breaks off 'Night and Day', seemingly either through his own, or his sister's imagined, awkwardness: perhaps at the sentiments, although they do not differ vastly from other songs, perhaps from some connection to his bachelorhood. I was reminded not so much, as some might have been, of Dennis Potter, as of Pinter’s play Old Times, which Leigh surely knows, with its snatches of song shared in the same way.

Poor Edwin, unlike the eccentric - and, the more that we hear of him, rather irritating* – Dr Hugh, is doomed to exist more in his memories: both Dorothy and he are, and they take comfort in a familiar pattern of songs when holding their sherry, finishing with the usual ‘chin chin’, led by Edwin.

Before the final scene, with retired Edwin at home from May onwards, Dorothy and he seem like Winnie and Willie from Beckettt's Happy Days, presumably a deliberate reference by Leigh: Edwin calling out snippets from the newspaper, which make less sense to the person who cannot see it, whilst Dorothy tries to make conversation with him, but he is then immersed in this, or whatever else, he is reading. He has been warned about just slowing down rather pointedly by Dr Hugh, and the play is called Grief.

All of the cast were excellent, so I do not see the need to single any one out for praise, although, since they were necessarily on the stage for much of the two hours' duration, one's admiration for the leading players is greater.


As, though, to whether what they performed really amounted to much:

1. Grief had an end that always seemed likely (though it was unclear what we were to infer had happened to Edwin - a stroke?). Was the pain in his knee an aneurysm?

2. For the reasons stated, it was not true to its time (there were also momentary snatches of dialogue that seemed too modern for their time, e.g. Victoria saying ‘I hate you!’ to Dorothy, and largely getting away with it); and

3. Both in the 'steals' from other playwights, and the kind of life, rather empty except for remembering other times, and talk (or cross-talk) listened to by other characters with a sense of frustrated toleration, it lacked originality. Not that everything has to be new, and there were some amusing moments, but so what?

Unless it was deliberately anachronistic, and was trying to show us, by mixing times, that the 60s and 70s, and their attitudes, had their roots in the behaviour of the post-war period, which would, with war-time, have been all that Victoria knew.


* ’All's well that ends’ was fun as a quip the first time, but not by the second repetition: David Horovitch appeared in the Shakespeare, and he may have brought it to the party as a cast-joke. He seemed like a witty doctor, in a Chekhovian British vein, with his ‘Where there's death, there's hope’.


§ Not that the modern style of living with which we are all too familiar, with the emergence of the lounge-diner (or even the studio flat), had not begun in the 50s, but the window in the set showed that the house of which we saw part was not a new build of that type at all - if it had been, all well and good, and people getting used to others living that way would have been got out of the way well before the scenes that we witness, but what we were clearly shown was from an earlier property, not this.
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