03 Thursday Aug 2017
Posted in Theatre
We’re playing Shakespeare in Words, tonight. A kind of anniversary performance, in the same lovely place where we debuted almost exactly one year ago – but with the new version, showcasing how the play has grown since.
Nice, isn’t it? Continue reading
27 Thursday Jul 2017
I don’t know whether I told you that I was formally adopted into the Other Company – Nina’s people – last April. I was already their resident author, and now am a full member, and will start teaching play-writing in the Company’s school next October. Also – possibly the most thrilling aspect of my change of status – I’ll get to direct my own Lunedì this year… Continue reading
15 Saturday Jul 2017
Tags
#Swashathon, Alan Breck Stewart, David McCallum, Iain Glen, Kidnapped, Michael Caine, Movies Silently, Peter Finch, R. L. Stevenson, Robert Cain
Hooray: the #Swashathon, Movies Silently’s “blogathon of swashbuckling adventure“, is back! Four days of cloaks and daggers, swords and sails, fops (or not) and farthingales, derring-do and damsels not-quite-in-distress… Does it get more fun than that?
Let’s get dancing, then – and discuss my favourite swashbuckler of all times: Stevenson’s Alan Breck Stewart. Alan is a wonderful character – the most perfect one in English literature, according to Henry James, no less – but how has he fared on the screen? Ah now, this is a tricky question – so be warned: it’s going to be a long, long post. Continue reading
13 Thursday Jul 2017
Posted in Books
Tags
Great Siege of Malta, historical novel, Mattias Tannhauser, Omnicompetent Hero, Pet peeves, The Religion, Tim Willocks
On the plane to Malta, I began reading Tim Willocks’ The Religion, one of a few Siege-themed novels I’d purchased in view of the journey. I rather liked the prologue, and my first glimpse of Grand Master La Valette and Sir Oliver Starkey, and the preparations for the siege.
If I was tempted to raise an eyebrow at La Valette’s life-or-death insistence that they must have Tannhauser at all costs… well, he is the hero, after all, and he’s been a Janissary for part of his life – so he must be in the thick of things, and there is some sort of reason for it, right? Continue reading
06 Thursday Jul 2017
Posted in Theatre
Tags
We had Of Men and Poets again, last week. A one-off performance in the small garden of the small Virgilian museum in the small town where we like to think Virgil was born. On paper, it was perfect: the summer evening, the right place…
True, because of a couple of last-minute substitutions, and because it came in between other things, Nina settled on a reading, rather than a full performance. But we’ve done this before: it’s still lovely to see, and very effective, so nobody worried a whit.
But perhaps we should have. Continue reading
29 Thursday Jun 2017
Tags
While in Malta, I visited the old capital, Mdina – a gem of a small walled town, all honey-coloured stone palaces and alleys. One of those palaces happens to be Palazzo Falson, or the Norman House, as its last owner, Captain Olof Gollcher liked to call it. Continue reading
22 Thursday Jun 2017
Posted in Lostintranslation, Theatre
I have, o Readers, a riddle for you: How is maize like an Ottoman Sultan?
Let me tell you a story. Do you remember Ugo Foscolo and his Salamini/Little Sausages? Do you remember as both I and my friend Dave in the comments wondered how on earth could he have made such a tragedy-killing blunder?
Well, it may be that I know just how… Continue reading
15 Thursday Jun 2017
Now, gentlemen, betake you to your arms,
And see that Malta be well fortified;
And it behoves you to be resolute;
For Calymath, having hover’d here so long,
Will win the town, or die before the walls.FIRST KNIGHT. And die he shall; for we will never yield.
08 Thursday Jun 2017
Tags
christopher marlowe, Doomed characters, Hanno Buddenbrook, Johnny Nolan, Konradin von Hohenfels, names
I remember once shopping for Sicilian wine, and choosing a bottle of Grecale for no better reason than the beautiful name. If I were being written, I thought, this wouldn’t bode well for my life expectancy… Continue reading
01 Thursday Jun 2017
So, Tamburlaine the Great, part II. Part I had been such a smashing success, and suddenly conquerors were all the rage in London playhouses, and one can easily imagine the Admiral’s Men pestering Kit Marlowe about a sequel… Continue reading
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