Il Palscoscenico di Carta is back!

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Interesting week, this… Which is why I haven’t posted on Thursday, by the way. Things have happened – mostly good, but time-consuming, and I never know when all the time goes.

DSCN1109BWOne of the things, though, is this: we have found a home for Il Palcoscenico di Carta. At long last. One wouldn’t believe how difficult it was, but really, we’ve tried all sort of places: from cafés to small museums, from bookshops to military clubs – with everything in between… some were so blatantly unenthusiastic that we walked away, some loved the idea but had no room, some were willing but not right now, some asked an extortionate fee… Continue reading

Don’t Anger the Goddess

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od4Back when I  worked as an assistant-director with a small company, there was this time when the director got sick, and I was left in charge of an open-air performance of a play about Odysseus coming home to Ithaca…

No, not that time. Same play, same company – but a different open-air stage, at a rather huge Roman reenactment. Only, beside directing, this time I was also substituting the actress who played the Wise Athena, Odysseus’ patroness, more or less…

I rather hated it, and my costume was of an orange so loud it hurt to look at – but frankly, it was the last and least of my troubles. Continue reading

No NaNoWriMo

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novemberThis post on Karavansara made me jump: good heavens above, is it that time of the year again already?

And of course it is, and it will be November in a few days, and so it is even late to begin to think about doing NaNoWriMo – but the fact is that, even if I had not lost track of time and planned ahead… er. It’s always the same story: much as I like the notion of a month-long concentrated effort with an artificial but solid enough deadline, November is always about the very worst time for it. Continue reading

The Collier Leaf

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massacre-at-parisIt’s hard to read the Massacre at Paris without wondering a little at the slightly corner-cutting feel of it. It seems hastily done in its violence and gore, and there is the fact that it is considerably shorter than the average Marlowe play. So it has long be assumed that the Octavo edition we have must be the result of some actor’s imperfect memory.

And then there is the Collier Leaf. Continue reading

The Surrender of Ad Alta Voce

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aavsurrenderSo, we give up.

It makes me a little  sad to tell you that Ad Alta Voce, our not-quite-book-club, is no more.

It goes out without the least fuss. The meetings used to begin again in october, and this year they just do not. Maybe we’ll have one last reading-dinner with the very small group, but that’s it. End of the story.

And the smallness of the group is one reason why we are giving up. There’s seven of us, eight on good nights – out of which only five read. Always the same five, one being my mother, who only reads because of emotional blackmail. Other than that, we have had little or no response in the village. Oh, we had a few more people at the beginning, but almost no one read at all, and they quickly dropped out… Continue reading

Bad King John

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johnbwExactly eight hundred years ago, King John of England lay dying in a bed in Newark Castle. He would die in the night, among rumours of poison, or “a surfeit of peaches” – while in truth it was a bad case of dysentery. Then again, most contemporary biographers would be eager to give him a death that was the product of either retribution or gluttony…

Poor John. Continue reading

Noises Off: a crash course in backstage mayhem

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moviesblogathonThis post is my contribution to the Things I Learned From The Movies Bloghathon, hosted by Speakeasy and Silver Screenings – and, lo and behold! it has to do with theatre.

Backstage, precisely – and the accurate – if hilarious – portrait of onstage and backstage life that is Peter Bogdanovich‘s Noises Off, based on Michael Frayn‘s play of the same name. I must have been all of thirteen or fourteen, when I was first introduced to the vicissitudes of the troupe of Nothing On, and found them a hoot. Jaded director Lloyd Fellowes and his cast and crew are less than twenty-four hours from first night, and desperately trying to hammer in shape their new farce imported from London. Except, Nothing On is dismal fare, the actors are not, but not ready, doors won’t stay open, sardines are never where they should be, cues are missed, lines forgotten…  Continue reading

If I taught history…

Sketch of unknown woman and children, probably...I was not born to be a teacher. No patience – at all.

Oh yes, I teach writing to adults, and some sort of drama classes to middle-graders – or rather a kind of semi-curricular program combining history, writing and drama. It’s a nice little thing, and it usually works well enough, and yet, while the final outcome has always been quite satisfactory so far, each time I arrive to the end confirmed in my certainty that I was not born to be a teacher. Continue reading