06 Friday Dec 2019
Posted in Theatre
Tags
A Christmas Carol, Backstage Life, Charles Dickens, dress rehearsal, first night, Shakespeare in Love
The second run of “my” A Christmas Carol” opens tonight – and let me boast a little: we’re sold out all the way to January. There is no way on earth to call it anything else than a huge hit, and I’m inordinately proud.
That said… Continue reading
10 Thursday Oct 2019
Gordon Craig in The Dead Heart
In 1859, as A Tale of Two Cities was being first serialized in weekly instalments in Dickens’ own magazine, All The Year Round, a play by Watts Phillips, called The Dead Heart, made its stage debut at the Adelphi, to much success.
Phillips, a novelist and playwright, had had little luck lately, because he insisted on writing serious, near-austere pieces that pleased the critics (and, apparently, the Queen) more than they did the melodrama-loving general public.
The Dead Heart, though, a stirring tale of the French Revolution, filled with thwarted love, howling injustice, epic struggles, evil abbés, heroic sacrifice, and so on, was a different matter – all the more so because very soon people started to notice the close resemblance between the play and that new novel by Mr. Dickens… Continue reading
15 Thursday Nov 2018
Posted in Theatre
And so, thanks to A Christmas Carol, I now have another backstage job to add to my theatre resumé.
Because yes, we debuted last Saturday, and it went enormously well, and we’re very nearly sold out until January, and have actual waiting lists… And usually, at this point, I’ve done what I had to do, and can sit back and enjoy the ride, right? Not so this time! Continue reading
14 Saturday Jul 2018
Posted in Silents
Oh yes, July 14th and all that… And since we were discussing Dickens, and mentioned A Tale of Two Cities, I thought I’d put here a very, very old and very compressed silent version of Sydney Carton’s story:
Yes – the whole tale in little more than twenty minutes… Well, it was thirty minutes, originally – because this 1911 ATotC was released as a three-reeler*, but only this two-reel version survives. Still, who knows, maybe the complete one will turn up someday… These things keep happening, don’t they?
Meanwhile, it is always fascinating to see how screenwriters worked back then, with the need to cram several hundred pages of plot and characters into a handful of minutes. True, sometimes they relied on a reasonable certainty that their audiences already knew the story – and this might well be one such case – but we can’t tell for sure, because we still miss one third of the adaptation as it was originally conceived by Eugene Mullin.
For one thing, who knows whether the half-hour version would still have one little title card informing us that it was the best of times, it was the worst of times…?
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* Three weekly one-reel installments, actually – and wouldn’t Dickens have loved that!
12 Thursday Jul 2018
Posted in Books
A few days ago I was talking books with a reasonably educated and definitely adult acquaintance – and, on saying that I’ve read a good deal of Dickens through the years, I earned a raised eyebrow and this question: but isn’t Dickens a children’s author?
Right then I raised an eyebrow in turn – but I have to admit that my acquaintance had reasons to think so. Very Italian reasons that have little to do with the audience Dickens wrote for… Continue reading
28 Thursday Dec 2017
Posted in Scribbling, Stories
I emerged from my Reading Days last night, for a trip to town to see The Man Who Invented Christmas – and, unlike the rest of my party, quite loved it.
I admit I’d been wondering a little as I watched: the film is as lovely as a vintage illustration or a Christmas card, and Dan Stevens is vividly endearing as the overimaginative, struggling, high-strung writer – but there are two aspects of the writing that, while very, very appealing to me, are perhaps not made to click with an Italian audience… Continue reading
24 Sunday Dec 2017
Posted in Silents
Christmas Eve… We can’t very well go without some Dickens now, can we?
So… What about the 1910 Edison silent version?
Happy Christmas Eve, o Readers!
22 Thursday Dec 2016
Posted in Books
Oh, I’ve been neglecting Scribblings something bad, lately…
The fact is, December is December, and I always find myself trotting around, doing errands, hunting for presents, queuing at the post office, crafting insanely complicated Christmas decorations…
And how is this differend from anyone else’s December, you’ll ask? Oh, it isn’t at all, I suppose – except that I never quite understand just where all the hours go, and my poor little blog suffers for it… Well, I expect things to go back to some kind of normalcy after Christmas. Or at least, I hope.
Meanwhile, did you know this website, devoted entirely to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol?
It is a real treasure trove: there is the story itself, of course, and essays about it, and articles about Dickens and his works, and Dickens’s own essays on Christmas, and galleries of vintage illustrations, and artwork, and information about many adaptations for the screen and radio, and links…
As I said, a treasure trove if you are a fan of the book.
I am. And while cynical enough to raise an eyebrow at Scrooge’s fright-induced U turn, and to see the element of emotional blackmail, I find – every December – that I don’t mind too much being emotionally blackmailed when it comes to Christmas…
15 Tuesday Mar 2016
Posted in Things
17 Tuesday Nov 2015
Posted in History, Scribbling, Stories
Tags
A Little Princess, A Tale of Two Cities, Anthology, Charles Dickens, Historical fiction, History Will Be Kind, The Copperfield Review, Winston Churchill
History will be kind to me because I intend to write it,
said Winston Churchill… and write it he did. Authors of historical fiction usually go about “writing history” with more modest ambitions – or do they? Just look at Walter Scott or Charles Dickens… And I know Dickens was no historical novelist, properly speaking, but there is no denying that A Tale of Two Cities did much to shape the common perception of the French Revolution…
So perhaps this is it: we do not so much write history as tell it – and in telling it, we can shape the way it will be understood and perceived.
When Kipling said that if history were told in the form of stories it would never be forgotten, perhaps he did not mean that stories should take over the job of telling history. Perhaps he was stressing the responsibility that goes with the job of telling history in the form of stories… 
Just think of Sara Crewe telling dull Ermengarde about the French Revolution, and the severed head of the Princesse de Lamballe being carried over the crowd, stuck on a pike… “The princess was young and beautiful…” Sara tells a gaping Ermengarde – who won’t easily forget her history after that. A shame that Mme de Lamballe was 43 when she met her gruesome death – an age that no little girl would call “young”… So Ermengarde will always remember a picturesque fiction. It may not be very important, provided she remembers the French Revolution, but what of Dickens’s rather biased portrayal of the same period?
And yes – stories are not history, and vice versa. It would be most unfair to blame a novelist for “making things up” or “making things more dramatic”, but Ermengarde’s Princesse still raises interesting questions about the fiction and the perception of history.
An
d History Will Be Kind, The Copperfield Review’s first anthology, provides an interesting exercise in “telling history”. A rich collection of historical short stories, poems and essays, it explores a range of historical periods, characters and events – from Empress Maud to Alexander the Great, from the Third Crusade to 1914 Mexico – and Kit Marlowe, of course. My own very young Kit Marlowe who, in Gentleman in Velvet, learns a hard lesson about consequences and prices to be paid.
On the whole, it is a little history of the world told through story, as well as an exploration of many ways in which “we” tell these stories…
You can find History Will Be Kind in e-book and paperback format here:
All else apart, and seeing the time of the year, wouldn’t it make a nice Christmas present for lovers of history and stories?
