Troy

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Achilles, Brad Pitt, British Museum, Byron, Cassandra, Chaucer, Clytemnestra, Euripedes, Euripides, Homer, Keats, Lady Hamilton, Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker, Penguin Puffin, Pompeii, Priam, Roger Lancelyn Green, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Stephen Fry, Troy, Virgil

The Trojan War has for centuries (millennia, even) inspired writers and artists.  We can think of so many writers – Keats, Byron, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Sophocles and Euripedes, as well of course as Homer and Virgil.  In our own time we can think of Margaret Atwood’s amazing Penelopiad (I wish I knew who it was I lent my copy to) and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls.You can see how artists have mined this great seam at the splendid Troy – Myth and Reality exhibition at the British Museum.  But hurry – it ends on 8 March.

From a jar of 530 BC showing Achilles killing the Amazon queen to a poster of Brad Pitt as the same great warrior in Troy (2004), you can see in how many different ways art has portrayed the tale of Troy.   This picture of Helen boarding Paris’ ship for Troy was once on someone’s wall in Pompeii: what does that expression on her face mean?

This wonderful bowl shows Priam begging Achilles for the return of his son Hector’s body – it may well have been made in the time of Christ. We know that soldiers’ lives aren’t all danger and excitement, but there are long periods of boredom while the troops wait for something to happen. Here are Ajax and Achilles whiling away some time playing a board game.

 

 

 

 

 

Lady Hamilton’s life was lively enough without needing to call on the classics, but here she is as Cassandra (painted by George Romney).

And you shouldn’t mess with Clytemnestra – as her husband has just found out.  Look at her face and the step by her feet.  John Collier painted that.

The exhibition website is at https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/troy-myth-and-reality.

Like many others I first was taken with it as a child reading the Puffin books The Tale of Troy and Tales of the Greek Heroes by Roger Lancelyn Green.  I’m now much enjoying Stephen Fry’s so readable and entertaining retelling of the Greek myths – Mythos and, my current reading, Heroes.  This doesn’t get to the Trojan War – I hope there’ll be a third volume for that.

What’s the story?

Tags

Mobile phones, Padlocks, Prague, True love

What prompts a story in your imagination?

The vogue for fixing padlocks to a bridge as a token of your affection has reached Prague: here are some on a bridge on Kampa Island, a romantic spot favoured by lovers.

On a visit earlier this year we saw this gentleman, in long conference with someone by mobile phone, trying to identify a particular padlock.

What on earth is the story here?  A broken romance, so painful that not even the padlock must remain on the bridge?  A padlock made of gold?  A vital message scratched on one?  And why delegate the finding of this lock to someone else?

Any ideas?

 

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The joy of words – en français

Tags

French, Kenneth Williams, Où est la plume de ma tante?, Petula Clark, Sasha Distel

Seeing Kenneth Williams’ party piece Ma Crêpe Suzette on TV last week I thought it deserved another outing, for the sheer fun he has in putting the words together.

I’m old enough to remember Petula Clark and Sasha Distel’s greatest hits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTlmeBBFLXg

I’d love to hear the French/English version.

Fine Work

©We have to thank the Jane Austen House Museum at Chawton (the only house in which Jane Austen lived and wrote which is open to the public) for allowing us to reproduce this image of our favourite author’s own handiwork, which the British Library currently has on loan from them. 

How do you work out your plots? Develop character? Decide how to effectively bring lovers together in a satisfying way?

Staring at a blank screen or sheet of paper can be more frustrating than inspirational. Instead, some of us develop our fiction while doing the family ironing (several gruesome murders in Herefordshire came about this way), others use a Labrador tugging at the extremity of a smart leather lead. I frequently nudge my subconscious into activity by dead-heading roses or measuring out the ingredients for a lemon drizzle cake.

One feels that Jane Austen knew the value of displacement activity instinctively. As an accomplished needlewoman, who made her own caps and no doubt her everyday gowns, she spent some of her leisure hours creating embroidered gifts for family and friends. The above photo is of a simple paper needle case stitched for her niece, Louisa. Did quiet time with her needle also help her decide that Lydia’s elopement would provide a satisfactorily scandalous derailment of the burgeoning romance between Elizabeth and Darcy? Did Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s insufferable arrogance simmer into being while Jane Austen frowned over the inflexibity of a back stitch? Darcy’s ungentlemanly proposal speech evolve over a peppering of French knots?

It is a delight to discover yet another of Jane Austen’s talents. Her perfectly constructed novels are like Savile Row tailoring. Pieces of story carefully selected and shaped to marry into an elegant whole. One creative art perhaps enhancing another. Maybe I should unearth that unfinished (and sadly amateurish) piece of tapestry from the attic…

We’d love to know how you distract yourself into creativity.

The Jane Austen House Museum, is, of course, an essential visit. They now own and have on display her gold and turquoise ring which was saved from leaving the country in 2014.

Austen House

Designing our book cover

I was interested to be sent this link, presumably for self-publishing in a digital medium: https://blog.dreamstime.com/2016/08/19/book-cover-design-how-to-choose-and-use-images_art44964

I quite like the idea of subverting a genre by having space ships alongside a regency heroine.  I guess I’ll never get employed as art director for a publishing house…

Harper Lee

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Harper Lee

Amazing and moving clip on tonight’s TV News of Harper Lee getting an honorary degree, when every student in the hall holds up a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. 2,000 of them!

You can see it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh3W9_gRAU8

RIP.

‘Mr Foote’s Other Leg’

Tags

Ian Kelly, Samuel Foote, Simon Russell Beale, theatre seat prices

There is still three weeks in which to see Mr Foote’s Other Leg at the Theatre Royal in the Haymarket in London. Simon Russell Beale plays Mr Foote and does so magnificently. It’s on till 23 January. The play is by Ian Kelly.

Samuel Foote actually lived, and I’m ashamed to say I’d never heard of him.  One book I must now get is the award-winning account of his colourful life, in and out of the theatre, that Ian Kelly wrote before the play. It’s called Mr Foote’s Other Leg: Comedy, tragedy and murder in Georgian London, and is published by Picador.

Foote began his public life by writing a best-selling account of the murder of one of his uncles by another. He had an early failed marriage, was sent down from Oxford for (among other things) a bizarre practical joke at the expense of the Provost of his college, and became a flamboyant personality in London coffee house society. He was a comic actor, good at impersonation; a playwright, famed for his satire; and an impresario at the Haymarket Theatre itself, adept at evading the licensing and censorship law of the time. Another strange practical joke (at the hands of royalty) costs him his leg – and eventually, perhaps, his reason. A savage satire on a celebrity Duchess landed them both in court, her charged with bigamy and him with sodomy.

The other actors in the play are great too.  The author of the play, Ian Kelly, plays Prince George (and then George III). Dervla Kirwan is the celebrated Irish actress Peg Woffington and Joseph Millson her lover the great actor David Garrick. Jenny Galloway plays Mrs Garner, the maid-of-all-work who has actually kept Foote’s theatre together for years: she has a great speech in which she lauds those who work backstage, as against the actors with their airs and graces. Micah Balfour plays Frank Barber, a freed slave from Jamaica who becomes Foote’s assistant, with much mutual puzzlement when Foote and Garrick are playing Othello.

There are many jokes (and insights?) to do with the world of the theatre.  There is much Shakespearean stuff.  There are comments on the role of the press (ostensibly in the 18^th century, but also of today).

At first I thought they were speaking too quickly for me to catch it all but then either they slowed down or I caught up, and all became well.

If you go, here’s a tip:  if you have time, before it starts read the timeline of Samuel Foote’s life in the programme.  That will elucidate much of what’s happening (especially at the end).

You also learn from the programme that one reason why Samuel Foote’s plays are not performed nowadays is that he sometimes wrote them with leading roles for a one-legged actor, with subsequent casting difficulties …

We went as a New Year’s Eve treat. As has been our experience at the Haymarket before, our seats were upgraded.  We had bought seats in the Upper Circle but found ourselves in seats with an excellent view in the Royal Circle.  (Haymarket seats are not cheap!)

In the words of the programme, “The play – like the book – is a comedy about theatre folk that also offers a huge panorama of 18^th-century life.”

‘And Then There Were None’

Tags

Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None, BBC TV, whodunits

I was in the happy position over Christmas, watching the amazing And Then There Were None on BBC TV, to be able to compare stage and TV versions of this classic Christie story. A group of ten strangers (each with a deadly and guilty secret in their past) find themselves cut off on an island, invited by the mysterious and apparently absent Mr U N Owen; they are then serially murdered, in the same sequence as in the nursery rhyme Ten Little Soldier Boys.

A group of us saw the Agatha Christie Theatre Company do this at Tunbridge Wells’ Assembly Hall in October, as part of their ten-months-long nationwide tour. (How well they must have known their words by the end!)   The cast included some names familiar to those of us of, er, more mature years: Paul Nicholas (star of the 1980s sitcom Just Good Friends), Mark Wynter (‘60s pop star, with hits such as Venus in Blue Jeans), and Deborah Grant (John Nettles’ ex-wife way back in Bergerac), to name but three.

The stage version gave us atmosphere and a storm, and the sense of being trapped. Unlike a film it couldn’t show us close-ups of bodies on jagged rocks, or transport us in momentary flashback to the Western Front or the drowning of a boy. But it did have the excitement of live theatre. Our group had a happy outing; I couldn’t remember whodunit, and the ending surprised me just as it had when I’d seen a film version years before. (This may have been the 1974 one with Richard Attenborough, Oliver Reed, Elke Sommer et al – this story does seem to appeal to all-star casts).

One of the motifs of the story is that there is on display in the house a group of ten toy soldiers. After each death the remaining characters discover that one of these has disappeared. That is easily effected in a film, but how did it happen on stage? In the interval I asked a fellow member of the audience, and he told me he’d seen one of the actors (one who was killed shortly afterwards) surreptitiously put one in his pocket. Maybe whichever cast member was nearest the toys at the time had the job of secreting one.

In our family we’re still enthusing about the TV version, shown on Boxing Day and the two successive nights in one-hour chunks. Wow! The atmosphere, the tension, the menace – and the absence of the semi-humorous tone you often get in Christie films – more, more! One by one the cast are killed, and they know it and can see it coming, and they fear each other. No supersleuth is there to explain the complexities of what is happening and to unmask the villain.  They just get killed, all ten …

I can see that some folk will have found too long the ominous pauses, but not us. To see Toby Stephens, Charles Dance, Sam Neill, Miranda Richardson and the rest put on their turns was just right for the dark evenings after Christmas when the festive supplies of food and drink need to be finished off.   I can’t see it myself, but the female half of our viewership were also much taken with Aidan Turner’s torso. Once displayed, why it then had to reappear quite so often I don’t know.   Yes, you guessed it – this was the role Oliver Reed played in the 1974 film: I can’t remember whether he kept showing us his chest.

Knowing who did it didn’t spoil my pleasure – indeed, it was fascinating to see the story unfold with that knowledge. What was difficult was not letting anything slip that would give the game away to my fellow viewers. Reader, I managed it.

The Twittersphere raved about the production – and the aforesaid torso was the detail most mentioned in that raving.

My favourite tweet was “They’ve really upped the stakes in the latest series of Big Brother.”

I don’t know why the BBC changed the skeleton in the policeman’s cupboard. In the play (and, I think, the original book) he has been bribed and has committed perjury, resulting in an innocent man being hanged. On TV he has instead kicked a young gay man to death in a police cell. One can only speculate why this change was made. 

Sometime I must read the novel to see how the Queen of Crime herself imagined the story. And to find out how it was that Mr U N Owen came to know all these terrible secrets.

I’ve heard it muttered somewhere that next year we may get Witness for the Prosecution (which I also saw the Agatha Christie Theatre Company do this at the Assembly Hall a few years ago). Bring it on!

 

An irresistible title

Tags

Oliver Sacks, The Guardian, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat – a title so intriguing that it must surely have shifted thousands of copies for that reason alone – is a collection of case histories about people with devastating brain conditions written by the neurologist Oliver Sacks. But this is not a dry medical textbook; these are riveting stories of memorable characters.

Oliver Sacks died on 30th August. The newspapers have been full of obituaries, chronicling the life and work of this extraordinary, wonderful man, who wrote about his patients not as objects of medical science but as humans with souls and unique identity – and their own stories to tell.

A piece in the Guardian Saturday 5th September by three different contributors offered some memorable vignettes and comment. Will Self writes how he met Sacks at a Duckworth publishing party. ‘He had a man with Tourette syndrome with him who was, I presume, either a patient, a friend, or, which is more likely, given Oliver’s overall disposition – both. At any rate, this man was running around the book stacks shouting “Fuck! shit! Damn!” And Sacks was chatting away…’

Jewish, gay and living alone for most of his life, Sacks was driven by a fascination for what it means to be human. He combined this with tender listening to every afflicted individual. Andrew Solomon suggests that when writing about his patients, ‘he was both exploitative of and deferential to them, telling their stories without regard for personal seemliness…it was audacious to be as careful as he was about the spiritual vulnerabilities of the profoundly impaired.’

Sacks, writes Sue Halpern, introduced us to ‘the strange and miraculous architecture of the human brain… to people with diseases and conditions that rendered them freaks to others but not to him and then, by extension, not to us.’

Time to re-read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, An Anthropologist on Mars, and Awakenings. 

WW2 heroes and their planes

Tags

Czechoslovak, RAF, WW2

Do you know – or are you yourself – an aviation enthusiast? If so he – or she, or you! — you might be interested in the recent book B-24 Liberator In RAF Coastal Command Service With Focus On Aircraft Of No 311 (Czechoslovak) Squadron RAF. This highly detailed book of 316 pages examines the role undertaken by the B-24 Liberator equipped units of Coastal Command during the Second World War, with emphasis on the activities of 311 (Czechoslovak) Squadron.

This extensive study includes overviews of the versions of the Liberator used by RAF Coastal Command and of the RAF Squadrons using it in maritime service, and a complete list and operational history of all 81 Liberators used by No. 311 (Czechoslovak) Squadron in Coastal Command service during WW2 and afterwards.  Hardback, the book contains 550 photos and 70 colour profiles. It is written by Pavel Türk and Miloslav Pajer.

It was launched at the Aviation Bookshop in Tunbridge Wells, in the presence of two RAF Coastal Command veterans, Ivan Schwarz and Arnost Polak, and the author Pavel Türk. It is published in the Czech Republic by JaPo, costs £59.99, and is available from the Aviation Bookshop, 31-33 Vale Road, Tunbridge Wells, TN1 1BS (01892 539284 and www.aviation-bookshop.com). Our thanks to the Aviation Bookshop for use of the photo of the veterans.