2/12/10, The Hospital, Covent Garden
2 hrs. Preview of the new film about George VI and his Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue: a fine piece of British heritage film-making and a hot tip for the Oscars. I'd just read the book by Logue's grandson Mark and the Sunday Times journalist Peter Conradi and (perhaps as a result) was slightly disappointed by the movie, despite the great praise it garnered at the London Film Festival.
The central performances (Colin Firth as the Duke of York/King, Geoffrey Rush as Logue) were strong. So too were Helena Bonham-Carter as the Duchess/Queen/Queen Mum and (perhaps surprising this) Guy Pearce as Edward VIII (even though the supposed older brother was played by the younger actor). But I didn't care for Michael Gambon's George V: the bullying was historically apt but he seemed to lack aristocratic polish. Claire Bloom was unrecognisable as Queen Mary. Anthony Andrews looked and moved like a waxwork as Baldwin. Derek Jacobi was implausibly reptilian as the Archbishop. Timothy Spall was frankly embarrassing as Churchill.
At times I drifted and played spot the location. The old Naval College at Greenwich stood in for wartime Whitehall, I think. I'm told Logue's distressed basement consulting room was in a house in Portland Place rented out for events and locations. The Duke's home at 145 Piccadilly was also a house in Portland Place. The Logue family home was in that tenement block behind Kings Cross which is often used for filming... and looked a very far cry from The Boltons where they actually lived in middle class comfort before moving to a rather grand villa in Sydenham.
And some of the compromises with historical truth needed to make a decent film irked me. The timescale is compressed, which is fair enough: everything happens between 1934 and 1939 in the film, whereas in fact Logue first treated the Duke in 1925 or 6. There's a nice scene in Westminster Abbey before the Coronation in which the king (who's been listening to the Archbishop and his scheming Establishment cronies) confronts Logue with his lack of qualifications, which allows Logue to respond with a bit of handy backstory about treating sufferers from World War One shellshock and never claiming to have qualifications because there weren't any for a new discipline he was helping to pioneer. There's another scene in which Logue starts asking the Duke about his childhood -- a primitive type of psychoanalysis, perhaps -- and meets resistance from the Duke which probably reflects reality. And the significance of the Duke's problems is emphasised by supposing that many more of his speeches were broadcast than was really the case and conjuring up a wonderful BBC control room with equipment cabinets carrying brass plates with the names of the countries of the empire to which they transmitted which had a certain bravura splendour.
But Logue is made out to be a failed actor. He calls the Duke "Bertie" whereas in reality he was always "Sir". And the Logues are shown as a good deal poorer than they were in reality. No doubt the aim is to emphasise the contrast between the privileged royals and the "common colonial" Logue, but the changes rather diminish Lionel as an historical figure.
What's more, to make sense of the Abdication crisis Edward VIII's supposed Fascist leanings are frequently referred to (I suspect no-one knew about them at the time and, if they did, those in the know were a good deal more perturbed by the religious question), and at one point a radio in the background carries what sounds like Abdication news when in reality it was all a terrible secret until the deed was agreed.
But looking back at that list I see there are many more positives than negatives (and I could have named several other positives) so no doubt I'm just being picky.
Showing posts with label geoffrey rush. Show all posts
Showing posts with label geoffrey rush. Show all posts
Wednesday, 15 December 2010
Monday, 13 April 2009
MADAME DE SADE
9/04/09, Donmar at Wyndhams
An elaborate and wordy defence of sado-masochism by Yukio Mishima, whose credentials for writing it include his later ritual suicide. Starring, of all people, Judy Dench and Rosamund Pike (whom I think of as rather virginal, but who has apparently played a Bond villainess, as well as Jane Bennett in Pride & Prejudice and is considered "hot" in certain quarters).
What were the Donmar thinking of? And what did the audience (elderly Dench fans, Donmar loyalists, foreign tourists) make of it?
Three scenes, 18 years apart, from 1772 to 1790 and the onset of the French Revolution. Mme de ade (Pike) and her mother (Dench) discuss her reprobate husband, who is always in and out of prison and never seen, along with her sister (Fiona Button, who reminded me of a former colleague who insisted on playing the ingenue well into middle age), servant and two acquaintances (one, a female roue, played with thigh-slapping relish and fine comic timing by Frances Barber).
The frocks were gorgeous. The set was a chilly stateroom in some mansion, the walls silver, onto which were projected at certain moments images (blood, the moon, snow-covered branches): a nice touch. From time to time the women would recall some vivid memory, at which point their voices would echo and the stage would fill with appropriate sounds. You couldn't fault the production, by Michael Grandage. The performances were fine: S said she thought Pike was "just saying the words" much of the time, but I thought that judgement harsh because they were all just saying the words at least part of the time, with the exception of Barber and the servant (who had little to say).
The problem was the play. Mishima tries to explain the inexplicable, and to justify it. Sado-masochism is irrational and (literally) perverse: that there are people who are drawn to it is unarguable, but that the attraction can be explained through rayional discourse is asking too much. Mishima of course fails, taking refuge in flights of unconvincing rhetoric and rather chilly dialogue. He throws in a few (positively 18th century) dramatic twists in token acknowledgement that this is a play, not an essay, but they do not convince (at the start of one act Mme de Sade's sister runs on with a letter announcing that de Sade has been pardoned by royal warrant; several minutes into the scene it then transpires that the letter is months old; a little while longer and it emerges that de Sade was rearrested immediately, of all of which his wife has of course been ignorant; so we get three sets of reactions from her, the first two on false dramatic pretences).
But it got us talking afterwards. S confided that she'd tried to read the Story of O and failed, and could not understand these poor, benighted women. (I have read it, and I can't understand the women either, but that doesn't mean I don't find the whole subject fascinating.)
We stood in the street discussing why de Sade in his day was considered as big a threat to the social order as the Revolution, with which he was quite erroneously identified (the Revolution had a positive prospectus until it went off the rails with Robespierre, who was perhaps a sadist; de Sade had no manifesto except his own perverse pleasure). And we talked of other representations of de Sade, in the Marat Sade and in the film Quills, where he was played by Geoffrey Rush and made palatable according to A because Rush is so charming. And we discussed Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which had something in common with Madame de Sade (period, frocks, a lot of talking) but succeeded far better according to S because of the erotic charge in the stage version between Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan.
So maybe this play wasn't such a turkey after all.
An elaborate and wordy defence of sado-masochism by Yukio Mishima, whose credentials for writing it include his later ritual suicide. Starring, of all people, Judy Dench and Rosamund Pike (whom I think of as rather virginal, but who has apparently played a Bond villainess, as well as Jane Bennett in Pride & Prejudice and is considered "hot" in certain quarters).
What were the Donmar thinking of? And what did the audience (elderly Dench fans, Donmar loyalists, foreign tourists) make of it?
Three scenes, 18 years apart, from 1772 to 1790 and the onset of the French Revolution. Mme de ade (Pike) and her mother (Dench) discuss her reprobate husband, who is always in and out of prison and never seen, along with her sister (Fiona Button, who reminded me of a former colleague who insisted on playing the ingenue well into middle age), servant and two acquaintances (one, a female roue, played with thigh-slapping relish and fine comic timing by Frances Barber).
The frocks were gorgeous. The set was a chilly stateroom in some mansion, the walls silver, onto which were projected at certain moments images (blood, the moon, snow-covered branches): a nice touch. From time to time the women would recall some vivid memory, at which point their voices would echo and the stage would fill with appropriate sounds. You couldn't fault the production, by Michael Grandage. The performances were fine: S said she thought Pike was "just saying the words" much of the time, but I thought that judgement harsh because they were all just saying the words at least part of the time, with the exception of Barber and the servant (who had little to say).
The problem was the play. Mishima tries to explain the inexplicable, and to justify it. Sado-masochism is irrational and (literally) perverse: that there are people who are drawn to it is unarguable, but that the attraction can be explained through rayional discourse is asking too much. Mishima of course fails, taking refuge in flights of unconvincing rhetoric and rather chilly dialogue. He throws in a few (positively 18th century) dramatic twists in token acknowledgement that this is a play, not an essay, but they do not convince (at the start of one act Mme de Sade's sister runs on with a letter announcing that de Sade has been pardoned by royal warrant; several minutes into the scene it then transpires that the letter is months old; a little while longer and it emerges that de Sade was rearrested immediately, of all of which his wife has of course been ignorant; so we get three sets of reactions from her, the first two on false dramatic pretences).
But it got us talking afterwards. S confided that she'd tried to read the Story of O and failed, and could not understand these poor, benighted women. (I have read it, and I can't understand the women either, but that doesn't mean I don't find the whole subject fascinating.)
We stood in the street discussing why de Sade in his day was considered as big a threat to the social order as the Revolution, with which he was quite erroneously identified (the Revolution had a positive prospectus until it went off the rails with Robespierre, who was perhaps a sadist; de Sade had no manifesto except his own perverse pleasure). And we talked of other representations of de Sade, in the Marat Sade and in the film Quills, where he was played by Geoffrey Rush and made palatable according to A because Rush is so charming. And we discussed Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which had something in common with Madame de Sade (period, frocks, a lot of talking) but succeeded far better according to S because of the erotic charge in the stage version between Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan.
So maybe this play wasn't such a turkey after all.
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