I had a friend

1. Because my immune system has deserted me, I am not going up to Manchester to teach Roman sexual obscenities to schreibergasse's class tomorrow. I am for obvious reasons rather depressed over this, so I have been trying all day to distract myself; toward this end, I watched the last two episodes of Mushishi with Viking Zen tonight and this afternoon met nineweaving for BerryLine and The Dresser (1983), which has gone instantly on my list of films I should have seen years ago.

Technically we were watching it for Michael Gough, but it's very nearly a two-hander between Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay as an aging, fast-failing Shakespearean actor-manager known only as "Sir" and Norman, the eponymous dresser who has to hold him together through one final performance of King Lear even as the bombs start to fall (it's Bradford in 1940) and the already ramshackle company (cobbled together from whoever couldn't get called up) threatens to come apart at the seams. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Slings & Arrows (2003—2006) wouldn't exist without this film, but the third season especially is in both its shadow and its debt. Sir is a titanically self-centered man who seems to have run his life on the principle that someone, somewhere has always ordered a large ham (TV Tropes, don't say I didn't warn you), with a regal capriciousness and God's own boom of a voice that can arrest a train in its tracks, but his mind is fraying away from him and the role of the raging, demented king is increasingly less an effort of theater and more an involuntary verité. Sharp-tongued and quick-witted, with a conjurer's patter of anecdotes and a crisp camp unflappability, Norman seems his natural Fool, expert at judging after sixteen years when nursery prattle is called for and when impatience will get the job done, whatever bloodyminded invention it takes to get Sir onstage—and in the right play—by the time the curtain comes up. Who is it that can tell me who I am? —Lear's shadow. But this set-up is misleading, because while The Dresser is truthfully a version of King Lear, the tragic figure at its heart is not after all the disintegrating actor-king of this little empire of greasepaint and rattling tin thunder, it's his indefatigable, brandy-fueled, heartbreakingly dedicated enabler and helpmate, waiting in the wings with a dishtowel tucked in his belt and a glass of beer on a tea-tray, still stage-struck after all these years. No one's hanged in this production except metaphorically, by love and grief. It's the same in the end. I am no longer awake enough to write the rest of what I thought of this movie, but you should be able to tell I was impressed.

2. Elizabeth Taylor. Earlier I told rushthatspeaks that I had only ever seen her in National Velvet (1944) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), but that's because I keep forgetting there were actors in Cleopatra (1963).

3. It looks as though there will be a film of The Magician's Nephew after all. Oh, God. I have been waiting for Tilda Swinton's Jadis since 2005, but please don't let some studio executive decide that what this story really needs is an evil island or more battle scenes. After their Voyage of the Dawn Treader, I am very dubious. And who the lion are they going to cast as Uncle Andrew? All my first choices have been dead for decades.

4. Please understand that I do not have the time to write a police procedural based on Euripides, but what other response is worth having to this line: "And if the ancient Greeks had had a police force, you can be damn sure a detective inspector would have had a part in Medea."

5. This poem makes me very happy.