I had a friend

[sovay]

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.

Comments

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Bad Asklepios! No chicken!

The Dresser was glorious.

Nine

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

@sir' being Donald Wolfit, apparently.

Re Medea - the line of that article that haunts me is "He survived by cleaning and repairing clarinets," I can see it's a job that someone could usefully do, but I can't see it as one you might stumble into if you were in a strange town with toothache...

Uncle Andrew: nominate Matt Smith. WE may have to wait until he's a bit older, but - (or is it just the big flappy coat, which seems to have accompanied him from Doctor Who to Christopher Isherwood?).

And good poem, thanks for the pointer.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

1. I have loved that film since 1983, and I had the chance to show it to rysmiel last year. I've been wanting to see it again since we saw the Jacobi Lear.

3. I will not watch the film whoever they cast, but how about Bill Nighy?

4. If not you, then who?

5. Me too. Thank you.

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

I blame the equinox. I spent Tuesday revisiting the joys of congestive heart failure and labile arrhythmia, and yesterday recovering from that. *feebles feebly* I'd have taken the cold.

[zdenka]

I feel like they'd have more use for a detective inspector in Oedipus.

Feel better.

[weirdquark]

And who the lion are they going to cast as Uncle Andrew?

John Hurt? He is possibly too awesome, but I think he would do a very good sniveling man of power.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

That was an awesome poem.

Re: Elizabeth Taylor. I think I also saw about five minutes of a version of Ivanhoe with her as Rebecca. Otherwise, I only saw her in National Velvet.

Re: missing out on the sexual obscenities class--I bet they'd appreciate even a handy crib sheet, if you could provide them with that (electronically, even, via Schreibergasse).

More generally, I hope your immune system remembers its sense of duty and returns soon.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Uncle Andrew? Obviously Alan Rickman for one good candidate; he can act.

[helivoy.livejournal.com]

I can't stand Lewis, so I feel Swinton is wasted in those films (Medusa mudcake hairdo included).

Medea as a police procedural would be the Andrea Yates story. Interestingly, city-states had police: the Spartans had the skotia (though its primary use was assassination of uppity helots), the Athenians actually employed Scythians (on the sound premise that they would be more impartial).

[clarionj.livejournal.com]

Teaching Roman sexual obscenities--I'd love to hear your talks. I'm sorry you're not feeling well and have to miss it.

Thank you for the poem link, and yes, it made me smile today. I've the urge to do something rhyming now, and I always enjoy the defining by negation technique (though I don't think I've ever tried it).

I was wondering if you'd still be interested in looking at the screenplay (realizing it's 120 pages! and people say screenplays are hard to read since they don't flow like prose). But if you are willing, where could I send it? My e-mail is patricia.esposito@yahoo.com, if you'd like to get in touch there.

I received your poem in Sybil's Garage and am very happy to have it :) You create the spark in the poem.

[thunderpigeon.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link to the poem. It was a great late-afternoon pick-me-up.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

I'm so sorry about your not being able to give that guest lecture. I've a nasty cough on myself--wasn't able to go to a house concert tonight, and I'm wondering if I'll feel up to going into NYC tomorrow for my book club meeting.

3.

I hope it comes out well, or at least adequately. I didn't see their Voyage of the Dawn Treader; I take it from your comment that perhaps this is just as well? It seems very strange to do The Magician's Nephew after Voyage..., but I suppose it's no worse than this strange chronological order for Narnia that's for some reason become fashionable in place of the order of publication which I grew up with.

4. Please understand that I do not have the time to write a police procedural based on Euripides...

Did you ever read Alexander Jablokov's "The Fury at Colonus"? I suppose tis more based on Aeschylus, but police procedural it be.

5. This poem makes me very happy.

It pleases me, also. Thank you for the sharing of it.