What kind of a foreign interpreter looks like that?

[sovay]

Like many then-viewers of Doctor Who, I ended up liking the writing of the Eleventh Doctor much less than his casting, but I still thought for six years that Matt Smith must have been an amazing Korovyev/Fagott in David Rudkin's The Master and Margarita (2004). I finally found visual confirmation:



He's missing the half-cracked pince-nez, but all of his plaids clash with one another. I'll take it. I have the diabolic on my mind because I dreamed last night about a black-and-white film of Damn Yankees which still starred Gwen Verdon—the irreplaceable Lola—but was otherwise much more Val Lewton than Broadway. I'm not sure it had any music. It might actually have been an adaptation of Douglass Wallop's The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant (1954). It's the first dream whose particulars I've remembered in months.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

My problem off the bat was that Nine was a little manic, Ten was more manic, and Eleven was even more manic-er. As you say, he was good when he was quiet, but they didn't give him enough chances to do that; instead he initially registered on me as Tennant Lite, Now with Added Caffeine. (I was exceedingly glad to see they toned it down with Capaldi, rather than cranking it up yet again.)

They did eventually differentiate him more . . . but they did so by a) making him really angry and hostile sometimes, and b) increasingly putting him in the middle of scripts that kept loudly pointing out how awesome the Doctor was and wasn't he just the most amazingly specialest person in the world who slept with Queen Elizabeth and kept getting called by Winston Churchill for help and gave Vincent Van Gogh the happiest day of his life and so on and so forth. And it is really, really hard for me to separate his acting from that, so that I can admire his performance without being profoundly annoyed by the script telling me to admire his character.