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| Jon Kudelka. The Weekend Australian: Review. December 20-30, 2012. |
Showing posts with label 2012. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2012. Show all posts
23/04/2014
Mirrors, or The Play Chooses You
This is an edited version of an essay that first appeared on thespellofwakinghours in March 2012.
O, is all forgot?
All school-days’ friendship, childhood innocence?
All school-days’ friendship, childhood innocence?
A Midsummer Night’s Dream [III.2]
People often talk about having a favourite Shakespeare play, the one play that they love and admire above all the others, for any number of reasons. While it’s a fantastic thing, I also think it’s not possible to have just one favourite Shakespeare play for life, for the simple reason that as we mature and grow, so do our tastes; we keep looking in the mirror and seeing new things reflected back at us. Throughout my early teens, like a lot of people, Shakespeare was just this guy, you know, who wrote some plays about four-hundred years ago, and people think he’s pretty okay still, but I never really ‘got’ why Shakespeare was Shakespeare, why he held such a godlike position in the literary canon. Mum and Dad took me to see The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) when I was twelve, and I ‘got’ enough of it to thoroughly enjoy myself. (I particularly remember the ‘balcony scene’ in Romeo and Juliet. One actor knelt in front of a chair with three tiny flowerpots strapped to his head, while another actor stood on the chair with a small watering can. ‘The balcony scene,’ the waterer said, deadpan, and the audience roared and applauded.) You could say that was the beginning, if you really wanted to. But if you think about it, this idea of having a sequence of ‘favourite’ Shakespeare plays is actually a part of our education whether we like it or not (or at least it was when I was at school; I believe the continuity and design behind it has been amended and inverted somewhat since then). Consequently, I have a theory happening, and I’m beginning to think it’s more purposeful and subtle – more conscious – than we’d ever assumed at first.
20/04/2014
Coriolanus
Ralph Fiennes, 2012.
John Logan’s
script for Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus
is, like the film, robust, muscular, tremendously masculine, and
uncompromisingly contemporary. Set in a place calling itself Rome , it is full of Brutalist concrete
apartment blocks, empty streets, protesting citizens and power-hungry
policiticans and power-brokers. As Coriolanus himself, Fiennes has the menace,
the gravitas and the unnervingly steely gaze of the once-popular general gone
bad. As his nemesis Aufidius, Gerard Butler also has the menace and requisite
air of danger about him, and in their confrontations, you really do believe
they could quite easily kill each other. Filled with muted colours and steely
concrete greys, browns, army-fatigue greens and lots of mud, ice and dirt, it
is a brutal look at the power that corrupts, corruption that empowers, how hard
it is to fight to be heard, and how easily things can go wrong. Again, it’s not
a film for the purists, but it is an intense, muscular and thrilling film, pared
down with considerable skill and flair by Logan ,
without losing any of Shakespeare’s humanist touches and flourishes.
05/04/2014
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