Posts Tagged ‘Tom Stoppard’
“Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature”*…
In 1982, the BBC ran a glorious nine-part series developed and hosted by John Barton, co-founder and director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. A master class in playing Shakespeare, it features RSC members and alumni including Judi Dench, Ben Kingsley, Peggy Ashcroft, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, David Suchet, Sinéad Cusack, Susan Fleetwood, Sheila Hancock, Alan Howard, Donald Sinden, Michael Williams, and more…
Indispensable for thespians, the series is every bit as rich a resource for those of us who want simply to enrich our appreciation of the Bard. All nine episodes can be streamed on Acorn or You Tube.
* Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 2
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As we declaim, we might recall that it was on this date in 1967 that Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead premiered at London’s Old Vic Theatre. A glorious piece of metatheater, the play expands on the exploits of two minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
The action of Stoppard’s play takes place mainly “in the wings” of Shakespeare’s, with brief appearances of major characters from Hamlet who enact fragments of the original’s scenes. Between these episodes, the two protagonists voice their confusion at the progress of events occurring onstage without them in Hamlet.
The title is taken directly from the final scene of Hamlet. In an earlier scene, Prince Hamlet has been exiled to England by the treacherous King of Denmark (his uncle Claudius, who of course has murdered Hamlet’s father to obtain the throne). En route to England, Hamlet discovers a letter from King Claudius which is being carried to England by Hamlet’s old but now untrusted friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The letter commands that Hamlet be put to death upon his arrival in England. Hamlet rewrites the letter to command that instead, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern be put to death. He then escapes back to Denmark. By the end of Shakespeare’s play, Prince Hamlet, Laertes, Ophelia, Polonius, King Claudius, and Queen Gertrude all lie dead.
“Don’t hate the media; become the media”*…
Punk Planet was a 16,000 print run punk zine, based in Chicago, Illinois, that focused most of its energy on looking at punk subculture rather than punk as simply another genre of music to which teenagers listen. In addition to covering music, Punk Planet also covered visual arts and a wide variety of progressive issues — including media criticism, feminism, and labor issues.
The most notable features in Punk Planet were the interviews and album reviews. The interviews generally ran two or three pages, and tended to focus on the motivations of the artist (or organizer, activist, or whoever) being interviewed. Punk Planet aimed to be more inclusive than the well-known zine Maximum Rock and Roll, and tried to review nearly all the records it received, so long as the record label wasn’t owned or partially owned by a major label. This led to a review section typically longer than thirty pages, covering a variety of musical styles. Although much of the music thus reviewed was, expectedly, aggressive rock, the reviews also covered country, folk, hip-hop, indie rock, and other genres. The Punk Planet reviews section also encompassed independently released comics, zines, and DVDs…
The first issue of the zine was published in May 1994, in part as a response to the perception that Maximum Rock and Roll was becoming too elitist. In September 2006, Punk Planet had printed 75 issues of their bi-monthly publication, and in the fall of 2004 launched a book publishing arm, Punk Planet Books, in conjunction with the New York-based small press Akashic Books…
A number of poor distribution deals and the collapse of the Independent Press Association resulted in mounting debts for the editors. As a result, issue 80 was shipped with a cover reading: “This is the final issue of Punk Planet, after this the fight is yours.” Subsidiary business Punk Planet books remains in business…
The annals of punk, the subculture as much as the genre– the invaluable Internet Archive (@internetarchive) has digitized and made the full run available: “Punk Planet Archive.”
* Jello Biafra
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As we travel in time, we might recall that this date in 1959 was “the day the music died”: the day that a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, J.P. Richardson (aka, The Big Bopper), and pilot Roger Peterson.
If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music… and of aviation.
– Tom Stoppard
“Don’t try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it”*…
Your correspondent is headed several time zones away, so (Roughly) Daily will be on hiatus until February the 10th or so. Meantime…
In 2000, the OECD asked 15-year-olds what they wanted to be when they grew up. Some 47% of boys and 53% of girls picked 10 careers, including doctors, teachers, lawyers and business managers.
In 2018, the OECD asked again. Though the nature of work has changed dramatically since the turn of the century, kids’ answers have not: An even larger share of both boys and girls say they want to go into the same 10 professions…
See the breakdown at “The world of work is changing, but the career aspirations of teenagers are not.”
[image above, source]
* Russell Baker
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As we reassess our aspirations, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972 that Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers premiered at the Old Vic in London. A satire of academic philosophy– likening it to a less-than-skillful competitive display of gymnastics and juggling– the play is set in an alternative future in which British astronauts have landed on the moon… leading to fears that the landing would ruin the moon as a poetic trope and result in a collapse of moral values.
Egad!
Michael Hordern as philosopher George Moore (from the playtext cover). Moore is about to loose the arrow and disprove Zeno’s arrow paradox.
Happy Groundhog Day!
“The act of a pro is to make it look easy. Fred Astaire doesn’t grunt when he dances to let you know how hard it is. If you’re good at it, you leave no fingerprints.”*…
Lillian Ross was a journalist and author who was a staff writer at The New Yorker for seven decades. Her novelistic reporting and writing style, apparent in early stories about Ernest Hemingway and John Huston, is widely understood to have been a primary influence on what would later be called “literary journalism” or “new journalism.”
Novelist– and one-time Ross friend– Andrew O’Hagan offers a remembrance on the occasion of the republication of Ross’s Picture, her account of the making of John Huston’s screen adaptation of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage [she’s pictured above, at work on the piece]…
I’ve never met anybody who hated as many people as Lillian Ross did. She would count their names off on her fingers, regularly within spitting distance of them, and her voice wasn’t quiet and she wasn’t shy. Bending back each digit and making a face, she’d offer a defining word after each name:
Gloria Steinem – phoney
Janet Malcolm – pretentious
Renata Adler – crackpot
Susan Sontag – nobody
Nora Ephron – liarOther hand:
Kenneth Tynan – creep
Truman Capote – leech
George Plimpton – slick
Tom Wolfe – talentless
Philip Roth – jerkIt was a mercy she only had two hands…
Great reporting isn’t usually harmed by the reporter having a poor character. It may even be improved by it. Lillian just happened to be hard-bitten in the right way. Her pieces relied on a ruthlessness, sometimes a viciousness, that she didn’t try to hide and that other people liked to comment on. She talked a lot about not being egotistical and so on, but reporters who talk a great deal about not obtruding on the reporting are usually quite aware, at some level, that objectivity is probably a fiction, and that they are most present when imagining they’re invisible. (Lillian was in at least two minds about this, possibly six. One minute she’d say a reporter had to let the story be the story, the next she’d say it was ridiculous: a reporter is ‘chemically’ involved in the story she is writing.)…
More on the complicated question of character and and the work that it produces at “Not Enough Delilahs.”
{Image above: source]
* Lillian Ross
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As we consider the source, we might send delightful birthday greetings to Sir Tom Stoppard; he was born on this date in 1937. A playwright and screenwriter, he has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, earning acclaim for such plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, The Invention of Love, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and for the screenplays for Brazil, The Russia House, and Shakespeare in Love; he has received an Academy Award and four Tony Awards.
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