TOP 100 ACTOR SITES
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| Lee to release heavy metal album Actor Christopher Lee is releasing a heavy metal album. breakingnews.ie |
Why can't theatre and romcoms get it together? | Brian Logan From As You Like It to The Front Page, theatre was once captivated by romantic comedies. Did we get too cynical?The other week I interviewed the playwright David Greig and the musician Gordon McIntyre about their lo-fi musical, Midsummer. The show (opening at Soho theatre this week) is being sold on the novelty of its indie soundtrack – but when I saw it in Edinburgh last year, it wasn't the music that stood out, it was the romance. Indie music in theatre isn't so uncommon. But romantic comedy? If there'd been popcorn for sale in the Traverse foyer, it could hardly have seemed more out-of-place. So is theatre down on romcom? It wasn't always thus: consider As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream et al, and Shakespeare starts to look (well, just a little) like the Nora Ephron of the Elizabethan age. Romcoms were popular, too, in the theatre of the early and mid-20th century. Some of the great Hollywood examples – The Philadelphia Story, The Shop Around the Corner, His Girl Friday (based on Hecht and MacArthur's The Front Page) – were cribbed from hit plays. Bernard Slade's Romantic Comedy, recently revived by (and starring) Tom Conti, was one of the genre's last hurrahs. Of course, there are still plenty of romances in theatre – but not many plays that satisfy themselves with romance alone, and fewer still that are funny. The classic romcom traces the lovers' will-they-won't-they trajectory up until consummation – and then blushingly draws a veil. But when modern stage comedies take love as their subject – Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, for example – they seldom send us home with romantic illusions left intact. It's instructive to compare Stoppard's theatre romcom with his script for Shakespeare in Love. In the theatre, if romcom flourishes, it's in the form of a musical. But why is it easier to take romance with tunes attached? We're clearly a bit snooty about the genre's escapist tendencies, its complacency, its formulaic nature. (Even Midsummer's creators are keen to establish that theirs is a romcom with a twist.) And fair enough. For my part, I find most romcom movies facile and smug. Most of us, I'd guess, are with Michael Billington when he writes of the 2004 stage version of When Harry Met Sally: "Theatre demands robuster language, saltier exchanges, more extreme situations than ... cinema provides. Compare this script with David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago or Patrick Marber's Closer and you realise how far behind the cinema lags when it comes to exploring modern sexual mores." Theatre is a place where serious people go to engage with serious questions – which is a splendid thing, until it calcifies into a prejudice against gaiety. I interviewed Richard Bean last year, and he referred to it as "the downside of my theatre-writing career ... that every bloody play I write gets called a comedy". Given how easy it is to dismiss romantic comedy, and given its association with actors such as Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey, it's no wonder that theatre spurns the genre. But my enjoyment of Midsummer – that timeless pleasure of seeing two lovely people vault some pesky hurdles before finally falling in love – made me wish it otherwise. It's not escapist to acknowledge that, sometimes, happy endings do exist.TheatreComedyBrian Loganguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Cole is world's most photogenic woman Cheryl Cole is the most photogenic woman ever. breakingnews.ie |
Mel Gibson and the Vikings | Andrew Brown If Mel Gibson wants to make a film with real Vikings in it, here are some tipsMel Gibson is to make a film set in the Dark Ages, in which Vikings invade Anglo-Saxon England, talking fluent Old Norse. Given his political and theological views, we can expect the the Christianised Anglo-Saxons to be the good guys, while the pagan Vikings bring fire, sword, slavery and socialised medicine.Of course this isn't the only possible treatment. Nothing but subtitles could diminish a Mel Gibson film recorded entirely in Old Norse. But still, if it were in a modern Scandinavian language, the possibilities might widen. One could get far beyond the old Kirk Douglas cliches about Vikings. We'd have to run it past the historians, but I can see a squad of Vikings, all with their own personalities:The serrated coastline stretched like a rusty knife in front of him. A little smoke wavered up from the ruins of the village, beaten back down by the sleety rain. The chief climbed down from his longship and splashed through the icy water to the shore. It never got warmer. Perhaps he had been raiding too long. Last night's mead was heavy on his stomach. The village, as usual, was heaped with corpses. He studied one or two of the younger ones. They reminded him of his daughter. He didn't know what she was up to. She never sent slaves these days. He walked to the centre of the village. Thorleif the war chief was there. 'Hey, Wallander,' he said. 'Hey,' said Wallander. 'So who killed these guys?'Or maybe something a little less downbeat?Blomqvist the bard came north on a freezing cold day in the dragonship with a girly tattoo. It was snowing. The bard had no feeling for snow. He had promised the crazed old war chief that he would investigate the death of his grand-daughter. He greeted the old man's elder daughter. 'We are a twisted family,' she said: 'You had better have sex with me.' When the witch learned she grew angry. To appease her anger she killed a monster. The bard had sex with her. Together they killed a monster; then another monster; then another monster; then they stole a huge hoard of gold together. 'I wish you would have sex with me more,' said the witch, 'But I quite understand you can't. You're too much of a feminist for that.' 'Yes,' said Blomqvist. 'But we could have sex now, if you like.'Other ideas never made it past the production stage. The Mel Gibson remake of Wild Strawberries, in which a short, old university professor drives to the south of the country, stopping at villages he knew as a child to pillage or massacre, did not play well in the screenings: the audience thought the old man should have cheered up a bit as he went on.All this seems a long way from the modern idea of Scandinavia. But there is some folk memory of the Vikings still. In the Saffron Walden museum, south of Cambridge, there used to be a ragged yellowy square of some stiff and translucent stuff , supposedly dried viking skin: all that remained of a whole flayed prisoner whose skin was nailed to a church door to discourage his chums from coming back again. But this too turned out to be a later fake, or an earlier precursor of Gibson's film. It was cow skin, not human at all. Gibson, of course, uses other parts of the bull in his art.Mel GibsonSwedenIngmar BergmanStieg LarssonAndrew Brownguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Scarlett Johansson wins acclaim in switch from Hollywood to Broadway Film star's New York theatre debut in A Vew From the Bridge gets top ratings from city's notoriously fastidious theatre criticsThe Hollywood star Scarlett Johansson made a leap from the silver screen to the boards of Broadway at the weekend when her debut in New York's hallowed theatre district met wide acclaim. Johansson, who is starring in a revival of Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge at the Cort theatre, was praised for a strong performance that impressed a range of critics.In Miller's 1955 depiction of a working-class Brooklyn family torn apart by lust and revenge, Johansson plays Catherine, the 17-year-old niece of a longshoreman, Eddie Carbone, played by Liev Schreiber. Eddie's paternal relationship with his niece is destroyed as he becomes jealous and obsessed after she forms a bond with his wife's cousin, newly arrived from Italy.The casting of Johansson had provoked scepticism among New York theatergoers, notoriously critical of Hollywood actors who dare to take to the stage, but the critics were seduced. Johansson melted "into her character so thoroughly that her nimbus of celebrity" disappeared, according to New York Times critic Ben Brantley.The Washington Post's Peter Marks lavished praise on the star, better known for her roles in Lost in Translation and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. "Johansson proves to be capable of far more than collaborating in eyebrow-raising star casting," he wrote. According to critic Elysa Gardne in USA Today, she "disappears so completely into the role of Catherine … that you won't stop to consider the qualities that make her distinctly suited to the part". Johansson herself appeared ebullient at the play's premiere, during which she auctioned a pair of tickets for the show, giving the proceeds to relief efforts in Haiti, saying it was "a very new thing for me" and felt like "baring your soul. It's a little bit of a scary thing," she said.Scarlett JohanssonTheatreBroadwayArthur MillerUnited StatesAlexandra Toppingguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |