My favourite things

Gee.

I guess I’ll just delete my blog and cry myself to sleep now.

Sorry, made myself laugh there.

Do you need a hug, cowardly little gray face?

I think you need a hug.

You also need a spelling lesson and probably several decades of therapy to fix however mommy and daddy screwed you up, but I can’t help you with that. So here, have some hugs from the Golden Globe winning, golden-haired, golden-hearted actor I proudly support:

“Never argue with a stupid man, for he will take you down to his level and beat you with experience” 

I love this quote for it has saved me many hours of pointless trouble with annoying people.

So I said, “Yeah, that would great! What would the creatures do? Would they save the Titanic from sinking?”

And she gave me the most disgusted look. I have never seen a 9 year old face look so appalled.

“No,” she said, speaking very clearly so as to never be so grossly misunderstood again, “they’re going to eat the passengers.”

When I first saw Harold Pinter’s Betrayal in its first Broadway production in 1980, it had a high-octane cast with Raul Julia, Blythe Danner, and Roy Scheider in a naturalistic setting. The current Broadway revival (the third since then) at the Bernard Jacobs Theatre takes a different tack. Directed by Jamie Lloyd, it transplants the London cast for a production that is spartan and less obviously starry, but altogether riveting.

The play presents the classic love triangle involving Robert (Tom Hiddleston), his wife Emma (Zawe Ashton), and their best friend Jerry (Charlie Cox). Using reverse chronology, it begins with Emma and Jerry reconnecting for a drink two years after their seven-year affair has ended and ends with the moment it was sparked. Sometimes that approach, as with Sondheim and Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along, is problematic, but not in Pinter’s hands.

Lloyd dispenses with virtually all scenery and chooses to keep all three onstage the entire time, even when there are only two characters in a scene. As a result, the dynamics of the affair (and the sense that there’s always another in the relationship) are clear to see. This austere approach couldn’t work without extremely precise direction and acting. The three actors each have the beautiful, lithe bodies of dancers who don’t miss a step in their moments, even on turntables.

Hiddleston, the marquee name in the mix, thanks to the Avengers movies and The Night Manager mini-series, is intense and skeptical, with a closed, narrow face. Cox is more trusting, with a broader, open face. Their friendship is perhaps not as deep as they avow, more professional than deeply personal, their squash games a sign of competitiveness. Ashton, of African-English parentage, has a feline quality that sets her apart and shows the strain of the triangle for “the other woman.” As it turns out, there are multiple betrayals, with secrets within confessions, and conflicting memories of what took place.

The National Theatre is opening up its archives as part of a new educational initiative that will release decades of unseen archival tapes documenting some of the theatre’s most celebrated productions.

Created in partnership with Bloomsbury Publishing and ProQuest, The National Theatre Collection includes in-house archival tapes, never before seen by the public, as well as the theatre’s roster of NT Live broadcasts from the past 10 years.

Available to libraries, schools, and the educational sector, the streaming service launched September 30 with an initial slate of 19 titles, including Frankenstein, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller; Coriolanus starring Tom Hiddleston; as well as James Corden’s Tony-winning performance in Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors.

An additional 30 titles are pegged for release by March 2020.

Meanwhile, here’s a well-dressed Tom to keep you company!