Category Archives: film

Identity and atrocity: international theatre since 1945

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This post is to publicise my lecture series this term on Identity and Atrocity in Anglophone theatre since 1945. It’ll be happening on Fridays at 11.15 in Lecture Room K of the English Faculty for Weeks 1–5 of term (18 Jan to 15 Feb), and the outline is below. For more information, leave a comment or email me (sophie.duncan at chch.ox.ac.uk). I’ll be tweeting about the lecture series at #IDtheatre – please join in, whether you’re attending or not!

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This series looks at theatre written and performed in Britain, Ireland, America, South Africa and continental Europe since 1945, thinking about how drama presents transgressive and marginalised racial, sexual, and national identities when plays bring the past onstage. The plays in this series, disparate in form and setting, introduce post-1945 drama’s international contexts, exploring some of theatre’s most iconoclastic and influential responses to atrocity. All plays listed below are available via the database Drama Online, except The Island, copies of which are available in various university libraries. Key primary texts include:

Week 1: Southern Gothic, Gay Panic: Tennessee Williams’s Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1955) and Suddenly Last Summer (1958).

Week 2: Beckett’s History Plays: Krapp’s Last Tape (1957)and Endgame (1958).

Week 3: Colonialism: fantasies and nightmares in Caryl Churchill’s The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution (1972) and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good (1988).

Week 4: Sexuality and the Holocaust play: Martin Sherman’s Bent (1979)and Sarah Kane’s Cleansed (1998).

Week 5: Blackness and Adaptation: Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona’s The Island (1972) and Lolita Chakrabarti’s Red Velvet (2012).

Shakespeare’s Props: Memory and Cognition

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Ask not for whom the bell tolls

My new book, Shakespeare’s Props: Memory and Cognition, will be published on 14th February 2019 by Routledge. How very romantic.

 

Advent 21: Pitchmas and the Candle

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we-wish-you-a-merry-pitchmas-and-a-happy-new-yearThis evening we went to see Pitch Perfect 3, the final installment of the college-a capella (“aca-stravaganza”) trilogy/franchise with which my wife is so obsessed that at one point I started having dreams about its star Anna Kendrick. This film is magnificent. The writers have freed themselves from the tyranny of plot, and someone has attacked post-production so savagely that 80% of the promotional trailer isn’t actually in the final film. There is a musical number approximately twice a minute, and it’s glorious. The key elements of close harmony,  choreography, syncopated hysteria, and strongly-implied lesbianism survive from the first two films, plus this time Rebel Wilson has learned how to act. I laughed aloud at so many lines, not normally but in my trademark Cinema Laugh, where I emit an involuntary whoop and then laugh again at the same line, from memory, five to eight seconds later. The Sun tells us that Pitch Perfect 3 is a “bad, bad film”, so I expect you to buy tickets forthwith. This film isn’t for The Sun. It’s for people who really like a capella and neurosis. Happy Pitchmas.

That aside, one actress who didn’t make it into the Pitch Perfect franchise is Emma Stone, key member of my ongoing list of “size zero Hollywood heroines who turn are revealed as having been incredibly under-used by absolutely slaying on Saturday Night Live” (the top two spots go to Gwyneth Paltrow and Lindsay Lohan). Tomorrow is the penultimate shopping day before Christmas, a.k.a. Panic Friday, and here is Emma Stone with Kate McKinnon with some essential advice on how to deal with last-minute Christmas shopping and That Person Who Just Gave You An Unexpected Present.

[REVIEW] Dunkirk (2017), Christopher Nolan

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Dunkirk is 106 minutes long and consists of approx. 103 minutes of drowning, in such profusion and at so many camera angles that it makes Titanic look like Lawrence of Arabia. Mark Rylance and Kenneth Branagh, as head civilian and military heroes respectively, leave some impressive pauses, through which Spitfires could be and indeed are flown. Branagh’s general is Henry V in middle age, eyes set to Agincourt, unsubtlety unenhanced by Nolan’s Churchill-by-numbers script. At one point it looks like a plane might land on Branagh’s head, but it doesn’t. I might have felt more charitable if I hadn’t just seen his trailer for Poirot.

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Harry Styles is on the left. Or on the right. Or in the middle.

As Brown-Haired Boy Soldier No. 3, Harry Styles is far more competent than I’d been led to expect: truly, he is the Lillie Langtry of our time. The further cast includes one black soldier, shoved to the front of a single crowd scene as in the brochures of a left-wing private school, before disappearing forever (as in the brochures of same). A nurse has one or two lines about making the men a cup of tea before she gets blown up, which is historically accurate but also typical Christopher Nolan. I caught about 15% of the Spitfire pilots’ dialogue, but thanks to the Enigma-thumping score, I wept copiously at every appropriate moment. What with that and the UEFA Women’s Cup, my jingoistic shallows are more visible than ever.

The film’s dedication, given at the end since the beginning is mainly exposition that sets up the telescopic time-plot – is to all those whose lives were ‘impacted’ by events at Dunkirk. I suspect that some of the generation who remember Dunkirk would be horrified by the verb, not least the Oxford tutor who once censured me for using ‘prioritise’ with the comment ‘You are not writing for the Guardian’. And of course nor is Nolan, not yet.

A friend of mine was cast in Dunkirk, but they cut his scene, so by rights I should pan the thing entirely. However, he’s still in the credits (at which I gladly whooped and applauded), and the cinematography is stunning, so if I went in for stars, Dunkirk would probably get three out of five. However, I should note that since I am in re. David Suchet what Jane Austen was to English history (i.e. partial, prejudiced, and absurd), Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot is already scheduled for minus ten.