Wu Wei

Hamletas in Tbilisi

Went to see a performance of Hamlet on Sunday as part of the Tbilisi International Festival of Theatre, (thanks Heidi for the ticket).  Or perhaps I should have said Hamletas, since it was a Lithuanian company visiting Tbilisi.  The play was in Lithuanian with tiny Shakespeare English subtitles disappearing to make room for the much larger subtitles in Georgian.  Of course some of the jokes got lost, relying on puns in English that can't be translated, but the cast enjoyed themselves in the light-hearted bits.  Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern in drag with short dresses made the audience pause  for thought, not sure whether it was OK to snigger.

But the direction was by Oskaras Korsakovas, the set was minimalist and quite different from any other Hamlet I had seen (which was a long time ago anyway).

The audience seemed impressed too.  Not a sound from the mobile phones. 

Rather strange programming, because there is another Lithuanian performance of Hamletas on Friday, by a different theatre group.  I wonder how many Georgians will turn up for the second version.

A Taste of Spice

Lotus reads has reviewed an Indian film all about spices (The Mistress of Spices), but she says it is not a recommended film.

Here's a better one about spices, Greek this time. Called Politiki Kouzina or A Touch of Spice in English, it is about a Greek family living in Constantinople (as the Greeks still call Istanbul), where the Grandfather keeps a spice shop. The shop serves Greeks and Turks alike. The grandson becomes a good cook even when he is only 10, and much of the film revolves around family cooking and which spices to use. The boy has a friend who is a Turkish girl. But the family is forced to leave Istanbul for Athens in the late 50s, leaving the grandfather behind.

Eventually the grown son returns to Istanbul and meets the grown Turkish girl who now has a husband and a daughter. I won't spoil the end for you. It's a sad story about exile but vivid about life and food in Constantinople. It's was very popular in Greece while we were there.

There's a DVD. It has English subtitles when they spoke Greek but later in the film the Turkish dialogue is rendered in English without subtitles.

A Taste of Honey

To christen (or whatever atheists do) the new dvd player, my sister borrowed some dvds from the British Council.

So we ended up watching "A Taste Of Honey", with Dora Bryan and Rita Tushingham. It is a film adapted in 1961 from a stage play which began in 1957. I remember seeing it on television at my friend's house when I was a teenager. I think her mother must have been out otherwise I can't imagine how we could have been allowed to watch this film. It was clearly one of the first "kitchen sink dramas" of the 60s and predated Coronation St, (which must be one of the last).

In it, a teenage girl shown in school uniform lives with her floozy mother and survives a moonlight flit to a new part of town. There the mother meets a younger man. When they want to go to Blackpool for a day out they have to take the daughter with them. As a typical teenager, she behaves as badly as she can so that eventually the boyfriend asks the mother to choose between them. The daughter gets some money and is told to go home on her own.

Soon the mother gets married again and moves in with the husband, leaving her daughter, without any means of support. She has to get a job and find her own accommodation. Somehow she does this, and manages also to get pregnant by her sailor boyfriend who of course sails off with his ship. Her job is selling shoes in a shop and she manages to sell shoes to a young gay man who follows her home. She then invites him to share her attic, as it turns out he has been kicked out of his lodgings for being gay. They live happily platonically together, with the gay guy looking forward to the baby coming (rather more than the girl) and he cooks and keeps house for her.

However, the mother turns up again (she has been kicked out by the new husband) and she ruins everything by in turn kicking out the gay guy, despite the girl's wishes.

The whole film is shot in black and white in Salford, Manchester with the background of dereliction and the Manchester Ship Canal. Some of the shots are recollections of Eisenstein with hero figures shot against the sky or industrial landscapes in good social realist tradition.

It's interesting that the girl seems to know more about gay guys than she does about how you get pregnant. I found that surprising, given my own knowledge at that age. I don't remember anything at all about a gay guy, so perhaps I was too innocent.

After decades of Coronation St and East Enders, it's hard to remember that plays and films rarely portrayed anything about ordinary life, (or if you prefer, working class life). Not that the average working class life had pregnant teenagers or gay men, any more than it does now.

Certainly, the film was shocking in the way that the school girl was left to her own devices by her mother. But I guess, at that time, working class girls were considered more or less grown up at 16 and expected to get unskilled jobs and/or get married early and have babies.

And the question is, has anything changed? Bee complains about the lack of career advice at school, and/or ambitions in some of her classmates.

Gilmore Girls helps you learn grammar

In Lithuania I spent some time (OK, not a lot, but some) puzzling the strange Slav and Lithuanian grammar of "we". In English you can only say Sandra and I. OK, in some cases this can become Sandra and me, or even me and Sandra, when speaking. This is quite simple, as befits a language whose speakers are not taught grammar at school and thus have extreme difficulty imagining how complicated other languages can make things.

In Russian and Lithuanian you say "we with Sandra". This is not the royal we. I was pondering the statement and wondering how many people were included in the we. At the time it wasn't clear whether Sandra and Audrius were going to do something with me or without me. Was it "we two" or "we three"? In the end it was clear from the context it did not include me. If it did, presumably it would have to be "we with Sandra and Varske". In which case, what does "we" mean at all. And how would the grammar go in "Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all"?

This is a complicated story. I'll get to the point in a moment.

I have been muttering about learning Slovenian, without doing much about it. My sister waved her instant Slovenian grammar (2 pages) at me yesterday. I quickly spotted that Slovene does not just have singular and plural, it also has a dual. I was able to recognise this from a slight brush with classical Greek and a very retentive memory. With a dual, there is special grammar for pairs of things, which can of course be masculine feminine and neuter. Russian numbers are bad enough, distinguishing between 1, 2-4 and 5 and more. Clearly Slovene is going to be very complicated.

So when Gilmore Girls series 5 began on the TV this evening I was knocked out to find I could understand the title: "Midve z mamo" — "Me and my mother". And I recognised that midve is actually "we-two-female", not "me".

Who says soap operas are not educational!

The Queen

Went to see the film yesterday with friends. I like to discuss films afterwards but one friend rushed off to rescue a car from a bad parking space and the other had not done her target walking for the day so I was left to walk to the bus stop and think about it myself.

The film portrays the British Royal Family's response to Princess Di's death. As it occurred at the beginning of Tony Blair's "reign" too, it shows him in retrospect as well. Nobody comes out prettily. The usual stereotypes of the Queen, Prince Philip, the Queen Mum and Prince Charles are shown. They were no more loveable played by "real" people, which somehow made them all look younger.

Tony Blair comes out as as a naive new boy anxious to please, with a not so hidden respect for the Queen, in contrast to Cherie who is played as a cynical anti-monarchist. He was touted as a moderniser, and a wind of change, though few believe that will be his legacy now.

I wondered why they made the film now, since at the moment, there haven't been any special royal scandals to get upset about. The Queen had the last word (to Tony Blair): we all have to go sometime! Though neither seem to be able to do it.

March of the Emperor

As reviewed here:

The Emperor's mating waltz in Antarctica, 29 June 2005

Author: jotix100 from New York

"The March of the Penguins" has to be one of the most beautiful documentaries in recent memory. Luc Jacquet, its director, takes us on trip to Antarctica where we are introduced to the majestic Emperor penguins. Mr. Jacquet and his cinematographers, Laurent Chalet and Jerome Maison, have done the impossible task to capture these penguins in their own habitat under conditions that seem almost humanly impossible to live, let alone take this team to register it for us, the viewers in all its splendor and bleakness.

The Emperor penguins have to be the most elegant birds on this planet. They have such a noble way of standing and shuffling in almost perfect lines from the sea to the area where they will mate, hatch their eggs, and then have the females leave for the sea to feed themselves and bring back food for the new chicks. After that is accomplished, it's the males turn to do their march back to the sea to feed and fortify themselves, returning to the hatching and mating area. What makes these penguins so unique is the sense of family they project at all times.

Mr. Jacquet makes it clear for us to understand the behavior of the Emperors in their hostile environment. The English version has the clear narration by Morgan Freeman who expands on the way these birds live and how they are able to survive under extreme conditions. From what I have read about the documentary, the English version, which we are seeing in this country, has a musical score by Alex Wurman, that enhances the movie in unexpected ways.

Antarctica, that icy white vastness at the end of the world, has never looked more majestic than in this documentary. Thanks to Luc Jacquet we are enlightened by all what we learn about the Emperors as they endure and survive under the worst possible circumstances and remain the graceful figures they are. Watching "The March of the Penguins" feels, at times, like being at the ballet watching a magical dance performed by these flightless birds that manage to look so dignified all the time while doing for us their amazing dance of survival.

But it's also advertised here, in this hilarious advert. You wouldn't expect the French to make fun of their emperor in this way.

Gilmore Girls 2

I'm sure you will be pleased to know that local Oxford University students have again replaced their tea and coffee breaks with "Gilmore Girls" breaks. In the past, the boyfriend was rationed to one hour's revision, then one episode of GG as reward, in the runup to his finals. Based on that example, it shouldn't be recommended.

A small problem arose last week while I was away. They got ahead of me and finished series 1 before me, and weren't allowed to open series 2 as it was my birthday present. Luckily I caught up at the weekend and so Gilmore Girls breaks can continue. I can expect Series 4 and 5 for Christmas presents I suppose.

If you don't know what I am talking about, see my earlier post.