DECEMBER 21st SUCH LANGUAGE! And at Christmas too…

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As regular readers know, I love Americans, I work with American colleagues and lovely American students, it seems this blog has lots of American readers – but please, guys, may we have our language back?! Only this morning I heard an English person, a Londoner, call in to a radio phone-in show and wish the presenter “Happy Holidays” – hello, is it summer time, time for buckets and spades and off to the seaside? It’s Christmas, and we on our side of the Pond wish each other a “Happy Christmas” for Christ’s sake! (This last not an expression I use a lot, but one should never miss a chance to be appropriate.) This week’s fit of linguistic xenophobia has been brought on by going to see the film “The Imitation Game”, starring the ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch.

Here is a story that has to be told – one of the most shameful, disgraceful episodes in modern British history, of the genius who arguably made the biggest single contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War 2 – and in so doing created the computer technology which for better or worse runs the entire planet to this day – the story of a man who, because he was homosexual, was damned by British society, made to undergo “chemical castration” and who committed suicide in 1954. In fact, Alan Turing’s story was told some years ago in a fine stage play by the brilliant Hugh Whitemore called “Breaking the Code”, in which Derek Jacobi starred at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. I wonder what happened to that, I wonder why it wasn’t turned into a film then?

For those who don’t know about Turing, the film should be seen: Cumberbatch deserves his accolades, he’s a terrific actor, and plays the part brilliantly. But if only they’d had a writer of Hugh Whitemore’s calibre creating the script! Graham Moore as a co-producer presumably deserves credit at least in part for getting the project off the ground, but we must assume he had an eye to the American box-office when he created a screenplay sprinkled with clunky trans-Atlantic expressions. There’s a sequence in which Charles Dance as the sceptical head of the Bletchley Park British Intelligence unit talks of “firing” Turing, whose colleagues respond with lines like “Well sir, if you’re going to fire him, you’ll have to fire me…” If you were getting rid of a government official in England in the 1940s they were either “dismissed” or “given the sack”. Firing was something you did when pointing a gun at German soldiers.

Towards the end of the film Keira Knightley’s character talks of someone who, had it not been for Turing’s code-breaking, would “likely have been dead”. This glaring Americanism – “probably have been dead”, please – stood out all the more because the actress has clearly been carefully coached to speak in an immaculate Celia Johnson period English accent, by the highly skilled Sarah Shepherd, one of the dialect experts on the Teach Yourself Acting team.

One hates to be a grumpy old pedant, but unless we GOPs don’t speak up how will accurate traces of our history and culture survive? We watched Rory Kinnear, playing the policeman who investigates Turing’s homosexuality, use a beautifully selected period typewriter – and then paint out a name with Tippex! Did the budget not allow researchers? The scene takes place in 1951 – a click on Google reveals that “liquid paper” didn’t start to appear until after 1956. Trivial detail you may say, but attention to detail avoids kicking holes in your credibility as a storyteller. Instead of condescending to the Americans by assuming they won’t understand authentic dialogue, take a look at the uncompromising period details their own productions achieve – for instance in “Boardwalk Empire”.

One is almost tempted to say”Bah, humbug!” The Scrooge season is upon us. I’ve come across two versions of “A Christmas Carol” already, within the last few days – one by the students on a drama foundation course I monitor at the CSVPA school in Cambridge, and then a rather wonderful radio version by Neil Brand – filled out with specially composed choral music – on BBC Radio Four. Check it out, it’s on the iPlayer for another four weeks: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04v9n00

And for readers in England’s north country, there’s a very special new staging of this great tale by the brand-new East Riding Theatre Company, a venture supported by none other than Dame Judi Dench, and featuring one of RADA’s finest grads, the estimable Clive Kneller. If you’re in Yorkshire, hie you to Beverley, one of the most beautiful towns in our land, and check out this exciting opportunity to revel in Dickens’s glorious imagination and word-magic. Just click on the link for details.

Here’s something for the pub quiz – which Dickens character visits in one night a miners’ hut, a lighthouse, and a ship at sea…? I knew all that of course, but I’d forgotten…

My world at present is full of end-of-term shows and showings – I watched the New York University Tisch students in a cracking version of Shakespeare’s “Timon of Athens” directed by Jeremy Stockwell at RADA’s GBS Theatre. Not a play one sees too often – it’s sort of Scrooge in reverse, come to think of it: the story of a man who reaps the rewards of o’er weening generosity – and Jeremy and the actors brought it alive with boldly defined characters and some rather startling physical routines…

Still at RADA, I went twice in twenty-four hours to one of the high-lights of London’s theatre year, the Specialist Technical and Design Exhibition. Mark your diary for early December 2015. It’s truly inspiring – the next generation of superb designers of sound and vision, of costume and prop makers. Like their Gower St co-students in the acting department, they’re bursting with talent, but their achievements may stay quietly unsung – even though they will hugely enrich our films, our television and our theatre. One of the property-maker grads, for instance, Elizabeth Peck, is currently busy at Leavesden Studios, where – now Harry Potter has grown up and moved out – Guy Ritchie’s making a new King Arthur movie, and Elizabeth is creating the centre piece for the Round Table. It should be seen by rather a lot of people – the word on the grapevine is that this will the first of SIX new Arthurian films, with Iris Elba rumoured to play Merlin. Surely they can’t not include Tom Hiddleston – a shoe-in for Launcelot, I would have thought? (Incidentally it was great to see Tom H winning the London Evening Standard award for the Donmar Theatre “Coriolanus” – see the March entry for this blog.)

Coriolanus’s wife in that production was played by Birgitte Sorensen, one of the stars of the wondrous Danish television series “Borgen”. I’ve been catching up with another series – or rather serial – from the same production team, “The Legacy”- again with superb actors, all performing in a coherent, consistent style. I wonder what’s the secret. Their work is riveting, and quite different from acting done by Brits or Americans, though I can’t quite define how. Is it to do with their theatre, film and TV industries being more integrated? Is it to do with the way they are trained? Does it all go back to dominant dramatists or directors, like Ibsen in Norway, or Bergman in Sweden? Let me know if you have any ideas about this – it would be great to hear from Scandinavian actors. My apologies in advance for my inability to converse in Danish – though I have to say I’ve developed a great fondness for the sound of the language behind the sub-titles!

One of the masters of the English language is of course Tom Stoppard. So, to the Noel Coward Theatre and the stage version of “Shakespeare in Love”, the final production of the season I attended with my NYU Americans. I loved the movie, and still chuckle at the memory of the rich, witty screenplay. Sorry, but for me Lee Hall just hasn’t managed quite to transfer Stoppard’s jaunty treatment of the somewhat daft, improbable story to the stage. But then again others love it – there some good performances, some lovely costumes, and a rare chance to hear some fine counter-tenor singing (but don’t go expecting a musical, it’s much more a play with songs.)

My main concern was with the extracts from Shakespeare’s plays – the lines, frankly, weren’t delivered expertly enough, the magic words just didn’t sparkle. But hey, the piece is making money, it’s keeping actors in work, who am I to carp? Just be aware that, as with so many London shows if you book on-line you will get ripped off with a “booking fee”. I just checked the ticket availability for “Shakespeare in Love” and at the top price you will pay an additional TWENTY TWO POUNDS FIFTY per ticket.

On Friday I was summoned to a rather smart restaurant for the NYU London Faculty Christmas lunch. As I paused at the entrance, the beautiful and elegant female “Maitre D” immediately closed me in a heart-stopping embrace, crying out “Ellis Jones – how marvellous!” Well, your author blinked, the numbers of beautiful young women impulsively clasping me to their bosoms have, it must be admitted, eased somewhat in recent years… Then of course the fog slipped from my brain and I realised it was Kelly Williams, one of the terrific actor grads from my RADA days, filling in between acting jobs – but not for long, you may be sure.

As Christmas looms, cast your minds back to that balmy Indian summer we had in October, and the image of me dressed as a shepherd, reciting Dylan Thomas poetry in Fitzroy Square. Look closely at the picture below, and you will see a gent in a flat cap following in a book my recitation of lines from “Under Milk Wood”.

He came and chatted afterwards, and turned out to be Ian Griffith, who played the schoolboy Billy in the original 1954 recording with Richard Burton! Ian pointed out that I had mis-pronounced one of the words – in the bit that starts “Only you can see, in the blinded bedrooms, the combs and petticoats over the chairs…” Of course it isn’t combs as I had pronounced it, as in combs for your hair but combs as in short for “combinations” – i.e under-wear! And this week Ian very kindly sent me a photograph of Dylan Thomas’s very own combinations drying on the line outside the boathouse at his house by the sea at Laugharne. It’s with this uplifting image I’d like to close this entry, and wish you and all our readers

A Very Happy Christmas!

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