Later this month (at least in some locations) you can choose the form of madness you wish to see:
Broadcast live from London’s West End, see Ian McKellen’s ‘extraordinarily moving portrayal’ (Independent) of King Lear in cinemas.Click on the above link or the one for Fathom Events to find a venue screening it on the 27th. It will be interesting to compare McKellen's performance now versus that of a decade ago with Trevor Nunn as director (which, coincidentally, is currently airing for free on Amazon Prime).
Chichester Festival Theatre’s production received five-star reviews for its sell-out run, and transfers to the West End for a limited season. Jonathan Munby directs this contemporary retelling of Shakespeare’s tender, violent, moving and shocking play.
‘It's a comic way of making a living, saying lines, but I can express something through acting. I can express myself through parts. I'm not good at expressing myself otherwise.’ Mr. Hopkins prepared for “Kean”—a demanding role of long, impassioned speeches, mercurial changes of mood, drawing‐room repartee—as he always does, by learning his lines, “Laurence Olivier has said, ‘Learn as much as you can, then throw the text away,’ ” Mr. Hopkins said. “And it was something Noel Coward used to require. I like to learn lines. I feel secure. I learn the whole part parrot fashion, by rote even for television and movies where the filming, of course, is done in segments.Second:
Mr. Hopkins also read a couple of biographies of Edmund Kean and discovered that Sartre's play, a slapstick farce delightfully out of keeping with the playwright's more serious image, really has little to do with fact. For. instance, In the Sartre play, Kean and the Prince of Wales are rivals for the affections of an ambassador's wife.It's a lengthy article with more information on Hopkins and some of his roles.
“Kean did not have a friendship with Wales,” said Mr. Hopkins. “And Kean had only one known affair. He was not really a womanizer. He was obsessed with acting and drinking. He wanted to be a buffoon and was uncomfortable being a celebrity. Kean was used as a prototype by Sartre: the actor trapped by the illusion of the parts he plays. The actor has to be careful not to cross the line between reality and illusion, or he will go mad.”
Does Mr. Hopkins identify with Kean? “I'm a perfectionist. I think it's a vice. I'm very demanding. Kean was also like that. I'm terribly insecure as an actor. It's fear. I've tried to modify it, but I get very wrapped up in work and then lash out because of fear. I don't trust people to do their jobs.
“When Kean did his first performance in London,” he continued, “it was after he had struggled for years in the provinces, as I did. He was offered Shylock. He waded in with an interpretation no one had ever seen. But the audiences loved what he did. He was a very modern actor, with a great eye for detail. But he was very exasperating for the people around him. He wanted to rehearse all the time, like Olivier.”
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 contains twenty prize-winning stories chosen from thousands published in literary magazines over the previous year. The winning stories come from a mix of established writers and emerging voices, and are uniformly breathtaking. They are accompanied by essays from the eminent jurors on their favorites, observations from the winning writers on what inspired their stories, and an extensive resource list of magazines that publish short fiction. (from the publisher's page, which also has the book's Introduction, providing synopses for the twenty stories)
I'm not a big reader of short stories, not going out of my way to read many of them. I had heard some buzz about "The Tomb of Wrestling" by Jo Ann Beard, so I checked this book out of the library to read it for myself. I'm glad I did. I may not have loved it as much as some commenters, but it's far and away the strongest story of the ones I've read in this collection so far. It begins, “She struck her attacker in the head with a shovel, a small one that she normally kept in the trunk of her car for moving things off the highway.” The reader finds out there is so much packed into that swing, allowing us to see the lives of Joan and her attacker as they meet in a tense and violent encounter.
I've jumped around to different stories and have enjoyed most of them. Two others I liked, "Stop 'n' Go" by Michael Parker and "How We Eat" by Mark Jude Poirier, are available at the LitHub link below. The latter story takes a strong will in order to handle this dysfunctional family.
Also in the book are the jurors' top choices and why they loved them, as well as brief notes from the authors about their stories. Definitely worth checking out. And makes me realize I probably need to visit some of the previous years' collections.
Links
Literary Hub has the list of stories and links to four of them
René Magritte's 1960 painting "The Tomb of the Wrestlers" and a little history behind the inspiration/challenge behind it.
