Juno and the Paycock

Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock is one of those plays you hear about but don't really see any more.   It was a huge hit when it was first produced way back in 1924, and within six years Alfred Hitchcock was given the task of directing the film version.  Unusually, (perhaps restricted by the contract he was then under) he stuck to the original script to a great extent, only opening out the one setting in the play occasionally, notably at the beginning, when Barry Fitzgerald (who played the Paycock in the original stage production) is seen briefly as a rabble-rouser.  

I've just watched the movie online - the copy is a little erratic: it sometimes cuts the tops of people's heads off, and in some shots it looks like it's not centred properly.  All that aside, it's great to see a top-flight cast giving this classic play all they've got.

The play doesn't entirely translate well to the screen: as it shifts increasingly from semi-farce to tragedy, the transition seems a bit over the top.  Perhaps in the theatre Juno's last speeches would be more effective.  On screen they don't quite work - for me.  It's not that we haven't been warned that tragedy is on the way: the son, Johnny, is a perpetual dark cloud in the background of the comedy scenes, but the other two disasters (daughter Mary's out of wedlock pregnancy, and the loss of the inheritance they'd all been banking on) seem just a little forced.  We can appreciate what O'Casey is doing without actually feeling as emotional about it as he intends.  This may, of course, be caused by the play being almost 100 years old, but I think it's more that some of the intensity that a theatrical performance would give is lost in the cinematic version.

What works best now is the superb comedy that the principals indulge in, especially the so-called Captain (the 'peacock' of the title) and Joxer, his drinking partner.  These two are played by Edward Chapman, an established stage actor in his first screen role, and Sydney Morgan, another stage actor who seldom appeared on screen, but directed a great many movies.  They're a wonderful team, and the detail in their characters is a delight.  Sara Allgood was also a stage actress, having worked in the famed Abbey Theatre, and having originated the part of Juno on stage.  Along with Chapman she appeared in at least one other Hitchcock movie.  She has the difficult role of being the mainstay of a somewhat erratic family, and being made representative by O'Casey of much more than just her matriarchal status.  John Laurie (a Scotsman), who plays the son, Johnny,  made a bigger impression in Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, a few years later.   Here he has little to do except for occasional outbursts; most of the time he's in the background of scenes, burning with a kind of gloomy intensity.  His big moment at the end doesn't quite come off, for me, but again it's the sort of role that might be more effective in the theatre.

Hitchcock brings his talent for comedy to light here throughout the movie, but the main scene in which he and the actors revel in O'Casey's script is when they're celebrating (along with the local barmaid, Mrs Madigan (Maire O'Neill, who played the part of Juno in a 1938 TV production) their new-found fortune.  There's huge comedy over drinks drunk too quickly and within the singing that takes place, and the interruptions of the long rambling stories Mrs Madigan indulges in.  This kind of comedy appears in a number of Hitchcock's films, especially those made up until the 50s, where a bunch of British actors would have delightful group scenes in which detailed characterisation was to the fore.  While comedy was almost always a part of Hitchcock's movies, the later films tend to sprinkle it more thinly.

Incidentally, on the imdb site, Chapman, who's the father of the family, is listed as only being 29 when he made the movie, which makes him younger than Laurie, who plays his adult son.  I think there may be an error somewhere, or else he manages to look (and act) considerably older than he actually is.

I also caught up on a short propaganda film Hitchcock made during the war, Bon Voyage.  This is a curiosity: it's made in French, with even the English characters speaking French (although one of them keeps on going on about the way his French is affected by his Scots accent).  It's about a young RAF man who's 'rescued' from France and sent home courtesy of the Resistance.  Except it isn't the Resistance but a German spy posing as a Resistance man.  As the story is retold (after our initial viewing of it) we discover that the spy is systematically killing off the Resistance people who are involved in the story without the hero's knowledge, and has used the hero to take an important piece of information to Britain.  A good deal of the story is told in dialogue rather than action, which is perhaps an indication of the frugality of the budget.  Nevertheless, it's well enough done, and worth catching up with if you're a Hitchcock buff.

Mike Gray

Michael Gray, whom I accompanied only three weekends ago, has won himself the New Zealand Opera Society 2009 opera grant. It's going to help fund a trip to the Cactus Language School in Bologna in June next year.
Mike's been a busy singing boy over the last few years, and as well in the last twelve months he was encouraged to switch from baritone to tenor (something another Dunedin singer, Simon O'Neill, did a few years back). He's moving up the scale, but of course it's a process, and he has a bit of a way to go to be entirely comfortable up there. He'll make it. He's a great musician, and performs well.

Oneillrentals

I mentioned the Go Dunedin website some time ago, in particular the way it always looks to me like God Dunedin.
While sitting behind a van today, waiting for the lights to change, I noticed that it was called O'Neill Rentals. Down the bottom of the back door was the website: oneillrentals.co.nz.
Because of the spelling of O'Neill, my eye read this as: one ill rentals. A fellow traveller in the car said: this rental has a leaky valve, this one has no exhaust pipe, and so on. I'm sure O'Neill Rentals are fine....don't be put off by my misreading of their website name in any way whatsoever!

Catching up on HitTail

Because I’ve been on holiday in Europe for a month I haven’t been attending to my HitTail results. Naturally, when I checked them out today I found there was rather a large number of them to sort through. Ce la vie.

I thought I’d take a slightly different approach to them this time. Rather than working through them one by one, I’ve gone back to the section called My HitTail where I can see all the results in a kind of graph. The highest search query gets 48 hits, and of course, being HitTail, there are some two or three hundred one hit queries.

The 48 hits related to people looking for Mike Crowl, something I find rather astonishing – unless it means that unconsciously I’ve been searching for my own name regularly. Obviously it means people have been searching for all the other Mike Crowls in the world. It’s not a common name, but common enough.

Brent Stavig still comes up high on the list; this time at second place. He also appears as Brent Stavig Seattle, Brent Stavig Starbucks and just as Stavig. I suspect Stavig is a less common name than Crowl.

Queries to do with my off-the-cuff jokey post about athlete's fingers, come third. But we also get athlete’s fingers/fingers itch/foot hand, even athletes foot tongue! Crikey. And foot blog - you mean there’s someone writing a blog about athletes’ feet? Well, not entirely. Footcaresales in the UK have a blog on foot problems with only three posts in it. Not sure that that really counts as a blog.

The ever popular shrinking shirts continue to make news, and Chrissy Popadics, whom I’d never heard of until I did a blog on her home town and team of Boise.

These hits are all above the twenty mark. In the teens we get only James Berardinelli, one of my favourite online movie reviewers, and the ubiquitous Michael Crowl.

Anna Leese, the opera singer, and Karl Maugham, the NZ painter come in at 7 each, while Ronnie Rinalde, the whistler, and the book, The Coroner’s Lunch come in at 5. When we get to the number 4, we have several queries vying for attention: Andrew J Hiduke, about whom I still know next to nothing; endowment express; the Dunedin website, godunedin; James Mason in the movie, Odd Man Out; a rock group called Lyrical Whips, and finally, Postie.com, which is part of the PayPerPost site. PayPerPost has for some odd reason now changed its name to IZEA, which sounds like something you ought to have in a NZ firm. (I remember reading some while back in The Listener, how New Zealanders tend to hone in on the letter Z, when reading, because subconsciously they have this thing about Z been primarily related to NZ, or New Zealand. And it’s true. I take notice of the letter Z frequently!)

We’re getting down the list now, and at number 3 we have the following:
Fallacious arguments;
Funky P, in Luxembourg, the band I ‘discovered’ while I was over there;
HitTail itself;
Itchy between fingers;
John Pratt, the man who enjoys making puzzles;
One of my other blogs: Mike Crowl’s Travel Diary;
Rob Roberge, the author of a neo-noir novel;
Shaun Tilby, the basketball player in the Nuggets Team (in Dunedin);
Those Were the Days notes – I presume this relates to some book, but on my site it relates to eating cheese rolls, rolls with cheese too hot to eat and dripping with butter. Nowadays they tend to be soggy, tepid, with a bit of margarine scraped across them.

I’m not going to detail those who made it into number 2, except to mention that to my surprise Kiri te Kanawa is there; Maggie Smith; something to do with design flaws relating to Bill Bryson; Emma Fraser, another singer; Gareth Farr the actor, not the composer (the latter appears under several different queries: Gareth Farr blog/facts/naked/orchestral music of the sea with samples); Kavi Raz, the Indian film actor; Simon O’Neill, another Dunedin opera singer; and Michael Tippett, the composer.

Okay, you say, having read – or skimmed through - all this: What’s the Point? Purely my own satisfaction. I like HitTails’ approach, and I like seeing what people are looking for. That’s it, really. If you want to check out the original posts on any of these topics, you don't need to go to Google.com to do it. Just putting the search query in the search box at the very top of this page will find everything that's been written about any of these subjects.

Some more name-dropping

The Dunedin singing stars continue to rise and rise. Now Simon O’Neill, who’s 35, has been contracted to the Met to sing in Die Walkure early next year. I never played for Simon, but knew him from local singing competitions. He was also in the St Kilda Brass Band in the early nineties, a band I’ve had a reasonable amount to do with ever since I was their official accompanist for solos, for a few years.
What have the stamps got to do with this? I'm told that Simon is the opera singer in the series - top right corner.
Meanwhile, Anna Leese goes from strength to strength, this time winning the Maggie Teyte prize. Part of the prize (not sure if this is something to be regarded as a ‘prize’ or an ‘endurance test’) is to sing a recital at the Royal Opera House. Hmm, that’s some place to sing in.
Years ago I had a friend called Donald Rutherford, with whom I toured round New Zealand doing La Boheme for the NZ Opera Company, when they were presenting what they called piano tours. I was the ‘piano’ part. Donald left NZ after that to go and join a Canadian opera company, and we lost touch. And then in the late sixties, when I was in England, he turned up out of the blue. He’d been engaged to understudy the part of Hamlet in an opera written by Humphrey Searle. This was an opera composed in the 12 note serial format, a method, which in my view, is counterproductive to good composition, but that’s another story. What it meant was that the thing was bloody hard to sing. Donald got the job as understudy because he’d been in the original production in Canada, as I recall, and knew the part well. Unfortunately, he had to go on, as the person who was supposed to do the part, was ‘indisposed’ as they say. I saw his performance, and it would have been good in a much smaller house, but the Royal Opera House is massive, and only voices that are naturally huge will fill it. It seemed as if the place was swallowing Don’s voice up every time he opened his mouth. Hamlet, I think, has gone the way of all unsuccessful pieces. And probably a good thing too!
Alongside Anna Leese and Simon O’Neill, Ana James, Jonathan Lemalu and Teddy Tahu Rhodes all continue the upward rise in the opera world. Rhodes is not someone I’ve ever met – if I recall he was involved with the Christchurch Opera Company at one time. Think he may have been in the full-scale production of La Boheme that they brought to Dunedin about eight years ago. My younger son appeared in it, as part of the local chorus brought in for the occasion. He had a brief moment of visibility as the waiter who cleans up after Musetta has tossed her glass to the floor and shattered it. Such is fame.