Easy Virtue

This makes the 1100th post on this blog. Doesn't seem that long since I was looking at a 1000.

Anyway, went to see Easy Virtue tonight, after having had it recommended by one of my work colleagues today. I don't know enough about Noel Coward's original play to work out what belongs to the original script and what doesn't, but certainly there are some wonderful lines. (I'm getting a copy out of the library to have a look.)

The cast are uniformly superb, and Jessica Biel, (someone I don't remember seeing before), is a match for all of them as the Outsider in the family. Colin Frith plays someone who is pretty much dead in his soul, which suits him well, as that seems to be the role he likes to play most of the time, and Kristin Scott Thomas as Biel's mother-in-law pours absolute venom with every line and look. Each and every smaller part is filled with a top-notch character actor, though perhaps Kris Marshall, as Furber the butler steals any thunder that's left over.

Fabulous stately homes play an important part, and the countryside looks terrific, thanks to Martin Kenzie. And then there's the 20s music, flitting in and out of the character's mouths and onto the soundtrack seamlessly.

What more to say about it? The story leaves all sorts of corners open at the end, even though the finale is satisfactory, and you have to wonder what a sequel might possibly bring. Death or life for those of the family who are left? Thoroughly enjoyable.

Easy Virtue - the play

Last night I mentioned going to see Easy Virtue, the movie. I thought it would be interesting to see what the original play was like, so got it out of the library today. Crikey. The first and most interesting thing is that the movie is far better than the play. The departures from the original are so considerable that only things that are similar to Coward's play are the following:

• A butler called Furber, who is a real person in the movie; in the play he has no existence except buttling.
• A strikingly good-looking woman who's married the heir in a very uptight family. However she isn't American in the play - and she's some years older than John; they go on about it all the time.
• An extremely repressed mother, who doesn't, however, have any concerns about the family property, though she's so uptight about life in general from the moment the curtain rises that she would act as an appetite suppressant to anyone silly enough to try and eat in front of her (actually, that's not dissimilar to the movie!).
• A father who's remote, but who likes his new daughter-in-law. He's not only remote in the play, he's utterly boring, and would probably have been played by an aging matinee idol who had relied in the past on his charms rather than his acting skills to sway the public.
  
• Two daughters, one serious and one scatty. Except in the play the serious one is a bit of a religious nut, and the scatty one is exceptionally catty with it.
  
• John, who's naive and callow. At least in the film he also has some charm.
  
• The neighbouring girl who would have married John if the outsider hadn't come in. She's much the same as in the film: wiser and warmer than the cold-hearted family.
  

The story is roughly similar: callow youth brings home gorgeous, slightly older woman, to the horror of the family. Woman has something in her past, and at the end has to leave for the sake of her sanity, even though she actually does love the boy.

But there the similarities end. Notice that I didn't say anything about the humour in the play; in fact, there's almost none. The funniest lines come in the author's introductions to his characters; their speech is seldom more than a little amusing - there's no laugh-out-loud humour here. Mrs Whittaker (the Kristin Scott Thomas character) is described thus: The stern repression of any sex emotions all her life has brought her to middle age with a faulty digestion which doesn't so much sour her temper as spread it. She views the world with the jaundiced eyes of a woman who subconsciously realises she has missed something, which means in point of fact that she has missed everything.

And what actress would be excited by this description of Marion, the older sister?: She is largely made and pasty, with big lymphatic eyes. Hilda, the younger sister, 'possesses all the vivacity of a deficient sense of humour.'

Which means that most of the humour and wit and nifty one-liners in the film are the film's scriptwriters, not Coward's. In fact, there's almost nothing of Coward in the movie, as far as lines go, at all. Furthermore, Coward doesn't provide us with the hay fever, the Picasso painting, the vicious chihuahua who gets squashed to death by being sat on, the motorcycle amidst the Hunt, the tango at the end with the father (nor the running away with him), the butler who's a bigamist, the can-can at the local cultural evening, the boyfriend with the broken leg, the other girl's wealthy father who's not only buying up the land but also has his eye (goodness knows why) on Mrs Whittaker senior. And the father has never been to war, been sullied by it, nor wandered about France living in brothels.

In other words, most unusually, the film is infinitely superior in almost every way. It would take a cast of considerable skill to make anything of the play as it stands; the movie even manages to remove the sense of datedness.

On top of this, Coward asks the impossible of the average modern producer: he asks for nine characters for the first two acts (plus adding in, during the second act, a young man of no importance who will appear unimportantly in the third, and an elderly bloke who appears for about a minute and is never seen again) and then in the third brings on another eight characters, plus several unnamed extras. These people have come to the ball that's taking place in the next room, and wander in and out randomly during the scene making inane remarks, or, to a degree, building up a bit of tension when the heroine doesn't appear on cue. So that's some dozen actors who do nothing for two acts and then do very little in the third.

I thought When We Are Married was a bit oddly constructed in terms of its usage of some actors: Dyson the reporter appears in the first and second acts for about three minutes apiece and then disappears; Rev Mercer comes on late in the second act for two minutes, is hussled off and then gets another couple of minutes towards the end of the last act; Lottie turns up very late in the second act but at least gets some stage room; the niece gets five minutes early in the first act, another half minute a bit later on, and then a couple more minutes at the beginning of the third act. She's totally forgotten otherwise. Even the young man who sets everything in motion in the first act, where he's a major player, is dumped almost completely after that (he gets a couple of minutes at the beginning of the third act too). My character, Ormonroyd, appears with Dyson early in the first act, and then vanishes for well over an hour before he becomes a major character later in the piece. I suppose in the thirties actors were a lot cheaper, and they could be tossed on and off like this without consideration!

Of course, with the Coward, it makes a big difference, after two acts of constant talk (and very little action - another difference between the play and the film) to have lots of people bobbing in and out, and women and men in pretty dresses and evening wear. It gives the last act some additional lift (and it certainly needs it).

Well, there you go. A relatively straight play turned into a successful comic movie: wonders will never cease.

This year's reading

In a recent post I mentioned that Salesman in Beijing was the last book to make it onto the list of books I've read in 2009 - which made me consider posting the rest of the books. So here they are, in the order they were read. Those in italics are fiction; the rest are non.

It's a fairly eclectic list; some of the novels were read for reviewing (for the Otago Daily Times), and the non-fiction titles tend to lean towards the areas in which I'm interested (not necessarily those in which I actually know a lot about the subject). Some of the books didn't get finished, but they'll only be on this list if I got through a fair chunk of them. There were heaps of other books, non-starters that I thought would be interesting and weren't, or that I just didn't get far through because some other more interesting book came along. Plus, this year, I had to read and re-read some text books for my course, and a number of other books that I dipped into for reference. Most of those don't appear here.

This year is perhaps notable for the number of books that I've read for the second (or third) time; I read somewhere about a person spending a year reading just the books she had on her shelves; I haven't made a conscious effort to do this, but I have re-read several that I had 'in stock.'

Since I started checking through this list again, I find there are at least two books that I've had to add because they got missed out. Weird. (The links are to reviews and blog posts I've written on the books.)

Knots and Crosses – Ian Rankin – 3.1.09
The Drunkard’s Walk – Leonard Mlodinow – 15.1.09
The Horse and His Boy (reread)– C S Lewis – 16.1.09
Set in Darkness – Ian Rankin – 25.1.09
Gilead (reread) – Marilynne Robinson – 29.1.09

Evil and the Justice of God (two-thirds) – N T Wright – 9.2.09
Reason for God – Tim Keller – 10.2.09
The Novice’s Tale – Margaret Frazer – 12.2.09
Extreme Weather Events – Tim Jones – 25.2.09
The Last Battle (re-read) – C S Lewis – 28.2.09

When we are Married (play) – J B Priestley – 2.3.09
Soul Survivor (re-read)– Philip Yancey – March 09

The Third Peacock (re-read) – Robert Farrar Capon – 8.4.09
Flashback Forward (well-skimmed) – John Cairney – 10.4.09
Twilight – Stephenie Meyer – 10.4.09
The Hunting of the Divine Fox – Robert Farrar Capon – 19.4.09
Digital filmmaking – Mike Figgis – 26.4.09
Creative Interviewing (mostly read) – Jack Douglas – 26.4.09

Sins of the Father – Fleur Beale – 7.5.09
Awakening – S J Bolton – May 09

Easy Virtue (play) – Noel Coward – 3.6.09
Readings for the Research Methods course – various dates.
Tzigane (play) – John Vakidis - 8.6.09
Leaving Church – Barbara Brown Taylor – June 2009
Original Sin – Alan Jacobs – June 2009
Fear and Polemic In Seventeenth-Century England: Richard Baxter And Antinomianism – Tim Cooper – (3/4 read) – June 2009

Anthony Trollope – James Pope Hennessey – 11.7.09

Just Take My Heart – Mary Clark Higgins – 3.8.09
Embracing the Wide Sky – David Tammet – 4.8.09
When in Rome – Ngaio Marsh – 14.8.09
The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton – abridged audio book version – 15.8.09
The Seven Dials Mystery – Agatha Christie – 17.8.09

Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies – Blake Snyder – 1.9.09
Reason for God – Tim Keller (re-read) – 7.9.09
People’s Train – Tom Keneally – 12.9.09
The Consciousness Plague – Paul Levinson – 18.9.09
A Week in December – Sebastian Faulks – 21.9.09
Finding Sanctuary – Abbot Christopher Jamieson – 25.9.09
Save the Cat – the last book on screenwriting you’ll ever need – Blake Snyder – 27.9.09

Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass on Tour – Adrian Plass – 11.10.09
Transmigration of Timothy Archer – Philip K Dick – 11.10.09
Somebody Loves Us All - Damien Wilkins - Nov 09
Performer as Priest and Prophet – Rock & Mealy – 17.10.09
A Kiss before the Apocalypse – Thomas Sniegoski – 21.10.09
The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy – Barbara Vine – 25.10.09
The Champion – Maurice Gee – 29.10.09

Supervision in the Helping Professions - ? – 1.11.09 (two-thirds finished – recalled to library)
The Complaints – Ian Rankin – 2.11.09
To Heaven, with Scribes and Pharisees – Lionel Blue – 14.11.09
The Big Picture – Tom Reilly – 29.11.09

And it was good – Madeleine L’Engle – 2.12.09
A little exercise for young Theologians – Helmut Thielicke – 2.12.09
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – J K Rowling (re-read) – 8.12.09
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – J K Rowling (re-read) – 17.12.09
SuperFreakonomics – Levitt and Dubner – 28.12.09
Salesman in Beijing – Arthur Miller – 31.12.09

Guest post: Beem Weeks

Continuing a month-long focus on authors from RWISA:

the Rave Writers International Society of Authors. 

Throughout August we'll be showing extracts from the work of these authors. 

For more information about any particular writer click the link under their photo. 

Wordless by Beem Weeks

“What’s that word say?”

“That’s an easy one, Daddy. Just sound it out.”

Levi Bacchus can’t read. 36 years old, and he’d never learned the meaning of a single sentence.

“I just ain’t cut out for this, Jamie Lynn.”

The girl’s countenance dropped in disagreement—just like her mother, that one.

“So, you’re a quitter now?” she bellowed, sounding too much like the woman who’d walked out of their lives two years earlier.

Levi took offense. “Mind your manners, Missy. I ain’t never been called no quitter.”

Beem Weeks

“Reading is something everybody should be able to do, is all I’m saying.”

“It’s easy for you,” Levi argued. “You’re just a kid, still in school. You have teachers telling you what to do and how to do it. I’m just too old for learning.”

The girl narrowed her gaze, jabbed a finger into the open book. “From the beginning,” she demanded.

His heaving huff meant he’d do it again—if only for her sake.

Words formed in his head before finding place on his tongue. Some came through in broken bits and pieces, while others arrived fully formed and ready for sound.

Jamie’s excitement in the matter is why he kept trying. Well, that and the fact he’d long desired the ability to pick up the morning paper and offer complaint or praise for the direction of the nation. All those people in the break room at the plant held their own opinions on everything from the president to the latest championship season enjoyed by the local high school football team.

“That’s good, Daddy,” Jamie said, patting her father on the arm. “That’s really good. You’ll be reading books before too long.”

A smile worked at the edges of his lips, refusing to go unnoticed.

“I’d like that, Sweet Pea.” That’s all he’d say of the matter. If it came to that, well then, he’d have accomplished something worth appreciating.

Levi harbored bigger notions than merely reading books. When a man can read, he can do or be anything he wants to be. His own father often said a man who can’t read is forever in bondage. How can a man truly be free if he cannot read the document spelling out the very rights bestowed upon him by simple virtue of birth? No sir; being illiterate no longer appealed to him.

Of his immediate family—father, mother, two older brothers—only Levi failed to attend college. Oh, he graduated from high school. Being a star quarterback will afford that sort of luxury. But when those coaches from the universities came calling, low test scores couldn’t open doors that promised more than a life spent in auto factories.

He’d seen a show on TV about a man who’d been sent to prison for five years for armed robbery. While there, this man learned to read, took a course on the law, and became a legal secretary upon his release. Eight years later, he’d earned a law degree and opened his very own practice.

Levi didn’t see himself arguing cases in a court of law—defending criminals most likely to be guilty just didn’t appeal to his sense of right and wrong. What he did see, however, is the need for a good and honest person to run the city he’d forever called home.

“Think I could be mayor?” he asked his daughter.

Jamie Lynn always grinned over such talk. “Everybody has to have a dream, Daddy.”

It’s what she always says.

Everything begins with a dream.

She gets that part of her from her mother.

“Once I can read without stopping to ask questions,” he mused, “maybe I’ll throw my hat into the ring, huh?”

“There’s nothing wrong with asking questions,” she answered, weaving wisdom between her words.

*      *      *

She’d been a girl scout, his daughter—daisies and brownies before that. It’s the other girls who bullied her out of the joy that sort of thing once offered. Straight A’s have a way of making others feel inferior, even threatened.

But Jamie Lynn isn’t the type to pine or fret. She chose to tutor—and not just her father, either. Kids come to the house needing to know this and that among mathematics or English or science. Her dream? To be a teacher one day.

And she’ll accomplish that much and more.

Her mother had that very same sense about her as well. She knew what she wanted in life, and cleared the path upon which she traveled.

High school sweethearts they’d been, Jamie Lynn’s mother and father. She’d been the pretty cheerleader, he’d been the All-American boy with a cannon for an arm. She went to college, he didn’t.

But she returned to him, joyfully accepting his proposal for a life together. Her degree carried her back to the high school from which they’d both graduated. This time, rather than student, she became teacher—American History.

Levi went to work building Cadillacs in the local plant. It paid well, offered medical benefits and paid vacation time. Life settled into routines.

Then came their little bundle. This didn’t sit well with the newly-minted history teacher. No sir. It’s as if Levi had intentionally sabotaged his own wife’s career in some fiendish plot to keep her home.

Words of love became “stupid” and “ignorant” and “illiterate ass.” She walked out one evening and never came back to the home they’d built together.

A former student, he’d heard—five years her junior. They’d ran off together, supposedly making a new home somewhere out west.

Levi didn’t challenge it. He received the house and the kid in exchange for his signature on those papers he couldn’t even read.

Jamie Lynn, she’s the light that shined in his darkness, showed him there’s still so much more living to be done. And learning to read, well, that just added to the adventure.

*      *      *

The night came when he read an entire chapter from one of Jamie Lynn’s old middle school books—straight through, unpunctuated by all those starts and stops and nervous questions. By the end of the month, Levi had managed the entire story—all 207 pages.

“We have to celebrate, Daddy,” she insisted.

It’d been the silly draw of embarrassment that twisted his head left and right, his voice saying, “No need to make a fuss, Sweet Pea.”

But fuss is only the beginning. “Dinner and a movie,” she ordered. “Then we’ll stop off at the mall and pick out a few books that you might like.”

There were stories he recalled from his boyhood; books other kids clutched under their arms and took for granted. Stories that stirred so much excitement in those young lives.

They’d belong to him now.

“You’re finally blooming, Daddy—just like a flower.”

And so was his daughter.

A teacher in the making.

Thank you for supporting this member along the WATCH "RWISA" WRITE Showcase Tour today!  We ask that if you have enjoyed this member's writing, to please visit their Author Page on the RWISA site, where you can find more of their writing, along with their contact and social media links, if they've turned you into a fan. We ask that you also check out their books in the RWISA or RRBC catalogs. Thanks, again for your support and we hope that you will follow each member along this amazing tour of talent. Don't forget to click the link under the author's photo to learn more about him.