A very good production of one of Shakespeare’s lesser known plays. This is the first I am watching in my endeavour to watch and study all of the Bard’s known stage plays this year.
The play starts strong with Helena and Parolles musing on virginity which is both a meaningful and funny beginning, in fact, the play remains consistently very funny throughout. Parolles impresses and is always a joy to watch, the steady revealing of his foppery is as wonderful…
Great Siberia is presented as a land of ghosts. The lost gather to understand themselves, but the noise of human endeavour begins to pour down like its own gestalt atmosphere, drawing us outside of ourselves and toward history.
Kurosawa illustrates his usual mastery with the gentle syncretism of his subtext. Its moments of silence reach to great emotional depths, the quiet is as much a marker of life as it is of death.
It can’t all be so bad when you realise the one thing you can control is who you give your time to.
In a period where the systems that control our lives have grown beyond any one person’s comprehension, our comfort cannot be that old grasping at illusions of an individual’s power to exert control. Instead this piece suggests an authentic comfort can be our own strength in endurance, and the ability to hold onto love within this incomprehensible mess.
An edifice to Aardman’s lack of restraint. From conception to premier everything was pointing against making this, and almost every creative decision herein is a clumsy misstep. Wallace and Gromit have been shook down, but now only pennies fall from the pockets of the wrong trousers.
