azdak

Is it just me, or is LJ a bit fucked today?

Wolfgang and I had our first Swedish lesson last night. We are attending a series of 11 beginners' lessons at night school in Vienna in the hope that this will enable us to consult our guide to all the best natural anchor spots in the Stockholm archipelago (apparently it is the bible of archipelago sailors, but of course it is in Swedish, though I suppose there might conceivably be a Finnish edition available, not that that helps) without worrying whether our translation, achieved with the help of the fickordbok on the boat (it means "pocket dictionary", so get your filthy minds out of the gutter, all you German speakers) has accurately distinguished between "great place to anchor when the wind's from the west" and "terrible place to anchor when the wind's from the west". The teacher started out by asking us all if we knew any Swedish words. We knew the least in the class, but the ones we did know were all things like "north", "south", "island" and "halyard", which at least no one else knew. We have now learned how to say things like "What is your name?" and "Where are you from?", none of which will be any use at all, because all Swedes speak perfect English, and even the ancient fisherman we met out in the wilds of the outer archipelago, who clutched his head in horror when he heard we only spoke English, managed to tell us that his family had always been fishermen and that he lived in the most beautiful place in the world and that we had a beautiful boat, which is more than I will be able to do in Swedish after my eleven lessons. However, I went into kindergarten this morning and said to one little boy whose mother is Swedish "Vat hetter Du?" and he looked at me in astonishment and said, "Philip" so something must have stuck.

Swedish grammar and vocabulary seem reasonably simple so far, but Swedish spelling is a mystery. "Det" is pronounced "de" and "de" is pronounced "dom" and every third letter is pronounced sh (k is sh and sh is sh and sj is sh and j is sh and s is sh). Or not. Depending on where in the word it crops up. I can see, given my passing acquaintance with phonology, that Swedish has a thing about palatalisation before front vowels and after liquids, but this sh obsession goes far beyond that.

I know quite a lot of Pico peole also have DW accounts, so if the LJ outage continues past today, I could host Pico here until LJ is restored. Pass the word...

We're a bit behind the times cinematically here in Austria, so last night we went to see Four Lions, which the internet informs me was released in the UK in 2010 and won a BAFTA and things. I'm glad it's finally made it here, because I haven't laughed in a cinema so much since - well, I can't remember when. It's one of these films where the entire conversation afterwards goes "And that bit when... And that bit when... and when he...." and everyone bursts into fresh gales of laughter at each memory. Riz Ahmed was fantastic as Omar, managing to give the film an emotional layer that made it more than just a black comedy, and handling the emotional moments with a delicacy of touch that stopped them tipping into sentiment (his "Simba's jihad" version of the Lion King that he tells his son as a bedtime story is both hilarious and moving). But all the actors were terrific. And there is bonus surprise!Benedict Cumberbatch.

My eldest daughter had her Latin exam yesterday. She has been complaining for a while that the passages they currently have to translate are all from the bible, and that this puts her at a disadvantage because she doesn't know any bible stories*. When I asked her how the exam had gone, she said, "Dreadful. We got that passage where Petrus sings a song about a chicken three times. What's that all about anyway?"

I can only hope the teacher is sufficiently entertained to give her a pass mark.


*This is what happens when you don't raise your child in any particular religious tradition, and then send them to a Catholic private school at the age of 15. Apart from smuggling passages from the bible into Latin classes, it's not an overtly religious education, and the children can opt to be given religious instruction in any faith. They are not, however, allowed to choose not to attend RE classes at all.**

**Unlike the European School that my daughter went to when we were living in England, where we were told by the po-faced RE teacher at the parents' information evening, "The children have the choice between Religion and Morality." We opted for Morality.

If you like Sherlock, and especially if you like Sherlock and Harry Potter, give The Almost Empty House a try. It's very good.

This is the outcome of this year's picowrimo project. It's a short original fic that I had had languishing half-written on my hard drive for years, until Pico came along and finished it in seven days (*plugs picowrimo*).


Title: Prtz the Perilous
Author: Azdak
Word count: Just under 5,000

Summary: Prtz the Perilous was the greatest sorcerer Ruthenia had ever known. He was also a bit of a prick.

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My baby sister got married this weekend, so Tashi and I went over to England for the first time in about four years (Bexy couldn't come because she had to have her appendix out, and Wolfgang stayed with her because it's miserable enough being in hospital without knowing the rest of your family is gallivanting about dancing at weddings). It was a lovely wedding, and it was lovely to see everyone again. They tied the knot in the church where my father had been a priest when he died, and after the ceremony one of my sisters and I went off into the graveyard to visit him, only to find that most of the family had had the same idea, so we took photos of all the visitors clustered round the headstone. The junior members of the party were practising their literacy skills on the gravestones nearby, so instead of saying "Cheese!" we all said "Gone but not forgotten!"

The next day we went back to London to see War Horse (I'd booked the tickets following grondfic's glowing recommendation) and I'm happy to report that it's everything it's cracked up to be. The play itself isn't all that good (okay, it's for kids, but it's still a bit cliched and superficial, and the storyline is stretched out so thin it's almost invisible), and the acting wasn't particularly impressive, but the production itself is absolutely magical. It's distilled essence of theatre, where the whole point is not that you put reality on stage, or even things that look like reality, but the actors assert "This thing here is actually something else" and produce the feeling of reality. It's all summed up in the horses. The horses are amazing. They don't look very like real horses - they deliberately look like puppets, with a sort of wooden frame/skeleton lined with netting that does nothing to disguise the presence of three operators, one of whom isn't even underneath the horse (I should say here that we were right in the front row, with our noses up against the stage - you probably couldn't see the mechanics quite so clearly from further back, so the illusion would have been stronger, but we had the advantage of seeing every tiny detail of how things worked).




The equine hero, Joey, in a fight with his rival Topthorne, who becomes a friend. The humans are the operators, not characters in the play.

You'd never mistake them for real horses, until they start to move. When they moved, it was impossible not to imagine that they were real. The way their chests heaved when they were frightened, the order their legs moved in, the head, the tail, the ears (there are one or two moments when everything on stage is utterly still, and then one horse moves one ear and the auditorium erupts with laughter).

The whole production is built around these two levels of artifice and truth. The set is all black, the stage itself a thick lumpy black, like mud, that disappears into darkness, from which the characters emerge, like the bird in Plato's cave, before disappearing into blackness again. Overhead is a strip of white, like a piece of paper torn from a book, or a patch of sky, and this was used to project sketches of the countryside, English and French, and scribbled dates and place names. Very occasionally, a prop appeared - a door to signify the entrance to a farm house, a cannon for the horses to pull, and in one memorable scene, a tank, made of thick strips of metal. It didn't look any more like a real tank than the horses looked like real horses, but it was terrifying. The lighting was very pure, mostly just shades of white, with the occasional use of orange for warmth, especially on Joey. In the scene where Joey gets caught on barbed wire, the light spilled out from behind him onto the audience in front, and since I was sitting over to the side I could see them clearly. One little girl, aged about seven, had her hands pressed against her mouth in an agony of empathy. You could see the barbed wire wasn't real - it was being pulled about the stage by actors in order to entangle the horse - but that didn't matter, because she could imagine it so clearly.

And that, really, is the essence of theatre. Chorus says in Henry V, "Think when we speak of horses that you see them." And we did. Every one of us saw them, through the medium of those bits of wood and netting. And we also saw the Great War, emerging for a brief moment out of the darkness of almost a hundred years of history. There are some really magnificent set pieces, including a cavalry charge in which a Captain is blown off his horse in slow motion, lifted through the air by two actors, his arms and legs stuck out like a starfish against the back-lighting. But the real vision of hell comes when a cannon is pulled onto the stage by two starving and exhausted horses. I don't think I've ever seen a theatrical moment to equal the power of that sequence. It was utterly stunning, and yet it was made by nothing but a few actors and two puppets against a white light.


Joey and Topthorne are set to work pulling the cannon after one of the draught horses has died.

I know a lot about the First World War. I don't suppose most of the children in the audience knew anything about it at all. But what we saw on stage was the feeling of the war. Not the gore and the yucky realism of cinema, but what it felt like to be there, with the wire and the mud and the machine guns, the gas and the shells and the corpses, the horror, the cruelty, the waste, but also the bravery, the camaraderie and the love. It was absolutely amazing.

Steven Spielberg is apparently going to film War Horse. I don't know how he'll do with it, but I do know one thing. It will be nothing like this production. It can't be. This is theatre, through and through. You couldn't begin to do it this way with film.

I got stuck for a while on a particular scene in the current writing project. I needed the characters to sit at a table, then move to a couch and then have sex. Sounds reasonable enough, but I simply couldn't get it to work. They would sit at the table, talk and then have sex or they would sit on the couch, talk and then have sex, but they refused to interrupt the process of having a conversation that led to sex at the table in order to go and sit on the couch for a bit.

This struck me as exactly the kind of problem I used to face directing plays. Which makes it Reason 1649 why writing is like acting/directing.

It's something of a cliché that actors are constantly asking, "What's my motivation?" One of my acting teachers used to tell a story about a famous theatre actress who was told by her director to move five paces to the left in order to say a particular line. When she asked what her motivation was for moving, he replied, "Your costume clashes with the scenery."

This particular source of conflict between actors and directors – the clash between the limited, subjective view of one particular character versus the bird's eye view of the needs of the production as a whole - is fundamental to theatre, so of course Michael Frayn couldn't leave it out of his classic Noises Off.. It's funny and it's spot on, and a shortened version is under the cut.
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