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  • Sunday Shortlist, from The Week
    A ‘huge-hearted’ production, and an ‘inescapably hilarious’ film

     
    THEATRE REVIEW

    Cyrano de Bergerac

     Adrian Lester stars in ‘glorious’ show at RSC’s Swan Theatre 

    “Why is this RSC reinvention of Edmond Rostand’s much-revived 1897 play so unusually enchanting?” asked Dominic Maxwell in The Times. Is it Adrian Lester, never better, as the large-nosed, “gilet-sporting, verse-spouting” soldier of the title, “handy in a duel, even handier with a turn of phrase”? Is it Susannah Fielding as his “ideal woman”, Roxane? Is it Simon Evans and the poet Debris Stevenson’s lively modern-language translation? Is it the humour, “which nestles this tragicomedy even at its saddest”? The truth is that nearly everything in Evans’ “huge-hearted production” is perfectly calibrated. Even the famous nose is nicely done: big enough for you to see why Cyrano, beneath the bravado, is deeply insecure – “but not so big that you spend time wondering how it stays on”.

    Lester is the highlight of the show, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. As Cyrano, channelling his love for Roxane through the handsome but tongue-tied young soldier Christian (Levi Brown), writing his love letters and feeding him lines, Lester gives this production its “sublimely wounded soul”. The staging is “nifty”, too, bringing the romance and violence of France’s 17th-century golden age to life.

    “Playful, poignant, profound, perfectly pitched” – Cyrano himself would have “a field day” finding words to describe this “glorious” production, said Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times. It “tumbles across the stage, filling the RSC’s Swan Theatre with life”. It is “just wonderful”.

    I found the production a little tricksy, said Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph. “Each character has their own speaking style: whether that be monosyllabic Christian, Roxane breaking lines as her thoughts fly, or Cyrano’s rhymes shifting to map his mood.” But the big set-pieces work beautifully, notably the famous balcony scene, in which Cyrano first whispers advice to Christian, and then woos Roxane himself, from the shadows. “It’s not perfect. But, played confidently across the board, and bolstered to the hilt by Lester’s presence, it’s another RSC must-see.”

    Until 15 November, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. 

     
     
    FILM REVIEW

    I Swear  

    Feel-good film lifts the lid on life with Tourette syndrome

    “A generation ago, Tourette syndrome was the butt of bad jokes,” said Tim Robey in The Telegraph. In this warm-hearted comedy-drama based on the life of the Tourette syndrome campaigner John Davidson, “it’s the source of all the good ones”. The film stars Robert Aramayo as Davidson, who was born in Galashiels in 1971 and began exhibiting symptoms when he was 10. It does not stint in showing us how hard it was to go “through the most awkward adolescence imaginable in an era when the condition was barely understood”; Aramayo also brilliantly conveys “the intense frustration and fatigue engendered by Tourette’s”.

    Yet “I Swear” is “inescapably hilarious” too – “such is the weird power of swearing when the swearer can’t keep a lid on it”. The film opens in 2019, when Davidson is at Buckingham Palace to receive an MBE for services to mental health. Suddenly, his nerves get the better of him: “F**k the Queen!” he shouts in front of Elizabeth II herself. We then flash back to 1983, when young John (Scott Ellis Watson) is growing up; he is a confident boy, but then the tics start.

    At school, he is marked out as different and the other children are brutal, said The Observer. Meanwhile at home, his “stony mother” (Shirley Henderson) treats him as an outcast. Kind people, however, see beyond his syndrome and offer him a loving home, and later a job. “Beyond all the tragicomic plot peaks and troughs”, “I Swear” argues that John’s main problem was never the Tourette’s itself, but the “ignorance and hostility of other people”. This “neat and tidy” message is delivered a “little didactically”, but we do, in fact, leave the cinema feeling better informed by this funny, touching, feel-good film.

     
     
    PODCAST review

    Waldy and Bendy’s Adventures in Art

    “A beacon of light flashing out amid the louring fog of pointless podcasting babble”: that’s how I see Waldy and Bendy’s Adventures in Art, said James Marriott in The Times. When it launched five years ago, I became instantly addicted; now it is back after a three-year break, and it is as good as ever. Hosted by the Sunday Times critic Waldemar Januszczak and the art historian Bendor Grosvenor, it’s a “joyful and inspiriting” series combining the latest news from the art world with discussions of classic paintings: topics covered in the opening episodes include the problems at Tate Modern, the National Gallery’s new extension, condoms in art and the work of Manet. The presenters are brilliantly contrasting: the “buoyant and enthusiastic” Waldy represents the hip side of the art world, while the “earnest, patrician and demure” Bendy speaks for the more fogeyish end. Together they’ve mastered the mixture of silly and serious that is the secret of successful podcasting.

     
     
    BOOK OF THE WEEK

    Heirs and Graces  

    by Eleanor Doughty 

    Although Britain’s aristocracy no longer enjoys the wealth and status it once possessed, it still inspires a “bizarre fascination”, said Henry Mance in the Financial Times. “Just look at the success of ‘Downton Abbey’, the continued interest in Lord Lucan’s 1974 disappearance, and the number of newspaper headlines about dukes and lords.” In “Heirs and Graces”, the journalist Eleanor Doughty “maps the 796 families in Britain with hereditary titles” in order to discover, as she puts it, “who they are and how they tick”. It’s a book that is “dense with personal stories” – you may “lose track of the baronets” – but Doughty, a generally “sympathetic chronicler”, does an excellent job of illuminating the nobility, exploring their habits and attitudes, their daily lives and larger concerns (chief among them the upkeep of their ancestral houses). The book is “often enthralling”.

    With Labour planning to remove the remaining hereditary peers from the House of Lords, it’s a timely moment for this “superb survey” to appear, said Alwyn Turner in The Times. The broad story it tells is “inevitably of decline”. Gone are the days of “pampered idleness”, when tales of upper-class sexual impropriety added much to the “gaiety of the nation”. A few aristocrats remain exorbitantly rich – the Duke of Westminster is worth more than £10 billion – but there are scores more with “perfectly normal” jobs, such as “Archers” actor Tim Bentinck, the 12th Earl of Portland, and the 5th Baron Monkswell, who worked as a “customer services adviser for B&Q”. All the same, many of Doughty’s subjects emerge as a “breed slightly apart”, their “bewildering” titles and honorary titles further confused by “nicknames of unknown origin (Bobo, Boofy, Crumb, Puffin)”.

    In an “interesting chapter” on primogeniture, Doughty interviews daughters “who feel overlooked and undereducated compared with their brothers, and finds wives who were treated as breeding mares”, said Richard Davenport-Hines in Literary Review. Other chapters delve into squabbles over inheritance, or the “troubles of having an alcoholic or drug-ridden heir”. But while Doughty doesn’t romanticise the upper classes, nor is there any hint of mischief or malice in these pages – she has no desire to “shake foundations”. This is a “forgiving, good-spirited book, which celebrates the adaptability, the fortitude, the oddness, the forbearance, the anger and the spite of the coronet class”.

     
     
    OBITUARY

    Diane Keaton  

    The Oscar-winning star of Annie Hall

    “Too tall and too ‘kooky’” – that was one casting director’s verdict on Diane Keaton in the late 1960s, said The Guardian. But when the actress, who has died aged 79, auditioned for the original stage production of the comedy “Play It Again, Sam”, its writer, Woody Allen, was transfixed. Keaton was, he recalled, “adorable, funny, totally original in style, real, fresh ... One talks about a personality that lights up a room, she lit up a boulevard.” A few years later, he cast her in the film version – in the same year as she proved her dramatic skills with her “heartbreaking” performance as Kay, the wife of Al Pacino’s character Michael in “The Godfather”, a role she reprised in its sequels. 

    But it was Allen’s “Annie Hall”, in 1977, that turned her into one of the biggest stars of her era. By then, she and Allen were ex-lovers – and he had, she said, based the role on her. (Her real surname was Hall; her nickname was Annie.) Her performance won her an Oscar, and helped establish the Diane Keaton persona, said The New York Times. This rested partly on her nervous, jittery delivery (“La-di-da, la-di-da, la-la,” is her famous line in the film), but also on her “unmistakable aesthetic” – quirky takes on “traditionally male looks”, including ties, button-down shirts, waistcoats and trilby hats. Famously self-deprecating, she downplayed her role in creating her “signature look”, but even if she had been inspired by the “SoHo chic” she saw on New York’s streets, it was Keaton who devised the wardrobe, and who made the clothes such a key part of the character. A versatile actress, she could disappear into roles (such as in Warren Beatty’s 1981 film “Reds”, for which she was nominated for an Oscar), but her ability to convey “Keaton-ness” was a skill in itself.

    Diane Hall was born in Los Angeles in 1946, where her father was a civil engineer, and her mother an amateur photographer. As a child, her female role models included Katharine Hepburn, to whom she would later be likened owing to her strength and intelligence, as well as her way with trousers. At 19, she moved to New York, where she won a role in “Hair” (she took her mother’s maiden name, as Hall was already taken). She made her film debut in 1970; “Annie Hall” was the fourth of the eight films she made with Allen – a lifelong friend whom she publicly defended when he was accused of abusing his adopted daughter. 

    She remained in demand in the 1980s and 1990s, with notable roles in films including “Father of the Bride” and “Baby Boom”. In 2004, she was nominated for another Oscar, for “Something’s Gotta Give”, in which she played a buttoned-up writer who is pursued by both a dishy young doctor (Keanu Reeves) and an ageing roué (Jack Nicholson). She herself never married, but she had long-term relationships with two of her co-stars – Pacino and Beatty. She adopted two children, and took time out to raise them, and also to look after her younger brother, Randy, who suffered from mental illness. With interests well beyond acting, she directed an episode of “Twin Peaks”, wrote books about art and architecture, published her photographs, and made a documentary examining beliefs about the afterlife, called “Heaven”.

     
     

    Image credits, from top: Marc Brenner; Graeme Hunter Pictures; Hutchinson Heinemann; Glasshouse Images / Alamy 
     

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