Street life - Dream streets
Should I blame Mrs Dalloway? I can hardly hold her responsible; she doesn't speak to me from the other side, she simply sets about her business, walking through the streets of London watching royalty drive past, marvelling at a small plane up in the sky.
Should I blame Mrs Dalloway? I can hardly hold her responsible; she doesn't speak to me from the other side, she simply sets about her business, walking through the streets of London watching royalty drive past, marvelling at a small plane up in the sky. She never once addresses me directly; she simply states that she will get the flowers herself and then steps out into the wondrous circus that is London street life.
No, I suppose I should blame the other woman, but that wouldn't be entirely right, she has long been dormant, and we pick her up at our own peril. Virginia Woolf is renowned for her unsettling nature - you have been warned again and again. You cannot blame her for leading you astray.
So I shall have to point a finger at Sir David Hare, dramatist, director (both film and stage) and screenwriter who was in Copenhagen last week to give a screenwriting masterclass as part of the Copenhagen Film Festival.
Hare, or perhaps I shall call him Sir David, considers himself to be a playwright, so any unnecessary pain in the department of film and cinema is brushed off . "Fortunately for me I do not depend upon screenwriting for my livelihood," he stated quite clearly. For two hours in the middle of an unusually sunny Saturday afternoon, we sat and listened to Sir David as he shared the secrets and sagas of the trade. To those of you not familiar with the accolades of Sir David, he is the man responsible for writing the screenplay for films such as Damage (starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche), and more recently The Hours. He sat back quite casually, dressed stylishly in a fine knit grey sweater and loose-fitting trousers, sharing the highs, lows, successes and failures of life as a playwright who somehow gets sidetracked into film - directing (Wetherby, Paris By Night and Strapless), writing and adapting. He was refreshingly honest, he was funny, he brought us nowhere closer to unlocking the writing code, but we all know that this is something that cannot be taught.
Perhaps we should sidetrack a little back to 1998, to Sam Mendes's production of a play, first produced in London's West End. It was called The Blue Room and it starred Nicole Kidman, a play that became very famous for Ms Kidman's brief nudity. The Blue Room is an adaptation of a Schnitzler's play Der Reigen. Here the threads of life begin to weave nicely. Schnitzler's novel Traumnovelle, known in English as Dream Story, is the novel adapted by Stanley Kubrick for his last feature film Eyes Wide Shut. This is the start of Kidman's entanglement in a narrative web of depravity and trauma. The next time she will meet with Sir David will be in her role, the best I have ever seen from Ms Kidman, as Virginia Woolf in The Hours. In between these two meetings, much happens to her...
I am sure that Ms Kidman must reflect, from time to time, how her contact with these stories has affected her life. After reading a few pages in Woolf's novel, you will never be able to walk down a city street in quite the same way. After Ms Kidman and Tom Cruise bravely took on Kubrick's final opus that travels exclusively to the depths of our fantasies and reveals the irreparable damage of unleashing them, Hollywood's most famous couple part forever.
And so when I walk out to buy a few steaks and get side-tracked for many hours - savouring cheese and meats at Gourmand, the French delicatessen, scratching at the window with the purple Charles Jourdan shoes, lingering in the fair trade Fisk shop, stroking the smooth horn sugar shovel for many lost minutes, drinking cappuccino at Ricco's café... I blame no one at all, but instead imagine them all, Dalloway, Woolf, Sir David, Schnitzler, Ms Kidman even, doing the same, time-wasting day dreaming, for better or for worse, but always with desperate hope, and always aware that they are part of some strange narrative.
No, I suppose I should blame the other woman, but that wouldn't be entirely right, she has long been dormant, and we pick her up at our own peril. Virginia Woolf is renowned for her unsettling nature - you have been warned again and again. You cannot blame her for leading you astray.
So I shall have to point a finger at Sir David Hare, dramatist, director (both film and stage) and screenwriter who was in Copenhagen last week to give a screenwriting masterclass as part of the Copenhagen Film Festival.
Hare, or perhaps I shall call him Sir David, considers himself to be a playwright, so any unnecessary pain in the department of film and cinema is brushed off . "Fortunately for me I do not depend upon screenwriting for my livelihood," he stated quite clearly. For two hours in the middle of an unusually sunny Saturday afternoon, we sat and listened to Sir David as he shared the secrets and sagas of the trade. To those of you not familiar with the accolades of Sir David, he is the man responsible for writing the screenplay for films such as Damage (starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche), and more recently The Hours. He sat back quite casually, dressed stylishly in a fine knit grey sweater and loose-fitting trousers, sharing the highs, lows, successes and failures of life as a playwright who somehow gets sidetracked into film - directing (Wetherby, Paris By Night and Strapless), writing and adapting. He was refreshingly honest, he was funny, he brought us nowhere closer to unlocking the writing code, but we all know that this is something that cannot be taught.
Perhaps we should sidetrack a little back to 1998, to Sam Mendes's production of a play, first produced in London's West End. It was called The Blue Room and it starred Nicole Kidman, a play that became very famous for Ms Kidman's brief nudity. The Blue Room is an adaptation of a Schnitzler's play Der Reigen. Here the threads of life begin to weave nicely. Schnitzler's novel Traumnovelle, known in English as Dream Story, is the novel adapted by Stanley Kubrick for his last feature film Eyes Wide Shut. This is the start of Kidman's entanglement in a narrative web of depravity and trauma. The next time she will meet with Sir David will be in her role, the best I have ever seen from Ms Kidman, as Virginia Woolf in The Hours. In between these two meetings, much happens to her...
I am sure that Ms Kidman must reflect, from time to time, how her contact with these stories has affected her life. After reading a few pages in Woolf's novel, you will never be able to walk down a city street in quite the same way. After Ms Kidman and Tom Cruise bravely took on Kubrick's final opus that travels exclusively to the depths of our fantasies and reveals the irreparable damage of unleashing them, Hollywood's most famous couple part forever.
And so when I walk out to buy a few steaks and get side-tracked for many hours - savouring cheese and meats at Gourmand, the French delicatessen, scratching at the window with the purple Charles Jourdan shoes, lingering in the fair trade Fisk shop, stroking the smooth horn sugar shovel for many lost minutes, drinking cappuccino at Ricco's café... I blame no one at all, but instead imagine them all, Dalloway, Woolf, Sir David, Schnitzler, Ms Kidman even, doing the same, time-wasting day dreaming, for better or for worse, but always with desperate hope, and always aware that they are part of some strange narrative.