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I should be grateful that I'm busy, really, but in between suppers (one for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shanith and dreiviertel last night, and one with narahttbbs and various denizens of the TrekBBS this evening) I've been trying to meet a deadline at work, hence my appearing in the office today. It wasn't bad, actually; no-one else was there, and I sat listening to my Kate Rusby and Eliza Carthy CDs while finishing edits on two articles, and preparing to rewrite a third - only to find that I had done the rewrite months ago and forgotten about it. So, this was a happy discovery and I was able to do some minor editing on it rather than retype the entire document as I had expected.
I've intended for some time to say something about the play my excellent sister took me to see on my birthday. This was Otherwise Engaged, a revival of a 1975 play by Simon Gray. I don't know much about Gray's work but this was an elaborate essay on the predicament of a particular kind of British - nay, specifically English - male in the 1970s, men who are being marginalised as the rules change and the country becomes an environment for which they were not educated. The moral centre of the play is Simon Hench, a publisher, played by Richard E. Grant, a character who appears at first to be someone to whom things happen - his oasis of peace, to be devoted to listening to Wagner, is interrupted by his sociology student lodger in search of a loan, then his private schoolmaster brother, and then his drunken philandering journalist best friend Jeff, who is in turn followed by his lover, Davina, a recent Oxford graduate in search of a book contract, and (once Jeff has left the stage) attempts to seduce Simon by taking off her peasant blouse. Amanda Ryan, playing Davina, and Grant have to play much of this scene in close proximity, and the effect is emotionally exhausting. Just as Simon has won us over entirely, our preconceptions are shattered by the news the next visitor brings, and while Simon might be the moral centre of the play this is not the same as being virtuous. In the second act, the assumptions upon which Simon has based his own sense of superiority are derailed; the final exchange with Anthony Head's Jeff reveals the depth of the private, unfolding tragedy.
Grant has to be on stage for the entire play. He's not an actor I've warmed to before - and I kept trying to imagine the originator of the part, Alan Bates, putting in a more demonstratively emotive performance - but this allows him to deploy his detachment strategically. Anthony Head has a seam in dissipated characters which is mined richly here; Jeff's emotive outpourings, fuelled and dampended by scotch, are defensive and Head's body language until the very end is closed even when he is being expansive about his love affairs.
As for the sets and costumes... they were placed ambiguously between the present day and 1975, presumably in a bid to avoid stereotyping. So white walls rather than silver wallpaper, and certainly not the browns and oranges of Abigail's Party - Simon would pride himself on taste. The title refers to the role Simon's answering machine plays in the plot. I remember 1975, and it's now history - communications were slower then, with the answering machine still a new device which the audience are not expected to be too familiar, and characters ponder whether private education will be abolished, and whether the world will pass to the broadly-educated and shrill such as the lodger Dave, played by Liam Garrigan, whose negotiating tactics - like his contemporary Davina's - are unashamedly direct and lack schooling in the old codes.
shanith and dreiviertel last night, and one with narahttbbs and various denizens of the TrekBBS this evening) I've been trying to meet a deadline at work, hence my appearing in the office today. It wasn't bad, actually; no-one else was there, and I sat listening to my Kate Rusby and Eliza Carthy CDs while finishing edits on two articles, and preparing to rewrite a third - only to find that I had done the rewrite months ago and forgotten about it. So, this was a happy discovery and I was able to do some minor editing on it rather than retype the entire document as I had expected.I've intended for some time to say something about the play my excellent sister took me to see on my birthday. This was Otherwise Engaged, a revival of a 1975 play by Simon Gray. I don't know much about Gray's work but this was an elaborate essay on the predicament of a particular kind of British - nay, specifically English - male in the 1970s, men who are being marginalised as the rules change and the country becomes an environment for which they were not educated. The moral centre of the play is Simon Hench, a publisher, played by Richard E. Grant, a character who appears at first to be someone to whom things happen - his oasis of peace, to be devoted to listening to Wagner, is interrupted by his sociology student lodger in search of a loan, then his private schoolmaster brother, and then his drunken philandering journalist best friend Jeff, who is in turn followed by his lover, Davina, a recent Oxford graduate in search of a book contract, and (once Jeff has left the stage) attempts to seduce Simon by taking off her peasant blouse. Amanda Ryan, playing Davina, and Grant have to play much of this scene in close proximity, and the effect is emotionally exhausting. Just as Simon has won us over entirely, our preconceptions are shattered by the news the next visitor brings, and while Simon might be the moral centre of the play this is not the same as being virtuous. In the second act, the assumptions upon which Simon has based his own sense of superiority are derailed; the final exchange with Anthony Head's Jeff reveals the depth of the private, unfolding tragedy.
Grant has to be on stage for the entire play. He's not an actor I've warmed to before - and I kept trying to imagine the originator of the part, Alan Bates, putting in a more demonstratively emotive performance - but this allows him to deploy his detachment strategically. Anthony Head has a seam in dissipated characters which is mined richly here; Jeff's emotive outpourings, fuelled and dampended by scotch, are defensive and Head's body language until the very end is closed even when he is being expansive about his love affairs.
As for the sets and costumes... they were placed ambiguously between the present day and 1975, presumably in a bid to avoid stereotyping. So white walls rather than silver wallpaper, and certainly not the browns and oranges of Abigail's Party - Simon would pride himself on taste. The title refers to the role Simon's answering machine plays in the plot. I remember 1975, and it's now history - communications were slower then, with the answering machine still a new device which the audience are not expected to be too familiar, and characters ponder whether private education will be abolished, and whether the world will pass to the broadly-educated and shrill such as the lodger Dave, played by Liam Garrigan, whose negotiating tactics - like his contemporary Davina's - are unashamedly direct and lack schooling in the old codes.