02.28.05
Posted in Film at 5.36 pm by niltiac
I’m so pleased that Cate Blanchett won Best Supporting Actress in the Oscars last night. Not just because she’s Australian but because she’s such a superb actor and also seems like a genuinely lovely person. I saw The Aviator last week and was blown away by her portrayal of Katherine Hepburn. The woman is a chameleon!
I’ve been a big admirer of Blanchett’s work for many years. I’ve watched her in Oscar and Lucinda, Elizabeth, Pushing Tin, Charlotte Gray, Veronica Guerin, The Lord of the Rings and, I’m sure, many others that I’ve forgotten! She changes in every movie and often her disguise is so complete that at first it often doesn’t dawn on you that it’s Cate. (Except in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, where she plays herself and her Ocker cousin at the same time to hilarious effect).
This is very rare in Hollywood. Her co-star Leo di Caprio, for example, turns in a very solid and praiseworthy performance but you never once forget that it’s Leo. Similarly, Tom Cruise always looks like Tom Cruise; Julia Roberts always looks like Julia Roberts, even when she’s playing a single mum from the wrong side of the tracks. It’s particularly amazing that Blanchett is so very, very beautiful but she is able to completely transcend her beauty for a role. Plus her transformations are built on acting skill – the way she walks, talks and dresses – rather than more obvious devices such as prosthetics, greasy hair or weight gain.
She won’t remember me but I have actually met Cate – she taught drama at Australian Theatre 4 Young People when she was a NIDA student. I can’t remember if I was in her class or if she taught the class in the room next door but I definitely remember the name and I’m pretty sure we had some contact.
(This claim to fame is not as good as my Nicole Kidman story but that’s one for another time).
Cate in the SMH
Cate in The Australian
Check out pictures of the lovely frocks here
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02.27.05
Posted in London, Theatre, Travel at 12.01 pm by niltiac
It started snowing this week. The first time it happened it was only a flurry and it didn’t settle. The second time, we got about half an inch and it settled. Everyone was so excited. It was 9 o’clock at night and there were people running around on the street, having snow fights and shrieking. I don’t think they were real Londoners though. There are some Australians across the road from us – we can tell because they’ve hung the flag in the window – and I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that they were the only ones out in the snow. It’s the first snow we’ve had all winter (in London that is) and only the week before the daffodils were starting to bloom down the street. Otherwise it’s been extremely mild and most days hats, scarves, gloves and the like are quite optional. You can see a blurry pic of the snow from our window here.
We did have a white Christmas though – it would have been a shock if we didn’t since we spent it in the Austrian Alps on a ski holiday! We had a truly fabulous time in Austria. It is a beautiful place, both in terms of natural beauty and in terms of art and architecture, and the people are very friendly. (They all look like ski instructors and that’s no coincidence – most of them either are or have been a ski instructor at some stage!). It was particularly great for me because I was an exchange student in Germany in high school and the immersive experience of actually being in a German-speaking country once again meant it all started coming back.
We started in Innsbruck, the Tyrolean capital in the middle of the Alps. It’s a beautiful, compact little city surrounded by mountains but surprisingly full for a town that size, complete with a university, an airport, a hospital and so forth). We spent three days out of five on the slopes. I did some snowboarding lessons with my boyfriend, which was fun but bruising, and then a day of skiing at the end so I could relax and enjoy myself without falling over every five minutes. Innsbruck is within easy travelling distance of about half a dozen excellent ski areas, so it’s good for people of all sorts of abilities.
View of residential Innsbruck 
Buildings in the old town of Innsbruck
The rest of the time we spent exploring Innsbruck and that was lots of fun. We stayed at the Hotel Weisses Kreuz (White Cross Hotel) in the old town, which is over five hundred years old. Mozart stayed there with his father when he was 13 – and I believe that is actually a fact, not just one of those apocryphal tales hotels like to tell to win over tourists. It was a very cool place with an old central staircase and a great breakfast buffet and very good value. It overlooks the Christmas market, which was on every evening we were there, with assorted crafts and knick-knacks on sale, plus plenty of food and gluhwein or cider.
View of Christmas market from Stadtturm
On Christmas Eve, we had a traditional Tyrolean feast with venison, duck and semifreddo at a nearby restaurant. I went to listen to the carols in the Dom (cathedral)at the midnight, although I didn’t stay for the sermon. We had a lovely Christmas Day, exchanging gifts in our hotel room and then getting the bus to a nearby village and walking back to Innsbruck through farmland with alpine views and dark forests.
View of the countryside near Innsbruck on our Christmas Day hike
A roadside shrine in the countryside near Innsbruck on our Christmas Day hike
Innsbruck was the home away from home for the rulers of the Hapsburg empire and it has plenty of impressive buildings and excellent museums. In the Hofkirche (main church), there are a few dozen statues, including one of King Arthur of England, some of which are designed by Albrecht Durer. The Hofburg (palace) is definitely worth a visit too.
Caitlin at the Stadtturm in Innsbruck
View of Hofburg (palace) from the Stadtturm (town tower) in Innsbruck
The Goldenes Dachl (Golden Roof) in Innsbruck
Statue designed by Albrecht Durer in Hofkirche in Innsbruck
After Innsbruck, it was onto Salzburg; only two hours away from train and actually not much bigger (145,000 compared with 120,000 for Innsbruck; Vienna is only 1.6 million and the entire nation only about 8 million). We didn’t get the lovely crisp, clear days that we had in Salzburg so our views were always a bit white and snowy. Salzburg boasts one of the most beautiful cathedrals I have ever seen, plus very grand royal residences and an impressive art gallery. But the Festung (fortress) is the high point of a trip to Salzburg – and it is also physically the high point of Salzburg. It covers an enormous area and I believe it’s a fact that the walls of the Festung were never breached in any siege. One of the archbishops who ruled Salzburg, Leonhard von Keutschach, had a turnip for his motif and the turnip symbol is found all over Salzburg.
Jack and Caitlin in the Festung in Salzburg
The other thing you’ll find all over Salzburg is Mozart. There are Mozart chocolates on sale everywhere you go (chocolate balls with marzipan and pistachio – actually they’re quite nice). There are two museums dedicated to Mozart, the Mozartsgeburtshaus (Mozart birth house) and the Mozartswohnhaus (Mozart live house). The latter is meant to be better than the former but it’s the only one we went to so I wouldn’t know. It was reasonably interesting but there wasn’t a whole lot in the way of original artifacts so as far as museums go, it was nothing special. It’s somewhat ironic since Mozart found Salzburg stifling and couldn’t wait to move out to Vienna but if you went by what you found in Salzburg you would never know he lived anywhere else.
One of the quite cool – but extremely touristy – things we did in Salzburg was go to the nearby salt mines. We had to put on special overalls, go on a train and a boat and slide down not one but too slippery dips. The commentary was very cheesy but it was still very interesting, particularly to think that this was the source of Salzburg’s wealth (not to mention its name, ‘salt city’) for so many hundred years.
We spent about five days in Vienna, including New Year’s Eve. By this stage we’d downgraded to a youth hostel, which wasn’t too bad. Vienna is spectacular! The thing you have to remember about Vienna is that it was basically the capital of Europe for a very long time as the seat of the Holy Roman Empire. Just walking around and through the Museums Quartier, the former palace complex which now includes the Kunsthistorischesmuseum (Art History Museum with an excellent exhibition on Titian) and the Naturhistorischesmuseum (Natural History Museum) opposite, plus the Hofburg with the royal state apartments inside, is so stunningly beautiful it takes your breath away. I particularly enjoyed vieasiting the Naturhistorischesmuseum – it had some really interesting exhibits, some of which were part of the emperor’s personal collection and some of which were acquired later. Students of Australian history will be interested to note that Welcome, the giant gold nugget found at Ballarat, is on display here. It’s certainly not one of their main exhibits and we only knew it was there because we fell across it.
The Naturhistorischesmuseum. (The Kunsthistorischesmuseum is identical and opposite).
The interior of the Kunsthistorischesmuseum in Vienna (formerly part of the palace complex)
Detail of a door in the old town of Vienna
Welcome, the famous nugget from the Australian Gold Rush, on display in the Naturhistorischesmuseum in Vienna
We spent New Year’s Eve at the big street party in and around St Stephansplatz in the centre of town and went to a free dance party in the town hall. That was fun. I was a bit disappointed by the fireworks but later discovered that the fireworks had in fact been cancelled as a gesture of solidarity with the victims of the Asian tsunami (I’m sure they were very grateful) and in fact all I’d seen was whatever the kids were letting off in the streets.
Vienna is very much a city for music lovers of all persuasions – it’s home to Kruder and Dorfmeister and the Wienerstaatsoper (Vienna State Opera). We did in fact go to see the opera (sadly K&D weren’t playing) and had a lovely time swanning about in the opera hall, watching through our binoculars from a great height and listening to beautiful music. One of the best places to go in Vienna is the Haus der Musik (you can figure out that translation I’m sure), a very 21st century museum dedicated entirely to music. It’s very interactive so you have a floor where you can roll dice to compose a waltz, exhibits on the structure of the ear and the brain and a room where you record sounds that you can blend together to create tracks. Even their rooms on the great composers rocked – much better than the stuffy on Mozart museum in Salzburg.
What else did we do? We went on a walking tour of underground Vienna. This included some Roman ruins and a now defunct training complex underneath the fire station that doubled as a waste incinerator until the 1990s, but mainly lots and lots of cellars. The cellars were pretty cool and intriguingly they used to link up so you could walk all over the old city underground and if you ran out of storage room you would dig deeper – or just use your neighbour’s cellar. We also went out to see the Hundertwasserhaus, which I’ve been curious about ever since I was a little girl and received a postcard of the place from a family friend. The building is used for private homes so we could only see it from the outside but it was definitely worth a look.
Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna
In January we had our first visitors since we moved to our nice new flat in Clapham in October. Ben and Misty came to stay for a day and a weekend either side of their ski trip to Austria. Ben had been working on site in Sweden for a month and was on his way back to Australia, while Misty has recently moved to Ireland for work. It was terrific having them to stay, partly because they are really good company and partly because we got to go out and be tourists for the day. There are some pics here.
Sadly, one of the good friends I’ve made since moving to London has moved back to New York. Rema, who I met through Natalie, had been living here for nearly a year but due to visa hassles (they’re from India and waiting on their green card), her husband was unable to join her and after 11 months apart she grew tired of waiting and decided she needed to live with her husband again. Fair enough but we’ll miss her!
Here is a pic:
Natalie, Rema and Caitlin celebrate Nat’s birthday at a cheesy bar in Covent Garden
The other Caitlin and I went to see the Turks exhibition at the Royal Academy, which was very good and lots of fun, although quite crowded. It was interesting because it wasn’t just Ottoman or Hittite stuff, which is mainly what I saw in Turkey, but drew from an incredibly wide region (as far as western China) and several thousand years of history. Caitlin are jokingly calling ourselves the Caitlins Culture Club or CCC – you can join as long as your name is Caitlin.
Dominique, who I worked with at The Australian, is now here, which is nice. We caught up for afternoon tea at the Orangery in Kensington Gardens. She’s been reporting on London Fashion Week but we should see each other again soon.
I have made a New Year’s resolution to go to the theatre more often (tough, I know) and we’ve been trying our utmost to keep it. We figure that we’re in London and you don’t come to London to go to the beach, you come for the theatre and culture. So far this year I’ve been to see Mary Poppins with my friend Natalie for her birthday, which was loads of fun. You can read my review here. We went to see Kevin Spacey in National Anthems, which was absolutely superb (review here). We have also seen Cirque du Soleil and the lavish production of His Dark Materials, based on the Philip Pullman novels, at the National Theatre (review here). It’s been brilliant so far – if only getting fit and saving money and writing the great Australian novel were just as easy!
My job is going quite well. I am still in the deputy news editor role although I should be able to write more features this year. I edited our supplement on the six-monthly consumer magazines report from the Audit Bureau of Circulations – twelve pages in two and a bit days with two reporters plus me! The hardest bit was ensuring all our tables were accurate – we didn’t quite manage but we only have one teeny correction for Runners’ World so I guess that’s pretty good going. My boss was really pleased with how it turned out and he wrote me a formal letter and organised a £500 bonus for my next pay cheque so I’m pretty stoked! Overall, there are things I love about the job and things I hate. Media is certainly a fascinating area to be specialising in, especially in London, although it’s frustrating how specific we are about the sort of media we cover (very focused on the commercial side – ie media planning and buying). The magazine is now very glossy and smart – not at all like a typical trade rag. And the editing gig is great experience. But I do miss being at a big paper and writing for a wider audience so I’m going to try to work towards moving back into papers over here. I’ve always intended to do this but the added impetus is that our company is up for sale because the venture capitalist has withdrawn his funding and the titles are being sold off individually or in twos and threes, so the future is not terribly stable at the moment.
My boyfriend and I went to Edinburgh a few weeks before Christmas, which was great. We saw quite a bit of our friend Scott. We stayed in a B&B in the New Town, which was quite nice (apart from the powdered scrambled eggs; we didn’t make that mistake twice). Edinburgh is a very attractive city. It’s got some good shopping and good restaurants and would probably make a fairly pleasant place to live if you don’t want anything too lively. But its main appeal for visitors is the physical beauty and sense of history. Edinburgh castle is perched high on a rocky outcrop and absolutely dominates the city. Leading down from that is the Royal Mile, which has plenty of tourist traps but also plenty of places of genuine interest, and if you follow it down far enough you get to Holyrood (the palace as opposed to the castle) and the new Scottish parliament. There is a largish tract of genuine wilderness at the edge of the old city (but at the centre of Greater Edinburgh) and we climbed up to Arthur’s Seat, the highest peak in the middle of this park. It was a tough climb and we expected to be rewarded with spectacular views but the mist rolled in so by the time we reached the top we really couldn’t see further than three metres away!
Ruined abbey at Holyrood
Caitlin on hike up to Arthur’s Seat
Our next trip is to Paris for a long weekend to celebrate our five-year anniversary next month. We are also planning to go to the States in October for a wedding and hopefully home for a holiday at Christmas. See you then!
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02.26.05
Posted in BookCrossing at 4.37 pm by niltiac
As many of you know, my not-so-secret obsession is BookCrossing, a website for tracking and sharing books.
There is an article on BookCrossing in The Independent today and apparently it was on Radio 2 this morning as well. There’s been a sudden frenzy of interest in BookCrossing in the UK media and we’re all hoping it will translate to an upswing in membership and book journalling.
My interest was sparked by an article in The Australian in July 2003. (There is a reprint of that article here).
So I have been BookCrossing now for 18 months, first in Sydney, now in London – with a few books released in Turkey, Austria and elsewhere. I have met some truly great people, including my friend Natalie, through BookCrossing, and I’ve read some truly great books too!
Many people focus on the wild releases and that is obviously a big part of it but it’s not the only part. I enjoy wild releasing – and it’s always a thrill when they get picked up (more on that later). But I also enjoy participating in bookrings or bookrays (where you have a pre-arranged list of names of people who will read the book), trades, RABCKs (“random acts of BookCrossing kindness” – gifts rather than trades), and simply browsing at the monthly meetups or at official BookCrossing zones. I enjoy the social aspect of meeting with other book lovers and talking about books – or not – over a drink or too. I enjoy being able to pass on books that I’ve read and enjoyed.
Many people say that the idea doesn’t appeal because they treasure their books too much. I don’t pretend that BookCrossing is for everyone but there’s no reason not to give it a go. Everyone has books on their shelves that they will never read again and unless they are valuable or sentimentally important, why keep them? Or if you have duplicate copies – why keep both? There is no reason you can’t start off with one or two and see whether it takes your fancy.
Many people effectively participate in their own version of BookCrossing anyway by passing on books they enjoy to their family and friends. How much more satisfying would that be if you can read what they think about it and then track what happens to the book as they pass it on to their family and friends? Or is that just me?
And then there’s wild releasing. Probably only one in eight books released into the wild gets journalled but as long as it’s getting picked up and hopefully enjoyed that’s okay. And sometimes, the books will be journalled months later.
Here is a recent wild catch I had from a book I left out the front of the Royal Academy, which I visited to see the Turks exhibtion.
Book Title: The Looking Glass Wars
Author: Frank Beddor
Monday, February 14, 2005
I was delighted to see the book on the bench at the Royal Academy! I don’t know how long it was there for before I saw the yellow logo in the corner of my eye. I’d been hoping that I would see a recently released book for some time.
It looks interesting and I will try and read it very soon.
It has also encouraged me to release some of my own so that others can experience the pleasure of catching a book!
By martinaperry from London, England United Kingdom
Book Rating: out of 10
Here is another from Borough Market. The lady appears to believe that you have to find a book in order to join BookCrossing, which is not the case (anyone can join at any time), but I’m very pleased she found my book.
Book Title: Mansfield Park (Penguin Classics)
Author: Jane Austen
Saturday, January 08, 2005
I noticed this book today, lying on a table at the Monmouth Street Coffee House at Borough Market. I knew about BOOKCROSSING because I’d found a book while walking in a London park with my mother-in-law. She’d taken that one home because she was so excited to have found it. This time it was my turn to be excited. I spent some time deciding whether to pick it up – did it belong to someone; would some irate person chase me down the street accusing me of theft? In the end I did, and it’s now on my bedside table waiting to be read. Thank you to its former owner – I will read it and send it on its journey.
By rosyprimrose from London, England United Kingdom
Book Rating: out of 10
The aim of all this is to make the whole world a library. You can look on it as a form of recycling! It’s not like Napster Mark I or KaZaA at all – there are no copyright issues because you’re dealing with a physical edition of a book and you’re not copying it. Besides which, there is no doubt that a) I’ve been buying more books and b) trying new authors, since I started BookCrossing.
I have never found a book in the wild myself – or at least not by accident (I’ve found a few that I’ve gone looking for but they were well hidden). But I’ve certainly had many, many books come my way since joining BookCrossing. You can check out my bookshelf page here.
Yes, I know all this is a little nerdly. Guilty as charged. I’ve always been a bookworm and I may as well own up to it. But there are over 330,000 BookCrossing members worldwide and it’s growing fast, so at least I’m not alone!
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02.25.05
Posted in London at 8.40 pm by niltiac
“Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes, hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread but give us roses.”
I just like the quote.
In a sense the story of how I came across it is a very postmodern one: It is printed on the menu of a pub called Bread & Roses in Clapham, London.
But in fact, the quote comes from a song written during a strike of women textile workers in Lawrence Massachusetts, USA in 1912.
And it turns out the connection between the pub and the quote is not so random after all. To all outside impressions, the pub is just another trendy watering hole in Clapham but I now discover, upon looking at their website, that the pub is run by the Workers Beer Company and is a trade union initiative.
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02.24.05
Posted in Family & Friends, London at 7.26 pm by niltiac
In January we had our first visitors since we moved to our new flat last October. (My boyfriend’s birthday and my cousin Jenny both came to visit us when we were living in the studio flat in Oval). Ben and Misty came to stay for a weekend and we had loads of fun! Ben had been working in Sweden for a month and was on his way home, while Misty moved to Dublin not so very long ago. They met up for a ski holiday in Austria and came via London to visit us.
It was great to see them and we shared some excellent conversations over a few glasses of red wine and a few of cognac too. We also got to play at being tourists for a day. We went to Borough Market for breakfast, walked along the river, unfortunately couldn’t go on the London Eye because it was closed, had a beer and then I went home to start the celebratory roast lamb while my boyfriend took them to the British Museum.
We have a large living room with two sofas and visitors are definitely welcome (as long as we know you, that is!).
Misty admires the boat at Southbank
A busker in front of the Millennium footbridge (something of great interest to Ben and Misty who are both engineers) with St Paul’s in the background
View of London Eye and Thames with Westminster in the background
View of Big Ben and Westminster
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Posted in Society & Politics at 11.51 am by niltiac
These brave souls from Nepal are defying a government ban on independent news broadcasts to bring news of Nepal to the outside world. As they say ‘we want our democracy back’.
I did read an excellent articles about how Nepalese newspapers were making fun of the ban on political reporting by carrying no news whatsoever – just pages of trivia such as articles on the variety of socks on sale at the markets in Kathmandu.
It’s really sad what’s happening in Nepal with a once peaceful democratic country now caught between the rock of a repressive government and the hard place of a Maoist insurgency. Countless westerners have enjoyed the hospitality of the Nepalese people in the Himalayas and elsewhere. Don’t forget them now.
As they say, ‘we want our democracy back’.
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02.23.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 8.13 am by niltiac
Once upon a time, before the Dreamtime, the centre of Australia was forested. Every years the monsoon came, penetrating to the heart of what is now the driest continent on earth, and feeding the lush forestation and cornucopia of plants and animals. Or at least according to the scientist quoted in this article.
I’ve heard similar things said about the Sahara and it may or may not be true, but it’s an interesting possibility! The Outback is such a central part of the Australian identity and I can’t imagine it any other way. The desert has its own awesome beauty but it’s certainly not the best environment for supporting and giving life. If the centre was covered in rainforest and blasted by monsoons every year, Australia would be a very different place. Biodiversity would be greater. Europeans would have settled further inland in greater numbers and the country now would probably be much more heavily and evenly populated (no doubt bringing its own set of ecological problems).
One thing that is certainly true is that deforestation can radically alter the ecosystem and the climate. Yet forest is being destroyed at an unprecedented rate around the world (and Australia is no exception – just look at the decimation of the old-growth forests in Tasmania). We are bombarded in the news every day with yet more conclusive proof that the world is becoming hotter and drier and that it’s a manmade phenomenon. If we don’t act now, future generations will be living in a global Lake Eyre.
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02.22.05
Posted in Society & Politics at 8.10 am by niltiac
Arash Sigarchi and Mojtaba Saminejad are both in prison in Iran – for having a blog. Today bloggers around the world have been asked to dedicate their sites to freeing Arash and Sigarchi and other cyber-dissidents. If every blogger did nothing but put the phrase ‘Free Mojtaba and Arash Day’ on their website, that alone would mean the phrase could be seen 7.1 million times.
I feel like I should be writing something erudite about freedom of expression. I am a journalist and a writer so my biases are clear but I do think it’s really important to protect artistic and political freedoms. I don’t know what Arash and Mojtaba did to upset the Iranian authorities so much but I would say any government that cannot withstand the scrutiny of its own people has no real authority.
It strikes me – as an Australian and as a UK resident – that we are in danger of losing many of our freedoms because of the war on terror. Many important civil liberties – in particular the ancient tenet of habeas corpus (ie they can’t detain you without charging you) – are being wound back. Recently, the Blair government had to make a full apology to the Guildford Four for their wrongful imprisonment during the Irish troubles. An injustice was perpetrated and the lives of four families were ruined as a result. New anti-terror laws in Britain, Australia and the US make it an almost a certainty that this will happen again. The worst thing is that it won’t even make our societies any safer from the real threats.
Of course, the difference is that I won’t be arrested for writing this blog – and that’s something to celebrate!
Committee to Protect Bloggers
Amnesty International
Electronic Frontiers Foundation
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02.21.05
Posted in London at 11.18 pm by niltiac
Winter has been very mild so far – most days hats, gloves and scarves are entirely optional. In fact, it’s been so warm that the daffodils are out already. But not this week. On Saturday we had snow for the first time – only a light flurry and it didn’t settle but snow all the same. And this afternoon it started snowing seriously. I can see the snow driving down in the glare of the streetlights and it’s settled on our balcony, the trees and the cars on the street. Earlier there were people at every doorway and window watching the snow and a few hardy souls running around on the street hurling snowballs. I think they were the Australians from across the road (I haven’t met them but the flag in the window is a strong hint).
View of the street from our window on a snowy evening
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02.20.05
Posted in London, Theatre at 11.17 am by niltiac
His Dark Materials
National Theatre, London
Part I – 20 January 2005
Part II – 17 February 2005
It’s unlikely that His Dark Materials could be held in any other theatre in the world, at least not in its current form. It’s simply a matter of technical capability. The stage at the Olivier Theatre in the National was cylindrical with many levels; the drum could move up or down or rotate from side to side for a set change. This allowed for almost constant set changes as the narrative flipped between the various characters and as Lyra and Will travelled between the worlds.
His Dark Materials is adapted from the trilogy of the same name by Philip Pullman, which includes Northern Lights (published in the US as The Golden Compass), The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. The books are epic high fantasy with armoured bears, hot air balloons, travel between the worlds, witches, spectres and ghouls. It’s interesting to see how all this translated to the stage and well worth seeing for anyone interested in theatrical adaptation.
The play was fairly true to the book but condensed. Yet even with a few cuts – the scientist character and the planet of the wheel people in the third book disappear entirely – it’s really, really long, which is why it’s divided into two parts. You can actually see the two parts together in one long six-hour production but that would be absolute madness. Three hours at a time is long enough.
The staging was lavish. The sets were beautifully designed and, as mentioned before, technically impressive. The costumes were fantastic, especially for Lyra’s mother and the armoured bears. All the humans in Lyra’s world have a daemon – a soul in animal form – and this is realised through clever puppetry. The ghouls tormenting the souls in Hell were quite amazing. The sheer spectacle of it all is worth the price of admission alone.
I enjoyed Part I much more than Part II. In part this is probably because the first book is stronger than its sequels although I didn’t notice this so much when I read them. Both plays are silly and over the top and a spectacle and this is part of the point. But I felt Part II veered too much in this direction. It started off well but I was starting to lose patience in the last half hour to hour because the acting was becoming increasingly overwrought and losing its sense of truth. The character who played Lyra had put on a funny voice, which I could overlook in the beginning but grew increasingly irritating as the play went on. It started off as a classy production for adults and children alike but started to veer alarmingly into pantomime territory towards the end, albeit with high production values.To be fair, some of the acting was very good and some of the faults were due to direction or dialogue rather than acting but overall the increasing sense of melodrama was a little wearying.
Nonetheless, the production overall is so remarkable that any lapses in taste are quite forgivable. Recommended.
Part I ****
Part II ***
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