Asking the Wrong Questions

Today at Strange Horizons , I write about Russell T. Davies's adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream for the BBC.  It was a bit of a surprise to me that this film even existed--whatever promotion there was for it seems to have been swallowed up by the media blitz for the second season of The Hollow Crown .  And as I write in the review, this turns out to have been massively unfair, because whereas this year's Hollow Crown sequence was an uninspired slog enlivened, here and there, by a few fine performances, Davies's Dream is witty, fun, and most of all very smart in its approach to the play and its problems.  To be clear, this is still a Russell T. Davies production, with all the good and bad things that implies (the Murray Gold soundtrack is quite a hurdle, for example).  But ultimately, he and the play turn out to have been a perfect match, and the result is one of the most rewarding Shakespeare adaptations I've seen in some time. My posit...

People my age, I think, can for the most part be divided into two groups--those whose first encounter with William Shakespeare the playwright (as opposed to William Shakespeare the cultural icon and creator of such linguistic commonplaces as "To be or not to be") came from Baz Luhrman's 1996 Romeo + Juliet , and those for whom it was Kenneth Branagh's 1993 Much Ado About Nothing .  I'm in the latter group, and--all due respect to Luhrman--I can't imagine a better introduction.  Branagh's sun-dappled, cheerful film, in which he and his then-wife Emma Thompson headline as the argumentative lovers Benedick and Beatrice, is not only a top-notch adaptation of an excellent play, but it has a lightness and an effortlessness that cut through a young person's (or even a not-so-young person's) conception of Shakespeare as serious or difficult.  It's full of song and dance and beautiful scenery which, far from distracting from the archaic language, only e...

Now that it is over, let us take a moment to praise a show that did not, in life, receive nearly its fair share of accolades. A show about show-making, which starts with the realization, by a respected creator and long-time veteran of the battle between commercial and artistic considerations, that he has stagnated, and allowed the venue for which he has been responsible for decades to stagnate with him. His violent abdication can be remedied only by the return of his former protégé, a brilliant man who parted with his mentor after a brutal humiliation. He, in turn, must find a way to balance his artistic integrity with the financial considerations of his employers, who have little understanding of art and even less interest in learning about it, while battling his attraction to his leading lady, an aggravating but furiously talented woman. I'm speaking, of course, of the Canadian series Slings & Arrows , which wrapped up its three season run (making for a grand total of eigh...

Give Angela Carter credit--she didn't brag without justification. Her writing, as it turns out, really does "cut like a steel blade at the base of a man's penis" (admittedly, I don't have any personal experience with which to make a comparison). I'd like to quote a passage from Wise Children to illustrate just what a fantastic writer she was, but I'm spoiled for choice. Open the book at any random page and you're almost guaranteed to find something quotable. Here, try this from the opening chapter: "You can see for miles, out of this window. You can see straight across the river. There's Westminster Abbey, see? Flying the St. George's cross, today. St. Paul's, the single breast. Big Ben, winking its golden eye. Not much else familiar, these days. This is about the time that comes in every century when they reach out for all that they can grab of dear old London, and pull it down. Then they build it up again, like London Bridge in the...