Early morning with Orlando Bloom

Not jaded, I hope.

But I've had enough great nights in the theatre to be able - normally - to get a message out of my mind by the morning after.

Today is a bit different.

I need a strong cup of roadside coffee as well as the copy of The Guardian that the last customer has kindly left behind.

David Storey's 'In Celebration' has delivered a tougher punch than I remember from before.

It opened in London last night with Orlando Bloom as the miner's son who left home, left his parents' life and, as the play begins, has just left his new life as a writer.

In 1969 it was one of the first London shows I ever saw.

With Brian Cox, I think, in the part now played by Bloom.

Alarming  then - especially so for anyone whose own family came from those same northern towns where education and escape was what the older generation promised to the young.

Alarming now too.

Bloom may be more famed for playing to the cameras as Caribbean Pirate and Tolkien Elf.

But on the Duke of York's stage he controls all the dark corners of the miner's house when the educated sons return to show what their parents really lived and hoped and sacrificed themselves for.

The Guardian critic, Michael Billington, liked it too. No mention - only other memories for me -  of the notorious time when David Storey punched him for pronouncing one of his plays 'a stinker'.

I'm just checking the cafe copy of The TImes. Benedict Nightingale is no less praising.

This is theatrical as well as social nostalgia - a hard-crafted play that piles pressure without crude excess or artifice, performed by a cast in which each work selflessly for the others, one giant star.

But still too bright at the back of my brain this morning.

Comments

[Judith Fitzgerald]

Although I cannot say for certain, ISTM British theatre's at least as healthy as Canada's is, Annette. It's also interesting that Margaret Atwood's "first" play previews in Stratford-upon-Avon . . .

http://tinyurl.com/ythhwq

. . . while our Stratford Festival of Canada just changed its name BACK to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival:

http://tinyurl.com/2cmo3r

The real hero of London theatre is another Canadian, Honest Ed Mirvish (who died last week). In a wonderful biographical portrait of his extraordinary life, The Globe and Mail's Sandra Martin tells his triumphant tale vis-à-vis his acquisition and restoration of the Old Vic:

http://tinyurl.com/yvkgz4

Serendipitously, Sir Peter attended In Celebration in 1969; that same year, I fell in love with the theatre (probably because the first show I saw was Hair at the Royal Alex, thanks to Hon Ed [who befriended me in uni]).

BTW, pay no attention to the sidebar headline beside Sandra's story ("The True North, Stoned and Free"); although . . . It may perhaps explain why I put the Aristotelian quote below this one here rather than in "Guilty, Lord Black."

(Pshaw! O' course, I didn't exhale, said she, turning a bluer shade of pale.)

[Judith Fitzgerald]

In Ars Rhetorica, Aristotle considered hubris as a way "to cause shame to the victim, not in order that anything may happen to you, nor because anything has happened to you, but merely for your own gratification. Hubris is not the requital of past injuries; this is revenge. As for the pleasure in hubris, its cause is this: Men think that by ill-treating others they make their own superiority the greater."

βελτίωσα ( και γυναίκεs ) σε ότι!

[Annette]

"Bloom should guarantee it a young audience" says Michael Billington. Is the English theatre in such bad shape that it needs moviestars? Happy that Bloom does a good job; I just found this remark so sad.

[Judith Fitzgerald]

Sir Peter, if you become much more subtle, I shall have to nominate you for the 2007 Order of the Knight of the Holy Ground Table* honour.

IF, I wonder, Lindsay Anderson had lived to direct O. Bloom, would not the obvious talents of the young star blossom with him, lovingly, in his film roles? O Lucky Man!

As Sir Alan Bates so encharmingly opined, "[Lindsay] had a tremendous complicity with actors, so that you always felt that you were creating something with him, not for him; and, I found him unique among directors in this regard."

* Okay, I 'fess up: I invented the Order; but, it ought to exist (especially since A. N. Whitehead so presciently noted: "The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future").

p.s. Mr. Anderson worshipped John Grierson (who founded Canada's National Film Board, one of the best in the galaxy)
p.p.s. Cinnamon AND chocolate, pls/tnx :)

[Andrew Kenneally]

Or perhaps to be cruel, Susan, because God knows there's been little sign of any gifts when it somes to his film-acting so far. A bit like chip-board; lightweight & wooden.

[Susan Balée]

So glad Bloom performed well on stage. Perhaps that is where his gifts lie, rather than in these movies where special effects matter more than acting.