Eating Muffins in an Agitated Manner

What a piece of work is a man

Posted by Sari

 

Hamlet is my favourite of Shakespeare's great tragedies. Its poetry is unsurpassed, and its themes are so rich that there is always room for new interpretations. It is also a play that is easily reduced into a parody of itself: an oidipal mad prince spouting a potpourri of famous quotations about life, universe and everything.  It is perhaps then not surprising that none of the productions I have seen, mostly on film, really hit the mark. As a matter of fact, my favourite Hamlet on film has thus far been Iain Glen in Stoppard's film of his own play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead – partly, I suppose, because the structure of the play leaves Hamlet a mystery. Ros and Guil were never able to glean what afflicts him.

As luck would have it, Hamlet seems to be in vogue and thus there are new opportunities to meet the melancholy dane even for us living far away from the anglophone stages. BBC has adapted RSC's much lauded version with David Tennant for TV, and National Theatre streamed a live performance of their equally acclaimed version to movie theatres around the world  in December.

The RSC production is the older one and already out on DVD. It shouldn't surprise anyone that The  Tenth Doctor is a good Hamlet. Tennant has been doing RSC productions for quite a while, and his nervous, physical energy translates well to the part. I especially liked how he is  almost unrecognisable with his solemn suit and flat hair in his first scene, and how differently he plays the first monologue compared to the others, like a breakdown. It is only after the ghost's news he transforms his sleeked back hair into the more familiar unruly mop and brings his more familiar almost manic style to play. His Hamlet is clearly a young volatile man in a situation over his head, his vulnerability underlined by his bare feet. The supporting cast is good, especially Penny Downie as Gertrude and Patrick Stewart as a cool Claudius. Mariah Gale's Ophelia was probably the best I have seen, though I have to say that to make Ophelia's descent into madness credible you have rely heavily on extra-textual elements. As it is written, her character just does not make sense as anything else except a symbol.

Gregory Doran's direction has been transferred to film fairly statically, most of the action stays in the throne room, until the scene between Gertrude and Hamlet after which - maybe mirroring Hamlet's move from introspection to action – there is lots more variety in scenery.  All in all, I found the direction and staging relatively unobtrusive giving the actors room to breathe.

As interesting and succesfull as RSC Hamlet is, the National Theatre's version wins this competition hands down. There are a number of similarities between the productions. Both have a modern setting, Cornelius has been transformed into Cornelia, and as the RSC/BBC did with the cctv images marking the change of scenes, the National Theatre's version also draws attention to the act of observation, of being under scrutiny.

Hytner's direction at National Theatre takes the interpretation further. Here Denmark is a modern dictatorship masquerading as democracy, Polonius is brilliantly transformed from a bumbling fool to a sinister spymaster, and Hamlet's personal revenge is balanced with the politics of a police state. Everybody is always under surveillance in this Elsinore, everyone is maintaining a public image. Claudius' first speech is a televised address, and the whole tragic massacre seems to bring little change, as the play closes with young Fortinbras lamenting the events to his own camera crew.

The actors are almost all superb. Patrick Malahide's Claudius is a masterpiece of malevolence. ”My words fly up, my thoughts remain below./Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” made my blood run cold. Clare Higgins' psychologically astute Gertrude, corrupted by the power structures she depends on, drowns her self doubt and loathing to drink. Ruth Negga's Ophelia made more sense than most, and her death – murdered by secret police – gave more insight into Gertrude as she knowingly lies to Laertes about her fate.

But all this would be nothing without Rory Kinnear's award-winning performance as Hamlet. He is simply blindingly good. He somehow manages to make the soliloquies sound both new and right, he deftly deleniates between Hamlet playing mad and Hamlet loosing himself, and he is able to change his register from comedy to tragedy in a heartbeat. His stage presence is hypnotic, his diction is clear and natural and the way he humanises the character makes for a coherent and extremely satisfying interpretation. The end result is the perfect Hamlet for our time.

A Very Late Booksy Post

Posted by Sari

This is more than a bit embarrasing, my reading diary is about two years out of date. There are roughly about a seventy books which I have read and not committed my opinion for the posterity to enjoy. How will they survive without my definitive and ground breaking analysis on these works?! To remedy the situation at least a bit, here are some.

Gregory Benford: Martian Race

In Benford’s Mars exploration novel, the nation states have concluded that the best way to get a manned Mars mission off the ground is to pool resources and offer a huge reward for anyone who completes the mission. Two privately funded missions are on or on their way to Mars, racing to fulfill the requirements to win the grand prize. Benford extrapolates what kind of media circus a privatly funded Mars mission could be, what kind of life could be sustained on Mars, and finally, the pros and cons of competition and co-operation in such extreme circumstances.

There is something very old school and sciency as opposed to fictiony about this book. Technologically, a manned Mars mission is within our reach, and though this novel has enough babble about trajectories and payloads, it is the social and economic aspects of a Mars mission that Benford is really interested in. The characters are rather bland - including Julia, the biologist who is the point of view character - and their relationships are rather one note affairs. Even the Martian life Julia finds is somehow subservient to the social extrapolation. It is the idea that matters, and the the end result is pretty much a fictionalised version of Zuber’s A Case for Mars. Which is not a bad thing, but because the fiction in this science fiction is rather thin, one is left with a feeling that reading Zuber would have been enough.


Lois McMasters Bujold: Diplomatic Immunity / Cryoburn (Spoilerish)

Bujold has again written a Vorkosiganverse novel to fill her contractual obligations to Baen. I am not sure if this is a good or a bad thing. Miles has already had a number of satisfying ends to his story arch, so each new novel seems to be a little forced in terms of the whole series.

I re-read Diplomatic Immunity as a quick comfort read earlier this year. In the novel Miles and Ekaterin are diverted from their belated galactic honeymoon to solve a diplomatic incident in quaddiespace and end up trying to stop a bombing at a space station and an interplanetary war with Cetaganda. It is a nice novel. It is nice to see the quaddiespace again, to find out how Bel is doing and the detective story is also quite deftly handled. But after the novels from Mirror Mirror to Civil Campaing it does feel bland, even though Miles gets himself ina fix that nearly costs him his life.

The same can be said about Cryoburn, though there Bujold's penchant to mix adventure with quite deft handling of more serious science fictional ideas is more evident than in the preceding novel. This time Miles who has evidently settled into his life as a husband, father and an imperial auditor is sent to the planet Kibou-daini to look into a cryofreeze corporation expanding their operations to Komarr. Again, as is usual for Bujold, the surface of the novel is a action/detective story, while the theme of the novel is something more fundamental to human experience: dying. And because this is science fiction, also immortality. Most of the punch of the book is at the end where the themes come together with a real bang. Unfortunately, the story itself just lacks something to make this work as well as the best books in the series.

A.M. Dellamonica: Indigo Springs

This Sunburst award winning novel is an intrusion fantasy of the same sort as some Sean Stuart’s work: magic is breaking into our world and the consequences are alarming to say the least. It is a novel told in flashbacks about how Astrid discovered magic which manifests as a  fluid callec vitagua which can imbue people and objects with power. Astrid is imprisoned and tells her story to Will, whose family has left him to join a magical cult founded by Astrid's friend and hopeless love interes Sahara.

Indigo Springs is one of those books I wanted to like more than I actually liked. Its writing is economical, the worldbuilding excellent, and the characters believable. Even so, it just did not grab me, and the ending wich is left pretty open for the sequel sort of annoyed me.

Robert Charles Wilson: Julian Comstock

For some quite inexplicable reason I have been attracted to this novel since the first time I saw a picture of it. It was just the name: Julian Comstock. For some reason I wanted to read about Julian Comstock. Jukka was not as enthused as I was so I held out investing in the hardback, even though every time I visited Akateeminen I felt compelled to lift a copy up and just look at it. This, obviously was a way to set yourself up for a disapointment. How could the book be as intriguing as the idea of it I had built up in my head for nearly a year. And it wasn’t my imaginary book, obviously, how could it be, but it was something quite as good.

Julian Comstock is a story of a post-apocalyptic America in the 22th century. Oil has run out and resulted in a collapse of the modern North America. By the events of the book, slavery is back as indentured servitude, America is ruled by a life-long president, is at war in Labrador against Europe, and religious life is regulated by Dominion which oversees different churches and controls access to the information salvaged from the ruins of the once great cities. Julian Comstock is the nephew of the current president who had Julian’s father killed as a traitor when he was getting too popular. Julian’s life story and his rise to the presidency is narrated after the fact by his friend Adam Hazzard, a naïve country boy Julian befriends while exiled to west by his uncle.

There are lots of things I liked about Julian Comstock. The story pulls you in, the worldbuilding works, the historical references to our times, to ancient Rome and to Civil War era US all mash well with the postapocalyptic America. Wilson has also made his future one where race is an unmarked feature, and – like in LeGuin’s Earthsea – the realisation that many of the characters including Adam are in not white is a much needed jolt out of complacent reading habits. I also liked the ending of the book, predicated though it was by the mapping of Julian Comstock’s life over emperor Julian the Apostate.

However, there are problems in the book. The biggest is one that is typical for  many speculative fiction writers, and it is that of focalisation. In Julian Comstock, the sole focaliser is our naïve and thus unreliable narrator Adam, as the novel is presented as his memoirs. It is a legitimate way of constructing a novel, but does not quite work here. The register slips when Wilson needs to give reader necessary pieces of information Adam should not know or, even more crucially, understand, and thus Adam's character does not remain consistent. This could be explained by the difference between a young naïve Adam to whom things happen, and old jaded Adam who is telling the story, but if that is what Wilson was aiming for, the structure fails to make it clear for the reader. For me the problem is even more annoying as this feels like a problem with craft not art – artificial as that dichotomy may be.

But even so, this, the first of this year’s Hugo nominee novels I have read, set the bar pretty high. It will be interesting to see how it stacks up with more lauded nominees, especially the co-winners Windup Girl and The City and the City.

Joulumartti toivottaa Hyvää Joulua!

Viranomaistiedotuksia:

Joulumartti liikkuu ja peuhaa. Ja syö kinkunderia.

Myndighetsmeddelande:

Julmårten vandrar och stojar. Och äter skindander.

Public service announcement:

Xmasmorty is out and about. And devouring hammy.

Let it Snow!

Posted by Sari

As you might know or, in the case of the most readers, have noticed, it has been snowing in Helsinki. Quite a lot. Apparently, we have the most snow in whole of Finland. Eat your heart out Lapland. The result has been as expected. Trains have been late, Busses have been stuck on snowbanks and traffic in general has been, well, hellish. It took Jukka one and half hour to get from Vallila to City Center, normally a trip of about twenty mintues.

And I understand that this does not a happy people make. In addition to life being more complicated  when it is cold anyway, you have all above mentioned problems with moving about. But personally, I LOVE THIS! I ABSO-FRACKING-LUTELY LOVE THIS! So there. Admittedly, our car is in a nice warm garage, and I work mostly  from home so I have been spared the worst of the traffic. But I think there just are people who love winter and people who love summer and never the twain shall meet. Snow is gorgeous, even when it gets into your shoes. Cold is just a question of right clothes. I have been enjoying every minute of walking with the dog through the snow and wind. I have actually been making longer walks just because it looks and feels wonderful outside. For the record, Martti loves this too. The smells are more intensive on the snow and he powers through the snowdrifts like a little tank if needs be to get to that particular scent.


 I spent the whole last summer complaining about the weather. The heat ruined my summer completely,  I just felt absolutely afwul only to be told how I just should enjoy a wonderful summer. So now I am going to skate, ski, walk, photograph the awesome beauty of winter, cuddle up with candles and a nice glass of red wine, and revel in my favourite time of the year. You haterz can just hate.