Pippa Rathborne's CONTRAblog: June 2012

Wednesday 27 June 2012

Playing Carice Elgar

ELGAR, STIRRING THE SPIRIT

Cast: David Graham, Pippa Rathborne

Musicians: The Locrian Ensemble

Edinburgh, London & National Tour 2004 - 2007

production photo by The Locrian Ensemble

Motherhood for the personal and common good: illustration by William Blake for the frontispiece to the 1791 edition of Mary Wollstonecraft's children's book, Original Stories from Real Life. Image source: Wikipedia

I must have been mazed by the weekend's progeny of evils, financial and torrential, because while watching Sharon Osbourne being interviewed on TV, I thought Cherie Blair in one of her desperate fashion attacks had dyed her hair crimson. I think these two powerful women share identities, the one grown rich on ruthlessly promoting dubious acts, boastfully hectoring audiences, and guarding a mad husband's reputation, and the other a talent show panelist....

face, voice, 2008

MHP CASTING PHOTOS

phony

I pressed the eject button within 10 minutes of watching Meryl Streep....

Still running

Atalanta by Heinrich Keller, 1802, Kunsthaus, Zurich. Image source: Web Gallery of Art

It was a time of high taxes, low wages, rising unemployment, failed revolutions, reactionary oppression, and deepening social inequality while the poor despaired and the rich luxuriated in power....

Heredity and Rebellion

NEOCLASSICAL GODDESSES AND ROMANTIC HEROINES

testing the limits of self-determination

part ten: Heredity and Rebellion

Atalanta by Heinrich Keller, 1802, Kunsthaus, Zurich. Image source: Web Gallery of Art

Atalanta, or "equal in weight": the princess had a sort of masculine rigour*

A might-have-been of history, one of the lost heirs to the throne, and the only one known for “rolling about”, Princess Charlotte of Wales is significant as a catalyst for national catharsis by dying young, not for any achievements in her life. Her real character was buried under decorous veils of Victorian sentiment, concealing the tension and flux of her personality, the combined result of inheritance and of her own response to the spirit of her times. Her individuality was puzzling to contemporaries, who tried to reduce it to "masculine rigour" and "acts" similar to Queen Elizabeth I's.

Like Blake’s Little Girl Lost, her impetuosity and candour, her instinctual behaviour, her sensual appetites, her enthusiasms, her wildness were disapprovingly held in check by adults. “Doucement, chèrie”, her urbane husband (the future “Uncle Leopold” of her cousin Victoria) would whisper to her whenever she got out of control in public, as if he was breaking in a horse....

Feasting during austerity

JUSTICE FOR DESSERT

I don’t think the case of the unpaid security staff abandoned under London Bridge for a couple of hours during the ludicrous excesses of the Jubilee (from which the “humbled” Queen herself....