Monday, December 8, 2014

7 January - Amadeus

First of all my huge thanks to you all for your very very generous gift voucher - I am looking forward very much to my meal at the Brasserie des Etangs Mellaerts (and Tim is delighted that it's on a tram route - rather presumptious of him to think I'll take him along as well!!!)

I really do get a great deal of pleasure from the group, so I think that next year we need to have a serious conversation about the fact that if there's to be a gift then I should contribute too! 

And as I say repeatedly - I really do think Rina has the hardest job of all!

But on to January - and we'll be reading Amadeus by Peter Shaffer.



You will need to bring your imagination with you as this highly acclaimed, and highly fictionalised, play about the lives of Mozart and Antoino Salieri relies heavily on staging effects and music when performed professionally. Unless one of you would be happy to provide the music??

The origins of the play are from a supposed rivalry between Salieri and Mozart.  In the 1780s while Mozart lived and worked in Vienna, he and his father Leopold wrote in their letters that several "cabals" of Italians led by Salieri were actively putting obstacles in the way of Mozart's obtaining certain posts or staging his operas.  For example, Mozart wrote to his father in May 1783 about Salieri and Lorenzo Da Ponte, the court poet: "You know those Italian gentlemen; they are very nice to your face! Enough, we all know about them. And if [Da Ponte] is in league with Salieri, I'll never get a text from him, and I would love to show here what I can really do with an Italian opera." Decades after Mozart's death, a rumour began to circulate that Mozart had been poisoned by Salieri. These rumors then made their way into popular culture. The biographer Alexander Wheelock Thayer  believes that Mozart's rivalry with Salieri could have originated with an incident in 1781 when Mozart applied to be the music teacher of Princess Elisabeth of Wuttemberg,   and Salieri was selected instead because of his reputation as a singing teacher. In the following year Mozart once again failed to be selected as the Princess's piano teacher.  However, even with Mozart and Salieri being rivals for certain jobs, there is very little evidence that the relationship between the two composers was at all acrimonious beyond this, especially after 1785 or so when Mozart had become established in Vienna. Rather, they appeared to usually see each other as friends and colleagues and supported each other's work. For example, when Salieri was appointed Kapellmeister in 1788 he revived Figaro instead of bringing out a new opera of his own; and when he went to the coronation festivities for Leopold II in 1790 he had no fewer than three Mozart masses in his luggage. Salieri and Mozart even composed a cantata for voice and piano together, called Per la ricuperata salute di Ophelia.

Amadeus was first performed in 1979, and in 1981 won the Tony Award for Best Play and subsequently became a 1984 Academy Award winning film: the cast included Simon Callow in the role of  Emanuel Schikaneder, although he had played the title role on the London stage.

There are a number of historical characters, and many of them are new to me - so my apologies to those of you with a better working knowledge of musical history if I spell out who some of these people are!

These notes are lifted from Wikipedia - where  you will find out far more about these people if you wish to!

Vienna, 1758.
Painting by Giovanni Canaletto
Antonio Salieri

 
(18 August 1750 – 7 May 1825) An Italian classical composer, conductor and teacher who spent his adult life and career as a subject of the Habsburg Monarchy. He was a pivotal figure in the development of late 18th-century opera and a cosmopolitan composer who wrote operas in three languages. Salieri helped to develop and shape many of the features of operatic compositional vocabulary and his music was a powerful influence on contemporary composers. Appointed the director of the Italian opera by the Habsburg court, a post he held from 1774 to 1792, Salieri dominated Italian language opera in Vienna. During his career he also spent time writing works for opera houses in Venice, Rome, and Paris. 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart



(7 January 1756 – 5 December 1791).  Baptised as Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty. At 17, he was engaged as a court musician in Salzburg but grew restless and travelled in search of a better position, always composing abundantly. While visiting Vienna in 1781, he was dismissed from his Salzburg position. He chose to stay in the capital, where he achieved fame but little financial security. During his final years in Vienna, he composed many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and portions of the Requiem which was largely unfinished at the time of his death, having composed over 600 workds of symphonic, concert, chamber, operatic and choral music.  He was survived by his wife Constanze and two sons.

Constanze Weber
 


(5 January 1762 – 6 March 1842)  Constanze Weber was born into a musical family.  Her father Fridolin Weber worked as a double bass player, prompter and music copyist.  Constanze had three sisters: all were trained as singers, and Josepha and Aloysia both went on to distinguished musical careers, performing later on in the premieres of a number of Mozart's works. During most of Constanze's upbringing, the family lived in her mother's hometown of Mannheim, an important musical center of the time. The 21-year-old Mozart visited Mannheim in 1777 on a job-hunting tour and developed a close relationship with the Weber family. He fell in love, not with the 15-year-old Constanze, but with Aloysia. While Mozart was in Paris, Aloysia obtained a position as a singer in Munich, and the family accompanied her there. She rejected Mozart when he passed through Munich on his way back to Salzburg. By the time Mozart moved to Vienna in 1781, Aloysia had married and her husband, Joseph Lange, agreed to help Cäcilia Weber with an annual stipend, and she took in boarders to make ends meet. 


On first arriving in Vienna on 16 March 1781, Mozart stayed at the house of the Teutonic Order with the staff of his patron, Archbishop Colloredo.  In May, he "was obliged to leave," and chose to board in the Weber household, originally intending "to stay there only a week."  After a while, it became apparent to Cäcilia Weber that Mozart was courting Constanze, now 19, and in the interest of propriety, she requested that he leave. The courtship continued, not entirely smoothly. Surviving correspondence indicates that Mozart and Constanze briefly broke up in April 1782, over an episode involving jealousy (Constanze had permitted another young man to measure her calves in a parlor game). Mozart also faced a very difficult task getting his father's permission for the marriage.  The marriage finally took place in an atmosphere of crisis, and it has been suggested that eventually Constanze moved in with Mozart, which would have placed her in disgrace by the mores of the time.  Mozart wrote to Leopold on 31 July 1782, "All the good and well-intentioned advice you have sent fails to address the case of a man who has already gone so far with a maiden. Further postponement is out of the question." The biographer Heartz relates, "Constanze's sister Sophie had tearfully declared that her mother would send the police after Constanze if she did not return home (presumably from Mozart's apartment)." On 4 August, Mozart wrote to Baroness von Waldstätten, asking "Can the police here enter anyone's house in this way? Perhaps it is only a ruse of Madame Weber to get her daughter back. If not, I know no better remedy than to marry Constanze tomorrow morning or if possible today."  The marriage did indeed take place that day. In the marriage contract, Constanze "assigns to her bridegroom five hundred gulden which [...] the latter has promised to augment with one thousand gulden", with the total "to pass to the survivor". Further, all joint acquisitions during the marriage were to remain the common property of both. A day after the marriage took place, the consent of Wolfgang's father arrived in the mail. The couple had six children, of whom four did not survive infancy.


Joseph II, Emperor of Austria (13 March 1741 – 20 February 1790)





Count Johann Kilian Von Strack:  Groom of the Imperial Chamber

Count Franz Orsini-Rosenberg: Director of the Imperial Opera

Baron Gottfried van Swieten: Prefect of the Imperial Library

Two Venticelli:  "Little Winds" Purveyors of information, gossip and rumour

Major Domo

There are also a number of silent parts:

Teresa Salieri:  Wife of Salieri

Katherina Cavalieri:  Salieri's pupil

Kapellmeister Bonno  

Salieri's Valet and Cook

 




 

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

3 December - And Then There Were None

On 5 November we read the rather moving Journey's End, which gives the reader/audience a taste of the horrors of the trenches in WW1.  It was rather a long play, but one which would have been impossible to cut because no scene is 'wasted': each dialogue gives so much information about the characters in the piece, their lives, their fears and their hopes.


Next month will be much jollier!  And not just because I'll have some wine mulling for the 'interval'!

We will read And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie: it is reputed to be one of her finest works, but although she thought it finely crafted Christie herself did not think so.

It is Christie's best-selling novel with 100 million sales to date, making it the world's best-selling mystery ever, and one of the best selling books of all time. 

The play opened in 1943 under the title of the book: Ten Little Niggers, but when it opened in New York the following year the title was changed to Ten Little Indians.  The original title was a reference to a song on which the piece was based:

Ten little nigger boys went out to dine;
One choked his little self and then there were Nine.
Nine little nigger boys sat up very late;
One overslept himself and then there were Eight.
Eight little nigger boys travelling in Devon;
One said he’d stay there and then there were Seven.
Seven little nigger boys chopping up sticks;
One chopped himself in halves and then there were Six.
Six little nigger boys playing with a hive;
A bumble bee stung one and then there were Five.
Five little nigger boys going in for law;
One got into Chancery and then there were Four.
Four little nigger boys going out to sea;
A red herring swallowed one and then there were Three.
Three little nigger boys walking in the Zoo;
A big bear hugged one and then there were Two.
Two little nigger boys sitting in the sun;
One got frizzled up and then there was One.
One little nigger boy left all alone;
He went out and hanged himself and then there were None.

This isn't going to spoil the story for you, because although the song is referred to in the play, the text was later adapted to reflect the song more accurately for film - but this isn't how the play we will be reading ends!

The play was adapted into a film in 1945, 1963 and again in 1974

And Then There Were None (1945).jpg                                              And Then There Were None FilmPoster.jpeg


There is a new adaptation to be screened by the BBC next year: I hope this won't spoil it for you!

I would urge you NOT to go to wikiepedia, and to try to stop you from doing so, here's a summary of the characters.  Each has been summoned to an island from which they cannot escape (no boat, and the boatman has been paid not to answer distress signals), each is a murderer .. and then they mysteriously begin to die, one by one ...






The Cast In No Particular Order:

Anthony James Marston killed two young children (John and Lucy Combes) while driving recklessly, for which he felt no real remorse nor did he accept any personal responsibility, complaining only that his driving license had been suspended as a result.

Mrs Ethel Rogers, the cook/housekeeper and Thomas Rogers' wife, described as pale and ghostlike woman with shifty light eyes. She was dominated by her bullying husband, who withheld the medicine of their former employer (an elderly spinster, Miss Jennifer Brady) to collect an inheritance they knew she had left them in her will. Mrs Rogers was haunted by the crime for the rest of her life

General Mackenzie  a retired World War I war hero, who sent his late wife's lover (a younger officer, Arthur Richmond) to his death by assigning him to a mission where it was practically guaranteed he would not survive. Leslie Macarthur had mistakenly put the wrong letters in the envelopes on one occasion when she wrote to both men at the same time.

Rogers, the butler and Ethel Rogers' husband. He dominated his weak-willed wife and they killed their former elderly employer by withholding her medicine, causing the woman to die from heart failure and inheriting the money she bequeathed them in her will.
 
Emily Caroline Brent, a rigid, repressed elderly spinster holding harsh moralistic principles. She accepted the vacation on Soldier Island largely due to financial constraints. Years earlier, she had dismissed her young maid, Beatrice Taylor, for becoming pregnant out of wedlock. Beatrice, who had already been rejected by her parents for the same reason, drowned herself in a river, which Miss Brent considered an even worse sin.
 
Dr Edward George Armstrong, a Harley Street doctor, responsible for the death of a patient, Louisa Mary Clees, after he operated on her while drunk, many years earlier.

William Henry Blore, a retired police inspector and now a private investigator, accused of falsifying his testimony in court for a bribe from a criminal gang too dangerous to double-cross, which resulted in an innocent man, James Landor, being convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Landor died in prison. Blore arrives using the alias "Davis" and claiming to have arrived from South Africa, as he was instructed to do by Isaac Morris, who hired him for "security" work, but is confronted about his true name which was revealed on the gramophone recording, and he acknowledges his true identity
 
Philip Lombard, a soldier of fortune. Literally down to his last square meal, he comes to the island with a loaded revolver, as suggested by Isaac Morris. Lombard is accused of causing the deaths of a number of East African tribesmen, after stealing their food and leaving them to starve.
 
Vera Elizabeth Claythorne, a cool, efficient, resourceful former teacher and governess, who has taken mostly secretarial jobs since her last job as a governess ended in the death of her charge, Cyril Hamilton, whom she intentionally allowed to swim out to sea – as the child had wanted to do but had theretofore been denied as too dangerous – and drown. She did this so her lover, Cyril's uncle Hugo Hamilton, could become the family heir, inherit the estate and marry her, which had been their original plan before Cyril's birth changed things. She swam out to sea to "save" Cyril to make it seem he had disobeyed her – as she had consistently told him it was too dangerous – but knowing she would not arrive in time. Hugo, however, who loved his nephew, abandoned her after he somehow realised what she had done.
 
Justice Lawrence John Wargrave, a retired judge, known as a "hanging judge" for liberally awarding the death penalty in different murder cases, and is accused of judicial murder as a result of giving biased summation and jury directions leading to a hanging which was widely believed at the time to be a deliberate miscarriage of justice on his part.


 




There are 10 characters, and if we happen to be just 10 then we'll pick names out of a hat for parts to read!

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

5 November - Journey's End

I was delighted that so many of you enjoyed the plot twists of Deathtrap last month!  It is a fun play, if somewhat American in its references, which maybe we therefore didn't fully appreciate?

Next month will be much more sombre, as we will be reading Journey's End by R C Sherriff in a nod to the centenary of the outbreak of World War One and Remembrance Sunday.  Although not a  household name, Sherriff also wrote the screen plays for The Dambusters and Goodbye Mr Chips. 

Journey's End is an emotional examination of the lives and fears of soldiers in the trenches of World War One. Perhaps one reason why this play has stood out amongst WWI literature is that it was based on Sherriff's own experience as a captain in the war.

Normally I search the internet for pictures to give you a feel for the play.  This month I am delighted to have some that I took when I produced the ECC production in 2006. 

A sad story:  the costumes were hired from a wonderful company in the UK. Wonderful original pieces.  Yet sadly an arsonist attacked their store and they lost most of their stock of genuine historical costumes.






















Monday, September 8, 2014

1 October - Deathtrap

Unfortunately, as I had flu in August (really!) we had to postpone Abigail's Party until September.  I was really very sorry that Dawn could not be with us, as this had been her suggestion and a very good one it was too!

I was delighted that you all found it so funny, and I can't type the name of the play now without smiling at the memory of how tickled Isobel was throughout the reading!!

Beverley certainly is a monster, but with the exception of Sue, caught up in the horrendous evening, none of the characters are people you'd really want as neighbours.

NEXT MONTH: DEATHTRAP by Ira Levin

I urge you NOT to google the plot of this play!

Sidney Bruhl is a playwright living off his reputation for one smash thriller.  But that doesn't pay to keep him in the style to which he has become accustomed.  Then one day he receives a highly commercial draft from a student.  But is it worth killing for?

This play's twists will make you gasp!

It is set in 'The Present': the present then was 1978, but really it is timeless and could be set as a modern day thriller.

The cast are:

Sidney Bruhl: A washed up playwright, living off his reputation and dwindling savings

Myra Bruhl: His wife, with money of her own

Clifford Anderson: A young student that Sidney met at a seminar that he gave.

Helga ten Dorp: A psychic who is living in a neighbouring house

Porter Milgrim: Sidney's friend and lawyer

Below are a couple of pictures of set, to give you a feel for Sidney's study, in which the entire piece takes place.




Ira Levin: The 'Real' Playwright
Whilst not a challenge to The Mousetrap, Deathtrap holds the record for the longest running comedy-thriller on Broadway.  In 1982 it was adapted into a film starring Christopher Reeve, Michael Caine and Dyan Cannon.

A Young Christopher Reeves ...

and Michael Caine ...

and Dyan Cannon





Wednesday, July 16, 2014

6 August - Abigail's Party

Many thanks to all who turned up today to read The History Boys ... and especially to Margaret who had the most difficult lines.  I was so pleased that we were able to read it, at last!  And I felt you all enjoyed it and appreciated Bennett's humour.

Welcome to Sheena - we hope you enjoyed the group and hope we have given you a favourable impression of WIC!

Thank you too to Kyung-Sook and Isobel for the lovely cakes - they were yummy.  And my thanks to everyone who took some of the cakes home with them!

NEXT MONTH:  ABIGAIL'S PARTY

As I am pressed for time tonight, I am shamelessly copying from Wikipedia!  However, I might mention that the BBC version featured the wonderful Alison Steadman as Beverley and Janine Duvitski as Angela.  You might remember the latter from a number of sitcoms, most notably One Foot in The Grave, and I personally feel she is often under-rated as an actress.  Tim Stern was Laurence, John Salthouse played Tony and Harriet Reynolds was Susan.  All were the original cast apart from Harriet Reynolds who replaced Thelma Whiteley.

As this play was set in the 70s, I hope to be able to provide suitable nibbles for the interval.......

So this is what Wikipedia has to say (abridged):

Abigail's Party is a play for stage and television devised and directed in 1977 by Mike Leigh. It is a suburban situation comedy of manners, and a satire on the aspirations and tastes of the new middle class that emerged in Britain in the 1970s. The play developed in lengthy improvisations during which Mike Leigh explored the characters with the actors, but did not always reveal the incidents that would occur during the play. The production opened in April 1977 at the Hampstead Theatre, and returned after its initial run in the summer of 1977, 104 performances in all. A recording was arranged at the BBC as a Play for Today, produced by Margaret Matheson, and transmitted in November 1977.



  • Beverly Moss - An ex-department store make-up representative, 'a quondam beautician', she has failed her driving test three times. During the play, she flirts with Tony and is always trying to impress her guests. According to the critic Michael Coveney; "Beverly is undoubtedly a monster. But she is also a deeply sad and vulnerable monster...The whole point about Beverly is that she is childless, and there is a sense in which that grotesque exterior carapace is a mask of inner desolation."
  • Laurence Moss - Estate agent with 'Wibley Webb'. Laurence is Beverly's husband, and the pair frequently argue. He aspires to the finer things in life but seems powerless to compete with Beverly's more flamboyant persona, and compensates by working too much, as his wife points out on several occasions. 
  • Tony Cooper - He works in computing. Tony is quiet throughout most of the play, usually appearing uneasy and giving one-word answers, but towards the end he becomes somewhat irate and quick-tempered, particularly with his wife. 
  • Angela Cooper - Tony's wife. A nurse, Angela appears very meek and somewhat childlike, unintelligent and tactless.
  • Susan Lawson - Sue was getting divorced at the same time the other characters were getting married. She is a quiet character who does not really have the courage to say no. She is the only female visibly not 'dressed-up' for the gathering; clearly, she would rather be elsewhere.