The Mousetrap

We will be reading The Mousetrap on Wednesday 4 December.  Please remember that the identity of the murder is a closely guarded secret, and never revealed by anyone who has seen the play.  I suggest we maintain this tradition after our reading!

November 2013: To Kill A Mockingbird

Thank you to everyone who turned out on this dreary and wet afternoon.  Special thanks to Margaret and Dawn (welcome Dawn, we all hope you enjoyed your first afternoon with us) for hot-footing it from the WIC Newcomers Coffee Morning, and to Naomi for re-arranging her day to be with us.

It was Naomi's last playreading, as she returns to the UK next week: we are truly sorry to lose you Naomi and hope that if ever your return visits coincide with the first Wednesday of the month you will come back and visit us.

Bye bye Naomi - come back and see us some time!

Today's play was a bit of a challenge - and my apologies to anyone who found it confusing with so many characters coming and going!  However, I think we all enjoyed revisiting (or visiting for the first time) this famous book which so many of us hold dear.  I think we all agreed that it is a wonderful work although somewhat emotionally draining.  I was wondering after whether she has read The Help, and, if so, what she made of it.

Harper Lee

After our discussions about Harper Lee and her reluctance to give interviews, I did a google.  I found this wonderful article which I have lifted directly from The Guardian's website. 

Article by Paula Cocozza, 28 June 2010 (link: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jun/28/harper-lee-interview-mockingbird)  Do read this, it's wonderful (Brits will particularly enjoy the fact that the interview was with the Mail on Sunday):

It's nearly 50 years since the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee's Pulitzer prize-winning novel. Famously, Lee has spent most of the time since living a quiet life, which journalists commonly describe as reclusive, chiefly because although Lee is known in her Alabaman home town, she won't speak to the press, and has never published another novel.

So imagine the excitement when the Mail on Sunday devoted two pages to the story of a meeting between its writer Sharon Churcher and the legendarily silent novelist. "When [Harper Lee's] friends agreed to give our reporter an introduction, it was on one strict condition . . . Don't mention the Mockingbird" ran the preamble. This is how the meeting went (read it slowly, to make it last):

"Nervously, I approach the novelist, carrying the best box of chocolates I could find in the small Alabama town of Monroeville, a Hershey's selection costing a few dollars. I start to apologise that I hadn't brought more but a beaming Nelle – as her friends and family call her – extends her hand.

"'Thank you so much,' she told me. 'You are most kind. We're just going to feed the ducks but call me the next time you are here. We have a lot of history here. You will enjoy it.'"

Here's the original article, which is a bit longer than the interview!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1289793/Dont-mention-mockingbird-Meet-Harper-Lee-reclusive-novelist-wrote-classic-novel-mesmerised-40-million-readers.html

However ...

I think what Jane had read was about the lawsuit Harper Lee against a small (not for profit) museum she claims is using Mockingbird to boost their profits:  http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/01/harper-lee-monroeville-museum-lawsuit-mockingbird

Earlier this year she also sued her literary agent, claiming he has tricked her into handing copyright over to him: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/04/harper-lee-sues-agent-copyright.  The Daily Mail reported in September that this has been settled and that Lee is happy.

Links on the right of both those Guardian articles will take you to further articles about the famous recluse.

I finish with this photo of her taken in 2007.  I think it's rather cute!

Lee is awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, November 5, 2007

October 2013: Tom & Viv by Michael Hastings

It was a glorious Indian Summer day, and we were able to sit outside for the first time ever!

But, well, what a difficult play to write about!  The theme of the play did not really reflect the glorious weather!  We all agreed it is one of the plays that we will remember.  We enjoyed reading it, and we felt it was a beautifully crafted piece of work, but it was not one which had us laughing out loud.

Tom & Viv in 1916

The sad story of T S Elliot's marriage to his first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood.  Sad for so many reasons, not least that today Vivienne's illness would have be  understood and treated with compassion. Sad because the medicine to make her better probably made her worse.  Sad because she was surely not the only woman to suffer as she did.  Sad because of the wasted lives ... but one has to wonder how Elliot's poetry would have developed had he not met Vivienne.  Would he have been drawn towards a similarly challenging muse?

But the play does reflect some moments of intense passion and joy between the two.  A passion which Elliot denies at the end of the play, but which was surely there in some form in their early days.

At the end of the play we all felt we wanted to know more about Elliot and Vivienne, and no doubt we have all gone home and switched on our computers to look them up!  I do hope so - there is far more to read about them than I have put below, even just the Wikipedia entries make interesting reading.

Some bare facts.

Thomas Stearns Elliot 1888-1965

Born in Missouri, but became a Brit in 1927.
Studied at Harvard & Oxford.
Married Vivienne 3 months after he met her (in Oxford) in 1915.  They remained married, although they were legally separated, until her death in 1947.  It is claimed that she, and her illness, was an inspiration for much of his poetry.
Modernist poet, who was given the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948 and The Order of Merit in the same year.
Married his second wife Valerie in in 1957.

Vivienne Haigh-Wood Elliot 1888-1947

It has been said:  "Vivienne ruined Tom as a man, but she made him as a poet."
She too was a writer, but her fame lies in being 'Elliot's first wife'.  The hormonal imbalance she suffered dominated her life and dictated the path her life took towards insanity.

Next Month:  To Kill a Mockingbird

September 2013

This blog is starting at the beginning of the new WIC Year: September 2013.

The WIC Play Reading Group is open to any WIC Member interested in theatre – you don’t need to be a good actor nor does English need to be your mother tongue.  We meet at 1.30pm on the first Wednesday of the month – contact me at janet.middleton@yahoo.com if you’d like to know more.

Our First Meeting: 27 January 2011 - Remember that cake ladies?!?!

Since last September we have worked our way through the Alan Ayckbourn trilogy The Norman Conquests, and enjoyed seeing the same scenario being replayed through different eyes and angles.  We have also read Really Old, Like 45 – a play chosen simply for its wonderful title!  It was quite modern and different to those we had been used to, and envisaged a future when the elderly have to justify their existence. Jumpy was another modern play dealt with a mother and daughter relationship breaking down.  We then read Taking Steps, another Ayckbourn relationship comedy, so we followed this with a serious piece: Look Back in Anger which was certainly a more difficult read and although to some degree dated, it was an interesting piece of social history.

The 'Interval' is always an important part of our meetings!

Normally at our meetings I spend a great deal of time trying to ensure that everyone gets a fair turn at reading, but in May we approached Equus differently.  Having read the play I felt it would benefit from us having just one person play an individual role throughout, and so this is what we did.  Those of us who were there felt that on this occasion we benefited from this approach, as the play is compelling and we felt we were able to engage better with the characters and the depth of the play when we didn’t have to worry about who was playing which role at this point.  I think we all felt pretty drained by the end of the session!

We  finished the WIC Year by reading The Audience.  This play was, at the time of the reading, being performed in the West End with Helen Mirren winning great acclaim for her role as Elizabeth II.  This reading was made in homage to the fabulous NTLive transmissions, which have been stopped in Belgium.  There are a number of people lobbying for them to be reinstated, and if you are interested in knowing more about this please don’t hesitate to contact us at goliveinbrussels@gmail.com or follow our blog at http://gontliveinbrussels.wordpress.com/.

Celebrating Rina's Birthday!

Future plays on our agenda include Tom and Viv (about TS Elliot and his first wife), Our Man in Havana, The Mousetrap and To Kill a Mockingbird. 

Ideas for plays to read are always welcome!