The familiar doesn’t have to get old. Last night at the Coliseum there were children in the boxes, adults in the circle and grandparents in the stalls.
Summer's here, which can only mean Hollywood blockbusters. But it's not all Spider-Man, talking apes and World War Two with platoons of thespians fighting on the beaches. There's comedy, a saucy menage-à-trois, a film about golf and even a ghost story. It's called A Ghost Story. We hereby bring you sneak peeks of the season's finest and more titles anticipated in the autumn (and hey, the trailer might even be the best part).
AUGUST
It's not often you hear the sound of film critics sobbing quietly to themselves, but this really happened at the screening I attended of A Monster Calls. Having seen the trailer, with its scenes of a giant tree stomping around a spooky-looking rural landscape, I'd marked it down as one to avoid. How wrong can you be.
Not quite three wishes; this film’s Czech title is Tři oříšky pro Popelku, which translates as three nuts. We’ll get to that later. Three Wishes for Cinderella, a Czechoslovak-East German co-production from 1973, is a treat, and still an annual Christmas fixture on Eastern European TV screens.
Director Václav Vorlíček’s source material wasn’t the familiar Cinderella retelling by Charles Perrault, but a darker version written by the 19th century Czech folklorist Božena Němcová. There’s no father, only one nasty step-sister and a refreshing lack of flashy magic. In place of a fairy godmother, heroine Popelka has three enchanted walnuts guarded by a benevolent owl, each of which contains a particular outfit to be worn when the plot demands.
Popelku’s ghastly step-mother and half-sister provide some of the giggles
Popelka, winningly played by 19-year-old Libuše Šafránková, is feisty and cheeky, more at home wielding a crossbow on horseback than she is sifting lentils from dust on the kitchen floor. As such, she’s an ideal working-class female role-model. Her confidants are the other low-grade servants and various animals, all of which play key roles as the story unfolds. Crucially, Popelka is unfazed during her first encounter with Pavel Trávníček’s Prince (pictured below right, with Šafránková), and it’s made clear that she pursues and marries him because she loves him, not just because his wealth and status offers her an escape route from domestic drudgery.
This is frequently a very funny film. Popelka's ghastly step-mother and half-sister provide some of the giggles, particularly during a brilliantly choreographed ball scene. Their fate isn’t as gruesome as the one dished out in the Grimm Brothers’ version of the story (see Sondheim’s Into the Woods), but it’s well deserved.
And in this handsomely restored print, everything looks superb, the wintry outdoor locations gleaming thanks to an East German camera crew. Karel Svoboda’s tinkly soundtrack adds to the fun. Subtitles are easy to read, though a newly-dubbed English dialogue track would have made the film more accessible for younger viewers.
As an extra there’s an appreciation by historian Michael Brooke, placing Three Wishes in its proper historical context and noting that the two boom periods for Czech movie fairy tales coincide with the darkest periods in the country’s post-war history. Subtexts aside, this is wonderful seasonal entertainment, a tasty antidote to today’s digitally animated bilge.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Three Wishes for Cinderella
For anyone disposed to treat the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse as hallowed ground – and such issues have gained much currency at the Globe recently following the announced early departure of artistic director Emma Rice – The Little Matchgirl may seem like a wanton deconstruction of its space, which is cheeked into a knowing update that comes close to Edwardian music hall, and with aperçus stingingly relevant to the venue’s recent backstory (“Candles are much more atmospheric than electricity” is one such textual quip).
On 10 October 2016, World Mental Health Day, the team of Belarus Free Theatre came back together to start the final stages of production for Tomorrow I Was Always a Lion, a new theatre show based on Arnhild Lauveng’s autobiographical book. Arnhild Lauveng is a Norwegian writer and practicing psychologist. In the book she tells the story of her own recovery from the incurable condition of schizophrenia.
Australian Ballet's cinema broadcast on Tuesday night appears to have been a little under-publicised – at least in my local multiplex, which was deafeningly empty with just five spectators.
If you’re going to go toe-to-toe with Daredevil and Jessica Jones, the first two series in Netflix’s supremely realised and blood-spattered depiction of Marvel Comic’s Hell’s Kitchen, it’s as well to do it with conviction. By hosting Preacher, based on the comic book series by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Amazon went in swinging – low and hard, fighting dirty from the off.
WARNING: HERE BE SPOILERS!
Does Alexei Ratmansky, former Bolshoi director and current world-leading classical choreographer, really love Prokofiev's Cinderella, or did he choose to create a new one for Australian Ballet in 2013 principally because he wasn't happy with his first (for the Mariinsky) in 2002? My bet is a bit of both: the second production, like the first, shines with an unfeigned affection for both score and story, but it also reads as a candy-coloured riposte to the usual adjectives applied to the 2002 production: ugly, spiky, uneven.
The earliest known versions of Rapunzel and Cinderella appeared in an Italian compendium of fairytales known as the Pentamerone. They were collated by Neapolitan courtier Giambattista Basile and published in the 1630s after his death. The 50-strong anthology also includes versions of Puss in Boots, Sleeping Beauty and Hansel and Gretel. None of these familiar stories has made it into Tale of Tales, Matteo Garrone’s cinematic sampler of Basile’s collection.