Thursday we screened Anne of the Thousand Days for the history group. Richard Burton's Henry VIII didn't have as much juice as Keith Mitchell in The Six Wives of Henry VIII or even Robert Shaw in A Man for All Seasons. But Genevieve Bujold was a very pretty Anne Boleyn, and Anthony Quayle was in fine form as Cardinal Wolsey.
This afternoon the Play Read-Through Meetup did Michael Frayn's classic comedy Noises Off. I remember seeing it in London fifteen years ago. My seat was actually too close to the stage--if I'd been sitting further back I'd have had an easier time taking in all that was going on. I did the part of Frederick, the actor playing Philip.
It's about a theatre company doing a touring production of a third-rate
"people coming in and out of doors" farce: the first act is a very
rocky dress rehearsal, the second is backroom dramatics as the play's
performed, the third is a performance near the end of the run, with
everything falling apart! Some of the humor was inconveniently visual for reading through, and we skipped over most of the second act with its pantomime slapstick.
Tonight I saw Mel Gibson's Hacksaw Ridge with the Movie Meetup. (I was hoping some people from the history group would come, but they weren't interested.) It's a square but powerful war movie about a hillbilly conscientious objector who serves as a medic in World War II, enduring intolerance, and ends up saving seventy soldiers on Okinawa and getting the Congressional Medal of Honor. COs are an interesting subject to me: morally, refusing to fight in an unjust war is an easy call--it's refusing to fight in a just war that takes the real guts! Merlin in The Once and Future King says that the bravest people are the ones who aren't afraid of looking like cowards.
I've finished The Chimes (I have some questions about the goblins' motivation) and started Cricket on the Hearth.
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