Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
(Dir. Geoff Brittain) Adelaide University Theatre Guild, 15 August 2015 This ivy-league Greek tragedy, a superb three-act melodrama by Edward Albee, was filmed in 1966 by Mike Nicholls, using camera-men suspended from ropes to achieve the claustrophobic intimacy the piece requires. The action occurs in the sprawling living room of George and Martha, a New England University history professor and his wife, the daughter of the Vice Chancellor. A Saturday evening faculty party has been in swing and Martha wants to party on, inviting newbies Nick and Honey back to their house. As the night unfolds, Mario-Lanza-amounts of liquor take effect, tempers flare, and secrets are…
Continue Reading →The Aristocrats
"The Aristocrats!"
(Dir. Penn Jillette & Paul Provenza) (2005) The Varnished Culture‘s late great friend, Dr David Barnes, loved this film, a quirky, tight, one-joke riff on the old vaudeville set-up where a truly disgusting and depraved act, auditioned before the jaundiced and horrified agent, is entitled “The Aristocrats!” As Drew Carey observes, the punchline is enhanced if you say it with a grand flourish of the arms. The challenge is to make the middle of the joke, a description of the act, as deviant, degenerate, debased, degraded, immoral, reprobate, debauched, dissolute, lewd, obscene, sordid, wicked, vile, base, iniquitous, vicious, brutal, criminal, warped and twisted as possible. Many heroic attempts keep…
Continue Reading →The Newsroom
A witty, eloquent and glossily produced mockumentary about a TV news service and all the time the talent and crew spend agonising about morals, just like they don’t in real life. Entertaining but you are driven to recall P. J. O’Rourke’s question: “Why does the Left assume we’re all as stupid as they are?”
Continue Reading →Mr Justice Raffles
His Honour writes his judgments like a crime novel; Resemblance to the dead or living is coincidental; You joined the Law Society – Defended with due piety The ineffectual thing – Raised no more than your profile. Cold rictus from the sand dune’s sting, By inches, so you burned To set rump on throne, and have it said ’twas earned. Invested, outed, by and by, Always the bad guy, Chained by secrets and precedent, Liver corroded by time, and spent Lapping the waves of the future, Colder then warmer the groove of the suture; A Judge must not deign to…
Continue Reading →Home and Hosed
'...to early beds'
The wind is spent, the dust is down, The light is playing tricks, It filters in, fades, reappears On the tar of platform six, where The schoolboys are disgorged, Attached like leeches to their cause, Splitting hairs and splitting heads, Home and hosed to early beds, Lemmings diving in the sea Line up blindfolded by the wall. “That is not what we meant at all” Say mother and father, watching us slip In their vice-like grip. Through the tattered world, the stink Punched full of holes, the useless salty water Stings, taunting us to drink.
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