Europe’s Best Website plunges into the world of telly only rarely, (as goodness knows every single show that goes out over the ether gets recapped up the wazoo these days, for good or bad) but for this correspondent, the very best thing on the box in the last twelve months has been the weekly 35-years-ago Top of the Pops repeats on BBC4. Pre-’76, the archive was swiss-cheese at best, with dozens and dozens of shows lost to the ages, but when we joined what looks like a considerable on-going project , the gaps were narrowing down to insignificance.

The ‘Pops gets a hard time from the Nostalgia Police, thanks to the gruesome later incarnations and Steve Wright’s voiceovers on the generally-emetic TOTP2. But there was a time when it was always there, always grinding out the chart on a Thursday and heralding the weekend in the best fashion possible. Back when its broadcast rules (highest climber, highest new entry, number one, non-movers only after four weeks, no fallers unless they rose again and beat the previous position etc) emanated from the old-school Light Entertainment honcho who had no agenda other than reflecting the pop singles of the day. Unfettered pop!

And what reflections 1976 and 77 have provided so far. *Just* pre-punk (although this entry works from the entirely acceptable definition that British punk was a few dirty little scrotes and chancers getting slightly uppity then happily dying or selling out, leaving little of note) and firmly controlled by the bow-tied Robin Nash as producer, it’s abundantly clear that the charts are fuelled by either pocket money or your mum. Or, indeed, your gran. How else would you explain the Brotherhood of Man? Or Acker Bilk? Or JJ Barrie?

Someone actually saves all their kisses for that guy.

It’s nostalgia through a prism, of course. I was too young to watch TOTP in ’76 – I was three at the time – but many of the tunes featured go on to become the Radio 2 staples of many a long family drive to visit the rellies, right through my formative years. So now I get to watch songs I know like the back of my hand being performed when fresh and new. (Or, in T-Rex’s case, when sad and bloated.) Although it’s the one-hit wonders and forgotten, low-charting singles which provide the most fun, and – let’s face it – weirdness. Like 5000 Volts. Or Twiggy. Or Johnny Wakelin. Or the Chanter Sisters. Or, heaven help us,  Glamourpuss.

There’s a thick seam of unforced batshit running though the whole production, to be frank – I’m not sure whether it’s caused by thirty-five years’ distance, or just that the world was stranger back then, but there’s at least a couple of ‘what the fuck?’ moments in every show, and we could do worse than take a gander at where they usually hang out.

1) The opening chart run-down, to the BBC in-house rendition of ‘Whole Lotta Love’. I didn’t recall this at all (my Pops-watching began in ’81-’82, only months after this bizarre practice ended). Are we now so spoiler-phobic that telling you who’s number one at the start of the show seems like a really odd way to behave?

Fred West, in his ‘Hairy Cornflake’ days

2) The presenters. Alright, it’s definitely easy money to rag on these guys, especially as this was just an unfortunately-for-us on-screen perk of the day jobs for which they were hired, but it’s a grim old line-up and no mistake. The ‘Pops got a slagging much later in its history for hiring visually-acceptable non-dj’s to front it, but that’s only because we were so inured to having some misshapen gargoyle creep on west from Broadcasting House to pick up the mic.

There’s no reason why any of these people should be considered telly material at all (except for Noel Edmonds, of whom we’ll etc). Look at David Hamilton, for example – a nervous weeble with a Weetabix helmet, barely getting though the links before his own tonsorial static fuses the studio lights. Or Tony Blackburn, a man whose eyes should really feature in a documentary about the dark and unnatural things that cling to the edge of undersea volcanoes. Or Dave Lee Travis (never trust a chap who has to come up with his own nickname), a barrel-chested quasar of obnoxiousness, whose ego expands to fill any space he enters. Or the slick Kid ‘David’ Jensen, shiny of jacket and exotic of accent.

Or Jimmy Fucking Savile, of whom little really needs to be said, although he certainly touched me in a special place as a child, and I suspect he touched many others in the same way.

Now then, now then – when I’d finished with it, it was *this* big.

Only Noel comes out of it with any dignity. Top R1 dog at this point, manning the Breakfast Show, he’s smartly dressed (at least in comparison to DLT, who often looks like he’s wandered on set fresh from gutting a dog), seemingly in control and familiar with the acts, and he gets from one link to the next without fuss or too many extraneous bits of business – no wonder this was only a step-up to justified Saturday-morning domination – he’s just on the verge of his all-conquering Nation’s Big Brother period at the moment – there’s not even a hint of the seething little martinet he’d later become.

3) The ‘People, the ‘Flip and the ‘Co. Yes, pre-video blah blah not all the acts could be booked blah blah dancers were needed blah. Happily we joined just as the tired Pan’s People gave way to Ruby Flipper after eight years (On their last show, Noel rather strangely announced that PP were “shuffling off stage left”, and that Ruby Flipper would now be appearing “throughout the Top of the Pops series”) Never a bastion of sanity or good taste, the revolutionary new four-girl-three-boy line up allowed Flick Colby to come up with some of the loopiest routines of her career.  Sadly, the girls having been joined by Phil, Gav & Floyd was regarded as a step too far for the something-for-the-dads brigade i.e. on the orders of Bill Cotton, and we saw them getting the boot in favour of the more traditional Legs & Co, taking my first crush Cherry Gillespie with them. Bye, Cherry. I’ll miss you.

You too, Floyd. Only not quite as much.

4) Again, despite it being the pre-video era, there’s a surprisingly large amount of shipped-in footage, from American and European pop shows, sometimes around half of any given edition. Professionally lit, colourful backdrop, smoother-feeling video-grain? That’ll be Soul Train.

5) Big cocks. Man, check out the tight trousers on a lot of the performers. There’s plenty of pressed sausage on show behind those gaudy and flammable trouserings, so keep your eyes out for the good stuff. And while we’re on the subject of sizzling-hot man-love, check out this oft-featured promo for Dr. Hook’s ‘Love You A Little Bit More’. Not only is the song seemingly describing the tenderest of potential gang-rapes, the video stops only just short of a glade-set fisting-festival of epic proportions. Colour me disappointed. I like the one with no teeth best!

6) The cut to a man on a horse in David Soul’s ‘Don’t Give Up On Us Baby’, for no godly reason. The song doesn’t mention a horse, and it’s not even him on it! (Also, listen to the lyrics closely and tell me it’s not one long passive-aggressive whine from a not-hugely-regretful domestic abuser).

7) Ah, hang on, maybe David was singing the song to a horse. That might make more sense.

Do NOT google for ‘sexy horse’, whatever you do. I have no idea what I was thinking. Here, instead, is just a horse.

8) The reliable, mildly-annoying mid-70s phenomenon of the young-ish, fey-ish man sitting behind a piano, sharing slightly too much of himself to sustain a pop career. We’ve had jaunty (David Dundas), poppy (Andrew Gold), proggy (John Miles) and my favourite, Randy Edelman’s ‘You’re An Uptown Uptempo Woman, I’m – Going By My Own Lyrics – A Bleating, Freeloading Twat’.

Quite why this genre disappeared is anyone’s guess: as a group they looked as if they could do with being thinned out by a war – let’s hope it was that.

9) ABBA making nearly everyone else look like amateurs. They spend a lot of time at number one, of course, and despite them now being untouchable cultural totems that even Pierce Brosnan’s singing voice can’t ruin, seeing them in the context of the weekly chart can’t help throw unflattering melody-based comparisons every which way. The B-O-M even tried to steal their act! Not something you’d expect from a brotherhood, really.

The promo film for ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’ shows the foursome on the very verge of superstardom, and even though Bjorn and Benny are characteristically stuck doing the harmonies, the latter’s look to the camera here says a thousand words:

‘I’ve fucked everyone in this band, and should I turn my mind to it – I could fuck you too.’

Okay, 19 words. But by god how he means them.

10) Nostalgia shows will have it that the mid-70s were a pasty and monochrome wasteland, with the only black person in the country living next door to Reg Varney. This is shown to be bollocks, given how around 40% (sometimes more) of the 76-77 acts were black. Soul (be it real or ersatz) was enormously popular with the single-purchasing public at the time, it seems, and every week there’s usually something storming, like this from Billy Ocean, or this from The Real Thing. Or, er, this from The Stylistics.  But, more importantly, fans of outré men’s tailoring may want to tune in just for the fashion crimes the soul acts undertake on a weekly basis. You like acres of dayglo polyester? Or glistening and glittery piping on lapels? Or primary-coloured ruffle-fronted shirts? Or jackets, with waistcoats, and no shirts? Of course you do.

11) The audiences. Forget the posing style-victims of the 80′s onwards, these grubby floors get filled each week by what looks like a couple of busloads of sixth-form students, or a youth-club day out. You’ll get a couple of great gormless looks-to-camera every week, too. By someone called Judith, probably. Or Ruth.

What do you like most about teenage girls, Jim? “Oh, that’s quite a question. Here, let me write my answer on your hat.”

12) The end credits on the late-showing extended version – it’s just a song being played over a kaleidoscope stuck to a BBC camera, panning back and forth over the studio as everyone pisses off home. Look, there’s a man winding up some camera cable around his arm! Oh, you missed him.

All claims for erection-induced accidents are to be sent to the usual address.

If you haven’t tuned in yet, you’re in luck – it doesn’t seem to be winding down at any point soon, and these are proper social documents, each edition a wonderful snapshot of the taste of the nation in any given week.  As ’77 moves on and we’re gifted an incredibly non-exciting glimpse of safety-pin and nose-ring, we’ll probably hear of Paul Morley or one of his ilk tuning in and declaring ‘Year Zero’ or ‘That’s Why This Was Needed’ or another of their waning clutch of ancient talking-points designed to get their increasingly jowly faces on a Clips’n’Cunts show this tax-year.  We didn’t need punk – not unless you felt that 35 years on, you might get a craving to be ineptly sold some butter.

Light Entertainment is, and always has been, the best entertainment. There’s a time and a place for youth rebellion, and it’s not in the middle of Manhattan Transfer – ooh, your gran likes them, don’t you Gran?

There’s is Ricky’s eleventh piece for MostlyFilm. You can throw eleven shades of abuse at him here.

Thanks to the excellent ‘Yes It’s Number One’ blog for the hideous pic of Sir Jim’ll. 

A series of disasters awaits Scarlett on her return to Tara: her mother is dead, her father has lost his mind, the livestock has been stolen and the house has been ransacked. This is the hardest period of her life as she struggles to keep the household together in the dying days of the war and the early part of an uneasy peace. Rough homespun, faded prints, patched hairnets – every detail of the costuming illustrates how far the fortunes of the Old South have fallen. With their floppy sun bonnets, the O’Hara girls could be pioneers pushing west. Like pioneers their only means of survival is the land.

As we did at the end of the first half of the film, we’re seeing much greater equality between black and white characters: look how the checks on Mammy’s dress are echoed in the pattern on Melanie’s skirt, while the colour of Mammy’s apron and headscarf exactly match the colour of Melanie’s blouse. Scarlett blends in too, but remains the most colourful character.

The victorious Yankees have levied impossible taxes on Tara, and Scarlett stands to lose the place unless she can pay them. She thinks she can borrow the money from Rhett Butler, but only if she can project an air of prosperity. And so she improvises, using one of the few things she has that are still undamaged: her mother’s green velvet curtains.

This is a wonderful costume as it conveys so much information. The dress is cumbersome and old fashioned, more eighteenth century than nineteenth. There are some faintly absurd touches: the chin strap under the hat and the way the heavy tassels and curtain cord have been incorporated so blatantly into the design. This dress is a fake,  a burlesque, and it doesn’t fool Rhett for long.

Scarlett is back in green of course, her colour of self-determination. Her motives are more altruistic this time, but this costume is a definite call back to the dress she wore to the Twelve Oaks barbecue. As she did then, she carries out a scheme to get what she wants, is thwarted and ends up marrying a quite unsuitable man. For (almost) the first time since her marriage, Scarlett wears her hair down, this time in girlish ringlets, recalling the Shirley Temple-look of the earliest scenes of the film. I like the Robin Hood hat: there’s a lot of the cocky, swaggering outlaw to Scarlett here.

Scarlett marries Frank Kennedy (an ‘old maid in britches’), moves back to Atlanta and transforms herself into a businesswoman. Under Scarlett’s direction, Frank’s hardware store starts to thrive and she invests in a lumber mill. Atlanta is booming again and Scarlett is cashing in.

War and Reconstruction have transformed the South and Scarlett too. Gone are the frills and ribbons and bows of the pre-war days, these clothes are practical and contemporary and show up the green curtains-dress even more for the pantomime it was. In particular, there’s a masculine edge to her costumes here, just look at those stiff white collars. The horizontal detailing, particularly in the gold outfit up top, lend a slight military air. Scarlett is strong, strident and holding her own in a man’s world.

An interesting contrast between Scarlett and Melanie here and quite untypical looks for both. This is the scene following the attack on Scarlett at the shanty town as the women wait for news of their husbands, who have gone out on a vigilante mission. This is a scene in which Melanie is the one in control, for a change, coolly lying to the authorities.

Scarlett’s white blouse with it’s broderie anglaise details and blue bows gives her a very soft and feminie look, almost schoolgirlish or waifish. Melanie appears by far the stronger and more capable of the two: the high neck, the black neck tie, the strong red bars on her bodice.

As a side note, it’s remarkable how often Scarlett wears a deep V-neck, exposing her throat and bosom. Just scroll up, or take a look back at Part 1.

Scarlett has, thanks to her marriage to Rhett (we’ll skip over the proposal scene: she’s in a black mourning dress and there’s not much to say about it) , leapt from being comfortably off to being extremely wealthy, and it’s a showy new wealth that faintly appals the people of Atlanta. The Butlers’ honeymoon and the early part of their marriage is sketched in with a series of very brief scenes, showing many aspects of Scarlett’s trusseau. I’ve selected just a couple.

In the top picture, Scarlett and Rhett are dressed in matching white outfits, with just a touch of black: they’re in perfect harmony. These stand in for wedding outfits, perhaps, (we don’t see their actual wedding). There’s even a veil on Scarlett’s rather naff hat.

In the second one, they have returned to Tara and Rhett has promised to restore the plantation to its former glory. Is it significant that Scarlett is in green and white to mark this return home? ‘It’ll come to you this love of the land, there’s no getting away from it if you’re Irish,’ her father told her.

The Butler marriage has hit the rocks. After the birth of their daughter (Bonnie Blue Butler – always dressed in blue), Scarlett tells Rhett she doesn’t want any more children and banishes him from her bed and back to Belle Watling. Again, she’s in green for this act of self-assertion and defiance.

There’s a lot of these robes and housecoats in Scarlett’s wardrobe from here on in, and as the plot becomes increasingly soapy. The grand saga of the War and Reconstruction is all but forgotten from this point and the scope of the story narrows to focus on personal dynamics.

This is a very fashion-forward Scarlett, it’s a new and sophisticated look for her. The wide crinoline skirts have gone to be replaced with something much more slim-fitting. The hair is different too. No more chignons, it’s now swept up at the back in what, to twentieth century eyes, would have been a much more modern style. Even blue is a relatively unusual and fresh colour choice for her.

This is the scene in which she and Ashley are caught embracing (fairly innocently as it happens), the gossip spreads and Rhett plunders her wardrobe to take his revenge (see below). The script explicitly ackowledges the extent to which dress can tell a story and make a point. ‘Put on plenty of rouge,’ he tells her. ‘I want you to look your part tonight.’

The scarlet woman! It’s all over town that Scarlett and Ashley are having an affair and of course it’s the woman who must bear the shame. Rhett makes her go to Ashley’s party, he makes her accept Melanie’s hospitality and makes sure she’s dressed like the wanton hussy everyone thinks she is. Everything about this dress – sequins, feathers, chiffon – explicitly recalls the costumes we’ve seen Belle Watling dressed in. It’s also far too expensive for the occasion. The Wilkes are doing well in a middle-class sort of way, but don’t enjoy the riches that the Butlers do. The contrast between the rich dress and the humble, gingham mantlepiece frill is almost embarrassing. Melanie is modestly dressed in silvery grey again.

Red and white for a rape. This is probably the most gothic scene in the film: a drunken Rhett taunts Scarlett about her obsession with Ashley, playfully suggests he might crush her skull between his hands before carrying her back up that long flight of red stairs. The symbolism is all pretty obvious here. The red robe with its white ruffled interior, the wide neckline and lapels. She’s basically dressed as a giant vulva.

Scarlett’s sufferings are ramped up: Rhett leaves her, she falls downstairs and miscarries his child, and Bonnie is killed, an event that ultimately proves fatal to the marriage. As the film becomes more focused on these domestic dramas, so Scarlett becomes trapped in a domestic setting, housebound in her housecoats. The diamond-earrings and fur wrap that she wears to recuperate in the garden have more than a touch of high-camp, soap queen about them.

We began in white, and so we end in black. The film occasionally flirts with fairytale archetypes: if she’s Snow White in the first scene with her white dress and red hair ribbons then she’s transformed in the wicked queen by the end – look at that stiff high black collar. It’s a mature and serious look for a mature and serious Scarlett. The mid-nineteenth century crinolines and chignons have well and truly given way to the narrow skirts and ‘up dos’ that will endure into the early part of the twentieth. Scarlett ends the film looking to the future, and fittingly her costume is forward-looking too: tomorrow is another day.

It would be Frank Capra’s 115th birthday today. Here he is on the set of It Happened One Night, cracking a great joke to Claudette Colbert and.. I dunno, some guy with a funny moustache.

Stop! Trailer time! It’s The Raid. I actually know nothing about this, so I’m watching this cold.

Woah! Holy shit! And oh ho, don’t trust us with foreign-language, eh? Still. Fuck me. I’m going to watch that again. You don’t have to. That looks ridiculously great. Oh, endorsement from Nuts. Pah. Isn’t Barry Norman doing their cinema reviews these days, anyway?

Link time! Could this oral history of Friends be any meatier? No, it could not. Enjoy.

And here’s the (very strong, my friends) week in Mostly Film:

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, a personal take on a great film

Swallows and Amazons Forever, on the new musical version with songs by Neil Hannon

A Glimpse of Striped Stocking, Dark Shadows set in the line of sexy witches through the ages

A Study in Scarlett, viewing Gone With the Wind through the prism of Scarlett’s frocks

Join us next week for part two of A Study in Scarlett, NOISE, pop pickings and a genuine exclusive from the director of a new release.

I first saw Gone With The Wind when I was young and impressionable and I’ve loved it ever since: the spectacle, the melodrama and, yes, the frocks. Watch a movie as often as I’ve watched the Wind and you start to notice things, little patterns and parallels. I’m no fashion historian, but it seems to me that Gone With The Wind tells its story as much through costume as through action and dialogue.

Scarlett O’Hara’s story is one of riches to rags to riches again, and of course what she wears throughout the film reflects this. Clothing is a signifier of social status and wealth in any film  but in Gone With The Wind this fact has particular resonance. The wealth of the South came from cotton.  Strict dress codes apply, particularly for women. At key points in the story, items of clothing are given as gifts or rewards or tokens of affection. They are the means through which a woman can recreate herself, the key to a better future, badges of success, markers of disgrace. They can oppress or liberate.

With all this is mind, I thought it would be fun to take a closer look at some of Walter Plunkett’s stunning costumes for the film, chiefly those worn by Vivien Leigh as Scarlett, what they say about the character at different points in the story, how they link her to or set her apart from other characters.

This is a story about growing up and getting on, so of course we begin with a white dress. Virginal, bridal, a blank page. This is 16-year-old Scarlett before anything happens to her. Tomorrow the civil war will begin and, for the first time, she’ll find out she can’t always have what she wants. This is a deliberately childish outfit: the puffed sleeves, the frilled skirt, the high neck, the little ribbons in her hair all scream Shirley Temple, the epitome of 1930s girlhood. Scarlett is supposed to be the oldest of the O’Hara girls, but in the scene of the family praying look how much her dress makes her look like the youngest.

It’s significant that the accent colour here is red: one of Scarlett’s two signature colours. Red reflects not just her name, but the red earth of the family’s Georgia plantation. ‘The red earth of Tara’ is a refrain repeated throughout the film.

Scarlett’s second signature colour is green. It’s the colour of probably the two most celebrated costumes of the film. Here’s the first: the green-sprigged muslin she wears to the Twelve Oaks barbecue. The colour of Irish nationalism, green links Scarlett to her Irish heritage. In the novel, Margaret Mitchell makes it clear that the rebellious side of her heroine’s nature comes straight from her Irish father. For Scarlett, green is the colour of rebellion and self-assertion.

This dress was quite a deliberate choice. We already know, thanks to Mammy, that the cut of this dress is inappropriately risqué for the occasion: a lady should not show her bosom before the afternoon according to convention. Indeed, all the other ladies in this scene are wearing long-sleeved, high-necked, mono-coloured dresses, small bonnets and hairnets. These contrast unfavourably with Scarlett’s off-the-shoulder floral and wide-brimmed straw hat. Apart from her younger sister Suellen, she’s the only woman there wearing her hair down.

She’s being deliberately transgressive, not just in what she’s wearing but in what she’s planning to do. Scarlett carries out her plot to tell Ashley Wilkes that she loves him, persuade him to break his engagement to Melanie and elope with her: behaviour that goes against the strict codes of her society.

A quick word on Melanie’s outfit in the first picture. The soft (Confederate) grey is typical Melanie, and a colour we never see Scarlett (the rebel, not the loyalist) wear. Melanie’s bonnet, shawl and mittens in the shot above look positively matronly compared to Scarlett’s simple sexiness. Melanie is the first of two women Scarlett will be deliberately contrasted with throughout the film.

“A widow had to wear hideous black dresses without even a touch of braid to enliven them, no flower or ribbon or lace or even jewellery, except onyx mourning brooches… And the black crepe veil on her bonnet had to reach to her knees and only after three years of widowhood could it be shortened.” Gone With The Wind, chapter 7

Scarlett is widowed twice, so she spends a good deal of time in black and hates every minute of it. In agreeing to dance with Rhett Butler at the Atlanta ball she tramples all over convention again and, in a kind of reverse of the barbecue scene, it’s the plainness of her clothes that sets her apart from the other women. Note that the bonnet Rhett brings Scarlett from Paris is green, Scarlett’s colour of transgression. Although she tells Rhett that she daren’t wear it, she does so later on to greet Ashley arriving home for his Christmas leave, the first time we see her out of mourning.

We’ve gone through the virgin, flirt and widow phases and this scene marks a kind of a return to the beginning. Scarlett is no longer in formal mourning and has settled into life with Melanie in Atlanta. Both women have enjoyed a Christmas visit from a subdued Ashley who knows the tide of the war is about to turn against the South. The red and white dress recalls not just the festive season, but that dress Scarlett wears in the first scene, albeit with significantly more red and rather more grown-up detailing. The frills have gone, but the puffed sleeves and red hair ribbons explicitly recall that first outfit and perhaps it’s significant that this is a scene in which, again, a lovestruck Scarlett is fixated on Ashley. It’s the first time since his marriage that he has given her some indication he is still attracted to her and they indulge in an illicit clinch. She’s giving him a golden sash she has made, a precious gift as the blockades are making fine cloth increasingly scarce. Scarlett is wearing a similar fringed sash on her own dress and the gift ties the two of them together.

Returning from a tiring nursing shift, Melanie and Scarlett encounter the Atlanta prostitute Belle Watling. A protégé and mistress of Rhett Butler, she brings a touch of scandal to the town. She’s the second woman Scarlett will be compared to and contrasted with. This brief scene brings Scarlett together with both of them: her Madonna-whore touchstones.

Melanie is in grey, again – the colour of the Confederate army. Look at the obvious homemade, hand-knitted quality of her coat and hat. The Yankee blockade is really beginning to bite now. The South can neither export its raw cotton nor import the goods it needs and is having to become increasing self-sufficient.

The pink chiffon veil is typical of the showy clothes Belle wears: she’s always swathed in luxurious fabrics and bold colours: pinks, purples, golds and reds. We can assume that many of these are provided by the blockade-running Rhett Butler. The money she hands over for the hospital is wrapped in one of his fine handkerchiefs.

This is the drabbest outfit we’ve seen Scarlett in so far – even her mourning clothes were classier and more expensive-looking than this printed cotton frock – but the pink connects her to Belle rather than to Melanie.

The drabness continues. Here Scarlett has abandoned her nursing shift at the hospital to discover Atlanta in chaos, fortifying itself against the coming Yankee attack. It’s a working outfit, indicated by her apron and the buff and brown, the first time we’ve seen her in anything like these colours and the first time we’ve seen her do anything like hard or difficult work. These colours also, significantly, link her to the slave characters, often dressed in russets and oranges and browns: Scarlett’s status is rapidly declining, or to put it another way, we’re seeing an equalisation in the status of black and white characters. In the shot above, Scarlett’s outfit, with its combination of swinging, patterned crinoline and dirty apron, pitches her exactly between the social extremes exemplified by her spoilt Aunt Pitty and the maid Prissy.

The Yankees are comin’! And Scarlett is about to endure the worst day of her life. I can’t be sure whether the pink dress here is the same one she wears in the earlier scene with Melanie and Belle, but get used to it as we’ll see an awful lot of it from now on. It’s notable that the hooped underskirt has gone altogether and for the first time we have crinoline-less Scarlett, war-time privations not stretching to the quantities of fabric needed. It’s also striking just how closely her dress resembles Prissy’s. But for Prissy’s apron and headscarf, and Scarlett’s more revealing neckline, the two are dressed virtually identically. The straw hat she wears in the still above recalls, with its green velvet ribbons, the one Scarlett wears at the Twelve Oaks barbecue: a visible reminder of a vanished world amidst the horror of defeat.

And that takes us to the mid-point of the film. As God is my witness, I’ll be back next week with Part 2.

When I was little the witches of fairy tales were frightening creatures with warty hooked noses, long straggly grey hair, impractically long, shapeless black dresses who were fond of turning the broomstick into flying vehicles (obviously they had bums of steel – no comfy sofa flights for them). But not so the witches of movies and television. With the exception of the green faced wicked witch of the west (the original www) and the odd Disney moment, witches are alluring, sexy women with men issues. Because even witches, with their magical powers and their broomstick toughened posteriors are really driven by the male sex. Boys, it’s always all about you.

A scene from a Tim Burton film. But which one?

Dark Shadows understands this tradition. An ensemble piece based on a cult US TV show of yore, that I confess I have never seen but it sounds even better than Sunset Beach – and I wasn’t sure that was possible – in the batty storyline stakes (excuse the pun); Dark Shadows stars Johnny Depp as a rich young man (Barnabas Collins) who enjoyed rumpy pumpy with Eva Green’s socially inferior and very beautiful Angelique. Unfortunately for poor old Angelique, Barnabas didn’t love her, preferring the unsullied, socially acceptable, beautiful young blonde (you hate her already don’t you?) Josette DuPres, and so she was left scrubbing floors whilst he and his beloved planned their perfect lives together. A tad miffed, Angelique sends Josette to a rocky death off the side of a cliff, curses the Collins’ family with ill luck and Barnabas with being a vampire. Oh, and for good measure locks him in a coffin, secures the coffin with several chains and then buries him.

Now if ever there was a moral to a story then surely that moral is: “chaps – do not mess with the hearts of women who may have magical powers and the propensity to hold a grudge”. You’d think wouldn’t you, but remember we are in a man’s world, so really this is a morality tale about women having to learn not to be daft enough to have pre-marital sex with men, even good looking rich ones who have known you since childhood and seemed to reciprocate your feelings. So Barnabas gets out of his coffin, almost 200 years later, and wreaks his revenge on the still alive, still sexy and still passionately in love with him Angelique (all of this is in the trailer, so no spoilers I promise).

Of course it’s not really a morality tale it’s a comedy about a fish out of water – namely an almost 200 year old vampire finding himself in 1974 – with a barely strung together plot that promotes family values and true love being a selfless non-possessive act.  Depp manages another excellent comedy creation, Eva Green is wonderfully sexy and clearly having a whale of a time and the rest of the cast are completely wasted but look fabulous. And there is a great gag that features MacDonald’s, but I won’t ruin it for you. Personally I enjoyed it a lot, even if it is nothing more than an entertaining, bubbly but small pot of dark chocolate mousse of a movie.

Now would be a good time to do that ‘turning back time’ thing, Cher.

But back to those sexy witches. The 80s gave us the Witches of Eastwick; three very beautiful women with perfectly lovely lives who feel that what they really need is a man to spice things up a bit. And so a short, slightly dumpy, very oddly dressed Jack Nicholson turns up to insult them into his bed and help them to realise their witchy potential. OK so they banish him at the end (spoiler apologies to anyone who hasn’t seen this film yet), but they live in his house, raise his kids and seem quite affectionately fond of his appearances on their TV, so have they really managed a fulfilling life without him?

Then in the 90s there was the Craft; four hot teenage school girl witches. OK so their magical powers weren’t fuelled by romantic yearnings, but they do get a little heady with their power and over-step their place in the scheme of things. And of course as everyone knows a group of powerful women, particularly sexy teenage women, can’t possibly be expected to get along or to survive without some form of romantic jealousy, and so the two that don’t find fulfilment through a male character suffer a poetic comeuppance.

Also in the 90s there is Practical Magic, a film so blatantly about how a woman needs a man to be happy and fulfilled that I won’t even bother to explain the plot. Of course there are no bad witches in Practical Magic, but there are two very sexy women (Sandra Bullock and Nichole Kidman) and if there was no Angelov – a tall dark psychotic boyfriend type – to accidentally kill and then use magic to try to cover up the fact, why there would be no lesson for them to learn. Women, know your place – kill a man and you will get your come-uppance in some form or another, even if it’s not going to jail for murder.

OMFG I’M IN A PHOTO WITH VERONICA LAKE YOU GUYS THIS IS AWESOME!

Other sexy witches you should check out, and see how they come undone by a hero or heroine with a good man by her side, or see the error in their male issued ways thanks to one good man include the stunning Veronica Lake in I Married a Witch and the very beautiful indeed Renee Soutendijk in The Fourth Man.

Why, even the WWW (that’s the wicked witch of the west, in case you have forgotten) is really driven by thwarted love; or at least that is what the plot of Wicked tells us. Seriously green face, I’m disappointed in you. After learning this shocking news I could only be more upset if I heard that Grotbags was really madly in love with Rod Hull and driven by her envy of Emu turned to stripy socks over her previous stockings and a desire to cause passionate panic only to be thwarted at every turn by the naughty Emu puppet alter ego of her amour.

You have to admit, there is something about her.

Now you may be reading this, stroking your chin and thinking “Well yes, but of course when women discover they have magical powers in films or television and this is expressed visually by a change from frump to va-va-voom what is being expressed is a woman finding the power of her sexuality. In turn, when these sexy witches use their power for ill, or even just domestic cheating (looking at you Bewitched), they must be punished for society cannot allow a woman that uses her sexuality to hold power over men, or anyone else, and stands outside of the socially secure convention of marriage and the traditional male dominated power structure has to be seen to either conform in some way to that structure or be punished.”

You may have a point there chin stroker, but I don’t remember the witch mobile in my childhood bedroom featuring a lady wearing a plunging neckline, with long silky hair, a stunning face and legs to die for. In the movies, it seems impossible to find any witch at all who doesn’t, even if that beauty is only skin-deep.

Dark Shadows is currently on general release. 

by Jim Eaton-Terry

There are many great things about having small children and living in the country, but access to theatre productions isn’t one of them.  The formula for touring family shows seems to be pretty well set; take a classic text, a bare stage, half a dozen recent graduates, and some inventive staging (a sleeping bag…is a dragon!) and you’re guaranteed a slot at the local arts centre.  They’re almost always full of bounce and energy, but once you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all, and the songs are always awful.

So I was in two minds about the Bristol Old Vic production of Swallows and Amazons; on the one hand, another staging of a slightly fusty children’s classic, on the other hand, no matter how irritating Neil Hannon can be, he knows how to knock out a tune.

My biggest concern was that the production would put quotation marks around Ransome’s world of adventures.  Swallows and Amazons, more than almost any book I can think of, suffers from a disconnect between the real books (which, telling the story entirely through the eyes of the Swallows,  treats their world with utter seriousness) and the image of ginger beer and hockey sticks.   This does Ransome huge disservice; the Swallows and the Amazons may wear shorts and sail boats but their world is always grounded in reality, so I was somewhat dreading the show once I realised they were taking the Five Go Mad in Dorset approach of casting adults.

There is a terrible temptation to sneer at the past, and particularly to laugh at the innocence of so much 20^th century children’s literature.  It’s always seemed an example of remarkable arrogance on the part of critics living in the unprecedented safety and comfort of the post-1960s West to patronise writers who spent the early part of their lives in the trenches or, in Ransome’s case, being sued by Lord Alfred Douglas and eloping with Trotsky’s secretary after the Russian revolution..

My fears were completely unfounded; I’ve rarely seen a production as deliriously funny, exciting and touching as this and, with a couple of tiny exceptions, the producers at no point made the slightest attempt to apologise for the book.

I saw Swallows and Amazons with six members of my extended family, from my four-year-old daughter to my 75-year old father.  Like many families we have a long relationship with the books;  the copy of Winter Holiday I’m reading to my daughter was given to my mother for her tenth birthday, and most of my most memorable childhood holidays were spent on Windermere (in a chalet, rather than an old tent, but still).  From the first scene, all of us were completely gripped and transported to the lake.

The script is a solid – and almost entirely straight – version of the book, though it strips out what Neil Hannon refers to as “all that nonsense about reef knots” and subtly reverses the class relationship between the Walkers and the Blacketts (in the books it’s very clear that the Amazons, who at one point simply dismiss the local policeman, are quite some way posher than the Swallows, with their Australian mother).  Neil Hannon’s songs are a complete joy, with far less of the over-clever jokes that he must have been tempted to put in (okay, except “Raised by our mama on the banks of the Amazon delta/with nothing but the clouds and a four-bedroom house for shelter” but who could object to that?).  I would normally post a link to the best of them, but all I can find is a clip of Hannon singing one:

What you miss there is the glorious performances.  With the exception  of Stewart Wright’s frankly slightly creepy beginning as Roger (which is, I suspect, the nature of playing a seven-year old boy) every one of the main cast is impeccable.  The reviews tend to highlight Akiya Henry who carries most of the weight of the play as Titty, but I was equally impressed with Celia Adams who gives a real threat to Nancy, and Richard Holt who takes possibly the most thankless role in the play and brings it completely to life.  John Walker is the other emotional pole of the story and Holt carries all his repressed emotions, determination, and makes the humiliation of one pivotal scene genuinely touching.

The real triumph of the show is in the staging.  I began by being slightly rude about the tendency of touring theatre productions to make the most of limited resources  (a man in goggles is…a goblin!) and to an extent Swallows and Amazons plays the same tricks.  Both the ideas and the executions are so far above the usual run of these things as to render the comparison almost insulting.  Some of the best moments in the show are best left unspoiled, but I’ll just mention some of the quieter grace notes – clapping and snapping fingers to create a camp fire, and the use of frames to convey both photographs and the view through telescopes.  The bigger coups were almost buried in spontaneous cheering.

The show is coming to the end of this tour, but is playing in Cardiff this weekend and will no doubt be revived; with or without kids it’s a fantastic way to spend an evening.

Jim Eaton-Terry tweets on occasion and can do a reef knot, but not start a fire without newspaper.

By Ron Swanson

I look at my relationship with my favourite film as being analogous with great, romantic love (starting to get an insight as to why my love life is, um, troubled, while writing this sentence). My childhood sweetheart was Star Wars, my first teenage relationship was Goodfellas, and the first one where romance and feelings mattered was The Apartment. About three years into that relationship, though, I realised that I didn’t believe in CC Baxter and Miss Kubelik’s happy ever after (Billy Wilder’s intention, I believe), and ironically, it didn’t work out for me and The Apartment, either.

Currently I’m in a continental-style group marriage with three films. I hope, at some point to write about why I love David Lean’s Brief Encounter so very much or why Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West takes my breath away with every viewing. However, as this weekend sees the re-release of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, that seems like a perfect excuse to eulogise one of the best and most laudable films ever made.

If ever the point needed to be made that politicians know nothing about anything important, you could do worse than explain that Winston Churchill (then Prime Minister) hated The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp*. He believed that, with its heroic German character, it would undermine the country’s wartime solidarity. He went out of his way to damage the production, blocking Powell and Pressburger’s casting of Laurence Olivier as the central character, Clive Wynne-Candy, for example. It would be impossible to list all of the nuances that Churchill, and contemporary critics, missed; but there could be no worse slander to this film so drenched in humanity than to accuse it of being anything other than ardently anti-Nazi.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp would be an extraordinary film if it had been made at any point in history. But for this film to have been made in the midst of World War II beggars belief. In spite of Churchill’s objections, this is a film that eloquently, powerfully makes the case for the war. It does it in the words of a retired German army officer, Theodor Kretschmar-Schuldorff (played exquisitely by the great Anton Walbrook), recounting the horror he feels over his Nazi children as he appeals for British citizenship. In showing the humanity of Germany, as portrayed by Walbrook, it emphasises the horror of Nazism, and does nothing but re-enforce the importance of the Allied efforts to defeat such evil.

Schuldorff is rescued from an internment camp by Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesey in the role of a lifetime). Their friendship was formed after Wynne-Candy insulted the German Army during the Boer War. The matter was settled by pitting the two men against each other in a duel and they become friends afterwards, while convalescing in hospital. That hospital stay also introduces the other key relationships in the film; as the two friends both fall in love with a young British woman, Edith Hunter, played by Deborah Kerr. Wynne-Candy doesn’t realise his feelings in time, but Kretschmar-Schuldorff does and he and Edith are soon married.

The other two women who subsequently come into Wynne-Candy’s life (his wife Barbara and army driver Johnny) are both also played by Kerr. This taints the rest of the film with Wynne-Candy’s sadness at letting the love of his life slip through his fingers. He admits that he loves Barbara because she reminds him of Edith; they get married but we never get to see their happiness together. Likewise, once Theo has married Edith, we never see them together again. So while Blimp is a romantic film, it’s shot through with a sense of great loss and sadness.

The film’s other major themes echo that sadness. We see both men alienated by the nature of their armies. Wynne-Candy doesn’t approve of the loss of a sense of decency and fair-play that he perceives is seeping through the British military. Theo, meanwhile, is aware of the need to defeat the Nazis, whatever the cost. This has left them both estranged from their lives’ work as patriots and soldiers. Wynne-Candy feels this sadness acutely.

When we first meet Wynne-Candy, as a rotund, elderly, walrus-moustachioed windbag, he’s organising military exercises for young recruits, and is shown to be out of touch with modern methods when he’s captured by an over-zealous young lieutenant. He is incensed by the flagrant breach of the rules, but is mocked by a generation with no interest in his insistence on gentlemanly soldiering. We’re reminded that this is the way of the world. After all, Clive only found himself in Germany in 1902 after disobeying orders, believing in the wisdom of youth. What the film wishes us, in the audience, to take away is that wisdom is not diminished by age or experience. That age should be respected, cherished and valued.

The film is also a technical marvel. Shot in glorious Technicolor by the great Georges Périnal, this is as much of a visual spectacle as Powell & Pressburger’s later masterpieces The Red Shoes or Black Narcissus. The filmmakers never received the critical acclaim that they deserved during their careers. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp was not appreciated upon release, and was heavily cut. The US version was re-edited into chronological order, robbing the film of much of its thematic momentum, and cut by nearly half, down from 163 minutes to just 90.

The critical reassessment of Powell & Pressburger has been led, in part, by Martin Scorsese. A famous devotee of Powell’s much maligned solo-effort Peeping Tom, Scorsese has lionised the work of The Archers (the pair’s mini studio) as well. He’s not alone, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp has been named as one of the 50 best British films by the BFI, while Anthony Lane, writing in the New Yorker magazine, has claimed it as his favourite film.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is many things: a great and affecting love story; a wise and moving treatise on friendship; a wistful film about getting old and being replaced by a new generation; and the value of decency, especially in terrible times. It’s not merely the best film released this week, but a true touchstone in British cinema history and one of the bravest, warmest and most urgently necessary films ever made.

* Politicians’ tastes have not improved… Tony Blair’s favourite film is Rush Hour.

We’re firmly in blockbuster season now, so what we got? Oh, hi, Tim Burton! Is that Johnny Depp? And Helena Bonham-Carter? What are the odds?

To be fair, that looks lots of fun, and I’m not as Burton-sceptic as some of my MF colleagues. Anyway, we have an article next week which talks more about Dark Shadows so I’ll leave it there.

This isn’t a link dump! But, since you ask, here’s an amusing fight over the use of poster quotes. Four stars, MostlyFilm.

THIS ISN’T A LINK DUMP, but here are this week’s MostlyFilm articles:

Café de Flore, our review of Jean-Marc Vallée’s new film.

All the world’s a stage, some highlights from the Globe’s current Shakespeare in Foreign season.

One Face, A Thousand Lives, on MoMA’s Cindy Sherman retrospective.

Join us next week for Blimp, Swallows & Amazons, sexy witches, frocks frocks frocks and MORE.

Café de Flore is 85% of a very good film, and it’s a pity that the 15% I wasn’t crazy about comes at the end. Written and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée – who previously directed C.R.A.Z.Y., which I liked a lot a few years ago, and The Young Victoria, which I couldn’t really be bothered to see – it’s a romantic tale set in 2011 Canada and 1969 France.

The 1969 section focuses on single mother Jacqueline (Vanessa Paradis), struggling to bring up her young son, Laurent, who has Down’s Syndrome. She is determined to disprove the low expectations society has for her child, both in terms of life expectancy and quality of life, but this determination leads to frustration when the boy starts to develop ambitions of his own. The Montreal storyline revolves around the love life of Antoine (Kevin Parent) a club DJ on the cusp of turning 40. Antoine, the opening voice over tells us, appears to have it all – a great relationship with his partner, two children, a successful career. But it gradually becomes clear that there is a fly in the ointment, and Antoine is not sure he deserves his good fortune.

Oh, Johnny, what wacky character will you play next?

The opening half hour or so introduces the characters, but we only gradually come to understand how they are connected to each other. This is not just the case with the two time periods; the 2011 section only reveals its hand slowly. I found this rather exciting to watch. So many films set their stall out clearly in the first few minutes, allowing you to predict pretty much where the story is going. Café de Flore obliges you to pay attention and work to uncover the links between the characters. This is something of a rarity (21 Grams springs to mind as another example).

Vallée’s handling of the disparate threads is excellent. The various characters and their stories start to coalesce, through flashbacks, flashforwards and intercutting (Vallée is also the editor). The mystery of how the dual storylines are intertwined is nicely maintained, and there are repeated flashes suggesting imminent disaster, and a tragic end for at least one of the characters, to maintain suspense. The only initial link appears to be from the song that gives the film its title – it’s the favourite of both Laurent and Antoine – and a theme of obsessive love. As in C.R.A.Z.Y., the soundtrack is put together (I’m tempted to say curated) with obvious care and love. (I’m not the music geek Vallée appears to be, but for those who care, there’s a fair bit of Pink Floyd in this one.) The cast are also good, and in Marin Gerrier and Alice Dubois, who play Laurent and his Down’s friend Veronique, the film also has two of the most huggable children I’ve seen on screen in a long while.

So to start with, everything’s fine. You have a good looking, well-crafted film that aims to be a serious film about adult relationships. Where the film went fatally wrong, for me, was in the revelation of what joins the two storylines. The next paragraph will contain spoilers, so you may wish to stop reading now.

Music break. Spoilerphobes, please leave.

For a while, I was wondering if the 1969 scenes would turn out to be a dream or fantasy of one of the modern characters (Carole, Antoine’s first wife, is having troubling dreams which appear to echo Jacqueline and Laurent’s story). In fact, the revelation is heavily implied in the film’s tagline (‘one love, two lifetimes’) but I had missed that before seeing the film. My heart started to sink when Carole visited a medium in the hope of solving the puzzle of her recurring dreams; when the medium asserted that she and Antoine are reincarnations of characters from the 1969 segment, I was rolling my eyes in despair. I don’t mind this kind of fantasy in films, quite the reverse, but to introduce it into what had apparently been a serious drama demanded a leap I was not prepared to take. The plot twist felt as though it belonged in a much sillier film; it’s the kind of material rarely presented in such a po-faced manner outside the work of Bruce Joel Rubin.

I’m not sure what kind of resolution would have worked for me. I had theorised that that Antoine or Carole might be related to the 1969 characters in some way; I had also wondered if these sections might simply be dreams. That might not have been completely satisfying dramatically, but I would have been prepared to accept it, and respect it as the writer/director’s decision. I can’t say the same for the new age nonsense that is actually presented. While Vallée tells his story very well, it’s unfortunate that the story, however sincerely meant, is ultimately silly.

Uncle Frank blogs about films at Uncle Frank’s Film Blog

From April 21st to June 9th, The Globe theatre is the stage for all the world, as 37 international theatre companies are coming to London to present 37 of Shakespeare’s plays in their own languages. This international celebration of the Bard is the centrepiece of the World Shakespeare Festival and it offers a rare opportunity to see familiar tales reinvented in a new language and infused with the spirit of a different culture. Hindi, Cantonese, Korean, Arabic, even British Sign Language and Hip-Hop – this is Shakespeare as UK audiences have never seen or heard him before. Mostly Film sent a few curious theatregoers to The Globe and here is their take on some of the productions so far

Richard III [Mandarin]
by Philip Concannon

The National Theatre of China’s presentation of Richard III in London got off to a rocky start. Just before the show began, we were informed that the company’s costumes and props had been placed on a UK-bound ship some seven weeks ago and they were still on that ship, stranded somewhere outside Felixstowe. So the version of Richard III that we saw at The Globe wasn’t everything it might have been, but the show must go on, and there was still plenty in this performance to impress.

The simple costumes adopted as makeshift replacements actually give the whole affair an appealing minimalist vibe, with the cast all clad in black and differentiated by splashes of colour, and when a character died the act of draping a black cloth over the head was hauntingly effective way of marking their passing. The actors may have lacked the props that would have brought their adaptation to vivid life (a battered old chair and table was all they had to work with), but the urgent drumbeat that accompanied the performance went a long way to creating an engrossing atmosphere.

The biggest surprise served up by this Richard III was Richard himself. We are so used to seeing this character debilitated by a hump or limp, but here he was upright and oddly charming, carrying himself with a smirking swagger as he implemented his Machiavellian plans. Zhang Dongyu brought plenty of charisma to the part, as well as an unexpected sense of humour. Even non-Mandarin speakers were amused by the sly glances and gestures he threw at the audience while others took centre stage, and the laughs didn’t end there, as a broader style of comedy was provided by a pair of acrobatic assassins.

With the possible exception of She Nannan as Queen Margaret, none of the other actors quite managed to match Dongyu’s impact, and as a result the show tended to drag when he was out of the spotlight, but such slack periods were few and far between. This Chinese take on Shakespeare was a straightforward and compelling adaptation, even if we can only imagine the show they would have put on had their ship come in.

Troilus and Cressida [Maori]
by Irene Musumeci Klein

Welcome to Troy, Aotearoa. Ngakau Toa’s Maori version of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, which kicked off the first week of the Globe to Globe Festival 2012, proved such an inspired act of cultural translation it should settle the identity question once and for all: forget Bacon, Oxford, De Vere – Shakespeare must have been Maori.

Life in the antipodes taught him all he needed to write a play about ‘wars and lechery’ for his ‘wooden O’. He learnt the art of storytelling on an epic scale in the marai, the wooden meeting house at the centre of Maori villages, where genealogies and ancestral stories are carved into the walls and recited by the tribe. Then he watched a dozen men perform a haka – eyes bulging out of their sockets, tongues hissing, chests bellowing a war cry, tattooed thighs and buttocks drumming the floorboards.

The Maori company came to the Globe and conquered: they navigated the insidious waters of its massive space and tamed its wild acoustics. The acting was big, loud, and highly effective, even though I would have preferred a less caricatured depiction of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, which was as camp as the Greek tents.

The show’s power came from its parade of proud, physical masculinity, set up to be mocked and debunked by Shakespeare’s script. But quieter, intimate moments worked as well: Troilus and Cressida’s doomed struggle for love had a crushing bittersweetness rarely seen in productions tainted by the play’s cynicism.

At the end of the show the audience were so energised that an impromptu response haka was performed by a large contingent of expat Maoris. It made me want to be Maori too for a night, just to be able to show my gratitude in such a way.

The Tempest [Bangla]
by Philip Concannon

As the rain that had threatened throughout The Tempest finally began to fall towards the end of the play, I felt it was fitting that this particular production should climax with the audience getting wet. After all, the play begins with a shipwreck, depicted on stage by the actors carrying model ships on their arms and swirling as Ariel (Shimul Yousuf) whipped up a storm. It was an inventive and elegant way to open this Bangladeshi version of Shakespeare’s play, and it set the tone for the next two hours.

The Dhaka Theatre brought music and movement to The Globe with their performance. Barely a scene was allowed to pass without one or more of the actors breaking into a song or dance, as the company blended traditional Bangladeshi folk music into the narrative, with the key scenes in the text being expressed in an energetic and accessible fashion. Throughout the play, the physicality of the performances impressed; most notably when Prospero (Rubol Noor Lodi) exerted his dominance over Ariel and his slave Caliban (Chandan Chowdhury) by leaping across the stage and coming down with a crash that knocked the other actors to the floor. Even the musicians got in on the act, with two drummers consistently drawing gasps and spontaneous applause as they spun through the air while keeping an astonishing rhythm.

The Tempest is cleverly directed with the 13-strong cast lined up across the back of the stage and utilising a number of colourful boxes in a variety of ways. Everyone plays their part, but two performances clearly stand out. As Trinculo, Samiun Jahan Dola has a gawky charm and a skill for physical comedy that instantly wins the viewers’ favour, while Yousuf’s Ariel is the beating heart of the show. Her reaction to finally being liberated by Prospero is an affecting moment.

The actors seemed genuinely overwhelmed by the ovation they received as the final dance number brought The Tempest to a close, but they had fully earned such a reaction. In their hands, Shakespeare’s tale of magical feats had cast its spell over the audience.

Julius Caesar/Giulio Cesare [Italian]
by Concetta Sidoti

When I heard that Italy’s contribution to the Globe to Globe season would be a modern-dress Julius Caesar, I imagined I’d be seeing a Silvio Berlusconi-style swaggerer brought down by his former friends. But this was to underestimate the ambition of the Globe and of 369gradi and Lungta Film, the two Italian companies that brought this production to London (trailer here). In this austere and daring adaptation directed by Andrea Baracco, the cast numbered six, the scenery consisted largely of three doors – and Caesar was “played” by a tatty leather chair.

If that sounds funny, it wasn’t. The scene where the three plotters – Bruto, Cassio and Casca – advance in unison and strike viciously, leaving red chalk lines all over the chair, set to an orchestral arrangement of Kraftwerk’s The Model, was astonishingly powerful. No need to speak the words “Et tu, Brute?” when the idea behind them is reverberating around the theatre.

The rest of Caesar’s dialogue was not missed either and the modern Italian adaptation by Baracco and Vincenzo Manna was sparse and elegant while doing justice to the great funeral speeches – “Amici, romani, concittadini” and all.

The dialogue was only part of it, though. This was a production that emphasised movement and music, introducing elements of dance and using its numerical disadvantage as a spur to greater creativity in rigorously choreographed scenes where crowds and battles were expressed by a handful of actors and props.

At the heart of the play was Giandomenico Cupaiuolo as Bruto, a good man driven mad by the dark and corrupt Rome that surrounds him, and by the internal voices that whisper to him. His chief tormenter was Roberto Manzi’s shaven-headed, black-clad Cassio – a malevolent force who recalled Nosferatu. Gabriele Portoghese’s Marc’Antonio was a brash hipster in sunglasses who turned serious just long enough to deliver the speech that sealed the fate of the conspirators. His interactions with the opportunistic and imperious Ottaviano (Lucas Waldem Zanforlini, who also played Casca) foreshadowed the battles that follow in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.

Initially, I had hoped that Antony and Cleopatra would be the Italian play in this international season, expecting lashings of passion and spectacle on the Globe stage. Instead – and to the theatre’s credit – it programmed this spare and unsparing production, which deserves to be seen by a larger audience. To that end, the entire performance has been filmed in Italy and is available on YouTube. It starts here…