The Imitation Game

Alan Turing, codebreaking, Bletchley Park

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Eagerly awaited general release of The Imitation Game (trailer), starring Benedict Cumberbatch in a superb bit of acting, and was not disappointed. The story, hidden for almost 30 years, is by now familiar—Alan Turing, the brilliant but eccentric Oxford student admitted to Bletchley Park’s code-breaking team, figures out how to decrypt messages generated by the Nazis’ super-secret Enigma machine, shortening WWII by two years, and, oh, by the way, inventing computers in the process.

Last month Andrew Hodges, author of the book the movie’s based on, was in town for a talk—a bit dazed about this great success 30 years post-publication—and his insights (summarized here) were, frankly, helpful. He powerfully described the homophobia that pervaded the British intelligence services (and society in general) in the 1950’s that made Turing a target. Also the greater significance of the apples, alluded to only glancingly in the movie and without context. Turing was fascinated with the Snow White story, and saying more drifts into spoiler territory.

I earnestly hope someone said to him what Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) says near the end of this film. Clarke responds to Turing’s lifelong struggle with being different from other boys and men, and says how he “saved millions of lives by never fitting in,” as Tom Long put it in The Detroit News. Or, “Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine,” says the movie’s tagline.

There’s a little too much standing in front of the marvelous prop constructed for the movie, which the producer says is like the original Turing machine, just not in a box, so you can see the works. The secondary characters are thinly developed and no doubt worthy of greater interest. However, the scenes of Turing as a young boy (Alex Lawther), trying to come to terms with his differentness, are heartbreaking. Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 89%; audience score 95%.

The Theory of Everything

Stephen Hawking, Eddie Redmayne , Felicity Jones, The Theory of Everything

Eddie Redmayne & Felicity Jones, The Theory of Everything

The uplifting Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything (trailer) is well worth seeing. The basic outlines of the story are well known. In his student days at Cambridge, Hawking developed a neuromotor disease that affects the body, not the brain, and was given two years to live. Such a diagnosis would end the ambitions of most people, but he survived to become preeminent in the fields of theoretical physics and cosmology with numerous British and international honors, including a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. civilian honor.

Hawking also has tried to make the complexities of the physical sciences accessible for non-scientists, and his book, A Brief History of Time, has sold more than 10 million copies. I have the Illustrated edition, and I’ve read it, picture captions and all. (So, I actually know what the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is: let’s see, you can know the speed of an object or its location, but you cannot know both at the same time. Please, no questions.)

Eddie Redmayne is superlative as Hawking, and Felicity Jones convincing as his devoted first wife, Jane. The film avoids the typical mawkishness traps, in large part because, as Rene Rodriguez says in the Miami Herald, “Redmayne keeps you focused on the soul of a man trapped inside a malfunctioning body.” The supporting cast is singularly excellent too.

The movie is based on a book written by Jane, whom Hawking met at Cambridge shortly before the neurological problems began to surface. The couple have three children, and he is portrayed as a loving father. It ends some 25 years later, in the late 1980s.

There’s only a smattering of science and mathematics in the movie; in general, it’s about coping against greater odds than a person can at all reasonably be expected to overcome. The movie suggests, not unreasonably, that Jane’s determination was a significant factor in keeping him alive. Not just surviving, thriving. Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 81%; audiences 84%.

Skylight

Bill Nighy, Carey Mulligan, David Hare, Skylight

Bill Nighy & Carey Mulligan in Skylight

If Britain’s National Theatre Live version of David Hare’s remounted play Skylight, comes to a movie theatre in your area, don’t miss it! It’s a live performance filmed last summer, and, unlike the live opera shown in movie theaters, it isn’t “live, live.” But it isn’t just a camera set up in the back of the theatre, either. There are wonderful closeups of the three actors, and given who the actors are, you want to catch every nuanced facial muscle.

Carey Mulligan plays a 30ish woman (her first stage role), Kyra Hollis, who teaches in what is apparently a rather desperate London school and lives in rather minimalist circumstances in a British public housing flat, of a type familiar from U.K. crime shows. She’s visited by a young man—played briefly and brilliantly by Matthew Beard—who is the son in a family she once lived with. The young man urges her to return to try to help his father, who he says is lost in grief and rage over his wife’s death a year before. The son departs, and the father arrives.

Played flawlessly by Bill Nighy, the father is a successful restaurateur for whom Kyra once worked, and the sparring between the two over why she left his home and her work, the new life she’s constructed, and what was and is between them carries the rest of the play. When it was first produced in 1995, Skylight won the Olivier Award for Best New Play. Many funny moments. Tears, too.

Johnny Worricker

Bill Nighy, Worricker

Bill Nighy as Worricker (photo: ichef.bbci.co.uk)

If you saw the two Masterpiece Contemporary thrillers starring Bill Nighy (perfect, as ever), chances are we agree they were terrific. If you missed them, Nighy plays MI5 agent Johnny Worricker, on the outs with his bosses and trying to bring attention to the shady dealings of Prime Minister Alec Beasley (Ralph Fiennes without much hair).

Needless to say, the Powers That Be don’t approve of Worricker’s activities and are seriously looking for him. In the first of the two dramas shown this month, “Turks and Caicos,” he’s chilling out on the islands when he’s spotted by a CIA agent played by Christopher Walken, with his typical opaque style, and you’re never quite sure who’s who and what’s what. Except that Worricker’s former girlfriend, Margo Tyrell (Helena Bonham Carter), wastes no time realigning her priorities and jetting down to the Caribbean when he needs her. In the second, “Salting the Battlefield,” Worricker and Tyrell are on the run, and doing a pretty good job of it, too, until family ties threaten to flush them out into the open.

These two productions are followups to 2011’s film with the same characters, “Page Eight,” which lacked only Bonham Carter’s Margo Tyrell. Somehow I missed that program when it was broadcast three years ago. Thanks, Neflix! What makes these dramas so good are the scripts. The screenplays and the direction are by British playwright, theater and film director, and two-time Academy Award nominee David Hare. Says Grantland reviewer Chris Ryan, “If it’s adult contemporary, it’s as good as adult contemporary gets.”

Olive Kitteridge: on TV

Olive Kitteridge, HBO, Elizabeth StroutI hope you  spared yourself the awful Death Comes to Pemberley on Masterpiece Theater last Sunday and watched HBO’s Olive Kitteridge instead. I’d read the Pemberley book, by P.D. James, and it should have been great. Huge disappointment. So I wasn’t optimistic about the television version. Talented Anna Maxwell Martin should have stuck with The Bletchley Circle, where she had an innovative, meaty role.

Olive Kitteridge will be playing on HBO (2 parts) numerous times in coming weeks, so if you missed it the first time, try to catch it. Just for the acting alone, it’s terrific, with Frances McDormand playing Olive and Richard Jenkins as Henry, her long-suffering husband. I’d read the book, so was prepared for Olive’s prickly personality. She’s likely not someone you’d want to spend a lifetime with, but Henry hung in there, and NPR reviewer Eric Deggans calls the production “maybe the best depiction of marriage on TV.”

For me, the television version posed much the same question as did the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Elizabeth Strout. Why was Olive so unyielding, so unmoved by others’ feelings, even as she registers them? She is that rare creature—someone who truly won’t bother to be likeable. “Olive had a way about her that was absolutely without apology,” a character in the book says. Her father’s suicide is talked about on several occasions, and did that cause the big disconnect? It doesn’t seem so. And just when you’re about to give up on her, she’ll do something remarkable.

The Understudy

JD Taylor, Adam Green, The Understudy, Theresa Rebeck, Adam Immerwahr, McCarter Theatre

JD Taylor & Adam Green in The Understudy (photo: McCarter Theatre)

An exciting opening night at McCarter Theatre on Friday, with the audience anticipating Theresa Rebeck’s knowing backstage comedy, The Understudy, and area fans awaiting the directorial debut of up-and-coming Adam Immerwahr, McCarter’s Associate Artistic Director. Adam’s fine work has been on stage at Trenton’s Passage Theatre, but this was the Big Time, on the big McCarter main stage. He pulled it off beautifully, in a production whose complexity, pre-show gossip said, required three tech rehearsals.

The conceit of the play is that a new Franz Kafka play has been discovered and is being produced on Broadway with two Hollywood action stars in lead roles (shades of the first season of Slings and Arrows, the hilarious Canadian series). The play opens with a literal bang, when unemployed but high-minded actor Harry (Adam Green) rushes on stage for a rehearsal, as he’s been cast as the understudy to the lesser of the Hollywood lights. Harry’s opening monologue—interspersed with bits from the Kafka play—shows all his disdain (“OK, I’m bitter”) for the star, his acting ability, and the film vehicle he just appeared in, for which he was paid more than $2 million. Harry fixates on this impossibly large sum with a shimmering mix of envy and pop-culture loathing.

The stage manager Roxanne (Danielle Skraastad) is a woman Harry was once engaged to but ran out on two weeks before the wedding—the wedding dress “still hangs in my closet. Like a wound.” The third character, the pretty-boy and somewhat dim star, Jake (JD Taylor), valiantly tries to explain Kafka and the deep significance of this new play. The cast is strong, with Green (who played Figaro last year) having a genius comic touch. The humor in Skraastad’s lines is limited to sarcasm, which she wields expertly. Taylor, too, plays his deceptively complex role so that the audience goes from laughing at his selfies and sense of entitlement to appreciating his vulnerabilities. We never see the stoner manning the light, sound, and set cues, who gets every one of them wrong, creating constant onstage turmoil (and requiring those three rehearsals).

The name of the fake Kafka is “The Man Who Disappeared.” It applies to both of the male characters, and is the one fact about Harry that is never out of Roxanne’s main line of sight. Harry describes a casting call experience where an assistant tells him, “No one will see you, you don’t exist.” Very Kafka, and very apt for all of them at one point or another. What the play shows is how they can exist for each other, at least for a few moments. Rebeck’s intimate knowledge of the theatre and its dilemmas is absolutely convincing, but the problem of “being seen” and heard applies to creative artists in general, to people in general, to all of us who’ve had the dream of going to an important meeting and . . . you . . . just . . . can’t . . . get . . . there.

Powerful Theater

Antony & Cleopatra, Shakespeare,  McCarter, Esau Pritchett

Nicole Ari Parker and Esau Pritchett in Antony & Cleopatra (photo: nj.com)

Last week we saw McCarter Theatre’s production of Antony & Cleopatra, directed by Emily Mann. It stars Esau Pritchett (who gave such a moving performance last year in August Wilson’s Fences), Nicole Ari Parker (Showtime’s Soul Food), and a strong supporting cast. Their performances, combined with a single stripped-down set for fast scene changes, gorgeous Cleopatra-wear, and an unexpected percussion accompaniment perfect in every beat add up to a whole greater than the parts.

This is the play about which some say, if all Shakespeare’s plays but one were lost, save this one, because it has passionate love (and a Romeo and Juliet-style ending), war, betrayal, tragedy, and Romans. Even some humor. It’s hard to judge the play itself, as its four-hour run-time was substantially cut, as so often happens, but the resulting production is fast-paced and emotionally rich. And this play is not often produced, so here’s your chance! Through October 5.

Wittenberg, David Davalos, Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, Jordan Coughtry, Anthony Marble, Erin Partin

Erin Partin, Anthony Marble, and Jordan Coughtry in Wittenberg (photo: STNJ)

There’s only one more week to catch The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey’s production of Wittenberg by David Davalos. Directed by Joseph Discher, this highly entertaining play set in 1517 at the eponymous university and town stars Jordan Coughtry as Prince Hamlet, a student, Mark Dold and Anthony Marble as Hamlet’s professors, the ideologically opposed Martin Luther and John Faustus, and wonderful Erin Partin as whatever lady is needed onstage at the moment.

Witty and fast-moving—great body language from Marble (Faustus), who is a would-be 16th c. rock star—it has modern touches that aren’t intrusive and numerous Hamlet references and puns. Faust’s office—Room 2B. If you’ve never seen a tennis match on stage, this is how it’s done, a nice metaphor for the lobbing back and forth of Hamlet’s budding worldview by Luther (God’s will) and Faustus (a man decides his own fate). Again, perfect set and costumes. We admired Erin Partin’s recent performance as Ariel in The Tempest, and a local review correctly noted about this performance that she plays each of her characters “with such veracity” that it seems multiple women are in the cast.

Robin Williams

stars, heavens, night sky

(photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

Still not recovered from the too-soon loss of Philip Seymour Hoffman, now this.

Scientists unraveling the neural links between mental illness and creative genius may one day have more answers to today’s painful questions.

Knowing anguish comes with the territory, though, apparently doesn’t lessen it, nor reduce the need for the ultimate, last escape.

Not for Hemingway, not for Plath, not for Williams, not for so many.