#martin surprised me by being Likeable so hes fine

[socksandbuttons]

Im gonna fight this guy AND his boy shorts

[ladyherenya]

Books read in December

I set myself some reading goals for the end of the year -- finish any books I’d already started, read the books I'd already borrowed, and to read ebooks I’d bought before buying any more. But I guess most of those books just weren’t the right genre? A few exceptions aside, this month I read a bunch of other things instead.

Also read: The Frost Fair Affair and Holiday Brew by Tansy Rayner Roberts, and Sweetest in the Gale and 40-Love by Olivia Dade.

Reread: Love Lettering by Kate Clayborn and Bookish and the Beast by Ashley Poston.

Total: thirteen novels (including two audiobooks and two rereads), three novellas, and three story/novella collections.

Favourite cover: The cover was what caught my attention for Finding My Voice and Old Baggage.

Still reading: Between Silk and Cyanide by Leo Marks, Or What You Will by Jo Walton and The Disorderly Knights by Dorothy Dunnett.

Next up: A Most Improper Magick by Stephanie Burgis.

*

Queen’s Play by Dorothy Dunnett (narrated by David Monteath): In 1548, Francis Crawford of Lymond arrives in France, incognito in order to protect Scotland’s queen, seven-year-old Mary. I enjoyed this, even though I am not very interested in the antics of the French court and thought The Game of Kings benefitted from having more characters who I found wholly likeable and/or who matter, personally, to Lymond. Dunnett is an impressive storyteller -- vivid descriptions, lively dialogue, nuanced characters and twists that take me by surprise. Moreover, those satisfying puzzle pieces explain the plots and intrigue, give insight into personalities and develop the narrative’s themes (here, the consequences of power). 

The Kinship of Secrets by Eugenia Kim: In 1950, four year old Inja lives with her grandparents and uncle in Seoul, while her sister Miran is in America with their parents. War delays the family’s reunion. This is a fascinating portrayal of two sisters growing up in different countries, and an incredibly poignant story about a family separated. Compelling, and beautifully written, and despite moments of intense grief, hopeful. I liked how, in the end, Inja and Miran didn’t have all the answers.. But I wonder if I’d have found the ending more satisfying if I had a deeper understanding of who they both were as adults.

Teacup Magic series by Tansy Rayner Roberts:

Tea and Sympathetic Magic: Stephanie Burgis recommended this novella as something similar to her Harwood Spellbook series and it certainly has a similar appeal: romantic fantasy, bordering on comedy-of-manners territory. Like Georgette Heyer but with magic and diversity and an intention to challenge problematic and outdated attitudes. Charming and cosy, like a good cup of tea rather than a frothy hot chocolate. Miss Mnemosyne Seaborne, a reluctant guest at a houseparty. She joins forces with the other guests after an unexpected abduction occurs. Entertaining, and even though it was too short for me to really become invested, I immediately wanted to read the sequel.

The Frost Fair Affair: After her previous adventures, Mneme has new friends, a suitor and a campaign: overturning the social conventions which prevent women from travelling by portal. After someone in Town steals her political pamphlets, she gets caught up in a mystery. I enjoyed this oh so much! I found myself caring a lot more about Mneme and her relationships; I liked the mixture of intrigue and danger, and how in the cause of dealing with these, Mneme learns more about the man she hopes to marry; and the Frost Fair, on a frozen river, makes a delightful setting. I'd love to read more.

Belladonna U(niversity) series by Tansy Rayner Roberts:

Unreal Alchemy: Oh, this is my new favourite! Urban fantasy about Australian uni students who are connected to an indie rock band, Fake Geek Girl. These stories are funny, geeky and romantic, with great chapter titles and lots of fandom references. They employ different points of view and different narrative styles in a way that’s really effective. I love the characters and how important and intense their non-romantic relationships are. Between them they have a variety of romantic/sexual relationships and feelings, but friendships and familial relationships, like the one between twin sisters Hebe and Holly, also drive the narrative. The first collection contains four stories/novellas.

Fake Geek Girl -- Ferd moves into the Manic Pixie Dream House; Holly and Sage argue about the future of the band.

Unmagical Boy Story -- Viola has feelings about her best friend losing his magic, transferring colleges and making new friends.

The Bromancers --  The band and frriends spend a weekend at a magical music festival.

The Alchemy of Fine -- A prequel about the band’s origins.

Holiday Brew: This collection is more serious and less overtly fandom-y than the first, but arguably still very meta (especially if you consider Viola, Jules and Ferd as a response to the trio in Harry Potter). I sat down intending to read just one of these stories -- and ended up reading them all.

Halloween Is Not A Verb -- Holly invites various people to their mums’ place for Halloween.

Solstice on the Rocks -- A short story about university graduation.

Kissing Basilisks --  Begins on New Year’s Day, is compelling, and picks up the non-band-related narrative threads from Fake Geek Girl.

Missing Christmas by Kate Clayborn: This novella is loosely connected to Beginer's Luck but stands alone. It's sweet. Business partners and best friends Jasper and Kristen pay a last minute trip to a client and get trapped by a blizzard, which pushes them to reconsider the boundaries they’ve drawn in their relationship. I liked the moments which showed that they’re an effective team because they know each other so well and can communicate through subtle body language. 

Finding My Voice by Marie Myung-Ok Lee: Ellen is a Korean-American teenager in her final year of high school. Her story is about applying for college, gymnastics training, Ellen’s relationships with her best friend and her first boyfriend, dealing with racism at school and with her parents’ expectations that she will follow her sister to Harvard. It’s very short, first published in 1993. I was aware of all the places where a YA novel written today would be allowed to give more details and to expand the story, but it was still interesting.

The Magnolia Sword: A Ballad of Mulan by Sherry Thomas: I’ve borrowed this several times this year, only to return it unread each time, and I was starting to wonder if I really wanted to read it. But once I actually sat down and focused, I quickly realised that I definitely did! I became completely engrossed in this Mulan retelling. It’s a tense adventure. I enjoyed the characters and their interactions, particularly the elaborate courtesy of formal conversations, and the way Mulan and her companions value loyalty and camaraderie. I thought this was a very believable take on the whole girl-disguised-as-a-boy thing too.

Dear Mrs Bird by AJ Pearce: In 1940, Emmy wants a newspaper job but is instead typing up letters for a women’s magazine and discarding mail from readers whose problems are Unacceptable. Frustrated that Mrs Bird won’t offer advice to so many women in need, Emmy's tempted to take matters into her own hands. Her optimism means she makes some naive mistakes, some of which made me wince, but it’s also an incredible strength. She's delightful company. I really like how much of this story is about her friendship with Bunty and I enjoyed the insight into women's magazines and the Auxiliary Fire Service.

The Lonely Hearts Dog Walkers by Sheila Norton: Recently separated, Nicola moves back in with her mother, starts as a teaching assistant at her daughter’s new school, gets a puppy and joins a group of dog walkers, who embark upon a mission to save the local park. This was very low-angst and, once I realised the sort of story it was, kind of predictable. I can recognise the appeal of this brand of realism, but personally would have preferred more humour or more emotional complexity. Were Nicola a colleague, it’d be easy to find things in common to discuss, but her story wasn’t quite what I was looking for.

Chasing Lucky by Jenn Bennett: When Josie and her mother return to Beauty to look after the family bookshop, Josie has plans -- keep to herself, finish high school, secure a photography apprenticeship, move to LA. But after Josie accidentally breaks a store-front window and her childhood friend Lucky takes the blame, Josie’s priorities change. I enjoyed this more than I expected to. I particularly liked how Lucky subverts people’s expectations, and how Josie’s family works at communicating better with each other.

Old Baggage by Lissa Evans (narrated by Joanna Scanlan): It’s 1928 and Mattie Simpkin, a now-middle-aged militant suffragette, lives in Hampstead with her friend Florrie Lee (aka The Flea). Mattie gives lectures about the suffragettes but realises she’s not reaching the younger generation. So she starts a club for “healthy outdoor fun” for teenage girls. Mattie is wonderfully forthright -- amusing, engaging and informative when it comes to things she’s passionate about -- but she’s also fallible.  A really delightful yet bittersweet story about friendship and loss and the opportunities available for women. I liked its awareness that being able to loudly be yourself is a privilege not everyone has. 

There’s Something About Marysburg series by Olivia Dade:

Teach Me: Rose is unimpressed -- not only must she share her classroom with the new history teacher, he’s been given her Honors World History class. There’s something particularly satisfying about people who have been hurt and lonely finding support and love in each other. I like that they get to know each other over many months. I like Martin’s relationship with his teenage daughter and Rose’s relationship with her ex’s parents is so touching that one scene made me cry. And it was interesting seeing the US school system from the perspective of experienced teachers; I appreciated the details about their jobs.

Sweetest in the Gale: a Marysburg story collection contains three novellas about couples in their forties.

Sweetest in the Gale -- Griff is worried when Candy, a fellow English teacher, returns for the new school year uncharacteristically sombre and subdued. A really sweet romance about people who are navigating loss and grief.

Unraveled -- Maths teacher Simon is assigned to observe and mentor the new art teacher, Poppy. I enjoyed the threads of mystery.

Cover Me -- After a concerning mammogram result, Elizabeth marries an old friend so she’s covered by his health insurance. Predictable as anything, but that made it a safe position from which to explore serious and sobering topics.

40-Love: I’m not interested in tennis or holiday resorts; I was disappointed that this novel wouldn’t show Tess being an assistant principal; and even though some of my favourite fictional couples have a significant age-gap, I’m wary about age-gap romances (and socially-programmed to think it’s odd for a woman to date a much younger guy). But I liked the other stories in this series and I was curious. It’s Not really My Cup of Tea, but I was convinced that Tess and Lucas were both capable of making their (somewhat unconventional) relationship work. An interesting exercise in challenging my social-programming.

The Viscount Who Loved Me by Julia Quinn: After watching Bridgerton (not always to my tastes but mostly fun), curiosity prompted me to read the opening of the second novel, and I was so entertained by Kate Sheffield verbally sparring with the viscount, whom Kate is determined to prevent from marrying her younger sister. I continued to be entertained up until the viscount acts a bit too entitled on his wedding night (that’s unattractive, if outrightly problematic). Which left me in rather an uncharitable mood for the final act, so I can’t identify if the drama of dealing with past traumas didn’t meet the standard of the earlier comedy or if I just hold such scenes to differing standards.

[somefantasticplace]

THE SECRET LIFE OF BOB

On living in a homeless hostel, a year of paralysis and the Hell's Angel who stole his girlfriend

"Do you want me to tell you the truth?" asks Bob Mortimer. "It’s just that most people want me to lie and talk nonsense to them." Generally, people like to assume that he is a funny little fellow wearing a bra and clutching an oversized frying pan all year round.

More than anyone else who has spent so much time on our television screens in the last ten years, the off-duty Bob Mortimer is an impenetrable character. He has always maintained a lower public profile than his cohort Vic Reeves and, such is the fantastical nature of his on-screen persona, it is almost impossible to consider the life he leads outside it. On the telly, his every move - whether he is lowered from a ceiling impersonating Liberace or mock-scolding his comic partner - is able to reduce an audience to hysterics. There’s something about the every movement of his diminutive frame that is unfathomably amusing . It’s much the same when he’s off duty; his face is boyish and cheeky, his eyes permanently excited and his shouty laugh an almost constant accompaniment to his words.

He’s surprised but willing when he’s asked to tell the truth. And, remarkably, he maintains his affable demeanour as he begins to recount it. For the 30 years before he was famous, he occupied a world characterised by drinking, violence, anarchy, homelessness and incapacitating illness. It was out of those often dark and disturbing experiences that Mortimer grew to become the self effacing, likeable and outstandingly funny 40 year old he is today.

"We got the shit kicked out of us"

A childhood in Middlesbrough

Bob Mortimer’s home was made to breed recklessness: there were four brothers and no father. His Dad died when he was six and his Mum was left to discipline the rabble as best she could. "She tried her best to be strict. My eldest brother was a rocker and the next one down was a mod. Ours was the house that all their mates would come round to because there was no dad."

While his troublesome siblings misbehaved on the streets of Middlesbrough, the young Bob would occupy his entire time with football. "I’d play all day long," he says. "I wanted to be a footballer and I went for the apprenticeship with Middlesbrough FC. I was in their under-15 team. At the end of the season you were dragged into the office to be told if you were going to be taken on and I wasn’t. It was a shock because I was good - one of the best in my town. But you don’t realise what a big world it is and how many other good players there are."

His passion for the club was therefore confined to watching from the terraces. He started in the early Seventies, when hooliganism was approaching its golden age, and developed a strange fascination for the violence that surrounded him. He spray-painted the words "Boro Boot Boys" on the wall of Barclays bank in Middlesbrough town centre, but he became less of an enthusiastic observer after experiencing yobbery close up: "When I was 14 we were at Leeds and suddenly found ourselves surrounded - they knew we were ‘Boro. We got the shit kicked out of us. I was running away when I looked back and saw three of the Leeds fans kicking the shit out of my brother. So I ran back to try and help but this little boy held out a coke bottle at about head height and it smacked me one. I managed to jump in and had quite a good impact at first but after that we were done. I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking of. My brother was in hospital for weeks."

"I was a Libertarian Anarchist"

Becoming politically aware in Brighton

Being far more cautious about avoiding trouble, Mortimer went on to follow ‘Boro to 63 league grounds. It’s a statistic he reels off with childish enthusiasm. Remarkably, he continued his devotion even after leaving his home-town. When it came to choosing a university, the young Bob headed as far away from home as he could. "Quadrophenia had just come out and I loved the album," he says. "So I went down for my interview at Sussex University, I went and stood on Brighton beach and thought to myself ‘I’ve got to fucking come here.’ "

It was a whimsical decision that was to have a distinct impression on his character: "I’d just been in Middlesbrough playing football and all of a sudden I was studying stuff about racism which really opened my eyes. Until then I probably was a racist in so far as I just thought everything was fine. In Middlesbrough we had an Asian community but I never thought of them having anything to complain about. But once my eyes were open I developed that youthful passion about certain issues. I was a Libertarian anarchist. We chained ourselves to things and disrupted exams . It’s a load of wank really but it’s worthwhile on a personal level."

The first few months at Sussex were unhappy enough to tempt him to drop out. He remembers with distinct embarrassment the occasion on which he arrived at a law society ball, dressed in his Middlesbrough shirt and Doc Martens, to be confronted by a sea of chuckling Southern-types in tuxedos.

He found solace in the football team, of which he became a member and was coached by current Leicester City manager Martin O’Neil. While his new found politics provided a further focal point he didn’t become entirely serious. Drunk, he rampaged through the streets of Brighton one fateful evening putting in the front windows of two shops. "The police turned up straight away and all I could do was shrug, admit to it and say ‘Sorry, I’m pissed.’ " Threatened with a charge, his university tutor intervened and Mortimer was let off with an enormous fine. He spent years paying it off, but keeping his criminal record clean was essential to the career he was about to embark upon.

"I lived in a homeless hostel"

Hard times in South London

"I saw an advert that said: ‘Take on the government with Southwark Council.’ So I took the job as a lawyer." The newly idealistic Mortimer had taken a masters degree in welfare law and embraced the crusade against homelessness and degradation in one of the country’s most deprived boroughs. Ironically, it was he who ended up without a home. "I had nowhere to stay in London so the Council said that I could stay in their homeless hostel until I found somewhere. I ended up staying there for four years."

He admits he was shambolic in his day-to-day approach to working, but he was relatively successful as a lawyer. " I did a very good job of playing the system," he says with pride. "I could more or less guarantee people that could re-house them, which is what they wanted. They were living in dumps and I could get them out. It really changed their lives."

His successes were largely due to dogged approach to the job. This was an attribute he was to apply to his future career. "Bob is a worrier," says the Fast Show’s Charlie Higson, a long time friend and colleague who has recently directed Mortimer in Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased). "Whereas Jim [Vic to us] has an unswerving faith in everything they do, Bob studies tapes of their shows and takes extensive notes. He’s learnt a great deal from doing that, though."

Bob’s happy memories of legal success are harshly offset by the hardship he experienced during the same period. " I woke up one morning with rheumatoid arthritis," he says. "I went to lift my head but couldn’t. Then my mouth went. I had to drink through a straw and be dressed and bathed for about nine months." His girlfriend of the time nursed him through the illness in the confines of the hostel. Although there is an obvious downturn in his usually cheery expression, Mortimer recounts his experience with surprising matter-of-factness. Eventually, he found the right combination of pills to relieve the pain and return to work but the problem has forced him to abandon his love of playing football forever. "I just can’t do it, so I don’t think about it," he asserts briskly.

"I was pissed out of my head"

Meeting Vic Reeves

Work as a solicitor was arduous and poorly paid, but Mortimer ploughed on: after moving to a private practice he got 70 per cent of his 1500 clients acquitted. "I enjoyed being a solicitor at the beginning," he says. "But after a while the appeal tails off a bit and I was such a conservative fella that I didn’t think there was anything else I could do.  I just though ‘Well, this is it for the next 30 years.‘ "

It took a dramatic course of chance events to redirect him. "I was living in this hostel with my girlfriend. I came home one dinnertime and found this Hell’s Angel shagging her. I was terribly upset. I was standing there in my suit because I’d just come from court, so I looked a right c***. I just told her to get out."

That evening, he was keen to drown his sorrows but had few friends in London. In the end, he looked up a vague acquaintance from Middlesbrough. "I’d never really been in touch with him but I was desperate so I gave him a ring. He said he was going to see his mate do a comedy show and I said, ‘All right, I’ll come.’ " The mate turned out to be Jim Moir who was performing as Vic Reeves for the first time that night at the Goldsmith’s Tavern in London’s New Cross. "It was just Jim and five of his mates in the room upstairs. There wasn’t much to it - everyone got up and did something, it was just arseing about." Bob describes himself as being "painfully shy" and implies that it was only the circumstances that had brought him to the pub that night that encouraged him to get involved in the comedy. Almost every week, word of mouth would cause the size of the audience at the show to double. In the end, it moved downstairs into the pub and Bob became more and more involved.

If his recently-scorned mood had encouraged him to perform on his first night with Vic, how did he overcome his shyness in front of a packed boozer? "I was pissed out of my head," he admits. "I can’t believe I did it. But they were nice people in the audience and they would come up and talk to me afterwards. There must have been something in that that tempted me to carry on. Jim is naturally quite outgoing but I don’t know what the fuck I was doing on the stage. Getting a reaction was quite intoxicating for a man who had always been shy." Vic refutes this, claiming: "I’ve never thought of Bob as particularly shy. But there was something in both our upbringings that discouraged us from ever parading ourselves like peacocks."

Bob still describes these early shows as the funniest things he and his partner have ever produced and, as crowds of 250 people began to fill the venue, television executives began to show an interest. "The show taking off was such a gift," he reflects. "I was so conservative that, even if someone had offered me another job when I was a solicitor, I would have said no. But the one thing no-one can resist is the offer to go on telly. Even when we got the offer to do a series I made sure I still had a job to go back to. In fact, I only took twelve weeks off work." Things were suddenly changing in all aspects of his life. Just before his television debut, he returned from a break in Middlesbrough to find the hostel burned down by the man who lived in the room below: "He didn’t think anyone was in but there was and they had to jump from the top to escape," Bob remembers.

He was re-housed by the council to a flat in a Peckam tower block. He stayed throughout the first two series of Vic Reeves Big Night Out on Channel Four, and when the BBC poached him and Vic (in what must have been a lucrative deal), he still remained in the flat. In fact, he was there for two whole series of The Smell Of Reeves and Mortimer, by which time he had become one of the country’s most high profile performers. Why? "It was nothing more than deep-rooted laziness," he confesses. "Eventually I bought a place up the road. But when I was still in the flat I remember Lloyd Grossman wanted to do a Through The Keyhole with me. It would have been funny because it was a real cockroach infested place, but I resisted the temptation."

"There's always one that wants to hit you"

Growing up

Today, Bob Mortimer is slightly drunk. "I tried absinthe for the first time last night and I haven’t really recovered," he reveals. His stocky figure is unusually bedraggled as he makes himself a cup of tea and recounts the proceedings of his night out, during which Vic showed him his large collection of photographs of dog excrement. His experimentation with absinthe was the first drinking he has done in a full six months. In fact, he says, he tries to avoid pubs altogether nowadays: "There’s always one when you’re just having a drink and they say: ‘Who do you think you are?’ And they want to hit you. And we’re not fighting men. I mean, unless we’re out with [Mark] Lamarr. He’s handy - is that the word?"

Mortimer embarks on yet another change of direction in the forthcoming BBC series Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased). In it, he and Vic make their debuts as straight(ish) actors. "Bob was a bit embarrassed at first," says Reeves. "He had a couple of weeks where he was coached for straight acting, but I don’t think he needed it. He does worry about things, like what show we should do next and what direction we should take. I just let him work it out in his own mind before I talk to him about it." Behind the playful, casual exterior, there appears to be an intensity borne out of the fact that he truly treasures his career.

Last year, he announced an intention to stop working for up to three years in order to spend more time with his family. Since filming Randall & Hopkirk, Bob has immersed himself in a long spell of doing nothing. "I enjoy it because it’s like when you used to nick off school when you were a kid," he enthuses. "And I know, eventually, I’ll be going back to work." He is also occupied with his two young children. "Fatherhood is a massive turning point. But it surprises me how many people say they enjoy it from the off. I mean, my memories of the first two years with both my kids is of not sleeping - passing my girlfriend on the stairs and saying ‘We’ve got to get through this.’ " He now sees fatherhood as providing a sense of purpose in life, as well as being a bit of a laugh. "Lying kids on the bed, putting adult clothes over them and drawing ‘tasches on them is fucking hilarious!" he says. "I remember when our plumber Ken Fowler came round to fix the boiler. My boy was sitting in a highchair wearing a vest and we’d drawn a big tattoo on his arm that said ‘I love Ken Fowler’." Hysterics ensue at the memory of the plumber’s bafflement.

Indeed, Mortimer is happy to get his kicks as a family man nowadays. The fact that he was 30 by the time he embarked upon a life in showbiz meant that he had a more considered approach to the trappings of his success. "Me and Jim are quite susceptible to ‘mad for it’ areas," he says. "But I suspect that, had it all been available to us when we were 18 not 30, it would have blown our minds. I think, being older, you have the perspective so you try and be polite and helpful. You see some young comics acting line c***s, like they’re a big deal. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t have been like that myself at 18, but you do feel like telling them how lucky they are." Perhaps more than anyone in his position, Mortimer is well aware of what the alternatives are.

Later

April 2000

[torestoreamends]

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Recap: Cast Four – 22/23 & 26 May (Part One)

On Wednesday and Thursday I saw Cast Four for the first time. I came out of those performances unsure how I felt about the cast and the changes to the show. There was a lot that I didn’t like, and I didn’t feel excited about the year ahead at all. Looking back now, I was exhausted when I was watching those shows. I didn’t take much in, and when I was trying to write my recap I knew I was missing a lot. I felt neither passionate about nor proud of what I was writing. 

So on Sunday I got another ticket and tried again. I ended up sitting further back than I have in a year and a half, but also in the second most central seat I’ve had in a year. And it helped. 

I’ve always found that sitting close to the stage you focus on the action close to the front a lot more. It’s difficult to get the depth of what’s going on. When you sit slightly further back it’s far easier to take in the choreography, and what I was unhappy with on Wednesday and Thursday was largely the choreographic changes. 

My Sunday seat gave me a view like I was looking at a model box of the show — it was the sort of view the show was designed to be seen from. All the shapes came out, the lighting, the details of the movement, plus it was an absolute gift of a show. I fell in love with portrayals and changes I hadn’t been certain of, and fell even more deeply in love with the things I’d already enjoyed. 

So, without further ado, here are some thoughts about the new portrayals we’ve got (including our first cover of the year — the wonderful Gordon Millar as Karl etc.), followed by a recap of Sunday’s show, combined with thoughts from Wednesday and Thursday. 

Because this got exceptionally long (my second longest recap ever), I’ve split it in half. Part One is below, and Part Two can be found here.

*

David Mara — Station Master

If I had to pick anyone to step into Martin’s shoes, it would have been David. He was great in every role I saw him cover last year, and he was great in this role too. I like the strange whistle he does at the start of the scene — it reminds me of someone else who used to do proper signalling style whistles — and it’s fun to watch him looking with confusion at the boys as they chat in their corner (although I am concerned by how much he must overhear). I can’t wait to see this scene develop over the year.

Lucy Mangan — Myrtle

I think Lucy’s going to be a really excellent Myrtle (and I can’t wait to see her cover Delphi too). There were some great over the top little touches to her portrayal. When she did ‘the weeping after he was taken’, she cried once then stopped, cried again then stopped, then one of the boys started trying to talk so she held a hand up to stop him while she cried a third time. It’s ridiculous little details like that, which make me most excited to see her again. 

Blythe Duff — Professor McGonagall

They honestly couldn’t have found a better person to take over from Sandy. Blythe is the first McGonagall not to have the Maggie Smith look, but that actually made me love her more. It was her warmth and charm and sparkle that made her feel like McGonagall, and I would probably fight to the death for her already.

Her Trolley Witch was also gorgeous. I’ve seen many Trolley Witch debuts over the years, and even ones I ultimately come to love have felt disappointing first time round, but not this one. She captured the right feeling of ancient, authoritative power so perfectly. I cannot wait to see her again.

Gordon Millar as Karl

Our first cover of the year, and what a good one. On Wednesday and Thursday he went straight onto my ‘must watch’ list, so a big part of me deciding to go for a ticket on Sunday was the desire to see him. 

His Karl is actually quite sweet (which I think stems from Gordon being a lovely, funny human being), but in the St Oswald’s scene Gordon’s character is an absolute — to put it bluntly — dick. He’s a bully, a nasty piece of work, and it really helps the scene (more on that later). I also loved Gordon’s Krum a lot. This one has great movement (like seemingly everyone in the cast), and I cannot wait to see more of him.

Luke Sumner and Emma-May Uden as Yann and Polly

I feel bad lumping these two together but in the show they really did come as a pair. They were perfect fake, popular, nasty individuals. I’ve never hated Yann and Polly more, and I mean that in the best possible way. They were just the sort of people who would bully Albus and Scorpius, and I loved it.

Ronnie Lee as Craig

My heart belongs to Ronnie. There was just something so likeable about him. Sometimes Craig feels like a little ray of sunshine, and that’s just how it should be. Also, I appreciate the boldness of someone who’ll full on lie on the death table, with both feet in the air, so it looks like they’ve been blasted off their feet and are falling to the ground in slow motion. That was an excellent death.

Another thing I noticed about Ronnie was his dance talent. There was a Mackley-esque fierceness to his Death Eater dance, and he was just generally brilliant at the movement. This whole cast is so noticeably strong on the movement — possibly the strongest so far.

Also, while I’m talking about Ronnie I have to mention the other two members of the most adorable trio of Slytherin boys ever — there’s Gordon, as mentioned above, and Duncan Shelton. They had some chants going on in the first task, some excitable stampy feet, and just lots of general sweetness. I can’t wait to get to know these three better. They’re going to be brilliant.

Kathryn Meisle as Umbridge

One of our very first Hogwarts foreign exchange students. I thought she did a really good job, and I particularly thought her Petunia was good. Also, she did a little skip when she was going off after telling Scorpius he was ruining Voldemort, which was just the perfect touch of sweet, girlish, disgusting Umbridge.

Madeleine Walker as Delphi

I had two first impressions of Madeleine as Delphi. First, I don’t know how many of you have seen Puffs, but in terms of attitude and eyeliner she looked just like Megan — like she’s trying to be edgy but is actually just a nerd. My other first impression, related to that, was that Delphi was exactly the sort of person that Albus and Scorpius would want to be friends with. 

She’s awkward and nerdy and has the same vibe as they do. It’s easy to see how well she’s playing them, especially in Part One. But at the same time, once she’s revealed her true self she doesn’t change much, and there’s something very creepy about that. This person who seems so harmless and nice has all this evil lurking literally right under the surface, and she holds very little of herself back. 

It should also be said that at some point this year, Madeleine is going to deliver the wildest Torture Scene we’ve ever had. Even on Sunday she absolutely blew me away, and it’s only going to get better. I’m so excited. 

Michelle Gayle as Hermione

I liked Michelle‘s Hermione. She had a bit of the know-it-all vibe, and her Hermione felt quite young. There was this obvious relation to book Hermione that worked well. I particularly liked her scene in Harry’s office right at the start of the play. She felt like Harry’s friend from the books. I also think that she’s got a lot of great thoughts about the character, and I can’t wait to see her engage with them throughout her performance and develop them over the year.

She made a great attempt to play Delphi Polyjuiced, which I really appreciated. That was a big highlight from her. It’s surprising how rare it is to see the adults actually try to replicate what the kids are doing (aside from Jamie B, who’s a master of the art).

Rayxia Ojo as Rose

Rayxia’s back, and it’s wonderful. Her Rose has always seemed so grown up and mature, and next to Dominic’s Albus she feels particularly so, just because she looks so tall beside him. It’s weird because in all the ensemble scenes she’s one of the shortest people around. Anyway, it’s great to have her back in the show, she works wonderfully with Michelle (there’s a similarity of character there that’s really nice), and I can’t wait to see more from her.

Ryan Mackay as James

I’ve seen Ryan as James a few times before, and always enjoyed him, but he seems to have come into his own with this cast. He particularly owned the Lily and James death scene, and it was uncanny how much he and Dom looked like brothers when they were standing near each in the opening scene. I also adored his Cedric, particularly on Sunday, and he has a very fine background moment in St Oswald’s that I truly think helps make the scene palatable. I’m so pleased he gets an expanded role with this cast and seems to be flourishing with it. 

Dominic Short as Albus

Sometimes when I watch someone play a character in this show for the first time I feel an instant comfort in their portrayal, and that was how I felt with Dom. It was a mixed blessing because I felt so comfortable and confident in him that I didn’t pay him as much attention as I should have done (there was lot to take in), but I really loved him. Thankfully, on Sunday I get to pay a lot closer attention to him, and he absolutely blew me away. Even from near the back of the stalls his expressiveness drew me in. 

His Albus has a certain happiness to him. He’s less broken than the last couple have been. There’s genuine jubilation in his portrayal at certain moments, like when he casts some of the spells successfully and when they figure out how to get a message to Harry.

There are many moments when he reminded me vividly of Sam’s Albus (which will never be a problem), and I loved the flashes of anger and emotion. On first viewing I felt that he was quite a young Albus, especially after Joe whose Albus was quite mature and surprisingly thoughtful. However, on second viewing he felt a lot more self-aware, and there was some real tenderness there. Some absolutely beautiful moments.

One of my favourite things about him was that in Part One he feels wrapped up in his own problems, and you can clearly see the spiral from an enthusiastic boy looking forward to going to Hogwarts to an angry, miserable, withdrawn young man by fourth year. The transition scene was perfectly played in that regard.

I really was very impressed by him. I think he’s the Albus they’ve been trying to cast since the show opened. He has Sam’s fierce anger and prickliness, with Theo’s emotion, Joe’s humour, and an ability to adapt and change to what’s going on around him. We’re only at the start and already he’s sparking my imagination and making me desperate to see more. This is going to be the most excellent year.

*

So, with those first impressions out of the way, let’s get into some changes and great character moments.

Opening and transition scene (Act One, Scenes One to Four)

The weird thing about a first show, especially one in which the person playing the Sorting Hat is staying the same, is that for the first few seconds nothing feels different. It could be any other show. But then the first member of the ensemble walks out and you realise that everything has changed.

There’s a new bit of choreography in the first scene that I was pre-warned of but of course completely forgot about until it happened, so it took me by surprise. The Sorting Hat (who now wears glasses as part of his costume – fun facts) stands in the middle of the stage and manipulates the people around him. There’s a whole group that he diverts with a flash of light, a man he turns round with a gesture, and he makes the woman at the front of the stage walk round her suitcase.

As someone who loves the Sorting Hat, his role in the play, and what it means, the whole interaction felt a bit random. It’s obviously a flashy opening to the show, with a bit of magic, but I’ve never seen the Sorting Hat as a manipulator. I’ve realised recently that he’s a protector and guardian of the boys (particularly of Scorpius) in the same way that Hagrid is a protector of Harry, and he’s also the bringer of magic to the show, but this doesn’t seem to add anything to that. If anything, there needed to be more of the manipulation – there were only three interactions, so it didn’t actually make that much of an impact on someone seeing it of the first time. To me it ought to be go big or go home.

On the second viewing I realised that technically bringing Harry onto Platform 9 3/4 could count as one of the manipulations (it’s got the same sound effect associated with it), and I also realised that he never seems to touch a group that has Delphi in. So maybe there is some meaning in there if you dig a bit.

The first big line change is Lily’s line in the opening scene, which is no longer ‘Are they here? Maybe they didn’t come’. It’s not her wondering whether the Granger-Weasleys are late, and lamenting that they’re always late. Thankfully this isn’t a line from the epilogue, so the change doesn’t really have that much impact. It’s another of the random changes that we now see throughout the show – ones that don’t really make much of a difference, and it’s unclear why they were made.

In this opening scene, seeing Dom and Ryan side by side showed how perfect their casting as brothers is. They look so similar, particularly in face shape. 

Watching this cast for a second time from a distance let me appreciate a really cool James moment properly for the first time. When Albus is being sorted, James and Scorpius are on complete opposite sides of the stage, perfectly symmetrical, and they’re the only two people in the crowd picked out by a spotlight, which illuminates both their faces. It’s like Albus’s Sorting is visibly tearing him between his family and his new best friend, and it lets you see both their reactions perfectly — James’s bewilderment and Scorpius’s disbelieving excitement. 

Going back to the opening scene, we got to see the first glimpse of Dom’s Albus before anything happens to him. There’s a youthful joy there. He laughs at Ron’s jokes and seems to be relaxed around his family. He’s genuinely excited to be going to Hogwarts. Until he gets there…

There are directions throughout the transition scene that with each passing year, Albus gets more withdrawn and miserable, and that’s just how Dom played it. You could see the process of Albus becoming increasingly demoralised with life at Hogwarts, and it was wonderful. Right from the start, Dom had such ownership over Albus, putting his stamp on the role, and even just the first scene made me excited to see him in Part Two – it was an excellent start.

In the first show everything was technically perfect, but in the show on Sunday, the fire didn’t work on the Incendio trick. However, Dom’s cover for it was perfect, and added something to the character. He just sighed very heavily and sort of threw his hands in the hair as he said he didn’t expect it to work anyway. I never realised before how that line is so open to all possibilities.

The next few obvious changes came in the transition scene: Scorpius now offers Rose a rose in London (is it a trick rose? It looked like it had a collapsible stem to me), also, when the boys’ potion explodes, the kids around Albus and Scorpius flop forwards instead of bending backwards. And then, of course, you get the wand dance.

Dominic was so bold in the wand dance, which I really enjoyed. Nothing was held back and everything was extended and gone for. There was actually lots I loved about the new choreography in this scene too (I think it was one of the biggest successes of all the changed elements). There are lots of circles and lines, and my favourite moment was when all the other kids circled round Albus, leaning in and looming over him. I also liked that he got a moment to fit in and help the others – just a brief flash of success, that must be all the more painful for being so fleeting.

The new wand dance begins with a big flashy trick – the current shot of fire now connects up to a sort of flaming rope on the ceiling, so that brief spark flies all the way from the bottom to the top of the stage. It ends with the usual red smoke, and one of the other kids taunting Albus: “Even his wand wants to be in Gryffindor”.

To briefly backtrack, I need to give a quick shoutout to Dom’s “I stayed for your sweets” from Sunday. He did a little dad dance as he said it, and I can only describe it as like he was milking a cow. A little up and down motion with his hands, fists clenched. I know it sounds weird (this show has made me write some very bizarre descriptive phrases) but he made it work, even if he did look like a ridiculous nerd doing it. 

Blanket Scene (Act One, Scenes Six and Seven)

I really liked the introduction to Delphi in the scene before the Blanket Scene. Her conversation with Albus is really sweet, and she curtised to him before she went off to talk to Amos (the first of two curtsies in the show — the second was to Scorpius when he called her The Augurey). 

One of her finest moments was when she shook hands with Harry and looked at the scars on his hand. You could feel her reading ‘I must not tell lies’ and mentally calling him out for lying right in front of her. After all, he does know about the Time-Turner, she knows he does, and she also knows that he’s lying to Amos. It was such a powerful, silent moment of judgement. A gorgeous little detail.

In the Blanket Scene itself, I adored how Dom’s Albus interacted with his siblings. Because I was so far away for the Sunday show I couldn’t actually see or hear Albus laughing at James’s antics, but I could see his shoulders bouncing from the laughter. And then when Lily comes in looking for her Potions book, Albus holds his hands up to say it’s not his fault. It’s only when Harry comes into the room that he finally sits down, perched on the edge of the bed, and from that moment he never really relaxed or seemed comfortable. His space had been invaded, and he tensed up almost immediately. 

Once they got into the scene itself, we found an angry Albus, who wasn’t afraid to raise his voice and fight back. At no point did he seem even close to accepting the blanket, and there was an expression on his face that said that he hated his dad’s reasoning for giving it to him. He knew the gift was all about Harry, and he detested it right from the word go.

One of the things I noticed about Dom’s Albus was how he always shrank back, never holding his ground. He ended up occupying parts of the stage that people don’t normally go to – only by a few centimetres sometimes, but it was still noticeable. In this scene he was pushed well back beyond the bed, and again in the final scene he hid among the graves, keeping a physical distance from Harry. In this particular scene it worked really well, the shrinking away, closing himself off, as Harry got more heated. I also loved that he said the final line of the scene the original way round: ‘No luck or love for me then’. 

Dom’s is one of the angriest Blanket Scenes we’ve had for a while. He really explodes, and it’s wonderful. He fully unfolds the blanket when he describes it as mouldy, and gives it a look of disgust that Harry is so upset by. 

St Oswald’s (Act One, Scene Thirteen)

I have now seen the new St Oswald’s three times (once on Broadway, twice in London), and I still can’t say that I’m convinced by it. 

At first I hated it. With a passion. It starts off alright, with a biscuit palace appearing onstage, then quickly descends into something quite distasteful. The stage direction in the script for this scene is about magic being done for fun. It’s supposed to be joyful, people who can do magic because they love it rather than having to do it for work or study. It should be colourful and vibrant, as well as chaotic.

What we get is certainly chaotic, but as the employees of St Oswald’s play various tricks on the residents, there’s an uncomfortable feeling to the scene. There’s not a nice spirit there. Previously the scene has been hilarious and delightful. Now it’s just mean, and borders on elder abuse, which just isn’t necessary. The scene could have been remade without going anywhere near that territory, and I do think it’s a serious misstep. Not to mention the fact that some of the tricks are so juvenile and fake (one lady gets stuck inside a sofa, with a pair of legs that are so clearly not her own sticking up in the air). 

On Sunday, my third viewing of it, however, I did start to see sort of what they were going for, and there were a couple of redeeming features. When you sit close to the front it’s difficult to see the choreography going on towards the back of the stage, so sitting further back allowed me to see Ryan’s role in the scene, and I loved what he brought to it. 

His staff member has a very brief role in proceedings, but I think it’s essential. While Gordon was bullying the residents (which he did with incredible viciousness), Ryan was looking utterly horrified. There was an expression on his face that just said ‘this is so far from okay, I’m not doing this’, and that was the point when he exited the scene. 

It was really good to see someone in character acknowledging how bad what was going on was, and showed a self-awareness that I hadn’t realised was there before. There was also the fact that at the end of the scene, when the nasty staff member gets his comeuppance (he ends up holding a teacup that’s spilling over with fire), the residents of St Oswald’s all started dancing and enjoying themselves. Those two things combined really helped me with it, and I think with further viewings I might come around to accepting it. 

It is still frustrating to have to work so hard on it though. I’ve always loved this show for its artistry and joyful magic, and this scene feels like an unnecessary step away from that. What was wrong with the original, very funny, perfectly good spirited version of the scene? 

Around the map (Act One, Scene Seventeen)

The scene where the adults talk around the map, trying to work out where Albus and Scorpius might be, is always a bit of a dark horse of a scene. It doesn’t feel that important, but there’s always so much fascinating character work going on there. And so it was in this show.

I caught Harry and Ginny having a silent conversation, in which Harry told Ginny not to mention what he said to Albus. I’m pretty sure that was because he didn’t want Draco to know, and if he had to tell Hermione he’d rather tell her in person. And yet of course Ginny brings up an opportunity for him to tell everyone. It made it feel almost as if she was betraying him, which did actually work.

There’s a lot of conflict during the show between Harry and Ginny. It’s hidden because their relationship is so strong and they do spend so much time interacting. They obviously love one another. But Ginny does find Harry’s actions difficult to swallow sometimes. She calls him out on them. And that tiny interaction in this scene really laid the groundwork for that.

Ginny’s priority throughout the play is Albus. Harry is a grown man who can look after himself, and while she loves him, she knows that Albus is by far the more vulnerable party here, and she’s going to fight every step of the way to find him and help him. In this scene, getting Harry to admit what he’s done is the best way of achieving that, so she makes it happen. She doesn’t actively tell everyone what Harry’s role in Albus’s disappearance was, but she puts him in a position that enables him to tell the truth.

To know that that came from a silent conversation between the two of them was so fascinating, and it added an extra dimension to the journey they take through the rest of the show. We could not be more lucky. Jamie and Susie are such fantastic actors, and the thought they bring to their characters is game changing.

Opening of Act Two (Act Two, Scene One)

Here were a couple of changes that I loved straight away. Before in the dream sequence, young Harry has been haunted by a single, ghostly hand, and that’s still the case. Except in the new version, by the end there are three hands reaching for him.

This might be a bit random, but I really liked the fact that there were three hands, not four. The odd number threw things off and added to the creepiness of it. There was something even more unnatural about the dream. And actually what I noticed throughout the show is that in the moments that are meant to be unnatural and wrong, tiny bits of choreography have been tweaked to make that vibe feel so tangible. 

The other great thing about this new version of the dream is that Harry finally does look like he’s wet himself. It’s a detail that should have been added years ago, but I’m glad it’s here now. Also, Harry’s clothes are now genuinely too big for him. They look like adult’s clothes, just the way they should. Those little things make all the difference.

The adults visit McGonagall’s Office (Act Two, Scene Three)

There were so many reasons to love Blythe as McGonagall, but one of my favourites came in this scene. As they were leaving the office to go and find the boys, she saw Ron with the napkin tucked into his top, and reached across to take it off him with a tut. It was so brusque and no nonsense, plus it hinted at her familiarity with him and the others. Although she holds power over them (even Hermione) by virtue of being one of the most wise and respected figures in the Wizarding World, this group are also colleagues in a sense — fellow soldiers who have fought through a war together — and the respect goes both ways. Respect and fondness. Almost a familial bond. It was such a sweet little touch. 

Expelliarmus Scene (Act Two, Scene Four)

This is one of the big trick scenes that can go wrong, but I’m pleased to report that it didn’t in either show. There was an air of confidence from both Madeleine and Dom, and the trick worked really smoothly. Being able to pull that one off with such panache must take guts, especially first time out, and they did a great job. In fact they were both very good with the magic throughout.

Another excellent Delphi moment came at the end of this scene (only in the first show — sadly it wasn’t repeated on Sunday). After she kissed Albus on the cheek, Scorpius did his normal flailing routine in front of her, and she was having none of it. She rolled her eyes and, from several metres away, did a fake little ‘mwah mwah’ in the air, roughly directed to either side of his face. It was sarcastic, impatient, and designed to let him know that he needed to get out of her way fast, which he did. It was a great way of handling his ridiculousness.

Bane and the search for the boys (Act Two, Scene Five)

One of the little details I noticed during the opening of this scene, when everyone was searching the forest, was that Harry wasn’t quite alone when he started calling for Albus and Scorpius. On Wednesday I assumed this was just because the ensemble were a little bit slow getting off the stage, but it was the same on Sunday too, and I was really pleased. I liked it as a sign of Harry’s desperation. Even amongst all these other people helping him, he starts shouting for his son. No waiting for a private moment. No embarrassment. Just his guilt and his need to get his son back safely.

First Task (Act Two, Scene Seven)

If anyone was afraid that the First Task might be a little quiet without the Mackley, Josh, and James Phoon show, you needn’t be. There was plenty of chaos going on, enough to make it difficult to watch the main action.

This was the scene that made me fall in love with the trio of Slytherin boys – Ronnie, Gordon, and Duncan. They were simply wonderful, and absolutely adorable. They had a little chant that I couldn’t quite catch (I think it might have been Cedric related), and then there was some excitable chanting of Krum’s name when he was announced. Also, Ronnie kept stamping his feet to emphasise his applause, and it looked like the three of them were having a whale of a time.

On Sunday, when Gordon was in Hufflepuff, Ronnie went on a Josh-style excursion to visit him, which was very sweet. When he got back to Slytherin there was a lot of hat stealing and Krum chanting and just general chaos. 

Hospital Wing (Act Two, Scenes Eight and Nine)

Albus had a little nightmare while Harry was talking to Dumbledore. He didn’t thrash around as much as Theo used to, it was quite contained, but he was definitely bothered by something going on in his head. There’s something nice about an Albus waking up with a shout of his dad’s name. Even after everything, he still subconsciously loves and needs his dad.

Another little detail from this scene was that this Albus actually ate some of the chocolate. It’s always fun to note who does and doesn’t (Joe very much did not).

One of my favourite Dominic moments came in the scene after this one, when Albus tells Scorpius that he can’t speak to him anymore. He was sharp with Scorpius, but it seemed to be driven by his desire to at least try and do what was necessary to make peace with his dad. However, he was certainly not happy about it. After he’d told Scorpius they’d be better off without each other, he turned to his dad to say ‘okay?’ It was spiteful, spat out, as if saying ‘are you happy now?’ As much as he wants his dad’s affection, he hates the things he has to do to try and get it.

Staircase Ballet (Act Two, Scene Twelve)

This was the first scene where I really noticed the difference in height between Jonathan and Dominic. I obviously knew that Jonathan is the tallest Scorpius we’ve ever had and Dominic the shortest Albus, but there’s something about seeing it in person that makes it all so much more real.

The two boys came together at the top of the stairs (the point when they’re standing side by side, and Albus is trying to avoid Scorpius’s eyes) and there they were. Tall and tiny.

The other thing I really loved about this staircase ballet came from something I’ve noticed before. While Scorpius moves through Hogwarts with ease, from staircase to staircase without a thought, Albus hits dead ends and has to wind his way through the school. It’s like the school accepts Scorpius, but is rejecting Albus. And in both these shows, when Albus walked out from the wings to climb the staircase and meet Scorpius in the middle, he was faced with the wrong end of the staircase. Instead of having steps leading up, there was an unattainable ledge high above him. It was just another sign of the school shutting him out. Another barrier. Sometimes he must feel that he can’t possibly get anywhere – even the building is against him, let alone the classes, his magic, and his fellow students.

Library Scene (Act Two, Scene Sixteen)

I don’t remember much from this scene on Wednesday, but Sunday was vivid, so let’s talk about that. In fact, let’s just talk about Dominic. 

In every scene, but in this one particularly, his body language alone carried right to the back of the theatre. While Scorpius was yelling at Albus, most of the time he was on the verge of stepping forward. He wanted to interrupt, to defend himself, to just say something, maybe even apologise. He was constantly on tiptoes, half stepping forward, half rooted to the spot, shoulders hunched, Time-Turner cradled in his hand. 

Then Scorpius started talking about his mum, and that was when Albus finally stopped trying to interject. He stepped back, bowing his head. He seemed to shrink, and all the fight went out of him until there was just despair. 

When I first saw Dom’s Albus I thought he might be selfish, but on Sunday I realised just how self-aware he is. Especially in the library scene he was so conscious of everything he’d done and said, and what Scorpius was directing at him. It was heartbreaking to see him crumble like that. And when he got onto his apology there was such softness to it, but also power, this drive to let Scorpius know the truth. It was such a beautiful apology, and I’m so pleased that by Sunday Dom had already found Albus’s softer side, because (probably down to nerves) that was the one thing I was lacking on Wednesday and Thursday. 

The other big thing to talk about in this scene has to be the hug. I don’t even know if it can be described as a hug, because there wasn’t much of the boys holding onto each other. While Dom did attempt to do some hugging, Jonathan just draped himself over Dom’s shoulders. He was hanging off him, arms dangling down his back. Only very briefly did Scorpius actually pat Albus’s back, before they parted. It was one of the most awkward disasters of a hug I’ve ever seen. I loved it.

Act Two ending

A couple of little things to finish off Part One:

McGonagall absolutely embraced ‘I solemnly swear that I am up to no good’. She did the most epic wand swish, and was really going for it. Rebellious McGonagall might be my absolute favourite thing to come from the show.

When the boys are under the lake, they now have wild static hair. I noticed it first because I spotted how wild Dom’s hair was. Then I noticed that Scorpius’s wig was sticking up. It took me a second to twig that it was because they were meant to be underwater. At first I thought it was a nice touch, but then I realised that, because the hair doesn’t move like they’re underwater, it kind of just looks like they’ve been attacked with balloons backstage. Also, I feel really sorry for Dom who has to brush that mess out before he can go and have lunch. A little puff of wind or something to make the hair move might make the whole thing more effective. It’s difficult to tell. But for now I guess I’ll just be entertained by how wild they look.

Umbridge did a very creepy skip as she went off after telling Scorpius about Voldemort Day. It was chillingly perfect; just the right amount of gross girlishness.

The Dementor on stage left is wild. Both on Wednesday and Sunday it kept pogoing up and down like mad. I kind of love it. It’s very excitable. 

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So that’s Part One. Click here for Part Two and a little bit of summing up >

[preserving-ferretbrain]

Review and Digression: The Black Magician Trilogy and Fantasy in General

by Dan H

Friday, 04 January 2008Dan remains unnecessarily complicated~

I don't read a lot these days. I'm lazy and easily distracted. When I do read, I tend to read fantasy. Growing up on Narnia, D&D, Warhammer and Terry Pratchett left me with the kind of mind which adapts to fictional worlds far more easily than real ones. Unfortunately despite having an abiding infatuation with the Fantasy genre, I don't actually ... well ... like it very much. Leaving aside the fact that a lot of it just isn't very good (a criticism which could be levelled at any genre, including literary fiction) it tends to be overlong, rambling, and full of annoying details about the history of imaginary places. George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, for example, began amazingly, creating a rich and detailed world with a complex multiple-viewpoint narrative, creating a real sense of the unfolding of history, and I loved the early books with a passion. The later books, however, got horribly bogged down in history and worldbuilding and the annoying obsession with detailing every last second of events in the Seven Kingdoms as it unfolded. Similarly while I loved The Hobbit, I could never get past the first book of The Lord of the Rings because of all the goddamned scenery. And the least said about Harry Potter the better. 

I picked up Trudi Canavan's The Magician's Guild out of a smug sense of irony. The blurb on the back, which describes a none-too-original situation with a Magician's Guild who march through a city protected by a shield of pure magic driving out vagrants, only to find that a plucky young slum girl can penetrate their defences by means of her hitherto unknown magical power, left me with the impression that the book would be at best amusingly awful, but worth picking up on buy-one-get-one-free.

I started reading the book with the same patronising self-assurance, quietly laughing at the rather generic fantasy names and the peculiar made-up wildlife. About three chapters in, however, something happened. I realised that I was actually really enjoying reading the book. I wasn't storing up scathing comments to put on the internet at a later date, or constructing detailed point-by-point analysis of why the series was subtly advocating neo-Marxist doctrines through the medium of a story about wizards. I was actually enjoying it. Taking a moment to think about it, I realised that the source of my enjoyment was something I had seldom seen before in a fantasy novel: the plot was actually progressing. Every chapter, something happened which built on the things that happened in the previous chapter, and set up the things that were going to happen in the next chapter. It introduced conflicts and then resolved them, usually in the space of less than two hundred pages. Not only that but, wonder of wonders, once something had been resolved, it stayed resolved. There were no "protagonist gets captured, protagonist escapes, protagonist gets captured again, protagonist escapes again" sequences. Not a page in the book is wasted on irrelevant descriptions or pointless sidequests.

On her website (which I will say more about later) Trudi Canavan describes herself as having a short attention span, if she is bored writing something - says Trudi - then she assumes people will get bored reading it. Perhaps the reason I loved these books so much is that Trudi's attention span seems to match my own almost exactly. Every time I found myself thinking "okay, I've had enough of this plotline now," the plot would be resolved within two pages and taken in a completely new direction. Each book in the Black Magician Trilogy is in two parts, and in between parts one and two, the book changes gear completely. In The Magician's Guild, for example, the first half of the book focuses on Sonea (the protagonist) trying to avoid being taken in by the magician's guild, while the second half focuses on her trying to avoid being thrown out again, and the transition comes at exactly the point where you start thinking "okay, I've had enough of this girl running away from people now". This pattern repeats in books two and three, with the change of pace at the half-way point being both refreshing and genuinely surprising.

Canavan's mastery of pacing extends to the overarching plot of the trilogy as well as to the individual books. A common problem in Fantasy series is for it to be obvious from chapter one of book one how the series is going to end, which makes the rest of the series into so much pointless preamble. I know I promised I wouldn't bring up Harry Potter, but the last three HP books are an excellent example of this problem. Once Voldemort comes back, it's obvious that we're just waiting for Harry to hit eighteen so he can confront the bugger, and books five, six, and seven are just 1500 pages of buildup. Canavan, on the other hand, very carefully reveals her plot elements only at the point at which they become relevant. The plot of book two is set up in the last chapters of book one, the plot of book three is set up in the last chapters of book two. At no point do we have to ask ourselves why we care about subplot X when main issue Y is clearly more important.

To put it another way. Trudi Canavan is blessedly aware that she is writing a novel, a work of fiction intended to entertain a reader. There is a popular adage that a fantasy novel is like a window into another world, and too many fantasy writers take this literally, seeming to view their books as something which you look through in order to see whatever happens to be going on in their secondary creation at a given time. Canavan never loses sight of the fact that she is writing fiction, telling a story, trying to entertain people.

This becomes ever more apparent if you look at her excellent

personal website

, which is full of beautifully down-to-earth bits of information and opinion. A rather nice section on her weblog explains the sorts of fanmail questions she won't be answering, one of which is "Pedantic Irrelevant Detail Questions". In particular she points out that "You know, if I didn't mention it, it was probably not relevant". As our esteemed editor has already pointed out

elsewhere on Ferretbrain

there is a nasty tendency for modern writers (particularly fantasy writers) and modern readers (particularly fantasy readers) to view works of fiction as having some kind of set, external reality, and to view questions like "is Dumbledore gay" or "how do you explain the discrepancies between the Star Wars prequels and the implied backstory of the original trilogy" as having a definitive, relevant answer. Throughout her website, Trudi espouses a beautifully sensible view of her work. She views writing as a craft you get better at by practising, and her books as works of fiction she created to entertain an audience. She also comes across as charmingly geeky (check out her pinboards full of notes and hand-drawn maps).

Looking back at the above 1200 words, I seem to have been rather embarrassingly gushy. I'd love to redeem myself with some sarcastic barbs about style or characterisation, but I genuinely don't have any. I could make some kind of joke about the made-up animals (all of the animals in Canavan's worlds are fictional, with the peculiar exception of horses) but it seems frankly churlish to do so (particularly given the fact that she has explained and defended her decision to pack her world with invented rodents on several occasions). The Black Magician Trilogy is by no means great literature (which is good, because great literature bores my tits off), but it is well written, engaging fantasy. It's tightly plotted, masterfully paced, the protagonists are all interesting and likeable.

I still wish she'd call a cow a cow though.Themes:

Books

,

Trudi Canavan

,

Sci-fi / Fantasy

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Wardog

at 16:31 on 2008-01-04Also she's hotter than Scott Lynch...

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Rami

at 18:26 on 2008-01-04Yay! I liked the Black Magician trilogy too -- although I thought bits of it did seem just a tad contrived -- and I'm glad it's not been ripped to shreds :-)

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http://davidlynch.org/

at 08:03 on 2009-11-25This is an excessively late comment.

I, too, really enjoyed the Black Magician trilogy, but there were two things in the final book which annoyed me enough that I'm unlikely to ever go back and reread it.

(Spoilers ahoy, gentle reader.)

First: Akkarin's death felt pointless, and seemed to mainly happen so that the trilogy could end on an "awesomely tragic" note. It sat poorly with the tone of the rest of the series, and broke my immersion in the world. Actually, the death itself I'm okay with... it was Sonea finding out she was pregnant that really got to me.

Second: The only character in the series who's sympathetic to gay people turns out to be gay... it's just he could never admit it to himself until now! This just bugged me. All it would have taken is for him to not be the only tolerant person, and I'd have been fine with it.

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Dan H

at 11:22 on 2009-11-25I'm okay with Akkarin dying - I kinda felt it was heading that way. I mean once you've got life-energy transfer magic it's pretty much mandatory for somebody to sacrifice themselves with it.

The "and then she turns out to be pregnant" thing was a little bit irksome. If only because I'm beginning to get sick of the fact that people in fantasy settings only *ever* seem to get pregnant after their partners die (and then *always* do). It's like some kind of extremely severe population control policy in Fantasyland.

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Wardog

at 13:27 on 2009-11-25This is completely off-topic but zomg, you write WoW add-ons! That is way cooler than being a director.

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Rami

at 17:12 on 2009-11-25

zomg, you write WoW add-ons! That is way cooler than being a director.

I almost agree. I mostly think

lj.py

is much more amusing than Mulholland Drive;-).

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[mostlygibberish]

I liked the part with the donkey jumpscare.

After watching High Noon last week, I saw a few people saying John Wayne hated it so much he made Rio Bravo in response. Well, having seen it now, it struck me as more of a stubborn refusal than any serious counterargument. Rio Bravo was about as traditional western as it gets, but in a petty, defiant kind of way. Not that it matters much; It's a great movie in its own right.

The plot was solid, the characters were all pretty interesting, and the action scenes were very well done. My only real issues were with the inconsistent pacing, and the way the situation felt like it was being taken too lightly by everyone involved. The inclusion of a random musical interlude was quite jarring too, but with Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson performing, it worked fine.

Dean Martin gave a surprisingly great performance as the alcoholic deputy, though admittedly I've never seen him act before now to have any point of reference. Angie Dickinson brought a cute, likeable energy to her role, but the way she fell head over heels for John Wayne at first glance was just lazy and unconvincing.

The dialogue-less bar fight at the beginning was a bit weird, but things soon fell into a more familiar, predictable structure. John Wayne really just plays that exact same character in every movie, huh?

At one point Dude's face was being shaved, and the foley was ridiculously loud for no good reason. Every time Ricky Nelson smiled I thought about how his teeth were far too immaculate to be in a western.

I was surprised the climactic battle wasn't quite the end of things, but that they didn't linger long enough for the marshal to arrive either. Most of the movie was building up those two events, or at least whichever would come first, so to run a full ten minutes beyond one of them without covering the other was a strange decision.

No moral ambiguity or questionable authority figures here. Just a traditional, predictable western, and a great one at that.

[imgonnabeyourbubblegumwitch]

January Book: Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda (A Review)

In which I attempt to condense the complicated emotional roller coaster this book sent me on into a rational and non-screaming-in-anger review.

I think I did okay.  

Some spoilers so I’ve given my general opinion below and the actual review is below the cut. 

Simon vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda: 1/5 Stars

Yeah I didn’t like it. I’m surprised too. 

I guess what frustrates me most about this book is some kind of internal insistence that I had to read it because it was LGBT and everyone else loved it. But it was making me miserable. But it was LGBT and everyone else loved it. But it wasn't fun. But it was…etc.

Anyway I guess shout out to Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda for reminding me there's no point reading something I hate just because other people like it or because it’s a particular genre. 

(Going to use this pretty obvious revelation to happily quit the Scarlet Witch comics I started just before Christmas. Marvel says she's no longer Magneto's daughter? Interesting opinion. I accept it's canon but I sure as hell aren't accepting it as my headcanon).

Anyway proper review below as promised. 

So I feel like I am going to be in a minority here but I really wasn't into this book. I wanted to like it because I heard a lot of good things about the film and so, being one of those book before film people, I picked this up expecting good things. Maybe the hype was part of what made it a bit of a let-down for me. I tend not to do well with things that have been hyped up; maybe because I end up with unrealistic expectations, maybe because I'm a special snowflake who has super special tastes different to the norm. I don't know.

So as I was starting to read this I was pretty scathing. I nearly gave up at page 21. Now? Honestly I'm just exhausted by it. I skim read through the whole thing in about an hour and a half just so I could say I sort of finished it. I'll be the first to admit that because of that perhaps I missed a lot of things that could have made the book a better experience for me. But honestly though, it infuriated me so much at the beginning that I couldn't read it any other way.

One of the biggest problems is that I don't really like books that use copious amounts of pop culture reference, especially when these can easily be dated. As a general rule I tend to prefer fictional universes that feel a little more timeless - Harry Potter, the Bartimaeus Trilogy, Lockwood and Co. Even my current favourite series - The Rivers of London - makes me grimace when it references to Brooklyn 99 or similar. This really is just a personal preference thing and I can understand why others would want to read a book about a clearly modern high school experience.

If you are like me however, Simon Vs the Homo Sapiens is probably not for you on this front. There are endless references to pop culture including some that, given the nature of internet culture, already feel a little dated. As an example of the many many pop culture references, some I can remember off the top of my head without even glancing at the book are: Tegan and Sarah, Tumblr, Yaoi, slash fiction, Harry/Draco fanfiction & Harry Potter in general, Def Leppard, Yoda, Katniss,  etc etc.

I guess the writing was fine. It was written as though in a way someone young might talk. It's a distinctive voice that most of the time I just kind of shrugged off as neither working for me, or irritating me. Occasionally however there were stylistic choices that were just odd. The extra half a second it took me to try and figure out the meaning of the sentence/phrase took me out of the story slightly - a minor nit-pick I know, but one I'll make anyway. An example from page 33: "If I were straight. The Abby thing. I do think I get it. " I re-read those sentences three times trying to figure out whether he meant "If I were straight I'd get people liking Abby" (as in, I struggle to objectively tell if someone of the opposite gender is attractive) or whether he meant "If I were straight I'd like Abby too" (as in, Abby is attractive but not really my thing being gay). I suppose maybe in the grand scheme it doesn't make too much difference. But little things like that interrupting my reading flow was not something I needed when I was already supremely uninvested in this story.

Another example is from later on when Simon makes a comical autocorrect error via email. Essentially the premise is his phone corrected "such" to "dick" but it took me such a long time to work this out because of the format of the emails. The second email sent - the correction - is above the first email because if you were looking in an inbox that is how they'd appear. But because you read down the page and because most of the other emails were naturally chronological reading in this fashion this really threw me. Again: minor nit-pick - the emails are timestamped so like the confusion was definitely me being a moron. But it's another instance of being taken from the book for a moment too long.

Another problem that impacted my ability to engage with this book is that I really didn't like Simon. Some of the things he said and the views he held made me a little uncomfortable. I don't expect every character to hold views exactly like mine and I accept someone doesn't have to be a likeable person to be a likeable character. There are some fantastic characters who aren't really very nice people, or who hold views that are dissimilar to society as a whole or to an individual reader. I guess an example of this might be the Lannister family from Game of Thrones - I wouldn't want to be friends with them or emulate like 95% of what they do. But they sure are fun to watch/read about.

Simon though, I think I was done with him by page 21 - my original quit point. At this point he mentions that he thinks it's different for girls when they come out because a lot of guys think lesbians are hot. This is kind of a case where I guess you don't have to agree with a characters view or observations, but these sort of things just pile up. Another early on moment that really bugged me was this comment when describing their friend group: "Leah's two friends, Morgan and Anna, who read manga and wear black eyeliner, and are basically interchangeable. Anna and I actually dated freshman year, and I still think she and Morgan are interchangeable. "

Perhaps this is meant to demonstrate he's very gay because he's not hyper-aware of girls appearances? But it just read like Simon lacking basic human decency of bothering to tell two people who are friends of a friend apart. And maybe he was trying to be funny? If he was, it definitely falls flat for me. There are mentions in the book of Simon being oblivious to what other people might want or think, forgetting to offer his sister food when he makes sandwiches for him and his friend for example, and maybe this is an extension of that. This still feels odd to me however.

In the light of fairness I will say there were moments when I did feel for Simon - when Martin attempts to apologise for example, and some of his pre-coming-out thoughts, worries and dilemmas did feel authentic. But they weren't enough to encourage me to read on or to root for him.

Final thought because this is really long and more attention than I intended to give this book in the end: I'm confused as to how this school tumblr is supposed to work. Is it one page and everyone has a log in? Is it a tag? I'm assuming it's a tag based system? Anyway I guess that's another minor nitpick that doesn't matter in the scheme of things.  I just struggled to picture how it would work.

So in conclusion, this book sent me through the five stages of grief -

Denial: well everyone else liked it so I must like it too I guess.

Anger: I can't believe I spent money on this book. Let me write down all the bits I hate for the review I'll write. Oh my goodness I can't believe Simon said/thought that.

Bargaining: okay well Simon is kind of annoying me but I'll skim read it - it'll probably get good in a bit.

Depression: I can't believe I'm still reading this book, I can't believe I'm the only one who doesn't like this book, I feel like I've been trapped reading this book forever, time is meaningless.

And, finally, acceptance: it is what it is, and I'm too tired to do much but admit this just wasn't for me.

Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda: 1/5 stars

[tocinephile]

Ada’s Top 10 Films of 2019

It’s typical of me to watch all (or most) of the Oscar best picture nominees before compiling my top 10 list each year.  Well, I have a confession: I actually saw all the nominated films some time ago, but have struggled with deciding on 10 films because, sadly, I don’t think there were that many stellar films made last year. 

There were seven films in my book that were absolutely fantastic, but far too many that missed the mark or just failed to shine as brightly as they could. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to rank them amongst the top ten of the year because I don’t want to recognize them for being “good” when they had the potential to be “phenomenal”. 

That said, here we are on the day of reckoning (aka Oscar day) and here’s what I have to say about my top 10 films of 2019 

As usual, my selections meet the following requirements:

any film that screened at a festival that I attended in 2019 

any film with a Canadian theatrical release dated in 2019

is listed on www.imdb.com as released in 2019

1. The Irishman - dir. Martin Scorsese

I also included The Irishman as one of the best films of the decade. Not because it was particularly original, nor Martin Scorsese’s best, but because even though it’s neither of those things, it’s still one of the best films of the decade. I really see a near 4 hour tale as something Scorsese has longed to make, but had to wait until the medium of filmmaking and the audience’s methods of consuming had evolved before he could realize his vision. I’ll be the first to admit, I didn’t sit through the entire film in one sitting, but I couldn’t wait to get back to it and didn’t once feel put off by its length. 

2. Knives Out - dir. Rian Johnson

This was the funnest film I saw this year. While I’m quick to compare it to one of Rian Johnson’s early films, Brick, the two are both similar and completely opposite at the same time. Knives Out is whimsical vs Brick’s detached wit, I loved the comedic timing and snappy pace of Knives Out. It’s just really entertaining filmmaking that’s neither highbrow nor lowbrow, everyone can come along for the ride.

3. Parasite - dir. Bong Joon-ho

Another stellar piece of writing and directorial masterpiece, Parasite is dark and warming at the same time. The finest scripts are the ones that can combine seeming opposites, and the best direction is when a cast is lead to bring out all these layers simultaneously in their performances. If I had my own awards show, Parasite would definitely be winning for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay.

4. Avengers: Endgame - dir. Anthony Russo and Joe Russo

It’s debatable whether Infinity War was the better movie, and I did have to watch Endgame more than once to take it all in.  My final verdict (and keep in mind, I’m hardly an expert on the Marvel universe) was that they did a good job of wrapping up lose ends and leaving just enough variables and possibilities out there for the franchise to continue. I guess a lot of these under-the-radar achievements really rang out after seeing the Star War Saga fail so epically.

5. Joker - dir. Todd Philips

Joaquin Phoenix was jaw-dropping brilliant here. I know there is a lot more to the movie, but whenever I think about it, I never get past my awe of his performance. I probably need to watch it again a couple of times before we can discuss the other elements of this film.

6. 1917 - dir. Sam Mendes

One of the favourites to win Best Picture at the Oscars. This was a very finely crafted film, I can’t impress on you how much you need to see it for it’s cinematography, close up depictions of war, production design, and even acting. While I recognize the story is an important one to tell, it actually seemed like the least spectacular thing about the film. Don’t get me wrong, 1917 is completely engaging and sets a standard for war films.

7. Yesterday - dir. Danny Boyle

I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise to see a film directed by Danny Boyle and written by Richard Curtis appear on my top 10 list. I think Yesterday actually fell under the radar, it’s a whimsical imagining of a world that has forgotten the Beatles’ existence except for one young struggling musician who cannot resist the temptation of this knowledge to further his own career. It’s funny, heartwarming, and charming. It also gave me faith that one of my favourite directors and one of my favourite writers whose careers has taken them to such blockbuster heights can still produce something with such a fresh, indie-feel to it.

8. Dolemite Is My Name - dir. Craig Brewer

I’ve forgotten for perhaps some decades now that Eddie Murphy is good, thank you Dolemite is My Name for reminding me. Let’s face it, I love films about film productions, and that portion was the best thing about this movie! It’s around this part of my list where I had a pile of films I liked (not loved) equally, but Dolemite’s hilarious scenes, funktastic costumes, and awesome performances made it truly exceed my expectations, which is why it’s on my top 10 list.

9. Martin Eden - dir. Pietro Marcello

From TIFF 2019, this is an Italian retelling of the Jack London novel. What I dig most about this adaptation is its use of archival footage seamlessly woven into the film. Spliced together and utilized to establish a scene or inform the view of the character’s surroundings, it adds an artistic element to an already intricate story. I feel like a good story was built in, it was just up to them to adapt it well, and they did.

10. How to Build A Girl - dir. Coky Giedroyc

Another TIFF 2019 selection, Beanie Feldstein was an excellent choice for the title role in How to Build A Girl, an adaptation of the novel by Caitlin Moran  about an aspiring young writer who reinvents herself in London as a notorious critic with a poison pen. It’s pretty much the perfectly formulated coming of age story infused with just out there enough humour, likeable characters, lots of heart, and all around feel good-ness. Had a crazy fun time watching it.

Honourable mentions:

Jojo Rabbit Uncut Gems Marriage Story The Cave Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood Guest of Honour

Also a film that I watched a little too late or else may have considered in my top 10s for films of that year is Giant Little Ones (2018), I highly recommend this Canadian film dealing with questions of sexuality by a teenage boy that requires him not only reevaluate himself but his existing attitudes to those around him.

I’m a little pressed for time (5 hours until the Oscar Pre-Shows start) so I will write a follow up post discussing the Honourable mentions in greater detail. Wish me luck on my Oscar pool picks!