Poppyland

The critic and his graveyard by the sea, the poet thereabouts, the successful playwrights, the village girl.

Clement Scott of the Daily Telegraph, Swinburne (under the supervision of Watts-Dunston), Sims & Pettitt, Louie Jermy.

The critic dies, the poet is pummeled, the playwrights thrive, the girl goes mad.

The city and the country that do never meet.

The actor-playwright Wilson Barrett (The Sign of the Cross) appears, Alfred Austin the poet laureate and Sir Henry Irving do not, certainly not Ibsen.

Alan Howard, Phoebe Nicholls, John McEnery, John Shrapnel et al.

Mrs Brown

This would have to be ten times greater to be a portrait of Queen Victoria, as it is a hundred times better than a Masterpiece Theatricale. But it surpasses the notion of its premise for an abstract truth quite in keeping with its elements. VR and John Brown and Ponsonby and Disraeli are all rich and fine but they are not up to snuff, they make you sneeze and say, “shall we have oats, Bully?”

That is the very ticket. Losey is required for this, the Divisionist painting recombines in the eye, here is the naked thing after the fact, Losey in the mind reconstructs the cold grief and the great hairy man for a very satisfactory treatment.

Richardson to Wood (The Charge of the Light Brigade), “‘...But I think it’s too long, and I don’t think we can have Queen Victoria fucked by a bear, not even a very funny Russian bear, do you?’ So we didn’t.”

Frears reconciles this to the picture plane as The Queen.

Shakespeare in Love

Virginia Woolf’s incandescent Shakespeare, consuming all its dross. How the muse goes a progress through the mind of a genius.

John Webster is le voyeur, Marlowe the martyr.

Shagsbere as nonce-writer, with the fount of inspiration to him and an education in the theater.

The principal structure is undoubtedly William K. Howard’s Fire over England, much anagrammatized but splendidly visible in the duet for queen and maid.

Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet is the key to much of the handling.

Among Stoppard’s themes are the invention of love and the New-found-land (as filmed, by way of De Mille’s The Ten Commandments).