Neglected Gem #62: True Believer (1989)

In True Believer, James Woods plays Eddie Dodd, a New York lawyer who made his name on political and civil liberties issues in the sixties. Eddie still likes to present himself as a renegade – he tokes up in his office, he eschews traditional workday dress, even in the courtroom, and he wears his hair in a ponytail. (The salt-and-pepper color gives it the appearance of a powdered wig – he could be an aging Revolutionary War hero.) But the only clients he accepts these days are transparently guilty dope dealers whom he gets off on technicalities and who reimburse him in drug money. He justifies his office full of sleazes by claiming, “The last struggle in the war for constitutional rights is being waged over drugs,” and on some level he believes he’s still sticking it to the bastards in power every time he wins a case. The truth is, though, that he’s grown as cynical as any old sixties warrior: he’s come to believe everyone’s guilty. It’s a fresh-faced law-school grad named Roger Baron (Robert Downey, Jr.), a long-time admirer who turned down more prestigious offers to take a job as Dodd’s assistant, who stirs his dormant spirit. He gets Eddie to take on the case of a young Korean named Shu Kai Kim (Yuji Okumoto), in prison for eight years for an alleged street killing in Chinatown, who’s just knifed a fellow inmate, the member of a racist gang, in self-defense. Eddie agrees to reopen the Chinatown case, though he goes in assuming that, like all his clients, Kim is guilty as hell. But then a punk beats him up outside his apartment, threatening worse if he defends “the chink,” and that makes him angry and curious. The deeper he digs, the more certain he becomes that Kim was framed. Soon Eddie Dodd is back in the fray.

All That Is Old Is New Again: On the Current State of Doctor Who

Peter Capaldi as the Doctor, on BBC's Doctor Who

This past winter, my wife knit a Tom Baker-era Doctor Who scarf as a birthday gift for a friend. It turned out my friend has been wanting one since he was a kid, and could not have been more thrilled with the gift. He proudly wore the 12-foot scarf, its colourful tassels dragging along the streets of Washington, D.C., for the remaining cold days of the year, and even beyond them. Recently he told me a story: while walking to work on one such day, he crossed paths with a young boy (perhaps nine-years-old) and his mother. The boy, on seeing my friend, began jumping up and down and pulling at his mom's coat, yelling with delight: ""Doctor Who Scarf! Doctor Who Scarf!!!"

I tell this story, not only because of the profound pleasure the incident provoked in my friend, but because it reveals something I've long believed about Doctor Who as a televisual and cultural phenomenon. Even after 50 years and over 34 seasons, the show appeals across cultures, continents, and generations. (Tom Baker stopped wearing that scarf more than three decades before that young American boy was even born!) I loved the show as a child, when episodes of Peter Davison's Doctor aired on my local PBS channel, and as an adult the relaunched BBC series has topped my list of favourite shows since the show appeared in 2005.

Taylor Swift's "Shake it Off": It's Only a Dance Party

Like, something kinda awesome happened this summer. On August 18, Country music superstar turned pop idolette, Taylor Swift, released a dance video in support of her latest single, "Shake It Off." The video, still in circulation, shows the young superstar in a self-parodying comedic romp through a wide range of dance styles: ballet, b-boy, emotive modern dance, Lady Gaga-esque robotic show dancing and twerkingframed by competitive rhythmic gymnasts leaping through their ribbon spirals and squadron of cheerleaders. The premise of the video is that these athletes and performers represent a closed society of hard-bodies and high achievers to which the deliberately self-deprecating Swift remains an outsider. She is a klutz. She falls when she attempts a ballerina’s curtsy. She can’t even make ribbons look pretty. It’s quite funny, a true satire with dance, in all its many-genered splendour, at the centre. Which in itself should be something to smile about. But instead the innocuous dance numbers, although joyously and satirically presented, have provoked controversy.

Not a Contender: The Drop

James Gandolfini and Tom Hardy in The Drop

When The Godfather opened in 1972, Pauline Kael wrote of the terrifying light it shed on the dark underbelly of American society. Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954) had got it wrong, she remarked—Terry Malloy didn’t clean up the docks, after all. The mob had only gone into hibernation, gestating into the new and more virulent mutation that Coppola unleashed two decades later. But though The Godfather and Kazan’s film each concerned itself with organized crime, their characters and setting couldn’t differ more. Coppola treated his gangsters as patrician nobility; Kazan’s were street toughs and longshoremen. Michael Roskam’s new picture, The Drop, draws a closer connection, conjuring up Kazan’s milieu on the gritty, befogged docks of Brooklyn. And he’s even resurrected Terry himself in the person of Bob Saginowski (Tom Hardy), the bartender of a watering hole used to stash the Chechen mafia’s dirty money. But despite its feel of authenticity and enticing beginning, the movie’s ultimately undone by writer Dennis Lehane’s damnable propensity to preposterous climaxes and deflating character revelations.

Blazing the Trail: Gaming’s Emergent Genres

Bungie's Destiny is just one of the gaming industries new offerings this fall. 

Few industries move at the ferocious clip of the gaming industry. Seas change with dizzying frequency, and like any art form it has both a commercial and an experimental side – but what makes gaming unique is that everyone, no matter where they sit on the spectrum, are changing what gaming is. Gaming is reliant on technology, and as technology’s exponential growth surges forward, games ride along in that wake. While well-established gaming genres are enjoying a hedonistic expansion in terms of scope and polish, with AAA titles becoming bloated to the size of Hollywood blockbusters, there are innovators working diligently on the fringes to deliver experiences that will push the entire medium in new and untested directions. Gaming hasn’t seen such a wild, untamed frontier since the 1990s – and what we’re seeing now puts those breakthroughs to shame.

The Shaw’s Early Shaw: Arms and the Man & The Philanderer

Kate Besworth and Martin Happer star in the Shaw Festival’s production of Arms and the Man (Photo: Emily Cooper)

In George Bernard Shaw’s early comedy Arms and the Man, Bulgaria is at war with Serbia, and the heroine, Raina, the daughter of one major and the fiancée of another, glories in the excitement of the conflict and the swashbuckling self-presentation of the latter, a handsome warrior named Sergius who marches into the fray like a character out of a Walter Scott novel. But on the last night of battle, a Swiss mercenary fighting for the Serbs, Captain Bluntschli, slips into her boudoir to escape from the Bulgarians, and she doesn’t have the heart to give him away. She even feeds him – chocolate creams, his favorite. (She nicknames him her “chocolate cream soldier”; hence the title of the Oscar Strauss operetta version of the material, The Chocolate Soldier.) Bluntschli’s conduct offends her notions of how soldiers should comport themselves, but he and not Sergius is a professional soldier; he finds Sergius’s heroics ridiculous (not to say dangerous). But while Bluntschli undercuts Raina’s schoolgirl notions, he also wins her heart; Shaw’s play may burlesque the romantic temperament, but it’s a romantic comedy and one of his most lighthearted works. It’s also, not surprisingly, one of his most frequently produced plays.

Talking Out of Turn #35: June Callwood (1984)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show, On the Arts, at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the Eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was radically starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions who were only concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone) which made it look as if they hadn't read the outline. Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be simply a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews a couple of years ago, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large. 

author and activist June Callwood.

One of the book's chapters, The Arc of the Cold War, dealt with both its peak and decline since the Soviet Union would dissolve by December 1991. The interviews in this chapter, which included SF author Frederik Pohl on his novel Chernoybl and spy novelist Fletcher Knebel's Crossing in Berlin, provided a cross-section of observations about the psychology of the Cold War rather than detailing the different aspects of it. In their film, Seeing Red, documentary filmmakers Julia Reichert and James Klein examined the early years of the American Communist movement, its beginnings in the Thirties, its rise in the WW II years, the later disillusionment with Stalin, and then its legacy in the Eighties. Author June Callwood was (until her death in 2007) a Canadian journalist, activist and author, who wrote Emma: The True Story of Canada's Unlikely Spy (Stoddart Publishing, 1984). It was the story of Emma Woikin, the daughter of a Doukhobor family in Saskatchewan and a child of the Depression years, who became a spy for the Soviet Union. Woikin's life was complicated by a husband who committed suicide and her losing her only child at birth. When she left the prairies to work in Ottawa, she became entangled with Soviet agents and was arrested, along with thirteen others, in the Igor Gouzenko affair in the fall of 1945. Gouzenko had escaped the Soviet Embassy with over 109 documents that proved there was an existence of a Soviet spy ring in Canada. Emma Woikin would eventually come to serve three years in prison. These revelations and arrests contributed to the beginning of the Cold War.

A Drama of History: The 40th Anniversary of Randy Newman's Good Old Boys

"It's hard to hear a new voice, as hard as it is to listen to an unknown language," D.H. Lawrence wrote in Studies in Classic American Literature (1924). "We just don't listen." Lawrence wasn't just talking about something as basic as the fear of something new. New ideas, as he later suggested, can always be pigeon-holed. "The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything," Lawrence explained. "It can't pigeon-hole a real experience. It can only dodge. The world is a great dodger, and the Americans the greatest. Because they dodge their own very selves." Lawrence was addressing here the varied works of American writers James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. A panoramic and illuminating study, the polemic examines how a number of gifted writers were coming to terms with the experience of a young country still in the process of finding its identity. For an artist who has barely registered on the public's consciousness, except in his movie music and his songs for Pixar pictures, singer/songwriter Randy Newman could be one of Lawrence's great dodgers – an Artful Dodger – and one who deliberately creates paradoxical narratives in his songs. And his music, like the writers of the previous century, has also been on a comparable sojourn. For almost half a century now, the country he depicts with both love and devotion is also riddled with broken promises, violence, paranoia, superstition and arrogance.

An Epic Sans Nostalgia: Yves Beauchemin’s Charles the Bold

One of the most fascinating dimensions of Canadian history, at least for those of us who did not grow up in Canada, is the history of Quebec and its relationship to the rest of Canada. While those south of the border are aware of Montreal as a cosmopolitan, French-speaking, “European-style” city that doesn’t require a trans-Atlantic flight and where the legal drinking age is 18, a deeper appreciation of Quebec – and the economic, religious, political, and cultural transformations it has undergone in the last 70 years – is much more rare. One way to cultivate such appreciation is certainly reading some of the numerous and fascinating histories that are available. A difference approach is available in Yves Beauchemin’s multi-novel series, Charles the Bold (Charles le téméraire).

Beauchemin is the premier Quebecois author of our time: his most famous novel, Le Matou (1981: translated into English in 1986 as The Alley Cat and adapted for film in 1985) is also the most widely-translated work of French Canadian literature of all time, currently available in more than 16 languages. He has received numerous literary awards in both Quebec and France, and the University of Bordeaux organized a colloquium on his work in 2000. Born in 1941, Beauchemin has a degree in literature and art history from the Université de Montréal, and has worked as an editor, journalist, and a researcher. Charles the Bold is not an autobiography, but Beauchemin’s familiarity with the places and communities present in his work make them richer than they might be otherwise, the streets, cafés, and bars as multi-dimensional as the characters.

Happy Valley: Do You Know Where Your Children Are?

Sarah Lancashire as Sergeant Catherine Cawood in Happy Valley

As Catherine Cawood, a police sergeant in the West Yorkshire valleys in the six-episode TV series Happy Valley, Sarah Lancashire gives a performance that’s part kitchen-sink drama, part hard-boiled noir. (The show, which aired on BBC One this past spring, is now available for streaming on Netflix.) It’s the kind of full-bodied, lived-in acting that brings the viewer so close to the character that you may feel that you can smell the cigarette smoke in her hair. The weary, middle-aged Catherine lives with her sister Clare, a recovering drug addict played by the wonderful Siobhan Finneran, whose own hair is a messy rat’s nest that sometimes looks like a bad wig, and is still more flattering than the tight wicked-stepmother ‘do she wore as the conniving servant O’Brien in Downton Abbey. Catherine is also taking care of her small grandson, Ryan (Rhys Connah), who has a perilous habit of asking questions for which there are no simple answers.

Neglected Gem #61: Cadillac Man (1990)

As Joey O’Brien, the down-on-his-luck car salesman in Cadillac Man, Robin Williams has a slightly greasy mustache and the sickly complexion of a third-rater who can’t even pump energy out of his sleaziness any more. He can still pull off something nervy, like working a broken-down funeral procession, trying to sell both the besieged undertaker and the grieving widow (Elaine Stritch), but he looks fatigued from trying so hard. And when he arrives at work late, and the boss’s son, Little Jack Turgeon (Paul Guilfoyle), tells him he’s going to lose his job unless he sells a dozen cars by the end of the weekend, his face is an alarmingly clear map of his feelings: terror and failure are written all over it. Joey used to be a hot-shot, and he spent his money faster than he could make it – on women, mostly – and now he’s way behind. He owes money. His ex-wife Tina (Pamela Reed) is pressing him to contribute to their teenage daughter’s college fund and provide the kid some kind of paternal moral support. His married girl friend, Joy (Fran Drescher), is contemplating leaving her husband (Zack Norman) but isn’t convinced Joey will be as good a provider. And his other girl friend, a would-be designer named Lila (Lori Petty), wears him out, dragging him to clubs where she wants her ridiculous creations to attract attention.

Monkey Business – Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons

Wen Zhang in Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons

Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons was an easy sell. I’m drawn to Asian cinema for the same reasons I’m drawn to Asian culture in general: its fascinating singularity makes for a completely fresh perspective. Watching a Hong Kong blockbuster like Journey, which has the honour of capturing both the largest single-day box office gross and the largest total international gross of any Chinese film (taking in $19.6 million and $215 million US dollars, respectively), is like biting into the pickled ginger that comes with an order of sushi: refreshing, exotic, and wonderfully palate-cleansing, especially after a long summer’s barrage of Hollywood values. Journey is a retelling of one of the four great novels of classical Chinese literature, which endure in Asian culture much the same way Grimm’s fairy tales and Aesop’s Fables do in Europe and North America. It tells the story of Tang Sanzang, who gathers a posse of disciples to aid him in a quest to travel west and find a cache of ancient sutra texts, in his relentless pursuit of Buddhist enlightenment. This film adaptation is helmed by Steven Chow, best known for his wacky martial arts extravaganza Kung Fu Hustle, and in translating this ancient tale from scroll to screen he makes sure to include as much fun, sincerity, and humour in his interpretation as possible.

A Small Surprise: A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur

Deborah Hay and Kate Hennig in A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur. (Photo:David Cooper)

For its annual lunchtime one-act, an eagerly anticipated tradition, this year the Shaw Festival has picked one of Tennessee Williams’s last and least known plays, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur. (It was first produced in 1979, four years before his death, with Shirley Knight in the lead.) Williams wrote it as a full-length work in two scenes; trimmed by the director, Blair Williams, to just under an hour, it turns out to be one of the highlights of the season.

The play is both raucous and lyrical-tender – a trademark Williams combination. Set in St. Louis in the mid-thirties, it centers on Dorothea (Deborah Hay), a delicate, easily frazzled young woman who teaches high-school civics classes and shares an apartment with Bodey (Kate Hennig), a working-class German-American spinster who calls her Dotty. The two names hint at the tension between the protagonist’s current lifestyle and the one she intends to shift into. Bodey keeps trying to set her up with her twin brother Buddy, a hefty, beer-drinking, cigar-smoking fellow (whom we never meet), but he holds no remote interest for Dotty. On this particular Sunday, Bodey is putting together a picnic for the three of them to share at Creve Coeur, out in the country. But Dotty doesn’t want to encourage Buddy, and unbeknownst to Bodey she’s made arrangements to move in with the art history teacher, Helena (Kaylee Harwood), in a more upscale neighborhood that she can’t really afford. (Dotty isn’t good with money; you might think of one of the lines Williams wrote for Blanche DuBois, whom Dotty is a variation of: “Money just goes. It just goes places.”) Helena always refers to Dotty as Dorothea.

Sea of Corruption, Aura of Melancholy: Venice in the Mysteries of Donna Leon

Novelist Donna Leon

Donna Leon is an American-born former English professor who decamped to Venice over thirty years ago. Since 1992, beginning with Death at La Fenice in which her first victim was a conductor who was dispatched in the dressing room of the opera house, she has written a series of exceedingly popular crime novels set in Venice. The Commissario Guido Brunetti detective novels have been widely translated except in Italian at her request. Like the best of this genre, Leon’s police procedurals are a vehicle for exploring wider social issues: toxic waste cover-up, the sex slave trade, the blight of tourism, and above all, official corruption and incompetence, which explains why her novels can end ambiguously, with the guilty not often brought to justice. Part of Brunetti’s problem is that he must find creative ways to bypass – usually assisted by his highly proficient assistant, computer savvy, Signora Elettra – the limitations of his hapless and opportunist boss, Giuseppe Patta, who seems more interested in feathering his political ambitions than in discovering the truth or ever tackling the Mafia. For the most part, Patta believes the socially well-connected are innocent and should not be burdened with a police investigation. His priority is to keep Venice’s reputation clean so that it continues to be a mecca for cash-rich tourists. Forget about the environmental hazards posed by tourism and the peccadilloes of politicians.

Musical Soap: ABC Television's Nashville

The ABC series Nashville – no relation to the great Robert Altman movie – weds melodrama to the best music to be heard consistently on TV since the HBO show Treme completed its tenure. Treme, set in New Orleans following Katrina, was something special: a wide, layered, variegated exploration of a society dealing with the aftermath of a geographical disaster that was also inescapably a political one. The show’s writers threaded half a dozen stories that exposed not only the challenges for New Orleans residents of putting their lives back together but also the ways in which the catastrophe knocked up against corruption in the government and police department both during and after the storm. And as a bonus that reflected the high content of music in the blood of the city of New Orleans, each week the audience got to hear extraordinary musicians perform – some famous, some known mostly to local aficionados, playing themselves, as well as actors playing musicians.

Nashville, which begins its third season this fall, is set in another American city that is defined by its music, but the series isn’t a serious examination of its milieu, nor does it share Treme’s documentary-realist style. It’s a glossy nighttime soap with exaggerated characters and a tortuous, often preposterous plot line. But it’s as entertaining as anything on TV: energetic, engrossing, with characters you keep in your head from week to week and songs you can’t wait to listen to over again. (Each season has produced two CDs; I’ve played all four soundtrack albums so often in my car that I know every tune by heart.) Nashville is the Grand Hotel of television, except that its pop-culture secret – the element that makes it addictive – isn’t star power as much as the power of its music.

Tainted Love: FX's You're the Worst

Chris Geere and Aya Cash star in You're the Worst, on FX.

The summer television season has come and gone, and it was a season of surprising, if ambitious misfires: Hollywood stars couldn't make Crossbones any less absurd or Extant any more compelling, and the less said about the return of Games of Thrones' much-lamented Sean Bean in TNT's painfully derivative Legends the better. But the show I'm already missing (even though it still has two episodes remaining of its 10-episode order) is the one I didn't see coming: FX's dark relationship comedy You're the Worst. Created by former Weeds writer Stephen Falk, the series doesn't come with any super-spies, worldwide apocalyptic events, or mysterious – possibly alien – pregnancies. What it does have is charm, humour, and a delightfully dark undercurrent that it plays without shame.

Allegories and Prophesies in Song: "The Beehive State" and "The Devil Came From Kansas"

Singer/Songwriter Randy Newman, in 1971 (Photo by Charles Seton)

Historian Constance Rourke once observed that Americans are "a people unacquainted with themselves, strange to the land, unshaped as a nation." That particular kind of estrangement is rarely taken up in song, but listening the other day to Randy Newman's deceptively obscure "The Beehive State," from his 1968 debut album Something New Under the Sun, I caught some of the intriguing aloofness in the mystery she poses of what it means to actually be an American. "The Beehive State" begins with a delegate from Kansas taking the Senate floor, where he is asked to describe what his state is all about. But we don't find out very much from him. First, we discover that Kansas is for the farmer and "the little man." The representative then, with a persistence that suggests a declaration of war, tells the senators gathered that they all they need is a firehouse in Topeka. Hardly worth the trouble. Next, the senate calls to the floor a delegate from Utah. He steps forward with a desperate plea that is also rather opaque: he insists Utah needs water to irrigate their desert, but mostly he just urges everyone to tell this country about his state. Why? "'Cause nobody seems to know." But how much do we really know when the song – which is barely two minutes in length – is over? With a relentless staccato rhythm that he builds on the piano, Newman tells this story so swiftly that he barely gives you time to absorb what the song is actually saying (which could be nothing so urgent as a laundry list). But he gives the song all the immediacy of prophesied fact and portentous calamity. "It should be longer," Newman once told an interviewer. "But I couldn't think of more to say." So is less truly more?

La Dolce Vita: The Trip to Italy

Movies like Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip (2010) elude the reductive marketing categories of studio advertising. The trailer pitched the film as a buddy flick and a road movie, which was certainly true. But those qualities, and the loose-limbed improvisational humor from Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, belied its directorial craftsmanship and thematic depth. Winterbottom put on this front intentionally, letting the easy pleasures of the comic structure seduce you into the serious philosophical question at play: Namely, what makes for the good life? Coogan and Brydon traipse around the countryside of northern England, taking in coldly beautiful vistas, fine French cuisine, and precious fraternal companionship. Yet only one of them, Mr. Brydon, actually enjoys the manifold pleasures surrounding them. Mr. Coogan can’t get out of his own egotism. He stumbles through the excursion in haze of pot, career ambitions, empty one-night stands, and narcissistic self-pity. Everything’s a competition with him, even their leisurely impersonations of Michael Caine and James Bond, and you winch at how he squanders relationships – including that with his good friend. For a moment, standing on a cliff of prehistoric rock formations, he steps outside himself and beholds the scene’s grandeur with wonder. But it’s short-lived and he quickly snaps back into his unhappy prison. Winterbottom contrasts him with Brydon’s simpleminded joviality and stable family life, and the picture ends with the question it secretly begins with: Why are some people blissfully content and others impossible to satisfy?

But if the studio execs didn’t know what to make of this character study last time, they’ve got a second chance with the release of The Trip to Italy, Winterbottom’s follow-up (both began as BBC series before morphing into feature films). And he’s made it easier for them, requiring less critical thinking and more pleasurable imbibing. The director and his two actors cut right to the chase (or the road as it were) repeating the premise of the first installment: The pair are to review a series of meals they share on holiday, this time in Italy. In a flash, they’re cruising Piedmont mountain roads in a Mini Cooper and dining on the culinary delights of the Cinque Terre. The ribald banter is back, even more uproarious than before: Coogan and Brydon mind meld into a withering parody of The Dark Knight Rises, the latter yelling inaudibly into his mouth in mockery of Bain before switching to an absurdly hoarse Christian Bale. Coogan matches and even exceeds him later in Capri with an impossibly dead-on imitation of Brando’s Don Corleone. But his is done in reverence; their skewering of Christopher Nolan is mercilessly accurate. Winterbottom also quickly dispatches the question of what a second movie, using the same structure as its predecessor, could have left to say. The boys take jabs at bands who succumb to “second-album syndrome,” after a successful debut; the self-awareness here disarms you with ease.

Full Circle: Revisiting The Beatles' Revolver (1966)

In 1966 – before The Beatles abandoned the stage for good with a show at Candlestick Park, in San Francisco, and where Paul McCartney would recently play before the former baseball park itself passed into history – the new studio music they released that summer brought the group full circle to their first session at EMI in 1962. As if to commemorate the concept of completing a circle, the record was called Revolver. Recorded from April through June 1966, Revolver was a rich panorama of musical and philosophical styles, a masterpiece of eclecticism. George Harrison's interest in Indian music and religion came full bloom. The fruit of McCartney's venture into the world of avant-garde theatre, visual art and music fully emerged. John Lennon's fascination with Eastern thoughts about mortality, brought on through chemical enhancement, reached its apex. Ringo Starr even decided to redefine the sound of his drums to provide yet more personality to the music. 

Sean O’Casey’s Tragicomedy at the Shaw: Juno and the Paycock

Corrine Kolso, Mary Haney, Jim Mezon and Benedict Campbell in Juno and the Paycock (Photo David Cooper)

My introduction to Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock came when I was an undergraduate at Brandeis University through a memorable black-box production where the audience sat tennis court-style on either side of a long, rectangular playing area. I recall being continually caught up short by the tonal shifts and amazed by the depth of the tragedy undergirding the domestic comedy: the battles between the long-suffering working-class Dublin housewife Juno Boyle and her indolent husband – known as the Captain because of a brief stint he spent on a ship, which he’s fanned into a romantic tale of maritime adventure – who fakes pains in his legs whenever the chance of a job rears its ugly head, preferring to spend his hours tossing back pints at one of the local snugs with his neighbor Joxer. These two incorrigible codgers are the only ones left on stage at the end, when the Boyle family has been torn apart and the creditors have claimed the furniture; they stumble onstage drunk out of their minds and pass out, in a moment that looks forward to the final curtain of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (where the stage is littered with aging, hopeless dipsomaniacs). In the Brandeis production, one of the pair rolled a whiskey jar to the dead centre of the stage; for the final stage picture, the lights faded to a single special on the empty jar.