THE VOICE OF REASON
Solon, (born c. 630 BCE—died c. 560 BCE), Athenian statesman, known as one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece (the others were Chilon of Sparta, Thales of Miletus, Bias of Priene, Cleobulus of Lindos, Pittacus of Mytilene, and Periander of Corinth). Solon ended exclusive aristocratic control of the government, substituted a system of control by the wealthy, and introduced a new and more humane law code. He was also a noted poet.
Scene in the print room. Find out the significance of this extra special prop this week.#RSSSeagull
22/24/25/27/28/29 Apr 7:45pm
23 Apr 3pm pic.twitter.com/UtAGaD1vi7
By the end of the first act, my companion was asleep. I, however, was moved nearly to tears by Rachel Burnham's Masha, expressing the misery of her unrequited love for Konstantin, who loved Nina, who loved Trigorin, who loved no one but himself. I had not expected at all to be moved so early in the play and indeed had a fair idea of what the characters would say and do. I suspect however that as one gets older one's waterworks in more ways than one, become rather more loosened. Masha was played as a sulky teenager with depth, and perhaps I was moved by this because it reminded me of my self-image then of being a sulky teenager with depth as well as all a lifetime's accumulation of unrequited loves. It was as if the totality of that misery was conveyed in that short speech by Masha to Eugene.
When my companion awakened and stayed awake to enjoy the second half, he declared that he could smell the vodka that Masha was drinking in the drunk scene.
"Takes snuff, has a taste for vodka, always wears black, is worshipped by a schoolteacher who talks non-stop about money." #RSSSeagullpic.twitter.com/Y5c56m1owX
Having recently seen The Cherry Orchard at the Arcola, my interest in Chekhov was whetted and revived. One of the pleasures of his characters is that they are real, flawed and always have something interesting to say about life. One can identify in turn with all the characters from the insolent servant, the exasperated estate manager, the adulterous wife, the rejected dullard of a husband, the miserly actress, the despondent owner who is about to die and regrets not having tried harder to achieve success, the doctor who complains that his time is never his own, to the ruined woman who ran away to Moscow with the writer who loved no one but himself and finally the rejected lover.
This is a hugely enjoyable production with an excellent cast. Sorin I thought could have been a little less spry and animated, since he is supposed to be ill.
The fresh young, pretty, long-limbed and graceful Nina (Magdalena Jablonska) played youth very well. She is still doing her A levels. Understandably she did not quite convey the transformation of being pumped and dumped by an older man, being the mother of a baby that did not survive nfancy, being disowned by her parents, and looked just as pretty, fresh-faced and youthful after all this was supposed to have happened to her, her hair still looking like a shampoo advertisement. Two streaks of tears down her cheeks was intended to convey this interval of disappointment and disaster, but I thought a good spray of water to her hair to make it look at least greasy and unkempt when she was obviously meant to be near a nervous breakdown, would have gone some way to making up for any lack of experienced misery to artfully convey her transformation in demeanour and voice.
Not having read http://www.sparknotes.com/drama/seagull/ as I had, my companion found the ending a shock and pronounced it "terrible", presumably because it made life seem meaningless.
What is the moral of this story?
Konstantin had more promise than Nina, but he destroyed himself. Nina was a mediocre actress, but lived on declaring that it is the purpose of life to endure, even when aware of our own irredeemable mediocrity, rather than to destroy ourselves because others do not sufficiently acknowledge how special and clever we are.
Try not to miss it, because tonight is your last chance.
7:45pm tonight is your last chance to see "The Seagull"; Torben Betts' fast-paced translation of the Chekhov classic.https://t.co/uPjvpMNgei
Yes it's pretty well the situation we are facing. As I said since last November Le Pen will not win, France is not the US the French are like women in general they will always choose security and comfort over freedom. The rest is just show off.
Abdullah Chagorwhat
is manly about hunting an unarmed creature for FUN, its not funny, it
does not toughen them up, want to toughen up? come swimming with seals
with me in 5 degrees water.
Claire KhawWhile
soldiers are not required to be riders, an element of judgement and
courage is required to follow a hunt. There is also the camaraderie of
the hunt. Foxes are vermin, not Basil Brush as townspeople seem to
mistakenly think.
Foxes have been known to eat babies in London suburbs.
Claire KhawIf
I were a fox, I would prefer the all or nothing option option of
escaping from the hounds or a quick death being ripped apart by hounds,
rather than being shot or poisoned or having to chew my foot off if it
were caught in a trap suffering for days and days before finally dying.
Claire KhawAn
example of the TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY: townspeople telling country
folk what they may or may not do in their spare time in their own
neighbourhood.
A. Because I am not immoral, evil, selfish, stupid and irrational. Feminism encourages women to be promiscuous women and such women should be discouraged for the good of your civilisation and the long term national interest. All feminists assume the right of women to have premarital sex and these promiscuous women are the soldiers of feminism who corrupt the morals of men by bribing them with fornication. The conquest is now successful and complete. You won't find a single senior white Western male politician prepared to uncompromisingly support marriage. Not even won't senior politicians discuss this, no senor academic will discuss this either, and certainly no senior nationalist.
These pathetic white nationalist men who complain about being exploited by Jews and invaded by Muslims are actually too afraid to marry women of their own race because they know the rules of no fault divorce would financially eviscerate them the moment their wife is bored or irritated, or has a political disagreement with their husbands.
Q. What do you think about patriarchy?
A. All advanced civilisations are patriarchies, all declining and primitive societies are matriarchies. Why would someone who lives in an advanced civilisation want to live in a primitive society or be degenerate? Only the degenerate. I don't want to be degenerate.
They could be talking about the abolition of no fault divorce or why marriage is eugenic and bastard dysgenic, but they prefer to blame Jews and Muslims who piss on them from on high that they are too venal and sex-addicted to give up because they already know they are unmarriageable and are too atomised to co-operate with each other to organise a revolution or an effective political movement.
Having just seen how Trump has utterly betrayed them, they have had the stuffing knocked out of them, yet again.
They also know they are all beta males and no beta male will accept the authority of another beta male.
These arrogant fuckers just won't accept that they need a religion with patriarchal moral values that supports the institution marriage and think they can get what they want (ie a pogrom against Jews and Muslims and immigrants) without this.
Most of them just hope to die before Western civilisation as they know it collapses anyway.
So, while they remain in denial in the hope of fucking promiscuous women, or wanting to avoid offending them because these promiscuous women are their daughters, sisters, grandmothers etc, things will continuing going from bad to worse till Western civilisation as we know it collapses.
Q. What do you think about intersectionality?
A. Intersectionality is about the acquisition of victimhood as a means of achieving status in a degenerate and declining society. It is a feminine stratagem and useful only for this purpose when your society is already a stinking degenerate matriarchy on its way to hell in a handcart and accelerating fast.
Q. What do you think about rape culture?
A. As I understand it, the term "rape culture" is about not asking obvious questions of the complainant as to how she came to be raped, as she alleged. Was she drunk? Was she silent and thus indicating consent as her alleged rapist had intercourse with her? Did she by her behaviour indicate that her alleged rapist had reasonable grounds for thinking she was consenting? What was she wearing? If she objected to having sex, why didn't she struggle? The defence is no longer allowed to ask these questions.
Q. What do you think about objectification?
A. You mean women as sex objects? Men want to have sex with women, and women want men to give them stuff in return. This is the way of the world.
Q. What do you think about cat calling?
It is how lower class men indicate their appreciation of a woman's attractiveness when they are in groups.
Q. What do you think about slut shaming/sex positivity? A. Obviously, fornicatresses who are promiscuous women must be shamed to discourage women from being and becoming fornicating promiscuous women and adulteresses. That is the only way to eradicate feminism. Emasculated men enfeebled by half a century of being breast fed premarital sex won't get it together to comprehensively denounce this or uncompromisingly support marriage. It would be like expecting the most degraded drug addict to call the cops on his dealer. That is why a big new idea is necessary to galvanise these degenerate enfeebled emasculated beta male victims of feminism. It is probably too late for them now anyway, but for the sake of good order I will continue to keep pointing this out.
Q. What do you think about lgbt issues?
A. LGBT sex is a category of extramarital sex that the Koran forbids.
Q. What do you think about minority rights issues?
A. I think we should be focusing on what form the *dominant culture* should now take. That is the real question. I am interested in being part of the dominant culture and being one of the people who had a hand in the formation of the new dominant culture.
Q. What do you think about gender discrimination?
A. We should expect it since everyone exercises it.
Q.. What do you think about misogyny/misandry?
A. Men and women who have had bad experiences and relationships with the opposite sex will feel bitter and angry. This is less likely to occur in a patriarchy than in the stinking degenerate matriarchy that we have now.
Q. What do you think about anti feminism/MRAs/MGTOW?
A. MGTOW is part of the matriarchy.
The only way to solve the problem of feminism is to re-establish the patriarchy.
The only way to re-establish the patriarchy is to see to it that most members of society practise marriage and respect its rules ie no extramarital sex (and this includes premarital and gay sex).
MGTOW not marrying would just exacerbate the degeneracy of criminal bastards who will soon become the majority, making society even more criminal and chaotic.
MRAs who still don't understand this are being willfully blind because they don't want to grasp the nettle of denouncing promiscuous fornicatresses because they want to have sex with women without marrying with them or paying for a prostitute.
Q. What do you think about men's issues?
A. Beta male victims of feminism clearly have many issues with feminism and I have already proposed that it be eradicated with Secular Koranism, because I can't quite see any other system of rules with sufficient moral authority being strong enough to do the job.
#RedIce give airtime to Anne Marie Waters! Come on people, wise up! She's a lesbian neo-con provocateur who is COMPLETELY in bed with the Zionists who are trying to exploit legitimate concerns about Islamism to get us to fight their Greater Israel war in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, Breitbart give space to a major article which sees the main problem with Islam being that it denies transexuals their 'rights'.
FFS, there are many real and huge problems with mass immigration and Islamisation, but the fact both impinge on liberal decadence is utterly irrelevant to nationalists, traditionalists, ethno-nationalists and Christians.
It just shows that the so-called 'alt-right' isn't 'right' at all. It's just the perverts doing to the 'right' what they've already done to the 'left' - namely take it over and make it look utterly ridiculous and irrelevant to ordinary people.
Here's the bottom line: The very core of our problem with mass immigration is our own catastrophically low birthrate, and the feminisation of our society. Which makes the anti-normal lobbies a major part of the problem, and most definitely NOT part of the solution.
As for the 'march' that these freaks are promoting, if I turn up I'll join with any traditionalist Muslims who come out to oppose it!
1) Invite immigration, especially Muslim immigration.
2) Create hatred and resentment against Muslims by giving Muslims privileges unavailable to non-Muslims and non-Jews as well as unemployment at home so the indigenous and uneducated plebs become so stupid and desperate they join the armed forces to fight and kill Muslims in neocon wars abroad.
3) Keep them stupid by tolerating sluts and bastards and denying them free and decent selective education.
4) Rinse and repeat ad nauseam until your civilisation collapses.
"There are thousands of papers, stretching back over hundreds of
years, affecting Belle Reve as, piece by piece, our improvident grandfathers
and father and uncles and brothers exchanged the land for their epic fornications—to
put it plainly! . . . The four-letter word deprived us of our plantation, till
finally all that was left—and Stella can verify that!—was the house itself
and about twenty acres of ground, including a graveyard, to which now all but Stella
and I have retreated."
This was Blanche Dubois' elegy of
her ancestors to her brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski. It succinctly explains
the end of an era for the AmericanDeep
South, and hints portentously that the fall of any civilisation is linked to
tolerating low standards of sexual morality.
Hearing such a speech in the 21st century, perhaps no reasonably
informed denizen of the West can resist the urge to look uneasily over one's
shoulder, so to speak, and asking "Isn't that us, too?"
Who can get away with sexual impropriety in indefinitely? Not the
likes of Blanche Dubois whose past caught up with her.
She only washed up to the doorstep of her sister Stella and brother in
law Stan because she was run out of her hometown for reasons of sexual immorality.
For those who know the play, Blanche Dubois is possibly the worst
house guest in the world. Penniless and knowing her salvation to be marriage,
Blanche failed to assume a manner more befitting her fallen station in life,
constantly abusing the hospitality of Stan her brother in law whom she
considered too common for her sister Stella, even as she insulted him in his
own home both to his face and behind his back as well as having frequent hot
baths at his expense and guzzling his booze.
It is precisely Blanche's station in life that is at issue. She is
from the Southern aristocracy of plantation owners fallen on hard times, for the
estate her family owned had to be sold to pay for generations of accumulated
debt.Denial is a feminine vice and Blanche Dubois
exemplifies denial – the eighth deadly sin - in all its folly. What does she deny? Her fallen status, her
being in receipt of the hospitality of a man whose manners and class she
despises and her inability to comport herself accordingly, because she still
believes herself to be better than him by reason of her birth alone.
Blanche married an unstable and apparently penniless poet who was also
homosexual when she was 16. When confronted by her about his homosexuality
after catching him in bed with an older man, blowing his brains out by shooting
himself in the mouth was his response. Clearly, Blanche's parents and family
were not fully in charge of matters enough to arrange a good match for
her.No mention was made of her absent
father, but she was known to meet soldiers from a nearby camp on her lawn when
they called for her while her deaf mother slept.
Having such a past would have tainted her marriage prospects, and this
she exacerbated by taking to drink and living in a hotel of ill-repute.Still harbouring ideas above her now fallen
station, she continually insults her sister for making do with a Polack of a
factory worker while antagonising him even as she enjoyed his reluctant
hospitality, depriving him and his wife of their privacy they used to enjoy
when they could make love without worrying about a third occupant hearing them
do so.
If she had not been so intent on antagonising him with her airs and
graces or hogged his bathroom whenever he wanted to use it, he might not have
been quite so anxious to get rid of her or spoil her chances of marriage with
so much relish. As it was, male solidarity dictated that he had to inform his
friend , co-worker and comrade in arms Mitch of her sordid past to prevent him
from winding up marrying an alcoholic slut with mental health issues.
This seems fair enough, but he did rape her. Was she perhaps
"asking for it" subconsciously? Compulsive flirt that she was, she
did ask him to do up her dress as early as in Scene 2 and clearly saw him as a
potential for "a bit of rough".
Earlier in the evening the rape took place, Blanche had repelled
Mitch's advances by shouting "Fire!" when he became too insistent on
enjoying her sexual favours despite declaring his intention not to marry her. Presumably
she could have done the same thing when she saw Stan was about to rape her, but
it seems she did not protest . We may therefore reasonably speculate that her
show of a struggle was perhaps meant more to arouse him further than to prevent
herself from being raped.
If she had wanted to stay on with the Kowalskis, she could have made
herself pleasant and helpful to Stella when she came back from the hospital with
the baby, but instead, she complained that her husband had raped her.
Presumably a rape victim who wanted the perpetrator punished for rape
would have gone straight to the police, not merely complained to his wife and
expected ... what? What are you expected to do if your elder sister complains
to you that your husband had raped her? You’d have to call the police yourself,
wouldn’t you, if you took the accusation seriously. Disbelief, anger and the
withdrawal of the hospitality you have extended to your trouble-making nuisance
of a sister would have been the most predictable reaction and consequence.
Stan does not make Blanche
move out the following Tuesday using her one-way ticket back to Laurel that he
himself had bought her as birthdaypresent, though this was what he asked her to do originally. Indeed, he
even allowed her to stay a few weeks more, which was generous of him,
considering she was also accusing him of rape when previously she was only
complaining about him resembling an ape.
That there was acard game in session asBlanche is escorted off the premises perfectly
illustrates the fact that life goes on even as we go mad after having destroyed
ourselves as a result of having too many ill-chosen sex partners.
The roles were played with
conviction by the cast. The young collector Blanche kissed on the mouth was
particularly handsome, I couldn’t help noticing. What is it with older woman
who want to seduce much younger men?That
they are easy prey? They are bound to be grateful? No one will sympathise with
them if they complain of sexual assault? Blanche was repeating a pattern of
behaviour when she tried to seduce or sexually assaulted him, for she had her
employment as a teacher ended when she was discovered to be having an affair
with a 17 year old schoolboy.
Because of my willing
suspension of disbelief,I tend to
forget the actors are acting unless there is something particularly striking
about the role or the appearance and demeanour of the actor. The haircut of
Nick Carter did not strike me as the kind of haircut Stanley Kowalski would
have had and I suspect Stan would not be obviously overweight either, though he
would betall, big, burly and
apelike.His movements would be slower
and more deliberate than Nick Carter’s - who I noticed had a tendency to move
his arms too quickly - to convey the required stillness and menace of a reasoning
human ape.The Stan in my mind’s eye would
not be overweight either.
Maddie Penfold was too
slight to play the matron come to take Blanche away to the loony bin and what
she wore oddly inappropriate. I remember her in a black cocktail dress
drunkenly in another role at the beginning but forget what she said now or who
she was meant to be. One of the minor characters included a negro woman, but
Penfold is blond.
Dan Thomassen’s accent was RP
though he acted well, but probably because the others did their American
accents so well.He was perhaps too
graceful and well-formed a young manto
play the awkward clod I imagined Mitch to be.To play Mitch well, I think he would have to be actually repulsive to
Blanche, to bring home the horror of her fallen status in life: the lady of the
castle forced to consider marrying a sweaty serf.
Beth Mabin cannot be faulted
in the way she played Stella, and certainly not her mastery of the movements of
a heavily pregnant woman.
Rebecca Lewis was utterly
convincing and the enthusiastic comments of others fortunate enough to see her
perform at the sold out performances are enough to convey her talent and
promise as an actress in this very demanding role. The best moment for me was
the “broom moment” in Scene 4, after she grabbed it away it away from Stella
when she was cleaning up the mess after Stan's tantrum.
This scene was omitted in
thefilm with Vivian Leigh, Rebecca
Lewis made it completely her own.