má consciência burguesa atingirá o seu acme com a revolta milenarista de O Pobre de Pedir.

a dor e o sonho são, na ficção brandoniana, os únicos vectores que intensificam a vida e lhe dão plenitude.

estética do grotesco no autor

Nothing in “Thor” is, and I suspect that is not an accident. If you can’t remember what you saw, then there’s no harm in seeing it again. There is no reason to go to this movie, which might be another way of saying there’s no reason not to. Something like that seems to be the logic behind “Thor,” and as a business plan it’s probably foolproof.

Quand Papagena, la femme qui va l'aimer, tout d'abord enveloppée d'un long manteau et recroquevillée comme une vieille sorcière, ôte soudain ses oripeaux pour apparaître jeune, vêtue à l'identique de Papageno, le rire est instantané. Clin d'oeil malicieux, elle est le seul personnage à n'être pas pieds nus mais en socquettes roses.

“A Magic Flute,” though a couple of minutes longer, is even more skeletal. The orchestra is reduced to a piano. That the pianist, Alain Planes, the only known quantity among the participants, jumped ship on the eve of the premiere was a bad omen. Franck Krawczyk, the arranger, had to stand in.

The arias are sung in an exotically flavored German. The dialogues are spoken in French. I saw the first of two alternating casts. None of the young singers is on the verge of a major career. The only one worth citing is Leila Benhamza’s Queen of the Night: Her coloraturas are clear, yet the lyrical passages need work. The acting isn’t any better. The general impression is that of a school performance at a provincial conservatory.

in Mozart, the music is drawn to the surface by the words."

Time is this merciless, corroding force, but you also know that, if you stay with it, it will take you towards the pure essence."

for those with ears to hear and eyes to see, A Magic Flute offers not a reduction of Mozart's opera but a beautiful realisation of its inner core.

The aim, Brook says in the programme, is to produce a "light effervescent Flute, where an intimacy with the performers will allow the tenderness and the depth of the score to appear". Yet it's a rather prim and chilly experience, not joyless exactly – the end is an exquisite delight – but detached, uninvolving and played at the same subdued level throughout.

The polarity between the moments of pantomime humour and the deep seriousness of the story of Pamina's abduction never strikes sparks.

Tarantino seems to be repeating the same trick he pulled with Inglourious Basterds, which borrowed its moniker from a 1978 Italian war film of (nearly) the same name but ignored pretty much everything else. The original Django is a 1966 spaghetti western, directed by Sergio Corbucci and starring Franco Nero as a ruthless gunman. Nero said he's been given a role in the film, but that may well be the only connection – other than that Tarantino will riff off the genre's tropes in much the same way he cheerfully rifled through the "dogs of war" domain last time around.

Reining in Quentin Tarantino would be like telling Jimi Hendrix to quit with the guitar solos – and yet someone might have to do it. Could that be the secret behind the screenplay's bizarre leaking? After all, if you're determined to win an argument, there's nothing like having a bit of backup.

Helen Mirren plays Angela

The greatest performance is from Colin Jeavons as the horribly put-upon Donald, brutally called "Donald Duck"

I don't think I have ever seen in any television drama something as shockingly, explicitly real as Donald's distress after being bullied.

He is all alone, hiding in a barn, rocking back and forth, desperately lonely and sobbing to himself "Come back dad... come back dad... ". It is deeply upsetting to watch because we know that in some angry, masochistic way he is saying this to upset himself still further. This scene - one of the most purely violent I've ever seen in any television programme - shows how important it was to cast adults. Seeing an adult cry like a child is shocking, and adult actors can make children's pain brutally and tactlessly real to an audience which wants to forget what being a child was actually like.

famous lines from AE Housman's A Shropshire Lad, which Potter himself reads over the final sequence:Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those?That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again.

Could it be that in remembering this past you are not debarred from the blue remembered hills, but rather, you are inhabiting them for the very first time - inhabiting them in a fuller, realer way than when you were there as a child? Memory, though conflicted and anguished, affords you a vivid new presence (and it may also be that Potter wants us to superimpose an ironic meaning on "land of lost content" with its "air that kills"). Now you are there, really there, intensely aware as you never were at the time of the ironies, the injustices and the exquisite luxuries of having nothing to do all day.When an adult truly remembers what it was like to be a child, with an adult's perspective, there is something forbidden and almost transgressive about it. That is what, I think, Potter is getting at when he cast adults as children. It wasn't a stunt: it was a representation of the act of memory.

Mr. Shawn exposes the contradictions and compromises of the urban liberal mind with a mercilessness that is sly and at times hilarious.

Despite the density and richness of its language, however, “The Fever” doesn’t go very deep in its analysis of the fundamental causes of the world’s inequities or posit any rational ideas about how they could be eased. Mr. Shawn is limited by the scope of the narrator’s experience, of course — an economist or political scientist he is not — but the resulting narrative circles around a few basic conclusions that seem thinner and more obvious the more they are illustrated or simply repeated.

“My feeling in my heart a sympathy for the poor does not change the life of the poor,” our narrator unsurprisingly says toward the play’s conclusion. At least Mr. Shawn displays a self-knowledge to match his narrator’s when he has him continue, “And artists who create works of art that inspire sympathy and good values don’t change the life of the poor.”

Its simple finger-pointing at the egoism and materialism of the complacent bourgeoisie seems reductive.

More to the point, I think Mr. Shawn overestimates his audience’s taste for self-flagellation by a good half-hour. “The Fever” would cut deeper into the consciousness if it were shorter. He should know that a 90-minute monologue gives too much rein for straying thoughts about dinner plans and how best to catch a taxi after the performance. And perhaps — who knows? — a few audience members might put that half-hour to better use, studying or working for gradual improvements in the lives of others rather than lamenting their own egoism over glasses of Champagne.