Magma Mag

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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

McGregor hits all the right notes as a man with a conscience and sense of professional pride who is in way over his head. He's smart but not too smart and doesn't always make the right moves. Brosnan gets the politician's arrogance perfectly as well as the duplicity lurking so close under the surface. Williams nearly steals the show as the wily, controlling wife that senses her control is at last slipping.

Invited to consider the suggestion that the audience might have recoiled from the play's content, which includes descriptions of masturbation, paedophilia and sex with an "enormous woman" who lets out "elephant moans", he responds cheerfully: "Ah, but I thought it was well written! When I was first exposed to the films of Ingmar Bergman, I found them frank and disturbing portraits of the world we live in, but that was not something that displeased me. They were beautiful. I thought people would respond to my plays the way I responded to Bergman's films."

In the mid-1980s, the sexual vaudeville of Shawn's early work gave way to political concerns, though the dramatic procedure was the same: just as the lust-filled reveries that occupy a person's private thoughts remain hidden from the world at large, so, in the second act of Shawn's playwriting career, the obscene oppression of the world's poor by rich and powerful nations is covered up by hypocrisy and, if necessary, military force

The original production of 1990 was described by Frank Rich, then the resident theatre critic of the New York Times, as "nothing if not a musty, radical chic stunt destined to be parodied". A revival in 2007 prompted the headline in the same paper, "The World's a Mess, and It's All Your Fault". Rich deployed the weapon that is used frequently in attacks on Shawn's plays, calling The Fever "an almost entirely humourless assault on the privileged class by one of its card-carrying members".

Shawn, who was educated at private schools before going to Harvard and Oxford, posits a defence based on sincerity. "Being in poor countries was something that changed me more than anything else." He wrote The Fever after visits to Central American states where ruthless dictatorships relied on backing from the US government. "It gave me an insight into the sickness of my own society." The epiphany gave him permission "to devote my life to being a writer". He has an engaging belief in the transforming power of literature.

In Hare's view, the reconstruction of Shawn as a political playwright happened as a result of his exposure to British theatre. "Wally came to Britain in the 1970s, and fell under the influence of Howard Brenton, Caryl Churchill and myself. Until then, the main tendency of his work had been surrealist."

When A Thought in Three Parts, which incorporates the comic youth hostel orgy, was mounted by Joint Stock at the ICA in 1977, it led to protests from members of parliament and a demand on the part of the Conservative MP for Staffordshire South West for "urgent talks with the Arts Council". There exists a theatrical legend that the play was banned; the reality, though less sensational, is equally dismal. Threatened with the loss of its grant, as Hare recalls, the ICA "decided not to extend the scheduled run, despite sold-out houses".

A note at the head of The Fever says that it was "first performed in various apartments in New York City". The performer was the author. It has since been played in many countries, by actors of both genders.

"The trouble with theatres is that people are sitting in seats that they have sat in before, to watch other plays. They are settling in for a certain type of experience, bringing with them a lot of preconceptions that start filtering into their brains before the play has even begun." In spaces such as an abandoned men's club building, where The Designated Mourner received its first and only New York staging, "the audience doesn't know what to expect, and is perhaps more willing to meet you halfway."

"I have lived in the shadow of my father. It would be ridiculous to pretend that there is no relationship between the sex in my plays and the reticence about sex which my father practised, even carrying it over to his duties as magazine editor. It's almost too obvious to mention. Clearly, I must be in some sort of reaction to that, although" - he does the comic deadpan - "I've taken it awfully far."

Grasses of a Thousand Colours is like Shawn's early plays, in being domestic drama of an outlandish kind. Animals don fancy costumes and welcome humans to a party. Cats make satisfying lovers. Husband and wife take pleasure in savaging one another, just as they do in other works by Shawn. Donkeys stand on the table at dinner and "haphazardly piss", while men admire their penises. "Of course it has upsetting elements," Shawn says, looking as if, as was once said, the strongest four-letter word he could utter is "Gosh". He insists that writing "is not a voluntary process.

Isn't all writing to some extent about trying to get through the layers of propaganda and false interpretations and received ideas and clichés that prevent us from seeing what's going on? I think that's the enterprise."