Let'sTalk Off-Broadway

These Seven Sicknesses by Sean Graney, directed by Ed Sylvanus Iskandar, The Flea Theater, featuring The Bats

Allison Buck as Tekmessa and Grant Harrison as Ajax, photo Laura June Kirsch, courtesy Flea Theater

If you’re lucky enough to see These Seven Sicknesses, you’re in for a rich adventure.  It’s like setting sail.  First of all, you’ll walk in to a party -- there’s a buzz, the actors, in costume, are there to talk with you, offering to bring you water or wine.  This is transformative, opening you to whatever's going to happen soon on the stage, that is, the wood floor between the facing banks of the audience.   

The play is an ambitious and exciting weaving together of the seven extant plays of Sophocles.  It follows their basic story lines and generally their emotional arcs while changing some aspects.  To catch any of Sophocles’ words you have to think fast because the language is our current lingo and delivered with today’s expressions and body language, marvelously by a superb group of young actors -- the Flea’s Bats.  The stories are tragic, and Graney’s treatment of them is witty and hilarious.  Since it’s a long evening¸dinner is served (by the actors to the audience) after Act I and -- if you can believe it –- dessert comes after Act II, which leaves room for delightful conversation among the actors and audience.  Feeling so well taken care of is in itself transformative.  

For those who may know Sophocles’ plays and are interested in the order in which they’re taken up, Act I presents, with these titles, Oedipus [The King], In Trachis, In Colonus.  Act II:  Philoktetes, Ajax.  Act III:  Elektra, Antigone.

The opening act is over-compressed which led me to think These Seven Sicknesses might be superficial but -- hold on, it isn’t!  Still, much of Act I is performed with rambunctious speed.   Oedipus acknowledges his guilt fairly early on so Sophocles’ portrait of him as a searcher for truth is lost.  The Oedipus episode slows down, though, for its exciting, theatrical crescendo.  In a scene poignantly played by Satomi Blair, Oedipus’ wife Jocasta, drenched in guilt at the discovery of her polluted marriage with her son, steps into her bath and cuts her wrists, her blood reddening the water (in Sophocles she hangs herself).  In terms of the themes of blood and pollution in the play, as Ms. Blair commented to me in the intermission, this manner of suicide is rich in symbolism.  To see a woman step into a bath on the  plank floor between the facing banks of seats has character of a sacrifice: it"s "not in Sophocles" but it's filled with suggestive resonance of other sacrifices of women in these plays and at the heart of much Greek drama.

above:  Satomi Blair as Jocasta, photo Laura June Kirsch, courtesy Flea Theater

below: Seth Moore as Philoktetes and Alex Herrald as Neoptolemus, photo Laura June Kirsch, courtesy Flea Theater 

Philoktetes, next,  follows most closely Sophocles’ actual and emotional story line, it’s given the time it needs, and is magnificently acted by Seth Moore:  the upshot -- a great Philoktetes!  Years ago, as the story goes, the Greeks were headed to fight at Troy but the warrior Philoktetes had a gangrenous, disgusting leg wound, so they abandoned him on a desolate island -- “They left cans of food for me but no can opener,” Philoktetes says.  Now, after ten years of fruitless war, the prophetic word is out that the Greeks can’t capture Troy without Philoktetes’ magic bow.  The play begins as Odysseus and Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son, arrive on the island to get it.  They and we meet a Philoktetes in agony, half-crazed with bitterness at the way he has been treated¸ his isolation, and the unrelenting pain of his rotting leg.  With Odysseus and Neoptolemus plotting by fair means and foul to get that bow, the pain of suspicion is added to his anguish.  Philoktetes covers the long stage with his one good leg and a make-shift crutch, his suppurating leg fallen upon, and stomped upon by Odysseus who’ll stop at nothing.  In this episode several nurses, on hand throughout These Seven Sicknesses as a singing Greek chorus … Well, what they do here is an operation, more I will not say, except that it gives Seth Moore the opportunity to add some blood curdling cries of pain to his stunning performance.

Ajax, the story of unother unappreciated warrior, omits Sophocles' rich, long speeches but gives plenty of time to the main dramatic action, choreographed on a grand scale and performed with thrilling power, deft speed and spinning turns by Grant Harrison as Ajax.  The hero whose name is proverbial for great strength is brooding over an unbearable blow to his honor:  since Achilles, the greatest Greek fighter, died, his armor was to be awarded to the the next greatest fighter and in a vote the Greeks awarded it -- not to Ajax but -- to Odysseus.  Ajax is agonizing over the intolerable insult when a squadron of armed men and women enter in a choreographed advance, uttering the low, oddly frightening bah's of sheep.  Driven by a passion to avenge his honor, and crazed by the disrespect, Ajax enters battle against what he thinks are his enemies and slaughters them all, only to find out that he has, in his insanity, slaughtered nothing but a herd of sheep.

 After that, what’s left for a hero to do?

Philoktetes and Ajax emphatically bring to mind current issues:  fruitless wars that last ten years, and the grievous plight of fighters, suffering wounds that won't heal, lacking their due respect, who may be driven to violence and suicide.  Seeing these issues laid bare in ancient stories expands them to the universal.      

Other highlights include Kate Michaud’s passionate and complex performance as Herakles’ wife Dejanira, stung by Herakles’ rejection of her in favor of a younger woman but loving him still -- with good reason, that’s one mighty, compelling Herakles played by Victor Joel Ortiz.

With the shaved head and dark garb of a Buddhist monk, Holly Chou, a brilliant character actor playing the Blind Seer, speaks prophetic ambiguities with precise articulation -- what an irony! 

Betsy Lippit bounds into Elektra an explosive tomboy.  What a fury she is, grappling in full rage with her mother Clytaemnestra, who brings out her side of the story, played by Akyiaa Wilson.  These are only among my favorite episodes and performances -- there are great moments throughout.  There are, after all, 7 plays and a cast of 37! 

These Seven Sicknesses is a rich feast of theater! 

These Seven Sicknessess plays at the Flea Theater in Manhattan's Tribeca through March 4.***  For information and tickets, click on live link of title. 

***Due to popular demand, The Flea Theater will bring back THESE SEVEN SICKNESSES this summer. This critically lauded theatrical adaptation of Sophocles’ seven surviving plays (Oedipus, In Trachis, Philoktetes, In Colonus, Ajax, Elektra and Antigone) will return for a limited engagement June 6 through July 1

Yvonne Korshak

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The Philanderer by Bernard Shaw, directed by Gus Kaikkonen, The Pearl Theatre Company

... pre-vintage Shaw ...  

Shaw’s early play, The Philanderer of 1893, is a romantic comedy that’s as focused on the ideas of Henrik Ibsen as it is on love, and with good reason:  for Shaw ideas and love were equally suffused with eros.

Shaw saw Ibsen’s A Doll’s House five times around 1893 and this iconic drama was revelatory, bringing him to the possibility of a theater of ideas.  And, with his comic bent, and awareness of the pitfalls of stern moralizing, Shaw sought a humorous way to explore Ibsen’s theme of the independent woman.  This led him inThe Philanderer to comic exaggerations which today to me seem dated, though when the play was first produced, they may have seemed fresh and provocative.  As a gauge of that, the Pearl's program tells us that  "...due to strict censorship ... it was not performed on the stage until 1902."

In a romantic triangle (like one Shaw experienced), Grace Tranfield, a down-to-earth widow and Julia Craven, volatile and erotically assertive, both love Leonard Charteris, an attractive curmudgeon, who’s just broken off from the over-possessive Julia and is now courting Grace.  During some romancing at Grace’s house, Julia bursts in, claiming Leonard really belongs to her.  Shaw, alluding to Ibsen’s “advanced” ideas about independent women, has fun with the jealous Julia – how can a woman who calls herself independent speak of one person “belonging” to another?

Julia keeps up her boisterous scene even when Grace’s proper father, Colonel Craven, arrives, along with his long lost friend who happens to be Julia’s father.  How fascinating that Shaw describes a similar romantic rivalry and late night scene in his diary in early 1893! An exhausted Leonard (just like a “horribly tired and shocked and upset” Shaw) finally gets Julia out of there with a romantic lie, sober Grace having long ago retreated upstairs. 

The play continues at to the “Ibsen Club”, where a stern portrait of Ibsen dominates the Library, and where Ibsen’s ideas about independent women are carried to the point of caricature.  Women are allowed in this London club, an innovation, but to be members they must be “unwomanly women.”  Julia’s younger sister, Sylvia, fills the bill in a pants role.  But how Julia can manage to stay in the Club, in spite of her “womanly” amorousness and sexy clothes, is the set-up for some humor.

The conflict between Julia and Grace over Leonard (because it’s wearing thin it seems to me) is joined by stuffy Dr. Percy Paramore’s unrequited love for Julia, who despairs even more when the news comes in that his gruesome scientific experiments are proven to be useless (anticipating Shaw’s later The Doctor’s Dilemma).  As in Moliere’s The Misanthrope , which the sexual dynamics in The Philanderer much resemble, the undercurrent of true sexual attraction between the flirt and the curmudgeon, here Leonard and Julia, retains its ambiguity and the romance is left unresolved. 

I’m glad to have had the chance to see The Philanderer and I appreciate the The Pearl for putting in on.  The production is straightforward and so adequate for introducing one to the play, but it’s uninspired.  Of the central threesome, Bradford Cover is strong and charming as the rumpled Leonard.  Karron Graves plays the amorously determined Julia with the vivacity the part calls for though, at the heights of emotion, her voice gives way to a kind of shrieking in her all out performance .  Rachel Botchan could have used some of Graves’ energy -- a fine performer in other roles I’ve seen, she played Grace with a dull placidity that makes one wonder what Leonard could possibly see in her.

The Pearl used to be in a proscenium theater but now plays in a theater with seating on three sides, yet continues to stage plays fully to the front as in the old theater:  more flexibility and variety of movement would be interesting, and give better site lines to those seated on the side.     

The Philanderer  holds fewer streaks of the Shavian wit than one hopes for.  But the fact is, when he does construct one of those marvelous, sly build-ups that land you with pleasurable jolt at a great line, and you find yourself laughing heartily, then the play, Shaw, and everything else, for the moment, seem intensely worthwhile.

The Philanderer  plays at NYC's City Center Theater in mid-town Manhattan through February 19, 2012.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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Stopped Bridge of Dreams, written, directed and designed by John Jesurun, Ellen Stewart Theatre at La MaMa

... artistic directors ...

Ellen Stewart, the astoundingly brave and brilliant founder of La MaMa theater in NYC’s East Village, died just about a year ago, Jan 13, 2011.  Since, from the time she founded her experimental theater group in 1961 to the time of her death, La MaMa created approximately 3,000 productions.  (!)  I doubt anyone could have seen all of them -- except Ellen Stewart.  But some of the greatest theater I’ve ever seen, simply unforgettable productions, were at La MaMa.

What will happen to La MaMa now that Ellen Stewart is gone?  Here’s what I’ve noticed so far.  Things are busy at La MaMa which is a good sign.  They’ve been serving as a venue for some other exciting theater groups and performers which keeps their performance spaces -- the tiny and the large -- active.  They've also mounted their own productions since the loss of Stewart and these, in my view, have been less successful. 

Stopped Bridge of Dreams, La MaMa’s own production, is a case in point.  It has a lot of trendy elements, from Oriental influence and allusions to the use of video and “multi-media” -- not much multi, mainly, video -- but these seem mainly there to distract one from thinking about that there’s no real play here. 

While there’s not really a plot, there’s a situation, though it takes awhile catch on to it.  We’re up in the air in a transcontinental airliner that functions as a brothel and the characters are the prostitutes plus the Madam.  We hear about the clients but never see any.  The denizens of the plane have some ghostly characteristics but they’re alive -- somewhere in the numinous between life and death and past and present, though that doesn’t quite work out either.

The characters have various relationships among themselves.  A central relationship is between the Madam and a young man who is or is not one of her thousands of unborn aborted children; you may guess that this is a tense relationship.  There's a flirtation or two.  Although the prostitutes populating the plane seem suited to the environment, and generally not looking to leave, there’s seems to be an underlying ennui.  Or maybe that was my ennui waiting for this to be over.

This all takes place under monitors that just below ceiling level run the full length of the long theater, with screen-saver like videos suggesting the heavens, clouds, etc., and also some panoramic shots of cities approached as for landing from above (my favorite shots).  Cameras provide varied angles and greatly magnified close-ups of the performers interacting or narrating, live or filmed ahead of time.

There's reference to an early "floating world" Japanese novel with narration from it of the tragic story of a young girl who grows up to be a prostitute and supplants the current Madam as the new Madam of the plane.  The old one will drift off to become a cloud -- at least that’s what she says.

Speaking of video ... The Wooster Group, an outstanding off-Broadway group, pioneered the use of videos and other tech, slick and mod-appearing devices in their plays in ways that are challenging, witty, and make one see things in new ways.  The video-driven multiple points of view in Stopped Bridge of Dreams rely on some aura of innovation, but are unsearching.  This play doesn’t lead one to see things in new ways, through tech or otherwise, it's more watered down Sci Fi.

The author, director, designer, John Jesurun, has an imposing lists of honors and activities for his theatrical work, including back in 1996 a MacArthur “genius award” Fellowship.  So much for all that.  The -- to now -- falling off from quality of the La MaMa productions since the death Ellen Stewart drives home that among the real geniuses of the off- and off-off Broadway scene are the Artistic Directors.  Creators such as Ellen Stewart, and -- to name just a few current -- Brian Kulick of Classic Stage, Jim Simpson of the Flea Theater, Jonathan Bank of Mint Theater, Elizabeth LeCompte of the Wooster Group, and others, make it happen.

Although their theater groups each differ profoundly one from another, these artistic directors share imagination, intense individuality, leadership, love of theater, and perseverance against great odds.  They unite individual vision with habits of personality that, to me, are quite astsonishing, they are like iron in their toughness.  If you want to look for genius, in my view, here’s where. 

About that question, how will La MaMa fare?  Give it time.  Great artistic directors need apply.

Stopped Bridge of Dreams  plays at La MaMa's Ellen Stewart Theatre in NYC's East Village through February 5, 2012.  For further information and tickets, click on live link of play's title. 

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are totally private -- no emails ever appear with comments. 

New American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with thoughts on Washington Crossing the Delaware

Albert Bierstadt, The Rocky Mountains, Landers Peak, 1863, oil on canvas, 73 1/2 x 120 3/4 in. 186.7 x 306.7 cm (for other paintings, see full captions with dimensions at end)

The MMA’s New American Wing is a feast of paintings.  There are so many, and they are so fine and varied, and worth seeing for different reasons.  The overall effect is to give a sense of the strength of the American painting tradition, placing it on a par with the European traditions.  That’s clearly what the designers of the new wing intended, and they succeeded.  And why, evidently, the galleries are “a contemporary interpretation of 19^th-century Beaux-Arts galleries,” according to a Museum description.  The general sense is familiar great.  It engenders a sense of pride in the accomplishments of American painting in the circumscribed period the Wing covers, from the 18th Century to 1920.

In light of all the innovation current in museums throughout the world, the fundamentally conventional character of the New American Wing is surprising and even disappointing.  The designers went against the stream in this.  At the same time, though, while wondering, “wasn’t there another way to do it?”, I was delighted at their accomplishment in solving a difficult problem -- weaving together chronological organization with thematically focused galleries.  The decision in exhibitions to go with “chronology” or “thematic” often seems either-or (and can be bitterly fought over).  Here the designers effectively integrate the two, and it works.

It's wonderful to see favorite people of the past -- and for me that's George Washington -- seeming as if alive as in this painting by Charles Willson Peale (L) (apologies -- the painting is much brighter than the photo). Naturally portraits are almost always designed to magnify whomever's portrayed.  Charles Willson Peale's low point of view in this very large

portrait (all dimensions given in captions below) makes this tall man seem exceedingly tall, exceedingly solid, and his individuality of great importance.  How grand, and how expressive of the democratic spirit of the new republic, that the fabric seller,  Elijah Boardman, painted near in time by Ralph Earl on a canvas of approximately equal size conveys a comparable magnitude and substance.  Boardman is advertising his fabrics -- some, in this moment of warm feeling between France and the United States, look quite French.

The great icon of American patriotism, the huge painting by Emanuel Leutz of Washington Crossing the Delaware of 1851, has come out of the shadows of a long, dim wall and is now the centerpiece of a double-sized and well lit gallery, and a spectacular gilded frame has been constructed for it based on vintage photographs. 

The painting commemorates a key event in the American Revolution:  December 26, 1776, in harsh weather, Washington and his men crossed the Delaware River, surprising and capturing approximately 1,000 Hessians based at Trenton, N. J. who’d let down their guard following Christmas revels.  This victory, following upon darker days, raised Revolutionary morale and stirred a new belief in the possibility of the American cause, encouraging the new recruits Washington needed for the army.

Leutz sacrificed historical accuracy in the service of the inspiring image.  The Stars and Stripes flag, for example, hadn’t been designed at the time of the crossing but by 1864 had become a stirring national symbol, while the original Grand Union Flag of 1776 by then would have been largely unfamiliar.     

While the crossing took place in the dead of night, with rain, sleet and snow, Leutz gives James Monroe, right behind Washington, almost equal billing.  He carries the flag -- literally and figuratively.  Like Washington, Monroe was a future President, and his Monroe Doctrine of 1823 asserted the national policy of no further intervention by European powers in the Americas, extending the principles of the American Revolution.

The boats are painted smaller and the river wider than they were, heightening the drama, and horses were not brought over in small boats.  Yet, the fight against great odds, the hazard of the event, the intelligence of the complex plan, the courage to carry it out, and the momentous meaning of the victory are the truths that Leutz conveyed.  It’s hard to want it any other way -- or at least this image is so embedded in our national awareness, it’s hard to imagine it differently.

In the painting’s former, dimmer setting, I’d never noticed Washington’s watch fob, seen below his stomach, at the bend of his leg.  Watches were very valuable and symbols of status, and a watch fob is a favored male attribute, as in the portrait above of Isaiah Berlin, and is visible in several portraits of Washington (though not in the Peale above).  In place of the usual metallic chain, here Washington’s watch fob is represented by two round balls, where his leg bends out from his torso, below the belly (shadowed -- check it out in the museum). This is so unusual, I wondered if these two rosy balls are intended to suggest “balls” in the anatomic sense, and characterizing -- along with the stance, facial expression and weaponry -- Washington’s masculine vigor.  And it may carry an even more specific symbolic purpose -- as my companion suggested -- to connote specifically Washington as Father of his Country.   I think so.

Washington Crossing the Delaware is flanked by two important works, of our great Hudson River School, equally monumental, and artistically surpassing Leutze’s painting, Frederick Church’s Heart of the Andes  and Albert Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountains (illus at top):  the historic sense of the gallery is heightened by the fact that these three paintings were displayed together, much as they are here, in the Metropolitan Sanitary Fair of 1864. 

Entitling one of twenty-seven galleries "The West 1860-1920" marginalizes a good part of our country and highlights the Americans-doing-it-like-the-Europeans bias of the New American Wing.  On the other hand, it's interesting, though not unusual, to see Frederic Remington's Bronze sculpture Broncho Buster (L) adjacent to Remington paintings like On the Southern Plains.  While focused on paintings, sculptures are interspersed, pertinently, among the galleries of the New American Wing, though sculptures are mainly on exhibit elsewhere in the museum. 

In the fundamentally conventional organization of the New American Wing, Barbara Weinberg, Curator of this section created a stimulating shake-up.  Thomas Eakins' brooding portrait of his brother-in-law, The Thinker:  Portrait of Louis N. Kenton, is hung, unexpectedly, in the gallery of "Portraiture in the Grand Manner" among proud, patrician portraits such as Sargent's Madame X (below R; to compare Eakins and Sargent, click on live link).  Eakins' single standing figure, darkly dressed on the tall canvas coordinates with the "grand manner" portraits in form, but in spirit it's entirely different.  It fits in, and it doesn't.  The unexpected inclusion of Eakins' portrait with the "grand manner" portraits stimulates new thought.  

Eakins' large portrait in its newly-thought out position is climactic, given that the next gallery, if one is following the chronological arrangement, brings us to the latest works, the Ashcan School (1900-1920), not a strength of this museum -- there are some good paintings, e.g., but no George Bellows.  The American Impressionists nearby, of the same period, fare better. 

Sculptures are exhibited elsewhere … art of Native Americans is elsewhere … Modern art is elsewhere -- don't expect to find Jackson Pollock in the New American Wing!   There are no seventeenth-century paintings, although these galleries include an extensive collection American silver from 1660 to 1800 (including of course Paul Revere), Late Colonial furniture, and a fully re-created and furnished entrance hall from a the pre-Revolutionary Van Rensselaer Manor House.  Few women artists are represented, and little "outsider art," partly because, by definition, the mediium is mainly painting.  There’s no consistency in the decisions underlying these arrangements -- it’s a matter of taste, past practices, the “feel of things,” and the history of the museum’s acquisitions, and in that sense, “The New American Wing” is something of a misnomer -- buyer beware.  

Moving through the galleries, the stars remain the stars in a fixed firmament.   John Singleton Copley, Frederick Church, Albert Bierstadt, George Caleb Bingham, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, simply stun among the rest. 

George Caleb Bingham, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, 1845, o/c 29 x 36 1/2 in  73.7 x 92.7 cm 

Additional captions in order of appearance:  Charles Wilson Peale, George Washington, ca. 1779-81, o/c, 95 x 61 3/4 in  241.3 x 156.8 cm;   Ralp;h Earl, Elijah Boardman, 1789, o/c, 85 x 51 in 210.8 x 129.5 cm;  Emanuel Gottlieb Leutz, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851, o/c, 149 x 255 in  378.5 x 647.7 cm;  Frederic Remington, The Broncho Buster, 1895; revised 1909;  this cast, by November 1910, bronze, 32 1/4 x 27 1/4 x 15 in  81.9 x 69.2 x 38.1 cm;  John Singer Sargent, Madame X(Madame Pierre Gautreau), 1883-84, o/c, 82 1/8 x 43 1/4 in  208.6 x 109.9 cm.  Photos courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

                                                                                              Yvonne Korshak 

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For information on visiting the Museum, click on live link. 

 

FILM REVIEW – The Iron Lady, with Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher, Jim Broadbent as Denis Thatcher, Alexandra Roach as the young Margaret and Harry Lloyd as the young Denis

There's one reason to see this film: Meryl Streep. The Iron Lady follows Britain’s Margaret Thatcher from aspiring politician to political powerhouse, from loving wife to grieving widow.  Streep brings to this range of life experience her power to move one with the slightest tilt of her head, to convey inner experience with the minuscule shift of the direction of her eyes.  By the end of the film, one feels one has been enlarged and touched by the depth with which one has shared the full life of another human being from the inside.  We feel we know what it felt like. That makes the movie a great pleasure to experience.

The story's told through Thatcher’s mental world in old age as it flows between past and present, and between what’s actually happening in her life and what’s illusory -- particularly the hallucinatory and “alive” presence and companionship of her beloved husband, Denis Thatcher, who often settles in with her for a chat across the dining room table, on the sofa, and in bed, but who -- as she at the same time knows well -- had died a few years earlier.  It's a compelling, and genuinely interesting coda to a moving love story.      

Thatcher's against-all-odds climb to the pinnacle of power as Prime Minister of England is Horatio Alger-like (though her father did own two grocery stores).  The film sees a relationship between her arch conservatism, especially her focus on individuals as responsible agents, and disdain for government solutions for people’s problems, to her own relatively humble beginnings and tough uphill battle.  She remembers herself as a girl working in her father’s grocery store, through her early grasps at political office and her marriage with the wealthy businessman, Denis, to her rise as a national political figure.  Along the way she has to overcome, and often overlook, sexism and snobbery (the grocer’s daughter in Parliament -- you can imagine!). 

In its treatment of her long tenure as Prime Minister, the film gives glimpses of positive and negative aspects of the tough-minded and at times brutally enforced conservative policy of the "Iron Lady", and takes us through to her eventual defeat as head of the Conservative Party. 

But for all of Thatcher’s central, and continuing, political significance, these are background to what the film focuses on and does well: the inner life of this strong and independent-minded woman, now diminished in strength, and with her independence challenged in even the smallest everyday matters -- like going out on her own to buy a carton of milk.  This is an imagined telling of her toughest battles:  lost love and old age.

It’s not possible to know how much the subjectively presented film reflects that “real” Margaret Thatcher.  Are these really her thoughts?  Streep sounds like and looks very like Thatcher but, in the scenes of Thatcher's mid-years, a little softer and prettier, with Streep’s characteristic girlish underlay (she managed to avoid this, however, in her astonishingly convincing portrayal of Julia Child in Julia and Julia).  But never mind physical vanity:   in the showdown -- old age -- Streep gives all to expressiveness.  During one scene in which she’s still really good looking, it takes a long time to sew on a bodice button, with Streep’s impressive décolleté spotlighted all the while.  I thought, she likes to allure, but she likes even more to be a great actor.  There’s nothing’s left of handsome -- or glamorous or graceful -- in the old, red eyed, bulky, wispy haired, and often frightened Mrs. Thatcher.

But personality persists.  This Margaret Thatcher maintains her full self in the face of the frailties of age, grief and hallucinatory confusion.  We know about these, since the movie let’s us see her at her weakest, but the rest of the world doesn’t have to know!  Interacting with others -- with a doctor, or at a dinner party -- she drifts off.  But she realizes it.  And will not tolerate condescension.  How shall she retrieve her dignity?  Characteristically, of course, by a rousing political statement, on the spot, articulate and vigorous.  She rouses herself with a jolt, I'm still Margaret Thatcher.  These are some of my favorites scenes in the movie. 

Alexandra Roach is charming, feisty, looks the part, and in all ways creates an affect consistent with the mature Margaret portrayed by Streep, and Harry Loyd brings an erotic chemistry to their romance that effectively warms the movie.  Olivia Colman as their daughter Carol portrays the conflicted but loving relationship with her extraordinary mother. 

But how did the grocer’s daughter become Prime Minister of England anyhow?  We get glimpses of what she did but no insight into how.  Surely Thatcher didn’t climb the slippery slope just by being a peppery young woman.  She couldn’t have maintained power and forced through her policies without manipulations, accommodations, negotiations and alliances within alliances, but these are barely hinted at, and the film leaves one wondering about the mechanisms of her success.  There’s another movie to be made about Margaret Thatcher.  But this one is compelling in human terms, a most public woman in her private life, a most powerful woman struggling with the weaknesses of old age, illumined by a remarkable actress.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Please scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private -- no emails ever appear with comments.