Tom Roper's Weblog

Kempton and Newcastle

Kempton 155: Molotof
Kempton 225: Captain Chris
Kempton 300: Nacarat
Newcastle 315: Belon Gale
Kempton 335: Toubab

Euripides' Helen: the King's College London Greek play 2011

I'm no drama critic. I lack both the necessary theoretical background and, an infrequent theatre-goer, the practical experience, to do a decent job. However, as far as I can see no one else has tackled the recent King's College London Greek Play, so I shall have a go.

I saw the first night, preceded by a talk by Bettany Hughes, author of Helen Of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore, which, as I find as I read it, is an exhaustive and fascinating account of Helen both in antiquity and how she has been seen since.

It's an odd play. Instead of the Homeric version of the Trojan war, it seems that the Helen snatched away by Paris from Menelaus's court to Troy was not the real Helen, but an eidolon. The real Helen, blameless, was brought by Hermes to Egypt where she has lived ever since. So, after the sack of Troy, Menelaus travels home and is shipwrecked on the coast. The play has an unusual happy ending too: Helen and Menelaus, reunited, conspire with the Egyptian king Theoclymenus' prophetess sister Theonoe, to outwit the king, faking a sea-burial for Menelaus, who they claim is dead, and then seizing the ship and sailing for Sparta.

Georgia Crick Collins, as Helen, was splendid in a demanding role; Menelaus was equally good, though he did play a few too many lines for laughs. Andreas Andreou, a modern Greek speaker, as Theoclymenus, had the difficult task of speaking in the classical language. The other parts were handled well, and the chorus, delivered their lines convincingly, though they sometimes lacked the cohesion necessary to convince the audience that they are watching a single unit. I have been spoilt for choruses, though, by seeing last year's Cambridge Greek Play, Agamemnon.

I was impressed by the audience too. With so many school students in the audience, the foyer crammed and echoing to teachers' despairing cries of, "St Custard's, do stick together', before we were let in, I feared that the production might be disrupted by inappropriate levity, but, though the odd double-entendre in the surtitles did raise a titter, everyone was very well behaved.

Ascot, Haydock and Wincanton

225 Ascot: Iconoclast
300 Ascot: Pride of Dulcote
320 Haydock: Carruthers
335 Ascot:  Karasenir
345 Wincanton: Overturn

Town and country

I left London this evening with the free newspapers displaying lurid headlines about a gang-fight in Trafalgar Square; I arrived home to be greeting by a newspaper placard outside the station warning about sheep-worrying.

Totesport Hurdle

In haste: not time to give you the rationale, or sing a threnody for the horses who died here six days ago.

Newbury 150: Get Me Out of Here

Eric Gill at Moorfields

I haven't said a great deal here about my current workplace, Moorfields Eye Hospital, but this is perhaps worth mentioning. There's an Eric Gill bas relief outside, showing The giving of sight to Blind Bartimaeus (Mark 10:46-52). It's on the facade of the 'new' building, started in 1933. It is now not so prominent, as the main entrance has moved to a side street. I was pleased to find that the Joint Library of Moorfields and Eye Hospital and the Institute of Ophthalmology used to use Gill's design as a bookplate.

There are also supposed to be some nursery rhyme tiles somewhere in the building, which moved from the Royal Westminster Ophthalmic Hospital in High Holborn. Three came to Moorfields, the remainder went to Great Ormond Street.

 

Hitler versus library campaigners

I believe that, in over seven years of writing here, I have never yet recommended an online video. Rules are made to be broken.


Hitler versus library campaigners

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Sandown, Fllos Lala and Wetherby

I took a little time off the #savelibraries campaign to browse form for this afternoon's racing. There were my conclusions:

225 Sandown: Rock Noir
240 Ffos Las: Oscar Whisky
300 Sandown: Mister Hyde
310  Ffos Las: Blazoing Bailey
315 Wetherby: Cape Tribulation
335 Sandown: Aimigayle

This is an historic occasion, the first time I have included Ffos Las, the country's newest race-course, in these selections.

A shock for the Milanese

Nothing gladdens a librarian's heart more than to be able to exercise some harmless pedantry. So I was amused when I came upon this abstract from the literature. I think it speaks for itself; click on the image below to enlarge.

 

 

 

Montorsi, Piero, Boiti, Costanza, Galli, Stefano, Ravagnani, Paolo, Agrifoglio, Marco, Fabbiocchi, Franco, Trabattoni, Daniela, Teruzzi, Giovanni, Bartorelli, Antonio, Pontone, Gianluca, and Fiorentini, Cesare.
Is carotid stenting a durable technique? Acute and up to 7 years long-term clinical results from a single-center consecutive series of patients.
Journal of the American College of Cardiology 55(10_MeetingAbstracts), A213. 9-3-2010.

Ian McMillan banned from speaking in a Sheffield library

It's not just Mubarak's police state that tries to silence writers.  Ian McMillan,  presenter of the Verb on Radio 3, has been banned from running a creative writing workshop at Upperthorpe library in Sheffield, the SINTO blog reports. There's no justification given on Sheffield council's website. 

It is curious that this should happen in Sheffield , the city which hosted, with full support from the council, the founding conference of the Library Campaign in the 1980s.

This is extraordinarily stupid. Councillors and senior officers are reported to fear that he may make 'political comments'. I should hope he would.  If Sheffield councillors were to bother to go into a library, instead of spending their time trying to close them, they would find Dewey class 320 devoted to a great deal of political debate, to say nothing of the 330s, fiction and poetry sections, and so on. An important  reasons why the movement to save libraries has gathered such momentum is that libraries have such an important place in our lives, including our political lives,  arsenals of the democratic culture," as Sidney Ditzion described them.  

Fortunately, Sheffield library users and workers are taking this in their stride and are organising a mass shush-in at 11 am on Saturday 5th February, part of the national day of action to save libraries. One very much hopes that the council will rescind the ban on Ian.

I give the last word to Ian himself, 'Libraries are a vital and irreplaceable part of a cultured and civilised society, and one of the few public places left where you don't have to pay to get in...'