Post by adina on Jun 30, 2015 17:21:37 GMT
I just bumped into this thingy:
"A coffee with the actor Samuel West gives a sense of how this intellectual electricity flows through everyone who works with Stoppard. West played Valentine in the first production of Arcadia, directed by Trevor Nunn at the National Theatre in 1993. West had just missed getting into a production of The Importance of Being Earnest when Arcadia came along: “The part went to Richard E Grant and I was miffed.” Then he read for Septimus at the National – the role that eventually went to Rufus Sewell and made his name. This reading, West tells me with a sheepish grin, went “quite badly”; but he returned to read for Valentine. By coincidence – another one – he’d just memorised Byron’s poem “Darkness” for a competition; it’s a poem that appears to anticipate the eventual death of the universe, as modern physics understands it. The play hinges on whether such knowledge could have been had a couple of centuries in the past.
“I said to Trevor and to Tom, you know there’s a Byron poem about this, don’t you? ‘I had a dream, which was not all a dream./The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars/Did wander darkling in the eternal space,/Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth/Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air . . .’ I recited it and, at the end, they were – briefly – dumb. Tom was quite excited. And Trevor said, ‘That’s one for the programme!’ I just felt happy that I might have got something into the programme of Arcadia.”
But he got the job, no small thanks, he’s sure, to both Byron and Stoppard – because the lines didn’t just go into the programme, they went into the play. “And it turned out to be arguably the greatest postwar play in English,” West says, his face alight at the memory, “and almost certainly the greatest new play I’ll ever be in.” Most plays, he says, “require you to become a bit of an obsessive. But the wonderful thing about Arcadia is that becoming obsessed with it didn’t seem to narrow the world down at all: it seemed to explode it.”
link
Ah!
I just love it! I can imagine a proud blush on Sam West's face when he was telling the story. (In the play, the poem was recited by Hannah to Valentine. )
"A coffee with the actor Samuel West gives a sense of how this intellectual electricity flows through everyone who works with Stoppard. West played Valentine in the first production of Arcadia, directed by Trevor Nunn at the National Theatre in 1993. West had just missed getting into a production of The Importance of Being Earnest when Arcadia came along: “The part went to Richard E Grant and I was miffed.” Then he read for Septimus at the National – the role that eventually went to Rufus Sewell and made his name. This reading, West tells me with a sheepish grin, went “quite badly”; but he returned to read for Valentine. By coincidence – another one – he’d just memorised Byron’s poem “Darkness” for a competition; it’s a poem that appears to anticipate the eventual death of the universe, as modern physics understands it. The play hinges on whether such knowledge could have been had a couple of centuries in the past.
“I said to Trevor and to Tom, you know there’s a Byron poem about this, don’t you? ‘I had a dream, which was not all a dream./The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars/Did wander darkling in the eternal space,/Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth/Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air . . .’ I recited it and, at the end, they were – briefly – dumb. Tom was quite excited. And Trevor said, ‘That’s one for the programme!’ I just felt happy that I might have got something into the programme of Arcadia.”
But he got the job, no small thanks, he’s sure, to both Byron and Stoppard – because the lines didn’t just go into the programme, they went into the play. “And it turned out to be arguably the greatest postwar play in English,” West says, his face alight at the memory, “and almost certainly the greatest new play I’ll ever be in.” Most plays, he says, “require you to become a bit of an obsessive. But the wonderful thing about Arcadia is that becoming obsessed with it didn’t seem to narrow the world down at all: it seemed to explode it.”
link
Ah!
I just love it! I can imagine a proud blush on Sam West's face when he was telling the story. (In the play, the poem was recited by Hannah to Valentine. )
a lot for finding and posting, Adina!
, great! Thanks PGG!
