Last Saturday I watched Einstein and Eddington, a drama shown on BBC2 about the interaction between the two scientists during the First World War.
It was a visually superlative work, directed by Philip Martin (and commissioned by Jane Tranter, Controller of BBC Fiction).
Full-lipped mittel-European beauties sang Schubert lieder. Symbolic dark thunder clouds rolled over the beautiful “Cambridgeshire” countryside as sunlight shone on the foreground, briefly illuminating the unrequited friends. Officious Prussians militarists behaved menacingly to non-conformists (so that you expected Maugham’s Ashendon to appear, suggesting a possible and ambiguous way out).
The dialogue was poor, even allowing for the fact that hardly anyone can understand the Theory of Relativity and so we had to take a great deal on trust. The sub-Mendelsohn music was irritating (not quite Fingal’s Cave so that I kept expecting it to break into the full overture). Also, I didn’t like the way the zenophobic crowd smashing the shop windows of foreigners was stereotyped as ignorant male C2 thugs – in fact as the sources show, this was done by men and women of all classes, and all levels of education.
Above: I was surprised at how good an actor David Tennant was in the film. He is so over-popular, in television productions that are so gushingly over-praised, that I had formerly regarded him as theatrical flim-flam (without any justification, since I havn’t watched any of the revived Dr Who). I meant to see him in Hamlet but as usual I didn’t get round to organizing it.
More: http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2007/05_may/21/einstein.shtml
Fingal’s Cave: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJHaIevlvac
No comments:
Post a Comment