Rickman Report
Dec. 21st, 2011 10:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kelly_chamblissToday my partner and I saw Alan Rickman in Seminar, a play about writing and the teaching of writing. We enjoyed it very much, although I don't think it's going to go down as a literary classic -- a little too glib and surface-y, to my mind, though funny and well-acted.
Rickman plays Leonard, a well-known novelist whose career (for various reasons) has petered out, so that he now works as a "rock-star editor" (to use another character's words) and teaches extremely expensive writing workshops to carefully-selected clients. ($5000 per person for ten sessions! Comes out to about $1000 per hour for Leonard, since he doesn't seem to do any preparation for them. He just reads the students' work in class -- and can give definitive assessments of greatness and talent or lack of same after reading less than a page.)
Leonard is Snape without the billowing cape and the cauldrons: he moves beyond snarky into downright vicious, routinely "stomping on the hearts" of his students (as one of them puts it). In the end, though, we realize that despite his misery and rage ("You keep ranting around with this bitter psychopath act..." says one student. "It's not an act," snarls Leonard), he still cares deeply about the power of the written word.
There are four students altogether, two males and two females, all of whom represent various writerly types: Douglas (Jerry O'Connell), the "not untalented" nephew of a famous writer who is always name-dropping and bragging about his connections and talking pretentious crap ("the space where interiority and exteriority meet"); Izzy, an Asian woman who is interested in the sexual, edgy energy of writing and who doesn't mind using sex to advance her career; Kate, a rich, pampered, but likable white girl who has been working for six years on a story about a girl obsessed with Jane Austen and who is initially devastated when Leonard tells her it's a "soul-sucking waste of words" (or something to that effect); and Martin, a nerdy Everyman sort of guy who spent literally his last dime to take the writing workshop yet who refuses to share any of his writing.
The relationships wind together and get more complicated. The first 5/6 of the play take place in Kate's posh apartment, alternating scenes of the actual writing workshop with scenes of the students' varied reactions. Some of these episodes are more plausible than others; I thought they tended to get a bit repetitive. It all builds to a masterful scene where Leonard, ostensibly outlining the sad, declining career trajectory that he foresees for Martin, makes clear that he's actually talking about his own life. It's a grand performing moment: as you might imagine, Rickman simply breathes this part; it's a seemingly-effortless performance; there's never a moment where you think, "ah, he's acting" (except in those moments when Leonard is acting, doing his effective "nasty genius" show. He makes a positive insult out of the word "semi-colon.")
The other actors were really strong, too, I thought, Kate and Martin in particular. The overall character of Izzy seemed very real to me: I've been in writing workshops myself with several different Izzys. The only false acting moment came in the beginning, when Douglas is holding forth about his time at the Yaddo writers' retreat -- O'Connell seemed very mannered and just generally overacted. But he settled down. (Oddly, Rickman's opening speech was too mumbled to be comprehensible, but this may have been a deliberate acting choice; I'm not sure).
In the end, though, everyone ends up better off than when they started, which I found rather implausible; the playwright seemed to want to have all the fun of creating a wonderfully nasty character and then wimped out by letting us like him in the end. In some ways, Leonard was rather like Severus, though without all the necessary complexity.
We really enjoyed the show, though, as my partner said, it ends up rather excusing or even valorizing viciousness...as if mostly-desirable ends justify mostly-abusive means. And the play overall was that sort of fantasy that I think we all recognize, whether we're writers or not: the fantasy of having our hitherto-unrecognized genius spotted and outed by someone who has been dismissive of us. It's the same sort of impulse that led people to cheer for plain, odd Susan Boyle as she wowed Snarky Simon Cowell (is that his right name?)
So I think we ultimately got something of a cheat of a feel-good ending, but the journey to it was tremendous fun. Rickman is fabulous at this sort of thing; every line-reading was a piece of art.
And, for additional fun, we got to have coffee withwinoniel beforehand. She was just as delightful in NY as she was at DiaCon -- one of those instant friends who you feel you've known forever.
Rickman plays Leonard, a well-known novelist whose career (for various reasons) has petered out, so that he now works as a "rock-star editor" (to use another character's words) and teaches extremely expensive writing workshops to carefully-selected clients. ($5000 per person for ten sessions! Comes out to about $1000 per hour for Leonard, since he doesn't seem to do any preparation for them. He just reads the students' work in class -- and can give definitive assessments of greatness and talent or lack of same after reading less than a page.)
Leonard is Snape without the billowing cape and the cauldrons: he moves beyond snarky into downright vicious, routinely "stomping on the hearts" of his students (as one of them puts it). In the end, though, we realize that despite his misery and rage ("You keep ranting around with this bitter psychopath act..." says one student. "It's not an act," snarls Leonard), he still cares deeply about the power of the written word.
There are four students altogether, two males and two females, all of whom represent various writerly types: Douglas (Jerry O'Connell), the "not untalented" nephew of a famous writer who is always name-dropping and bragging about his connections and talking pretentious crap ("the space where interiority and exteriority meet"); Izzy, an Asian woman who is interested in the sexual, edgy energy of writing and who doesn't mind using sex to advance her career; Kate, a rich, pampered, but likable white girl who has been working for six years on a story about a girl obsessed with Jane Austen and who is initially devastated when Leonard tells her it's a "soul-sucking waste of words" (or something to that effect); and Martin, a nerdy Everyman sort of guy who spent literally his last dime to take the writing workshop yet who refuses to share any of his writing.
The relationships wind together and get more complicated. The first 5/6 of the play take place in Kate's posh apartment, alternating scenes of the actual writing workshop with scenes of the students' varied reactions. Some of these episodes are more plausible than others; I thought they tended to get a bit repetitive. It all builds to a masterful scene where Leonard, ostensibly outlining the sad, declining career trajectory that he foresees for Martin, makes clear that he's actually talking about his own life. It's a grand performing moment: as you might imagine, Rickman simply breathes this part; it's a seemingly-effortless performance; there's never a moment where you think, "ah, he's acting" (except in those moments when Leonard is acting, doing his effective "nasty genius" show. He makes a positive insult out of the word "semi-colon.")
The other actors were really strong, too, I thought, Kate and Martin in particular. The overall character of Izzy seemed very real to me: I've been in writing workshops myself with several different Izzys. The only false acting moment came in the beginning, when Douglas is holding forth about his time at the Yaddo writers' retreat -- O'Connell seemed very mannered and just generally overacted. But he settled down. (Oddly, Rickman's opening speech was too mumbled to be comprehensible, but this may have been a deliberate acting choice; I'm not sure).
In the end, though, everyone ends up better off than when they started, which I found rather implausible; the playwright seemed to want to have all the fun of creating a wonderfully nasty character and then wimped out by letting us like him in the end. In some ways, Leonard was rather like Severus, though without all the necessary complexity.
We really enjoyed the show, though, as my partner said, it ends up rather excusing or even valorizing viciousness...as if mostly-desirable ends justify mostly-abusive means. And the play overall was that sort of fantasy that I think we all recognize, whether we're writers or not: the fantasy of having our hitherto-unrecognized genius spotted and outed by someone who has been dismissive of us. It's the same sort of impulse that led people to cheer for plain, odd Susan Boyle as she wowed Snarky Simon Cowell (is that his right name?)
So I think we ultimately got something of a cheat of a feel-good ending, but the journey to it was tremendous fun. Rickman is fabulous at this sort of thing; every line-reading was a piece of art.
And, for additional fun, we got to have coffee with
winoniel beforehand. She was just as delightful in NY as she was at DiaCon -- one of those instant friends who you feel you've known forever.