Astonishing Week

All in all it's been an astonishing week. I came back from the States on Sunday morning, stayed in sick Sunday night, went to see a show Monday night, worked Tuesday to Thursday, saw a film tonight, working tomorrow and another show tomorrow night.

One of my professional theater friends (since I'm doing this semi-anonymously, let's call her "Kate") said I should go to the theater three times a week. I wasn't able to do that right when I moved here, getting settled at work, life, etc. But I'm going to try in the New Year.

I cheated a little by going to a film tonight. I wanted to see Mark Ravenhill's solo piece which has a splashy interview in Time Out but as I found out by going to the Bush Theatre Web site -- does not actually have a performance until Tuesday (the first preview).

Instead I managed to get a seat to see Children of Men, largely on the http://frankswildlunch.blogspot.com/2007/01/i-just-started-reading.html">advice of a blogger-playwright with good judgment and refreshing honesty. (I get teary-eyed over aesthetic brilliance myself, even when reading a review after seeing something, but I've never fessed up to it before.)

The ad campaign when it came out in October really put me off, I'm not entirely sure why now. Usually Clive Owen and Julianne Moore would be enough to draw me in, but there was something too sci-fi-ey about it. Instead what Alfonso Cuaron has done is diced and chopped our contemporary anxieties and laid them out on the screen in a film that manages to be extraordinarily harrowing and continuously original while maintaining its faith in humanity and even a wickedly fitting (and British) sense of humor. Michael Caine is a hoot as a hippie pothead, and Clive Owen does his intense brooding thing, making you glad in every frame he didn't get suckered into that Bond business.

It's rare that a film or a play absolutely astonishes me, but it happened tonight.