Latest news with #autobiographical
New York Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Broadway Dreams Were Dashed, Then Rob Madge Knocked on Some Doors
'Everybody needs a good setback in their life and gosh, 2024 did that for me.' That was Rob Madge, speaking on video last month from their London home. A theater maker who identifies as nonbinary, Madge smiled wide into the camera and, wearing a crisp white guayabera-style shirt that was mostly buttoned, looked as if they were on their way to a 'White Lotus' resort happy hour. But Madge wasn't talking about cocktails and island intrigue. They were recalling dashed Broadway dreams. In February 2024, the Broadway run of Madge's autobiographical show 'My Son's a Queer (but What Can You Do?)' was postponed just weeks before it was to begin preview performances at the Lyceum Theater. There was talk of opening on Broadway the following season, but that never materialized. In a statement last month, the show's producers, Tom Smedes and Heather Shields, said 'the heartbreaking decision' to call off a Broadway run was because 'the risks of launching and sustaining the production were simply too great' for the show's 'long-term health.' Madge, 28, said having Broadway fall through prompted them to consider difficult and dueling questions, the likes of which plague any theater artist putting work into the world. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Along Came Love review – l'amour, loss and lingering shame in eventful French relationship movie
The title of Katell Quillévéré's first movie, Un Poison Violent from 2010, was taken from Serge Gainsbourg's song Un poison violent, c'est ça l'amour, and the awful toxicity of love is a theme that has run through her work ever since. It is an underground stream that has become very much an overground stream in this new, heartfelt movie. It's robust and a little unsubtle, without the nuances and indirections that govern her best work, but handsomely produced and resoundingly performed, avowedly autobiographical and inspired by her grandmother. Quillévéré has said that her influences are Maurice Pialat for the tough realism and Douglas Sirk for the melodrama and the sense of buried shame. I wonder if there isn't some David Lean in there for the final scene at the railway station. Madeleine is a young single mother played by Anaïs Demoustier; working as a waitress on the Brittany coast just after the second world war, in a uniform requiring her hair to be tied up in a ridiculous white bow, she has a difficult five-year-old son, Daniel. She meets a shy, sweet, bespectacled young man, François Delambre (a performance as sturdily intelligent as Demoustier's from Vincent Lacoste), who is a postgraduate student in Paris, and from a wealthy local family, self-conscious about a limp caused by childhood polio. They fall in love and marry – poignantly, perhaps unconsciously drawn to each other by the fact that each has a secret. François is gay (in an era when this was a serious criminal offence), but with this new relationship has taken an earnest decision to put it behind him. And Madeleine's child was conceived through a relationship with a German officer during the occupation, for which she was shamed and head-shaved by jeering locals in her now abandoned home town – that notorious, ugly French phenomenon of the liberation in which the menfolk, to distract from their own more serious Nazi collaboration, took it misogynistically out on the women. As the 1950s turn into the 60s, Madeleine runs a bar and François pursues an academic career and they drift in and out of a somewhat underpowered folie à trois with an American GI called Jimmy (Morgan Bailey) – a narrative deadend. They become a bourgeois family with another child, a daughter, but François's self-hating homosexuality resurfaces, that part of him without which he paradoxically would not have found Madeleine, the genuine love of his life. Meanwhile, Daniel is angrily obsessed with his biological father, who probably died on the eastern front. This is a very eventful period film that covers a lot of storytelling ground and is acted with forthright confidence. And yet, despite or because of it being based on reality, I found myself not quite believing in the parts or the whole. But its fervency and its eroticism give the film its currency. Along Came Love is in UK cinemas from 30 May.
Irish Times
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Paul Durcan - 11 memorable lines: ‘She was a whirlpool, And I very nearly drowned'
The work of Paul Durcan , who died aged 80 on Saturday, will be familiar to many, as it featured on the Leaving Certificate English syllabus. Many of his poems are autobiographical and confessional. Below are some memorable lines from his life's work. 'Every child has a madman on their street/ The only trouble about our madman is that he's our father' Madman 'In 1949 in the black Ford Anglia/ Now that I had become a walking, talking little boy/ Mummy drove me out to visit my grand-aunt Maud Gonne/ In Roebuck House in the countryside near Dublin/ To show off to the servant of the Queen/ The latest addition to the extended family' The MacBride Dynasty 'I may not have been mesmeric/ But I had not been mediocre./ In your eyes I had achieved something at last./ On my twenty-first birthday/ I had played on a winning team/ The Grangegorman Mental Hospital team/ Seldom if ever again in your eyes/ Was I to rise to these heights. Sport READ MORE On the way back I fell in the field/ And she fell down beside me./ I'd have lain in the grass with her all my life/ With Nessa:/ She was a whirlpool, she was a whirlpool,/ And I very nearly drowned. Nessa Bring me back to the dark school – to the dark school of childhood/ To where tiny is tiny, and massive is massive. En Famille, 1979' That was that Sunday afternoon in May/ When a hot sun pushed through the clouds/ And you were born!/ I was driving the two hundred miles from west to east/ The sky blue-and-white china in the fields/ In impromptu picnics of tartan rugs/ When neither words nor I/ Could have known that you had been named already/ And that your name was Rosie/ Rosie Joyce! May you some day in May/.Fifty-six years from today be as lucky/ As I was when you were born that Sunday: Rosie Joyce Homeless in Dublin/ Blown about the suburban streets at evening,/ Peering in the windows of other people's homes/ Wondering what it must feel like/ To be sitting around a fire. Windfall, 8 Parnell Hill Dublin. Next to the fresh grave of my beloved grandmother / The grave of my first love murdered by my brother. Ireland 1972 Dear Nessa – Now that our marriage is over/I would like you to know that, if I could put back the clock/Fifteen years to the cold March day of our wedding/I would wed you again and, if that marriage also broke/I would wed you yet again and, if it a third time broke/Wed you again, and again, and again, and again, and again. Hymn to a broken marriage There – but for the clutch of luck – go we all. The Death By Heroin of Sid Vicious I got a Ryanair early flight back to Dublin, / To settle my affairs and get ready for my own little sleep, / Meeting my mother in the big deep ' Il Bambino Dormiente
