For this year’s second series ‘On Film’, Paul Loosley examines the broad cinema canon of a couple of fiercely intelligent Irish playwrights; both Dublin-born, a little more than a year apart, who, while both having much to say about society, were using their remarkable writing skills to say quite dramatically different things in quite contrastingly different ways..
Venue: Indicine, The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre
Genre: Movie Screenings
Ticket: FREE ENTRY / FREE SEATING
Date: 18th September @ 3pm George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion
In, surely, his most famous play, Shaw demonstrates that accent, demeanor and birthright do not guarantee innate intelligence nor moral standards or any other desirable human value. Class, even education, is an illusion. The hilarious and ingenious use of language has never been surpassed in the theatre or on the screen. In this 1938 film Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins spar brilliantly more as a modern 1930’s couple rather than the Edwardian pair of the original play. Shaw added new scenes and oversaw the whole production. And, as a result, the screenplay won an Academy Award much to Shaw’s bafflement. Starring Leslie Howard (who also co-directed) and Wendy Hiller.
Date: 25th September @ 3pm Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband
This was Oscar’s penultimate play. A tale of perfumed letters, stolen bracelets, past indiscretions and outright blackmail set amongst London’s noble classes. With some of Oscar’s wittiest repartee; in particular the line that could probably sum up Wilde’s own character: “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance”. This colourful 1999 film version, directed by Oliver Parker, has a brilliant cast who simply sweep through the bourgeois opulence of Victorian upper class life. The starched shirt fronts, the sumptuous gowns and the profusion of décolletages perfectly recreate a decadence anyone would envy. Starring Rupert Everett and Cate Blanchett.
A note from Paul:
George Bernard Shaw on the other hand was a confirmed socialist, pacifist and a Christian. Frowning on the disparity between the idle rich and the hard-working poor, Shaw managed to lighten his burdensome political statements with clever metaphor and an equally superlative wit. And, unlike Wilde, Shaw managed to live quite long enough, not only to see his plays become moving pictures, but to actually contribute to their making.
Oscar Wilde was a confirmed aesthete and a lover of all things beautiful including both high society and low young men. His work reflected both his self-declared wit and his hedonistic approach to life; peppered with Lords and Ladies and servants and London townhouses; paradoxically a string of satires about and, at the very same time, an admiring homage to the superficial world of late Victorian London.
Altogether, once again proving that superb insights, outstanding stories and brilliant language can always translate to the big screen, with sometimes great success and often fantastic success.
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