Brook.jpgVivica.jpg

Tiuhti.jpg

There is sometimes in British popular press a gossipy question asked from celebrities and interviewees: which persons alive or not would you invite to a fantasy dinner table? Answers vary from Shakespeare to Hitler, the captain of Titanic and Marilyn Monroe.

I made a comment on Alan Bennett’s mental companions in an earlier post: people he has always lived with (although never met or not even alive).

One of my mental companions is theatre director Peter Brook.   It is not, entirely, because of his theatre work, directing my beloved Paul Scofield.  It is because Brook read Tolstoy’s War and Peace at the age of 9, and decided he will marry a Natasha when he grows up. He indeed met Natasha Parry and married her – what persistence of mind. I read War & Peace when I was 12, sounds precocious, but the BBC  1970s 20-part TV  War & Peace was on then, and I had a guide there – and I read more of the peace and not so much of the war.

Peter Brook is still alive and kicking at the age of 95. He has Lithuanian ancestry, so perhaps Russian classics were a family interest. Now I learn that his cousin was a Moscow Theatre Director Valentin Pluchek.

I think my mother saw Brook’s famous The Midsummer Night’s Dream on its Scandinavian tour: I recall her speaking volubly on the swings and the colours and the whiteness and the fairies, and how great it was (I must have been 6 at the time). Here is an excerpt of that Brook direction: https://youtu.be/WD5RzxLsCpg?t=174

Another mental companion is another theatre director Vivica Bandler. I share a birthday with her, and although I share a birthday with the poet J.L. Runeberg,  Jörn Donner and Lars Hulden , it is Vivica whom I connect with. Bandler writes in her memoir that she shares a birthday with playwright Carson McCullers.  In fact, she does not, McCullers was born later in Februay. But Vivica says (in her memoir) that it is important to invent the past, and she can’t write about recent past, because she hasn’t had time to invent it.  Bandler was keen on astrology, and we Aquarians understand each other so well.  (We pain of a***s, I should say 😊). Another Unreliable Reader.

Here is a short piece on Vivica Bandler by Bengt Ahlfors, in Swedish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0059OPAJXg Viviva is also a character in the Tove Jansson’s Moomin stories, Vifslan (Thingumy and Bob,Swedish: Tofslan och Vifslan, Finnish: Tiuhti ja Viuhti).

I am not sure if the memory of my mother speaking of The Midsummer Dream performance is real, but if it is not, it is very well invented!

Midsummer.jpg

 

Alan Howard's voice there..:! The deep, meldious, raspy one--I saw Alan Howard RIP as Professor Higgins in Shaw's Pygmalion in London.