An extremely random book – a memoir rather than a novel
really – that my parents bought for my wife ages ago (maybe when she moved to
London and started to accompany me to see the Royal Shakespeare Company, first
at the Novello Theatre, than at the fairly awful New London Theatre, and then
finally at the Barbican?).
To me the book is fundamentally divided in three intertwined
plots/narrative lines – the narrator’s troubled family past and his complex
relationship with his sister and her mental illness, his personal experiences
as a dresser/stagehand, and lastly his Shakespeare classes for elderly people
in New York City.
The first narrative line is soft and touching, and Smith is
actually remarkably good at portraying the situation for what it actually
is/was (or at least, that’s the impression the reader gets) without any need to
sweeten it, or to portray himself as better or worse than how he genuinely
appears to be.
The second narrative line is intriguing – reading about
Katherine Hepburn, Jessica Tandy, and all the other great actors who crossed
the stage in Stratford CT is like watching a very good documentary with random
comments and anecdotes by people who happen to have crossed paths with some of
the greats of the 20th century.
The last narrative line is clearly the one that touches me
the least, probably because I am one of those awful people who tend not to find
too much poetry in the elderly and the remarkably problematic challenges they
have to face on a daily basis – to me those are just painful and very possibly
insurmountable.
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