This is a bit of a catch-up post, most of which was composed before we left on our various trips over the past ten days.

The Deep Blue Sea: We went with Chris and Nancy to the National Theater to see “The Deep Blue Sea”, a play by Terrence Rattigan first performed in 1952. (It was later a film, starring Vivian Leigh in 1955.) It is a story of a woman who has left a loveless marriage and run away with a handsome pilot who can’t seem to get over the War. But it turns out that he is really incapable of loving her and the attempted suicide ends up terminating their doomed relationship. The play begins with her attempted suicide and doesn’t get much happier from there. Helen McCrory plays the central role of Hester with the usual good supporting cast. (She is one of those actors who is more famous in British theater, although she did play Mrs. Malfoy in the “Harry Potter” movies.) Her dissolute love interest is played by Tom Burke, whom we saw playing a strikingly similar role in the much more modern “Reasons to be Happy” at the Hampstead. There are some melodramatic moments, but over all the play is so well constructed that it maintains your attention, even if it is a bit dated in some respects. The central psychological drama manages to ring true today, possibly because Hester was an atypical and modern woman for 1950s Britain. The push and pull of her relationship with her ex-husband and lover are key to developing her character, but it is her scenes with the upstairs doctor that are most compelling. The dramatic tension comes from your doubts as to whether she will end up killing herself or pull herself together and get on with the rest of her life. The play does not clearly resolve this question in the dialog, but a the end Hester is left alone and is staring at her lover’s clothing as she is packing it up to send to him and you think, “Uh oh. This is it.” But she had just put an egg on the stove to fry and she is startled out of her reverie and goes and finishes cooking the egg and then sits down to eat her egg sandwich as the play ends. This little bit of stage business gave the feeling that the urge to end it all had past and that she was going to move on with some sort of life. I wonder if it was in the original stage direction?

Painting slow-down: I haven’t been able to get to my paintings much lately, although I have two in process which I can’t seem to finish. One is a study of Jerry Fried and me standing at the end of a nearby alley. Right now it is in a sort of nether world between being realistic and impressionistic. I’m beginning to think it is more cartoonish than anything else, so I may go that way. As for the second one, I’d decided to do something without some much little detail and started painting two frogs sitting on lily pads. I discovered that I am incapable of drawing a decent looking frog, so after several attempts, I just painted the damn things over and now have a perfectly pleasant, if slightly boring, painting of some lily pads. I’m not sure where to go with that one….