Эпизоды
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It’s Sunday afternoon! Miss Brill extracts her fur from its box and heads gaily to the park where the people from this southern French town like to stroll, chat, observe each other and listen to the band as it strikes up a tune in the green rotunda. Miss Brill's particular pleasure is to sit on her favourite park bench and listen in on the conversations of others. She feels that she is one of the actors in these eagerly anticipated Sunday performances! This story by Katherine Mansfield is a finely chiselled everyday tragedy.
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The Cheek by Jowl production of Measure for Measure from 2016 - in Russian - dispenses with some of the comic characters to intensify its focus on the Duke. The setting for the Royal Shakespeare Company production of the play, from 2019, is 19th-century Vienna - lush and oppressive. It is fascinating to see how two top directing and design teams shake, shape and stir this great play – in which Isabella pronounces one of Shakespeare’s greatest speeches.
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Пропущенные эпизоды?
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Measure for Measure was Shakespeare’s first Jacobean play. After acceding to the English throne in 1603, King James became the sponsor of Shakespeare’s theatrical troupe… and Shakespeare thumbed through the new monarch’s publications to see who he was dealing with. The Duke Vincentio of the play resembles King James 1. And yet Shakespeare succeeds in making this fantasticall Duke of dark corners both a problem solver and an eerily disturbing character.
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In this episode, we reflect on how these three stories - The Man in a Case, Gooseberries and About Love - intermesh. Chekhov draws his characters with gentle, clear-eyed irony. Like the curious figure of Mavra, these men fear to take decisive action, they clothe their deepest aspirations in silence and shy away from risk. There are brief moments of radiance but the rain that falls during these stories leaves hopes and dreams damp and defeated.
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The final story in the trilogy – “About Love” – belongs to the landowner Alehin. Appointed a justice of the peace, Alehin has the opportunity to go regularly to town to attend the circuit court. There he meets the lovely Anna Alexyevna, a married woman to whom he is drawn and who is drawn to him. They go to the theatre together, sitting side by side, their shoulders touching. What will Alehin do? When should he speak?
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Ivan Ivanovitch tells the second story – “Gooseberries” – about his brother Nikolai’s 25-year attempt to establish himself on a farm in the countryside where he can drink tea, watch his ducks swim and grow gooseberries. Dismissive of his brother’s rural ambition, Ivan Ivanovitch becomes passionate – in the warmth of the drawing room – about the importance of not allowing oneself to be lulled to sleep.
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“The Man in a Case” is the first of three stories that Chekhov wrote around the year 1898 about the lives and characters of the schoolmaster Burkin, the veterinarian Ivan Ivanovitch and the landowner Alehin. This first story introduces the ludicrously cautious character Byelikov, a professor of Greek who is afraid of anything that involves risk and novelty. Burkin describes how, despite this temperament, Byelikov comes very near getting married…
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The 6-year marriage between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes broke down in May 1962 when Hughes began an affair with another woman. That month, the furious Plath and the uneasy Hughes went on an excursion to the Devon coast. On a windswept cliff-top, they came across some rabbit traps hidden in the grass. Both poets wrote a poem about this. This episode concentrates on Hughes’ poem, written several years later.
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The 6-year marriage between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes broke down in May 1962 when Hughes began an affair with another woman. That month, the furious Plath and the uneasy Hughes went on an excursion to the Devon coast. On a cliff-top, in a roaring wind, they came across some rabbit traps hidden in the grass. Both poets wrote a poem about this. This episode concentrates on Plath’s poem, written in that same month of May 1962.
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Tara Westover's Educated is the autobiographical story of a girl born into a fundamentalist family in the USA. The family lives in rural Idaho, largely cut off from other people, as Tara's father prepares feverishly for the end of the world. Tara eventually manages to go to university. It's a story about being indoctrinated and controlled, about fanaticism, about courage, about learning to own one's own narrative, about realising that the people you love do not necessarily belong in your life, and about what it means to be educated.
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In the year 1127, when the Jurchen armies invaded Shandong, Li QingZhao and her husband were forced to flee south and their precious art collection was scattered and largely destroyed. We discuss the powerful poem, from the poet’s final decade, that begins with an image of the sun setting like melted gold…
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This episode is devoted to a close reading of a poem that begins in the poet’s bedroom and ends with her staring forlornly into a stream. The poem is infused with a powerful sense of loss. Love is a vanished utopia. Too listless to comb her hair, or to refill the incense burner, the poet tracks time by watching the sun inch its way up her bamboo curtain…
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In this first of three episodes about the extraordinary 12th century Chinese poet Li Qingzhao, we talk to Lin Yan about the prosperity and sophistication of the Song Dynasty in which the poet and her art collector husband grew up, and read the famous short poem about a storm, a drinking session, a maid and a crabapple tree.
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The Old English poem The Wanderer - about the loneliness of being a homeless outcast - dates from around the year 900. The final stanza, referring to our Heavenly Father, was probably added on by the monks that transcribed it: a Christian ending would have made it more acceptable to their abbot. Michael Alexander’s transposition of the poem into modern English, first published in the 1960s, is outstanding.
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Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian tells the story of a woman who decides one day to stop eating meat, to renounce the 'chain of blood' that produces it. Her decision is rejected by her husband and her family, by a society that values conformity to social norms. We talk to Korean pharmacist Dan-Bi about this remarkable novel…
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Anthony Burgess' novel Nothing Like the Sun is a fictional biography of Shakespeare's love life, with solid roots in history. The hypothesis underlying the novel is that emotional and physical pain moved Shakespeare away from the comedies of the 1590s to the tragedies of the early 1600s.
In this episode, we hear "WS" converse with the sailor Hoby on the bank of the River Avon, we follow him to Bath to buy playscripts, we see him encounter the Young Man of the Sonnets one night at the theatre. And then there is the Dark Lady, her face blessed to gold... and her mourner's eyes. -
We talk about the final two books of "My Brilliant Friend", the story of Lila and Lenù, and also, more generally, about the themes and preoccupations of Ferrante’s work, and the reactions she has provoked in her native Italy.
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Elena Ferrante’s beautifully-crafted story "The Lost Daughter", first published in 2006, is set in a seaside resort on the Ionian coast over a single summer. It probes the pains, the joys and the unbearable absences of the mother-daughter bond.
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In Daemonology, the book he published in 1597, Shakespeare’s contemporary and patron King James wrote: “The old and crafty serpent, being a spirit, easily spies our affections, and so conforms himself thereto, to deceive us to our wrack”. This is a concise plot summary of Shakespeare’s drama.
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The first of two episodes about Justin Kurzel’s 2015 film of Shakespeare’s drama. Kurzel visually spectacular film delivers on both the physical and the psychological landscape of this story, on the weird sisters, on the increasing loneliness of the murderous couple, and on the cruelty of the period and of Fate or Weird.
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