![]() There were scales on his yellow south-wester, in his fair closely-curling hair, a couple on his ruddy-brown nose, hundreds upon his indigo-blue home-knit jersey, and his high boots, that were almost trousers and boots in one, were literally burnished with the adherent disks of silvery iridescent horn. Josh Helston glittered in the morning sunshine like a harlequin in a limelight, for he was spangled from head to foot with the loose silvery scales of the pilchards caught during the night, and on many another night during the past few weeks. He was a fair, short man, somewhat deformed, one arm being excessively short, seeming little more than a hand projecting from one side of his breast but this in no wise interfered with his activity as he stood there glittering in the bright morning sunshine on the deck of a Cornish lugger, shaking pilchards out of the dark-brown net into the well or hold. ![]() The utterer of these words certainly spoke them, but in a musical, sing-song intonation peculiar to the fishermen of the district. “Why, lad? There’s a queshton to ask! Why? Warn’t you born in Co’rn’all, the finest country in all England, and ain’t you going to grow into a Cornishman, as all old books says is giants, when you’ve left off being a poor smooth, soft-roed, gallish-looking creatur’, same as you are now?” “You don’t know it, Master Will, lad, but Natur’ couldn’t ha’ done no better for you if she’d tried.” Kushner’s version emphasises the moral vacuum of the consumerist American Dream (a spending-spree is unleashed on the unspoken promise of Alf’s demise) but he also takes simple, enjoyable relish in verbal cruelty: “You look like you swallowed a hat-box, or is that a goitre?” Manville’s vixen blithely remarks, with knowing impunity, to a former acquaintance.Chapter One. ![]() We do too, complicit in the mischief-making. Her quarry is Hugo Weaving’s store-keeper Alfred, who is being urged by all around him to exploit his past point of connection with her, to tap her generosity, though he’s shifty to his boots about his teenage behaviour.Įveryone hangs on the inscrutable revenant’s every word and look her entourage – latest husband, creepy butler, synchronised double-act of man-servants – and the lickspittle residents. There are hints of Monroe with her film-star chic blonde hair, but she’s an iron lady too (both legs are made of metal). She looks a million dollars (maybe even a billion, the sum she will proffer): her face all ageless impassivity. Returning to her rundown (bankrupt) hometown, this golden girl is expected to offer a massive cash-injection and does so, on condition that the old flame who jilted her after impregnating her years ago literally gets the chop it’s blood-money or bust.Īrriving on the station platform in an infernal cloud of steam, she stands stock-still, leaning on a cane. Yet again she’s the business – ideal on paper and perfect in practice – as mega-rich Claire Zachanassian, the anti-heroine who delivers the ultimate payback in The Visit, Swiss playwright Frederick Durrenmatt’s 1956 satirical tragicomedy of murderous revenge. And she was the lynchpin of Eyre’s revival of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (20), as the drugged, dreamy matriarch Mary Tyrone, nursing inconsolable loss. She was rightly awarded an Olivier for her towering turn as the wronged, haunted, but stalwart Mrs Alving in Ibsen’s Ghosts for Richard Eyre at the Almeida in 2013 (thereafter in the West End). Thanks to her recent Oscar-nominated success in Phantom Thread, and her leading role in the BBC sitcom Mum (building on multiple past successes with Mike Leigh), she has become a household name in her sixties, but it’s her stage work which makes her one of the greats. With all due respect to Dames Judi and Helen, she is your go-to woman for withheld emotion, capable of indicating a vast hinterland of feeling with the smallest details. Lesley Manville has a paradoxical quality among actors that the more she exercises restraint the more she raises the theatrical temperature.
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