Writer and novelist
Watching the TV version of Abigail’s Party by Mike Leigh 40 years after its debut on stage at the Hampstead Theatre in 1977, followed by the televised version as a Play For Today on the BBC later that year, is an unnerving experience.
The things that seemed funny back then have acquired a darker edge, and the work has become a play for this day in ways that we couldn’t have anticipated.
‘We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school.’ So goes the Springsteen song. True as ever, Boss.
Furthermore, some of us also learned a lot from the single’s big sister, the LP, and in particular from the notes on the record sleeve, which is what the cover encasing the vinyl was called.
The youngsters in Rumer Godden’s novel The Greengage Summer, set in the 1920s, are blessed with the usual requirements for an interesting fictional childhood — a set of quirky siblings and unconventional absent parents.
Goaded into action by the brattish behaviour of her five children, Mama Grey whisks them away from Belmont Road, Southstone, their dull habitat on the south coast of England, to the Champagne area of France, to visit the battlefields and pay homage to those who died in the Battle of the Marne.
How could a novel about young women working in New York six years after the end of the Second World War have any relevance to today’s 20-somethings in similar situations?
When the novel is Rona Jaffe’s The Best Of Everything (published 1958), the answer may surprise you. And what is even more surprising is that in many ways this book has more contemporary resonance than Sex And The City, its later, flashier, sister in the group-of-women-dealing-with-love and-work genre.
One of the 339 books referenced in the Gilmore Girls TV series is The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s 1968 influential account of druggy trips and the growth of the hippie movement. Jess Mariano — well, who else — is seen reading it. A very Jess choice.
But it’s the other Wolfe whose words have particular resonance as we look forward to revisiting the Gilmores and Stars Hollow in Netflix’s new four-parter, Gilmore Girls, A Year in the Life.
A toothsome if uneven mix of espionage, Middle Eastern politics, kidnapping and the ever-fertile setting of an exclusive girls’ school makes Cat Among The Pigeons (1959) by Agatha Christie a rattling good read.
The plot hinges on a cache of jewels, worth about three quarters of a million pounds, which Ali Yusuf, Sheik of Ramat, wants to smuggle out of his country before he is captured or killed by revolutionary forces. He entrusts the jewels to his good friend Bob Rawlinson, who secrets them in the luggage of his sister and niece, Joan and Jennifer Sutcliffe.
The title of Noel Streatfeild’s 1936 children’s classic book Ballet Shoes exerts an irresistible pull on the psyche of young girls everywhere, as strong now as it ever was.
Stories about ballet schools promise a glut of tutus, leotards, satin shoes, backstage rivalry, exotic teachers called ‘madame’, stars in the making, moments in the limelight. For many post-war little girls, Ballet Shoes was our first taste of the heady delights of battements and barre work, which we would practise in our bedrooms on wobbly toes holding on to the back of a chair, dreaming of being the next Anna Pavlova or Margot Fonteyn.
I Capture The Castle, set in 1934 and written 12 years later when Dodie Smith was living in America and homesick for England, is studded with unexpected delights.
The framing device is a diary written by 17-year-old Cassandra, who describes the six months in the life of her family during which their fortunes change and she grows up.
Now, Voyager is a classic women’s picture, a melodrama, a three-hanky weepie. In many ways, it’s something of a mess, with separate stories and themes jostling for attention.
The 1942 film tells the story of Charlotte Vale, Boston heiress and downtrodden, dowdy maiden aunt driven over the edge of mental stability by her mother’s treatment of her.
Hands up, I wanted a happy ending to say goodbye to The Good Wife. Or at least a satisfying ending which signed off on an optimistic note and met my need to see equilibrium restored.
What we got was an unsettling, uncomfortable finale which brought the drama to a dark conclusion.
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