The best animal movies for kids
Willie would rather keep in nose buried in Huckleberry Finn than mingle with the other kids, especially the bullies who make his life torturous. That's when his mother decides it's time for a four-legged friend, much to her husband's dismay. When Willie and his new beagle skip form a friendship, things take a turn in a positive direction for the young boy. But don't leave the tissues too far away—there are moments that'll make you tear up and reach for your furry best friend. Rated PG.
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Time Out
06-06-2025
- Time Out
The best animal movies for kids
Willie would rather keep in nose buried in Huckleberry Finn than mingle with the other kids, especially the bullies who make his life torturous. That's when his mother decides it's time for a four-legged friend, much to her husband's dismay. When Willie and his new beagle skip form a friendship, things take a turn in a positive direction for the young boy. But don't leave the tissues too far away—there are moments that'll make you tear up and reach for your furry best friend. Rated PG.
Telegraph
17-05-2025
- Telegraph
Mark Twain's bizarre obsession with ‘killing' Shakespeare
When Mark Twain was convinced of something, he seldom brooked disagreement. Over the two dozen books he wrote, he showed an exceptional level of intellectual vigour, commitment and acuity. Yet he used those mental powers to advance one particular unusual belief: that William Shakespeare had never written the plays attributed to him, and that credit probably belonged to Francis Bacon. Such was Twain's zeal on the subject, wrote his secretary Isabel Lyon, that one would have thought he 'had Shakespeare by the throat righteously strangling him for some hideous crime'. For two months, from January until March 1909, Twain beavered away at what would become his final published book, Is Shakespeare Dead? He had a bullheaded certainty. 'I know that Shakespeare did not write those plays, and I have reason to believe he did not touch the text in any way,' he told his friend and authorised biographer Albert Paine. 'It is the great discovery of the age.' Twain, it should be noted, cherished Shakespeare's plays, and saw them often. In the 1870s, he and his wife, Livy, had visited Stratford-upon-Avon, and Twain, in these early days, backed the creation of a Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. He had researched Shakespeare while preparing his novel The Prince and the Pauper (1881), and in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the King and Duke try to palm themselves off as Shakespearean actors, offering hilariously garbled versions of the Bard to backwoods audiences. But Twain had always questioned the authorship of Shakespeare 's oeuvre. His 50-year faith in Bacon dated back to his days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, when fellow pilot George Ealer, 'an idolater of Shakespeare', read the plays aloud to him and bashed Bacon supporters royally. Twain begged to differ. After going to see one performance of Romeo and Juliet, Twain even told a companion, 'That's one of the greatest things Bacon ever wrote.' Why did Twain attack Shakespeare with such gusto? Partly it stemmed from his extreme disillusionment with people, which only grew in his later years: his belief that the planet was chock-full of fools and frauds such as the Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy: 'I think he [Shakespeare] & Mother Eddy are just about a pair – a pair of humbugs.' The Shakespeare cult, as Twain saw it, proved that people were merely sheep who followed a herd instinct and echoed what they heard. Twain's error was using his own career as a frame of reference. In his final years, he had devoted enormous time to his autobiographical dictations, which by this point amounted to 450,000 words: he simply couldn't believe that Shakespeare had left behind no manuscripts or letters. With an extreme paucity of original documentation, Shakespeare biographers had relied on a handful of mouldy anecdotes about the man, many recorded long after he was gone. Twain compared his own literary fame to the glaring emptiness of Shakespeare's record. Had Shakespeare been truly famous in his own time, Twain argued, 'his notoriety would have lasted as long as mine has lasted in my own village [Hannibal] out in Missouri... a really celebrated person cannot be forgotten in his village in the short space of 60 years'. He mentioned his Hannibal schoolfriends, who regularly retailed legends about him to reporters. Yet the comparison was odd: Twain lived in a very different media environment, one in which a thriving American newspaper industry published features, profiles and interviews, and in which celebrity culture had already taken root. Like many Shakespeare deniers, Twain also observed that the playwright was curiously well versed in law courts and legal proceedings. Nobody, thought Twain, could master 'the argot of a trade at which he has not personally served'. Some scholars have speculated that Shakespeare clerked in a law office before starting his theatre career in London, but Twain was convinced that Shakespeare plays betray knowledge that only a highly educated person such as Bacon might have known. Yet Twain failed to confront many obvious objections to his theory. How could Bacon's imposture have remained hidden during his lifetime and after? Did he confide in no one? How did he make necessary changes to plays during rehearsals? Or did Shakespeare, the man under whose name all this work was disguised, rush to Bacon's home each night for secret revisions? What about cases such as The Two Noble Kinsmen, in which we know that Shakespeare collaborated with other authors? Twain never dealt with the problem of the First Folio: the fact that Elizabethan actors thought so highly of William Shakespeare that they assembled this legacy for posterity only seven years after the playwright had died. It should further be noted that this wasn't for Twain a unique situation: he had also identified John Milton, not John Bunyan, as the true author of The Pilgrim's Progress. Even Twain's heartiest admirers, Paine and Lyon, appealed to him not to publish Is Shakespeare Dead? Colonel Harvey, his editor and publisher at Harper & Brothers, agreed that it would be ill-advised, both showing intellectual slippage on Twain's part and dealing another blow to his image as America's leading humorist. But Twain was hell-bent on publishing it; worse, he was desperate to beat into print another book, Some Acrostic Signatures of Francis Bacon by William Stone Booth, which aimed to show that Shakespeare's work was shot through with coded messages pointing to Bacon's secret authorship. As a result of the rushed editing process, Twain's last published book appeared on April 8 1909, a mere month after the manuscript was completed. It was greeted with something less than acclaim: no one endorsed it, then or later, as 'the great discovery of the age'. And the haste landed Twain in an embarrassing imbroglio with another writer, George Greenwood, who claimed that Twain had quoted freely from Greenwood's similar book, The Shakespeare Problem Restated, without crediting him – an awkward position for Twain, a militant on copyright issues. The problem, in truth, was a rogue footnote, and Twain's apology ended the kerfuffle. But it may have contributed to the health problems that increasingly plagued him. The Greenwood controversy blew up in June 1909, as Twain travelled to Baltimore. On the day he checked into the Belvedere Hotel, one newspaper carried the incendiary headline 'Is Mark Twain a Plagiarist?' Feeling worn out, Twain shunned newspapermen who came to elicit his reaction, and lay down in the hotel room with a book. When he arose and paced the room, he suddenly paused with one hand clutching his chest. 'I have a curious pain in my breast,' he told Paine. 'It's a curious, sickening, deadly kind of pain. I never had anything just like it.' Twain's instincts were accurate: at 73, he was suffering from angina pectoris, with a reduced blood flow to the heart muscle producing sharp, frightening attacks. Twain rallied enough to address the graduates at St Timothy's School, in Catonsville, Maryland, a tiny, elite and very proper all-female boarding establishment. On his way to the graduation, he chomped on a cigar and glanced admiringly at the parade of Baltimore girls traipsing down the sidewalk. 'Pretty girls – and you almost have a monopoly of them here – are always an inspiration to me,' he told a reporter. In addressing the graduates, Twain's eyes sparkled, and he spiced his remarks with trademark mischief. He advised the girls not to smoke or drink to excess, then delivered his punchline: 'Don't marry – I mean, to excess.' It was to be the last speech of his 43-year lecturing career. In terms of health, Twain knew that he had passed a watershed. After the Baltimore trip, among many restrictions the doctor placed on the writer's activities the most onerous was an exhortation to cut down on smoking and try to heal his 'tobacco heart'. Since boyhood, Twain had remained defiant on this score – as defiant as his lifelong pro-Bacon stance. 'It isn't going to happen,' he insisted. 'I shan't diminish it by a single puff.' In the end, he did, slashing his consumption from 40 cigars per day to four. 'I don't care for death,' he wrote, '& I do care for smoking.' But this consummate American showman knew exactly what approached. 'I came in with Halley's comet in 1835,' Twain said. 'It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't.' After 75 years away, in April 1910 the comet returned, appearing above Twain's home in Redding, Connecticut. Twain, having suffered successive angina attacks, was heavily sedated and probably didn't know. On April 21, with the comet still in the sky, he breathed his last.
The Guardian
11-05-2025
- The Guardian
Happy Days review – Pamela Rabe gives an aching performance in Samuel Beckett's unrelenting play
The character of Winnie in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days was described as a 'summit part' akin to Hamlet by Dame Peggy Ashcroft, one of the earliest Winnies. Only a daring actor would attempt the role: essentially a 90-minute monologue of looping, repetitive prose, and a prescriptive list of stage directions encompassing pauses and facial expressions. All while buried in earth – first from the waist, then the neck. But the rewards of scaling this mighty peak are extraordinary; it's hard to think of a more intriguing female character on stage, or a better scaffold for technical and emotional virtuosity. Who is Winnie? Beckett stipulates that she's 'about 50'; she's married to the taciturn Willie – who is seen sporadically on stage with her, generally crawling. She's well-educated, judging by her literary references. Her daily routine is dictated by a bell, for reasons undisclosed. She is at all times partially buried, in a scorched mound of earth in an unbroken landscape, for reasons undisclosed. The sun is hellish, the bell is relentless, and her helpmate seems thoroughly unhelpful. Despite this, she persists. She keeps talking; she recalls her youth; she counts her blessings. Keeps herself tidy. Beyond this, her psychology is contested territory. Is she stoic? Heroic? Pathetic? Deluded? There are myriad ways to play Winnie, and myriad ways – as an audience – to read her. Pamela Rabe's Winnie, immured in Sydney Theatre Company's Wharf stage for the next five weeks, seems pretty well broken by the time we meet her. Beckett writes his heroine's performance as a kind of tragic clowning routine: peppered throughout her monologue are the stage directions 'smile on' and 'smile off', as Winnie switches abruptly between the bright, cheery mask of extreme optimism, and a more doubtful, melancholic and even pained persona. In this production, co-directed by Rabe with veteran lighting and set designer Nick Schlieper, this oscillation between contrasting moods and affect is more muted. Rabe is not convincingly bright; you don't get the sense that Winnie really buys into the fantasy of an imminent 'happy day' – or that she truly experiences the moments of relief written into the script. It's an aching performance that speaks of a woman repeatedly bopped on the head by life, driven gradually downwards into her earthy confinement. Rabe gives in to full-throated anguish in the course of the play; her Winnie weeps. When she scolds Willie (played here by the wonderful Markus Hamilton, perhaps a little too young and vital to convincingly conjure the broken Willie) resonant notes of bitterness and contempt hint at their unhappy history. But without the light and shade, the play is tougher viewing – and less satisfying for an audience, who doesn't experience the full arc of Winnie's journey as we watch her mask progressively slip off. There are fewer laughs in this production, too. Beckett's play has comedy as well as tragedy, and Rabe has great comic sensibilities as an actor – which shine through in several glorious moments – but many opportunities for comic relief are lost. At these times, the theatre can feel uncannily quiet. Similarly, Beckett's language – described by many actors and directors of this play as inherently musical in its rhythms and repetitions – is muted, with Rabe's delivery of lines leaning naturalistic. This adds to what is overall an oppressive atmosphere; beyond occasional bursts of music from a wind-up music box and Winnie singing, there's no sound track. The design feels similarly airless, with Schlieper – taking set and lighting duties – presenting the most claustrophobic version of Beckett's prescription for a 'trompe-l'oeil backcloth to represent unbroken plain and sky receding to meet in far distance'. The backdrop is a flat, unmodulated monotone, and the stage space is enclosed in a dark box. Beckett's 'expanse of scorched grass' is rendered as a dull grey and slightly gritty papier-mache-like surface. Winnie and Willie's universe is thoroughly devoid of contextual references, and thoroughly drab. In the second act, the directors boldly disregard Beckett's direction for an unchanged setting, instead turning down the lights and casting the stage in an inky blue wash, with only Rabe's face spotlit, and protruding from the earth mound in which she is now almost entirely buried. It's a gorgeous and striking tableau – peak Schlieper – though this aesthetic 'cool change' arguably undercuts Beckett's intimations of an interminable cycle of repeating days. Overall, this is a tough space to exist in for the show's run-time. Perhaps appropriately so – Beckett is not big on consolation – but this production may struggle to bring first-timers or sceptics of his work along for the ride. Happy Days is at Wharf 1 theatre, Sydney Theatre Company until 15 June.
