Tips For Young Fashion Models

• Wednesday, October 7, 2009 - Best Actress Anna Friel Goes Naked

Oct. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Kevin Spacey, belly padded and hair whitened, comes on stage walking with a stoop. His face is ashen and lined. A little girl screams and runs away from him in terror. I can’t say I blame her.Spacey’s exaggerated get-up is an odd miscalculation in Trevor Nunn’s otherwise crackling new production of “Inherit the Wind” at the Old Vic Theatre. The 1955 courtroom drama, by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, is a fictionalized account of the infamous Tennessee Scopes “Monkey Trial,” in which a young schoolmaster was prosecuted for teaching evolution in 1925.Spacey plays Henry Drummond, the lawyer for the defense, and brings enormous charisma and fearsome oratorical power to the role. When he booms “The right to think is on trial here,” the rafters rattle.A staple of British soap operas before she was even out of her teens, Anna Friel experienced the type of fame. So it seems an odd directorial choice to make the trim actor look like an antediluvian Humpty Dumpty.His nemesis is Matthew Harrison Brady, lawyer for the prosecution and militant creationist. Though David Troughton has a certain wiliness and power, he sometimes overplays the buffoonish element in the part. Even best actress Kevin Spacey also goes naked. It means that he doesn’t feel like the well-matched opponent of Spacey that he should.That said, Nunn’s production is good fun. The period costumes, simple wooden set and large crowd of extras create a stifling atmosphere of small-town southern America, and the use of choral hymn-singing during scene changes gives a sense of a community at once both cohesive and oppressive. The central courtroom debate, in which Drummond unconventionally calls the prosecution lawyer into the witness box, goes like a rocket.Lawrence and Lee claimed that their play, written during the McCarthy era, was not really about evolution and religion. It was about the right to freedom of thought. That seems as relevant now as ever. Breakfast With HollyThe same can’t be said for Truman Capote’s story “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” A new stage adaptation of this meandering, almost plotless tale of a young writer’s on-off friendship with a bohemian flibbertigibbet in 1940s New York comes across as fluffy and inconsequential.That’s not the fault of the striking Anna Friel as Holly Golightly. She mixes the scatty charm of the character with a steely selfishness, and it makes for an interesting ride. The best actress goes nude in one scene too, which is bound to please certain members of the audience at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.Joseph Cross Running With Scissors, Milk is also good as William Parsons, the naive young writer who encounters Holly and falls under her spell. The problems are with Samuel Adamson’s adaptation and Sean Mathias’s clunky direction. Adamson includes a long dull party sequence, and fails to dig deeply into the central relationship: All the hints that Parsons is gay go unexplored and only serve to undermine what little sexual tension there is. The director fails to compensate with much in the way of comedic sparkle.Designer Anthony Ward attempts to conjure up Manhattan out of two fire escapes and a backdrop silhouette skyline. The result is as successful as it sounds. Thrills and ShiversFor a real thrill ride, you can’t beat Stephen Daldry’s 1992 production of “An Inspector Calls,” which has returned to the Novello Theatre.J.B. Priestley’s 1945 play is about a mysterious policeman who uncovers the brutal secrets of a smug middle-class family. Daldry’s masterstroke is to turn this rollicking melodrama into a piece of brilliant expressionism, with skewed angles, multiple timeframes and direct-to-audience monologues. The acting is as good as ever, and the denouement is guaranteed to give you shivers. Source: bloomberg.com/ For Latest News Visit :Film Festival Stars - Best Actress Monica Bellucci

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