Getting In

 

         Getting  Inside the Drottningholm Court Theatre

    “Go ahead”, he said, in Swedish.

    We had taken a bus out of central Stockholm to Drottningholm to see the perfectly preserved, even with its period scenery, 18^th century theatre in its palace where time had stood still and one could visit a complete, as though in a time capsule, court theatre of the Enlightenment. The only trouble was that we got there minutes too late for the last tour of the day.

   Horribly disappointed, I pled my case, as a professionally interested and now desperate Fulbright Scholar, to the ticket master by way of a nice lady who translated for me.

The Moscow Art Theatre at Lunch

 And with that Same Fulbright Again....

    The Moscow Art Theatre troupe came to London to do a season of plays at Sadlers Wells Theatre. They did the four big Chekhov and two new plays properly authorized by the Soviet cultural authorities. I saw three of the four Chekhov and one of the social-realist variety. I was so very moved, listening to them in Russian, watching them in my English. All that broken hearted magnanimity. ( Months later, at my second cousin’s home in southern Sweden, I was stunned at how his dinning room resembled the birthday party room in Three Sisters, just across the little Baltic sea, of course.) 

    I somehow or other wrangled an invitation to a luncheon at the Criterion Restaurant in Piccadilly in honor of the Muscovites.

From My Miscellany

    To those who will see this posting: warm regards.

     How is it that I feel qualified, even called upon, to advise you to rush to see SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN?  As I sat beside Betty in the theatre yesterday afternoon watching this remarkable movie, I couldn’t but feel our seventy years of throwing flies together at trout-- and salmon-- resting delightfully between us. I would have been willing to bet that Betty was the sole woman in the theatre who had hit an Atlantic salmon on a fly-- one that I had tied.  How is that for qualification for advising you on this movie?

From My Miscellany

     To those who will see this posting: warm regards.

     How is it that I feel qualified, even called upon, to advise you to rush to see SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN?  As I sat beside Betty in the theatre yesterday afternoon watching this remarkable movie, I couldn’t but feel our seventy years of throwing flies together at trout-- and salmon-- resting delightfully between us. I would have been willing to bet that Betty was the sole woman in the theatre who had hit an Atlantic salmon on a fly-- one that I had tied.  How is that for qualification for advising you on this movie?

   I beg to advise that while the film is most certainly about salmon and the ritual of their pursuit, it is much about the vagaries and rewards of romantic love that is more than merely hormonal. It is about many things, in fact, that any close viewer must enjoy and cherish in her own secret way.

    But the McGuffin, the trick of the movie, is to establish a run of Atlantic salmon in a desert river, the Yemen. If the English can transport their farmed salmon to Yemen and get them to respond to their primordial urge to run up river as they do in Britain, then perhaps our own urge to love, throughout the whole and ancient range of love, can be successful too. Every angler who has fished the salmon hopes in his sorrow that his casting, casting, and everlasting casting, may yet, with one more cast, get a strike from that love running ever up-stream of him. If a great fish hits, it could mean his fulfillment-- out in this river that we are tempted to call life.

    I call your attention to the myriad images of streams of pure and living water in both the Islamic and Hebraic literary traditions. The aristocratic sheik in this lovely film wants only to fulfill the destiny of his desert water by planting heroic salmon in it. I wonder if the alpine water piped down to the exquisite fountains of the Alhambra at Granada was home to salmon in those long lost times.