Paine play.

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

A play about Tom Paine has just opened at the Globe Theatre - it's the Trevor Griffiths never-filmed film script/play that was broadcast as a radio play on Radio 4 last year, cut down to 3 hours for the stage. I didn't like the radio play - I thought it didn't catch Paine's personality, though I'm not sure if that was down to the script or Pryce's downbeat performance. I was also surprised by the take on the French Revolution, given that Griffiths is left-wing/Marxist. Paine's best biographer is the late 19thc Moncure Conway, and Conway goes to great lengths to make the very convincing case that Paine was the victim of the machinations of the American ambassador, Morris, not simply 'of Robespierre', an idea the review of this play I heard this evening put across. Paine wasn't freed when Robespierre fell - he was left rotting in prison until November, when the new American ambassador, Monroe, got him out.

Griffiths must have read Conway - he is the main man, biography-wise - so why miss this? It's surprising, especially as the Left is generally francophile and loves to put the boot into America whenever it can, especially for just this sort of backroom, Kissingeresque politicking. Ah well.

Comments

[sibylla-oo.livejournal.com]

If it's as you say, it would be another deception, wouldn't it?
I have posted on my LJ something about the revival in pro-revolutionary historiography, even in the English-speaking countries. So, let's hope the fiction would follow.

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

The original script/play (the 6 hour version, from which this has been cut to a more audience-bum-friendly 3 hours) was written over 20 years ago, so the writer - who is pretty old now, I think - probably isn't following whatever trends are going on in history faculties. I'm surprised, though, because Paine's imprisonment is generally thought to be Morris' doing, and Griffiths must be aware of that. Maybe this is too 'petty' an explaination for a dramatist reared on Danton's Death, etc.