AND ANOTHER THING…
The Hutton Inquiry into the death of weapons expert Dr David Kelly has finally concluded its deliberations. Looking back over the past few weeks we can see highlighted the very best & worse elements of Britain’s political scene. The contrast between Lord Hutton’s rigorous, objective, even-handed and yet absolutely thorough investigations & the slipping & sliding, peeping & hiding– one moment recondite & reasonable, the next belligerent & combative – of the Downing Street gang was very striking.
Whatever the considered findings of the Inquiry are to be, two things are quite certain: that none of the main protagonists will emerge as squeaky clean & shiny bright, & that no matter how strenuously pedantic or brilliantly athletic the manoeuvrings of government officials, the Iraq dossier was deliberately altered so as to be publicly credible & persuasive where initially it had been privately cautious & sceptical. And if you change the wording of a document, either by omission or substitution, you are by anybody’s reasonable definition, lying.
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Poor old Reuben didn’t get his time on the swings or amongst the waitresses at Café Rouge. He’s teething & has a streaming cold so he had to stay in amongst the detritus of wrapping paper & assorted gifts. We’re hoping that when he has finally shredded the last square of paper & eaten the last cardboard box, he may begin to take an interest in what was inside them.
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A further rehearsal of Ask for the Moon today, once again with the lace workers. Although they’re still on scripts, we’ve begun blocking it now. The emotional agility & discipline of these three young actors is very striking. Ayla, playing Fanny, a passionate 16-year-old who becomes pregnant by her lover who leaves for London, has a single line on which she must begin to cry. Each time we did it (& it was necessary to repeat the sequence several times) Ayla’s emotional commitment was total. And yet this wasn’t adolescent self-indulgence or sentimental trickery. She was able to enter into the moment with absolute authenticity & then withdraw on direction with absolute control. There’s a long way to go yet, but something of the essence of what Stanislavski termed ‘emotional truth’ is already firmly in place.
1:09:57 AM 
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