Royal Prerogatives: HIRH Princess Liala Farouk of Egypt

HIRH Princess Liala Farouk of Egypt, Grand Duchess of Alexandria

Princess Liala claims to be the daughter of HM King Farouk of Egypt and HRH Princess Mafalda of Savoy, who was killed in Buchenwald in 1944, 13 years before the Princess' birth.

HRH has enthroned herself in Melbourne, and her website (currently suspended by its server) shows she's having a right royal old time.

Present Laughter

By Noel Coward

American Airlines Theatre, 227 West 2nd Street, New York
January 22 2010


I broke my own rules and paid full price for an orchestra seat at the revival of Noel Coward’s “Present Laughter.” This play is the latest vehicle for Victor Garber whose manifold talents were said to brighten even Broadway’s lights. The play had a RAVE review in the New York Times and I was itching to see something truly wonderful and this seemed to be it.

All of the actors, and Victor Garber most particularly, walked through the play, speaking their lines in monotone. There was no energy, no interpretation, no acting, no presence, and no laughter.

I don’t understand it. Everyone in it, not only Mr. Garber, was a famous actor with years of experience. The only explanation I can come up with is that the play was regarded as an iconic set piece which had to be delivered with starched postures and clipped English vowels typical of the more tawdry Sunday night broadcasts on Masterpiece Theatre. In these travesties, evidence of proper delivery is provided when the performance is as stilted as an amateur production in which no one knows where to stand and takes a prompt for each line. Thus was "Present Laughter."

No matter; the success of my evening was assured because I left at the first interval, abandoning my $116 to the ill gotten gains of the Broadway machine and wantonly threw good money after bad at dinner at the luxe (and louche) Standard Hotel down near W13th Street instead. There I celebrated my relief at being out of the pit of despair that was orchestra row G seat 37.

Judging by the envious glances given by my fellow sufferers who were less brazen about making their escape, I was not the only one who felt this way.

New York City Ballet, All Russian Program

Lincoln Center, New York, Tuesday January 19 2010

I had a lovely evening at the New York City Ballet watching deliriously beautiful new works plus one old one by Balanchine who learned it from Fokine.

The mid town dame on my right said “Do me a favour and slap me if I snore” and the Polish Jew on my left nudged me and said “so far I am not asking for my money back eh?”

At interval the mid town broad woke up and put on her lipstick and said of the ballet we’d just sat through “that was DISGUSTING.” The Polish Jew’s wife yelled at her husband how appalled she was that she saw the rabbi eating a ham sandwich in the diner on 2nd Avenue and the mid town woman said “WHERE on 2nd Avenue, where EXACTLY?” and then leaned across me and discussed tuna melts for about ten minutes before she said to me “and what’s YOUR story?”

One is never alone in New York, yet never intruded upon. E. B. White said it all.

Save Me

Robert Cary (Director)

Drama, USA, 2008, 1 hour, 36 minutes.
Robert Desiderio (Screenplay), Rodney Taylor (Photograph), Phillip Bartell (Editor), Jeff Cardoni (Music), Christopher Racster, Herb Hamsher, Chad Allen, Robert Gant and Judith Light (Producers).

“Save Me” is a brilliantly written, acted and directed screen play about all the people involved in an evangelical centre devoted to curing gay men of their homosexuality.

This is a topical subject in the USA where mainstream politicians openly proselytize the religious righteousness of anti-gay attitudes while an extraordinary proportion of them are themselves caught participating in sexual practices which are at the least deviant (by their own standards).

However the film deftly addresses both sides of the story in a way that links the motives of all parties involved to the pursuit of the highest forms of love. The evangelists who run the centre, the men who live there, the family members who commit their siblings and children to its care and even one father who damns his gay son to hell shortly before he expires and makes his own merry way to that destination, are all exposed as humble humans trying to do what they think is best.

Yet the film makes no excuses for its characters. It reflects the bitter divisions that exist between people who are gay and those who condemn them, but its greatest achievement is in bringing understanding to the motives of those who truly (if preposterously) believe they can cure homosexuality through a life lived in reflection of Christ. The role of the mother played with exacting fortitude by Judith Light is a moving expose of a mother’s anguish, the denouement of which is slightly reminiscent of the end of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”

It’s an engaging and touching film which makes its point without risking reason through vitriol, from which emanates a droll kind of compassion for the perpetrators of the tyranny of Jesus even as the heroes, mercifully, ride off into the sunset (together).

December 2009