Seen and heard: February 2016

The Lady in the Van – film of Alan Bennett’s stage play, based on his diaries, themselves deriving from real events. Several whole new dimensions are added by the film treatment, first among which is the uncomfortable and frequently disgusting realism of Mary Shepherd’s presence in first a smart North London street and then in Alan Bennett’s driveway, and second is the sharp dialogue and interplay between Bennett the writer and Bennett the person living out the events, which on screen can be actually played by the same actor – tremendous performance by Alex Jennings – with the added impact of close reaction shots. The excellence of Maggie Smith’s performance goes without saying. Fun also to re-read Alan Bennett’s diary of the filming.

Game Design Workshop: A Play Centric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, by Tracy Fullerton – best book on game design I’ve read for ages. Each chapter works through one aspect of game design, with exercises inviting the reader to apply the concepts to games familiar to them – the activity which would be workshopped in a face-to-face course, such as the one Fullerton teacher. I thought I was pretty familiar with game design, but every chapter has an insight for me. (See quote in my Cuttings for this month, on the importance of fixing on the player experience – for which read learner experience if you follow the analogy, as I’ve done frequently, between game design and learning design.)

The Night Manager - blisteringly good and powerful TV adaptation updating John Le Carre’s novel to the present, with Tom Hiddleston somehow both effacing and attention-grabbing as the hotel night manager of the title, Olivia Coleman gripping and empathetic as the spymaster, Tom Hollander a million miles away from his goofy dramatic roles (Mr Collins in Price and Prejudice, Rev) as the international arms dealer’’s sinister chief of operations, and Hugh Laurie both affably relaxed and scarily sharp as the arms dealer Richard Roper himself. The moments of sickening violence are a reminder of the death and mass destruction lurking behind the glamorous locations.

The Philadelphia Story – watched on TV. Because like most people I'm more familiar with the musical updated version High Society, I was struck by the quality of the writing (it should be good, since it derives from a stage play) and by the quite specific satirical target of the old Quaker families which seemingly then still in 1940 dominated Philadelphia like an aristocracy (the surname of Katherine Hepburn’s character, significantly, is Lord)