Lesley Sharp among the stars to perform at Festival

Professional actresses and actors, Lesley Sharp (top photgraph), Eve Matheson (middle photograph), Jenny Quayle, Michael Palmer and Philip Battley, have been engaged by Dr. Joe Spence (lower photograph) to perform in rehearsed readings of extracts from Greene’s plays (mainly The Potting Shed and The Complaisant Lover) at the Graham Greene International Festival in the Civic Centre, Berkhamsted (UK), on the evening of Friday 1st October 2010.

Dr. Spence will introduce and conclude the event with a talk on “In and Beyond The Living Room: The Art and Scope of Graham Greene, Dramatist”.

Dr. Spence has been the Master of Dulwich College since September 2009. He was previously Master in College at Eton College and headmaster of Oakham School. He is an historian and playwright. He writes on nineteenth and twentieth century Irish literary and cultural history, and has had two plays (Gogol’s Gamblers, Pleasance Edinburgh and BAC, and Descent, Pleasance Edinburgh and King’s Head, Islington) produced professionally. His interest in the plays of Graham Greene has been long-standing, and grew out of a fascination with the playwrights of the 1950s and ‘60s (such as Greene, John Whiting, Enid Bagnold and Rodney Ackland) who were ignored in the era of the Angry Young Men.

The actresses and actors, who will appear at the Festival subject to their availabilities, began rehearsals with Dr. Spence in the third week of August 2010.

Graham Greene’s The Potting Shed will be revived at the Finborough Theatre (Earl’s Court, London, UK) on dates between 12th and 27th September 2010.

Rowan Joffé re-imagines "Brighton Rock" in new film

At the Graham Greene International Festival in Berkhamsted School (Hertfordshire, UK) at 11.30am on Sunday 3rd October 2010 the award-winning writer and director Rowan Joffé will give an illustrated talk on “The Re-imagining of Brighton Rock”, when he will speak about how he adapted Greene’s novel Brighton Rock to create a new film. While emphasising that he has not remade the 1947 film, he will address two main questions:

(i) Why re-imagine the novel when such a great film has already been made?
(ii) Why set the film in 1964?

The talk will be illustrated by excerpts from the film and by still photography.

Rowan Joffé wrote the screenplay for the film The American (starring George Clooney, directed by Anton Corbjin). He directed the television drama The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall (written by Simon Block for Talkback Thames / Channel 4), for which he won the BAFTA Award for Best Fiction Director 2009 and the BAFTA Award for Best Actor. He wrote the screenplays for the 28 Days Later sequel (directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo) and Last Resort (directed by Pawel Pawlikowski). He was the writer and director of the television drama Secret Life (starring Matthew MacFadyen for Channel 4 / Kudos Productions). He wrote Turkish Delight, an afternoon play for BBC1, for which he won the Royal Television Society Best Drama Award 2003. He also wrote Gas Attack, a television drama for Channel 4 / Hart Ryan in 2001. He was nominated for BAFTA’s Best New Writer in 2002 and for Best Single Drama at the Broadcast Awards 2002. He won the Michael Powell Award for Best New British Feature at the Edinburgh Festival 2001. Rowan Joffé's film of Brighton Rock will have its première at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2010.

Prof. Neil Sinyard is unfortunately indisposed after an accident in July, and his talk, scheduled for 11.30am on Sunday 3rd October 2010, is cancelled. Trustees and friends will want to wish Prof. Sinyard a speedy recovery.

Four Events celebrate Greene and Film at Festival 2010

The brilliance of Graham Greene’s cinematic writing will be celebrated at four events at the forthcoming Graham Greene International Festival 2010.

(1) The Ministry of Fear (classification: PG) will be screened on the evening of Thursday 30th September at The Rex, Berkhamsted’s beautiful art deco cinema. It will be introduced by Mike Hill, who was director of the Festival from 2005 to 2007. With Jon Wise, he is co-author of a bibliographical and contextual reference book, The Writings of Graham Greene: A Reader’s Guide.

The film is based upon Greene’s 1943 novel of the same name, and it tells the story of a man who, after his release from a mental asylum, finds himself caught up in an international spy ring in London during the Blitz. After guessing the weight of a cake at a fair, he is pursued by foreign agents and incriminated for murder. The film was directed by Fritz Lang, starred Ray Milland and Marjorie Reynolds, and was released in the USA in 1944. It is renowned as a “film noir”, and runs for eighty-six minutes. The original music was composed by Miklos Rozsa and Victor Young.

(2) At the Town Hall, Berkhamsted (Hertfordshire, UK), on the afternoon of Friday 1st October 2010 Mike Hill will give a talk on "Greene and Hitchcock".

The speaker is interested in the superficial biographical dissimilarities between Graham Greene and Alfred Hitchcock, and also a number of similarities, and he sees the parallels between their respective bodies of work. These include their use of autobiographical detail, their willingness to experiment, and their late return to their roots. He considers that their artistic preoccupations were often remarkably similar—an interest in dreams, an involvement with the spy thriller, a recognition of the fragility of civilisation, a serious investigation of matters Catholic, and the development of “ingenious melodramatic situations”. He also sees a cinematic connection between the two and possible influence between their works, and he is aware of Greene’s criticism of Hitchcock’s films in the 1930s and his later lack of admiration for Hitchcock’s work. He regrets the resultant lack of artistic cooperation between the two.

(3) On the evening of Saturday 2nd October 2010 in Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School (Hertfordshire, UK) Prof. Thomas O’Connor will give an illustrated talk titled “Double Exposure: Capturing Greene on Film”.

Prof. O'Connor teaches at the School of Media Arts and Design at James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia, USA. He has written and produced over fifty documentaries and teleplays for broadcast, several of which have won major awards. He has travelled widely for his productions — throughout Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean and Mexico. His film Fatima was the first nationwide documentary shown in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. During a NASA fellowship in 1998, he wrote and produced a documentary on the first manned lunar landing. His feature screenplay titled Fools of Time has been optioned by a Los Angeles production company. Currently he is working on a documentary about Graham Greene. He is pictured above at the author’s grave in Vevey, Switzerland.

(4) Film enthusiasts will also look forward to an illustrated talk by Rowan Joffé, the writer and director of Brighton Rock (2010). On the morning of Sunday 3rd October 2010 in Newcroft Lecture Theatre, Berkhamsted School (Hertfordshire, UK) he will speak about “The Re-imagining of Brighton Rock”, and he will show some clips from his film along with still photography. Rowan Joffé's talk replaces the originally advertised talk by Prof. Neil Sinyard, who is indisposed.

Medieval theology in Greene's Catholic novels

At the Graham Greene International Festival on Friday 1st October 2010 at 2.15pm in the Town Hall, Berkhamsted (Hertfordshire, UK), Dr. Frances McCormack (National University of Ireland, Galway) (pictured in the top photograph) will discuss aspects of medieval theology, as she discovers them in one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers in the English language.

Her title is “Nothing but a regret: compunction and shame in the Catholic novels of Graham Greene”.

She will explain the medieval theological doctrine of compunction, which was a monastic doctrine of a sorrow and regret which would bring one closer to God. According to the theological writers of the time, it had four sources: (i) awareness of one's own sins, (ii) contemplation of heaven, (iii) fear of damnation, and (iv) sorrow for the sins of others. She will argue that this doctrine informs Greene's Catholic writings, motivating his characters to the sense of regret and shame which they so often feel. She will examine this compunction as a motivational force in the lives of both protagonists and antagonists in the Catholic novels.

Dr. McCormack is a Lecturer in the Department of English at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She is the author of Chaucer and the Culture of Dissent (2007), and she was the lexicographical consultant for Terence Patrick Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English (2nd ed.). In addition to her enthusiasm for Chaucer, her research interests include Old and Middle English literature, political, religious and devotional literature of those eras, mystical writing, anticlericalism, penitential writings and heresy.

At the Festival on the afternoon of Saturday 2nd October 2010 in Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School (UK), Monica Ali (photographed by John Follain, above) will speak about “My Writing and Graham Greene”. She wrote the introduction to one of Greene’s great Catholic novels, The End of the Affair, in Vintage’s centenary edition, 2004. She is the author of Brick Lane amongst other texts, and she has lectured at Columbia University, New York.

On 7th October 2010 Vintage Classics will release a new edition of Greene’s most famous Catholic novel, The Power and the Glory (1940), and the volume will be enhanced by notes for reading groups.