The Italian city of Venice is gearing up for a wedding extravagance of this weekend. The Hollywood actor George Clooney and his fiancé, a British human rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin are expected to marry there. Lots of celebrity guests are arriving for the event. And among them there are dozens of journalists and paparazzi. The entertainment editor of Vanity Fair Italia is also hoping to catch a glimpse of the couple and their glamorous guests.
So plenty of press and paparazzi outside the hotel, have you seen anyone famous arrive yet?
Well, yesterday we saw Matt Damon, Ellen Barkin, and Cindy Crawford and her husband. That’s the people we know that are here.
The people of Venice are pretty sophisticated people. How big a deal is it in Italy among ordinary people?
This wedding is bringing more jobs and more work in three days. So they are very happy actually.
With western intervention in Iraq making headlines, a play about the 2003 Iraq War has been revived at the Park Theatre in London this week. Dan Damon went to the technical rehearsal.
OK, thank you very much.
This The Vertical Hour, a much more intimate piece about personal reactions to global crisis.
This play now has given more relevant in 2014. And it wasn’t 2006.
Why?
I think lots of people including myself thought that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was going to be a one-off event to deal with that one particular issue. But of course, the America’s foreign policy has continued to develop.
In 2014, Peter Davison plays Oliver Lucas, a British doctor antiwar.
I’ve spent many years being very angry about what happened. I felt doubly appalled by what happened.
Nobody gives a damn for the Iraqis. They just can’t wait to tell us we were wrong. You are wrong. You lose.
Peter Davison agrees with his character Oliver. America’s sense of national mission can be dangerous.
He says if you get a call from your President, you will feel that you have to answer that call. And I say if my Prime Minister called, I’ll let it ring. That’s the difference.
So David Hare has influence and reputation, two Oscars, three Golden Globes and more. Does his play about global politics have influence, too?
Very few people go to the theatre as a proportion of the population. What good does it do to write a play? But I suppose I would say that if you are somebody who thought deeply about these kinds of questions, as David Hare has, and if you can articulate that well through an involving theatrical performance, what you can achieve in the theatre is a sustained intensive examination of an issue or a set of issues.