I interviewed the screenwriter, Guy Hibbert, about Five Minutes Of Heaven for the Writers' Guild a couple of months ago and I think knowing the background to the script made watching the film even more rewarding than it would otherwise have been.

Then again, I suppose I missed out on some of the suspense - I knew, roughly, how it would turn out.

Either way, I thought it was a brilliant piece of drama. Great acting, great direction and a very truthful feel to the whole piece.

The writing was terrific. Bold enough to leave long silences yet also with some monologues from James Nesbitt that reminded me of Enda Walsh.

The end, so succinct and powerful and right, was brilliantly realised.

I loved the descriptions of the Korean and Japanese baseball teams practice routines in this article in The New York Times - and the joy felt by the American scouts watching on.

Baseball scouts are known for watching games, but the best in the business focus just as much on pregame practice, sometimes more. Three games can pass without getting to see how a shortstop can flash into the hole, or how well a second baseman charges a slow grounder. But when top Asian teams take batting practice, a scout’s inner aesthete awakens to the beauty of the game.

It reminded me of the theory about the importance of 'deliberate practice' as espoused by Anders Ericsson and made famous by Malcom Gladwell.

And it brought to mind the activities of Charlton substitutes at half-time. You couldn't call what they do for ten minutes practice. They have a kickabout. It's casual. Jokey. And with no sense of purpose other than keeping warm and vaguely occupied.

Somehow I don't think either the Asian baseball players and coaches or Anders Ericsson would approve.

I didn't realise until after I'd seen it that The New Electric Ballroom preceded The Walworth Farce.

The two plays by Enda Walsh share a premise about people trapped in their own homes, but the earlier piece, set in Ireland, doesn't, for me, quite live up to the latter.

There is some brilliant writing - the fisherman's monologues are particularly stunning - but I found the reliance on monologue slightly limiting.

Then again, perhaps it just suffers in comparison to The Walworth Farce which was one of the best plays I've seen for a very long time and full of drama.

Ballroom was more like a poem, in some respects. It reminded me of Under Milk Wood. Dark, lyrical, funny, sexy and full of the vivid life of a fishing village. 

...is not structure, after all. According to Billy Mernit, "The most important task a screenplay must accomplish is to get whoever is reading it to identify with the lead character."

In fact, Mernit goes so far as to say that successful screenwriters tend to disregard the 'rules of screenwriting' (keep it brief, show don't tell etc) in order to make sure that readers identify with their lead character.

Sounds simple. And of course screenplays can't easily be split into 'character' and 'story', it's all intertwined (or should be). Nonetheless, it's an insight that strikes me as quite profound.

The thing about John Adams's music and operas, apart from their sheer brilliance, is that they grip you (me) from start to finish.

Very little happens in Doctor Atomic but the tension and drama never let up. I wish I could say something intelligent about the music, other than that there seemed to be a notable broadening of style in places but I don't have the knowledge of the vocabulary.

He certainly has a great sense of what works on stage. His operas are full of life, combining big ideas and very personal emotion.

I slightly missed having a truly original libretto here - Alice Goodman's words for Nixon and Klinghoffer are so outstanding - but this patchwork of poetry and science worked well.

And any quibbles seem irrelevant. Doctor Atomic is a huge and wonderful work, brilliantly performed and directed at ENO.

An understudy, James Cleverton, stepped into the very big shoes of Gerald Finley to play Oppenheimer - lovely voice, very natural on stage. Cheers from the audience at the end, but even bigger from the cast on stage after the post-bows curtain.

I didn't much like Marius von Mayenburg's Ugly One, but The Stone, also at The Royal Court, is superb. Technically brilliant as it shifts between decades on an almost bare stage with no costume changes, and beautifully acted.

Breathtaking.

Billington queries whether it reveals a general truth about Germans seeking to escape their Nazi past (no idea, but even if it doesn't this was the truth about this one fictional family); but then, amazingly, he also found the play hard to follow.

[It appears Charles Spencer -two stars!! - and Benedict Nightingale had similar problems. Blimey. At least some critics were on the ball.]

A decent job of assessing Updike's work by Ian McEwan in The Guardian today - it fails to do him justice, but at least McEwan acknowledges that.

Some good insights.

Like Bellow, his only equal in this, Updike is a master of effortless motion - between third and first person, from the metaphorical density of literary prose to the demotic, from specific detail to wide generalisation, from the actual to the numinous, from the scary to the comic. For his own particular purposes, Updike devised for himself a style of narration, an intense, present tense, free indirect style, that can leap up, whenever it wants, to a God's-eye view of Harry, or the view of his put-upon wife, Janice, or victimised son, Nelson. This carefully crafted artifice permits here assumptions about evolutionary theory, which are more Updike than Harry, and comically sweeping notions of Jewry, which are more Harry than Updike.

Updike once said of the Rabbit books that they were an exercise in point of view. This was typically self-deprecating, but contains an important grain of truth. Harry's education extends no further than high school, and his view is further limited by a range of prejudices and a stubborn, combative spirit, yet he is the vehicle for a half-million-word meditation on postwar American anxiety, failure and prosperity. A mode had to be devised to make this possible, and that involved pushing beyond the bounds of realism. In a novel like this, Updike insisted, you have to be generous and allow your characters eloquence, "and not chop them down to what you think is the right size". He was clear, too, that we all sense more than we can ever put into words, and was mindful of the example of Joyce and his "great attempt to capture the way we move through life".
 
And from Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

A virtuoso, he was never content with virtuosity. He sang like Henry James, but he saw like Sinclair Lewis. The two sides of American fiction—the precise, realist, encyclopedic appetite to get it all in, and the exquisitist urge to make writing out of sensation rendered exactly—were both alive in him. He was at once conjurer and chronicler, and it is this that makes the great Updike novels masterpieces properly so called: they get it all in and they get it all right. Describing the “Rabbit” books to a new reader, one is stunned to be reminded of their apparent inconsequence: the hero isn’t a great bootlegger who gets killed, or a boy on a raft with a runaway slave, or even a suicidal small-town gent or an exotic expatriate in Spain. He doesn’t do anything grand. He’s a high-school basketball star in a dying town; he runs a Toyota dealership; he has an affair or two with a woman; he stays married; he has a hopeless son. And yet Rabbit’s small acts hold not just truth but also glamour, a mystery and glow almost Proustian.

I'm not a good enough writer to express how I feel about the work of John Updike, who died this week.

Neither are quite a few authors of the tributes I've been reading.

But I enjoyed this selection of thoughts from writers in The New Yorker.

Including from Paul Theroux:

"He helped us see. I regard him as a master, appreciative in ways that enlarged his vision and made his writing sing.

The completeness of this vision is astonishing. So I’m surprised, even a little shocked, by the belittling tone of the obituaries: the talk of how one book was weaker than another, the sorting out, the awarding of marks.

This misses the point: his work is all of a piece, capturing the life forces of America, a half century of the social, the political, the marital; of solitude and intimacy; and passion—the human libido is often warmly throbbing in Updike’s fiction. "

I loved the audacity of this - a whole orchestra on stage! - and I loved the way that Stoppard integrates the orchestra into his play so effortlessly. It's playful, clever, funny and moving. 

Ecstatically received by the second house of the evening (it only runs 65 minutes). So full marks to the National for innovative programming following on from the short Pinter plays last year.

Perhaps some shorter new plays could be tried at the Cottesloe; as double-bills if necessary. I think several new works have suffered in recent years from over-stretch and would have been more successful cut down to around 70-90 minutes.

Two confessions: I've never seen a zombie film (I switched off Shaun Of The Dead after about ten  minutes) and I expected Dead Set by Charlie Brooker to be pretty rubbish (A zombie film? By a journalist? Set in the Big Brother house? Pah.)

In fact, it was excellent. Really good. Tight, gripping, funny and just scary enough.

Very well acted and directed. Brilliant effects. And the writing, apart from  the occasional Brooker-ish flourishes, was mainly quite understated (in a good way) - which seems a surprising thing to say about a zombie film, by a journalist, set in the Big Brother House.