Nude with Violin

My friends organized an outing to see Noël Coward's Nude with Violin this weekend.  The play was cute, and well-acted, but not deeply satisfying.  The story was a bit thin, and its insights into pretensions and fashions of the art world were apparently not considered entirely fresh even at its debut in 1956.*

I also found myself mildly distracted by minor details, such as the strong hints that Sebastien was Paul's lover, followed by Sebastien's glib revelation at the very end that he has a bratty 14-year-old child, named Stotesbury. (It is not necessarily difficult to explain how such a situation can come about, but the play makes no attempt to explain it.)

However, one real highlight was the opportunity to listen to one-half of a telephone conversation in several different languages.  Who knew I would get the chance to practice my rudimentary French and German at an English-language community theatre?

And it was good to have an excuse to leave the apartment and take a break from working on my paper (perhaps ironic, after months of procrastinating).  We also had dinner at La Bonne Soupe, which was good.  My ginger rum drink was delicious.


* The gist of the play is that, after a famous painter's death, his family learns that he never actually painted anything in his life.  The paintings of Paul's first artistic "period" were painted by one mistress; the paintings of his second artistic "period" were painted by another.  It is unclear to me why a religious man created the paintings of Paul's third period, but it appears that Paul's valet's child was easily bribed into slapping together 30 paintings for Paul's hitherto unknown fourth period.