#to pull off

[cordeliathefloofydemon2]

I found a better head image with the whole crew.

It’s even got ✨💕furío💕✨

[greatmuldini]

Illusion may be the foundation of all our happiness but even if it is illusion let us keep it.

We do not remember W Somerset Maugham for his farcical dramatic work today, but the plays he wrote during the First World War while variously engaged in either secret "government" work or private divorce proceedings (or both), were celebrated at the time as perfect contemporary renditions of the classic comedy of manners, and it is not difficult to see why they provided audiences with much-needed attractions and distractions.

Caroline, written in 1916, does not mention the war in any way, and Home and Beauty deals with the familiar cliché of the missing soldier-husband who returns alive in a supremely improbable scenario. Frivolous though they may seem from a modern perspective, both plays struck a particular chord with British post-war audiences. The now largely forgotten Caroline presents us and the eponymous heroine with a very human dilemma that is ultimately resolved in the only way possible: by not resolving it at all.

For ten years, Mrs Caroline Ashley has lived the comfortable life of a London socialite, safe in the knowledge that her conveniently absent husband has no plans of ever returning to their matrimonial abode. This has left her free to entertain what we must assume are entirely platonic relationships with a young and hopeless admirer, Rex, and with Robert Oldham, who is a tall handsome man of five and forty, well-preserved, but inclined to stoutness; he is well dressed, well cared for, and evidently desirous to hold on to a semblance of youth.

Robert is also a very busy divorce lawyer whose expertise on the subject has made him reluctant to tie the knot himself. What would be a perfectly satisfactory arrangement for all three corners of the triangle is under constant threat from Caroline's female friends who are eager to see an end to the intolerable impasse - one way or the other. The tender equilibrium is shattered when, out of the blue, news of Stephen Ashley's death arrives.

The general expectation is for Caroline and Robert to take immediate action, but neither shows any inclination to follow their friends' advice. Faced with the prospect of the wear and tear of domestic life, the happy couple find that there is always something a little melancholy in getting what one wants. After hitting the first proverbial brick wall in a row over who has the prettier house to live in, it becomes clear to both that they must remain single - until the telephone rings.

The full comic potential of the physical stage business could only have been accessed by accomplished performers with impeccable timing. Nothing less could be expected of the leads in the Midland Theatre Company, who drew a respectable weekly salary of £15 and beyond being more or less word-perfect for two parts at the same time also had to devise and apply their own make-up for each role. While in 1948 the aspiring junior player (unpaid) went unnoticed by the critics with his portrayal of Clarence the errand boy (half-a-crown for you, my lad), the leading man of 1952 had reached the lofty heights of his profession. 

As Robert Oldham, Patrick McGoohan was delicious. One enjoyed every second of his semi-caricature of a worthy gentleman,wrote the Coventry Evening Telegraph, and the picture shows an actor who is far from being inclined to stoutness and even further from the required age but is able to project, from the front row to the back of the auditorium, the essential quirks and foibles of the character with the instruments at his disposal - instruments that would have put him in charge of the character and allowed him to drive the plot to its not entirely inevitable conclusion.

For anyone still wondering how Robert and Caroline will extricate themselves from their predicament, suffice it to say that through an ingenious invention Stephen Ashley is revived, much to the relief of everyone concerned. The crisis is defused, paradoxically, by an act of deliberate self-deception: conventional expectations are thwarted, a happy ending is averted, but a state of perfect satisfaction is blithely (re-) instated. Underneath the veneer of sophisticated nonsense, therefore, a sense of human tragicomedy prevails.

[kanashiba]

Alright I’m putting my fat ass on lockdown until my godamn jawline re-appears

[theangelsbitch]

Good life for two days.

It started simple. Waking up with a sense of something being off. Wrong. Then nothing. Just opening his eyes and knowing that everything… was fine. Dean rubbed at his eyes, grumbling softly as he sat up and scratched at his stomach. “Babe?” He called with a frown, glancing around.