You heard it from Ben first ~ theatre notes

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

You heard it from Ben first

The Australian finally catches up (via the London Times) on the Comedie-Francaise/Handke stoush, an issue followed closely on Ben Ellis' Parachute of a Playwright blog and on this blog here and here and here and here and here and, oh yes, here as well... Well, you get the picture.

The latest is the sacking (correction: unexpected non-renewal of contract) of the Comedie-Francaise adminstrator, Marcel Bozonnet. Covered by Mr Ellis a week ago.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Alison,

You said "The Australian finally catches up (via the London Times)", on the Handle affair, but in their story they claim that Handke was:

...Throwing a rose on to the coffin of the former dictator, who died in The Hague while on trial for war crimes, the playwright said he was "happy to be beside Slobodan Milosevic, a man who defended his people".

To quote from Handke's response to Nouvel Observateur (which Ben translated back in May!), Handke said:

..I did not place a red rose on the coffin of Slobodan Milosevic...And nowhere, in my short speech at Pozarevac, did I say, "I am happy to be close to Slobodan Milosevic, who defended his people."

Given that Nouvel Observateur printed an apology to Handke for those inaccuracies, with a little luck we might get a correction from the Times and/or The Australian around Christmas.

Alison Croggon said...

Yup. That's what you get for reprinting articles without checking. If they'd checked out our blogs, however, they might have got their facts straight. :)