Carving in Snow

A gutless and immoral movie has been nominated for eight Oscars including Best Film, Best Director and, perhaps most offensively, Best Adapted Screenplay. That film is The Imitation Game . Alan Turing It's gutless because it cannot bring itself to look directly at Alan Turing's sexuality. Yet as the end credits roll, and emotive music kicks in, the film tries to position itself as a plea for equality. This is disingenuou s. Even though Turing is surrounded in the film by good looking men, not once is he seen to give them even a sideways glance. Worse, Turing's relationship with Joan Clarke, important in real life, but a sidelight, is here moved to the centre of the story and decorated with the familiar tropes of a cinematic heterosexual love story: romantic picnics, furtive glances, close shots, and so on. In feeling a need to anchor the film with a love story - a need it's easy to dispute - the filmmakers have chosen to play it straight. Gutless.

A few days ago, before embarking on a week of fresh frontier works as part of several festivals now playing in New York - Coil , Under the Radar , Prototype and others - I visited two classics of the American theatre: A Delicate Balance and Into the Woods . Edward Albee's 1966 Pulitzer winning play about an unnamed terror is running at the Golden Theater with a starry cast including Glenn Close, John Lithgow and Lindsay Duncan. It's a curious experience. It's the type of production you would never see on an Australian profession al stage - a perfectly realised WASP living room with a curtain rising and falling on tableaux at beginning and ends of acts and scenes.  The performances are mostly disappointing. Few of the cast seem to be living in the play's situation and instead rely on presenting its ideas. Lithgow's extraordinary speech about a pet cat he had put down for avoiding his company and refusing to purr is an exception. So too are perfor