Having established its Serious Credentials, it gains confidence and begins to move away from the elegiac tone that threatens to overwhelm it. If you can stick with it, you will be rewarded. The first few episodes look beautiful but move at a stately pace. Now I am more so, but beyond the practical, the questions posed by the book and the show about how much of a refuge art can provide, what we should work to preserve, what makes a civilisation and what, ultimately, makes life worth living, remain interesting ones. Even in 2014, I was sceptical that there would be such an appetite. The second timeline takes us 20 years in the future, when Kirsten (now played by Mackenzie Davis) is part of a troupe of actors known as the Traveling Symphony, who tour the midwest putting on Shakespeare plays – Hamlet, when we meet them – to the scattered plague survivors. In the very early days, for example, Jeevan and Kirsten go round a supermarket that is full of produce but empty of people. It is almost more discomfiting, however, to be able to point now to moments the creators get wrong. People die alone, with their loved ones unable to be with them, and people grieve alone. Though “their” plague is much more devastating than ours (it has a 99% fatality rate), it is still quite something to see people coughing in enclosed spaces while those nearby bristle, and others wonder about masks or gather supplies so they can hunker in apartments until the virus has burned itself out. Different episodes concentrate on the experiences of different characters, but the through line is young Kirsten (an absolutely extraordinary performance from 13-year-old Matilda Lawler in her first substantial role), a child actor who is abandoned by her chaperone when a stage performance of King Lear is chaotically truncated by the death of the lead, Arthur (Gael García Bernal).Īudience member Jeevan (Himesh Patel) tries to take her home, but they are overtaken by the collapse of civilisation and begin their new life navigating the disaster together. The first concerns the early days and years of the pandemic. There are – as is starting to feel mandatory with small-screen dramas – two timelines. Now the television adaptation by Patrick Somerville (known for Maniac and The Leftovers) for HBO, streaming in the UK on Starzplay, is here and … resonating. I read Emily St John Mandel’s bestselling Station Eleven shortly after it came out in 2014, when the tale of a mysterious flu sweeping the globe and laying waste to normal life lay wholly beyond the bounds of reality. It does not store any personal data.How deeply strange it is, how deeply unsettling, to be able to compare and contrast a fictional pandemic with the real thing. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly.
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