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Culture News in Brief: HC Andersen’s creepy secret and a director’s obsession with midgets

Ben Hamilton
March 6th, 2019


This article is more than 5 years old.

From the storytelling maestro’s to Whacko Jacko’s bedroom and the macabre role choices by Charlotte Rampling, the weirdness continues

Jim Broadbent played HC Andersen in the London production (photo: Manuel Harlan / bridgetheatre.co.uk)

In Martin McDonagh’s new play ‘A Very Very Very Dark Matter’, in which HC Andersen and Charles Dickens play prominent parts, the Irish playwright portrays the celebrated British novelist as a “foulmouthed, lecherous fraud”, according to the Observer.

And according to John Bowen, a professor of 19th century literature at the University of York, the truth was far worse as Dickens actively tried to gaslight his wife – convince her she was insane – so he could commit her to an asylum and settle down with his mistress.

Another midget
Nevertheless, ‘A Very Very Very Dark Matter’, which ran from October to January in London, is very much about Andersen, and although it touches on the Danish writer’s visit to Dickens’ home in 1857, it is mostly set in Copenhagen.

It is set in an attic flat in the Danish capital where Andersen keeps an African midget woman captive in a cage – for 16 years! She is, the darkly comic play reveals, the muse for creations such as ‘Thumbelina’.

McDonagh’s trademark
Fans of McDonagh might start to question whether he is taking his obsession with deriving humour from midgets too far.

In the films ‘In Bruges’ and ‘Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri’, thanks to the inclusion of Peter Dinklage, you would have thought the laugh barrel had been rendered dry. Obviously not.


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The American singer-songwriter Paul Simon has donated over 150,000 kroner to outdoor youth association Natur & Ungdom in Skanderborg, eastern Jutland, as part of his mission to make a charitable donation in every country he visited as part of his 2018 tour. Annette Rask Krogsøe from Natur & Ungdom told TV2 Østjylland that the organisation thought it was a joke when it received the notification from Germany. “It looked like a Ghanaian letter, and we didn’t really believe it,” she said. “He writes in his letter of thanks that he would like to ‘give back’ to the audience who has supported him for many years.”

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Brothers pen Eurovision entry for Moldova
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Charlotte Rampling takes cameo in Danish crime series
British actress Charlotte Rampling, who never seems to turn down a part these days – particularly if it’s set in the Cold War or on the trail of a serial killer – has taken a cameo in the new Danish crime series ‘DNA’, which stars Anders W Berthelsen and Nicolas Bro and is set to debut this autumn on TV2.

Cartoon is the most watched Danish film at the cinema since 1985
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