Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Wise Children - post III

The world of Nora and Dora is one that is enchanting but works better when they are together. The moment they start to drift apart, as they do in Hollywood, they lose something of their personalities.

At the cause of the distance between them are men with Nora involved seriously with an Italian named Tony while Dora is ending her involvement with a drunken Irishman who is the same age as her uncle Perry.

The hollowness of Hollywood starts to eat away at Dora and she yearns to go back to the house in Brixton and get back into that life. But Nora is not as keen to leave and there comes a point at which the relationship between the twins could see them go their different ways.

It all ends in farce with both sisters avoiding marriage by an inch and being dragged back to London with their grandma leading the way. Things are then interrupted by the war with grandma being killed by a bomb and the sisters being left more or less on their own.

That is until their father's first wife becomes wheel chair bound and penniless and the twins take pity on her and ask her to move in with them. The Hazzard family starts to fall apart and the sisters age and become left in a house with memories and not many visitors after Perry dies and the gulf between them and their natural father seems to be wider than ever.

But of course they have his 100th birthday to go to. But before that there is a chance to dress up and roll back the years.

More tomorrow...