Kevin Spacey, Madame Arcati : An Obesession With Penises

Kevin Spacey’s Richard III closed last night after a triumphant  run at the Lyric Theatre with Spacey receiving standing ovations. After the final performance Spacey shared champagne with billionaire Paul Ramsay who had forked out a $200,000 donation to the Kevin Spacey Foundation for a pair of tickets and another 100 grand for a game of tennis with the actor.

One theatre patron who wasn’t too taken with Spacey’s acting or the Sam Mendes production was former NSW premier Bob Carr who walked out of the play at interval and ripped into the Hollywood star's performance on his blog Thought Lines. 

Another who is probably not on Spacey’s Christmas card list is the famous British blogger Madame Arcati who has finally hung up her bicycle clips. Madame announced a week ago that her four year run was at an end.

Arcati has delighted, amused and horrified readers in equal doses but it was when she ignited a family feud amongst the Spacey family that her readership went through the roof.

Madame interviewed Spacey’s brother Randy Fowler in 2008. Randy had written a book Spacey’s Brother: Out of the Closet  in which he revealed that as a child he was regularly raped by his father who was was obsessed with pornography, was anti-Semitic and a member of the American Nazi Party.

Then Randy’s ex-wife Stephanie Mastini contacted Aracti bemoaning Spacey's superiority complex and claimed Randy was being ignored by his famous sibling.

Randy

Stephanie

Over the next two years matters degenerated into a family squabble with Stephanie’s sister Francine Mastini entering the fray calling her sibling Madame Batshit.

Finally Randy Fowler returned fire blaming Madame Arcati for all the fuss and accused all and sundry of trying to out his Oscar winning brother as gay.

There had already been much snickering about Spacey-who is the current artistic director of the Old Vic Theatre in London-after he was mugged in a London park at 4.30am by a young man who stole his mobile phone. (The incident brought back memories of the legendary BBC correspondent Sir Robin Day who had  been similarly mugged in Holland Park Walk whilst taking a constitutional walk. Day said at the time he had no idea the Walk was a gay beat even though he had lived nearby for 20 years.)

Soon Randy's ghost writer Jack Ewing chipped in and not to be left out, Spacey's biographer 

Randy Tamblyn had a few words to say as well.

The outcome was a rash of twitter bannings by Spacey with Madame Arcati and Stephanie being consigned to the sin bin where they have probably been joined by Bob Carr.

The penises ?. The man who is reputedly the mastermind behind the Madame Aracti blog  Victor Olliver has fled to the gentler world of Astrology and has become resident star gazer for the famous publication The Lady, Britain's oldest published magazine. 

Editor of The Lady, Rachel Johnson (sister of London's Lord Mayor Boris Johnson) has just resigned with dreadful timing to join the PR fixers Bell Pottinger.

The magazine's publisher Julia Budworth once accused Johnson of being "obsessed with penises".

Bob Carr Savages Kevin Spacey

The critics have loved his performance but former NSW premier turned art critic Bob Carr has walked out of Kevin Spacey’s Richard 11 during interval.

Writing on his Thoughtlines website Carr says:

Bob Carr loonpond.blogspot.com

“If you like Shakespeare, don’t see this. If you liked Kevin Spacey in American Beauty (1999) don’t see this. If you like the fun of Shakespeare’s villain Richard, Duke of Gloucester, don’t see it.”

Ouch!. But there’s more: "Spacey plays the cheapest and most obvious laughs, as if entertaining a school-age audience “The crude over-acting by him and his colleagues was reflected in too many shouted lines. Words are lost in the upper registers. Resonance and enunciation are thrown away and Shakespeare’s words go missing”

Wagner enthusiast Carr wasn’t too keen on Derek Jacobi’s Lear either despite the production receiving high praise from The Guardian and UK Telegraph.

" I, however, found it distinctly unmoving."

Even the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Antony and Cleopatra comes in for a pasting from Bob

" With inadequate voices (that is, inadequate for these roles) from Kathryn Hunter and Darrell D’Silva I found myself consulting the paperback text on my knee when I could."

And in the comments section our Bob  rips into those who disagree.

Derek Jacobi in Lear

Brendan W says " I do so love the implication that by enjoying the Spacey version of Richard III that I am somehow dumb….Of the two plays I saw this past weekend (Gross Und Klein and Richard III) I only enjoyed one, but was treated to spectacular, albeit very different, performances on both occasion"

Bob puts Brendan in his place: " You have seen TWO professionally-performed Shakespeare and declare that one was the “definitive”? When you have gone to the UK and seen productions by the RSC and The National Theatre come back and engage."

Bob is a famous Civil War enthusiast which possibly explains his support for the disastrous Iraq war but he once managed to wangle a forward for his book out of Gore Vidal, an anti-Iraq invasion exponent.

He was premier for 10 years before suddenly resigning in 2005 and fleeing to the sheltered workshop for those with political contacts –the Macquarie Bank also known as the Millionaires Factory. 

                

Many said he was the ‘best premier the Conservatives never had” who stuffed Sydney’s public transport, slashed legal aid and injury compensation and engaged in an unholy alliance with News Ltd tabloids on phony Law & Order auctions, eventually making it difficult for many to get bail which filled the jails.

Bob  fled with perfect timing as three successive Labor premiers tried to hold together the shambles left behind only to be turfed from office in a massive landslide to the Coalition last March.

Currently he’s lecturing the State and Federal Labour Parties on how to succeed but it's nice to know his lavish state pension and merchant bank sinecure keep him theatre tickets.

Recently Bob poured scorn on  the Occupy Movement saying the “greedy incompetents on Wall Street” will be tamed by “parliamentary politics”.

The Macquarie Bank is one of the largest and most successful private banks on the planet with extensive dealings on Wall Street. The CEO received a $33M payment last year. With Carr at the Macquarie the amount of government contracts worth billions that flowed into Macquarie while Labor was still in power may have been pure co-incidence.

Maybe Bob's role in the Millionaire's Factory is to 'tame' them We live in hope.