To strive, to seek, to find…

From today’s Gorkana mailout:

The Independent / The Independent on Sunday
Roger Alton has now been confirmed as the new Editor of The Independent. Roger, formerly Editor of The Observer, will replace Simon Kelner, who will become the Managing Director of both The Independent and The Independent on Sunday. Simon will replace Terry Grote who will retire next month after nine years of running The Independent and The Independent on Sunday titles.

After the jump, a little taster of what’s in store for The Indie:

It’s long, but, honestly, this is totally worth it. Best bits I’ve bolded for you…

Roger Alton introduces this week’s Observer

Observermail

Roger Alton
07 December 2007

One of the (many) perks of this job is that you can get to cut a few
corners. And so it was last week that I went to see the brilliant new
production of Othello at the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden London
(paid for tickets of course!). It’s been praised to the skies (with
the notable exception of splendid Charlie Spencer in the Daily
Telegraph) and rightly so, and I can’t wait to see what our own
Susannah Clapp says about it in the Review section: we’ve talked to
several members of the audience too.

It’s an amazing experience at the Donmar: you are so close to the
action, it’s like being in Othello’s front room. You want to rush on
stage, punch the Moor (brilliantly played by the amazing and
amazingly good looking Chiwetel Ejiofor) firmly in the mush and say
“For Christ’s sake, stop being such a twerp, of course your wife’s
not having it off with Cassio. She loves you, and it’s all the fault
of that little creep Iago.” Then … er … end of play, and you get
carted off to the nearest shrink.

But seriously, you are so involved in the play, I started asking
myself questions of the play for the first time (I’ve seen it many
times - I saw Paul Robeson at Stratford, Olivier, McKellen and
Willard White a few years back, so I’ve done my time in the Cypriot
dungeons). First, why is Iago such a f***ing bastard?? It must be
obvious to anyone with an IQ higher than a biscuit that he is
completely off his rocker and the nastiest piece of work this side of
hell, which is where he clearly belongs, and, Shakespeare almost
explicitly suggests, may well have come from.

Second, why is Othello such a twat? Lovely wife, good career, but
chucks it all away for the sake of bloody missing handkerchief.
Finally, Mrs Iago, who we know by the end of the play to be quite a
nice old stick: why on earth, when she witnesses the emotional
savagery inflicted by Othello on Desdemona over the missing
handkerchief, why doesn’t she say, “Look frightfully sorry and all
that, I found it and gave it my husband.” Well, again, end of play
sadly … but watching this stunning show so closely you cannot
believe anyone could behave so meanly. So beg, borrow or steal …
and do try to get a seat. But it’ll cost yer … as it did me.

On a similar theme: the play is directed by Michael Grandage, who
hasn’t put a foot wrong in his time as artistic director at the
Donmar (Frost/Nixon was fantastic, and he also did Guys and Dolls in
the West End, with Ewan McGregor , who is a taut, ratlike, nasty
nasty Iago). So my pitch is this: when Nicholas Hytner, who has
probably done as much as any other single human being to improve the
cultural life of London (and the rest of the country of course) as
director of the National Theatre, picks up the peerage he so richly
deserves and eventually moves on from the South Bank, the Grandage
takes over at the National. Come on, Department of Culture, Media and
Sport, you know it makes sense.

From the sublime to the sublimest. I had a talk to a very cheery
Gordon Brown a few days ago, who was in a very feisty form and
looking much fitter, and more youthful than he does in the Commons
during those dreadful maulings on the telly at PM’s Questions. One of
the issues the PM was very interested in was Jose Mourinho’s future,
and more particularly his future in this country as possibly the next
England manager. Well I was spectacularly ill-informed on this, and
didn’t think it was going to happen and said so. But I later checked
it out and it seems Gordon is very much on the button here. Jose
could be coming to manage England, and a bloody good thing too.
Anyway, we’ll be doing a large amount on the Jose saga in our Sports
section (and trust me, our writer Duncan Castles is very much on the
inside track here). And the thought occurs of course, if Gordon ever
gets fed up running Britain (or vice versa of course), he could
clearly make a bloody sight better fist of running the FA than the
current lot. And the PM is a genuine football fan too.

All in all we have a super paper for you this weekend. I am looking
forward to finding out how much our news team have got on the Canoe
Man story. What a treat it is, and it’s moving so fast as a story
that almost every hour brings forth new revelations.

Elsewhere I can recommend a brilliant and very frank interview in
Review when the unique Lynn Barber takes on the unstoppable Simon
Cowell; Philip French’s verdict on the Hollywood blockbuster of
Philip Pullman’s book The Golden Compass; and of course some
definitive Christmas present guides in our Books pages, our Review
section, and our Music magazine.

Both our magazines this weekend are excellent: the Music mag has
Radiohead on the cover, and literally everything you need to know
about music for Christmas (books, shows, CDs, DVDs etc), and some
great pictures of Amy Winehouse and the Arctic Monkeys (not together
I should say). In the weekly magazine there’s a brilliant interview
with long, tall, thin and very talented Rhys Ifans, and Shirley
MacLaine at her most engagingly bonkers talks about her time as an
Egyptian princess.

Don’t miss it!

AMAZING. Plus, “engagingly bonkers”? YES. Lovely stuff.