The Once and Future Queen

    I returned from a showing of the new film adaptation of Anna Karenina to find a message from the teacher with whom I'd studied the novel; stars flood the sky at times, rhyming with those that look upon them. The book has always had an allure to me; as a teenager it was an object whose name jumped out at me from the shelves of my parents' books. "Anna Karenina."  Mysterious, beautiful, Russian, eminently female. When I was 16, I chose it for myself, the first "grown-up" book I read unassigned.  It, and not any work by Dickens (who would later become my focus), was my true entree into the Victorian novel, into the time period that I knew resonated  with me in art viewed, costumes worn, plays performed.
     It occurred to me as I watched the Stoppard adaptation, which places the story and its characters within the context of a theatre, how much Anna is like an actor, with her ever suggestible mind.  Her present life is static; it has little movement.  But then she boards a train, and travels to Moscow, where the vision of a man suggests to her--perhaps memories she used to have, perhaps ideas for what the future could hold--and she creates a new and vibrant present. This creation is what happens in the theatre, where past and future combine to make a present--a heightened present, a dramatic present.  A constructed present.    
     There are some stories that take on a life larger than their own--like the tales of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table--that confuse history and allegory, fact and myth--a world created for the world at large.  Anna Karenina is such a story: an expansive tale, far flung and far reaching.  I was so pleased that this latest cinematic treatment used a theatrical framework to encompass the tale's scope.  That the narrative is placed inside a jewel-box of a Victorian theatre reminds us that this is a story; this is an imagined world that must be contained, whether between two covers, a proscenium, or a screen--or, indeed, the mind of our heroine.  And the limitation enhances its universality; theatres are small but they hold a world.  Because it is small, its reach can be wide.  It is such a beautiful way to take these characters off their pages, and breathe them into a place where we re-imagine humanity.  To see it on the screen even more lovely--the medium of film bows to the living nature of theatre.  Frames within frames, as Pirandellian as it gets, a trinity of limitless time.   There are so many ways to open a story, so many ways to re-tell them.  It is this cyclical drama that compels me at the moment, as I prepare to return to a world I visited once before, to get to know a character I met for a time, re-discover the woman I was with her then and discover the woman I can be with her now
     I begin to remember that land like watermarks on my skin, or in a gesture, a turn of phrase, and then I begin to re-imagine it on different soil, suggest to myself the possibilities.  It was once and will be again, and that is how I'll presently find myself on a plane to Camelot.  Camelot!    I hear there's not a more congenial spot . . . .