The marquee event of May's London Theatre Tour was the opportunity to see, on consecutive nights, two out of the three remaining great ladies of the English stage, Helen Mirren and Judi Dench, who as good fortune would have it were playing limited engagements just a few blocks away from each other in the West End. For the trifecta Maggie Smith would have had to be on as well, but at 78 she has stated publicly that she doesn't intend to do live theatre again - which I'll believe when I see it, or, I guess, when I don't. Dame Judi, at the same age, shows no inclination to call it a day, and although there are rumors that her vision and her memory are both failing, neither appeared to be an issue for her at the performance we saw, and while there are most assuredly fewer appearances ahead of her now than there are behind, time and tide being what they are, she strikes me as the kind of actor who will probably carry on one way or another until the Big Curtain comes down for the last time.
Up first for us, though, was Dame Helen in
The Audience, an unabashed star vehicle created by Peter Morgan and Stephen Daldry (screenwriter and director respectively of
The Queen) for the express purpose of returning Mirren to her award-winning role as Elizabeth II, making a ton of money on a sure-fire limited engagement hit, and, not for nothing, doing a bit of fence-mending with the Palace, which by some accounts was not best pleased with the portrait of the royal family offered in the film. Royal protocol even provided a ready-made structure: every Tuesday at 6:30 pm, the Queen meets with the sitting Prime Minister for a private discussion of current political events and the government response to them, a perfect set up for Morgan to tour some of the key moments in Elizabeth's 60 year reign and through them to consider her evolution as a monarch and as a person. The result is, perhaps inevitably, not so much a play as a series of vignettes, and while the production is sleek and accomplished, the hopscotch narrative makes it difficult to get much emotional traction with the characters and it rarely breaks loose from a somewhat static energy: a PM arrives, the Queen invites them to take a seat, they talk for a proscribed period of time, then Mirren has a dramatic costume change (sometimes executed, with great finesse and theatricality, right on stage) and we're on to the next. There are occasional exuberant appearances by a pair of very jolly live Corgis, whom one is disproportionately grateful to see. Matters aren't helped much by Morgan's decision to write very specifically for a hometown crowd, and more than that a hometown crowd of a certain age. Unlike James Graham's political play
This House, which made a graceful job of elucidating and contextualizing itself as it unfolded, so that at any given moment you had enough information to keep your footing and appreciate the terms of the world being presented to you - sort of the theatrical equivalent of a computer's streaming feed staying just ahead of the video - Morgan assumes his audience has lived through or studied everything that happens on stage and tends to just drop you in it at the beginning of each scene to fend for yourself as best you can. I can't really criticize him for this, it's a culturally specific piece in its way and he obviously knows his crowd - the mostly British audience was clearly delighted by everything that happened and there was a lot of affectionate laughter and little yelps of recognition at the appearance of each Prime Minister - but as one did feel somewhat on the outside of an inside joke much of the time and having a bit of a scramble to keep up with the political references.
However, there was plenty to enjoy in the individual performances, which were generally stronger than the script and in some cases, as will happen with accomplished actors, transformed it into something better than it is. The redoubtable Edward Fox, who's spent the better part of his career playing aristocrats and Oxbridge dons, in his 8th decade has thrown himself into a succession of full-on character roles, dotty old recluses and shabby hangers-on, and here gleefully abandons his patrician looks and usual Erte-like silhouette to deliver a surprisingly persuasive Winston Churchill, complete with the old lion's gravelled growl and listing gait, and his trick of dropping his chin to his chest and staring people down out of the tops of his eyes.
He has only one scene, but when he makes his slow, lumbering exit upstage you feel a political era and a certain idea of English identity going away with him.
Paul Ritter, so moving as the working-class father of an Asperger's child in
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, is nearly unrecognizable as a weepily insecure John Major, who treats his meetings with ER more like a personal therapy session. But the primest of the Primes is Richard McCabe's wonderful Harold Wilson, the Labour PM from 1964 to 1970 and from 1974 -1976. (It's the '74 general election that created the "hung Parliament" of
This House.) Looking even in his beautifully tailored suits as if he's slept in, or possibly on, his clothing and flourishing his Yorkshire accent like a flag, McCabe's Wilson establishes early on a entirely unique relationship with Her Majesty, resolutely unfazed by her royal status and talking to her more or less as he would to anyone else, with respect for her intelligence and a refreshingly blunt Northern humour. As the Queen tentatively allows their political relationship to evolve into a genuine friendship, we really feel for the first time the isolation of a woman who cannot really be herself with anyone, ever, ("I have to seem like a real human all the time," reflects Alan Bennett's version of the Queen in his disarming little novellina
The Uncommon Reader, "but I seldom get to be one - I have people to do that for me") and what a rare pleasure and relief it is for her to be around someone whose own straightforward personality allows her the freedom to let down her guard. Wilson gets more stage time than any of the other PMs, and his relationship with ER puts the heart into the evening, to a degree that makes you feel that the play Morgan really wanted to write was the one about this unlikely friendship between the monarch and the Labour PM but by the time he figured that out he was committed another way and it was too late. Mirren, too, seems to come to life in her scenes with McCabe, their delight in each other as actors resonating against the pleasure their characters take in one another's company - the performance becomes, in these scenes, momentarily great.
The only female in the cast besides Mirren is Haydn Gwynne, a tall athletic woman with one of those marvelous high-boned, hawkish English faces that in another era would have have been described as "handsome." She has the unhappy task of bearing the collective loathing for Margaret Thatcher of the audience, the playwright and the designers, who have kitted her out in a cartoonish exaggerated wig and power suit that makes her look more like a Spitting Image puppet than the woman herself. Somewhat miscast to begin with and laboring as well in the long shadow of Meryl Streep's eerily accurate channeling of Thatcher in
The Iron Lady, Gwynne leans into what she's been given, overplaying Thatcher's aggressive chin-first stride and hollow hooting voice, like an owl who's swallowed a bassoon, but it's the only performance of the night that feels one dimensional, more caricature than characterization. It's not really Gwynne's fault, I think she's probably doing exactly what she's been asked to do and what the script demands, but it seemed to me that Morgan does himself and the play a disservice by letting his personal feelings (or professional expediency) get the better of him and squandering an opportunity in Thatcher's one scene with the Queen to move beyond the political to a deeper, more telling exploration not just of what divided them but what connected them - two powerful women functioning in a traditionally male world, and trying to balance a carefully crafted public persona with their private identity as women, wives and mothers. I would cheerfully have traded eight minutes with James Callaghan (remember him? no? nobody else does either) for a more richly realized scene with Thatcher, or for an additional one with Wilson.
Despite her justly celebrated
poitrine and some judiciously padded costumes to give her the boulster-like dimensions of ER in her later years, there is a flinty angularity to Mirren's presence on stage, and her crackling intelligence hums like a dynamo underneath everything she does. She spends much of the play listening and reacting, which she does with an electric acuity, and when she winds up to deliver one of the many
bons mots Morgan generously gives her - it's impossible to imagine the real Queen having this kind of facility for zingers - they land with the precision of a heat-seeking comic missile. (Watch how she does it: listening, listening, ankles crossed and legs at an angle in approved ladylike fashion, eyes and chin lowered in the opposite direction, and then when she's ready, her head comes up and around, the eyes land on their target, the chin lifts up and forward as if she were physically lofting the line, and boom. Nothing but smoke.) It's not a great role, honestly, although Mirren's authority and street cred make it seem like one, and I felt at times that she was a bit on auto-pilot - when you're that good and that skilled you can get away with it and no one the wiser, and in fact if she didn't come so vibrantly on line with McCabe when he appears one might never know. And of course she is the best thing that could possibly happen to the Queen in her final years on the throne, providing a final mythic permutation of her that corresponds to how her people would like to imagine she is, and how they would like to remember her: a kind of tough-minded SuperGranny with the political acuity of Henry Kissinger, the drawing-room wit of Mrs Millamant, and a really great jewelry collection. It's interesting to consider that thirty years from now, when people share memories of Elizabeth II, it may very well be Helen Mirren they're actually remembering.
* * *
A few blocks away in St. Martin's Lane, John Logan's long one-act
Peter and Alice also focuses on an encounter between real people, in this case Peter Llewellyn Davies, the boy who inspired J.M. Barrie's
Peter Pan, and Alice Liddell Hargreaves, the child muse for what was originally titled
Alice's Adventures Underground. They met only once, in 1932, when Alice was in her 70s and Peter in his 30s, on the occasion of an exhibition at Columbia University celebrating the centennial of Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll's birth; it included the original manuscript of
Alice, which the real Alice had sold in 1926 to an American collector in order to maintain her home after the death of her husband. (It was returned to England in 1948 and is now in the British Library, where thanks to a specially designed interactive computer program you can leaf through it on a screen and see Dodgson's tiny, clear, mathematician's
handwriting and meticulous little line drawings.) Alice of course was the honored guest of the exhibition and gave a speech, and Peter, a publisher by that time, was invited to introduce her, presumably because he was the only other person on the planet to have shared her particular life experience: the complicated burden of having one's childhood appropriated, reinvented and made eternal by an adult writer. (Well, there was one other, but he was only twelve at the time - it wasn't until much later, in his beautiful and painful memoir
The Enchanted Places, that we would hear from Christopher Milne about life after the Hundred Acre Wood.) Shadowed throughout their lives by their fictional child-selves, trapped in the amber of the cultural imagination and doomed to disappoint everyone they met simply by having grown up, they were, as writer Charles Elton puts it, "like Dorian Grey in reverse: [their] attic was in every bookshop in the world." What they might have spoken about together, their differing relationships to their fictional alter-egos, and the way their lives were affected by their unasked-for fame, is the substance of Logan's play.
For many years, Alice deliberately separated herself in the public sense from "Alice," as we might refer to her, by not speaking about her or the book. The Liddell family's friendship with Dodgson ended suddenly and permanently soon after the summer of Wonderland, and we'll never know why, because Alice’s mother burnt all the correspondence between her daughter and her shy adult friend, and after his death Dodgson’s relatives destroyed all of his diary entries from the “Alice years”.
(This was something that happened a lot in the Victorian era, the relatives of notable people were always making huge post-mortem bonfires of things that in their estimation might reflect badly on the reputation of the deceased or his relatives - much of the writings of Sir Richard Burton, and a lot of the later work of JMW Turner were lost in this way.) But it may not be entirely fair to conclude from these events that Dodgson was a paedophile whose behaviour with Alice became inappropriate. The fact is that to judge Dodgson in the context, and by the standards, of our own era may be both too harsh and too simple; the psychology of Dodgson's world was different, and must surely be considered in terms of its possible effect on his attitude towards Alice. He met her at the height of the Victorian infatuation with childhood and with children, who were celebrated as emissaries from the prelapsarian world: joyful, pure hearted, inspirational and arrived direct from God “trailing clouds of glory.” But at the same time, young girls were still routinely married in their mid-teens, and so began to be perceived, and to perceive themselves, as objects of male interest at a very early age. (Dodgson's photographs of Alice are undeniably unsettling to a 21st century eye, but not just because of how he's perceiving her through the lens: it's also the way that she is looking back.)
None of which is to say that Dodgson may not well have had genuine problems, but the society he lived in was deeply conflicted (not to say actively confused) about sexual matters in a way that was hardly helpful even among adults to healthy male/female relationships, and he was certainly not alone among 19th century men of letters in conceiving a passion for a very young girl. (John Ruskin, anyone? Check that one out if you want to hear about something really screwed up.) But it's always been my belief that whatever his sexual issues may have been, Dodgson would never have acted on them. It would have been not only completely out of character for this timid and socially awkward man - deaf in one ear and plagued by a crippling stammer, he was always more comfortable anyway in the nonjudgmental company of children - but it would also have destroyed the the innocence and unworldliness that made Alice beautiful to him, and it was in some sense to preserve those qualities, and to give her a connection to them that would last forever, that he made her the gift of
Alice in Wonderland.
One can infer far more about Dodgson's emotional relationship with Alice, it seems to me, by looking at the fantasy world he created for her, and the same is true of Barrie's Neverland - the difference between them is crucial to how they impacted on Alice and Peter as they grew older. Behind its light-footed, whimsical children's narrative, Dodgson’s book can be understood as a child’s-eye view of the world of grownups: capricious, unpredictable, baffling, arbitrarily imperious. But it's also a place of perpetual transformation, evolution and mutability, where nothing is quite what it appears to be, or at any rate not for very long: it confirms and reassures that the fundamental condition of the universe is Change. Wonderland is in its gentle way an introduction to the shifting realities of impending adulthood, and offers a kind of implied template for how to navigate them. While being grownup may be a sad condition, Dodgson suggests, it's also the inevitable way of the world and it needn't be too bad if one can maintain a sense of the absurd. With a little wit, ingenuity and spunk, along with a nimble imagination and a willingness to look at things (sometimes literally) from a different angle, a young woman need not be daunted by its challenges. Most importantly of all, there is always a way back to Wonderland as long as you know where to look and keep your Inner Child's eye open for the portals; it shimmers underneath the grownup world even if you can't quite see it, just as the children we used to be are still there somewhere inside of the adults we've become. This was Dodgson's gift to Alice, made out of the generosity of a troubled heart: an entertainment for a child, a map for an adult, and in the end a refuge and a comfort for an old woman.
Not so with Barrie’s Neverland, which is a different and I would argue darker sort of place altogether - the anti-Wonderland, if you like. Barrie's imaginary landscape is a Boy’s Own world of perpetual adventure where children reign supreme, unimpeded by the rules or worries of adults, and where those grownups who do appear are hostile interlopers to be defeated and driven out. It's the perfect imaginary life for an eight year old boy – or an emotionally arrested man – and while there are wonderful things about it (fairies and flying and so on) that tap into our primal longing for our more innocent and carefree selves, it's not called Neverland for nothing. Unlike Dodgson's infinitely mutable fantasy landscape, Neverland is a place of unnatural stasis that sets itself against the basic truth of life itself: all things change, and change is crucial to survival. It's an unsophisticated world without moral or intellectual complexity, where nothing and no one ever evolves or ever will. If you stay there, you'll escape the cares and circumscribed behaviours of adults, but you’ll also never experience the richness of mature relationships with the world and with other people; if you go, you can never return to the careening freedom of Neverland – no more flying, no more adventures, a death of joy and of the imagination. Where Dodgson offers Alice a hopeful “And”, a connection between childhood and adulthood and the promise of an open door between, Barrie slams that door shut and offers only an agonizing Either/Or.
With this contrast in mind, it’s not surprising that in later years Alice again embraced her Wonderland as what we might now call her “happy place,” a solace for the tragedies that life had in store for her (the loss of her husband, the death of two of her three sons in World War I, financial difficulties and so on), while Peter spent the whole of his adulthood trying to get out from under the shadow of Neverland and the even more persistent one of the Boy Who Never Grew Up, a haunting made even more painful by his belief that the true inspiration for Peter Pan wasn’t him at all, but his adored, glamorous older brother Michael – the notoriety was not only unwanted, it wasn’t even rightfully his. Once again, as with Alice and Dodgson, we’ll never know what really went on between J.M. Barrie and the Davies boys (letters, bonfire, etc), but based on the anecdotal record and events as they played out, it seems clear that even if he didn’t abuse them in a physical or sexual sense, he almost certainly did so psychologically, projecting his own rejection of adulthood onto them, playing them off against each other for his favor, and doing everything he could to prevent their leaving Neverland (that is, leaving him), impeding their efforts to establish independent, fulfilling adult lives and relationships. And the universe in its own perverse fashion granted his wish: two of the boys never would "grow up". George, the eldest, ran away to the army at the very beginning of World War I and died in Flanders the following year, barely 21. The dashing Michael, not even that old, killed himself in what's assumed to have been a suicide pact with another boy after graduating from Oxford. And, though may years later, Peter in the end threw himself under a train at Sloane Square station, escaping finally and forever from Barrie’s poisoned gift of eternal childhood. (In a final heartbreaking irony, many of the newspaper headlines blared "Peter Pan Commits Suicide.")
Entire books have been written about all this, and it's far more than Logan can comfortably encompass in the 90 minutes of the play, so the script is frankly a bit of a muddle, but because the audience brings such a strong personal connection of its own to these characters, and because of how beautifully it's played and what it's about (lost/stolen childhood, the longing for that innocence once it's behind us, all those things that tap into the piercing sadness of getting older) the cumulative effect of it across the evening is huge and ultimately the play does achieve what it intends to. I would be surprised if there was a single person not in tears by the end.
It should be said that its title and media coverage notwithstanding there are actually five other actors in the play besides the two stars, and I'll name them here in recognition of the fact that they execute their appointed tasks nobly, professionally and generously, in the absolute certainty that no one is paying the slightest attention to them: Nicholas Farrell and Derek Riddell (as Dodgson and Barrie), Ruth Bentall and Olly Alexander (as the storybook "Alice" and "Peter") and Stefano Braschi (as everybody else). They're a credit to the honorable position of Supporting Actor.
But at the end of the day
Peter and Alice is in effect a two-hander (indeed it might be a more focused and richer script if it actually was) and let's not kid ourselves, we all know who we're there to see. With his pale poet's face and great dark eyes, the fascinating young actor Ben Whishaw has made something of a specialty of playing wounded, anguished young artistic types, and his Peter is very much of that ilk. In some ways it's a tricky performance to get involved with because he hides so much from you with his physical choices, never quite lifting his head, never quite meeting anyone's eyes, his lanky, almost adolescent frame curled in on itself in a perpetual wince, as if in constant anticipation of an unwelcome approach by an unwanted admirer. But he knows exactly what he's about, and when, at the moment that Peter finally gives in to memory and allows himself to relive the first exhilarating games of pirates and lost boys with the man they called "Uncle Jimmie," Whishaw at last turns square to the audience and shows us his exalted, panic-stricken face, filled with longing and terror, the impact is devastating.
Which brings us to Dame Judi. Judi Dench is the kind of actor who gives critics and journalists fits because it's virtually impossible to discern or describe how it is she's doing what she's doing. In fact pretty much the entire hold-up on this post has been about this one paragraph. Go ahead, do a search for reviews of this play or a couple of her recent films and you'll be amazed how little anyone has to say about her other than that she's fantastically good. It's impossible to offer any more concrete discussion than that, because while there's certainly a performance happening, and a process that's led to it, the mechanism of that process and the details creating the performance have been disappeared. She just
exists at you for 90 minutes. So I can say that she inhabits the stage as if it were just another unusually large room in her house; that the familiar musical voice, with its appealing taffeta-rustle (once long ago uncharitably described by a detractor as "croaky"), still chimes with the clarity of a bell in autumn in the friendly wood-and-plaster resonator of this gilded Edwardian theatre; and that she remains unsurpassed in her ability to play several different, and often conflicting, emotional colors simultaneously, which is why she's so often and so effectively cast as women who, like Alice, are soldiering through circumstances of enormous pain or loss by keeping alive their capacity for joy and their belief in its inevitable return - Pragmatic Romantics, we might call them. No other actress that I've seen has ever layered quite so many delicate shadings into Viola's line "I am all the daughters of my father's house/And all the brothers too" - partly a courtier's elegantly turned riposte, partly a daring hide-in-plain-sight revelation, partly a heartbreaking private joke at her own expense that encompasses the absurdity of her position, the pain it's causing her, and the - as she imagines - inconsolable grief that's brought it about
. She creates order out of the tangle of Logan's many dramatic threads by gathering them all into her hand and playing them all at the same time: when Alice begins to articulate to Peter and to herself what Wonderland has meant to her, and Peter asks caustically whether she's proposing that he should believe in fairies, Dench instantly fires back "Why not?", but with such a light, flickering touch that it's impossible to say whether it's a challenge, a legitimate question, a mischievous poke in the ribs, or all three at once. It's a performance that embodies Dodgson's lesson to his Alice: nothing is permanent, everything changes, and to be human means living on the constant pendulum sweep between disappointment and hope, past and present, pain and joy, reality and wonder.
As amazing as it was to have the chance to see both of these remarkable actresses on stage, because we saw their plays back to back it was also a rare opportunity to consider each of the performances in the context of the other. With artists of this calibre and stature it seems almost insulting to indulge in a Compare/Contrast exercise in any judgmental or qualitative sense - comparison being odious or onerous or something bad beginning with O - and one doesn't want to break a butterfly upon a wheel by picking things apart too much, but nevertheless there is a comparison to be made, and a contrast to be noted. Mirren leads from her head, all ferocious intelligence and technical skill, a superb craftsman absolutely in command of her instrument; it's a performance that in a way
presents itself as a performance in the expectation of being admired, an awesome display of technique in the service of character - and I don't mean that as a criticism, or to imply that there isn't a fully realized emotional dimension to the work, it's a question of how the various aspects of her process balance themselves out in practice. It's like the difference between Bach and Debussy, or between Canaletto and Turner - not one of excellence or expertise, but of execution and effect. Mirren's extraordinary artisanship, let's use that word, is part of what she's offering us to enjoy and appreciate. Dench, on the other hand, leads from her heart, all luminous spirit and "invisible acting". There is extraordinary craft at work here as well, but she places it differently; it's so organic to the shaping of the performance as a whole that the audience forgets that it's there, and she probably does as well, trusting it to support the emotional life of the character as she lives it on stage.
To talk about this another way: just recently a director colleague shared with me a favorite quote about actors and acting from the distinguished Japanese actor/director Yoshi Oida:
"In Kabuki theatre, there is a gesture that indicates 'looking at the moon,' where the actor points into the sky with his index finger. One actor who was very talented, performed this gesture with grace and elegance. The audience thought 'Oh, his movement is so beautiful!' They enjoyed the beauty of his performance, and the technical mastery he displayed. Another actor made the same gesture pointing to the moon, and the audience didn't notice whether or not he moved elegantly - they simply saw the moon."
There's a sense in which this is exactly the difference between Mirren and Dench, and it made itself manifest in a particular kind of challenge that both of them had to address, having in the course of their respective scripts to play their characters at a variety of different ages. (Dench, who's a decade older, has to go younger than Mirren, who's helpfully provided with a little girl to play Elizabeth as a child.) Although Mirren has the transformative assistance of her crack team of dressers, the real achievement is in what she does physically to "locate" the Queen at a given moment in her life, and it's an absolute master class to watch her do it: where on the scale she pitches her voice and how much air she allows into it, the adjustments to her posture, her carriage, her gait, where her center of gravity is placed - this is an actress who is a consummate player of her own instrument. Judi Dench, in her first moment of transformation, stretches out her arms, tilts her head back, and - there is simply no other way to say this, and believe me I know how it sounds -
light begins to pour out of her as she describes the bees, and the sunshine, and a long ago summer day by the river when she was ten years old and on the brink of Wonderland, and the years run off her like water, leaving behind the eager, inquisitive, clever child we suddenly realize has been peeking out at us all along from inside the old woman. This is craft in an entirely different sense. To me it's why certain actors are magical, and here I am going to go ahead and make an Odious Comparison: what Dench does at this moment is to do with something that lives outside of both technique and experience and has nothing to do with either - and which Mirren, for all her magisterial authority and skill and through no fault of her own, does not have. Judi Dench holds out her hand, and the audience just...goes to her. Whatever it is, I suspect she's always had it, because it isn't something that can be taught or learned. It's there or it's not. Actor magic.
What an incredible privilege to have been able to see both of these performances - seriously, for someone who works in theatre it just doesn't get much more thrilling than this. But, while it's a matter of taste of course, like everything else, I also learned from them that there is deep and observable truth in what Oida says. Helen Mirren is a great artist, and one stands in awe and admiration of how marvelously she crafts and creates her character. But for me the forever moment of these nights in the West End will always be seeing the moon and Wonderland, reflected in the beautiful, aging, ageless face of Judi Dench.
Photo Credits
Buckingham Palace: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimmyharris/2533950576/">jimmyharris</a> / <a href="http://foter.com">Foter</a> / <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">CC BY</a>
10 Downing Street: href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/number10gov/4581073867/">The Prime Minister's Office</a> / <a href="http://foter.com">Foter</a> / <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a>
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson: href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalmediamuseum/7893553898/">National Media Museum</a> / <a href="http://foter.com">Foter</a>
Alice Liddell: href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/blogpocket/4407180278/">blogpocket</a> / <a href="http://foter.com">Foter</a> / <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a>
J.M. Barrie: href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalmediamuseum/7893554540/">National Media Museum</a> / <a href="http://foter.com">Foter</a>
Wolf Moon: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/skynoir/3101174846/">Sky Noir</a> / <a href="http://foter.com">Foter</a> / <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a>
