Enjoy them while they’re up! Hat-tip to Rebecca for the find.

Every chapter-heading epigraph in Robert Galbraith’s Lethal White is taken from Henrik Ibsen’s Rosmersholm. As we have discussed here, it would be hard to overlook the importance Galbraith/Rowling attaches to this play about the haunted lives of people living in the wake of a woman’s suicide for which they were responsible. That longish post and the conversation that followed with Joanne Gray in its comment thread — ‘Lethal White: Ibsen’s Rosmersholm‘ — offered five reasons beyond the ‘white horses’ for Serious Strikers to study the play.

Joanne Gray wrote me today to share the news that there will be a new production of the Ibsen classic in London this summer. Tom Burke, the star of the Strike novel adaptations for the BBC, will be playing the lead role of John Rosmer. As Professor Gray noted, he will be on stage with Rosmersholm just before he returns to filming Lethal White, the only Strike novel not yet transformed into little screen fare.

I’m not a big fan of the teevee production or Burke’s selection to play Strike; the shows are truncated, devoid of nuance, and he, though a fine actor, is far too short and trim to play the Cornish giant. Having said that, learning that he will carry a memorized knowledge of Rosmersholm into the filming of Lethal White, I am much, much more enthusiastic about this adaptation of a Galbraith novel than I have been about any of the others.

I hope friends in the UK will get tickets to see the show and let us know if the “new adaptation” is faithful to the original or a pointed political interpretation. The invitation to see the fresh staging because “The piece sees West try to undermine Rosmer’s idealism and get him to understand a more free-thinking way of life on the eve of a major election” is not encouraging in that regard. Let me know what you think — and thanks to Joanne Gray for the news!

One of the first things I was obliged to write after a hurried reading of Lethal White was whether there were links between Strike4 and Goblet of Fire, the fourth Harry Potter novel. Does Lethal White Echo Goblet of Fire? It has been an ongoing topic of conversation here that Rowling-as-Galbraith seems to be a writing a series in parallel with and commentary on the corresponding number in the Hogwarts Saga with each Cormoran Strike mystery. My first report was that Lethal White certainly did in fact parallel Goblet in fascinating ways. I listed seven points that popped up on my first trip through the book; Louise Freeman, who had guessed two years ago that the London Olympics would serve as a Quidditch World Cup/Triwizard Tournament equivalent background in the fourth book, and Evan Willis contributed several more on that post’s comment thread. You can read or review via this link that first Goblet-Lethal post on HogwartsProfessor.

I resolved to re-read Goblet of Fire after reading Lethal White several times to see what parallels I’d missed, if any. I am putting together the Pillar Post for Lethal White now and have to finish off and put up all the draft posts in queue on that subject before I do. After the jump, then, a list of the thirty-three (33!) echoes and correspondences between Potter4 and Strike4 for your consideration, correction, and co-operation; please add the ones I missed in the comment thread by clicking on ‘Leave a Comment’ above!

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