Day 106: The Artist Man and Mother Woman, by Morna Pearson

It's always a little bit awkward to watch a grown man submit to an overprotective mother. It's never expressly stated but I get the impression the "Artist Man" might be very easily played as rather autistic, though it seems to stem more from the dysfunctional relationship at home, where at forty-something he still lives with just his aging mother. His father is dead and this is only mentioned briefly and skated over in a scene that could be played in so many different ways. When he ventures out to the shops alone for apparently the first time in his life, and advertises for a date, she does everything she can to stop it - including murder, though this it once again only strongly implied rather than exactly stated. I was left with the strong impression that perhaps he doesn't really know about his differences, that maybe he has been so sheltered that stretched to not telling him of a diagnosis (though his interactions with the few people he meets at the shop and through his dating ad make it painfully obvious that he doesn't have much in the way of social skills, dispite being an apparently successful art teacher)

This play is written "in dialect" and while I've struggled with this before, I am starting to get the hang of particularly the scottish terms - I think partly being in a weekly drama class with mostly-accented classmates has helped to attune my ear. I didn't find I was slowed down nearly as much by it this time, and was drawn into the story with a deep sympathy for the vulnerable and smothered Geoffrey.

Day 104: The Awkward Squad, by Karin Young (Day 105 is day off)

Penultimate "Plays for Today by Women" installment. Interesting take on the class divide, using memoires of the mining strikes as a parallel for more recent financial problems in a family with roots in the mining community but aspirations of a middle-class life. Naturally everyone's apparent success is short-lived and there are secrets each is keeping from the others, making for an engaging read and I'm sure, an exciting play in production. Not much in the way of monologues apart from the character in her late 60s, but definitely one to keep to hand if I ever need pair or group work scripts.

I feel like I'm running out of things to say specifically about all these plays, I may need to rethink why I'm doing this project. Firstly the reading is to get a better feel for what's out there as well as returning to a few old favorites. I've probably read more plays in the last 100 days than I had in my entire life previously. This blog is meant to be a check that I am focussed while I'm reading, that I can take something away from it and articulate that in writing. It's partly telling that the blogs written when I haven't had the opportunity to talk to someone else about what I've been reading tend to be shorter, and more often seem to be full of missed points or even straight up admissions that I didn't like the play. That's a tricky one to solve - ideally this blog should be a way of having that discussion myself, without the need for an external ear. I have never been all that good at factual writing. Essays at school were a chore, even lab reports and projects at university were a slog. Where this project has fallen down has almost exclusively been the writing side of things. So, I might try mixing things up a bit. Maybe in future posts sometimes there will be character explorations, or fiction written taking the play as inspiration. I'll probably feel a bit silly doing things that way for a while, but if it refreshes the blog a bit and makes it easier to maintain, then that can only be a good thing.

Day 99: Sweet Cider by Emteaz Hussain

"All action takes place in a park. The park is any inner city park in northern England where there is a strong Pakistani Kashmiri community..."

I'll admit straight up, I really have no background knowledge going into this. There are a lot of words and phrases used in the characters' native language - some of them are translated in the text, but not all. Their situations, talking about living in a secret refuge, selling drugs and stolen trainers and self-harm which is shown to the audience but never dealt with in discussion between the characters, even when one sees it happen. That last point in particular threw me, it's not entierly clear why they put it in if it's never really linked in. As a snapshot of a life I have no real context for, it's interesting. Ultimately though, I feel like in my mind I simplify the story down to "these are people with issues like being gay, poverty, estranged families, religion, self-harm and pregnancy... and nothing really gets addressed or dealt with in the course of the play". Granted some of the problems presented are probably specific to the community it's meant to portray, and maybe once again I've missed a critical point. Pointing out a group of people and saying "look, they have the same problems as everyone else" is great, but I would have liked to see a bit more of a story, maybe see how those particular characters actually resolve those problems. I know this is an issue I keep coming back to - I miss the point of "snapshot" style plays, particularly in reading them. Maybe if I read enough of them, I'll eventually get it.

Day 98: Cloud Nine, by Caryl Churchill

I had some reservations about picking up any Caryl Churchill, as I have less than happy memories of working with one or two of her scripts when I was at school. While those specific expectations didn't apply to this play, I can't say I found myself "splitting my sides laughing" as the blurb promised. Maybe it's just another case of missing the humour and "sexual politics" but all I really saw was a group of people with a variety of sexual identity issues, some of which change through the course of the play, including a blatant case of child molestation that is mentioned once, referenced again later and nobody ever does anything about it. My feelings on that last point might have been influenced by how strikingly different it is to Mouths of Mothers which I read and reviewed in an earlier post. Of course, there's only so much that can be understood from reading rather than seeing it performed, but my first impression is of everyone involved being incredibly flakey about issues that should be given more care and attention - it's a rare opportunity to cover race, gay/bisexuality, polyamoury, gender dysphoria AND child abuse all in one play, and it feels like a roll call and a missed opportunity to really discuss how those issues affect people. Nobody really seems to have a solid bar set as to how much exploration on the part of their partner they are willing to tolerate, or even a clear idea of what they want for themselves (with one or two exceptions). Once again I have a play where I have to admit, I don't get it.

That all said, the genderbending for certain roles is interesting, and I might come back to this if I find a performance or film to watch. I would need to see it performed to make a judgement one way or the other on the direction that the black slave/servant is to be played by a white man - it makes sense for the script, to a point, but the reason for it "in character" is just as uncomfortable ("you'd never know he was black") as if it were a casting decision not dictated by the script. I realise I'm struggling to phrase that in writing.

Day 87: DOUBLE FEATURE! Romeo and Juliet (film adaptation based on Shakespeare's play) and Kindertransport, by Diane Samuels

Today was mostly spent travelling, including a ten-hour flight from London to Miami. I managed to pull myself away from several hours of re-watching old favorites (yay, on-demand videos! Makes a change from last time I flew to the US and they didn't have individual screens at all) to check out the most recent incarnation of Romeo and Juliet, as well as reading my chosen play for the day, Kindertransport.

I'll start with Romeo and Juliet. The film is billed as being based on Shakespeare's play since some of the language has been updated a bit, mostly when the people speaking are meant to be teenagers - the older generation tend to stick more faithfully to the original text. I've always shied away from modernisations, but the last time this play was brought to film in Baz Luhrman's version the setting was modernised leaving the script almost entirely intact and I really found it uncomfortable to watch. This was a complete joy, in contrast. The younger generation characters were played by actors much closer to those in the script than is usually the case, possibly combined with the slightly easier text this may have been intended to draw a younger audience into the story. There was also an unusual twist to the ending - the first kiss that Romeo gives the comatose Juliet actually wakes her up, so in his final moments of life, having already taken the poison, he not only sees that she is alive, but they very much share their final kiss goodbye and she watched him die in her arms. Utterly heartbreaking and a fresh take on the scene - most of the renditions I've come across she only wakes after he dies. That scene aside, the whole unfolding tragedy seems so much sadder with the characters played so young, the deaths that come from the various duels feel far more accidental in the hands of angry children who might just as well be playing at swordfighting, only happen to have live blades. Perhaps my being a little bit older has something to do with that feeling too, though.

Moving on, Kindertransport tells the story of a jewish girl sent out of Germany as a refugee in the late 1930s, and tracks her gradual but total naturalisation in England, leaving behind her entire heritage to such an extent that her husband and daughter don't know about it. The play is split between following the young Eva in her journey out of Germany to Manchester from the age of 9 through her teenage years, and the much older Evelyn, preparing her own daughter for university and leaving home and coming across books and letters from a past and now denied childhood. I read The Diary of Anne Frank (in original German) at A-level, which covers what the girl in this play was getting away from, and Goodnight Mr Tom much earlier, which gives some idea of (domestic) refugee children. The combination of the two was really something I hadn't thought much about before. I think I had it in my head that the German refugees fled to nearer continental countries like Austria, rather than winding up in the UK, so this is yet another play I feel like I've learned from (and also come away not entirely sure if I sympathise with any particular side of the arguments presented).

Day 85: Welcome to Ramallah, by Sonja Linden and Adah Kay

Another from Plays for Today by Women, and again I find myself learning about current/recent historical events that I really should have known more about. This time the topic is the occupation of Palestine, with two very different perspectives as two jewish girls talk with two men from Palestine. One of each pair are fairly open minded and have already learned something of the other side of the story when the play opens, their sister and uncle respectively are far more convinced that the story they know, whether told by family or having lived through it himself, is the only one that is true and/or meaningful. By the end a lot of information has been exchanged and while convictions are hard to break in the space of hours everyone does seem to come out of the meeting with a deeper understanding of the whole situation.

For me, what little I heard of the war/occupation over the last few years was just another war - I developed a rather awkward combination of cynicism and fear about war as a child and tend to lump together "wars" in general in my head and avoid reading about them. As something of an introvert, I was pretty much of the opinion that if everyone in the world minded their own business and didn't take things that weren't theirs, we could have an ideal world. (Sharing wasn't my strong suit...) The biggest sticking point on that theme in the play is the Jewish girl maintaining that these were "ancestral lands" that used to belong to her people thousands of years ago, and that they have, however minorly, been living there ever since so it was merely reclaiming what was rightfully theirs. Obviously not the way the current locals are going to see it, and thus we have the main argument of the play. It's fairly clear to me which side the play invites the audience to take for most of the action. There is a final more personal twist at the end, but I will in this case avoid giving too much away and instead encourage my handful of readers to find the play and watch or read it for themselves, particularly if you have a very one-sided (on either side) view of the occupation, or like me have very little knowledge or opinion.

As a complete aside, I found myself considering an ongoing situation in my LARP game where an ancient race is fighting a nation for control of their land... and the ancient race has a much older claim to the land. It is a fantasy setting (and also a game) but I was seeing parallels with the in-game situation through the whole play, and may well end up taking some of the thoughts and messages from the play back to the game.

Day 82: From the Mouths of Mothers, by Amanda Stuart-Fisher

This play was created in collaboration with a charity that supports the non-abusive parents of sexually abused kids, and is adapted from several hours worth of interviews with voluntary participants. It's certainly not a light play, and it isn't meant to be. The stories all overlap, which makes it rather hard to follow for a lot of the early part of the play. Maybe that's partly my own struggles with following more than one conversation at a time, but I suspect it's also partly to show how easily each voice can become a bit lost in the noise for the medical, legal and emergency service professionals involved, and how devastating it is being just one lone voice that nobody can give full attention to. We do get to see each mother interacting with the son or daughter in question through the play, in snapshot conversations, but the mothers don't talk to each other. The final line brings them all into unison and... well, just reading it had me at the point of tears, so I can only imagine what it would be like to watch performed.

It's an awkward and difficult subject, and a lot of it makes for uncomfortable reading, as well it should. Some plays are subtle in their politics or activism. This one pretty much just comes out and talks about it, straight up. There's a lot of good advice, though most of it comes from examples of how not to deal with things. Whether I'd recommend it to others, I think if it's a subject you're interested in, it's worth a look. It is, without a shadow of a doubt, going to hit hard anyone who has been involved in simlar situations from any side of the story, but really it can't be any other way.

Oddly, I'm considering this as a potential source of monologues. There are a few of the mothers who are spot-on age appropriate and some great deep emotional stories (and because each story is just broken up through the length of the play, it'd be easy enough to run a couple together for length) - I would probably need to choose a different Shakespeare piece to go with it than the monologue I'm currently working on, for contrast - there's a subtle difference between a soliloquy and directly addressing the audience and I feel like it's not enough of a distinction.

Day 81: A Dish of Tea with Dr. Johnson, (adaptation based on two books by James Boswell)

The title credits were getting a bit long so I abbreviated, in full they should read: Adapted by Russell Barr, Ian Redford and Max Stafford-Clark from James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson and The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. The play is presented as a sort of living memoir delivered to an implied small and intimate audience by Dr Johnson, both as long monologues and conversations with Boswell. The conversation seems to keep coming back to the theatre, particularly discussing prominent contemporary actors (and at that, mostly Garrick).

As a portrait of the man, it is an interesting read though I suspect as with so many plays rather a lot is lost in not hearing and seeing it acted out. I did find myself hearing Dr Johnson's voice as he was portrayed in Blackadder, and I suspect either both sets of writers were working from the same source material or the writers of this play had been somewhat influenced by the episode in which he appears. Either way, he seems to have been a classic example of the eccentric, addictive-personalitied, self-assured and manic creative type, who seems to take a lot of pleasure in disliking and disagreeing with things.

There's a lot of quick changing, if cast according to the suggested layout, for the man who for most of the play is Boswell. Some of these are instant shifts on-stage from a female character back to Boswell, which put me rather in mind of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, only I don't get the impression this was intended to be a farce, so I'm not sure how that would work - again, interesting to see, should the opportunity arise.

Day 79: Yours Abundantly, from Zimbabwe, by Gillian Plowman

The first in a compendium of six recent plays written by women, this one mainly takes the form of a series of letters from children, the headmaster of a local school in Zimbabwe, and his wife to a woman who met one of the kids while on holiday there and (in the eyes of her daughter) is having a "midlife crisis" in making plans to return as a teaching assistant. Through the eyes of both the locals, and the wealthy and deeply sympathetic woman who becomes their benefactor, the story of life under Mugabe unfolds, and one by one the letters begin to talk about friends who are lost to illness or under circumstances where the government is implicated. Eventually the headmaster is killed explicitly for his anti-government beliefs, and we're told that the woman continued to teach at the school after his death.

When I was growing up, I didn't take a lot of interest in world current events. A newspaper was something for grownups - I was interested in fiction, particularly fantasy, and the snippets of information that filtered through to me when I accidently saw parts of a news program on television, or saw the older girls handing out badges for some overseas cause or other scared me away. I can't help feeling a little bit like I should know more about the background to the play than I do, and I certainly feel like I come away from the reading with more of an understanding than I had before. When I was seventeen I visited Tanzania for a month with a group from school, a trip that included a week working with a Masaai tribe. While I was out there we did get to briefly see their local school, which I think gives me a bit of context for the play - it is a different country and a different set of circumstances, but as an image to keep in mind it's probably closer than imagining any school I've ever been to.

The daughter's protests that her mother won't be able to get her home comforts if she goes out to Zimbabwe struck me as equally funny and deeply sad. It has been my experience in travelling to a whole range of places in various states of development that it is always easiest to let the place tell you how to respond. The friends I went out to Tanzania with will probably all agree, on returning we were all craving hot baths, bacon, a bed without a sleeping bag, water that didn't need iodine added to it... but I don't think I really noticed missing those things while I was out there. There were so many other experiences, and simply a different way of life, that pining for those creature comforts wasn't so much inappropriate as just something that didn't occur to me. I'm not sure everyone I was with would agree with that second part, and I suspect that the sentiment in the play that it's crazy to think you could just live without everything you take for granted every day is one that a lot of people would find themselves nodding along to. And that, I find sad.

Day 78: A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams

One of my latest acquisitions, this is a play that seems to feature a lot when talking about studying theatre and drama as one that everyone seems to have had some contact with. I'm glad that I can come to this for the first time on my own, having not covered it at school. There are parallels and symbolism in the names of the local streets, buildings and vehicles with the storyline and the lives of the two sisters, but like the music which is sometimes in Blanche's head and sometimes really there but always in the background, the names just help sketch out the outline of the action. I can very much empathise with sisters who are so different they cannot hope to understand each other's life choices, but as secrets get revealed through the course of the play it's difficult to really know who to sympathise with. In the end, Blanche is dragged off to a mental hospital "for her own good" and it's clear by then that she would likely struggle to look after herself alone. But everyone involved in having her committed has their own problems - I'm left feeling like any one of them coming into an unfamiliar group might be treated similarly, with the possible exception of the incredibly unfortunate boyfriend who really defines bad timing, innocence and poor judgement.

In terms of character development I can see that this would be a really interesting play to get stuck into. Most of the characters are masking themselves to some extent, some of them only to certain other characters. There are reasons for those different faces, most specific is the deep emotional scarring that has driven Blanche to a madness she doesn't really recognise in herself. There's also the stark counterpoint in the total lack of physical privacy - we watch the action through windows and transparant walls, neighbours are free to come and go, and even the two rooms of the apartment adjoin by only a curtain. The trunk - which has a key - is open most of the time. The only truly private place shown in the entire course of the play is the bathroom, and Blanche seems to spend most of her time in there. Just one more implication that she has something monumental to hide.

I'd certainly go and see this if I happen to catch it playing somewhere handy, but I doubt I'll raid it for monologues - partly because it's apparently so well known. It makes a nice change that the women carry the play, and though they do all have or gain partners through the course of the story, they are strong and clear characters in their own right and not defined by thier respective men.

Day 77: The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? by Edward Albee

For our pairs/group script work at EAS this term, I was given the opening few pages from this play. It seemed like a good idea to add it to my reading list for the week, as well as being worth getting hold of the script so I had my own copy since we're not allowed to take home or mark up the copies that were handed out in class. It's also good practice to read the entire play when working on scenes and monologues anyway. The fact it's "not mandatory" for this particular class is not the relevant point.

The title, if the two lines are reversed, basically spoils the plot - Sylvia (the other "woman") is, in fact, a goat. The action of the play surrounds the leading man revealing the truth to a friend, who decides the only reasonable thing to do is to tell the man's wife, and the subsequent fallout with his wife and son. That he has apparently been occasionally screwing a goat for the last six months appears to be just one of a host of problems within the family. With the existing tension that lies between a homosexual son and his trying-to-be-understanding parents, and the wife's concerns for her husband's possible early signs of dementia (which may in fact be a manifestation of his own worry about his affair) the revalation about Sylvia not surprisingly breaks all three family members down completely and the latter half of the play is almost entirely pitched so that everyone on stage is yelling, crying, breaking things or all three. When she storms out and returns later with the now slaughtered Sylvia, it feels like a small victory for cheated victims everywhere, and because the mistress in question is a goat, it's not going to result in doing time for murder.

There are some fantastically emotional walls of text for Stevie (the wife) which would make potentially great monologues, so this is certainly one to earmark for that.

Day 74: American Buffalo, by David Mamet

For a change, this one actually seemed to have a plot... or almost did. We don't actually get to see the plan through, since two people (one of whom we never meet) end up in hospital before the heist can go off. There are no women on stage and the two mentioned as the story unfolds turn out to be a lesbian couple who cheat at cards, and that (along with some colourful language on the subject) is all we find out about them, though again there's an implication of more going on, just the guys in question are too busy badmouthing them to each other to listen. Possibly. The story is perhaps an easier-to-follow indication of what the "point" of all of these plays might be: to show everyday disappointments and "natural" (or at least naturalistic) situations. It's a pretty normal thing for plans to be scuppered, even if the plan itself (to rob a guy) isn't quite so much a part of the daily dealings of the average member of the audience. I did find myself wondering if maybe this time we might actually get a resolution to the problems posed in the story.

Challenging established "rules" when it comes to any art form can often be a great way to bring in new ideas. In this case though, bucking the idea that a story should have a conflict and a resolution, or a setup and consequences... or even just a beginning, middle and end... it feels like sort of the literary equivalent of finishing a song a note early. Off-colour comments from the characters aside ("I'm not your nigger, or your wife") this play did at least resolve some of the plot it set up.

As a thought experiment, I tried imagining the various characters as female, and how they would play differently. Genderswapping the young apprentice is the most obvious, at which point the entire story becomes focussed on a bullied and damaged anorexic desperate to please a boss who is probably her father/uncle, and she's eventually basically beaten into a coma for trying to play with the big boys. It's horrific. If all three are women, on the other hand, it becomes a rather twisted take on a maiden/mother/crone dynamic where basically nobody likes each other, they all have their own agenda and eventually an argument turns into a catfight and someone winds up in hospital... and the whole thing is kind of a dark comedy. Perhaps most interesting would be to cast Teach as a woman. I'll admit I've been focussed on how there aren't a lot of well-written women in these plays, and I may have been swayed a bit by reading a lot of articles lately on the subject of women in hollywood/on stage. I played a number of traditionally male roles growing up - in a largely all-girls environment it was usually the larger girls who maybe didn't fit as well into the stock costume dresses who ended up playing boys... but I liked it. I was never going to be Juliet, or Hermia... but I made a pretty good Mickey in Blood Brothers.

Day 72: Squirrels, by David Mamet

I'm now halfway through the first collection of Mamet's plays, and once again I find that while being varied in subject material, his approach to conversation and obsession with mundane stories and misogynist characters is a common thread. For once, we have a woman on stage who isn't actively a love interest of either of the men involved (though, not for want of trying on her part, and there's a strongly implied history with one of them), has creative talent and aspirations and... doesn't actually have a name. This vibrant, chatty, outgoing woman with a flair for writing, is only ever known as "The Cleaning Lady". Most of her lines (which are substantial) are spoken more at the men than to them, and most of her scenes could leave out what little nodding-along she gets in response and work perfectly well as monologues. It's something at least that she's there and as fleshed-out as a character as the others (perhaps even more so), but I can't help feeling like in the context of the way she's treated that the takeaway message is "and don't we hate it when they just go on and on like that". I'll admit, I've formed a pretty strong opinion of this particular playwrite, and perhaps I should give the benefit of the doubt here. The character is well-written, though not well-treated nor apparently entirely phased or surprised by that fact.

This time, the snapshot is of a series of freewriting sessions between an older author and his younger apprentice. The Cleaning Lady appears to be at the very least a previous collaborator with the older man on writing projects, with a certain subtext that there was more to that relationship than writing. She also attempts to ask both men, on at least two occasions, if they want sex.

Day 69: A Chorus of Disapproval, by Alan Ayckbourne

This is the second play this month which is about a group of actors putting on a performance, in this case of The Beggar's Opera, which I read and reviewed waaay back on day 12 of this blog. There's a lot of comedy (and some fairly kinky romance themes) in the backstage antics, along with a big dose of emotional blackmail. The songs and lines they are rehearsing reflect and intertwine with the more serious parts of the story, which works out nicely for pretty much the whole thing, until the ending. The Beggar's Opera has a twist happy ending with a reprieve from hanging, but it's left entirely unclear whether the mirror character in A Chorus will get similarly "let off". By this point he's managed to damage relationships with almost everyone in the company, though it's perhaps an interesting staging question whether he's really been as innocent in the whole situation as he makes out (and reads on the surface).

Using the play to reflect the rest of the action is certainly a much-used device in terms of play-within-a-play type stories, but in this case I think it feels closer to some experiences I've had personally - when working for months on a script it can be easy to start seeing parallels in life to those situations your character finds on stage, or even start to deal with those situations informed by how your character copes in the script. That mentality, where the problem feels just a little bit familiar because you've acted through it, makes it very easy for things to go wrong when there's no script, and your own needs are far more complex than the characters involved on stage. I hope I'm making some sort of sense here, it's not an easy concept to write conscicely.

I enjoyed reading this script and I'd certainly like to track down a performance at some point, not least to see whether Guy gets played as the overly-hazed new recruit or basically as a spy. The former is the more obvious choice but he certainly has the potential to have his own agenda hidden under the surface.

Day 68: Sexual Perversity in Chicago, by David Mamet

I've had a lot to comment on about this play to friends in rather colourful language not entirely appropriate to the tone I've been trying to set for this blog (and at least mostly succeeding). I am increasingly of the opinion that David Mamet is mostly driven by the urge to give voice to the worst possible stereotype of the entitled white American man, in a variety of ages and social situations. The blatent misogyny in this particular play might be shrugged off in part as merely a sign of the era in which it was written, but I found much of the interaction between the men and women throughout to be almost painful when read as a female today. One woman is very nearly assaulted on stage by a man, and then her friend and his friend hook up into what turns out to be a pretty ugly and uncerain relationship. That eventually breaks up, and we're treated to the two lads basically letching to each other about every ass that walks past them by way of consoling the newly single guy. And, curtain. Nobody has really gained anything other than a new neurosis or two for the ladies, and another notch in the bedpost for Hookup Guy.

I wasn't allowed to watch soap operas as a kid, and perhaps that ingrained in me a deeper discomfort with stage and paper stories as well as television which deal with small, gossipy plots set in the real and present world happening to unremarkable characters. These are the situations I shied away from at school when they happened to me, my books and films and plays were an escape from that world and my tastes as I've grown up haven't changed much from that drive for escapism. My aversion to the genre, though I'm not sure that's even an apropriate term for it, does seem to come up short against a lot of recently-written drama. I've come to realise my taste in film has become narrower still, ruling out almost anything that isn't epic fantasy action, animated, 3D or all of the above. And nearly all of the "straight drama" I've seen in the last decade focussed on an author I loved growing up in some way. Partly that's a cycle - films advertise similar films, and I end up blinkered to at least half of the new releases simply because I don't know anything more about them than a name on the billboard. In a way, this project has started to address the blind spots, but actually appreciating and enjoying those stories that fall into a category I learned to look down my nose at when I was nine is something a bit harder to do.

It seems somewhat unfair to simply dismiss a story as pointless, but if there was a take-home message other than perhaps a warning to women about the evils of the sexually active male of the species, then I missed it entirely. Once again, Mamet has got me irritated that I've had to sit through reading something I didn't enjoy engaging with. Not in a challenging, thoughtful way, but as an observer to a particularly low-speed train wreck which turned out to be improper use of the emergency break rather than a derailed fireball. At least I'm getting practice writing eloquent vitriol in a careful bid not to resort to swearing.

Day 67: Duck Variations, by David Mamet

This is basically fourteen short scenes of two old men sitting on a park bench vaguely discussing a variety of topics, with the self-assured ignorance of stereotyped "set-in-their-ways" old men, and somehow always ending up coming back to talking about ducks. They run a gamut of very confidently knowing nothing about oil slicks, zoos, and boats, and several angles of man's place in nature and the meaning of life. I think it's a play that probably benefits far more by being seen rather than read, as the dialogue leaves a lot of room for unspoken emotions.

My initial instinct was wondering what the point of the play was. On the surface it's just two old guys talking about life and ducks. But after time letting the hindbrain work on it, I think the reflections on life are something that everyone can relate to. Their speech and slightly derailed thought patterns are distinctly "old person" in nature, but I find myself thinking that perhaps younger (maybe disabled, or unemployed) people could just as easily be used, without much need to tweak the lines.

This was the first play in the first book of Mamet's collected plays (Methuen edition) and I'll be working through the rest of them over the coming week or two. I'm interested to see what sort of variety is to come. This is the second of his plays I've actually tackled (See previous post on Glengarry Glen Ross) and have once again come up against the problem of incomplete thoughts and sentences as a script style choice. While I did eventually start to understand the context this time, it makes the action a little bit harder to follow when dealing with the print version.

Day 64: Antigone, by Sophocles (translation by Robert Bagg)

Having once again noticed the use of modern turns of phrase, and this time quite an obvious one ("you bet" for yes...) I did have a look at the notes and find that this was deliberate, but I also noticed that certain parts which felt more classical did so for a reason - they are written in verse which doesn't generally rhyme, but for certain characters is in iambic pentameter. This third installment in the cycle feels more lyrical in general, there were certainly large parts that felt like they should be sung (as suggested in the stage directions, and as they would have been in their original form) far more so than the previous two.

The actual plot line in this play is very short: Antigone buries her brother, against the mandate of the new king of Thebes, and this leads fairly directly to a triple suicide. Cheerful stuff, and without the politics and cliffhangers of the previous plays. It does rather feel like a devastating postscript to a story already dripping with tragedy. The new king seems to have a family as cursed by prophesy as Oedipus's was, but the difference is that he brought it, consciously, upon himself where Oedipus was following a path that seemed to be written for him at birth. There's a difference too in the way each of them copes with his respective downfall. Oedipus finds a renewed faith in his last days and dies mysteriously, vanishing without a trace on a sacred hilltop with at most a single witness sworn to secrecy. All this after living a life exiled for crimes of which he is guilty but couldn't possibly have known it at the time. Kreon, the new king, could be seen to inherit the curse through his association with the family, as it is Antigone's death which leads to his son's suicide, in turn triggering Kreon's wife to follow suit. It was mentioned earlier in the cycle that due to the curse of basically inbreeding, the daughters would never be considered eligible and were expected to die untouched. A more modern story might twist the ending in a more positive light and have Kreon make the right call to save Antigone's life and thus perhaps break the curse and give everyone (who's left by this point) a happy ending... but then, it wouldn't be a tragedy. Instead, he sticks doggedly to his belief that as rightful king his word must be law, and to his plan to see Antigone put to death. With his entire family dead, he realises too late that he has no other choice but to turn to his guards, and have them escort him away.

There are resonances in the final scenes of this play with the deposition scene in Richard II, but rather than stepping down to a usurping Lord as Richard does, Kreon is admitting defeat to prophesy and the Gods themselves. Both have an arrogant sense of right to rule, and both are struck low in a melodramatic way... and both have a strong thread of Faith running through their story. Finally, both seem ready to accept death at the end, seeing no life ahead of them after loss of leadership.

Day 59: Coriolanus, by Willam Shakespeare.

Back to reading Shakespeare after a bit of a break and several film adaptations. Speaking of which, the plan is to see the National Theatre cinema broadcast version of this on the 31st, though Thursday's audition, if it goes well might come with the slight drawback that one of the early classes will clash with that. We'll see how things go.

The play seems to me to be almost more about how literally everyone is trying to manipulate a man who is basically famous for being a formidable soldier and not much else. His army let him charge the gates on his own, his friends talk the consulate into putting him in power, the Tribunes rouse the general public to call him out for treason before he's even accepted the seat, once exiled (very much with an air of "well if you can't make your damn minds up who needs you lot anyway") he forms an apparent aliance with an old enemy who OF COURSE plots against him behind his back, and when he comes back to invade Rome his family come to him to try to convince him not to burn down the city. Because putting a child (his son) who is just about old enough to know to "run away and then come back to fight when I'm bigger" in front of a hardened warrior who's just about had it with everyone is a really good idea. As it turns out, it works... to distract Coriolanus long enough from his fight for the conspirators in his new band to find him and kill him. If the character were particularly cocky about what he'd achieved in the wars, I'd think maybe that was the moral here... but he's not. He never really wanted the government position - he walked out of the meeting because he was embarrassed by his friend trying to "sell" him as a candidate and they chose him anyway. He did everything he could to throw the election day with the public and THEY chose him anyway (a point which was used as the spark for the rebellion pretty much as soon as he was out of earshot). I can't help but feel that the real tragedy here is that this was a man who was doing just great for himself until everyone around him started meddling, the whole thing spiralled and the final actual sword thrusts becomes pretty much lost in the general backstabbing that's been going on for most of the play.

This was not a quick read, and as much as I find myself getting distracted and feeling like it's a bit of a slog when a play takes the best part of the day to get through, I did enjoy the story. It feels a bit drawn out in places, but that only adds to the detail of just how many different groups and individuals seem to want a piece of the man over the course of the action.

Day 58: Oedipus the King, by Sophocles (translation by Robert Bagg)

I may have picked up the Oedipus Cycle book in Waterstones almost entirely because I felt cultured doing so, and joked about being the picture of privilege settling down to read this morning with Classic FM on in the background. As it turned out, my limited knowledge of the story wound up making the whole thing an addictive page-turner. I also found myself wondering why it was never pointed out to me when we were performing Murder in the Cathedral at school that it was quite clearly stylistically based on greek tragedy (something I couldn't have noticed for myself until I'd actually read some). Admittedly that was an extra-curricular performance rather than part of normal lessons. It's just one more time I've found myself cursing time spent in secondary school losing my curiosity for language and history. I wasn't expecting to find quite such a revalation in reading this. If anything I might have been expecting a bit of a slog as I did in Congreve's plays, but this goes back so much further and touches that fascination for ancient civilizations I had in primary school.

I found myself musing that I wouldn't be able to tackle the original material, since greek isn't one of my languages. I picked up a (translated) anthology of Brecht plays at the library today, if I find one of those that I like, I might dust off my decade-out-of-use German to have a go. I doubt I still have enough latin to try anything in that, though I remember at GCSE being given a passage or two of Illiad to play with and loving it. On the subject of languages, I've recently acquired a beginner book of Irish, since my other half lives over there (and has suggested it might be worth applying to one or two schools there as well as here in the UK). Now that I've got the book, I have become suddenly very self-conscious about actually trying to learn to speak the language. I think that's partly because over the years I have learned languages (or at least smatterings of them) either at school or through necessity in places where English wasn't widely spoken. In itself the fact that everyone in Germany is more or less fluent in English made it quite tricky to make full use of exchange programmes - once out there, if you sounded like you were remotely struggling, the locals would just switch to far better English than I could ever hope my German to be. The complete opposite is true backpacking in Tanzania, where apart from hiring a tour guide, it was very useful for a couple of us to make friends with a phrase book for several hours a day and I came back with a few hundred words. That was quite some time ago and I've forgotten most of it, but the joy of codes, riddles and languages (which I think I always approached as more or less the same thing) was a huge part of who I was when I was younger and it's just one more thing I'm eager to reconnect with.

I seem to have massively diverted from the play in question, but for the first time in a while I've found my reading has sparked memories and thought processes at a tangent, and that's worth exploring whenever I can. More specifically then, there are some really quite grisley turns of phrase and graphic gory descriptions of the offstage action. I'd have to see other translations to know for sure, but I suspect those are not an artefact of the translation and are probably some of the closest words to the original intent. Particularly in the earlier part of the play, most of the language wouldn't sound entirely out of place in an entirely modern setting, aside from explicit references to singing and dancing the lines. After the reveal though, the whole thing feels much more deliberately tragic. In performance I'm sure that change of pace would only help the final scenes feel even more devastating. Again though, I'd have to look at other translations to see whether the shift is a common device (and so presumably evident in the original work) or a choice by Bagg to update the voices of the characters for most of the play to appeal to a modern audience.

Day 54: History Boys, by Alan Bennett

This is the second of the books I got for Christmas, this time I do have the film to go with it but for this first contact I read the script. It's an interesting take on how students see their favorite teachers, though perhaps it's all rather more literal in this story. I'm fairly sure even in the 80s most schools wouldn't have been so lenient on a teacher known to be "interfering" with their students. I see a clear parallel with the storyline of Dead Poet's Society, though the focus is in this case more on the teacher.

I was (perhaps unfairly) a bit put off by a large chunk early on in the play being in french, as it's one language I never really learned. I'm aware that puts me in a dramatic minority in this country. After the abysmal attempts at primary school where for reasons I can't recall our class went through about five teachers in three years, I gave up entirely and chose German as it was offered from the beginning of secondary school. Mercifully in this case there's enough Franglais and English interspersed into the "lesson" to have a reasonable idea what's going on. I'd be happy if the film includes subtitles, but either way I'll cope.

The closing scene is a clever way of bringing a trick I normally associate with screen to the stage: showing what each of the characters went on to after the main action of the story. It also brings the focus back outwards to the rest of the cast in a scene which could just as easily be focussed entirely on just the teachers, instead showing his legacy.

Overall I enjoyed reading the script, and look forward to coming back to the film adaptation at some point later in the year.