23 Thursday Nov 2017
Posted in Theatre
Because I’m going to the dentist this afternoon, for my first ever canal root therapy, I’m wallowing in abject terror – and all I can think of is dentist-related.
Therefore, from the first act of George Bernard Shaw’s You Never Can Tell:
In a dentist’s operating room on a fine August morning in 1896. Not the usual tiny London den, but the best sitting room of a furnished lodging in a terrace on the sea front at a fashionable watering place. Continue reading
08 Wednesday Feb 2017
Tags
christopher marlowe, George Bernard Shaw, Léon Daudet, Nat Cassidy, Patricia Finney, Robert Brustein, William Shakespeare
It strikes me how often fiction and theatre portray Will Shakespeare in the act of absorbing his materials rather than creating them.
No, really: the average fictional Shakespeare spends half his life jotting down, more or less metaphorically, everything he hears… Continue reading
09 Tuesday Aug 2016
Tags
Caesar and Cleopatra, George Bernard Shaw, imagination, Plays Pleasant, Saint Joan, The Man of Destiny, You Never Can Tell
When it comes to George Bernard Shaw… well, it’s complicated.
His Plays Pleasant, Caesar and Cleopatra, Saint Joan and a few more are a good part of why I became a playwright. And back in secondary school I talked my classmates into staging You Never Can Tell (not that we went far), and later directed a student production of the Man of Destiny while in College, in which I also played the Strange Lady, and bought a huge, sturdy, very heavy second-hand volume of the complete plays in Edinburgh, and lugged it around Scotland for weeks, and translated three of his short plays into Italian, and was recently startled to find out just how much Saint Joan still colours my perception of Joan of Arc – and yet… Continue reading
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