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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
Once upon a time, in late Nineteenth-Century England little John Masefield lived a happy childhood, with a loving family and a love of books. Then his parents died, and the boy’s guardian, an aunt out of Dickens, sent him off the Conway, the training ship of the Merchant Navy, to cure him of his “book-obsession”.