15 January: The Daughter of Time

 Happy New Year!

Well, at time of writing it's still ... MERRY CHRISTMAS

And many many thanks for your generous Eurostar voucher.  I will enjoy using it to go the the theatre in London!  And I will try to go to something that isn't Operation Mincemeat!

But to January's reading.  I think it's possibly different from things we've done before but it is a wee bit old.  However, it's a subject that is of some interest to me and indeed this summer we visited Leicester, viewed the car park and hole where the body of King Richard III was found and visited his new tomb and the wonderful modern museum.  We had done quite a lot of research before we went, but this didn't spoil the enjoyment!  I'll put some holiday snaps on the blog below (yay! I hear you all cry!)

The Daughter of Time

by Josephine Tey

 

The Daughter of Time is a 1951 detective novel  concerning a police officer's investigation into the alleged crimes of King Richard III of England. It was the last book Tey published in her lifetime, shortly before her death. In 1990 it was voted number one in The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time list compiled by the British Crime Writers' Association. In 1995 it was voted number four in The Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time list compiled by the Mystery Writers of America.

Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant is feeling bored while confined to bed in hospital with a broken leg. Marta Hallard, an actress friend of his, suggests he should amuse himself by researching a historical mystery. She brings him some pictures of historical characters, aware of Grant's interest in human faces. He becomes intrigued by a portrait of King Richard III. He prides himself on being able to read a person's character from his appearance, and King Richard seems to him a gentle, kind and wise man. Why is everyone so sure that he was a cruel murderer?

With the help of other friends and acquaintances, Grant investigates Richard's life and the case of the Princes in the Tower.  

4 December: Jeeves & Wooster

 

This month we will be reading a play based on the Jeeves & Wooster stories of P.G. Wodehouse, so silliness and mayhem are ensured!  We last read this in 2018, and if memory serves we had fun.

To make it slightly more confusing the play that we are reading has a plot which revolves around Bertie Wooster deciding to stage a one-man show revolving around his recent experiences at Totleigh Towers, only to discover on the evening that, in typical Wooster fashion, nothing has gone to plan and the show is not ready to be staged. In desperation, he enlists Jeeves and another valet, Seppings, to help him stage the production, with Bertie as himself and both Jeeves and Seppings playing multiple characters. Both in the story Bertie is narrating and the play as it is being performed, events quickly spiral out of control, prompting Jeeves to step in to make sure all ends well.

Still with me?

Although a cast of 3, they perform a host of other roles - which we will not replicate!

As everything is explained, sort of, in the play I will not give a breakdown of the characters here!

I hope you will enjoy it!

 

 

 

6 November: The Real Thing

 my thanks to Val for suggesting we do another Tom Stoppard. I have not had the chance to reread it yet, but from memory this is one of his more accessible and humorous plays. I am certain you will enjoy it.

 

As always I am stealing some text! 

The Real Thing 

by Tom Stoppard that was first performed in 1982. The play focuses on the relationship between Henry and Annie, an actress and member of a group fighting to free Brodie, a Scottish soldier imprisoned for burning a memorial wreath during a protest.

The Real Thing examines the nature of honesty and uses various constructs, including a play within a play, to explore the theme of reality versus appearance. It has been described as one of Stoppard's "most popular, enduring and autobiographical plays."^[1][2]

Characters

Max: "40-ish" male actor who begins the play married to Annie. Acts in Henry's new play, House of Cards.

Charlotte: "35-ish" actress who begins the play married to Henry. Appears opposite Max in House of Cards.

Henry: "40-ish" playwright who, at the beginning of the play, is married to Charlotte and conducting an affair with Annie. Both believe in love and yet approach it with cynicism.

Annie: "30-ish" actress who begins the play married to Max. She has been conducting an ongoing affair with Henry while also working as an activist for Brodie, a soldier who was arrested and imprisoned for setting fire to a wreath at the Cenotaph.

Billy: "22-ish" young actor who plays Giovanni to Annie's Annabella in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. Openly shows romantic interest in Annie.

Debbie: "17" year old daughter of Charlotte and Henry who nevertheless spends very little time with them.

Brodie: "25" year old soldier imprisoned for setting fire to the wreath at the Cenotaph. Annie takes him up as a cause.

 

Given the subject matter of the play, I am also going to include Wikipedia's brief summary of Stoppard's own, perhaps complex, love life:

Stoppard has been married three times. His first marriage was to Josie Ingle (1965–1972), a nurse. His second marriage was to Miriam Stern (1972–92); they separated when he began a relationship with actress Felicity Kendal. He also had a relationship with actress Sinéad Cusack, but she made it clear she wished to remain married to Jeremy Irons and stay close to their two sons. Also, after she was reunited with a son she had given up for adoption, she wished to spend time with him in Dublin rather than with Stoppard in the house they shared in France. He has two sons from each of his first two marriages. In 2014 he married Sabrina Guinness.

 

4 September: The People Next Door

 

I confess.  I picked up this play thinking it was something else!!  Oops.  I hope you will forgive me.

 

It is a modern play.  Very.  Be prepared for a few naughty words!  It deals with modern problems, with humour.

 

This is the 2003 Theatre Guide summary of the play (well, bits of it!)

 

I think we all deserve a treat. It's been a long, hot summer, everyone has been off at the Edinburgh Festival, and the only histrionic fiction staged for our delectation has been the Hutton Enquiry. Happily, we can now all have that special treat, because Henry Adams's Fringe First Award-Winning play has transferred from the Traverse to the Theatre Royal Stratford East.

This is a very fine piece of writing from the Caithness-born playwright, Henry Adams.  .... It's strengths lie in its wit, its characterisation and its bizarre and topical plot. It is also belly-laughter funny. It is so satisfying to reel with laughter at some of those things we fear most.

The People Next Door deals in topicalities and stands out particularly in Scottish playwriting simply by putting a hitherto neglected minority group of black and Asian immigrants on the stage. Ipso facto it's got everything going for it.

Nigel is a half Pakistani whose father did a runner when his Scottish mother was pregnant. In his daydreams he is Salim, an ultra hip, super cool guy with considerable street-cred and the lingo to prove it. In everyday reality, he lives in a tenement on disability allowance having been diagnosed with a mental disorder. He might have a borderline personality but Nigel is warm, caring, savvy and just crazy enough to have no inhibitions about saying what he thinks. In other words he is utterly loveable.

His only friends are Mrs Mac, the old Scottish widow upstairs, and a black teenager, about as smart as they come, with an unfortunate family background. Nigel suffers from chronic anxiety, and if he thinks he is paranoid a man is just about to walk into his life to show him he's not nearly paranoid enough.

Enter Phil, a bent copper with stashes of drugs in every pocket and up his nose, and a psychosis Freud would have salivated to get onto his couch. Phil bursts into Nigel's life because he has discovered that the long-lost half-brother, the golden boy, Karim, has become an international terrorist on the wanted list of every intelligence agency in the Western Hemisphere and Phil intends to show the boys in the Special Branch that the average copper, himself in particular, is just as smart as they are.

This is genuinely a topical play, with a serious political statement to make, if, like I do, you see the personal as political. But it is delivered to us with a comedy that bleeds seamlessly on occasion into farce and satire.

 

7 August: Uncle Vanya by Chekov

 

Following on from last month, in August we will again be re-reading a play.

Uncle Vanya 

Chekov

Another 2016 masterpiece!  I could not resist this, having recently seen Andrew Scott's brilliant one man production.

 

Here's what I wrote in 2016.

 

Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov

It was first published in 1897 and received its Moscow première in 1899.

The play portrays the visit of an elderly professor and his glamorous, much younger second wife, Yeléna, to the rural estate that supports their urban lifestyle - an estate from which they receive but take no part in maintaining. 

Two friends, Vanya, brother of the Professor's late first wife, who has long managed the estate, and Astrov, the local Doctor, both fall under Yelena's spell, while bemoaning the ennui of their provincial existence. 

Sonya, the Professor's daughter by his first wife, who has worked with Vanya to keep the estate going, meanwhile suffers from the awareness of her own lack of beauty and from her unrequited feelings for Dr. Astrov. Matters are brought to a crisis when the Professor announces his intention to sell the estate: Vanya and Sonya's home and raison d'être, with a view to investing the proceeds to achieve a higher income for himself and his wife.

The version we will be reading however is an adaptation by Brian Friel,  who has been described as 'Ireland's greatest playwright' and an 'Irish Chekhov'.  You may find the occasional word or expression that is unfamiliar - and it is possible that I will not be able to translate for you!  

Characters

• Aleksandr Vladimirovich Serebryakov – a retired university professor, who has lived for years in the city on the earnings of his late first wife's rural estate, managed for him by Vanya and Sonya.
• Helena Andreyevna Serebryakov (Yelena) – Professor Serebryakov's young and beautiful second wife. She is 27 years old.
• Sofia Alexandrovna Serebryakov (Sonya) – Professor Serebryakov's daughter from his first marriage. She is of a marriageable age but is considered plain.
• Maria Vasilyevna Voynitsky  – the widow of a privy councilor and mother of Vanya (and of Vanya's late sister, the Professor's first wife).
• Ivan Petrovich Voynitsky ("Uncle Vanya") – Maria's son and Sonya's uncle, the title character of the play. He is 47 years old.
• Mikhail Lvovich Astrov – a middle aged country doctor.
• Ilya Ilych Telegin (nicknamed "Waffles" for his pockmarked skin) – an impoverished landowner, who now lives on the estate as a dependent of the family.
• Marina Timofeevna – an old nurse.

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)

Cheknov is considered to be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. His career as a playwright produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. 

Chekhov practiced as a medical doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress."^[7]

Chekhov renounced the theatre after the reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Konstantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays,Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a "theatre of mood" and a "submerged life in the text".

Chekhov had at first written stories only for financial gain, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story.^[10] He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them.

 Brian Friel (1929-2015)

Brian Friel was considered to be one of the greatest living English-language dramatists, and referred to as an "Irish Chekhov" and "the universally accented voice of Ireland".

Recognised for early works, Friel had 24 plays published in a more than half-century spanning career that culminated in his election to the position of Saoi of Aosdána (Head of the Irish Arts Foundation). His plays were commonly featured on Broadway and won many awards. 

 

26 June (July Reading): The Hard Problem by Tom Stoppard

 

For personal reasons we'll be doing repeat readings in July and August.  Several suggestions were made, and this month we will be reading:

 

 

The Hard Problem

Tom Stoppard.

Read in 2016 which was a particularly fine year for the group and we read some brilliant plays - this being one of them!

 

Here's what I wrote in 2016:

 

The much-anticipated The Hard Problem has received somewhat mixed reviews.  I am always nervous when approaching a work by Stoppard as he is so very very clever and intellectual that watching one of his plays can be quite taxing and not an easy night out.  But I found this play not only strangely accessible but also in some respects a disappointment: I don't want to give away the ending, but for me it was too neat.  Here are some extracts from reviews.

From The Telegraph:

Sir Tom Stoppard’s new play, his first in nine years, is called The Hard Problem – a reference to the difficulty scientists and philosophers have in fathoming the nature of human consciousness. Watching it has left me with a hard problem of my own. I want to salute Stoppard, now 77 and one of our finest living playwrights ... But there’s no getting round it: this is a major disappointment.

From The Observer:

The “hard problem” of the title is the problem of consciousness. Where is it? What is it? Crucially, is “the mind” the same as “the brain”? The joy of the play, his first for nine years, is that it brings this problem to the stage and poses it crisply. The difficulty is that Stoppard then glides away from examining it. Often taxed with being too intellectual as a playwright, he is here not intellectually stringent enough. The great adventurer looks strangely conventional. 

From The Guardian:

A rich, ideas-packed work that offers a defence of goodness whatever its ultimate source... Stoppard’s play may not solve the hard problem of human consciousness. But it offers endless stimulation and represents, like so much of his work, a search for absolute values and a belief in the possibility of selfless virtue.

The Hard Problem

Hilary, a young psychology researcher at a brain-science institute, is nursing a private sorrow and a troubling question at work, where psychology and biology meet. If there is nothing but matter, what is consciousness?

This is 'the hard problem' which puts Hilary at odds with her colleagues who include her first mentor Spike, her boss Leo and the billionaire founder of the institute, Jerry.

Is the day coming when the computer and the MRI scanner will answer all the questions psychology can ask? Meanwhile Hilary needs a miracle, and she is prepared to pray for one.

 

Sir Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard was born in July 1937 in Czechoslovakia.  He fled from the Nazis as a child refugee to Singapore with his parents and brother. When that became a difficult place to be his father sent his family to Australia and, as a doctor, remained where he felt he was needed, but he died 4 years later.  In 1946 his family moved to the UK, via time in India,  and after studying there Stoppard became a journalist and, in 1960, a playwright.

Stoppard's mother died in 1996. The family had not talked about their history and neither brother knew what had happened to the family left behind in Czechoslovakia^. In the early 1990s, with the fall of communism, Stoppard found out that all four of his grandparents had been Jewish and had died in Auschwitz and other camps, along with three of his mother's sisters.  He has expressed grief both for a lost father and a missing past, but he has no sense of being a survivor, at whatever remove. "I feel incredibly lucky not to have had to survive or die. It's a conspicuous part of what might be termed a charmed life."

He is a prolific writer whose works include many well-known plays and films - including Shakespeare in Love - and he has received many awards.  

His themes are always intellectual and his works include discussions on human rights; censorship; political freedom; linguistics and philosophy. 

 

5 June: Equus by Peter Shaffer

 

Thank you to Rina for suggesting that we read again this modern classic. It is gripping and absorbing, I am looking forward to getting to grips with it again.

 

And in 2017 it drove young Harry Potter fans to distraction when Daniel Radcliffe took on, and bared all, in the lead role ... (queue raciest picture to ever appear on this blog below!)

Equus is a 1973 play by Peter Shaffer, about a child psychiatrist who attempts to treat a young man who has a pathological religious fascination with horses.

Shaffer was inspired to write Equus when he heard of a crime involving a 17-year-old boy who blinded six horses in a small town in northern England. He set out to construct a fictional account of what might have caused the incident, without knowing any of the details of the crime, and to evoke the same "air of mystery" and "numinous" qualities as in his 1964 play The Royal Hunt of the Sun but in a more modern setting. The narrative of the play follows the attempts of Dr. Martin Dysart to understand the cause of the boy's (Alan Strang) actions while wrestling with his own sense of purpose and the nature of his work.

The original stage production ran at the National Theatre in London between 1973 and 1975.