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Review: The Pot of Gold and Other Plays

The Pot of Gold and Other Plays by Plautus My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is the second set of Plautus plays translated by E.F Watling 60 years ago. Not as good as the first The Rope and Other Plays and more ribald. That said, the title play 'The Pot of Gold' is excellent as is 'Pseudolus' . Plautus often breaks the 'fourth wall', not just with the characters giving the prologue, or the cast giving an exhortation for applause (a device used by Shakespeare in Midsummer Nights Dream and The Tempest ), but by characters in the body of the play acknowledging what the audience does or does not already no. There are some clever stage devices: in The Swaggering Soldier , a connecting door allows for a farcical appearance and disappearance of twin sisters (the same person rushing from house to house), a technique that Alan Ayckbourn would likely admire. As with his other plays, the concept of Twins (real and imagined), wily slaves, a...
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Review: The Pot of Gold and Other Plays

The Pot of Gold and Other Plays by Plautus My rating: 3 of 5 stars View all my reviews
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Review: The Rope and Other Plays

The Rope and Other Plays by Plautus My rating: 4 of 5 stars View all my reviews
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Review: Selected Poems

Selected Poems by W.B. Yeats My rating: 3 of 5 stars In the introduction to the collection, Timothy Webb writes that ' Yeats maintained that poetry should be a revelation of hidden life' (and not a criticism of life, as Matthew Arnold felt). There is certainly a lot of revelation. Yeats wipes the layers of dust off mythology and Irish history and opens a box hidden in plain sight. I started the collection after a journey from Dublin to Belfast, and slowly dipped into its pages over a couple of months. Some of the poems remain a mystery, with references to names and places familiar to the poet, but not to the reader, and others echo history that is painful to many after more than four centuries in Ireland. My absolute favourite is 'Stolen Child' , but the haunting verses were already imprinted on my memory. In 1998, at the university halls of residence (Derwent D Block), Rachel, Neil, James, Ray, and I would cook Sunday lunch in a Baby...
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Review: Selected Poems

Selected Poems by W.B. Yeats My rating: 3 of 5 stars View all my reviews
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Review: The Lottery

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson My rating: 4 of 5 stars View all my reviews
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Review: The Outsider

The Outsider by Albert Camus My rating: 5 of 5 stars 'My Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday. I don't know.' Short, dispassionate first-person sentences take us straight into the detached mind of the protagonist, Mersault. He’s not quite all there, something like Lenny from Of Mice and Men, but without the warmth. A blank page of a man. His subsequent trial, ostensibly about a murder, is really about his emotional flatness and his failure to grieve his mother. Morality, it seems, is more about appearances than acts. As with much of the Algiers of Camus' novels, the heat is relentless. Not just the sun, but the pressure. He seems dazed by it, like a man in a desert. And yet, no one else really sweats it. Unlike The Plague or The Myth of Sisyphus, where the whole town bakes, this is solitary heat. Internal, almost metaphysical. In modern psychiatric terms, you’d wonder about affective disorders or dissociation: impairment of social re...
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