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, ad hoc catering requests necessitating town cooks to furnish conger eels and pig heads, and redemption prices paid for flute-singers and courtesans appear liberally. These are all borrowed from the Greek plays of the 4th and 5th centuries BC.

When I lived in Cambodia in the early 1990s, I was part of the Phnom Penh Players, a very amateur group that evolved to bring cheer to the expats. We performed Chekov, Stoppard and Ayckbourn (even taking the latter's Table Manners on tour to Vietnam). As I read Pseudolus, I could imagine myself as the chief slave, dissecting human nature through comedy.

I gave this collection Three Stars.

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