"The Iceman Cometh" by Eugene O'Neill

 This classic play is  set in a bar in New York in 1912; the characters are all failures in life, such as a bent policeman drummed out of the force, two combatants from either side of the Boer war, a card sharp from a circus, and an ex-socialist. The barman has a couple of prostitutes working for him but he denies he is a pimp because he doesn't best them up and a pimp wouldn't have another job; he sees himself as an agent for the girls. He still takes their money (and slaps them but that isn't the same as beating them ...) The owner of the bar and associated rooming house in which many of the characters live is Harry, who hasn't been outside for twenty years, since his wife died. They are waiting to celebrate Harry's birthday. A young man, Porritt, unknown to the rest, arrives to talk to Larry, an ex-anarchist who has given up causes to become a "grandstand philosopher"; Porritt is clearly troubled about the fact that his mother, an anarchist, has been arrested and may be facing a life sentence in jail. Hickey is expected to come any moment; the deadbeats look forward to his arrival because he always buys them drinks and cheers them up.

But when he does arrive, they discover he is on a mission. He wants to improve them. He wants them to face up to the fears that have paralysed them, that has caused each one of them to put his life on hold, awaiting a better tomorrow. He wants them all to be free.

I became convinced, in Act Two, that there was a religious dimension to this play. One of the key characters is the "grandstand philosopher" Larry, described by O'Neill thus: “He stares in front of him, an expression of tired tolerance giving his face the quality of a pitying but weary old priest’s.” (Character description of Larry Slade). Hickey had lines that made him sound like Jesus, for example: “I saw I couldn't do what I was after alone. Not in the time at my disposal. I knew when I came here I wouldn't be able to stay with you long. I'm slated to leave on a trip. ... Why, if I had enough time, I’d get a lot of sport out of setting my line of salvation to each of you all by my lonesome.” (Act 2: Hickey) The furniture which is cabaret style in the first act is rearranged in the second to form a single long table: the Last Supper, I thought, and Larry's comment: “By God, it's a second feast of Belshazzar, with Hickey to do the writing on the wall!” (Act 2: Larry) reinforced the religious vibes. Meanwhile, Parritt is a Judas-like betrayer. And, true enough, Hickey is preaching a gospel of salvation from the curse of tomorrow to slightly more than twelve disciples. Even the ending (spoiler alert) in which Hickey is led away by the police to be condemned to death and executed, follows the story of Christ.

The play has a lot of words; it is a very wordy play which needs nearly four hours to be performed in an uncut version. Each of the characters has an arc and there are a lot of characters. They all have their individual issues and most of them have a number of speeches. The final act is dominated by some very long speeches from Hickey.

The play has very specific descriptions for each character. Not all of these were obeyed by the production I saw - Hickey, described as having "a stout roly-poly figure" was played by a slender actor. The stage settings are also minutely described. Sometimes the playwright instructs the actors how to speak. O'Neill didn't seem to want to leave much to the discretion of the director!

I read this as a playscript but at the same time I watched a brilliant (if black and white and grainy) 1960 American TV movie production starring Jason Robards as Hickey (he played the role in the second theatre production, in which TIC was recognised as a classic of American theatre) and featuring a young Robert Redford. The production I watch cut more than a few lines to trim the play into two feature-length halves; the original must have run for at least 3h 30m excluding intervals.

It may be a marathon but it is an extraordinarily wonderful play.

Eugene O'Neill won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. 

Selected quotes:

• “I saw men didn't want to be saved from themselves, for that would mean they'd have to give up greed, and they'll never pay that price for liberty.” (Act 1: Larry)
• “I took a seat in the grandstand of philosophical detachment to fall asleep observing the cannibals do their death dance.” (Act 1: Larry)
• “No one here has to worry about where they're going next, because there is no further they can go. It's a great comfort to them.” (Act 1: Larry)
• “I was born condemned to be one of those who has to see all sides of a question. When you're damned like that, the questions multiply for you until in the end it's all question and no answer. As history proves, to be a worldly success at anything ... you have to wear blinders like a horse and see only straight in front of you. You have to see, too, that this is all black, and that is all white.” (Act 1: Larry)
• “I know all about that game from soup to nuts.” (Act 1: Hickey)
• “I've watched many cases of almost fatal teetotalism, but they all came out of it completely cured and as drunk as ever.” (Act 1: Mosher)
• “You can't be too careful about work. It's the deadliest habit known to science.” (Act 1: Mosher)
• “He has to be punished, so he can forgive himself.” (Act 2: Hickey)
• “She just had to keep on having lovers to prove to herself how free she was.” (Act 2: Parritt)
• “Honour or dishonour, faith or treachery are nothing to me but the opposite of the same stupidity which is the ruler and king of life, and in the end they rot into dust in the same grave.” (Act 2: Larry)
• “The Iceman of Death.” (Act 3: Larry)
• “It was like a game, sizing people up quick, spotting what their pet pipe dreams were, and then kidding ‘em along that line, pretending you believed what they wanted to believe about themselves. Then they liked you, they trusted you, they wanted to buy something to show their gratitude. It was fun.” (Act 4: Hickey)
• “I could see disgust having a battle in her eyes with love.” (Act 4: Hickey)
• “I'd get so damned lonely. I'd get thinking how peaceful it was here, sitting around with the old gang, getting drunk and forgetting love, joking and laughing and singing and swapping lies.” (Act 4: Hickey)
• “Go, for the love of Christ, you mad tortured bastard, for your own sake!” (Act 4: Larry)

The play was first performed in New York by the Martin Beck Theatre in 1846.
The script was first published in the UK by Jonathan Cape in 1947
The script I read was for the Royal National Theatre production and published by Nick Hern Books in 1993.
I read it, and watched it, in August 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Under Milk Wood" by Dylan Thomas

“To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.”

This is a play for voices, first performed on the radio with the mellifluous Richard Burton supplying the narration. It was written by Dylan Thomas who, as you can see in the quote above, had a way with words.

The story is set over a single day in the Welsh seaside town of Llareggyb - famously, Thomas originally used the name Llareggub because it was ‘bugger all’ backwards, but was persuaded to modify it.

It starts at night, with the inhabitants of the town asleep and dreaming. Typically, they dream of sex. Miss Price, for example, dreams of “her lover, tall as the town clock tower, Samsonsyrup-gold-maned, whacking thighed and piping hot, thunderbolt-bass'd and barnacle-breasted, flailing up the cockles with his eyes like blowlamps and scooping low over her lonely loving hotwaterbottled body.” Sex pervades the play, portrayed, not in a romantic air-brushed light but as an everyday, matter-of-fact, warts-and-all, embodied coupling and conjugating.

Death is also present in dreams. Captain Cat dreams of drowned shipmates. Mrs Ogden-Pritchard is with both her husbands, Mr Ogden and Mr Pritchard, in her dreams.

The dawn arrives and the inhabitants wake and go about their daily lives. Willy Nilly postman delivers letters. Polly Garter scrubs a floor. Sinbad Sailors opens the pub. The children go to school. The listener follows, hopping from character to character. From time to time the narrator interrupts with a set piece, marking the hours of the day like a prayer:

• “There's the clip clop of horses on the sunhoneyed cobbles of the humming streets, hammering of horse- shoes, gobble quack and cackle, tomtit twitter from the bird-ounced boughs, braying on Donkey Down. Bread is baking, pigs are grunting, chop goes the butcher, milk-churns bell, tills ring, sheep cough, dogs shout, saws sing. Oh, the Spring whinny and morning moo from the clog dancing farms, the gulls' gab and rabble on the boat-bobbing river and sea and the cockles bubbling in the sand, scamper of sanderlings, curlew cry, crow caw, pigeon coo, clock strike, bull bellow, and the ragged gabble of the beargarden school as the women scratch and babble in Mrs Organ Morgan's general shop where everything is sold: custard, buckets, henna, rat-traps, shrimp-nets, sugar, stamps, confetti, paraffin, hatchets, whistles.”
• “The sunny slow lulling afternoon yawns and moons through the dozy town. The sea lolls, laps and idles in, with fishes sleeping in its lap. The meadows still as Sunday, the shut-eye tasselled bulls, the goat-and-daisy dingles, nap happy and lazy. The dumb duck-ponds snooze. Clouds sag and pillow on Llaregyb Hill. Pigs grunt in a wet wallow-bath, and smile as they snort and dream. They dream of the acorned swill of the world, the rooting for pig-fruit, the bagpipe dugs of the mother sow, the squeal and snuffle of yesses of the women pigs in rut. They mud-bask and snout in the pig-loving sun; their tails curl; they rollick and slobber and snore to deep, smug, after-swill sleep. Donkeys angelically drowse on Donkey Down.”

Many of the characters have wonderful names: PC Attila Rees. Polly Garter the good-time girl, Organ Morgan who likes to play his organ at night, Nogood Boyo, Lord Cut-Glass, Willy Nilly postman, Captain Tom Cat, Farmer Utah Watkins from Salt Lake Farm.

I was reminded of Cannery Row by John Steinbeck, another study of the inhabitants of a town. Both authors have a remarkable facility with words. They make their characters come alive. And, crucially, they show life in all its aspects, with empathy, without judgement. As Thomas says: “We are not wholly bad or good/ Who live our lives under Milk Wood.”

Selected quotes:

• “And before you let the sun in, mind it wipes its shoes.”
• “A bit of stone with seaweed spread/ Where gulls come to be lonely.”
• “Mrs Dai Bread Two, gypsied to kill in a silky scarlet petticoat above my knees, dirty pretty knees, see my body through my petticoat brown as a berry, high-heel shoes with one heel missing, tortoiseshell comb in my bright black slinky hair, nothing else at all but a dab of scent, lolling gaudy at the doorway, tell your fortune in the tea-leaves, scowling at the sunshine, lighting up my pipe.”
• “I know what you're thinking, you poor little milky creature. You're thinking, you're no better than you should be, Polly, and that's good enough for me.”
• “From Beynon Butchers in Coronation Street, the smell of fried liver sidles out with onions on its breath.”
• “She feels his goatbeard tickle her in the middle of the world like a tuft of wiry fire, and she turns in a terror of delight away from his whips and whiskery conflagration.”
• “Mrs Pugh smiles. An icicle forms in the cold air of the dining-vault.” Not dining room! Vault. Connotations of a crypt.
• “The only sea I saw/ Was the seesaw sea/ With you riding on it./ Lie down, lie easy./ Let me shipwreck in your thighs.”
• “They make, in front of their looking-glasses, haughty or come-hithering faces for the young men in the street outside, at the lamplit leaning corners, who wait in the all-at-once wind to wolve and whistle.”

May 2025

Originally published in 1954

I read my 2025 Renard Press paperback edition while listening to the BBC Sounds original recording of the radio play version from 1954.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Shakespeare's Borrowed Feathers" by Darren Freebury-Jones

 An attempt to portray Shakespeare as a dramatist developing his craft by learning from, collaborating with, and sometimes borrowing from other dramatists of his time.

The title refers to the 'Upstart Crow' gibe by Robert Greene in which someone called 'Shake-scene' is described as "an upstart crow beautified with our feathers". 

There sometimes seems to be a belief that Shakespeare was a genius so unique that he, unlike every other great writer, never had to learn from others. This does a disservice to other great playwrights of the time who have been so overshadowed that they stand in danger of being forgotten. Maybe, it is conceded, Christopher Marlowe wrote some interesting stuff as Shakespeare was just getting going perhaps Ben Jonson penned some amusing plays. But Shakespeare ...

There is no doubt that Shakespeare was a box office draw and he is one of the very few writers of the time who escaped an early death in poverty. But he was not the only writer of best-sellers. The crowds flocked to see not only Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus but also Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. This book even suggests that Shakespeare wrote The Contention between York and Lancaster’ and ‘The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York’ (now known as Henry VI parts 2 and 3) in response to the smash hit 'Harey the vi' and that later. when his company got its hands on the rights for that play, he revised it, adding a few scenes, and presented it as the first part of his Henry VI trilogy.

This book uses textual similarities to establish whether and to what extent Shakespeare was influenced by earlier writers. It suggests that his bombastic characters such as Don Armado in Love's Labour's Lost and Falstaff in Henry IV (1 and 2) and Merry Wives were inspired by the style in which John Lyly wrote his best-selling prose romances 'Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit' (1578) and 'Euphues and His England' (1580). There are echoes of Marlowe's 'The Jew of Malta' and 'Edward II' in Shakespeare's Shylock and Richard II. George Peele worked with Shakespeare on Titus Andronicus and John Fletcher on Henry VIII (All if True) and The Two Noble Gentlemen. 

But the biggest influence may be that of Thomas Kyd. Hamlet contains a number of echoes of Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, including a ghost, a character called Horatio, and a play within a play. Kyd might also have been the author of King Leir, the original for Shakespeare's Lear, and for an ur-Hamlet which has now been lost. 

The arguments that Freebury-Jones use make extensive use of similar words and phrases that occur in different plays, the suggestion being that Shakespeare the actor remembered these when writing. I didn't find this evidence especially convincing. More interesting was the percentages of things such as 'feminine' endings (iambic pentameter lines that have an extra, eleventh, syllable added, as in "To be or not to be, that is the question"): Shakespeare's used a far higher percentage of such lines than most dramatists of the time, especially Marlowe. Other stylistic differences included the percentage of lines that rhyme and the amount of 'end-stopping' (rather than enjambment). 

I would have liked to learn more about these but this information wasn't presented in a consistent way which made it hard for a general reader like myself to decide whether the case had been made for influence, or collaboration, or sole authorship. 

It was a fascinating introduction to a group of playwrights whose work deserves better recognition. I have seen and enjoyed both The Spanish Tragedy and Thomas Middleton's The Changeling but there are lots of other plays that need performing.

April 2025; 205 pages

Published by Manchester University Press in 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Copenhagen" by Michael Frayn

Why did Werner Heisenberg visit Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941? This three-hander play, first performed at the National Theatre in London, England in 1981, explores this meeting.

It was, of course, the height of the Second World War and both Nazi Germany and the Allies were trying to develop the Atom bomb. Heisenberg was working on nuclear fission in Germany, Bohr, with a mixed Jewish ancestry, was living in Denmark under Nazi occupation (he escaped to Sweden later in the war). Did Heisenberg ask Bohr whether it would be morally wrong for a physicist to create a bomb? When, later, he asked Speer for money to pursue his research he,  possibly deliberately, asked for less than he would need. 

The meeting was complicated by the fact that Bohr, one of the father's of the quantum atom, had been Heisenberg's mentor in the 1920s when quantum physics was experiencing revolutionary new ideas almost monthly. This was the period when Heisenberg, seeking solitude on a rocky island in Heligoland, invented the matrix-maths solution to quantum mechanics which would later be superseded by Schrodinger's wave mechanics. It was also when Heisenberg announced his Uncertainty Principle and when they together created the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics.

The play mostly explores the relationships between the two men, and Bohr's wife Margarethe. Inevitably it involves some quantum physics. I used to teach Physics and I have always struggled to understand quantum mechanics (as did most of the scientists of the time, one of the reasons why the Copenhagen Interpretation was needed to explain what the mathematics and experiments 'meant'). So this play was always going to be difficult. There were times when it managed slightly over-simplified but nevertheless very clear explanations and there were times, for example when mentioning Complementarity, when it seemed to duck the issue entirely.

Here is my understanding of Complementarity. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (better called his Indeterminacy Principle) is a mathematically proved conclusion that some system's (for example an electron) have paired properties (for an electron, its position is paired with its momentum) which are linked in that the more precisely you measure one of these properties the less precisely you are able to measure the other. In the play, Heisenberg explains it thus: “You can never know everything about the whereabouts of a particle, or anything else ... because we can't observe it without introducing some new element into the situation, an atom of water vapour for it to hit, or a piece of light - things which have an energy of their own, and which therefore have an effect on what they hit.” (Heisenberg, Act 2) But the principle is more fundamental, it isn't simply an experimental error that could somehow be circumvented but a property of nature. Nevertheless, the Uncertainty Principle is one aspect of Complementarity. Another is the fact that an electron can behave both as a wave or as a particle ('wave-particle duality') and which behaviour it adopts appears to be determined by the way it is being observed. Thus Complementarity seems to be the idea that there are two versions of truth and both are true although neither can be true at the same time.

Selected quotes:

• “If you don't know how things are today you certainly can't know how they're going to be tomorrow.” (Heisenberg, Act 2)
• “If it's Heisenberg at the centre of the universe, then the one bit of the universe that he can't see is Heisenberg.” (Margarethe, Act 2)
• “If you are doing something you have to concentrate on you can't also be thinking about doing it, and if you’re thinking about doing it then you can't actually be doing it.” (Margarethe, Act 2)

March 2025; 96 pages

Published by Methuen Drama in 1998

I saw this play at the Grove Theatre in Eastbourne on Wednesday 9th April 2025

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Changeling" by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley

 This play was probably first performed in 1622 and is often regarded as Middleton's best play (Rowley is thought to have written the first and last scenes and the 'madhouse' subplot). Middleton may have collaborated with Shakespeare on Timon of Athens.

Spoiler alert: the paragraph below describes the whole plot

Alsemero, visiting Vermandero's castle in Valencia, Alicante, Spain, falls in love with the daughter of the house, Beatrice (also sometimes called Joanna). She falls for him which is awkward since her father has engaged her to marry another man, Alonzo de Piracquo. So B-J commissions Vermandero's servant Deflores, a man she cannot otherwise stand, to murder her betrothed. Because he is in love with her, he agrees to do this. But afterwards he is offended when she seeks to pay him. He doesn't want her money, he wants her maidenhead. Reluctantly, she agrees. Deflores deflowers her. Then, realising that Alsemero might discover she isn't a virgin on their wedding night, B-J persuades her maid Diaphanta (also a maid) to sleep with Alsemero in her place - a version of the 'bed-trick' - which Diaphanta eagerly agrees to do because she fancies Alsemero. Afterwards, B-J is jealous and persuades Deflores to murder Diaphanta. In the showdown, the AdP's brother demands to know what has happened to AdP (who has disappeared). Initial investigations offer up two servants who have been hiding in a local madhouse (because they want to have sex with the madhouse keeper's wife - this is the comedy subplot) but then Deflores confesses, implicating Diaphanta. They are locked in a closet from which are heard groans. Are they having sex? No, they are stabbing one another to death.

Production:

I saw this play performed by the Lazarus company at the Southwark Playhouse on Saturday (matinee) 7th October 2023. It was a tremendous production, in the round, with superb performances from Alex Bird playing Alonzo, Jamie O'Neill playing Deflores, Henrietta Rhodes playing a superbly sexy and saucy Diaphanta, and Colette O'Rourke playing Beatrice Joanna. The lighting, sound and effects worked perfectly. It included three songs (Mikko Juan had a brilliant voice) which replaced the sub-plot of the lunatics; otherwise (except for some necessary alterations consequent upon the gender swap of Vermandero to Vermandera and the addition of one or two modern words) the text was fully respected. My full review is here.

The dating of the play:

• It refers to the Battle of Gibraltar between the Spanish and the "rebellious Hollanders" (1.1) which was in 1607; it therefore post-dates this. 
• The testing of Beatrice-Joanna's virginity probably refers to the scandal involving Frances Howard (whose virginity was examined prior to her being allowed to annul her marriage to her first husband on the grounds of non-consummation) and Robert Carr; they were 'in the news' when they were imprisoned in 1616 (for murdering Sir Thomas Overbury) and again when they were released from imprisonment in 1622.
• Middleton was buried in 1627, so the play must pre-date that.

Selected quotes:

"We have but two sorts of people in the house ... that's fools and madmen - the one has not wit enough to be knaves, and the other not knavery enough to be fools." (1.2)

"Every part has his hour: we wake at six and look about us, that's eye-hour; at seven we should pray, that's knee-hour; at eight walk, that's leg-hour; at nine gather flowers and pluck a rose, that's nose-hour; at ten we drink, that's mouth-hour; at eleven lay about us for victuals, that's hand-hour; at twelve go to dinner' that's belly-hour." (1.2)

"A capcase for one's conscience." (3.3)

"Do you place me in the rank of verminous fellows

To destroy things for wages?" (3.3)

"You forget yourself:

A woman dipped in blood and talk of modesty?" (3.3)

"Look but into your conscience, read me there -

'Tis a true book, you'll find me there your equal.

Push! Fly not to your birth, but settle you

Into what the act has made you, you're no more now;

You must forget your parentage to me -

You're the deed's creature." (3.3)

"Can you weep Fate from its determined purpose?" (3.3)

"Murder, I see, is followed by more sins." (3.3)

It's certainly easier to understand on a first reading than a typical Shakespeare: the language is less convoluted, perhaps. The scansion of the iambic pentameters may have worked with the pronunciation of the day but there are many occasions when it doesn't work today; the verse seems more blank than free.

October 2023

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Madness of King George III" by Alan Bennett

I saw the Madness of King George III by Alan Bennett at the Grove Theatre on Saturday 15th April; it was directed by Orion Powell.

It was enjoyable but somehow it never quite worked. The suspension of disbelief never quite happened. They were actors on a stage reciting lines throughout.

Why?

King George III suffered from some sort of breakdown which prevented him from effectively ruling three times during his reign. The first attack was in 1788. In those days the King appointed the prime minister and was essential to the business of government. If the King was incapacitated, the Prince of Wales would take over as Regent and the government would change. But, given the power of the King, how could the Crown Prince take over? Did Parliament have the power to choose who was King? This illness therefore precipitated a constitutional crisis. 

To a large extent, this is a play of ideas. Bennett is trying to explain to an audience presumably not well versed in the complexities of Georgian politics that the government run by Prime Minister Pitt the Younger is dependent on the continuing health of the King, in particular on his ability to confirm appointments and so ‘bribe’ MPs and those who control parliamentary seats. When madness rendered the King incapable of doing this, the opposition demanded that the Crown Prince became Regent; there was every likelihood that if this happened the King would never recover (or at least be deemed to recover) because the Prince Regent would not want to cede power back to his dad.

So it's about power and this story is mirrored by the story of who controls the King. At the start of the play no-one can sit in his presence, or talk directly to him, or look at him, but once he has become the patient he is blistered, strait-jacketed and gagged without his permission.

These are complicated ideas and I doubt I would have understood them without having read the playscript beforehand (and the author's introduction). 

And the fact that the play is about ideas makes it harder for the actors to develop characters and therefore harder for them to emotionally connect with the audience.

Bennett makes this more difficult. Because he wants to show the King before, during and after his illness, he has to extend the timescale. I would have started in media res, with the King already ill, with the new-fangled treatment by outsider Dr Willis battling with the old-fashioned remedies of the establishment quacks, with Pitt and Fox at loggerheads over whether there should or shouldn't be a regency, with the Prince of Wales arguing with his mother as to what is the best thing for his father.

I would also have drastically cut the cast. In the Bennett version the King has five attendants (three pages and two ensigns). I would have had two (you need two in a play so they can conflict with one another, otherwise it is a lot of should-I-shouldn't-I soliloquies). There are three members of the government and three members of the opposition; again, only two are needed (in fact, if the Prince of Wales counts as the opposition, you'd only need one other, especially if the Lord Chancellor who flipflops can be counted in both camps). There are three establishment quack doctors, only one is needed (although this might have lost the humour of the preposterous quackery). The Duke of York was no more than sidekick and foil to the Prince of Wales.

What good would this have done? It would have meant that the audience would have needed to spend less time wondering who was who and more time getting involved with each character. It would have meant that each actor would have had more lines and therefore more time to develop the characterisation of the role. 

As it was, this play was mostly actors delivering lines.

Of course, this would be a tremendous simplification of a complex history ... but Bennett's play has already done this. 

It might be argued that this is a historical drama so Bennett has to stick with the historicity. Except he didn't. One of the pages of the King is called Fortnum and there are a couple of lines, designed to elicit laughs, about Fortnum leaving the palace to start a grocery business in Piccadilly. But the real Fortnum left the court of Queen Anne in 1707, 71 years and three monarchs before the action of this play. His grandson was an attendant of George III's Queen but his service started in 1761, still 27 years before this play started. So Bennett is being ahistorical here. Like Shakespeare was with his histories. Drama don't need to stick to the truth.

Who am I to think that I can rewrite a play that is perennially popular? But why is it popular. Is it because Alan Bennett already has a name for writing great theatre? Or is it because it is about royalty and the typical British theatre audience loves royalty (and the typical British actor loves all that dressing up). 

I don't think this is a well-written play and I think that my feelings about the performance at the Grove exposed the play's flaws.

The script contains extensive stage directions, prescribing how scenes are to be changed and even the music to be played. Most of these were ignored by the Grove company, who otherwise followed the script to the letter.

Selected quotes:

• "He is not himself. So how can they restore him to his proper self, not knowing what that self is?" 
• "Our saviour went about healing the sick." "Yes, but he had not £700 a year for it, eh?"
• "I am the King of England." "No, sir. You are the patient."
• "I have always been myself even when I was ill. Only now I seem myself. That's the important thing. I have remembered how to seem." 
• "Did we ever forget ourselves utterly, because if we did forget ourselves I would like to remember." 
• "No life is without regrets. Yet none is without consolations."

I think Bennett was trying to distil a very complicated story into too short a space of time. The need for a large cast meant that characters could not afford to be complex. Contrast this with one of his Talking Heads monologues in which a single character is given fifteen minutes. I suppose there must be a place for dramas with a large cast and a lot of action but I prefer one with a fiercer focus.

April 2023

This review was written by the author of

Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Commedia dell'Arte" by Giacomo Oreglia

A classic book about the influential renaissance drama form, although sometimes strange in form: there are a lot of lists of characteristics and some verbatim quotes from dramas. Nevertheless, as an introduction to a hugely important part of the history of drama, this book is a valuable introduction.

I knew, vaguely, that Cd'A was linked to pantomime and to Punch & Judy but there are echoes of Cd'A in both Shakespeare (one given scenario seems to echo aspects of the Tempest, Falstaff echoes the Captain, Polonius and Gratiano echo the Doctor, sometimes called Doctor Graziano, Shylock is a type of Pantalone) and Moliere: “Moliere himself modelled his acting on the great Scaramouche and felt the lash of the French critics precisely because his stage technique was foreign. Moliere’s early plays were adaptations of Commedia plays.” (from the Introduction by Evert Sprinchorn) The plot of Don Juan also seems to have been developed by Cd'A.

The most interesting part of the book, for me, was the descriptions of the character traits. The biggest disappointment was the sketchy treatment of Scaramouche and the near invisibility of Columbine; both these characters seem to have been late inventions but I was expecting more about them.  Nor did I learn why Bergamo seemed to be of such crucial importance: so many of the early characters appear to have originated there.

Despite its imperfections, it was an important and easy-to-read introduction to Harlequin and his colleagues.

Selected quotes:

• “What the film, the comic strip, the TV situation comedy, and burlesque (in the American sense) have been to the twentieth century, the Commedia dell’Arte was to the Renaissance - entertainment for both high-brow and low-brow, comprising tried and tested situations endlessly varied, always undemanding intellectually, often raunchy and vulgar, and, at its best, vigorous and spirited as only popular art can be.” (from the Introduction by Evert Sprinchorn)
• “Each troupe consisted of a constellation of characters who remained the same regardless of the plot they found themselves embroiled in. Think of the Marx Brothers.” (from the Introduction by Evert Sprinchorn)
• “The plots given in the scenarios may be comic, tragi-comic and occasionally comic-pastoral. They are developed by the use of the most varied devices: disguises, identifications, misunderstandings, kidnappings, shipwrecks, spells and magic. The central theme is always the love of young people, the jealousies and rivalries of the old ones and the intrigues of the zanni”  (Ch 3)
• “When you tell lies, tell big ones. Lies, steaks and meat balls must be big or not at all.” (Ch 5)
• “In the shops of the great even smoke is sold by weight” (Ch 5)
• “On a heavily made up old woman. Madam, your house does not need painting, it needs pointing.” (Ch 5)
• “On one who says there is no dishonour in his family. It must be that his house is not a very old one.” (Ch 5)
• “To one who tells you to go to the devil. Sir, I do not go to places where there are no return tickets.” (Ch 5)
• “This night is as long, as cold and as obscure as a composition by a bad poet.” (Ch 5)

May 2022; 147 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Jew of Malta" by Christopher Marlowe

On the surface, this play is stuffed with anti-semitism. Marlowe's Barabas is an ill-used character at the start, who therefore has some sort of motivation for his wickedness, but the delight he takes in his evil and his relatively quick downfall make it much harder for us to sympathise with him than for Shakespeare's Shylock.

The relationship between arch-villain Barabas and his clownish sidekick Ithamore is a little like that between Faustus and Mephistopheles and the delight they take in their murders reminded me of the mischievous wickedness in Dr Faustus. The victims of Barabas and Ithamore are fools and idiots; it was difficult to care that they were being slaughtered. 

The plot is picaresque, one thing after another.

The plot (spoiler alert)

The Prologue is spoken by Macchiavel. He argues against morality and sees the only right as that conferred by might. The play the segues into Barabas, the protagonist, in his counting house; neatly it opens with him in mid-thought. His primary (indeed, almost sole) motivation is money.

The Turks turn up in Malta and demand ten years back-payment of the agreed tribute. Governor Ferzene decides that this can best be achieved by taxing all Jews in Malta at 50% of their wealth ... and when Barabas hangs back he, the wealthiest, is taxed at 100%.

But Barabas has hidden some treasure in his house ... which is being turned into a nunnery. So he has to recruit his daughter, Abigail, to become a nun to move into the nunnery to get his hidden treasure back. This done, she stops being a nun.

Martin de Bosco, a Spanish ship's Captain newly arrived from defeating the Turks at sea, persuades Ferzene and his council to refuse to pay the tribute to the Turks and use the money levied on the Jews to mount a defence against the Turkish invasion that will surely follow.

Two boys fancy Abigail: Lodowick, Ferzene's son, and Mathias, whom she fancies. To revenge himself on governor Ferzene, Barabas and his newly purchased Turkish slave and enthusiastic sidekick in evil, Ithamore, decide to trick Lodowick and Mathias into fighting a duel; both are killed. 

Abigail, realising she has been duped into getting her boyfriend killed, becomes a nun again. Barabas and Ithamore, realising they have to silence Abigail, make a poisoned porridge and kills all the nuns in the nunnery, including Abigail. On her deathbed she confesses to Father Barnardine.

Father Barnardine is bound by the seal of the confessional so he can't tell anyone. But, supported by Father Jacomo, he goes to Barabas and Ithamore and drops hints ... so they strangle him and dupe Jacomo into thinking he has done the deed. They then turn Jacomo in to the authorities and he is hanged.

Local prostitute Bellamira and her pimp Pilia-Borza conspire to get gold from Barabas. She pretends she has fallen in love with Ithamore; he, besotted, blackmails Barabas about the two boys tricked into duelling, the poisoned nuns and the strangled friar. Barabas initially pays up but then disguises himself as a musician and tricks Bellamira, Pilia-Borza and Ithamore into smelling poisoned flowers. 

He is not in time to prevent the three denouncing him to the authorities but before he is found guilty the witnesses are dead. He feigns death using a sleeping draught and governor Ferenze has his body thrown over the wall.

Where he encounters the besieging Turks and shows them a way into Valetta. The Turks defeat the Maltese and, in gratitude, make Barabas governor. But he realises that he cannot rule a people who hate him and decides to rebetray Malta, this time back to Ferzene, for money. He arranges to blow up the Turkish troops in an old monastery and to trick the Turkish leader into having dinner on a platform in the castle which will collapse. But Ferzene double crosses Barabas (keeping up?) and it is Barabas who is on the platform when it collapses and tips him into a cauldron where he is boiled to death.

It looks to me like the plot is merely a device for lots of exciting things to happen on stage: 

• Abigail breaking into her own house to steal back the treasure from Barabas and throwing it down from the balcony to where he waits below
• the swordfight between Mathias and Lodowick, cheered on from the same balcony by Barabas
• the comedy when Barabas is poisoning the porridge and Ithamore is protesting that it is a shame to waste such good food
• the deathbed confession of Abigail ... and the problem with the secrets of the confessional leading to the comedy in which Barnardine and Jacomo try to lure Barabas into confessing without ever being able to accuse him outright
• the strangling of Barnardine and the framing of Jacomo
• the ludicrous love scene between Bellamira and Ithamore
• Barabas masquerading as a musician in order to foist poisoned flowers on Bellamira, Pilia-Borza and Ithamore
• the apparent death of Barabas and the hurling of his body from the battlements
• the collapse of the platform the the cooking of Barabas

Irony and betrayal and critique of religion

What distinguishes the play is the use of an outsider's perspective (principally Barabas but a little of Ithamore) to critique the established order. Almost everything that Barabas says is tinged with scorn and irony; he repeatedly criticises the supposedly superior morality of the Christians. Furthermore, Marlowe's characters are almost all motivated by money: Bellamira the prostitute when she seeks to seduce Ithamore to get him to blackmail Barabas, Fathers Jacomo and Barnardine when they fall out over which of their religious houses will benefit from the fortune of converted Barabas, even Ferenze when he realises that if he defies the Turks the Maltese can keep the tax they have levied on the Jews to pay the tribute.

For example:

“I count religion but a childish toy,
And hold there is no sin but ignorance.” (Machiavel in the Prologue; doesn't he sound like Faustus?)

“Who hateth me but for my happiness?
Or who is honour'd now but for his wealth?
Rather had I, a Jew, be hated thus,
Than pitied in a Christian poverty;
For I can see no fruits in all their faith,
But malice, falsehood, and excessive pride,” (Barabas, Act 1)

“Some Jews are wicked, as all Christians are:
But say the tribe that I descended of
Were all in general cast away for sin,
Shall I be tried by their transgression?” (Barabas, Act 1)

Marlowe frequently repeats the contemporary myths about Jews (including that they crucify babies) and this seems to be done ironically, as when Barabas (Act 2) himself says:
“As for myself, I walk abroad o' nights,
And kill sick people groaning under walls:
Sometimes I go about and poison wells
...
Then, after that, was I an usurer,
And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting,
And tricks belonging unto brokery,
I fill'd the gaols with bankrupts in a year,
And with young orphans planted hospitals;
And every moon made some or other mad,
And now and then one hang himself for grief,
Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll
How I with interest tormented him.
But mark how I am blest for plaguing them;--
I have as much coin as will buy the town.”

“It's no sin to deceive a Christian;
For they themselves hold it a principle,
Faith is not to be held with heretics:
But all are heretics that are not Jews;” (Barabas, Act 2)

Words, words, words

So is the play redeemed by its words? Marlowe has a special place in English letters as the creator of the 'royal line': the iambic pentameter of blank verse that Shakespeare later used to such effect (although Shakespeare developed it by mixing it with prose and by frequently breaking the strict form to include weak endings (such as the extra syllable in 'To be or not to be, that is the question'). 

There are some great lines:

Prologue

“Many will talk of title to a crown:
What right had Caesar to the empery?”

“Might first made kings, and laws were then most sure
When, like the Draco's, they were writ in blood.”

Act One
“What more may heaven do for earthly man
Than thus to pour out plenty in their laps,
Ripping the bowels of the earth for them,”

"Your extreme right does me exceeding wrong”

“she were fitter for a tale of love,
Than to be tired out with orisons;
And better would she far become a bed,
Embraced in a friendly lover's arms,
Than rise at midnight to a solemn mass.”

Act Two
“Thus, like the sad-presaging raven, that tolls
The sick man's passport in her hollow beak,
And in the shadow of the silent night
Doth shake contagion from her sable wings,
Vex'd and tormented runs poor Barabas
With fatal curses towards these Christians.”

“I learn'd in Florence how to kiss my hand,
Heave up my shoulders when they call me dog,
And duck as low as any bare-foot friar”

“First, be thou void of these affections,
Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear;
Be mov'd at nothing, see thou pity none,
But to thyself smile when the Christians moan”

Ithamore, the Moslem, is also allowed to boast of his evils:
“In setting Christian villages on fire,
Chaining of eunuchs, binding galley-slaves.
One time I was an hostler in an inn,
And in the night-time secretly would I steal
To travellers' chambers, and there cut their throats:
Once at Jerusalem, where the pilgrims kneel'd,
I strewed powder on the marble stones,
And therewithal their knees would rankle so,
That I have laugh'd a-good to see the cripples
Go limping home to Christendom on stilts.”

Act Three
“O mistress, I have the bravest, gravest, secret, subtle, bottle-nosed knave to my master, that ever gentleman had!”

"My sinful soul, alas, hath pac'd too long
The fatal labyrinth of misbelief,”

“he that eats with the devil had need of a long spoon”

"Why, master, will you poison her with a mess of rice-porridge? that will preserve life, make her round and plump, and batten more than you are aware.”

“As fatal be it to her as the draught
Of which great Alexander drunk, and died;
And with her let it work like Borgia's wine,
Whereof his sire the Pope was poisoned!
In few, the blood of Hydra, Lerna's bane,
The juice of hebon, and Cocytus' breath,
And all the poisons of the Stygian pool,
Break from the fiery kingdom, and in this
Vomit your venom, and envenom her
That, like a fiend, hath left her father thus!”

Act Four
“How sweet the bells ring, now the nuns are dead,
That sound at other times like tinkers' pans!"

“Fornication: but that was in another country;
And besides, the wench is dead.”

“To fast, to pray, and wear a shirt of hair,
And on my knees creep to Jerusalem.”

“He sent a shaggy, tatter'd, staring slave,
That, when he speaks, draws out his grisly beard,
And winds it twice or thrice about his ear;
Whose face has been a grind-stone for men's swords;
His hands are hack'd, some fingers cut quite off;
Who, when he speaks, grunts like a hog, and looks
Like one that is employ'd in catzery
And cross-biting; such a rogue
As is the husband to a hundred whores;”

Act 5
“For he that liveth in authority,
And neither gets him friends nor fills his bags,
Lives like the ass that Aesop speaketh of,
That labours with a load of bread and wine,
And leaves it off to snap on thistle-tops”

This is very much a play to be performed rather than read; the spectacle is clear. It is driven by a bitter critique of hypocrisy in religion. But the plot is just one thing after another and the characterisation is weak.

March 2020;

Plays by Marlowe reviewed in this blog also include:
Edward II

Other plays reviewed in this blog may be found here

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"A Life in the Theatre" by Tyrone Guthrie

I hadn't heard of this gentleman; I had muddled him up with Tyrone Power the film star (they are cousins). Mr Guthrie was a small-time actor and important theatre director and producer from the 1920s until the early 1960s; he also developed talk radio in the very early days of the BBC, and possibly produced the very first drama serial for Canadian radio. He had an influential life and he worked with an enormous number of much better known people including Robert Donat, Flora Robson ("I ... persuaded Flora Robson to return to the stage. She had quit in despair after a series of wretchedly insignificant parts followed by a long period out of work, and was doing welfare work in a factory."; C 4), Edith Evans, Charles Laughton, James Mason, Laurence Olivier, Robert Morley, Emlyn Williams, Sybil Thorndike, Alec Guinness (as Hamlet), John Mills, Jack Hawkins, Andrew Cruickshank, Ralph Richardson (as Bottom and Othello), Vivien Leigh (as Titania), Margaret Leighton, Anthony Quayle, Leonard Bernstein, and many others. His influence included him working on the first Edinburgh festival. Yet the memoir is modest; he seems genuinely more interested in giving other people credit and in explaining the technical issues involved with staging plays. This was a very interesting memoir from a man who seems unjustly forgotten.

The Old Vic, where, under the management of Lilian Baylis, Mr Guthrie spents several seasons, was opened in 1818 as the Royal Coburg, named after Prince Leopold, the husband of Princess Charlotte, daughter of the Prince Regent and the Heir Presumptive. When she died in childbrith Leopold left Britain (having declined the throne of Greece, he later became the first King of the Belgians)' the theatre subsequently became known as the Royal Victoria after Leopold's niece (and the Queen).

Some delightful moments:

• "My mechanical capacities are a little limited. I can pump a bicycle tyre; switch an electric light on - and off; and, if I count twelve slowly, take a deep breath, and clear the mind of cant, I can recall whether, if you turn it clockwise, you can make a screw go in, or out." (C 3)
• "Who would want caviar if it were not only cheaper and more available than cod, but it appeared at every meal; if it were not merely familiar, but inescapable?" (C 3)
• "A good journalist must discipline himself to write intelligibly and fast ... but I can conceive that in knocking the nonsense out of you, it may knock out much of the sensibility too." (C 5)
• "None of Hamlet's scenes demand a very close rapport between the participants. Most of the psychological material is conveyed in soliloquy." (C 5)
• "Just as doctors prescribe bread pills in Latin and a handwriting totally baffling to every human eye except that of the particular pharmacist with whom they are hand in glove; just as musicians have to say fortissimo instead of 'very loud' so stage-lighting experts like to make use of a highly technical vocabulary" (C 5)
• "Like most ardent young people ... I thought it my duty to make people like what I liked, I even thought that if I tried hard enough the attempt would succeed." (C 5)
• "once God had told Miss Baylis what to do, there was really no point in opposing their joint will." (C 8)
• "Pommer looked agonized but grimly determined, like Prometheus after the eagle had pecked out his gizzard for the millionth time." (C 9)
• "If people say a thing is good for you, it is merely a ruse to induce you to undergo a thoroughly unpleasant experience." (C 10)
• "No one thinks well of a medicine that tastes nice; to be good for you it must taste filthy and if possible smell filthy, and look filthy too; disinfectants must sting; a good book must be a penance to read - one of the reasons why the Bible is printed as it is." (C 10)
• "On the opening night ... one of the actors got lost and flew about in a frenzy through room after room, pre-set on a turntable. The actors on stage, making up lines and pretending to look for their lost colleague in the garden, were startled to see him crawl through a fireplace." (C 11)
• "One of the charms of a tall tale is its tallness." (C 13)
• "Personality - the great euphemism for sex appeal" (C 15)
• "The whole effect was like Chopin scored for military band." (C 15)
• "At its best, grand opera is the greatest experience the theatre can offer to an audience. ... Opera is such a great, grinding, galumphing behemoth n- so much energy goes into battling with the multitude of people concerned, the masses of scenery, the mountainous heaps of coronets, riding boots, fans, goblets, scimitars and rosaries that the purpose of it all gets lost." (C 16)
• "Feeling rather as I imagine some of the less gregarious animals must have felt on the first night in the Ark." (C 17)
• "It is extraordinary to what an extent British life is still dominated by the traditions and opinions of a numerically tiny upper class. ... The Times is the house magazine of quite a small, exclusive, but overwhelmingly influential club. To 'get anywhere' in England ... it is still almost a prerequisite that you subscribe the 'establishment' conventions of speech, manners and morals. If you do not, then you must make your way ... by enacting, rather cleverly, the character role of an Outsider." (C 18)
• "I for one do not subscribe to the belief that there exists a vast body of unproduced masterpieces just because all the metropolitan managers, agents, producers, actors and directors are too dull to know a good thing when they see it." (C 19)
• "She lacked the push, the restless demonic energy which alone lifts a player into the first rank." (C 19)
• "She liked the life of a touring, or provincial, player: knitting and companionable chats in draughty, grimy dressing-rooms, the brightly lit two hours of painted fantasy, then the long trudge through the rain, under the railway arch, past the gasworks, round by the Sacred Heart convent to the digs and cocoa in a Thermos." (C 19)
• "It was a sparrow slum. By day it was comparatively quiet; but towards evening, when the business sparrows came back home, their love life become most obtrusive. Boy sparrow would meet girl and pursue her all over our stage. They were impervious to fear, or for that matter shame. Scenes of unbridled bird sexuality made the life of Richard III seem very anaemic and suburban. These dear little feathered friends would not have hesitated to make away with their nephews. Why, they had no compunction whatever about the death of their own offspring. As the weeks wore on and their eggs hatched, the nestlings fell to their death on the concrete floor below literally by the dozen." (C 21)
• "In schoolmastering or the Church, the labourer is in a seller's market. You can get a job unless you are patently half-witted or have a record blacker than even the hardest-pressed employer can overlook." (C 22)

A fascintating and very readable memoir of A Life in the Theatre. March 2020; 314 pages