The Tempest by William Shakespeare
The Tempest – One of the last if not the last of the written plays, this one has always been among my favorites. It’s such a slight play in terms of plot, with really only a handful of scenes, a pretty straightforward plot in a lot of ways, and a small cast of characters. It’s also one of the plays (and there’s plenty of others) where the concept of plays and performance come up in the text itself. The plot, if you don’t know it: […]
An Inspector Calls by J. B. Priestley
Dangerous Corner by J. B. Priestley
I've Been Here Before by J. B. Priestley
Time and the Conways by J. B. Priestley
An Inspector Calls – 5/5 This is nice little disturbing play about class consciousness. A well-off family is about to sit down to dinner one evening when a knock on their door reveals a a police inspector asking to interview the family. When they ask him what it’s about he’s a little coy, for reasons that become clear later, and he explains that a girl (young woman) has been found dead of suicide and he wants to investigate her death. The father of the family, […]
The Dying Grass by William Vollmann
I have no real idea what to say about a book like this. It’s an experience, that’s for sure. If you’ve read any of the other Seven Dreams books by William Vollmann you can probably guess some of the things that go in this one. Usually there’s a storyteller figure, here called William the Blind, who acts as a kind of guide through the various stories. Here that means someone who can be in the future of the narrative, looking at the American Northwest and […]
Look Back in Anger by John Osborne
War of the Worlds by Orson Welles
Sleuth by Anthony Shaffer
Dr Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
Gaslight/Angel Street by Patrick Hamilton
Rope by Patrick Hamilton
Look Back in Anger – 3/5 I took a class in grad school called “Post-War British Masculinity” and lest you think it was just a code-word for “Angry Young Men” we also read some tremendously good books like the Collected Philip Larkin, Brideshead Revisited, and The Jewel in the Crown. This was also one of the books we read, though we mainly talked about the movie, since it starred a very histrionic Richard Burton in full “RAGE, RAGE AGAINST THE DYING OF THE LIGHT” kind […]
The History Boys by Alan Bennett
Single Spies by Alan Bennett
Forty Years On by Alan Bennett
The Madness of George III by Alan Bennett
If you haven’t read much Alan Bennett, I really recommend him. He’s devilish in the best of ways, and his short novella An Uncommon Reader, is truly wonderful. History Boys – 5/5 This is the famous, Tony-awarding winning, and filmed play by Alan Bennett. In the play, we begin in the 1980s or so with a group of public school boys being instructed in literature, especially poetry in preparation for college entrance exams. The instruction method is chaotic, and seems to be based in the […]
Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson
Cbr14Bingo – Font — While there’s a lot of talk of printing, printing errors, and handwriting in this book, I am mostly looking at this as a sober look at the facts we know about the life of Shakespeare with the dry wit and editorial selection prowess of Bill Bryson. This book looks at the history of Shakespeare, as a person, and tries to sort out the facts. What this means is that Bryson looks squarely at what we know for sure based on specific […]