Sometimes a playwright seizes history by the throat, shakes it like a terrier with a stolen bone, and shouts: ‘Look at this — don’t you dare look away again.’ Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is one such moment: a gangster parable masquerading as a clown show, a political sermon delivered by a … Continue reading The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui: A Morality Play for a World That Has Mislaid Its Morals
Tag: existentialism
Ubu Roi: The Crown, the Curse, and the Colossal Belly of Human Folly
If Gogol showed us corruption, and Beckett showed us despair, then Alfred Jarry — bizarre, bicycle-riding prophet of the avant-garde — showed us what happens when civilisation finally gives up pretending to be civil. Ubu Roi isn’t a play; it’s a cultural detonation, a theatrical act of vandalism so gleefully grotesque that even today it … Continue reading Ubu Roi: The Crown, the Curse, and the Colossal Belly of Human Folly
Pilgrimage North: Where the Wind Remembers Your Name
Northern pilgrimages — those walks that feel less like a journey to a holy place and more like a negotiation with eternity. Down south, a pilgrimage is a gentle stroll between tea rooms, the sort of thing you might undertake with a guidebook and sensible shoes. Up here, the guidebook will be soaked within a … Continue reading Pilgrimage North: Where the Wind Remembers Your Name
The Naked Civil Servant: A Gospel According to Outrage
This book didn’t slip quietly into the world like a well-behaved parishioner. The Naked Civil Servant — Quentin Crisp’s scandalous act of cultural streaking, his autobiographical confession written with the dignity of a saint and the insolence of a man determined to rattle the tea trays of middle England. It’s a work so defiantly honest, … Continue reading The Naked Civil Servant: A Gospel According to Outrage
‘Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life’. — C. G. Jung
Madness isn’t a visitor, Jung tells us — it’s a tenant. A hereditary lodger sealed into the house of the psyche long before we learned to speak. Most people spend their lives pretending they don’t hear it pacing upstairs. They turn the radio up. They shut the door with a polite smile. They medicate the … Continue reading ‘Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life’. — C. G. Jung
Wording 