In the end, they decided she was innocent — and that was all she was ever allowed to be. I’ve always felt that Daisy Miller is less a story about impropriety than about cowardice. Not Daisy’s — heaven forbid — but ours. Ours as readers, as observers, as members of those polite little tribunals that … Continue reading Not Bad: A Epitaph for Daisy Miller
Tag: fiction
The Lottery: A Sermon in Sunlight
This isn’t a story that creeps like fog, but a story that strikes like a thrown stone. Though Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery manages both. It begins with a sky of perfect summer blue, as though God Himself had painted it fresh for a village fête, and ends with Tessie Hutchinson screaming under a rain of … Continue reading The Lottery: A Sermon in Sunlight
All Day on the Sands: A British Passion Play in Dripping Cardigans
Alan Bennett has never quite been my usual flavour — a bit too cardigan-and-cucumber-sandwich for my tastes. And yet All Day on the Sands, this modest, meandering little play, has fastened itself to me like damp sand between the toes. I suspect it’s because these were precisely the sort of ‘holidays’ we had when I … Continue reading All Day on the Sands: A British Passion Play in Dripping Cardigans
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui: A Morality Play for a World That Has Mislaid Its Morals
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
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
Wording 