I'm Blathering Now...

What a veritable box of delights the bank holiday weekend has delivered to me. I’ve read about a man tormented by his friends abandonment of him; watched a play where the relatively only sane person gets shot and presumably dies; and watched grown men beat each other with their bras or whacking wooden willies. Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years Of Pilgrimage – by Haruki Murakami  is possibly one of his more believable novels. Murakami writes about nightmarish situations which are relatable but usually too surreal to be taken seriously. In this novel though, whilst there is a small amount of the surreal, the power of dreams is considered by many to be our unconscious state talking to us, and so there is the element of suspended disbelief when reading the book. Tsukuri’s four best friends at school all have names which mean colours, red, blue, white and black. Tsukuru is the only one whose name is colourless and this upsets him, he thinks he is the boring one of the group,

I don’t blog about all of the plays I see, all of the books I read or all of the activities I partake in; I write about the things which I have avidity for and which may be of interest to others. So when I start writing about a play within 24 hours of seeing it, you know it has left a mark on me. As soon as the play came to the Burketeers attention, a group booked to see it, but I foolishly said no, I didn’t see the appeal of travelling a long way to see a play about domestic abuse. If it hadn’t been for a marathon box set of Elementary I would have missed out on a gem of a play. How so you ask? Well the name Aidan Quinn kept popping up on Elementary and it was like an annoying blue bottle buzzing around. WHY DO I KNOW THAT NAME???? Best friend Google told me he was in Desperately Seeking Susan (I loved that film when it came out – I was 12, forgive me!) It turned out that he was also in the New York production of A Lie of the Mind in ‘85. I’m not sure if I believe in serendip

Oscar Wilde, by all accounts, was a dazzling conversationalist. He could entrance an audience with his quick wit and dazzling wordplay. He had the air of an actor who enjoyed being dazzled by the limelight, wearing outrageous outfits with equally outrageous opinions to boot. He was a sublime writer. Whilst his poetry may have been overshadowed by his contemporaries, his novels, critical writings and dramas were highly regarded. The Importance of Being Earnest is possibly his best known and best loved work. With such a well-known play the anticipation of the audience is higher than that of a new, or lesser known play. The cast and creatives therefore have to work a lot harder to satisfy the demands of their audience and at Theatr Clwyd, the costume and props department have excelled themselves. “It has as its philosophy…that we should treat all the trivial things of life seriously and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality” Oscar Wilde Wilde’s o

Play-wise, April has been quite busy: Hamlet, Love In Idleness, The Goat, Othello, Arsenic and Old Lace, Gabriel, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Dumb Waiter and The Dock Brief...phew! But in spite of these distractions, I've also managed to get a bit of reading in (and some house work... but the less said about that the better!) I ended March reading Sharon Bolton's third book in her Lacey Flint series, "Like This For Ever" and I was going to start April with the fourth installment, however, I got side tracked by a book that a friend bought for me. She was interested to see what my take on it was. Now I love a good crime/mystery novel. The darker and more twisted the better! From the Famous Five and Nancy Drew, to Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes, my childhood was never devoid of a good mystery to solve and questionable characters to think about. As an adult I've enjoyed being swept away to Venice with Commiserio Brunetti, to the darker side