8.3.24

Dusk

I don't have much experience with the canonical 1990s shooters this is based on – your Dooms and Quakes – but it feels like this takes what made those games special and perfects it. You move quickly, the guns are loud, and the level design is stellar. The creators were taking ideas from Half-Life and Deus Ex as well as more cartoony keycard-based shooters, and one of the joys of the game is uncovering secrets that give you little power-ups. Exploration and attention is rewarded, and can give you a leg-up in encounters.

Dusk never gets tiring – it's always bringing something new to the table. In Episode 2 you start to see levels reconfigure. By Episode 3 you can swich the direction of gravity. Only in the last two missions was I ready for it to be over – there's a big combat arena where you face every enemy in the game in waves, and then two quite challenging boss fights. I dialled the difficulty down to get through it, and still had fun blasting away. 

5.3.24

King Richard II

King Richard IIKing Richard II by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is Shakespeare’s masterclass in portraying controversial political material in such a finely balanced way as to avoid controversy – he was the only playwright of his time to avoid tussles with the law. This for me is a more successful staging of a regicide than Julius Caesar, because the charismatic ruler remains on stage until the end, and indulges in ever more fantastic self-pitying flights of fancy. Richard is a bad king and a great poet. In his heart of hearts he probably knows it, which is why he is weirdly eager to give up his title and his responsibilities. Shakespeare’s point (if he has one) may be that poetry is ultimately an easier vocation than politics.

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24.2.24

Edward II

Edward IIEdward II by Christopher Marlowe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This struck me as structurally similar to Doctor Faustus – the subject of the play indulges in heterodox pleasures and is ultimately doomed by overplaying his hand. Substitute dalliances with devils to attain forbidden power and knowledge for dalliances with favourites of low birth and the same sex. Edward II like Doctor Faustus wants to live deliciously, and Marlowe clearly sympathises with that libertine spirit even while ensuring it is violently crushed at the end. Tragedy demands the reassertion of traditional religious, sexual and social norms. The sinners are punished and the audience should leave the theatre feeling righteous, except Marlowe never quite purges his (and our) admiration for the radicalism of his tragic heroes. The poet is of the Devil’s party, and Marlowe certainly knew it.

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11.2.24

Julius Caesar

Julius CaesarJulius Caesar by William Shakespeare
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Definitely a play of two halves, the second of which doesn't match the dramatic interest of the first. Basically everything after Mark Anthony's rhetorical showstopper with Caesar's body is quite dull. I find Brutus and Cassius's long quarrel scene odd and their subsequent deaths bathetic. Shakespeare does a good job balancing the different viewpoints, although I suspect that the conspirators' cries of liberty and enfranchisement would appear more suspect to an Elizabethan audience than they do now. Caesar's murder is essentially a regicide that unleashes a civil war, and eventually results in Octavian as emperor anyway, so while Brutus may have been high-minded he was certainly (and quite literally) misguided. The influence of rhetoric on politics is ultimately what the play is about – the tribunes chiding the mechanicals at the start, then Cassius drawing out Brutus as the figurehead for the conspiracy, and climaxing with Mark Antony's playing the mob like a fiddle. The latter half loses that thread a bit, which is why this reputedly balanced play feels lopsided to me.

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7.2.24

Volpone

Volpone (New Mermaid Series)Volpone by Ben;Brockbank Jonson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A play that’s better performed than read. On the page you can easily lose track of the disguises and tricks being played on the different gulls, which on the stage would be clear to see. This is nonetheless very funny, with the pace and lightness of a screwball comedy, despite the somewhat disturbing themes of rape and torture it touches on. Volpone and Mosca are delighted by their own ingenious dramaturgy, and you can sense Ben Jonson’s own satisfaction with his craft shine through his protagonists.

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3.2.24

King Lear

King LearKing Lear by William Shakespeare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This hits different when you have two daughters who refuse to do what you tell them to do. When I was a teenager I found Lear unreasonable and the complaints of Goneril and Regan understandable. Reading it now brings out just how pointed and heartbreaking a portrayal of patriarchal love it is. Lear overbearing affection makes him myopic, and he largely brings his afflictions on his own head. Edmund’s cold attitude to his family, perhaps born of a lack of affection, provides the perfect counterpoint. He and Edgar are the co-plotters of this tragedy. The brothers are like Hamlet split in two – Edmund inheriting a ruthless intelligence and Edgar acting like a madman for the moral edification of failed fathers. In a bleak play he and Cordelia provide a grim sense of hope that a younger generation through their determination and suffering can redeem their parents.

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28.1.24

Troilus and Cressida

Troilus and CressidaTroilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is quite a weird play. The Arden edition’s explanatory notes can be frustrating, but David Bevington’s introduction does a good job highlighting the many facets of chauvinism displayed by the characters. Shakespeare tends to be more sympathetic to women than a lot of his contemporaries, and it’s interesting that here it means not giving that much insight into Cressida’s psychology. She is labelled a slut by others, but it feels like she’s just trying to make do in a world where she is traded from one man to another.

I imagine the audience knew the story so I was at a disadvantage. I assumed the unnamed warrior in the gaudy armour who runs away and is killed might have been revealed to be Cressida in disguise trying to make her way back to Troilus. Instead she just disappears from the final act of the play, robbing it of a sense of catharsis.

Bevington does a good job explaining the contemporary allusions to the Essex rebellion, a context that will be entirely lost on modern readers and viewers. Does feel like the play may have in large part been political satire, which stops working when current events move on. Thankfully this being Shakespeare, there’s always enough other stuff going on to keep the play fresh and ready for reinterpretation.

This is not very well-thought out, but a recurring element in the play is the body being anatomised into parts (and often corresponding attributes). The references to humours and a metaphorical treatment of organs like the heart and brain is common in Shakespeare, but I got the sense that this play has even more of that than usual, which may reflect the focus on the physical – perhaps another way to express disillusionment with the grand heroics of the Trojan war.

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15.1.24

'Tis Pity She's a Whore

'Tis Pity She's a Whore'Tis Pity She's a Whore by John Ford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Martin Wiggins’s excellent annotations and introduction in the New Mermaids edition sets out how effectively the play undercuts social niceties with the disturbing nature of human desire. What stuck out to me was the instances where the audience’s own observation of the action is noted by the play – with characters talking about how their decisions will be judged by airy spirits or posterity once all is revealed. Soranzo insists the whore deserves no pity, while the Cardinal’s final line “tis pity she’s a whore” is unsatisfying. The play works because it hovers above such judgements, and leaves the audience ambivalent about what they’ve just seen.

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8.1.24

Cymbeline

CymbelineCymbeline by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an odd play but it managed to sweep me up in its drama. A lot of very tense, theatrical moments. A recurring motif is people in authority being so muddled by flattery and false reports that faithful service requires ignoring direct commands. Figures in power don’t understand their own interests, possibly including Jupiter himself, who seems to require the intercession of ghosts in order to set right the confusions in the play and deliver justice.

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