“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, January 5, 2014

Darkside 2

The way in which the final song becomes the fourth-wall-collapse moment of the play. With that yearning, elegiac coda--where is the Juggler? (“And what exactly is a dream? And what exactly is a joke?” “Jugband Blues”).

And the hilarious Wise Man (“He's naked. Is that wise?”) which is none other than “Time” and its guitar solo, on the edge of trite. Yet very intense: the Wise Man's lesson, to the adolescent running the show, is “This…is not…a drill.”

The way Stoppard is an OOO playwright, refashioning existing play-objects. Expanding, remixing, remastering.

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