Skip to main content

Forgotten Plays: No 9 – The Words Upon the Window-Pane and Purgatory by WB Yeats

A drama in which the spirit of Jonathan Swift haunts a seance and an astonishingly brief update of the Oresteia confirm the poet’s remarkable skills as a playwright

Few plays are more forgotten than those of WB Yeats. Revered as a poet, he’s ignored as a dramatist yet he deserves to be remembered for a number of reasons. He cofounded the Abbey theatre in 1904, he put Irish legend and history on stage, and he sought to create a drama “close to pure music”. His output was huge – his Collected Plays runs to more than 700 pages – and I’ve plucked out two of his works that, while vastly different in style, show his fixation with death, expiation and eternal recurrence.

The Words Upon the Window-Pane (1930) is in many ways exceptional: it is Yeats’s only play with a realistic modern setting. Its subject is a seance held by the Dublin Spiritualist Association in rooms once occupied by Jonathan Swift’s Stella. Yeats has much fun at the expense of the visitors – one of whom wants advice about setting up a teashop in Folkestone – but the main concern is to expel an evil spirit who has been haunting past sessions. It turns out to be that of Swift whom we hear – through the medium, Mrs Henderson – bitterly rejecting offers of love from the two women who most adored him.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2OYeekX
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pop's coolest choreographer Marion Motin: 'I want to touch your soul'

The woman who got Christine and the Queens and Dua Lipa moving talks about her switch to Rambert and partying on tour with Madonna ‘I’m a lazy girl,” says Marion Motin, laughing at herself. The French choreographer is sitting back in her chair, smiling, dressed in a baggy tracksuit and mismatched earrings. She is laid-back, sure. But lazy? I don’t believe her. This is a woman who created all the choreography for Christine and the Queens’ Chaleur Humaine tour in just 10 days. Who got through the notoriously gruelling audition process to dance on tour with Madonna. Who founded her own all-female hip-hop crew, Swaggers, 10 years ago, to show that women can win dance battles too (and they did). Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2JbolC5
Post a Comment
Read more

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

A little rain must fall: the tragic secret of a musical movie masterpiece

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a life-enhancing 60s sensation, is about to enrapture a new generation of filmgoers Voguish director Damien Chazelle’s pick for “the greatest movie ever made” isn’t his masterwork La La Land, or even Citizen Kane. It’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Chazelle claims to have watched this New Wave classic more than 200 times, and regards his own not-quite-Oscar-winning 2016 musical as a crypto-remake of Jacques Demy ’s entirely sung-through phenomenon. It wasn’t love at first sight. Initially, Demy’s film, with its strange operatic style, “threw me for a loop,” says Chazelle. On its debut in 1964, it provoked a similarly perplexed response. Yet it went on to win the Palme d’Or and five Oscar nominations; it pulled in more than a million filmgoers in France alone, and became an enduring obsession for those, like Chazelle, who have fallen under its spell. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/37GLogV
Post a Comment
Read more