Which is what cahn wants to know. Allowing for variances due to mood and time of life, I think my overall favourite of the tragedies is probably Euripides' Medea. I have yet to see a production which doesn't captivate me - and I've even seen one in Greek without subtitles, at the Salzburg Festival - , and it's a role made for actresses to excell at. I shall never forget watching Diana Rigg in London as Medea, and the utter, complete silence after the last word had been spoken. It seemed eons until the audience broke into thunderous applause, everyone was that emotionally shattered. Greek plays in general when performed today have to deal with several obvious obstacles - the chorus, the way key scenes are only reported, only two characters speak with each other, the completely different pace, the world for which the plays were written being very different from any given audience today - , but I also haven't seen a production of Medea which failed to hold its audience. After the Diana Rigg starring one, I remember hearing people around me on the way to the underground debate whether Medea was evil or good and coming to no conclusion. Given she kills her children and the off stage Creusa and her father, that's a testimony of how much Medea's situation and motivation - she's a vilified alien in xenophobic Greek society, the husband who benefitted from the deeds she's vilified for abandons her and, to add insult to injury, is insufferably smug about it - still speak to any given audience. It also helps that we're not just told about Medea's wiliness, she demonstrates she's the smartest person in this play when running verbal circles around Kreon and Jason once she's made up her mind. And, rare for the heroine of a Greek tragedy, she gets away with it. She doesn't die. Euripides even makes sure we know she'll find a next home in Athens. And yet the ending, no matter how much you root for Medea in this play, is also a tragedy for her. Killing her children can not be undone. She will always have to live with it. It's taboo-breaking and horrifying even today in a way killng one's husband after he killed your daughter, as Clytemnestra does in Agamemnon, is not. She's an utterly compelling character who does a truly monstrous deed.

Now I've read many later takes on Medea, other plays - Franz Grillparzer's plays, Giradoux, Anouhlih - and I've read Christa Wolf's novel. I also saw the movie starring Maria Callas, which isn't based on Euripides, though - much of it covers the Golden Fleece backstory - and while it's interesting in terms of offering a glimpse at Callas' acting abilities without any musical support, it doesn't replace what I wish we had, which is a filmed version of her singing the role in Cherubini's opera, which was and is perhaps the part most associated with her. Thankfully, there are recordings, like this one from Milan, 1953, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. This opera, starring Callas, also gets my vote for best adapatation into another medium. Not least because it captures the larger-than-lifeness of Medea, the way one feels for her without diminishing the horror of what she does. And that's where basically most adaptations fail, especially ones like Wolf's novel which want to "reclaiim" Medea as a solely positive feminist icon. Now it may very well be that pre Euripides, she did not kill her children (though she had killed several other people in those earlier myths, including her brother), and Robert Graves among others theorizes the citizens of Corinth bribing Euripides into transferring the child killing from them to her. But I would argue that it's this exact deed - the killing of her cihldren (and the fact there is no external punishment for it) - which ensured Medea became one of the best known female characters in Greek myths. Not the only reason, but the most important one. What Wolf in her novel does - exculpating Medea not just from the cihld murder but everything else, every not-noble feeling (the Corinthians are the ones killing kids, she did not kill either her brother nor Pelias or anyone else, she's not jealous of Jason's new bride but has long moved on to a more satisfying lover) - removes all that makes her Medea and leaves us with a good woman wronged by xenophobia and unreliable men. Yes, a symphatetic character, but not Medea. Conversely, the French guys put all the emphasis on the amour fou aspect with Medea and Jason (Jason thus comes across marginally more sympathetic as it's clear he still loves her but can't do the emotional tango anymore), while Grillparzer (a 19tth century playwright) does emphasize Medea the rejected alien and immigrant, who desperately wants to belong to Greek/Europrean society and "civiiisation" only to find herself betrayed and rejected by it and even her own children, which causes her to return to her earlier self. It's also compelling, but in a different way and without the larger-than-lifeness again. Callas-as-Medea in Cherubini's opera it is!

Runners up for favourite Greek tragedies are: Oedipus (I get why Aristoteles picked this one as his fave - like Medea, it works millennia later on so many levels, including a "detective finds out he himself is the killer" drama), and two very early entries in the "war sucks" category, "The Trojan Women" (Euripides again) and The Persians. The last one is by Aischylos, is the very first completely preserved tragedy, and the most extraordinary thing about it is t hat it describes the results of a war (specifically, the defeat of the Persian fleet at Salamis) from the "enemy" pov of the playwright, who himself fought in said war. Our main character is Atossa, the Queen Mother, waiting for reports. Try to imagine an Elizabethan playwright writing a drama "The Spaniards" in which a non-evil Phililp of Spain, with whom one cam empathize, waits for news about the Armada, and you see how rare something like this in most eras is. Even today. (Just think of the evil mutant Persians from Zack Snyder's 300.) Now don't get me wrong, The Persians also leaves you in no doubt the Greeks are rather fabulous and worthy winners, but the non-denigration of the titular Persians, writing them as human beings longing to see their loved ones again (Atossa isn't the only one, there's also the entire Chorus), that makes the play still very much worth performing, and I saw it via global streaming in the first year of the Pandemic performed in Greece (with subtitles), which was a fantastic experience.

However: the Greeks didn't just write tragedies. My favourite Greek comedy is The Assemblywomen by Aristophanes, which admittedly isn't just for the text itself but also because I got to play in it as a girl when my school staged it for its big 400 anniversary. Yes, Lysistrata is justifiably more famous, but the Ecclesiazusae - in which the women of Athens stage a coup and take over power - is still immensely watchable. Now don't get me wrong, Aristophanes certainly didn't intend it as a reccommendation for female empowerment. It's a satire, and the new society the women erect (shared wealth by everyone, and also before any man gets to sleep with a hot young woman he has to satisfy an old and/or unattractive one) certainly wouldn't have looked as something its original audience would have wanted. But it's still immensely fun to play. (If there is an adaptation into film, music or another medium, though, I don't know it, sorry.)

The other days

London for a week always means theatre time for me. My main treat will happen on Friday, but in the meantime, here are two I already managed to see.

Hobson's Choice: one of those British comedy classics which for some reason I never managed to catch before, including the David Lean film version starring Charles Laughton. This one has Martin Shaw (of The Professionals fame in his younger days) as the title character, but turns out one of those plays where the title character isn't the main character - that would be, without a question, Maggie, ably played by Naomi Frederick. As a pay, it also strikes me as a bit of a late 19th century middle and working class Lear from the daughters' pov, and done as a comedy. Which is to say: at the start of the pla, shoe shop owner Hobson is a petty tyrant to his three daughters, getting drunk in the pub and indulging in grandiose speeches while they do all the (unpaid) work both in the household and in the shop, above all the oldest, Maggie. Through the play, Maggie not only plots her and her sisters' escape but the complete overthrow of her father, establishes a rival business that soon takes away the trade, and by the end takes over the orginal shop while her father (having nearly drunk himself to death without her) concedes utter defeat and has to give complete power to her. If you think about it, there are any number of points where this could have gone into very dark territory, but the production never does - there is never any sense that Hobson's early insults and ongoing humiliations of his daughters have impaired, let alone destroyed their sense of self worth, and Maggie's triumph at the end comes without cruelty, just very matter-of-factly, and the narrative makes it clear she's saving her father's life while she's at it. Plus Maggie is such a force of nature throughout that one in the play is a match for her; that she enlists shy underpaid bootmaker Will for marriage (you could also say: bullies - he really doesn't want to marry her at the start) is one of those things that would look terribly with reversed genders, but again, the play not only goes for the comedy of shy trembling man versus strong no nonsense woman, but also makes it clear Will benefits from Maggie taking over his life; instead of an underpaid exploited worker, he ends up boss of two shops and with a much stronger sense of self worth, standing up for himself.

Everyone involved had great comic timing, and it's easy to see why this play keeps getting revived. It's also something that, like G.B. Shaw's plays, was written as a contemporary story and is now a costume play because you can't update it when its plot and problems are very much that of a specific setting, so late Victorian/early Edwardian costumes (not too grand, we're in Manchester shops, not in Ascot) are used. All in all, I felt greatly entertained, but don't have the urge to watch it again.

1984: adaption of George Orwell's novel by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan. Adapting a novel (any novel) for the theatre always is tricky, let alone this one, but team Icke and Macmillan for my money did a superb job of it. One key angle for their angle is the appendix Orwell wrote about Newspeak, which implies that the Party fell after all - since it analyzes from a future perspective that's not totalitarian -, another the question of what makes reality and how to maintain a sense of past and present if you're completely taken over. And thus, you have structures within structures - Winston is remembering, or tries to, the events leading up to his arrest and torture even while he's being tortured and his past is being rewritten (O'Brien's "where do you think you are, Winston?" Question keeps returning through the play?), but at the same time, people from a post - Big Brother world are discussing his diary as a text (fictional? Historical?), and yet that reality, too, with the end of the play is called into question.

Orwell's depiction of a totalitarian state remains as disturbing as ever. (Being German, I didn't read it in school as part of the curriculum, I read it while still at school as part of my spare time reading, and was freaked out in a "wow" way.) And absolutely not dated, au contraire, sad to say. The "hate" rallies and the blaming of Goldstein as a traitor figure for all the misery could be Turkey (and Gülen as Goldstein) now, but you don't have to go East, going West will do, too (see "Lock her up!" Chants at the recent RNC or rallies last autumn in Germany where effigies of Angela Merkel were hanged). The constant recreation of reality to fit the Party's current position, the way blatant lies are accepted no matter or ridiculous they are, and then reversed into new lies again: yes, hello, Brexit campain and aftermath, we don't even have to go to Russia for this.

One element that as a teenager didn't resonate for me the way it does now: when O'Brien, pretending to be a resistance member, gets Winston and Julia to volunteer for any number of criminal acts which sound as if they're taken from the current news but really are in the novel: kill themselves and kill any number of innocent people for the cause, throw acid in a child's face. The recording of this agreement is what O'Brien later uses to demonstrate to Winston that he can't claim moral superiority, and when I read that as a teenager, it didn't seem as effective as later things O'Brien did to me because after all Winston and Julia did none of those things, and it was all a trick. But here, on stage, in an age where people do kill lots of innocents (and themselves) for what they perceive to be a world saving cause against an evil state, it was a devastating moment.

Still not as bad as what followed, though. The way they handle the problem of torture on stage: every time it happens, the white clad goons close in on Winston so the audience can't see him, and when they go back to their position, he's got bloody finger tips, or bleeds out of the mouth etc. And then the rats. Which you don't see at all, but the imagination works overtime at this point and Winston's panicked scream that finally breaks him inwardly as well as outwardly is so harrowing because you couldn't bear it anymore as an audience member as well, even in the tv age of torture torture all the time.

If I have one complaint, than that one of the most disturbing elements of the novel, the strange, perverse intimacy between inquisitor and victim that is there between O'Brien and Winston does not come across. The film version starring Richard Burton (in his last screen role) as O'Brien and John Hurt as Winston Smith managed that, but here between Angus Wright as O'Brien and Andrew Gower as Winston it's not there, and earlier it's also not clear why Winston trusts O'Brien enough to approach him in the first place. Angus Wright is just too obviously chilling a bureaucrat from the start.

The audience isn't left off the hook at any point. One of the most effective uses of modern day technology is that when Winston and Julia are in the room they believe to be without surveillance, cherishing this little bit of privacy, they're not on stage but the audience sees them on screen, being in the position of the surveilling Big Brother in the post Orwell sense themselves. And while the appendix-inspired frame of treating Winston's diary as a historical text (or a historical fiction), complete with debate of mobile phone using contemporaries, could offer some emotional relief (the Party does fall after all, Winston wrote his plea to the future for us), it's called into question again by the end (did the Party fall, or did it just find a different method of controlling and shaping reality?), and the very end isn't the appendix inspired frame but, as in the novel, Winston's last moment of complete emotional capitulation.

I hadn't been sure the dramatic form would be able to get the power of Orwell's fiction across, but did it ever. No intermission, either, it just builds and builds and builds; the emotional effect isn't "now I've seen an adaption of a dystopian classic" but "through a mirror - into the hear and now - darkly".

I'll be in London for the Easter holidays, which will include the chance to see some great British dames - two on the stage (Judi Dench and Helen Mirren) and the rest in real life. :) *waves at kathyh, kangeiko and rozk* This unfortunately means no annual Easter Wells post, as they don't have those in England. However, I will try to make up for it with stage reports and possibly some snowy London photos.

Depressingly, every time I visit London I notice more bookstores have closed, so I expect there will be more of that this time, too, but the theatre can always be relied upon. Also, Doctor Who is about to return to the screen, which I'm mostly looking forward to, although the just released webisode prequel made me have this reaction precisely . (Seriously, Moff, three, four times if you count R-as-M in a row is way too often and not clever but unimaginative.) But I had liked the first half of season 7 more than the two previous Moffat seasons (as seasons: s5 and s6 suffered for me from the same "this is a horrible and important thing, but only in arc episodes and otherwise we'll just forget about it" syndrome and some ooc behaviour from the Doctor to make that possible; as far as individual episodes are concerned, both s5 and s6 had some gems, too), and I'm really intrigued by the new companion, so, as I said: I'm mostly looking forward to season 7.5. Something I expect to remain constant: after each episode is broadcast, I'll read positive reviews that will make me wonder why I can't see that wonder of deep storytelling and see a talented, improvised mess instead, and then I'll read bashing reviews which will make me think "hang on, this is really unfair, such and such was great and this and that endearing, and weren't you just looking for stuff to hate?".

Also: I'm only occasionally reading interviews of the DW actors - it depends on the people, i.e. I read and listend to a lot that David Tennant and Catherine Tate did, because they were hilarious together off screen as well, but I never read a single Billie Piper interview and the only one with Karen G. I read was about her role in We'll Take Manhattan, not about DW. But as accident would have it I read a recent one by Jenna-Louise Coleman and in it she mentioned her favourite current show is Breaking Bad. Clearly a woman of taste. :)

Tuesday, aside from Useful Stuff ™, was British Museum, kathyhand National Theatre day. kathyh and self went to the Hadrian: Empire and Conflict exhibition, which was excellent. I’m always flabbergasted at what organizational skills it must take to persuade so many museums all over the world to temporarily part with their artefacts, as this particular one boasted of pieces from Rome, Jerusalem, Chicago, what not.

In a tribute to the power of fiction, right at the start of the exhibition there was a showcase devoted to Marguerite Yourcenar with pages from drafts of her novel about Hadrian which unarguably probably is what most people associate him with. (Unless they’re Brits, in which case they think of the wall first.) kathyh and self admitted shamefacedly to each other that much as we love historical novels, we still haven’t gotten around to this particular classic. (Also, my Yourcenar knowledge is limited to awareness she was the first female member of the Academie Francaise.) Then the exhibition proper started, placed in and around the old Reading Room (where Karl Marx, Bernard Shaw et al. studied in their time), and it really managed to get a sense of both Hadrian and the period across. Among the most fascinating things were parpyri, fragments of a contemporary poem about Hadrian and his lover Antinous and, even more amazing, a letter of Bar Kochba, the leader of the last Jewish uprising, admonishing his followers for stealing supplies. That something as fragile as such a letter should survive millennia stunned us both and we stared t the yellowish material under glass. Otherwise, there were models of the Parthenon (which Hadrian restored and completely rebuild), the Castel San’Angelo and the Villa Adriana which I once spend most of a day in when in Italy, as it’s a gigantic area, with the various sections trying to recapture styles from all over the Roman empire; and statues and portraits, of course, but not just the usual suspects. There was one of Hadrian as a young man with sideburns which made him look like an early 70s radical (not unfitting, I suppose), and near the end a bust of Marcus Aurelius as a teenager. As we always think of Marcus Aurelius as an old man (and looking like Alec Guinness), this fascinated kathyh and self to no end. (Hadrian really did his bit to keep the highly efficient adoption system up after smacking a greedy blood relation down; he didn’t simply adopt Antonius Pius but made him adopt the young Marcus Aurelius so that the succession was secured twice over.)

It was a biographical day; in the evening, I went and saw Howard Brenton’s new play Never So Good at the National Theatre, with Jeremy Irons as Harold Macmillan. Odd thing: years ago I already saw a play about Macmillan, A Letter of Resignation, with Edward Fox as Macmillan and set during the Profumo affair, with flashbacks. It was interesting to compare the takes of the two playwrights (A Letter of Resignation was by Hugh Whitemore) and the two actors on a near-contemporary figure – someone whom most of the audience would at least have childhood memories of. Also, you have to wonder: why Macmillan? In the case of Brenton, who contributed 13 episodes to Spooks, you can tell it’s a mixture between the idea of the dying breed of dedicated public servant with some personal hang-ups, and the idea of a man from another era increasingly out of tune with his times. He’s also good in building in the actuan bon mots (“the trouble with Anthony Eden is that he was trained to win the Derby in 1938; unfortunately h ewas not let out of the starting stalls until 1955” in a way that makes them feel natural and getting in a few pointed allusions to the present day, as when Eden, Macmillan and Selwyn Llyod talk about the Suez Crisis, and you know exactly what current day equivalent Brenton is thinking of:

M: Selwyn, you do think we are right to attack? I mean, in the past you’ve argued Nasser is the devil incarnate!

L: It’s that, after the invasion, I mean… we’ll find the Egyptian economy wrecked, railways, roads, communications largely destroyed, there will be disease… I think we do need some kind of plan. I mean, victory’s all very well, but what do we do then? (…) The occupation force we will need will be huge. National Service will have to carry on, which could prove to be very unpopular…


It was a mixture of rueful laughter and knowing groans from the audience at this point, and the irony that in that case, it was the American president who acted to prevent an invasion escaped no one.

As for the acting, Jeremy Irons was a more self aware and sharper Macmillan than Edward Fox’ older statesman, though conversely Fox was more believable as a nice guy; Irons was best in the Tory political scheming scenes with Churchill & Co. in both 1939 and the Fifties, and in his irony and hang-ups ridden scenes with his wife and her lover, whereas Fox brought across the out-of-tune-ness with the times much better. Re: the Macmillan marriage and the explanations for the state of same, I find it odd how not intrusive this deeply personal stuff feels, whereas if this was a play about, say, Tony Blair, I would have felt deeply uncomfortable watching. The difference a few years make, or maybe the fact all participants are dead? Who knows.

Today: more Useful Stuff, a meeting with Edgar Feuchtwanger & family, and Shakespeare in the Globe!

Back in Germany, dead exhausted. In a good way; it was a great week. After working in the British Library, I treated myself to the absolutely gorgeous exhibition there, Sacred, which presents basically the holy books of Judaism, Christianity and Islam through the centuries. Now of course I had seen numerous medieval bibles before - and beautiful they were - and even the occasional Talmud, but never before so many Qu'rans, ranging from editions like the one penned for Sultan Baybar which has just six words written in gold per page to handy Qu'rans made of and written on leather so you could carry them in the saddle bag. The exhibition might as well have been subtitled "people of the book", because that Muslim description of the the other two Abrahamic faiths sums it up for all three there. And no matter whether New Testament, Thora or Qu'ran, standing there, looking at those books that must have taken decades to create, each letter painted so carefully, one felt awed and silenced by both labour and beauty.

On a more chatty note, I had a delightful lunch with londonkds, and we geeked out afterwards in the sun; this week has been something of a mini convention to me, only with one friend at a time instead of all of them at the same time. But I need to make introductions the next time; living in the same city as they do, they need to meet each other!

My last theatre treat was Saint Joan at the National Theatre, with Anne-Marie Duff in the title role. It's my favourite Shaw play, and so I was both gratified it was sold out (I think I got the last ticket) a few days earlier when I bought it) and somewhat nervous (what will they do with it?). It was performend in the Olivier, where I had seen Sophocles' two Oedipus plays - which was an amazing experience, especially since the Olivier is build somewhat like a Greek amphitheatre - and Macbeth with Derek Jacobi as Macbeth and some noneentity, sadly, as Lady M (it's a curse - other than dream team Ian McKellen/Judi Dench on video, I never ever saw a Macbeth with both M and Lady M played by great actors). They went for minimum scenery (basically just chairs and flags) and a mixture of present day and vaguely historical costume (the inevitable armour for Joan, mainly). Acting-wise, it was good, with one reservation I had about Anne-Marie Duff - as long as Joan was still ascendant and got her way, she was a bit one-note and too high strung for my taste, and I kept wondering where she would go from there, considering what was to follow; but after the interval, from her fallout scene after the coronation at Reims onwards, she was great. The two crucial scenes, which must be fiendishly difficult for an actress - the trial scene in which she finally does recant only to recant her recantation when she sees it will only give her a life time in prison, and the end of the epilogue were incredibly intense. She played Joan's breakdown so painfully real, not quieter and quieter as I had seen it done before but with cries and sobs that really made you believe this was a woman a) who had been imprisoned for months and b) in fear of her life; and yet you also completely believed her when she went from there to "light your fires". The horror of imprisonment, the horror of death in flames; I can't think of another production which pulled that of.

In the program, one of the essays makes the caustic comment that Joan today would wear the red of a Guantanamo prisoner; our Regietheater being that it is, you can bet she would have done in a German production. The Brits didn't go there, presumably trusting the audience to make their own uncomfortable analogies, and thus remained more universal.) Stogumber's breakdown after Joan's burning when faced with the reality of her death as opposed to the bloodthirsty rethoric and Cauchon's question - "does a Christ have to die in every generation for those of too little imagination" rarely have so resonated.

I'm in two minds about what they did with the epilogue; they basically cut it down to the characters in it saying what happened to them post-trial, left the interaction between them and Joan out altogether (until the very final one), along with the English soldier and the visitor from 1920, and gave the announcement of Joan's canonization to Brother Martin. However, from then onwards we did get the rest of the epilogue, and the bit which is the crucial point; everyone praising Joan, Joan's "woe to me if all men praise me" (which Michael Holyrood appropriately observed is very much old GBS talking about himself, too) and offer to return from the dead, everyone turning away in horror at the prospect, and Joan's final question, which was as powerful as in every other version of the play I've seen and heard: "O god that madest this beautiful earth ,when will it be ready to receive Thy saints? How long, o lord, how long?"

The reason why I'm in two minds about the cuts: on the one hand, they didn't take a way the core of the epilogue, so I'm good with it, on the other, they did take away something that's important - to me, at least - about the play, something of its, in lack of a better term, Shavian dimension. The going from the horror of Joan's death to the chit-chat in Charles' dream only gradually turning into the haunting final point is so very GBS; the Shaw version of a tragedy is still wonderfully witty, after all, and to make the epilogue bleak-only is to make it more of a classical play than he ever wanted to write.

Ah well. Otherwise, I was gratified to see the gags worked as reliably as ever, many decades after Shaw wrote them. The big discussion between Warwick and Cauchon, with Stogumber as the occasional third, is pure talk, pure debate, no action, and if it's not one of the most riveting and funny scenes of the play, you're doing something wrong. They got it right. (And I was very amused how many people in the interval which immediately followed that scene referred to Shaw being Irish in their conversation; though maybe they're right, maybe you have to be Irish to make as relentlessly fun of English nationalism (with Stogumber's English patriotism being the comic mirror of Joan's French one) as Shaw does.)

I'm not sure GBS would have approved of them actually showing - well, miming - the burning. It did work for me, but I also remembered the fact that the play doesn't show Joan's death as written was one thing T.E. Lawrence argued, letter-wise, with Charlotte Shaw and thus by proxy with GBS about. Lawrence was friends with the Shaws at that point and Holyrood argues, not implausibly, that Shaw used some of his characteristics for Joan. He got sent an advance manuscript of the play and loved it. After praising it to the skies, he came to his one cricticism, which was: "It was good to make her sign that confession... and then she died, 'off'. I have a prejudice against the writer who leaves the reader to make his top-scene for him. I funked it, in the deaht of Farraj, faced it, in the plain narrative of my mishaps in Deraa the night I was captured. Here in St. Joan the climax will be the red light shining from the courtyard. It's indirect art and direct shirking. Of course if he'd dipped his pen in all his strenght and written straight forward the play could never have been presented: but the more honour so. I twould have cleaned us all to have seen Joan die."

(Charlotte Shaw wrote back, not surprisingly disagreeing, and got in return an autobiographical confession: "The trial scene in Joan. Poor Joan, I was thinking of her as a person, not as a moral lesson. The pain meant more to her than the example. You instance my night in Deraa. Well, I'm always afraid of being hurt: and to me, while I live, the force of that night will lie in the agony which broke me, and made me surrender. It's the individual view. You can't share it. About that night. I shouldn't tell you, because decent men don't talk about such things. I wanted to put it plain in the book, and wrestled for days wiht my self-respect... which wouldn't, hasn't, let me. For fear of being hurt, or rather to earn five minutes respite from a pain which drove me mad, I vae away the only possession we are born into the world with - our bodily integrity. It's an unforgivable matter, an irrrecoverable position; and it's that which has made me forswear decent living. You may call this mordbid: but think of the offence, and the intensity of my brooding over it for these years. It will hang about me while I live, and afterwards if our personality survives. Consider wandering among the decent ghosts hereafter, crying, 'Unclean, unclean!'" The sting of the burning was very big in Joan and GBS would have made his play impossible by portraying it.. Yet if the play was to be not a morality but life itself, he would have given the physical its place above the moral." )

Today was travel back day; and for the first time since last I was in the US, I had to remove my shoes again. Note to self: be grateful you wore socks. I wouldn't want to go barefeet on that ground at Heahtrow...