Note: I read these plays from the English Literature syllabus for CSS exams as per my preparation for the exams.
201- Heartbreak House by G.B. Shaw
I heard about Shaw when I came across a quotation of his,
which much like himself, was unconventionally contradictory. It said: ‘The
reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in
trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all the progress depends on the
unreasonable man.’ Now, I am usually a champion of the noble and
self-sacrificing idea of compromising oneself to the demands of the world,
since the world would never do so. But Shaw’s striking boldness in putting the
stake of progress on those who do not reason with the world was something I
wasn’t ready to hear. Nonetheless, I became curious about Shaw and my curiosity
was soon answered by the English Literature syllabus for the competitive exams
that we have here. ‘Heartbreak House’, I had read in one article about Shaw,
was one of the best plays by him, and after reading it with a thrilling
excitement and energy in a week, I was convinced by the article’s claim. I
hadn’t read any Plays before; therefore I wasn’t only reading Shaw for the
first time, but also a play. And luckily Shaw’s ‘Heartbreak House’ made me fall
in love with the genre. Plays are made of dialogues, with few descriptive
details about the set provided in-between for the theatre adaptation or for
reader’s help to visualize; they also come in ‘Acts’, which is similar to Parts
in novels; characters are numbered here and are usually listed at the beginning
of the play; each play is also of a certain genre: comedy, tragedy, romance,
fantasia, tragicomedy, and so on. ‘Heartbreak House’ is subtitled as ‘a
Fantasia in Russian manner about the English themes’, which explains its
influence from the Russian playwright and short-stories writer Anton Chekhov.
In this play, which takes place in a ship-like house during the course of one
evening, we have the owner Captain Shotover and his daughters Hesione, who
lives in this house, and her Lady Utterwood who has come to visit after running
off with her husband years earlier; also, we have their respective husbands
Hector and Randall, and probably the protagonist of the play Ellie Dunn, a
friend of Hesione’s who’s keen on marrying a rich, old man, but which Hesione
is against. This play is eventful. There’s always something happening. Emotions
are high and characters treat each other with brutal honesty. Hearts break, one
after another, as secrets are unveiled, but the story continues as hearts are
mended just as quickly. I was awe-struck by Shaw’s excellent dialogues and
intricately woven plot which promises high drama from the first page to the last.
The social commentaries, the arguments about morality, the insights into human
relationships – and all of them carried out with such acute, brutal, and
soul-shaking honesty – beckons to the greatness of Shaw’s understanding of the
society and the humans that form them and his genius of bringing that
understanding with so much life and rigor on the page. One of the best books
I’ve read this year!
Rating: 5/5 *****
202- Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
While usually I feel a bit unsure and restrictive when
purchasing books for my personal use, having the external objective, on this
occasion, of preparing for the exams spoiled me to shop left and right for
every book that I could find off of the syllabus – without any hesitation
whatsoever. And it paid off. I got my hands on Shaw’s plays, Emerson’s essays,
and most rewardingly, I finally found Beckett’s play ‘Waiting for Godot’, which
I had anticipated of buying/reading for a long time. Reading the play itself,
however, was a completely bizarre experience. But what was I expecting anyways
from this absurdist play? Perhaps the TED-Ed video which so attractively
pitches this play for readers to read led me to have contradictory expectations
of enjoying the play despite its grim and frustrating plot. A tragicomedy in
two acts, this play is about two characters waiting at a crossroad beside a
tree, for someone who never shows up: Godot. A play where, literally, nothing
ever happens; or as the famous review of the play by Irish Times stated, ‘where
nothing happens twice (meaning in both acts)’. I didn’t enjoy reading this play
it all. The fascination I had for reading this play turned to frustration and
exhaustion as I began reading it. But here is the irony of this play: the
deserved and much acclaimed importance of this play isn’t because it presents
the life or the mood of the post-WW2 world in any hopeful, elevated, or signifying
way – but rather that it captures so candidly the absurdity of life and
existence which had becomes threateningly clear after the second war. Yet the
reason this play continues to resonate with readers is that even when the world
isn’t at war, life, in existential terms, doesn’t stop being absurd – man and
life, as it seems, are always at odds. And so while I definitely didn’t enjoy
reading this play as a whole, I also haven’t enjoyed living my life as a whole
- and that resonation of this play to my life, and to human lives in general,
is what makes this play so irresistibly significant.
Rating: 4/5 ****
203- The Caretaker by Harold Pinter
This was out of the left field for me. I had never heard of
Pinter or any of his works. He isn’t, I presume, mentioned in the contemporary
conversations among the bookish people either. This explains the academic
nature of this syllabus that I am preparing from, which I rather welcome for
whatever I have read so far has been based either on my instincts or
recommendations that I have gathered from the conversations about books. More
academic content of literature, therefore, was a much-needed element for me to
get an education from. Pinter’s revolves around three characters, two young men
who might be brothers and an old man whom they give shelter and later offer him
the job of the ‘caretaker’. Although this play didn’t strike me as anything
significant from the reading of it, I nonetheless quite enjoyed the dialogues
between the young folks who own a shelter and an older person who is in need of
one. This created a tension where the old man at times felt a certain
humiliation, which wasn’t intended from the young fellas, but due to his direly
hapless situation the old man had to but oblige to his cruel circumstances. I
am sure that much like Beckett’s play, Pinter’s ‘The Caretaker’ must have some
far-reaching and deeper meaning to its otherwise plain and simple plot, for
which I am yet to read the literary explanations of the play. On the whole,
however, this was one of the plays that I just enjoyed reading without having
had to go through the excitements or frustrations.
Rating: 3/5 ***
204- Pygmalion by G.B. Shaw
I was lucky to have to get and read two of Shaw’s play, for
if ‘Heartbreak House’ was one of his best work, ‘Pygmalion’ was definitely his
most acclaimed. The plot, which is about an ill-mannered, flower-selling girl incredible
transformation into this delicately speaking, fine, high-class lady after a
couple of intentionally bachelor men, one famous linguist and one retired
colonel, take her on as a challenge and train her for six-months, and the
motives of the plot, mainly being a satire on the bourgeoise society, are what
immediately and attractively makes for a great recipe for a famous play. Shaw’s
providence on this promising plot with his witty, piercing, moving, and sharp
prose and dialogues does the rest to make this play, probably, his best-known
play, if not his best. While ‘Pygmalion’ is certainly an entertaining read and
thoroughly enjoyable, to me it seemed a little less ‘packed’ and thrilling than
‘Heartbreak House’, which was full of surprises and high drama. The challenge
taken on the two men to transform this unruly girl into a fine lady is
definitely inviting enough, however, the way this challenge fulfills itself
isn’t as dramatic or ‘challenging’. As soon as the bet is on, in the next act
we immediately see the first glimpses of Lizzie’s transformed self – having
skipped the juicy and spicy part of the training itself. The tension which is
felt between Lizzie and her misogynistic teacher both prior to and after the
training is quite well formed as it provides a tantalizing friction. Especially
when Lizzie becomes this fine-speaking lady and her values change similarly,
she then begins to oppose Higgin’s cruel and objectifying behavior towards her
with new found rigor and confidence. As for Higgins, he is shocked at his own
doing. The play ends rather abruptly and is then followed by a long epilogue
from Shaw commentating on how things played out further and what it meant. The
friction between Lizzie and Higgins which later advances into a blown-out
conflict does make for a kind of opposing, uninitiated, and brimming ‘romance’
which is the subtitle of this play. However, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that
at its heart this play is also, and more intentionally, a satire. But one consensus
is easy to arrive at, and that is that this play, as by the standards of Shaw,
is definitely an entertaining and thought-provoking read.
Rating:
4/5 **** October 29, 2021_