RIP (Read In Progress) Wednesday

[neonpossibilities]

It's Wednesday!

What are you reading?

Comments

[pedanther]

I've picked up Down and Out in Purgatory again, and I'm also working my way through A Choice of Catastrophes by Isaac Asimov - non-fiction, the hook is that it's about all the ways the world might end, but you also learn a lot of general science and history along the way.

Yesterday, I read A Woman of No Importance, so I've now read all four of Oscar Wilde's drawing room plays. I had the impression before I started that they were all comedies, but I'm not so sure now: Earnest is definitely a comedy, but A Woman of No Importance is more of a drama that happens to be stuffed with people saying witty things, and the other two fall somewhere in between.

[spiralsheep]

A Woman of No Importance is the only one of the four I don't recall ever seeing.

Have you read / seen Mrs Warren's Profession, 1893, by George Bernard Shaw? Definately more comedy than melodrama and yet not lacking dramatic events.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Warren%27s_Profession

[pedanther]

Wikipedia says it's the least often revived or adapted of Wilde's plays, and I think I can see why; it doesn't quite come together, I think. It has some oft-quoted lines in it, though I realised afterward that the reason one of them was so familiar was that Wilde recycled it in Earnest.

I have not read or seen Mrs Warren's Profession, but it's been on the list to get around to one of these days.

[spiralsheep]

One less than perfect play out of four is a hit rate most playwrights would envy.

I was lucky enough to see Felicity Kendal as Mrs Warren and she absolutely made the role live.