Filed under Of Literary Interest

A Centenary for The Bad Boy of Welsh Literature

A Centenary for The Bad Boy of Welsh Literature

Thomas’s best-loved work is his play for voices, Under Milk Wood. A late work, it perhaps belongs in the category described by George Orwell as ‘a good bad book’ with its mixture of vulgarity and sentimentality. The prayer of Revered Eli Jenkins is an example of how the most famous of Anglo-Welsh poets inspires both love and embarrassment in Wales. Continue reading

‘Ulysses Prestissimo’: a slam version of the whole epic

‘Ulysses Prestissimo’: a slam version of the whole epic

James Joyce’s Ulysses may be termed ‘modernist,’ but it is such a unique work that it is difficult to categorize, and also very difficult to manipulate. In recent years Bloomsday Melbourne Inc. has edited and reshaped chapters for its quasi-theatrical presentations, but now, to take on the whole of this both internalized and externalized mammoth of a work, so geographically, physically and psychologically capacious, is to attempt something Herculean, including the stables! Continue reading

Hail Mary, full of Yeats

Hail Mary, full of Yeats

McCready makes much of how Belfast in the 1950s was a cultural desert, and I wondered if, in terms of serious literary theatre, the same could not also be said of many cities in the western world; certainly ’50s Brisbane and Melbourne were not too dissimilar from Belfa Continue reading